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Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays.

Articles By Christopher Hitchens

The New Gaffe
How the Republican presidential candidates are benefiting from their “gaffes”: They’re not unforgivable, just imprudent.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Nov. 28, 2011, at 1:17 PM ET

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In God They Trust
How the conservative belief in American exceptionalism has become a matter of faith.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, at 11:20 AM ET

295 Comments

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Because Our Fathers Lied

Remembering our veterans and reflecting on the glorious ambiguity of Rudyard Kipling's war poetry.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Sunday, Nov. 13, 2011, at 1:06 AM ET

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Herman and Hamid
Why is it so hard to speak honestly about allegations of sexual harassment or our corrupt ally in Afghanistan?
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, at 12:51 PM ET

246 Comments

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What Will They Think of Next?
Why the crazy Iranian plot to pay Mexicans to kill the Saudi ambassador isn’t so implausible.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Oct. 24, 2011, at 7:08 AM ET

105 Comments

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The New Libya’s First Mistake
Muammar Qaddafi should not have been killed, and his surviving son should be captured.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, at 11:07 AM ET

440 Comments

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Romney’s Mormon Problem
Mitt Romney and the weird and sinister beliefs of Mormonism.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Oct. 17, 2011, at 11:05 AM ET

2956 Comments

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Lord Haw Haw and Anwar al-Awlaki
What the execution of a World War II traitor can teach us about assassinating American-born terrorists.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Oct. 10, 2011, at 11:28 AM ET

466 Comments

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Citizen Enemies
Those who protest the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki have to say what they would have done instead.
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, at 1:49 PM ET

249 Comments

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Pakistan Is the Enemy
We know that Pakistan's intelligence service is aiding terrorists. What are we going to do about it?
Christopher Hitchens | FIGHTING WORDS | Monday, Sept. 26, 2011, at 11:33 AM ET

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What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Welcome to an unofficial Christopher Hitchens site. dailyhitchens@post.com

Christopher Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is an Anglo-American author and journalist. His books - the latest being Hitch 22: A Memoir - have made him a prominent public intellectual and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He has been a columnist and literary critic at Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. He was named one of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect.

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On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus

The Atlantic

By Jeffrey Goldberg Mark Judge at The Daily Caller senses a conversion in the making: "Could Christopher Hitchens become a Christian? It's a possibility that doesn't seem laughable anymore." Judge's paper-thin argument: Hitchens's just-published ...

Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens

New Statesman (blog)

Among the many highlights is Dawkins's interview with his fellow anti-theist Christopher Hitchens, who began his Fleet Street career at the NS in 1973. The great polemicist is currently undergoing treatment for stage IV oesophageal cancer ("there is no ...

Is Christopher Hitchens about to convert?

Daily Caller

Hitchens, the celebrated British journalist, angry atheist and roué, has a very powerful piece in the January issue of Vanity Fair. Hitchens has been in Houston undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2010. ...

Wrong to Suggest Cancer-Stricken Hitchens About to Convert to Christianity

First Things (blog)

Christopher Hitchens has what we are told is terminal esophageal cancer. Hopefully, that process will reverse or take a very long time. But because he is famous, in a sense all comments about his personal situation–as opposed to his work–take on the ...

Bing News

On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus - Atlantic Online - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 -
Christopher Hitchens is one of the most passionate atheists - Examiner - Monday, December 05, 2011 -
A Profile in Courage, Determination, and Dedication - American Thinker - Saturday, December 10, 2011 -
Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens - New Statesman - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 -
Cancer-Stricken Hitchens Rejects Old Saying 'Whatever Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger' - Christian Post - Thursday, December 08, 2011 -

Yahoo! News

On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 -
Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 -
TheDC Video Vault: A classic Christopher Hitchens rhetorical beatdown - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 -
A response to Christopher Hitchens after his latest attack on Mormonism - Monday, November 14, 2011 -
Christopher Hitchens On Rudyard Kipling, War And 'Sacrifice' - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 -

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Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens in Texas - New Statesman. http://t.co/kLBgbzbm about 17 hours ago
Richard Dawkins to guest edit New Statesman, interviews Christopher Hitchens in Texas. Christmas issue, Out Dec 13. http://t.co/9mVqGKju 5 days ago
Trial of the Will. By Christopher Hitchens | Vanity Fair | January 2012. http://t.co/xS6StlTO 7 days ago
Asteroid Named for Christopher Hitchens | Vanity Fair. http://t.co/EtpFMvcX 7 days ago

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Books by Hitchens

2011 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. Twelve.
2011 The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism. Da Capo Press
2010 Hitch-22: A Memoir . Twelve/Hachette Book Group.
2007 god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books
2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Perseus Publishing
2006 Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography. Books That Shook the World/Atlantic Books
2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers
2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays. Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books
2003 A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Plume Books
2002 Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell's Victory, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.
2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books.
2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Verso.
1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Verso.
1997 Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger. Verso
1997 The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (UK) Verso.
1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. Verso,
1990 The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. Chatto & Windus
1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
1988 Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports. Hill and Wang (US)/Chatto and Windus (UK).
1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988)
1984 Cyprus. Quartet.

As co-author or co-editor

2011 Hitchens vs. Blair: Be it resolved that religion is a force of good in the world. House of Anansi Press
2010 The Best American Essays 2010. Mariner Books
2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson). Canon Press
2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
2002 Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (co-editor, with Christopher Caldwell)
1994 When Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (with Ed Kashi). Pantheon Books
1994 International Territory: The United Nations, 1945-1995 (with Adam Bartos). Verso
1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said). Verso
1981 Inequalities in Zimbabwe (with David Stephen).Minority Rights Group
1976 Callaghan, The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner). Cassell

As contributor

2010 The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969. Christopher Isherwood. HarperCollins.
2010 Civilization and Its Discontents. Edited by James Strachey. W.W. Norton & Company
2010 New Threats to Freedom. Edited by Adam Bellow. Templeton Press.
2005 A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, Thomas Cushman (editor). University of California Press
2003 Animal Farm and 1984. George Orwell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Introduction by CH.
2000 Vanity Fair's Hollywood, Graydon Carter and David Friend (editors). Viking Studio
2000 Safe Area Gorazde, Fantagraphics
1998 After Diana: Irreverent Elegies. Mandy Merck. Verso

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Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir

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Doubsie RT @RichardDawkins: You can read a preview of my interview with Christopher Hitchens in @NewStatesman here: newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… 27 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

RobWLester I liked a @YouTube video youtu.be/MwbBWxNJTcI?a Christopher Hitchens on Charlie Rose 25-Feb-04 (Part 3) 28 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

GreatMindsOnGod Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens [New Statesman Preview] | bit.ly/vrQNoQ 47 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite

jeremystyron ‎"One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority." - Christopher Hitchens about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Daosorios Anticipo de la entrevista de Richard Dawkins a Christopher Hitchens: Para su edición especial de Navidad, la rev... bit.ly/uAD3tq about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

thetechjedi RT @RichardDawkins: You can read a preview of my interview with Christopher Hitchens in @NewStatesman here: newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

zurairi Excerpt from Richard Dawkins interview of Christopher Hitchens for @NewStatesman j.mp/tMeOIb about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Godott RT @webacion Christopher Hitchens Destroys the Cult of Ayn Rand goo.gl/xZJ8m from “The Moral Necessity of #Atheism” Lecture #yoga #lululemon about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Barajas_1987 New Statesman - Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… via @georgeeaton about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

AtheistFeedz New Statesman Interview Preview: Richard Dawkins Interviews Christopher Hitchens - Fascism and the Catholic... tmblr.co/ZJFhVwDEe-Cj about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

KidSagan @Flyingfree333 Similar to Christopher Hitchens' "pet theory" : "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum (cont) tl.gd/enacf4 about 1 hour ago · reply · retweet · favorite

webacion Christopher Hitchens Destroys the Cult of Ayn Rand goo.gl/xZJ8m from “The Moral Necessity of #Atheism” Lecture, 2004 (3 min) 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

jjsipalan LOL! RT @uppercaise: there's always christopher hitchens @boosulyn: What if there was no God?" 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

sasgendo @iamsrk The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris, The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan or God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

uppercaise there's always christopher hitchens @boosulyn: What if there was no God?" 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

snowcroft RT @VanityFair: #MondayReads—Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens, selected by @nytimesbooks as one of the year's best . vnty.fr/tZyY1i 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

joewenker On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus - The Atlantic bit.ly/vvrkTO via @AddThis 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

