Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, 2007.
Born	(1949-04-13) April 13, 1949 Portsmouth, England
Occupation	Author, Journalist
Nationality	USA

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is an British-American author, journalist and literary critic. Currently living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate and Free Inquiry; additionally, he is an occasional contributor to other publications and has appeared regularly in the Wall Street Journal. His brother is fellow journalist Peter Hitchens.

Hitchens is known for his iconoclasm, atheism, antitheism, anti-fascism and anti-monarchism. He is also noted for his acerbic wit and his noisy departure from the Anglo-American political left. He was formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of Britain and America. But a series of disagreements beginning in the early 1990s led to his resignation from The Nation shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He is also known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson, and his criticism of Mother Teresa.

While Hitchens' idiosyncratic ideas and positions preclude easy classification, he is a vociferous critic of what he describes as "fascism with an Islamic face," and his critics have been known to describe him as a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refuses to embrace this designation. In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Bosnia and Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".

Hitchens no longer considers himself a Trotskyist or a socialist; yet he maintains that his political views have not changed significantly. He points out that, throughout his career, he has been both an atheist and an antitheist, and that he has always remained a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. Hitchens has launched a detailed criticism of religion in his book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He has also stated that, while he "was very much in rebellion against the state" during his youth, he is now "much more inclined to stress […] issues of individual liberty."

Hitchens became a United States citizen on his fifty-eighth birthday, April 13, 2007.

Education and early career

Hitchens was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge (his mother arguing that 'If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.') , and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. During his years as a student at Oxford, he was tutored by Steven Lukes.

Hitchens joined the Labour Party as soon as he was eligible, in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 "along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam." Shortly thereafter, Hitchens joined a "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect." He became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree and in the 1970s went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, amongst others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman he became known as an aggressive left-winger, stridently attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War and the Roman Catholic Church. After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation. While at The Nation he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.

Hitchens criticized the first Gulf War, claiming — in an essay reprinted in For the Sake of Argument— that the Bush administration lured Saddam Hussein into the war. This position was called into question years later, during a debate in September of 2005, as being inconsistent with Hitchens' later anti-Saddam views. Hitchens answered that during the post-war period, when he spent time among the largely pro-American Iraqi Kurds, he came to believe that the responsibility for the crisis lay primarily with Saddam Hussein.

Political views

Past Support for Saddam Hussein

In a piece written for The New Statesman in 1976, Hitchens praised Saddam Hussein as "perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser." He went on to add:

"The Kurds now have a very attenuated version of autonomy, and former members of the Barzani armed forces are being moved to the South. At least, however, Iraq constitutionally recognises that she is a partly Kurdish state, which is more than Iran or Turkey do. Further tests for the regime lie ahead. The quarrel with Syria, which involves differences over Ba’athist ideology as well as a dispute over Syrian damming of the Euphrates river, has now extended to the Lebanon, where Syrian troops have attacked newspapers and buildings controlled by Iraqi-sympathising Palestinians. Relations with Iran are still far from cordial. In response to requests for criticism in the party press, some demands were raised for a constituent assembly, and other complaints voiced about the tightness of the regime. All these remain to be acted on, and as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussain will rise more clearly to the top. Make a note of the name. Iraq has been strengthened internally by the construction of a ‘strategic pipeline’ which connects the Gulf to the northern fields for the first time. She has been strengthened externally by her support for revolutionary causes and by the resources she can deploy. It may not be electrification plus Soviet power, but the combination of oil and ‘Arab socialism’ is hardly less powerful."[4]

"Theocratic fascism" and early disagreements with the Left

Hitchens was deeply shocked by the February 14, 1989, fatwa against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie. He became increasingly concerned by the dangers of what he called "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face" (a play on Susan Sontag's phrase "fascism with a human face", referring to the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, which is in turn a play on Dubček's phrase Socialism with a human face): radical Islamists who supported the fatwa against Rushdie and sought the recreation of the medieval caliphate. Hitchens is often credited with coining the term "Islamofascism", but this appears not to be the case, and Hitchens himself denies it. (Malise Ruthven appears to be the first to have used the term in an article in The Independent on 8 September 1990.)

