Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, 2007
Occupation	Author, Journalist, Pundit
Nationality	British / American
Period	Atheist

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is a British-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.. Hitchens is also a political observer, whose books — the latest being God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything — have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. In 2009 Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in U.S. media." The same article noted, though, that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list" and that he "styles himself a radical," not a liberal.

Hitchens is a polemicist. While he was once identified with the British and American radical political left, he has more recently embraced some arguably centre right causes, notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left-wing publications of both his native United Kingdom and the United States, Hitchens' departure from the political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he calls "fascism with an Islamic face." In 2007, on his 58th birthday, retaining his British citizenship, Hitchens also became an American citizen after having resided in the US for a quarter century.

Hitchens is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and also for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, amongst others. He is an anti-theist, and he describes himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. In September 2008, he was made a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Hitchens is currently writing his memoirs, due for publication in the spring of 2010 .

Career

Early life and education

Hitchens was educated at the independent The Leys School, Cambridge, his mother arguing , "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it", and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics. During his years as a student at Oxford, he was tutored by Steven Lukes.

Hitchens joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam." Shortly thereafter, Hitchens joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect." He became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism". In addition, like many who came of age politically in the late 1960s, Hitchens was a great admirer of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Hitchens has remarked that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs."

London

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree. His first job was with the London Times Higher Education Supplement, where he served as social science editor. Hitchens admits that he hated the job and was later fired from the position, recalling that "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it." In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman, he became known as an aggressive left-winger, stridently attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.

Emigration to United States

After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation. While at The Nation he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992 , writing ten columns a year. He left The Nation in 2002, after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, but others—including Hitchens—believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.

Prior to Hitchens's ideological shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal declared Hitchens his dauphin or heir..

Work

Literature

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. In the past several years, he has continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. He has visited all three countries in the so-called "Axis of Evil": Iraq, Iran and North Korea. His work has taken him to over 60 different countries. Hitchens writes a monthly essay on books in the Atlantic Monthly and occasionally to The New York Times Book Review. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In "Why Orwell Matters" he defends Mr Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America is a short biography of Thomas Jefferson, while Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography discusses the significance of the Rights of Man. Works he has recently reviewed include Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie; Saturday by Ian McEwan; the D. J. Enright translation of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust; the Alfred Appel Jr. annotated version of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (whom he named as on a par with James Joyce); John Updike's Terrorist; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Enemies of Promise. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.

During a three-hour interview by Book TV, he named authors who have had influence on his views:

• Aldous Huxley
• George Eliot
• George Orwell
• Martin Amis
• Kingsley Amis
• Ian McEwan
• Salman Rushdie
• Colm Tóibín
• Karl Marx

• Richard Dawkins
• PG Wodehouse
• Evelyn Waugh
• Paul Mark Scott
• James Fenton
• James Joyce
• Albert Camus
• Oscar Wilde
• Conor Cruise O'Brien

Politics

Main article: Political views of Christopher Hitchens

In the 1960s Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". After adopting a strong pro-interventionist foreign policy, beginning to use the employment of the term "Islamofascist" and his support for the Iraq War have caused Hitchens's critics to label him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refuses to embrace this designation, insisting, "I'm not any kind of conservative". In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies". He became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire". In 2001, however he flirted with libertarianism, and still holds many arguably libertarian positions, including his support of the legalization of cannabis, although holding a mainly pro-life position on the issue of abortion. He told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist". Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist". He suggested that he had returned to his early, pre-socialist libertarianism, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral authoritarians. Hitchens as recently as 2009 has called himself a Marxist. In a 2006 in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist" . Hitchens affirmed his Marxist theory several times including in 2009 in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx" in which Hitchens explains how Marx's economic analysis in Das Kapital has predicted many of the failures of the U.S. economy, including the late-2000s recession. .

Regarding specific individuals

Main article: Christopher Hitchens's critiques of specific individuals

Over the years, Hitchens has become famous for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has also written book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters) and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography). However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques take the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell, George Galloway, Mel Gibson, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, Michael Moore, Daniel Pipes, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms,, and Cindy Sheehan.

