Christopher Hitchens

Brazen and unapologetic, brilliant and engaging... with a soft spot for the warmth of friends. He was far too rare a man, and it's to be a lonely walk down the rest of the corridor, without the laden profundity he could espouse to the night. I miss him, a lot. His death wrattled my "soul" - and am now healthier than I have been in a long time, as I watched him decay in the last year due to excesses and genetics. He parried with lightning fast recall, and carried a secondary scimitar of wit. His loss is bigger than journalism, skepticism, or politics - and it is now our duty to intone that fiery intellect in ourselves.... and move forward in time making him immemorial.

True. At the end, he was just a blousy and boozy Englishman, out of his depth, generally ignored by those in positions of real power. He came to the US to become a courtier and sold his soul in the process. Not the first. Won't be the last. Good riddance.

Heavens to Betsy, you Yanks are suckers for baloney - particularly when its served by an Englishman.

*Stands up and applauds*.

M.S., thank you for cutting through the ass-kissing bullshit and voicing an opinion that I also felt about Hitchens, but was unable to express since so many of my fellow Canadians lauded him solely based on his intellect and accent. Guy was more than a bit of a wankstar, and took a stand against issues only to be cheeky. He made me laugh and he was entertaining, but ultimately he was an overly-critical arsewipe.

*Stands up and applauds*.

M.S., thank you for cutting through the ass-kissing bullshit and voicing an opinion that I also felt about Hitchens, but was unable to express since so many of my fellow Canadians lauded him solely based on his intellect and accent. Guy was more than a bit of a wankstar, and took a stand against issues only to be cheeky. He made me laugh, and he was entertaining, but ultimately he was an overly-critical arsewipe.

The alternative to the Iraq war was to set a precedent that it's okay to breach nuclear non-proliferation rules. We would no longer be able to negotiate with rogue nuclear states (bluffing or otherwise) from any position of strength.

The alternative to the Iraq war was to set a precedent that it's okay to breach nuclear non-proliferation rules. We would no longer be able to negotiate with rogue nuclear states (bluffing or otherwise) from any position of strength.

Hitchen's defence of the invasion of Iraq in Slate may not use a lot of emotional vocabulary about the horrors of war, but it requires the opposite side to think hard if the alternative of leaving Saddam and his sons in power would have been so much better.

And yes, I see now, Galloway and Hitchens have very much debated, and Galloway clearly won. Hitchens is, rather was, a very big hypocrite.

Of course hitchens was wrong about Iraq; 100% totally wrong. And, incidentally, history will NEVER be able to put bush in a better light, however much revisionist historians try to.
Was saddam a bad man? Oh sure! Is the World a better place without him? Oh yes! But then, so it would be if we could ban Monday mornings, wasp stings, income tax, bad breath etc.
The Iraq war was bad at every level particularly so when predicated on the bunch of lies propounded by bush and b.Liar. I see no value in anybody whose opinion is otherwise; after all, if it was such an eminently right thing to do, for whatever reason, why would one need to fabricate such tissues of lies to support it?
I would like to have seen him in debate with George Galloway; I don't think such a thing ever happened.

Just wondering...

Did we need to invade an Asian country in order for a more democratic government to appear in the Phillipines, S.Korea, Taiwan, etc.?

Mr. Hitchens failed to understand that there is the horse as well as the bull variety, and he was guilty of spreading an over-allotment.

Regards

Funny, M.S. indicates how his writing degraded after he supported the war in Iraq. I think MS makes for tedious writing, ever since he supported Obama. You see, its the political viewpoint that makes a good writer!

He was the consummate arm chair quarter back...always criticizing those people in power who had to make the imperfect, tough decisions that those in power face. Never having any real position of power himself, so no real responsibility or stake in the outcome.

Critizing everyone from Mother Teresa, to Bill CLinton, Dave Cameron, alienating Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky...the list goes on and on and on... at some point you need to look in the mirror and ask whether it is everyone who is always wrong, or the reflection look back at you?

And then he hitched his cart to the star of GW Bush, the man he described himself as thoroughly unintelligent. What good did it do to free the Kurds, if it meant blowing up Iraq? gaining the love of Kurds, only to gain the hatred of the rest of the world? Islamofascism didn't exist in Iraq until Bush invaded. That war came to exemplify everything wrong with America, from its dependence on oil, to its manipulation of the population worthy of North Korea. And now America is Broke...and that power vacuum is being filled by worse torch bearers.

The drinking and the smoking were tired cliches...oh, he was so tortured from all the contrarian thinking he thrust upon himself.

Definitely the thinking man for men who couldn't think for themselves.

CH deserved that obit. On Iraq, surely MS you are premature in assessing whether the world, or some big part of it, is better off for want of prudence, knowledge and common sense in and about George W. Bush on the subject of Iraq. Even Iraqis, in 50 years time, are not likely to be much taken up with lamenting 100,000 or so casualties attributable to the US led invasion. With some feeling for probabilities Iraqis and the rest of us may be saying, with some surprise, that it is hard to see things having turned out so well if Saddam hadn't been overthrown and a majority government elected a few years later. None of that means CH was any more sensible than the third rate intellect in the White House in his enthusiasm for the war.

