There is a tendency, in profiles of Christopher Hitchens, for the bestselling atheist and militant author to be defined solely in relation to his high-profile targets and the high-velocity force at which he hits them.
Very rarely is it elucidated anywhere – except, of course, by Hitchens himself – precisely why he has gone after such perennial favourites of the general populace as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Clinton.
That he took exception to the first’s acceptance of money from the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the second’s support for thermonuclear testing in India, and the third’s opportunistic decision to authorise the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate in the middle of the 1992 Presidential election campaign, well, none of this ever really gets a look-in.
Instead, his objections are customarily glossed over with thinly-veiled contempt or patronising bemusement by those who are happy to wallow in received wisdom and consensus. “You don’t like Bill Clinton? Or Mother Theresa? But everybody knows those cats are great!”When one takes Hitchens’ reasoned and meticulously researched attacks into proper account, however – as one must do unless one would happily accept gifts from the Duvaliers oneself, or sign away a lobotomised man’s life in order to appear tough on crime and win votes – one quickly realises that his true targets are not so much these mammals, as he likes to call them, as the mammalian vices and fallacies that they so clearly personify. Hitchens’ real targets, in this analysis, are hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and the suppression of liberty by tyranny. Pretty good targets, by any reasonable standard.
Matthew Clayfield
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
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