Soc DOI 10.

1007/s12115-008-9123-3

COMMENTARY

The Suppression of Open Debate: The Case of Christopher Hitchens

Simon Cottee & Thomas Cushman

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Keywords Hitchens . Left . Jihadist terrorism

This is the story of how a small, but culturally powerful, clique of Left-leaning Anglo-American intellectuals tried to derail the publication of a book about Christopher Hitchens and his bitter and well-publicized break with the Left. The book, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, published in June 2008 by New York University Press, is a collection of Hitchenss most incisive and controversial writings on the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the Left, and includes a selection of his quarrels with some of his former comrades. What follows is a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to foster political self-reflection and self-critique among those who consider their political affiliation to be on the Left, and the readiness of its self-appointed guardians to thwart open debate among intellectuals. It is a tale of the cultural reach and power of, to paraphrase Karl Popper, the enemies of the open society, and their tenacious attempts to influence the form and content of public discourse. Back in 2005, Simon Cottee, a British criminology lecturer, met Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College, to discuss an article that Cottee had submitted to the Journal of Human Rights, founded and edited by Cushman.
S. Cottee (*) School of Social Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG, UK e-mail: s.r.cottee@bangor.ac.uk T. Cushman Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA, 02481, USA e-mail: tcushman@wellesley.edu

The article examined the Lefts indulgent attitude towards, and mischaracterization of, the threat of jihadist terrorism. In the course of our meeting we strayed onto the subject of political apostasy among Left intellectuals, and how internal Left critics or defectors are ritually excommunicated and denounced by the true believers as unclean, impure, deviant, mentally unbalanced and unworthy of serious attention. We recalled a line from the redoubtable radical journalist Marc Cooper: Leaving the left can be a bit like trying to quit the Mafia. You cant get out without getting assassinatedliterally or figuratively. At some point in the conversation we hit upon a mutual admiration. Cushman spoke of his interest in the work of the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who wrote a classic article in 1956 on what he called degradation ceremoniesthe formalized ways in which societies denounce and distance themselves from their deviant elements. Garfinkel vividly describes a process whereby the target of the degradation ceremony is ritually attacked and transformed into an outsider. At the hands of his condemners, the target is recategorized as literally a different and new person. He is made strange and separated from a place in the legitimate order, his very existence an affront to the health and normalcy of the world from which he has deviated. He experiences a kind of social death and perpetual banishment from normal society. The degradation ceremony is thus fundamentally an instrument for othering, a purification ritual that serves symbolically to reaffirm social bonds and clarify the limits of morality and of what can and cannot be tolerated. It is an especially prominent feature of closed social groups and societies, where the definitions of reality and truth are homogenous and rigidly circumscribed, and where any threat of difference must be, as Peter Berger and Thomas

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Luckmann phrase it, nihilated. We then spoke about the work of other great sociologists of deviance, such as Erving Goffman, Howard Becker and Edwin Lemert, all of whom had sought to challenge the tendency, which they saw as endemic in conventional society, to pathologize deviants and to label them as crazy, abnormal, or defective. This body of sociological knowledge, which itself had a kind of deviant and subterranean quality about it, seemed to capture perfectly the phenomenon we had been discussing and with which we were both captivated: the Lefts ritual cleansing of its deviant, impure elements. For Cushman, it was especially resonant: in 2003 he had sponsored, at Wellesley College, an international centenary conference on George Orwell, which resulted in an edited book (with John Rodden) entitled George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century (Paradigm, 2004). At the conference and in the book, the vilification of Orwell by leftists he had criticized was a major topic of discussion. In addition, Cushman had recently published a collection of liberal-Left arguments in defense of the Iraq war, entitled A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (California, 2005), and had gained raw first-hand experience of the dynamics of social banishment on the part of the anti-war Left intelligentsia, ranging from polite ostracism to vicious personal attacks, in one case bordering on physical assault (ironically by the director of a Peace and Justice Studies program at a college in New York State). But the focal point of our discussion was Christopher Hitchens, who, in the days after 9/11, had vehemently repudiated many of his fellow leftists for their abject unwillingness to fully condemn the attacks and for their failure to recognize the character and ideological roots of jihadist terrorism. Hitchens accused them of being soft on fascism, and railed against their masochistic contempt for the western democratic societies to which they belonged (and from which they copiously benefited). By October 2002, Hitchens had had enough, and, in a highly symbolic gesture, resigned from the Nation, the Left weekly to which he had contributed a fortnightly Minority Report since 1982. In his last report, dated October 14, Hitchens lamented that the magazine had become the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. Shortly after, Hitchens wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled So Long, Fellow Travelers, and expressed his contempt for a Left that was coldly indifferent to the cause of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for regime change when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. He also expressed his loathing of a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist, and a Left that can think of Milosevic and Saddam as victims.

