Power, Faith & Unbelief.

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race." – Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal agreed with George Bernard Shaw that the subjects which interest civilised men can be narrowed down to politics and religion. Not just in Creation but in his 'inventions' Kalki and Messiah. The religious instinct in man fascinated Vidal, especially as he saw the late 20th Century as a period of the deterioration of the traditional religions. Meanwhile he had preempted the rise of the death cult in America in his 1954 novel Messiah. In the bourgeois fetish for the cultures of the past Vidal found great hopes for our civilisation in the Stoics of Rome and the Confucians of China. The great mistake of humanity, in his view, was monotheism in its claim to universal truth and he held Christianity in particular disdain. In his novel Julian the focus is the Roman Emperor Julian who sets out to undo the union of Christian dogma and state-power in order to revert back to the plurality of Paganism. This exemplifies the liberal side of Gore Vidal, his loyalty to secular humanism.

It is typical of Gore Vidal in his 'reflections' to blend history, religion and politics in fiction for the reason that the court historians are so awful that the novel is now the only medium that can redeem history. In Creation the protagonist is a member of the Zoroastrian faith, perhaps the earliest monotheism, and witnesses the murder of Zoroaster. Cyrus is on the side of monotheism in the book, as well as the established powers in Persia and holds the masses in contempt. This is in contrast to Vidal's own political views, which could be taken as a hybrid leftism. In the book the political leaders of the time, particularly Thucydides and Pericles, are juxtaposed against one another as conservatives and democrats. The chaos of China is presented as a land which may conceive of the totalitarian impulse, while at the same time Confucian politics are received in a very positive light. Cyrus Spitama identifies himself with the conservatism of Thucydides as well as of Confucian hierarchical order and practical moral values.

In Creation Gore Vidal takes us on a tour of the ancient world, from Persia to Cathay and back, with Cyrus Spitama as our guide. Spitama is embedded in the ruling class of the Persian Empire, whilst also being descendent of Zoroaster and a follower of the Wise Lord consequently. Many of the major philosophical and religious ideas of the time are explored in the book, in Ancient Greece Cyrus encounters many philosophers and delivers his tale to his nephew Democritus. It was appropriate given the affinity Vidal had with the atomist principles espoused by Lucretius and Democritus. The vision was of a cosmos as a kind of soup of atoms bumping up against one another. The book culminates in the exposition of the atomist philosophy by Democritus. In another sense the relationship between Cyrus Spitama and Democritus mirrors the relationship between Gore Vidal and his grandfather Thomas Gore. Specifically the passing of the elder's wisdom to the young man.

The focus on the Persian Empire rails against the Western vanity, the tendency to see itself as a great fusion of Hellenism and Judeo-Christian values. Creation begins with Cyrus leaving the Odeon as Herodotus goes over his own version of history. The portrayal of Ancient Greece is just as one of many great powers rather than the centre of the world. The warring forces of China in the days of Confucius as well as the rival kingdoms of India feature prominently. The relativity of Greek glory to the lessons of the Buddha and Confucius, Mahavira and Lao Tzu. It's more than a novel, it is a work of comparative religion and philosophy crafted to persuade the reader not to be so arrogant in his modern assumptions. This is not to say that Vidal isn't writing from a position beyond commitment. Vidal was a lifelong atheist and opponent of monotheism. If anything he wants to enlighten us of the possibilities beyond the desert God of Abraham. The novel was timed well with the rise of Reaganism and the emergence of the Christian Right.


For Gore Vidal the threat of the Christian Right is equivalent to the threat of Le Pen in France, in other words it is fascistic and anti-democratic in nature. The accumulation of obscene piles of wealth in a few private hands matches the concentration of power in American society. This creates a systemic need to block democracy at every turn. Vidal would remind us that the political system in the United States is not at all democratic. First of all, there is only one political party with two right-wings - the Democrats and the Republicans - which is the party of property. Chomsky has spoken in these terms too, except he called it the business party. There is a structural need within capitalism which can be differentiated in terms of a base and a superstructure. The economic base depends upon the ideological superstructure for its legitimacy. The relation of the base to the superstructure is not just dependency, there is a tension between the pluralism and relativism of the market against the sociality of institutions and tradition.


The management of this tension can found in the revival of political religion in the new world. The Christian Right was born out of the attempts made throughout the 70s by conservatives to regroup after the losses in the last decade. The Nixon administration left America disillusioned with politics, only for great hopes to arise with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The failures of the Carter administration to achieve significant change cleared the way for Reagan in 1980. Nowadays it is almost compulsory for American Presidents to be Christian: No unbelievers allowed! But it wasn't always this way. Crucially it was Carter who had made religion an issue in his openness about the faith to which he subscribed. This could be taken as a long-time result of the Christian revival of the 1950s. Really it was the 1960s which convinced many Christians that the shared fabric of society - its traditions, institutions and moral values - was about to be destroyed in its entirety. This is less a story of a Christian Right than the story of the New Right.

