"You should see the faces of some of those who think they are result of intelligent design"
'Cynical contrarian'
He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.
In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: "I love the imagery of struggle.
"I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."
Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut short: "It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you thought it was."
Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War.
He became a correspondent for the Socialist Workers Party's International Socialism magazine.
In later life he moved away from the left. Following the September 11 attacks he argued with Noam Chomsky and others who suggested that US foreign policy had helped cause the tragedy.
He supported the Iraq War and backed George W Bush for re-election in 2004.
It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian", another "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay".
But he could dish out scathing critiques himself. Bill Clinton he called "a cynical, self-seeking ambitious thug", Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Mother Teresa a fraudulent fanatic.
Hitchens could be a loyal friend. He stood by the author Salman Rushdie during the furore that followed the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.
Writing on Twitter after the announcement of Hitchens' death, Mr Rushdie said: "Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops."
The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist.
He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises."
The author and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins described him as the "finest orator of our time" and a "valiant fighter against all tyrants including God".
Hitchens wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic.
He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22.
People always say that writers should think independently, should listen to their inner voices, but it’s not so often that someone really practices that over a career, producing a body of work that is faithful only to itself–not to allies, or friends, or one’s political side, or even to widely held standards of politeness and tact. He alienated his leftist fans by arguing for war in Iraq, but he also condemned the use of torture in prosecution the “war on terror”—and backed it up by having himself waterboarded. Hitchens knew when to care greatly about the larger world, and when, therefore, not to give a rat’s ass what the larger world thought of him. It’s one thing for a writer to be principled, and it’s one thing for a writer to be a jerk; it’s a rare thing to be a principled jerk, and that’s what Hitchens was.
"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sands grain of the Sahara. (…) In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here "
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Polemicist, Author, Orator, & Antitheist (1949 – 2011)
The Intellectual Odyssey of Christopher Hitchens: A Comprehensive Analysis of Political Evolution, Rhetorical Mastery, and the Antitheist Crusade
The intellectual legacy of Christopher Eric Hitchens represents a unique intersection of twentieth-century British radicalism and twenty-first-century American polemics. Born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens emerged as a figure whose life was defined by a constant state of intellectual friction—a "contrarian" whose primary loyalty was to the Enlightenment principles of free inquiry, secularism, and the relentless pursuit of truth, regardless of the political cost. To analyze Hitchens is to trace the movement of a mind that viewed the world through the lens of power dynamics, beginning with the anti-totalitarianism of the Trotskyist left and culminating in a singular defense of Western civilization against religious fundamentalism.
The Portsmouth Origins and the Hidden Lineage
The foundations of Hitchens' worldview were laid in the post-war environment of Portsmouth. His father, Eric Ernest Hitchens, known famously as "the Commander," was a career naval officer whose service on HMS Jamaica in the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst in 1943 served as a lifelong point of pride for Christopher. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hickman, met the Commander while serving as a "Wren" in the Women's Royal Naval Service. This marriage of military discipline and a more cosmopolitan, aspiration-driven maternal influence created a household of specific expectations. Yvonne Hitchens was determined that her son would join the British elite, famously remarking that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it".
A critical discovery in 1987, when Hitchens was thirty-eight years old, fundamentally altered his understanding of his own identity: he learned that his mother was of Jewish origin. This revelation, occurring after both his mother’s suicide and his father’s death from esophageal cancer, led Hitchens to embrace a Jewish identity through matrilineal descent. This shift in self-perception did not manifest as religious conversion—Hitchens remained a lifelong atheist—but it informed his later, more nuanced defense of the State of Israel and his visceral reaction to anti-Semitic tropes in both the Islamic world and the Western left.
Biographical Overview: Foundations and Early Education
Hitchens' education at Mount House School and The Leys School provided the classical British training necessary for his later rhetorical prowess. At The Leys, he began to refine the linguistic skills that would allow him to dominate his peers. Discovering that words could be wielded as weapons, he used wit to neutralize the bullying he experienced as a student of slight build. By the time he reached Balliol College, Oxford, in 1967, to read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), he was already a formidable debater and a committed activist.
