Matt Johnson, How Hitchens Can Save The Left.

 

- I've long been a fan of the esteemed Christopher Hitchens who passed away in 2011. I've read most of  his books and was inspired by many of his essays, interviews and YouTube clips over the years. This new book by Matt Johnson, an American writer and editor, is a brilliant exploration of Hitchens’s thoughts and beliefs. He was nothing if not controversial, and made many enemies particularly over his support for the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. 

- The book is superbly written and edited and very comprehensive. It also includes a detailed analysis of current events such as Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the re-emergence of the Taliban's ugly primitivism in Afghanistan. Hitchens's theses become highly relevant and enlightening. 

-  I highly recommend this book and can do no better than quote this summary from the back cover: 

  'Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today's left, he's remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout - a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks.

In How Hitchens Can Save the Left, Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values. He was an internationalist who believed all people should have the liberty to speak and write openly, to be free of authoritarian domination, and to escape the arbitrary constraints of tribe, faith, and nation. He was a figure of the Enlightenment and a man of the left until the very end, and his example has never been more important.

Over the past several years, the liberal foundations of democratic societies have been showing signs of structural decay. On the right, nationalism and authoritarianism have been revived on both sides of the Atlantic. On the left, many activists and intellectuals have become obsessed with a reductive and censorious brand of identity politics, as well as the conviction that their own liberal democratic societies  are institutionally racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. Across the democratic world, free speech, individual rights, and other basic liberal values are losing their power to inspire. 

Hitchens's case for universal Enlightenment principles won't just help genuine liberals mount a resistance to the emerging illiberal orthodoxies on the left and the right. It will also remind us how to think and speak fearlessly in defense of those principles.'