An afterword to the life of Christopher Hitchens
Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens' widow, talks about his legacy, his illness and life without him.
Guests
- Carol Blue
- Wife of the late Christopher Hitchens
Publications
- Title
- Mortality
- Author
- Christopher Hitchens
- Publisher
- Allen and Unwin
- ISBN
- 978 1 74237 4611
Further Information
Credits
- Executive Producer
- Gail Boserio
Comments (23)
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Anon :
11 Oct 2012 8:06:33am
You guys, I think you uploaded the wrong program...this seems to be about selecting an archbishop. Hardly what the title suggests.
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shahn murphy ... gold coast :
12 Oct 2012 1:21:39pm
Excellent program as usual tell me Phillip when are U going to interogate your old mate Barry Humphries he seems to be entering the apex of a brilliant career it would be an interesting interview
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DrGideonPolya :
16 Oct 2012 9:06:43am
Christopher Hitchens will be remembered for his incisive writing in support of the sensible position of atheism or agnosticism and for his forensic exposure of the immense crimes of Henry Kissinger who he estimated had killed 8 million people (mostly in India-China and Bangladesh)(see Christopher Hitchens, "The Trial of Henry Kissinger").
Unfortunately Christopher Hitchens blotted his copybook with his support of the invasion of Iraq, condemned as illegal by millions decent people around the world, including conservatives such as John Valder (former president of the Australian Liberal Party) and Nick Clegg (UK Deputy PM and leader of the UK Liberal Democrats).
Since 2003 the carnage in Iraq has involved 1.5 million violent deaths (Google "Just Foreign Policy), 1.2 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 5-6 million refugees and 0.8 million under-5 infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to gross US Alliance violation of the Geneva Convention. The post-1990 Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide has involved 4.6 million Iraqi deaths, this carnage including 1.7 million violent deaths, 2.9 million deaths from war-imposed deprivation and 2.0 million under-5 infant deaths (Google "Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide").
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crank :
16 Oct 2012 1:03:49pm
As ever, right on the money. Hitchens' moral debacle after 9/11 really is a mystery. Not only did he support the aggression (the 'supreme crime' in international law) against Iraq, but as a well-informed and clever fellow he would have known that the ' WMD' justification was a blatant lie. Hence he was complicit, before and after the fact, through his propaganda services, in the genocide of over one million Iraqis. That is a big stain on any reputation, and he compounded it with his increasingly shrill demands for the same treatment to be meted out to Iran. He justified his proselytising for bloody regime change on the basis of hatred of Islamic fundamentalism, but in his latter years, he played down his earlier, principled and correct, denunciations of Israel, even as that apartheid, terrorist, state moved further and further into the territory of fundamentalist clerico-fascism. A notable life, but a reputation in tatters thanks to the grievous errors of his last decade, I would say.
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Antipodes :
16 Oct 2012 3:59:14pm
The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq theory was not something only embraced by idiots and opportunists before the war. Hitchens, among other humanists made an error in support of this war, which was mistakenly believed to be for the greater good. It saddens me to think that people erroneously think he was doing it for sinister reasons.
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RJB :
16 Oct 2012 5:36:24pm
A person of that intellect does not make errors of that magntude. - He would have had his reasons.
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Stephen Coates :
17 Oct 2012 12:45:59pm
Mr. Hitchens summarises his case in Hitch 22 from which I quote. "Here are some of the thikngs we unearthed or observed. Unnoticed by almost everybody, and unreported by most newspapers, Saddam Hussein's former chief physicist Dr. Mahdi Obeidi had waited until a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad to accost some American soldiers and invite them to excavate his back garden. There he showed them the components of a gas centrifuge - the crown jewels of uranium enrichment - along with a two-foot stack of blueprints. This burial had originally been ordered by Saddam's younger son Qusay, who had himself been in charge of the Ministry of Concealment, and had outlasted many visits by "inspectors" [his quotes]. I myself rather doubt that Hans Blix would have found the trove on his own." (p314)
He goes on to describe the excavation of the burial site at Al-Hilla where thousands had been buried by Saddam, dead or alive, after 1991 and he noted that there were 62 more sites in southern Iraq alone.
