Christopher Hitchens ""Islamofascism" is hellbent on destroying our civilisation"

[Dat1111]

Christopher Hitchens: 'I was right and they were wrong'

not sure what a legend should look like exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's not this. The paunchy, middle-aged figure who opens the door at 10am has a crust of dried toothpaste around his mouth, an air of bleary dishevelment and the stooped shuffle of a man just out of bed and wishing he'd postponed the appointment to a less ungodly hour. Expecting to meet a sort of rakish Russell Crowe, I appear to have found a hungover Timothy Spall.

Where is the celebrated rhetorician, famed for speaking in perfect paragraphs sculpted from flawless sentences? Gruff, vague and nursing a cup of tea, he clasps one hand discreetly over the other in a manner suggestive of some practice in taming the morning shakes. Having flown in from America only the previous afternoon, he explains that he had been out with his old friend Martin Amis until 3am. Gradually – fortified by two packets of cigarettes – he begins to reconstitute himself, looking less and less like Spall but, strangely, more and more like Terry Wogan. He can't really manage eye contact. Once noon arrives, though, he brightens up, proposing the first scotch of the day with one of those bluff jokes about rules for drinking so dear to saloon bar bores the world over.

This, then, is the legendary Hitch – one-time titan and hero of the left, latterly post-9/11 neocon turncoat – the man who took on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, George Galloway, God and Saddam Hussein. Really? This guy?

Hitchens is in London to talk about his memoir, Hitch-22, a hefty work charting his path from Trotskyist agitator at Oxford in the 60s, to glamorous young New Statesman colleague of Amis and Ian McEwan in the 70s, to prolific Washington pamphleteer and columnist throughout the 80s and 90s, and international darling of the intellectual left. There can scarcely have been a war zone or salon in the world untroubled by Hitchens' attendance, his ubiquity matched only by his prodigious output, moving Gore Vidal to anoint him his "dauphin".

Then came 9/11, and his dramatic political realignment, which reinvented him as the surprise poster boy for the neocon right. The memoir, as you might expect, goes into quite a lot of detail about why he thought we should invade Iraq, and why he was right. What the left just does not get, Hitchens argues, is that "Islamofascism" is hellbent on destroying our civilisation, and unless you fancy being bombed back into pre-Enlightenment times, you should bloody well be out there on the barricades, fighting the good fight beside him. Anyone who disagrees is either stupid, cowardly, naive or too lazy to have bothered updating their political faculties "since Woodstock".

Hitchens wants to make it clear that he has not written an autobiography, but the clarification is unnecessary given the book's striking omissions. He's not terrifically interested in emotional self-examination, and there is barely a mention of his three children, one of whom was still in his first wife's womb when he left her for the second, neither of whom gets much of a look-in. There is nothing, either, about his years of estrangement from his younger brother Peter, the rightwing British columnist. "Don't have copyright on other people," he explains rather unsatisfactorily.

Yet he found the memoir more of a challenge than anything else he's ever written. "I found that, well, what's the argument here? And, of course, there isn't one. You're not making a case." To the great polemicist, this was a problem. His solution was to write "not a confessional", but what he calls "the context of the battle of ideas".

Some readers will doubtless be gripped by his tales of assignations with guerrillas and presidents, and judge at face value the case Hitchens makes for his ideological journey. But it is the chapters on his parents, both now dead, and the other private reflections that are more illuminating – more so, probably, than the author intended. Because, for all Hitchens' stated contempt for the personal as political, I would say his opinions today owe more to his emotional world than to any amount of argument.

When the invasion of Iraq was first debated, one couldn't fail to notice the preponderance of left-wing men of a certain age who came out in support of the war. Radicals as adults, but often from conservative backgrounds, now beginning to confront their own mortality, and preoccupied by masculinity and legacy, their palpable thrill about military might suggested that, deep down, they secretly feared progressive principles were for pussies. Now here was their chance, before it was too late, to prove their manhood.

In 2006, Hitchens' wife, the American writer Carol Blue, told the New Yorker her husband was one of "those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been. There's a whole tough-guy, 'I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die' talk, which is key to his psychology – I don't care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing."

Full story here..



http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010...cca-aitkenhead


The Iraq Effect

If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened

Hitchens.

[lipskip]

Yeah, and two years later....

Civilization- 1

Islamofascism- 0

What's the point Dat? Did somebody else's Hitchens thread upset you?

The guy was a smart, pompous, ass. A drunk, bisexual that took way too much delight in showing others as intellectually inferior, rather than proving his own claims. Sometimes entertaining to listen to, always sad to watch. He struck me as 'a shell of a man'.

[NoGODisGOOD]

Hitchslap is still in full effect even after the man is dead. Anyone want a shot of Johnny Walker Black?

[Dat1111]

Originally Posted by lipskip

Yeah, and two years later....

Civilization- 1

Islamofascism- 0

What's the point Dat? Did somebody else's Hitchens thread upset you?

The guy was a smart, pompous, ass. A drunk, bisexual that took way too much delight in showing others as intellectually inferior, rather than proving his own claims. Sometimes entertaining to listen to, always sad to watch. He struck me as 'a shell of a man'.

Well technically they are gaining power across the middle east how far they go is another thing

[lipskip]

Originally Posted by Dat1111

Well technically they are gaining power across the middle east how far they go is another thing

Funny.... I'm sure they say the same exact thing about us.

[figatova]

Originally Posted by lipskip

What's the point Dat? Did somebody else's Hitchens thread upset you?

[Chained]

Most logical atheists are against, and state that Islam and its followers are the most dangerous cult today. Also, that there ar many mor extremists than liberals and euros like to admit.

[Gmike]

""Islamofascism" is hellbent on destroying our civilisation"


Its hellbent on destroying civilization period.

[Wimbly]

Originally Posted by Dat1111

The Iraq Effect

If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened

Hitchens.

So is the Arab Spring a symptom of violent Islamist revolutionary tendencies or a side effect of the wonderful democratic new Iraq?

Which is it Dat?

[_SCARFACE_]

Islam wants to go back to the 6th Century