Taki Runs My Hitchens Articles
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by Richard Poe Tuesday, October 23, 2007 10:47 pm Eastern Time |
Archives 13 Comments |
Taki |
Many thanks to Taki Theodoracopoulos and to all the good folks at Taki’s Top Drawer for reprinting my trio of essays on the Christopher Hitchens question. Given the privileged status Mr. Hitchens currently enjoys in elite circles both Republican and Democrat, I daresay these stories would have found a cold reception in almost any venue of respectable punditry other than Taki’s.
To speak and be heard is a treasure beyond price. For this gift, I extend to Mr. Theodoracopoulos and to his stalwart crew my heartfelt gratitude.
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Part I
October 9, 2007
Writer Christopher Hitchens has hit the jackpot. His new book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, has proved a runaway bestseller. Why, then, is Mr. Hitchens so angry? Eyewitnesses report that Hitchens erupted into a drunken rage at a recent promotional event for his book. After denouncing circumcision as a “filthy Jewish practice,” Hitchens reportedly descended from the stage, visibly inebriated, approached a Roman Catholic priest in the audience, and began shouting at him, only inches from his face. Hitchens called the priest (a hero of Sept. 11) a “child molester”. Read more…»
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Part II
October 15, 2007
Hitchens rejects the Soviet or “Stalinist” model (as do virtually all leftists today), and proposes instead that we fashion our enlightened “secular” state after the example of… Moorish Spain. Hitchens praises the Muslim warlords who conquered Spain in AD 711 and ruled it for centuries. Hitchens suggests that life under the firm yet benevolent rule of enlightened Muslim emirs may be the closest thing to a perfect society that we benighted humans can expect to achieve. Read more…»
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Part III
Hitchens: Enemy of my Enemies?
October 22, 2007
The now-infamous confrontation between Hitchens and Father Rutler at Manhattan’s Union League Club on May 1 reveals a deadly weakness in the conservative movement. It shows how carelessly and reflexively we have fallen into the habit of treating our enemies as friends, and our friends as enemies. Many of us, it appears, have lost the ability to tell the difference. This is no trivial flaw. Unless corrected, it spells doom for our movement, and perhaps for our Republic. Read more…»
How ironic that, in recent times, not only Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but also Christopher Hitchens complains of rude treatment from a host at a New York City public speaking event. In that context, what a strange and interesting bedfellow Hitchens has found for himself!
Fr. Rutler was correct: Hitchens was vulgar — the transcript certainly bears that out. In better times, Hitchens’ discourse would have earned him a slap in the mouth. Rutler gave Hitchens what comes closest to a figurative slap in this era of verboten corporal punishment and all the fallout therefrom. How did Hitchens react? Did he put forth an eloquent defense of his vulgarity, reasoning that emphasis greater on the penis and lesser on the soul was proportionate in the absence of a Great God? Not in the least: He whines (albeit quick-wittedly and eloquently) that it was Fr. Rutler’s brief commentary that sank the event to the depths of the vulgar; he accuses Fr. Rutler of the cardinal sin of the modern age. That Ahmadinejad would congruently accuse Lee Bollinger of same sin is irony most arch.
I’ve been reading your comments over there, and it’s nice to see you engaging intelligent people in debate again. It’s certainly a breath of fresh air after your attempt at engaging those people at CIM.
Mr. Hitchens is typical of atheists from Voltaire to Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. They are very quick to blame the ills of the world on a God that they deny exists while refusing to face the fact that the most egregious perpetrators of evil are those atheists like themselves who do exist and who act out of their own personal sense of “rationality”. When you call them on it, their excuse is that those evil guys were not “real atheists”.
Mr. Hitchens disgraced himself at the funeral of Mother Teresa by mouthing unsubstantiated slurs against the Catholic nun while Hindu Indians honored her in the same manner as they had their own modern saintly hero Mohandas Gandhi. The Mother and the Mahatma had both championed the poorest of the poor and dedicated their lives to bringing some dignity to the oppressed in a non-violent fashion. I dare say that it is no accident that there are no atheists who have distinguished themselves in such work and that no atheist will ever be honored as these two religious heroes were.
Mr. Hitchens is a drunken slob lacking in both brains and manners. He is the quintessential “stupid atheist” who fails to see that the only person whose behavior he needs to criticize is his own. We have seen his like come and go before but only as the death tolls mounted. A minimum of 100 million people were eliminated in the name of the Communist World Revolution making the 37 million killed by the Nazis pall by comparison.
What the execrable Mr. Hitchens was doing in the Union Club was much more like a Beer House Putsch by Herr Hitler than a reasoned discourse on the dangers of religion. All monsters start as embryos and end in catastrophe. However, Mr. Hitchens will likely drink himself to death before he can do much harm and his epitaph will be a cautionary tale about alcoholic excess and the psychoses it engenders. And when he lies sputtering and dying in his impotent inebriate rage, it is likely that the only ones who will deign to care for him will be Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity who have been taught to turn the other cheek.
Art Sippo MD
You guys took him and we don’t want him back. He’s your problem now.
Sincerely,
The Left