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Christopher Hitchens
Columnist, Vanity Fair and The Nation; Author, The Trial of Henry Kissinger and Letters to a Young Contrarian
I find myself – having written about how to be a dissenter, a contrarian – in the odd position of coming before you at a time when I'm a very militant member of the overwhelming majority – though a critical member. I'm not an Ashcroftian. I wrote a piece immediately after September 11, saying that after 20 years of being a Green Card holder I thought it was time to take out the papers and, as an act of solidarity, become a U.S. citizen. Then the attorney general informed me that if I remained a Green Card holder, I could be arrested and executed without knowing the charges against me, and in secret. So in solidarity with the 20 million other people who have had their habeas corpus taken away, I say you can have my body but my habeas corpus not.
On the morning of September 11, I had in common with a lot of people a number of emotions: anger, disgust, solidarity. But there was another one that I couldn't quite place, and I hope I can say this without risk of indecency: it was exhilaration. Here is the enemy, in as plain and clear a view as it could possibly be: theocratic fascism, disclosed in its most horrific form. If that's the battle, if they want a clash of civilizations, they can have one, and I will never get bored with prosecuting it. And I only hope that it's fought properly and diligently and thoroughly.
I called off the book tour for a while in order to go to Pakistan and to Kashmir. And I came back even more convinced that I was right the first time. To me the warning of this war – which didn't begin on September 11 this year, but on the February 14, 1989 – was when the theocratic leader of Iran issued in his own name the offer of a bounty for the murder of a writer of fiction who wasn't a citizen of Iran – my friend Salman Rushdie. We had there what we have now: a factional fight among extremists in the Islamic world, where those who hope to win this fight for the most ultimate fanatical fundamentalism try to win it by taking it to the West.
When George Bush Sr., then president, was asked for his comment on the fatwah, he said that as far as he could see it involved no American interest. I remember Susan Sontag that day saying – rather splendidly – Well, it would be contemptible to point out to the president such a small thing as the fact that Mr. Rushdie's wife – an American – had gone into hiding with him; that would be paltry. But perhaps the issue of free expression or free speech or the right to write novels unimpeded by threats of murder for bounty had some connection with the defense of the U.S. Constitution. Some of us were fighting this war against religious fascism before the Bush family joined in. We're perfectly happy to see them join us, but we would have been fighting it whether they wanted to or not. (I might add that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, earlier in 2001, used heavy artillery to destroy the Hellenic Buddhist sculptures of Bamiyan on the Afghan border, that was another warning too.)
The second thing I spent a lot of time doing the last ten years was, generally speaking, warning about the dangers of ethno-theocratic, or ethno-spiritual, or, if you like, ethno-religious feeling: the mad combination of religion with ideology.
And third, I spent a lot of time writing on the attempt to prevent the massacre – the erasure – of the culture of the Muslim people of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo – the Muslim population of Europe. It was something that was thought a matter of indifference to many people, but seemed to me should be stopped, should be prevented. One couldn't face the Muslim world in any manner or in any matter having acquiesced in the destruction of the European coalitionists.
It is a timely moment to be discussing how and why to combat all current and future fusions of the ethnonationalist and theocratic. And why it is that the United States, with its pluralism and multiculturalism, is the special country and special terrain on which that battle has to be fought.
