Principle. posted by Richard Seymour

The Late Christopher Hitchens is on the campaign trail for the righteous Blair these days, which is appropriate since they almost match one another in mendacity and opportunism. In doing so, he launches a sloppy attack on Respect and on the Socialist Workers' Party, which is so replete with errors that I feel some tender urge to cough politely, move on and say no more about it. How to summarise the article without being unkind? Well, it is very badly written, it says nothing new and what was worth repeating is obliterated by what was never worth saying in the first place.

Here is what the Hitch needs to know, and apologies to those for whom this is treading old ground. The Muslim Association of Britain is not a part of Respect. Some of its members left the organisation to join Respect, which means that they left an integralist organisation with some debt to Sayid Qutb to join a socialist organisation which defends gay rights and abortion rights as a matter of its constitution and manifesto, which is progress indeed. The attackers of Galloway appear to be the remnants of the violent Islamist group, al-Muhajiroun, not Hizb ut-Tahrir. Similarly, the 'invasion' was of a press release by the Muslim Council of Britain at Regent's Park mosque, not the MAB's office. The attack on the Jewish war memorial does not appear to have been directed at King, if the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland (who was there) is accurate in his observations. It was King who immediately claimed the attack for herself, for the obvious reason that her campaign strategy against Respect has been, from day one, to stress her Jewishness and racial background. No one in Respect has given it a thought, and it has not appeared in our election literature. By way of contrast, Oona's leaflets delivered in 'white' areas efface all mention of Muslims , (a Stalinist exercise in itself), while those delivered to Bangladeshi areas say:

Labour delivers for Muslim communities

Since 1997, together with the British Muslim community, Labour has:

* Established state-funded Muslim faith-schools for the first time.

* Abolished the hated 'primary purpose' rule which stopped many
British Muslims bringing their husband or wife to the UK.

* Safeguarded Halal food production.

* Outlawed religious discrimination in the workplace.

* Doubled bi-lateral aid to Bangladesh.

* Appointed British Muslims as Ambassadors, including to Bangladesh.

* Sent the only state-funded Hajj delegation from a Western Government.

There you have communalism of a kind that would shame Respect.

The rest of Hitchens' article contains the usual array of slandering techniques - his opponents 'admit' to some terrible collusion with Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi resistance consists primarily of Zarqawi-style lunatics, Galloway was a 'loud advocate' of Ba'ath party rule, others - not him - are 'renegade pseudo-Bolsheviks' etc (as if the SWP's position on imperialism, which he would once have accepted, is heterodox). Then there are the pitifully inept formulations that have come to pepper his prose: "Blair's Britain is a sort of post-Keynesian full-employment and welfarist society." By such phrases is a neoliberal government, which has cut welfare and lost a million manufacturing jobs while creating nothing like full employment, redeemed. And the tic-like insistence that his enemies are part of the establishment, are the true conservatives: Blair "took a bold stand against the establishment and against a sullen public opinion". Some boldness that finds allies in the Conservative Party, the Bush administration, Israel, the Daily Telegraph, the Murdoch stable, the British army etc. against the combined might of public opinion.

So far so good. If the old ones don't necessarily turn out to be the best ones, they are at least endearingly familiar. What would be irksome if it weren't so tedious is Hitchens' pretense that his support for the Iraq war, and therefore of Tony Blair, has anything to do with 'principle'. Darling, give that a fucking rest. This is a man who has initially said he would not favour war with Iraq, then decided that he did; would not characterise the Ba'athist regime as fascist to score cheap points, and then decided that he would; was channeling Cassandra over the existence of WMDs in Iraq, then rejoined the chorus (only to bleat more about it when some new wafer-thin 'evidence' emerged); complained vigorously of being misrepresented and smeared by his ex-comrades, while dissembling, condescending & sneering at them himself; accused the Left of changing the subject, while at the same time expending an awful lot of energy discussing anything but the arguments he is supposedly despatching; moralises about the acts of mass murder carried out by the extreme, but minute, Wahabbi sects claiming to be part of the resistance, yet glibly passes over the far greater murder inflicted on Iraqis by the occupiers. It is hard to know which face to slap here.

If Hitchens hasn't an ounce of shame left in him, he could at least have the meaner instincts of self-preservation that would guide away from composing such missives. After all, what man of sanity would advertise to the whole world that he has no principle that he will not discard willy-nilly, and that there are no depths of bad faith that he will not plumb in doing so?