Hitchens: Czeslaw Milosz’s Extraordinary Accomplishment

Christopher Hitchens takes a close read of poet Czeslaw Milosz’s understanding of politics: “The long-term achievement of Milosz was to have scrutinized, not just in between but clean through, and well beyond, the party “lines” that claim for themselves exclusive truth. In doing so he shamed the so-called intellectuals who managed the ugly trick of denying freedom to their own minds, the better to visit the same deprivation upon others.”