Chesterton, Hitchens, the Nazis, and the Prussian State

Zac Alstin | Friday, 1 June 2012 

Who dares attack my Chesterton?

Christopher Hitchens' last piece of journalism was a all-out attack on another great journalist, G.K. Chesterton. He came off second best.

It is a cliché of pop psychology that we are least able to tolerate people who remind us of our own selves. There’s only room for one Life Of The Party and we feel a twinge of antagonism toward anyone whose excellence threatens to outshine our own. I was reminded of this when I read Christopher Hitchens’ posthumously published review of a biography of the great British journalist G.K. Chesterton. It certainly was a curious valediction. As an obituary for Hitchens described:

“Consider the mix. Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk.”

Two British journalists, each with a cult following, separated in death by 75 years and a seemingly impassable intellectual divide. One broadly forgotten by the culture but remembered with easy devotion and treasured by his fans, the other widely lauded, praised for his genius, but with a legacy yet to be determined.

May 29th was Chesterton’s birthday. I completely missed it, thereby proving that in the ranks of Chesterton fanatics, I am trudging along right at the back. But there I at least have the honour of being a rear guard. And in this capacity I feel compelled to respond to one deceased British journalist’s attack upon another.

Not that Chesterton needs defending. Of those introduced to GKC’s works, a minority is unimpressed. That’s fine. But few have the audacity to draw Chesterton down to their level, to examine the prodigy through their own cloudy lens, and to declare the result deficient. Chesterton fans will not be surprised: Hitchens showed as little appreciation for GKC’s thought as one might expect from a man steeped in Marxist, atheistic and hedonistic currents.

Any attempt to defend GKC is swiftly overtaken by the compelling desire to delve more deeply into his prose. A good defence becomes a better offence, and we find a host of loyal bloggers cheerfully demonstrating to the ghost of Hitchens passed that his dismissal of GKC as “deeply unserious and frivolous” is old hat. If Chesterton is not remembered widely, many of his critics are not remembered at all. A “Mr. McCabe” gave voice 106 years before Hitchens to the charge that Chesterton was a man of cheap paradox and frivolity:

“But how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors and inaccurate `facts,' and the substitution of imagination for judgment, I cannot see."

Back in 1905 Chesterton rebutted both McCabe and Hitchens:

“Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.”

In another volume he apologised for the seriousness of his writings:

“Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.”

The Chesterton fan gets it. He gets that his hero is not merely heaping frivolity on frivolity, making light of his opponents’ accusations. Every one of his lines points toward a single inexhaustible understanding of the truth. The truth is a medicine that transforms us. Nothing could be more serious than such a resolute search, and that is why the truth shines through Chesterton’s work.

“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that…

"The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”

Was GKC “sinister?

But Hitchens’ article was not simply a doomed repetition of tattered criticisms. He may be the first person to describe G.K. Chesterton as ‘sinister’, and he further condemned Chesterton’s work as a “minor but still important failure to meet a distinct moral challenge,” the rise of Nazism. In the context of “the Hitler-Vatican Concordat” he opined that “Harsher but correct would be the verdict that his [Chesterton’s] Catholicism made him morally frivolous about Hitlerism.”

Of Hitler, Chesterton had comparatively little to say. Is this surprising? Perhaps not, considering that GKC died in June 1936, less than four years after Hitler became Chancellor, and less than two years after the establishment of his dictatorship. To put this in context, Winston Churchill began his vocal opposition to German rearmament in 1932.

As early as 1933 Chesterton foresaw war with Germany:

“We are already drifting horribly near to a New War, which will probably start on the Polish Border. The Young Men have had nineteen years in which to learn how to avoid it. I wonder whether they do know much more about how to avoid it than the despised and drivelling Old Men of 1914.

“How many of the Young Men, for instance, have made the smallest attempt to understand Poland? How many would have anything to say to Hitler, to dissuade him from setting all Christendom aflame by a raid on Poland? Or have the Young Men been thinking of nothing since 1914 except the senile depravity of the Old Men of that date?”

He condemned the violence of Hitler’s regime as early as 1934:

“If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder, we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.”

