Hitch-22

Hitch-22: A Memoir is a memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.

All page numbers are from the trade paperback edition published by Twelve, ISBN 978-0-446-54034-6, in June 2011, first printing

Spelling, italics and ellipses (except as noted) as in the book. Bold face (except in chapter 15) added for emphasis.

• The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason.
  • Preface (p. xiv)

• Nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.
  • Prologue with Premonitions (p. 5)

• Death has this much to be said for it:
  You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
  Wherever you happen to be
  They bring it to you – free.
  • Prologue with Premonitions (p. 7; quoting Kingsley Amis)

• I of course do not believe that it is Allah who determines these things. (Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book god Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.)
  • Chapter 1, “Yvonne” (p. 9)

• Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of “the flock.”
  • Chapter 1, “Yvonne” (p. 10)

• “The one unforgivable sin,” she used to say, “is to be boring.”
  • Chapter 1, “Yvonne” (pp. 13-14)

• It was indeed Auden – who had been a master at such a school as well as having been a pupil at one – who had said that the experience had given him an instinctive understanding of what it would be like to live under fascism. (He had also said, when told by the headmaster that only “the cream” attended the school: “yes I know what you mean – thick and rich.”)
  • Chapter 3, “Fragments from an Education” (p. 49)

• The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong.
  • Chapter 3, “Fragments from an Education” (p. 51)

• But a protestation of my innocence would have been, as in any inquisition, an additional proof of guilt.
  • Chapter 3, “Fragments from an Education” (p. 51)

• Of course I now recognize this as the working model, drawn from monotheistic religion, where love is compulsory and must be offered to a higher being one must necessarily also fear. This moral blackmail is based on a quintessential servility. The fact that the headmaster held the prayerbook and the Bible during the services also drove home to me the obvious fact that religion is an excellent reinforcement of shaky temporal authority.
  • Chapter 3, “Fragments from an Education” (p. 54)

• I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.
  • Chapter 4, “Cambridge” (p. 78)

• I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place.
  • Chapter 4, “Cambridge” (p. 78)

• After all, to be a mere “Sixties” person, all you needed was to have been born in the right year, and to be available for what I once heard called “the most contemptible solidarity of all: the generational.”
  • Chapter 5, “The Sixties: Revolution in the Revolution” (p. 85)

• If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.
  • Chapter 6, “Chris or Christopher?” (p. 98)

• The occasion was to become a famous one, since it was the very time when the habitual and professional liar Clinton later claimed that he “didn’t inhale.” There’s no mystery about this, any more than there ever was about his later falsifications. He has always been allergic to smoke and he preferred, like many another marijuana enthusiast, to take his dope in the form of large handfuls of cookies and brownies.
  • Chapter 6, “Chris or Christopher?” (p. 106)

• Even as I tried to convince myself, I realized what I have often had to accept since, that if you have to try and persuade yourself of something, you are probably already very much inclined to doubt or distrust it.
  • Chapter 6, “Chris or Christopher?” (p. 108)

• Once you have been told that you can’t leave a place, its attractions may be many but its charm will instantly be void.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 113)

• So there it was: Cuban Socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 114)

• One of the claims of the Cuban revolution was to have abolished prostitution and though I had never personally believe this to be feasible (the withering away of the state being one thing but the withering away of the penis quite another), the whore scene in Santa Clara was many times more lurid than anything to be imagined in a “bourgeois” society.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 115)

• I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. Oh, please never forget how useful the obvious can be. And how right it is that the image of the undraped emperor is such a keystone of our folklore.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 117)

• As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was – cliché is arguably forgiven here – very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when The Left lost or – I would prefer to say – discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 121)

• While at Berkeley he had been handed a pamphlet that spoke of the contents of the university’s library system as so much “useless white knowledge”: this had somewhat put him off the New Left in it then-Bay Area form, where I assure you it can still be met with.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 122)

• I made a minor discovery which has been useful to me since in the analysis of some larger public figures like my contemporary Bill Clinton: if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need to never dine and or sleep alone.
  • Chapter 7, “Havana versus Prague” (p. 124)

• But the Seventies were only the Seventies because they had to have a name. Nullity and anticlimax appeared to close in on all sides. And so did certain kinds of nastiness, often composed of, or distilled from, the worst of the Sixties.
  • Chapter 8, “The Fenton Factor” (p. 143)

