Great obituary - or rembrance of a friend.

You have some great lines here yourself, Nick:

Nick Higham, a ferrety cultural bureaucrat who has never written a sentence anyone has remembered.

Wonderful!

As for this:

He remained a friend of and inspiration to many leftish writers, but for the "anti-imperialist left" that embraced life-denying, women-hating, gay-killing Islamists, he had nothing but contempt. Its indulgence of religious reaction had ruined it beyond redemption.

It describes exactly why so many have come to regard the Guardian which has embraced this bizarre so-called left-wing new agenda as beyond redemption.

Yes, the BBC got Nick Higham to do Ken Russell's obituary too and that was a bloodless affair delivered in the style of an annual financial account. Dunno what Hitchens thought about colons, but maybe he wouldn't have liked a capital letter after one in a title about him.

I'm sorry. One apologist for the Iraq war praising another apologist for the Iraq war is stomach turning. Cohen has not a single word to say for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died and suffer as a result of a war he promoted.

Hitchens was a charlatan, and the world is better off without him.

But he and everyone who knew him understood his distinction between a drinker and a drunk

Perhaps everyone who knew him were also drunks .... misery loves company

I shall miss Hitch.

He was a great man.

As for 'women-hating' who was it called the Dixie Chicks 'Fat Slags' when they dared to criticise his hero George Bush? Yes Christopher Hitchens who walked out on his wife when she was pregnant with their second child.

He died too young when he had too much left to say.

One of the best pieces I read for quite a while.
Excellent.
Sometimes I felt that He let down those close to him, perhaps because of that drinking
habit.
I spoke to his ex-wife 2 months ago, this is what she had to say.

Me:

He is very ill , last time I came across him was in the Guardian, Do u keep in touch?

Eleni Meleagrou

Of course, very much so, he is the father of my children and we remain, in our way, a "family"

Me: Great To Hear that !
Of course she knew that the end is near, but she put a brave face just the same.

My commiserations to Eleni.

I'm sorry.

So you bloody well should be for this nasty contribution.

Hitchens was a charlatan, and the world is better off without him.

At least the world noticed him. Can you, with your spiteful judgements, say the same?

One of Hitchens' best and most overlooked books is Cyprus: Hostage To History - his definitive account of the events leading up to the appalling Turkish occupation of Cyprus.

For a humanist he was especially indignant at the desecration of Cyprus's Christian and Hellenic heritage - viewing its cultural treasures as a heritage of all mankind.

Hitchens was one of the first English writers to document the ethnic cleansing of the Greek Cypriots and the tragic partition of the island - whose consequences are still with us today.

Hitchens despised tyranny and one of his greatest lessons on Cyprus is that under no circumstances should the consequences of the Turkish occupation of Cyprus become legitimised.

"Fatalism would be the greatest betrayal" he wrote. It wouldn't just be a betrayal of Cypriots that we should acquiesce to injustice, but it would be a betrayal of all those fighting tyranny and oppression everywhere.

He was, instead, enchanted by the bravery and prescience of Victor Serge, George Orwell and the other left oppositionists of the early 20th century who opposed communism and capitalism equally. Ex-Trotskyists are now among the most dishonest people in politics, but their predecessors in the 1960s still had the integrity to teach him an invaluable lesson. Leftwing dictatorships were "Stalinist" in their theology, and a true Trotskyist should have no qualms about fighting them as fiercely as he or she fought the racist and repressive regimes and ideas of the right.

Well Victor Serge did some splitting of his own when he realised that Trotsky wasn't upset about the Stalinist purges in themselves, only that they were purging the wrong people.

Did Hitch not have any problem with Trotskysit purges, then? Perhaps he saw some equivalence with neocon war criminals.

Hitchens was a man of huge intellectual honesty, an incisive, tenacious and probing mind with no time for the disgraceful pompousness of the left. The censorious, snivelling and cliche-riddden diatribes that so often clutter these pages almost all pale into insignificance alongside his work.

In the US, where I live, NPR once again today underscored why I shall never give them money by broadcasting a pathetically bitter attack on Hitchens from the weaker man Chris Hodges.

Ultimately, the reason for Hitchens unpopularity with the left is easy to sum up: he made them squirm with his vivid descriptions of the hypocrisy and moral vacuousness. For this discomfort, the tugging at their utterly unearned self-righteousness, they could not forgive him. Therefore, he must be wrong - whatever he wrote.

