Hitchens and Hobsbawm: the death of twentieth century politics

Above is a discussion between Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawm from 2003 on the occasion of the publication of the latter’s autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life.

The conversation is and feels like it’s from another era. It’s not so much what Hitchens and Hobsbawm have to say to each other, but the freedom with which they express their opinions, their frankness and honesty. There is no treading on eggshells, self-censorship or fear of offending.

Both men are now deceased – Hitchens died in 2011 and Hobsbaw in 2012 – and with their passing Britain lost not only two of its most prominent public intellectuals and exponents of Enlightenment values of reason, liberty, progress, but also two of its mordant contrarians. In fact, one of the pleasures of listening to the two men is how Hobsbawm consistently refuses to accept the premises of Hitchens’ questions and terms, demanding greater clarity and precision.

Of course, both Hitchens and Hobsbawm started out as Marxist revolutionaries. Hitchens was a 1960s radical while Hobsbawm says he became a communist in early 1930s Berlin out of necessity. Since Germany’s experiment with liberal democracy had collapsed and capitalism had palpably failed, it appeared to Hobsbawm that the only way to oppose fascism – with its existential threat to Jews (Hobsbawm was the scion of English and Austrian Jews via Alexandria) – was by becoming a communist. (On the importance of being Jewish, Hobsbawm says: ‘You can’t get away from it. They won’t let you.’)

Revolutionary Marxism was an ideology from which Hobsbawm never wavered. As a student at 1930s Cambridge University – Hobsbawm’s family had wisely emigrated to England in 1933 when Eric was 16 – he moved in the same circles as the Cambridge Five, the spy ring that passed on information to the USSR during the Second World War, asserting that if he had been asked to spy for Stalin he would have done so; while after the death and denunciation of Stalin and the invasion of Hungary, when other intellectuals left the Communist Party of Great Britain, Hobsbawm remained a dedicated member and defender of the faith – leaving him open to perennial accusations of Stalinism and of being an apologist for communist repression and mass murder.

Ironically, this life-long commitment to communism doesn’t stop Hobsbawm from admitting that the working class – which with its virtues of solidarity and fairness was seen by Marxists as the bearer of a more fraternal and equitable society – had lost its influence and potential. Hobsbawm even mourns the decline of the British establishment – wounded by Suez and 1960s popular culture and finished off by Thatcherism and neoliberalism, which decimated both the labour movement and the old British elite.

A more vigorous debate between Hitchens and Hobsbawm on the 2003 Iraq war would have been interesting. Hobsbawm does denounce the invasion not only as misguided – by invading Iraq, Hobsbawm says, America threw away the global imperium it had gained as a result of winning the Cold War – but also an act of barbarism.

Yet Hitchens who supported the effort to topple Saddam Hussein doesn’t put his case forward, other than to teasingly call opponents of the war ‘reactionaries’. If Hitchens had defended himself he probably would have argued that in supporting the invasion of Iraq he had not made the journey from revolutionary Marxist to Republican neocon, but was being consistent in his loathing for brutal dictators – whether Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein – and in his belief that the West had a moral imperative to take military action to bring freedom to those suffering under their repulsive rule.

Castlereagh: enlightened conservative or face of murder?

John Bew’s biography of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) – Castlereagh: the biography of a statesman – chief secretary for Ireland from 1796 to 1800, colonial secretary from 1802 to 1805, war secretary from 1806 to 1809 and foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822 – is a brilliantly researched and a conscious, compelling, if not always convincing, effort to restore the reputation of one of the most derided figures in British political history. 

Hated by his fellow Irishmen for overseeing the brutal suppression of the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798, and, through bribery and coercion, pushing through the Act of Union, 1801, between Ireland and Britain, Castlereagh was equally loathed by British political radicals and reformers of the age – Jacobins, the nascent working class movement, opponents of the continuing wars with France – both the counterrevolutionary wars followed by the wars against Napoleon.

However, Bew – who is currently a policy adviser to Boris Johnson, overseeing a review into Britain’s role in the world post-Brexit – rejects the notion that Castlereagh was just an old fashioned Tory, an enemy of the enlightenment, and instead asserts his fellow Ulsterman was an ‘enlightened conservative’.

Castlereagh, Bew says:

‘…travelled widely in Europe, read a broad range of literature and eschewed the anti-Catholicism of many of his peers in England and Ireland. He was convinced that the only approach that government could take towards religion was one of toleration and that each man had the right to make his peace with God on his own terms. True, he was an enemy of political reform, but this was because of the dangers of mob politics which he saw first-hand in Paris during the French Revolution and Ireland during the rebellion of 1798.’

As a diplomat, Bew argues, Castleregh has as much right to be called a hero of the Napoleonic wars as Wellington and Nelson. Castlereagh was the statesman who put together the coalition that led to Napoleon’s defeat and then oversaw the creation of congress-diplomacy, through which the victorious powers arranged to keep the peace in Europe. It was as a proponent of realpolitik, Bew says, that Castlereagh has attracted the admiration of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and modern Conservative foreign secretaries, Douglas Hurd and William Haigh.

