Neohawks: Leftists Who Love the War Too Much

Greil Marcus is a discerning radical humanist. So it was a shock to pick up the progressive paper First of the Month and find him dissing leftist intellectuals for their skepticism about the war on terror. Marcus is not the only member of the counterculturati to find the hawk within. Dan Savage, the shoot-from-the-hip sex columnist, has lately become hip to the shoot. Then there's Christopher Hitchens, the ex-socialist who has found an occasion in 9-11 to revise his ideological profile. He is now a latter-day incarnation of the Cold War liberal. Hitchens's recent homage to George Orwell includes a remarkable defense of his work for the British government during the McCarthy era, when Orwell supplied lists of suspected com-symps, dutifully noting who was homosexual—or Jewish. Hey, says Hitchens, Orwell wasn't lying.