There are too few like Hitchens, for whom human rights and human freedoms matter above politics. May his books now sell extra well, and maybe persuade a few more lost souls to open their minds and think - and not reject an idea because one of their dimwitted associates told them the idea was 'neocon' or some other such label used to stop thought.

RIP Hitch.

Well said Nick, I'm currently reading your book "Whats Left" its a strange feeling being upset over the death of a person I never met but I found myself having tears in my eyes after I found out he had lost his fight with cancer.

I agreed with his position on Iraq despite the effect this had on my friends, I simply had to ask myself the question, am I on the side of the Iraqi progressives or not..

I couldn't agree more with your reaction to the BBC saying he was an alcoholic and that he had gone from left to right, anyone who had read or watched him speak would have understood what he was about in this regard.

all this said I for one will miss him dearly, he was a voice apart which was both refreshing and inspiring, and to repeat what Nick said..

"Those who read him knew that when we had something to say on our own account that our bosses, friends, family and colleagues would deplore, we at least had the comfort that Christopher Hitchens was on our side."

Take Care Hitch I'm going to miss you, I don't like to have them but if I did, you would be my hero..

The world noticed a lot of people, usually for all the worst reasons,

Did I cheer-lead for an aggressive, illegal and genocidal war? No.

"Shoot them down like pigeons!"

........but for the "anti-imperialist left" that embraced life-denying, women-hating, gay-killing Islamists, he had nothing but contempt. Its indulgence of religious reaction had ruined it beyond redemption.

And how is life in the "pro-imperialist left" camp?

I've never really understood the "Let's-encourage-Imperialist-powers-to-bomb-Iraq-(or Iran)-into-the-Stone-Age-and-pretend-it's-to-liberate-women-and-gays" but unlike Hitchens, I'm not an intellectual.

He was, instead, enchanted by the bravery and prescience of Victor Serge, George Orwell and the other left oppositionists of the early 20th century who opposed communism and capitalism equally.

Always seemed like a very lucid chap, his steering clear of ideological dogma makes him sorely missed.

Good tribute Nick, from the heart and all the better for it.

Who said this in praise of the use of cluster bombs?

“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”

The clue is that he is Nick Cohen's hero.

ps Why does Nick Cohen believe that a massive daily intake of alcohol doesn't make you an alcoholic. Wishful thinking?

While fundamentally disagreeing with him on some issues, and being eternally grateful to him for clarifying my thoughts better than I could on others, there's no denying the suspicion that he relished his role as a contrarian polemicist & controversialist and saw it as being almost on a par with his journalism. One of the tragedies of his death, for those of us outside his immediate circle, is that we won't now get to see whether age and wisdom might have curbed some of those traits, and led him to apply his talents more directly to the latter, without feeling the need to indulge the former quite so gratuitously.

Cohen.

Hitchens broke with the left, it reminded us, over the 9/11 atrocities and the second Iraq war. Leftists accused him of "betrayal," it continued, and quoted one who had described him as a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay". The BBC could not bring itself to add that the "leftist" in question was George Galloway, who saluted the "courage" of the secular fascist Saddam Hussein, went on to apologise for the regimes and movements of Sunni and Shia clerical fascism, and – lest we forget – led millions in demonstrations against the war to overthrow Iraqi Ba'athism without the supposedly moderate and respectable voices of liberal England uttering a word of protest against his presence

.

The perverse logic here is of the sort that led Hitchens to become more unbalanced in the last decade of his life. Not all opponents of the Iraq war were 'objectively' pro-Saddam or indifferent to the brutality of the dictatorship.

Those such as Galloway and leading figures in the StWC were largely not bothered about the illiberalism of Hamas and Hizbollah ( "clerical fascism" in Cohen's words ). But few intelligent people take them seriously anyway.

Hitchens supported the Iraq Warm the most serious of mistakes, for a number of reasons.

1) The previous realpolitik had done nothing to diminish the evil of Saddam Hussein's regime. It had backed Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War. The US had a duty to put right those wrongs

2 ) The sanctions imposed by the US after the conclusion of the 1st Iraq War had led to suffering and deaths.

3 ) Support for the Kurds who had been subject to horrific repression ( e.g The Hallabjah Gas Attack 1988 )

4) Ignorance or indifference to the sectarian and ethnic consequences an invasion could bring in practice beyond the USA winning in the aftermath of the victory

4 ) To win a polemical battle and score points over adversaries on the "anti-imperial left". This was characteristic of those like Galloway too. Using Iraq and its "successes" and "setbacks" simply to win arguments.

