Among the Intellectualoids: Hitch Is No Snitch
Schwartz, Stephen
A M 0 N G T t E L L T A 0 by Stephen Schwartz Hitch Is No Snitch Did Trotsky's fate seal Sidney Blumenthal's? c hristopher Hitchens and I do not agree about very much. For example, as a friend...
...If every worker's Beck rights were protected by an executive order, and if every worker took advantage of them, unions would lose 82 percent of their annual dues...
...Let the government do its own dirty work...
...Unlike the preceding contests—mere skirmishes without long-term repercussions — "this election" is supposed to set the stage for the next decade, generation, century...
...Naturally, he, like Katha Pollitt, has seized on Hitchens's defense of Orwell's "snitching" to explain his alleged "betrayal" of Blumenthal...
...For example, as a friend of Albania and Albanians, I will never forgive his assault on the outstanding Albanian personality of our time, Mother Teresa...
...On November 7, 2000, all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judiciary—will be at stake...
...66 April 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Under the dim lights and over the delectable cuisine, we argued about many things...
...We now see from Venona that, as Trotsky declared, the entirety of the American Communist Party was involved in "snitching" on American citizens who opposed Stalin...
...I wrote him a letter of congratulations for his stand...
...If the 2000 election were a boxingmatch, it would cheer the promoters that the two contestants are very evenly matched and that this is the third in an ongoing series of grudge matches following the 1994 GOP capture of the House and Senate...
...why should Orwell help the repressive powers of the state...
...The danger for Republicans is that the stakes are not the same for both parties...
...Referring to a new book by Ellen Schrecker, Hitch reported on this twist of Trotsky's fate in the August 24, 1998 issue of the Nation...
...If only lo percent of union members exercised their Beck rights it would cost the unions The 2000 elections will decide the Democrats' future...
...John Judis of the New Republic has endorsed Blumenthal, defending the hatchet-man of the Clintonocracy on the basis of their shared employment by In These Times, a leftist tabloid that tried its best to meld the politics of Tom Hayden with the journalistic methods of the National Enquirer, but ultimately failed...
...Venona decryptions of secret KGB communications: the extent to which anti-Stalinist leftists—with whom Hitchens has always identified—were targeted by Stalin's operatives in the U.S...
...POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Winner Takes All E very two years the leaders of both political parties address their key coalition members and solemnly pronounce the next election to be the most important in a generation...
...In other words, defending Western democracy from the most dangerous enemy it ever faced was "dirty work...
...But when I heard that this U.S.-based British provocateur had blown the whistle on Sidney Blumenthal for lying to the Senate about slandering Monica—and was being savaged by the left for doing so—I felt a pang of responsibility...
...To "inform" on those who collected information for the KGB's terrorists was something other than schoolyard, or even gangland, snitching...
...Cockburn, now spreading Stalinist-like slanders about Hitchens, is the son of a Stalinist agent, Claud Cockburn, whodefamed Orwell and his comrades back in Barcelona in 1937...
...Hitchens professed doubt about these revelations...
...People who report on their friends and associates may legitimately be called "snitches" if the charges are groundless...
...With Reagan's first victory in 1980, 34 Republican representatives were swept into Congress...
...Then I sprang a question on him: "What would you think of the case of a man who had desperately wanted to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but who was killed before he could...
...Another, Katha Pollitt, wrote: "Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong...
...History suggests that the presidential election could help decide whether the GOP keeps its narrow six-vote majority in the House...
...A Republican Washington could enact a modest version of Paycheck Protection or implement the 1998 Supreme Court ruling that workers may be compelled to pay union dues only for the "maintenance and negotiation" of their own contracts...
...Today there are very few "boll weevils" or "Blue Dog Democrats," and very few "Rockefeller Republicans...
...In that article, Hitch discussed a revelation in the recently published (and ineptly edited) twenty-volume "complete works" of George Orwell...
...In 1952, Republicans won the presidency and both houses from the Democrats, yet the liberal drift in policy was hardly affected...
...A real hero of a real revolutionary movement, the former Soviet military intelligence chief Walter Krivitsky, who defected during Stalin's purges, may have put it best...
...One does not come away from Stalin easily...
