Deus nao foi grande: Christopher Hitchens nao poderia ter ido...

Uma síntese dos seus escritos em diversos sites de publicações com as quais colaborou.
Creio que, no seu ateísmo, Hitchens era menos fundamentalista do que Richard Dawkins.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949-2011)

A morte de um polemista

Observatório da Imprensa, edição 673 - 20/12/2011

Christopher Hitchens era um provocador. Podia-se gostar dele ou odiá-lo, mas não era possível ignorar suas ideias. O jornalista e escritor britânico, que vivia nos EUA desde o início da década de 1980, morreu na semana passada aos 62 anos, vítima de pneumonia por conta de um câncer no esôfago diagnosticado no ano passado.

Hitchens era fã declarado do escritor britânico George Orwell, autor de 1984, e do presidente americano Thomas Jefferson. Ele gostava de escrever sobre os mestres da literatura, mas era mais conhecido por seus artigos e livros com opiniões duras e, na maioria das vezes, controversas, sobre política e religião. Era colunista da revistaVanity Fair desde 1992 e escreveu 16 livros – o mais popular deles, Deus não é grande – como as religiões envenenam tudo, foi lançado em 2007. Na obra, Hitchens defendia a superioridade moral do ateu contra a irracionalidade do religioso.

Além de criticar qualquer tipo de fé religiosa, o escritor passou a fazer, após os ataques terroristas de 2001 nos EUA, ataques contundentes aos “fascistas islâmicos”, defendendo a política externa intervencionistado governo americano– irritava-se, no entanto, quando era chamado de conservador. Mais recentemente, acusava o papa Bento 16 de acobertar escândalos sexuais na Igreja Católica quando era cardeal. Em uma de suas intervenções mais famosas e odiadas, disse que Madre Teresa de Calcutá era uma porta-voz do que havia de mais reacionário na Igreja. Também era crítico ferrenho de Bill e Hillary Clinton e de Henry Kissinger.

Como jornalista, Hitchens foi correspondente no Chipre, Uganda, Sudão – seu trabalho o levou a mais de 60 países. Em 1975, cobriu pela revista britânica New Statement a Revolução dos Cravos em Portugal. Depois de se mudar para os EUA, passou a escrever para o semanário The Nation – onde assinou duras críticas aos presidentes Ronald Reagan e George Bush.

O câncer de Hitchens foi diagnosticado em 2010, logo depois do lançamento do livro de memórias Hitch 22. Em sua coluna na Vanity Fair em junho deste ano, ele escreveu: “Meu principal consolo neste ano de viver morrendo tem sido a presença dos amigos”.

Mais sobre Hitchens

** A Slate, onde Hitchens assinava uma coluna desde 2002, compilou artigos de amigos e colegas de trabalho sobre ele. “Editar Christopher Hitchens era o trabalho mais fácil do jornalismo”, escreveu June Thomas, que editava as colunas do escritor na Slate. Jonathan Karp, publisher da editora Simon & Schuster, listou 10 curiosidades que considerava “admiráveis” em Hitchens, entre elas: “Ele tinha boas ideias no banho. Foi onde chegou ao título para Deus não é grande” e “Ele é o único autor com quem trabalhei que se dirigia a mim como ‘camarada’”.

** Anna Wintour, editora-chefe da Vogue, assinou artigo na Slate relembrando a amizade de muitos anos com Hitchens – ou Hitch, como era chamado pelos amigos. “Não havia nada que Hitch gostasse mais de fazer do que falar – melhor ainda se falar significasse discutir. Hitch não ligava se ele concordava ou não com você; de fato, ele o contrariaria só por fazê-lo”, escreve ela.

** “Christopher Hitchens era espirituoso, encantador, e um encrenqueiro, e para aqueles que o conheciam bem, ele foi um presente, eu ouso dizer, de Deus”, escreveu Graydon Carter, editor- chefe da Vanity Fair.