The Oxford Crucible and the Radical Left
The 1960s at Oxford were a period of intense political ferment, and Hitchens was at its center. He was tutored by eminent scholars such as Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny, graduating in 1970 with a third-class degree—a result he later attributed to his preoccupation with political organizing and journalism rather than academic minutiae. During his time at Oxford, Hitchens’ political identity was shaped by the anti-Vietnam War movement, the struggle against nuclear weapons, and the fight against racism.
His formal entry into politics began with the Labour Party in 1965, but he was soon expelled in 1967 for his public opposition to Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s support of American intervention in Vietnam. This expulsion facilitated his move toward the International Socialists (IS), a Trotskyist group led by Tony Cliff. The IS ideology was characterized by its rejection of both Western capitalism and Soviet-style "state capitalism," adhering to the motto "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism". This anti-totalitarian framework remained a permanent fixture of Hitchens' thought; even as he moved away from institutional socialism, he retained a Marxist preference for materialist history and a profound disdain for "unaccountable corporations" and bureaucratic states.
Influential Literary and Philosophical Foundations
Hitchens’ early intellectual development was significantly influenced by a specific canon of literature that emphasized the struggle of the individual against the machine of the state. He recalled being "bowled over" by the following works:
Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler): A foundational text for his anti-Stalinist outlook, exploring the psychological toll of totalitarian dogma.
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): An early encounter with the complexities of morality and guilt.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (R. H. Tawney): A critique of the intersection between faith and economic power.
The Works of George Orwell: Hitchens viewed Orwell as his primary intellectual model—the writer who transformed political writing into an art of truth-telling.
His early years also revealed a personal flexibility that he later discussed with humor. Hitchens was bisexual during his younger days, famously joking that as he aged, his appearance "declined to the point where only women would go to bed with [him]". This era of his life also saw him appearing on the television quiz show University Challenge in 1968, further establishing his public persona as a brilliant, if provocative, young intellectual.
The Fleet Street Years and Investigative Journalism
Following Oxford, Hitchens began a rapid ascent through the ranks of British journalism. In 1971, after a year traveling the United States on a scholarship, he joined the Times Higher Education Supplement as a social science correspondent, though he was famously fired after six months. He transitioned to television as a researcher for ITV’s Weekend World before joining the New Statesman in 1973.
At the New Statesman, Hitchens was part of a legendary literary circle that included Martin Amis, James Fenton, and Julian Barnes. Amis described Hitchens at this time as "handsome, festive [and] gauntly left-wing," a figure whose physical vitality matched his intellectual intensity. His work during this period was marked by a commitment to foreign reporting. In November 1973, he reported on the constitutional crisis of the military junta in Greece, which became his first leading article for the New Statesman. In 1977, he interviewed the Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a conversation he later described as "horrifying". These experiences solidified his view that the role of the journalist was to act as a witness to the crimes of authoritarianism, a theme that would later dominate his American career.
Professional Trajectory in the United Kingdom (1971–1981)
The American Migration and the "Minority Report"
In 1981, Hitchens relocated to the United States as part of an editor exchange program between the New Statesman and The Nation. This move was driven by his exhaustion with the British political landscape of the late 1970s—a period he characterized as "Weimar without the sex"—and a desire for the "bigger stage" of American discourse. Settling in New York and eventually Washington, D.C., Hitchens began writing his "Minority Report" column for The Nation in 1982, a tenure that would last for twenty years.
In America, Hitchens initially maintained his position as a standard-bearer for the radical left. He was a relentless critic of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, attacking their "sado-monetarist" economics and their interventionist policies in Central America, specifically in El Salvador and Nicaragua. He became known for his "gauntly left-wing" perspective, eventually being viewed as the "heir" to the great American polemicist Gore Vidal. However, even during this period, Hitchens’ politics were evolving. He began to emphasize the centrality of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution to his political philosophy, viewing the American experiment as the most successful realization of Enlightenment ideals.
The Evolution of Influence: From The Nation to Vanity Fair
By 1992, Hitchens’ reach expanded as he became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, writing ten columns a year. This transition allowed him to bridge the gap between niche political commentary and broad-market cultural criticism. His work for Vanity Fair was often more personal and literary, though no less provocative. He targets individuals whom he believed were protected by unearned halos of sanctity. This included his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which accused the nun of being a fundamentalist who preferred the suffering of the poor to their actual relief.
