Christopher Hitchens on Media, Political Views, Ideology, Beliefs - Interview (1987)

• published: 01 Sep 2014
• views: 782

Alexander Linklater has summarized Hitchens' intellectual outlook as follows: One of [Hitchens'] old strongholds [was] the 17th-century contest between king and parliament of the English civil war. For Hitchens, the Cromwellian revolt represents not just the foundational struggle for parliamentary rule, but the great rejection of divine right. ... But he is no optimistic Enlightenment rationalist. He identifies himself with Thomas Paine's disillusion at the French terror, and Rosa Luxemburg's famous warning to Lenin about the inexorability of one-man rule. He retains, however, from his Marxist youth an intellectual absolutism and a disdain for liberal dilemmas and trade-offs -- hence a brutal assault on Isaiah Berlin's genteel liberalism in a 1998 essay. He is incurious about what religious belief feels like, or what meaning it has for millions of people -- even though, unlike his co-anti-religionist Richard Dawkins, Hitchens concedes that religious feeling is ineradicable. Hitchens became a Marxist and a Trotskyist in his teens, beliefs that further developed during his time at Oxford University. In the 1960s Hitchens joined the left -- specifically the International Socialists -- drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire". But by 2001, Hitchens had disavowed socialism, declaring "capitalism is the only revolutionary system".[2] In the same year he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist". Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalization as "innovative and internationalist". He suggested that he had returned to his early, pre-socialist libertarianism, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral authoritarians.[3] Although by 2004 he described himself as "a recovering ex-Trotskyite",[4] in a 2006 debate he remarked that "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".[5] Hitchens, as recently as 2009, again referred to himself as "a Marxist". Hitchens continued to affirm his respect for Marxist theory, including his 2009 article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx". There he explains how Marx's economic analysis in Das Kapital has predicted many of the failures of the U. S. economy, including the late-2000s recession. In a June 2010 interview with The New York Times, he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist". He continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men, and the Bolsheviks' October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens%27_political_views