Remembering Christopher Hitchens
He passed away 12 years ago, December 15, at MD Anderson in Houston
The late writer and militant activist gave many valuable, still applicable lessons regarding freedom of expression and the struggle against antisemitism, as well as making endless, acute observations about the Middle East, during his abbreviated life.
Hitchens succumbed to esophageal cancer at 62, after an 18 month-long fight, having been diagnosed at the opening of a 2010 book tour for his best-selling memoir, Hitch 22 — a play on the title of his good friend Joseph Heller’s famous novel. He passed away Dec. 15 after contracting pneumonia.
I was reasoned into atheism by Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion at the late age of 20, which turned out to be only 6 months before Hitchens’ passing, so I didn’t have a lot of time to learn about his work while he was still with us. Although I just missed him, I’ve since studied his work for thousands of hours and offer my thoughts here (a Substack column whose title was ‘annexed,’ as he’d say, from his Slate column) on where he would’ve stood today.
Hitchens, inspired to become a journalist by the great James “Jimmy” Cameron, inspired me to become a journalist.
‘Beginning In Reverse Order’
Needing to sadly cancel the remainder of his much-anticipated book tour for treatment, the lover of literature and politics suddenly had to command all his focus towards his ill health. Nevertheless, Hitchens continued participating in the struggle against clerical reaction, for a secular society, and an atheist worldview, while undergoing treatment from ‘inside the chemo clinic,’ as he grew fond of saying in his trademark, sarcastic, self-deprecating style. The collection of his writings during this time were posthumously published in a book titled Mortality. The last book Hitchens published was an essay collection titled, Arguably, in September of 2011, two months before his passing. A posthumous collection of essays, And Yet, were published in 2016.
For those unfamiliar with this last phase of his life, it’s worth summarizing briefly.
As you can imagine, the great atheist Hitchens (who was known as the ringleader of “the Four Horsemen” of atheism or, as he would say in his ironic, Marxist humor, “four horsemen of the counter-apocalypse”) received loads of mail inquiring if he was questioning his views on the divine, given his sudden proximity to death.
But Hitchens stood his ground, pointing to the absurdity of the notion that the origins of the universe are dependent on the health status of one primate, as well as holding up science, modern medicine, and other treasures of The Enlightenment as our only means of “salvation,” as a species, from maladies like cancer and other life-threatening diseases. As his friends, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie would say of him, Hitchens gave an example of how to die with dignity. Indeed, he often said in his last days:
“I didn’t choose this fight, but now I’m in it, and I want to give it my best shot.”
On top of the philosophical refutations, the chain-smoking, top-shelf whiskey-loving atheist would also point to the predictability of his ailment.
“It’s the cancer one would expect, if you lived a rather rackety, bohemian life as I did for so long. That’s a bit of a yawn,” he told 60 Minutes in an end-of-life exclusive.
What would Hitchens have said about our current crises regarding freedom of expression, antisemitism and the Middle East?
Hitchens — a biographer of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson —used to say that historians must never try to guess what the figures about whom they are writing “must have thought” at this or that time, or about this or that topic, although he made one exception regarding what he maintained he certainly knew about what Jefferson “must have thought” the first time he laid eyes on Sally Hemmings. He did grant however, in some cases, it’s possible to perhaps glean what they might have thought about certain things, given they are not too far separated from the time of the biography subject’s death, and if they wrote about such things during their life. For example, Hitchens maintained all his life that George Orwell would have opposed the Vietnam War, a point he often had to argue against conservatives, on the grounds that Orwell definitively wrote and fought against colonialism during his life and specifically opposed French colonialism.
Hitchens would have been 74 years old if he were still with us. Many of his contemporaries and spouses are alive, although his best friend, Martin Amis, lamentably passed in May, astonishingly, to the same cancer that took Hitch. (Martin, too, fancied cigarettes and alcohol, as one does.) And Hitchens wrote and said plenty about the above issues. Where he would have stood today is quite clear.
Freedom of Expression
Hitchens, a champion of the “principles of the Enlightenment,” often described himself as a “free speech absolutist.” This was in theory. In practice, he led many campaigns against censorship of all kinds and from all quarters. In the 1980s, he spoke on a panel in Washington D.C. against “official secrets” and “national security,” topics he opposed greatly and actually one of the biggest reasons he left England. He argued that the government shouldn’t be able to decide what a secret is, especially when many of those “secrets” are already well known in the public domain.
