# Posted 6:36 PM by Patrick Porter  

OXBLOG INTERVIEWS HITCHENS: You heard it folks!

A few weeks ago at the London-Paris Festival, Patrick Belton and I interviewed the British pundit and contrarian Christopher Hitchens.

Here is the first part of the interview, we'll post the second part shortly.

London, 8 October 2006
Oxblog's Patrick Porter and Patrick Belton with Christopher Hitchens

PP: Today is the anniversary of the Cable Street riots in London’s East End, and also of Kim Jong-Il's ascent to leadership of the North Korean Workers’ Party. Fascism is a word that has been used a lot today. So what is fascism?

CH: Fascism? First of all, it has to meet two or three conditions. One is ethnic, national, even religious paranoia - either that the group itself is in danger, or has special privileges, or both. Almost inevitably, that means anti-semitism-the idea there is a secret government out there, responsible for your woes.

Second, an alliance between the oligarchy and the lumpen. You couldn't have it better than the Saudi sponsorship of madrassas.

Another is its irrationality. With the Soviet Union there was a degree of predictability, it was essentially rational. There were certain things we knew they weren’t going to do. It was containable. But fascism tends to irrationality. It is not an accident that suicide - the death cult - is a part of this. Attacking New York in broad daylight on 9/11, for example, when they could have taken over Pakistan, and had a nuclear-armed state in their hands, if they were just willing to do it quietly. On the other hand the elaborateness of the display meant battle is joined, which excited some of their constituents.

It both hates and envies modernism. It doesn't want to do science, but it wants what science produces, to seize and pervert it. The Nazis could have had the nuclear bomb, but they got rid of all Jewish scientists. In this, you can look at A. Q. Khan, and his work to exploit science, and turn it against modernism.

The leaders of the Soviet Union were even if bastard children of the Enlightenment, were its children nonetheless. It was nothing like the totalitarian principle: one book, one leader, one principle, the book is infallible - you don't need any other.

PP: Is this rhetoric of a war against fascism actually counter-productive, as some have argued? Just to act as a devil's advocate, is there the danger that in referring to disparate phenomena as Islamo-Fascism, itself reaching back to a semiotic from 60 years ago, you encourage different groups to identify with each other as a worldwide cause, helping to call into being the very thing you're trying to oppose?

CH: No, I don't think so. Before 9/11, only myself and a few others who were trying to call attention to it would have known the name of Al Qa'ida. They've been at it for ages, not only trying to detract Kashmir from India, create a Muslim state in the Philipines, Jamat Islami in Indonesia, in the Philippines the Al Sayef, which was directly financially supported by Iraq. These groups are not the product of western overreaction, they are the products if anything of being underreacted to. We should resist this idea that we are the author of this problem.

You could make an exception, I think, for Palestine. Palestinians did not choose the government under which they have been living for a generation, they did not take to Islam until recently and some did not even then, it's different. The Israelis respond to Iraq with the answer ‘now you know what it's like’ - I don't believe that, we don't try to govern an Arab people against its will, because our right to do so is in our holy book.

PP: What do you think of news that your bete noir, Henry Kissinger, is advising the White House on Iraq?

CH: Well, I've just filed an article on just that for Slate. The Kurds were horrified when Bremer was appointed in Iraq, because the name Kissinger makes them pee green. Bush did ask Kissinger to be head of the 9/11 Commission, for which I can claim to have made him not do that – for the simple reason he was a war criminal, terrorist, couldn't travel to all other countries because he is under indictment in many of them, which would have been a significant impairment in his ability to do the job, and he couldn't declare his interests. I know he hates me because I have had an impact on his life.

PP: In today’s foreign policy debates over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is the the traditional left-right distinction now unviable? Doesn’t both isolationism and interventionism now cut across the political divide? Is neoconservatism revolutionary?

CH: The main enemies I have had, have always been on the right - Kissingerian realists, old State Department Arabists, nativist isolationists who are not always particularly philosemitic, who have their counterpart on the left in Gore Vidal.

In the debate with Scott Ritter there was a man of the Reaganite right with a very insular concept of the American national interest.

On neoconservatives, the term is coined by Michael Harrington, and like the Tories and Suffragettes, they eventually agreed to adopt it in an example of word circulation. The New York Times author got it right on this point.

As a term used in the mainstream, neo-conservative has its confusing elements. The conservative position is that the dangers of change are greater than the dangers of the status quo- in this, they and I could not be more un-con. George Packer's Assassin's Gate gives the best account I've read about how the conflict between prolongation of the status quo and overdue change plays out in Iraq. Innuendo is there in the term too, as its ethnic implication is not always well concealed. The first time I had a look at them was during Bosnia, when they were defending Muslims while others opposed their right of return - if not for that precursor, I couldn't trust its moral credibility on Iraq.

PP: What do you think of Nick Cohen’s analysis, that when it comes to foreign policy there is a distinction between those who think of themselves as anti-imperialist, and view America as the imperial threat, and those who think of themselves as anti-fascists?

CH: That is actually an older theory dating back at least to Gulf War One, though I don’t like to call it Gulf War One, I see both conflicts in the Gulf as part of the same war. Fred Halliday posed the need for the left to choose between fascism and imperialism. He argued that the left could be anti-imperialist about American intervention, as long as it accepted the abolition of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. I was hostile to the war of George Bush senior, and at the time I argued that the outcome of that war proved that you could have both ­ Saddam Hussein as a fascistic ruler who was confirmed in power by the USA. But that was avoiding the essential truth of Halliday’s argument.

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