The Cancer at the Heart of the Propaganda Machine: At a Time When a War on Iran Seems Imminent is the Incapacitation of Christopher Hitchens to Be Celebrated?
By Joshua Blakeney
Media Coordinator of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge
July 31, 2010
On June 30, 2010, Vanity Fair journalist Christopher Hitchens confirmed that he has cancer of the esophagus. He posted this note on the Vanity Fair website: “I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.”i Contemplating this revelation I couldn’t help feeling that the neoconservative armchair warrior was getting his just deserts. Hitchens has in recent years been an ignominious cheerleader for wars of aggression which have led to the wide dissemination of depleted uranium weapons. Such weapons have ballooned cancer-rates among the populations of Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza. A recent epidemiological study in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health showed that the Iraqi city of Fallujah is experiencing higher rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukemia than was observed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear attacks of 1945.ii In this article I hope to convince the reader that the prospect of Christopher Hitchens having to cancel engagements - at a time when an Israeli-American assault on Iran seems imminent - is a positive one for humanity as it stands to emascultate the propaganda machine of one of its most erudite apologists for aggressive warfare.
Celebrating and exploiting somebody’s sickness, weakness or even death is something Hitchens often does himself. This gives me license defend my thesis – using his own standards – that the incapacitation of Christopher Hitchens is a boon for humanity. I am not per se against celebrating the misfortune of those who contribute to mass misery and pain. Who doesn’t think we’re better off without Andrew Jackson, Augusto Pinochet, and Ronald Reagan among others? But Gore Vidal? Mother Teresa? Edward Said? Even Cindy Sheehan? Hitchens kicked all of them either when they were at their lowest or on their death beds. Hitchens’ ex-friend Alexander Cockburn wrote: “my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Mumbai, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?…one more particularly despicable piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part…[was] his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death [from cancer], and then for good measure again in his obituary.”iii Nafeez Ahmed in an excellent refutation of Hitchens’s unsubstantiated slurs against Vidal states: “Gore Vidal is now eighty-five; has lost the use of his legs; and lost his partner of 50 years…Hitchens approach, however, is to kick an old man when he’s down, rather than to engage critically and constructively with what his [Vidal's] still sharp mind has learned.”iv On May 17, 2007 Hitchens was interviewed by Fox News and by CNN about the death of the Christian Fundamentalist Jerry Falwell who had died two days previously. Hitchens used these platforms to unabashedly celebrate the death of the extremist preacher stating, “it is a shame that there isn’t a hell for him to go to.” Hitchens legitimately asserted, “we have been rid of an extremely dangerous demagogue who lived by hatred of others and prejudice.” Falwell was guilty, according to the Vanity Fair polemicist, of “extraordinary offenses to morality and truth” which were “offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality.” Hitchens accused Falwell of “fawning on the worst elements in Israel…encouraging the most extreme…fanatics and maniacs on the west bank and in Gaza not to give an inch to those who already live there.” The deceased Reverend was a “Chaucerian fraud” who preyed “on the gullible.” Hitchens fulminated that on “[the] Israeli question…in the most baser and hypocritical way he [Falwell] encouraged the worst elements among Jewry…[and] ruined the chances for peace in the middle east.” Hitchens accurately mentioned that “lots of people are going to die and are already living miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man” concluding sternly that “his death is a deliverance.”v
The war machine has benefitted significantly from the Hitchen-esque, defense of “the war on terror,” cloaked in the mantle of secularism and the enlightenment. Much secular-progressive energy has been wastefully channeled into a naïve support for the 9/11 Wars thanks to Hitchens’ and his fellow rhetoricians’ mantra about ‘defending the rights of Islamic women’ and ‘fighting theocracy.’ In A Long Short War Hitchens postulates: “The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban’s annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?”vi “I still think like a Marxist” the opportunist often espouses during speeches promoting imperialist wars of aggression, which any Marxist would naturally find repugnant.
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