Christopher Hitchens has died December 16, 2011
Posted by smiffy in Uncategorized.trackback
It was with a little sadness that I woke up this morning to the news (long expected) that Christopher Hitchens has died of cancer.
I’ll try to write a longer piece considering his work and his unfortunate career trajectory later. But the immediate thought that comes to my mind is that it would be shame if he was remembered entirely for his wrong-headed approach to the invasion of Iraq, and to the ‘War on Terror’. It should be recalled that he was once a very strong critic of U.S. imperial adventures globally, particularly in Central America, and some of his earlier writing, available in the collections Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument would surprise anyone who knows him primarily for his more recent work.
It’s also odd to note how much of a shadow he, and others of the so-called ‘Decent Left’ cast over the early years of this blog. They were always wrong of course, but 5-6 years ago there was, at least, an argument. Now it’s clear, even to them, just how wrong they are (although the overthrow of the Gadaffi regime may encourage them to regroup, just as their support for the invasion of Iraq was based on the success – as they saw it then, although again they have been proved wrong – of the invasion of Afghanistan).
Whatever else about Hitchens, and there is plenty to criticise, he rarely wrote anything that wasn’t worth reading, and some of his best writing can be found in his collection of literary essays Unacknowledged Legislation or his more recent pieces about his cancer treatment in Vanity Fair.
More will come later, but in the meantime, here is a fair piece about him from the New Statesman as well as our own post on the time he came to Dublin to debate Ireland’s greatest intellectual, John Waters.
Hitchens’ being wrong about some things didn’t make him wrong about everything: he never let up on `Mother’ Teresa or Henry Kissinger. He thought ideas and books were important enough to defend: he took the right side on Salman Rushdie.
Most of all, I could never wholly dislike somebody who likes Louis MacNeice.
There’s a very good, and generous considering their disagreements, review of Hitchens’s last book by Terry Eagleton in the current issue of Harpers.
I still think “For the Sake of Argument” and “Prepared for
the Worst” are excellent collections of essays.
RIP Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens, who detests a cliché almost as much as he abhors a despot, has turned into one of the dreariest stereotypes of all: the revolutionary young hothead who learns to stop worrying about imperialism and love Paul Wolfowitz…
By what means did a pinkish, bohemian comrade of mine in the British International Socialists come to compare the burka to the hood of the Ku Klux Klan? …
‘When Amis launched a vile assault on the Muslim population of Britain in the wake of 9/11, suggesting that the community should be hounded, harassed, and perhaps deported, Hitchens mounted a squalidly disingenuous defense of him….
it has not gone unnoticed among Hitchens’s former political friends that his conversion from socialism to capitalism has coincided with curious exactitude with history’s own drift in that general direction.’ Eagleton
http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083729
A man who never could grasp the difference between being smart and being wise.
Nails it for me.
He sounded clever and wrote in a flashy, impressed- with- itself kind of way, but as empty and conventional at heart as the similarly impressed- with- itself fiction of his mate, Amis Jr
In 1997, I attempted to interview Hitchens for Fortnight in the bar at the Europa Hotel in Belfast. We drank. We chatted. I didn’t bother switching the tape recorder on. It was one of the best conversations of my sheltered life. At it’s end, I staggered out to find some air and food. Two hours later, Hitchens was at a podium, speaking as elequently as expected, on a theme of Mahlers’ Fifth, Louis McNeice, Arthur Griffiths, the literary legacy and political present of Belfast. I’ve never met a liver and mind like his.
Two days later, I took Hitchens to church. My closest place of worship, Martyrs’ Memorial Hall, was celebrating the grand opening of the Paisley Jubilee Complex. “It sounds like a medical condition. It is.” That is how he commented on the experience in The Nation.
I communicated with him occasionally over the years, and felt justly flattered when he would ask my opinions on Northern Ireland.
Regardless of the trolls who will be sharpening their clubs, Hitchens was a remarkable journalist and a mould that can be traced back to the dawn of polemics, but charcely exists today. Print journalism has reached another milestone, or tombstone.
Even if you hated his guts, you ought to mourn that passing.
A man who helped create the intellectual climate that justified the Iraq War. What a useless, inhumane man. Good ridance to yet another opportunistic, self-serving scumbag.
