Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens at the Arkansas Literary Festival 2007.
Born	April 13, 1949 Portsmouth, England
Occupation	Author, Journalist
Nationality	UK USA

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England) is a British-born American author, journalist and literary critic. Currently living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Nation, Slate and Free Inquiry; additionally, he is an occasional contributor to other publications and has appeared regularly in the Wall Street Journal. His brother is British journalist Peter Hitchens.

Hitchens is known for his iconoclasm, anti-clericalism, atheism, antitheism, anti-fascism and anti-monarchism. He is also noted for his acerbic wit and his noisy departure from the Anglo-American political left. He was formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of Britain and America. But a series of disagreements beginning in the early 1990s led to his resignation from The Nation shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He is also known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson, and his iconoclastic criticism of Mother Teresa.

While Hitchens' idiosyncratic ideas and positions preclude easy classification, he is a vociferous critic of what he describes as "fascism with an Islamic face," and his critics have been known to describe him as a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refuses to embrace this designation. In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Bosnia and Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".

Hitchens no longer considers himself a Trotskyist or a socialist; yet he maintains that his political views have not changed significantly . He points out that, throughout his career, he has been both an atheist and an antitheist, and that he has always remained a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. Hitchens has launched a detailed attack on Religion in his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He has also stated that, while he "was very much in rebellion against the state" during his youth, he is now "much more inclined to stress... issues of individual liberty."

Hitchens became a United States citizen on his fifty-eighth birthday, April 13, 2007.

Political views

Education and early career

Hitchens was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. During his years as a student at Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes, Hitchens joined a "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect." He wrote for the magazine International Socialism, which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree and in the 1970s went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, amongst others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman he became known as an aggressive left-winger, stridently attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War and the Roman Catholic Church. After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation. While at The Nation he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.

Hitchens criticized the first Gulf War, claiming — in an essay reprinted in For the Sake of Argument— that the Bush administration lured Saddam Hussein into the war. This position was called into question years later, during a debate in September of 2005, as being inconsistent with Hitchens' later anti-Saddam views. Hitchens answered that during the post-war period, when he spent time among the largely pro-American Iraqi Kurds, he came to believe that the responsibility for the crisis lay primarily with Saddam Hussein.

"Theocratic fascism" and early disagreements with the Left

Hitchens was deeply shocked by the February 14, 1989, fatwa against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie. He became increasingly concerned by the dangers of what he called "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face" (a play on Susan Sontag's phrase "fascism with a human face", referring to the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, which is in turn a play on Dubček's phrase Socialism with a human face): radical Islamists who supported the fatwa against Rushdie and sought the recreation of the medieval caliphate. Hitchens is often credited with coining the term "Islamofascism", but this appears not to be the case, and Hitchens himself denies it. (Malise Ruthven appears to be the first to have used the term in an article in The Independent on 8 September 1990.

Hitchens did use the term "Islamic Fascism" for an article he wrote for The Nation, shortly after 9/11, but this phrase also had an earlier history. For example, it was used in The Washington Post on 13 January 1979; it also appears to have been used by secularists in Turkey and Afghanistan to describe their opponents.

Hitchens also became increasingly disenchanted by the presidency of Bill Clinton, whom he had known at Oxford, accusing him of being a rapist and a serial liar. Hitchens also claimed that the missile attacks by Clinton on Sudan constituted a war crime. The support of some on the left for Clinton alienated him further from the "soft left" in the United States. On the other hand, he became increasingly distanced from the "hard left" by their lack of support for Western intervention in Kosovo.

The years after the Rushdie fatwa also saw him looking for allies and friends. In the United States he became increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the "excuse making" of the multiculturalist left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he became friends. Around this time, he also befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.

Post-9/11

After 9/11 his stance hardened. Hitchens has strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly in his "Fighting Words" columns in Slate. Hitchens had been a long term contributor to the left-wing The Nation, where bi-weekly he wrote his "Minority Report" column. After 9/11 he decided the magazine was making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. On September 24 and October 8, 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation . Chomsky responded . Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky to which Chomsky again responded . Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation in part because he believed its editors, its readers and contributors such as Chomsky considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden. This highly-charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky.

