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Christopher Hitchens Dies At 62
An anonymous reader sends this quote from the NY Times:
"Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62. He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion. Mr. Hitchens's latest collection of writings, Arguably: Essays, published this year, has been a best-seller and ranked among the top 10 books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review."
Sure. We could talk about his shameless shilling for the Iraq war. Hitchens can rot in hell for that as far as I'm concerned.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ironic that a person so opposed to religion would support a war against a secular government which has ended up in a blossoming of religious extremism and the resurrection of the old Shiite vs Sunni conflict. Being against totalitarianism is admirable but chaos and clan based rule is a form of totalitarianism too. If you are afraid to go out of your home at night because someone with a grudge against you is out there in a militia then how is that better than worrying about the secret police of the dictator?
Iraq has been left a corpse strewn mess full of people wracked with PTSD worse than any US vet could imagine. At least the US soldiers go back to their comfortable homes and their long list of benefits. The people left behind have to live in it for the rest of their, possibly, short lives.