Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens reading from one of his works, Hitch 22: A Memoir^{[citation needed]}

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“”Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the Supernatural and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

—Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian[citation needed]

Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949–2011) was a chain-smoking, atheistic, British drunken smartarse — what every self-respecting gentleman aspires to be! Hitchens was a self-identified antitheist and was known as one of the "Four Horsemen" in the New Atheist movement (along with Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris). He was the brother of Peter Hitchens; until shortly before Christopher's death, the two had been estranged for many years.

Prior to his atheist activism, Hitchens was known for his criticism of the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Dubya (for a while, however, he might have been his most noted atheist cheerleader, but for quite separate reasons of anti-theocratic and anti-dictatorial sentiment), and Obama administrations. He was also known for his opposition to the theistic concept of an intervening God. In fact, looking back on his 40-year career, there weren't many people Hitchens liked, except for George Orwell, Václav Havel, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, and once upon a time, Noam Chomsky and Che Guevara. And himself, of course. However, his fierce ideological disagreements did not keep him from maintaining unusual personal relationships. In the later years of his life, people as diverse as Lawrence Krauss, Salman Rushdie, and Justice Antonin Scalia frequently visited him at his house to debate God knows what.

Although Hitchens eventually abandoned socialism in favor of Keynesianism, he continued to call himself a Marxist and expressed sympathy for Karl Marx, feeling his critiques of capitalism were fairly accurate. Despite being applauded by many atheists for his vocal, uncensored criticism of religion, some of his views were controversial, such as his furious support for the War on Terror and interventionism in the Middle East, as well as his support of burqa bans, saying: "It is quite plainly designed by men for the subjugation of women."

Hitchens was 62 years old at the time of his death from esophageal cancer, a cancer most often associated with drinking and smoking. However, this age has been called into question due to missing transitional forms.

Views on religion

Hitchens in 2007

“”One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

—Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Hitchens was known for his views on atheism and other social issues on which he would hold forth eruditely and at length. He was also known for taking provocative positions on various topics. He was a supporter of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars (something that hurt his standing with the left), and had notoriously attacked Mother Teresa and Hanukkah for representing a triumph of religious orthodoxy over scientific and humanitarian advancement. He also condemned former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, stating that Kissinger deserves prosecution "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture."

Formerly a Trotskyist of the Tony Cliff variety, Hitchens was the last Trotskyist convert to the right-wing. However, he denied the term neoconservative, stating that he wasn't a Conservative in any sense of the term. Like many other ex-Trotskyists, his opposition to Islam was one of the primary reasons for the switch in ideology.

As a result of his grievances with Islam, Hitchens had a long-standing feud with former British MP George Galloway, who once traded barbs with Hitchens outside a U.S. senate subcommittee, calling him a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens replied "Only some of which is true."

His 2007 bestselling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything proved to be a major work of what would become known as "New Atheism", seen as a more militant approach to dealing with religious matters. In it, he argued that religion, being the root of much tribalist and isolationist thinking, is irrational and dangerous to societies that aspire to freedom.

Hitchens' dislike of religion did not prevent him from opposing Islamophobia, for example. Reviewing Oriana Fallaci's book The Rage and the Pride, Hitchens called it "a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam", describing it as "replete with an obsessive interest in excrement, disease, sexual mania, and insectlike reproduction, insofar as these apply to Muslims in general and to Muslim immigrants in Europe in particular".

Criticism of Mother Teresa

“”Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

—Christopher Hitchens

One of Hitchens' earliest forays into the criticism of religion was his book The Missionary Position, which argued that Mother Teresa of Calcutta gave substandard clinical treatment to many at her hospices and that her spirituality entailed a masochistic cult of suffering for Jesus, often to the point where patients in her care were denied pain-relieving treatment. He further argued that much money donated to her charities was funneled to right-wing Catholic regimes around the world. He also held that her charities acted as a front for proselytizing and for promoting Catholic proscriptions against birth control. Hitchens found her views against birth control particularly odious, given that she worked in India, a country wracked by poverty and overpopulation. A film documentary based on the book, entitled Hell's Angel, aired in the United Kingdom to a large television audience, but got virtually no exposure in the United States.

Mother Teresa was first promoted heavily in the Western world by Christian pundit Malcolm Muggeridge, with whom Hitchens found multiple occasions to quarrel.

