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Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, Hitchens, Iraq War, Islamism, Martin Amis, Michael Moore, New York Times
I’ve recieved the accusation before that I am inspired by the literary style of the late Anglo-American journalist Christopher Hitchens. It’s possible to take this both as a great compliment and a sly insult. People (often Americans) can mean it as a way of saying ‘you write very well’. Others (often English) use it less kindly to mean ‘you aren’t original’, or ‘you’re a copycat’.
Either way, they are close to the mark but a little off. The greatest prose stylist in modern English letters is Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens’ best friend. Whenever I’m looking to sharpen up my own style, I read a random book review written by Amis to remind myself of what perfection on a page looks like. I imagine Hitchens himself was greatly inspired by his lesser known friend and may have been subject to the occasional stylistic over-ruling by him.
But Amis will never be a big a name as his late comrade. That’s for sure. Hitchens, who just days before 9/11 was a charming but marginal leftist known only to the most geekish political observer, ended his life with a full page obituary in the New York Times and a headline announcement on BBC news.
The reasons why have a lot to do with style and a little to do with substance.
Hitchens was an undoubtedly brilliant author. His essays must have inspired a million bloggers and his opinions have changed a million minds. He was not the greatest stylist ever. In fact from an English perspective, he wasn’t even unusually poetic, but it’s easy to understand how he came across as exotic in the staid environment of American politics; a fact of course that was amplified many times over by his ability to speak as well as he wrote.
I do not speak as easily as I write. In debates I rise too quickly to anger. I’m ok with everyday conversations, but otherwise emotion overtakes me, especially when I talk about politics.
Compare this to Hitchens, who seemed able to make his emotions dance perfectly to the tune of his intellect. He never got angry when it didn’t serve his point to do so. He never laughed out of time, or shook, or retreated. A suicidal masculinity oozed from his deep voice and steady eyes, turning his opponents into furniture.
It’s conventional to say that the legacy of Hitchens will be dominated by two things – Anti-Christianity and Iraq. I’m not so certain. He will of course be remembered by many as the man who held on to the pro-Iraq war viewpoint like a rottweiler with a bone. And for others, his contempt for Evangelical Christianity will remain his largest contribution.
But for me, his impact was greatest upon the specific issue of Islam and its relationship with the Western Left.
Despite devoting very little in his ‘God is not Great’ volume to Islam, it was easy to tell that it was the faith most contemptible to him. The launch of his most prolific period (during which he became familiar to all) was shortly after the Islamist attacks of 9/11 when he posted some commonsensical articles about the attack in the distinctly un-commonsensical magazine The Nation.
But let’s not make this a biography. What do we, in the Counter-Jihad tendency owe Hitchens?
Well firstly and most obviously, it is a lot easier to speak about Muslim extremism now than it would have been had Hitchens never existed.
Few take time to recall what it was actually like during those few hot months after the attacks. The Islamist onslaught had the precisely opposite effect to the one rationally expected. People turned on America in their millions. Sympathy broke out in Western capitals for the new, glamourous savages. ‘They had it coming” was the popular refrain from the Left. Criticism of Islam itself was deemed completely out of line.
Nowadays, the wall of political correctness around Islamism has collapsed. If it weren’t for Hitchens and his popularisation of the anti-Islamist position, this might not have been the case.
And ‘popularisation’ is entirely the right word. Hitchens was a pop-culture intellectual. He was appealing even to those who hate the intellectual. This allowed the anti-Islamist argument to penetrate into the parliament of youth, an arena usually dominated by Leftists like Michael Moore. And once it was inside the door, people began more and more to open up to it.
Secondly Hitchens, whether intentionally or not, inflicted massive damage on the conventional Left. Leftists still hate him for what he did during a period that would otherwise have been a bumper harvest for them. Michael Moore was discredited at the peak of his career, and many people fondly remember Hitchens showing the finger to the liberals in the audience of Bill Maher’s show. He made Leftism look soppy, sorry for itself, hippyish and outdated.
Thirdly and lastly, Hitchens elevated the quality of writing in American journalism to an English standard. I’m sorry if that sounds offensive to America. I adore America, but I also adore the English language and the way it is used by the English.
I can’t foresee a time soon when Hitchens will be forgotten. A new book called ‘Unhitched’ attempts the same type of character assassination on Hitchens that he himself became famous for. Even if the criticisms are valid (and there are many that could be made), Hitchens is more than a cult figure now. He has achieved the same kind of status-invincibility as the boxer who has never lost a bout achieves when he retires early. It doesn’t matter how well you can hype up your retrospective chances of defeating him, you’ll never get the chance. One may as well invite Genghis Khan outside for a fist-fight. It means nothing. He’s gone. And when he was here, no-one could match him.
D, LDN
Defend the Modern World 
I think he was a great speaker, but his writing was too angry. His religion writing was too angry and often unfair.
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And he was never completely anti-Muslim.
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I don’t agree with everything he wrote. His writing on religion was the least interesting to me. I prefer his commentary on the Iraq war, 9/11 and terrorism.
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Anti-Muslim is not the same as anti-Islamist.
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“And when he was here, no-one could match him.”
