یادی از کریستوفر هیچنز

[Russell]

در برنامه چارلی رز در روز تولد هیچنز یعنی 13 آوریل،یک برنامه به یاد او اختصاص داد تا از لحظات بیادماندنی و خاطرات او با 4 نفر از نزدیکترین دوستانش سخن بگوید:
سلمان رشدی،ایان مک ایوان،جیمز فانتوم و مارتین ایمیس

Charlie Rose - A discussion about Christopher Hitchens (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12297)


خیلی برای جامعه ضد خدا جای خوشحالی داشت که "هیچ" رو در کنار خودشون داشتند از نگر من،شخصیت بسیار جالب و دوست داشتنی داشت،جاش واقعا خالیست در عرصه فکر و اندیشه.شاید بیاد ماندنی ترین خصلت او توان و سبک ادبی و شوخ طبیعی او در سخن گفتن و مناظره بود.بقول چارلی رز میتونستی عاشقش باشی یا ازش متنفر باشی ولی نمیتونستی نادیدش بگیری.

[Russell]

Salman Rushdie (http://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie): Christopher Hitchens died a year ago today. I still think of him every day.
Salman Rushdie (SalmanRushdie) on Twitter (https://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie)

[Russell]

Transcription:
“Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example? I mean…I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled and have conversations with authors from previous epochs, it’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology and I have to say it sounds like a complete fairy-tale to me.
The only reason I want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him anytime because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment. But when Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy, for challenging the gods of the city, and he accepted his death, he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters, too.
In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure and what is true—could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having.
And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive.
Which means that to me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith, that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the…on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any otherway.
And I’d urge you to look at those of you who tell you, those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead, till you believe as they do. What a terrible thing to be telling to children!
And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a…think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself.
Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
Thank you.”





Hitch died a year ago Why Evolution Is True (https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/hitch-died-a-year-ago-2/)


I have transcribed, for my own purposes, Hitchens’ great closing argument against William Dembski, after Hitch had been diagnosed with the cancer. No-one seems to have done it online, so I assume I’m the first to have copied the words out. It’s great, if you don’t know it: delivered to an audience of young believers whom he appears to win over hugely, judging by his reception on the link.
No doubt at some time, perhaps the first anniversary of his death, you could use it. In any case, it’s thoroughly inspirational, and brings a lump to my throat, every time I listen to that lovely rich baritone

[Russell]

1105
This Saturday, December 15th will mark the first anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens. Sadly, Hitchens body lost its fight with esophageal cancer after a nearly two-year long battle with the disease.



As a rationalist, I won’t become too maudlin or remorseful. However, I do miss his optimism; wit and ability to obliterate any of the numerous faithful who attempted to challenge him in debate and who he'd tear to pieces with his knowledge, word choice and ideas. Sometimes he did this with half his brain tied behind his back after knocking back multiple glasses of whiskey before he’d take the podium and take down his opponent.


In this hectic and stressful world of ours it is sometimes too easy to forget both simple and great men. Sometimes without even realizing it we dim the light of memory as the years pass and as we recall less. However, I believe Christopher Hitchens is one of those seminal intellectuals who will live on for generations. This, because of his intellect, his books and articles and the numerous videos that will keep his memory and ideas alive. Hitchens' brilliance showed both in his passion and compassion for good ideas and truth versus the tyrannical lies and self-deception of superstition, religion and faith.


His voice will be circling in my head until I follow him into the nothingness void of non-existence. Until that day, if I maintain the capacity to do so, I will recall him fondly.


I think we should all acknowledge the huge debt which the non-theist movement owes to him. We stand on the shoulders of a true giant. So not only do we owe a debt, but we must also carry on in his memory for the sake of rationality, humanism and secularism to ensure each holds a firm place in our philosophy, in our politics and in our total human experience.

