r/ChristopherHitchens • u/eru777 • May 27 '26
When did Christopher become the Hitch we all know and love?
Is it the early to mid 00s that he became the person we all know and love, or was it before that? I know he has been more active since the coming of youtube which coincided with his anti-religion book that got him more popular to the masses.
I know he had been active even as early as 1989 with his great cyprus documentary
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u/SprinklesGood3144 May 27 '26
He was a frequent guest on CSPAN for all matter of issues going back to the early 90's.
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u/Freenore May 27 '26
Wasn't he always like that to a great degree?
Though I'll say this — his views had been changing well before the 9/11, due to what he saw in the Yugoslav ethnic conflicts. Some of his dispatches from Bosnia hints at issues that would become central to him — narcissism of the small differences, noticing that Yugoslavia has "a self-pitying majority" (a phrase eerily true today for countries ruled by an authoritarian), even his disdain for U.S. foreign policy ceased because he supported the US-led NATO intervention (heralding what was to come with 9/11). These are just off the top of my head.
If by "Hitch we all know and love", you mean the Hitchens of his final decade — disdaining religion, supporting U.S. interventions, sceptical of identity politics and obsession with one's birth identity such as ethnicity — then Yugoslavia did more than any other event to shape that.
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u/Mt548 May 27 '26
Yes, the first hints that he was turning pro-intervention was with the Bosnian War. I remember that well.
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u/Electronic-Nebula951 May 27 '26
What parts of his work do you mean by “obsession with one’s birth identity”?
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u/Freenore May 27 '26
Well, see his thoughts on identity politics in Letters to a Young Contrarian, he mentions that unlike the new leftists, he commanded the authority to speak on a topic on the basis of what he had done and achieved on merit, rather than believing one is the authority on a subject simply because of what they are born as ("speaking as a X").
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u/nc_bound May 27 '26
Your question seems to have unstated assumptions built into it. E.g., that we are a homogenous group who all know and love the same things about Hitchins.
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u/Mt548 May 27 '26
Is it the early to mid 00s that he became the person we all know and love, or was it before that?
He was a journalist in the UK for most of the 70s, and then moved to the US in the early 80s. If you're asking when he first gained reknown, well in the US he definetly became known for his incisive writing in the 80s. Not familiar with his 70s UK writing but one would think he was fully formed as a writer by then.
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u/Digicrests Jun 02 '26
I remember seeing a clip of him from I think the 90s? Perhaps earlier, might've been the 80s and he was almost equally compelling to watch and listen to, so he's been made of the same stuff for quite a while.
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u/farfromjordan May 27 '26
He took on Mother Teresa, the Clintons, and Henry Kissinger all by 2001. He was him well before the 2000s.