‘Tis said he died of cancer but it was terminal self-absorption that got him in the end. Hitchens believed himself to be the writer who would, one day, make Gore Vidal redundant.
What a wanker…
Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humour?

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 16 2011 14:11 utc | 4

“b” strikes again. It now appears definite that the Iranians got that drone by spoofing its GPS guidance system, as Richard Silverstein explains at http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/12/16/new-evidence-iran-cracked-communications-system-of-u-s-stealth-drone-and-downed-it/ . This is essentially what “b” speculated a week and a half ago, on Dec. 5.

Posted by: lysias | Dec 16 2011 16:05 utc | 6

More whisky for the rest of us…

Posted by: Biklett | Dec 16 2011 17:54 utc | 8

As to Hitchens he was part of a generation of ex-imperial youth (dad an RN officer, educated at Public School) who did more damage to socialism than the CIA ever dreamed of doing. What he excelled in was the dirty fighting of sectarian debating, the sub intellectual business of ruining honest debate, shouting down and ridiculing opponents. He was a brawler, at his best when drunk.
In the sixties the victory of socialism seemed, to the likes of Hitchens, to be inevitable. The arguments that it would prevail unanswerable and easy to rehearse.
In a working class movement reeling from the Cold War the IS position “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism” had an almost obscenely cheap attraction. To be fair to Trotskyists, it was a position that Trotsky would never have put forward for all sorts of reasons, not least because of its a-historical vulgarity. In fact it was a stepping stone, and a well used one, from left to right.
And, when Hitchens needed it, it was a perfect escape from the left when it came under intense pressure, in an intelligentsia being re-colonised by proponents of Capitalism, from liberals to reactionaries. Hitchens was not into the dull work, far from the spotlights, of fighting alongside comrades, most of whom were destined to fall or to desert, he had a living to make and one small talent to sell, that of the cheap debater. I was reminded of Hitchens’s perfidy recently when the “left” in England and France reacted to the NATO/Saudi attacks on Ghadaffi, as they did to the campaigns against Serbia and, no doubt are doing so again in Syria, not by denouncing imperialism but by, in effect, repeating the old IS line” Neither Tripoli or Washington..neither Damascus or Washington..neither Milosevic or NATO…” Slogans which in effect mean (a) that the weaker side can expect no help from them and (b) that they are on the Pentagon’s bandwagon and are eligible for rations and, at least, immunity from attack, besides offering exotic and arcane variations on imperialist apologias.
On the other hand the infestation of hypocrites and traitors which subverts the socialist movement is not wholly bad: you wouldn’t want a constituency which can be misled by the likes of Hitchens, Kouchner, BHL, Comrades Blair, Straw and Mandelson or, for that matter, Tony Cliff’s latest re-incarnation, to get close to the levers of state power. Until the left can see through the poseurs, provocateurs, egotists and psychopaths who will always gravitate towards the opposition, until it can cleanse itself of the old fixation with leaders and charisma, it will not only fail but ought to.
Bad enough that Hitchens should die an apologist for Jabotinsky fascism, but rather that than as a member of the revolutionary government.

Posted by: bevin | Dec 16 2011 18:49 utc | 10

bevin, you have made your point well except that there is an archeology to the hitchens of this world. there was the ‘god that failed school’ whose identification with ‘socialism’ was purely cursory, it was about them, not about the people or the larger movement
there is more deeply felt socialism in the work of malcolm lowry. deeply unnerving. a connection that was integrated with a whole jigsaw of feelings about the world. it is difficult to go past the very contradictory but just as profound james agee. for them ideas were more than a frockcoat. these cretins funded by the cia attempted & to some extent dominated high culture with their quarterlies & as hobsbawn points out in his memoir – their complete absence from the academy in the cold war. it was thin even then – supporting an infantilist commentary & history of what happened in socialist societies. i have just been reading what was happening in the chinese mass movement from 1925 -35 & it is of labyrinthine complexity – there is no monolith, no one man vision of history . that was also true of soviet society in a different way, reduced to one man, when even the crudest societies are more complex than that
in fact most serious histories of the last 30 years acknowledge to some degree or other that complexity, not apology but offering a reasonable portrayal of how that society functioned & failed
this complexity was beyond the fools of the god that failed whether spender, muggeridge, even orwell did not have enough distance to view it correctly so it is no surprise that his work could become cold war tracts
the generation of hitchens & amis are quite disgusting in a vanity coupled with a complete incapacity to work on any other area than the surface, they never went beyond that, & christ there are even worse examples in the english & french speaking world. minimal intellects making a big boom, television helped that, it made fools seems like saints
the other day though in the levenson inquiry the murdoch hack gave a truer picture of that society & how it really functions, for all its vulgarity – in a few sentences he stripped the world hitchens would like us to believe, bare

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 16 2011 19:25 utc | 12

Hitchens doesn’t even deserve a short 6 word posting.
So anyway I’ll link to some important news stories I’ve been reading:
– As the Sex Pistols sang “God save the Queen, the fascist regime” seems suitable for this.