Contrary to what some of his critics think, Hitchenss break with the Left was not really a defection, since he did not sign up to a new creed nor propel himself into an opposing political grouping. Neither was it a recantation, for Hitchens did not reject the beliefs and convictions that defined his leftism. On the contrary, the break was fuelled by a profound disillusionment with the western Left in its current guise as, in Hitchenss eyes, a spent status-quo force. For Hitchens, the Left had reneged on its better traditions in favor of something truly reactionary: religious dogmatism and a hatred of liberal democracy and progressive politics. In Hitchenss mind, it was not he, but his former comrades, who had defected, and it was they, and not him, who had all the explaining to do. And yet: Hitchens does not quite cut the figure of the classic internal Left critic. Like his hero George Orwell, Hitchenss aim is to salvage, in spite of his comrades, the ideals of the progressive Left: liberty, equality, secularism, democracy, and solidarity with the oppressed. But, unlike Orwell, he is acting not for the sake of the Left as a living tradition, but for the sake of the very ideals themselves, as free-standing commitments that have a moral claim on us, regardless of our party-political alignments. As Hitchens recently put it, he is no longer interested in defending the honor of the Left. Hitchenss break with the Left, then, was really a break with the herd-thinking of political movements and the confines of orthodox political ideologies. Despite these subtle features of his apostasy, Hitchens was vilified by his former comrades as a traitor and a turn-coat, as someone who cruelly and cynically betrayed his former friends and allies. The main accusation is that he has become a rank ideologist of imperialism and a fanatical cheerleader for the Bush administration. And since being a turn-coat seems always to be indicative of a far wider moral decline, Hitchens was accused, variously, of being a racist, an alcoholic (a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay, as the British Member of Parliament George Galloway famously put it), a snob, dishonest, venal, overweight, unkempt, psychopathic, and a closeted homosexual. Hitchens was, to paraphrase Garfinkel, castigated as a deviant, as someone lower in the local scheme of social types. He was ritually separated from the Left, purged from its orbit, and even redefined, in Mary Douglass anthropological sense, as essentially dirty and impure. We thought that the cultural construction of Hitchens as a lowly apostate and a tarnished heretic would make an excellent case-study for thinking about the Left and its rituals of denunciation and purification. The latter had been a prevalent feature of 20th century Left-wing politics, where leftists rushed to the defense of the Soviet Union and purged anyone who dared to criticize it or who was not sufficiently strident in their criticism of the capitalist enemy, and in particular the United States. The comrades

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thus became experts in the politics of denial and the ancient art of rhetorical redescription, or what is now called spin. Confronted with irrefutable evidence of Soviet inhumanity, their response was to evade or excuse it. Mitchell Cohen nicely captures this mentality when he mockingly wrote: Confront Stalinist atrocities? Ummm...lets address the real issues, czarism, capitalism, and imperialism. This particular rhetorical device is what criminologists term condemning the condemners, and is routinely used by criminal perpetrators to minimize or obscure their wrongdoing. Among philosophers and linguists, it is referred to as the tu quoque logical fallacy, a disreputable ad hominem strategy which focuses attention not on the actual intellectual substance of an opposing argument, but on impugning the integrity of the opposing party making it. Commonly, it consists of a statement to the effect that yes, its bad, but not as bad as... or who are you to judge, considering your record, which is... In political and intellectual discourse, the deployment of this rhetorical tool is often justified in the name of balance and context, but its real purpose is either to downgrade the seriousness of the wrongdoing at issue by comparing it to morally equivalent or worse kinds of wrongdoing or to simply hide it from critical scrutiny altogether. For the Left-wing comrades, the imperative was to defend the cause of communism at all costs and to resist the trap of giving ammunition to the enemy. The imperative, in other words, was to deny, evade and rationalize. And for those who were unwilling to collude in a lie and who sought to criticize the Soviet experiment from a Left perspective, their fate was permanent ostracism and exile, and sometimes far worse. They were condemned as internal enemies, their motives defamed, and even their sanity questioned, something to which Orwell testified, and of which he had direct personal experience: The upshot is that if from time to time you express a mild distaste for slave-labor camps or one-candidate elections, you are either insane or actuated by the worst motives... In the vilification of Hitchens by former comrades, we saw the dramatic recrudescence of this othering mentality among true believers on the Left, despite their loudly proclaimed aversion to essentialist thinking. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003, it seemed that Hitchens was everywhere, and that not a day would pass without a blistering face-off between him and his former comrades. Given the relevance and sheer drama of these disputes, as well as the prominence of Hitchens as a public intellectual, we thought that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to reproduce them in a book volume, alongside Hitchenss own post-9/11 political writings and a selection of critical responses from his liberal-Left critics. Unusually for a work of this sort, we felt that it was important not simply to

