The “New Atheism” movement experienced a surge in prominence following the September 11th attacks. However, its trajectory shifted after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, as the movement—particularly its outspoken advocate, Christopher Hitchens—faced sharp criticism from the Left. Eurocentric left accused both Hitchens and the movement of being “racist,” and “neo-conservative.” As a result, the western Eurocentric left came to perceive “New Atheism” as a reactionary strain of anti-religious liberalism, marked by Islamophobia, and endorsement of military interventions. A significant issue is that some privileged Western leftists do not fully understand the complexities of imperialism. This lack of comprehension makes them susceptible to get manipulated as “useful idiots” by Islamists or Arab nationalists, who deliberately blur the distinction between a religion and its adherents. Consequently, these leftists are used to advance the Islamist agenda. Charges of racism or being a neoconservative levelled against Christopher Hitchens by certain progressive and leftist atheists often reflect a superficial understanding of his intellectual work, leading to misinterpretations and inaccurate assessments.
Christopher Hitchens & Trotskyism
Mainstream political analysts have often offered a superficial interpretation, suggesting that Christopher Hitchens had minimal connections to Marxist ideology, despite his acknowledgment of George Orwell’s influence and his prior involvement in the Trotskyist movement. However, Hitchens’s association with the “International Socialist” within British Trotskyism strongly challenges this view. His affiliation with Trotskyist circles provided him with a distinct Marxist lens through which he analysed imperialism and capitalism. Hitchens’s contributions to understanding the history of the Left, particularly his reflections on Orwell, are valuable and merit deeper examination. Hitchens stood out for his approach, which extended beyond the confines of academia or policy expertise. He was recognized for his consistent engagement with and analysis of contemporary issues through his writings. While his departure from the Left might be mischaracterized as mere apostasy, it is more accurately seen as a sincere, albeit imperfect, effort to navigate the complexities of the situations he encountered. His Marxist political education, rooted in sectarian traditions, equipped him with unique intellectual tools that enabled him to deliver nuanced critiques of the modern Left in esteemed publications such as The New Statesman, and The Atlantic.
In examining the anti-Stalinist Marxists of the 1930s, Christopher Hitchens emphasized the contributions of key theorists such as C. L. R. James, Victor Serge, and Trotsky, noting their reliance on conscience as being equally, if not more, significant than strict adherence to Marxist principles. Their opposition to Stalin, including Hitchens’s own stance, was rooted in a Marxist critique of capitalism. Hitchens’s admiration for George Orwell can be seen as reflecting the Trotskyist perspective that emerged relatively late in Britain. Notably, many future leaders of the New Left did not distance themselves from Stalinism until after Trotsky’s death, particularly following the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Orwell, by contrast, was aligned with the small and scattered independent international Left. His early and unpopular critique of Stalinism within the British Left was a central reason for his importance to Hitchens. George Orwell, as a member of the “International of persecuted oppositionists” who opposed the Hitler-Stalin pact, emerged as a steadfast leftist critic of the Left, shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he documented in Homage to Catalonia. Christopher Hitchens highlights Orwell’s unwavering commitment to the principles and insights he gained in Spain, emphasizing that in Animal Farm, the Russian Revolution’s initial ideals are portrayed as legitimate, presenting the revolution as one betrayed rather than fundamentally flawed.
Hitchens warning against “Anti-Imperialism of the Idiots”
His critiques extended to ideologies he perceived as oppressive, including Islamism, Stalinism, Ba’athism, fascism, and Nazism, reflecting his unwavering opposition to authoritarianism in all its forms. Despite his controversial neoconservative stance on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, his position stemmed from a profound solidarity with pro-intervention leftists in Iraq, the Kurdish self-determination, and the rights of other oppressed minorities in the region.
Hitchens was a vocal critic of the Assad regime in Syria, other Baathist authoritarian governments, Zionism, and various forms of tyranny. Christopher Hitchens, disillusioned by the realities of Stalinism, the impracticality of Trotskyist permanent revolution, and the perceived inadequacies of social democracy, found himself in a state of ideological uncertainty. Simultaneously, he observed with dismay the abandonment of persecuted leftists by their supposed allies within the Western left, who rationalized their inaction under the guise of misguided anti-imperialism, particularly in the face of Islamist threats. This is particularly notable because it placed him in opposition to figures on the “red-brown” left, such as George Galloway, who were anti-war despite holding views which can be identified as transphobic, queerphobic, and socially conservative. While many criticized Christopher Hitchens for supporting the Iraq War, his stance was rooted in a principled defence of the Kurdish people. As Slavoj Žižek once mentioned Christopher Hitchens was one of the very few western activists who had connections with communists in Iraqi interim government. His political views were driven by a genuine empathy for a group that had endured decades of persecution from both national socialist governments and extremist Islamist groups. This motivation sets him apart from critics like George Galloway, who, in Hitchens’s view, simply adopted an anti-Western position, evidenced by Galloway’s praise for Saddam Hussein and his support for Bashar al-Assad, a leader responsible for genocides and massacres. Hitchens’s reasoning, though controversial, was born from a place of moral conviction, not racism or neoconservative mindset.