In June 2004, Hitchens severely criticized Michael Moore in a review of Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11 .

Where he stands now

Hitchens has said he no longer feels a part of the Left, yet does not object to being called a "former" Trotskyist. His affection for Trotsky remains strong, and he says that his political and historical view of the world is still shaped by Marxist categories. However, in 2004, Hitchens regarded himself as a 'single-issue voter,' concerning himself with what he sees as the battle between the forces of secular democracy and those of theocratic fascism.

Hitchens is sometimes seen as part of the self-styled "pro-liberation left," comprising left-leaning thinkers who support OIF. This informal grouping includes Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen, Julie Burchill, and Michael Ignatieff (see Euston Manifesto). Neoconservatives of the last decade are hesitant to embrace Hitchens as one of their own, in part because of his harsh criticisms of Ronald Reagan. He similarly refuses to define himself as a member of the neocon movment.

Despite his many articles supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the US presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for George W. Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to neutral, saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end" .

In the interview with journalist Johann Hari in 2004, in which Hitchens described himself as "on the same side as the neo-conservatives," he also states that he does not support George Bush per se (still less Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld) but rather allies himself with those whom he sees as the "pure" neo-conservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz. Although Hitchens finds himself defending Bush’s foreign policy, he has little admiration for the man himself and has criticized Bush's support of intelligent design. As an anti-theist with a penchant for drinking, Hitchens was unimpressed by Bush's claim to have been "saved from drink by Jesus".

In March 2005, Hitchens supported further investigation into alleged voting irregularities in Ohio during the US presidential election, 2004.

In contributions to Vanity Fair, Hitchens criticised the Bush administration for its continued protection of Henry Kissinger, whom he views as complicit in the human rights abuses of Southern Cone military dictatorships during the 1970s. In 2001, he had published a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, on Kissinger's alleged role in the crimes of regimes in South America and Asia. In that book Hitchens accused Kissinger, first as National Security Advisor to President Nixon, and then as Secretary of State to the same president, of either actively participating in or tacitly condoning decisions that would lead to the massacre of Bengali civilians within East Pakistan. He also asserts that Henry Kissinger, and by extension, the Ford administration, bore direct responsibility for the invasion of East Timor. Hitchens also asserted Kissinger and the Nixon administration's responsibility for the coup that resulted in the overthrow of the Allende government, and installation of Augusto Pinochet as president of Chile.

In May 2005, George Galloway MP entered into an argument with Hitchens before giving evidence to the US Senate. Galloway called Hitchens a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay", "[s]ome of which", Hitchens contended in a column, "was unfair." A few days later, Hitchens wrote an article that attacked Galloway's political record, criticized his Senate testimony and made a case for Galloway's complicity in the Oil-for-Food scandal. Hitchens debated with Galloway in New York at Baruch College on 14 September, 2005. Both Galloway and Hitchens appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on September 23, 2005.

In a September 2005 article, he stated "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA; challenging President Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

In a June 5, 2006 article on the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by US Marines in Haditha, he stated that

all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.

Key arguments

Cyprus

Hitchens' first book focused on the partition of Cyprus. While Hitchens did not unilaterally support either the Greek or Turkish side of the conflict, he severely criticized Western governments and the Western media for ignoring the Greek Military junta's active support of the EOKA-B--a nationalist, pro-Enosis, Greek Cypriot terrorist organization which ultimately overthrew Greek Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios III. Hitchens argued that this coup d'état, and the political machinations of Nikos Sampson, the new dictator of Cyprus, instigated the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

Nuclear weapons

Hitchens regarded the employment of nuclear weapons as the compulsory enlistment of civilians in a war and, as such, a violation of individual sovereignty.