Hitch lived long enough to tell Julian Assange to stop fooling around and “turn himself in,” arguing that principled and courageous journalists who dared exposing state secrets should be willing to face the government in court, as he would have. Regardless, I’m certain Hitchens would’ve opposed the current treatment of him by the British state, although he may’ve also pointed out that it’s for this very reason that Assange should’ve turned himself in in 2011. His trial would’ve been finalized a long time ago and it may’ve gone his way.
In 1989, he was one of the few leading voices against the Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempts to assassinate Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses. He helped Rushdie hide out in his apartment while on the run from attempts on his life. Hitchens stridently pushed back against apologists for Khomeini who argued that the problem was Rushdie’s “blasphemy” and “offensive language.” While Rushdie survived, although he was newly attacked again in 2022, many of his publishing staff were slain. Apologia for Islamist homicide, as we can see, is an old story.
While Hitchens was a voice and champion of many dissident and radical writers facing censorship and threats from reactionary forces worldwide, such as the Velvet Revolution in Stalinist Eastern Europe, throughout his career, he also made it a point to uphold the free speech of people who may have a hateful agenda, those with which he vehemently disagreed and opposed. His case in point was defending the British fascist historian, David Irving, a well-known Holocaust-denier and sympathizer of Adolf Hitler. Irving was prosecuted in various European jurisdictions for his antisemitic opinions, something Hitchens opposed.
Aside from the principle of applying free speech consistently, regardless of its content, Hitchens fascinatingly argued that even though Irving’s work undoubtedly contained pro-Nazi falsehoods, hitherto unknown facts about the Third Reich were actually discovered and hitherto unalterable and unquestionable Holocaust lore was disproven by Irving’s primary documents research. Hitchens argued the readers and general public should be able to decide for themselves what they think of Irving’s work instead of the government or publishers deciding for them.
In the 2000s, with the war against al-Qaeda getting underway, Hitchens’ battles for free speech were almost entirely against Islamist forces. A flashpoint was in 2005, when a Danish newspaper and the Danish people were attacked by Islamist governments and mobs for refusing to censor animated satire of the non-prophet Mohammed published in the Jutland Post. As with Rushdie, liberal critics and religious heads criticized the satirists, rather than the murderers. Moreover, the media scandalously covered-up the situation, by refusing to air or re-print the cartoons. Hitchens took CNN to task for their decision to not replicate the images out of fear. I republish the cartoons here:
One of the magazines Hitchens wrote for, Free Inquiry, re-published the cartoons which led to it being pulled off the racks by Borders Books. The retailer went out of business just months before he passed away which may’ve pleased him because he called for a boycott of Borders after they censored Free Inquiry. He used to say, “I’ll never speak again at another Borders Bookstore, unless they pay me a lot of money.” They never did.
Ironically, I didn’t know about the boycott and the scandal when I stole professor Dawkins’ book from a Borders Bookstore in Houston that was trying to get rid of all their books as they prepared to close down for good. I’m not sure what Hitch would’ve thought about my misdemeanor book theft but I’d like to think he may’ve tacitly approved. I can still remember the conversation with the poor bookseller (Barnes and Nobles was my first job so I feel a special sympathy for them). I asked where their books by Richard Dawkins were. She responded, “The atheism or science books?” I thought to myself, “What’s the difference?”
Hitch gave a famous speech at a Canadian university that year as part of a debate about the Canadian Parliament’s consideration of a law that would have banned “hate speech,” a thinly veiled attempt to ban criticism of Islam and Islamism as well as an obvious (in hindsight) precursor to the more recent attempts to outlaw “misgendering” transgendered individuals.
Hitchens gave a marvelous, master oratory on the subject of free speech, beginning by yelling the words, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” After illustrating the fact that nothing happens when you yell fire in a crowded theatre, other than earning strange looks, he educated the audience about the U.S. Supreme Court decision which gave birth to the cliche. He described how the landmark case involved a group of Yiddish-speaking socialists who’d printed a leaflet, in their own language, opposing President Woodrow Wilson’s participation in World War I, from which they’d fled Europe.
The “greatly overpraised” Judge Oliver Wendel Holmes, as Hitchens referred to him, maintained that the Yiddish-speaking socialist’s leaflet opposing the first imperialist world slaughter was akin to yelling fire in a crowded theatre where there was none. (This legal precedent was later overturned.) Hitchens argued that the Yiddish-speaking socialists were actually the real fire-fighters where there really was an all-consuming fire. Thus, one should never call on people’s right to yell fire to be curbed, because who’s to say whether there really is a fire or if there isn’t?
