Christopher Hitchens left behind a one-line rule for dismissing unsupported claims
Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That compact principle, now called Hitchens's razor, is cited in philosophy and law. Its author was a Portsmouth-born polemicist who began as a Trotskyist, backed the Iraq invasion, and insisted to the end that he was still on the left.
Christopher Hitchens was born on 13 April 1949, the elder son of a Royal Navy commander, Eric, whose ship HMS Jamaica helped sink the German battleship Scharnhorst in December 1943. His mother Yvonne had served as a Wren; only at 38 did he learn she was of Jewish origin, after which he identified as Jewish. His younger brother Peter became a socially conservative journalist. After boarding schools in Devon and Cambridge, he read philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, appeared on University Challenge in 1968 and left in 1970 with a third-class degree. As a teenager he was gripped by Orwell and by Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
In the early 1980s he moved to the United States, writing for The Nation and Vanity Fair. His politics defy easy labels. A democratic socialist who had joined the International Socialists, he attacked American policy in Vietnam, Chile and East Timor yet supported intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, argued for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008. He backed gun rights and same-sex marriage, opposed the war on drugs, and saw Islamism as the main danger to the West.
Religion was his great target. Calling himself an antitheist rather than merely an atheist, he held every faith to be false, harmful and authoritarian, and argued that science and philosophy offer a better ethical guide. Alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, he was counted among New Atheism's so-called Four Horsemen.
Across 18 books he took aim at famous figures as readily as at gods, with hostile studies of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, the last in The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He died of complications from oesophageal cancer on 15 December 2011, aged 62.
Source: Christopher Hitchens
