Ah yes, Hitchens being unbiased, covering both sides of the issues, both the socialist and communist perspectives.
Interesting to hear about your contact with Hitch. What if anything does he ever say about Solzehnitsyn? I read his Gulag Archiapelago when it was first published in the late 1970's and it put me off communism and quick.
Hitchens is very smart, but must have been drinking while writing this. It is very rambling and unfocussed, and far from the concise writing we expect.
I certainly don't agree with his every view but I firmly believe he has an utterly genius command of the English language. Even when I take an opposite position than he espouses, it's a pleasure to read his brilliant wit and powers of description.
And his shredding of Michael Moore was a masterpiece :-)
Wow -- that's pretty cool that you got to meet (and drink) with Hitchens. I'm continually astonished that he's able to have such a staggering output of well-written stuff, especially with all the drinking!
Trotsky loving piece of crap.
Krondstadt will not forget.
Neat story. Hitchens could easily lose some grey cells w/o anyone ever noticing. Although his level of drinking might explain some of his more outrageous remarks, like the ones about Mother Teresa.
Trotsky was directly responsible for mass murder during the Russian Revolution, and, indeed, it was largely through his able offices that the revolution succeeded, thereby visiting a catastophe on humankind that haunts us to this day. The romantic drivel attached to his name, largely through the efforts of liberal philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook in the 30s, exists only because he provided a counterpoint to the monster Stalin, beside whom, I would suggest, anybody would look pretty good.
I recently read Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, which Hitchens refers to, and was struck by how slavishly naive and precious the passages on Trotsky were, and indeed how naive the entire novel was about politics. I found the book undeserving of its status as the great American novel (Martin Amis, Hitchens' good buddy, called it just that recently), but the left loves it still. I put it down with a conviction deeper than ever that the kids really are on the left and the adults on the right.
As for Hitchens' booze intake, which has been mentioned on the thread, it will catch up to him. I myself believe its effects can be seen in his work of recent years. Some of the luminosity of his literary brilliance has dimmed. At his age prodigious drinking is deadly. Ask Papa Hemingway.
Hitchens is the son of a depressive mother who committed suicide in the mid-1970s when he was twenty-four. Boozers have "issues," even the great writers and other artists who drank their way through fame. Though for artists there may be early on some connection between the creative spark and alcohol, it's only for a very brief stage. After that -- for them all without exception -- booze is a burden and a medication for the passions, not a muse.