I see no reason to say anything good about Christopher Hitchens on the occasion of his passing. Had you or I come to his notice, he probably would not have said anything good about us. Two observations:
1. The gloppiest eulogies have come from right-wingers like Michelle Malkin. Quite an accomplishment for a former Nation contributor.
2. I hated Hitchens before hating Hitchens was cool. Back in the 1980s, I let my subscription to The Nation lapse and swore never to purchase another copy as long as Hitchens and Cockburn remained on staff.
(Is Cockburn still there?)
If George Orwell (another writer who made an ethically dubious rightward shift) were alive -- and if he had returned to his older, better self -- he would advise you not to mourn Chris Hitchens. Mourn the 1,500,000 Iraqis who died in the evil war that Hitchens championed.
Update: Anna Wintour -- dropping enough names to overload even a king-sized push broom -- eulogizes her friend "Hitch" here. The problem with the left is that, for far too long, its intellectual leaders have been writers who feel comfortable hanging out with debauched, arrogant one-percenters like Anna Wintour. That is over.
9 comments:
Afuckingmen.
Least anyone forgets how he earned his nickname "Snitchens"
http://www.counterpunch.org/1999/06/15/hitch-the-snitch/
And now, as a Judas and a snitch, Hitchens has made the big time. OnFebruary 5, amid the embers of the impeachment trial, he trotted along to Congress and swore out an affidavit that he and his wife, Carol Blue, had lunch with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal last March 19 and that Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. Since Blumenthal had just claimed in his deposition to the House impeachment managers that he had no idea how this linking of the White House stalker stories had started, Hitchens’ affidavit was about as flat a statement as anyone could want that Blumenthal has perjured himself, thus exposing himself to a sentence of up to five years in prison. "
And that was before he supported W's war on Iraq.
Oh god. I had forgotten about the Blumenthal-Clinton thing.
Clinton will be remembered as the best president since FDR. And Hitchens will be recalled as a worm-riddled dog pooh stain on the sidewalk of American punditry.
If this defunct miscreant had been born with less intellect, and with far less opportunity to display his prodigious gift, I am sure he would have become a serial killer.
Hitchens was, IMHO, a flat-out sociopath who believed in no cause higher than inflicting pain on others. In his salad days he sought to wound only the privileged class and empire from which he sprang, but in midlife he tired of verbally eviscerating such easy prey and sought new targets on which to pounce -- via betrayal.
Such a talent, but eventually besotted by an overwhelming taste for malevolence. What now surprises me is that he didn't fake a "deathbed conversion," one that would be later discredited by his publisher releasing a videotaped deposition revealing the sham -- just to viciously tweak the noses of all those sincere Christians who were actually praying for him.
Peter Renfrew
I think it is a human nature to feel something when some one dies. I used to hate him so bad but when I read he died.....
Dreadful man.
But De mortuis nihil nisi bonum
So, let's see ~ the one good thing he did was to leave the UK, thus clearing his stench from that fair land of my birth.
There was one good thing. From "The Case Against Henry Kissinger":
"In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they privately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and the electoral strategy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic 'worked,' in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign. In another way, it did not "work," because four years later the Nixon Administration tried to conclude the war on the same terms that had been on offer in Paris. The reason for the dead silence that still surrounds the question is that in those intervening years some 20,000 Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point. The impact of those four years on Indochinese society, and on American democracy, is beyond computation. The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger."
http://bit.ly/uiGUma
Kissinger and Nixon broke the law in this maneuver, and we wouldn't have known about it for many more years if it hadn't been for Hitchens.
Not that the revelation did us much good--neither Nixon nor Kissinger went to prison for it.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Hitchens didn't reveal that story. I read about it years earlier in a Kissinger bio -- can't recall which one.
Hitchens has never done raw research on that level.
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