person:christopher hitchens

Le champ intellectuel français aujourd’hui | Revue du Mauss permanente
http://www.journaldumauss.net/spip.php?article976

Vers la fin du XXe siècle, dix ans après la fin de la Guerre froide et la victoire planétaire du libéralisme économique, l’intellectuel – qui s’était dédié à la critique savante du scientisme comme cause d’une dérive dangereuse – est lui-même critiqué comme ennemi du progrès. Le règne de l’expert spécialisé s’impose. Cependant, depuis les années 2000 et sa série de crises mondiales aggravées par la puissance technique – et non prévues par les experts –, l’intellectuel est de nouveau sollicité pour « comprendre » et « proposer »

#intellettuale #francia

Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-etiquette

The dictate that one ’not speak ill of the dead’ is (at best) appropriate for private individuals, not influential public figures

Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/dawkins_harris_hitchens_new_atheists_flirt_with_islamophobia

That’s opportunism. If atheism writ large was a tough sell to skeptics, the “New Atheism,” Muslim-bashing atheism, must be like selling Bibles to believers. After all, those who are convinced that God exists, and would otherwise dismiss the Dawkins’ and Harris’s of the world as hell-bound kooks, are often some of the biggest Islamophobes. It’s symbiosis — and as a biologist, Dawkins should know a thing or two about that. Proving that a religion — any religion — is evil, though, is just as pointless and impossible an endeavor as trying to prove that God does or doesn’t exist. Neither has been accomplished yet. And neither will.

Les voies du Seigneur sont impénétrables ...

Mère Teresa, tout sauf une sainte
http://charlatans.info/news/Mere-Teresa-tout-sauf-une-sainte

Le mythe d’altruisme et de générosité entourant la figure de Mère Teresa est remis en question par un article de chercheurs des Universités de Montréal et d’Ottawa, publié dans Studies in Religion/Science [1], qui est une analyse des écrits publiés sur Mère Teresa.

La figure charismatique de la religieuse Mère Teresa mise à mal par une mise en lumière de quelque 287 documents. Malgré tout, sa médiatique dévotion à la cause des pauvres en Inde aurait eu l’avantage de susciter des vocations.
#religion

Rachel Corrie’s parents accept LennonOno peace grant from Yoko Ono on behalf of their daughter | The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/rachel-corries-parents-accept-lennonono-peace-grant-yoko-ono-beh

http://electronicintifada.net/sites/electronicintifada.net/files/styles/large/public/lennon-ono-rachel-corrie.jpg

Carol Blue Hitchens, US author John Perkins, Yoko Ono, US singer Lady Gaga, Craig and Cindy Corrie, parents of peace activist Rachel Corrie pose during the Lennon Ono Grant For Peace awards ceremony in Reykjavik, Iceland on October 9, 2012.
(Thorvaldur Orn Kristmundsson / AFP/GettyImages)

Alexander Cockburn, un homme de caractère | Serge Halimi (Le Monde diplomatique)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2012/08/HALIMI/48024

Alexander Cockburn, un homme de caractère | Serge Halimi (Le Monde diplomatique)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2012/08/HALIMI/48024

Alexander Cockburn, un homme de caractère | Serge Halimi
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2012/08/HALIMI/48024

Au moment où la chape de plomb reaganienne s’abattait sur les Etats-Unis, trois plumes radicales et talentueuses ferraillaient presque chaque semaine, dans l’hebdomadaire The Nation, contre la droite libérale et ses politiques impériales : Andrew Kopkind, Christopher Hitchens et Alexander Cockburn. (...) / États-Unis, #Idées, #Intellectuels, #Médias, #Personnalités, #Politique, #Presse - 2012/08

#États-Unis #2012/08

Farewell, Alex, My Friend | Jeffrey St Clair (CounterPunch)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/21/farewell-alex-my-friend

Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside. Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever. (...) Source: CounterPunch

À lire absolument: Imperialism, despotism, and democracy in Syria -
Joseph Massad
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012269456491274.html

It was in this context that the Iraqi exile opposition in London and Washington, especially the irrepressible Kanan Makiya, who were calling for a US ground invasion and for more bombings of Baghdad by US forces, began to attack all those who oppose the US invasion, including the late Edward Said, as apologists for Saddam. […]

The Iraqi exile opposition insisted along with its US imperial sponsors and the chorus of pro-war American intellectuals that people should make one of two choices: for or against Saddam. While the US and its Iraqi partners had their way, the subsequent destruction of Iraq, the dismantling of its state structures, and the destruction of its societal cohesion is the clearest illustration of what such a choice entailed for the Iraqi people and their country.

In 2011, we were treated to a repeat performance of the very same scenario. The Libyan exile opposition and those inside the liberated parts of the country, consisting mostly of erstwhile servants of the Qaddafi regime, began to call for a NATO invasion of Libya to help the Libyan people in their uprising against Qaddafi. […]

It would seem then, as Marx put it, that history repeats itself twice - the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But does it repeat itself a third time?

