Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens is the former columnist for The Nation, putatively on the left, who in the late 1990s veered to the right to first argue against abortion, [1] and then turn on his former colleagues. Now, Hitchens is considered a neocon who supported the US war of aggression against Iraq, and even travelled to Iraq as an embedded journalist to cheer on the US troops. He now writes mostly for Vanity Fair and Slate. [2]
Contents
Attacks on former friends
Beginning shortly after 11 September 2001, Hitchens has written several pieces attacking former friends.
Edward Said
At Edward Said's passing away, amidst perfunctory praise, Hitchens questioned Said's 'political judgment' which was perverse enough to 'only imagine the lowest motives for those in favor of regime change in Baghdad'. He noted Said's 'slight tendency to self-pity'; the 'too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood' that marred his literary work; his capacity for 'stooping to mere abuse when attacking other dissidents—particularly other Arab dissidents, and most particularly Iraqi and Kurdish ones' [Said had written critically of Kanan Makiya, the KDP and PUK].[3] It was in 2003 -- a quarter of a century after it was first published -- that Hitchens wrote an attack on Edward Said's influential Orientalism, first in The Guardian, as Said was in his final decline, and later in The Atlantic after his passing away.[4] In the latter, Hitchens refers to the 'sheer vulgarity', 'incoherence', 'essential emptiness' and 'fantastic' quality of Said's writing; chides him for his opposition to the Iraq war and upbraid's him for suggesting that the US was responsible for the destruction of Iraq's museums and libraries (curiously Hitchens insists this was done by 'the Saddam regime')
Gore Vidal
His most recent is an attack on Gore Vidal in which, among other things, he insinuates that acclaimed essayist and novelist is an anti-Semite. An article in which he accuses Vidal of 'a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong'; of going 'slumming again' and indulging in 'the lowest in himself and in his followers'; in which he refers to Vidal's 'clumsy and nasty attempt to re-write his history'; his 'crank-revisionist and denialist history'; his 'awful, spiteful, miserable' ways; his want of 'a bit of dignity'; his descent into 'the cheap, and even to the counterfeit'; his 'barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity'; his 'Sarcastic, tired flippancy' and 'lugubrious resentment'; Hitchens ends by pronouncing 'I have no wish...to assassinate Vidal’s character'!
Vidal's fault, among others, is to say of England: “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.” Hitchens fumes: 'What business does this patrician have in the gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?'[5]
Related Articles
Christopher Hitchens, 'Losing the Iraq War: Can the left really want us to?', Slate, 8 August, 2005. (Accessed 7 April, 2009)
Affiliations
Connections
Notes
- ↑ Sasha Abramsky, 'Christopher Hitchens - Interview', Electric Library/The Progressive, 1 February, 1997. (Accessed 7 April, 2009)
- ↑ 'Christopher Hitchens - About This Author', goodreads.com, accessed 7 April, 2009.
- ↑ Christopher Hitchens, A Valediction for Edward Said, Slate, 26 September 2003
- ↑ Christopher Hitchens, Where the Twain Should Have Met, The Atlantic, September 2003.
- ↑ Christopher Hitchens, Vidal Loco, Vanity Fair, February 2010
