Martin Amis & Chris Hitchens: Vicious Racism Concealed by a British Accent

By John Dolan, AlterNet. Posted May 24, 2008.

Martin Amis' new book, The Second Plane, is worth discussing only as a symptom of the plague of British right-wing ("Tory") rhetoric popping up in American conservative discourse. The American right wing, desperate for articulate hate mongers, has taken to importing Tory polemicists to stir the base up against the Muslim/Arab "enemy."

In mealymouthed America, where most people are shocked by anything stronger than "You know what? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that," the Tory writer's comfortable, familiar stance toward hatred can make an undistinguished hack seem like a powerful voice. That's why Christopher Hitchens is now the darling of right-wing America. Our homegrown hate mongers, like Ann Coulter, are so painfully amateurish and ham-handed that Hitchens, simply by applying the old Tory hater's kit, can seem like a master.

Apparently, even educated American editors are suckers for imported British bile. That's the only way to explain the fact that many of the essays collected in The Second Plane were originally published by the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. So, more as a public-health warning than a literary review, here's a look at Tory rhetoric as exemplified by Martin Amis.

Tory discourse has only two topics: hatred of the new and foreign, and grief for the old and familiar. The object of its hatred changes its name from generation to generation, from Papist to Jew to Irish to German to Russian to Arab; but the methods used to vilify the currently demonized alien are remarkably stable over the generations. Every device Amis uses to vilify Arabs and Muslims can be found, aimed at other targets, in Tory literature going back several decades.

Martin learned the poison-pen trade at home, from his father, novelist Kingsley Amis. Like Hitchens, Kingsley started out by calling himself a leftist, but a leftist who hated almost everything about the left except that fact that it shared his hatred for his social superiors. Once his novel Lucky Jim became a hit and he joined the elite, Kingsley discovered that he had no further grudges with the Tories and spent the rest of his life vilifying women, non-whites, and anyone else who failed to meet his standards of English-ness.

To American readers, the targets of Tory xenophobia can seem bizarre, even comic. For instance, in Lucky Jim, Amis Senior rails against Italian cooking, denouncing olive oil at some length as a vile "butter substitute." Keith Waterhouse, another Tory writer of that era, devotes half a page in one of his novels to a similar sermon against pizza. This obsession with Italian food, which was just coming into fashion in Britain, suggests an important difference between British and American right-wing writing: While most American conservative rhetoric pays lip service to "melting pot" rhetoric, British writers are openly xenophobic, assailing all foreign influences, whether in cookery or movies. Hitchens, for example, took a bizarre detour in one of his screeds to denounce the unfair presentation of medieval English royalty in Braveheart.

And unlike most American rightists, British Tories are always defeatists, convinced their cause is lost, paralyzed by nostalgia for an imaginary golden age or fighting a rearguard action in defense of a doomed, yet superior culture. In Lord of the Rings terms, England is Gondor, Mordor is the alien (the Arab/Muslim, at the moment), and without a Frodo-level game-saver, we're doomed. You can hear this sort of wretched whine even in pop music, as when Morrissey moans, "We are the last truly British people you will ever know." (Though in an amusing twist, Morrissey later came out of the ethnic closet and admitted he was Irish.)

It's not that psychiatrists don't pass out enough Prozac across the Atlantic. There's a very sound basis for Tory gloom: Britain lost the 20th century. Take a look at a map of the world circa 1900 and you'll see what a devastating fall England has suffered. In 1900, most of the Tropics were colored British pink. Now all that's left is Britain itself, a wet little island.

The logical conclusion for the Tory, looking back on that great fall, is that the 20th century was a horrible mistake. By contrast, America seemed to be doing very well right up to Sept. 11, 2001 (though some would place the catastrophe a bit earlier, on Nov. 5, 2000, or Jan. 20, 2001). Only after 9/11 and the Iraq catastrophe did right-wing America feel a doomed affinity for Tory gloom and hatred.

So now Red-State America is in the mood to hear that the whole modern world is a big mistake. That was exactly the argument of Paul Johnson, popular right-wing historian of the Thatcher era. But since he couldn't say outright that the natives were better off when ruled from London, he resorted to literary techniques to make anti-Imperialist heroes like Gandhi into villains in his big Thatcher-era pop history book, Modern Times. Johnson showed Tory writers how to defend the indefensible (imperialism, colonial massacres) using literary devices rather than argument. So although he can't really say outright that everything was better when London ruled India, he devotes a strange amount of space to slandering the sexual practices and toilet habits of Gandhi and the suspect lack of sexual enthusiasm of former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.

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John Dolan is an editor of the Moscow-based English-language alternative paper, The eXile. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).

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