Hitchens In Death

Updated with more links below.

Christopher Hitchens is dead. When I think of Hitchens, one word comes to mind above all else: Iraq. Specifically, his support for a war that was ill-intentioned, ill-conceived and ill-executed from the outset, followed by his even more egregious refusal to back down from his initial stance. Surely even the most ardent of Hitchens fans cannot fail to see the irony in his lifelong excoriation of Henry Kissinger over Vietnam, in the context of his unending support for the war in Iraq.

So yes, Christopher Hitchens is dead. As are hundreds of thousands in Iraq. For me, his death will eventually come to be yet another that I toss onto the mental pile that is deaths associated with the war. Note, not caused by, for that was a fate that Hitchens was careful to steer away from, even as he freely condemned others to it. And this is before we get to his other sins, for they were manifold; from the inexcusable, such as his willingness to conflate Islamofascism, Islam, chauvinism and women’s rights into one muddled mess (for a takedown, see below), to the mildly irritating, such as his smug prescription on how to make a proper cup of tea (the water, milk and tea must be brought to a boil together Mr. Hitchens.)

For those of you sick of the canonization of Hitchens by Slate and other outlets, here are a few pieces that should be read in the wake of Hitchens’ death (click through and read each in its entirety):

Corey Robin:

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist.  He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

Only a writer of Hitchens’s talents could do justice to the culture that now so shamefully mourns him.

Glenn Greenwald:

The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role, in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.

John Cook:

It was something else for 113,000 civilians who died in the chaos unleashed. The great tragedy of Hitchens’ life was that, toward its end, he aligned himself so stridently with the very fools, cowards, and charlatans who most desperately invited exposure by his prodigious skills as butcher. How can someone who devoted so much of his life to as noble a cause as destroying the reputation of Henry Kissinger blithely stand shoulder to shoulder with Rumsfeld?

People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made. In September 2005, he defended the debacle in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard in terms that are simply breathtaking in their lack of concern for the victims of his Mesopotamian adventure. It was headlined “A War to Be Proud Of.”

Mukul Kesavan:

In Hitchens’s bizarre world, the world’s largest pluralist democracy, home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world, would make common cause with the likes of Amis and Steyn whose prescriptions for saving civilization include systematic discrimination against Muslims, collective punishment, deportation and strategic “culling”. Hitchens argues that it’s important for liberals to stake out this rhetorical position because he doesn’t want anti-Islamism (his term for being anti-Muslim in a respectable way) to become the monopoly of fascists. Muscular liberals like Amis and Hitchens would deny them that space.

Finally, because Aaron Bady generally writes more intelligently about more things than most of us could ever hope to do, here is a rant that he wrote in reaction to the Hitchens column linked to above.

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