Fighting Islamofascism

“”The antiwar movement mantra was: "Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country." Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime." I could go on. (I think No. 4 may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the "doves" to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to reread themselves saying things like, "The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic".

—Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens evolved from being largely a pacifist to a believer in confronting what he considered evil and fascistic governments. This transformation was completed after 9/11, when he became a strident advocate for war in the Middle East. He essentially embraced the label of not only a supporter of war, but also a believer in humanitarian intervention and argued that fighting to overthrow the governments of places like Iraq and Afghanistan would be beneficial for those living under the rule of said states. At one point he even said "'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favorite headline for some wobbly liberals... But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age."

Hitchens believed that Islamofascism must be fought in every possible way, including restricting the right to wear what one wants by banning the burqa. He argued that this is for security and the desire to protect women from overbearing men, and was not in any way an attempt to take away peoples' freedom — even though it negates more than two different interpretations of the US Constitution's First Amendment: freedom of religion, free speech as applied to dress, and freedom of association.

In 2008, Hitchens volunteered to be waterboarded so as to write about it from experience. It was performed by experts in torture and torture resistance from SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). Hitchens lasted only 17 seconds. He reaffirmed his position that waterboarding is torture, is both immoral and ineffective, and furthermore opens the doors to American prisoners being tortured by others.

Criticism of liberals allying with fascists

Hitchens also called Sam Harris "irresponsible" for writing that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists," and replied, "Not while I'm alive they won't." He also disagreed with Harris's opposition to building a new mosque in New York city, and wrote a piece criticizing the "demagogy" of opposing building a new mosque two blocks from the former World Trade Center (which is actually a long walk in densely packed Manhattan). Hitchens expressed that the mosque should be built, writing "Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit and letter of the First Amendment or the principle of the "wall of separation"."

Criticism by religious moderates

“”I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

—Christopher Hitchens

Non-fundie religious commentators have often noted that Hitchens attributes the positive elements of some Christian individuals and organizations to humanism rather than to Christianity. In particular, Hitchens argues in God Is not Great that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King are not really Christian (which is a compliment from Hitchens' perspective), noting that King never advocated divine punishment for his opponents and derived much of his thinking on non-violence from Gandhi, a non-Christian source. While it might seem a moot point to lambast Dr. King in this way, the same point about the cognitive dissonance of "moderate" faith is continually made (even more fervently) in the opposing trench:

“”Many Christians have been duped into accepting a false idea: that there is a 'neutral' position they can take in regard to social issues. Some Christians even accept the myth that the U.S. Constitution declares that there should be a separation of church and state. They are hesitant to inject Christian beliefs into politics. God's Word, however, makes it clear that there is no neutral position.

—Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum

In a televised debate, his brother, the (ironically enough) Christian apologist Peter Hitchens, unsurprisingly argued that this was essentially a no-win scenario for Christianity. Others similarly concluded that Hitchens has too narrow a definition of religion, which then enables him to condemn it as universally toxic. So far, none of these critics have accused Hitchens of engaging in the no true scotsman fallacy, not only because this exact phrase circulates more frequently among rationalists, but more importantly because believers calling Hitchens out on alleged logical fallacies would be a bit like him being accused of being yellow by a bunch of bananas.

Chris Hedges has made similar criticisms, in addition to denouncing his support for the Iraq War. Hedges' criticisms are heavily focused on the notion that evil does not originate per se mainly in religion; rather, religion provides a secondary post hoc rationalization for evil. Hedges and Hitchens debated these issues in Berkeley, California in 2007. At this debate, when the two quarreled over the motivations of suicide bombers, Hitchens angrily accused Hedges of making excuses for suicide bombers, suggesting that Hedges condoned their actions. Hedges has also accused Hitchens and Sam Harris of the same divisive rhetoric as religious extremists.

Views on other topics

“”"What is it you most dislike?" Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

—Hitchens

Abortion

Hitchens personally opposed abortion, even going so far as to name himself philosophically pro-life (while politically championing the pro-choice right to abortion), all the while strongly criticizing the Christian pro-life movement. For example, in a 1989 piece for The Nation, he wrote:

“”I have always been convinced that the term 'unborn child' is a genuine description of material reality. Obviously, the fetus is alive, so that disputation about whether or not it counts as 'a life' is casuistry. The same applies, from a materialist point of view, to the question of whether or not this 'life' is 'human.' What other kind could it be? As for 'dependent,' this has never struck me as a very radical criticism of any agglomeration of human cells in whatever state. Children are 'dependent' too. […] Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows that the emotions are not a deciding factor. In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain, and, whatever the method, break some bones and rupture some organs.