It's interesting that you describe the coalition invasion of Iraq as illegal, Gideon, but won't apply that term to Iraq's invasions of Iran and then Kuwait.
He wasn't complicit in anything. He was there on the ground as a journalist, unlike you Andrew ("crank") and Gideon who deny all facts that don't suit your own ideology.
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Melissa :
07 Jan 2013 6:01:49pm
Anyone who believes that millions have died in Iraq is deluded. The truth is that Hitchen's support of the war in Iraq was a direct consequence of his hatred of religion.
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Marcus Poulin :
05 Apr 2013 4:30:59pm
Yes Dr. Polya.
It would have been a moral debacle if we would have allowed Saddam not to stay.
He was a Wonderful & Benevolent Man who invited all to Iraq with Warm Tidings and Peaceful Yearnings.
It was the Evil George W. Bush, Evil Christopher Hitchens, and the Evil Collective of Imperialistic Americans who took that kind and decent man Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti out of power.
And also the U.N. which incidentally never could do anything about Iraq's quest for nuclear weapons. Like they are presently not doing anything about Iran's quest for the same.
The U.N. cannot DO a thing about the 5 Million killed in the Congo.
The U.N. is inexplicably VERY concerned with that firearms law-abiding Americans do own while that
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WJAy :
16 Oct 2012 2:41:55pm
Hitchens was refreshingly non-conform in the opinions he held, to the ire of the Left, who treated him like their poster boy.
In our predictable polarised world between
pro gay marriage/pro abortion/anti USA/anti Israel/pro euthanasia/pro media laws
against
tradional marriage/anti aborton/pro US/pro Israel/anti euthanasia/against media laws
he had his feet in both camps, not as a token of his open-mindedness, but as his intellectual honesty.
When was the last time a left atheist expressed an anti-abortion view and even becomes very friendly with an American Christian pastor (featured in the DVD "Collision")?
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A Monotheist :
16 Oct 2012 3:59:19pm
Hello Everyone:
A few interesting words were exchanged there. They included, came as a shock;highly experienced doctors; we all want to live;I'm sorry, I'm in hospital, I'll be out soon!!
In the past, I heard a variation of similar experission from Phillip. For an instance, after a glitch in his pacemaker, Phillip was praising the medical experts for fixing the glitch; but!
Let's see what we can make of the interesting words. The death of Christopher came as shock;I guess, even to Christopher himself. As it was mentioned, Christopher used to write to his audience that he would be soon out of the hospital.
I remember once Christopher implied, he writes therefore, he exists.
Does anyone remember Richard Dawckins arguing that, early in the history of evelution, having a religion may have been a boon for human survival? It seems even an atheist needs clinging to something when life matters most. But, how is that, they can't stand the miracle seekers.
I wounder how Christopher would have spent his remaining life if he had known there was no hope of recovery whatsoever!
I guess that would have meant death plus not being able to write equall absolute nonexistence.
But, as Phillip seems to believe, from nothing comes nothing. Now, forget the scientific validity of such a belief, since science has already determined the age of the universe or the fact that the subparticles pop out of nowhere, one may wonder whether Christopher once did indeed pop out of nowhere and then again popped in absolute nowhereness.
Now Phillip,I know you want to live for ever, evevn if it means in the memories of the future generations; but! Do you know that, the very idea of living in people's memory disguise your inner yearning for The Reality, The God?
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Clea :
16 Oct 2012 5:19:31pm
Thanks for the nice interview.
Yes, I do very often wish that Christopher Hitchens was still with us to comment on so many things.
That apartment must seem so empty without him.
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Tony (not GP) :
16 Oct 2012 5:36:27pm
CH1/3
PA
Regarding your interview with Carol Blue – she acknowledged that CH's vehement behaviour may have caused his falling out with friends when CH's views changed. Looks like Yoko is as crazy as the Nobel committee but Carol is a pacifist (in favour of GWII)..
