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...of years ago in the London communist Morning Star. Galloway had welcomed Hitchens' support for the Vietcong in Vietnam and his demands for the arrest and prosecution of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal--among many similar causes.
Yet only the other day the same Galloway dubbed the same Hitchens "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay and a useful idiot".
The point is that Hitchens has become a passionate supporter of the war in Iraq--and of regime change throughout the Middle East, while Galloway remains an unreconstructed propagandist for Saddam Hussein.
But has Hitchens really changed? He insists he is still where he has always been--in the tradition of George Orwell fighting for democracy and free thought against dictatorship and superstition. It is, he insists, the herd of mindless lefties in the media, churches and academia who, by defending "the insurgents" (that is, murderers and terrorists), have betrayed the great tradition.
As this new collection of his recent polemics shows, there has always been a touch of the double agent in Hitchens. Many of the essays have an autobiographical sub-theme where he celebrates the writer who has a foot in both camps--Rudyard Kipling, creator of Kim, the white boy who "passed" for an Indian, or Leon Trotsky the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, or Aldous Huxley, the sceptic who believed in nirvana and an end of history.
The greatest of these men of permanent contradictions is Winston Churchill. Hitchens' tribute to him is all the more eloquent for...
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