The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

BY CONOR KERR

Hitchens was known for his controversial and confrontational style in both his prose and his live debates and talks, and found and lost many friends because of his views. Throughout his student years he was associated with the hard Left, but found his own views colliding with even that stance. Whilst many of the Left opposed Margaret Thatcher’s invasion of the Falkland Islands, Hitchens supported it. He was dismayed at the Left’s reaction, or lack of, to the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989. The real turning point, and what his critics have focused on since, is his support for the Bush/Blair led invasion of Iraq in 2003. For Hitchens the Iraq war (and Afghanistan) was justified as a war that he himself would wage, albeit through language, as a fight against what he termed “Islamo-fascism”. But while some see these events as a betrayal, they show a steadfast opposition to totalitarianism wherever it was, whether its nature was religious or political and regardless of the left-right dimension, “I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right.” It is his opposition to religion that made him in recent years the face of the new atheist movement, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett – or The Four Horsemen as they became known. He held special contempt for religion particularly the three main monotheisms. “… We are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured mammals.”

For “Hitch”, as he was fondly known, no subject was out of bounds and respect was only ever given where it was rightly due. Mother Teresa was famously the subject of his book The Missionary Position, a fierce critique of her preaching: “Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.” He also referred to her as “that lying, thieving Albanian dwarf.” Henry Kissinger was the subject of another book, in which Hitchens explained the case that Kissinger was and is a war criminal: “Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracised and excluded.”  Amongst his other targets were Bill Clinton (“a habitual and professional liar”), JFK, Ronald Reagan (“Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.”), Prince Charles (“…a morose, bat-eared and chinless man, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consort…”), and he wasn’t exactly George Bush’s biggest admirer (“He is unusually uncurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things”).

But it wasn’t just politics that Hitchens focused on, he offered his views and opinions on just about everything, as the title of Quotable Hitchens states, literally from Alcohol to Zionism. “The best blended Scotch in the history of the world…is Johnny Walker Black. Breakfast of champions, accept no substitute.” An apt choice given that, by his own admission, he used to drink enough “to kill or stun the average mule.” He also gave his opinion on the more overvalued aspects of life, which were not always religious: “The four most over-rated things in life are: champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.” The one unforgiveable sin is to be boring, as his mother would say and he himself would often quote, and it cannot be denied by anyone that Hitchens ever was.

It was noted in a newspaper article recently in the US about the efforts of elite institutions to try and preserve the Catholic upbringing of their students during and after college. The author of the article described the temptations that face young people in college: “When exposed to Nietzsche, Hitchens, co-ed dorms and beer pong, such students are expected to stray.” Lawrence Krauss, physicist and friend of Christopher, summed it up perfectly, “…what a remarkable tribute to the man this simple sentence represented. To be so overpowering in one’s cultural impact that one can be mentioned without explanation is one thing, but to be sandwiched between Nietzsche and beer pong is an honour that very few of us can so hope to achieve”.