The Debt Neocons Owe to the Atheist Left

Peter Hitchens describes his brother’s hawkish neoconservative foreign policy as a natural outgrowth of Christopher’s youthful Bolshevism, saying that he “continued to be utopian long after he should’ve stopped, and that’s what got him into the mess over the Iraq war.” In The Rage Against God, Peter even goes so far as to claim that “utopian atheism” is “common among neoconservatives.” In light of this statement, professing Christians who agree with the elder Hitchens’ views on foreign policy would do well to question whether they also agree with his godless, leftist premises.

Read the entire article

The Debt Neocons Owe to the Atheist Left

Echoes of Hitchens’ foreign policy are still audible in the current debate surrounding Iran. When Hitchens called the Iranian government a “messianic regime” that was motivated purely by religious fanaticism and was “enslaving and ruining a formerly great civilization,” he lent his voice to the multitude of neoconservatives who insist that the Tehran regime cannot be reasoned with. If Iran’s leaders are nothing more than jabbering jihadists who have imposed themselves on the Iranian people against their will, then any war against Iran would be a war of liberation.

Read the entire article

Christopher Hitchens explains how he became a Neocon

Julian Barnes on Christopher Hitchens’s “ripple dissolve”

In the New Statesman centenary edition:

He was the most brilliant talker I’ve met and the best argufier. At the Statesman he was largely gay, idly anti-Semitic and very left-wing. Then ripple-dissolve to someone who was twice married and had discovered himself to be Jewish and become a neocon. An odd progress, though he didn’t do the traditional shuffle to the right; he kept one left, liberal leg planted where it always had been and made a huge, corkscrewing leap with his right leg. I enjoyed his company but never entirely trusted him.

Also quite dry on David Cameron and the Coalition Government:

It seems perfectly possible that David Cameron will be remembered as the prime minister who “lost” Scotland and took Britain out of Europe. But then, this is a government with rare powers: who thought you could manage to produce a fall in unemployment combined with a triple-dip recession?

Source 

When Neocon Heroes Die

This reviewer, like every reviewer of Unhitched in the liberal media thus far, outs himself as a votary of the Hitchens personality cult. “Hitchens was a friend, mentor and neighbor of mine,” he writes, as if to reassure the reader of his objectivity in this matter. He is also, in the interests of fuller disclosure, a neoconservative writer for the Weekly Standard — just the sort of bargain basement intellectual company that Hitchens kept in his last decade. If Unhitched is written in the style of a “prosecution,” this review is an indictment.

What am I charged with? In a series of increasingly shrill non-sequiturs, I am condemned for every seditious affront to empire ever confected: anti-Americanism, apologia for the bad guys, sympathy for the devil, etc. For example, I have placed myself “on the side of the late and unlamented Argentine military junta,” because I deemed the British war an imperialist one. Oh, well. Sorry about that. For no obvious reason, I am also deemed to believe that “a noble anti-imperialism inevitably arises out of anti-Americanism,” whatever the latter term means. Again, duly chastened.

Read the entire article

A Clash of Fundamentalisms

There is a widely read new essay at the neocon Jewish Ideas Daily denouncing Christopher Hitchens as an anti-Semite. How sweet comeuppance can be, especially for these two parties that definitely deserve each other. There is much worth noting, however, about how they got there.

It was inevitable, to be sure, that the largely modern Orthodox neoconservative core would clash with an erstwhile ally who expressed his agreement with Voltaire “that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil.” Yet what our author fails to grasp is that what he insists on calling anti-Semitism – a talismanic phrase that he may or may not have noticed gets diminishing returns – is merely Hitchens’ dogged consistency. Hitchens joined the crusade against Islamofascism (how quickly we forget he coined that noxious term) because he was committed to armed progressivism while his leftist comrades had to oppose it because it was being articulated in a Texas drawl. And to his credit, Hitchens is rare in his consistency among the atheist mandarins for being as unsparing to Judaism as to Christianity and Islam.

But of course all this is lost on one who writes shamelessly of “the existence of a Jewish nation in the land of Israel for centuries, its sovereignty ended only by genocide at the hands of Roman legions . . . . and various other significant and notably secular historical facts.” The heart of the matter lies in the somewhat obscure figure of Israel Shahak, whom Hitchens reveres as a “great and serious man” and his antagonist insists was a “barking mad” Jewish anti-Semite.