And by 1935 he was waxing eloquent in typical Chesterton style on the precise evils of the Nazi regime:

“Hitler's way of defending the independence of the family is to make every family dependent on him and his semi-Socialist State; and to preserve the authority of parents by authoritatively telling all the parents what to do… In other words, he appears to interfere with family life more even than the Bolshevists do; and to do it in the name of the sacredness of the family.”

He even provided, ahead of schedule, a response to Hitchens’ invocation of theReichskonkordat:

“It will be noted that the Church generally had a Concordat with her enemies rather than her friends. There was a dispute with Napoleon and a Concordat with Napoleon: a dispute with Mussolini and a Concordat with Mussolini; a dispute with Hitler and a Concordat with Hitler.”

But there is no need to apologise for Chesterton. Hitchens got it completely wrong. Nazism was not, for someone of Chesterton’s era, a “distinct moral challenge”. It was an extension of an earlier ‘moral challenge’: Prussia.

We have the advantage of being able to judge our ancestors. But hindsight can sometimes hide as much as it reveals. For although we now regard Nazism, quite rightly, as being close to the epitome of human evil, the evils of Imperial Germany have faded. Yet nearly everything Chesterton had to say in precise and scathing criticism of Prussia, may be applied with equal vigour to its Nazi progeny. GKC was against Nazism before it even existed.

Historians sometimes describe the two World Wars as a single war with a half-time break. Chesterton drew the link back further to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He analysed the ideology of the Prussian state and distilled its errors into three main faults:

“A failure in honour which almost amounts to a failure in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud.”

To Prussia Chesterton attributed the Realpolitik that manifested itself in the “militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas [such as] the vow or the contract, which Prussian intellectualism would destroy.” Decrying this ‘failure of honour’ might seem naïve to a modern audience, for whom Realpolitik is really just politics. But Germany instantiated Realpolitik with its invasion of Belgium in World War One in contravention of the Treaty of London, which had guaranteed Belgian neutrality. Indeed, the Prussians were so antagonistic to their treaty obligations that the German Chancellor wondered why Britain would go to war over a "mere scrap of paper".

In such an historical context it is even more surprising that experienced statesmen put their trust in Hitler and a similar agreement made in Munich in 1938, with Hitler happily agreeing to go no further than Czechoslovakia. Chesterton’s Prussian analysis is equally pertinent in both cases:

“The Prussians had made a new discovery in international politics: that it may often be convenient to make a promise; and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it. […]That is the importance of the German Chancellor's phrase. He did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might make it seem an exception that proved the rule. He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases, that victory was a necessity and honour was a scrap of paper.”

Think of Nazi Germany as simply an extension of Prussia and Chesterton’s analysis approaches clairvoyance. On the topic of Prussian egomania, Chesterton wrote that:

“it is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him. This extraordinary inequality in the mind is in every act and word that comes from Berlin.”

To demonstrate this egomania, Chesterton drew on a few unusual examples.  He pointed to a phenomenon, in which men had – as a variation on the theme of duelling for honour – invented “the one-sided duel.”

“I mean the idea that there is some sort of dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword; a waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of the Kaiser in the affair at Saberne was found industriously hacking at a cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing; but pursue the strict psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the defenceless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other murderer. The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any theory of honour mixed up with such things; any more than with poisoning or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian or American gentleman would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as ‘honour,’ must really mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean something more like what we should call ‘prestige’."

What matters is not so much the examples, but Chesterton’s diagnosis of the “political pessimism and cynicism” of the Prussian state. He observed that Prussians really were men of “blood and iron” with all the disadvantages that incurred. The progressive scientific regime of Prussia was as cold and dead as iron.

“In other words, the Prussian Empire, with all its perfections and efficiencies, has one notable defect—that it is a dead thing. It does not draw its life from any primary human religion or poetry; it does not grow again from within. And being a dead thing, it suffers also from having no nerves to give warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals; it has no premonitions; about its own spiritual doom its sentinels are deaf and all its spies are blind.”

