Richard Seymour’s demolition of Christopher Hitchens

When my brother was at secondary school doing his A levels, he was given such stinking references by his teachers that one university interviewed him because they had to see this lad for themselves. I have rarely seen a book so roundly pilloried by reviewers as Richard Seymour’s Unhitched, the Trial of Christopher Hitchens, and so curiosity forced me to read it.

I can see why it got bad reviews. It is impudent to trash the reputation of a well loved journalist while he is still warm in his coffin. And Richard’s style is not everyone’s cup of lapsang souchong. Continue reading

Book review: ‘Unhitched: the Trial of Christopher Hitchens’ by Richard Seymour

The target is a famous journalist who ranked among the foremost English language polemicists of his era; the assailant is something of a lesser luminary, sadly afflicted with a prose style that comes across like a deliberate parody of an obscure 1970s French structural-functionalist political sociology text.

On the literary level, I guess, Richard Seymour’s Trial of Christopher Hitchens was never going to persuade a jury. But the political underpinnings of the charge sheet deserve fairer consideration than they have had in any of the reviews of this book I have read so far, mostly penned by people who obviously haven’t bothered to read the volume they so readily dismiss. I am going to be as charitable as I can. Continue reading

Hitchens, the “kitsch-left”, and the cult of the individual

I was somewhat taken aback when I saw that James Bloodworth had joined the brigades calling for a ‘statue’ to the late journalist Christopher Hitchens to be erected in London’s Red Lion Square.

Taking to the pages of the Independent, he proclaimed: “Hitchens represents a break only with those parts of the left that after 9/11 didn’t feel in any sense obliged to take responsibility or make any difficult decisions, mainly because they’d given up on ever attaining power and therefore thinking about how power might be used as a force for good in the world.”

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Alexander Cockburn: the Christopher Hitchens who the left could love until the end

Journalists are ten a penny today. Every other person you meet is one, in one sense or another. And that’s not because we all hang out in particularly meretricious settings with the haves (not the have-nots), but because we’re all writing, all giving our opinion, all setting the tone among our friends and beyond.

That’s apparently good. Fine. But if this is what we’re all going to be doing now, we need to keep things interesting. What is not interesting today among young journalists is that they need to play safe. They need to play to their gallery because they still probably want to become politicians.

This is what is killing journalism. Not that we’re all doing it, but because our options still have to be open when we are doing it. It’s the equivalent of our front page Facebook pictures. The interesting ones are where we’ve decided to stick two fingers up; sure, this may damage my job prospects, but I’ve made my choice, and that choice is fuck you. Continue reading

Christopher Hitchens and his critics

Obituaries that openly exult in the death of their subject remain something of a rarity. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all that.

That hasn’t stopped all the wrong guys from cheering the passing of Christopher Hitchens. The Hitch was, according to a prominent contributor to Britain’s widely-read socialist blog, a ‘grubby apologist for empire’ who exemplified the ‘moral depravity’ of liberalism.

Elsewhere, a former backbench MP who knows a thing or two about moral depravity himself blasted the late essayist as a slug, a toff and an apostate in the service of the devils. Perhaps George Galloway can spell out what he regards as the proper penalty for apostasy? Continue reading