R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

[kidlewis]

To b fair he agreed with the invasion of Iraq to rid the people of saddam just as he agreed with the Falklands war. Both noble reasons and why I agre with both wars on those principles. Fortunately now it seems the people of these countries atelier showing the power and will to do it themselves.

Egypt syria even a little bit in China too.

Spent hours yesterday watching his debates and he is by far the best speaker and debator I have seen. Mainly due to the passion and conviction which he speaks about his distaste for religion.

I wonder how many people he has 'shown the light to' in that respect. Quite a few I imagine

[leviramsey]

Nick Gillespie eulogizes Hitchens

As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there's just no way you're going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.

Throughout his life, he remained a man of the left, but he had no patience for orthodoxy and groupthink (the first night I met him in person, we ended up bonding over a softness for the early Oliver Cromwell, of all people). Not surprisingly, his biggest rows came among his political and ideological compatriots. A devout atheist, he abjured abortion and was no fan of Martin Luther King, Jr. He made a huge break with the supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the book-length indictment No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. In the years leading up to but especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he had nothing but righteous contempt for those he perceived as soft on religious terrorism and ended up leaving his longtime perch at The Nation partly as a result.

It's easy to mistake his thoroughgoing iconoclasm - this is the guy, after all, who wrote jeremiads against Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa - for a reflexive, even juvenile cynicism, but there was far more than that going on. Whether the target of his scorn was much-beloved (he thought Gandhi a great villain for the way he lionized poverty and preindustrial living practices) or thoroughly hated by the wide world (Saddam Hussein, for one), Hitchens was never a cheap-shot artist.

Rather, his positions, attitude, even his jokes stemmed from what can only be recognized as a great Enlightenment belief in Progress with a capital P, rational debate, and the great marketplace of ideas. While I don't share his contempt for religion (he was puzzled by my "apatheism," or indifference to the whole matter), his stance grew out of his conviction that some methods of thought were more advanced and liberatory than others. But because he was committed to rational and public discourse (however caustic at times), you could always argue with him. Which is exactly as things should be. I didn't always agree with him (his positions on the invasion of Iraq, for instance, and his admiration of the awful I.F. Stone leave me scratching my head) and he certainly wasn't infallible. But he was a true public intellectual, giving better than he got, sure, but always up for conversation large and small.

AFAIK, Hitchens has never retracted his support for the invasion of Iraq. From The Economist:

Even after many of those who had supported the invasion had given up on it, Mr Hitchens refused to admit any error. In a March 2007 column that will most likely not be on anyone's list of favourites, he constructs a tortuous labyrinth of questions which allow him to present the illusion that not only was the decision to invade correct on the basis of what we knew in 2003, but that even in retrospect, the world would not be any better off had the invasion never taken place. Nowhere in this weird syllogism do the words "casualties", "torture", or "dollars" appear.

It may seem petty to belabour these old arguments now. The bitterly divisive war is, after all, over (an argument Mr Hitchens never let get in the way of his decades-long pursuit of Henry Kissinger for his crimes in Vietnam). And in the late 2000s, as America's attention turned away from its humiliating mistakes in Iraq, I began to be able to appreciate Christopher Hitchens again. I enjoyed the merciless swagger he displayed in his scabrous writing on religion. And I was awed by his performances as a television pundit. The same facility for ridicule and stony-faced refusal to grant his adversary even the slightest toehold that I found infuriating in print became, on television, the skill and polish of a true virtuoso. If I ever have to face an ideological adversary on TV, I remember thinking, that is how I want to do it. I remember wondering whether any such performance would even be possible without a British accent.

I understand from the writings of those who knew him that Mr Hitchens was a wonderful if sometimes difficult friend, a brilliant and hardworking columnist, and an emotional and intellectual inspiration. And even without having known him, I find the tales of his productivity inspiring. But as a figure in political history, I think of Mr Hitchens as something of a warning. In a terrific 2003 essay in the London Review of Books, Stefan Collini wrote that Mr Hitchens had exalted, as the greatest of all struggles, a "united front against bullshit". His allergy to one kind of bullshit, that propounded by some of his erstwhile left-wing allies, blinded him to other, ultimately more pungent varieties. As a result, on the most consequential political issue of the last decade of his life, the bullshit got him.

[snowychap]

To b fair he agreed with the invasion of Iraq to rid the people of saddam just as he agreed with the Falklands war.

?

[kidlewis]

He believed that tyrants persecuting their people in such barbaric ways should be ousted

[legov]

Given the plethora of health problems he's had over the last few years I think it's fair to say that it's been a long time coming.

Rest in peace Chris, even if I don't agree with all of your methods.