A marxist (atheist) appraisal of Christopher Hitchens, for your consideration

'Journalist, scoundrel Christopher Hitchens dies at 62'

British-born journalist Christopher Hitchens died December 15 at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, at the age of 62. His death has prompted an outpouring of praise and commentary in the US and global media. The New York Times chose to feature an account of his passing prominently on the front page of its printed edition and, for a time, even more prominently on its online version.

To say the least, the torrent of admiring words is out of proportion to Hitchens’ accomplishments and significance. He began his public life as a “left” journalist in Britain and moved on, without undergoing any apparent internal struggle, to become a proponent of imperialist war and violence, residing in Washington, D.C.
In paying tribute to Hitchens, those writing his obituaries primarily seek to legitimize their own present and future obeisance to power and money. For the Times and its staff in particular his departure is a major event. He exemplified a social type they admire.

Taken from the widest angle, Hitchens’ trajectory resembled that followed by many of his contemporaries in the “protest generation.” His was an especially spectacular and filthy evolution, but the difference between a Hitchens and a great many left celebrities, including those who still maintain a pretense now and then of opposition to the existing order, is slight. What has characterized these middle class elements, above all, has been an immense unseriousness about the great life-and-death questions of our day.

Chatter about Hitchens as a “contrarian,” an “iconoclast” and so on is simply self-deception, and comparisons to George Orwell, on the latter’s worst day, are equally absurd. Hitchens, for the last decade of his life and more, aligned himself with the American state, its CIA and military, as Washington embarked on a murderous drive to conquer the globe.

The Christian right is not the only variant of contemporary reaction. That Hitchens did not share its bigotry and fanaticism is of no importance weighed against his support for the invasion of Iraq, with the resulting destruction of a society and the deaths of perhaps one million people, and other imperialist crimes, and his cheerleading the build-up of a police state in the US, including the murder this year of unindicted US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Hitchens died an unrepentant and unapologetic proponent of the “global war on terror” and the crusade against “Islamofascism,” the racist-chauvinist justification for the conquest of Middle Eastern energy supplies by the US and its allies.

Associated with the “state capitalist” International Socialists group in the UK in the 1970s and later the Nation magazine in the US, Hitchens was the sort of private school “leftist” that British society regularly turns out, essentially snobs and careerists, who ditch their former “comrades” as soon as the wind shifts or more tempting opportunities present themselves.

His autobiography is an exercise in shameless name-dropping and self-promotion. The journalist’s account of meeting Margaret Thatcher, newly elected Conservative Party leader, whose neo-colonial Malvinas War Hitchens would later endorse, is especially distasteful: “Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she [Thatcher] knew my name and perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy [Hitchens’ own piece in the New Statesman]. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion …” What is one to make of this?

In the late 1990s, by which time Hitchens had largely given up his leftist pretensions, the Washington Post bluntly portrayed the circles he belonged to in the US capital as “an elite subset of Washington society—the crowd of journalists, intellectuals, authors and policymakers, mostly in their thirties and forties, who regularly dine together and dine out on each other.” Another Post article at the time described “a rarefied world where the top pols and bureaucrats sup with the media and literary elite at exclusive dinner parties. It’s a cozy little club of confidential sources and off-the-record confidences.”

Truly, a “slashing polemicist” (New York Times) of a unique sort.

In 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which became the occasion for Hitchens to cement his ties to the ultra-right, we noted on the WSWS that the journalist “was a former ‘left,’ who has moved openly and sharply to the right over the past several years. During the impeachment drive of 1998-99, engineered by the extreme right, Hitchens foamed at the mouth about the sins of Bill Clinton. Indeed at one point he actively intervened, playing a small but dirty role, and did his best to pin a perjury charge on a Clinton aide [Sidney ...