AntitheistAnon RT @DIAGroup 14 May 2010: Frank Turek vs. Christopher Hitchens-- Delivered by Feed43 service http://... bit.ly/t4505C #Antitheism 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

ladyhank959 A powerful story that I know too well. Christopher Hitchens Takes on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger? vanityfair.com/content/vanity… via @VanityFair 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

DIAGroup 14 May 2010: Frank Turek vs. Christopher Hitchens-- Delivered by Feed43 service bit.ly/tVnnvx #atheism 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

jinoyjosep New Statesman - Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

DanielrBarron New Statesman - Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… 2 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

NathanielStampr On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus pulse.me/s/3ZRFp Let's commit to pray for Hitchens. 3 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

HillyFoz I just bought: 'Hitch 22' by Christopher Hitchens via @amazonkindle amazon.co.uk/dp/B003ZUXXCY/… 3 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

levek Judeo-Christian faith:"It’s a celestial dictatorship,where eternal praise & submission is demanded.A divine North Korea.Christopher Hitchens 3 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Zavtra13 This might be the best 2.5 minutes you spend on YouTube today! Christopher Hitchens Drops the Hammer youtube.com/watch?v=QbBVB6… 3 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

WillCunningham "Arguments that explain everything.. explain nothing" --Christopher Hitchens 3 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

LiaAllmon Another said Christopher Hitchens is weirdly flexible 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Lcstyle I favorited a @YouTube video from @thefilmarchive youtu.be/rCiRDS8flrc?a Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton: No 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Svetlanakim One can't indefinitely do for somebody what he is reluctant to do for himself. ~ Christopher Hitchens 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

danconley Regarding Christopher Hitchens and "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger" #Nietzsche danconley.com/blog/2011/12/1… 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

caliberink New Statesman - Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

danishism how anyone read the latest hitchens vf piece & came away with the idea that he might turn into a believer is beyond me bit.ly/vXy4AR 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

RaggedTime New Statesman - Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… via @georgeeaton 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

humanprovince Hard imagine finding something I care less about than what @Goldberg3000 thinks about whether Hitchens will find god: bit.ly/vXy4AR 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

jj_gould Just to be clear: Christopher Hitchens has not found God theatln.tc/uZWLE2 / @goldberg3000 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

zeitboy24 I liked a @YouTube video youtu.be/h10yH0nom_8?a Ateísmo, Christopher Hitchens es confrontado por la 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

GoldbergHQ I think Christopher Hitchens needs to debate Tim Tebow before he dies. 4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Wintery_Knight Christopher Hitchens debates William Lane Craig: Does God Exist? wp.me/pqyhO-72Y 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

mykatmikey RT @garonsen: BREAKING: Christopher Hitchens has not found Jesus: bit.ly/sGArtk 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

yruadik Jeffrey Goldberg talking about his friend Christopher Hitchens: my pointlessness quota is filled for the next month 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

The_Jaytheist RT @RichardDawkins: You can read a preview of my interview with Christopher Hitchens in @NewStatesman here: newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

Moro_Tighfield RT @mmdewalt: On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus zite.to/rAeux4 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

mmdewalt On the Possibility of Christopher Hitchens Finding Jesus zite.to/rAeux4 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

substantial_1 Dec. 13, Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens: newstatesman.com/blogs/the-stag… 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

anicasunny Christopher Hitchens Takes on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger? | Culture | Vanity Fair vanityfair.com/content/vanity… via @VanityFair 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

ParkerReport RT @garonsen: BREAKING: Christopher Hitchens has not found Jesus: bit.ly/sGArtk 5 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

matt_t1 RT @garonsen: BREAKING: Christopher Hitchens has not found Jesus: bit.ly/sGArtk 6 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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lbpoundcake RT @garonsen: BREAKING: Christopher Hitchens has not found Jesus: bit.ly/sGArtk 6 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite

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Christopher Hitchens

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Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens

Posted by George Eaton - 13 December 2011 13:11

Exclusive extracts from Dawkins's interview with the polemicist in Texas.

Meeting of minds: Richard Dawkins (left) and Christopher Hitchens in conversation. Photograph: Michael Stravato.

As we revealed earlier this week, this year's New Statesman Christmas special is guest-edited by Richard Dawkins (copies can be purchased here). Among the many highlights is Dawkins's interview with his fellow anti-theist Christopher Hitchens, who began his Fleet Street career at the NS in 1973.
The great polemicist is currently undergoing treatment for stage IV oesophageal cancer ("there is no stage V," he notes) and now rarely makes public appearances but he was in Texas to receive the Freethinker of the Year Award from Dawkins in October. Before the event, the pair met in private to discuss God, religion and US politics. The resulting conversation can now be read exclusively in the New Statesman.
I'd recommend pouring yourself a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label and reading all 5,264 words but, here, to whet your appetite, are some short extracts. As they show, though physically frail, Hitchens retains his remarkable mental agility.

"Never be afraid of stridency"

Richard Dawkins One of my main beefs with religion is the way they label children as a "Catholic child" or a "Muslim child". I've become a bit of a bore about it.
Christopher Hitchens You must never be afraid of that charge, any more than stridency.
RD I will remember that.
CH If I was strident, it doesn't matter - I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum. You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You've educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out.
Stridency is the least you should muster . . . It's the shame of your colleagues that they don't form ranks and say, "Listen, we're going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements."

Fascism and the Catholic Church

RD The people who did Hitler's dirty work were almost all religious.
CH I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.
RD Can you talk a bit about that - the relationship of Nazism with the Catholic Church?
CH The way I put it is this: if you're writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word "fascist", if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with "extreme-right Catholic party".
Almost all of those regimes were in place with the help of the Vatican and with understandings from the Holy See. It's not denied. These understandings quite often persisted after the Second World War was over and extended to comparable regimes in Argentina and elsewhere.

Hitchens on the left-right spectrum

RD I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
CH Yes; it's broken down with me.
RD It's astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule.
CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian - on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

