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, 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.

Attacks on former friends

Beginning shortly after 11 September 2001, Hitchens has written several pieces attacking former friends. 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?'

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

• Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son