It is good that Alexander Cockburn (AC) + Sidney Blumenthal were in touch with CH be4 he died. I'm indexing articles by and about CH. Below are excerpts from 2 of the best which give more information apposite to your interview with CB [e.g. Bill Clinton]: the first is a bit dyspeptic [in my view justified]; the second more generous.
Tony
Farewell to C.H. by ALEXANDER COCKBURN - CounterPunch Diary DECEMBER 16-18, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/
I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed...
... the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill ... Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.
Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger... I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?
Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?...
see CH2
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Tony (not GP) 2 :
16 Oct 2012 5:52:44pm
CH2/3
One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final post mortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention–which fuelled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of the absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves, that was one of the worst. He also rounded on Gore Vidal who had done so much to promote his career as dauphin of contrarianism.
... He was for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. … I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.”)
... I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol.
I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you BY NEAL POLLACK - SALON DEC 21, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/i_knew_christopher_hitchens_better_than_you/singleton/
Every writer who had a drink with Hitch has now told his story. But even Rushdie and Amis didn't know him like this.
Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch.
...It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.
In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match’s Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge...
see CH3
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Tony (not GP) 3 :
16 Oct 2012 6:15:55pm
CH3/3 Pollack cont..
...Borges invited Hitch and me into his home, fed us tea and empanadas, and launched into a seamlessly brilliant discourse on surrealism in Latin American history. He talked for 30 minutes without stopping, during which time Hitch smoked six-dozen cigarettes. When Borges finished, Hitchens paused, spat in his ashcan, and said, “Of course, you know, you’re wrong about everything.”
He then proceeded to refute Borges, point for point, until he reduced the blind scribe of Buenos Aires to tears...
No one loved ideas more than Hitch.
... Hitchens spoke out against war, and also for war. In a span of five years, he bore witness to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the explosion of the Eiffel Tower, and the construction of the new holographic Eiffel Tower. He had acid in his pocket, acid in his pen and acid in his veins. Then Darkness fell, on Sept. 11, 2001. We’d all moved to America and gotten totally rich.
Hitchens changed that day. For months, he’d wander the streets at night, looking to drunkenly berate someone who disagreed with him about the evils of Islamofascism. Occasionally he’d attempt to strangle young journalists, who admired him unquestioningly, with their own neckties. But he was right. He was always right. Even when he was wrong.
The night they killed Osama bin Laden, he showed up at my apartment, drunk but lucid, quoting T.S. Eliot, Longfellow and, of course, himself. We stayed up watching CNN, which was actually pretty boring. In the morning, over a breakfast of corn flakes and whiskey, I said, “Well, I guess that’s the end of Islamofascism. Good job!”
Hitchens went into my kitchen, took a cutting board off the counter, and threw it into my forehead,
Hitchens went into my kitchen, drawing blood.
“Don’t be an imbecile,” he said. “The struggle never ends. Also, you must remember that there is no God.”
I needed four stitches that day. Hitch put them in himself, with his teeth. What a friend he was.
Rest in peace, dear man.
*************** Just in case you missed it. Tony (not GP)************
Neal Pollack (born March 1, 1970) is an American satirist, novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He lives in Austin, Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Pollack
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Heather :
17 Oct 2012 11:54:58am
Tony, I think you missed the point that the 2nd piece is satirical.
The anger about the Edward Said obit is overblown, it doesn't appear to any more critical than most obits written by others.
Anyways, there are lots out there who criticized what CH wrote about others who were dying/dead that then turned around and did the same themselves when CH was ill/dead.
Miss the man.
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Tony (not GP) 4 :
17 Oct 2012 2:26:47pm
Re Pollack - when I first read it in Feb 2012 I got it right away, - I'll admit that I was taken in initially when preparing post - I was actually looking for the article by a Hitchens' protege. But twigged regarding Pollack - although truth is stranger than fiction how do you put in stitches with your teeth.