Vietnam

Hitchens regarded America's intervention (and that of its allies) in Vietnam as a shameful continuation of European colonialism, betraying the enlightenment principles of liberal democracy and human emancipation. Today, he also views it as a betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Hitchens regards the complete occupation of Palestine as an example of colonialism and an unjustifiable subjugation of another people. He has described Zionism as being based on "the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land." Hitchens supports Israel's right to exist, but has argued 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.

However, Hitchens has not limited his criticism to expansionist Zionists and Islamic extremists. On November 14, 2004, Hitchens noted that

Edward Said asked many times, in public and private, where the Mandela of Palestine could be. In rather bold contrast to this decent imagination, Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath).

Milošević and the demise of Yugoslavia

Hitchens argued that the choice in Yugoslavia was between what he perceived as a multi-ethnic plural democracy in Bosnia and a fascistic, religiously inspired ethnic cleansing state driven by Slobodan Milošević. Hitchens argued that defending multi-ethnic democracy was morally essential and of far greater importance than any leftist concerns about a "new imperialism".

The quality of American and British Intelligence

In a variety of articles and interviews over a long period of time, he has asserted that British intelligence was correct in claiming that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Niger and that US envoy Joseph Wilson had been dishonest in his public denials of it. He has also defiantly pointed to discovered munitions in Iraq that violated U.N. Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687, the cease-fire agreements ending the 1991 Iraq-Kuwait conflict.

Regarding specific individuals

Mother Teresa

In 1992, Hitchens wrote an article for the US left-wing journal The Nation in which he called Mother Teresa "The Ghoul of Calcutta". He later narrated and co-wrote Hell's Angel, a documentary broadcast 8 November 1994 on Channel 4 in Britain, and expanded his criticism in a 1995 book, The Missionary Position. He despised the unquestioning adoration of the vast majority of Western commentators, which he felt judged her by her reputation, not by her actions. His particular qualms were with what he perceived as her lack of treatment for people — particularly children — placed in her care; her strong religious views on contraception and abortion, the latter she described as "the greatest destroyer of peace today"; and her "acceptance" of poverty, which took the form of encouraging the poor to embrace their poverty.

Hitchens asserts that Mother Teresa behaved like a political opportunist who adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism. He also condemns her for using contributions to open convents in 150 countries rather than establishing a teaching hospital, the latter being what he implies donors expected her to do with their gifts.

He also criticized her for what he considers to be less-than-honorable financial dealings: the pursuit and acceptance of donations from third world dictators, large donations accepted from Charles Keating, who was later convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy; and the allocation of these donations away from treatment and towards furthering what Hitchens considered "fundamentalist" views. Hitchens's writings have earned him the ire of Roman Catholics — Brent Bozell, for example, called Hitchens (and Aroup Chatterjee) "notoriously vicious anti-Catholics".

During Mother Teresa's beatification process, Hitchens was called by the Vatican to argue the case against her. He gave his testimony in Washington. In this role he was fulfilling the role of what was previously known as the "Devil's Advocate", but the position was abolished under John Paul II. Hitchens has satirically referred to his work in the case as the person chosen "to represent the devil pro bono".

Ronald Reagan

Two days after Reagan's death, Hitchens stated that "this was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time." However, Hitchens argued that

there was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

Mel Gibson

During an arrest for driving under the influence, Mel Gibson asked the arresting officer if he was Jewish and said that "fucking Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Hitchens criticised Gibson, stating,

Many conservative Jews, from David Horowitz to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, stuck up for Gibson as a man who defended family values against secular nihilism. I was just in the middle of writing a long and tedious essay, about how to tell a real anti-Semite from a person who too-loudly rejects the charge of anti-Semitism, when a near-perfect real-life example came to hand. That bad actor and worse director Mel Gibson, pulled over for the alleged offense of speeding and the further alleged offense of speeding under the influence, decided that he needed to demand of the arresting officer whether he was or was not Jewish and that he furthermore needed to impart the information that all the world's wars are begun by those of Semitic extraction. Call me thin-skinned if you must, but I think that this qualifies.

