{"author":"Christopher Hitchens","author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens","total_quotes":329,"quotes":[{"text":"That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["anti-war","bosnia-and-herzegovina","bosnian-war","ethnic-cleansing","genocide","humanitarian-intervention","interventionism","isolationism","leftism","neocons","neoconservatism","noninterventionism","pacifism","war"],"id":1585,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["atheism","delusions","fantasy","illusions","religion"],"id":1924,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["atheism","christianity","edward-said","humility","london","palestine","religion","rushdie"],"id":4544,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"The believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["anti-theism","atheism","christianity","faith","religion","totalitarianism"],"id":5153,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["activism","al-qaeda","antisemitism","dictatorship","freedom-flotilla-ii","gaza","gaza-war","genocide","hamas","hezbollah","human-rights","israel","israeli-palestinian-conflict","middle-east","palestine","politics","protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion","symbolism"],"id":6195,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["2004-indian-ocean-earthquake","acts-of-god","atheism","deluge-myth","god","holocaust","noah","ontology","pathetic-fallacy","problem-of-evil","religion","theodicy"],"id":8527,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["conversation","letters","writing"],"id":8828,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.).","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["cats","dogs","god"],"id":10336,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":11922,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that 'we' are all agreed on 'our' interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ('our sensibilities are enraged...') Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron 'Maulana' Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called 'US.' Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was 'Wherever US is, We are.' It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["deceit","language","politics","populism","surveillance"],"id":14054,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":329,"pages":33,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}