The Clinton Antagonism and the Impeachment Testimony
A pivotal moment in Hitchens' relationship with the American left occurred in the late 1990s. While he remained a critic of the Republican right, he turned his sights on President Bill Clinton in his 1999 book No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Hitchens accused Clinton of "triangulation"—the cynical adoption of opposing political positions to ensure survival—and of personally corrupting the Democratic Party.
The conflict became intensely personal in 1999 during the Clinton impeachment hearings. Hitchens testified that his friend, Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, had told him about a White House campaign to discredit Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker". This testimony was viewed as a betrayal by many in the Democratic establishment, and it marked the beginning of Hitchens’ isolation from the mainstream American left. He was accused of being a "snitch" and an opportunist, but Hitchens maintained that his duty was to the truth, even when it damaged his social circle.
The 9/11 Turning Point and the Iraq War Advocacy
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks served as a definitive watershed in Hitchens' intellectual life. While he had already begun to distance himself from the left over its perceived failure to support humanitarian intervention in the Balkans (specifically in Bosnia and Kosovo), 9/11 accelerated his ideological realignment. Hitchens found the reaction of certain segments of the left—which suggested that the United States had "invited" the attacks through its foreign policy—to be "contemptible" and a sign of moral "masochism".
In 2002, he resigned from The Nation following a public feud with his editors and fellow contributors over the impending invasion of Iraq. Hitchens argued that the defense of civilization against "Islamofascism" was the primary issue of the era, and he became one of the most vocal advocates for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He defended the invasion of Iraq as a "postponed liberation," arguing that Hussein’s regime was a destabilizing totalitarian force that had already committed genocide against the Kurds and was a persistent threat to global security.
Political Realignment: From Socialist to "Conservative Marxist"
Hitchens’ support for President George W. Bush’s foreign policy led many to label him a neoconservative. While he endorsed Bush for re-election in 2004—favored "slightly" because he believed the nature of the "jihadist enemy" necessitated a forceful response—he rejected the neoconservative label. He continued to identify as a Marxist, albeit a "conservative" one, who believed that the materialist conception of history validated the necessity of defeating religious reactionaries who stood in the way of social progress. His final words, as reported by Andrew Sullivan, were "Capitalism, downfall," a cryptic reminder of his lifelong engagement with Marxist thought even at the moment of his death.
The Antitheist Manifest: God Is Not Great
In 2007, Hitchens achieved a new level of global prominence with the publication of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The book became an international bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, cementing Hitchens' position as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.
Hitchens’ critique of religion was not merely a rejection of metaphysical claims but an attack on the moral and political consequences of faith. He argued that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry". He famously described God as a "celestial dictator"—the ultimate form of totalitarianism, which demanded servility and repressed the human spirit.
Analytical Framework of "God Is Not Great"
Hitchens identified as an "antitheist" rather than just an atheist. While an atheist simply lacks belief, an antitheist is "relieved" that there is no evidence for a god, viewing the existence of an omniscient, all-powerful judge as an intolerable threat to human freedom. He was particularly vocal about the "disgusting" religious practices of circumcision and female genital mutilation, viewing them as physical manifestations of religious control over the individual.
Rhetoric as Intellectual Combat: The Debating Mastery
Hitchens was widely regarded as one of the most formidable debaters of his generation. His style, often referred to as the "Hitchslap," combined an effortless recall of esoteric facts with a sharp, often caustic wit. He drew from his Oxford Union training, utilizing linguistic dexterity as a potent weapon in intellectual combat.
His debating technique was characterized by a specific structure:
Humorous Engagement: He would bait the audience with humorous, often blasphemous hyperboles (e.g., comparing Heaven to a "celestial North Korea") to capture their attention.
Momentum Buildup: He would list a "firing squad's worth of bullets" in a single sentence, establishing an ethos of being a well-informed critic.
Moral Escalation: He would transition from wit to urgent seriousness, positioning his opponent as a defender of tyranny or ignorance.