The debacles of the early 60s such as the Cuban crisis and the assassination of JFK the Establishment was shaken to its foundations. Everywhere there seemed to be collapse as the issues of civil rights, racism and imperialism became the moral battleground in the American body politic. The obvious opponent for Gore Vidal was William F Buckley, l'enfant terrible of American conservatism, and they would cross swords repeatedly in debates at party conventions in the late 60s. Around this time Paul Weyrich infiltrated the student Left and was astonished by the level of planning and tactics that he witnessed. He realised that the conservatives were wrong in their assumption that the people would support them because they were right about the issues. In actuality what was needed was a movement capable of rolling back the achievements of the Left. It would be a counter to the counter-culture. The key was the mobilisation of the religious, who were largely apolitical.

As Adam Curtis notes "The fundamentalists were driven by pietism - the belief that a true Christian should not only devote their life to god, but also turn their back on the secular political world. They should live the good life through their own actions - and forget about politics." The New Left had actually laid the groundwork for the entrance of right-wing Christians into the political realm. The issues of gay rights, abortion and sexual discrimination mobilised the Christian Right because the liberalisation on these social issues threatened the way that they led their private lives. Then Jimmy Carter abolished the charity status of the religious schools. For many it was the last straw, enough was enough. Paul Weyrich reached out to Jerry Falwell, the product of this backroom deal was the Moral Majority. Falwell pulled some strings in order to pull together numerous right-wing preachers in America. The aim was now not just to convert, but to register the converted as Republican voters in what would later be known as the culture wars.

The network of preachers were soon spreading anti-Carter propaganda and then an obvious alternative revealed himself to the newly political Christians. It was Ronald Reagan, the old hero of libertarians, who had been trashed by Gore Vidal in a debate with Buckley. Vidal had condemned Reagan in 1967 as an aging actor with little knowledge of the world outside the United States. This is on top of viciously draconian policies were hardly friendly to blacks and the poor. Before a crowd of Christians, at a mass rally, Reagan said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would only want the Bible to read. The election could've been won without the Christian vote. It was about a movement that could be used to influence and shape the political discourse. The right-wing hegemony turned the debate towards social and cultural issues on which the liberal Left had to be marginalised. Meanwhile the Right could implement an economic agenda as the leading political issues were moral.

Hitch is Dead.

By Hitch is dead, I mean that the Hitchens who was once wrote alonside Alexander Cockburn for The Nation and stood with Noam Chomsky at conferences is no more. In this sense Christopher Hitchens has been a zombie for quite some time. In death he is, what he dreads so much, a cliché. As the soixante-huitard turned chickenhawk known as Christopher Hitchens may not live to write the obituary of Henry Kissinger. Recently Hitch (his new nickname) was in a debate with Tony Blair on whether or not religion is a "force for good". Ironically Blair thinks that Mubarak was a "force for good", but still we're too overlook the criminal and immoral nature of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. A debate over whether or not Blair is a "force for good" would make the supposedly 'radical' Hitchens appear as he is, thoroughly and blindly conservative. That reminds me, before we get our trousers off, to point out that the above picture is inaccurate as Christopher Hitchens is actually pro-life and is only permissive of abortion out of pragmatic reasons.

I have meant to write an article on Mr Hitchens for a while, especially since he charged Gore Vidal as a conspiracy theorist in his usual modus operandi in February of last year. A great irony considering Hitch modelled himself on Gore Vidal, going as far as to compare his admiration for Vidal to "penis envy". But as a result of my busy schedule at the time I put off the article to summer about the time when Hitchens discovered he had cancer. This put me off, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out that Hitchens "waited til his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly". Then again I've never bought into the idea that we shouldn't speak ill of the dead and dying just out of courtesy. This is on top of the fact that Hitch has kindly pointed out that his "attack" on Edward Said was actually a critical review of Said's work and was released with the 25th year since the publication of Orientalism - not with Said's ill health.

If we want to talk seriously about Hitchens we must take note: it is no coincidence that the liberals are increasingly fixated with secularism, while the radical Left becomes interested in theology. Nor is it coincidence that Christopher Hitchens has drifted to the Right over the last 20 years. Both of these have come after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War which heralded the end of history as Fukuyama put it. The old ideological struggles were over, the power of the market and liberal democracy had triumphed over all other systems. By 1989 CHitchens, who was in Romania at the time, had been involved in Third Camp politics of the Left for over 20 years. Originally aligned with the International Socialists which stood in opposition to Really Existing Socialism as well as capitalism. Later Hitch turned towards democratic socialism. Note the prominence of leftist men of action, as well as of the pen, namely Trotsky and Orwell.

