I’m not as smart as Christopher Hitchens. His IQ was probably off the charts, and in a way he made it look cool — whiskey in one hand, cigarette in the other, quoting poets and polemicists like they were neighbors. On a lot of points, he was right. But there are things about him that irritate the hell out of me.
Take his critique of American imperialism. Before 9/11, he saw clearly how the U.S. meddled across the globe — Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan — propping up dictators, crushing movements, and playing god with people’s lives. He was scathing, sharp, and unflinching. That’s the Hitchens I admire.
But then came 9/11. And it’s like he just took the event as if it had fallen from the sky — “space weather,” unquestionable, beyond context. He didn’t pause to ask how it happened, or who was pulling strings behind the curtain. He didn’t look at the CIA’s history of cultivating jihadists, arming the Mujahideen, or stoking fires in the Middle East when it suited American interests. Instead, he made a pivot: the U.S. was now the imperfect but necessary champion of Enlightenment values, and jihadism was the new fascism to be crushed at all costs.
That’s the contradiction. He could dissect imperialism in Latin America, but when it came to Islamic fundamentalism, he put the scalpel away and cheered on the same empire he used to expose. What the hell was he thinking?
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a fan of fundamentalist Islam. I lived a couple of years under it. As a man, I adapted; I didn’t have a huge problem. But if I had been a woman, maybe it would have been different. Still, from what I saw, these systems don’t stay strong because of their own brilliance. They stay strong because we give them an enemy. The more the West says don’t do it, don’t do it, the more appealing it becomes to double down. Pressure feeds fanaticism. Without an enemy, these regimes bore their own people. They rot from within.
That’s where Hitchens lost me. He wanted to confront, to fight, to crush. But I think confrontation is fuel. If we dealt with them more relaxed, without turning every theocracy into an existential threat, they would evolve, decay, and change on their own.
And this is where history and philosophy matter. Nothing in history is frozen. As Hegel said, the world is always in motion, always becoming. Religious states, like empires before them, are not eternal fortresses. They rise, they ossify, they fall. Hitchens wanted to burn them down; I believe they will collapse under their own contradictions. You don’t need to strangle history. You just need to let it run its course.