Hitchens did use the term "Islamic Fascism" for an article he wrote for The Nation, shortly after 9/11, but this phrase also had an earlier history. For example, it was used in The Washington Post on 13 January 1979; it also appears to have been used by secularists in Turkey and Afghanistan to describe their opponents.

Hitchens also became increasingly disenchanted by the presidency of Bill Clinton, whom he had known at Oxford, accusing him of being a rapist and a serial liar. Hitchens also claimed that the missile attacks by Clinton on Sudan constituted a war crime. The support of some on the left for Clinton alienated him further from the "soft left" in the United States. On the other hand, he became increasingly distanced from the "hard left" by their lack of support for Western intervention in Kosovo.

The years after the Rushdie fatwa also saw him looking for allies and friends. In the United States he became increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the "excuse making" of the multiculturalist left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he became friends. Around this time, he also befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi. During a debate with George Galloway, Hitchens revealed he is a supporter of Irish reunification.

Post-9/11

After 9/11 his stance hardened. Hitchens has strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly in his "Fighting Words" columns in Slate. Hitchens had been a long term contributor to the left-wing The Nation, where bi-weekly he wrote his "Minority Report" column.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. On September 24 and October 8, 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation. Chomsky responded Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky to which Chomsky again responded. Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation in part because he believed its editors, its readers and contributors such as Chomsky considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues. This highly charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky.

Where he stands now

Hitchens has said he no longer feels a part of the Left. Although he does not object to being called a "former" Trotskyist, his affection for Trotsky remains strong, and he says that his political and historical view of the world is still shaped by Marxist categories. However, in 2004, Hitchens regarded himself as a 'single-issue voter,' concerning himself with what he sees as the battle between the forces of secular democracy and those of theocratic fascism.

Hitchens is sometimes seen as part of the self-styled "pro-liberation left," comprising left-leaning commentators who support the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. This informal grouping includes Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Norman Geras, Julie Burchill, and Michael Ignatieff (see Euston Manifesto). Neoconservatives of the last decade are hesitant to embrace Hitchens as one of their own, in part because of his harsh criticisms of Ronald Reagan. He similarly refuses to define himself as a member of the neocon movement.

Despite his many articles supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the US presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for George W. Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-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".

In the interview with journalist Johann Hari in 2004, in which Hitchens described himself as "on the same side as the neo-conservatives," he also states that he does not support George Bush per se (still less Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld) but rather allies himself with those whom he sees as the "pure" neo-conservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz. Although Hitchens finds himself defending Bush’s foreign policy, he has little admiration for the man himself and has criticized Bush's support of intelligent design. As an anti-theist with a penchant for drinking, Hitchens was unimpressed by Bush's claim to have been "saved from drink by Jesus".

In contributions to Vanity Fair, Hitchens criticised the Bush administration for its continued protection of Henry Kissinger, whom he views as complicit in the human rights abuses of Southern Cone military dictatorships during the 1970s. In 2001, he had published a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, on Kissinger's alleged role in the crimes of regimes in South America and Asia. In that book Hitchens accused Kissinger, first as National Security Advisor to President Nixon, and then as Secretary of State to the same president, of either actively participating in or tacitly condoning decisions that would lead to the massacre of Bengali civilians within East Pakistan. He also asserts that Henry Kissinger, and by extension, the Ford administration, bore direct responsibility for the invasion of East Timor. Hitchens also asserted Kissinger and the Nixon administration's responsibility for the coup that resulted in the overthrow of the Allende government, and installation of Augusto Pinochet as president of Chile.

In a book on the subject, Hitchens contends that,

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

Opinions

Cyprus

Hitchens' first book focused on the partition of Cyprus. While Hitchens did not unilaterally support either the Greek or Turkish side of the conflict, he severely criticized Western governments and the Western media for ignoring the Greek Military junta's active support of the EOKA-B--a nationalist, pro-Enosis, Greek Cypriot terrorist organization which ultimately overthrew Greek Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios III. Hitchens argued that this coup d'état, and the political machinations of Nikos Sampson, the new dictator of Cyprus, instigated the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

Nuclear weapons

Hitchens regarded the employment of nuclear weapons as the compulsory enlistment of civilians in a war and, as such, a violation of individual sovereignty.

