Hitchens “no closed mindedness like the closed-mindedness of liberals”

by Scoop Shachtman, 24 April 2008

Hitchens interview (via MH):

In 1982 he backed Britain against the Argentinian junta in the Falklands. On this he ran against almost everyone else on the British left, and had sharp disagreements with James Fenton. “I had been in Buenos Aires,” he says. “I’d seen what the Galtieri regime was like.” He cites this as an early example of the British left taking reactionary positions. “If it had been up to them the junta would have lasted ten more years and destroyed the society of the Falkland Islands.” He likens the response of liberal friends to the reaction he would get 20 years later when he announced his support for George W Bush. “People would goggle at you as if you were an idiot. There’s no intolerance like liberal intolerance, no closed mindedness like the closed-mindedness of liberals.”

Comments

  1. Dave

    Thursday 24 April 2008 at 16:39

    Hurrah for Hitch, telling it like it is as usual. I’m too young to remember who was against re-taking the Falklands but it’s depressing to think anybody coulda supported Galtieri’s goons over Maggie. Gosh, I’m glad I’m not a brain-dead liberal any more!

  2. geejay

    Thursday 24 April 2008 at 20:27

    Many of Hitches opponents are proof of the maxim “Scratch a liberal, and you’ll often find a fascist underneath”

  3. Duncan Money

    Thursday 24 April 2008 at 21:18

    Just a couple of things.

    an early example of the British left taking reactionary positions

    Since the majority of the left in Britain were soft on, or sympathetic to, Stalinism from the 1920’s onwards, then displayed a similar attitude to Maoist China, I think Mr Hitchens is being a little optimistic with his identifying the Falklands War as the beginning of reactionary politics on the left.

    There’s no intolerance like liberal intolerance

    Let’s try and keep a sense of proportion.

    It is likely, given current trends across Europe, that a political party of the extreme right will gain state power in the coming decades.

    Then we’ll see, once again, what intolerance is really like.

  4. graeme

    Thursday 24 April 2008 at 21:54

    What a load of shit, for the reasons Duncan outlined above.

  5. Bill

    Friday 25 April 2008 at 17:22

    People forget that this guy (Galtieri) would send people he didn’t like on one way helicopter trips over the sea. He hated Pinochet but if that’s enough to give him a pass for conquering the Falklands, you might as well give him the Nobel Prize because he flossed between meals.

    You weren’t required to like Maggie to be a progressive. But to like Galtieri while claiming to be one is to live a lie.

  6. Will

    Saturday 26 April 2008 at 23:09

    I enjoyed reading that for some of the autobiographical content. Some of it was new to me (tho’ not a great deal). Also good was this excerpt:

    “If there’s anything that still identifies Hitchens as a man of the radical left, it’s that he’s willing to take this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion; to declare there is a map of positions that everyone should have navigated correctly since the fall of the wall. “Wanna hear?” Certainly I want to hear. What he outlines is a checklist for being right—as a leftist—over all the big international issues since 1989: “First, everyone should have welcomed the fall of the Berlin wall and the overthrow of Ceausescu… As they should have been pro-Tiananmen crowd earlier that year. That’s the baseline.” Next, he continues, everyone on the left should have defended Salman Rushdie, “unequivocally, against the ayatollah.” The left should then have perceived that the “semi-utopian, Fukuyama, end-of-history stuff” was an illusion, and that the age of the totalitarian state hadn’t stopped. And when Milosevic invaded Bosnia, and Saddam invaded Kuwait, they should have been “not just for stopping that, but for overthrowing the people responsible… One has to be opposed to totalitarianism and its racist and theocratic version in particular. And the inescapable thing that lies behind all this is that it’s bound to make 1960s people reconsider their view of the US… anyone who hasn’t reconsidered it at all… I have no respect for.”

    That’s just about perfect.