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| children = | relatives = Peter Hitchens (brother) | influences = George Orwell, Leszek Kolakowski, Voltaire, Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Hofstadter, Paul Mark Scott, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, James Fenton, Jessica Mitford, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Israel Shahak,〔''Christopher Hitchens and his Critics'', p. 264.〕 Isaiah Berlin, W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag〔 | influenced = Johann Hari, Martin Amis, Douglas Murray, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, James Fenton | signature = Christopher Hitchens signature.svg| | website = }} Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British citizen, an author, religious and literary critic, and journalist. Hitchens later spent much of his career in the United States and became an American citizen in 2007.〔'Hitchens, Christopher Eric', Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2012 ; online edn, January 2012 (accessed 5 May 2012 )〕 He contributed to ''New Statesman'', ''The Nation'', ''The Atlantic'', ''London Review of Books'', ''The Times Literary Supplement'', ''Slate'', and ''Vanity Fair''. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, Hitchens criticized such public and generally popular figures as Mother Teresa; Bill Clinton; Henry Kissinger; Diana, Princess of Wales; and Pope Benedict XVI. He was the elder brother of the conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens. Having long described himself as a socialist and a Marxist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the controversy over ''The Satanic Verses'', followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and the antiwar movement's opposition to intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, Hitchens did not leave his position writing for ''The Nation'' until post-9/11, stating that he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."〔 The September 11 attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate" and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy that challenged "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind," and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine ''La Regle du Jeu''. I gave it the partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: It was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought." Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he stated that he considered himself still "a leftist" and "still think() like a Marxist". A noted critic of religion and an antitheist, he said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilisation. Hitchens authored ''God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,'' which was a New York Times bestseller. Hitchens died on 15 December 2011 from complications arising from esophageal cancer, a disease that he acknowledged was more than likely to have been due to his lifelong predilection for heavy smoking and drinking. ==Life and career== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Christopher Hitchens」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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