The Great Hitchens-Hitchens Rift of 2001 . Edward Lucas throws new light on the Quarrel

From time to time, my famous row with my late brother still rises from its grave to trouble me.  It did so again this morning (26th August 2019) from a wholly unexpected source, an article in ���The Times��� (of London)  by my friend Edward Lucas, who like me was very active on the anti-Soviet side in the Cold War. Edward is writing about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, whose 80th anniversary has just taken place, and which is one of the most important, most fascinating and least understood events in modern history.

I cannot reproduce it all, because it is behind a paywall.

 

But this is the crucial segment: ���Freshly arrived in Washington DC from the still occupied Baltic states in 1990, I had a huge row with the late Christopher Hitchens, who insisted that for all its faults the communist experiment was fundamentally benign, whereas the Nazi one was inherently evil. I said that from the victims' viewpoint being murdered for your social rather than racial background was a distinction without a difference.���

 

This conversation (alas, my late brother is no position to give his account of it) was some years later than the one in about 1984 or 1985 which would eventually form the basis for my brother���s angry refusal to speak to me, which lasted for several years until he issued this olive-branch, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/06/hitchens200506 which I readily accepted.

 

But if the exchange took place as Edward describes, it suggests that my late brother���s attitude towards the Soviet experiment was more, er, nuanced than he might later have wished to acknowledge. Of course he was not a Stalinist, the charge which he angrily denied, though I had not made it. He was a Trotskyist, first as a member of a Trotskyist grouplet and later as an admirer (as he states clearly here) of Trotsky himself, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076zht

(This, by the way, was recorded in August 2006).

 

But in my experience quite a lot of Trotskyists (and he was definitely one of those) still defended aspects of the Soviet experiment, as Trotsky did himself. I was keenly aware of this as, even in my most fervent Trotskyist phase, I could never bring myself to see anything good about the USSR, and once got into trouble with my International Socialist comrades for issuing at the University of York (above the IS imprint)  a leaflet saying that the Soviet Union was ���no more socialist than Surrey���.

 

Why dig up this row? It has a rather important core, and is at the root of my opposition to liberal interventionist wars such as those in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and the mad romance of the ���Arab Spring���.  

 

Others care about it, and often have false impressions of it ��� see this exchange with one of my least favourite neo-conservative commentators, David Frum. Mr Frum plainly hero-worships my late brother (and so has closed his mind to the awkward facts of his undoubted lifelong Bolshevism).  He is very grudging about admitting the facts, and does so here (there are useful links to the original casus belli) while hinting that I may be suffering from some Freudian difficulty. Yikes, as one might say

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/06/christopher-peter-hitchens/488291/

 

Those really interested may also read this account, which shows that my late brother did not, when I first brought it out in his presence (four years after his row with Edward Lucas) , dispute the famous quotation about the Red Army watering its horses in Hendon, nor get especially exercised about it. Timing is all. I suppose.  (I must stress here that when I wrote the 2001 ���Spectator��� article in which I quoted it again, I took the trouble to send it to my brother in advance, which I would hardly have done if I had been trying to wallop him with a surprise attack. I was amazed when he responded by saying I was lying).

 

Here���s an account of (and a link to) the 1994 C-Span exchange

 

 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/the-red-army-waters-its-horses-in-hendon-new-light-on-an-old-quarrel.html