** “Desde o começo Christopher Hitchens a tinha – a voz, a voz característica que é a marca de um verdadeiro escritor e o ponto básico para um colunista”, afirmou Richard Lingeman, editor sênior da The Nation, onde Hitchens escreveu de 1985 a 2002.

** A New Yorker compilou uma lista de “artigos notáveis” de Hitchens publicados na última década.

** A New Statesman publicou trechos da última entrevista de Hitchens, concedida ao cientista e autor Richard Dawkins e publicada na edição especial de Natal – que tem Dawkins como editor convidado.

** O escritor Ian McEwan, um dos amigos mais próximos de Hitchens, escreveu no New York Times sobre as visitas nos últimos meses. “Não havia nenhum homem mais fácil de se visitar no hospital. Ele não queria flores e uvas, queria conversas e presença. Todos os silêncios eram úteis. Ele gostava de descobrir que você ainda estava ali quando acordava de seus frequentes cochilos induzidos pela morfina. Ele não estava interessado em estar doente. Ele não queria falar sobre isso.”

Dois mortos ilustres, um outro que nao faz nenhuma falta

Dois intelectuais e um ditador, desses bem absolutos, bem desprezíveis, o contrário total dos dois primeiros.
Assim é a vida.
Os dois primeiros farão falta. O ditador já deveria ter ido há muito tempo...

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Christopher Hitchens: minha homenagem a um contrarianista

WHAT CAN BE ASSERTED WITHOUT PROOF CAN BE DISMISSED WITHOUT PROOF.

Conheci muito pouco da obra de Hitchens, apenas alguns artigos no New Yorker, e alguns outros esparsos na imprensa britânica ou americana, retranscritos na internet. 
Mas o que conheci me fez seu admirador, não tanto pelo ateismo militante -- sou um irreligioso, mas não um ateista, ou ateu militante, o que acho inútil e desnecessário, já que 90% da humanidade permanecerá religiosa -- mas mais pelo seu contrarianismo visceral, sempre pronto a ir contra o que Flaubert chamava de "idées reçues", ou seja, as obviedades do senso comum, no mais das vezes politicamente correto, e não raramente erradas.
Como contrarianista aprendiz, agradava-me sua verve afiada, sua argumentação inteligente, sempre lógica, quando não ousada, na defesa dos valores que ele julgava maiores do que as idiotices geralmente repercutidas em certa imprensa progressista (aliada de algumas das piores causas possíveis).
Minha homenagem a ele; espero agora ler vários dos seus escritos, que estão sendo reunidos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 


Welcome to an unofficial Christopher Hitchens site:
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Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011) was an Anglo-American author and journalist. His books made him a prominent public intellectual and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was a columnist and literary critic at Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. He was named one of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect.


Entitled Mortality and based on his columns for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens' final memoir will be published by Atlantic in the new year.

The forthcoming memoir will be based on the essays, said Atlantic Books, and will be called Mortality. The book had been planned for some time, said a spokesperson.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/christopher-hitchens-memoir-published-in-january

2107) O papa nao está acima da lei - Christopher Hitchens

Bring the Pope to Justice
Christopher Hitchens
Newsweek, Apr 23, 2010

Popes and their problems through the centuries

Detain or subpoena the pope for questioning in the child-rape scandal? You must be joking! All right then, try the only alternative formulation: declare the pope to be above and beyond all local and international laws, and immune when it comes to his personal and institutional responsibility for sheltering criminals. The joke there would be on us.

The case for bringing the head of the Catholic hierarchy within the orbit of law is easily enough made. All it involves is the ability to look at a naked emperor and ask the question "Why?" Mentally remove his papal vestments and imagine him in a suit, and Joseph Ratzinger becomes just a Bavarian bureaucrat who has failed in the only task he was ever set-that of damage control. The question started small. In 2002, I happened to be on Hardball With Chris Matthews, discussing what the then attorney general of
Massachusetts, Thomas Reilly, had termed a massive cover-up by the church of crimes against children by more than a thousand priests. I asked, why is the man who is prima facie responsible, Cardinal Bernard Law, not being questioned by the forces of law and order? Why is the church allowed to be judge in its own case and enabled in effect to run private courts where gross and evil offenders end up being "forgiven"? This point must have hung in the air a bit, and perhaps lodged in Cardinal Law's own mind, because in December of that year he left Boston just hours before state troopers
arrived with a subpoena seeking his grand-jury testimony. Where did he go? To Rome, where he later voted in the election of Pope Benedict XVI and now presides over the beautiful church of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as several Vatican subcommittees.