Vietnam

Hitchens regarded America's intervention (and that of its allies) in Vietnam as a shameful continuation of European colonialism, betraying the enlightenment principles of liberal democracy and human emancipation. Today, he also views it as a betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Hitchens regards the complete occupation of Palestine as an example of colonialism and an unjustifiable subjugation of another people. He has described Zionism as being based on "the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land." Hitchens supports Israel's right to exist, but has argued that

Israel doesn't "give up" anything by abandoning religious expansionism in the West Bank and Gaza. It does itself a favor, because it confronts the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews, and because it abandons a scheme which is doomed to fail in the worst possible way. The so-called "security" question operates in reverse, because as I may have said already, only a moral and political idiot would place Jews in a settlement in Gaza in the wild belief that this would make them more safe.

Of course this hard-headed and self-interested solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists. But one isn't seeking to placate them. One is seeking to destroy and discredit them. At the present moment, they operate among an occupied and dispossessed and humiliated people, who are forced by Sharon's logic to live in a close yet ghettoised relationship to the Jewish centers of population. Try and design a more lethal and rotten solution than that, and see what you come up with.

However, Hitchens has not limited his criticism to expansionist Zionists and Islamic extremists. On November 14, 2004, Hitchens noted that

Edward Said asked many times, in public and private, where the Mandela of Palestine could be. In rather bold contrast to this decent imagination, Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath).

Milošević and the demise of Yugoslavia

Hitchens argued that the choice in Yugoslavia was between what he perceived as a multi-ethnic plural democracy in Bosnia and a fascistic, religiously inspired ethnic cleansing state driven by Slobodan Milošević. Hitchens argued that defending multi-ethnic democracy was morally essential and of far greater importance than any leftist concerns about a "new imperialism".

The quality of American and British Intelligence before the 2003 Iraq War

In a variety of articles and interviews, Hitchens has asserted that British intelligence was correct in claiming that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, and that US envoy Joseph Wilson had been dishonest in his public denials of it. He has also defiantly pointed to discovered munitions in Iraq that violated U.N. Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687, the cease-fire agreements ending the 1991 Iraq-Kuwait conflict.

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

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

Abu Ghraib and Haditha

In a September 2005 article, he stated "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." Hitchens continued by stating that he

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

In a June 5, 2006 article on the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by US Marines in Haditha, he stated that

all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.

Regarding civil liberties

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

In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA; challenging President Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Regarding specific individuals

Main article: Christopher Hitchens' critiques of specific individuals

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 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), all three of whom the author greatly admires. However, the vast majority of Hitchens' critiques take the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell, George Galloway, Mel Gibson, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, Michael Moore, Daniel Pipes, Ronald Reagan, and Cindy Sheehan.

International journalism

Hitchens spent part of his early career as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. In the past several years, he has continued journeying to and writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. His work has taken him to over sixty different countries.

Literary review

Hitchens regularly contributes literary reviews to the Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works. Works he has recently reviewed include Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie; Saturday by Ian McEwan; the D. J. Enright translation of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust; the Alfred Appel Jr. annotated version of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (whom he named as on a par with James Joyce); and John Updike's Terrorist.

Television appearances

Hitchens has appeared on mainstream news programs with greater regularity in recent years. His appearances have often been characterized as overtly polemical, and sometimes belligerent. While debating on the MSNBC program Hardball, Hitchens called an aide to Richard Armitage a "bitch." Similarly, while on Real Time with Bill Maher, he gave Maher's audience the finger while saying "fuck you, fuck you," after saying " That's so facetious that your audience, which will clap at apparently anything is frivolous."

Hitchens has also appeared on the Daily Show a number of times. This includes an August 25 2005 appearance to promote his book about Thomas Jefferson; however, he was primarily engaged in a heated debate with Jon Stewart over the legitimacy of invading Iraq for the duration of his appearance. Hitchens was interviewed for the May 23 2005 episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit! in which he questioned the validity of Mother Teresa's public image, saying "it must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century."

When the Reverend Jerry Falwell died on May 15 2007 Hitchens was interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360°. On the following day - May 16 2007 - Hitchens appeared on Hannity and Colmes along with Ralph Reed, due to the critical comments Hitchens made about Falwell after his death. During this appearance, Hitchens said, "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox"

Praise for and criticism of Hitchens

Throughout his career, Hitchens has been the subject of considerable praise as well as severe criticism.

