UPDATE In response to the outraged, my position is simple. The Iraq War killed hundreds of thousands and maimed millions. Dead or wounded included over a million children. Those who planned the Iraq war, including those who used media positions to propagandise for it, have lost entitlement to the signs of society’s respect.
The world will undoubtedly be a duller place without Christopher Hitchens. Oh, and a better one too.
British journalism is full of people of the same generationwho have lurched from the Trotskyist far left to a crazed neo-con agenda with no intervening period of sanity. I suspect the available riches for zionist propagandists are a major factor. Hitchens, Aaronovitch, Phillips, Cohen. You can probably think of others. A strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution.
Beautifully put and utterly correct. I used to enjoy his wit and irreverence. Then, almost quite suddenly, he turned into a pro-war anti-islamist neo-con who was utterly boring and predictable. I did not at all understand this transformation, particularly within the current political environment when most decent folk at around his age are moving to the left. But I think that you have hit the nail on the head in providing a sad but economically sound explanation.
Brilliant writer. You’re just jealous.
@John
“I did not at all understand this transformation”
You’ve never seen his brother, then?
What sort of an animal writes, on the morning of his death, that the world will be a better place without him?
Are you mentally ill?
@Lee
No.
Not sure if this a joke. Forgive me if it is, for I’m engaging with it at face value. By ‘available riches’, do you literally mean money and salary?
That argument seems difficult to sustain. While it’s obviously true that many Zionist individuals and organisations shape or control dialogue in a number of countries through their organised capital, public intellectuals can make a pretty decent living by ignoring the Middle East altogether (indeed, many do).
Further, why, when Hitchens was obviously a very smart guy, would it have taken him a couple of decades of getting paid to write and speak publicly to realise “Gosh, you get paid more if you take a neocon stance than if you defend human rights”? I think he, perhaps, might have realised this earlier?
There’s surely more to his – and the others you mention – transformation than money. We owe it to ourselves, and the ideas we believe in and which others have abandoned, to examine what the real factors for transformation might be.
You are entitled to your opinions, but I think I can say with a high degree of probability that more human beings will be inspired with the messages that Christopher Hitchens gave to the world than with your rather limp diatribes.
@Patrick Agreed. Shameful statement.
Patrick,
I think it is beyond doubt true that you will find that, on the various mornings of the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children, he was writing what a good thing the war was.
Craig, and since when did two wrongs make a right?
Patrick,
True, but if your point is no more than that it is seemly to wait a few days before expressing my view of the man, it is not such a strong one. Do you hold it as a universal principle? You must have been outraged by coverage of Gadaffi’s death?
‘You do not speak ill of the dead’ (My mother 1927-2009) Holds good in England and im sure it does in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but with accents.
Your very very wrong
Alan
I should be fascinated to know what things Hitchens said could be suggested as being widely regarded as “inspiring”!
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Gavin – it’s an interesting question. I’m not sure it’s a conscious process, since no-one would be that selfish in front of oneself, if I can put it that way. A proportion of people are enormously self-interested and avaricious, and so they move to a profitable political position, thin slice by thin slice. In their view, the process is so glacial it’s just a change of heart, or perhaps not even noticeable.
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At that point, the mass media – who are inclined in the direction of corporatism anyway – regard them as “acceptable polemic” and may fete them enormously. The Right is, for the most part, given a great deal more of an easier time than their Left-leaning counterparts, since when meeting journalists the former are amongst friends. As Craig says on another thread, Manning and Assange are not given an easy ride in the media – but Fox and Werrity are afforded substantial respect. And so the pattern holds, for an elite on the one side, and Official Enemies on the other.
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Whether this psychological process applies to Hitchens or not is debatable, but his supporters might acknowledge it as a possibility.
What’s insensitive isn’t that you’re writing too close to the man’s passing; it’s that you’re talking utter rubbish.
