Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-2011) was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, in Southern England, during the wartime service of both his parents in the Royal Navy. He received an excellent education under their care, initially at Leys School in Cambridge and later at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics. In his autobiographical book "Hitch-22," published much later in 2010, he recounted, among other things, some homosexual experiences from that period of his life. In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the movement opposing the Vietnam War, the escalation of nuclear arms, and the dominance of multinational corporations. In 1965, he joined the Labour Party of England, but was expelled in 1967, along with his entire student organization, due to their criticism of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's support for the Vietnam War. He began his journalism career in the 1970s as a correspondent for the Trotskyist magazine "International Socialism," and later as a contributor to "The London Times Higher Education Supplement" on social science topics, and the magazine "The New Statesman." The suicide of his mother in a hotel room in Athens in 1973 brought him to Greece out of necessity. Upon returning, he published a revealing article about the state of the Greek junta, which became his first piece published in "New Statesman." In 1981, Hitchens moved to the United States, starting to write for the weekly magazine "The Nation" and the monthly "Vanity Fair," where he fiercely criticized Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and U.S. policies in Central and South America. Through the bold and unconventional content of his political discourse, Hitchens became one of the most prominent journalists and intellectuals of his time. A fervent admirer of Thomas Paine, George Orwell, and President Jefferson, he did not hesitate to include in his criticisms the Nobel Peace laureate Mother Teresa and Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 1989, he began to distance himself from the traditional line of "leftist" intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and John Updike, due to their tepid reaction to Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence against Salman Rushdie over his book "The Satanic Verses." Loyal friends until the end remained, conversely, authors Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie. In 1997, he supported the demand for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, expressing his views in the book "The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification." After September 11, 2001, his articles openly supported U.S. international intervention against theocratic regimes and subsequently the war in Iraq, for which he was accused of being a neo-reactionary. Nevertheless, he continued to proclaim his radical atheism in every way, writing the book "God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," published in 2007. He published several other books, including: "Cyprus", 1984, which was reissued under the title: "Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger", 1989, "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice", 1995, "Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography", "The Trial of Henry Kissinger", 2001, "Letters to a Young Contrarian", 2001, "Why Orwell Matters", 2002, and "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer", 2007. In September 2005, he was ranked fifth in a poll of the 100 most important intellectuals by the magazines "Foreign Policy" and "Prospect". He passed away in Houston, Texas, on December 15, 2011, at the age of 62, following a complication of pneumonia that worsened his health while he was suffering from esophageal cancer.