Saturday, December 17, 2011

Remembering Hitchens

I join a lot of people today who mourn the death of Christopher Hitchens,  he influenced a lot of people and like all good writers made me jealous of his gift.  Like a lot of people outside of the US and Britain, I only grew aware of Hitchens' existence with the advent of the internet,  before that, I did not have any means to read his writing.  Fittingly enough, I first became aware of him because of his pro-Iraq war writing.

As a Filipino,  I was against the 2nd Iraq war because my country has been subject to the US routinely running roughshod over the sovereignty of the Philippines.  So,  the protection of every nation's sovereignty is very important to me.  Hitchens' argument for the war though is different from those of Bush and co.,  he was arguing that if we as people want to protect the human rights of Iraqi's, the best method will be to remove Saddam. 

I liked that Hitchens presented a different framework for viewing the Iraq war.  I love people who challenges my perception of the world.  He did this and did it with such masterful use of words.

He will be missed.

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