Christopher Hitchens Dies at Age 62……of the gentle death….Pneumonia

In Memoriam, my courageous brother

Christopher, 1949-2011

 

By Peter Hitchens

(ghr)  Please excuse the break in this action, but I wish to insert the following remarks about Christopher Hitchens.  

The regular readers of this Prager fan communication site  know that we have referred to Mr. Hitchens’ writings on many occasions.    Mr. Hitchens has advertised evidence in his writings for several decades,  that he is one of the more obnoxious, easy to dislike, cantankerous, in you face,  arrogant, blabby, countrary jerks , often features of males who espouse   atheism. 

What has made him unique, at least from my own persuasion, is despite all of the above and worse, one generally  becomes rather interested in what he has to write.  

There was a period in my own life when I was slipping in my understandings into the nether world of God denial myself.   The more I read of this Hitchens, the more I learned that atheism wasn’t my brand of tea.    The more and more I read Hitchens, the stronger my own religious understandings and attachments became. 

The snottier the Hitchens attacks, the more amused I became ……and this  amusement drew me back to  the classic Old Testament God and the classic human battle of good versus evil.

There is no greater fool than an atheist……unless of course, he or she has actually risen from the dead.  At least for those who insist there is a God and an afterlife admit the concept is a Faith.

The human visually dies, legally dies, physically dies, and what has been seen and known  as a unique individual decays before our eyes.   A normal, that is, a rational individual, admits what follows regarding the spirit that was the deceased when alive,  is as yet, unknown……This reality leaves a lot of  room for Faith.  

The atheist ‘s certainty of his religion adds to his, her intolerance.  

I came to like Christopher Hitchens anyway…..and so, I offer the following tribute written by his brother found at Mail online…..oh, yes, and may God Bless You Christopher Hitchens:

“In Memoriam, my courageous brother” :

“How odd it is to hear of your own brother’s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event.

I wouldn’t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the, ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property. 

I have this morning turned down three invitations to talk on the radio about my brother. I had a powerful feeling that it would be wrong to do so, not immediately explicable but strong enough to persuade me to say a polite ‘no thank you’. 

 

Loss: Peter Hitchens, right, describes his relationship with his late brother Christopher, left, as ‘complex’ but adds the pair got on better in the last few months than they had in 50 years

 

And I have spent most of the day so far responding, with regrettable brevity, to the many kind and thoughtful expressions of sympathy that I have received, some from complete strangers. 

Many more such messages are arriving as comments here. My thanks for all of them. They are much appreciated not only by me but by my brother’s family.

 

More…

• Strident atheist intellectual, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens dies, aged 62, after battle with cancer
• RIGHTMINDS: Christopher Hitchens: the moral power of polemical fury, writes HYWEL WILLIAMS

Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable loss, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human.

So, odd as it would be if this were a wholly private matter, I think it would be strange if I did not post something here, partly to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy, and partly to provide my first raw attempt at a eulogy for my closest living relative, someone who in many ways I have known better – and certainly longer – than anyone else alive.

Brotherly love: Peter, left, and Christopher, right, play in the sand during a holiday in Devon in the fifties

And in Scotland in 1954: Peter says his brother was courageous – a trait to be envious of

It is certainly raw. Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly.

We both knew it was the last time we would see each other, though being Englishmen of a certain generation, neither of us would have dreamed of actually saying so. We parted on good terms, though our conversation had been (as had our e-mail correspondence for some months) cautious and confined to subjects that would not easily lead to conflict. In this I think we were a little like chess-players, working out many possible moves in advance, neither of us wanting any more quarrels of any kind.

At one stage – and I am so sad this never happened – he wrote to me saying he hoped for a ‘soft landing’ (code, I think for abandoning any further attempts to combat his disease) and to go home to his beautiful apartment in Washington DC.

Journey: Peter, right, says he is still baffled by how far he and his brother came from ‘the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools’

There, he suggested, we could go through his bookshelves, as there were some books and other possessions he wanted me to have. I couldn’t have cared less about these things, but I had greatly hoped to have that conversation, which would have been a particularly good way of saying farewell.

But alas, it never happened. He never went home and now never will. Never, there it is, that inflexible word that trails close behind that other non-negotiable syllable, death. Even so, we did what we could in Houston, as the doctors, the nurses, the cleaners, and who knows who else, bustled in and out.

I forgot, till I left, that I was wearing a ludicrous surgical mask and gown, and surgical gloves (I am still not sure whose benefit this was for, but it was obligatory) all the time I was sitting there, and – this is extraordinary – time seemed to me to pass incredibly swiftly in that room. I was shocked when the moment came to leave for the airport, that it had come so soon.

 

Early days: Christopher stands outside the offices of the New Statesman where he developed a fierce reputation as a left-wing writer in the 1970s

 

Changing camps: Christopher, right, with former British prime minister Tony Blair in Toronto last year, supported the Iraq war, much to the shock of his left-wing political friends

Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it. 

I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been.

A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could.

I’d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess. 

 

Talking heads: Peter, right, wishes to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy for him and his family

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.

