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.
Frankly I am sick of the creeps the likes of that booze sodden blackguard C. Hitchens, who aided and abetted the mass murder in Iraq, in his cheerleader-ship; harrumphing the worst kind of pricks whom will shit themselves if a car back fired from afar around these, but are always all too ready to order the troops into battle, to divert the taxation funds into the bank accounts of the various wankers set as oligarchs/military industrial complex.
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Further, the demise of his kind of specimen, makes me somewhat religious; wishing that there is a hell, and an after life, so the bastard can get a good roasting and a good kicking in for his crimes against humanity.
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So far as the indignations about this line of thought goes, I have one answer; go fuck yourselves in a mirror.
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?
Craig,
As a principle, I don’t think it is appropriate to say that the world is a better place, on the morning that a man (with grieving children, who can access the internet and see your comments) has died. I do think it is appropriate to hold back for a reasonable amount of time before spewing your opinions on the man. It is a question of respect, and a question of decency. The honourable thing for you to do now would be to apologise and retract your comments.
I don’t see the relevance at all of Gadaffi here.
Patrick
I feel I have to object to the sentiment of this blog entry. The crux of Craig’s argument is that Christopher Hitchens had “a strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution” from which you “suspect the available riches for zionist propagandists are a major factor” and hence that the world will be a better place without him in it.
In your opinion the charge of “intellectual prostitution” leading to the idea will be a better place with those who practice it dead.
Having read Christopher Hitchens autobiography and many articles and seen him in various debates and interviews, I came to the conclusion that his position was based on his own considered judgement, and his position of being stridently anti-totalitarian and pro-freedom of speech. This being the case, this then clears Hitchens of the charge of “intellectual prostitution”.
My own opinion is that your loosely founded argument is a substitute for your view that Hitchens’ support for the war, a war in which many people died and from which a situation arose in which many more people died, was the wrong thing to do, and the world would be a better of place if those who did that were dead. You may affirm or deny this claim, but I would ask you to be sincere in your reasoning.
Finally the sibling rivalry is over and I’m not mourning. This spat news is merely pushed up the agenda to take up valuable news tiome from the real issues, i.e. the Fox Werritty, Gould conspiracy to attack Iran.
The BBC are cowards and bootlickers for acting up to these neocon warmongers, occupy them, b….x to their consultation.
I agree with Craig entirely on this one.
Hitchens in all of his writings came across as a vainglorious, unprincipled, loathsomely self-obssessed arse. As for being right about Kissinger and the Clintons. Gee, really? I had no idea about Kissinger or the Clintons until Hitchens came along and the scales fell from my eyes!
Without his continued propagandising for the neocon lunatics that now hold sway over the USA (yes, that includes the supremely craven Obama, who has proved himself the equal of any neocon agenda) the world is indeed a better place.
And as for not speaking ‘ill of the dead’. What utter bollocks.
My position is simple. 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.
Craig, then that makes you just as bad as Christopher Hitchens.
ingo,
Your German mind has worked it out.
A petulant and sulking Nick Clegg –the Madame Fifi of British politics – could not bring himself to attend the Commons this week to listen to the Prime Minister’s statement on the historic use of Britain’s EU veto.
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UK now has been afforded the “observer status” (basically look but don’t touch of kind of arrangement), Clegg says nothing, but has come out talking about the dearly departed C, Hitchens, and his encyclopedic knowledge. Evidently Clegg was a fact checker for the articles written by him. The zionist gate keepers would like to debate their agenda, regardless of the actualities, and events unfolding around the world.
As far as I am concerned George Galloway nailed it with his description, “a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”. At the time I admired “popinjay” as a non-blasphemous, non-scatological term of belittlement. Since then I have come to see that it was meticulously accurate: like the more familiar “weathervane”, it means someone whose opinions swing erratically around through the entire circle of the compass.
As for Patrick’s horror at any public criticism of the recently dead, isn’t that an example of precisely the kind of superstition that Mr Hitchens himself mercilessly castigated – for example, in “God is not Great”? Note that there is no gratuitous or spiteful exaggeration in “drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”: every single word is factually correct.
I’m not sure I would necessarily go along with Craig’s view that the world is a better place without Mr Hitchens. Surely he was entertaining – to those who appreciated his particular brand of zany opinionated argument – and did little or no harm to those who simply ignored him.
Of course I am feel compassion for Mr Hitchens’ family and friends, and I appreciate that he was – as Alan Campbell was quick to insist – a “brilliant writer”. But what shall it avail a man to have a wonderful gift of articulacy, fluency, and persuasiveness if he uses it to advance opinions that eventually come full circle and contradict each other? Isn’t such a communicator ultimately a confusing time-waster? What did he really believe, and how would he really advise others to behave? It’s hard to look at Hitchens’ lifetime opus and come to any reliable conclusions at all, except that he liked airing his views and being paid for doing so.
Patrick,
It makes me as unfettered by convention and outspoken as Christopher Hitchens. Whether that is good or bad is another question.
There is a eulogy for him on the BBC website. Straight out of Vanity Fair at the beginning, just like them quoting Werritty’s Spectator article the other day.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16212418
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Interesting that Clegg once worked for him.
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Oesophageal cancer is a very unpleasant disease. My father died from it but at a later age than Hitchens and he did not drink heavily as Hitchens was reputed to do. But I weep no tears at all for Hitchens when I remember how he used his platform to proselytize for unjust and illegal actions like the Iraq war.
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Do you remember this toe curling stuff too? {http://keeptonyblairforpm.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/blair-vs-hitchens-full-transcript-munk-debate-religion/}
Hitchens was a journalist who learned from what he observed, not just in London and Washington but in more than 60 countries.
Yes, more points of reference than a diplomat.
