Christopher Hitchens

File:Christopher Hitchens 2.jpg

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949, England) is a journalist, author, and literary critic. He lives in Washington, DC in the United States, and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Nation, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Daily Mirror, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Free Inquiry, Slate, The New York Times Book Review and The Atlantic Monthly.

Hitchens is well-known for his iconoclasm, anti-clericalism, anti-Fascism, and anti-colonialism, as well as his appreciation of George Orwell and advocacy of Kurdish self-determination. An exemplary sample of his work would include The Missionary Position, which condemned Mother Teresa as egotistical and obscurantist; No One Left To Lie To, which denounced Bill Clinton; The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in which he made the case against the former National Security Adviser for war crimes in Southeast Asia and Chile; and Why Orwell Matters.

At one time Hitchens was considered a staunch member of the Anglo-American left. In recent years, especially since September 11, 2001 attacks, his reputation has shifted, and he is now often regarded as a kind of neo-conservative, at least in certain important areas.

Although he no longer considers himself a socialist, he does not see much change in his political views. He has written on a broad range of subjects, but perhaps above all else he despises religion. To paraphrase him, he is not only an atheist but an antitheist. This is set within a broader context of enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, emancipation and reason. His disagreement with others on the left is that these values could – and at times, should – be defended by military force.

Political views

Background

Hitchens' earliest political convictions were very left-wing. He became a Trotskyist during his years at Balliol College, Oxford and was tutored by Steven Lukes. He wrote for the magazine International Socialism, whose publishers' descendents (the International Socialists) are today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group had a broad allegiance to Trotskyism but differed with more orthodox groups in refusing to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism". Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree, and went on to work for the New Statesman in the 1970s, where he became friends with, amongst others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Here he became known as an aggressive left winger, stridently attacking such targets as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, the Catholic Church and others. Moving to the United States in the 1980s, Hitchens remained on the left, writing for The Nation magazine. He attacked Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. Hitchens criticised the first Gulf War, claiming (in an essay reprinted in "For the Sake of Argument") that the Bush administration lured Saddam Hussein into the war.

Islamic fascism and neoconservatism

Hitchens was deeply shocked by the fatwa (February 14 1989) against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie and he became increasingly concerned by the dangers of what he called "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face": radical Islamists who supported the fatwa against Rushdie and seemed to desire the recreation of the medieval Caliphate. Hitchens is sometimes credited with coining the term Islamofascism, but Malise Ruthven has a better claim, since he used it in an article in The Independent on 8 September 1990.

Hitchens did use the term "Islamic Fascism" for an article he wrote for the Nation shortly after 9/11 (although again the phrase is used earlier than that, for example in the Washington Post on 13 January 1979, and it also seems to have been used by secularists in Turkey and Afghanistan to describe their opponents).

Hitchens also became increasingly disenchanted by the presidency of Bill Clinton, accusing him of being a rapist, and a serial liar. Hitchens also claimed that the missile attack by Clinton on the Sudan was a major war crime. The support of some on the left for Clinton alienated him further from the "soft left" in the United States. On the other hand he became increasingly distanced from the "hard left" by their lack of support for Western intervention in Kosovo.

The years after the Rushdie Fatwa also saw him looking for allies and friends, and in the USA he became increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the "excuse making" of the multiculturalist left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right, and especially the neoconservative clique around Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he became friends. Around this time he also befriended the Iraqi businessman Ahmed Chalabi.

Post-9/11

After 9/11 his stance hardened, and he has strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly through his columns in Slate. Hitchens had been a longterm contributor to the left-wing The Nation weekly, where he wrote his Minority Report column. After 9/11 he decided the paper was a mouthpiece for the kind of excuse-making on behalf of Islamic terror he was now arguing against, so in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of the threat of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. On September 24 and October 8, 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation. [1][2] Chomsky responded. [3] Hitchens responded in rebuttal to Chomsky,[4] and Chomsky rebutted Hitchens' rejoinder.[5] Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation in part because he believed its editors, its readers, and persons such as Chomsky considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden.[6] This was one of the most highly-charged exchanges of letters in American journalism, involving Hitchens and Chomsky, as well as Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn.

