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Yea, you don’t know shite

He was Almost a full blooded conservative by the time he died. He vocally despised the PC crowd and expressly defensed Columbus Day .

Yea, I don't know shite. This is just before he died: LINK

This was a quote from him in 2004

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"[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do – fought and died for his beliefs."[

So yes, tell me what I don't know about his completely unjustifiable admiration for this sociopathic monster

I'm happy to discuss this at length. I'm not disputing that he said that. I'm disputing your assessment of how Hitchens would view current events, which is 100 % incorrect. Those quotes are a reflection of how he reacted to Guevara's death at the time. I despise Guevara and Hitchens was completely wrong to have ever seen him in a positive light. But he was describing how he felt as a (misguided) university student at the time. While he never completely shed his boyhood admiration for figures like that, he was never a "real" Marxist. He wasn't a leninist but a Luxemburg Marxist, a sect most people are unaware of. Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish marxist/socialist who opposed both Leninism and Nazism, much like Orwell, Hitch's obvious hero. She was eventually killed by nazis.

If you know anything about Hitchens, you'd know he renounced socialism - he in fact said he was no longer a socialist - and actually said Marx underestimated the regenerative powers of capitalism. His views were idiosyncratic, but he was never a "true believer" in Marxism. I think it was a lot of posturing in his university years. I've read a lot of Hitchens, and I don't think he ever actually knew or cared much for economics and I certainly have never seen any contemporary writing of his advocating nationalization let alone actual communism. His interest in Marxist figures was sociopolitical, not economic and his admiration for figures like Trotsky was rooted in them being grand, tragic figures of history rather than actual devotion to their dogmas. There are several youtube links of him talking about Trotsky where his admiration, while still mistaken, is very qualified and couched in broad historical terms rather than endorsement. THe thing about Hitchens is that even when he was wrong- say about Trotsky or Iraq, he still provided insight and made compelling arguments.

He broke away from the left in the 80's after liberals turned on his friend Salman Rushdie when the Ayatollah issued a fatwa for the Satanic Verses, a book that was allegedly critical of Muhammad. The other nail in the coffin was after 9/11 when the Western left viewed 9/11 as some blowback for imperialism rather than an assault on western civilization. He championed the term "islamofascism" and unapologetically said Islam was the most dangerous religion in the world, which would certainly piss off the insane liberal crowd today. I don't think people appreciate how "conservative" he actually was in the last 20 years of his life. He was a chauvinist for western civilization in the best possible way and despised how the left felt the need to apologize for American successes. While he had contempt for the Evangelical community, he knew the greatest threat to intellectual and expressive freedoms came from the left, particularly the PC crowd. As early as 1992, he was writing unapologetic defenses of Columbus Day. Here's a link to an article called Londonistan where he bemoans how London has turned into a terrorist breeding ground because the left decided it had to accomodate jihadists in the name of political correctness. Also a link to his essay on Columbus where he actually uses Marx to argue that the world is better off for Columbus's discovery. Does this seem like th work of someone who would endorse tearing down statues and renaming everything in sight?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/06/hitchens200706

https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138574010898/the-christopher-hitchens-essay-on-the

Hitchens loved America and loved the idea of america. There's a reason he fell out with the Chomskys and Vidals of the world who wanted to continually apologize for America. He would be appalled by what's happening today, and honestly, would be on the cancel culture firing squad for his comments on Islam.

This post was edited on 6/20/20 at 11:08 am