A 22-year-old man who created a “Letz start a riot” Facebook page as looting swept English cities last summer has been jailed for two-and-a-half years. West Mercia Police said it hoped the sentence imposed on Danny Cook acted as a deterrent to anyone else tempted to incite disorder on the internet.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facebook-riot-inciter-jailed-6276839.html
Bear in mind that this 22 year old guy never actually attended any riots or protests. He merely stayed at home on the internet and created this facebook page voicing support for them. So now he gets a 2 and a half year jail term and a criminal record. I also have no doubt that Facebook sold his information out to the cops. So remember this story the next time David Cameron starts waxing poetic about the Arab Spring.
– From that Zionist rag The New York Times is a story about China’s spy agencies from 1990’s to Present, which I found kind of interesting since it isn’t reported on much. Just read with the healthy caution needed when looking at US Mainstream News Outlets.
China’s success in obtaining the secret design of the W-88 is the most dramatic example of a fact that United States counterintelligence agencies have been slow to recognize: just as China has become a global economic power, it has developed a world-class espionage service — one that rivals the C.I.A.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/opinion/sunday/chinas-spies-are-catching-up.html?_r=1
– Alot have probably read this already but Christian Science Monitor scored an interview with an “Iran military engineer” who explains how the US Drone was brought down via changing the GPS coordinates to make the drone thing it was landing on its base.
Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/1215/Exclusive-Iran-hijacked-US-drone-says-Iranian-engineer/%28page%29/3
– Finally a guide to everything you need to know about the CIA spies uncovered by Hezbollah including profiles of some of the people.
http://www.thearabdigest.com/2011/12/no-nonsense-guide-to-cia-in-lebanon.html

Posted by: Colm O’ Toole | Dec 16 2011 20:41 utc | 14

Correction: Robert Scheer

Posted by: Copeland | Dec 16 2011 22:16 utc | 16

I am perhaps at a loss to understand what happened to Hitchens; he seems to have suffered some kind of break with reality. It seemed like a mental breakdown to me. I feel no sympathy for his betrayal; but some sense of loss for him as a person. When a writer goes to pieces, it’s a terrible omen about human frailty. When I was a boy, I came come one day to find my mother weeping; she had just seen Truman Capote on TV on a talk show in such a state of dissipation, that she said we had just lost an artist, one of our great writers. Not to compare Hitchens with Capote; but it sends a shiver down my back to think of collapses of that kind, moral or artistic, where the rational just implodes into irrational.

Posted by: Copeland | Dec 17 2011 0:09 utc | 18

I doubt if Jesus is weeping.

Posted by: Linda J | Dec 17 2011 0:54 utc | 20

thank you ‘giap and Copeland. both sentiments powerfully expressed. Copeland, I’m going to repost one of your comments at the little blog I contribute to.

Posted by: lizard | Dec 17 2011 4:36 utc | 22

b;
I think the news have reached you a bit too late my friend, he died long time ago!

Posted by: pirouz_2 (RT) | Dec 17 2011 8:47 utc | 24

A conventional, pandering, mainstream, provocateur. Get em all riled up at Slate or The Nation. Whatever.
As the French say, N’importe quoi, meaning, literally ‘anything’ but really means ‘ongoing BS’
———
his embrace of the Iraq War seemed to issue from another sentiment.
His second wife is / was, vaguely or desperately Zionist. ..? Hitchens discovered his Jewish roots (I first typed toots!) late in life ..with reservations, which meant that he became a VALID interlocutor, you know, arguing about everything, for a Pal Homeland (yet against it because Hamas were religious terrorist extremists), at the same time for a Jewish State, and not too critical of Jewish fundamentalism / Zionism.. but he denied that as well…
He survived as a sort of clown cum media darling, because he could be quoted on anything in any direction, scooted on his reputation as an iconoclast, his life in the US as a Brit ‘intellectual’ with the accent and the outrageousness and all..not a nice way to make a living, though it pays, and very well.

