Christopher Hitchens bit the dust

[GPDP]

Forgive the silly title, but I wanted it to not sound so similar to the Kim Jong Il thread. Also, I realize this thread comes late, as he died days ago, but might as well, you know?

Anyway, I kinda liked his expose on Kissinger, but he turned out to be a real neocon tosspot later on, and I'm not a fan of his militant brand of atheism. Not sure what else to say.

[Ostrinski]

He was an asshat. R.I.P.

[RadioRaheem84]

His last years did more damage to his reputation and completely soured whatever positive work he did for the left in all his years prior to becoming a neo-con.

[Madvillainy]

dude was never cool with me even wen he was a so called leftist. supported the brits during the falklands war back in the day wen he was considered a god among leftys. fuck him.

[Red Commissar]

His last years did more damage to his reputation and completely soured whatever positive work he did for the left in all his years prior to becoming a neo-con.

That's my perception of him too. Jumping on the clash of civilizations bandwagon and wrapping up his atheism it pretty much washed away what ever reputation he had built up and made him a pariah.

[Zealot]

Ex-Trotskyist neo-con. Can't say I really miss him that much. His critique of religions was okay but even that became overbearing sometimes.

[OHumanista]

That's my perception of him too. Jumping on the clash of civilizations bandwagon and wrapping up his atheism it pretty much washed away what ever reputation he had built up and made him a pariah.

I agree with it too.
I couldn't ever read a quote from him again (even the best ones) without thinking about how deluded he became.

[Rafiq]

He died of cancer....

[RadioRaheem84]

I think he might have been a charlatan all along. He was brilliant, but for a Marxist he was awfully idealist. Didn't have a materialist bone in his body.

I remember he lashed out at a caller once in the 90s for calling him a liberal because he thought of it as an insult being a Marxist.

So he knows the difference between liberal and leftist yet chose to play American punditry game.

He plain sold out.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Smart, sometimes funny. Saw him debate some right-wing historian about Trotsky (he was supposedly defending Trotsky). He did a terrible job, seemed either drunk or hungover. There is an op-ed piece in the NYTimes today asserting that many religious believers liked old Hitch, in spite of his atheism because they saw him as some kind of kindred spirit. I guess they understood that he was primarily
a neo-liberal intellectual, whoring for the bourgeoisie. Ciao bambino.

[9]

Meh, good riddance.

[cb9's_unity]

Honestly, I have to respect the guy for keeping an original take on a lot of things. There is a lot of good in taking down people like Mother Teresa. The American media was better with at least one person who thought independently. I can respect him despite the things he was dead wrong about.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Jumping on the clash of civilizations bandwagon and wrapping up his atheism it pretty much washed away what ever reputation he had built up and made him a pariah.


Ex-Trotskyist neo-con. Can't say I really miss him that much.


I think he might have been a charlatan all along. He was brilliant, but for a Marxist he was awfully idealist. Didn't have a materialist bone in his body.

As I posted on Louis Proyect's blog while this site was down:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/#comment-59091


I suspect his “leftism” was fake from the beginning. The SWP was and is infected with Identity “Politics” fetishes, so he merely switched his pseudo-radicalism from Identity “Politics” to radical anti-theism.

[Princess Luna]

Christopher Hitchens was one of those people, who even though I vehemently disagreed with several of his positions, I still had a ton of respect for. R.I.P.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Well, he did go on Fox News shortly after Jerry Falwell died and proclaimed that, if they had given Falwell an enema, they could've buried him in a shoebox. I think I've mentioned that before on this site, it's probably one of my all-time favorite TV moments. He was kind of good as an IRL troll. Terrible politics in general (including his stance on religion), but occassionally he'd make me laugh.

[Threetune]

He was a ‘house lefty’ to entertain the pseudo intelligentsia with his ‘left’ support for imperialist warmongering in Yugoslavia and Iraq. They paid him well for his services to capitalism.

[Sasha]

He was a sexist prick:
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.
It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then.


SOURCE: http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher

[Chambered Word]

good riddance, rest in pain scumbag.

[RadioRaheem84]

I suspect his “leftism” was fake from the beginning. The SWP was and is infected with Identity “Politics” fetishes, so he merely switched his pseudo-radicalism from Identity “Politics” to radical anti-theism.


Of course his leftism was fake. Utterly fake from the very start. He was just using it to get notoriety as a contrarian.

He was awful at defending Marxism against an easy opponent as Dinesh D'Souza during the 80s.

[~Spectre]

Alexander Cockburn agrees that Hitchens was always a fraud:


I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.

As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned.

On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties and nineties it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the “October surprise”, denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release. He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire – bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.

Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?

Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.

One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final post mortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention–which fuelled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of the absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves, that was one of the worst. He also rounded on Gore Vidal who had done so much to promote his career as dauphin of contrarianism.

He courted the label “contrarian”, but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being. He was for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency put out a friendly obit, noting that “despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish” and noting his suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic, also his sliming of a boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other researchers used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens boys’ Jewishness was pretty slim and fell far outside the definitions of the Nuremberg laws. I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.”)

As a writer his prose was limited in range. In extempore speeches and arguments he was quick on his feet. I remember affectionately many jovial sessions from years ago, in his early days at The Nation. I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol.

"If you gave Hitchens an enema..." you could bury him a matchbox.