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Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a prominent intellectual and journalist whose political views have been expressed in his prolific writings on American and international politics.

First principles

Alexander Linklater has summarized Hitchens' intellectual outlook as follows:

One of old strongholds the 17th-century contest between king and parliament of the English civil war. For Hitchens, the Cromwellian revolt represents not just the foundational struggle for parliamentary rule, but the great rejection of divine right. ... But he is no optimistic Enlightenment rationalist. He identifies himself with Thomas Paine's disillusion at the French terror, and Rosa Luxemburg's famous warning to Lenin about the inexorability of one-man rule. He retains, however, from his Marxist youth an intellectual absolutism and a disdain for liberal dilemmas and trade-offs—hence a brutal assault on Isaiah Berlin's genteel liberalism in a 1998 essay. He is incurious about what religious belief feels like, or what meaning it has for millions of people—even though, unlike his co-anti-religionist Richard Dawkins, Hitchens concedes that religious feeling is ineradicable.

Marxism

Hitchens became a Marxist and a Trotskyist in his teens, beliefs that further developed during his time at Oxford University. In the 1960s Hitchens joined the left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He became a socialist "largely the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire".

But by 2001, Hitchens had disavowed socialism, declaring "capitalism is the only revolutionary system". In the same year he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist". Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalization as "innovative and internationalist". He suggested that he had returned to his early, pre-socialist libertarianism, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral authoritarians. Although by 2004 he described himself as "a recovering ex-Trotskyite", in a 2006 debate he remarked that "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".

Hitchens, as recently as 2009, again referred to himself as "a Marxist". Hitchens continued to affirm his respect for Marxist theory, including his 2009 article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx". There he explains how Marx's economic analysis in Das Kapital has predicted many of the failures of the U. S. economy, including the late-2000s recession. In a June 2010 interview with The New York Times, he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist". He continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men, and the Bolsheviks' October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia.

The American Revolution

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After his disenchantment with socialism, Hitchens increasingly emphasized the centrality of the American Revolution in his political philosophy. As early as 2002 Hitchens wrote that "as the third millennium gets under way, and as the Russian and Chinese and Cuban revolutions drop below the horizon, it is possible to argue that the American revolution, with its promise of cosmopolitan democracy, is the only ‘model’ revolution that humanity has left to it".

Islamism

Hitchens was deeply shocked by 14 February 1989 fatwa against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie. He became increasingly critical of what he called "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic 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 Hitchens himself denied 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 the September 11 attacks, 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, accusing him of being a rapist and a liar. Hitchens also claimed that the missile attacks by Clinton on Sudan constituted a war crime.

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

Republicanism in the United Kingdom

Hitchens was a vocal supporter of Republicanism in the United Kingdom, in 1990 publishing the book-long polemic The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. During a debate with George Galloway in 2005, Hitchens revealed that he was "a lifelong supporter of the reunification of Ireland," and was critical of Galloway's opposing views on the war, as well as his "insulting" attitude towards the U.S. Senate. Many times, when discussing "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland, Hitchens would refer to their location as simply "Ireland", rather than "Northern Ireland", as for example in an article written for Slate in 2007, discussing the power-sharing and devolved government in Northern Ireland and describing it as "an agreement to divide the spoils of Ireland's six northeastern counties". During the I. R. A. bombing campaigns on the British mainland, which began in the nineteen-seventies, Hitchens claimed that he had “kept two sets of books: I didn’t like bombs, I didn’t like the partition of Ireland. ”

Bosnian war

Hitchens cited the Bosnian war as something that monumentally changed his views on military intervention and that he for the first time found himself on the side of the neoconservatives. In an interview with Johann Hari he said:

"That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested. "

Hitchens argued that the choice in Yugoslavia was between a multi-ethnic plural democracy led by Muslim president Alija Izetbegović in Bosnia and a fascistic, nationalistically inspired ethnically-cleansed state driven by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević. He called Milošević a fascist and a "national-socialist", and considered the Croatian nationalist president Franjo Tudjman "equally detestable". In God Is Not Great, he wrote that the crimes of the Roman Catholic Croatian neo-fascists during this period are "often forgotten". He was highly critical of Western inaction against Christian Orthodox Serbian and Roman Catholic Croatian nationalism in protection of the Muslim Bosnians, partially blaming this on the Clinton administration and specifically Hillary Clinton.

