Glória in excélsis Deo.

The life-long, unrepentant Trotskyist polemicist and warmongering atheist known as Christopher Hitchens has died of esophageal cancer.

Hitchens was a man of his time, an insignificant son of a World War Two British war criminal, who was catapulted to fame through his absolute hatred and intolerance of all things religious, while his younger and more conservative brother faded into obscurity.  He blasphemed against God, castigated the Pope, and openly brandished hate against the Catholic Faith (and to a lesser degree Islam), but was a fanatical and follower of modernism down to its last detail, and tolerated no dissent from its orthodoxies and doctrines.  In short, whilst those around him praised him as an unconventional and brave man who “dared to speak out,” nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite his associations with the New Left, his bile-filled invective against everything traditional, against culture, religion and identity, Hitchens found a home among the neoconservative clique of American politics.  FrontPageMag, the online magazine run by his fellow ex-communist, David Horowitz, has praised Hitchens as a defender of Western civilization.  In turn, Hitchens had reciprocated his admiration of neoconservatives.  He admired Paul Wolfowitz, and minced no words about his glowing veneration of the neoconservative movement, saying that ”it [could] turn US power into a revolutionary force”.  Like many neoconservatives (although he himself never used the label), would continue to promote wasteful, internationalist, and globalist wars in the name of “democracy,” but not necessarily because he actually supported the United States or its people, but because as Piatak says, “his entire politics is motivated by his hatred of religion and tradition; he’d be just as happy bombing St. Peter’s as the Taliban”.

To his credit, such an analysis of neoconservatism was an accurate, candid and frank one, even if he did not intend for it to be so.  Moreover, he did not make an effort to hide the reasons for his undying admiration of the neoconservatives, even if he refused to be associated with them in name; at least in this aspect of his life he had been honest and consistent.  Of course, it needs no explanation that the origins of the neoconservative movement, and its outgrowth from the New Left are not in dispute by any objective scholar, and this may have been its appeal to Hitchens.

If anything, in Hitchens and his work is a snapshot of the world we live in.  While Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, and Eric Margolis are derided as “unpatriotic conservatives,” the Catholic-hating, leftist Hitchens found himself in good company among his neoconservative friends.  Moreover, whilst being praised as “defender of Western civilization,” he clearly must have known and understood that his writing, speeches, and his attack towards Christianity (the very foundation of Western civilization), were the catalyst for the destruction of the Western world itself.  Perhaps it is because he told people what they wanted to hear.  After all, we can hardly imagine a critic of the Talmud, gaining the same amount of fame – much less being showered with praise.  Even Republicans who dare to step outside the invisible bounds are castigated and shunned, but no matter what ridiculous rhetoric Hitchens comes up with, he remained a poster-boy of both the neoconservatives and the militant, atheistic left.  Indeed, shortly after Hitchens’ passing, the faux-conservative David Frum rushed to write a bleeding-heart eulogy for the late Hitchens.

The views that Hitchens held were undoubtedly repulsive on so many levels, representing everything wrong with not only Britain today, but the modern democratic-liberal system.  But it is no surprise that the world will perhaps remember him as a great man, just as they remember that most prominent of all heretics, Martin Luther.  As Saint Paul once said, “The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight” (1 Corinthians 3:19).  But even as the world moves ever closer to his twisted and perverted vision, his pyrrhic victory remains one of this world: Sic transit gloria mundi.