Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 132

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2017

bon vivant, Hitchens seemed an unlikely foil for the American left.
But that is exactly what he became-and then some-after 9/11.
He never lacked passion to pursue the truth as he saw it, and he
felt liberated, and obligated, to do so when his adopted country
was attacked. He had arrived two decades earlier to work for The
Nation, the flagship journal of the American left. But the manifest
horrors of radical Islam caused him to turn against-with his biting, inimitable literary style-former friends and fellow travelers.
He was a man who lived to fight and was easily bored by conventional ideas. The uniquely deadly fanaticism he saw in Islam led
him to full engagement on many intellectual fronts, becoming a
kind of leftist neoconservative when it came to American foreign
policy under George W. Bush. In Oppenheimer's words, "Iraq was
to be one of Hitchens's Orwell moments. . . .  Hitchens saw that the
fascism his country was fighting against was so great an evil that
there was no other choice, in the end, but to throw in on the side
of flawed but redeemable liberal democracy. . . . And for Hitchens,
as for Orwell, half the fun of the refreshingly simple choice was
the license it gave him to unleash the patriotism that his cosmopolitan conscience had been holding in check for decades."
Oppenheimer ends his book with a postscript that reiterates
his opening insistence that he is really chronicling six men who
peered into the abyss "at the most terrifyingly fundamental
level." In fact, they all seemed to have stepped back from it, for
reasons perhaps more scrutable than Oppenheimer suggests.
They underwent similar transformations only because something
within them pointed in a common direction. As Robert Louis Stevenson might have said of them, "if I could show you these men
and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under
every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without
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Modern Age - Winter 2017

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