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55 comments from readers

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar
13 December 2011 at 14:00: What a wonderful to men , I have just bought Arguably Essays by Christopher Hitchens and I have founded a year ago a facebook page with 17500 members called "Global Secular Humanist Movement" https://www.facebook.com/GSHMP I am Iraqi by origin born in 1991
M.Johnson
13 December 2011 at 14:09: -"Christian children" or "Muslim children": I think that s not a very good "main beef" to have against religions, it's an identity thing. Besides I may have heard of children who are Muslims, not often of "Muslim children". I see your point from his perspective, religion should be a choice, and kids shouldn't have any religion. and I disagree, I think religion is also culture, but I dont think you're expressing it properly.-as for "fascism and Catholicism" I agree that the Catholic elites are likely to be corrupted and overwhelmed by stronger and evil ideologies however it is against their principles and the Catholic people, not the elite, are more likely to stick to the principles. They were over-represented in the resistance movements, as they were in abolishing slavery etc... -"the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do". This is not accurate. It is the case in Catholicism, in Islam also to some extent, at the local imam level. It's also true for Shias that there is a supreme leader, they are just a travesty of Islam anyway. A rabbi or a chief rabbi is just a Jew who knows more about religion and its laws and interpretations than others, not a supreme being. I see Dawkins as a christo-centric person with little understanding of other religions, who thinks "religion is bad" in a very simplistic way, and I was very disappointed by the poorness of the arguments in the God Delusion.
Joe Blogs
13 December 2011 at 14:24: I hope many more conversations between these two men will happen. I hope Australia goes well for Hitch next year.
Sasan Kasravi
13 December 2011 at 15:19: M.Johnson, I think you've misinterpret what Dawkins is getting at, it's something he's written about at length in his books, particularly The God Delusion. His complaint isn't that children identify themselves as Muslim or Catholic. Instead his objection is that children who are far too young to have any sort of complex belief system, a one or two year old for example, are called Muslim just because their parents are Muslim. He compares it calling an toddler a Republican or a Keynesian. In this case what the child actually believes isn't at all a matter of concern for the religious, who from birth instill in them that they belong to a group which, to be fair, they can't possibly be educated members of until they're at least ten or so years old.
TerminusEst
13 December 2011 at 15:35: M.Johnson: you, sir, have some mental problem if you say God Delusion have weak arguments. Clearly, you are not atheist and, clearly, you will not change your beliefs for whatever reason. Why don't you stop wasting your time reading this type of books and stay with your Bible?
Vaughan Jones
13 December 2011 at 15:52: M Johnson has one of those terminal points in the brain where rationality and reason is prevented from boarding the logical highway by a burly religious autobot. He missed the point entirely about the offence level caused by the label of a "Muslim Child" or a "Catholic child". Because of this complete failure to see the point he has lost the right to hold a respected opinion on the matter.
Barnie
13 December 2011 at 15:58: M.Johnson "I see your point ... religion should be a choice, and kids shouldn't have any religion. and I disagree, I think religion is also culture, but I dont think you're expressing it properly." That's making the almost certain mistake of assuming the RD would agree that culture needs religion. Just because religion needs to control culture, doesn't mean that culture needs religion. As with the explicit example given above of the Catholic church, religion has certainly done more than it's fair share of harm to society.
Joe Public
13 December 2011 at 16:06: How ironic, yet how telling that Hitchens should speak about the evils of a divine dictator and meanwhile his admirers and supporters display the very same qualities towards anyone who happens to question or disagree with them!
Reg Le Sueur
13 December 2011 at 16:18: Joe PublicAre you saying then that Hitchens' supporters should limit themselves to Divine Adulation of his Person, and not be so uncouth as to agree with his views? As others have pointed out, we atheists do not physically or psychologically abuse believers, as they do to us,-we merely point out the errors of their ways, and question their beliefs. They should be grateful!
Morph
13 December 2011 at 16:22: Joe Public "How ironic, yet how telling that Hitchens should speak about the evils of a divine dictator and meanwhile his admirers and supporters display the very same qualities towards anyone who happens to question or disagree with them!" I don't think that is the case. The problem is that believers don't have any compelling arguments for faith or god. In fact, they don't have arguments at all! And when you have a debate between reason and faith, where faith equals "no argument at all", you can see why these men may sound "dictatorial" to some.
Roxane
13 December 2011 at 16:23: @Joe Public: If you were familiar with any of the other writings and interviews by RD and CH, you would know that, if they had a magic wand and could eliminate religion from everyone's brains, they wouldn't use it. It's only the extreme theists--including the Dominionists running for President in the US--who think that the public should be required to think in one way. What part of "I hate totalitarianism" don't you understand?
B Smith
13 December 2011 at 16:27: 'RD The people who did Hitler's dirty work were almost all religious.' Probably the most fatuous remark of the year. Can we have a competent guest-editor next year?
Meme
13 December 2011 at 16:28: To M. Johnson: Labelling of children should NOT be a main "beef" toward religion?!The whole reason for religious prosperity is indoctrination (at least one of the main reasons). Is it not?
Simon3W
13 December 2011 at 16:42: I don't feel capable of describing myself as a Christian, never mind my children. But they are churchgoers. Somehow though, I don't imagine this would make Prof Dawkins feel much better. Perhaps they aren't West Ham fans either, though they seem to enjoy Saturdays as much as Sundays. They're also book readers rather than telly watchers. I confess, this may not be entirely their own decision. I would love a go at this neutral parenting lark, but can't fathom how one might go about it. Not without damaging my kids quite considerably.
Joe Public
13 December 2011 at 16:58: To Reg: no! I encourage freedom of expression and freedom of thought, unlike the views expressed by a previous commentator in regards to one who disagrees with Hitchens. To Morph: the person and claims of Jesus Christ cannot be lightly dismissed despite what RD has said in The God Delusion on that matter (not much, by the way). To Roxanne: surprise, surprise I too hate totalitarianism! And I hate it as much when it is expressed by those who will not allow expression of opposite beliefs to theirs on the matter of religion!
la potenza della speranza
13 December 2011 at 17:17: I'm looking forward to rading this edition. No-one can logically argue in favour of childhood indoctrination, state sponsored or otherwise.
Devdas Davids
13 December 2011 at 17:57: Joe Public: "the person and claims of Jesus Christ cannot be lightly dismissed". No, they really can be dismissed and lightly dismissed at that. The person and claims of Lord Krishna on the other hand...
Mary
13 December 2011 at 18:03: It's pathetic the mental gymnastics christians have to go through to justify genocide, rape, slavery, incest, child murder, and vicarious redemption in this barbaric, old book..Christianity is the most perverted system that man has ever invented, bar none. I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women. It will be in the future, the proud boast of women will be, that they never contributed a line to the Bible. Well done you Girls
Marcus
13 December 2011 at 18:04: I agree with much of what Dawkins says. I do have to take issue with this article though. The Nazi Party (National Socialists) were not of the extreme right, they were of the extreme left. Stalin was a figure of the extreme left also. Whilst Hitler himself was a devout athiest, as was Stalin I would also contest that many of the people around Hitler were religious. Were they? Name three figures that were deeply religious an in Hitlers inner circle.
Mary
13 December 2011 at 18:06: Thankyou so so much Christopher Hitchens. Your book, god is not Great, was the closest thing I've had to being "born again". And none of that imaginary stuff. It opened my eyes, ears, heart and mind. I'm now living a better life, and making the most of it - fear, shame and guilt free. So again, to someone I feel I've come to know and like, thankyou. A side benefit, incidentally, of freeing myself from religious indoctrination was the unexpected pleasure of finding my mind to be a private place. I had not realised until then, how much I resented the intrusion of a heavenly 'peeping Tom'. A permanent farther/dictator who never goes away, who you are ordered to Love and Fear. What a Horrible concept to impose on your Children. Homo Sapiens-circa, 250.000 years old Monotheism-circa, 3,000 years old What is the mystery about morality?
Mary
13 December 2011 at 18:17: Hitchens' arsenal includes the arguments of famous philosophers and scientists, first hand experience and an uncontested command of literature and the English language. To me, he offers a strong intellect and wit without being esoteric to the point of confusion.Those at odds with him on this topic are often left speechless by the potency of his words, to which the deeply religious often have trouble uttering a coherent response. I sincerely hope Hitchens recovers and the public can continue to watch these debates in the future.
kenntin
13 December 2011 at 18:37: It seems that many have missed the point here. Agreeing with Hitchens conclusions is not agreeing with "Hitch" it is agreeing with logic, acquired by critical thinking and a secular view of history.This was accomplished by dedicating oneself to its application daily. To master and implement it for ones own surreptitous agenda I give you Tariq Ramadan or Willy L.Craig and you can hate yourself for it at your earliest convenience
John Drinkwater
13 December 2011 at 19:00: "The Nazi Party (National Socialists) were not of the extreme right, they were of the extreme left." You've obviously never read any history. Fascism was a direct backlash against the rise of communism. Fascism most certainly is *the* extreme right-wing ideology. I should add that I think Hitchens fans are the most pathetic lot of people I've come across in awhile. Look, for example, how they simply copy the man's words - e.g. "mental gymnastics" - and pass them off as their own. You people are a joke.
Observer
13 December 2011 at 19:00: Most of the atheists are rich and powerful(looking at the view!!!) and I feel like they don't really care about the people at the bottom. If evolution is right atheism should become dogmatic in order to replace religion. Also, the self proclaimed big time atheist need to sharpen their preaching style I don't think its a good idea irritating people after all if people convert to atheism the first thing in their mind is not to be grateful but rather to respond to all the insults they received. Unless and of course if its because of a personal experience that made them change their path. ch doesn't like when people bother him for spiritual reasons but he is huge advocate of freedom of speech but doesn't want his family to be exposed to religious views.
Indu Pendent
13 December 2011 at 19:07: Am I the only one who things that Dawkins is a professional athiest? Does it make me troll? Are Dawkins children "athiest children" or does he not believe in indoctrinating his kids?
Don Michael
13 December 2011 at 19:11: Hmmm, Hitchens and Dawkins. Awesome. As for the comment from M. Johnson: it almost always comes down to how we were raised - with or without faith. I was one of the lucky ones. There was no discussion about relgion, god or faith. There was no discussion about atheism. Our home's neutrality allowed me to formulate my own beliefs by observing, reading, watching, being aware, and being logical. By the time I was a young adult I was convinced that religion, in general terms, poisoned everything around it. It still does and always will. Those who support religion usually had it hammered down their throats, with no hope of escape, and now they are its prisoner.
Karla Wachsmann
