Hitch 22: A Memoir

Christoper Hitchens, “Hitch 22: A Memoir” Twelve, 2010, 424 pps
I suppose I may have read this book with more sympathy than normal considering the author died in December 2011 from cancer, age 62. He is an especially convincing writer; I truly felt I was listening to a friend talking to me—not many books get such a reaction. This book is well worth your time.

Hitchens was born in the United Kingdom and later became a foreign correspondent; he became especially critical of U.S. military adventures following WWII. However, this changed on 9/11 when he concluded the Islamist extremism as well as Saddam Hussein posed a threat which must be met. He even became a U.S. citizen. Hitchens was a crusading atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not discovered by him until her suicide.

Pg. 114: Hitchens visited Cuba in 1968. After Che Guevara was killed, the Cuban leadership declared 1968 to be the “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla” and issued a call to all schoolchildren in the country that they should live their lives “Como el Che” or in the manner of Guevara. It was the impossibility of following this directive that hit Hitchens first, even before the realization that the whole thing was borrowed from what Christians called “The Imitation of Christ.” So there it was: Cuban socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another.

Pg. 136: I held this job for about six months before its editor said something to me that made it impossible to go on working for him. “You’re fired” were the exact words as I remember.

Pg. 145: I eventually came to appreciate a feature of the situation that has since helped me to understand similar obduracy in Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus, and several other spots. The local leaderships that are generated by the “troubles” in such places do not want there to be a solution. Solution would mean that they were no longer deferred to by visiting UN or American mediators and no longer able to make a second living by smuggling and protection-racketeering. The power of this parasitic class was what protracted the fighting in Northern Ireland for years and years after it had become obvious to all that nobody (except the racketeers) could “win”.

Pg. 192: The struggle against totalitarianism is a struggle for the citizens to cease to be the property of the state.

Pg. 232: I did not at all like Ronald Reagan in spite of his historic compromise with Gorbachev. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with a folksy smirk that got him called “The Great Communicator” by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths. (“South Africa has stood beside us in every major war we have ever fought,” he declared while defending a regime whose party leadership had been locked up by the British for pro-Nazi sympathies in the Second World War. “The Russian language contains no word for “freedom” was another stupefying pronouncement of his: Who knows where he got it from, or who can imagine a president whose staff couldn’t tell him of the noble word Svboda? On two occasions, he claimed that he had been present for the liberation of the Nazi death camps while, in fact, he had never left the safety of the Los Angeles movie back lots during the war. Nobody was less surprised than I when Regan was later found to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease: I believe it will one day be admitted that some of his family and one or two of his physicians had begun to suspect this as early as his first term.
Reagan was frequently photographed in the company of “end-times” Protestant fundamentalists and biblical literalists like Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson: tethered gas-balloons of greed and cynicism of Chaucerian proportions. Regan also speculated that the jury might yet return an open verdict on the theory of evolution. He was married to a woman who employed a White House astrologer. He said that the Abraham Lincoln Battalion had fought on “the wrong side” in the civil war in Spain, which logically meant that there had been a “right” side and that it was the Francoist one. Reagan agreed to visit an SS cemetery in Bitburg and declared that those interred there were not just “victims,” but victims “just as much” as the civilians they had slaughtered.

Pg. 383: The important realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped form the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential illogical statement in human history.