Daniel Pipes

Hitchens severely criticized Daniel Pipes, upon Pipes' nomination to the U.S. government-sponsored U.S. Institute of Peace. Hitchens expressed "bafflement" at this appointment in a Slate essay entitled "Daniel Pipes is not a man of peace". Hitchens claimed that Pipes "employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him," and that this contradicts the USIP's position as "a somewhat mild organization [...] devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict." Hitchens concluded his opposition to Pipes' nomination by claiming that Pipes "confuses scholarship with propaganda" and pursues "petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity."

Cindy Sheehan

Main article: Support and criticism of Cindy Sheehan § Criticism

In a column, Hitchens states that Cindy Sheehan "has obviously taken a short course in the Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis and has not succeeded in making it one atom more elegant or persuasive." Hitchens commented upon the allegation that Sheehan had told Nightline that her son "was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." However, Hitchens used the alleged statement to denounce Sheehan for allegedly positing a "Jewish cabal" and for attracting the support of David Duke.

International journalism

Hitchens spent part of his early career as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. In the past several years, he has continued journeying to and writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan.

Literary review

Hitchens regularly contributes literary reviews to the Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works. Works he has recently reviewed include Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie; Saturday by Ian McEwan; the D. J. Enright translation of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust; the Alfred Appel Jr. annotated version of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (whom he named as on a par with James Joyce); and John Updike's Terrorist.

Television appearances

Hitchens has appeared on mainstream news programs with greater regularity in recent years. His appearances have often been characterized as overtly polemical, and sometimes belligerent. While debating on the MSNBC program Hardball, Hitchens called an aide to Richard Armitage a "bitch." Similarly, while on Real Time with Bill Maher, he gave Maher's audience the finger while saying "f— you, f— you," after calling them frivolous for what he viewed as being too quick to applaud Maher's argument. Hitchens has also appeared on the Daily Show a number of times. This includes an August 25 2005 appearance to promote his book about Thomas Jefferson; however, he was primarily engaged in a heated debate with Jon Stewart over the legitimacy of invading Iraq for the duration of his appearance. Hitchens was interviewed for the May 23 2005 episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit! in which he questioned the accuracy of Mother Teresa's public image, saying "it must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century."

Praise for and criticism of Hitchens

Hitchens is the subject of considerable praise as well as severe criticism. In September 2005, Hitchens was named as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect magazine. An online poll was held which ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazine noted that Hitchens' (#5), Chomsky's (#1), and Abdolkarim Soroush's (#15) rankings were partly due to supporters publicizing the vote.

Prior to Hitchens' (perceived) ideological shift, the American writer Gore Vidal had declared Hitchens his dauphin or heir.

Some criticize Hitchens for his frequent television appearances and claim that he is egotistic and has changed his political views for personal gain. Among his most severe critics is one-time colleague and friend Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn has frequently alluded to Hitchens's tendency to tipple. On August 20, 2005, Cockburn wrote:

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is [— a] guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited [until] his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel.

Hitchens's reply is:

In a recent effusion in the Huffington Post, Cindy Sheehan repeats the lie that her letter to ABC News Nightline was doctored, and says that a colleague of hers inserted the offending words in furtherance of his own "anti-Semitic" agenda. If she regards her own words as anti-Jewish, it's not up to me to correct her. I have not said that she is anti-Jewish, only that she shows a sinister ineptness in handling the wild idea of a PNAC/JINSA pro-Sharon secret government in the United States. .

There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, but others believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.

Accusations of anti-Catholicism

In April 2005 William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights denounced Hitchens as an "anti-Catholic bigot". According to the Catholic League website, Hitchens admitted during a debate with Donohue:

"I might have to admit for debate purposes that when religion is attacked in this country that the Catholic Church comes in for little more than its fair share. I may say that I probably contributed somewhat to that and I am not ashamed of my part in it."

UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge claimed that Hitchens has participated in "anti-Catholicism ... the last form of bigotry respectable amongst the elite".