13 December 2011 at 20:02: To Marcus I started to read Mein Kampf yesterday and... hmmm... according to Hitler`s writings, he was not atheist at all. He wrote that he was doing "work" for Almighty Creator and this work was killing Jews, Gypsies, Slavs (what pleasure for me as Slovak)! Maybe he was not devout Catholic, but he believed in God. Just read his stupid book and you will see. KW
Kevin Colquitt
13 December 2011 at 20:26: It looks as if ol' Joe Pub has severe problems with definitions. Those divine dictators (Hitchens, Dawkins and those of like minds) didn't stop him from commenting-twice nonetheless! Therefor, one has to wonder who he's babbling on about when he repeats his accusations of dictatorial censorship "by those who will not allow expression of opposite beliefs to theirs on the matter of religion"? He makes accusations with no evidence. Who, exactly Joe, is keeping you from expressing your beliefs about religion? You have commented twice. Your comments have not been scrubbed from the site. These dictators must be as impotent as the one that you worship!
Joe Public
13 December 2011 at 20:39: Thank you, Kevin. But you've missed the point. Comments were made before mine that were treated with disdain and that reaction prompted my comments. The expressions of disdain amount to a form of censorship (ineffective perhaps but intentional nonetheless). I'm trying to make the point that all comments ought to be allowed, including mine, including yours, including theirs, and treated with respect a least as valid. So I am exercising my right to comment and not excluding anyone else or discouraging them with unpleasant, unnecessary or unkind responses. And you're welcome to respond.
Bert
13 December 2011 at 20:56: Hitchens = a cold bucket of water over the head of the drunken masses. Religion can not, and will not, survive in an environment where it faces open critique. The emergence of science as a predictable and empirical system of explaining the natural world was the first dagger in the heart of religion. The second, and current, influence of modern communication (internet, mobile phones) which allows this information to be made increasingly accessible to a larger (and getting larger) portion of the planet will be the ultimate death knell. Expect 'Christian mythology' and 'Islamic mythology' to be the common terminology for our present day religions before this century comes to a close.
BR 13 December 2011 at 21:11: Indu Pendent - Probably not...but you wouldn't be in good company. Atheism is (typically defined as) a rejection of god claims for lack of evidence. If anything, I'd surmise he indoctrinated his children as rationalists an/or skeptics and let them make their own decision about the supernatural. Just guessing.
J.DiCaprio
13 December 2011 at 21:19: @M.Johnson. "I see Dawkins as a christo-centric person with little understanding of other religions, who thinks "religion is bad" in a very simplistic way", You can't be serious? A large portion the mans life is devoted to the very subject of religon.
spaarky13
13 December 2011 at 21:32: Tantalizing preview. Can't wait to buy my copy tomorrow even though the provinces had to wait 24 hours more than London. I would rather be stuck in a lift with Messrs Dawkins,Dennet,Hitchens and Harris than (say) the Archbishop of Canterbury (whose name I can't be bothered to google), Tariq Ramadhan or Rabbi Leopold Bloom.
Bert
13 December 2011 at 21:44: Religion throughout history has relied on indoctrination through the control of information and suppression of criticism. This is increasingly becoming no longer possible and consequently the rug is being pulled rather rapidly from beneath its feet. In an uncompromised debate between those selling a religious world view and those selling a scientific one (one in which where the hard questions are permitted) none of the world's religions can hold together under the scrutiny.
Peter J Danone
13 December 2011 at 21:54: Hitler was an extremist left wing Athiest mad man with deeply disturbed sense of self. A bit like the modern day BNP.I wasn't aware Nazi's were religious though. Thought it was a psyedo-religion in its own right like pure communism and other left wing ideals.
Bert
13 December 2011 at 22:09: "Hitler was an extremist left wing Athiest mad man with deeply disturbed sense of self." What a lovely and well timed case in point of this sort of misinformation. Anyhow who cares to gain some insight into the sort of skewing of the facts proponents of religion are forced to resort to can fact check this statement on any reputable website. It is in fact almost entirely the opposite of the truth. Hitler was an extreme right wing fascist and outspoken Roman Catholic.
Pierre Bayle
13 December 2011 at 22:10: @John Drinkwater "You've obviously never read any history. Fascism was a direct backlash against the rise of communism. Fascism most certainly is *the* extreme right-wing ideology." Actually, a very strong argument can be made that Fascism was a backlash against liberal/social democracy rather than communism. Communism was merely the fear factor that they used to gain support from the capitalist classes. Having said that, I agree that it was foolish of the poster to categorise Nazism as an extreme left wing ideology as it was a profoundly conservative anti-modernist doctrine. "I should add that I think Hitchens fans are the most pathetic lot of people I've come across in awhile. Look, for example, how they simply copy the man's words - e.g. "mental gymnastics" - and pass them off as their own. You people are a joke." I'm a little confused how you seem to be under the illusion that Hitchens has a monopoly on certain words. Mental gymnastics? Are you serious? That is a fairly common phrase. Going by your own arrogant logic: you've obviously never read anything. Hitchens vocabulary itself contains a lot of pet words and phrases from the writers he admires. After all you are what you eat. Obviously the collective nature of language troubles you but it is sheer tomfoolery on your part to react to this with fatuous playground insults. As G.K Chesterton reminds us when any stick will do be careful it’s not a boomerang. @Marcus "Name three figures that were deeply religious an in Hitlers inner circle." Well Himmler was a religious pagan. Hitler himself claimed he was doing gods work in Mein Kampf. Interestingly enough the only member of Hitler's inner circle to be excommunicated by the Church of Rome was Goebbels for the grave crime of marrying a Protestant. As Steigmann-Gall points out in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (2003) p.266: "The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years. ... Exploring the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation ... Nearly all Western societies retain a sense of Christian identity to this day. ... That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable." Not that we need to be pre-occupied by the Nazi's as there were many similarly genocidal regimes during the same period that were openly Roman Catholic such as the Ustaša in Croatia and Italian Fascism. Suffice to say, that fascism, Nazism (and Stalinism) are not born of a secular humanist world view intone with the writings of Spinoza, Bayle or Einstein but of a cultish fusion between celestial and political religion and based on the false premise that there is such a thing as infallible mammals. As Benito Mussolini pointed out in the ‘Doctrine of Fascism’ it is a religious concept of life.
Ernie
13 December 2011 at 22:15: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." — Adolf Hitler (Speech of May 1, 1927.
jankaas
13 December 2011 at 22:16: humans do good and bad things despite being religious. humans do good and bad things despite not being religious. Dawkins has not provided evidence that would allow him to move beyond these 2 statements of fact.
Jason Pilley
13 December 2011 at 22:40: Joe Public: "The expressions of disdain amount to a form of censorship (ineffective perhaps but intentional nonetheless)." Oh you silly little bitch!
Jason Pilley
13 December 2011 at 22:47: Ernie: as Wilhelm Reich shows in "The Mass Psychology Of Fascism," Hitler's words cannot be trusted, ever. By his works however you can know him: and "National Socialism" is no sort of socialism. jankaas: Perhaps not but Hitchens has pointed out that there are very many bad things that only religious humans do e.g. hacking at an infant's genitals with a blade.
Jason Pilley
13 December 2011 at 23:00: John Drinkwater: "I should add that I think Hitchens fans are the most pathetic lot of people I've come across in awhile." Yep, "What Would Christopher Do?" - that's us!!!! God, these sums are tricky aren't they!
Joe Public
13 December 2011 at 23:01: Thank you, Jason, for so effectively proving my point for me.
Aeron C
13 December 2011 at 23:05: TO : jankaas Prof. Dawkins has provided ample of information and evidences in many of his social encounters. Only thing missing is you need to consider them beyond your religious beliefs. Also, bit of intelligence is required to properly understand those.
Jason Pilley
13 December 2011 at 23:06: You're welcome, my dear censored friend! Life can be cruel but together I know we'll pull through, Joe.
Joe Public
13 December 2011 at 23:10: And I rest my case.
jankaas
13 December 2011 at 23:16: @Jason Pilley "jankaas: Perhaps not but Hitchens has pointed out that there are very many bad things that only religious humans do e.g. hacking at an infant's genitals with a blade." sorry, but no perhaps about it. Dawkins just hasn't. no-one has. it may never be possible. and you're wrong about circumcision. it was quite the rage in the US not too long ago. based entirely on a well meant but wrong intention. the proponents came to their decision despite it not being for religious reasons. http://www.circumstitions.com/USA.html
jankaas
13 December 2011 at 23:25: @Aeron C "Prof. Dawkins has provided ample of information and evidences in many of his social encounters." none of his arguments are supported by evidence that would allow him to move beyond the truism that 'religion is neutral'. "Only thing missing is you need to consider them beyond your religious beliefs." wrong. what's missing is you reading what i write. i have no religious beliefs. i don't 'do' religion. this however doesn't stop me from wondering why Dawkins thinks that the value of methodological naturalism can be transplanted into his preferred natural ontology by default. you ever wondered about that Aeron? "Also, bit of intelligence is required to properly understand those." oh do behave. that's no way to respond to my post.
Jeremy McArthur
13 December 2011 at 23:47: So it ok for children to believe in evolution that is based upon finding fossils and making assumptions but not ok to follow a religion because Dawkins doesn't like religion. Right. OK. I hear you loud and clear. You just want people to join your gang like being a Westlife fan or a Take That fan.
Observer
13 December 2011 at 23:47: Hitchens say that believers have a lot of work ahead of them to proof existence of a higher being but I say Hitchens is the one who needs to fasten with 2/3(we know its more!!) of the planet still beliving in higher being. chop chop hitch
adey
14 December 2011 at 00:08: Some of really need to start letting go of your hopes that one is exclusive to people with faith. Please don't tell me we will live one more century where everybody becomes athiest(btw nicknamed 'haters').
Michelle
14 December 2011 at 00:48: Love the discourse... it is vital. Keep it civil and open your minds.Substitute "Nazi" for Catholic and "Communist" for Muslim. It is all army building and it is criminal child abuse. Jason Pilley: No one says "What would Christopher do?" except in jest. Christopher would smack us for that... think for yourself. And by the way... we know Christopher exists, we can't same the same for Jesus !
sdgsdg
14 December 2011 at 01:02: Happy 2012 newyear,Merry Christmas ,Christmas top gift http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com http://www.sipostyle.com
Amergin
14 December 2011 at 03:32: Will those who try to defend the belief in the existence of God and the various religions surrounding that belief from the attack of non-believers please understand that prior to the attack on the WTC most atheist were silent non-believers but then we recognised that religion in its extreme forms and at its most vociferous had made the world a dangerous place to live. That coupled with the rape of children by catholic priests made we quiet atheists stand up and complain at the top of our voices that the religious extremists should cut it back a bit.I personally have a partner who is a good Christian lady and we live in harmony because she does not try to persuade me from my beliefs and I do not try to persuade her from hers. Its simpe really. Have you beliefs by al means and welcome but keep them yourself and certainly do not use them to justify killing others.
Lens
14 December 2011 at 07:21: Discussions like this will be the end of religion. Keep it coming!

