Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is an English-American author and journalist. His books, essays, and journalistic career have spanned more than four decades, making him a public intellectual, and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets.

As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical with an astute historical knowledge, Hitchens rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications of both his native United Kingdom and United States. Hitchens's departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." Hitchens's adoption of interventionist foreign policy, employment of the term "Islamofascist" and his notable support for the Iraq War have caused his critics to label him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refuses to embrace this designation, insisting himself to be not "any kind of conservative".

Hitchens is an atheist and has been identified as being an exponent of the "new atheism" movement. He and fellow high profile contemporary atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have often been referred to as "The Four Horsemen" and, excluding Dennett, the "Unholy Trinity". Hitchens is a secular humanist and anti-theist, and describes himself as a believer in the philosophical values of the Age of Enlightenment. His main argument is that the concept of God or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion, which inhibits it, as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. Hitchens wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in the 2007 book God Is Not Great.

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