...It turned out that earlyin the Cold War, Orwell had given British authorities a list of Stalinist apologists...
...For the first time in over a century, Americans are competing not just for party control of the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, but for ideological control of those institutions...
...But those who report honestly on criminal behavior are witnesses, and in Anglo-Saxon society, a millennium ago, those who knew of a crime but kept silent were held equally to blame...
...It's also likely that the next president will appoint three Supreme Court justices and set the governing majority of the Court for years to come...
...Whittaker Chambers recalled Krivitsky telling him, "In our time, informing is a duty...
...Some things don't change after all...
...At one of these dinners early last year, we were joined at the Washington Square Bar by his wife and fellow journalist Carol Blue, and by a female colleague of mine...
...But Hitch noted that "all [Orwell's] observations mirror precisely what he was saying openly (when he could get published) about the contemporary 'fellow travelers.'" There was nothing dishonorable or inconsistent about such informing...
...Sixteen more came in 1984...
...Finding ourselves on the same side of the Bosnian barricades, we put our scrap at Second Thoughts behind us...
...In the test vote on impeachment there were only five Democrats who voted "yes" and only five Republicans who voted "no...
...After 1960, though the Democrats had regained the presidency and held both houses, the ideology of Washington didn't shift...
...Edward Jay Epstein, who charges Hitchens with Holocaust denial, first became famous serving America's enemies by attacking the Warren Commission 35 years ago...
...In the case of Communications Workers ofAmer- ica v. Beck, this was found to be 18 percent of total dues...
...Calling such people "snitches" shows the moral parallel between Communism and the Mafia, which similarly labels its defectors...
...The American Stalinists The American Spectator April 1999 65 and their Muscovite masters, acutely aware of how poorly this would play in America a half-century ago, turned the tables adroitly...
...As recently as 1992, Clinton's presidential victory and Democratic control of Congress were not enough to pass a BTU tax, a $16 billion "stimulus" package, or socialized health care...
...If the Republicans elect a president in 2000 to go along with a slight increase in their congressional majorities, they can and will enact reforms that will break the pillars of the Democratic Party's national structure: labor unions, trial lawyers, and Big City machines...
...In 1996 Clinton picked up nine House seats for Democrats...
...Thereafter he would occasionally call me when he came to San Francisco and we would meet for dinner...
...He insulted me in an exceptionally rude manner, as reported in one of the national magazines...
...On the other hand, Jimmy Carter gained only one House seat in '76 and Clinton lost ten seats in '92...
...This time it might even be true...
...Those who properly denounced the "informing," routinely carried out by American Communists in the service of the KGB, were themselves labeled "informers...
...When I told him that the man's name was Trotsky, Hitchens was inclined to reject such bad news, almost 6o years after the fact...
...One of Hitch's Nation colleagues, Alexander Cockburn, disparaged Orwell as a snitch...
...I first met Hitch, as he is known far and wide, at the Second Thoughts conference in Washington in 1987...
...Then, in 1992, writing from Sarajevo for the Nation, he passionately and powerfully denounced the crimes of the Serbs...
...The Democrats are playing for their very survival...
...That's $8 billion each year...
...Man kommt nicht leicht von Stalin los...
...The top spies in Venona were much more interested in the daily affairs of the widow Trotsky in Mexico City, even after Trotsky's death, than they were in the Pentagon, the White House, or any other logical enemy...
...GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...We now know that Lawrence Duggan, a Soviet spy and head of the State Department's Division of American Republics—with responsibility for Mexico where Trotsky was in exile—lobbied actively against granting him the visa he needed to come and testify before HUAC...
...But over the next few months clip files and quotes from Trotsky's own writings convinced him that when the old revolutionary was murdered in 194o, he had been preparing a scorching exposure of the use of the Communist Parties worldwide by the Soviet secret police...
...Let me explain...
...Todd Gitlin, in the New York Observer, has excoriated Hitch as a Trotskyite unwilling to join the totalitarian liberals in the Popular Front with Slick Willie...
...Knowing that he, like myself, had been a Trotskyist, I pointed out the most fascinating revelation in the recently disclosed STEPHEN SCHWARTZ is the author of From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind, published last year by the Free Press...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