Tom Piatak in The American Conservative magazine labels Hitchens an "anti-Catholic bigot":

A straightforward description of all Hitchens’s anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine—he recently argued, in essence, that Judge Roberts should not be confirmed to the Supreme Court because he is Catholic—but his most disgusting, and revealing, anti-Catholic spasm was his reaction to the death of John Paul II, a man he dismissed as "an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long."

Disparaging Latter-Day Saint Comments

Hitchens is also notorious for his comments disparaging members of the Latter-Day Saint religion. Particularly prominent among such comments are those made to talk show host Hugh Hewitt following the ascension of Latter-Day Saint Harry Reid to the office of Senate Majority Leader. Following is an excerpt from the interview Hewitt conducted(HH is Hugh Hewitt;CH is Christopher Hitchens):

HH: And so, what do you think of Harry Reid?

CH: Oh, God. I mean, I just don't...where do we find such men? CH: A Mormon mediocrity, and extraordinary, sort of reactionary, nullity. HH: Now isn't that bigoted to say a Mormon mediocrity, Christopher Hitchens? CH: No, no. I'm always in favor of pointing out which cult people belong to. HH: You see, I think that is very, very harsh and offensive, but I will allow the Mormon listeners to call you on that. CH: No, he's a Smithite, for Heaven's sake. I mean, he believes that some idiot found gold plates buried in the ground. HH: But it is religious bigotry to call that out. And do you make similar comments... CH: No, it's not me who says he's a Mormon. Excuse me, it's he who says it. HH: I know that, but I still think... CH: I say that anyone who believes that stuff is an idiot. HH: I know you believe that, but isn't it sort of randomly bigoted to bring that out and throw it onto the table? CH: Not at all, no. It's essential to point out... HH: I disagree. CH: Especially at a time when people are always saying it's the Republican Party that's run by religious crackpots and nutbags. And it's very important to point out these people have a big foothold in the Democratic Party, too. HH: I think that's terribly religiously bigoted. I think that is up there with, like, saying about Jesse Jackson that he's African-American in the course of commenting on him. CH: Well, I don't really see how he could keep that a secret, how one could... HH: Well, it's not a secret that he's a Mormon. It's just sort of a random attack on a guy's faith. I don't like Reid at all, but...

CH: No, I think less of him because of the stupid cult of which he's a member. I would say the same if he was a Scientologist.

Honors

He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Personal

Family status

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.

Use of alcohol

A profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol -- and his prodigious literary output." . Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule." He noted that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind." The Guardian reports on remarks George Galloway made to Hitchens outside the US Senate, "'You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay...Your hands are shaking'...'You badly need another drink,' he added later, ignoring Mr Hitchens's questions and staring intently ahead". Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq...Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"

Ethnic identity

In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on April 14, 2002, Hitchens says he is Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother, Peter, took his new bride to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her nineties, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that her ancestors were Blumenthals from Poland . According to The Observer of 14 April 2002, Christopher "insists that he is Jewish," and explored the issue in depth in the title essay of his book Prepared for the Worst.

In a column he wrote for the Los Angeles Times on February 9, 2006, Hitchens wrote, "my grandmother told me as an adult that both she and my mother were Jewish, and it sent me looking for my forebears on the German-Polish border". Hitchens's brother, Peter, disputes that the brothers have significant Jewish ancestry and is a Christian.

Relationship with brother, Peter Hitchens

Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is also a journalist, author and critic. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London). Christopher denied having ever said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. However, after the birth of Peter's third child and some secret diplomacy by Peter, Christopher expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter Christopher and Peter gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved.

Religion

Despite professing atheism and publicly criticizing religion, Hitchens told an interviewer that he thinks all educated people should have a knowledge of the Bible. He also claimed to have instructed his children in religious history and that he encouraged his wife to hold a Seder dinner for their daughter.

