(Part 2) Top products from r/ChristopherHitchens

On death (from Hitch-22):

"The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall."

I also have to throw in a plug for The Quotable Hitchens.

He's actually a serious and very talented Youtuber. He's also a deconstructionist and contrarian. He recommends Terry Eagleton and Phil Zuckerman in this vid; it's a fair debate, Hitch would have welcomed it, obviously.

He called himself a Socialist until the 2000s, joined the British Labour party in 1965 and was part of a "Rosa Luxemburgist-Trotskyist sect" as he called the IS (International Socialists) until the early 70s. He said of himself he was a "Marxist by training" and in 2006 "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist" as socialism had stopped to be a viable alternative and a global movement as it was in his youth, and degenerated to corrupt populism a la Hugo Chavez. In god is not great, Hitchens called Marxism his "own secular faith" that "has been shaken and discarded, not without pain." He referred to his period of Marxist faith as "when I was a Marxist."

After reading Hitch 22 though I think that he at least at that time was no kind of Marxist in the conventional sense. He did not believe in the tenets of Marxism (proletarian revolution, the inevitability of capitalisms downfall etc., those things that Marx actually believed in). He was in my opinion rather a post-Marxist intellectual who was still influenced by Marxist discourse, meaning training in dialectical and historical materialism and referring to inner-Marxist arguments, especially those by dissidents, renegades and ex-communists, but also only in very general and undogmatic ways. Maybe you should read "Letters to a Young Contrarian" to get the idea of what he wanted young people to learn from his political development.

Interesting is also what he wrote about Leszek Kolakowski, whom he knew and with whom you should be familiar with if you call yourself a communist. My tip: read Main Currents of Marxism and see if you still want to call yourself that.

Hitch could have even thrown in the incompatibility of Jesus' teachings and capitalism.

On Hitches points in that video, heres a good read:

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Apocalyptic-Prophet-New-Millennium/dp/019512474X

Yes. Read it here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bomb-My-Garden-Mastermind/dp/0471741272

You can look at all his articles on Slate (starting here) where he argues for the Iraq war. They are the same articles that he put into A Long Short War his book justifying his stance on the Iraq war.