RIP Christopher Hitchens

[Asprilla 96]

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011

[Happy Face 29]

bah.

 

bit cheeky go say "rip". He deed. That's it, no resting, no peace or otherwise. he'd be appalled by anyone thinking of him up there having a drink. Did plenty enough with the time he had though. Sad day.

[Asprilla 96]

A bit pedantic but I take your point...!

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Had a feeling his time was up, he had been missing big engagements due to pneumonia, and he had also written an article about the human voice, having lost his, which he was not best pleased about. I was actually checking for his weekly online column the other day, he had still been churning them out quite regularly. I'll miss reading his stuff.

 

Hitchens once branded Mother Teresa “a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf” and said: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.

“She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

[The Fish 10857]

I haven't read half as much of his stuff as I should have

[toonotl 2980]

Real shame. Reading his latest book at the moment. Sad to think there won't be anymore to come. One of the leading orators, debaters, authors of his time. He will be greatly missed.

[NJS 4386]

Not unexpected but still sad - RIP

[Happy Face 29]

Edited December 16, 2011 by Happy Face

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

First Hitchens, then Havel; the world has lost two great thinkers--who next, Joey Barton?

[Gene_Clark 12]

I'm with Gorgeous George on this one; Hitchens was "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian; a drink-sodden, ex-Trotskyist popinjay," not to mention "the only buttefrly who changed into a slug."

[ChezGiven 0]

I think thats what psychologists call 'projection'.

 

Watched the Paxman interview on BBC2 earlier.

[Gene_Clark 12]

I think thats what psychologists call 'projection'.

 

Watched the Paxman interview on BBC2 earlier.

 

not quite of the same depth as the final interview with Dennis Potter was it?

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Ah yes, this bloke:

 

 

 

Why am I not surprised that you identify with him Gene? Maybe it's because you're a complete pillock.

[Gene_Clark 12]

Maybe it's because I don't rate Hitchens that I identify with the clownish, yet eminently quotable in this instance, Galloway on one particular topic.

 

Have you ever considered that?

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I considered it far more likely, given your risible and incoherent ramblings, that you're just an absolute pillock.

[Gene_Clark 12]

if my "ramblings" are "incoherent," you presumably can't understand any of them, which means you can't also classify them as "risible," as you'd have to be able to understand them to pass that judgement.

 

are you the intellectual alpha male in these parts whose judgement i need to accept on all matters?

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I am indeed THE intellectual behemoth of these waters, and I have deemed that YOU have failed to answer MY simple question. I wonder why that is? Don't be afraid, little man: speak up.

[Gene_Clark 12]

I'm 5ft 10"

[TicTacWoe 0]

The fact Hitchins was anti-euthanasia and at least somewhat anti-choice in terms of abortion really put me off him to a great extent despite the fact that I agreed with a lot of his writings.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

He didn't like abortion, but he was by no means against it. I don't think anyone likes abortion or wishes for it explicitly, until you meet some absolute pillock that should have been slaughtered at birth--*cough* GENE *cough*.

[Gene_Clark 12]

but infanticide, which you're advocating, isn't abortion is it?

 

the 1967 Act is quite specific in stating that 24 weeks is the maximum term and abortion can be carried out at.

[TicTacWoe 0]

He didn't like abortion, but he was by no means against it. I don't think anyone likes abortion or wishes for it explicitly, until you meet some absolute pillock that should have been slaughtered at birth--*cough* GENE *cough*.

 

 

 

 

Aye, I don't think he ever explicitly spoke out against abortion as you say. I did enjoy his obituary rants: http://www.screenjunkies.com/tv/tv-news/5-scathing-obituaries-written-by-christopher-hitchens/

[Happy Face 29]

On the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens —like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert —had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.

 

But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views —not ancillary to his writings but central to them —that were nothing short of repellent.

 

Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

 

Hitchens, of course, never “prosecuted” the “exhilarating” war by actually fighting in it, but confined his “prosecution” to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. As one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell, put it perfectly in Homage to Catalonia about the anti-fascist, tough-guy war writers of his time:

 

As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain.

 

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

 

I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. As Robin put it:

 

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

 

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who —in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary –detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”

 

Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda:

 

I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.

 

In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with “Just you wait!” and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets–with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he’d always said so. It’s amazing that he’d dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won’t care.

 

Currently, Hitch is pushing the line, in language that echoes the reactionary Paul Johnson, that the U.S. can be a “superpower for democracy,” and that Toms Jefferson [sic] and Paine would approve. He’s also slammed the “slut” Dixie Chicks as “fucking fat slags” for their rather mild critique of our Dear Leader. He favors Bush over Kerry, and doesn’t like it that Kerry ”exploits” his Vietnam combat experience (as opposed to, say, re-election campaign stunts on aircraft carriers).