• In the squalid and cramped back streets around the Belfast shipyards, it seemed to us, no better illustration could be found of the need for working people to forget their confessional and national differences and unite in a brotherly fashion. But to say that such appeals failed to achieve locomotive force among the masses would be to understate the case to an almost heroic degree.
  • Chapter 8, “The Fenton Factor” (p. 145)

• I eventually came to appreciate a feature of the situation that has since helped me to understand similar obduracy in Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus, and several other spots. The local leaderships that are generated by the “troubles” in such places do not want there to be a solution. A solution would mean that they were no longer deferred to by visiting UN or American mediators, no longer invited to ritzy high-profile international conferences, no longer treated with deference by the mass media, and no longer able to make a second living by smuggling and protection-racketeering. The power of this parasitic class was what protracted the fighting in Northern Ireland for years and years after it became obvious to all that nobody (except the racketeers) could “win.” And when it was over, far too many of the racketeers became profiteers of the “peace process” as well.
  No, what got people going in Belfast in the early 1970s was not humanism and solidarity but rather violence, cruelty, conspiracy, bigotry, alcohol, and organized crime.
  • Chapter 8, “The Fenton Factor” (p. 145)

• So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift – enviable if potentially time consuming – of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it.
  • Chapter 9, “Martin” (p. 159)

• Of the numerous regrettable elements that go to make up the unlawful carnal-knowledge industry, I should single out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that is often worn on the faces of its female staff.
  • Chapter 9, “Martin” (pp. 165-166)

• Even at the time, as I left the party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.
  • Chapter 9, “Martin” (p. 178)

• Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.
  • Chapter 10, “Portugal to Portland” (p. 181)

• “Sometimes the wrong people can have the right line.” I thought then that he had said more than he intended, and myself experienced the remark as a sort of emancipation from the worry, which did still occasionally nag at me, that by taking up some out-of-line position I would find myself “in bed with,” as the saying went, unsavory elements. It’s good to throw off this sort of moral blackmail in mind-forged medical as early in life as one can.
  • Chapter 10, “Portugal to Portland” (p. 185)

• The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.
  • Chapter 10, “Portugal to Portland” (p. 192; quoting Adam Michnik)

• It didn’t work so well in Salt Lake City, say, where Balliol men and Trotskyists alike were as rare as rocking-horse droppings and one had a little choice but to take the tour of the Mormon Tabernacle and notice the John Birch Society bookshop that was right next door to it. Beautiful as Salt Lake City was, with its street plan leading to white-topped horizons in every direction, and lovely as Utah was, with its main church having only just had the needful “revelation” that black people might have human souls after all, it was a slight relief to cross the frontier of Nevada and breathe the bracingly sordid and amoral air of Reno and Las Vegas.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 215)

• The best of that scene was probably over, because by the time you have heard of such a “scene” it has almost invariably moved on or decayed.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 215)

• Haight-Ashbury and the flower-power district were getting truly tawdry but this was also in obedience to the iron law which states that once you have to call something a “historic district” or a “popular quarter” then, just like the Wild West, it loses whatever character gave it the definition in the first place.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 216)

• I was thunderstruck, if only by trying to picture this happening in a British cinema. (Of course it would be tough to imagine it happening in a New York or Cleveland one, either, but a crucial part of seeing America was also seeing how many Americas there were.)
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 216)

• I went to see the Black Panthers, whose “breakfast program” for poor ghetto kids had degenerated into a shakedown of local merchants and whose newspaper now featured paeans to North Korea.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 216)

• An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. “My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.” “Oh really, that’s interesting: one didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.” “Nobody does. That’s how it survives.”
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 217)

• I remember a female editor saying to me over a generous cocktail: “Of course the difference between us and you Brits is that you have irony and we don’t.” I decided to smile and murmur, “Well, apparently not,” and she looked at me as if a trick cigar had just exploded in her face.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (pp. 218-219)

• When Nixon finally went down, I celebrated as if I’d defeated a personal enemy.
  In the aftermath of that very thing, though, I had to reflect a bit. After all, the American legal system and the U.S. Constitution had survived Nixon’s attempt to undo it. Congress had held wide-open hearings, of a kind it was very hard to imagine taking place in the Palace of Westminster, and summoned important witnesses to testify. The Justice Department had resisted the president’s lawless attempts to purge it. The special-prosecutor system had proved itself. The American press, led by the Washington Post, had penetrated the veil of lies and bribery and – despite crude threats from the White House – had eventually named the main perpetrators on the front page.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (pp. 221-222)

