Farewell to a Young Contrarian
The writer, journalist, polemicist and contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, has died at the age of 62, after a long battle with esophageal cancer. Ordinarily I leave obituaries of people I respect and admire to those who possess a greater gift for writing than I, however Christopher Hitchens was such an important figure to me I feel I should voice my thoughts on the great man. I won’t plaster this piece with dates and facts, if you wish to know a full account of his life they appear in various forms across the internet on this sad day. I only wish to explain why he was important, not just to me, but to anyone who cares about the issues that concern society as a whole.
Hitchens was a master of the English language, an astute scholar, a lover of literature, a devout humanist and a vehement critic of religion. His concise yet eloquent articles bore a style often imitated but never matched, and his life-long love of the English language gave his debates and frequent appearances as a television pundit a poetic quality that was, at one and the same time, both hypnotically beautiful, and scathingly critical.
Such was his ability to articulate an argument, he routinely made lesser minds seem incredibly foolish without realising they had lost the debate before uttering a word. No more apparent was this than during his debate in November 2010 (while severely ill) with former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Arguing against the proposition ‘Religion is a force for good’, Hitchens reduced a man, regarded in some quarters as one of the greatest politicians of recent history, to a meek and bumbling fool, desperately attempting to sidestep the gaping chasms in his own argument. As the author Martin Amis put it, “Christopher’s most memorable rejoinders, I have found, linger, and reverberate, and eventually combine, as chess moves combine”.
The very embodiment of contrarianism, Hitchens was no stranger to controversy. At a young age he felt affinity with the burgeoning counterculture movement, associating with Trotskyist groups such as the International Socialists (with which he was a member from 1966 to 1976), and openly criticising the Vietnam War and the policies of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (a man whom Hitchens accused of numerous war crimes including the illicit bombing of civilians in Laos and Cambodia at the tail end of the Vietnam War).
After enjoying an extended period as a darling of the Left (to the point that revered American author Gore Vidal spoke of Hitchens as his heir or ‘dauphin’), Hitchens made a political shift to the Right after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Disillusioned with the inability, or reluctance, of American Liberals to confront the religious fanaticism that led to the attacks, he threw his support behind the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens had for a long time become critical of “excuse making” on the left and the deification of political correctness that led to his peers shying away from supporting his close friend, the author Salman Rushdie. A staunch misotheist from an early age, Hitchens grew increasingly impatient with Liberal society’s refusal to confront the innate fascism, intolerance, bigotry and ignorance of organised religion, and even after switching allegiances to the Right, he was a vocal critic of the fundamentalist Christian attitudes of the Bush Administration.
His criticism of religion led him to openly attack several sacred cows, including Mother Theresa (“She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction”) and The 14th Dalai Lama. His criticisms extended to the political bastions of the new Left, including Noam Chomsky and the ‘demagogue’ Michael Moore (“Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities”).
Despite seeming at odds with both ends of the political spectrum, Hitchens remained in essence a Socialist in the Internationalist sense. His love for Socialism led him often to use the term rather than ‘Liberal’, even when appearing on Fox News, who viewed the word as synonymous with ‘Nazism’. In recent years he had returned to the Left of American politics, mainly due to the horror he felt when confronted with the post-Bush descent into madness that now consumes the Republican Party.
Hitchens love affair with alcohol and tobacco may have been the cause of his untimely death, yet even at the end he regretted nothing, and one can’t help but feel that without these vices, he wouldn’t have been the Christopher Hitchens we knew and loved. One such quote on the subject, taken from his touching tribute to Hunter S. Thompson sums up his attitude to ‘the finer things in life’ – ‘Stepping off the ski lift, I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition. What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. “Sir, that would be inappropriate.” In what respect? “At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level.” In that case, I said, make it a double.’
Hitchens’ views on politics was one of the leading factors that contributed to me studying the subject at University, and his countless articles and books on the nature of American foreign policy in Latin America led me to investigate the subject for my dissertation. His views on Religion helped shape the way I look at the current state of human society, and fed my healthy distrust for all things spiritual. For this and countless other reasons I am eternally grateful for Christopher Hitchens.
I’ll close with a quote from the man himself:
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
Christopher Hitchens - 1949-2011