Honours

In September 2005, Hitchens was named as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect magazine. An online poll was held which ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazine noted that Hitchens' (#5), Chomsky's (#1), and Abdolkarim Soroush's (#15) rankings were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.

He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Hitchens and the literary scene

There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, but others believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.

Prior to Hitchens' (perceived) ideological shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal declared Hitchens his dauphin or heir.

Hitchens and The Nation staff

Among his most severe critics is one-time colleague and friend Alexander Cockburn, a weekly contributor to The Nation. Cockburn has frequently alluded to Hitchens' tendency to tipple. On August 20, 2005, Cockburn wrote:

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is [— a] guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited [until] his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel.

Hitchens' clarified his stance, stating that:

[i]n a recent effusion in the Huffington Post, Cindy Sheehan repeats the lie that her letter to ABC News Nightline was doctored, and says that a colleague of hers inserted the offending words in furtherance of his own "anti-Semitic" agenda. If she regards her own words as anti-Jewish, it's not up to me to correct her. I have not said that she is anti-Jewish, only that she shows a sinister ineptness in handling the wild idea of a PNAC/JINSA pro-Sharon secret government in the United States.

Antitheism

Christopher Hitchens is antitheist and antireligious. Hitchens often speaks out against Judeo-Christian religions, or what he calls "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). In his book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western antitheists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism.

However, Hitchens told an interviewer that he thinks all educated people should have a knowledge of the Bible. He also claimed to have instructed his children in religious history and that he encouraged his wife to hold a Seder dinner for their daughter.

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

Hitchens has been accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded, "when religion is attacked in this country […] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share". Hitchens has also been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in The American Conservative, and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge. When Joe Scarborough on March 12, 2004 asked whether he was “Consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics”, Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that “all religious belief is sinister and infantile”. Piatak claimed that “A straightforward description of all Hitchens’s anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine”, noting particularly Hitchens' assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roberts should not be confirmed because of his faith.

Personal

Family status

Hitchens has a daughter, Antonia, with his wife Carol Blue, whom he married in 1991. Hitchens has two children, Alexander and Sophia, by a previous marriage to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot. They were married in 1981 and divorced in 1989.

Use of alcohol

A profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol -- and his prodigious literary output." Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule." He noted that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind." George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate subcommittee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "Only some of which is true." Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on September 14, 2005, he elaborated on his prior response. "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)." 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.'"

Ethnic identity

In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on April 14, 2002, Hitchens says he is Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother, Peter, took his new bride to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her nineties, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that her ancestors were Blumenthals from Poland. According to The Observer of 14 April 2002, Christopher "insists that he is Jewish," and explored the issue in depth in the title essay of his book Prepared for the Worst.

In a column he wrote for the Los Angeles Times on February 9, 2006, Hitchens wrote, "my grandmother told me as an adult that both she and my mother were Jewish, and it sent me looking for my forebears on the German-Polish border". Hitchens' brother, Peter, disputes that the brothers have significant Jewish ancestry and is a Christian.

Relationship with brother, Peter Hitchens

Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a social conservative journalist, author and critic. 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). 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. However, after the birth of Peter's third child and some secret diplomacy by Peter, Christopher expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter Christopher and Peter gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved, although a recent review of Christopher's book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Peter appears to have re-ignited the debate. This, however, did not stop them both appearing on the June 21st 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time.

Friendship with David Irving

It was revealed by the London Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman in June 2007 that Hitchens has in the past socialised with the convicted Holocaust denier David Irving. Rachman revealed that Hitchens has attended several dinner parties at which Irving was a guest, and is an admirer of some of Irving's work. Hitchens has since broken his "social contacts" with Irving, after the latter made a "shocking anti-semitic remark".

Bibliography

As sole author

• 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0446579807
• 2006 Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography. Books That Shook the World/Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84354-513-6
• 2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
• 2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays. Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
• 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. Reissued as No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family in 2000.
• 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
• 1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. Verso.
• 1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reissued 2004, with a new introduction, as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-592-7)
• 1990 The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
• 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) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns).
• 1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso).