On Christopher Hitchens (Norman Finkelstein)
►http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/on-christopher-hitchens

A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky. It’s the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has “grown up” – i.e., grown out of one’s “childish” past. It’s hard to pick up an article or book by ex-radicals – Gitlin’s Letters to a Young Activist, Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism… – that doesn’t include a hysterical attack on him. Behind this venom there’s also a transparent psychological factor at play. Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out but he didn’t. (...) Source: Norman Finkelstein

RIP Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

“I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me,” wrote Christoper Hitchens in his most recent essay. But today, after 18 months, his duel with cancer ended. He was 62 years old. The world has lost one of its most outstanding and prolific journalists and a wonderful polemicist, orator and bon vivant. Hitchens could write brilliantly about an extraordinarily wide range of subjects and people: the death penalty, religion, Leon Trotsky, Evelyn Waugh, the British monarchy, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, George Orwell, Saul Bellow, the Elgin Marbles, North Korea, the Balkans, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Paine and Philip Larkin.

In recent months, we had sad cause to add cancer to that list. The series of essays Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair about his illness stands as the finest writing on the subject since John Diamond’s C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too. Without a hint of self-pity or sentimentality, Hitchens confronted his fate with pure reason and logic. “To the dumb question, ’Why me?’” he wrote, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ’Why not?’” Nor did his humour desert him. To a Christian who insisted that God had given him “throat” cancer in order to punish the “one part of his body he used for blasphemy”, he replied: “My so-far uncancerous throat . . . is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed.” And to those who insultingly suggested that he should embrace religion, Hitchens’s flawless riposte: “Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: ’Don’t be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones.’ People might suppose this was in poor taste.”

Christopher Hitchens: Arrest The Pope!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBody5RPo2o

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/hitchens-cancer-war-religion

Finky (non, pas Alain ; l’autre Finky, Norman) évoque ces anciens gauchistes qui retournent leur veste. Très pertinent, et carrément marrant.
►http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/on-christopher-hitchens

A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky. It’s the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has “grown up” – i.e., grown out of one’s “childish” past. It’s hard to pick up an article or book by ex-radicals – Gitlin’s Letters to a Young Activist, Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism… – that doesn’t include a hysterical attack on him. Behind this venom there’s also a transparent psychological factor at play. Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out but he didn’t. Hating to be reminded, they keep trying to shatter the glass. He’s the demon from the past that, after recantation, no amount of incantation can exorcise.

Two altogether opposed political stances can each draw an audience’s attention. One is to be politically consistent, but nonetheless original in one’s insights; the other, an inchoate form of apostasy, is to bank on the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst. The former approach, which Chomsky exemplifies, requires hard work, whereas the latter is a lazy substitute for it. Thus Nat Hentoff, the hip (he loves jazz) left-liberal writer, would jazz up his interminably dull Village Voice columns by suddenly coming out against abortion or endorsing Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination. The master at this pose of maverick unpredictability used to be Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths - Salon.com
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/singleton

There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud. But what these paeans to Hitchens reflect even more so is the warped values of our political and media culture: once someone is sufficiently embedded within that circle, they are intrinsically worthy of admiration and respect, no matter what it is that they actually do.

Très intéressant.

Là, un criminel contre l’Humanité explique que Christopher Hitchens était un formidable intellectuel :
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-17/hitchens-remembered-as-formidable-intellectual/3736288

Farewell to C.H. | Alexander Cockburn (CounterPunch)
►http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h

I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed. (...) Source: CounterPunch

Alexander Cockburn enterre Christopher Hitchens: Farewell to C.H.
►http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h

Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away  about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient  Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’  books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?

Ramparts: Those Were the Days…
http://www.atissuejournal.com/2009/12/29/ramparts-those-were-the-days…/

Founded in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts soon became the muckraking voice of the New Left when Warren Hinckle took over as executive editor and Robert Scheer joined as managing editor. Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Hunter Thompson, Eldridge Cleaver, Christopher Hitchens, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Erica Jong, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jann Wenner, and Adam Hochschild were just a few of the noteworthy writers who contributed to the editorial content.

http://www.atissuejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Rampart_mags3.jpg

The credentials on the design side were just as impressive, largely due to a young art director named #Dugald_Stermer. A Los Angeles-born beach boy, Stermer studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining a design firm in Houston, Texas. Even though Stermer learned during the job interview with Ramparts that the magazine only had enough funding for two more issues, he took the job and headed back to California.

Les Britanniques méprisent-ils les intellectuels ?
http://www.nonfiction.fr/article-4628-les_britanniques_meprisent_ils_les_intellectuels_.htm

#via_google_reader

Paul Pardi: What’s So New About the New #Atheism?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-pardi/whats-so-new-about-the-ne_b_824918.html

The editors of Wired magazine in 2006 used the term “new” to describe the atheistic movement initiated by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. I think they were right. In a recent article for The Huffington Post, I made the claim that religious belief in the United States is at the edge of a significant evolutionary change. One reason I cited for this change is the pressure coming from “The New Atheism.” One reader commented that there really is no “new” atheism. The contemporary atheism is the same old thing in modern packaging. I don’t think it is.

#religion