He's a neocon.
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Christopher Hitchens
...why is he so confusin with his political positions.
Today he still considers himself "a Marxist, but not a socialist".
Wassup with him?
He's a neocon.
Not many neocons still refer to Lenin and Trotsky as great men.
He is a neocon though. I thought he renounced is socialist ideals a while back.
People call him a neo-con because he supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. This was done from an anti-theist perspective (and not one that should be supported). He's not actually a neo-conversvative in any other respect.
Oh my bad then.
Sam Harris did the same thing.
Although I think Richard Dawkins was against the war in Iraq, not sure about Afghanistan, probably.
I love Chris Hitchens and could watch videos of him all day long, mainly because he goes off on Nietzschen polemics and swears alot, oh and becasue he constantly looks pissed.
However the man politics are awful, he is a former member of what would be the SWP when he was in the UK, but later became a neo-conservative. He gives far too much weight to religion in his ideas and thus falls down the same shit hole as Fukuyama and other neocons by not putting economics at the base of things. By doing this he buys, whether he wants to or not, into a concept of autonomous ideas, which is un materialistc and bullshit.
By not putting capitalism first in his analysis he will condem the Islamic resistence in the middle east as some kind of theocratic hive mind that just popped up and that we need to crush for the benafit of all. However would he also say that there is no correlation between imperialism and religious resistence, does he not see the relation? When the British were bleeding Ireland we used much the same excuses, 'we must be there as home rule is Rome rule' because Imperialist opression is better than a theocratic republic.
However these arguments don't hold up to scrutiny. I would like to see Hitchens talk about Tibet for example, would he (as an american neocon) justify Chinese troops putting down resistence as Tibet free would be a theocracy. I think he would do backflips to not have to justify this, something non material thinkers will do time and again.
He is little more than an apologist for the Iraq War these days. A cautionary tale of where that kind of dogmatic anti-theism can lead-and pretty ironic too given it put him in alliance with Christian Fundamentalists.
He was quite amusing when he was on Question Time a few years ago along with his brother (a real right-wing piece of work) and was obviously drunk as a Lord whereas his brother Peter was the pinnacle of respectability yet Christopher still came off better. That made for good television.
He told Rhys Southan from Reason Magazine that he could no longer call himself a socialist, my conclusion is that he is a libertarian heavily influenced by his Marxist youth, someone from the right who isn't afraid to mention Marx every so often - as contradictory as it sounds, that's the best way I can think of looking at it.
Well he says that he is a Marxist but not a socialist. And he justifies this by saying that, Global capitalism is more revolutionary and more internationalist than state socialism.
So my view is that he no longer believes in EXISTING socialism (Cuba, North Korea) - However, if that is socialism or not - it's debateable.
^
He is a neocon, he isn't a socialist, a marxist or whatever elese he might say, no matter what jargon he uses he is an apologist for US imperialism.
Another thing Mr Rationality does is that he is he gets very loud and shouty when confronted with genuine marxists and starts to use emotional language. He has sold out no doubt, perhaps even he is aware of it
Would it save time to just say that Hitchens is a disagreeable fellow with opportunistic tendencies?
¡Patria o muerte!
I sometimes wonder how he doesn't buckle under the sheer weight of cognitive dissonance, considering his constant ideological backflips and heavily contradictory statements and positions.
It may be the reason he's always drunk off his ass. Precisely to deal with his poor ideological and opportunistic self-worth.
YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS
haha what GPGD said is bang on
I think he deserves more criticism and praise
He is a very intelligent man, he is a master orator and I would never want to have to debate him in the public sphere. He also has a brilliant disrespect for the religious right and other religious nuts, which is refreshing. If the man was still on the left I'm sure we would hold him in massively high regard.
However his views are massively biased, they are warped by a slavish support for capitalism and American Imperialism, something he should know better than to support.
It is a case of his good work being drowned in the mire of his shitty political stance. It has no material basis or contextual setting.
But you cannot just write him off as you would with other dickheads like him (Fukuyama and other RAND Corp losers)
Hitchens is a liberal-hawk, nothing more. He even refers to liberals as people on the left now like any DC establishment pundit. I remember when he was trying to convince people that Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik were people on the "left" that supported the war. Yes, the same Solidarity member that later pushed for economic shock therapy in his own nation.
It should be noted that while Hitchens never claimed to be a neo-con, he did say that if neo-con meant toppling dictators and replacing them with liberal democracies then sign him up.
Social-Democrats claimed to be Socialists. It obviously doesn't mean they were. If anyone wants to be an apologist for him, it'd be nice to see his modern "Marxist" works first. Marxist economics, historical materialism, etc.
* h0m0revolutionary: "neo-liberalism can deliver healthy children, it can educate them, it can feed them, it can clothe them and leave them fully contented."
* rooster: "Supporting [anti-imperialism] is reactionary. How is any nation supposed to stand up [to] the might of the US anyway?"
* nizan: "Fuck your education is empowerment bullshit, education is alienation, nothing more. You indulge in a dying prestige for a role in a bureaucratic spectacle deserving of nothing beyond contempt."
* Alexios: "To the Board Administration: Ismail [...] needs to be eliminated from this forum."
When you clear away the BS, Hitchens politics are really more in line with Glenn Becks. He's personal friend of several high ups in the world bank (including the former president) and he's just in love with liberalism and the free market and imperialism, despite any confused rhetoric to the contrary.
Being an apologist for US imperialism doesn't make somebody a neo-conservative.
On what grounds do you make this claim? The fact that he supported the invasion of Iraq is not evidence. Many liberals supported the invasions of Iraq.
While I accept that neo-conservatism can be identified as an ideology which advocates the use of military force to bring about American political and moral values around the world, that is not its sole definition and it's certainly not a philosophy that Hitchen's advocates. He supported the Iraq and Taliban invasions for the simple reason that he thought it was an attack on fundamentalist Islam and theocracy.
For the record, I'm not defending Hitchen's, but if you're going to use words at least use them correctly.
Where did he say that?
It sounds to me as if he said it as a retort towards people who use the neo-con label as some form of epithet towards his support of the wars, which to be honest is just a lazy criticism.