Antitheism

Main article: God is Not Great

Hitchens and John Lennox at the "Is God Great?" debate in Alabama

Christopher Hitchens is antitheist and antireligious. Hitchens often speaks out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he calls "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). In his book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western antitheists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His main argument is that the concept of God or Supreme Being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in the New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums" to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" (The Financial Times). Hitchens told an interviewer that he thinks all educated people should have a knowledge of the Bible. He also claimed to have instructed his children in religious history and that he encouraged his wife to hold a Seder dinner for their daughter.

Hitchens and The Nation staff

Among his most severe critics is his friend and one-time colleague Alexander Cockburn, a biweekly contributor to The Nation. On August 20, 2005, Cockburn wrote:

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 [until] 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 U.S. policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and Anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel.

Hitchens clarified his stance on Sheehan, stating that:

In a recent effusion in the Huffington Post, Cindy Sheehan repeats the lie that her letter to ABC News Nightline was doctored, and says that a colleague of hers inserted the offending words in furtherance of his own "anti-Semitic" agenda. If she regards her own words as anti-Jewish, it's not up to me to correct her. I have not said that she is anti-Jewish, only that she shows a sinister ineptness in handling the wild idea of a PNAC/JINSA pro-Sharon secret government in the United States.

Hitchens, in 2009, responded directly to the above 2005 Cockburn criticism, after C-SPAN's Brian Lamb read this Cockburn quote to him in an interview:

He's [Cockburn] nearly right about that -- I mean the 'sack of..' etc. is a matter of anyone's opinion – but on the criticism of Edward Said, I didn't publish them [the criticisms] when he was on his death bed, except in that I kept on publishing them. He [Said] and I had a couple of long-standing disagreements and those didn't change when he was ill and they didn't indeed change after he died when I published a sort of estimate of him, I thought a fairly generous one, which included those criticisms. It's actually rather silly of Alexander to say that, I think, because if you look at his journalism, he would rightly be proud of saying that he's often written counter-obituaries of people who have been overpraised and has chosen precisely the moment when there's a lot of sentimental garbage being published to say, 'come on, this guy wasn't so great!' So, it's silly of him – he gives a hostage to fortune in saying that. Cindy Sheehan I caught out in a lie on Slate, you can check it out. It was exhaustively done with all kinds of threads...She had said she thought her son was killed in a pro-Israeli war – a war, a Jewish war, a war for Israel. She then later tried to pretend she hadn't said this in an email, and so I caught her twice. I think it's beneath Alexander to be defending someone as cheap and demagogic as her. Who remembers now the Cindy Sheehan campaign, honestly? And what if we had listened to her? If we listened to her and pulled out our troops as a result of her hysteria, Iraq would now be run by Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda could have claimed to have driven us out in ignominious shame. Instead of which Al Qaeda has been defeated and humiliated, and Iraq is at least on course to become, many shoals ahead of it, a decent society. No one could possibly wish that Cindy Sheehan had been listened to then, or any other time.

Awards and accolades

In September 2005, Hitchens was named as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect magazine. An online poll was held which ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazine noted that Hitchens' (#5), Chomsky's (#1), and Abdolkarim Soroush's (#15) rankings were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.

In 2007 Hitchens's work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary". He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate, but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.

He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Hitchens was nominated for a National Book Award for God Is Not Great on October 10, 2007.

Hitchens received the 1991 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Rush Limbaugh is an admirer of Hitchens's writing, of whom he said "He’s misguided sometimes, but when you read him, you finish the whole article."

Personal

Family

Hitchens has a daughter, Antonia, with his wife Carol Blue, whom he married in 1991. Hitchens has two children, Alexander and Sophia, by a previous marriage in 1981 to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, whom Hitchens divorced in 1989. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, works for a London based think tank called the Centre for Social Cohesion.

