Respected British author Christopher Hitchens passed away on December 15, 2011 after a long battle with cancer. He will always be remembered as a columnist, literary critic and talk show participant, but alas, his final years were marked by a rightward political shift to slavish pro-US war mongering. He will be missed.
Read all about him here, from Wikipedia.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April, 1949 – 15 December, 2011) was a British author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades.
He was a columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair and World Affairs and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.
He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.
Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger among others.
His confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.
As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and the United States.
His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie.
The 11 September, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face" which extended to criticism of the religion itself.
His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a conservative.
Hitchens described himself as an atheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment.
According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilisation.
He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.
Asteroid 57901 is named after him. His memoir, Hitch-22, was published in 2010.
His mother, Yvonne Jean Hickman and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II.
In the 1960s Hitchens (who was a self-confessed bisexual) joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation".
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, as a Trotskyist.
Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party.
In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, the authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.
In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens.
After moving to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.
He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992.
Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. There he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia.
Despite going rightwards, Hitchens continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernisation of Russia.
In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discrediting of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".
He also opposed the torture of suspected terrorists in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
And he described Sarah Palin as a useless bimbo.
Besides not recognising Israel.
He infamously described Judaism, Christianity and Islam as 'the real axis of evil' and received death threats.