In my submission, the current scandal passed the point of no return when the Vatican officially became a hideout for a man who was little better than a fugitive from justice. By sheltering such a salient offender at its very heart, the Vatican had invited the metastasis of the horror into its bosom and thence to its very head. It is obvious that Cardinal Law could not have made his escape or been given asylum without the approval of the then pontiff and of his most trusted deputy in the matter of child-rape damage control, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Developments since that time have appalled even the most diehard papal apologists by their rapidity and scale. Not only do we have the letter that Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops, enjoining them sternly to refer rape and molestation cases exclusively to his office. That would be bad enough in itself, since any person having knowledge of such a crime is legally obliged to report it to the police. But now, from Munich and Madison, Wis., and Oakland, come reports of the protection or indulgence of
pederasts occurring on the pope's own watch, either during his period as bishop or his time as chief Vatican official for the defusing of the crisis.
His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.

As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory-as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall-there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same. As I am writing this, plaintiffs are coming forward and strategies being readied (on both sides, since the Vatican itself scents the danger). In Kentucky, a suit is before the courts seeking the testimony of the pope himself. In Britain, it is being proposed that any one of the numberless possible plaintiffs might privately serve the pope with a writ if he shows his face. Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC-which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan-can be asked to rule on "crimes against humanity"; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.

In Kentucky, the pope's lawyers have already signaled their intention to contest any such initiative by invoking "sovereign immunity," since His Holiness is also an alleged head of state. One wonders if sincere Catholics really desire to take refuge in this formulation. The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Benito Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy. It is the last survival of the political architecture of the Axis powers. Its bogus claim to statehood is now being
used to give asylum to men like Cardinal Law.

In this instance the church damns itself both ways. It invites our challenge-this is where the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights becomes relevant-to its standing as a state. And it calls attention to the repellent origins of that same state. Currently the Holy See has it both ways. For example, it is exempt from the annual State Department Human Rights Report precisely because it is not considered a state. (It maintains only observer status at the United Nations.) So, if it now does want to claim full statehood, it follows that it should receive the full attention
of the State Department for its "lay" policies, and, for that matter, the full attention of the Justice Department as well. (First order of business-why on earth are we not demanding the extradition of Cardinal Law?
And why is this grave matter being left to private individuals to pursue?)

It is very difficult to resist the conclusion that this pope does not call for a serious investigation, or demand the removal of those responsible for a consistent pattern of child rape and its concealment, because to do so would be to imply the call for his own indictment. But meanwhile why are we expected to watch passively or wonder idly why the church does not clean its own filthy stable? A case in point: in 2001 Cardinal Castrillón of Colombia wrote from the Vatican to congratulate a French bishop who had risked jail rather than report an especially vicious rapist priest. Castrillón was invited this week to conduct a lavish Latin mass in Washington. The invitation was rightly withdrawn after a storm of outrage, but nobody asked why the cardinal could not be held as an accessory to an official Vatican policy that has exposed thousands of American children to rapists and sadists.

Only this past March did the church shamefacedly and reluctantly agree that all child rapists should now be handed over to the civil authorities. Thanks a lot. That was a clear admission that gross illegality, and of the nastiest kind, has been its practice up until now. Euphemisms about sin and repentance are useless. This is a question of crime-organized crime, by the way-and therefore of punishment. Or perhaps you would rather see the shade of Mussolini thrown protectively over the Vicar of Christ? The ancient Roman symbol of the fish is rotting-and rotting from the head.

Hitchens, a NEWSWEEK contributor, is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.