• He might have done the right thing on that occasion, but I did not at all like Ronald Reagan and nobody then could persuade me that I should. Even now, when I squint back at him through the more roseate lens of his historic compromise with Gorbachev, I can easily remember (which is precisely why one’s memoirs must always strive to avoid too much retrospective lens adjustment) exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with a folksy smirk that I always found annoying but that got him called “The Great Communicator” by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 232)

• I found a row house in northeast Capitol Hill, where if I wanted to cab it home late at night from Dupont Circle, African-born taxi drivers would sometimes decline to take me (on the unarguable – at least by me with them – grounds that it was “a black area”). I have never since been able to use the word “gentrification” as a sneer: the unavoidable truth is that it’s almost invariably a good symptom.
  • Chapter 11, “A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American” (p. 236)

• I did not intend to be told, I said, that the people of the United States – who included all those toiling in the Pentagon as well as all those, citizens and non-citizens, who had been immolated in Manhattan – had in any sense deserved this or brought it upon themselves. I also tried to give a name to the mirthless, medieval, death-obsessed barbarism that had so brazenly unmasked itself. It was, I said, “Fascism with an Islamic Face.”
  • Chapter 12, “Changing Places” (p. 244)

• As time had elapsed, I had gradually been made aware that there was a deep division between Noam and myself. Highly critical as we both were of American foreign policy, the difference came down to this. Regarding almost everything since Columbus as having been one continuous succession of genocides and land-thefts, he did not really believe that the United States of America was a good idea to begin with. Whereas I had slowly come to appreciate that it most certainly was, and was beginning to feel less and less shy about saying so. We commenced a duel, conducted largely in cyberspace, in which I began by pointing out the difference between unmanned cruise missiles on the one hand and crowded civilian airliners rammed into heavily populated buildings on the other. We more or less went on from there.
  • Chapter 12, “Changing Places” (p. 244)

• I saw the awakening of a new respect for the almost-eclipsed figure of the American proletarian, who was busting his sinews in the rubble and carnage of downtown while the more refined elements wrung their hands. What an opportunity for the Left to miss, there, and what an overbred and gutless Left it had proved to be.
  • Chapter 12, “Changing Places” (p. 246)

• Amid all this chaos on the various frontiers what I increasingly thought was: thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United States of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity. As it was, the Taliban were soon in full flight from the celebrating people they had for so long oppressed, and Al Quaeda was being taught to take heavy casualties as well as inflict them. I was not against this.
  • Chapter 12, “Changing Places” (p. 250)

• At a time when smallpox vaccination was being denounced by leading men of god like Dr. Timothy Dwight of Yale as an interference with god’s design, Jefferson helped devise a method of keeping Jenner’s life-saving physic cool for conveyance over long distances, taught Lewis and Clark to administer it during their long trek across the interior, and saw to it that all his slaves were inoculated against the scourge.
  • Chapter 12, “Changing Places” (p. 256)

• In the larger world, I knew well enough, there was a challenge from Islamic extremism. It had, for example, destroyed the promise of the great Iranian revolution that pitted masses of unarmed civilians against an oil-crazed megalomaniac with a pitiless network of secret police and a huge, purchased army which in the end was too mercenary and corrupt to fight for him. At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity, a black-winged ghoul came flapping back from exile on a French jet and imposed a version of his own dark and heavy uniform on a people too long used to being bullied and ordered around. For the female population of the country, at least, the new bondage was heavier than the old.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (p. 266)

• When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship – though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…
  To the contrary, said Susan Sontag, Americans had a general interest in defending free expression from barbarism, and also in defending free citizens from state-supported threats of murder accompanied by sordid offers of bounty.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (p. 268)