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Preview: Richard Dawkins interviews Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher Hitchens

Born	Christopher Eric Hitchens April 13, 1949 (age 62) Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, UK
Occupation	Writer, journalist and pundit
Nationality	American/British
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Subjects	Atheism, biography, essays, journalism, literary criticism, and polemicism
Literary movement	New Atheism
Notable work(s)	God Is Not Great
Spouse(s)	Eleni Meleagrou (m. 1981–1989)Carol Blue (m. 1989–present)
Children	Alexander, Sophia, Antonia
Relative(s)	Peter Hitchens (brother)
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an Anglo-American^[7] author and journalist^[8] whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008.^[9] He is a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.^[10]^[11]
Hitchens is known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa,^[12] Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger. His confrontational style of debate has made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The 11 September 2001 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insists he is not "a conservative of any kind."^[13]
Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens describes himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens says that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "an antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there’s no evidence for such an assertion."^[14] He argues that the concept of god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.
Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on 13 April 2007, his 58th birthday.^[15] Asteroid 57901 is named after him.^[16] His memoir, Hitch-22, was published in June 2010.^[17] Touring for the book was cut short later the same month so that he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed oesophageal cancer.^[18]

[edit] Life and career

[edit] Early life and education

His mother, Yvonne Jean (née Hickman), and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II.^[19] Yvonne was at the time a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service),^[20] and Eric a "purse-lipped and silent" commander, whose ship HMS Jamaica helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of North Cape.^[2] The father's naval career required the family to move and reside in bases throughout Britain and her dependencies, including in Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.
Because Yvonne argued that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,"^[21] he was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and then later at Balliol College, Oxford. He was tutored there by Steven Lukes, and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell.^[20] In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge.^[22]
Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22.^[23] These experiences continued in his college years when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of the Thatcher government.^[24]
In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity to the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.^[25]
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam".^[26]^{[clarification needed]} Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, translator of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism.^[20] Shortly thereafter, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect".^[27] Throughout his student days, he was on many occasions arrested and assaulted in the various political protests and activities in which he participated.

[edit] Journalistic career (1970–1981)

Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,^[28] published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyite, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyite groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".
Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree.^[29] His first job was with the London Times Higher Education Supplement, where he served as social science editor. Hitchens admits that he hated the job and was later fired, recalling, "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it."^[30] In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, the authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman, he acquired a reputation as a fierce left-winger, aggressively attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.
In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a suicide pact with her lover, a former clergyman named Timothy Bryan.^[20] They overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover his mother's body. Hitchens said he thought his mother was pressured into suicide by fear that her husband would learn of her infidelity, as their marriage was strained and unhappy. Both her children were then independent adults. While in Greece, Hitchens reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta. It became his first leading article for the New Statesman.^[31]

[edit] American career (1981–present)

After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.^[32]^[33]^[34]^[35]^[36]^[37]^[38] He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992,^[39] writing ten columns a year. He left The Nation in 2002, after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,^[34] but others — including Hitchens — believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.^[40]^[41]
Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus.^[42] Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he has two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens has continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda^[43] and the Darfur region of Sudan.^[44] His work has taken him to over 60 countries.^[45]
In 1989 he met Carol Blue, a California writer, whom he later married and with whom he had a daughter, Antonia. In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.^[46]
Prior to Hitchens' political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir".^[47]^[48]^[49] In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco," calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories.^[50]^[51] Also, on the back of his book Hitch-22, among the praise from notable writers and figures, a Vidal quote endorsing Hitchens as his successor is crossed out with a red 'X' and a message saying "NO C.H."
His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.^[52] An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.^[53]
In 2007 Hitchens' work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary".^[54] He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.^[55] He won this award in 2011^[56]
Hitchens also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.^[57]

[edit] Literature reviews

Hitchens writes a monthly essay on books in The Atlantic^[58] and contributes occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In Why Orwell Matters, he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.
During a three-hour interview by Book TV,^[2] he named authors who have had influence on his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, P G Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien.

[edit] Political views

Main article: Christopher Hitchens's political views

The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto".^[59] In 2009, Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media".^[60] However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism.

[edit] Socialism

Hitchens became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." In 2001, 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 globalisation as "innovative and internationalist." He stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies."^[61]
In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist".^[62] 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".^[63] In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was.^[64] Hitchens was an admirer of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs."^[65] In a 1997 essay, however, he distanced himself somewhat from some of Che's actions.^[66]
He continues to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men,^[67]^[68] and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia.^[27]^[34] In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discreditation of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".^[27]

[edit] Iraq War and the war on terror

The years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie saw Hitchens 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.^[69] Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.^[70] 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.^[71] He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".^[72]
Following the 11 September attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation.^[73]^[74] Chomsky responded^[75] and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky^[76] to which Chomsky again responded.^[77] Approximately a year after the 11 September 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,^[78] and that they 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.^{[citation needed]}
Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and he has held numerous public debates on the topic with everyone from George Galloway^[79] to Scott Ritter.^[80] Though he admits to the numerous failures of the war, and its high civilian casualties, he sticks to the position that deposing Saddam Hussein was a long-overdue responsibility of the United States, after decades of poor policy, and that holding free elections in Iraq has been a success not to be scoffed at. He argues that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, is a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should be the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.
An updated summary of his views on Iraq and the war on terror can be found in his memoirs Hitch 22.