Where he stands now

Hitchens has said he no longer feels a part of the Left and does not object to being called a former Trotskyist. His affection for Trotsky is still strong, and he still says that his political and historical view of the world is shaped by Marxist categories. In June 2004, Hitchens wrote a blistering attack on Michael Moore in a review of Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11; [7] this review was so widely discussed that three major publications offered rebuttals.

Despite his many articles supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the US presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush, but shortly afterwards when Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates, and mistakenly printed Hitchens's vote as pro-Kerry, Hitchens shifted his opinion to neutral, saying: :"It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end."[8].

In an interview with the journalist Johann Hari in 2004, Hitchens described himself as "on the same side as the neo-conservatives". In that interview, Hitchens makes it clear that he supports not George Bush per se (still less Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld) but only what he see as the "pure" neo-conservatives, especially, Paul Wolfowitz. Although Hitchens finds himself defending Bush’s foreign policy, he has little admiration for the man himself, in particular his support for ‘intelligent design’ and disdain of reading. As an anti-theist intellectual with a penchant for drinking, Hitchens was unimpressed by Bush's claim to have been 'saved from drink by Jesus."

In March 2005 he supported further investigation into alleged voting irregularities in Ohio during the US presidential election, 2004.

In contributions to Vanity Fair, he offered rare but overt criticism of the Bush administration, for its continued protection of Henry Kissinger, whom he views as complicit in the human rights abuses of Southern Cone military dictatorships during the '70s. In 2001 he had published a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, on Kissinger's alleged complicity with such regimes in South America and Asia. An even more iconoclastic work was his 1995 book on Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position, which was highly controversial.

In May 2005, George Galloway MP, got into an argument with Hitchens, before giving evidence to the US Senate. Galloway called Hitchens a "drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay". "Some of which," Hitchens subsequently wrote in a newspaper column, "was unfair." A few days later, Hitchens wrote an article that attacked Galloway's political record, criticized his Senate testimony, and made a case for Galloway's complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal. Hitchens is scheduled to debate Galloway in New York on 14 September, 2005. [9]

Since May 2005, he has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post. He was a guest on The Daily Show on August 25, 2005.

Praise for and criticism of Hitchens

Appropriately for a self-described "contrarian" who deliberately seeks to provoke, Hitchens is the subject of considerable praise and admiration, as well as severe criticism. Among his admirers are The Observer writer Lynn Barber who wrote a glowing profile of him in 2002 [10] and the editors, including David Horowitz, at FrontpageMag.com who appreciate his support for the Iraq war and his criticisms of the Left.

Some have criticized Hitchens for egotism, for turning up everywhere on television to promote himself and his books, and for changing his political views if he perceives that a self-advantage can be derived from it. Among his severest critics are one-time colleagues and friends, Alexander Cockburn and Norman Finkelstein. Cockburn has frequently alluded to Hitchens' tendency to tipple, and Finkelstein has argued that the change in Hitchens' political views has more to do with being on the right side of power than with heartfelt convictions. In a column for August 20 2005 [11], Cockburn writes, "What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel."

Peter Hitchens

His younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is also a journalist, author and critic. Peter was initially also a leftist but later came to hold radically different, conservative, political opinions after several years spent reporting on the British Labour movement and British politics, followed by many assignments in Communist Eastern Europe and a period as a resident correspondent in Moscow at the end of the Soviet era. Today Peter writes for a London newspaper, the Mail on Sunday. He is a staunch but unpredictable conservative who opposed the invasion of Iraq and criticised elements of Thatcherism in his book The Abolition of Britain. He is also a leading critic of current plans to introduce a national identity card in Britain and has called for the replacement of Britain's Conservative Party by a new movement. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter expressed surprise at Christopher's reaction to 9/11, citing sometime extreme anti-American views that Christopher denied ever having held.

Key points

Hitchens has taken a stance on several issues throughout his career as a contrarian. Whilst he may not deliberately court controversy, he finds contention agreeable nonetheless. Here’s some of the key stances he has taken throughout his career, and his reasons why. Unless stated otherwise, his views on these issues have remained consistent throughout.

