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Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, I looked to the columnists of The Nation, a U.S. weekly news magazine that many regard as the unofficial voice of the U.S. Left, to let down an anchor of sanity during a period, several weeks or months in duration, when almost all other sources of critical, liberal dissent shut themselves down, intimidated, in knee-jerk, defensive response to bugle-calls for patriotic fervor. I was to be disappointed by what I considered to be a muddled, incoherent inability to make sense of events. Nowhere in the pages of The Nation during the immediate aftermath did I find sustained, critical dissection of official accounts (or theories) of the events of 9/11 itself; and the analysis both of the causes of 9/11 and of the U.S. response in Afghanistan left much to be desired. I was particularly astonished, however, by the strident voice of the magazine’s celebrated columnist Christopher Hitchens whose then most recent work, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, I admired, and with whom, shortly after 9/11, I had enjoyed an amicable exchange concerning the relevance of Pearl Harbor and its controversies to the events of 9/11. This British lion of the Left, within weeks, had transmogrified into a cheerleader for the “clash of civilizations,” and a scourge of repressive Arabism. I sympathized with his distaste for notorious tyrannical regimes of the Muslim world, but considered that any analysis was hopelessly shallow that did not so much as attempt to assess the significance over decades of U.S. political and economic interests as an important, perhaps the most important, basis for understanding transformations in the balance of world power as these might affect the Muslim world. Nor could I understand how the editorial board of such an important voice of the Left should not act either to contest such analyses or to rid itself of someone who clearly was moving towards a pro-establishment camp at a time where there were so few alternative outlets for the Left anywhere close to the mainstream. Some time in early 2002, I ceased what had hitherto been my faithful weekly reading of this magazine, since by then I had discovered a score of Web-sites that singly or together seemed to be doing a more satisfactory job at the business of dissent.

Scott Lucas’ new work, The Betrayal of Dissent, is an extended essay, a jewel of intellectual history, that provides some context to my personal odyssey since 9/11, and to my reactions to Hitchens. This is a book about the containment of dissent. Especially, it about those who, even if not friends of the Left, claim at least to be “contrarian,” (Hitchens’ preferred self-description) yet who, while claiming to be opponents of officially sanctioned and conventional wisdom, end up not merely supporting the establishment, but denouncing and attempting to stifle those who oppose it (often preferring ridicule, ad hominem invective, and other forms of specious argument over honest and rational debate). Lucas’ starting point is George Orwell: Orwell’s attack in the 1940s on pacifists and on the Left (even though as late as 1939 Orwell had himself rejected a war that he believed, wrongly as it turns out, might strengthen British imperialism); and Orwell’s collaboration with British intelligence in offering assessments of fellow intellectuals whom he deemed were unreliable (as potential fighters in the gathering storm against anti-communism). At this point, Lucas possibly underrates the real dangers of Nazism and Stalinism, and the failure of many among the British Left to recognize Stalinism as a form of Russian state nationalism, even of state capitalism. But the principal lessons that Lucas offers here are of the ugliness and pettiness of betrayal, and the mythology and iconicity of a contrarianism that operates in support of the state and is leveraged by the state in pursuit of its own ends (so that, for example, Animal Farm becomes a parable of communism, specifically, rather than of totalitarianism generally, and in 1949 the CIA finances a film version of the book).

Pursuing this theme of the containment of dissent by its erstwhile friends, particularly those who enjoy benign access to mainstream media, Lucas moves to the specific case of Christopher Hitchens, whose emergence as a scourge of dissent became manifest after 9/11 and during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But the scope of the book looks broadly at dissent and its media containment across a wide range of authors and mainstream media, from 9/11 to the build up towards the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the invasion and occupation itself, and its aftermath. Lucas chronicles the events themselves, the ways in which prominent voices in the media supported the establishment position and aided attempts to drown out the voices of dissenters. Even the chronicling of the events themselves is an astonishing reminder of the blackest farce through which the U.S. so recently has dragged the international “order”, in defiance of international and its own domestic laws. The voices of these intellectual cheerleaders for criminality are dismally familiar in their strident, conceited certainty, their self-appointed role as gatekeepers of the “reasonable,” and (like Orwell) as spokespersons for “decency, their deceptive pretense at “independence” and, not least, in their shallowness and fallibility. Equally important is the role of this book in recording many of the voices (among them, that of the recently deceased Susan Sontag) of those who persisted in their dissent, despite the odds, in providing alternative perspectives on the actual and on the possible.