• This sort of stuff was at least partly to be expected. Rushdie was a bit of a Leftie; he had contrived to disturb the status quo: he could and should expect conservative disapproval.
  More worrying to me were those on the Left who took almost exactly the same tone. Germaine Greer, always reliably terrible about such matters, again came to the fore, noisily defending the rights of book burners. “The Rushdie affair,” wrote the Marxist critic John Berger within a few days of the fatwah, has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many more.” And “the Rushdie affair,” wrote Professor Michael Dummett of All Souls, has done untold damage. It has intensified the alienation of Muslims here…Racist hostility towards them has been inflamed.” Here we saw the introduction – and by a former promoter of “Michael X,” do not forget – of a willful, crass confusion between religious faith, which is voluntary, and ethnicity, which is not. All the deaths and injuries – all of them – from the mob scenes in Pakistan to the activities of the Iranian assassination squads, were directly caused by Rushdie’s enemies. None of the deaths or injuries – none of them – were caused by him, or by his friends or defenders. Yet you will notice the displacement tactic used by Berger and Dummett and the multi-culti Left, which blamed the mayhem on an abstract construct –“the Rushdie affair.” I dimly understood at the time that this kind of postmodern Left, somehow in league with political Islam, was something new, if not exactly new Left. That this trahison would take a partly “multicultural” form was also something that was slowly ceasing to surprise me.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (pp. 269-270)

• The centers of several British cities were choked by hysterical crowds, all demanding not just less freedom for the collective (they wanted more censorship and more restriction and the extension of an archaic blasphemy law, and more police power over publication) but also screaming for a deeply reactionary attack on the rights of the individual – the destruction of an author’s work and even the taking of an author’s life. That this ultrareactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference. In Pakistan, long familiar with the hysteria of the Jamaat Islami and other religio-dictatorial gangs, it would have made no difference at all. But somehow, when staged in the streets and squares of Britain, it did make a difference. A pronounced awkwardness was introduced into the atmosphere: a hinting undercurrent of menace and implied moral and racial blackmail that has never since been dispelled. It took me a long time to separate and classify the three now-distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamist mentality, which were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (pp. 270-271)

• It’s still quite something to be told, by the armed, hoarse enforcers of a murder-based regime, that you are yourself “a deadman on leave.” And the claustrophobic world in which he had to live for some years was a prefiguration of the world in which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, live now. I mean to say a world in which a fanatical religion, which makes absolutist claims for itself and promises to supply – even to be – a total solution to all problems – furthermore regards itself is so pure as to be above criticism.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (p. 277)

• Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have “ever been threatened” by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (p. 278)

• The very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as “white” and “oppressive,” mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you.
  • Chapter 13, “Salman” (p. 280)

• The implied accusation – of a U-turn or even of a turned coat – bothered me not at all. I had long since learned to ask John Maynard Keynes’s question: “When the facts change then my opinion changes: and you, sir?”
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (p. 281)

• It was, in fact, only after the ghastly war with Iran was over that the truly horrific work in Iraqi Kurdistan had begun. Employing a Koranic verse – the one concerning the so-called Anfal, or “spoils,” specifying what may be exacted from a defeated foe – the Iraqi army and police destroyed more than 4,000 centers of population and killed at least 180,000 Kurds.
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (pp. 293-294)

• All those who have had similar or comparable experiences will recognize the problem at once: it is not possible for long to be just a little bit heretical.
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (p. 295)

• So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to employ them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being “nationalized,” had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad.
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (pp. 296-297)

• One of the manifestations of his megalomania was an ever-increasing piety. He had himself photographed, and painted on huge murals, in the robes of a mullah. He ordered that the jihadi slogan Allahuh Akbar (“God Is Great”) be added to the national flag of Iraq. He began an immense mosque-building program, including the largest mosque in the Middle East, named for “the Mother of All Battles.” He had a whole Koran written in his own blood. This macabre totem was to have been the centerpiece of that mosque. His party and state rhetoric became increasingly frenzied and jihadist in tone, and he stopped supporting secular forces among the Palestinians and instead began financing theocratic ones, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. An Iraqi bounty was officially and openly paid to the family of any Palestinian suicide bomber. Yet none of this – none of it, including the naming of the slaughterhouse-campaign against the Kurds after a sura of the Koran – would unconvince the utterly smug western “experts” who kept on insisting that his Caligula regime was a “secular” one. To the contrary, it was precisely the genuine secular forces in the country – the Kurds, the Communist and Socialist movements, and the independent trade unions – that Ba’athism had set out deliberately to destroy. And it then filled the resulting vacuum with toxic religious propaganda of the crudest kind. Anyone who heard an Iraqi radio or television broadcast in the last decade of the regime can readily confirm that the insistent themes were those of “martyrdom” and holy war.
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (pp. 297-298)

• I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (p. 299)