It's difficult not to agree with assessment here by F S Saunders,

His most noxious forgery was to peddle the cheap lies (Mark Twain's "conscience-soothing falsities") of Bush and Blair in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens' prose from this period, smoking with sulphur, reveals the contrarian running with the mainstream to block off other contrarians.

Having ordained that the "peacenik, Saddamite" left had ruled itself out of the debate – "it no longer matters what they think" – he substituted his indignant imagination for the actual debate taking place in the anti-war left. "Ha Ha Ha," he wrote on the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul in November 2001. "I get the impression that they [the peaceniks] go to bed saying: 'What have I done for Saddam Hussein or good old Slobodan or the Taliban today?'"

When advocating such a war as Iraq it was incumbent to provide solid evidence why, in the circumstances of 2003, a war would be justified and do less harm than not fighting it. Hitchens never provided evidence.

That was not provided and when Iraq predictably degenerated into chaos and sectarian bloodshed, Hitchens kept simplistically portraying the insurgents as all "Jihadi-Islamists" without any nuance at all.

Even worse, he started in Slate in 2005 to come close to rationalising torture in in the cause of pursuing the war on terror in my opinion. Read this piece from Slate ( <ahref="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/06/confessions_of_a_dangerous_mind.html">Amnesty's Amnesia ) closely and see what you think,

The forces of al-Qaida and its surrogate organizations are not signatory to the conventions and naturally express contempt for them.....they are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers—three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law.

I should also like to know how other Western governments, which are privately relieved that the United States assumed responsibility for the last wave, expect to handle the next wave of fundamentalist violence in their own societies. No word on this as yet.

An axiom of the law states that justice is more offended by one innocent person punished than by any number of guilty persons unapprehended. I say frankly that I am not certain of the applicability of this in the present case. Mullah Omar's convoy in Afghanistan was allowed to escape because there was insufficient certainty to justify bombing it. Several detainees released from Guantanamo have reappeared in the Taliban ranks, once again burning and killing and sabotaging. The man whose story of rough interrogation had planned to board a United Airlines flight and crash it into a skyscraper. </b

Saddam Husein killed millions of his own people and among other things committed acts of genocide but I'm guessing that doesn't bother you because you could just ignore that and get on with your life..

comments like yours remind me of those in the UK who after finding out about the concentration camps of WW2 said that the UK was just as bad because of its bombing German cities during the conflict..

As a debater he was peerless but often wrong, the mouthpiece for war apologists .

He was fundamentally wrong about Iraq . No mea culpas, just posturing .How to square this with the thousands unlawfully murdered?Silence and subterfuge from Hitchens and his mates.

For such a moral man he had a demonstratively casual attitude to the mass murder of human beings in Iraq.

His character assasination of Mother Teresa sprung from the unreflective conviction that goodness cannot come from religion.

Hitchens also wrote this, "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad"

What a humanitarian!

Who wrote this about Iraq in the New Statesman in 1976?

And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.

and

All these remain to be acted on, and as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussain will rise more clearly to the top. Make a note of the name. Iraq has been strengthened internally by the construction of a ‘strategic pipeline’ which connects the Gulf to the northern fields for the first time. She has been strengthened externally by her support for revolutionary causes and by the resources she can deploy. It may not be electrification plus Soviet power, but the combination of oil and ‘Arab socialism’ is hardly less powerful.

I'll give you one guess.

An intelligent and eloquent man though he was, he will forever be tainted by his support of the murderous invasion and destruction of Iraq. I laughed when I read Elcristoph1611's comment above about how support for the war meant you were on the side of the Iraqi progressives. Just this evening, the Tehran backed Shiite government has embarked on a campaign to imprison or sideline key political opponents from the party which legitimately won the last election. You people simply have no idea.

What made Hitchens' position so much worse, was his stubborn and foolish refusal to admit what the war had unleashed on the people of Iraq. Knee-deep in Iraqi blood, his denials of responsibility and most shamefully, his questioning of statistics on civilian deaths, made him look rather pitiful. In this regard Cohen, Hitchens and you are two peas out of the same pod - supporters and cheerleaders of death. Well done.

A reality often overlooked in an increasingly bureaucratised and professionalized society that has become the West, is just how little room there is for independently minded intellectuals such as Hitchens.