Posted by: Noirette | Dec 17 2011 20:34 utc | 26

Go hit the wogs…
Christopher Hitchens on the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan, “If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/left-and-911?page=0,3
Echoing POA, who wrote, “To me, there can be no more lowly a calling than that of a journalistic hack, tasked to misinform and incite,”
“…the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy — all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right…The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.” – George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79h/chapter5.html
Not a bullet-hole, but …

Posted by: DakotabornKansan | Dec 17 2011 21:12 utc | 28

So, Hitchens was a transparent panderer, etc.
Quite..the smarmy tributes (acid pen, ironic wit, strong stances, etc. etc.) and critics can fight it out.
What about the living, those who now have the creds that Hitchens lost over time or now thru death? Aren’t such ppl endlessly recycled by the media?
Naomi Klein is of course more careful, controlled, and mainstream. In a way I prefer the nutty desperate unthinking extravagance of Hitchens.
Klein in the Guardian, April 2007:
Excerpt 1:
“It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain – which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks – than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.”
Excerpt 2:
“Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.”
(bold in the original)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment
Afaik, N. Klein is respected and even adulated for now by the ‘left.’
And don’t get me started on E. Warren, I’ll be up all night.
Sorry for what seems like a derail.

Posted by: Noirette | Dec 17 2011 22:21 utc | 30

I have huge respect for Klein, born when I first read “Bagdad Year Zero”. I disagree with her on the degree of our “resilience”. But overall, I find her writings pretty right on.

Posted by: PissedOffAmerican | Dec 17 2011 23:08 utc | 32

PissedOffAmerican, I was too hard on Klein. The thing is, many public ‘intellectuals’ get my goat, just because they are ‘public’, i.e. given a voice, a place, in the media, which means that they will fudge here and there, or tailor their message to the ‘larger public’, or some section of the ‘public’ that has known xyz opinions. They become quasi-politicians, cultural icons or figures, make their living off it, thus are careful not to cross red-alert lines. They don’t contribute to meaningful change directly (indirectly, perhaps), because without the status quo they would not exist. They do slice and dice, well it is human I suppose. And Klein is one of the best of the lot…the shock doctrine did alert a lot of people and no logo was an entertaining book.

Posted by: Noirette | Dec 20 2011 14:32 utc | 34

If Hitchens is to be remembered let it be as an eminently forgettable persona non grata. He was a carelessly myopic ratbag motivated entirely by self-interest. It’s beyond the pale to even suggest that an individual who led such a selfish existence be remembered as some kind of selfless contributor to the betterment of humanity.
Xymphora put it well…
Some deaths are worth celebrating
It is funny that the monster Hitchens died at the same time that the monstrous war he called for came to an end. With all the things he wrote, the only thing he will be remembered for is that he was a neocon hanger-on. Pathetic.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 21 2011 15:08 utc | 36

@ran,
Funny how you say “horseshit” to me asserting that the U.S. military does not *purposely* target children and other innocents… and you essentially agree with me… i.e. you say they don’t give a damn – which acknowledges that there is no purposeful targeting going on. War assumes “collateral damage”… how much a general or similar decision maker considers such “collateral damage” in individual field decisions is open to debate and is probably variable depending on the individual and the situation. I’m not sure how you get from there to claiming that across the board military people “don’t give a damn how many innocent people they murder”. Do you *know* any military people – you seem to have a cartoonishly simple and dehumanized view of them as a class.

Posted by: Roger | Dec 21 2011 19:38 utc | 38

@ran, You’re twisting what I said. I simply pointed out that your complaint about not giving a shit is consistent with (though far more specific and limited and inferential then) my claim that there is not purposeful targeted murder of innocents taking place as a matter of policy. Simple logic applied here. I did not claim that there was rampant “not giving a shit” occurring (that was your claim alone) nor rampant murder (which you added later).
Bombs do tend to indiscriminately rip things to shreds within a wide blast radius. It’s just kind of how they work. You can propose that all use of bombs in wartime should be treated as a war crime… somehow I don’t think that is a practical position that would get much traction in the international community. It is worth noting that bombing has improved considerably since the days of carpet bombing with B-52’s… there is significant improvement in targeting and actual efforts to avoid civilian deaths. Cluster bombs obviously have some problems associated with them being undependable in not all detonating when they are initially dropped (and essentially becoming land mines)… but, the original concept (minus the malfunctioning) is really not much different than any other type of aerially deployed bomb.

Posted by: Roger | Dec 22 2011 3:25 utc | 40

Discussing how civilian death has been reduced due to improvements in technology as well as changes in policy – such as where we used to actively carpet bomb civilian populations as we did in WWII and Vietnam is somehow being a tool? I don’t follow your “logic”. This conversation between you and I was started by you on the very topic of technology – the use of cluster bombs. The fact that you resort to name calling and changing the subject to “illegal wars of agression” I will take as an admission (likely subconscious) that you can’t win on the cluster bomb argument. Beyond that, I’ve lost interest in debating you. You prove my original point about the hatred in this thread (and probably site). There are more positive and effective progressive/lefty sites to spend my time and money on.

Posted by: Roger | Dec 22 2011 19:30 utc | 42