Christopher Hitchens on Alternative Media (1998)

June 12, 1998 http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... More Hitchens: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/search/label/Christopher%20Hitchens

After immigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, writing ten columns a year. He left The Nation in 2002, after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, but others — including Hitchens — believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he has two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens has continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. He has visited all three countries in the so-called "Axis of Evil": Iraq, Iran and North Korea. His work has taken him to over 60 countries.

In 1989 he met Carol Blue, a Californian writer, whom he later married, and with whom he had a daughter, Antonia. In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Prior to Hitchens's political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir." In 2010 Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco," calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Also, on the back of his book Hitch-22, among the praise from notable writers and figures, a Vidal quote endorsing Hitchens as his successor is crossed out with a red 'X' and a message saying "NO C.H."

His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005, he was named one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.

In 2007, Hitchens's work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary." He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate, but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.

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[Marz1220]

Christopher's views have changed very little. Even during the first Iraq War, he plainly stated in interviews and debates that he was against it because he bet the Saddam regime would not be ousted and thus civilian Iragis and Kurds will be the ones who suffer most afterwards....

He was exactly right.

[lesnem]

@J4YM5 Actually not really.  Watch his stuff on the middle east in 1998 and you'll see he had already made up his mind about Iraq, and his stuff on bosnia outlines his break with the anti-war left. Also watch his 1989 interview about Salman Rushdie and you'll see he had the same opinions about Islam.

[hedonism13]

RIP

[4ridersify]

Great bit of archive

[username200203]

@Marz1220 He was not right then, and he said it. But your right, his views didn't change very much. He just didn't know enough then. The resistance to Saddam was in favor of the Iraq war, even after weeks of bombardment, they still said its worth it. Bush Senior betrayed them, by stopping the attack. The secular forces were rising, the US Government asured them, that they would help, and they turned their backs on to them. They missed the one great chance, a terrible defeat for the resistance.

[george120050]

around 18:05, that's not a bad description of predictive text. :(

[xomiakas]

My Hero.

[RaminHAL9001]

"The national consensus is now is that what two people do in the privacy of their own Oval Office is none of the public business. Think about that. That's where we're at; that's what we've come to! That really is a very de-politicized society that believes that, and a society that is this de-politicized society must have been very badly served by it's journalistic profession, it seems to me."

-- Christopher Hitchens.

[SethHesio]

Thank you so much for uploading this. Fantastic to see Hitchens in his prime. I sincerely hope he beats his illness. Doesn't look likely though. Awesome clip this is.

[CalvinHume]

58:00 hilarious

[iamthe3rd]

@Marz1220 yes. yes. yes. 

[BubbaGump332]

@cantroos They wouldn't be "nice people" but they would have no popular support because they would have no legitimate grievances to exploit and would therefore be marginalized as a fringe movement.