Today we bid farewell to The Hitch. A writer and social commentator of vast range and excellent writing. from his 1960s days as a left wing agitator and Troskyite to his metamorphoses as a defender of Bush's Wars, the iconoclastic Hitch consistently made you question your assumptions. And that's what good writers and commendatory are suppose to accomplish. Hereto are some of his writings.

Mommie Dearest

The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

By Christopher Hitchens|Posted Monday, Oct. 20, 2003, at 4:04 PM ET
Mother Teresa: No saint


I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.

It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century.

As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)

According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.


During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize *. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise "natural" family planning.(Return to corrected sentence.)

Here is a book Review of Hitchens' The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - Book Review
Author:

Norman Taylor

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, a very successful author living in Washington, has provided many fascinating revelations about the work of an Albanian nun, Agnes Bojaxhiu, who is better known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He refers to her as being on the fast track to sainthood whilst dominating a missionary multinational. He questions the fitness of a very old virgin to adjudicate on the matters of sex and reproduction, and looks with suspicion at her genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons, and convicted frauds.

His book provides an extremely interesting exposure of the Teresa cult. As the emissary of a very determined and very politicised papacy she is a very successful campaigner on behalf of her Missionary of Charity organisation with its 400 nuns and 40,000 lay workers, earning the unending gratitude and support of the Vatican.

Some people worship Mother Teresa and, most unfortunately, many will support her fanatical campaign against contraception and abortion. But nobody can ignore the facts that India's population of nearly one billion is disastrous; its unemployment is 50%, as is its illiteracy. When Mother Teresa was asked if she would agree that there are too many children in India she replied: "I do not agree because God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world he has created. And these little children are his life. There never can be enough." The author remarks, "if it were true that God always provides, then obviously there would be no need for the Missionaries of Charity in the first place". So what we see is an exercise in propaganda for the Vatican's population policy. Mother Teresa's support seems grotesque; she must know the suffering and misery caused by this papal policy.

Mother Teresa: Mother Teresa is welcomed at the White House by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, shortly after testifying on Capitol Hill to support the move to end abortion in the United States.Mother Teresa: Mother Teresa is welcomed at the White House by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, shortly after testifying on Capitol Hill to support the move to end abortion in the United States.

Mother Teresa has been favoured with huge sums of money during the past 30 years, but patients' illnesses have been wrongly diagnosed by unqualified sisters and volunteers unable to distinguish between the curable and incurable . Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning, and the very strictest economy is always enforced - much to the detriment of the patient's interests. It is interesting to note that, despite the enormous sums involved ($50 million remains in a cheque account in the Bronx), needles are used over and over again, and are rinsed under the cold water tap.

The nuns' answer to "why are you not boiling water and sterilizing your needles?" was simple: "There's no point. There's no time." Perhaps the patients take too long to die, and hastening death saves money. Cynical as that may be, Mother Teresa's global income is more than enough to equip several first class clinics like some of the finest in the West that she herself has checked into. To a person in the last agonies of cancer, and suffering unbearable pain, she said with a smile: "You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." A sign on the wall of the morgue of Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying reads "I am going to Heaven today".

Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta, was shocked by what she saw there. "It looked a bit like the photos of Belsen", she said. "All patients had shaved heads, there were old stretcher beds, no chairs, and not much medical care or painkillers". In another home, despite the existence of huge sums of money: "The sisters are rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they are trying to help. Instead they are forced to plead poverty, thus manipulating generous, credulous people into giving more goods, services and cash." So great wealth has no good effect on the lives of patients and volunteers. In a damp house heating remains off throughout winter and several sisters consequently got TB. This was stated by a woman who left the Missionaries of Charity for the same reason she joined it, "a love of her fellow humans".

Mother Teresa has a San Francisco hostel named The Gift of Love; it is for homeless men with HIV. They are not allowed to watch TV or smoke or drink or invite friends, not even when they are dying, and so, of course, they are exceptionally depressed. One man said how afraid he was of dying without morphine. It is hard to find anyone with a good word for The Gift of Love.

Rushing to Bhopal in the wake of the Union Carbide chemical spill, Mother Teresa was asked for her advice and counsel. 'Forgive', she said. "Forgive, forgive.'Rushing to Bhopal in the wake of the Union Carbide chemical spill, Mother Teresa was asked for her advice and counsel. 'Forgive', she said. "Forgive, forgive.'

Charles Keating was a notorious American swindler now serving a 10-year sentence for his part in the Savings and Loans scandal. He was generous with the money he stole from small investors. He gave Mother Teresa 1½ million dollars and the use of his private jet; in return she allowed him to make use of her prestige on several important occasions and gave him a personal crucifix. During the course of his trial she wrote to the court seeking clemency for the conservative Catholic fundamentalist and notorious thief. It was a suspiciously naive letter which did nothing to influence the judge . It prompted the Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County to write with some facts about Keating's crimes, about which Mother Teresa knew nothing.

