[lbo-talk] My letter to CH

[cgreen7223 at aol.com]

It's not like the unseemly joy over Hitchens's death is unprovoked. He 
used his influential position to advocate for mass murder and called 
anti-war people like myself idiots and enablers of totalitarian 
terrorist murder and so on. Calling people names  like that and 
cheerleading for mass murder in very crude fashion is not going to get 
you a very friendly response when you die. In his last ten years he 
gave the impression in his writings of being a pathological douchebag. 
But yes people should be more intellectually mature. At least Hitchens 
didn't kill innocent people himself, at least as far as I know. As H.L. 
Mencken once advised, irony is far more effective in polemical writing 
than unrestrained and inhuman moral rage of the sort where you cheer 
the death of people. I'm sure that as Hitchens gained more celebrity in 
the establishment and spent time with the likes of  David Horowitz and 
Paul Wolfowitz,  he  was deep down very unhappy. I wonder how much 
alcohol contributed to the sharp deterioration in his thinking.

I first became aware of him not long before he became involved in the 
Lewinsky affair in the late 90's. As he basked in the admiration of 
right wing idiots as "an honest liberal", he seemed to suppress his 
left wing beliefs. Maybe if more people on the left accepted as 
legtimate the critique of Clinton's private moral character, then he 
wouldn't have felt so alienated and thus joined the right wing.

Political turn-coats from left to right are fascinating. It would be 
interesting to know what was going on inside his head. The logic he 
used in his arguments to support the War on Terror showed extraordinary 
stupidity especially when you compare it with his level of knowledge 
about the world and the high level of reasoning he displayed many other 
times. Feeble-minded is a term that comes to mind to descibe his logic.

Obviously it is not easy being an active dissident against mainstream 
society and selling-out always presents a strong lure.

Chris Green
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=44901401