The words of a provocateur

THE BRITISH WRITER, polemicist and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, who moved from the left to neo-con, and enraged many of his followers for supporting the Iraq War has died in the United States.

HItchens died this week, following a battle with throat cancer brought on by a life of booze and cigarettes. He was 62 and a renowned toper, said to be  usually still standing and talking coherently while his companions were under the table.

Once an International Socialist, he ended up "betraying" the left when he supported the American invasion of Iraq following 9/11, which he blamed on "Islamofascism". He even supported George Bush's re-election in 2004. On the other hand he was an avowed atheist and published a book denouncing established religions.

In an interview a few months before his death he asked his friends and supporters not to "pray' for his recovery from esophageal cancer.

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair for whom Hitchens wrote some of his best work after leaving England to make his home in New York, called him a man "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar."

Many of  the comments flowing from his pen, often dipped in acid, have been quoted in the last few days. Here are some of them.

On George Bush:
"He's unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things."

On Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize:
"It would be like giving someone an Oscar in the hope that he would one day make a good motion picture. It's a virtual award. It's for good intent."

On Mother Theresa and Princess Diana:
"Both had spent their careers in the service and the pursuit of the rich and powerful. Both had used poor and sick people as ‘accessories' in their campaigns. And both had succeeded in pulling off the number one triumph offered by the celebrity culture – the achievement of a status where actions are judged by reputation and not the other way round."

On 9/11:
"The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about ‘the west', to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state."

On battling cancer:
"I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."

On New York, his adopted home:
"New York barmen, taxi drivers and policemen may labour too hard to give the impression of having seen it all before. But there is always a nagging suspicion that they actually have."

On Bill Clinton:
"One reason a gentleman may be obliged to lie is to protect the reputation of the woman. Clinton has lied in order to trash them."

On virginity:
"If asked my opinion about virginity, I would say 'I'm opposed to it'." ·