I wrote in late 2003 to similar effect when also defending the participation of those other than the UK and US who were part of the coalition of the willing. For them, it seemed to me, they justification was to earn alliance points with the US without serious cost or casualties. But, for the US, which could only hope for some far distant and necessarily doubtful historical justification,it was folly.

At the time I noted that the person who would want everyone to believe in Iraq's WMDs more than anyone else was Saddam Hussein for obvious enough reasons. Yet even that cause for doubt and caution, which must have been common currency with the few State Department people, sadly not powerful enough, who knew something about the Middle East and even spoke its languages, didn't get any public airing in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon push for war.

I am not changing my (complicated and amoral) views any more than CH did: I also was willing to accept the war if only America proved, contrary to all probability, to have both the moral/political stamina and the economic and military strength (including the strength to maintain all their other interests) to see it through. I even anticipated the insurgency without knowing how incompetent the Bremer administration would be and, therefore, how hopeless the postwar reconstruction was compared with the sometimes cited cases of Germany and Japan. And yet, even allowing for the truly appalling effects on the US and its position of power and influence in the world, I conceed that it is not impossible that one day we or our descendants may say that we are happily surprised by the probabilistic verdict of history. At present of course the position of Iran seems to be strengthened and, more immediately to the point, the Afghan war has dragged on unnecessarily for want of overwhelming force and major reconstruction having been deployed (because of diversion to Iraq) and the position of Pakistan, in itself and in its effects on the rest of the world, is a major disaster. Hard to see that not cancelling out any gains.

So why did George W. do it? Many reasons have been given but Steve Sailer's character analysis (in ISteve and other places) is worth mentioning. George H. W. Bush may have only been a good second class intellect but he was much smarter than his son George W. (not an idiot but an Ivy League MBA isn't everything when combined with his notorious lack of curiosity and problems with alcohol and Bible based recovery). George W. was conscious that he couldn't wait and react fast to things like his smarter, quicker, much better informed father so, according to the Sailer analysis, took to creating his own reality: he made things happen. He may have started early in such strategems as his mother has been quoted (accurately) as saying that the family regarded Jeb as the smarter and that George W. was "stupid like a fox". No doubt he hadn't the slightest clue about the superior knowledge and understanding to be found in the US State Department and was over-impressed by the vast experience of Cheney and Rumsfeld.

In case anyone doubts the scale of the disaster to the US, consider the loss of soft power thanks to Abu Ghreib and wholesale corruption and incompetence in restoring the Iraq economy, inter alia.

As to CH, I didn't need his entertaining assaults on the mutually contradictory accounts of the Abrahamic God's wishes and history of communication with his creation (and non-communication with Buddhists, Hindus etc unless to playfully confuse). I most often read him in The Atlantic (Monthly) and was in awe of his capacity to add highly readable and well informed reviews to the rest of his huge output, written and oral.

I am one of the few living people who've shared Hitchens' prognosis. I felt for him deeply. He was a great writer, regardless of topic. I disagreed with him about the attack on Iraq, but I disagree with a lot of people.

By the standards of those declaring Iraq as a triumph for Cheney/Bush, WWI was an unqualified success for Wilhelmine Germany.

Ross Douthat: The Believer's Atheist

I also thought that Hitchens would feel at home with the Depression-era Anglican writers. But I think the reason he's so well respected by the right apart from his obvious talent is the fact that he was a leftist who occasionally stood with the right and unapologetically. When he did, he help vindicate the right. "See, even that atheist Marxist thinks we're right!" Still, it's really bizarre that he's getting more respect from the religious right than the secular left. I wonder if he perceived that before he passed.

M.S.,

I found another error in the article, where you said, "I enjoyed the merciless swagger he displayed in his scabrous writing on religion."

It should read, "I was flabbergasted at his near-sightedness and his idiotic writing on religion."

It baffles me to read and to see just how many can earn a living from pointing fingers; how many gain support by questioning the obviously unclear by a clever arrangement of words. People come and go but ideas last and often baffle the ignorant to travel down dark roads to nowhere for years before realizing the time they wasted. The randomness of life provides a great connect the dots game that people love to play. I never met or even read more than a few of Hitchens works to realize he was just a distraction profiting from ignorance. It is a shame to lose a man of intellect and i would rather the slant be given to the fact that he solved 0 problems of the world thus wasting both his time in acquiring that intellect and his reader’s time in devoting their attention to him.

Christopher Hitchens was a wretched little troll of a man who delighted in cruelty. I have never understood the appeal of his writing which was never clever, or informative, or functional for any purpose except insulting others. For those of us who aren't amused by demeaning other human beings, he was a total waste of time.