As co-author or co-editor

• 2002 Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (co-editor, with Christopher Caldwell).
• 1994 International Territory: The United Nations, 1945-1995 (with Adam Bartos). Verso.
• 1994 When Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (with Ed Kashi). Pantheon Books.
• 1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said). Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4. Reissued, 2001.
• 1976 Callaghan, The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner). Cassell, ISBN 0-304-29768-2

As a contributor

• 2005 A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, Thomas Cushman (editor). University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-24555-5
• 2000 Vanity Fair's Hollywood, Graydon Carter and David Friend (editors). Viking Studio.

See also

• Christopher Hitchens' critiques of specific individuals

External links

Biographical

• Atlantic Monthly profile

• NPR profile

• In-depth interview and profilein New York Magazine
• Interview with Brian Lamb for the show Booknotes, an author interview series on C-SPAN (some biographical information)
• New Yorker profile

Hitchens' work

• The Christopher Hitchens Web, columns, articles, interviews, etc.
• A free video excerpt of a lecture by Hitchens
• Our war on fanaticism is just (SFgate.com)
• Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle: What's wrong with her Crawford protest (Slate.com)
• The case for mocking religion - Muhammad cartoon controversy (Slate.com)
• Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, March 2005, "Ohio's Odd Numbers"
• Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, 9 November 2004, "Kissinger Declassified"
• Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 21 June 2004, "Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore"
• Christopher Hitchens, Grand Street, Autumn 1985, "The Chorus And The Cassandra" - a defence of Chomsky's role in the Faurisson affair and the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge controversies, also reprinted in Prepared for the Worst, (1989) pp. 58-77.
• A few words of fraternal admonition to "Norm" Finkelstein, Hitchens' response to Finkelstein
• 'Galloway is a hot, blustering bully - but I'm staying on his case until the very end' (The Daily Telegraph)

Others

• Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling debate the merits of atheism on March 27, 2007
• Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson debate Is Christianity Good for the World? (May 2007)
• Christopher Hitchens, Bob Graham, David Corn, Ruth Wedgwood - Were We Misled? A Debate on Pre-War Intelligence live recording of WNYC's Brian Lehrer show recorded in February 2006 at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, MP3 format
• Michael Kazin on Christopher Hitchens, Dissent (magazine)
• George Galloway vs. Christopher Hitchens, in The Independent, 16 September 2005
• "The Grapple in the Big Apple", by Alex Massie, National Review Online, September 16 2005
• "Galloway vs. Hitchens", by Louis Proyect, Counterpunch, September 16 2005
• Christopher Hitchens: Arguments for the war to liberate Iraq collected by the Center for Security Policy September 22 2005
• "Free Radical", interview in Reason by Rhys Southan
• "Christopher Hitchens, Literary Agent Provocateur", National Public Radio profile, 21 June 2006
• "Road To Baghdad", City Pages, November 20 2002
• The Hitch, Village Voice brief profile by John Giuffo, 1 February 2005
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger Google Video, 1 hr 19 min 41 sec
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger Official movie web site
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger at Internet Movie Database
• Christopher Hitchens Vs. Jerry Falwell Video

Criticisms

• Exactly What Christopher Hitchens Means to Say by Wes Walls, a response to Hitchens' stance on the Iraq war
• Fraternally yours, Chris, by Norman Finkelstein: criticizes Hitchens for perceived "opportunism"
• Dreams and Delusions, by Edward Said: pillories "expatriate British journalists in America" for "just racism at the bottom though, no matter how dressed up it is"
• O brother, where art thou? Peter Hitchens laments his brother's position on the Iraq War

• O Brother, Why Art Thou? Christopher Hitchens responds to his brother's criticism

• Christopher Hitchens' last battle, by Juan Cole
• Hitchens Backs Down, by Alexander Cockburn
• Christopher Hitchens Rants Again, by Daniel Pipes
• The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens, Monthly Review
• The Purest Neocon: Christopher Hitchens, an unreconstructed Bolshevik, finds his natural home on the pro-war Right. By Tom Piatak, American Conservative, October 10 2005
• Christopher Hitchens: Flickering Firebrand, Obelus.org
• 'Hitchens and Said' by Hugh Fitzgerald, February 21 2007