Significant Public Confrontations and Debates
Despite his dominance, some critics noted that Hitchens often ignored the bulk of his opponents' arguments, instead opting to "toy" with them for the entertainment of a lay audience. His use of complex vocabulary was sometimes viewed as an elitist barrier that could lose the general population he sought to influence.
The Sibling Dialectic: Christopher vs. Peter Hitchens
The relationship between Christopher and his younger brother Peter was a source of public fascination. Peter Hitchens, also a journalist, followed a reverse intellectual path—moving from radical socialism and atheism to social conservatism and Anglican Christianity. Christopher famously remarked that the main difference between them was "belief in the existence of God".
The brothers fell out in 2001 after Peter wrote an article in The Spectator that Christopher perceived as labeling him a Stalinist. Though they reconciled following the birth of Peter’s third child, their public clashes continued. Peter's book The Rage Against God (2010) was a direct response to Christopher's antitheism, arguing that atheism mistakenly replaces demanding Christian moral codes with "inferior codes of common decency". Peter also challenged Christopher’s claim that religious education was child abuse, calling it a "totalitarian slander".
In their 2008 Grand Rapids debate, the brothers notably refrained from "public mauling," with Peter remarking that it felt as if the "longest quarrel of his life was over". Following Christopher’s death, Peter read the same biblical passage at Christopher’s memorial service that Christopher had read at their father’s funeral—St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 4:8—a final act of mutual respect.
Prosecution of a Legacy: Richard Seymour and the Critics
While Hitchens was lauded as a champion of free speech and a "successor to Orwell," he faced significant posthumous criticism. The most comprehensive "prosecution" was Richard Seymour's 2013 book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens.
Seymour’s critique focused on several core allegations:
Opportunism: The claim that Hitchens' post-9/11 shift was a "conscious rebranding" for the sake of self-promotion and access to power.
Intellectual Shallowness: Seymour characterized Hitchens as an "intellectually lazy poseur" who lacked depth and was unable to cope with complex ideas.
Plagiarism: Allegations that The Missionary Position was a rewrite of research by an unnamed Indian author and that his Kissinger essays borrowed heavily from Noam Chomsky without proper credit.
Racism: Criticism of Hitchens' 1992 claim that European colonization of the Americas should be celebrated with "vim and gusto" and his alleged dismissiveness of non-Western lives.
Seymour argued that Hitchens became an "amanuensis" of the George W. Bush administration and an "organic intellectual" for the ruling class. Other critics, like Glenn Greenwald, argued that a misapplication of "death etiquette" had given Hitchens an unmerited free pass for what they considered "repellent" pro-imperialist views.
The Country of Malady: Mortality and the Final Essays
In June 2010, Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He documented his struggle with characteristic detachment in a series of essays for Vanity Fair, posthumously published as Mortality (2012). He wrote about the "Tumorville" etiquette and the futility of prayer, particularly mocking the religious right for suggesting his cancer was a divine "Hitch-slap".
The most poignant of these essays focused on the loss of his voice. For Hitchens, to be robbed of his voice was to be robbed of his "spice of life"—conversation with friends. He described himself as feeling "shackled to my own corpse" and admitted to a "gnawing sense of waste" over the work he still intended to complete. Despite the pain, he remained uncompromising in his materialism, viewing the universe as indifferent and his cancer as a "blind, emotionless alien" rather than a sentient enemy.
Posthumous Bibliography and Collections
Conclusion: The Enduring Impact on Modern Secularism
The legacy of Christopher Hitchens is defined by his commitment to what he called the "epistemological razor": the principle that evidence must be the foundation of all assertion. He remains a polarizing figure—an "Orwellian" to some, an imperialist propagandist to others—but his influence on modern journalism and the secular movement is undeniable.
His work contributed significantly to the "rise of the Nones"—the increasing population of religiously unaffiliated Americans—and his rhetorical style continues to inspire a generation of writers to prioritize truth-telling over orthodoxy. By refusing to "turn the other cheek" in the face of what he considered theocratic bullying, Hitchens redefined the role of the public intellectual in a century marked by the collision of secular reason and sacred faith. He died as he lived: a "small-l libertarian" averse to control, whether by an Iranian theocracy or a nanny state, leaving behind a prodigious body of work that remains, in his own word, Arguably the most vital of its era.
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