—Christopher Hitchens

He reiterated these arguments in a 2006 World Magazine interview, stating that "I've looked at sonograms," and "the concept 'unborn child' seems to me to be a factual statement." In his 2007 book God Is Not Great, he argued, "As a materialist, I think it has been demonstrated that an embryo is a separate body and entity, and not merely […] a growth on or in the female body."

In a 1990 Washington Times article, he stated, "I can't think of a single circumstance in which I'd favor emptying a woman's uterus." He later acknowledged in God Is Not Great that "[t]here may be many circumstances in which it is not desirable to carry a fetus to full term," citing the occurrence of spontaneous abortions (i.e. miscarriages) and arguing that "sad though this is, it is probably less miserable an outcome" than an increased number of children born with severe birth defects.

However, Hitchens was opposed to overturning of Roe v. Wade, and voiced support for a legal right to choose, despite his personal misgivings with abortion in a 1991 interview in Mother Jones:

“”There is, in my opinion, no choice but choice. There is no way of avoiding the choice position. What I said was that conditions could be created by politics, by actual state intervention, if you will, where people might wish to exercise that choice less, and that would be a good thing. That there should be, therefore, a presumption in favor of the unborn. But if that fails, obviously you can't push it to the point of saying, 'We will force you to carry a child to term.' Everything in one revolts against that.

—Christopher Hitchens

Women

“”Perhaps worst of all - to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world? And can you name me a religion that has not done that?

—Christopher Hitchens

Skipping a beat from his generally pro-equality views, Hitchens wrote a piece for Vanity Fair in 2007, in which he seriously advanced the view that women are generally less funny than men. He argued that men are funnier than women because "the chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex," while "women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way," since "they already appeal to men, if you catch my drift." He wrote that "male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone's expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with," in contrast to women, who, "bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is." He claimed that "reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing" for women, and that this "imbues" women with "the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle" (or, in other words, makes them humorless sticks-in-the-mud, especially during pregnancy). He also claimed that women are more likely to put stock in superstitious and/or sentimental beliefs and practices because they are "partly ruled [...] by the moon and the tides." While he offered zero evidence, he must have been talking about the same intervals seen in the woman's menstrual cycle and the Moon cycle. Unless he was joking, of course (being a man of humor, and with wit that could be mordant).

In a 2010 interview with Australian television host Jennifer Byrne, Hitchens remarked that "most men are pretty hopeless when newborn bundles arrive," and are so impressed by how "women appear to know what to do [that] they think, 'Well, I'll go and do extra work and make some money.'" When Byrne noted that women can also be breadwinners, Hitchens replied, "I'm not having any woman of mine go to work," then added, "No, they don't need to work. They can if they like but they don't have to." He also stated that women are "called the gentle sex for a good reason" and expressed a wish not to see women "coarsened in the labour market."

However, it would be disingenuous to judge Hitchens' views as consciously chauvinistic, as he not only expressed sympathy towards women's political and social rights, but proudly and loudly championed for its political realisation worldwide:

“”The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease and stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say.

—Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens regularly referred to the sentiment of the above quote on numerous occasions and in various contexts. This might have eventually left a taste of "I can't possibly be X, since I'm Y" in some people's minds. Unconscious bias can be a bitch, though, as Hitchens would no doubt agree if he wasn't deader than a horse joke.

In his criticism of the atrocious nature of dogmatic religion, he made sure to deliver blows against the view of the woman as tainted or somehow lesser:

“”The New Testament has Saint Paul expressing both fear and contempt for the female. Throughout all religious texts, there is a primitive fear that half the human race is simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also a temptation to sin that is impossible to resist. Perhaps this explains the hysterical cult of virginity and of a Virgin, and the dread of the female form and of female reproductive functions? And there may be someone who can explain the sexual and other cruelties of the religious without any reference to the obsession with celibacy, but that someone will not be me.

—Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Broadcasts

In 1988, Hitchens contributed to a collection of published essays titled Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. His essay, titled "Broadcasts", explored the assertion of the Israeli establishment that 750,000 Palestinian Arabs evacuated Palestine in compliance with orders issued by their own religious and administrative leaders. Hitchens argued that this lacks evidence of any such broadcast and that the Palestinian Arabs were in fact forced to flee from a number of their major population centers by the Israel Defense Force (IDF). He concluded his essay in a pessimistic tone by speculating that "Even though nobody has ever testified to having heard them, and even though no record of their transmission has ever been found, we shall hear of these orders and broadcasts again and again."

Cancer

“”My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

—Christopher Hitchens

Unfortunately, smoking frequently and being an alcoholic (albeit a high-functioning one) does not come for free, and Hitchens had to undergo treatment for cancer of the esophagus. If you prayed for him, he'd kick your ass. He went to his eternal reward on 15 December 2011 due to complications related to the cancer.

A legacy and a half

“”Yeah, Hitchens…what a mess. He was a brilliant polemicist and one of the most artfully eloquent people I’ve ever met, but he was also politically vicious, and was adept at denying humanity to the people he wanted bombed. The most dangerously intelligent person I’ve known, he was quick to seize on the intellectual foundation of atheism as a useful tool to persuade others that his causes were legitimate. I suspect part of the reason was also that with God out of the picture, that left him the smartest man in the room.

—P.Z. Myers

The legacy of Christopher Hitchens is one mired in tragedy, yet with the skeleton of some truly terrific ideas. On one hand, he was a staunch defender of atheism, a frankly brilliant critic of religious crankery, and a staunch defender of liberalism until his very end, unlike one of the horsemen, who gave that idea the finger. This was especially impressive given he lived the later part of his life in an incredibly religious country, and one of the states in Jesusland thereby. However, he was never a strategist: he loudly and violently cheered the Iraq War, and was willing to drop the iron hammer on tyrannies as he saw fit. Hardly ever would he consider the blowback of such actions, but alas they succeeded his time.

Perhaps it represents the bigger issue with Hitchens, and it was a natural indomitable will for any position he took. In an ironic sense, this caused his liberalism to do a 180^o, another example being when he considered things such as Burqa bans, and at times possessed the aforementioned divisive rhetoric that characterises wingnuts and moonbats alike. Old age was a bitch to Hitchens, and caused his pacifism to turn into a position bent on hardline destruction of tyranny. That's not to say he was a coward, as he would visit North Korea (like, what have you done lately? Really.) and similarly terrifying countries for his journalism. He is considered to be a potential chickenhawk due to a loud advocacy for war, but he wasn't as much of a little brat as others with the moniker, considering that he frequently remarked he was incapable of performing the job of a soldier. It all leads back to that indestructible will that defined him.

Bibliography

God Is Not Great (2008 reissued edition, McClelland & Stewart Limited, Toronto)

• 1984 Cyprus, Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso)
• 1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said), Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4 Reissued, 2001
• 1988 Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports, Hill and Wang, ISBN 0809078678
• 1990 The Monarchy, Chatto & Windus Ltd
• 1990 Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)(June 1990)
• 1993 For The Sake Of Argument, Verso, ISBN 0860914356
• 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Verso ISBN 1-85984-054-X
• 1997 The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, Verso
• 1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family, Verso ISBN 978-1859847367
• 2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Verso
• 2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso. ISBN 1-85984-631-9
• 2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books
• 2002 Why Orwell Matters also Orwell's Victory, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-03050-5
• 2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
• 2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
• 2007 Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0-87113-955-3
• 2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, [Editor] Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6
• 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as God is not Great: The Case Against Religion, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
• 2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press
• 2008 Is Christianity Good for the World?—A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson), Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2
• 2010 Hitch-22: A Memoir, Twelve, ISBN 978-0-446-54033-9
• 2011 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, Twelve. UK edition as Arguably: Selected Prose, Atlantic, ISBN 1-4555-0277-4 / ISBN 978-1-4555-0277-6
• 2012 Mortality, Twelve, ISBN 1-4555-0275-8 / ISBN 978-1-4555-0275-2. UK edition as Mortality, Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84887-921-0 / ISBN 978-1-84887-921-8

External links

• Christopher Hitchens - An Online Directory
• Christopher Hitchens - The Best of the Hitchslap
• Christopher Hitchens on those who try hard to be offended.