After referring to Keating's conviction for defrauding 17 individuals of $900,000 he concluded with this statement "You urge Judge Ito to look into his heart - as he sentences Charles Keating - and do what Jesus would do. I submit the same challenge to you. Ask yourself what Jesus would do if he were given the fruits of a crime; what Jesus would do if he were in possession of money which had been stolen; what Jesus would do if he were being exploited by a thief to ease his conscience. I submit that Jesus would promptly and unhesitatingly return the stolen property to its rightful owners. You should do the same. You have been given money by Mr Keating that he has been convicted of stealing by fraud. Do not permit him the "indulgence" he desires. Do not keep the money. Return it to those who worked for it and earned it! If you contact me I will put you in direct contact with the rightful owners of the property now in your possession. Sincerely, Paul W. Turley." Three years later Turley had received no reply to his letter. Nor can anybody account for the missing money; saints, it seems, are immune to audit. This is not the only example of Mother Teresa's surreptitious attitude to money, nor of her hypocritical protestations about the beauty of poverty.



Mother Teresa with Pope John Paul II in India.Mother Teresa with Pope John Paul II in India.

This immensely well-researched book is a great credit to its author. The prospects of Mother Teresa bluffing more millions has, I hope, been sharply reduced. There are, of course, Catholics who have worked honestly and selflessly and sacrificed much without an ulterior motive, but she is not one of them. It would be reasonable to be suspicious of anyone who is popular with the like of American crook, Keating, exposed villain, Robert Maxwell, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And when the response to those responsible for an avoidable disaster is "forgive" we know that Mother Teresa remains a constant barrier to progress and justice. Without doubt she is an extremely successful and shrewd campaigner, but readers seeking for signs of compassion may find - as I did - that it is secondary to the promotion of religious dogma. If it is thought that I have revealed too much, please read the book. There is a lot more damning evidence to provide us with a reminder that "all is not gold that glitters".

THE MISSIONARY POSITION Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Published by Verso, 98pp.)
July, 1997

“Herewith, Hope It Serves. As Always, Christopher.”

Christopher Hitchens’ greatest Slate hits.

By June Thomas|Posted Friday, Dec. 16, 2011, at 12:40 AM ET
Christopher Hitchens


Photo by Christian Witkin

See Slate’s full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens. Read Slate’s complete collection of Christopher Hitchens' columns.

Editing Christopher Hitchens, who died Thursday at the age of 62, was the easiest job in journalism. He never filed late—in fact, he was usually early, even when he was clearly very sick—and he managed to make his work seem like a great lark. His weekly e-mails always read the same jaunty way: “Herewith. Hope it serves, As always, Christopher.”

The feeling that his work was anything but a grim chore was confirmed in an outtake from 60 Minutes’ profile of Hitch last spring, in which Christopher Buckley testified to watching him bash out a Slate column in 30 minutes at the end of a tiring weekend. No columnist—except perhaps Michael Kinsley—is more frequently and less successfully imitated, but the mimics can never disguise their hours of hard labor.

Hitchens’ writing style defied editorial intervention. Consequently, he reduced editors to fact-checkers. He had a prodigious memory, but his head wasn’t just stuffed with lines of poetry and tables of arcane facts: Apparently, he could also recall chunks of prose from the New York Times more or less accurately. Shortly after the news of Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest in an airport men’s room broke, Hitchens filed the piece that for me best exemplifies the breadth of his interests and the completeness of his recall—it contained quotes from an obscure academic work, recollections of hilariously profane bathroom graffiti, remembered conversations with British politicians, and lines of satirical verse published decades earlier.

Indeed, his long memory was the key to his talent. The news changes every day, but Hitchens never forgot a fact, a friend or—even more entertainingly—an enemy.

Selecting a collection of his best pieces is an impossible task, but there are certain themes that he returned to again and again:

Enemies: Henry Kissinger, Mel Gibson, Pope Benedict, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, (oh, and the Mormon Church too), Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Saddam Hussein, Michael Moore, Mother Teresa, Christmas, Hanukkah

Friends: Ahmad Chalabi, Kurdistan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

His obituaries were particularly refreshing, because he refused to moderate his opinion of the subject simply because he or she had died. See, for example, his farewells to: Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms, Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, Yasser Arafat

He also wrote beautiful, nuanced tributes to people he admired: Susan Sontag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Hunter S. Thompson

He could not bear the thought of banning words or ideas, and so he wrote powerfully in defense of the F word and N word, the free-speech rights of the Danish cartoonists, and the term Islamofascism, and against the impulse to obfuscate the horrors of the Armenian genocide.

And, of course, he dispensed advice. How else would Americans learn how to make a proper cup of tea?

Please tell us your favorite Hitchens column in the comments, below.

See Slate’s full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens. Read Slate’s complete collection of Christopher Hitchens' columns.

How Can Anyone Defend Kissinger Now?

The Nixon tapes remind us what a vile creature Henry Kissinger is.