republish Hitchenss key work, but to publish the criticisms of some of his most trenchant and public critics. In this sense, the book was conceived as an exercise in pluralism rather than in the shameless kinds of self-promotion that one usually sees in volumes dedicated to this or that thinker. Shortly after that first meeting, we began to draw together our favorite pieces and exchanges, and came up with a first manuscript, which we sent to Reed Malcolm, an enterprising and brave young editor at the University of California Press (UCP) with whom Cushman had successfully worked on the iconoclastic volume, A Matter of Principle. Malcolm straight away expressed his enthusiasm and support for the project and sought to clarify that the UCP was our first-choice publisher, and that we would offer the manuscript exclusively to the UCP. We replied that it was, and that our offer was exclusive to the UCP, and, on Malcolms request, began to sketch out an extensive introduction to the book, setting both Hitchens and the pieces in broader sociological, historical and political contexts. We subsequently received an advance contract for the book, subject to the final approval of the UCP Editorial Board. At the same time, we contacted Hitchens to see if he would agree in principle to the idea of the book. Hitchens responded positively and firmly, and although he writhed at our initial title (Hitchenss War), he graciously offered his support for the project, and granted us complete and unfettered access to his work. He also made it clear that he did not want any involvement in the project, since he felt that it would undermine the objective integrity of the book, as well as render him vulnerable to the charge of selfpromotion. As it turned out, Hitchens remained faithful to his promise, although he did kindly agree to write an afterword, in which he reflects on the recent battles in which he has been involved. Moreover, and contrary to the opportunistic and venal temperament that Hitchenss critics like to attribute to him, he did not demand a single cent from the books proceeds. (It is difficult to imagine that Noam Chomsky or the executors of the work of Edward Said would willingly and happily lend their support to a book that included not only their best and most controversial writings but also those of their best and most vigorous critics. We would hypothesize, based on the account which follows, that the prospects of this happening are very faint indeed.) The book was progressing rapidly, but then, as Cushmans permissions researcher delicately put it, all hell broke loose. As part of a section entitled Critical Responses, we had planned to include four pieces by, respectively, Tariq Ali, Edward Herman, Stefan Collini and Steven Lukes. However, all of them refused to grant us permission to reprint their articles. Collinis refusal was

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especially disappointing, since his article, a long review of Hitchenss book Orwells Victory, contained a number of illuminating insights into, and criticisms of, Hitchenss work. Still, we remained undaunted, and it was not as if we had a shortage of articles from which to choose. To his critics eternal dismay, Hitchenss work generates a mass of interest, and we had already secured permissions from Juan Cole, George Scialabba, Michael Kazin, Norman Finkelstein, and several others. Then we received news that Noam Chomsky was following suit, and was withholding the copyright to a letter he wrote in response to Hitchens in the Nation magazine. Edward Herman had also written a letter in response to Hitchens in the same magazine, and, in an email to our permissions assistant, was categorical that he too did not want this to be included in the book. Katha Pollitt, also, subsequently denied us the rights to her part of an exchange with Hitchens. It was obvious: we had been the victims of a concerted boycott. There was no other possible conclusion to be drawn. Since the pieces in questionall of them fascinating pieces of political rhetoricwere crucial for the Critical Exchanges section of the book, the very viability of the book was now in doubt. But the Nation had already granted us the rights to use Chomskys and Hermans letters. We had received a contract from the magazine, which was sent back with a check for payment of a fee set by the Nation for both permissions. In our correspondence with Herman, he was emphatic that he did not want his letter to be reprinted in the book, but was nevertheless candid enough to concede regretfully that, since the copyright belonged to the Nation and in view of the fact that the magazine had already granted us the permission to use the letter, he did not, as he expressed it, have a legal leg to stand on. Chomsky, however, was not conceding anything: he instructed the Nation that he was the sole holder of the rights to reprint his work, and insisted that the Nation had erred in granting us the right to reprint his letter. In a letter to the Nations Publicity and Syndication Director, Mike Webb, Cushman asked for clarification regarding the issue of copyright. Webb reported that Chomsky was utterly adamant that the copyright for his letter was his and his alone and that the Nation had made a mistake in offering us a contract to reprint the letter, although he did not produce a shred of legal evidence or documentation testifying that Chomsky was the sole holder of the rights to his letter. In the actual issue of the magazine in which the letter appears copyright is claimed explicitly by the Nation. After much equivocation and a lengthy delay, Webb eventually came down on the side of Chomsky and Herman: a decision that was based not on any legal argument, but on a cowardly partisan deference to Chomsky. As Webb himself unguardedly and incautiously put it in a

