/lit/ - Literature

Anybody else feels like the Left is very unfair with him?

Apart from Iraq, I see no reason why the Right should admire him so their dislike for him is understandable. But the same dislike coming from the Left seems pretty weird. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist and socialist throughout his life, wrote mostly for left-wing media, defended the "left of liberal" perspective on mainstream news, opposed nearly every US intervention except Iraq, defended the October revolution and the leninist tradition, brought attention to many causes, etc, etc.

But just because of Iraq he's denounced by most left-wingers as a neocon. I mean, for them, a politician can take right-of-center positions on nearly everything but still carry a flag for, say, gay rights or feminism and he's named a liberal, but Hitch picked left-of-center views on nearly everything and is deemed a reactionary, a warmonger, an imperialist.

It's weird because he's so much more in line with what a member of a decent left-wing movement would be than the majority of leftists today.

Just watch his videos and read his works from the 80s and 90s, before 9/11. He was very eloquent on his defense of a number of causes, and for him even the smallest injustice was worth reading about and bringing up whenever he could. He could offer facts and contextualize them in a way that most people are not used to. He was teaching as he was debating, and for me that's much closer to a left-wing "ideal" than nearly everything else we see today.

I'm not saying his "anti-theism" wasn't juvenile, I'm not defending him on Iraq. I'm just saying that post-2001 Hitchens was only 10 years of a 40-year career, and he continued to argue for a number of things in line with the left-wing mentality during that, so I think it seems a bit unfair to dismiss him like they seem to.

Pic related, it's Hitch crying because you guys don't like him