[edit] Criticism of George W. Bush

Prior to 11 September 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He has also criticized Bush's support of intelligent design^[81] and capital punishment.^[82]^[82]
Although Hitchens defends Bush’s post-11 September foreign policy, he has criticized the actions of U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and the U.S. government's use of waterboarding, which he unhesitatingly deemed as torture after being invited by Vanity Fair to voluntarily undergo it.^[83]^[84] In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.^[85]^[86]^[87]

[edit] Presidential endorsements

Hitchens would elaborate on his political views and ideological shift in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv. In this discussion Hitchens revealed himself as a supporter of Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, who was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore.^[88]

Hitchens speaking at a September 2000 third party protest at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates

Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".^[89]
In the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens in an article for Slate would state, "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity." He was critical of both main party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hitchens would go on to support Obama, calling McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace".^[90]

[edit] Blumenthal–Hitchens feud

Hitchens and Carol Blue chose to submit an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the trial of impeachment of Bill Clinton. In the affidavit, Blue and Hitchens swore that their then-friend, Sidney Blumenthal, had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial,^[91] and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts.^[91]^[92]

[edit] Israel–Palestine

Hitchens has said of himself

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.^[93]

A review of his autobiography, Hitch-22, in the Jewish Daily Forward, refers to Hitchens as "a prominent anti-Zionist" and says that he views Zionism "as an injustice against the Palestinians".^[94] Others have commented on his anti-Zionism as well^[95] suggesting that his memoir was "marred by the occasional eruption of [his] anti-Zionism"^[96] The Jewish Daily Forward quotes him saying of Israel's prospects for the future, “I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable.”^[94]
In Slate, Hitchens ponders the notion that, instead of curing anti-Semitism through the creation of a Jewish state, "Zionism has only replaced and repositioned"^[97] it, saying: "there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews." Hitchens argues that instead of supporting Zionism, Jews should help "secularize and reform their own societies", believing that unless one is religious, "what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place?"
During a town hall function in Pennsylvania with Martin Amis, Hitchens stated that "one must not insult or degrade or humiliate people"^[98] and that he "would be opposed to this maltreatment of the Palestinians if it took place on a remote island with no geopolitical implications". Hitchens described Zionism as "an ethno-nationalist quasi-religious ideology" and stated his desire that if possible, he would "re-wind the tape [to] stop Hertzl from telling the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land".
He continues to say that Zionism "nonetheless has founded a sort of democratic state which isn’t any worse in its practice than many others with equally dubious origins." He stated that settlement in order to achieve security for Israel is "doomed to fail in the worst possible way", and the cessation of this "appallingly racist and messianic delusion" would "confront the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews". However, Hitchens contends that the "solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists" and wonders "What did they imagine would be the response of the followers of the Prophet?" Hitchens bemoans the transference into religious terrorism of Arab secularism as a means of democratization: "the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad".^[97] Hitchens maintains that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a "trivial squabble" that has become "so dangerous to all of us" because of "the faith-based element."^[98]
Hitchens collaborated on this issue with prominent Palestinian advocate Edward Said, in 1988 publishing Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.

[edit] Domestic policy

Hitchens actively supports drug policy reform and has called for the abolition of the "War on Drugs" which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley.^[25] He has supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as "sadistic".^[99] On the issue of abortion, Hitchens prioritizes in affirming that he believes a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposes the overturning of Roe v. Wade and supports the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believes in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights as "the only thing that is known to cure poverty", and in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether.^[100]^[101]

[edit] Other

Other issues Hitchens has written on include his support for the reunification of Ireland,^[102]^[103] abolition of the British monarchy,^[104] and his condemnation of the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević^[105] and Franjo Tuđman^[106] in Yugoslavia, and the Bosnian War.^[107]

[edit] Specific individuals

Main article: Christopher Hitchens' critiques of public figures

Over the years, Hitchens has become famous for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has also written book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters), and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography).
However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques take the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell,^[108] George Galloway,^[109] Mel Gibson,^[110] Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama,^[111] Michael Moore,^[112] Daniel Pipes,^[113] Ronald Reagan,^[114] Jesse Helms,^[115] and Cindy Sheehan.^[27]^[116]^[117]^[118]^[119]^[120]^[121]

[edit] Religion

[edit] Personal life

Hitchens after a talk at The College of New Jersey in March 2009

[edit] Marriage and children

Hitchens married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981. They have two children, Alexander and Sophia. In 1989 Hitchens left Meleagrou for Carol Blue, an American writer.^[33] They have one daughter, Antonia.

[edit] Relationship with younger brother

Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian and socially conservative journalist in London, although, like his brother, he had been a Trotskyite in the 1970s. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London).^[143] Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on 21 June 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University,^[144] and at the Pew Forum on October 12, 2010.^[145]

[edit] Health and lifestyle

[edit] Smoking and drinking

A June 2006 profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output."^[36] However, in early 2008 he gave up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin.^[146] His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision.^[147] It was while writing his memoir Hitch-22 that he resumed smoking cigarettes and continued until his cancer diagnosis. Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", noting that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."^[148]
Anti-war British politician George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil for Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay",^[149] to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true".^[150] Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."^[151]
Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"^[152]
In the question and answer session following a speech Hitchens gave to the Commonwealth Club of California on 9 July 2009, one audience member asked what was Hitchens' favorite whisky. Hitchens replied that "the best blended scotch in the history of the world" is Johnnie Walker Black Label. He also playfully indicated that it was the favorite whisky of, among others, the Iraqi Baath Party, the Palestinian Authority, the Libyan dictatorship, and "large branches of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family". He concluded his answer by calling it the "breakfast of champions" and exhorted the audience to "accept no substitute".^[153]
In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' — most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there."^[154]
Reflecting on the lifestyle that supported his career as a writer he said:

"I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored – it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I'm going to wager on this bit... In a strange way I don't regret it. It's just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did."^[155]

[edit] Cancer treatment

Hitchens during his cancer treatment in 2010

In June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for Hitch-22 to undergo treatment for oesophageal cancer.^[156] He announced that he is undergoing treatment in a Vanity Fair piece entitled "Topic of Cancer".^[157] Hitchens said that he recognises the long-term prognosis is far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years".^[158] In November 2010, Hitchens cancelled^[159] a scheduled appearance in New York, where he was to debate religion writers David Hazony and Stephen Prothero on the subject of the Ten Commandments. Earlier that year, he published a piece in Vanity Fair on the subject,^[160] and is working on a book about the Ten Commandments as well.^[161]
In April 2011, Hitchens was forced to cancel a scheduled appearance at the American Atheist Convention, and instead sent a letter that stated, "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death." He closed with "And don't keep the faith."^[162] The letter also dismissed the notion of a possible deathbed conversion, in which he claimed that "redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before."^[162] In June 2011, he spoke to a University of Waterloo audience via a home video link.^[163]
In October 2011, Hitchens made a public appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, TX. Atheist Alliance of America was also a participant in the joint convention.^[164]
In November 2011 George Eaton wrote in the New Statesman:

The tragedy of Hitchens' illness is that it came at a time when he enjoyed a larger audience than ever. Of his tight circle of friends - Amis, Fenton, McEwan, Rushdie - Hitchens was the last to gain international renown, yet he is now read more widely than any of them." Eaton said, Hitchens would like to be remembered as a man that fought totalitarianism in all its forms but many remember him as a "lefty who turned right", remembering his support of the Iraq War and not, say, his support of the War in Bosnia on the side of the Moslems. Eaton concluded, "The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but, as he is increasingly aware, perhaps not as he would like.^[165]

[edit] Film and television appearances

As referenced from the Internet Movie Database, Hitchens Web or Charlie Rose.^[166]^[167]^[168]

Year	Film
1984	Opinions: "Greece to their Rome"
1988	Frontiers
1993	Everything You Need to Know
1994	Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher
1994	Hell's Angel
1996	Where's Elvis This Week?
1996–2010	Charlie Rose (13 episodes)
1998	Princess Diana: The Mourning After
1999–2002	Dennis Miller Live (4 episodes)
2002	The Trials of Henry Kissinger
2003	Hidden in Plain Sight
2003–2009	Real Time with Bill Maher (6 episodes)
2004	Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon
2004–2006	Newsnight (3 episodes)
2004–2010	The Daily Show (4 episodes)
2005	Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (1 episode, s03e05)
2005	The Al Franken Show (1 episode)
2005	Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope
2005	Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
2005–2008	Hardball with Chris Matthews (3 episodes)
2006	American Zeitgeist
2006	Blog Wars
2007	Manufacturing Dissent
2007	Question Time (1 episode)
2007	Your Mommy Kills Animals
2007	Personal Che
2007	Heckler
2007	In Pot We Trust
2008	Discussions with Richard Dawkins: Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen"
2008	Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
2009	Holy Hell
2009	Presidency
2009	Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?"
2010	Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

[edit] Selected publications

Main article: Bibliography of Christopher Hitchens

1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso)
1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said) Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4 Reissued, 2001
1990 "The Monarchy", Chatto & Windus Ltd
1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Verso
1997 The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, Verso
1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family, Verso
2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Verso
2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books
2002 Why Orwell Matters also Orwell's Victory, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-03050-5
2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, [Editor] Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6
2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press
2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson), Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2
2010 Hitch-22: A Memoir, Twelve, ISBN 978-0-446-54033-9 OCLC 464590644
2011 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, Twelve. UK edition as Arguably: Selected Prose, Atlantic, ISBN 1-4555-0277-4 / ISBN 978-1-4555-0277-6

