Rosenbaum, Hitchens and the Left

Christopher Hitchens has a new book out, on George Orwell. Orwell is one of those figures who tends to mean whatever you want him to mean: he's been adopted by political partisans (and, indeed, non-partisans) from across the spectrum, each one of whom finds his views perfectly encapsulated in Orwell's body of work.

The irony, judging by the latest column from the puffed-up Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer, is that Hitchens himself is starting to be treated in exactly the same way – and while he's still alive, no less!

Stefan Geens seems to admire this piece to the point of saying that he regrets not having had a subscription to the New York Observer. Huh? Putting the merits or otherwise of Rosenbaum to one side, the Observer is basically an Upper East Side gossip sheet filled with dinosaurs like Hilton Kramer and pointless Democrats like Joe Conason. It's read mainly for its real-estate column, and its hilarious pieces on the difference between Chapin and Spence. Why Geens thinks he'll be "slowly easing" into this piece of vanity publishing over the next few years I have no idea.

But of all the reasons to subscribe to the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum's political commentary has to be the worst. He might have interesting insights on the puzzles of Pale Fire, but his views on leftism in America seem little more than a warmed-over rehash of Martin Amis's ramblings in Koba the Dread.

At the risk of sounding like Rosenbaum myself, I wrote about the Amis book on September 8, but I didn't go into too much detail about the Amis v Hitchens feud: I reckoned Hitchens was more than capable of defending himself. The difference between Rosenbaum and myself, however, is that I provide a helpful link when I refer to my past entries, while Rosenbaum doesn't. His solipsism ("I think I made that clear in a column published here on Jan. 28"; "See my Nov. 6, 2000, column") serves no purpose: after all, no one saves their back issues of the New York Observer, and no one is going to trek down to the New York Public Library in attempt to follow the references.

Rosenbaum's actually worse than Amis, at least when he gets on to the subject of the Left's response to September 11 – a subject on which he rightly admires Hitchens. For while Amis picks his fights with an articulate, named individual (Hitchens), Rosenbaum flails unimpressively against an inchoate neo-Marxism which he sees all around him but can never seem to cite.

Look at the "two idiocies" he tries to fight back against in his column. The first is a relatively benign paragraph at the end of a film review, saying that Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition is "an American everyman, a pure-hearted killer who will commit no end of mayhem to ensure a better life for his children." From this, Rosenbaum deduces, after ratcheting up the sarcasm to embarrassing levels, that

Because they [Al Qaeda] hate America, they must be for liberation, and so we can’t blame them; we must accuse ourselves of being killers. In fact, we should thank them for providing our witty writer with an occasion for reminding the world that the "American everyman" is a killer. (Rosenberg's emphases.)

This response is so wildly disproportionate to its provocation, and bears so little relation to what was actually being said, that one worries for whatever critical faculties Rosenbaum ever had. But it's actually typical of his rhetoric. Rosenbaum's second "idiocy" – the "idiocy di tutti idiocies", in his words – was a nameless college professor saying that 9/11 might prompt Americans to do what the Germans did in the 1960s, and critically examine their past.

Before 9/11, of course, even Rosenbaum would have agreed with the statement that Americans ought to critically examine their past more than they do. Now, however, saying such a thing demonstrates no less than an "inability to distinguish America’s sporadic blundering depradations from Germany’s past, Hitlerism".

One more example: a Slate Breakfast Table discussion with David Gates on the anniversary of the attacks. Gates draws a parallel between the Taliban and John Ashcroft's obsession with "the flag stuff, the United We Stand stuff, the under-God stuff, the rituals of American civil religion, the encroachments of that old-time religion." Quoting Susan Sontag, he then points out that both of them oppose "pluralism, secularism, the equality of the sexes, dancing (all kinds), skimpy clothing and, well, fun".

It's easy to disagree with this. But it's easier to simply drown the point being made, and that's what Rosenbaum does in response, this time couched in a bit more politesse, since it's a friend he's talking to:

What comes across—and again I could be wrong—is that we are just about the worst thing in the world. No diff between Ashcroft and the Taliban.
But are you saying the Bush administration or America is morally equivalent to the Taliban? Do you see any significant differences?

What kind of tone-deafness is this? Is it not possible, any more, to make the point that the things we hate about the Taliban are actually the same things that we hate about the present Administration? Or, at least, is it not possible to say that without having to be boringly explicit about the fact that yes, actually, given the choice, we'd rather be where we are than in an Islamo-fascist theocracy?

The thing which annoys me is that Rosenbaum, in the Observer column, is explicitly aligning himself with Hitchens, who's far more intelligent and nuanced, and who actually is the recipient, in Koba the Dread, of the same sort of argument that Rosenbaum then goes on to gloss in the last part of his piece.

For Rosenbaum, making much the same mistake as Amis, says that "the Left [has] failed to come to terms with its history of indifference to (at best) and support for (at worst) genocidal Marxist regimes abroad". He slams "the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides—in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered." The contemporary Left, he says, has a "blind spot" when it comes to Marxist genocides, and claims that America "is the worst force on the planet".

Here, Rosenbaum stops citing anybody at all, and given his demonstrated knack for hyperbole, we can hardly take it that this characterisation of the Left is in any way accurate. But even if it were, he should have read his beloved Hitchens a bit better: here's an excerpt from his reponse to Amis in the Guardian.

