Hitch 22 promotional from publisher, Twelve Books:
The Olympian Christopher Hitchens is not a charming god. Often in debates, where magnanimous and graceful temperaments are required, Hitchens comes across less as an insightful and gracious Jove and more as a sneeringly condescending, irascible, contemptuous, and bored, if not entirely disinterested, Hera. But oftentimes, this perception is dependent upon whether you agree or disagree with his argument. While this aspect of his personality may be grating for some, in my opinion these bourgeois manners are inconsequential as I’m often accused of exhibiting the same defects. Rather for me, what equates to psychological waterboarding is Hitchens’ Trotskyism…or what’s left of it. No other man in the communist pantheon was more barbaric or more of an ideologue than Lev Trotsky (even Stalin tacitly accepted Lenin’s NEP – his rudimentary form of capitalism). And it’s precisely because of Trotsky’s sanguinary dogmatism that I find it so ironic that Hitchens, who considers the “violence and superstition” of religion intellectually and morally repulsive, would nonetheless find Trotsky to be a chap worth admiring. If we acquiesce to Hitchens’ demand to make reason and critical thinking our only benchmarks for life, then what sounds more logical: the Biblical account of man’s creation:
Genesis 1:26-28
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that moves on the earth.” So God made man; in the image of God He made them. Then God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds in heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
or Trotsky’s “new man” as created by Communism?
Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest…He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of blood, digestion, reproduction, and within the necessary limits, subordinate them to the control of reason and will…The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and become in his own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychological training…Man will make it his goal…to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will…Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious…The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.
To further emphasize this dichotomy, Christ taught forgiveness and mercy while Hitchens’ beloved Trotsky was merciless in his desire to destroy the “class enemy” and reveled in “revolutionary violence” for its socially transformative qualities.
In less than a month, this terror is going to take extremely violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution. Not only prison awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter.
In several previous posts (The Libertine, Part 1,The Libertine, Part 2), I’ve eviscerated Hitchens for his virulent anti-theism and his irreconcilable contradictions: one moment he’s Man’s Prometheus, freeing us from fear and ignorance by proclaiming that not only is God dead, but that He never existed to begin with; while in the next moment he’s God’s most ardent defender as he defends Malaysia’s Christians from the Muslims. Obviously he has a penchant for wanting it both ways and apparently found it with his “scandalous” tryst with two male classmates at Oxford, the “mildly enjoyable relapse” he wrote about in his book, Hitch 22. Because of Hitchens’ success in making anti-theism fashionable among the dilettantes and intellectual solons of Western society, it’s now become axiomatic for leftists to proudly proclaim their atheism as a distinction that merits our adulation and a testament to their transcendent powers of reason, much like Australia’s new Labour Prime Minister has done. Yet their shibboleth of science is also inadequate as it fails to provide either a moral code for life, a reason for altruism, or to answer many of our most profound existential questions. In fact, science still has never been able to advance Darwinism beyond theory and yet leftists ironically present it as a complete, dare I say it, religion.
While I haven’t come to praise Christopher Hitchens, I certainly haven’t come to bury him either. Even though Hitchens insists that God is a crutch people invent in order to feel a love they are undeserving of, the dialectical playa has nothing but love for Mr. Hitchens and he is in my prayers as he undergoes chemotherapy for esophageal cancer. Since I know Mr. Hitchens wouldn’t approve of my requests for divine intervention, I’ll also sip on a tumbler of Balvenie 12 and – in honor of Hitchens – I’ll drink it neat. Here’s to you, Ole Boy.
The God Debate – Rabbi David Wolpe vs Christopher Hitchens (Parts 1-9):
Note: Use your “up” and “down” arrows to adjust the volume and your “left” and “right” arrows to cycle through the playlist.
