NO
HITCHENS WAS BAD
Like I sort of inferred, the moment he stepped out of his own wheelhouse of religious critique, most of his contributions, especially about Middle-Eastern foreign policy, were pretty much half-cocked garbage IMO. Frankly though, that seems to be a running theme with the 00's atheist intellectuals of Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins. Come for the Spaghetti Monster and amputees, but make sure to leave before they start talking about how Israel has the moral clearance to retaliate bomb those radicalized hodjis - and their children if necessary - to whatever capacity they see fit.
Hitchens was good. It's easy to just remember him for wanting to assassinate Saddam Hussein and forget he had 30 years of writing and public appearances before that.
No, Nola, religious critique was not his "wheelhouse". He had always written about foreign policy and domestic policy. The fact that you lumped him in with people who justify Iraeli occupation of Palestine shows you don't actually know what he believed which makes me think you haven't read much of what he wrote. I could point to a C-SPAN interview in 1983 where he said Israel had a right to exist but didn't have a right to militarily occupy and colonize its neighbors. Or, from 2008:
Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do.
These aren't the words of someone who sits around opining "outside of his wheelhouse".
You could bring up Iraq, but he was always consistent with his moral principles, honest with reality, and intellectually deliberate. The man
waterboarded himself and decided that "if this isn't torture, nothing is." He visited Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to see the conditions for himself and talk to the people who live there. I put him in the same group I put John Kerry and Tony Blair: people who wanted action in Iraq for good reasons and were sad with the way it turned out.
This will come off as mawkish but Christopher Hitchens is an inspiration to me and I would be honored to be even a tenth the man he was. In my opinion his most important contributions weren't even his vigorous atheism. Christopher Hitchens was a relentless advocate for the truth. He possessed both moral and philosophical acuity, revealing fraudsters, hypocrites, and liars, like Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa, and Ronald Reagan. He never let him anyone tell him what to think, which is an underappreciated quality.
He also despised lazy thinking. I remember watching an interview with him where he mentioned how people love to write cliches they don't understand, like the phrase "generate more heat than light", which to him was stupid because infrared radiation is light. I bring this up because I also just watched a Thomas Friedman talk to refresh myself on that book on Accelerationism you mentioned and while relating his writing method he stated that you have to choose between whether you're "producing heat" or "producing light".
My point here is that this is a world filled with jackasses and mechanical turks who can barely string together coherent ideas let alone an original thesis, so when you watch or read or listen to someone with so much clarity of thought as Hitchens, you should take that person seriously despite your personal feelings about their ideas.
Even outside of politics, he wrote wonderful small histories. He was so well read that it's really worth your time to read any Hitchens article in e.g. Vanity Fair. His favorite subject was actually P.G. Wodehouse!
I basically hold Christopher Hitchens almost - but not quite - on the same level George Orwell. Laugh at that if you want, but it's really how I feel and I hope I could convince you to at least give him a fair shot.
