The only evidence I’ve ever seen offered for why I should hate Mother Teresa is that she was a Catholic and that all Catholics are evil. You may find that a convincing argument; I don’t. As for Oscar Romero, the human rights activist who made the only serious attempt to protect the people of El Salvador against the horrors committed by both sides in the Civil War, I don’t see what you’re trying to accomplish by mentioning details from the life of Cesar Romero. Is that supposed to be funny?
Taking this tack in defense of Hitches is somewhat ironic, given that spewing vile slander at people right after their deaths was one of his specialties. I’m merely telling the truth about Hitchens, a truth that most other people would rather not face. He rarely met a mass-murdering, mass-torturing communist dictator that he didn’t immediately fall in love with, and he rarely saw a Christian populace being slaughtered without defending those doing the slaughter. The result? Publications all over America in Europe, from all parts of the political spectrum, lavished him with praise and let him publish articles with them, and now that he’s died most of them will write obituaries that don’t mention the fact that he supported almost all of the most murderous regimes of the 20th century. I, on the other hand, will mention that fact.
I’d want a better cite than ‘the American conservative’, but further Googling reveals that he was involved in Cheka and some pretty unpleasant business in the civil war…an area of history I know little about, more reading needed I think. Ignorance fought, anyway. As a Trotskyist in his early career Hitch also championed Mugabe when he was fighting British imperialism.
He didn’t, and I know around here the war is as unpopular as can be, but he saw it as part of a wider goal of fighting forces of religious fundamentalism. I didn’t agree with the invasion at all but I still think he threw up interesting points that aren’t worth condemning his memory over.
He argues that secularism is a more ethical way or doing good works, as it isn’t subject to agendas - Hamas being a major provider of aid in Palestine for instance, and we all know why. Ditto the good works of Mormon missionaries who do so with the aim of spreading a cult. There were no ‘sacred cows’ for Hitchens, he wasn’t afraid to take icons down a peg or two (his writing on Ghandi is pretty illuminating). Never heard of him attacking Polish independence? He seems pretty contemptuous of Stalinism for the same reasons he’s contemptuous of religion. He also seems pretty admiring of Lech Walesa to the point where it undermines his own arguments.
I’m not pretending he a saint, either. I disagreed with many of his writings and views (particularly re-electing Bush in '04), but he does have my respect for always having a point worth saying. He was one of those not content to sit back and accept things as they were told. Not worth creating a GD thread about it but I firmly believe his memory deserves celebrating for that if nothing else, history is replete with the warnings of blithely accepting anything.
Christopher Hitchens was one of the only genuinely unpredictable political commentators I can think of. Normally, if I know a commentator’s basic political orientation, I can predict very accurately where he’s going t ocome down on any given issue.
But Hitchens truly fit no mold. No matter what you believe in, you’d find yourself cheering him AND cursing him regularly. Just when you thought he was hopeless, he’d say something inspiring, and just when you thought he was the perfect spokesman for your side, he’d commit blasphemy against one of your idols.
LOTS of commentators like to fancy themselves bold iconoclasts, ready to poke fun at anyone and anything. Christopher Hitchens is one of the few who wasn’t kidding himself.
Yeah, the notion is weird. On your deathbed it’s too late to improve your life. I guess you could wave away your priest and spend a few more moments with your family.
Oh, come on, Marley. You had it right the first time: It has to do with understanding motivations and realizing that other people are not quite so stupid as we sometimes like to suppose. Telling an atheist, “You better think twice. You’re going to die someday, and then what?” or telling a believer, “Well look at this, devastation in Haiti. Where’s your ‘God’ now?” as if the atheist may not have known about mortality or the believer may not have known about the existence of sorrow … this only reveals in what high regard we hold ourselves in comparison to others. It has nothing to do with the timing of the exhortation to our favored belief system.
Could we please make an effort to keep the thread on the subject of Mr. Hitchens and his work? There’s a Pit thread about the reactions of some believers to his death, and of course GD is the appropriate place to debate larger issues of belief vs. unbelief.
I know this is a not a warning, but just to clarify: I was calling the contention silly, and did not mean to suggest that it was characteristic of Marley himself. Indeed, had I thought the latter, I would not even have bothered raising my objection!
(Also, I think I’ve said my piece on what, I agree, is a bit of a collateral topic.)
I’m not seeing it. I don’t see him arguing that anyone should hate her, just that she’s not deserving of the universal accolades she received. The “attacks” also started before she died.
By Jove, Eve, he saw right through you!
I think that speaks to a broader issue about understanding people’s beliefs and opinions, not to the specific point about hoping somebody changed his mind right before he died.
Hitch and his brother Peter spent much of the last 50 years in various states of estrangement and contention. Here is Peter’s beautiful and moving eulogy to his brother. Well worth a read.
I particularly enjoyed his turn in Tales of Manhattan as the philandering fiance who enlisted Henry Fonda to claim the incriminating tailcoat (and ends up claiming Ginger Rogers as well).
Couldn’t have said it better. No matter where you stand I’m sure there’s something he wrote that would piss you off. Also, his writings in The Atlantic about modern letters were always worth reading, even when I didn’t know a thing about the person he was writing about. He was a great writer and critic, albeit an acerbic and gossipy one. Always an enjoyable read.
Because smoking probably sped up his death. He really should have reconsidered his cigarette usage.
Oh, he’s talking about some ficticious super-being, sorry, the answer to that would be “because that’s stupid”.
Hitchens was real literary figure, and one of our era’s truly great essayists. I think he was at his best writing about literary figures and intellectual life more generally. His work on Orwell, for example, is fantastic, and he’s written some fabulous book reviews for The Atlantic.
As an atheist myself, i support many of the points he made about the place of religion in public life. As someone who spends a fair bit of his own time thinking about religion’s role in American history, i didn’t find too much of Hitchens’ writing on the subject to be especially new or surprising, but i think he performed a public service by bringing the debate more fully into the public consciousness.
I found his sudden turn to the irrational right, at least on some issues, in the wake of 9/11 to be very frustrating. It wasn’t simply that he supported the chickenhawks in Washington, but that he was so contemptuous and dismissive of those who disagreed with him. I recognize that those qualities were around in abundance during the debate over the war in Iraq, but Hitchens’ aggressive idiocy on the subject made me lose a lot of respect for him, even while i continued to read some of his excellent writing that was unrelated to the war issue.