The Supress i on of Open Debate

8/13/2019 The Supress i on of Open Debate

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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 acautionary 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.

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 ofthe 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. H e i s 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 ofsocial death and perpetual banishment from normal

society. The degradation ceremony is thus fundamentally

an instrument forothering, 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

Soc

DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9123-3

S. Cottee (*)

School of Social Sciences, Bangor University,

Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG, UK

e-mail: [email protected]

T. Cushman

Department of Sociology, Wellesley College,

106 Central Street,

Wellesley, MA, 02481, USA

e-mail: [email protected]


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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 tocapture 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 theNation, 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-quoforce. 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 progres-

sive 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, butfor 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

cheerleaderfor 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, over-

weight, 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 termcondemning the condemners, and is routinely used by

criminal perpetrators to minimize or obscure their wrong-

doing. 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 intellec-

tual 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 areyou to judge, consideringyour

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 iseither 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 believerson 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 upwith 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 success-

fully 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 politicalcontexts. 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 self-

promotion. 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 controver-

sial 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 Cush-

mans 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

criticseternal dismay, Hitchenss work generates a mass of

interest, and we had already secured permissions from Juan

Cole, George Scialabba, Michael Kazin, Norman Finkel-stein, 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 inquestionall 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

Nationthat 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 documen-

tation 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 theNation, 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 contractwith 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 intellectu-

ally 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 localscheme 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, Cush-

man 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 ofNew 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 wonderfuland 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 Nationletter 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 editorsand did not

do justice to potential criticisms. In regard to this latter

point, Herman was clearly mistaken, for we had deliber-ately 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 bookHitchens-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 inour 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 thattheres 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 whichconsistency favors ideological rectitude over pluralism and

diversity of viewpoints.

The post-9/11 age,contraFrancis 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 ofSociety, is Professor of Sociology

at Wellesley College. He is the co-editor ofChristopher Hitchens and

His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left(New York University Press).

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The Supress i on of Open Debate