Prussia was once considered a leader in progressive fields such as eugenics and the efficient organisation of the state. The First World War dampened that admiration:

“Scientific officialism and organization in the State which had specialized in them, had gone to war with the older culture of Christendom... As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organized State was not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.”

But the popularity of these ideas resurfaced in the inter-war years:

“I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia is a pattern for the whole world.”

As strange as it might seem to us, Chesterton was relentless in his criticism. He referred unashamedly to Prussian principles and national character as barbarism. He said comparatively little about Hitler, because he had said so much about Prussia. He saw the nature of the evil in his own day with a clarity and prescience that modern writers should envy.

Chesterton’s friend and colleague Hillaire Belloc once wrote a cutting poem called ‘Lines to a Don’, defending GKC against the criticisms of a forgotten academic: “Remote and ineffectual Don / That dared attack my Chesterton.” Modern fans of the great British journalist are no less loyal or protective of “the Apostle of Common Sense”. But it is the worth of his work that inspires this love and loyalty to the man despite the human failings from which none of us are immune. As for Hitchens, a true fan will smile or shrug his shoulders or feel a touch of pity for a critic who totally missed the point.

Take this as a reminder to go and read some more.


Zac Alstin works at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide, South Australia. 
From MercatorNet.

Another View of Christopher Hitchens

Good points, but perhaps Hitch is too "freshly dead" himself for this kind of critique.  De mortuis nil nisi bonum.  For a more charitable view, see Fr. Barron's commentary on his Word on Fire site and below.


Fine wit in the service of plain hatred
by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza
Christopher Hitchens is dead. By his own lights, he is utterly defunct, decomposing more rapidly than yesterday’s newspaper. I take a different view, and do sincerely pray for a merciful judgment. In the mean time, I trust that his soul, even now, is chagrined with the extravagant evasions that marked his death. My colleagues were enthusiastic contributors. Our editorial board praised his “courage” as a journalist and deemed him the “greatest columnist and essayist in the English-speaking world.” The estimable David Frum wrote that, “If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity.”


Clarity he had. But hating cruelty? He was himself both hateful and cruel. Upon Bob Hope’s death, Hitchens wrote that he was a “fool, and nearly a clown.” When Ronald Reagan died, Hitchens called him a “stupid lizard,” “dumb as a stump” and “an obvious phony and loon.” On Mother Teresa: “The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.”

The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.

“He was a virtuoso hater and his hatreds were redeemed, when they had to be, by the sheer relish with which they were expressed,” wrote Michael Ignatieff upon his death.

For many of Hitchens’ fellow journalists, the virtuosity of his brilliant writing and bracing conversation earned him a pass on the hatred. But hatred it remained. His commercial genius was to harbour hatreds sufficiently vast and varied that a lucrative constituency could be found to relish all of them.

In the first of his elegant essays about the ravages of his terminal cancer, he wrote about the consequences of his abbreviated future: “Will I really not live to see my children married? To read — if not indeed write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?” The Scriptures in which Hitchens did not believe say that love is stronger than death. Maybe he thought hatred was, too.

He desired to live that he might trash the freshly dead.

READ MORE

Fr. Barron on Christopher Hitchens

Retrieved December 29, 2011 from Fr. Barron's Word on Fire website

Two Good Articles: Sandel and Hitchens

In clearing out a career’s worth of files, books, journals, and magazines, I came across the April 2004 issue of The Atlantic – the only issue I own (as far as I know). I noticed that it has two excellent articles.

The first, featured on the cover, is by Michael J. Sandel. The article, “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering,” foreshadows his similarly named 2007 book, The Case Against Perfection. I have discussed Sandel’s book and course on Justice elsewhere here and found his work very helpful in thinking about the virtues, moral philosophy in its practical application, and bioethics.

The article here carries the reader in a careful consideration of his moral intuitions about the willful attempt to design human beings to our liking through genetic engineering. What is it about designer babies, bionic athletes and the like that we find creepy in ways similar to our responses to such literary dystopias as Brave New World or the film Gattaca. Starting with this unease, Sandel considers one explanation or ethical principle after another and shows how it fails if some alteration to the story is made that leaves the unease but removes the apparent ground for it.