[edit] References

^ Christopher Hitchens and his Critics, p. 264.
^ ^a ^b ^c Christopher Hitchens In Depth Book TV, 2 September 2007 – List of writers can be seen @ 1:13:10
^ Kennard, Matt (2011-04-17). "Johann Hari on Chomsky, Hitchens, Iraq, and anarchism". Thecommentfactory.com. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Amis on his novel The Pregnant Widow^{[dead link]}
^ Harris, Sam. "Religion as a Black Market for Irrationality". Newsweek.washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Dawkins, Richard. "Christopher Hitchens: my hero of 2010". richarddawkins.net. Retrieved 2011-05-19.
^ Kroft, Steve (6 March 2011). "Outspoken and outrageous: Christopher Hitchens". CBS News. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
^ Donaldson James, Susan (2 July 2010). "Christopher Hitchens, Author of 'God is Not Great,' Battles Cancer". ABC News. Retrieved 11 March 2011.
^ "Christopher Hitchens on Sarah Palin: ‘A Disgraceful Opportunist and Moral Coward’". PoliticalArticles.NET. 2009-12-18. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Prospect (26 July 2008). "Intellectuals—the results". Prospect. Retrieved 4 September 2009.
^ Duncan Campbell (18 October 2005). "Chomsky is voted world's top public intellectual". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 September 2009.
^ Hitchens, Christopher (2003-10-20). "The fanatic, fraudulent Mother Teresa. – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine". Slate.com. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Eaton, George. The New Statesman Interview: Christopher Hitchens www.newstatesman.com, 12 July 2010. Retrieved 7 November 2010. Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu. I gave it the partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: it was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought."
^ Andre Mayer (14 May 2007). "Nothing sacred — Journalist and provocateur Christopher Hitchens picks a fight with God". CBC. Retrieved 29 June 2008.
^ Holiday Dmitri (10 July 2007). ""God Is Not Great" author, Christopher Hitchens talks about religion, politics, and becoming an American". Greater Talent Network. Archived from the original on 20 December 2007.
^ JPL Small-Body Database Browser
^ Hitch-22: A Memoir (Hardcover) Amazon.com product information page: Hitch-22: A Memoir. An edition was published in Australia by Allen and Unwin in May: ISBN 978-1-74175-962-4
^ Peters, Jeremy. "Christopher Hitchens to Begin Cancer Treatment", The New York Times, 30 June 2010.
^ http://www.slate.com/id/2255781/entry/2255782
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Walsh, John. The Independent. "Hitch-22: A memoir by Christopher Hitchens" Retrieved 28 May 2010
^ Lynn Barber "Look who's talking", The Observer, 14 April 2002
^ Blake Morrison I contain multitudes, The Guardian, 29 May 2010
^ Hitchens, Christopher, Hitch-22 (Allen & Unwin, 2010) p. 76 ff.
^ Levy, Geoffery, "So Who Were the Two Tory Ministers Who Had Gay Flings with Christopher Hitchens at Oxford?", Daily Mail, 6 March 2010, accessed 30 May 2010
^ ^a ^b Hoover Institution^{[dead link]}
^ Long Live Labor – Why I'm for Tony Blair Slate, 25 April 2005
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Heaven on Earth – Interview with Christopher Hitchens PBS, 2005
^ International Socialism: Christopher Hitchens "Workers’ Self Management in Algeria" (1st series), No.51, April–June 1972, p.33, Encyclopedia of Trotskyism, 25 October 2005
^ Alexander Linklater (May 2008). "Christopher Hitchins". Prospect Magazine. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NegtQIkhz6g
^ Barber, Lynn (13 April 2002). "Look who's talking". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 1 April 2010.
^ For the Sake of Argument by Christopher Hitchens Interview with Brian Lamb for the show Booknotes, an author interview series on C-SPAN (some biographical information) 17 October 1993
^ ^a ^b The Boy Can't Help It In-depth interview and profile] in New York Magazine, 19 April 1999
^ ^a ^b ^c "Free Radical", interview in Reason by Rhys Southan, November 2001
^ Christopher Hitchens The Atlantic, 2003
^ ^a ^b Guy Raz, Christopher Hitchens, Literary Agent Provocateur, National Public Radio, 21 June 2006
^ He Knew He Was Right New Yorker, Profiles, 16 October 2006
^ Christopher Hitchens Notable Interviews – video interview 2007
^ Christopher Hitchens – Contributing Editor Vanity Fair
^ Timothy Noah, Meritocracy's lab rat Slate, 9 January 2002
^ Annabel's – the magazine Vogue UK, 15 July 2004
^ At the Rom: Three New Commandments She Does The City, 30 April 2009
^ "Childhood's End", Vanity Fair, September 2006
^ "Realism in Sudan", Slate, 7 November 2005
^ Christopher Hitchens Twelve Publishers
^ Detailed Biographical Information – Christopher Hitchens, Lannan Foundation. Retrieved 27 April 2010.
^ Andrew Werth (January/February 2004). "Hitchens on Books". Letters to the Editor. The Atlantic. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
^ John Banville (3 March 2001). "Gore should be so lucky". The Irish Times. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
^ Gore Vidal on Christopher Hitchens YouTube
^ Christopher Hitchens (February 2010). "Vidal Loco". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
^ Youde, Kate (7 February 2010). "Hitchens attacks Gore Vidal for being a 'crackpot'". London: The Independent. Retrieved 17 February 2009.
^ Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Results Foreign Policy, registration required
^ The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Foreign Policy, registration required
^ 2007 National Magazine Award Winners Announced Press release, Magazine Publishers of America, 1 May 2007
^ National Magazine Awards Winners and Finalists Magazine Publishers of America
^ "2011 National Magazine Awards Winners and Finalists". Magazine Publishers of America. May 9, 2011.
^ "Secular Coalition for America Advisory Board Biography". Secular.org. Retrieved 2011-07-20.
^ Authors – Christopher Hitchens The Atlantic
^ FIVE QUESTIONS FOR: Christopher Hitchens SF Gate
^ "The 25 Most Influential Liberals In The US Media". Forbes.com. 22 January 2009. Retrieved 23 November 2009.
^ Rhys Southan from the November 2001 issue. "Free Radical – Reason Magazine". Reason.com. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Martin Amis Christopher Hitchens a conversation about Antisemitism and Saul bellow Part 3 YouTube
^ Solomon, Deborah (2 June 2010). "The Contrarian". New York Times. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
^ The Revenge of Karl Marx The Atlantic, April 2009
^ Just a Pretty Face? The Guardian, 11 July 2004
^ Hitchens, Christopher (1997), “Goodbye to All That”, The New York Review of Books, 17 July 1997
^ Amis, Martin (2002). Koba the Dread. Miramax. p. 25. ISBN 0786868767.
^ "Great Lives – Leon Trotsky", BBC Radio 4, 8 August 2006
^ "That Bleeding Heart Wolfowitz", Slate, 22 March 2005
^ "Ahmad and Me", Slate, 27 May 2004
^ Johann Hari, "In Enemy Territory: An Interview with Christopher Hitchens"", The Independent, 23 September 2004.
^ Christopher Hitchens, "The End of Fukuyama", Slate, 1 March 2006
^ Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism The Nation, 8 October 2001
^ Blaming bin Laden First The Nation, 22 October 2001
^ Chomsky Replies to Hitchens The Nation, 15 October 2001
^ A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky The Nation, 15 October 2001
^ Reply to Hitchens's Rejoinder The Nation, 15 October 2001
^ Taking Sides The Nation, 26 September 2002
^ "George Galloway vs Christopher Hitchens (1 of 12)". YouTube. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ "Christopher Hitchens versus Ritter – Iraq War debate part 1". YouTube. 2009-04-30. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Belz, Mindy. "According to Hitch", World Magazine, 3 April 2006
^ ^a ^b "A War To Be Proud Of" Weekly Standard, 5 September 2005
^ "Believe Me, It’s Torture", Vanity Fair, August 2008
^ On the Waterboard Vanity Fair, 2 July 2008
^ Lichtblau, Eric. "Two Groups Planning to Sue Over Federal Eavesdropping" The New York Times, 17 January 2006; Retrieved on 5 November 2009
^ "Statement – Christopher Hitchens, NSA Lawsuit Client". Aclu.org. 2006-01-16. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Hitchens, Christopher (7 August 1999). "Gov. Death". Salon.com. Retrieved 10 May 2009.
^ On Whether Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong Bloggingheads.tv, 14 October 2008