This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today. People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to.

My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember. 

We got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens. At such times one tends to remember childhood more clearly than at others, though I have always had a remarkably clear memory of much of mine. I am still baffled by how far we both came, in our different ways, from the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools, of battered and declining naval seaports, not specially cultured, not book-lined or literary or showy but plain, dutiful and unassuming, we took the courses we did. 

Two pieces of verse come to mind, one from Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’

‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, there’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends’

I have always found this passage unexpectedly moving because of something that lies beneath the words, good and largely true though they are. When I hear it, I see in my mind’s eye a narrow, half-lit entrance hall with a slowly-ticking clock in it, and a half-open door beyond which somebody is waiting for news of a child who long ago left home.

And T.S.Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (one of the Four Quartets)

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time’

These words I love because I have found them to be increasingly and powerfully true. In my beginning, as Eliot wrote elsewhere in the Quartets, is my end. Alpha et Omega.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html#ixzz1gk7OWgaH

Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright, Barack Obama’s “Father Figure”, who Morphed the President

In 2008 America elected a president whose pastor for 20 years preached anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, advocated bizarre pseudo-scientific racial ideas, opposed interracial marriage, praised communist dictatorships, denounced black “assimilation,” and taught Afrocentric feel-good nonsense to schoolchildren. When Americans discovered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s views during the 2008 campaign, they rightly wondered if Barack Obama, like his pastor, really believed that HIV/AIDS was created by the American government to kill black people. Even to this day, no one knows for sure whether Obama shares the views of Wright, whom the Chicago Sun-Times once described as Obama’s “close confidant.”

Candidate Obama tried to dismiss his support for Wright, telling Charlie Gibson of ABC News, “It’s as if we took the five dumbest things that I ever said or you ever said…in our lives and compressed them, and put them out there, you know, I think that people’s reaction, would be understandably upset.” And rightly so. In sermon after sermon, Wright’s radical black nationalist ideas were clearly and emphatically stated. They were not an aberration, but the focal point of Pastor Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Obama was an active member for 20 years.

Nor has Wright renounced any of his anti-Americanism. In a sermon last September 16 marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11 entitled, “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” Wright seemed to celebrate white America’s comeuppance. “We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon–and we never batted an eye!” Wright preached. “We supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black south Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.” He closed, invoking Malcolm X’s statement about the assassination of J.F.K, “America’s chickens! Coming home! To roost!” White America, he was saying, had gotten its just deserts.

Candidate Obama tried to distance himself from Wright’s more damning comments. But, crucially, he didn’t disown the pastor himself. In fact, in his rise to political fame, he had made Wright’s sermons his own, drawing on Wright’s “Audacity to Hope” sermon and appropriating its theme for his political coming-out speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. He even borrowed the sermon’s title for his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, in a bid to get Wright and other black churches to support his candidacy.

The question is why Barack Obama, raised without any faith at all, chose one of the most incendiary preachers in Black America to preach the word of God to him. Wright became, in Obama’s words, “like family to me. [Wright] strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.” Obama told a group of ministers in June 2007 that Wright helped “introduce me to my Christian faith.” But what, exactly, is Barack Obama’s faith? Just as important, what is Jeremiah Wright’s?

JEREMIAH WRIGHT WAS BORN on September 22, 1941, in Germantown, a racially mixed, middle-class Philadelphia suburb. His father, Jeremiah Wright, Sr., became the minister of the local Grace Baptist Church in 1938 and served there for 42 years. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a schoolteacher who eventually became the first black vice-principal at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, one of the city’s top-performing magnet schools.

Education mattered deeply to the Wrights. They helped their son with his homework while they bettered themselves with part-time courses. They enrolled him at Central High School, an all-male magnet establishment considered among the nation’s best public schools at the time. It was 90 percent white. The class yearbook announced, “Always ready with a kind word, Jerry is one of the most congenial members [of his class].” But Wright himself dismissed that period of congeniality in a later sermon. “I used to let my behavior be determined by the white world’s expectations,” he recalled ruefully.

The young Jeremiah was off to a promising start, but at age 15 was arrested for grand larceny auto theft. His parents sent him to the all-black Virginia Union University. But Wright quit after two years and joined the Marines. Wright later said he hated being educated at “black schools founded by white missionaries.” Still, during his short time at VUU he met fellow students who made a lasting impression: a young PhD student named John Kinney who had studied under both Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology; and Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a longtime friend and mentor of King.

After quitting the Marines, Wright joined the Navy, where he served for four years. He was stationed mostly in Washington D.C., and was there to help operate on President Lyndon B. Johnson as a cardiopulmonary technician before enrolling in college again at Howard University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1968 and a master’s in English in 1969. At Howard, Wright heard firebrand Stokely Carmichael, a.k.a. Kwame Ture, lecture on black power. He was further influenced by Cheikh Anta Diop’s racialist tomes advancing Afrocentrism, the theory that Africa was the cradle of modern civilization. After that, it was off to the University of Chicago Divinity School for six years. Then Wright, 31, joined Trinity United Church of Christ as pastor on March 1, 1972. In his provocative words, “the fun began.”

