it made it very much easier for police provocation to occur, because the planting of drugs was something that happened to almost everyone one knew." Hitchens was inspired to become a journalist after reading a piece by James Cameron. He avoided the recreational drug use of the time, saying "in my cohort we were slightly anti-hedonistic . He expressed affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by disagreement over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism and oligarchy, including that of "the unaccountable corporation".
In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell. In his adolescence, he was "bowled over" by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. He graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree. Hitchens was admitted to Balliol College, Oxford in 1967 where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was tutored by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny. Hitchens attended two independent schools- Mount House School, Tavistock, Devon, from the age of eight, and the Leys School in Cambridgeshire. Eric later worked as a bookkeeper for boatbuilders, speedboat-manufacturers and at a prep school. He paid tribute to his father's contribution to the war: "Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done." Eric's naval career required the family to move from base to base throughout Britain and its colonies, including to Malta, where Peter Hitchens was born in Sliema in 1951. Eric was deployed on HMS Jamaica, which took part in the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943. Hitchens often referred to Eric simply as 'the commander'. She was Jewish, something Hitchens discovered later in life he came to identify as a secular Jew. His mother had been a Wren, a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service. Their parents, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) and Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman 1921–1973), met in Scotland when serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the elder of two boys his brother, Peter, became a socially conservative journalist. Life and career Early life and education 1.2 Journalistic career in the UK (1971–1981).A heavy smoker and drinker since his teenage years, Hitchens died from complications related to esophageal cancer in December 2011. In the early 1980s he emigrated to America and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. īorn and educated in England, Hitchens worked as a journalist with the New Statesman magazine in London in the 1970s after leaving Oxford. The dictum "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" has become known as Hitchens's razor. He also advocated separation of church and state.
He argued for free expression and scientific discovery, and asserted that they were superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilisation. Hitchens described himself as an anti-theist, who saw all religions as false, harmful and authoritarian. However, he also supported the United States in the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War and other military interventions. Hitchens was very critical of aspects of American foreign policy, such as American involvement in war crimes in Vietnam, Chile and East Timor. Hitchens eventually stopped describing himself as a socialist, but he continued to identify as a Marxist, supporting Marx's materialist conception of history. Hitchens originally described himself as a democratic socialist, and he was a member of various socialist organisations throughout his life, including the International Socialists.
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author and journalist who wrote or edited over 30 books (including five essay collections) on culture, politics, and literature.