 

Sweet Jesus. What next?I’m afraid my old mentor is not the truth-telling Orwell he fancies himself to be. He’s becoming a coarser version of Norman Podhoretz.

 

One of the last political essays he wrote in his life, for Slate,celebrated the virtues of Endless War.

 

*****

 

Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration is to insist that these actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant. Nobody who writes about politics for decades will be entirely free of serious error, but how serious the error is, whether it reflects on their character, and whether they came to regret it, are all vital parts of honestly describing and assessing their work. To demand its exclusion is an act of dishonesty.

 

Nor should anyone be deterred by the manipulative, somewhat tyrannical use of sympathy: designed to render any post-death criticisms gauche and forbidden. Those hailing Hitchens’ greatness are engaged in a very public, affirmative, politically consequential effort to depict him as someone worthy of homage. That’s fine: Hitchens, like most people, did have admirable traits, impressive accomplishments, genuine talents and a periodic willingness to expose himself to danger to report on issues about which he was writing. But demanding in the name of politeness or civility that none of that be balanced or refuted by other facts is to demand a monopoly on how a consequential figure is remembered, to demand a license to propagandize —exactly what was done when the awful, power-worshipping TV host, Tim Russert, died, and we were all supposed to pretend that we had lost some Great Journalist, a pretense that had the distorting effect of equating Russert’s attributes of mindless subservience to the powerful with Good Journalism (ironically, Hitchens was the last person who would honor the etiquette rules being invoked on his behalf: he savaged (perfectly appropriately) Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, among others, upon their death, even as millions mourned them).

 

There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” —hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch –rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud. But what these paeans to Hitchens reflect even more so is the warped values of our political and media culture: once someone is sufficiently embedded within that circle, they are intrinsically worthy of admiration and respect, no matter what it is that they actually do. As Aaron Bady put it to me by email yesterday:

 

I go back to something Judith Butler’s been saying for years; some lives are grievable and some are not. And in that context, publicly mourning someone like Hitchens in the way we are supposed to do —holding him up as someone who was “one of us,” even if we disagree with him —is also a way of quietly reinforcing the “we” that never seems to extend to the un-grievable Arab casualties of Hitch’s favorite wars. It’s also a “we” that has everything to do with being clever and literate and British (and nothing to do with a human universalism that stretches across the usual “us” and “them” categories). And when it is impolitic to mention that he was politically atrocious (in exactly the way of Kissinger, if not to the extent), we enshrine the same standard of human value as when the deaths of Iraqi children from cluster bombs are rendered politically meaningless by our lack of attention.

 

That’s precisely true. The blood on his hands —and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents —is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.

 

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/singleton/?mobile.html

Edited December 24, 2011 by Happy Face

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

"There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins."

 

"The blood on his hands"

 

 

With regards to the Salon article: These are the pious tones we have come to expect from writers of this persuasion, especially when it comes to Iraq. Anyone who values and appreciates free speech will understand why it was important for a figure such as Hitchens to make a case for the conflict in Iraq, especially as the public debate over such a complex issue had been reduced to screams of, "no blood for oil!," by the likes of Michael Moore. People of an anti-war persuasion, or at least anti-Iraq war, would rather that there were no arguments for the conflict whatsoever, because it is evil, and that's that--go against this consensus in any way and you have blood on your hands. As to the charge of him never going near the front line, Hitchens went to Iraq again in 2003 during the first stages of the conflict. I've not read his reportage on that trip, but would be interested in doing so. I personally find nothing repellent in Hitchen's wish for members of religious death-cults like Al Quaeda to be killed, in fact I happen to agree with him that the world would be a better place without them. They fail to mention Hitch undergong waterboarding and his repeated attacks on the Bush administration for employing torture techiques on Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo.

 

I notice that there are not many excerpts from Hitchen's writings in the piece, save for a sentence or two which the writer would have you believe represented his wish for the slaughter of all Muslims, as opposed to the actual mass-murderers who routinely attempt to kill as many innocent people as they can manage.

 

Here is another accusation: "he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war." This is stated twice in the piece, with no examples. Sloppy!

 

Of course, all this is not to say that Hitchens was always right, not even regarding Iraq (I have a horrible feeling that after the withdrawal of US troops Iraq will descend into a bloody civil war; certainly there seems to have been an increase in violence and instability in recent weeks). However, his writing increased my knowledge and understanding of whatever subject he covered, even if I disagreed with the points he was making. I suggest that your time would be much better spent reading Hitch's stuff than a manipulative character-assassination on Salon, and then you can make your own mind up.

Edited December 24, 2011 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[Happy Face 29]