Christopher Hitchens didn’t care whether you love him or hate him. There were a lot of confusions about what Hitchens actually did for his living, from accusations of being shameless sexist, a political agent provocateur, to a God-hating misanthrope. The truth is that Mr. Christopher Hitchens was a celebrated Anglo-American author who authored numerous books and collections of essays. He attended Balliol College in Oxford and was ultimately specified one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect.
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| Christopher Hitchens |
His title and numerous appearances as a public intellectual caused quite the stir on more than one occasion. Hitchens became world famous as an aggressive debater of issues and his sporadic and often eccentric spontaneous outbursts divided the public at large. Why so? What was so subversive about his remarks? Was it what he said, or the way he said them?
Christopher Hitchens was a favorite on the television talk’s news circuit. He was well versed and outspoken on political affairs and was hyper critical of certain political figures namely Bill Clinton and Ronald Regan, however it was his atheistic views on God that he was well known for. To be noted, one of his final books was titled “God is not great”. Christopher believed religion was a form of totalitarianism and was aimed to suppress free thought. He was generally despised for his ability to make spaghetti out of people’s logic in public. His merciless humor and flippant pomp made him a marked man towards many contemporary politicians, intellectuals and persons “of note”. Mr. Hitchens never failed to make his argument compelling and exceptionally solid. To the dismay of many world-class debaters, Mr. Hitchens had an English accent only added the humiliation.
Having been raised as a Christian, Christopher Hitchens attended a Christian boarding school. Actually it seemed to have happened to Christopher that caused him to choose opposition with God. Moreover, he did make it his life calling to deny his creator and drive others from God. Why did he? It has been told that he began to refuse to participate in Communal prayer during his time in the Chamberlain Christian boarding school. It can be said that this period of his life marks the beginning of his revolt against God. He took up arms against the God’s Kingdom for the rest of his life. In the process he had more than likely led thousands astray with tricky arguments and well thought out essays.
In his autobiography Hitch 22: A Memoir, Hitchens was not that concerned about the intricate details of his own life. He liked to discuss more about the ideas that was proved to be a driving force for his life which was very much understandable since the day to day routines had not shaped his life. His memoir is different to that of others because it comes across more like a justification for his decisions and actions rather than his friendships or emotions. The book is disclosing, no doubt, though not in a sense most memoirs are. Readers more likely to react by arguing with the subjects of the book rather than the lessons learned from the life. Hitchens himself confessed that he mixed the personal and historical-political events with each other in his life. He had deep hatred for many people, though he didn’t explain the reasons for the same clearly. In his memoir, he felt bad since Bill Clinton didn’t openly support Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah against Rushdie. The chapter on the Iraq war is very introspective and is aptly described as the key moment in his life. On the other hand, the memoir is extremely amusing and witty.
Hitchens was highly critical of President Geroge W. Bush’s “non-interventionist” foreign policy prior to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. He also criticized Bush’s support of capital punishment and intelligent design. In spite of defending Bush’s post-11 September foreign policy, he criticized the actions of US troops in Haditha and Abu Gharib, and the use of waterboarding, which he unhesitatingly regarded as torture after he was invited by Vanity Fair to freely undergo it. He also excoriated Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Lady Diana, Pope Benedict XVI, and Henry Kissinger on a number of issues.
As a noted antitheist, he said that a person “could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct”, but that “an antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there’s no evidence for such an assertion.” He opined that the concept of a supreme being or a god is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom. According to Hitchens, free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of defining human civilization and teaching ethics. His anti-religion polemic God is not Great- How Religion Poisons Everything was New York Times Bestseller and sold over 500,000 copies.
Hitchens was taken into emergency care suffering from a severe pericardial effusion and then postponed his tour to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer, while he was on tour promoting his memoir Hitch-22 in June 2010. He wrote a book-length work “Mortality” about his last illness on the basis of his Vanity Fair column, which was published September 2012. Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December, 2011 at University Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston from complications arising from oesophageal cancer, a disease that he acknowledged was more than likely due to his lifelong proclivity for heavy drinking and smoking. According to his last wishes, his body was donated to medical research. Tributes followed from the physicist Lawrence Krauss, the actor Sean Penn, the actor Stephen Fry, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the writer Salman Rushdie, the philosopher A.C Grayling, the writer Ewan McEwan and Vanity Fair, in which he was honored as an “incomparable critic and masterful rhetorician”. On 9 October 2012, Hichens was posthumously awarded the LennonOno Grant for Peace, accepted by his wife Carol Blue.
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