As I have nothing good to say about this man, I hoped his passing would not involve me, but I will not sit quiet whilst mainly middle class lefties who should know better all but eulogise him. Yes for the first half of his adult life he was in the progressive camp, in the second he stood with reaction. In many ways his political trajectory was not unlike those intellectual leftists in the 1930s, who went over to reaction in the 1950s. When it was fashionable to be on the left they positioned themselves there, when it became fashionable and less dangerous to be with reaction they could be found there. And how their careers prospered.
Hitchens was not only wrong on the biggest political issue of his life, but he went over to the most reactionary type of capitalism and on the Iraq war, became one of its main propagandists in the USA, indeed, they used his pen as their battering ram in their attempt to discredit those who opposed the Iraq war. In other words he moved decisively and consciously into the class enemies camp, and as far as I am aware, he never retracted or apologised for his wretched betrayal.
We are not talking small beer here are we? 500,000 or more Iraqis had their lives stolen in that war and occupation.
All this talk of he was not all bad, he wrote some good stuff, reminds me of the way the bourgeoise regrouped around Albert Speer. Another man who was a tame intellectual for a reactionary and murderous politician.
If I am a troll sharpening my club, I do so as one who remembers the handiwork of Hitchens over Iraq and the coffins which flowed in its wake. I cannot see him as anything but an intellectual thug. I do not morn his passing, he ended his life as exactly what he was, a reactionary pen for hire, good riddance.
Do we get to invoke Godwin’s Law for comparisons to Speer?
Hitchens was badly wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan, but can you say where he went over to the `most reactionary type of capitalism’?
Incidentally, the point of a club is that you don’t sharpen it.
An important point to note is that Hitch was ripping
Mother Teresa to bits while her corpse was still warm; so, in a way, being nice to him post-mortem is dishonouring his memory.
Another way to put it is that the Hitch whom many of us was actually a casualty of 9/11.
He laid into her long before she died.
He was a great man in his time, and it’s the writings from that period which are on my bookshelf. So I’ll judge him by those.
Yes he undertook the ‘ Extravagant Journey ‘ beloved of so many intellectuals as they move from Left to Right, Cruiser, Harris and Martin Jacques to name just a few. Shame.
John Waters is Ireland’s greatest intellectual? I’m going to assume that’s either some twisted attempt at sarcasm or the result of a deep seeded hatred for Irish Intellectuals.
Michael Carley
Are you suggesting the Iraq war was not about Iraq’s oil resources and enriching the military industrial complex. Those who admire Hitchens cannot have it both ways by claiming he was an intellectual giant, but to stupid to understand Bush and Blair’s war had nothing to do with WMDs and over-throwing a dictator.
ejh
I would suggest the Ezra Pound defence might not go down to well in Baghdad.
Yes, the Iraq war was about oil and the military industrial complex. Hitchens was wrong about Iraq. Are you saying somebody is only worth reading if they’re right about everything, or that if somebody is wrong about one thing, they’re wrong about everything?
Anyway, the only person who is right about everything is me.
But what about Comrade Leon, wasn’t he right about everything?
Of course he was: has anyone every brought God, Marx, Trotsky or Orwell into an argument in order to say they were wrong?
I think Declan Ganley might have, or maybe it was Stalin (Ganley about Stalin, or Stalin about Trotsky, or both?).
I have some doubts about Kronstad. And I think he underestimated how terrible the USSR had got too.
Hitch was a wanker. but on ma death of calcutta and Henry Zoinazi he was spot on.
Michael C,
My main point about Mr Hitchens is he was not only wrong about Iraq, he became an active participant in that war on the side of big capital and thus had a degree of responsibility for all which flowed from it. If you look back at his work from this time he acted as a propagandist for GW Bush’s war on the Iraqi people.
This was the only time in his life when he had real power to influence events for the good and he choose not to. Instead he willingly jumped into the same trench as Capital.
When making a judgement about his life and work, it is impossible to ignore this stuff or treat it as a mere footnote. It does not mean his previous work is trash which should not be read. However the fact he was either not big enough to come clean about the scale of his mistake, or did not believe he made one. does mean he needs to be poked with a very long stick.
All the best
‘ the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one…
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant…
The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range…
A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own…
a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific…
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/06/charles_prince_of_piffle.html
An amusing chap, HItchens will be missed.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/
…
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.
…
I’m probably closer to Mick’s position than smiffy’s, in so far as seeing Hitchen’s as a great critic and having done great work in the past, and indeed still finding much of his writing insightful, but finding the position he adopted and more importantly retained in Iraq as almost impossible to get past. And what irks me is that his worldview was in some respects only a fraction away from the ‘Islamofascist’ stuff of people who are seriously toxic.