heated telephone conversation with Cushman, these people are friends of the magazine and in our political orbit. On the advice of Reed Malcolm, we decided not to push the issue with the Nation, since it was clear that in this case the clout of Noam Chomsky among the Left intelligentsia and his obsequious indulgence by the Nation would most likely be too strong a force to counter, even if the law was indeed on our side and the Nation had violated its contract with us. In any case, we had resolved to summarize the contents of the letters in question, and reprint Hitchenss responses to them. And as for the remaining pieces in the Exchanges section, we incorporated them into a larger section called Critical Responses and Exchanges. In spite of the de facto boyott and the sustained ire of Chomsky, Malcolm persisted with the book and secured two extremely positive outside peer reviews. On November 9, 2006, Malcolm then brought the book to the Editorial Board. To his, and our, astonishment the book was deferred, which in effect (due to the timing of the book) was tantamount to a negative decision. It is of course possible that the Board felt that the book would attract too much controversy or was itself too controversial or even that it was not sufficiently intellectually serious to merit publication. The UCP is one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, and quite rightly has a reputation to uphold. Yet, the book was, as is the case with all books brought to the Board, subjected to the usual process of external peer review, and had received two strong recommendations for publication. Furthermore, sensitivity to controversy did not, evidently, prevent California from publishing, in 2005, Norman Finkelsteins deeply controversial book Beyond Chutzpah, which was subsequently savaged by the eminent Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz and which was then followed by the termination of Finkelsteins position at DePaul University. It had to have been patently obvious to the Board that ours was a well-conceived and serious projecta project, moreover, which had been strongly shepherded by the UCPs own in-house editorial staff. In addition, at the time at which the Board convened, Hitchens was actually a visiting professor in the University of California system (unlike Finkelstein) and ought to have enjoyed the privilege and courtesy of fair treatment by the UCP, even if the ideologically driven Editorial Board condescendingly viewed him as a lowly apostate. Clearly, factors extraneous to the books quality had connived to derail its progress. Since his break with the Left, Hitchens is no longer viewed from the perspective of the Lefts cultural elite as a credible figure, and the publication of a book devoted solely to his thinking would have served to legitimize him. It is no secret that university presses in the US are dominated by radicals (and not so much by liberalsthe

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distinction is crucial in this case), and it is also no secret that the members of the UCPs Editorial Boardconsisting of tenured University of California facultygenerally share an ideological world-view that is to the far left of the political spectrum. Given their ideological proclivities, the Board was not about to collude in legitimating Christopher Hitchens, for it would have meant giving voice to an ideological adversary, to someone lower in the local scheme of social types and unworthy of their serious notice. Nor, perhaps more decisively, was the Editorial Board of the UCP about to incur the wrath of Noam Chomsky, with whom it shared a direct connection and apparently a deep ideological bond. Recognizing that the stalling of the Editorial Board was a de facto means of censoring a book which had been widely supported by the editorial staff of the UCP, Cushman immediately contacted Malcolm to announce that we had lost faith in the Press and that we had decided to withdraw the book. Having surveyed our options, we then decided to send the book to Eric Zinner, Editor-in-Chief of New York University Press, who after reviewing it, immediately issued a contract for its publication, with the full approval of the Presss Editorial Board. Not long after that decisive November Editorial Board meeting at the UCP, Cushman received an unsolicited long email from one of the Board members, who expressed outrage at the decision of the Board to stonewall the book. It contained a striking vindication not only of the book itself, but also of our dark suspicions about the integrity of the UCPs evaluation process in relation to our book. In this email, the Board member wrote: Over the course of my tenure on the board, now six and a half years all told, I have presented more than 250 books to the board. I have never lost a single book manuscript. Some of the books were as controversial as your manuscript, but I always felt that our spirited discussions and decisions were based on the merits of the manuscript and the critical reviews by the external reviewers. Neither was the case with your manuscript. He also said of the book that it was wonderful and that one need not agree with any of Hitchenss positions to appreciate it and to grow from it. We are not exaggerating in the least, then, when we say that our treatment at the hands of the UCPs Editorial Board was in violation of all the usual norms and values of academic publishing, and represented what we felt was something akin to an academic mugging, not only of Hitchens, but of us as scholars who had done our utmost to produce a book of value in the history and sociology of ideas. We really ought to have seen this whole episode coming, especially in the light of Edward Hermans correspondence, which offers a classic case-study in the conventional modes of thinking that operate on the reactionary Left. Hermans refusal to grant us the rights to both his article on Hitchens,