Paleolibrarian: One Year Later: Remembering Christopher Hitchens (http://www.paleolibrarian.info/2012/12/one-year-later-remembering-christopher.html)

[Russell]

یک هفته‌ای از سالگرد تولد هیچنز در 13 آوریل میگذره،روزی که مصادف ِ با تولد توماس جفرسون (در تقویم قدیم البته) اونجور که خودش دوست داشت یادآوری کنه.
این مقاله رو داشتم میخوندم درباره سفرش به ایران در سال 2005 و توصیف درخشانش از ایران و جامعه ایران که گفتم بی مناسبت نیست بیارم در اینجا.این لینک به متن کامل مقاله‌ست (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/07/hitchens-200507#) ،این هم بخشی از مقاله که بنظرم جالبتر اومد:


Iran today exists in a state of dual power and split personality. The huge billboards and murals proclaim it an Islamic republic, under the eternal guidance of the immortal memory of Ayatollah Khomeini. A large force of Revolutionary Guards and a pervasive religious police stand ready to make good on this grim pledge. But directly underneath these forbidding posters and right under the noses of the morals enforcers, Iranians are buying and selling videos, making and consuming alcohol, tuning in to satellite TV stations, producing subversive films and plays and books, and defying the dress code. All women are supposed to cover all their hair at all times, and to wear a long jacket, or manteau, that covers them from neck to knee. But it’s amazing how enticing the compulsory scarf can be when worn practically on the back of the head and held in place only by hair spray. As for the obligatory manteau, any woman with any fashion sense can cut it to mold an enviable silhouette. I found a bootlegger on my arrival at Tehran’s airport and was offered alcohol on principle in every home I entered—Khomeini’s excepted—even by people who did not drink. Almost every Iranian has a relative overseas and is in regular touch with foreign news and trends. The country is an “as if” society. People live as if they were free, as if they were in the West, as if they had the right to an opinion, or a private life. And they don’t do too badly at it. I have now visited all three of the states that make up the so-called axis of evil. Rough as their regime can certainly be, the citizens of Iran live on a different planet from the wretched, frightened serfs of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
.
Tehran is in fact more or less uncontrollable by anybody. It’s the Mexico City or Calcutta of the region: a vast, unplanned, overpopulated nightmare of all-day traffic jams and eye-wringing pollution, tissue-paper building codes, and an earthquake coming like Christmas. It’s also the original uptown-downtown city, built on the steep slopes of the snowy Elburz Mountains, which, on a good day, one can sometimes actually see. In the northern quarter, there are the discreet villas where the members of the upper crust keep their heads down and their wealth unostentatious. At the bottom of the hill, you can lose yourself in the vast bazaar, whose tough stall owners were the shock troops of the 1979 revolution. “Beware of north Tehran,” one is invariably told. “Don’t take its Westernized opinions at face value.” So I didn’t. Indeed, at one party, where the women by the interior swimming pool didn’t have a scarf or a manteau among them, and where the butler handed me a card printed in English that advertised special caviar supplies, and where the bar went on for a furlong, I met a sleek banker who, full of loathing for the regime as he was, defended Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons. In fact, his was the most vociferous defense that I heard. (Like all the others who ask so plaintively why Israel and Pakistan can have nukes and not Iran, he temporarily chose to forget that the mullahs keep denying that they have such weapons, or even seek them.)

...