• There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie’s prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime.
  • Chapter 14, “Mesopotamia from Both Sides” (p. 314)

• About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough – and even miraculous enough if you insist – I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
  Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others – while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity – so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called “meaningless” except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities…but there, there. Enough.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (pp. 330-331)

• The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on – only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (p. 331)

• Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (pp. 331-332)

• I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with “you” in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (pp. 332-333)

• Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (p. 333)

• What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (p. 334)

• What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (p. 334)

• I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (pp. 342-343)

• Publicity means that actions are judged by reputations and not the other way about: I never wonder how it happens that mythical figures in religious history come to have fantastic rumors credited to their names.
  • Chapter 15, “Something of Myself” (p. 352)

• But people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (p. 372)

• It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children less they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (p. 372)

• But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (p. 373)

• After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for “exile,” or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the “proof,” so for a time the professional interpreters of god’s will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.
  I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (pp. 378-379)

• I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.
  If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (p. 379)

• I have learned to distrust Utopias and to prefers satires.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (pp. 379-380)

• Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked.
  • Chapter 16, “Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…” (p. 381)

• Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn’t seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life – the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier – would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic.
  • Chapter 17, “Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul)” (p. 391)

• I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. “Racist” is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted.
  • Chapter 17, “Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul)” (p. 398)

• On me it had the effect of reinforcing the growing opinion that all such images were strictly man-made, and indeed mainly designed like much of religion for the ignoble purpose of scaring children.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 404)

• The chapter is called “A Comfortable Stop on the Road to Damascus”. The biblical cliché may seem inescapable but it actually retards understanding.…The whole point of the Damascus legend is that it refuses the very idea of the mind’s evolution, replacing it with the deranged substitute of instant divine revelation.
  We are forcibly made familiar, usually from febrile tenth-hand accounts of religious visionaries and other probable epileptics and schizophrenics, of those blinding and indeed Damascene moments (or moments of un-blindness as when scales supposedly fall from the eyes) that constitute such revelation. Yet one suspects, as with Archimedes and his eureka, that Pasteur was right and that in the case of sound minds at any rate, great apparent coincidences only occur to the intellect that has rehearsed and prepared for them.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 406; ellipsis represents the elision of an example)

• I always mentally cross my fingers and keep a slight mental reservation whenever “left” and “right” crimes are too glibly associated in the same breath. Yet now, it is those on the Left who have come to offend and irritate me the most, and it is also their crimes and blunders that I feel myself more qualified, as well as more motivated, to point out.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (pp. 408-409)

• I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 410)

• Watching the Stalinist world succumb so pathetically, even gratefully, to its death wish in late 1989, when I happily witnessed the terminal twitches and spasms of the Hungarian and Romanian regimes, I had briefly celebrated the end of the totalitarian idea. In Hungary this had already died years previously, at least as Communism, and in Romania it had long before mutated into something grotesque and monstrous: Caligula sculpted in concrete. Milošević, too, exemplified this fusion of the cardboard-suited party-line populist and the hysterical nationalist demagogue.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (pp. 412-413)

• Hannah Arendt remarks somewhere that the great achievement of Stalinism was to have deposed the habit of argument and dispute among intellectuals, and to have replaced it with the inquisitorial, unanswerable question of motive.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 414)

• The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated, and by 1982 Communism had long passed the point where it needed anything more than the old equation of history with the garbage can.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 418)

• But whether her mind changed her, or she changed her mind, she manifested the older truth that all riveters of the mind-forged manacles most fear, and that I here repeat: One cannot be just a little bit heretical.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 419)

• It became evident that the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 419)

• I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of my self, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 420)

• I have actually seen more prisons broken open, more people and territory “liberated,” and more taboos broken and censors floated, since I let go of the idea, or at any rate the plan, of a radiant future. Those “simple” ordinary propositions, of the open society, especially when contrasted with the lethal simplifications of that society’s sworn enemies, were all I required. This wasn’t a dreary shuffle to the Right, either. It used to be that the Right made tactical excuses for friendly dictatorships, whereas now most conservatives are frantic to avoid even the appearance of doing so, and at least some on the Left can take at least some of the credit for at least some of that.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 420)

• It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic. It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties. It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 420)

• Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need…More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (pp. 421-422)

• The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time.
  • Chapter 18, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” (p. 422)

• Encyclopedic article on Hitch-22 on Wikipedia