^ My Endorsement and Osama's Video: The news in Bin Laden's comments had nothing to do with our election Slate, 1 November 2004]
^ Hitchens, Christopher "Vote for Obama" Slate, 13 October 2008; Retrieved on 5 November 2009
^ ^a ^b "Salon Newsreal | Stalking Sidney Blumenthal". Salon.com. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ "July/August 2003 | Thinking Like an Apparatchik | Hitchens". The Atlantic. 2003-06-11. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Walter Hölbling; Klaus Rieser-Wohlfarter (2004). What is American?: new identities in U.S. culture. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 351–. ISBN 9783825877347. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
^ ^a ^b Goldstein, Evan R. (June 2010). "Born Grumpy, with a Talent for It: Christopher Hitchens's Memoir is Too Happy by Far". Jewish Daily Forward.
^ John Rodden (2006). Every intellectual's big brother: George Orwell's literary siblings. University of Texas Press. pp. 95–. ISBN 9780292713086. Retrieved 6 April 2011.
^ Richman, Rick (11 2010). "Bellow, Hitchens, and COMMENTARY". Commentary Magazine.
^ ^a ^b "Slate: Can Israel Survive for Another 60 Years?". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 8 July 2011.
^ ^a ^b "Frontpage Interview: Christopher Hitchens Part II". Front Page Magazine. Retrieved 8 July 2011.
^ Just a Pretty Face? by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 11 July 2004
^ Question and answers on Mother Teresa's opposition to women's rights Poverty linked to reproductive rights, 2006
^ Belief Watch: Pro-life Atheists NewsWeek
^ Galloway vs. Hitchens: The Transcript endusmilitarism, 16 September 2005
^ These Men Are "Peacemakers"? Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams make me want to spew Slate, 2 April 2007
^ Hitchens, Christopher End of the line The Guardian, 6 December 2000
^ "In Defense of WWII: Chapter 5 of 5". Youtube. Retrieved 7 September 2008.
^ "Shed No Tears for Milosevic". FrontPage Magazine. 14 March 2006. Retrieved 7 September 2008.
^ Bodansky, Yossef (1996). Some Call It Peace: Waiting for the War In the Balkans. International Media Corp. Ltd. ISBN 0952007053.
^ Video: Christopher Hitchens (15 May 2007) appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 YouTube
^ Unmitigated Galloway Weekly Standard, 30 May 2005
^ Mel Gibson's Meltdown Slate, 31 July 2006
^ His material highness Salon.com article by Christopher Hitchens
^ Unfairenheit 9/11 Slate, 21 June 2004
^ Christopher Hitchens "Daniel Pipes is not a man of peace", Slate, 11 August 2003
^ "The stupidity of Ronald Reagan". Slate. Retrieved 9 May 2007.
^ Christopher Hitchens "Farewell to a Provincial Redneck" Slate, 7 July 2008
^ Christopher Hitchens, Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle, Slate, 15 August 2005
^ Mommie Dearest Slate, 20 October 2003 – Hitchens's op-ed for Slate regarding Mother Theresa
^ Living in Thomas Jefferson's Fictions NPR, 1 June 2005 – Hitchens's NPR discussion regarding Thomas Jefferson
^ Why Orwell Still Matters BBC News, 3 July 2002 – Hitchens' BBC Video Essay in support of George Orwell
^ Transcript: Bill Moyers Talks with Christopher Hitchens PBS, 20 December 2002
^ Edward Luce (11 January 2008). "Lunch with the FT: Christopher Hitchens". Financial Times. Retrieved 12 January 2008.
^ Michael Kinsley In God, Distrust New York Times Book Review, 13 May 2007
^ Here’s the hitch by Michael Skapinker in The Financial Times
^ Associated Press^{[dead link]}
^ Hardcover Nonfiction New York Times Bestseller list, 3 June 2007
^ Free Speech onegoodmove, March 2007
^ Hitchens, Christopher (May 2007). God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books. p. 283.
^ Honorary Associate: Christopher Hitchens National Secular Society
^ Biography – Christopher Hitchens Secular Coalition for America Advisory Board
^ "Is Christianity Good for the World?" Christianity Today, 8 May 2007
^ "Hitchens apparent winner in religion debate. CBC News. Retrieved 27 Nov 2010". News.ca.msn.com. 2010-11-27. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ "Munk Debates Website". Munkdebates.com. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Pareene, Alex (4 February 2006). "Instant Team Party Crash: Legoland Uber Alles". wonkette.com. Retrieved 9 Dec 2010.
^ Look Who's Hammering Mel 1 August 2006
^ Hood, John Hollowed Be Thy Name Miami Sun Post ^{[dead link]}
^ ^a ^b Tom Piatak, The Purest Neocon: Christopher Hitchens, an unreconstructed Bolshevik, finds his natural home on the pro-war Right, The American Conservative, 10 October 2005
^ "Godless Provocateur Christopher Hitchens Pledges Allegiance to America". Holidaydmitri.com. 2007-05-01. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ Scarborough County Transcripts for 12 March 2004
^ ^a ^b Look who's talking The Observer, 14 April 2002
^ Hitch-22, page 352.
^ Hitch-22
^ "Honorary FFRF Board Announced". Retrieved 2008-08-20.
^ Christopher Hitchens,Oh Brother, Where Art Thou The Spectator, 12 October 2001, from FindArticles.com
^ "Hitchens v. Hitchens: Faith, Politics & War". Grand Valley State University. Retrieved 29 March 2008.
^ "Can Civilization Survive Without God?".
^ Edward Luce, Lunch with the Financial Times, 11 January 2008
^ Hitchens, Peter (5 April 2008). "Hitchens vs Hitchens ... Peace at last as a lifelong feud between brothers is laid to rest". The Daily Mail. Retrieved 8 April 2008.
^ Christopher Hitchens, Living Proof, Vanity Fair, March 2003
^ Unmitigated Galloway , The Weekly Standard, 30 May 2005
^ "There's only one popinjay here, George", Evening Standard, 19 May 2005
^ George Galloway Is Gruesome, Not Gorgeous, Slate, 13 September 2005
^ Oliver Burkeman, War of words, The Guardian, 28 October 2006
^ "April 2011". Commonwealth Club. Retrieved 2011-04-26.
^ A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain, Slate, 6 June 2010
^ [1], C-SPAN, 23 January 2011
^ [2], Washington Post, 30 June 2010
^ [3], Vanity Fair, September 2010
^ Goldberg, Jeffrey (6 August 2010). "Hitchens Talks to Goldblog About Cancer and God". The Atlantic. Retrieved 17 September 2010.
^ [4], Daily Hitchens, retrieved Oct 3, 2011
^ [5], "'Vanity Fair', April 2010
^ [6], New Statesman, July 12, 2010.
^ ^a ^b Scienceblogs.com article: "Hitchens' address to American Atheists."
^ Liz Monteiro (June 6, 2011). "Hitchens feted with standing ovation at UW video link debate". Waterloo Region Record.
^ Charles McGrath (October 9, 2011). "A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality". New York Times.
^ http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/11/hitchens-remembered-polemicist
^ "Christopher Hitchens". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
^ "Hitchens Web". Retrieved 7 April 2010.
^ "Charlie Rose". Retrieved 17 August 2010.

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Such, Such are His Joys David Brooks assessment in The New York Times, 1 July 2010
Hitchens on Dying with Cancer, video interview with The Atlantic, August 2010
Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets' in The Guardian, 14 November 2010
"Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem" feature article on Jewish Ideas Daily, 13 December 2010
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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The God and I

Christopher Hitchens

How the Republican presidential candidates are benefiting from their “gaffes”: They’re not unforgivable, just imprudent.

How the conservative belief in American exceptionalism has become a matter of faith.

Remembering our veterans and reflecting on the glorious ambiguity of Rudyard Kipling's war poetry.

Why is it so hard to speak honestly about allegations of sexual harassment or our corrupt ally in Afghanistan?

Why the crazy Iranian plot to pay Mexicans to kill the Saudi ambassador isn’t so implausible.

Muammar Qaddafi should not have been killed, and his surviving son should be captured.

Mitt Romney and the weird and sinister beliefs of Mormonism.

What the execution of a World War II traitor can teach us about assassinating American-born terrorists.

Those who protest the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki have to say what they would have done instead.

We know that Pakistan's intelligence service is aiding terrorists. What are we going to do about it?

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