The book therefore raises the question: just how “independent” are those brave, gate-keeping “contrarians,” for, as I have argued elsewhere, it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain the behavior of media reporting and commenting in terms of a pure political-economic model, as Hermann and Chomsky’s “propaganda model” attempted to do in 1988, without paying more attention to the likely manipulation and penetration of media by intelligence and covert operatives. Not that individual apologists for state criminality need necessarily be “bought,” though doubtless some are, but that those who hand them rare and privileged access to large audiences know precisely what they are doing.

Lucas exposes Orwell not so much for his inconsistency, for the betrayal that is intrinsic to his amicable relations with British intelligence (a single example of a long and important history of the shaping of public discourse by establishment and intelligence agencies), his donning of the mantel of a distracting British eccentricity and “decency,” but for the arrogance and contempt that his attitudes reveal towards working people and to women. Occasionally, Lucas’ labyrinth accounting of critique and counter-critique, especially when he moves to Hitchens, becomes difficult to follow. But important questions are addressed that make the path worthwhile. Why did Hitchens switch? Lucas argues it had something to do with the fact that Hitchens too had “snitched” - against Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton aide. Lucas explains that Hitchens and his wife offered affidavits to congressmen prosecuting Clinton that affirmed that Blumenthal had told them that Clinton had described Lewinsky as a stalker. For this he was angrily denounced by fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. To both Lucas’ and Hitchens’ credit, nonetheless, the record shows that the contrarian image did not entirely implode. Lucas quotes Hitchens as seeking, in 2002, campaigns against Saudi and Pakistani regimes with the argument that the “obscurantists and fanatics (of Riyadh and Islamabad) were nurtured in the bosom of the same “national security” apparatus that so grotesquely, if not criminally, failed to protect our civil society over a year ago.” That rare insight in effect aligns Hitchens to the likes of Michael Chossudovsky, Michael Ruppert and Gore Vidal whose reading of 9/11 is supremely different to that of the joint congressional intelligence committee and the 9/11 commission. It is an insight that would merit at least a lifetime of further investigation, but Hitchens lets it drop. Well before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Lucas also finds Hitchens criticizing Washington for its failure to think through the consequences of its determination to invade. But sadly, and possibly to his eternal embarrassment, Hitchens did subscribe, and for far too long, to the mythology of weapons of mass destruction and to claimed links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In a separate chapter, Lucas notes that meanwhile, almost all Hitchens’ named targets among the community of dissenters against U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, were veterans of the 1960s New Left: Cockburn, Chomsky, Zinn, Sontag, Pinter, Pilger, Tariq Ali. Most importantly, as I have noted, Hitchens’ “clash of civilizations” propensities seemed to glide over “specific analyses of American politics, power and ideology, as well as the complexities of the situation in Afghanistan and Central Asia.”

While charting attempts by public intellectuals to stifle dissent in their own ranks, Lucas’ work is just as important in chronicling the courage of those dissenters themselves whose voices made it to the mainstream, however much these were drowned or spoiled by the backtracking of others who ceded to arguments about the “inevitability of war,” or who, like Bob Woodward, laid their dissenter credibility at the door of the establishment as though this establishment was worthy of respect, of being treated as “normal” or even as “normally abnormal”, or who, in the manner of Orwell, tried to shut down compelling arguments by railing against “apologists for terror.”

The book’s principal defect is that it lacks a transparent methodology for the task it has undertaken. Other than occasional references to the work of such organizations like FAIR or the Pew Charitable Foundation that undertake or sponsor empirical surveys of media coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lucas offers little in the way of evidence to demonstrate the contrasting strengths (in such terms as regularity of appearance, positioning on page, and so on) of supporters and dissenters, to justify his choices of the voices that he charts, or his choices of the media through which dissenters and their opponents are heard. There is little or no consideration of the lines between mainstream and alternative media, of how such lines might be drawn, or their significance. The book was likely compiled too soon to deal in depth with the saga of Judith Miller of the New York Times, her relations with Ahmed Chalabi and the Pentagon, and the critiques and self-critiques of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other mainstream media of their collective failure to arrest the flow of lies and deceptions that justified the 2003 invasion. Nor is there nearly enough about the phenomena of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, and similar if less acknowledged examples of the new wave of political documentary through film and DVD that the Bush regime has unwittingly inspired. Finally, the book does not attempt to move beyond historical detail to isolate and analyze specific methods for the containment of dissent, although perhaps there is enough here to enable others to undertake this surely important task.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

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