Trinity, on its last legs when Wright joined it, was an odd choice. After all, as Bill Moyers of PBS recalls in his new book, Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Wright “could have had his pick of large, prosperous congregations, but instead chose one with only 87 members in a largely black neighborhood” of Chicago. Wright often compared Chicago to apartheid-era South Africa: “Just as Blacks could not be caught inside the city of Johannesburg after dark…the same held true for Blacks on the Southside of Chicago.” Breaking with his parents’ Baptist denomination, Wright recognized that at Trinity he could have complete authority to implement his vision.

There were, of course, impediments to that goal, not least his white colleagues. Many couldn’t understand his love of black-style worship or emphasis on the role of Africans in biblical history. Wright recalls nearly coming to blows in 1978 with a white associate minister who called his church a “cult” and derided him for having a “big ego.”

TWENTY-TWO BLACK church members who did not like the direction in which Wright was taking Trinity lodged a complaint with the UCC, then left the church. Wright attacked them as Uncle Toms “running to ‘massa’ to tell a white man what they thought was happening to their Negro church.” He had nothing but contempt for these middle-class blacks. They were, he noted, “bourgeois Negroes who wanted to be white.” Wright considered himself a “new Black who is not ashamed of his Blackness.”

Wright had come under the sway of the writings of James Cone, a professor of divinity, father of the black theology movement and author of the seminal Black Theology and Black Power (1969). Cone taught that Christianity needed to be freed from “whiteness.” He and Wright conceived of a Christianity in which black rage and the black power ideology fused with Marxist thought. According to Cone, “black people must find ways of affirming black dignity which do not include relating to whites on white terms.” Integration was impossible because it was brought about by “black naïveté” and “white guilt.” Cone approvingly quoted Malcolm X: “The worst crime the white man has committed has been to teach us to hate ourselves.” Freeing blacks would require getting them to love their inner African and Wright would do just that–Trinity’s longtime parishioners be damned.

Trinity gave Wright a chance to introduce ordinary blacks to these writings. During the initial media dustup over Wright’s views in 2007, the media couldn’t understand Wright’s, or Obama’s, Christianity because they couldn’t understand the underlying phenomenon of black liberation theology.

It didn’t help that the mainstream media had decided to take the issue of Obama’s faith off the table. The New York Times ludicrously editorialized in 2008 that Obama’s “religious connection” with Wright “should be none of the voters’ business.” Unlike George W. Bush, Obama wouldn’t “carry religion into government,” the Times promised. In fact, Obama often invokes religion in areas–health care and economics–where it isn’t normally mentioned. An analysis by Politico found that Obama invoked Jesus far more than George W. Bush did, and cited the Sermon on the Mount to make the case for his economic policies.”…….Read further by clicking on below:

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/09/the-gospel-according-to-wright

Why Progressivism Leads to Bureaucratic Dictatorship even without EVIL INTENT!

The Welfare State Neutralizes Opponents by

Making Them Dependent on Government

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

Political analysts have noted that because the number of those in the ruling elite amounts to only a small fraction of the number in the ruled masses, every regime lives or dies in accordance with public opinion.  No matter how powerful or pervasive a regime is, it can still be overrun by the sheer superior numbers of the people it governs.  However, this traditional political framework has been undermined by the development of the modern welfare state, says Robert Higgs, a senior fellow with the Independent Institute.

While the original framework would dissect the country into two populations, the gladly ruling and the reluctantly ruled, the welfare state has created a third group: dependents.  Though they are most certainly ruled, they are often fierce defenders of the regime and its advocated status quo, thereby breaking ranks with the rest of the ruled who only tolerate it.  They do this because the welfare state allows the current regime to be the primary provider for an ever-growing body of dependents, and this dependency engenders loyalty.

• An index of dependency developed by the Heritage Foundation found that the metric increased from 19 in fiscal year 1962 to 272 in fiscal year 2009.
• The Heritage researchers found that in 1962, 21.7 million persons depended on the government-run programs included in their index, yet this same figure for 2009 had grown to 64.3 million.
• Adding dependents not included in the Heritage study might easily increase the number to more than 100 million people, or to more than a third of the entire population.

The handouts of the welfare state exploit this large swathe of the population and earn their repeated and unwavering votes by perpetuating the status quo.  As greater portions of the population come to rely on the government for their livelihood, the more clout it will inherently have as its number of detractors dwindles.

An additional symptom of this growing trend, which can be seen in the current political sphere, is that the creation of a status quo-supporting population inherently causes increased resistance to change.  This conservativeness manifests itself in a lack of radical policy and in the loss of personnel turnover in Washington.

Source: Robert Higgs, “The Welfare State Neutralizes Opponents by Making Them Dependent on Government,” Independent Institute, December 8, 2011.

For text:

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3199

For more on Government Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=33

Comment:   Never forget the ABSOLUTISM in the Prager truth:  

                                                      “THE BIGGER THE GOVERNMENT, THE SMALLER THE CITIZEN!