[KC Burke]

Isn’t the title taken from his Belloc quote he cites near the end? I guess I am easier to dazzle, I found the article appropriate.

Hitchens, going after anything religous, picks out a noted Christian apologist, who most closely resembles his own legacy I thought was fair accessment.

Guide me as to the other deficiencies as you see them.

[x]

My objection was more to the title and the tone -- that whole, "we band of fans against the rest of the world." There's no need to be defensive or bitter or vindictive: it's almost certain that Chesterton's work will outlast Hitchens's. So why not demonstrate this in a less partisan or sectarian spirit?

There is also this to object to:

But there is no need to apologise for Chesterton. Hitchens got it completely wrong. Nazism was not, for someone of Chesterton’s era, a “distinct moral challenge”. It was an extension of an earlier ‘moral challenge’: Prussia.

Really? There may have been continuities between Frederick the Great's Prussia or Wilhelm II's Germany and Hitler's Third Reich, but not seeing just how distinct and horrible Hitler's regime was is a form of blindness in my book.

I'm not saying Chesterton was entirely wrong about Prussia, but it's also not obvious that Hitchens "got it completely wrong." Certainly, people who'd heard and heard and heard attacks on Prussia to the point where they discounted everything they heard weren't going to have their eyes opened to what was going on in Germany by more such talk. Readers may have thought, "Well, we could live with Prussia in spite of all that, so maybe we can live with Hitler."

Chesterton died in 1936, when Hitler was just getting started. I don't think he had anything to apologize for in what he wrote about Germany, but slashing attacks met with broadbrush defenses don't do him justice. A more critical, less fan-boy defense would have been more fitting.