Posts tagged Christopher Hitchens
“”So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.
It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then. (Years later, when he took up the question of abortion again in Vanity Fair, he said basically the exact same things, using the same straw-women arguments. Time taught him nothing, because he didn’t want to learn.)
That was the bad side of Christopher—the moral bully and black-and-white thinker posing as daring truth-teller. It was the side that reveled in 9/11, because now everyone would see how evil the jihadis were, and that rejoiced in the thought that the Korans of Muslim fighters would not protect them from American bullets. Some eulogists have praised him for moral consistency, but I don’t see that: he wrote tens of thousands of words attacking Clinton for executing Ricky Ray Rector, but seemed untroubled about George W Bush’s execution of 152 people—at the time a historical record—as governor of Texas. He was so fuelled by his own certainty he claimed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only proved they were there.
Regarding Christopher | The Nation
I’m putting off writing about Hitchens until such time that I can write about him soberly, but this is one of the better remembrances of him that I’ve read.
“”There’s some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.
…Theocratic irrationality is not so uncommon that defeats like this are enough to render it unattractive. No doubt some braggarts will continue to tell instant opinion polls in the region that they regard him as a holy sheik or some such drivel. (Funny how those polls never picked up the local appetite for constitutional democracy.) With any luck, there will even be demented rumors that Bin Laden is not “really” dead. Fine: He’d probably already done the worst damage he was going to do. In anything describable as the real world, his tactics were creating antibodies and antagonists, or no longer matched observable conditions, or had at least hit diminishing returns. From Baghdad to Bali, it has been conclusively demonstrated that Bin-Ladenism is the cause of poverty, misery, and unemployment and not—as some know-nothings used to claim—a response to it.
Osama Bin Laden’s legacy: It will depend in part on what Obama does next. - By Christopher Hitchens
Well put. But let’s not forget that he was also indirectly responsible for giving you (Hitchens) the war you’d been craving for but lacked a pretext to initiate. So perhaps he shouldn’t be remembered with such contempt by neoconservatives and imperial madmen who so abundantly profited from his decade-long period of hiding.
This whole episode is riddled with so many ironies that one can scarcely be satisfied with what has actually taken place!
Hitchens has cancer
Christopher Hitchens posted a note today announcing that he’s indeed been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I’m very sorry to hear that he is ill. He is undoubtedly confronting a far more menacing enemy now, one that I’m certain many of us - no matter how opposed to Hitchens’s views we may be - can enlist in the battle against.
I had intended to post a picture of Hitchens taken by my wife at our departure gate at Boston’s Logan airport which showed him being taken away on a stretcher by EMT personnel, but I don’t find that to be in great taste any longer.
On Christopher Hitchens, Part II
Long before my previous post on Hitchens’s racist rant (NOTE: a rant can be racist without the person offering it necessarily being one; I don’t believe that Hitchens is a racist, but lately he seems to have adopted the vocabulary of one…)in the pages of The Guardian I had placed an order for his memoir, Hitch-22, and for Paul Berman’s equally much-talked-about takedown of Tariq Ramadan (and his liberal collaborators),The Flight of the Intellectuals. There are many good and bad reviews of both books, which any cursory search of the main dailies would yield (On Berman: Thomas Meaney reviews, and more and more and more andmore and more; On Hitchens: here,here, and here). To my great delight, both books serendipitously arrived at my doorstep the other day, and I’ve been sifting through both since.
I should say from the outset that I’m in no way of one mind about either of these authors. Hitchens’s views, as most people who read this space know, on the whole seem quite irritating and pedantic to me. This is not to say, however, that I find his polemics against Islamism and other varieties of religious bigotry totally thoughtless. To the contrary, I very much share his core belief about the absolute superiority of Enlightenment values over religious views - I’m a liberal-humanist of the most uncompromising sort, after all. This is why I’m in full agreement with his and Berman’s consistent critique of Tariq Ramadan’s views on the relationship between religion and society. Berman correctly devotes chunks of well-researched material to exposing unresolved (and ultimately unresolvable) tensions between Ramadan’s views on the family, education, gender, and authority and the core liberal-democratic values. (More on Berman at a later time)
My issue with Hitchens (and to a lesser extent Berman) stems largely from his now publicly revealed belief that somehow all this constitutes a kind of ‘clash of civilization’ (yes, that much-cited, severely impoverished thesis advanced by my late undergrad professor, Samuel Huntington). For contrary to what some have objected to in my last entry about the designation of Hitchens’s view by me as ‘racist’, I do very much believe that the attempt to speak of ‘civilizational superiority’ of any kind (as Hitchens did in the Guardian interview) points to underlying assumptions about who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are, what ‘our’ civilization contributes contra to ‘theirs’, etc. As I said in my previous post, ‘Islamofascism’ does not qualify as a civilization; so unless by ‘our civilization’ Hitchens meant ‘human civilization’ (in which case the designation would be meaningless since that would include everyone, including the Islamists), then he surely meant to infer something more sinister about Muslims as a whole. Hence the reference to Edward Said.