I can’t help but feel like so many he moved back towards his original class position albeit not quite so comprehensively as some we’ve seen after a genuine radicalism in his younger years. What’s also irritating is how he didn’t seem to see how with Iraq he was pushing an open door whereas with Palestine his progressive words fell on stony ground. And that’s the crucial thing that he didn’t seem to see the distinction between running with power and running against it.
That said there’s no doubt he had a rough time of it the last year or two.
I don’t think there’s anything there I’d disagree with. While I think it’s worth remembering that he was once a strong and progressive voice of the left (albeit always with reactionary tendencies) that doesn’t detract from the fact that he’s now, rightly, defined by his disastrous support for U.S. military adventurism.
The point about his only pushing an open door on Iraq is an important one, although I’d query the assumption among some that his support for the Iraq war was in any way influential on its implementation. This is not to defend the position he took in any way, but does anyone seriously think that but for Hitchens the invasion would have be averted?
I’m also in two minds about the nature of his accommodation with neoconservatism, in foreign policy anyway, in the past decade or more. I don’t see it as quite the same volte face as you’d see with many other former leftists, Paul Johnson or Eoghan Harris or even his brother. I also think it’s too easy to simply see it as opportunistic, as aligning himself with the political position which would financially benefit him the most. I think there was a sincerity in the positions he took, but that is not, in itself, necessarily an admirable quality (say what you like about Nick Griffin, but I wouldn’t call him a careerist – career racist, maybe).
However, I hope to be able to tease that out more when I’m able to put something more substantial together.
I think you’re right, he was entirely sincere in his belief that the invasion of Iraq was correct and that wasn’t a belief made for financial gain, he was already a well regarded voice in US circles. I’d also agree that his influence was negligible, perhaps even counter productive du to the vehemence of his approach. One real oddity is how he believed then and after that this was an existential conflict. It would be interesting to consider that further.
“(albeit always with reactionary tendencies)”.
Smiffy’s comment reminded me of looking through the
book “the Quotable Hitchens” and being
dismayed to see quotes ridiculing Mohandas Gandhi and
the gun-control movement. There was also Hitchens’
misguided comments about David Irving being
” not just a fascist historian, but a great historian of fascism” when we now know Irving’s work is riddled with false
statements. His reference to the “Dixie Chicks” as
“f*cking fat slags” also smacked of misogyny.
Yep, it’s stuff like that that pushes me closer to Micks analysis Starkadder.
I should add that for such an self avowed rationalist it clear how much he wanted to believe the Iraq guff. Was part if that a submerged class thing or perhaps an over identification with his newly adoped homeland or what?
‘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.’-Alexander Cockburn on Hitchens.
There is a strain of left-wing thought, based on a misreading of Marx, that imperialism is progressive. This explains a lot about Hitchens and other neo-cons who were previously members of left-wing groups.
I nearly wish he was wrong about there not being a hell for that upper crust c*nt
he could burn there with Gilmore’s new mate tricky Brian Lienhan
Posh boy with a way with words. What was so progressive about calling Mother Teresa an ‘Albanian dwarf’? The Dixie Chicks insult is typical of him. A drunken boor, who sided with the US right over Clinton, and bought himself recognition at the highest level in America by taking the pro-war side.
I like Slate.com but their coverage of him is so wildly over the top and uncritical that I wish you or Mick got a chance to write a counter argument.
Not sure what “posh boy” has to do with it.
Harsh but fair from Lenin’s Tomb. Seymour is bang on about his provincialism:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/12/late-christopher-hitchens.html
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=27053
Callinicos on Hitchens.
The Dixie Chicks, a very conventional, non-radical big selling band, almost ruined their careers by criticising George Bush. Hitchens made tonnes of money out of praising him. I’m now positing Natalie Mains as a greater progressive than ‘the Hitch.’
The point is that what was a position paper or a college lecture to Hitchens means in reality death, destruction, poverty and starvation for millions of our fellow human beings.
Are you under the impression that Hitchens never went to the places he wrote about?
‘Posh boy’ has everything to do with it, because the one thing that remained with Hitchens, through all of his ideological tourism was the core belief that only people like him, white, male and educated at either Oxbridge or an Ivy League college could see things as they are. Everyone else thought the way they did because of their background or their prejudices or their religion or whatever, but only people from his background, or something like it, had the magical gift of objectivity.
