Without Compromise

Getty Images Christopher Hitchens at his home in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2010.

The past week, just before Christmas, has seen three deaths notable on the world scene. The first was that of cancer-stricken Christopher Hitchens, the British-American writer, polemicist, agitator, wit and formidable debater. His point of view on a wide range of subjects brought him fame as well as a circle of like-minded friends and admirers.

And his mindset also brought him enemies. He gave short shrift to the latter, and enjoyed the former.

The man could assemble an argument like few others. He was fully capable of demolishing the irrational, embarrassing the stupidly dangerous, and satirizing the absurd. He began life thinking left, ended it sharp to the right. That trip was given impetus by what he observed of the world around him, and the trajectory to the right was hastened by the events of 9/11, when he was mortally offended by the left chortling that American had it coming.

A mind to be reckoned with, a resolute atheist who alienated his brother who practised missionary zeal in his Christianity, he said and wrote opinion pieces that would shed him those friends whose friendship was a veneer, and cement that of the others, whether or not they shared his unshakeable convictions, because they valued and admired him as an individual with a fine mind.

With his diagnosis a year earlier of inoperable end-stage cancer, which his life-style hastened (his father died of esophageal cancer, and his own chain smoking and hard-liquor indulging weighted the trajectory of his health in the same direction; genetic inheritance aided and abetted by lifestyle, despite that he once claimed that smoking and drinking helped sharpen his mind, and since writing was so vitally important to him, both were worth the risk.)

He took the risk, and ran with it. And evidently never once looked back. Not even when his health was so compromised and his condition so dire that anyone else would have sought comfort in dulling the pain with enough opioids they would be unable to think rationally. Instead, he laboured right up to the last day of his life, writing the same kind of personal opinion pieces for celebrated journals that gained in reputation because they carried his work.

Christopher Hitchens was an original, and he owed nothing to anyone but his own hard-headed determination to offer moral resistance where it was due - without compromise.