Despite the terrifying culling of its youth in the 1980s, Iran is once again a young country. Indeed, more than half of its population is under 25. The mullahs, in an effort to make up the war deficit, provided large material incentives for women to bear great numbers of children. The consequence of this is a vast layer of frustrated young people who generally detest the clerics. You might call it a baby-boomerang. I am thinking of Jamshid, a clever young hustler whom I part-employed as a driver and fixer. Bright but only partially educated, energetic but effectively unemployed, he had been made to waste a lot of his time on compulsory military service and was continuing to waste time until he could think of a way of quitting the country. “When I was a baby, my mother took me to have my head patted by Khomeini. My fucking hair has been falling out ever since,” he said. You want crack cocaine, hookers, pornography, hooch? This is the downside of the “as if” option. There are thousands of even younger Jamshids lining the polluted boulevards and intersections, trafficking in everything known to man and paying off the riffraff of the morals police. Everybody knows that the mullahs live in luxury, stash money overseas, deny themselves nothing, and indulge in the most blatant hypocrisy. Cynicism about the clergy is universal, but it is especially among the young that one encounters it. It’s also among the young that one most often hears calls for American troops to arrive and bring goodies with them. Yet, after a while, this repeated note began to strike me as childish also. It’s a confession of powerlessness, an avoidance of responsibility, a demand that change come from somewhere else.

...

Every now and then you can sit in on late-night discussions where young people wonder when the eruption will come. Perhaps the police or the Revolutionary Guards will make an irrevocable mistake and fire into a crowd? Perhaps, at a given hour, a million women will simply remove their hijabs and defy the authorities? (This discussion gets more intense every year as the summer approaches and women face the irritation and humiliation of wearing it in heat and dust.) But nobody wants to be the first to be blinded by acid, or to have their face lovingly slashed by some Hezbollah enthusiast. The student activists of the Tehran “spring” of 1999, and of the elections which seemed to bring a reformist promise, have been picked off one by one, their papers closed and their leadership jailed and beaten. What else to do, then, except tune in to the new Iranian underground “grunge” scene, or kick back in front of the Italian soft-porn channel or one of the sports and fashion and anti-clerical channels beamed in by satellite from exiles in Los Angeles? As if …

...

و اینجا هم روایتش درباره ج.ا و بخصوص رفسنجانی خواندنیه:



It is a few miles from this triumph of civilization and culture that the Islamic republic, hostile to every form of modernity except advanced weapons and surveillance techniques, has decided to dig a huge, ugly tunnel into a hillside, the better to conceal its ambitions to become a nuclear state. The tunnel, along with some other “facilities” at Natanz and Bushehr, has been laboriously exposed in the course of a long, dreary inspection that has caught the re­gime lying without conscience, and also lying without fear of reprisal. The Bushehr reactor was actually begun in the time of the Shah, and it’s a good thing that he slightly outlived his mad kingly ambitions, because if he’d completed the work then the mullahs would have inherited a nuclear capacity ready-made.
And it is unlikely that sanctions will be lifted while the regime also continues to harbor so many wanted criminals, not just on its territory but among its leadership. Consider the repellent figure of Ali Fallahian, a former minister of “intelligence,” who faces an arrest warrant from a court in Berlin for sending a death squad to murder Iranian Kurds in the Mykonos restaurant in 1992. We also have the names of those Iranian officials who are wanted for blowing up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 and the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996.
All of these crimes were committed, without conscience and (so far) without reprisal, during the presidency of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was also the local star of the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages racket, the last time that an Ira­ni­an connection threatened to bring down an American president.
On the first occasion when I managed to breathe the same air as Rafsanjani, he was addressing a conference of Iranian women, who were made to sit swaddled in heavy clothing while he took his sweet time making some tedious observations about females and the Koran. One of the women’s magazines in Tehran is run by his daughter, but then, there is hardly an enterprise in the country, from the ­pistachio-nut monopoly to airlines and oil, in which Rafsanjani doesn’t hold an interest. The second time I was able to drink in his words was at “Friday prayers” at the university, the weekly grandstand from which the mullahs address the masses.
On this occasion, Rafsanjani was bursting with sound and fury and insult about imperialist threats to Iran, and swelling like a turkey-cock. (He’s a short guy, and is regularly lampooned on the street for his inability to grow a proper beard. In 2002, the last time he ran for election in Tehran, he came in below the bottom of the already fixed “list,” and some deft work was required to show him registering in the poll at all.) Demagogy aside, everybody knows that if a deal is to be done with Europe and the Americans, then it will probably be Rafsanjani who brokers it. He’s been on both sides of everything, all of his life, through war and revolution. He supported Khomeini in prolonging the war with Iraq, and then persuaded him to accept the U.N. resolution that ended it (and that may have killed the older man). He railed against the Great Satan, yet welcomed Reagan’s shamed envoys when they brought the cake and the Bible and offered to deal arms for hostages. He’s what our lazy press means when it describes some opportunist torturer and murderer as a “moderate,” or a “survivor.” I even met Iranians, completely sickened and disillusioned and ready to boycott any sham vote, who wearily said that Rafsanjani would be an improvement.