Debates about many public interest issues are increasingly dominated by experts and specialists. It is indeed sad to witness the passing of an intelligent polemicist because unfortunately one has the impression that there isn't a ready supply of replacements in the wings (Guardian contributors excluded naturally).

Dunno. Haven't read anything about/from him that didn't make me suspect he was a bit of a twat...

He was a brilliant writer, with a fierce intelligence which he applied to so many areas of life. His writings in the last 18 months also showed great courage as he counted down his remaining days.

Yet I'm finding the secular canonisation of of Hitchens increasingly difficult to swallow. Yes he was exceptionally clever and his TV slots were always watchable.
However you have to reconcile all that with the fact that he supported an ill-judged and badly fought war in which 1000s of Iraqis died. His writings for all their cleverness had an undercurrent of misogyny (read Why women aren't funny..). And for all that intellectual strength and brilliance he decided to drink and smoke himself to death.

However I will miss reading his work...

He remained a friend of and inspiration to many leftish writers, but for the "anti-imperialist left" that embraced life-denying, women-hating, gay-killing Islamists, he had nothing but contempt.

How can you write this shit and sleep at night, I really don't know.

To paraphrase Wilde, whom Hitchens adored, "on an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to betray the left. It becomes a pleasure." I won't give you any guff about the left leaving Hitchens rather than Hitchens leaving the left. He walked out and slammed the door with barely one regretful glance over his shoulder.

...and returned to trenches to stand by and fight along his Kurdish comrades, whom the international left had also abandoned in favour of preserving Saddam's genocidal fascist tyranny.

He was a true internationalist and remained always in solidarity with his Kurdish friends.

He was a mountain of Kurdistan, Comrade Hitchens.

Did Hitch write any fiction? Having looked through his works there are no works of fiction. If not please enlighten me. His hero Orwell wrote two very famous books, Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm (+a few others). Those books serve as an introduction to his essays, the Lion and the Unicorn, the Moon Under Water etc etc.

So yeah, he did not live long enough to put his ideas into literary form. That is always a guarantee for literary immortality. Joyce, Orwell, Wells, Chesterton, Belloc were all hacks but they were all best remembered for their fiction.

Hitchens was a charlatan, and the world is better off without him.

He was a better man than any of his critics. The world is a lesser place without him.

A wordsmith par excellence, an imaginative writer and brilliant in debate, but when he came out in support of the Iraq war, embraced Bush and took American citizenship I've never understood what made him change his previous stance so dramatically. Personally I mourned the 'loss' of Christopher Hitchen's a long time ago.

[George Galloway] – lest we forget – led millions in demonstrations against the war to overthrow Iraqi Ba'athism

The war - lest you forget, Mr Cohen - was supposedly about the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Or is it OK to now openly admit that it was a neo-colonial war of aggression?

He died too young, with too much left to say.

As a former admirer of Mr. Hitchens, I especially regret that he did not live long enough to admit that he was wrong about the invasion of Iraq. To the very end, he kept on insisting that Iraq possessed WMDs, that the Iraqis tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, and that Saddam Hussein personally backed al-Qaeda.

I suppose that if one spends a lifetime as a polemicist, mocking people with whom one disagrees, it becomes impossible to admit to a mistake.

Headline: "Christopher Hitchens dies. Warmongers in mourning."

Darkdaler:

Totally agree with everything that you say. The man was a viper and a fraud. A witty fraud, but still a fraud.

He died too young, with too much left to say

Perhaps, but he died a lot older than and was able to say a lot more than tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died as a result of an unnecessary war he supported vociferously, waged by people whose motives and methods he should have been wary of, and the results of which he had little good reason not to expect.

for the "anti-imperialist left" that embraced life-denying, women-hating, gay-killing Islamists, he had nothing but contempt. Its indulgence of religious reaction had ruined it beyond redemption.

Astounding how you can use an obituary to once again spout your craven war mongering, Nick.

Absolutely shameful. You make me sick.

Leftwing dictatorships were "Stalinist" in their theology, and a true Trotskyist should have no qualms about fighting them

Actually "leftwing dictatorships" were Leninist, including Stalin's, and Trotsky supported and participated in some of the worst aspects of Lenin's dictatorship, such as the merciless crushing of Kronstadt and the Red Terror. Where he disagreed with Stalin was on internal methods within the party, not so much on the treatment meted out to the rest of the population, least of all when he held power.