The consummately literate Hitchens referenced three works which he summarized as classic texts on the subject: Milton’s Areopagitica, Mill’s introduction to his essay On Liberty and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in which he said all argue that censorship not only infringes on the controversial speaker but also on the right of those in attendance to listen and hear opinions that might get them to reconsider their own. Censorship, therefore, is a double or even multiple offense.
Hitchens also made reference to the classic play Man for All Seasons, referencing the witch-hunting prosecutor character who’s asked by an interlocutor what he’d do if his own rights were infringed in a lawless state. Where would he turn, having admitted that he’d “cut down every law in England,” if he could capture the devil?
Hitchens ended the speech by pointing to the “false antithesis” that the same people who are calling for “hate speech” to be outlawed also happen to be the main sources of hatred in the world, like Islamists calling for the murder and enslavement of Jews, secularists and other nonbelievers in Islam and whose right to spew hatred is never infringed upon by the government. Even then, in 2005, Hitchens referenced hateful rallies in cities like London and New York calling for the slaying of infidels. So, what we’re seeing today isn’t new. It’s also no wonder that these same forces makeup the vanguard of today’s antisemitic street movement.
Hitchens on Antisemitism
Christopher Hitchens discovered in his late thirties, c. 1989, that he was Jewish. A tribute to him written in the Jewish Daily Forward described him as a ‘non-Jewish Jew.’ His mother, who tragically died in 1973, decided not to tell the boys, he and his brother Peter, out of fear that they would be discriminated against in school and in society. Their grandmother revealed the family secret at the age of 90. By that time, Hitchens had become a devoted champion of the Palestinian cause, as a co-editor with Edward Said and had become a good friend and comrade of Professors Noam Chomsky and Israel Shahak. As a traditional Marxist, Hitchens defended the rights of all nations to self-determination and made no exceptions for the Israelis. Christopher Hitchens was for a two-state solution as well as a champion of Kurdish nationalism.
In the last 5 to 10 years of his life, Hitchens gave a series of deep talks on the question of antisemitism. In 2007, he and Martin Amis held a discussion in London, hosted by the Jewish Chronicle, headlined, “No Laughing Matter.” They covered the work of, and their personal experiences with the author, Saul Bellow, who they both knew. Amis read excerpts and told anecdotes of Bellow which suggested Bellow’s belief in the existence of “Jewish anxiety” regarding Israel’s continued existence and the relevant impacts of 9/11 had on global opinion of Israel and Jews in general.
Then, after recalling his Marxist political background, and his thoughts on Bellow’s literary achievements, Hitchens admitted that Bellow was right about antisemitism in the black and Muslim communities in the 80s, against which he’d argued at the time. “I wish I could have my conservation with Bellow back, as Martin must also for many reasons,” Hitchens regretted. I quote a mini-tribute Amis made to Bellow, with whom he was especially close, in this piece of mine arguing that the bloodshed in Gaza is on Hamas. (Interestingly, re-listening to part I of the Four Horsemen roundtable for this piece, Hitch ended by making the point that religion has unnecessarily and disastrously poisoned the Israel-Palestine situation, particularly in Gaza.)
Hitchens also made the point in his discussion with Amis that antisemitism is different from other forms of prejudice in that it involves a pseudo-intellectual conspiracy theory about clandestine Jewish power, whereas “garden-variety racism” of the usual kind focuses on vulgar remarks against people of color, like dislike of their cooking, breeding rates, work ethic, etc.
“Nobody accuses Puerto Ricans of secretly running the World Bank,” he gave as an example. “Nobody says ‘the Armenians’ left the World Trade Center just before the planes hit. It has to be the Jews, otherwise it’s just not interesting.”
With antisemitism, the dislike is even masqueraded in false praise, Hitchens also noted. Quoting from Chariots of Fire, as he often did when discussing the topic, antisemitism can be caught “on the edge of a remark.” Today antisemitism is caught in “the edges” of remarks involving “rivers” and “seas” and being “free.”