Sample from index (stopped preparing in Feb 2012)I MIGHT GET BACK TO IT.
KEY
Article by Hitchens ABH
Pre 2001 CLOSE Friend/Collegue and/or of Hitchens OCF
Pre 2001 Friend/Collegue and/or of Hitchens OFH
Hitchens new friends [hate Chomsky support RTP R2P] HNF
Other OTH
Farewell to C.H. » Alexander Cockburn OCF www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/
Christopher Hitchens | Vanity Fair ABH Christopher Hitchens | Vanity Fair
Christopher Hitchens on Lebanon and Syria Politics Vanity Fair.htm ABH Christopher Hitchens on Lebanon and Syria | Politics | Vanity Fair
From Abbottabad to Worse - osama-bin-laden-201107 ABH http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/osama-bin-laden-201107
Iran’s Waiting Game hitchens-200507.htm ABH http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/07/hitchens-200507
The Blair Hitch Project - hitchens-201102 ABH http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/hitchens-201102
What I Don’t See at the Revolution - hitchens-201104 ABH http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/04/hitchens-201104
LRB · Andrew Cockburn · Worth It.htm OCF http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n14/andrew-cockburn/worth-it
Tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens LNL 20120123 OTH http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/tribute-to-the-late-christopher-hitchens/3782906
Atheist Found Dead in Fox Hole - Hitchens vs. Higher Power » CP Norman Finklestein OTH www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/22/hitchens-passing/
Hitchens and Booze » Counterpunch OTH Hitchens and Booze » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
Hitchens Backs Down » Counterpunch OTH Hitchens Backs Down » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
Hitchens: Bomb Iran Now » Counterpunch OTH Hitchens: Bomb Iran Now » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
HitchensSmears Edward Said » CP: by CLARE BRANDABUR 19 Sep 2003 OTH www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/19/hitchens-smears-edward-said/
I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you - Salon.com.htm SATIRE OTH http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/i_knew_christopher_hitchens_better_than_you/singleton/
counterpunch.org/2012/05/04/liebermans-ploy-and-horowitzs-distortions HNF http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/04/liebermans-ploy-and-horowitzs-distortions/
David Horowitz debunks David Horowitz a Media Matters analysis of The …a Matters for America.htm HNF http://mediamatters.org/research/200604180011
LRB · Jeremy Harding · Diary.htm HNF http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/jeremy-harding/diary
Oliver Kamm Chomsky, The
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Dylan :
16 Oct 2012 9:12:15pm
Was wondering when the other past Hitchens interviews would be uploaded to the 20 years website? Phillip mentioned it in the interview.
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ABC (Moderator):
17 Oct 2012 11:42:51am
Yes, we are doing this today!
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Jim Duffield :
29 Dec 2012 8:58:18am
Link please...
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Stephen Coates :
17 Oct 2012 12:29:43pm
As I'm currently reading "Arguably" by Christopher and very much enjoying this collection of his essays, Christopher remains very much alive for me and it was enjoyable to listen to Carol's reminiscing. I recently read his autobiography, “Hitch-22” and previously read “God is not Great” and "Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography" and enjoyed them both. Reading these, I’m regularly struck by his depth of literary and political knowledge and insight, his sense of humour and his skill writing clever turns of phrase. I’ll make a point of listening to Phillip’s interviews with him whether I had heard them the first time or not.
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A Stereotheist :
19 Oct 2012 5:26:41am
She reminds me of Yoko Ono
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Sophia :
23 Oct 2012 8:49:45am
The interview could of gone pear shaped when Carol Blue was asked how she met Hitch, of course, the romantic love at first sight script was told, it turns out that Hitch had a pregnant wife back at home and left her for Carol Blue.
Hitch was a contrarian, I enjoyed his work, however, he was sexist and saw women as playmates and handmaidens, his comments on women comediennes and interview on Tuesday book club are just some examples.
We need a female 'Hitch' any suggestions? And no , Germaine Greer is not in the running.
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