In the end, Sandel, a Harvard liberal, brings us to considerations similar to those raised by such conservative writers as Thomas Sowell and Roger Scruton. It is a wariness about the utopian desire to control and remake the world from scratch according to our own desires, with what Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision” and Scruton “unscrupulous optimism.” It is an unease reinforced by the utopian efforts of the last century, of left and right, of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as well as Hitler, with their drive – led by an enlightened party with an absolute dictator at the helm - to cast off the constraints of history, religion, tradition, the wishes of the masses, and human nature, to make the world anew by any means necessary (i.e., by extreme violence and the deaths of millions).

It is, as Sandel acknowledges, a religious sensibility that recognizes, in contrast to such unscrupulous optimism, the giftedness of life, its unbidden nature, and the inherent imperfection and limits of our life on earth. As he says,

To acknowledge the giftedness of life is to recognize that our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, despite the effort we expend to develop and to exercise them. It is also to recognize that not everything in the world is open to whatever we may desire or devise. Appreciating the gifted quality of life constrains the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility. It is in part a religious sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion.

Citing the theologian, William F. May, Sandel discusses how parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches us an “openness to the unbidden.” In a social world that prizes mastery and control, it is a school for humility. Though we care deeply about our children and love them unconditionally, we cannot choose the kind we want. As we appreciate them as gifts or blessings, we recognize that there are limits to how far we can or should seek to control, shape, and direct them.
Sandel points to the similarity in spirit between attempts to improve children through genetic engineering and the heavily managed hyper-parenting that is now common among the more educated and affluent. But far from vindicating genetic enhancement, the similarity highlights the problem with over-controlling, over-ambitious parenting. To appreciate Eugenics and genetic engineering
Eugenics, old and new, and genetic engineering represent the one-sided triumph of willfulness – the Triumph of the Will – over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding.

***

In the same issue of The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens offers a surprisingly sympathetic assessment of that earlier critic of Promethean pretensions to remake the world from scratch, Edmund Burke.

Hitchens points out how prescient Burke was in pointing to authoritarianism and violence of the French Revolution, its inherent elitism in substituting the enlightened few and ultimately the imperial dictator for both tradition and the wishes of the people. Burke points to the feebleness of the National Assembly and the absurdity of expecting the military leaders to submit themselves to it. Thus, he predicts the rise of Napoleon (not coincidentally the name George Orwell gives to the pig who represents Stalin in his dystopian novel, 1984) almost a decade before it happened:

In the weakness of one kind of authority [i.e., the assembly], and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself…. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

Except for the bit about the king, who by the time of Napoleon’s seizure of power had already lost his head to the revolution, this is eerily exact, as Hitchens says.
As Hitchens points out, Burke’s response to the French Revolution was diametrically opposed to his earlier support for the American Revolution, a shift that led to astonishment on the part of Thomas Paine, who supported both, and scorn from many later leftists, who characteristically attributed base material motives to Burke’s turn. In this regard, Sowell’s comments on the two revolutions, in an interview he did in connection with his reissued book, A Conflict of Visions, is instructive. Sowell argues there that the American Revolution reflected the constrained vision of its leaders, whereas the French Revolution was led by a revolutionary elite with an unconstrained vision and a determination to make the world anew according to their own understanding of the dictates of Reason. [The interview is available at http://fora.tv/2008/10/21/Uncommon_Knowledge_Thomas_Sowell_and_Conflict_of_Visions] From this perspective, Burke was right to support the American but criticize the French Revolution.

Hitchens, who is reviewing a Yale edition of Reflections on the Revolution in France with scholarly essays edited by Frank M. Turner, has an interesting discussion of Paine’s relation to Burke and also of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s essay. O’Brien is interesting both because of his attempt to rescue Burke from his easy dismissal (by liberals) as a reactionary and because he illuminates the importance of Burke, a fellow Irishman, in his Catholic and national sympathies in the face of English oppression. Here Hitchens surprises us with his own sympathy (empathy anyway) for Burke’s Catholic sympathies. Indeed, he almost reminds one of his devastating critic, Terry Eagleton, a Marxist whose own Catholic and Irish sympathies were aroused more recently by Hitchens’s crude and ignorant antics as a New Atheist.

