ShortJohnSilver
11th August 2010, 09:06 AM
Sure comes across as an English gent, yet we find out later...
(quotes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens )
In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on 14 April 2002, Hitchens says he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter Hitchens took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, that her ancestors had the family name Blumenthal, and were from Poland.
Due to Yvonne arguing that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it",[9] he was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes, and read philosophy, politics, and economics.
In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity to the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.[13]
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam".[14] Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, translator of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism.[8] Shortly thereafter, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect".[15] Throughout his student days, he was on many occasions arrested and assaulted in the various political protests and activities in which he participated.
He then became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,[16] which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".
So he was educated to be in the upper class, retained his place in society, considers himself of Jewish descent, but is angry about racism and oligarchy... uh huh ...
Everyone is now fawning over him because he has esophageal cancer, glossing over his hatred of Mother Teresa, his polemics against any sort of religion except Judaism.
That he is a flip-flopper on so many of his political views will not be mentioned.
(quotes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens )
In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on 14 April 2002, Hitchens says he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter Hitchens took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, that her ancestors had the family name Blumenthal, and were from Poland.
Due to Yvonne arguing that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it",[9] he was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes, and read philosophy, politics, and economics.
In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity to the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.[13]
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam".[14] Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, translator of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism.[8] Shortly thereafter, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect".[15] Throughout his student days, he was on many occasions arrested and assaulted in the various political protests and activities in which he participated.
He then became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,[16] which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".
So he was educated to be in the upper class, retained his place in society, considers himself of Jewish descent, but is angry about racism and oligarchy... uh huh ...
Everyone is now fawning over him because he has esophageal cancer, glossing over his hatred of Mother Teresa, his polemics against any sort of religion except Judaism.
That he is a flip-flopper on so many of his political views will not be mentioned.