In spite of giving a pep-talk to the Bushites in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and actively defending Bush as a viable alternative to the Democrats, on issues like Palestine, he still insists that he is a radical leftist. Hitchens reserves the label of "cliché" to pin on those who accuse him of becoming a conservative. It would seem as though Hitch can't stand the idea of being looked back on as a socialist who became a reactionary in later life, a cliche if there ever was one. So out of desperation Hitchens tries to hold together a "leftism" of sorts. To clarify this version of "leftism" that Hitchens buys into, it is so vacuous and hollow that it is possible to be conservative and adhere to it. For Hitchens there is no chance of a working-class movement developing, that could replace the international movement of the 20th Century. At the void where there should be a conspicuous socialist alternative to the market economy Hitch points and shouts that Karl Marx underestimated the "revolutionary" nature of the capitalist system.

All the while he labels the anti-globalisation movement conservative for it's nostalgic for a pre-industrial world. There is a ring of truth to such claims, but the conclusion drawn by Hitchens is not entailed by them. Revolutionary America has replaced the October Revolution for him, the jump has been made from Leon Trotsky to Thomas Jefferson. The admiration for George Orwell still lingers on, one of the more conservative figures in socialism. As Richard Seymour has pointed out Hitch still buys into a scholastic type of Marxism which singles out the US as the major force of historical progress, as the USSR is gone, against the forces of reaction. In this struggle against reaction, e.g. al-Qaeda, Hitchens has adopted the language of 19th Century imperialism. Recall the words of Mill "Despotism is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that the end be their improvement." The same thought-process is in Hitchens' support of atrocities in Iraq.

Rather than taking these problems as reason for the Left to "begin again", as Slavoj Žižek argues, Hitchens offered no solution and opts for identity politics. Specifically New Atheism, which is an endless intellectual war against religion in the name of Progress. Note Progress, in the Herbert Spencer sense, with a capital 'P' that holds all those Victorian connotations of liberal interventionism and free enterprise. The faith in historical Progress is a major part of the identity politics which Hitch now prescribes. In his endorsement of the "War on Terrorism" he went as far as actually delivering a pep-talk to the Bushites. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton, he's gone from dining with repulsive fat cats and giving them a piece of his mind to just dining with repulsive fat cats. Hitch has criticised the Bush administration in retrospect, as "impeachable" and "incompetent", whilst expressing modest regrets over Iraq (that the conflict strengthened Iran). But these are meaningless gestures, that have been brought on only by the misadventure itself, ignorant of the conditions under which the invasion was pursued.

It was GK Chesterton who said "Men who begin to fight the church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the church… The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them." The same is true in vice versa, that the fanatical defenders of religion have ruined religious things. The terrorists are prepared to destroy this world for love of another world, the warriors on terror are prepared to do away with democracy out of a rejection of the Judeo-Islamic civilisation. The ultimate paradox being that some of them love human dignity so much that they are even ready to legalise torture to defend it. In other words, to defend Western values we must infringe upon those values relentlessly. This could not be demonstrated more clearly than when Fallujah was virtually torn apart, killing 6,000 and forcing 150,000 to flee, Christopher Hitchens remarked "the death toll is not nearly high enough... too many [Jihadists] have escaped."

Out of his enthusiasm to invade Iraq to fight dictatorship and fundamentalism in the name of democracy and freedom, Hitchens has flung away such values and ideas. Free and democratic elections were only held after a great deal of resistance to the occupation from the Iraqi people, the aim of regime change was not to hold elections but to install a softer Saddam. Freedom and human rights are hardly flourishing in the "fledgling democracy", which is why Muntadhar al-Zaidi was tortured. Before free elections could be held the economy was overhauled, mass-privatisation and deregulation handed over the country's public services to the forces of the market without a mandate from the people for such policies. 80% of the oil was divided up, not by the "invisible hand", between American and British companies. Corporation tax was slashed and loopholes prepped to allow multinationals to transfer all profits out of Iraq untaxed. All the while companies like Halliburton and Bechtel lined up for multi-billion dollar contracts handed out by executive order.

This is the intellectual death of Christopher Hitchens, it converged several years ago with the beginning of an unjustifiable slaughter in the Middle East, the bloated corpse has been floating around face-down for quite some time now. The corpse has drifted so far to the Right it can no longer be turned from this trajectory and can only decompose along the way. It is ironic that a former Trotskyist cannot see how one can oppose both American imperialism and Islamist terror, you simply have to take a side and it better be the right one. The events of 9/11 tore apart the fantasy of American immortality and invulnerability, someone else must die and for the sake of public relations the Other slaughtered is always the bad guy. The Other being the hundreds of thousands of innocents dispossessed and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hitch has secured his special place in the commentariat as a cheerleader for war and oppression. A contrarian so contrarian he hardly realises he is a right-winger even after voting for George the Anointed.