Twelve years ago tomorrow morning I posted on my member diary page at that long ago lost (and nearly perfect) version of RedState about the passing of Christopher Hitchens. (That post from a much younger me is created below in its original from.) As of that posting, his Why Orwell Matters had already sent me down my first extended reading journey during the late summer and fall of 2010: all of Orwell’s books in order. (A few years later I repeated the exercise in another highly rewarding journey with Twain. But that is a story for another day.)

It wasn’t until more than a year after his death that I finished a collection of his essays titled Arguably in which I came across yet another inspiration for deeper reading with Victor Serge: Pictures from an Inquisition. Hitchens introduced this new character as:

After Dostoyevsky and slightly before Arthur Koestler, but contemporary with Orwell and Kafka and somewhat anticipating Solzhenitsyn, there was Victor Serge. His novels and poems and memoirs, most of them directed at the exposure of Stalinism, were mainly composed in jail or on the run. … – Page 585

Even more telling:

Serge himself was one of the few to refuse [the logic of the grand inquisitor], and this probably saved his life. There came a time when the agitation abroad in his behalf became too much to overlook, and when a campaign for his release – led by Romain Rolland – had embarrassed even the intellectual prostitutes of the French fellow-traveling classes. Stalin decided to examine the case in person, but before doing so he asked his police chiefs what crimes Serge had confessed to while in the Orenburg camp. He must have been somewhat startled to be told that the prisoner had confessed to nothing at all (a distinct rarity in those times), and this made it easier to release and deport Serge without too much loss of face. – Page 593

[Emphasis added]

Alas, I suspect the capacity for such a thing has surely been (mostly) bred and educated out of much of the West. In time, in our own little way, I imagine we will all be tested.

Anyway, that led to five of Serge’s books finding their way into my home library and many quotes and passages finding their way into my posting and commenting at sort-a-nominal-right-ish community sites of which you may be familiar. I recommend you become familiar with as much Serge as you can…and top of the list should be The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

Twelve years after his passing, I owe much of my late developing intellectual maturation to this contrarian and character. As it turns out, this little walk down memory lane is not so random. Hitchens came up a few weeks ago and I’ve been delinquent in documenting the link:

Christopher Hitchens and the collapse of journalism and critical thinking

Hitchens is still so bracing because, unlike journalists today, he operated in a zone of fearlessness and real freedom. The smog of ” wokeness ” had not yet descended onto the West. And the years Hitchens spent as a reporter and foreign correspondent and his deep education had given him experience that made him more than a pundit. …

That’s not the reality today. Liberal journalists can’t write anything that contradicts the official orthodoxy. …

Despite the internet, journalism is more restricted and intimidated than when Hitchens was alive. Do you ever open a newspaper or your laptop computer not knowing what Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, or Jonathan Capehart are going to say? Of course not.

The rotting husk of American journalism and the shallow, forced nature of modern contrarianism (when and where it peeks it’s opportunistic head out from behind the cover of safety these days…and only then to the most friendly of audiences) surely would have driven Hitch to drinking.

Anyway, as promised:

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Death of a Contrarian

(As posted by ntrepid at RedState on December 16, 2011)

“This little book has no ‘hidden agenda’. it is offered in the most cheerful and open polemical spirit, as an attack on a crooked president and a corrupt and reactionary administration”

With that as the opening line in the Preface of his 1999 book “No One Left To Lie To (The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton)”, I quickly became a fan of this author…Christopher Hitchens. 

I was very sad to see the news of his death pop up on my computer screen this morning.

To be honest, I only read three of his books.  The other two – “Why Orwell Matters” and “Letters to a Young Contrarian” – made it to my bookshelf just last year.  And, even more honesty, I’m not real sure how often I really agreed with him.  There are certainly a few very Big Concepts that he and I would have never come to any kind of agreement on but that really wasn’t the point.  He was a true thinker and, whether in print or in person (on my TV), Mr. Hitchens always made me think.  His points…his arguments…were blunt and always delivered with more than sufficient force.  On many levels…around work, among friends, or even on your favorite insufficiently conservative blog site…we all need fewer talkers and more thinkers in our lives.  His contributions to serious discussions around the world will be missed.

Just because I can, here are a few random bits of wisdom…just a taste… from the underlined passages in my copy:

“I cringe every time I hear denunciations of ‘the politics of division’—as if politics was not division by definition.  Semi-educated people join cults whose whole purpose is to dull the pain of thought, or take medications that claim to abolish anxiety.  Oriental religions, with their emphasis on Nirvana and fatalism, are repackaged for Westerners as therapy, and platitudes or tautologies masquerade as wisdom. …

“Bear in mind, however, that Utopia itself was a tyranny and that much of the talk about the analgesic and conflict-free ideal is likewise more menacing than it may appear. …

“It is only those who hope to transform humans who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.” (Letters to a Young Contrarian, pages 31-32)

and…

“I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows that he is right.  For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle” (Letters to a Young Contrarian, page 33)

There is much more where that came from.  I recommend you take some time away from here over the Holidays and read something…maybe even some Hitchens.

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As memory serves, the member conversation was quite good on that day but, alas, all was lost to the ether during the next site upgrade by an uncaring ownership. But I digress.

Hope you enjoyed this Friday ramble.

FJB.