Christopher Hitchins

From Philosopedia

Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 - )

Hitchins is a British-American journalist, literary critic, columnist, and author who was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge, and Balliol College, Oxford.

A leftwinger, he joined the Labour Party but was expelled when 18 because of his complaint that the party's Prime MInister, Harold Wilson, had a "contemptible support for the war in Vietnam." He became a correspondent for International Socialism and in the 1970s worked for the New Statesman. Emigrating to the United States in 1981, he wrote for Nation, writing attacks on Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as well as on American foreign policy in South and Central America.

He has supported U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he is critical of President George W. Bush in his frequent anti-theistic attacks for his having been "saved from drink by Jesus." Henry Kissinger he attacked in The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2001), pointing out his alleged role in the crimes of regimes in South America and Asia.

He has written over a dozen books, including The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995), in which he calls Mother Teresa a political opportunist who, acting as if a saint, raises money in order to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism. He tells of her relationships with corrupt but wealthy individuals such as Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michèle; the quasi-religious John-Roger; and the disgraced former financial executive Charles Keating.

In God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), Hitchens argues that

Israel doesn't "give up" anything by abandoning religious expansionism in the West Bank and Gaza. It does itself a favor, because it confronts the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews, and because it abandons a scheme which is doomed to fail in the worst possible way. The so-called "security" question operates in reverse, because as I may have said already, only a moral and political idiot would place Jews in a settlement in Gaza in the wild belief that this would make them more safe. Of course this hard-headed and self-interested solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists. But one isn't seeking to placate them. One is seeking to destroy and discredit them. At the present moment, they operate among an occupied and dispossessed and humiliated people, who are forced by Sharon's logic to live in a close yet ghettoised relationship to the Jewish centers of population. Try and design a more lethal and rotten solution than that, and see what you come up with.

In Guardian Unlimited (14 April 2002), he related how his brother, fellow journalist Peter Hitchens, upon taking his new bride to meet Dodo, their maternal grandmother who was in her 90s, was asked, "She's Jewish, isn't she?", adding, "Well, I've something to tell you. So are you." Her real surname, she said, was Levin, not Lynn, and her ancestors the Blumenthals were from Poland. Peter, however, says he is a Christian - the two brothers have other personal disagreements, for example in their positions concerning the Iraq War.

Hitchens is anti-theist, anti-religious, and anti-the three great monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Further, he is critical of Hinduism, Mormonism, and neo-paganism.

He and his wife, Carol Blue, whom he married in 1991, have a daughter, Antonio. He also has two children, Alexander and Sophia, by a previous marriage to Eleni Meleagrou, A Greek Cypriot whom he married in 1981 and divorced in 1989.