[Russell]

1786

اینیکی هم هست که البته این دیگه ساختگی نیست،بلکه هیچنز دربرنامه زنده Bill Maher انگشت وسط خودش را به حاظرین حواله میدهد و عبارت ِ مبارک Fuck you را جاری میکند !!

1785




Writer/author Christopher Hitchens on Friday night gave the finger to the Los Angeles studio audience of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher (http://www.hbo.com/billmaher/). As he laid out the case for how it's Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who wants World War Three, not George W. Bush, Hitchens cited how Ahmadinejad “says the Messiah is about to come back.” Maher quipped: "So does George Bush, by the way.” That caused a loud eruption of audience applause and cheering, which led Maher to clarify: “That's not facetious.” The crowd continued to applaud as Hitchens remarked, about those in attendance who had earlier cheered and laughed as Maher called Bush an “idiot” repeatedly: "That's not facetious. Your audience, which will clap at apparently anything, is frivolous.” Loud oohs and groans emanated from the audience, prompting Hitchens to give them the finger as he castigated them, “Fuck you, fuck you,” while the groans continued. (Transcript follows)

Video clip (41 seconds, includes vulgarity): Real (http://newsbusters.org/media/2006-08-25-HBORTBMHitchens.rm) (1.2 MB) or Windows Media (http://newsbusters.org/media/2006-08-25-HBORTBMHitchens.wmv) (1.4 MB), plus MP3 audio (http://newsbusters.org/media/2006-08-25-HBORTBMHitchens.mp3) (250 KB)

Joining Hitchens (Wikipedia profile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens), a list of his articles (http://www.hitchensweb.com/)) on the panel, Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, and former Democratic Senator Max Cleland.

Transcript of the relevant portion of the discussion about Iran on the August 25 season premiere of the weekly HBO show aired live Friday nights at 11pm EDT/10pm CDT:
Christopher Hitchens: “Who wants a Third Word War? The Iranian President says that one member state of the United Nations should be wiped physically from the map with all its people. He says the United States is a Satanic power. Members of his government, named members of his government have been caught sponsoring deaths squads. He's lied, he's lied to the European Union about his nuclear program-”

Bill Maher: “But you know that a lot-”

Hitchens: “He says the Messiah is about to come back. Who's looking for a war here?”

Maher: “So does George Bush, by the way [audience applause]. That's not facetious [audience applause continues].”

http://www.daftarche.com/images/imported/2013/04/99.jpgHitchens: “That's not facetious. Your audience, which will clap at apparently anything, is frivolous. [oohs and groans from audience, Hitchens gives them the finger] Fuck you, fuck you. [groans continue]”

Maher: “I was just saying what the President of Iran and the President of America have in common is that they both are a little too comfortable with the idea of the world coming to an end.”
Hitchens: “Cheer yourself up like that. The President has said, quite a great contrast before the podium of the Senate, I think applauded by most present, in his State of the Union address, that we support the democratic movement of the Iranian people to be free of theocracy -- not that we will impose ourselves on them, but that if they fight for it we're on their side. That seems to be the right position to take, jeer all you like.”




Read more: Hitchens Gives the Finger to Maher's Audience for 'Frivolous' Jeering of Bush | NewsBusters (http://newsbusters.org/node/7190#ixzz2RJ1oaNpl)