THE DEATH of Christopher Hitchens last month, at the age of
62, robbed the world of one its most eloquent advocates for freedom and
democracy.
He was a man of contradictions: a graduate of British
Marxism whose political hero was Thomas Jefferson; in 2000 he described George
W. Bush as "unusually
incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically
uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these
things", and then vocally supported his re-election against
Democrat John Kerry four years later. The victims of his mercilessly caustic
pen also included Republican statesman Henry Kissinger, Democratic President Bill
Clinton and even Mother Theresa ("She
spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, the empowerment of
women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory
reproduction").
However one consistent thread running through his seemingly
scattergun worldview was his hatred of tyranny and oppression. Indeed, his uncompromising atheism – of which
more later – was based on his belief that religion equaled slavery, with God
cast as an all-seeing, authoritarian overlord.
His socialism was, in his words, "anti-totalitarian" rather
than "anti-imperialist". He eschewed the knee-jerk anti-Americanism
so prevalent among European leftists, instead supporting US-led military
campaigns against ethnic cleansers like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.