Do you have any quotes to back that up?
(My gripe, you’ll probably have gathered, is that there are plenty of “posh boys” on the left – and their poshness often becomes an issue when they start disagreeing with us. But either it’s an issue, or it isn’t. And I don’t recall Hitchens being much attacked for being posh prior to his decision to turn on the Left after 9/11.)
Well how about this from the Guardian obit:
A resolution to spend time at least once a year in “a country less fortunate than [his] own” spurred him to witness the stirrings of revolution in Portugal and Poland, as well as counter-revolution in Argentina.
the selfless noblesse oblige of it all! Lucky Portugal, Poland and Argentina, eh?
Mmm, but that’s something of a tendentious reading, no?
“Noblesse oblige”? You really have no idea what you’re talking about. Judging people by the way they talk is the very definition of snobbery.
Hitchens’ biography makes it quite clear that he came from very humble circumstances. A lower-middle class upbringing in mid-50s England is hardly anyone’s idea of “posh” is it?
And unless I’m very much mistaken, I can’t imagine a job at the New Statesman in the mid-70s was much of passport to living large either.
If your father’s a Commander of the Royal Navy and you went to a private school, that’s not really lower middle-class.
He was a snob who interfered with and was interfered upon by other Tories while in public school and college – a first class deviant ala Lame Fox and William Plague
Do I detect a trace of hompohobia there?
I’m not judging him by the way he talked, I ‘m judging him by what he said.
Toryphobia – is the condition. I shouldn’t have to state this but I couldn’t be homophobic unless I too was a self hating Tory.
Hitchens was a Tory?
Henry Porter is reasonably fair on him, remembering him as a friend but not failing to point out the disagreement on Iraq:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/henry-porter-my-friend-christopher-hitchens
Nick Cohen makes you wonder whether he knows anything at all about the left:
Victor Serge, George Orwell and the other left oppositionists of the early 20th century who opposed communism and capitalism equally
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/christopher-hitchens-nick-cohen-tribute
Victor Serge opposed communism and capitalism equally?
Spot on re Serge Michael. Poor old Nick. Still not getting it and massaging the truth. Orwell is not above criticism but the idea he opposed ‘communism’ in an undifferentiated way seems wide of the mark too.
<i<Nick Cohen makes you wonder whether he knows anything at all about the left
A point I’ve made often. I think he’s been (or he was, if you prefer) leftwing for a long time without actually being involved at all. Which is not a criticism in itself, but it does mean that when he had his epiphany over Iraq and decided to denounce the Left, he didn’t really know what it consisted of, or who was prominent (or not) or to what degree. Hence, for instance, What’s Left banging on about Gerry Healy, about whom nobody had cared for decades.
That Cohen thing is as bad an obituary as I’ve ever read. It’s really a glowing tribute to his own moral courage and insight. I often wonder why Cohen describes himself as a left winger when all he ever writes are attacks on various leftist straw men. He’s like Roy Keane, everything that happens exists to prove he was right about something in the past.
Don’t forget this contribution from the Sindo, which concentrates on the important issues surrounding Hitchens
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/deeply-erudite-surprisingly-humble-and-with-most-unusual-hands-2966920.html
Dear God.
Rather sad and pathetic article by McCarthy.
[...] Here though, I want to briefly consider two critical pieces, one from the The Economist and another from The Cedar Lounge Revolution, a widely read leftist blog from [...]
I am reminded that we had to endure the same shite when Tony Judt died last year. The major difference is that we now have everyone who he went for a pint with (a l
I am reminded that we had to endure the same shite when Tony Judt died last year. Is everyone who went for a pint with him (or almost did as in the case of John Banville) going to write an article? Please don’t. We need to spare our forests and there is enough crap on the internet already.
Shared a pint? Mr. Hitchens once vomited on my shoes at a post-boatrace party.
Now the thing that must be said about Hitchens is…
It’s all right – you are spared.
Hitchens, Kim Jong -Il, Vaclav Havel and Alice Glenn in the same weekend. It’s like a 1980s college debating society wish list. Hope Alice isn’t having the last laugh this morning.
Alice Glenn too… She must have been pretty old, no?
Glenn was about 90 I think.
Wasn’t she in the World Anti-Communist League at
one point?
She was prominent in the ‘Anti-happiness league’ as Declan Lynch used to call it.