"In effect, the extremist Catholic and Orthodox forces were colluding in a bloody partition and cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were, and still are, largely spared the public shame of this, because the world's media preferred the simplification of "Croat" and "Serb, " and only mentioned religion when discussing "the Muslims. " But the triad of terms "Croat, " "Serb, " and "Muslim" is unequal and misleading, in that it equates two nationalities and one religion. (The same blunder is made in a different way in coverage of Iraq, with the "Sunni-Shia-Kurd" trilateral.)"

Abortion

Hitchens stated that " unborn child seems to me to be a real concept. It's not a growth or an appendix, You can't say the rights question doesn't come up. I don't think a woman should be forced to choose, or even can be. " Although holding a personal anti-abortion position, Hitchens opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade, stating, "that will make abortion more like a contraceptive procedure than a surgical one. That's the Hitchens plank, and I think it's a defensible one. " Hitchens believed that a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", supporting the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believing in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether. He strongly criticized the encouragement of sexual abstinence within the pro-life movement of the Christian Right.

Genital integrity

Hitchens was a notable genital integrity activist, strongly criticizing the tradition of both male circumcision and female circumcision. In collaboration with his antitheism, Hitchens described the tolerance of sucking blood from the penis after the removal of the male foreskin as "another disgusting religious practice".

Waterboarding

Following five years of defending the US practice of waterboarding prisoners of war, Hitchens was asked by Vanity Fair to experience waterboarding for himself at a U.S. Army training facility. In May 2008, Hitchens voluntarily underwent the procedure. Hitchens stopped the procedure after 11 seconds and subsequently endorsed the view that it was "torture". He concluded "if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture. "

Drug use

Hitchens has called for the abolishment of the "war on drugs", which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley. Hitchens favored the legalization of cannabis for both recreational and medicinal purposes, and said "Marijuana is a medicine. I have heard and read convincing arguments and had convincing testimony from real people who say that marijuana is a very useful medicine for the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and for glaucoma. To keep that out of the reach of the sick, it seems to me, is sadistic. "

Civil liberties

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

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 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.

Religion

At the New York Public Library in May 2007, Hitchens debated the Reverend Al Sharpton on the issue of theism and anti-theism, giving rise to a memorable exchange about Mormonism in particular.

In God is not Great, Hitchens contended that,

above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman . This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.

Hitchens was accused of "anti-Catholic bigotry" by others, including Brent Bozell and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge. When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was “consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics”, Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that “all religious belief is sinister and infantile”.

In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition. " In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part. "

On 4 April 2009, Hitchens debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig at Biola University on the topic "Does God Exist?" before both a live and closed circuit audience of over 15,000.

Middle East conflicts

The conflicts in the mideast and ideological war between Islam and the western world prompted Hitchens's most hawkish stance, which was against Muslim terrorism. While this was part of his much more general anti-theism, he attracted many critics.

In February 2009 he was physically attacked on Hamra St., West Beirut, after scribbling “No, no, FUCK the SSNP” on a sign erected by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party commemorating party member Khalid Alwan, who killed two Israeli soldiers there in the Wimpy café during the Israeli occupation of Beirut. He was able to escape, with relatively minor injury, to the Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel.

Israeli−Palestinian conflict

Hitchens 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. " He went further, saying "Zionism is a form of Bourgeoisie Nationalism" when debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis at a Town hall function in Pennsylvania " Hitchens supported Israel's right to exist, but 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.

On 14 November 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).

Hitchens earlier had collaborated on this issue with Edward Said, publishing the 1988 book Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.

Historical views on Saddam Hussein

In July 2007, the New Statesman printed selected portions of a 1976 piece by Hitchens which they claimed "took a more admiring view of the Iraqi dictator" than his later strong support for ousting Saddam Hussein.

"An Arab country with the second largest proven oil reserves, a fierce revolutionary ideology, a large and recently-blooded army, and a leadership composed almost entirely of men in their thirties is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Iraq, which has this dynamic combination and much else besides, has not until recently been very much regarded as a power. But with the new discussions in OPEC, the ending of the Kurdistan war and the new round of fighting in Lebanon, its political voice is being heard more and more. The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussein — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser. "

He also described the means through which the Baathist regime rose to power as similar to that of Iran: having crushed any political dissent and notions of an independent Kurdish state.