By Christopher Hitchens|Posted Monday, Dec. 13, 2010, at 11:28 AM ET
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Click image to expand.
Henry Kissinger

Over the last few weeks, this modest little column of mine has been acquiring an almost eerie prescience and potency. I called for the death sentence on Tariq Aziz to be commuted, and it was only a matter of days before the president of Iraq announced that he would not sign Aziz's death warrant. I called for Julian Assange to turn himself in, and he appeared at a London police station within hours of my words being published. Small stuff, you say. Show us something with a bit more heft and handle to it. All right, how's this? In my column of Nov. 15, I denounced the shameful offer made by the Obama administration to the Netanyahu Cabinet in Israel and called for it to be withdrawn. And last week, in a wretched and furtive manner that befitted its original taint of bribery and corruption, withdrawn it was. How do you like that?

One of my main points in that article was the extent to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dependent on a coalition that gave important portfolios to political parties with insane ideologies. I instanced Israel Beitenu, the ultra-chauvinist group led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and the religiously orthodox Shas Party, under the spiritual leadership of deranged Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. "Fringe" though they might be, members of such groups hold key ministries, including the ones that dominate the "settlement" process. Since I last wrote about him, Rabbi Yosef has again been to the fore, blaming the calamitous forest fires in northern Israel on the failure of Jews to observe the Sabbath in the proper way. And the country's interior minister, a Shas member named Eli Yishai, has rejected offers of firefighting equipment from Christian organizations, lest they use the opportunity to seduce Jews away to the worship of the Nazarene.
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Men with this mentality were offered $3 billion worth of American aid, plus a full range of diplomatic support, in exchange for a one-month suspension of settlement-building, this nonfreeze not even to include Jerusalem! And they rejected it as not good enough. It is difficult to say which is the worse national humiliation for the United States: the degraded initial offer or its contemptuous refusal. So I was thinking of demanding that the squalid bargain not be offered again. And then I decided that this would be a waste of a wish or a duplicate of a demand. So, while I am on a roll …

Here's what should now happen, and let's see if it does. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized, and excluded. No more dinners in his honor; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last. (Click here to listen to the conversation; the offending section begins at 13:56.)

Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

(One has to love that uneasy afterthought …)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon's psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he'd be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It's hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It's actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger—normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing—going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

After I published my book calling for his indictment, many of Kissinger's apologists said that, rough though his methods might have been, they were at least directed at defeating Communism. I never quite saw how the genocide in East Timor, say, had any effect in eroding the Berlin Wall. But I also pointed out that Kissinger did many favors for the heirs of Stalin and Mao: telling President Gerald Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House, for example, and making lavish excuses for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. He is that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism. It comes from a natural hatred of the democratic process, which he has done so much to subvert and undermine at home and abroad, and an instinctive affection for totalitarians of all stripes. True, full membership in this bestiary probably necessitates that you say something at least vicariously approving about the Final Solution. What's striking about the Nixon tapes is that they show Kissinger managing this ugly feat without anyone even asking him. May my seasonal call be heeded: Let this character at last be treated like the reeking piece of ordure that he is.

Never knew that about Henry Kissinger but I always had my suspicion. Nevertheless, no surprise at all.

There are few contemporary authors whose work I would read without question.

J.P. O'Rourke and Christopher Hitchens

I purchased 10 copies of his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" to give as gifts to friends.

That is a very good book, regardless of where your beliefs may lie...and a very easy read....

If you want to sharpen the points, I would recommend \Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus'.

Hithchens was an odd man... not a notably happy man, but a definite thinker, which I enjoy listening too and reading his diatribes.

Atabey,

Thank you for starting this forum about Hitch, one of my greatest heros, up there with Richard Dawkins and the late Carl Sagan.

I was keen to read what Dawkins would have to say about his passing. Here are the last 2 paragraphs of his article in The Independent. For the whole article, go to:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/richard-dawkins-illness-made-hitchens-a-symbol-of-the-honesty-and-dignity-of-atheism-6278298.htmlhttp://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/richard-dawkins-illness-made-hitchens-a-symbol-of-the-honesty-and-dignity-of-atheism-6278298.html

"Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

Farewell, great voice. Great voice of reason, of humanity, of humour. Great voice against cant, against hypocrisy, against obscurantism and pretension, against all tyrants including God."

I first learned of his death by a message from a Xtian friend of mine as follows:

> Did you know that your Athiest friend, Christopher Hitchens died tonight from cancer.
> If he retained his Christianity then he could have been cured.
> Cheers & may God bless all his believers

To which I immediately and angrily responded:

I have decided to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that your statement "If he retained his Christianity then he could have been cured" was a feeble attempt at bad-taste humor, rather than evidence of spectacular ignorance and stupidity.

I am not a "believer" of Christopher Hitchens, never have been, and don't know of anyone who is or was. I am very saddened by his early death, although he and I were aware of its inevitability, given he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a long time ago. This was no surprise since he was a heavy smoker and drinker.

Given your aversion to reality, I would not expect you to appreciate this man was a genius, a workaholic and a humanitarian, a fact acknowledged even by some of his greatest opponents. He has my utter respect, admiration and gratitude. Where you not so determined to remain an ignoramus, I would recommend you read some of his works.

He will not be going to heaven or hell, as he and I (and not you) understand that neither exist. However he will live on in the hearts and minds of millions, long after you and I are dead and forgotten.