I should have mentioned also that journalists who take a strong line in favour of a particular war, should be held more to account for that view. As writers for Media Lens often discover, journalists with the most substantial right-wing blind-spots are sometimes outraged that someone wants to hold them to account – and the complainant is either verbally abused or ignored.
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Perhaps the impact of Hitchen’s strident views will be felt when the UK/US media can no longer go along with the line that Iraq is a free and democratic country in a better state than it was found. I don’t think they can keep that one up for very much longer, to be honest.
Alan
Not speaking ill of the dead is a superstition rooted in the fear they might do us harm. I quite genuinely am interested in an elaboration of it (I see so far several hundred of you have come here for a Telegraph thread). Plainly it was not held to apply to Gadaffi by the media – a man of whom let me clarify I held a much worse opinion than I do of Hitchens. Yet the dead are the dead and it would appear to be claiming to be a universal principle. Could some of you Telegraph readers explain when it applies and when it doesn’t? What is the criteria? English gentlefolk?
What is the collective noun for neo con trolls?
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I always enjoyed George Galloway taking Hitchens on when George could get a word in that is. Hitchens took up most of the preceding video and half of this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHW3PM_d7SM&feature=related
Gavin,
Rubbish, really? He wasn’t a Trotskyist? he didn’t move to the neo-con right? I await your explanation as to how someone can be held to be profoundly intellectually brilliant yet hold both such opinions. I regard both as extremist nonsense. My guess is you only view the former that way. But still, how can a “brilliant” man hold both in phases of adulthood?
Craig you are wrong about Aaronovitch he was a Stalinist and Phillips has always been a Labour member on the make.I knew Hitch when he was in IS brilliant but arrogant but I dont think he moved to the right for money he was doing fine on the left but he got caught up in the gunghopost 911 mood in the US
Hmm. A scatterbomb of trolls?
Mary,
They’re not trolls they are Telegraph readers harrumphing over the Oxford marmalade. Very busy link from the Telegraph. Upholding conventions which Hitchens, the radical atheist, despised.
Hugh,
sorry I mix my stalinists and trotskyists on occasion!! Thanks for the clarification.
@Hugh_Kerr – he was fine on the left, but got caught up in the “gung-ho post-9/11 mood”. If true, that would make him unprincipled, no?
What a truly unsupportable and deeply nasty comment from you, Mr Craig Murray. It is perfectly possible to disagree with Hitch on many things especially the Iraq war to liberal interventionism as a workable concept deserving of support. What is so disappointing about your comment is that you display such ignorance of so much in your sweeping dismal and a complete lack of literary good taste. Hitch was indeed the Orwell of our time. And he was an honest to goodness seeker of the truth who did not suffer fools gladly; but nor was he some Zionist shill either. What an ugly charge. Show us the evidence for this or retract it if you have any honour.
I understand your point on his shift to the right but feel it’s an oversimplification to identify him only in that sense.
I wouldnt say he was unprincipled about the war just wrong! but he was right about many other things including Kissinger the Clintons Mother Teresa and religion and a brilliant polemicist
I support Craig’s honesty, although being less forthright than him I probably would not have added the “better place” line.
Time to remember the Not The 9 O’Clock News politicians sketch…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T17VzztS60M
Mr Murray,
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By now I think you use the word “Zionist” as nothing more than a pejorative to those whose politics you deplore. It does have a true meaning, y’know! And if anything, even unto death, Hitchens was not a Zionist. In fact, he was pretty vehemently anti-Zionist.
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He did become a bit neo-con as even he admitted though.
Purely respect for the dead. Should always hold true. The same as taking off your hat or saluting a hearse when it drives by. Even if you have no idea who the deceased was. It matters no a jot the historic context or how deep seated in folk law the act is.
Oh and I have not come from the Telegraph site and consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be wrong.
And yes i can feel sadness at the passing of Col Gadaffi. The manner of his death was beyond belief.
@Angry – is it possible in the context of US politics to be a neo-con but not a zionist? It’d be great to see some folks on the American hard right denouncing zionism, but I’m not aware of any.