"In their different crusades, both Iraq and Iran take a distinctly unsentimental line on internal opposition. Ba’ath party spokesmen, when questioned about the lack of public dissent, will point to efforts made by the party press to stimulate criticism of revolutionary shortcomings. True enough, there are such efforts, but they fall rather short of permitting any organised opposition. The argument then moves to the claim, which is often made in Iraq, that the country is surrounded by enemies and attacked by imperialist intrigue. Somewhere in the collision between Baghdad and Tehran on this point, the Kurdish nationalists met a very painful end. "

Kurdistan

Hitchens was a longtime observer of the cruelty of Saddam Hussein, and had spoken publicly for his removal since 1998. He spoke in favour of political autonomy, if not full independence, for the Kurdish people.

"During the many years I spent on the Left, the cause of self-determination for Kurdistan was high on the list of principles and priorities – there are many more Kurds than there are Palestinians and they have been staunch fighters for democracy in the region.

He also consistently wore a lapel pin with the Flag of Kurdistan on it, to show his solidarity with the Kurds.

9/11 and its aftermath

Following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. On 24 September and 8 October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation. Chomsky responded and 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, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues. This highly charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky. Hitchens was also severely criticized by Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist and Hitchens's former friend. Citing Hitchens's support for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, as well as Hitchens's critique of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, Finkelstein called Hitchens a "model apostate, " a "dirt bag, " and a "showboat run amuck" who is "dying for the camera. "

Hitchens strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan, particularly in his "Fighting Words" columns in Slate. Hitchens had been a long term contributor to The Nation, where bi-weekly he wrote his "Minority Report" column.

Iraq War

Hitchens' employment of the term "Islamofascist" and his support for the Iraq War caused Hitchens's critics to label him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refused to embrace this designation, insisting, "I'm not any kind of conservative". In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. He was also known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".

Pre-war American and British Intelligence
In a variety of articles and interviews, Hitchens asserted that British intelligence was correct in claiming that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, and that US envoy Joseph Wilson had been dishonest in his public denials of it. He also 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.

On 19 March 2007, Hitchens asked himself whether Western intelligence sources should have known that Iraq had "no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. " In his response, Hitchens stated that

he entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for material that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for — has in fact never accounted for — a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?

Abu Ghraib
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. " Hitchens continued by stating that he

could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day.

Haditha
In a 5 June 2006 article on the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U. S. 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.

References

1. Alexander Linklater, “Christopher Hitchens”, Prospect, Issue 146, May 2008
2. Rhys Southan from the November 2001 issue. "Free Radical – Reason Magazine". Reason.com. Retrieved 18 December 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
3. Rhys Southan from the November 2001 issue. ""Free Radical", Reasononline, from November 2001 print edition". Reason.com. Retrieved 18 December 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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5. http://www.youtube.com/v/K6rRA64f9ug&hl=en&fs=1
6. 2009, April,
7. Hitchens, Christopher (2002), Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books, pg 105
8. Applebaum, Anne (4 February 2006). "Cartoon Debate". Slate.com. Retrieved 18 December 2011.
9. William Safire (2006).) Y0ImhUQ1Gh4J:www.iht. com/articles/2006/10/01/news/edsafire. php+safire+islamofascism&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=4 "Islamofascism Anyone?" The New York Times, Language section. 1 October 2006. Retrieved 25 November 2006.
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26. Pro-life Atheists
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29. Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded (VANITY FAIR) 2 July 2008.
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38. Hood, John Hollowed Be Thy Name Miami Sun Post
39. Scarborough County Transcripts for 12 March 2004
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52. Blaming bin Laden First 4 October 2001
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54. "A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky: Minority Report". Humanities. psydeshow.org. Retrieved 18 December 2011.
55. Reply to Hitchens's Rejoinder 4 October 2001
56. Taking Sides 26 September 2002
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63. Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Fukuyama", Slate 1 March 2006.
64. Rybczynski, Witold (10 April 2006). "Wowie Zahawie". Slate. Retrieved 18 December 2011.
65. Landsburg, Steven E. (17 April 2006). "Clueless Joe Wilson". Slate. Retrieved 18 December 2011.
66. Slate: So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?
67. ^ "A War To Be Proud Of" 5 September 2005
68. The Hell of War 5 June 2006