published as For RationalizationOf Imperial Violence in the web magazine Z-Net, and his Nation letter was based on his belief that, as he put it, our book was obviously designed to give Hitchens more exposure and advance his ideas. The selection of critical responses to Hitchens, he wrote, was made by Hitchens-friendly editors and did not do justice to potential criticisms. In regard to this latter point, Herman was clearly mistaken, for we had deliberately chosen Hitchenss most eloquent and accomplished critics, of whom we counted Herman as a member, for inclusion in the volume. But the element of bad faith in Hermans reasoning is disclosed in his closing paragraph: I would not want to participate in such a project in any case. Hitchens is now getting far more exposure than he deserves, especially in light of his intellectual decline, intellectual opportunism, and increasing demagoguery in support of straightforward aggression. Is our book Hitchens-friendly? Certainly a book of this kind is grounded in some admiration of the subject, but we have some critical things to say about Hitchenss work in our introduction to the volume. And we chose to include a number of critical responses to Hitchenss work that are unsparing in their critical judgments and contain some powerful arguments against many of his key claims and ideas. This is, we think, exactly how Hitchens would want it. At one point in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics, Hitchens acutely observes that theres a general tendency not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with themto believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one. This perhaps explains Hermans knee-jerk assumption, wholly unfounded, that our motive in producing the book must be to advance Hitchenss ideas and expose him to even more attention (which, by the way, is something Hitchens does fairly well all by himself), rather than to offer a sociological view of factionalism and intellectual battles on the Left, to subject Hitchenss ideas to critical scrutiny, and to use the dialectical method ultimately to advance understanding of global political affairs. Indeed, the value of the book, if we can be so bold as to say so, is that it offers the reader a dialectical approach to the history of ideas, an approach which is ironically lacking among todays Left, which is more interested in fostering tendentious ideological monologues than a vibrant interchange of ideas. In his recent political memoir, The Fall-Out, Andrew Anthony writes very insightfully about the destructive and enfeebling consequences of ideological conformity among western leftists. He argues that in their implacable, uncompromising hatred of the bourgeois capitalist West, a large part of the Left contrived to deny, excuse, rationalize and evade all manner of inhumane actions and practices, and offers the Soviet Gulag as the preeminent example. At

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its best, the Left sought to defend, often with real bravery and to great cost, the moral necessity of free expression and critical skepticism. At its worst, it crushed dissent within its own ranks, and sought to purge itself of those who deviated from the received scripts. Unfortunately, the Chomsky Herman faction, which we experienced up close in all of its absurd pettiness and ignominy, shows all the signs of the Left in its less than glorious moments, a Left which consistency favors ideological rectitude over pluralism and diversity of viewpoints. The post-9/11 age, contra Francis Fukuyama, remains an acutely and stubbornly ideological one. Far from withering away, ideological positions have in fact hardened. Since that fateful day, the contours of global geopolitics have fundamentally changed, and the defining battles of the age are now between theocracy and secularism. Yet the reactionary Left remains stoically wedded to its frozen third-worldist, anti-imperialist convictions, and shows little sign of an internal reformation. Ideological conformity and repression continue to stalk its barren lands, the ancient

guardians of which are still yet to learn from their past mistakes and realize that self-criticism and openness to new ideas are essential for intellectual progress. It is a deep irony that a book largely about the herd-thinking and stagnation of the current Left should itself come up against these very same tendencies.

Simon Cottee is a lecturer in criminology and criminal justice at Bangor University, UK. He is currently writing a book on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the crisis of western liberals. He is the co-editor of Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left (New York University Press).

Thomas Cushman( Senior Editor of Society, is Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. He is the co-editor of Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left (New York University Press).