He also interestingly observed the incipient coordination between the isolationist right-wing in America, behind Patrick Buchanon (against whom Hitch often wrote and debated), and the America First “anti-war”-ism which his old friend, Gore Vidal, admired along with the movement’s horrid founder, Charles Lindbergh. This note was made in response to Amis who’d contended that there were no fascist roots in America. Making similar points a few years later in memory of Daniel Pearl at UCLA, Hitchens maintained that antisemitism was a sign not just that something bad is going to happen to the Jews but that something bad is going to happen to the society at large and that therefore antisemitism is a “common enemy of humanity.”
Hitchens on the Middle East, Jihadism and Hamas
Christopher Hitchens was a life-long writer and author on the Middle East. Starting out as a pro-Vietnamese Revolution and anti-Stalinism activist at Oxford in the late 1960s, Hitchens became intimately involved in the Kurdish struggle, as referenced above, in criticism of the Israeli government, had become an uncompromising supporter of the democratic and secular forces in Palestine, and was an exposer of American imperialism in Iraq, Lebanon and the entire region. He mightily opposed the Iranian counter-revolution and the invasion by Saddam Hussein that would end up aiding it in the long run, and later opposed the First Gulf War.
The experience of the Rushdie affair, along with his political opposition to Saddam Hussein, would be strong factors in his positions in the 2000s regarding Afghanistan and Iraq. In the wake of Oct. 7, many have recalled the post-9/11 era with rose-colored glasses. For example, in reply to undue pressure against Israel, by pundits who hate the Jewish state, they rhetorically ask, “What if people called for a ceasefire after 9/11?” Well, many did call for a ceasefire, some on 9/11 itself.
Hitchens spent a lot of his time refuting such people. One of them was his good friend Noam Chomsky who, shortly after the attacks, infamously said the attacks in New York were “the chickens coming home to roost.” They had a historic exchange. Hitchens would resign from The Nation, for which he’d written since emigrating in the 70s, in 2003, for their soft support for Islamism and opposition to the U.S. war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, military and political struggles which he championed.
When it came to Iraq, Hitchens pointed to the hypocrisy of people who argued against it supposedly because al-Qaeda was uninvolved, given that with regards to Afghanistan, there was undoubtedly a link with al-Qaeda, and yet the phony peaceniks still opposed it. “These people can’t be convinced with evidence,” he once said of them. It’s hard to remember now but it should never be forgotten that there were people opposed to the United States defending itself after 9/11.
In 2006, demonstrators in London rallied under the banner of “We’re all Hezbollah now.” Sympathy for jihadist groups is also an old story. Much of the rabid antisemitism we see now actually hit full throttle after the World Trade Center, Pentagon and attempted D.C. terror attacks. Intellectuals and even poets came out saying that the U.S. deserved the attack upon it because of its imperialist policies. This created an atmosphere of anti-Americanism under the guise of “anti-Imperialism,” which today underlies the hatred of Israel and the U.S. around the world and on college campuses.
Hitchens spent a lot of his time combating this strain of the Left, which allied itself with Islamism and was duped into thinking it represented some kind of liberation movement when in actuality it posed a reactionary threat to women, Jews and all non-believers. An early sign of the anti-Jewish character of this symbiosis was its widespread and pervasive claim that the U.S. was attacked because of its support for Israel. In fact, many of the main proponents against the U.S.’s fight against al-Qaeda were the same people who advanced the ‘neo-con’ canard, alleging that “neo-conservative Jews” were secretly controlling White House foreign policy.
Oct. 7 — which, upon revisiting a Hitchens C-Span appearance celebrating 25 years of its call-in show, was reminded by one of the callers who noticed Oct. 7 was not just the show’s birthdate but also the day the Afghanistan war started — was a long time coming. It wasn’t an intelligence failure merely of the Israelis, but of the world. Everybody should’ve known.
Hitchens pointed out in a D.C. panel in the mid 2000s that those who say that support of Israel is the cause of Islamist terrorism are proven disingenuous by those who blow themselves up in Israel-proper, such as the Passover Bombing, not in occupied settlements. Even then he was saying that such forces should be taken seriously, as they evidently won’t be content until there are no more Jews in what used to be mandate Palestine. He was right.
Hitchens would have also been elated by the Abraham Accords, especially the recognizing of Israel and Kosovo. During the 90s, Hitchens was a great champion of the people of Bosnia and Kosovo, for its national and human rights. Hitch would have also been pleasantly unsurprised by the irony of Donald Trump and his Republican Party being the best hope for a Palestinian homeland out of the two bourgeois parties. Hitchens often pointed out that George W. Bush was “the first U.S. President to use the words ‘Palestinian’ and ‘State’ in the same sentence,” also noting the positive effects of toppling Saddam Hussein had on the Israel-Palestine question.
