Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens was a chain-smoking, atheistic, BritishHe became a U.S. citizen in 2007, while retaining his British nationality. drunkenThe Christopher Hitchens guide to drinking (for the young) and artistically minded by Larry Schlesinger (August 2, 2013) Freshly Worded.Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens (2010) Twelve. ISBN 9780446540339.Is Christopher Hitchens an Alcoholic? by Stanton Peele (October 29, 2011) Psychology Today.Man v God: The polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens is more read in America than in his native UK – but that is about to change with his vitriolic new book attacking religion by Janice Turner (May 30, 2007) The Times Online (archived from July 20, 2008). "How do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule?" smartarseThe uneasy legacy of Christopher Hitchens by Will Lloyd (July 25, 2019) Spectator World. — 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,Whom he wrote a book on. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson,Hitch also wrote a book on him. 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,Hitchens cited the Satanic Verses controversy as one of the first things that estranged him from mainstream leftism and made his criticism of religion more prominent and public. and Justice Antonin ScaliaYes, that one. 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"Paxman meets Hitchens full 30 minute interview with BBCs Jeremy Paxman RIP". YouTube. 12 December 2010. Retrieved on 9 October 2015. and expressed sympathy for Karl Marx, feeling his critiques of capitalism were fairly accurate.The Revenge of Karl Marx, The Atlantic 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,Christopher Hitchens' 10 most controversial quotes, Sydney Morning Herald. 17 December 2011. as well as his support of burqa bans, saying: "It is quite plainly designed by men for the subjugation of women."Christopher Hitchens, "Learn from France, and Consider Banning the Burka." New York Daily News, 2009 June 30. 
Hitchens was 62 years old at the time of his death from esophageal cancer,Julie Weiner, "In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011," VF Daily, 2011 December 15, . a cancer most often associated with drinking and smoking.Anthony, Andrew. "Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'", The Observer. 14 November 2010. However, this age has been called into question due to missing transitional forms.
==Views on religion==
 
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 WarsUnfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore (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.In his book The Missionary Position, he skillfully painted a picture of Mother Teresa as less a devoted worker for the poor than a monomaniacal, penny-pinching missionary with a perverse love of suffering and public attention.Christopher Hitchens, "Bah, Hanukkah," Slate, 2007 December 3. 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."http://www.amazon.com/Trial-Henry-Kissinger-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/product-description/1859843980 The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001)
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"Secular Web Kiosk: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything". infidels.org. Retrieved on 9 October 2015. 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".Holy Writ, The Atlantic, June 2006.
===Criticism of Mother Teresa===
 
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===
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."WAR ON TERROR: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS on why peace-lovers must welcome this war.
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.Christopher Hitchens. "Believe Me, It’s Torture," Vanity Fair. 2008 August. 
===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."https://www.city-journal.org/html/facing-islamist-menace-12993.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-sep-18-oe-harris18-story.html 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"." https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/the-dispute-over-the-ground-zero-mosque-is-an-object-lesson-in-how-not-to-resist-intolerance.html
===Criticism by religious moderates===
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:
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.Eric Reitan. "Christopher Hitchens, Religious in Spite of Himself?". Religion Dispatches. Retrieved on 9 October 2015. 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.Hitchens vs. Hedges; Atheist vs. Believer Clash Ignites Audience, AlterNet 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==
===Abortion===
Hitchens personally opposed abortion, even going so far as to name himself philosophically pro-lifeMark D. Wood, (1 September 2008). "Christopher Hitchens the Pro-Lifer?" – via YouTube. (while politically championing the pro-choice right to abortion),EST, Lisa Miller On 11/28/08 at 7:00 PM (28 November 2008). "Beliefwatch: Pro-life Atheists". Newsweek. all the while strongly criticizing the Christian pro-life movement. For example, in a 1989 piece for The Nation, he wrote:
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."Mindy Belz, "The World According to Hitch", World Magazine 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:
===Women===
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.Christopher Hitchens, "Why Women Aren't Funny", Vanity Fair 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.'""Jennifer Byrne Presents: Christopher Hitchens". abc.net.au. Retrieved on 9 October 2015. 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:
Hitchens regularly referred to the sentiment of the above quote on numerous occasions and in various contexts. "The fanatic, fraudulent Mother Teresa.". Slate Magazine. Retrieved on 9 October 2015."Christopher Hitchens: Empowerment of Women". YouTube. 23 May 2012. Retrieved on 9 October 2015."The Feminist Mystique: Rest in Peace Christopher Hitchens!". thefeministmystique.blogspot.com. Retrieved on 9 October 2015.http://umrscblogs.org/2012/02/04/planned-parenthood-lowercase-the-cure-for-poverty/ 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:
==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."Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship And The Palestinian Question, p. 83, 1988.
==Cancer==
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.Not really. He was happy for people to pray for him if they wanted, and accepted it as a sincere expression of good wishes. He went to his eternal reward on 15 December 2011 due to complications related to the cancer.
==A legacy and a half==
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 180o, 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==
thumb|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.
==Notes==
==References==
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