Just War and the Righting of Wrongs

Fr. Barron has an interesting, clear exposition of Just War theory in relation to Libya in a recent column at the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/libya-and-catholic-just-war-tradition/2011/03/25/AFivEmYB_blog.html). According to the Catholic social teaching tradition, he explains, going to war can be undertaken morally only when definite criteria are met.

These are 1) declaration by a competent authority, 2) the presence of a just cause, 3) some proportion between the good to be achieved and the negativity of the war, 4) right intention on the part of those engaged in the conflict, and 5) a reasonable hope of success.

He argues that not all these criteria are met in the case of the Libya intervention against Gaddafi and therefore the military action is unjust. Barron believes that the first and fourth criteria are clearly met but the third and fifth are not.

But what about the second? What is a just cause? Barron explains:

Traditionally, legitimating causes included the repulsing of an unjust aggression against one’s nation as well as the righting of wrongs in other nations or cities. Thus, in accord with that second specification, Thomas Aquinas said that a nation could go to war to punish a wicked king. Here we might see a ground for our pre-emptive moves against both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadaffi. Also, it would seem to provide a justification for sending troops into, say, Rwanda while the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents was proceeding there without any interference. On the other hand, the Popes of the twentieth century, taking into account the terribly destructive nature of modern warfare, have ruled out the righting of wrongs criterion and have accepted only the repulsing of unjust aggression as a legitimating cause.

There is something troubling about this ruling out of the righting of wrongs in other countries, especially when considering the responsibilities of the world's most powerful nation in an increasingly integrated, "globalized" world. Modern warfare is destructive, yes, but so is genocide, and nations like the U.S. have and use the technological capacity to minimize the unintended deaths of civilians. The current pope and his predecessor have also called for an international authority with teeth - see Benedict's Caritas in Veritate - presumably with the purpose precisely of righting wrongs like the Rwanda genocide or the explicitly threatened mass slaughter of civilians in Benghazi. In the absence of such a credible global authority - a very dubious proposition in the first place, many Catholics and others argue - can the United States justly observe such horrors as passively and impotently as if it were of no more weight in global affairs than Switzerland?

Christopher Hitchens, the militant atheist who has consistently defended U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, makes this point powerfully in his Slate columns - see for example his critique of Obama - "Is Obama Secretly Swiss?" (http://www.slate.com/id/2286522/) where he argues that "The administration's pathetic, dithering response to the Arab uprisings has been both cynical and naive."

Hitchens, of course, does not argue from within the Catholic just war tradition, but indirectly he raises, in my mind, troubling questions about the justness of ruling out the righting of wrongs when there is the clear capacity to stop great evil (as in genocide or mass slaughter of civilians on a large scale), and to do so, in principle, in circumstances where the other criteria for waging a just war are met.

The Rage Against God

Peter Hitchens’s The Rage Against God is a fascinating account of the world I grew up in—the postwar period in England when the old confidence in traditional authority, imperial power, morals and customs started to fall apart. I am a few years older than Hitchens and when I was at public (private) school, the old ways and beliefs seemed still strong. It was only a few of the more intellectual boys (like me) who were openly atheist. By his time, it seems the old confidence and authority of our elders and teachers was in steeper decline. Hitchens sees the ignominious debacle of the 1956 Anglo-French Suez adventure as a turning point. It shook the self-assurance of our island nation that was never defeated in war. It brought home the decline of empire and all that went with it, including the powerful navy from which Hitchens’s father was let go. The shocking public sex scandal at the highest levels of government known as the Profumo Affair (1963) provided evidence of the moral decay accompanying political decline.

So the ground was already prepared for the 1960s, with its unconstrained vision of how we could cast off all tradition, the collective wisdom and experience of past generations, and start from scratch without need of marriage, family, the capitalist state and economy, and especially the established Church of England. The C of E was associated with all things we wanted to overthrow—monarchy, tradition, conservatism (the established Church was sneered at as the Tory Party at prayer), and, of course, moral (especial sexual) restraint.