Crocodile – if you look back to an old post on the CDL, Ed Hayes
says Glenn was a WACL member:
http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/meanwhileback-in-magill-this-month/
There’s also a good piece on Hitchens by Katha Pollitt in The Nation which I think catches him, and the myth surrounding him, very well. I don’t think his writings will outlast him largely because they were generally ephemera knocked off in a hurry. And they often had a whiff of the drink about them. It’s a bit odd to see someone being eulogised for their hard drinking when it’s just killed them. (See Hunter Thompson who did however write, in the two Fear and Loathing books, the kind of sustained work that Hitchens could never manage).
Hitchens ended up like Niall Ferguson, convinced that the USA represented a superior form of civilisation because they paid him a lot more money there. He’s like PJ O’Rourke, we’re supposed to take him seriously because he wrote for glossy magazines and did a lot of television. The Dixie Chicks comment alone says a lot about the man.
This is the Pollitt piece, and very good it is, and (as I say here, where I previously posted it) more damning, to my mind, that a lot of more overtly condemnatory stuff.
Other good pieces of various kinds:
Greenwald
Dave Beecham
DD Gutenplan, written last year.
I think all of these pieces, like Pollitts, gain a lot of strength from acknowledging Hitchens’ strengths, and his better days in the past: it makes their criticisms much more convincing that claiming Hitchens was never up to much, or that he was just drinking and myth. It wasn’t so.
And even at the end, he was a long way off Niall Ferguson, who’s a different sort of character altogether.
The Ferguson comparison relates to Hitchens’s love affair with America in later years. It is perhaps only human for people to become very very fond of a country where they can make serious money.
Ferguson loves the American academic world because the rewards are so much greater for high flyers. The difference between what you get paid at The New Statesman and the big American magazines is not negligible and I think coloured Hitchens’s attitude. But I might be wrong, who knows anyone’s motivations really.
I read him a lot over the years but, honestly, I’d have a job remembering anything particularly memorable he wrote. It was fun to see him attacking someone you didn’t like. At least it was first. And, speaking as someone who has done a lot of both writing and drinking over the years, they don’t mix at all and the combination should be avoided. If he managed to write good articles with a skinful on board, that just shows that he had the potential to be a lot better. I think a lot of people are suckers for that old Behan/Fitzrovia/Bukowski mythos.
Speaking of Ferguson, that spat between himself and Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books is a howl, the intellectual, and not all that intellectual, version of a row outside a chipper after the nightclub has closed.
Good stuff alright, but I have to say, I’ve slightly more respect for Ferguson, who has defended himself better than I would have expected. The initial review was very funny, and a masterclass in demolition, but it may have been just a bit unfair, if what Ferguson has said since is to be believed – I’ve better things to do than actually read his book though.
Speaking of the LRB, the Diary in the current issue of Mohammed el Gorani, one of the youngest and longest serving Gauntanamo detainees is well worth a read – though possibly not with food. There’s a bit where one of the ‘good’ guards, a black guy from Louisiana, realises that the detainees, all those evil muslims, are a lot less racist than mainstream US society, announces as he’s leaving that when he gets home, he’s going to leave the army and convert to Islam…..
I’d agree with you that on reading Ferguson’s letters you actually get the impression that he’s being traduced in some manner and isn’t any kind of extremist at all.
But if you read the article on Salon entitled Niall Ferguson And the Brain Dead American Right, you see how Ferguson actually talks in front of a right wing American audience. It’s pretty disgusting and it makes his LRB protestations look completely disingenous. Not just a right wing blowhard but a slippery one as well.
Haven’t got the current LRB, I’m a subscriber but am currently working out how many mag subs I can afford to keep for next year. The one I’d miss most is The Wire funnily enough.
Had that conversation re subs with myself too… Big cull underway.
Interesting alright – although I couldn’t help noticing that, on the same page where the right-hand sidebar advertised a piece on ‘professional fact checking is as broken as professional journalism’, the piece on Ferguson referred to ‘the right-wing British tabloid, the Telegraph’.
The Yanks love going on about their bloody fact checking.
I saw that wheen I first read the piece. I suspect some confusion with the Times. (Or possibly the Daily Vile, I suppose.)
Eamonn McCann records his memories of Hitchens
here:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/eamon-mccann/pity-hitchens-couldnt-stick-around-for-the-death-of-kim-16094273.html