campaigns weren’t exactly dishonest, but then they didn’t really count, either.) So I didn’t so much repudiate a former loyalty, like some attention-grabbing defector, as feel it falling away from me. On some days, this is like the phantom pain of a missing limb. On others, it’s more like the sensation of having taken off a needlessly heavy overcoat.[90]
I can write about this now in a relaxed manner, but for a long time I felt I had to phrase any disagreement with actual or former comrades in terms that were themselves “Left.” It was quite easy, for example, to argue that Bill Clinton was an acquiescent front man for all manner of corporate special interests. My book denouncing him for this, and for his disgusting crimes against women, and his “Wag-the-Dog” missile attack on Sudan, and his cruel use of the death penalty as a racist political weapon for his advancement in Arkansas, was brought out by the publishing arm of the 
might claim to be. The old slogans still sometimes strike me as the best ones, and “Death to Fascism” requires no improvement.
Sarajevo, though, was the first place where I began to realize that I had embarked upon a reconsideration that wasn’t completely determined by me, or by what I already thought and knew, or thought I knew or thought. Much of it was probably dawning on me while I slept. 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. Milosevi, too, exemplified this fusion of the cardboard-suited party-line populist and the hysterical nationalist demagogue. Here in grisly action was the gargoyle leader Paduk, founder of the “Party of the Average Man” from Nabokov’s 1947
Driving around Bosnia’s bombarded capital city with the bravest and most literate reporter of my generation, John Burns, I made the slightly invigorating discovery that must have occurred to previous Hitchenses in deadlier war zones. Physical courage is in some part the outcome of sheer circumstance. You can’t actually stay hidden forever on that corner at which the snipers are taking aim. You will starve to death, for one thing. So make the dash that you were going to have to make anyway, and you will have crushed your own cowardice for a moment, which is a tremendous feeling. I was often enough whimpering with fear but never given the chance to make fear make me feel any safer if I cowered or did nothing. (I also discovered, as have many others, that the stupid old propaganda line about “no atheists in foxholes” is just that: it never crossed my mind to pray.) I merely pass this on in case it’s ever of any use. Meanwhile, though, I was kept warm and animated by my rage at what I was seeing.
An ancient and civilized town, famous in European history as the site of a tragic drama but also celebrated as a symbiotic meeting place of peoples and cultures and religions (the name itself derives from the antique word
Again, I couldn’t be entirely sure whether this was a quasi-Damascene moment or a long-meditated one. As a young boy I had been taken by my parents on a holiday in the Channel Islands or, as the French call them more neutrally, Les Isles Anglo-Normandes. This Anglo-Norman archipelago is anyway under British rule and has been for a long time, and I suppose I dimly knew that it was the only part of Britain that had been occupied by the Nazis. Straying away from my family to haunt a second-hand bookshop in the town of St. Helier, capital of the main island of Jersey, I found a book thrillingly titled
Michael Scammell’s biography of Arthur Koestler says that “his intellectual nerve-endings were so finely tuned that he experienced the onset of fresh ideas like orgasms, and mourned their passing as the end of treasured love- affairs.” I can lay no claim to have been half so fortunate. Brief and full of passionate intensity as it was, my moment in St. Helier wasn’t quite like that. Indeed, I can’t be sure that such transfiguring initial moments are even enviable. I do know what it’s like, however, to mourn the passing of a love, and I remember Sarajevo for that reason. By the end of that conflict, I was being called a traitor and a warmonger by quite a lot of the Left and was both appalled and relieved to find that I no longer really cared. Again to cite the ever-eloquent Koestler, this time on the Hitler-Stalin pact from his essay in
I remained in that state of suspended animation until the day when the swastika was hoisted on Moscow airport in honor of Ribbentrop’s arrival and the Red Army band broke into the Horst Wessel Song. That was the end, from then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary.
Under much less arduous circumstances, I found it was taking me much longer to “let go.” I had wanted the moral arithmetic to add up, while still hoping that it could somehow be made to do this on the “left” side of the column. In Bosnia, though, I was brought to the abrupt admission that, if the majority of my former friends got their way about non-intervention, there would be another genocide on European soil. A century that had opened with the Muslim Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, and climaxed in the lowest sense of that term with an attempt to erase Jewry, could well close with a Christian destruction of the continent’s oldest Muslim population. This was an exceedingly clarifying reflection. It made me care much less about the amour propre of my previous loyalties. I might illustrate this better if I did so by means of two other figures who were highly important to me: Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag.
At the time of the Milosevi wars, I was still engaged in a desultory email exchange with Chomsky on another matter. He had written, as far back as 1990, that Vaclav Havel’s visit to Washington after the overthrow of Czechoslovak Communism was not at all what it had seemed. For Havel to address a joint session on Capitol Hill, only months after the murders of the Jesuit leadership by death squads in El Salvador, and to make no mention of the part played by the United States in this dreadful episode, was in Noam’s opinion disgraceful. (I think this “moral equivalence” canard was being resuscitated because of Havel’s support for intervention in the Balkans: a policy that Chomsky detested.) Havel’s speech, he intoned, was just as if an American Communist had gone to Moscow in 1938 and spoken to the Presidium as an invited guest while deliberately suppressing any mention of the purges. I tried as a friend to dissuade him from this analogy and from the conclusions that were doubtless meant to flow from it. I forget all the points I made, but I hope I kept in mind the fact that Congress was elected whereas Stalin’s assembly was not, and the prevalence of censorship, torture, and murder in one case and not the other. I certainly said that Havel was the new and freely chosen representative of a small country, who had come to thank a big one which had at least rhetorically stood by it in adversity, so that the moment for a public
