Hitchens
I didn’t know this. Christopher Buckley remembering the late Christopher Hitchens in the New Yorker:
In those days [30 years ago], Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan! The things—come to think of it—he said about my father. How did we become such friends? I only once stopped speaking to him, because of a throwaway half-sentence about my father-in-law in one of his Harper’s essays. I missed his company during that six-month froideur (another Christopher mot). It was about this time [1987] that he discovered that he was in fact Jewish, which somewhat complicated his fierce anti-Israel stance. When we embraced, at the bar mitzvah of Sidney Blumenthal’s son [Max Blumenthal], the word “Shalom” sprang naturally from my lips.
The JTA tracks Hitchens’s Jewishness, revealed to him as a racial matter 24 years ago by his grandmother, and relates it loosely to his growing militancy on Israel, and even suggests it was a good career move for him in D.C.
Well, we knew it was coming. Sad day, he was a always worth the read.
I always liked Hitchens view on Zionism – basically that it was messianic, and he couldnt understand how redemption was going to be achieved by turning european thinkers into middle eastern farmers. haha.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxhyy9Wpb4
He was a racist though. That much is abundantly clear, and should be mentioned. He had a classic upper crust white englishman view of the world – namely, upper crust white englishmen and their brethren should run the show, the rest of everyone else should just deal with it. I never understood how he could call himself a “trotskyite” but then I realized that he meant the Trotsky the Bolshevik – not the early Trotsky. Here it makes sense, as one of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” he was certainly part of a vanguard…..
Phil,
You’re very late to this party. The fact that Hitchens was of Jewish descent was known to all the people for whom that nugget of information would matter. It explains in a large part his ability to survive professionally over the years.
The passage in his memoir– basically supportive of a fair two state solution, and critical of Israel for never making that possible– is eloquent and reasonable. But he was gyrating so wildly towards neocon positions during that time, I don’t know if it was the last word.
He had his hideous moments of poor observation as well (from the JTA article):
This tendency to blame things forward, as if the Palestinians or the Americans produced the Holocaust and should therefore be smeared with what was, is a blight that reasoned thinking will (should) eventually eliminate.
Well his career change from Marxist to Zionist must have increased his wealth so at least his heirs can live in luxury,but the decision to stop being a Marxist was the wrong one,or at least irrelevant,as he should have stopped smoking instead.
The world at least breathes a little better today.Most of us unaware naive peace lovers stopped smoking years ago.Funny,dat.