In 1991 Christopher Hitchens, then a self-described radical journalist, went on CNN to debate the Gulf War. In the YouTube era, Hitchens fans would coin the term “hitchslap” to describe Hitchens’s most ferocious moments in debate. Hitchens wrote about the bad behaviour of Clinton and other powerful individuals without neglecting poverty and other impersonal sources of misery — hence his support for single payer. The arrival of Burgis’s book suggests that Hitchens has stood the test of time as a radical contrarian rather than as a war pamphleteer. In light of the later Hitchens’s missteps, it’s easy to forget what the left can still learn from his younger incarnation.

Source: thestar April 11, 2022 03:00 UTC