Try to break outside the group think.
Hitchens took issue with his former fellow travellers. That requires more courage than letting your views evolve with the fashions of a small metropolitan bubble.
Get close to the ground (closer than you get as a diplomat), have the courage to expel yourself from your social circle, throw off the trappings and customs of your clan, lose yourself in a hostile crowd, challenge your premises.
And like Hitchens, you’ll find your perspective changes.
That will make you a more rounded human being, though not necessarily a better writer.
Post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens was a loathsome creature:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp
I mistakenly retweeted this presuming it was honoring Hitchens before I read it. Clearly foolish of m
Hitchens was more than just a supporter of the Iraq war. He was a vehement anti tyrant and was in no way a Zionist.
Incidentally I agree that all tyrants deserve was Saddam received, I disagree on the “collateral damage” aspect. Just as I disagree on the wanton terror bombing of German civilians. If I wished the world to be rid of those who disagree about allied bombing of German civilians. We’d be pretty sparsely populated.
Hitchens had many great things to say. As a prominent atheist no doubt enlightening many with his writing he undoubtedly has been a force for good, and if you believe as I do that a world.filled with atheists is a.more peaceful world, a force towards peace to some extent.
You can’t just cherry pick the Iraq war in a vacuum and pretend he never did anything else. Ans use that as a justification to say the world is a better place without him.
To all those saying that special respect should be afforded on the day of someone’s death. I’m fairly sure Hitchens would think your an arse.
See what you mean Craig.
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333 Comments so far….!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/christopher-hitchens-obituary?intcmp=239
I think that those saying, “please respect the dead!” have little understanding of who Hitchens was. For a start, he had no respect for the dead himself, as anyone who watched his gloatfest over Jerry Falwell’s death will remember. Secondly, he probably wouldn’t consider it “respectful” to start uttering platitudes and homilies to him now that he’s dead. He would probably think it disgusting.
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Anyway, I always thought him entertaining even when I sometimes massively disagreed with him. But I think that this video of him debating some wooly-headed rabbis is him at his absolute best:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbBVB66DC5k
This is what Hitchens wrote on the death of Jerry Falwell, “It is a shame that there isn’t a hell for him to go to. We have been rid of an extremely dangerous demagogue who lived by hatred of others and prejudice.”
Do as you would be done by.
As for his Zionism, after 9/11 Hitchens dropped his support for the Palestinians like the proverbial hot brick. He then went on to attack Edward Said as he lay dying.
What a piece of work!
Mr Murray, as it happens I wish you hadn’t pussied out by making that update.
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Hitchens knew more than anyone what it was to debate ruthlessly and if his fan-boys and fan-girls don’t get that then they were far too soft for him anyway.
Wrong link.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/8960100/Christopher-Hitchens-dies-aged-62.html
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The Guardian’s obit by Peter Wilby allows no comments. Scared of what might come out of the woodwork?
Similar stuff in the Mail. Only 111 comments, so far…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2074866/Writer-Christopher-Hitchens-dies-aged-62-battle-cancer.html
Craig, with you 100%. This is not the time for hypocracy. Soon he wont be news.
Hitchens excused the inexcusable. He choose, in full knowledge, to be on the side of the mass murder and have innocent blood on his hands. Only he knows why but now he faces judgment.
The coordinated attack on you was a predictable development.
If Hitchens was a zionist he had a funny way of showing it:
“I am an Anti-Zionist. I’m one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians.”*
I believe he was wrong about Iraq too–but I think he was also sickened by the hypocrisy of those on the left who refused to oppose fascism with an Islamic face.
I mourn the loss of someone who stood up for intellectual argument in the public sphere. We have far too few of them. You are one Craig, he was another. How many others can we all name? The fact that intellectuals do not always agree is kinda sorta the point, no?
*Walter Hölbling; Klaus Rieser-Wohlfarter (2004). What is American?: new identities in U.S. culture. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 351–. ISBN 9783825877347.
‘My position is simple. 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.’
Very succinct and very reasonable. The more DT readers you have given apopleptic seizures to the better, Craig.
“Only he knows why but now he faces judgment.”
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No, he doesn’t. He’s dead.
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“The coordinated attack on you was a predictable development.”
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What “coordinated attack” are you talking about?
It’s hilarious to read the standard old-wives BS regarding the dead even in this strange, 19th, 21st century. I couldn’t stand the self-righteous popinjay when he was alive so I’m suppose to, now he’s dead, not think it or say it. I didn’t care he was alive and don’t care he’s dead nor did I ever think he was creative or insightful. He followed the pathology, recently noted in the letters section of the LRB by Pankaj Mishra in reply to a letter from celebrity historian Neil Ferguson, “… among intellectuals once identified by Orwell: ‘the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible’ “. And the bowing and scrapping I did say, I think, is usually done for money, fake honours and ego.
All this post demonstrates is your bad taste, profound ignorance and increasing detachment from reality.
Jon: @Angry – is it possible in the context of US politics to be a neo-con but not a zionist?
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Hi Jon, thanks for the question.
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The answer is, yes. It is possible to be a neo-con but not a Zionist.
“Frankly I am sick of the creeps the likes of that booze sodden blackguard C. Hitchens, who aided and abetted the mass murder in Iraq, in his cheerleader-ship; harrumphing the worst kind of pricks whom will shit themselves if a car back fired from afar around these, but are always all too ready to order the troops into battle, to divert the taxation funds into the bank accounts of the various wankers set as oligarchs/military industrial complex.”
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This.+1
Craig – why didn’t you have the intellectual honesty to attack Christopher Hitchens while he was alive and able to defend himself but only now do so when he is dead and unable to respond to your accusation of “intellectual prostitution”???
Is such behaviour the sign of a man of honour or a whore?