One of his political analyses that sparked his split with the western left was indeed insightful, particularly his assertion that sub-imperialist praxis led by Iran, Russia, China, and the Ba’athist regimes, which could challenge Western imperialism, was far more authoritarian and should not be endorsed by the genuine left. Hitchens also warned against potential alliances between Islamophilic Eurocentric leftists and far-right Islamist factions, encapsulating this caution with his famous phrase, “Resist It While You Can.” As a result, Hitchens himself argued that he did not abandon the left; rather, the left abandoned him.
The Leninist Atheism of Hitchens vs God-Builders among the New Left
Some leftists, with a limited understanding of Marxism, have occasionally mischaracterized the atheism of Christopher Hitchens as excessively critical of religious communities, particularly the progressive elements within the religious Left. However, it can be historically seen that similar forms of left opportunism have existed long before the October Revolution. Long before the October Revolution, Lenin, alongside Alexander Bogdanov and others, co-founded the Bolsheviks as the vanguard faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), opposing the Menshevik social democratic faction. Later, internal divisions emerged within the Bolsheviks themselves over their stance on religion and its relationship to Marxism. Prominent Bolshevik figures such as Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Maxim Gorky advocated for a concept known as “God-Building,” which sought to reinterpret religious values through a leftist lens, aligning them with communist principles. Lunacharsky in his article with a name “Religion and Socialism” wrote that:
- “Socialism unites secular and religious ideological groups in the struggle for the proletariat. Any action aiming to merge socialism with religious fanaticism, or militant atheism, are actions aimed at splitting the proletarian class and have the formula of divide and rule, which plays into the hands of bourgeois dictatorship.”
Lenin, along with other Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin had to push back against that “God Building” opportunism within the Bolshevik tendency itself. Lenin responded to the “God Building” tendency within the Bolsheviks by writing the following in this article “Socialism and Religion“:
- “Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, overburdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like.”
Lenin also responded to Maxim Gorky, another leader of the “God Building” movement:
- “There’s nothing more abominable than religion. All worship of a divinity is a necrophilia. Any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most inexpressible foulness.”
N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky who also shared the similar atheist view as Lenin wrote several points about how religions and Marxism are not compatible in their classical book “The ABC of Communism”.
They wrote:
- “Many weak-kneed communists reason as follows: “Religion does not prevent my being a communist. I believe both in God and in communism. My faith in God does not hinder me from fighting for the cause of the proletarian revolution.”
- “This train of thought is radically false. Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically. In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith.”
N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky can also be seen identifying the clerical influence in politics and their role of religious propaganda as the class enemy of Marxists. They wrote the following in their classical book “The ABC of Communism”.
- “The struggle with religion has two sides, and every communist must distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have the struggle with the church, as a special organisation existing for religious propaganda, materially interested in the maintenance of popular ignorance and religious enslavement. On the other hand, we have the struggle with the widely diffused and deeply ingrained prejudices of the majority of the working population.”
- “The association of religious propaganda with scholastic instruction is the second powerful weapon employed by the clergy for the strengthening of the ecclesiastical regime and for increasing the influence of the church over the masses.”
Lenin also narrated the similar understanding of the role of religion, a useful tool the oppressed people might have created on their own in the early days out of the sufferings they endured but later developed into a propaganda against the oppressed people by the ruling class to be submissive. Lenin can be seen writing the following in his article “Socialism and Religion“:
- “Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price ticket to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.”
Lenin vehemently opposed Lunacharsky’s ideological stance, viewing it as a detrimental dilution of Marxist principles into a form of moderate liberal reformism. Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin emphasized militant atheism as a benchmark for genuine Marxist commitment. They argued that Marxists should transcend bourgeois materialist atheism and engage with the inherently atheistic principles of historical materialism.
The western left in 21st century who had adopted the opportunistic God Building theory has failed to protect the genuine fellow left-wing progressives such as Salman Rushdie, those from Charlie Hebdo, and others. It is, therefore, deeply ironic to witness opportunistic red-brown conservative left populists—who themselves indulged in “God-Building” opportunism—criticizing figures like Christopher Hitchens, who embodies the Marxist atheist critique of religion, as being liberals.
Hitchens and New Atheism on Trial
Christopher Hitchens is a controversial figure, particularly for his support of the Iraq War. However, he remains an important figure in both Marxist and atheist circles, and his legacy should be appreciated by both. The New Atheism movement, which Hitchens helped popularize, has declined since his death. Its leaders have either passed away or become embroiled in controversy. For example, Richard Dawkins has been criticized for his comments on the transgender community, and Sam Harris has been accused of lacking a nuanced understanding of political and economic issues. The movement’s decline may be due in part to its focus on a privileged, Western, secular perspective that was intertwined with neoconservative views. To move forward, atheists and humanists should reject both the red-brown left’s Islamophilic and the anti-Muslim (so called Islamophobia) bigotry of the political right. To truly uphold human rights and civil liberties, they must build solidarity with marginalized communities at the grassroots level, collaborate with various political groups to defend secularism, and firmly reject any form of neoconservative imperialism.