You demand that people - you prefer the term "intellectuals" - give an account of their attitude to the Stalin terror. Irritatingly phrased though your demand may be, I say without any reservation that you are absolutely right to make it. A huge number of liberals and conservatives and social democrats, as well as communists, made a shabby pact with "Koba", or succumbed to the fascinations of his power. Winston Churchill told Stalin's ambassador to London, before the war, that he had quite warmed to the old bastard after the Moscow Trials, which had at least put down the cosmopolitan revolutionaries who Churchill most hated. TS Eliot returned the manuscript of Animal Farm to George Orwell, well knowing that his refusal might condemn it to non-publication, because he objected to its "Trotskyite" tone. (You can read all about this illuminating episode in my little book on Orwell.) I think we can say fairly that the names of Churchill and Eliot are still highly regarded in conservative political and cultural circles. You have a certain reputation for handling irony and paradox. How could you miss an opportunity like this, and sound off like a Telegraph editorialist instead, hugging the shore and staying with the script?
However, while all of those and many other dirty compromises were being made, the Bulletin of the Left Opposition was publishing exactly the details, of famine and murder and deportation and misery, that now shock you so much. I evidently wasted my breath in telling you this, but there exists a historical tradition of Marxist writers - Victor Serge, CLR James, Boris Souvarine and others - who exposed and opposed Stalin while never ceasing to fight against empire and fascism and exploitation. If the moral and historical audit is to be properly drawn up, then I would unhesitatingly propose the members of this derided, defeated diaspora, whose closest British analogue and ally was Orwell, as the ones who come best out of the several hells of the last century. A pity that you felt them beneath your notice.

It is, surely, undeniable that the strongest criticism of Marxist genocide came from the Left, and that the Right has often made very strange bedfellows itself: note Hitchens' point that "Moscow directly ordered the French Communist party to help put down the rebellion against De Gaulle, and Brezhnev both sought and received Lyndon Johnson's advance assurance that a Red Army invasion of Prague would be considered an 'internal affair'".

Of course, there were misguided Stalinist apologists in the West. I defy, however, Rosenbaum to find any leftist who still believes, as he seems to think they all do, that McCarthy was worse than Stalin.

If this is the man who's saying goodbye to the Left with such vitriol, then I'm sure the Left, in turn, will say good riddance to him. And no, Stefan, this is not what Hitchens is saying, not by a long shot. I'm with Hitchens on the subject of whether America "deserved" 9/11. But I'm a long, long way from Rosenbaum.

Posted by Felix at 10:44 EST

Comments

Rosenbaum does not believe that the left thinks McCarthy is worse than Stalin. He believes that the left thinks Ashcroft is a greater menace than Bin Laden, and this happens to be the precise sentiment that led Hitchens to quit The Nation; he says so in the last paragraph of his piece--go look it up. Can it be that in your estimation, when Rosenbaum says this, he is being tone deaf, but when Hitchens posits the same view almost verbatim, he's "far more intelligent and nuanced?"

And Rosenbaum's whole article is about making the point you only grant Hitchens: Just as Hitchens clarifies that there were those on the left who "exposed and opposed" Stalin, Rosenbaum find his own leftist hero who is capable of making a stand against Bin Laden. Namely: Christopher Hitchens. (And, admittedly, himself.)

Your other critique of Rosenbaum seems rather slight (or perhaps you were flailing?): Have you ever seen hyperlinks to past news articles in a newspaper, no less a pink one?

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 17:45 EST, October 13, 2002

You're wrong, Stefan, Rosenbaum does believe the Left thinks McCarthy was worse than Stalin. See him in his own high-sarcasm mode (his emphases kept in):

As if it was maybe just an accident that Marxist-Leninist regimes turned totalitarian and genocidal. No connection there. The judgment that McCarthyism was the chief crime of the Cold War era doesn�t need a bit of a rethink, even when put up against the mass murder of dissidents by Marxist states.

Believing that McCarthy was worse than Stalin is ridiculous, and no one does. Believing that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden, however, is perfectly justifiable (even if it's wrong). John Ashcroft has torn up the Constitution of the United States; Osama bin Laden is a defeated man who might not even be alive and who has no base any longer to launch attacks against anyone. As a non-US citizen in New York, I can be arrested, denied an attorney, tried in secret, and sentenced to death without appeal. I can also be the victim of a terrorist attack. The only question is which is more likely: and about that, reasonable Leftists can disagree.

As for the hyperlinks, yes, I've seen hyperlinks to past stories on newspapers' websites. Even on pink newspapers' websites.

Posted by: Felix at 18:01 EST, October 13, 2002

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id138.htm

Posted by: andican at 22:54 EST, September 16, 2003

If you can get past the stylistic narcissism of his essays (the written equivalent of someone who likes to hear themselves talk), Ron Rosenbaum has little to offer his readers.

He writes as though you are already party to his views, as though the simple act of Ron Rosenbaum trashing Gore Vidal or Pete Seeger, or extolling Chris Hitchens is enough. We don't need facts or reasoned arguments, just read a passage where Ron gives it to some whacko lefty.

And what about all those lefty whackos? I mean how can they possibly entertain ideas that are so far beyond the mainstream that even Ron Rosenbaum cannot countenance them. Oswald didn't kill JFK? Get outta here! You're joking right?

On the plus side, writers of Rosenbaum's caliber will only ever "preach to the choir." Rosenbaum is a literary Rush Limbaugh. Theirs is a style of polemic that compels neither thought nor reflection. Mind pap for the mindless wishing to remain that way.

I've read my last Rosenbaum piece. Life is too short to waste on bad logic and self-enamored writers.

Posted by: Martin Gorda at 12:20 EST, May 15, 2004

Rosenbaum, Hitchens and the Left

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