Bibliography

As sole author

• 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Warner Twelve, ISBN 0446579807
• 2006 Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography, Books That Shook the World Series, Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84354-513-6
• 2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Eminent Lives/HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
• 2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
• 2003 A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, Plume Books
• 2002 Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell's Victory, Allen Lane
• 2002 The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Verso
• 2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books
• 2000. Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Verso
• 2000. No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, Verso
• 1995. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
• 1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports. Verso.
• 1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar Straus Giroux. (reissued 2004, with a new introduction, as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-592-7)
• 1989 Prepared for the Worst. Hill and Wang (US)/Chatto and Windus (UK).
• 1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (1988 US) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should they be returned to Greece? (Published with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns)
• 1984 Cyprus, Quartet, (revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso))

As co-author or editor

• 1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor and co-editor with Edward Said), Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4
• 1976 Callaghan: The Road to Number 10 , (with Peter Kellner), Cassell, ISBN 0-304-29768-2

As a contributor

• 2005 A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, Thomas Cushman (Editor). University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-24555-5

External links

Biographical

• Atlantic Monthly profile
• Christopher Hitchens Bio at Greater Talent Network (Speakers Bureau)
• NPR profile

• In-depth interview and profilein New York Magazine
• Interview with Brian Lamb for the show Booknotes, an author interview series on C-SPAN (some biographical information)

Hitchens's work

• The Christopher Hitchens Web, columns, articles, interviews, etc.
• Our war on fanaticism is just (SFgate.com)
• Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle: What's wrong with her Crawford protest (Slate.com)
• The case for mocking religion - Muhammad cartoon controversy (Slate.com)
• Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, March 2005, "Ohio's Odd Numbers"
• Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, 9 November 2004, "Kissinger Declassified"
• Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 21 June 2004, "Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore"
• Christopher Hitchens, Grand Street, Autumn 1985, "The Chorus And The Cassandra" - a defence of Chomsky's role in the Faurisson affair and the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge controversies, also reprinted in Prepared for the Worst, (1989) pp. 58-77.
• A few words of fraternal admonition to "Norm" Finkelstein, Hitchens's response to Finkelstein
• 'Galloway is a hot, blustering bully - but I'm staying on his case until the very end' (The Daily Telegraph)

Others

• Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling debate the merits of atheism on March 27, 2007
• Christopher Hitchens, Bob Graham, David Corn, Ruth Wedgwood - Were We Misled? A Debate on Pre-War Intelligence live recording of WNYC's Brian Lehrer show recorded in February 2006 at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, MP3 format
• Michael Kazin on Christopher Hitchens, Dissent (magazine)
• George Galloway vs. Christopher Hitchens, in The Independent, 16 September 2005
• "The Grapple in the Big Apple", by Alex Massie, National Review Online, September 16 2005
• "Galloway vs. Hitchens", by Louis Proyect, Counterpunch, September 16 2005
• Christopher Hitchens: Arguments for the war to liberate Iraq collected by the Center for Security Policy September 22 2005
• "Free Radical", interview in Reason by Rhys Southan
• "Christopher Hitchens, Literary Agent Provocateur", National Public Radio profile, 21 June 2006
• "Road To Baghdad", City Pages, November 20 2002
• The Hitch, Village Voice brief profile by John Giuffo, 1 February 2005
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger Google Video, 1 hr 19 min 41 sec
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger Official movie web site
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger at Internet Movie Database

Criticisms

• Fraternally yours, Chris, by Norman Finkelstein: criticizes Hitchens for perceived "opportunism"
• Dreams and Delusions, by Edward Said: pillories "expatriate British journalists in America" for "just racism at the bottom though, no matter how dressed up it is"
• O brother, where art thou? Peter Hitchens laments his brother's position on the Iraq War

• O Brother, Why Art Thou? Christopher Hitchens responds to his brother's criticism

• Christopher Hitchens' last battle, by Juan Cole
• Hitchens Backs Down, by Alexander Cockburn
• Christopher Hitchens Rants Again, by Daniel Pipes
• The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens, Monthly Review
• The Purest Neocon: Christopher Hitchens, an unreconstructed Bolshevik, finds his natural home on the pro-war Right. By Tom Piatak, American Conservative, October 10 2005
• Christopher Hitchens: Flickering Firebrand, Obelus.org
• 'Hitchens and Said' by Hugh Fitzgerald, February 21 2007