During a recent private visit to the USA I realised how much the American public and media had finely honed their love-hate relationship towards Christopher Hitchens – who has just passed away after suffering from terminal cancer for years.
His books and articles were to be found all over the place, even though conventional book stores like Barnes & Noble happen to be a dying breed. So much so that someone I looked up told me that at present, the Americans are all hooked to one particular book outlet – amazon.com!
I met him personally only once – in my office in Valletta, when he was still a flamboyant radical left-wing journalist still well-steeped in The New Statesman mode although by then he had already migrated to the leftist US publication The Nation. He couldn’t have been more British in his ways and mannerisms and yet his American style could be smelt and detected from miles away.
He had gone out of his way to remind me that he had been brought up in Malta and that his brother Peter had been actually born in Sliema in 1951.
I usually tend to be dismissive of those who veer from one extreme to another in their political views but I must confess that there was something intellectually stimulating about the man’s provocative and compulsive writing and polemical approach even when his views happened to be diametrically opposed to mine.
It seems that what made him cross the Rubicon was his disappointment at the rather half-hearted and ineffective manner in which in his opinion the West defended Salmon Rushdie in the light of the Khomeini fatwa.
On its part 9/11 made him opt for a more interventionist type of foreign policy which almost tipped into neo-conservatism, although he always rejected the neo-con tag.
At a later stage he became one of the biggest defenders of the war on terror as well as of the GW Bush war on Iraq.
This obviously contrasts sharply with his early days when he was kicked out of the British Labour Party for finding Wilson too soft on the Vietnam War and nuclear bombs. It was this disillusionment that originally led him to take a far more radical lurch to the left by embracing Trotskyism and the counter culture of the protest movements of the time.
His choice of personal targets was, to put it mildly, intriguing:
Apart from writing all about atheism in God is not great, he took on Bill Clinton in No one left to lie to; Henry Kissinger who he always aspired to put on trial and Mother Theresa about whom he wrote a scathing attack called The missionary position: Mother Theresa in theory and practice.
At a later stage his articles started turning up in all types of American publications, including Vanity Fair whom he wrote for a number of years.
The more pronounced became his illness the more he intensified his writing.
His memoir Hitch 22 was and will remain a literary gem, even for any of those who might have never bothered to read any of his books or articles.
In his private life he went through various odd experiences – calling it hedonistic is an understatement - while his mother’s death left an indelible traumatic effect on him when she was found dead in a suicide pact with her lover in Greece.
One of the best ‘living’ memories of Christopher Hitchens is a lengthy debate still available on You Tube where he engaged in a heated discussion on the merits and demerits of religion with Tony Blair – then just converted to Catholicism.
I think the best way to introduce oneself to Hitchens’ writings is to try and get the book The quotable Hitchens: From alcohol to Zionism which apart from being expertly edited by Windsor Mann together with an incisive foreword by Martin Amis, also carries appreciations by the man who is arguably Britain’s leading novelist – his personal friend Ian McEwan.
Talk shows, TV debates and lecture circuits all found him at ease as he cris-crossed the globe debating any subject under the sun.
Religious fundamentalism almost became a full time obsession for him.
Not one to hold back from adventurous travels, he had been in the most ‘exotic’ of spots – from N. Korea to Iran and Darfur – always in search of his notion of the truth.
Please allow me to lift a couple of gems from this collection of quotes of his which speak for themselves, courtesy of their wit and intelligence:
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the transcendent and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
“Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals… but an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age!”
“Agnosticism is sometimes used as a halfway house by those who cannot make a profession of faith but are unwilling to repudiate either religion or god absolutely…”
“Ian Fleming gave stupid mock monikers to many of his cock-fodder heroines, from Pussy Galore to Kissy Suzuki, but Ursula Andress is a natural porn name if ever I’ve struck one…”
“Although the arms race and the cold war started at about the same time, they have never run in sync. The United States has generally been the initiator in the arms race, while the Soviet Union through the original sin of the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe, was the gravest offender in beginning the Cold War…”
“The pseudoscience of astrology has survived many refutations but who will bother to consult the zodiac now that we know that the Reagan family used it to make their decisions?”
“The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance…”
On Al Gore: “When he isn’t robotically normal, he is abnormal in an abnormal way.”
“The Kennedy interlude was a flight from responsibility, and ought to be openly criticized and exorcised rather than be left to die the death that sentimentality brings upon itself.’’
But arguably his best quote is on newspeak: “Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords: dream, fear, hope, new, people, we, change, America, future, together…”
One simply has to admit that for this intrepid author and polemicist words mattered.
The world will be a much emptier and duller place without him.
Even for believers and those with totally different political views.
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www.leobrincat.com
Leo Brincat is the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Sustainable Development & Climate Change