More than any other modern intellectual, Hitchens revolted against the sinister absurdity of a time when feminists, democrats and liberals in the poor world and immigrant communities were more likely to find their reactionary enemies indulged and excused by the left rather than the right.

This is exactly what these two men - Nick and Hitch - believe.

They are at war with all of Islam, and all of us indulge and excuse Muslim behaviour if we do not declare pre-emptive attack on them.

It is because of this aggressive believe that, despite their numerous social and political essays, they will not be remembered by a soul on the left.

And of course the right have heroes of their own to remember.

Hitch gets a few nods from the atheist community, but that's about as much impact on the future as these two men will leave.

Unlike the neo-fascist New Leftists who dominate CiF, Hitchens was a true liberal. He actually cared about women's rights, minority rights, freedom of expression, and the endless pursuit of the truth without being suckered into pro-Islamist political correctness. For this he was shunned by the New Left but embraced by all thinking people.

Whether you agreed with him or not (and as I am not an atheist, I often disagreed with his opinion on religion), his writings ALWAYS made you reassess your own position on certain issues or events.

A brilliant man who will be missed.

The casualties of the Iraq war including the civil component were due to the war itself, which was the direct and predictable result of the invasion he supported. And a very large and only partly documented number of casualties were caused directly by coalition forces. Hitchens was not responsible for the deaths, but for supporting by his words the actions which brought them about, directly or indirectly.

...Nick Higham, a ferrety cultural bureaucrat who has never written a sentence anyone has remembered.

That's one way to conduct the battle of ideas.

He assured the nation that Hitchens was an "alcoholic". Hitchens could certainly knock it back. But he and everyone who knew him understood his distinction between a drinker and a drunk. If he were a true alcoholic he could never have written so much, so fast and at such a high standard.

First, being drunk and being an alcoholic are not the same thing.

Second, in Hitchens own words his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule". He also claimed that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."

It's a v sad state of affairs when Guardian readers pay tribute to a hate fuelled educated man who boasted ( in his own auto-biography ) that he actually helped persuade Bush & Neo- Cons to go the war in Iraq. Then getting another 'fake ass' liberal, fellow war mongerer, to also 'big him up' is just sooo pathetic and indicative of The Guardian's current demise. It's sad that a person has passed and that commands some respect for a fellow human being to a certain extent but reading the 'gush gush' here is soo depressing. " Why don't you all go The Mail, Telegraph, Express where you belong ? ". YourGeneticDestiny, Darkdaler, Wage Labourer and njegos I thankyou for putting across your soild views on Hitchens and what he truly was. It is our duty to put forward our opinions about someone who we believe was a deeply divisive person on fundamentally important issues in our current lives. Thank this world for Alexander Cockburn, Chomsky, Terry Egleton et al for exposing 'pseudo liberals' disguised as socialists.

DITTOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!

There are enough hagiographies now being written about Hitchens in the Guardian, to found a cult. What a pity that Hitchens did n't believe in God, and that therefor - oh:- disbelief in God is no bar to the founding of cults, is it? I mean, look at Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and any number of other great figures from history. They were all the heads of vast cults of hero-worship, and they did n't believe in God, either.

There has been nothing to match this orgy of praise-singing for Hitchens in the Guardian/Observer, since Steve Jobs died recently.

(And I did n't join that cult either).

I suspect that it's not just support for mass murder in Iraq (on the typical manichean basis of opposing another mass murderer, which is the way Stalinists used to justify their support for Stalin as opposed to Hitler) but also

his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule"

that makes Nick Cohen sycophanticly identify with this typical journalist - an alcoholic supporter of a fundamental lie opposed to anothger fundamental lie, which contradiction excessive alcohol enables the stunned average mules of journalism to continue spouting their rubbish, even when i8t's dressed up with some occasional insight.

"One apologist for the Iraq war praising another apologist for the Iraq war is stomach turning. Cohen has not a single word to say for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died and suffer as a result of a war he promoted."

On that note, it is notable that you have nothing to say about the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam, not one word of contempt for the fascist islamist ideology that was largely responsible for the post-liberation deaths. You are a hypocritical fraud of the precisely the kind Hitchens skewered so well.

An apologist and a warmonger, what a deadly combination? Lovelyjubbly!
Stop admiring and apologizing for a warmonger who shook hands with the likes of "Saint Blair". All of you have blood on their hands. Hope he is enjoying a dose of hell he prescribed for Iraq.

Dittooooooo!!