Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949; d. 15 December 2011)was columnist for The Nation and other progressive publications. In the months following 9/11, he renounced some of his former leftist views and departed from The Nation; he embraced many neoconservative positions and relations. He then moved to write for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, and The Weekly Standard (a principal neoconservative magazine).

For the last 25 years of his life, Hitchen identified with the neoconservative movement. In an interview with Johann Hari, Hitchens stated that he admired Paul Wolfowitz, whom he described as a "a real bleeding heart." He recounted that the CIA wanted to keep the Iraqi army together. "That's how the US used to govern. It's a Kissinger way of thinking." Wolfowitz on the other hand, he said, wanted to "disband the Iraqi army, because they didn't want anybody to even suspect that they wanted to restore military rule." Hari wrote that Hitchens "thinks that if this philosophy can become dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn US power into a revolutionary force."

Humanitarian bombardier
Hitchens was a member of a group that Edward S. Herman refers to as The New Humanitarians This group accepts US/NATO intervention around the world on the basis of "humanitarian considerations".

In 2002 Edward S. Herman concluded his article, Christopher Hitchens And The Uses Of Demagoguery, by noting that: "Christopher Hitchens is a real asset to the war party, because he is a facile writer and covers over by vigorous assertion and imagery his new reactionary politics and the feeble intellectual defenses he musters for it. His value is enhanced by the fact that he is a "straddler," that is, a man in transition from an earlier left politics to apologetics for imperial wars, but with a foot still in The Nation's door and a harsh critic of Kissinger and Pinochet. He is therefore presentable as a member of the "rational left" or left that has "seen the light." Such folks are much honored by the mainstream media."

Affiliations

 * Director, Fund for Constitutional Government
 * Editorial Board, World Affairs journal
 * Former Advisory Board member, Democratiya

Books

 * Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said, co-editors, Blaming the Victim: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question," 1988.