I had never watched a video of this Hitchens (although I’ve watched plenty of the other Hitchens, his brother’s Peter) because I have better things to do with my time than listening to nonsense and I’ve been knowing for decades the sort of things that atheists, new and non, say.
After reading your post, I watched this video in which the giant, Professor John Lennox, crushes the dwarf Christopher Hitchens:
If it only took me one, my first, video experience to disprove the “invincibility” thesis, imagine how many other debates must be around with more of the same.
Yes, I can see what you mean (see below), but that is in my view your limit, David (I say this as a friend). You write well, but you pay too much attention to the style, which is the form, in proportion to and at the expense of the content, the validity and depth of arguments. Even the fact that your models are anti-Christian atheists speaks volumes, I believe.
Life is too short and we have an urgent battle to fight. We need to go for the jugular, rather than pause and engage in inconsequential details. In addition, simplicity is the best style. Brevity is of paramount importance. Overly Baroque, Byzantine language is not necessarily good. One may waste time and attention to achieve nothing, to express counterproductively tortuous periphrases. Martin Amis does that.
In the above video I can see what you mean: Hitchens is a journalist, a mass communicator by trade, is good in terms of body language, engages with the audience, does not read from a script.
Lennox is an Oxford Professor of Mathematics and a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science.
Of course there is no match intellectually and philosophically, but in the opposite sense of what you say. Lennox easily exposes the self-contradictions, paradoxes, factual inconsistencies and logical fallacies of Hitchens and his ilk.
If you shift your attention from what they both say, rather than the physical, postural, eye-contact, tone-of-voice way in which they say it, if you imagine it written down, you may acknowledge the same.
In addition, to say that an author (you cannot call Christopher Hitchens a “thinker” by any stretch of imagination) cannot be refuted after death is to go counter of three millennia of Western civilization. Most great thinkers were refuted after their death. This does not apply to Christopher Hitchens because: 1) he is not great, original or a thinker; 2) he has already been refuted when alive, actually he (or rather his rehashed pseudo-arguments) had been refuted many times even before he started opening his mouth.
Please take this as a sign that I like your work very much and I think you can do even better.
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I wrote in the post that it isn’t Hitchens’ atheism that I remember him for, but rather his resistance against Jihad. The subject of the article was not atheism let alone atheism vs Christianity.
True, Hitchens was also a fine stylist. Style in English literature is highly prized and is one of the reasons the English language has spread so far and wide. Style also has, as Orwell related, a direct relation to truth, especially in political dialogue. I suspect you see in Hitchens only his atheism, which is not the totality of his work. Until 2001, Hitchens barely touched on religion. Friedrich Nietzsche was also an atheist, but no student of philosophy, however devout, would allow that to prevent them from learning about him. I value what Hitchens’ wrote on Iraq, Islamism, the Middle East, and Cyprus. He was a lonely voice of protest about the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus for many years, long before 9/11. He wasn’t an original philosopher, that’s true, but his example has allowed for the breaking of a taboo on the left vis-à-vis Islam and that deserves to be remembered. As for John Lennox, I’m not a great fan. He fared less well against Richard Dawkins. But then to repeat, this was not the point of the above text. The post was about what the resistance to Jihad owes Hitchens. Nothing more. I may write about religion in the future.
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“I have better things to do with my time than listening to nonsense and I’ve been knowing for decades the sort of things that atheists, new and non, say”
“If it only took me one, my first, video experience to disprove the “invincibility” thesis, imagine how many other debates must be around with more of the same. ”
“he has already been refuted when alive, actually he (or rather his rehashed pseudo-arguments) had been refuted many times even before he started opening his mouth.”
I was tempted to write a long reply to your comment, but I feel these quotes alone illustrate the intellectual dishonesty of your position.
it is also quite telling that you seem to believe that the arguments John Lennox presents in the video “destroy” Hitchens position, or rather the “rehashed pseudo-arguments” you believe he represents. Though I certainly don’t agree with everything Hitchens has said or the way he presented many of his arguments, I can’t help but feel that you (and to a far lesser extent Lennox in this video) are grossly over-simplifying Hitchens’/the atheist position, thereby making it easy to dismiss.
Because of these reasons your comment strikes me as deeply disrepectful, disingenuous, willfully ignorant and not at all aimed at finding truth, only validation. I would’ve complimented you on your lovely writing style, but since you criticised the “the validity and depth of arguments” of this blog post and consequently posted such a terrible comment, I really don’t think hat would be appropriate.
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It’s not about style, it’s about facts and reason.
“Hitchens was not a thinker.” You just made yourself seem very ignorant with that statement. The fact is religion is bogus, it’s an outdated way of trying to understand our place in the cosmos in which the universe was no bigger than our galaxy according to followers of Christianity a some hundreds of years ago.
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When did hitch mention Cyprus. I dont recall him talking about it.
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He wrote an entire book about it, called Cyprus: Hostage to History.
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I like some of his interviews. He came across well and spoke wel. Peter Hitchens is good to.
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Reblogged this on The Atheist .
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What We Owe Christopher Hitchens. | Defend the Modern World
http://www.rogervivier-paris.com http://www.rogervivier-paris.com
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