Use of alcohol

A profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output." However in early 2008 he claimed to have given up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin. His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision. Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule." He noted that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind." George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate subcommittee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil for Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "Only some of which is true." Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on September 14, 2005, he elaborated on his prior response. "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)." Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"

Ethnic identity

In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on April 14, 2002, Hitchens says he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother, Peter Hitchens, took his new bride to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that her ancestors were Blumenthals from Poland.

Peter Hitchens disputes that the brothers have significant Jewish ancestry, arguing that "they are only one 32nd Jewish".

Relationship with younger brother, Peter Hitchens

Hitchens's younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a socially conservative journalist, author and critic. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London). Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved, although a recent review of Christopher's book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Peter appears to have re-ignited the debate. This, however, did not stop them both appearing on the June 21, 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on April 3, 2008, at Grand Valley State University.

U.S. citizenship

Hitchens became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, on his fifty-eighth birthday, April 13, 2007.

Filmography

• Hell's Angel (1994; writer, narrator)- television documentary
• Diana: The Mourning After (1998; writer, narrator) - television documentary
• Hidden in Plain Sight (2003) (interviewed)
• Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope (2005; interviewed)
• Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (2005; interviewed)
• Discussions with Richard Dawkins, Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen" (2008; discussant)

Bibliography

As sole author

• 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0446579807 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
• 2006 Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography. Books That Shook the World/Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84354-513-6
• 2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
• 2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays. Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
• 2003 A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Plume Books
• 2002 Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell's Victory, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.
• 2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
• 2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books.
• 2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Verso.
• 1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Verso. Reissued as No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family in 2000.
• 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
• 1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. Verso, ISBN 0-86-091435-6
• 1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reissued 2004, with a new introduction, as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-592-7)
• 1990 The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
• 1988 Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports. Hill and Wang (US)/Chatto and Windus (UK).
• 1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns).
• 1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso).

As sole editor

• 2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Perseus Publishing. ISBN 9780306816086

As co-author or co-editor

• 2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson). Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2.
• 2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
• 2002 Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (co-editor, with Christopher Caldwell).
• 1994 International Territory: The United Nations, 1945-1995 (with Adam Bartos). Verso.
• 1994 When Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (with Ed Kashi). Pantheon Books.
• 1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said). Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4. Reissued, 2001.
• 1976 Callaghan, The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner). Cassell, ISBN 0-304-29768-2

As a contributor

• 2008. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (co-edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
• 2005 A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, Thomas Cushman (editor). University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-24555-5
• 2000 Vanity Fair's Hollywood, Graydon Carter and David Friend (editors). Viking Studio.

External links

Articles By Hitchens

• Index at The Atlantic Monthly
• Blog for the Mirror, a British tabloid
• Hitchens Web
• Build Up That Wall – Christopher Hitchens Online Directory
• Hitchens articles at Slate magazine

Interviews

• BookTalk.org - online book discussion of "God is Not Great"
• Video debate/discussion "On Whether Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong" (about many things) between Hitchens and Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv
• Christopher Hitchens at Politics and Prose on Fora.tv on May 10, 2007
• Uncommon Knowledge: Christopher Hitchens
• Q&A: Christopher Hitchens, C-SPAN, 27 April 2009 (56 min 56 sec)
• Christopher Hitchens on Freedom of Expression
• "The War on Terror Revisited" - FCE

Debates

• Review of Hitchens' A Long Short War, Bully Magazine, April 15, 2004.
• Christopher Hitchens debates Peter Hitchens
• Hitchens debates Turek on "Does God Exist"
• The Hitchens-Wilson Debate, a written debate where Hitchens debates with theologian Douglas Wilson the question of whether Christianity is good for the world.
• Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton on Fora.tv on May 7, 2007

Profiles

• "Christopher Hitchens" feature story by Prospect magazine, May 2008
• "Incendiary Author Spares No Targets" feature story in The New Zealand Herald, May 2008

Reviews

• Review of Hitchens' A Long Short War, Bully Magazine, April 15, 2004.
• Gabriel Brahm reviewing Hitchens for Democratiya

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