I have read Hitchens' articles in Vanity Fair, and I have read at least one of his books, but while I read his review of the Luxemburg letters, I could not forget that its author was the one and the same Christopher Hitchens, with the benefit of learning from the devastations of two world wars, the Korean, Vietnam wars, and Bush Senior's attack on Iraq in 1991, who defended the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The same Hitchens who was once a socialist, and who at the end, proclaimed, on occasion, that he was still a Marxist. And the invasion of Iraq that serves the interests of the ruling class, the capitalists. But it seems Hitchens held his ground and had his motives, too, for supporting an Empire's war.
Hitchens continues: "the central tranche of this collection of letters was written during that bleak incarceration, and that political relapse."
Is "bleak" the correct word here? (Women are never "heard" even when they articulate their thoughts in writing!)."Bleak" is not a word that Rosa Luxemburg would have attributed to her numerous stays in a prison cell. Nor would she have said that the times in which she lived were "bleak." On the contrary! For Luxemburg, the times were ripe for a revolution!
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.
Even from a prison cell, Luxemburg begins a letter (1917) to a friend, Louise Kautsky in which the subject is life itself--in revolutionary practice:
Lulu, beloved! Yesterday in Berlin I had a hearing (in my absence) at which undoubtedly a few months of prison have again fallen to my lot. Today it has been exactly three months that I have been stuck "sitting' here--in the third stage [of my imprisonment]. In celebration of two such memorable days, by which they have interrupted my existence in this pleasant way for years now, you deserve to get a letter.
In the same letter, she writes:
Now I am bright and lively again and in a good mood, and the only way you're failing me is that you're not here chitchatting and laughing as only the two of us understand how to do. I would very soon get you laughing again, even though your last few letters sounded disturbingly gloomy.
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