Christopher Hitchens
From Philosopedia
- Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life - except religion. . . . Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? . . . . Atheism strikes me as morally superior, as well as intellectually superior, to religion. Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
- Christopher Hitchens, "The Lord and the Intellectuals," Harper's (July 1982).
- Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life - except religion. . . . Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? . . . . Atheism strikes me as morally superior, as well as intellectually superior, to religion. Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
Hitchens, Christopher (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011 )
Hitchens, born in Portsmouth, England, attended Cambridge and graduated from Oxford in 1970, reading in philosophy, politics and economics. From 1971-1981 he worked as a book reviewer for The Times. In 1981 he emigrated to the United States. Hitchens from 1982 to 2002 wrote "Minority Report," a column for The Nation.
He has written widely, including for Slate, The Daily Mirror, The Atlantic Monthly. and Vanity Fair. He also writes for Harpers and other U.S. and American newspapers and journals. As a foreign correspondent, he has covered events in 60 countries on all five continents. Hitchens has written a host of books. His criticisms of Clinton and pro-Iraqi war views have made Hitchens increasingly controversial among progressive readership, but he remains a stalwart atheist and iconoclast.
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By and about Hitchens
In The Nation (1 August 1994), the controversial journalist Hitchens wrote,
- Bertrand Russell was right, in my far-from-humble opinion, to conclude that all religions are rubbish in the same way. At any given period it might be true that Shi’a Islam, for example, or Roman Catholicism or Calvinism acted in a fashion more repulsive and intolerant than the ‘mainstream’ faiths. But these peaks of atrocity and stupidity have a way of flattening out over time, as if to give every confession its own chance at bat.
In particular, Hitchens is known in freethought circles for authoring The Missionary Position (1995), an expose on Mother Teresa, which
- finds Agnes Gouxha Bojaxhiu an evil and selfish old woman who has consorted with white-collar criminals and despots. She is, Hitchens avers, less interested in aiding the poor of Calcutta and elsewhere than in using them, wretched people with insufficient care and forced to confront their mortality, as a way to enhance and missionary her Roman Catholic beliefs. She once said to Malcolm Muggeridge that “the poorest of the poor are the means of expressing our love for God.”
- In 1985, visiting Guatemala and walking where fresh-killed Indians were all about, she said when asked about those deaths, “Everything was peaceful in the parts of the country I visited. I do not get involved in that sort of politics.”
- In 1988 she told Navin Chawla, “Leprosy is not a punishment, it can be a very beautiful gift of God if we make good use of it. Through it we can learn to love the unloved.”
- One apostate, Susan Shields, told Hitchens, “In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to haven.’ An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.”
- When she left Haiti, having been presented with the Légion d’Honneur, she told Baby Doc’s First Lady, Michèle Duvalier, “Madame President, the country vibrates with your life’s work.”
- Anthony Gottlieb wrote favorably in The New Yorker (15 May 2007) about God Is Not Great, comparing it with other recent books about atheism.
- Vanity Fair in an article by Juli Weiner wrote of fellow contributing editor Hitchens.
Hitchens pulled out all the stops, and Murray Kempton, reviewing the work, extrapolated tongue-in-cheek that when Hitchens gets to Heaven and the Recording Angel opens his book, he will cry out with holy glee, “Christopher Hitchens? Bully for you.”
When Hitchens signed a 1999 affidavit claiming that his friend Sidney Blumenthal once told him that Monica Lewinsky was “a stalker,” he became the scourge of the literary left. Lewinsky was the White House intern who was brought to her knees by President Bill Clinton, who himself was almost brought to his knees for having lied about their sexual escapades. Blumenthal had sworn he never said she was “a stalker,” leading Alexander Cockburn to call Hitchens “a Judas” by Alexander Cockburn, Victor Navasky to term him “an informer” by Victor Navasky, and many others to refer to him as Chris the Snitch. In No One Left To Lie To (1999), Hitchens lashes out at his opponents and, in a political tirade, claimed that “Clintonism poisons everything it touches.” In the Fall 1996 issue of Free Inquiry Hitchens is interviewed by Matt Cherry and says:
- I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.
An honorary associate of the National Secular Society, Hitchens since 2000 has turned out at least one book per year, the most recent being God Is Not Real: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
Personal
Hitchens was married to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, but the couple divorced in June 1981. Two children, Alexander and Sophia, resulted from this marriage. He has one daughter, Antonia, with his second and current wife Carol Blue, whom he married in 1991.
Obituaries
Hitchens died at the age of 62 at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, from pneumonia, a complication of the esophageal cancer he had been diagnosed with in the spring of 2010
Books
- Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (Cassell, 1976)
- Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989)
- Imperial Spoils: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles (Hill and Wang, 1989)
- Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990)
- The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995)
- No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 2000)
- Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (Verso, 2000)
- Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books, 2001)
- The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2002)
- Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell's Victory (Allen Lane, 2002)
- A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume Books, 2003)
- Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, Thunder's Mouth (Nation Books, 2004)
- Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives/HarperCollins, 2005)
- Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography, Books That Shook the World Series (Atlantic Books, 2006)
- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Warner Twelve, 2007)
- Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve, 2011)
- Arguably, Essays (Twelve, 2011)
He also has written two collections including many Nation essays:
- Prepared for the Worst (Hill and Wang, 1989)
- For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993)
(Reviewing Arguably, Bill Keller writes that Hitchens is a man of his words, reporting that Hitchens feels these essays bear "the full consciousness that they might be my very last." Keller, who once was The New York Timess executive editor, includes the following:
- Hitchens erects his own pantheon of American heroes, and the country offers no end of inventive, radical, idealistic and activist figures for him to admire. Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and Lincoln all get loving and refreshing treatment here. Not surprisingly, he takes the side of those who regard the antislavery insurrectionist John Brown as a visionary hero against those who deem him a terrorist. (Morally, Hitchens is more about ends than means; his book is dedicated to three Arab suicides who martyred themselves in the Arab Spring, one by car-bombing a Libyan Army post.) He embraces the literature of Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Saul Bellow and others, finding in American writing since the founding “a certain allegiance to the revolutionary and emancipating idea.”
- In Jefferson’s decision to send the young American Navy against the extortionist Barbary pirates, Hitchens discovers a precedent for the current American engagements with Islamic fanatics, and an argument for a selective but bold use of American power in the world. Elsewhere, he takes on Graham Greene’s moral cynicism about America’s part in the cold war.
- At times the book feels like an ongoing argument with the leftist intellectuals on the other side of the Atlantic, who tend to view America as lacking in history, culture or moral standing.
- In an essay on the journalism of Karl Marx, written for the left-leaning Guardian, he puts an elbow in the ribs of his old socialist friends: “If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it . . . in the fact that he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country).”
- “There is currently much easy talk about the ‘decline’ of my adopted country, both in confidence and in resources,” he writes in his introduction. “I don’t choose to join this denigration.”
- Christopher Hitchens: American patriot. We’ve done a lot worse.
(CA; Matt Cherry] interviewed Hitchens further about Mother Teresa in Free Inquiry, Fall 1996) {E; The New York Review of Books, 11 July 1996; TYD}