Of course, having Henry Kissinger as an admirer is more of an indictment than an endorsement – Christopher Hitchens has persuasively argued that Kissinger for his policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, Chile, should have been charged as a war criminal; while the stinging assessments of Castlereagh’s contemporary foes, disgusted by the political repression at home that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street conspiracy, still ring true.

For Byron, Castleregah was the Irish grim reaper, a ‘placid miscreant’ – a reference to Castlereagh’s notoriously calm, or to detractors, cold, demeanour – while to Shelley he was ‘Swellfoot the tyrant’ – a mocking reference to Castlereagh’s gout – or, in the Masque of Anarchy, written after Peterloo, the very face of murder.

I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
(Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, 1819)

Cold-blooded, smooth-fac'd, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fix'd,
And offer poison long already mix'd.

An orator of such set trash of phrase
Ineffably—legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,
Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments and perpetual motion.

A bungler even in its disgusting trade,
And botching, patching, leaving still behind
Something of which its masters are afraid,
States to be curb'd, and thoughts to be confin'd,
Conspiracy or Congress to be made—
Cobbling at manacles for all mankind—
A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,
With God and Man's abhorrence for its gains.
(Byron, dedication to Don Juan, 1819)

Robert Burns' Scots Wha Hae

 

Robert Burns’ Scots Wha Hae (1793) is perhaps the greatest ode to freedom ever written. It purports to be in the form of a speech by King of the Scots Robert the Bruce before the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), at which the forces of the Scottish monarch successfully repelled the invading army of King Edward II of England and helped secure Scotland’s medieval independence.

Obviously, for nationalist Scots, the symbolism of the Battle of Bannockburn is overwhelming and has shaped the object of their politics – the recovery of Scottish independence. 

But there’s no suggestion that at the time of writing the song, Burns’ was making a call for Scottish independence or secession from Great Britain. (Some Unionist Scots suggest Burns saw no contradiction between being a patriotic Scot and a patriotic Briton). After the political union of England and Scotland in 1707, there was no agitation for greater Scottish autonomy until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Home Rule movement began to develop north of the border. 

It’s fairer to say that it wasn’t Scottish nationalism that informed Burns’ lyrics but a radical universalist egalitarianism shaped by the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. 

Christopher Hitchens also points to the influence on Burns of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, as reflected especially in Burns’ poems The Tree of Liberty and, perhaps Burns’ most notable poem, A Man’s a Man for a’ that – both, Hitchens says, repudiations of the monarchy and the hereditary principle in general and calls for radical social justice: 

Heard ye o’ the tree o’ France 

I watna what’s the name o’t 

Around it a’ the patriots dance 

Weel Europe kens the fame o’t. 

It stand where once the Bastille stood 

A prison built by kings, man 

When Superstition’s hellish brood 

Kept France in leading-strings, man. 

(The Tree of Liberty) 

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp 

The man’s the gold for a’that 

(A Man’s a Man for a’that) 

However, while it makes no sense to refer to Burns as a Scottish nationalist, his internationalism and egalitarianism is precisely the strain in Scottish culture and politics that the SNP now says it represents.

Indeed, the SNP argues that these precious Scottish values are being undermined by Scotland being tied to a Westminster government that has as its heart a Little England political philosophy – epitomised by Brexit – and an ideological commitment to neo-liberalism, which subordinates equality to free markets and cares little for narrowing social division. The only way for Scotland to realise the ideals Burns embodies, the SNP says, is by becoming independent. 

In the video above, that is the American poet Maya Angelou whooping and cheering at the end of Dick Gaughan’s rendition of Burns’ song. 

Angelou frequently spoke of the importance of Burns to her poetry. 

‘I fell in love with poetry and, amazingly, in a small village, a hamlet in Arkansas, I met Robert Burns. He was the first white man I read who seemed to understand that a human being was a human being, and we are more alike than unalike.’

Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Paine

 

It is impossible to overstate the influence of the thoughts, attitudes and bloody-mindedness of Thomas Paine on Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ contrariness, radical atheism and dedication to revolt in all its manifestations owes much to the English political philosopher and American founding father. Above is a lecture given by Hitchens to accompany his biography of Paine, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and below is an extract from Hitchens’ God is not Great, which draws attention to Paine's book The Age of Reason, a coruscating renunciation of the myths and stories of the Bible.

‘Even the great Thomas Paine, a friend to Franklin and Jefferson, repudiated the charge of atheism that he was not afraid to invite. Indeed, he set out to expose the crimes and horrors of the Old Testament, as well as the foolish myths of the New, as part of a vindication of god. No grand and noble deity, he asserted, should have such atrocities and stupidities laid to his charge. Paine's Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. It had a tremendous worldwide effect. 

‘His American friends and contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers and their private Anglican Church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the state.’ (Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great).