The Rhetorical Hitcheroo

Matt Welch | August 29, 2005

At the risk of OD'ing on Christopher Hitchens deconstruction, I'd like to re-highlight one of the popinjay's most ridiculous and illustrative war-justifications from below:

The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact.

Wasn't the Hitler-Stalin pact, um, a pact -- not some highly disputed set of "links" -- and one that was signed publicly between two rampaging imperialist dictators in the midst of run-up to World War II? But to become upset by such analogical illiteralism misses the point of Hitchens' real ongoing rhetorical achievement, dubious though it is: More than any other person I'm aware of, he has made it safe for right-wingers to finally use the F-word just as often as the Left.

It used to be that Hitch deployed this Partisan Review-style vocabulary to convince his old Internationalist comrades that Yugoslavia was the next Spanish Civil War. But now it's just a violate-Godwin's-Law-for-free card, which a grateful pro-war nation has embraced, providing yet more evidence that there is no Lefty rhetorical trope the Right will despise enough to avoid co-opting completely.

Such deft rhetorical switchery and political shape-shifting leads to a lot of unintentional comedy, and here's my favorite: Hitchens' biggest new fans are especially fond of extrapolating from George Orwell's old saw about pacifism being "objectively pro-fascist," sometimes as headlines on links to Hitch's latest. But as Eric Blair's modern popularizer knows too well, Orwell -- whose original essay, it should be mentioned, was referring to British pacifists during Hitler's bombing siege of London -- repudiated his "objectively pro-fascist" line before the War was even over, in an essay about propaganda that's well worth your time.