Kicking Nuns for Fun and Profit
Hitchens always was a Trotskyist. Make no mistake about that. Yet, when you consider the man qua man who was Hitchens qua Hitchens, I have to grant him the respect that he is due. Right now, I have "No One Left to Lie To" his book about Bill Clinton. Hitchens supported the war against Saddam Hussein for reasons that are hard to argue, though granted that the demise of Saddam Hussein has done little to make life better in Iraq. Be all that as it may ... Mother Teresa was the greatest confidence artist in the 20th century.
"Hitchens, of course, was proudly an old-school liberal"
Huh? Old-school liberal? I don't think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher...
"Long describing himself as a socialist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the 'tepid reaction' of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and the 'anti-war' movement's opposition to intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina—though Christopher did not leave his position writing for The Nation until, post-9/11, he felt the magazine had arrived at a position 'that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.'[5] The September 11 attacks 'exhilarated' him, bringing into focus 'a battle between everything I love and everything I hate,' and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy which challenged 'fascism with an Islamic face'.[6] His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not 'a conservative of any kind', and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.[7][8] Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he maintained that he was a leftist.[9]"
A leftist is not an "old-school liberal."
I evaluated Hitchens by his writings as I discovered them. I stand by that. He was not an advocate of the free market because he was an advocate of the free mind. That settled all other issues for him.
He clearly went through an intellectual journey, but he was guided by a precise and accurate moral compass.
In the topic thread on "Hitchens Destroys Rand," I go into more detail on my experience with his works.
Reading Hitchens I found someone whose primary virtue was their choice to use their mind, even from an early age.
(More on Hitchens later.)
Why?