Christopher Hitchens {hearts} Trotsky

I didn't personally follow Christopher Hitchens very much. His drunken, bellicose, irrationality seemed to speak for itself. I did read some of his work, and it was mostly over-the-top rants (presumably drunken) with no evidence to support them. Pretty funny considering the Hitchens razor, "What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence", an assertion which fails its own claim and is therefore internally non-coherent.

The Hitchens attachement to the Atheist communists is outlined in several places, some of which are accumulated in this article in Forbes:

"For example, here we have Hitchens quoted in the 2005 PBS documentary “Heaven on Earth:” (h/t to Rod Dreher for digging this out)

It [World War I] had crucially undermined the autocracy, the Romanov dynasty. And I think it had very much discredited the Russian Orthodox Church, for which he [Lenin] had a particular dislike. But he was very willing to finish those jobs, all three of them, to wipe out the Romanov family, to rebuild the army, and under Trotsky’s leadership of the Red Army, and to seize the opportunity to confiscate church property and to dissolve, as far as possible, the influence of the church.

One of Lenin’s great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.

The difficulty was that he also inherited, and partly by his measures created, even more scarcity and economic dislocation. The Bolsheviks had studied what had happened to the French revolution and they knew there was a danger of autocracy developing in their own ranks, and they were always on the look out for another Bonaparte. And the person who most looked like Bonaparte to them was Trotsky, who had flamboyance and military genius and charisma.

Hitchens is quite obviously praising the roles played by Lenin and Trotsky in “secularizing” Russia. What he omits, of course, was that this was secularization at gunpoint, secularization via murder. Lenin and Trotsky** didn’t merely prohibit the Russian Orthodox Church from playing a role in crafting legislation or in running the schools. That would have been eminently defensible, and was arguably long overdue. Rather, the Bolsheviks banned any practice of religion whatsoever and physically liquidated those who resisted. Thousands upon thousands of Orthodox clergy and believers were executed during the “Red Terror” and the various other repressions during the Civil War, as clear an example of crimes against humanity as is possible to find. If Hitchens has any second thoughts about the advisability or desirability of this he was rather uncharacteristically mum (if you think that I am cruelly “omitting context” I encourage you to read the link in full – Hitchens has no ill words about the role Trotsky played in the revolution).

But perhaps I’m being unfair, perhaps I’ve simply used the magical powers of the internet to summon a single instance of Hitchens making a few intemperate remarks. Who knows, maybe he was hitting the sauce that day. If you think that, if you think I’m being unfair and churlish, read this Atlantic piece from the summer of 2004 in which Hitchens refers to Trotsky as “a prophetic moralist” and says that “even today a faint, saintly penumbra still emanates from the Old Man.” Those are hardly words of moral condemnation, and if anything still “emanated” from Trotsky it is not saintliness but the stink of mendacity from his cheerleading of the Soviet Union’s absorption of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia or its invasion of Finland. Trotsky! Saintly! I’m not sure whether the sheer gumption it takes to append the term “saintly” to a blood-soaked revolutionary like Trotsky is more impressive or more revolting, but it could only have been done by someone who is astoundingly ignorant of the subject at hand."

Hitch was quite intolerant, and once trashed a Muslim poster on the streets of Beirut, and was himself soundly trashed by an angry Muslim who saw him vandalize it. So violence didn't work out so well for himself, personally; but it was not personal violence that Lenin and Trotsky represented, it was governmental violence upon their own populace. An interesting infatuation, Hitch.