RIP Christopher Hitchens

[Ben]

Yeah, to clarify - he supported that one decision from Bush. I don't think you could call him a Bush supporter...

Yes! The invasion. Moreso than Bush. He wasn't very fond of any politician. Hated Bush. Hated Clinton. Said, on Dennis Miller's old show, "... (Clinton) should be taken downtown." He called Clinton: a serial rapist.
He knew what politicians were about. Most are opportunists. Most are disgusting characters. I mean, Hitchens had... Well, here's what he said about Falwell.





On Mother Teresa.... Not a Saint. But a sinister fraud:

[onmyknees]

He was infuriating at times, maybe it was the accent....lol...but I always thought he was somewhat mad, ( as in a Beautiful Mind, Mad) even self destructive with his love of whiskey and Marlboroughs. Atheists cheered him for his views on faith and religion, Liberals recoiled at his views on The War on Terror. Conservatives furious with his views on Mother Theresa, which ultimately was the beauty of Hitchens. He was not to be boxed in...It occurs to me, anyone who can savage Mother Theresa, and slam Barrack Obama in the span of a few seconds is a tortured, yet brilliant soul. It would have been fascinating to see Hitches and William F. Buckley in a discussion.

[Jackal]

Mr. Hitchens will be missed by myself and readers across the globe and time. My condolences to his children, wife and family.

[loveboof]

On Mother Teresa.... Not a Saint. But a sinister fraud:

Yeah fascinating stuff. Have you read his book The Missionary Position? (Such a great title)
_

Why is it that no American anchors can chair a debate without bias?! If you invite two 'expert' guests for a discussion then let them speak! So annoying.

[onmyknees]

I'm sure depending on one's politics, everyone who read or watched Hitchens has a fond memory....Here's mine.

[Stavros]

To be fair, what I enjoyed about reading Hitchens and watching some of his tv programmes was the clever way in which he wrote and presented, his provacative arguments, and his lack of fear. He was wrong about a lot of things, but that's his problem. If I want informed opinion on the Middle East, the US at home or abroad, and Mother Teresa, I would not turn to Hitchens anyway, I tend to think of him as a journalist, and have a low opinion of journalists. T

Loveboof says:
Can I support one war, whilst condemn another? Of course I can. Can I condemn violent actions, and still consider violence necessary on occassion? Yes.

This is so problematic a statement I know where to start, but I don't know where to end. It goes to the core of the theory and practice of human rights, and is one of the reasons I don't rate Hitchens intellectually.

The obvious problem with human rights is that if such rights exist, everyone has them. My human rights are the same as Saddam Hussein's, Osama bin Laden's, and Stalin's. And the same as John and Mary in Texas, Pablo and Maria in Mexico, and Mohammed and Ayesha in Jordan, and so on throughout the world.

It seems to me, that one cannot propose that citizens of the USA have human rights, but not the citizens of Iraq; the logical position for people like Hitchens is therefore to say, candidly: there are no human rights, and we cannot invent any, or codify any in law that are practicable for everyone in the world at the same time.

For Hitchens the problem of the Just War is that he likes it, but it it was a Christian concept, or more properly an excuse designed (initially by Augustine of Hippo) to enable Christians to kill other humans beings (they are supposed to love them). Ironically, given the life of Jesus and Hitchens' hostility to religion, he failed to grasp a signal fact, and a radical fact of these times, possible the most radical of all:

The most courageous political position to take is to be a pacifist.

He had the option, he chickened out. Great bloke, shame about the politics.

[Ben]

Yeah fascinating stuff. Have you read his book The Missionary Position? (Such a great title)

I did read it. When it was released. He does attack everyone. Including Lady Di. Well, why does anyone like the Royals???
I mean, the entire class system in England turns me off. I mean, that's the essence of the revolting/crass class system in England. (Hitchens is inspiring me today -- ha ha!)

[loveboof]

I'm sure depending on one's politics, everyone who read or watched Hitchens has a fond memory....Here's mine.

It takes guts to so completely disregard audience approval like that. I've seen the same from Dawkins (although much more polite obviously lol).
_

I mean, the entire class system in England turns me off. I mean, that's the essence of the revolting/crass class system in England. (Hitchens is inspiring me today -- ha ha!)

Again, what a great example of the balls of this guy. On a tv interview, and he still won't stand for some moron talking nonsense in a public park!

Btw, the class system in England has been dissolving quicker than a sugar cube in a hot posh teapot over the course of my life time - so whatever it is you dislike probably won't exist for much longer.
_
(I'll read your post later Stavros - don't have time now )

[Ben]

Weekend Edition December 16-18, 2011
31
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/

CounterPunch Diary
Farewell to C.H. by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

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.

[runningdownthatdream]

He was infuriating at times, maybe it was the accent....lol...but I always thought he was somewhat mad, ( as in a Beautiful Mind, Mad) even self destructive with his love of whiskey and Marlboroughs. Atheists cheered him for his views on faith and religion, Liberals recoiled at his views on The War on Terror. Conservatives furious with his views on Mother Theresa, which ultimately was the beauty of Hitchens. He was not to be boxed in...It occurs to me, anyone who can savage Mother Theresa, and slam Barrack Obama in the span of a few seconds is a tortured, yet brilliant soul. It would have been fascinating to see Hitches and William F. Buckley in a discussion.

Do you have any original thoughts independent of your political leanings?