The casualty porn being advanced today by Hamas is quite similar to the second gulf war as well. During the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq, who’d joined forces with the remnants of Hussein’s old regime, critics often pointed to extreme, politicized figures, in this case published by the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine. Like the supposed casualty figures today, they didn’t distinguish between Al-Qaeda combatants and civilians killed, nor those killed by the jihadists, nor did they place any responsibility on the jihadists. All blame was pinned on the U.S., just like it currently is on Israel. Hitchens helped expose these fraudulent statistics.
And like today with Israel, many of the same forces calling for Israel’s surrender were also calling for U.S. surrender in Afghanistan and Iraq, demanding its withdrawal. It’s good that many grant Israel’s right to self-defense now, because many didn’t grant the U.S. the right to defend itself back then, and still don’t, even defenders of Israel. But al-Qaeda was ultimately defeated. The Taliban, with the help of Pakistan, was able to stay alive and recapture the country in 2021. Bush’s attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East led to the rise of Hamas to power in 2006, after which they orchestrated a bloody, Saddam Hussein-style coup against their political rivals.
Hitchens was one of the first to call attention to Vladimir Putin’s expansionism, particularly in the republic of Georgia, noticing also its relations with North Korea and Iran, sounding the alarm as early as 2005 for Russian attacks on Ukraine’s sovereignty. His last article was on the Middle East and the Arab Spring which had taken place the summer before his death, an essay published in The Guardian. It paid homage to the John Brown-type of heroes who ignited the Arab Spring.
“Christopher Hitchens: from 9/11 to the Arab spring:”
“Three men: Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamedeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu – a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur and a Libyan husband and father. In the spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt. The third, it might be said, gave his life as well as took it: loading up his modest car with petrol and home-made explosives and blasting open the gate of the Katiba barracks in Benghazi – symbolic Bastille of the detested and demented Gaddafi regime in Libya,” he wrote as a tribute.
After giving tribute to the civil resistance movement in Iran, the Kurdish struggle, and the Lebanese struggle against the Syrian occupation, at American University in Beirut in 2009 at a talk under the topic of, “Who are the real revolutionaries?”, he had the following reflection:
It was clear that a good number of the audience (including, I regret to say, most of the Americans) regarded me as some kind of stooge. For them, revolutionary authenticity belonged to groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, resolute opponents of the global colossus and tireless fighters against Zionism. For me, this was yet another round in a long historic dispute. Briefly stated, this ongoing polemic takes place between the anti-imperialist left and the anti-totalitarian left. In one shape or another, I have been involved – on both sides of it – all my life. And, in the case of any conflict, I have increasingly resolved it on the anti-totalitarian side. (This may not seem much of a claim, but some things need to be found out by experience and not merely derived from principle.) The forces who regard pluralism as a virtue, "moderate" though that may make them sound, are far more profoundly revolutionary (and quite likely, over the longer-term, to make better anti-imperialists as well).
If Hitchens were still with us, he would have been a champion for the people of Ukraine, continued championing the people of Georgia as he did upon Putin’s 2008 invasion, and supported the struggles of the residents of Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran. He would’ve insisted that the free speech rights of today’s pro-Hamas voices not be curbed (“I like ‘em where I can see ‘em,” he used to say), would’ve agreed that counter-mobilizing and answering politically is the correct political response, and that a total, annihilating defeat should be dealt to Hamas, Palestine’s enemy.
I’ll end with this excerpt from Hitch’s last piece. We should follow this example.
“Especially over the course of the last 10 years, the word "martyr" has been utterly degraded by the wolfish image of Mohammed Atta: a cold and loveless zombie – a suicide murderer – who took as many innocents with him as he could manage. The organisations that find and train men like Atta have since been responsible for unutterable crimes in many countries and societies, from England to Iraq, in their attempt to create a system where the cold and loveless zombie would be the norm, and culture would be dead. They claim that they will win because they love death more than life, and because life-lovers are feeble and corrupt degenerates. Practically every word I have written, since 2001, has been explicitly or implicitly directed at refuting and defeating those hateful, nihilistic propositions, as well as those among us who try to explain them away.”
— Christopher Hitchens, 9 September 2011
In memoriam, Christopher Hitchens, 13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011.