Now, leafing through Hitchens’s memoir I immediately noticed that it contains a whole chapter devoted strictly to his quarrel with Said. I jumped straight into it, and to my utter satisfaction found that indeed a nerve had been trampled upon! It’s quite apparent that Hitchens was deeply affected by the harsh treatment rendered to him by Said. He does not hold back and responds by accusing Said of having grown into an obstinate anti-Western intellectual near the end of his life after being diagnosed (‘liberated’, as in let loose, is the term Hitchens uses) with leukemia, and of being especially soft on Islamism. Of course, he produces no substantive rebuttals to Said’s charges. He merely mentions that he doesn’t take the charge lightly and that Said was supremely unfair to him in spite of the oodles of solidarity shown to him by Hitchens over the issue of Palestine. In other words, there is very little in the way of reflective thinking or dialogue when it comes to his explanation of just why his support of an illegal and violent campaign in the name of a ‘superior civilization’ does not constitute a racist mindset (as Said had charged). Surely, as a well-traveled former leftie (yes,vruz, he very much used to identify himself as being on the Left, and he does refer to it time and again in this memoir) he must know that radical Islam inhabits a rather arid and desolate island in the the much larger Arab and Muslim habitus. Surely he must know that liberal-humanist beliefs grow out of a desire for coexistence and critical dialogue, as opposed to a penchant for violence, mockery and ostracism.
Hitchens’s pugilistic posture, with all its assumptions about an enlightened, harmonious Western civilization at war with a violent, extremist Islamist civilization, in the end relies on too many straw men, too much animus, and way too much credulity for it to land a thoughtful blow. As a once resident of an intolerant, racist Islamist regime in Iran, I know too well (and at a great cost to me and my family) just what the pathologies of the Neanderthals on the other side sound and look like. Hitchens’s drunken outbursts, in their refusal to dispose with binary vocabularies and simplistic classifications, sound a little too much like the battle cries of the enemy to me. And if I may say so, no amount of verbal acrobatics can convince his old comrades and ordinary followers of the cause to which he has so lazily devoted himself.
“ Do I think our civilisation is superior? Yes, I do. Do I think it’s worth fighting for? Most certainly.”
Christopher Hitchens, The Guardian, Saturday 22 May 2010.
I read the article very carefully just to make sure that the racist rant offered up by ‘The Hitch’ was not selected out of context and hence unrepresentative of his overall point (if there was one). Alas, the little prick did mean it every bit as much as he meant to profess his love for Martin Amis for the millionth time!
There was a time when Hitchens’s defense of neoconservative policies was simply tragic, for at least one could rationalize away his grave misjudgments on Iraq and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’ as unfortunate instances of cloistered naivete. But this drivel… this is just naked racism, pure and simple.
Leaving aside the obvious questions about just what ‘our civilization’ is supposed to mean here (his and Amis’s, I presume - you know, the one populated with precocious little toads and frogs babbling away about their favorite whisky-induced wet dreams featuring this or that ‘cunt’ or ‘riffraff’), just who the hell figures as ‘the barbarian’ in this desolate imagination? It can’t just be the abstract figure of the ‘Islamofascist’ he is so fond of conjuring up since no one claims that to be a marker of civilization identity. It must be the whole of ‘them’ then; you know, those humorless, misogynistic, violent ‘Mooslems’. If that’s who we are supposed to be guarding our wet dreams against, then isn’t this a twisted first for a former leftie? I don’t want to be echoing that other thug George Galloway here, but surely Hitchens seems to have skipped the proto and gone straight for single malt fascism.
In the lead up to the Iraq war, the late Edward Said wrote a fiery column in the Egyptian weekly, Al Ahram, in which he indirectly accused Hitchens of being a racist. Said and Hitchens had a long friendship prior to this, and I remember thinking that perhaps being near the end of his life and irretrievably entrenched in his ‘late style’ Said was unfairly hyperbolic in his estimation. Here’s what he wrote:
“So let us not accept any longer the ideological demagoguery that leaves language and reality as the sole property of American power, or of so-called Western perspectives. The core of the matter is of course imperialism, that (in the end banal) self-assumed mission to rid the world of evil figures like Saddam in the name of justice and progress. Revisionist justifications of the invasion of Iraq and the American war on terrorism that have become one of the least welcome imports from an earlier failed empire, Britain, and have coarsened discourse and distorted fact and history with alarming fluency, are proclaimed by expatriate British journalists in America who don’t have the honesty to say straight out, yes, we are superior and reserve the right to teach the natives a lesson anywhere in the world where we perceive them to be nasty and backward. And why do we have that right? Because those woolly-haired natives whom we know from having ruled our empire for 500 years and now want America to follow, have failed: they fail to understand our superior civilisation, they are addicted to superstition and fanaticism, they are unregenerate tyrants who deserve punishment and we, by God, are the ones to do the job, in the name of progress and civilisation. If some of these fickle journalistic acrobats (who have served so many masters that they don’t have any moral bearings at all) can also manage to quote Marx and German scholars — despite their avowed anti-Marxism and their rank ignorance of any languages or scholarship not English — in their favour then how much cleverer they seem. It’s just racism at bottom though, no matter how dressed up it is.”
I learned long ago not to second-guess Said’s character judgments when it came to persons whom he knew intimately, but I didn’t quite share his verdict on Hitchens back then. How wrong was I.
