Tag Archives: New Statesman

Christopher Hitchens: From Radical To Charlatan

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Caricature Of Hitchens Transformation

My  homage to Hitch.

It has being one month since the passing of atheistic gladiator and political charlatan Christopher Hitchens. For four decades Hitchens has being a figure of love and hate, starting off like myself, as a Trotskyite, on the far left of politics, he then evolved to become a cheerleading pompous of the the far right US neo-conservative movement, following the attacks of 9/11.

In this article I will give my opinions on Hitchens from my admiration and respect for him on his religious principles and intellectualism on theology to my absolute loathing of him for selling out his political principles of Marxism and becoming a right wing ego-maniac. I mean no offence to his memory but as Hitch done with Mother Teresa, I will not hold back from my views regardless of what other think. For that personality trait I thank Hitch for inspiring it in me.

When it comes to religion bashing there was no greater intellectual advocate than Hitch, A man of great wit and intelligence who could brush aside any argument of creationism or the defence of religion as easy as he could brush the dust from his old Marxist beret.I’ve watched numerous debates between Christopher Hitchens the numerous creationists he destroyed intellectually and I must say as an atheist it gave me  immense joy as I listened to the intellectual truism of Hitchens and his loathing for religion in all forms, I would hang on every word as he eloquently made his case of anti-theism. Hitch was never one to censor himself he was one who always and a great narcissistic trait of self promotion and attention which he done through his controversial words, especially with quotes like this on Mother Teresa  “Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. His controversial remarks on the death of Jerry Falwell and his bashing of Islam made him the leftist baby of the mainstream media, always ready to debate religion Hitch gave the world some memorable speeches, and by himself rattled the very foundation of the Western Christian church as he ploughed through every spokesman they flung at him.

On the beatification to sainthood of Mother Teresa the Catholic Church needed a Devil’s Advocate to argue against her being sainted, well there was only one man for that job, that’s right the Hitchmister, He famously played Devil’s advocate against her to which he described as being like “representing the Evil One, as it were pro bono”. 

When it came to debating religion Hitchens was the best in the “business” A man of great charisma, eloquence, wit, intelligence and fierce passion for this I respect and admire him and for this he will be greatly remembered for generations to come and his books will continue to sell like he wanted.

Now here is why I call him a political charlatan(for which he is), From the early 60s till the mid 90s Christopher was a radical! A man of the Trotsky left who espoused socialism as its best, He spent 30 years of his life defending the oppressed, opposing war, railing against the corporations and politicians of America calling them what they were scum and conmen. He was a loved friend of the left, a man all defenders of freedom and opponents of war would happily call a friend and comrade and vice-versa. Back then Hitchens was politically knowledgeable and focused on politics not religion. It wasn’t till the mid 90s or later that Hitch became a radical atheist and this is when his understanding of politics began to diminish and he became a political charlatan and hate figure of many of his long time friends. You see when hitch became religiously obsessed he began to see politics through an anti-religious lens and this is his downfall. With the aftermath of the September 11th attacks hitch turned his back on his principles and friends and became a right-wing cheerleader for the neoconservative warmongering administration of George Walker “Texas Ranger” Bush. Hitch supported the illegal invasion or Iraq because he said he couldn’t stand by while Saddam Hussein was in power, but this is nonsense because for years in the 70s Mr. Hitchens stood silently by and once seemed to supported the regime of Hussein, once saying in a 1976 article for The New Statesman about Iraq “…. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussein — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.” The reason he supported the Iraq war was not because of outing Saddam but because he took it as an opportunity to give Islam a good beating to which he loved to do.

Hitchens defended The Bush Administrations illegal war activities  in such a pompous manner, He praised The Bush Administration‘s response to Hurrican Katrina even though it is widely accepted the Bush Administration failed in their response to Katrina, He went on to support the re-election of George W Bush in the 2004 US presidential election, He would speak of anti-war activist with such disgusting disrespect, especially when you consider most of the people involved in anti-war activities where once very close friends of his a year or 2 beforehand.

Hitchens taught he knew it all, so much so as to go and disrespect such great minds and his former hero’s Chomsky and Vidal, by claiming they are crackpots, anti-modernists, cowardly and harness facts in a very vulgar way, What an insult to two great independent thinkers of which Hitchens thinks he’s better than. When the Iraq war started Hitchens cheered it as loud as he could, praising Bush and the other Fascist’s in America for their interventionist views and actions, even if their actions cause the death of 600,000+ people. Hitch refused in his last days to accept that American policy was responsible for these deaths , going as far to say something on the lines of , if a radical Islamist blows himself up in an Iraqi market then It has nothing to do with America, But Hitch is being a warmongering ignoramus when he says such nonsense because anybody with a real understanding of war and politics will tell you that the atmosphere for suicide bombings didn’t just appear one morning in Iraq, the situation that allows suicide bombings was created not when America invaded Iraq(which also played a part) but decades beforehand when America decided to get militarily and politically involved in Middle Eastern politics, like their support of the racist terrorist regime in Israel to their support of Arab tyrants like Mubarak, The Shah of Iran or the royal family in Saudi Arabia which violates human rights on a massive scale, this kind of support is what created the situation that now allows the breading of anti-American views in the Arab world and ultimately the use of suicide bombing as a weapon by the poverty stricken people of the Iraqi insurgency, it is these facts that Hitchens ignored when he would spout his neo-con propaganda to his followers who swallowed it foolishly.

Here is an example of how Hitchens in his later years let his anti-religious obsession blind him from the reality of American responsibility in current Arab political instability, I once watch an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher in which Mr.Hitchens and George Galloway debated Bin Laden, In it Hitch put a religious twist on reality and said that it was Islam and its fascist tendency’s that created Osama Bin Laden, to which Galloway rightly so disputed and said it wasn’t religion that it was “America who created Bin Laden by supporting him politically, militarily and financially during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when Bin Laden was a leader of the Mujahedeen”. These are well known facts that Hitch most definitely knows but refused to recognise them even if he did so in the past.

So Let’s be realistic Christopher Eric Hitchens although a great mind and orator discredited himself in his last years when he sold out on his principles and became a media darling earning a small fortune from it, he chose money and wealth over principle and reality and for that I will never forgive him. Yes he was brilliant on religion and disproving it with such charisma but he was wrong on politics and most importantly he was wrong to alienate himself and lose his closest friends by choosing to support illegal wars committed by the oppressors of humanity, this is something he despised a few years beforehand only to become a proponent of war and murder for which he rightfully suffered alienation, He insulted his former close friends and comrades in such a way that it is of no wonder he became hated by the left. I once admired everything about Hitch but no longer, not since he sold himself to the corporate whores so he could gain attention and feel special. Noam Chomsky once said “If you think you are a radical and your getting mainstream attention then you should begin to question if you really are a radical”, Hitchens took himself as a radical and he was on religion and he was politically 20years ago but sadly in his last years he became a mainstream darling and anti-radical, his views were deemed by the establishment as acceptable because they supported the Administrations propagandistic views. This is why I say “Hitchens: from Radical to Charlatan” because It is exactly what he was, a former anti-war Trotskyite who became a right wing neo-con war monger.

This Article follows in the tradition of Christopher Hitchens, of denouncing someone soon after death for what they really were so I expect Hitchens apostles to accept it without insult as I mean no offence.

RIP. Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011 I’ll meet you on the other side

Author-Darren M

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