“There’s always the lingering thought, left in the air, of whether this is goodbye,” said Christopher Hitchens as we sat in his Washington apartment one bright winter’s afternoon. And for us, I knew that it was.
There was no question about it. Christopher had advanced cancer of the oesophagus—a peculiarly cruel fate for one known for, literally and metaphorically, his voice. “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be,” he had written in Vanity Fair in 2010, “I have very abruptly become a finalist.” He departed life on 15th December 2011, aged 62, with much still left to say.
Like many others, for he was a man of gregariousness and boundless conviviality, I had the privilege of counting him a friend. In the decade since his death, scarcely a day has passed when I haven’t thought of him and wondered what the peerless polemicist would have said about these dark times. The abominable crimes of Presidents Assad and Putin, the debasement of American democracy and civic life by President Trump, the follies of English nativism, and Beijing’s financial imperialism and repression of Uighur Muslims would all have elicited his furious eloquence.
Christopher’s output, in columns, essays and books, was voluminous. He was one of very few foreign journalists to transplant to the United States and make an impact within the Beltway. He also had many detractors and enemies, notably but far from exclusively, among his former comrades on the radical left. Their hostility troubled him not at all. Unable to best him in debate while he was alive, some turned to condescension in death, insinuating that his talent was superficial and his politics a pose. In a review of a posthumous collection of Christopher’s essays, Terry Eagleton said primly: “His desire to belabour the establishment was matched only by his eagerness to belong to it.”
Rather than assail the critics—for what would be the point, and where would it end?—I merely counter that Christopher was a giant of letters and of social criticism. His death diminished not only his admirers but the allied causes of rationality and liberty. His work transcended journalism. It was literature, and deserves to be celebrated as such for generations to come.
It’s often thought that Christopher’s break with the left dated from 9/11 and his incredulity that people of purportedly progressive politics could explain away such an atrocity. His foes certainly thought so, charging that he had become, in the phrase of Tariq Ali, a “vile replica” of his former self for backing the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is a profound misreading. Christopher took leave of the “anti-imperialist” left long before 9/11, because he knew that some of the gravest crimes in international politics were born not of interventionist zeal but of western indifference. The paradigm case was Bosnia, a constitutional multi-ethnic state that in the 1990s was prevented, by a misconceived UN arms embargo, from defending itself against the deranged genocidal ambitions of the Milosevic regime in Serbia.
With a few honourable exceptions, the radical left abandoned a threatened Muslim population at the heart of Europe. Some of its prominent figures, such as Edward Herman, a rank intellectual fraudster who was extraordinarily accorded a kid-glove obituary in the Washington Post in 2017, engaged in outright denial of Milosevic’s crimes and of the genocide of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. This was a type of “left” that Christopher always stood against, and on similar grounds to his well-known hostility to the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger: oppressed peoples and small nations were not dispensable in the interests of some wider ideological scheme.
You can go through Christopher’s record and find his consistent backing for the cause of statehood for Kurds, Kosovans, Tamils and Palestinians, while he reviled the terrorism committed by fanatics claiming to act for them. Go back further, to his time at the New Statesman 40 years ago, and you’ll find his careful distinction between the principled stand of Terence MacSwiney, mayor of Cork during the Irish war of Independence, who died on hunger strike in 1920, and the bloody cult of the IRA prisoners then on hunger strike in the H-block.
When, as was made possible by the Good Friday Agreement, Rev Ian Paisley consented to power-sharing with Gerry Adams, Christopher characteristically declared that it made him want to spew: “There will be no return to life for the thousands of people who were murdered in these men’s quarrel, and it seems indecent to me that we should be thanking them for their mercy in calling off the bloodshed…”
Christopher’s support for military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s lost him many friends, but was born of the same impulse: solidarity with those threatened by theocracy, terrorism and genocidal dictatorship. He maintained that Saddam Hussein’s regime was in our future, unless the west consigned it to history, for the distinction between a rogue state and a failed state is a fine one. He would have looked on appalled at the recent history of Syria, where a brutal despotism has managed to be both types of state simultaneously, with horrific humanitarian consequences and a predictable caucus of ideologues who in defiance of evidence acquit Bashar al-Assad of crimes against humanity.
Beyond these writings, I should mention three other characteristics of Christopher. First, the quality of his prose and oratory was a marvel, and he amply deployed his skill in debate. He could not only defeat anyone in argument but humiliate them, and it was a mark of his graciousness that he rarely chose to do the latter. Among the relatively few victims I can think of are obtuse preachers; a Catholic Archbishop along with the voluble Catholic convert Ann Widdecombe; those who made excuses for theocratic terrorism; a preening pro-fascist charlatan called Justin Raimondo; and inevitably George Galloway, whose intellectual mediocrity Christopher early discerned amid the bombast. There was also Newt Gingrich, then Republican speaker of the House, who found a fossil on holiday once and kept it as a memento. According to Christopher: “He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office. He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his skull…”
Second, his atheism was not only impassioned but vital. Not for him the bromide that he wished he could have faith. Rather he maintained, in the subtitle of his book God is Not Great, that “religion poisons everything.” It’s a deliberately provocative but unassailable conclusion. There can’t ultimately be consilience between religion and the quest for knowledge, as the findings of science constantly reduce the scope for non-naturalistic explanations. He showed that rationalism has important things to say not only about how we should understand the external world, but about how we should live.
And third, though I have no way of expressing this adequately, he was a great guy. His arguments were not feuds. Philosophical differences were never purely a cause for enmity. At our last meeting he earnestly recommended to me his brother Peter’s book The Rage Against God; the notion that, from their radical differences of opinion, the brothers were at loggerheads was entirely untrue. I think of him as James Boswell described his friend Samuel Johnson: “a man whose talents, acquirements, and virtues, were so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence.”
