There is no question in my mind that Christopher Hitchens was the bravest ideologically driven writer since—well, I’ll say it—my father, Norman Podhoretz. The bravery he displayed was not in taking unyielding positions and holding to them even when the outcome appeared bleak, as was the case with his support for the war in Iraq—contrast Hitchens’s stalwartness with the unutterable cravenness of the self-righteously inconstant Andrew Sullivan, whose salivation at the Pavlov-like bell rung by the website clicks of the the anti-war left when he put his toe in the Bush-lied waters turned into an unslaking yearning for the rewards of that Internet traffic, and you get a sense of how things might have been different for Hitchens.
No, his bravery was personal; in maintaining views that angered not those for whom he had contempt but those whom he liked and socialized with and who even held some of the purse-strings for him, like The Nation, Hitchens did the most difficult thing a thinking person can do outside wartime or a threat of imminent violence or danger, and that is take a stand that puts him at odds with the entirety of his community. There can be real fun in this, to be sure, and you can’t be as consistently, almost willfully contrarian as Hitchens was without thrilling yourself by being the mischievous boy who is always looking to get away with something outrageous. But it is still extraordinarily difficult to keep yourself strapped to the mast when the sirens are singing to seduce you and are also threatening at the same time to dash your ship against the rocks. Christopher did, and, like my father, he set a great example for a generation of younger writers who found his combination of literacy, smart-assery, and polemical brilliance so alluring.
That said—and while also acknowledging the limpid quality of his prose, the supernatural ability he had to churn out literate articles despite the fact that he drank more than any other person I have ever known (with the exception of Pat Moynihan), and his enormous personal charm that always made time spent with him a pleasure—Christopher was also capable of expressing himself in a fashion that deserves to be called repugnant. I once saw him at a party in Washington in the 1980s accuse a young Reaganite then working idealistically for a controversial official as that official’s “butt boy” to that Reaganite’s face, an act of public-school mortification and bullying of a kind I’d never witnessed before and hope never to have to see again; he suggested in print once that Ronald Reagan could not negotiate with Mikhail Gorbachev because the assassination attempt on Reagan’s life had left the president incontinent and he would have to leave the room too often; he stood in defense of the historiographic virtues of the Holocaust denier David Irving, which is a little like praising Josef Mengele for his medical skills; he wrote indefensibly disgusting things about Mother Teresa; and then there was the case of Israel.
Christopher’s loathing for Israel originated in his days as part of Britain’s neo-Marxist left and its post-1967 decision to treat the Jewish state as an imperialist power (where once it had been considered a great success in the battle against British imperialism). But when he turned from those views, he continued to express an alienation toward Israel even when he came to hold views about the civilizational threat of Islamic radicalism that were remarkably consistent with, say, Natan Sharansky’s. In the end, his feelings toward Israel calmed down but never underwent an evolutionary change, because his problem was not with the notion of a homeland for the dispossessed Jewish tribe so much as it was with the continued existence of the tribe itself—a tribe of which he was astonished to discover in midlife he was a member, on his mother’s side. That tribe survived on this earth through the millennia because of its fidelity to the laws not of man but of God. That fidelity, as I am sure he was honest enough with himself to understand, made his own formidable life possible.
Something tells me that Hitchens suspected that he was Jewish long before the supposed revelation about his self-hating Jewish mother was made public. Having scrambled out of meager social station by a mother who demanded that he attend a public school that was a bastion of English condescension to all but the aristocracy (read as anti-Semitic, it must have been a life-long obsession of his to prove his bonafides by publicly hating the very ethnicity of which he was a member.
I’ll say rest in peace because I don’t think he’d object to well wishes. The loss of his presence to wife and children is bound to be great. n nI’ll also say that he picked on the weakest theological opponents he could find because he was either unequipped or unwilling to do battle with the strongest. n nI suppose we all need heroes. And my parents are my mine. n nI lost my Mother in June and with that I entered into what seems another existence. Only my Jewish neighbors Yefim and Sofia gasped when they asked how she was and I replied: she died.
I’m glad to be an American and I’m glad for the prepossession of Roger Williams. n nFrom Roland Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty: n n n
From Paradise Lost and Michael the Archangel via The Travail: n n n
"There is no question in my mind that Christopher Hitchensu200b was the bravest ideologically driven writer since….." n nI am saddened at his death as most are. He was a brilliant polemicist and his literary writings are just first rate (I suggest his pieces on Evelyn Waugh for example; superb). n nHowever, I must challenge John Podhoretz's above characterization. The Christopher Hitchens of the 1970s and 1980s (I'm agnostic as to the Sixties version but those years probably also apply) was a vicious, mean, Marxist who wished little but ill towards the United States. His writings in The Nation and elsewhere were little more than Marxist agitprop filled with lies about this country and her policies. No bravery can be seen in those words. He was of the Left, for the Left, and of the Left. n nI am heartened, indeed, that he saw the errors of his ways and became a US citizen. But I am saddened that he spent many of his years using his skills against the very principles – freedom of conscience, freedom of the individual, the dignity of man – that he came to love. n nYes, sad to see him go. n n
RIP, although his bed is in HELL.
One other difference between your father and Christopher Hitchens is that Hitchens never liberated himself from Marxist orthodoxy. Take a look at "An Evening With Christopher Hitchens" in *Salmagundi,* No. 133/134 Winter-Spring 2002, where he eventually makes this quite manifest. His movement toward defense of an assertive, anti-Islamicist American foreign policy had more to do with what was happening to the left than with any genuine open-mindedness or intellectual honesty. For that movement was made when the left was embracing postmodernism and hence was abandoning its faith in humanity's "progress" toward rational self-consciousness, intersubjective certainty, and unabashed and ruthless atheism. As this occurred—as the left embraced the particular and the local ("diversity") over and against the "meta-narratives" of an allegedly oppressive, hegemonically rationalist West—Hitchens remained steadfastly devoted to the Marxist metanarrative. The left's embrace of postmodernism came, moreover, at roughly the same time as the fall of the Soviet Union, and that event left America as the most progressive force in History—bourgeois of course, but for that very reason on the ultimately correct path, i.e., the predicted dialectical path of History. Hitchens had taken Marxism in with his mother's milk, as he had the British left's loathing of Israel, and he remained irrationally attached to both to the end. n nHis intellectual honesty was, in short, less than he claimed. In *Letters To A Young Contrarian,* he admonishes his reader never to write a review of books he hasn't read. I confronted him directly on this; I knew, from some things he had written about a particular author's work, that he had never actually read a word of that author's writings. He claimed he had, and quoted a secondary source, and I called him out on it, and asked him to name even the title of one of the books written by this author. He couldn't. So he ordered another scotch, and changed the topic. n nA friend of mine once described him as having a silver tongue and a tin ear. That still seems apt to me. I admire (and will miss) the tongue; I can't but regret the ear.