What Sort of People are the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club?

I can’t really claim that I never notice the extraordinarily spiteful attacks on me which come from one particular quarter. They're almost impossible to miss. Some of them are on Twitter. Others arrive here directly. Others surface in various places on the Internet. Those responsible claim to be admirers of my late brother, Christopher.

 

THis is fairly new. Until quite recently, most of his American fans didn’t even know I existed (many still don’t), but especially since I wrote about his death, and attended his memorial meeting in New York last April, they have learned that I do. And they don’t like it.

 I haven’t kept a complete log of the sort of thing which has been hurled at me from this quarter, but here are a couple of samples from the past few days: ‘I can’t even see that man’s name without becoming enraged’. ‘How can Peter Hitchens be such a useless piece of **** when his brother was so intelligent?’ ‘I honestly don’t understand how Peter and Christopher Hitchens were brothers’ Plus a lot on the lines of how the wrong one is dead, or we died in the wrong order, and one unimprovably witty contribution (which has now vanished from the web) suggesting that I should have been aborted, so that Christopher could have grown up untroubled by my presence. I should add, in all justice, that I have also had many civilised and friendly communications, direct and indirect, from my brother’s admirers, for which I am grateful . Many of them have been condolences. But that, as most people would agree, is entirely proper and almost to be expected. So I am not saying that these savage and ill-intentioned snarls and curses are typical of the Christopher Hitchens fan club. I have no way of knowing how typical they are. I am saying that they exist, and that they continue to occur quite frequently, and that I find them interesting.

 

Now, of course I don’t like this sort of thing. But that’s not what worries me about it, nor what interests me about it. A lot of people wrongly assume that I oppose ad hominem argument because it pains me personally, and I am too thin-skinned to take a bit of raillery. Not at all. I have said here before that anyone who got through an English boarding school education in my era has already experienced, and survived, most of the nastiest forms of bullying and humiliation available outside an actual torture chamber. We couldn’t go home in the evening, and the terms were long.

 

No, it just gets in the way of discussing the subject - though I would say that it was an actual fact that Professor Nutt’s considerable self-regard shone out of the Channel Four ‘Ecstasy’ programme, and also that the programme was in fact more than a little ludicrous. Sometimes one is allowed to laugh when one’s opponents fall over and land on their bottoms with silly expressions on their faces, or what sort of life would this be? Anyway, I have deployed, dozens of times, the forces of fact and reason against Professor Nutt, and on this occasion he has run into trouble with more than one of his fellow scientists (Professors Iversen and Parrott), just as in the past he has been criticised by Professor Sir Robin Murray, so those who sneer at me that I know nothing about science, and can’t therefore criticise Professor Nutt, had perhaps better go and try their debating methods on these people.

 

However, I do not believe that I have ever suggested that any opponent of mine should have been aborted, or would be better off dead.(I might feel that death would not be a tragedy in the case of some dreadful tyrant, such as Fidel Castro, but this is a man who has himself been responsible for many unjust deaths and much torture and persecution).

 

Of course, it is unusual (though not unknown, nor specially surprising) to have two brothers who are in roughly the same trade, and who disagree about most things. And then there is the added difficulty that one of those brothers lives in, and has a following in the USA, and the other does not, made still more complicated by the fact that both have (rather different though sometimes overlapping) followings in Britain. I suspect I have British readers (for instance) who still don’t know I have a brother or who he is. And it is just as true the other way round. As for the USA, I have a tiny, faint presence, writing occasionally for the American Conservative magazine and doing very infrequent broadcasting appearances there. Only one of my books has ever been published in the USA, because the others deal with specifically British history and concerns, and have no real application to the US. But I have begun to suspect that even this modest existence is too much for some of the CH fan club.

 

I would imagine that my opposition to the Iraq war is much closer to their views than my brother’s keen an unflinching support for it, right to the very end of his life. So what is the problem? Well, over the years I have debated most of the major controversies of our time, and there are two subjects where you regularly meet bilious, hate-filled unreason *simply for holding an opposing point of view* . They are linked. They are religious belief, and hedonism, and the sub-class of hedonism which covers illegal drugs. It is summed up in the statement that 'Nobody can tell me what I do with my own body', the key text of the Century of the Self.

I have a theory that the enormous success of my brother’s anti-God book (which was a colossal seller in the USA) was caused by a huge cultural revolution among American college kids, brought up in Christian homes and Christian towns, arriving at their campuses and throwing off what they regard as the tedious moral shackles of a suburban faith. What they liked about Christopher was that, in debates and TV appearances, he made their pastors and their parents look foolish , and his English Oxford smoothness gave an intellectual cover to what was in most cases an almost elemental rage against their backgrounds. His way of life , the way he dressed, the way he was rude, the way he drank and smoked and swore, was heroic to them. I remember there was a period when sweet-faced young women from Iowa or Nebraska, more used to banana milkshakes than to ardent spirits, put films of themselves on YouTube choking down fiery slugs of Johnnie Walker Black, in emulation and admiration of their hero. I didn’t notice many or any of them lighting up cigarettes in sympathy, for some reason. But they can certainly swear. Oh, my goodness, yes, sir, they can do that. And they can be rude, though the rudeness lacks the curving, beautifully-timed style ( and sheer nerve) that gave my brother’s insults such power.

 

I’m not sure they actually read his writings all that much, though they like to possess them. People often buy books as a modern relics, so that they can own a piece of the ‘ true cross’ . It was noticeable, at the memorial meeting in New York, that those of us sitting near the front, who were family and friends or colleagues, and had read Christopher’s books and articles and reviews, laughed a lot less at the jokes (when his works were read out by others) than those sitting nearer the back, the admirers from a distance who had lined up in the street to get in. For them, these jests were a fresh and novel experience. For the rest of us, they were well-known, enough to conjure a smile, but not a laugh.

 

My suspicion is that, for some of these people, since the very things they admire him for are the very things that I most specifically reject, the idea that I am closely related to him, have a similar education and background, is close to unbearable. They admire him so much that it is close to reverence. They would, if I were dead, or had no opinions, or agreed with Christopher, quite possibly allow me to have a share of that reverence, a member of the Holy Family. But oh dear, what is this? I am not dead. I do have opinions. They are the wrong ones, the wrongest opinions, in fact, that I could possibly have. Yet my voice is eerily similar to their hero’s and I bear the same surname . Help! There is no room in the atheist shrine for me. 

 

Thus it would be better if I did not exist at all. Why? If I am related, and if I am intelligent, then that means that it is possible they may be wrong about God and the Self. And of course it is desperately important to them that they are right. If God exists, and they do not have absolute sovereignty over their bodies, and their dull parents and pompous pastors and priests are correct, or may even have a point,  then their whole choice and way of life, their whole rebellion against the previous generation, is open to question. They don’t even want to consider that possibility. Thus they conclude that I must be stupid, and that it is impossible that my brother and I are really related,  and (in some cases) that they wish I were dead. I treasure the hope that these poor lost children will grow up enough, one day, to see what a sad, hopeless and deluded view of the world this is, and may come to realise – through this very process – that they may possibly be mistaken about greater things as well.