Hitchens describes well the utopian illusions of that period and their disastrous social consequences. It was a cultural and sexual revolution that was, among other things, a revolt of the young against the prospect of falling into the fate of their parents—an adult world not only of hollow forms and beliefs (if they were truly believed at all) but, materially, a world of suburbs, the paraphernalia of babies and the demands they make on one to be adult and responsible, confining and restraining the autonomous self. (No wonder baby boomer couples had so few children!)

Hitchens is justly harsh about this brave new world of adolescent pride and self-absorption, the sacrifice of the needs of children to the freedoms of adults (a prevalent theme motif of those who still are undermining our most child-friendly institution, marriage). His central topic, however, is militant atheism, the rage of atheists against God.

In Part 2 of the book, Hitchens takes on three arguments circulated by his brother Christopher and other “new atheists.” He shows how many conflicts fought in the name of religion are not about religion—for example, no-one in Northern Ireland believes that the Catholics and Protestants were fighting over religious differences about the Eucharist, the issue of “justification,” or anything of the sort. He also points to the much higher level of unrestrained violence perpetrated by atheist regimes, from the French revolution to the Bolsheviks, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and so forth. He argues that a non-relativist morality that goes beyond the Golden Rule depends on an absolute power above human society that is not subject to change at a tyrant’s or totalitarian’s whim. And he takes on the argument that the atheist states like the former USSR are not really atheist but depend on religious cults like that of Stalin.

The most powerful part of the book is his account of the difference in practice between an atheist state with a cult of the leader and a Christian society, where the command to love God and your neighbor as yourself has penetrated the culture and survives, even if exiguously, in post-Christian societies like England. He shows how militantly (and successfully) the Bolsheviks sought to extirpate all trace of Christianity from Soviet society, aiming especially at children. One of the very first decrees of the Soviet state in 1917 was to forbid the teaching of Christianity in schools and many more repressive measures followed. Tellingly, Hitchens draws vividly on his own experience as a reporter in Russia as well as showing, by way of his experience of complete political and social disintegration in Somalia, how he became convinced that his “own civilization was infinitely precious and utterly vulnerable and that [he] was obliged to try to protect it” (p.98).

Tellingly, Hitchens links this militant atheism of the Stalinists, this rage against God, to the efforts of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to describe religious education as child abuse—a very serious charge, ludicrous as it sounds, that paves the way for more and more anti-Christian measures enforced by an ever more powerful state. For Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the family and other institutions of civil society, including the churches, temples, and mosques, were a threat to the apotheosis of the state and its leader. All these regimes attacked the churches and the family, seeking either to extirpate them altogether or subordinate them to the state.

Hitchens notes that he, along with Christopher and many others (myself included, but also the philosopher and Catholic Alasdair MacIntyre) were at one time Trotskyists. We were fiercely opposed to Stalinism and the kind of totalitarian state built by Stalin and Mao, and insisted on the fundamental differences between true revolutionary socialism and Stalinism. Hitchens will have none of this. Unlike Christopher and MacIntyre (and me for that matter), he has completely rejected and settled accounts with that tradition, which he says, rests on the self-delusion that things would have turned out differently if Trotsky had won out in the struggle against Stalin. I won’t take up the argument here, but simply note that many of us who have abandoned Trotskyism in any form have failed fully to come to terms with it despite its complete incompatibility with current commitments.

Another chord the memoir struck with me comes under the nice subheading, “The Prodigal Son Returns Too Late.” He means that the Anglican communion he returned to was not the C of E he had left decades earlier. Even more than the Catholic Church in the West, the C of E had been infected with a liberal, secularizing modernism. Traditional teaching on faith and morals as well as liturgy, architecture, music and ancient practices and forms had been abandoned and the communion was falling into apparently irreversible decline. Hitchens deplores these developments, which include discarding some of the greatest literary treasures of the C of E and the English language—the King James Bible and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. But he gives no hint of finding a more orthodox home in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church, a choice toward which faithful Christians still in the Anglican communion in the UK and North America are surely feeling pushed.