Trotsky

Favoured Trotsky and Trotskyism as a broadside against Stalinism and western establishments, in particular both sides' support for nuclear weapons. Hitchens regarded this as the compulsory enlistment of civilians in a nuclear war, and as such a violation of individual sovereignty. Trotsky’s defence of the enlightenment and the materialist conception of human history as well as a loathing of religion no doubt contributed to his appeal.

Vietnam

He regarded America’s intervention (and her allies) in Vietnam as a shameful continuation of European colonialism, betraying the enlightenment principles of liberal democracy and human emancipation. Today, he also regards it as a betrayal of the American Revolution.

Israel-Palestine

He regards this as another example of colonialism; an illegal, and unjustifiable occupation by Israel of another people, to deny them their basic human and moral rights. The religious dimension of Zionism unquestionably re-enforces his support for the Palestinian cause.

Mother Theresa

He despised the unquestioning adoration of the vast majority of western commentators. His particular points was her lack of treatment for people—particularly children—placed in her care; her strong religious views on contraception, abortion (which she described as ‘the biggest threat to world peace’) and her ‘acceptance’ of poverty. Also, the pursuit and acceptance of donations from third world dictators and the allocation of these donations away from treatment towards furthering her theistic views. One journalist Brent Bozell calls Hitchens a "notoriously vicious anti-Catholic..."

Yugoslavia

Hitchens argued that the choice in Yugoslavia was between a multi-ethnic plural democracy in Bosnia and the fascistic, religiously inspired ethno-cleansing driven by Slobodan Milosevic. As such, he argued that defending that multi-ethnic democracy was morally essential and of far greater importance than any leftish concerns about a ‘new imperialism’.

Iraq

Hitchens regarded Desert Storm as a conflict between secular democracy and theocratic fascism. He also argued that it was a moral necessity to support Iraqi and Kurdish left-wing secularists. He draws parallels with the left's response to the Spanish civil war, where (he argues) neutrality is not an option. In his view, the anti-war left have abandoned the principles of secularism, liberal democracy and feminism by allying themselves with the ‘insurgents’ who despise these key principles.

At the moment, Hitchens regards himself as ‘single issue voter’, concerning himself almost exclusively with the battle between the forces of secular democracy and theocratic fascism. As for domestic affairs (i.e. domestic to the United States) he comments infrequently. However when he does it is usually to attack religion. Whether this single-issue focus will remain indefinitely remains to be seen.

Despite his flirting with neo-conservatism, Hitchens is sometimes seen as being part of the self-styled "Pro-liberation Left": i.e. left wingers who supported Desert Storm. This loose grouping includes Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, and the bloggers at Harry's Place.

Bibliography

• A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, by Thomas Cushman (Editor), (University of California Press: 2005) ISBN 0520245555
• Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives/HarperCollins: 2005) ISBN 0060598964
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books; 2004) ISBN 1560255803
• Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (Pub Group West, 2004)
• Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books, 2002), also published as Orwell's Victory (Allen Lane, 2002)
• A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume Books, 2003)
• Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books, 2001)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2001)
• Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (Verso, 2000)
• No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (Verso, 2000)
• The Elgin Marbles: Should they be returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns) (Verso, March 1998)
• Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger with new Afterword (Verso, 1997)
• The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995)
• For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993)
• Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990)
• Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles (Hill & Wang, 1988)
• Cyprus (Quartet, 1984)

External links

Hitchens' work

• The Christopher Hitchens Web, columns, articles, interviews, etc.
• Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, March 2005, "Ohio's Odd Numbers"
• Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, 9 November 2004, "Kissinger Declassified"
• Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 21 June 2004, "Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore"
  • A point-by-point rebuttal of Hitchens' critical review
• Christopher Hitchens, Grand Street, Autumn 1985, "The Chorus And The Cassandra" - defending Chomsky against his critics

Other

• Fraternally yours, Chris. By Norman Finkelstein. [An article which criticizes Hitchens for what Finkelstein sees as his "opportunism"]