Peter Hitchens International relations and national sovereignty Can you tell me anything interesting about this article? Hitchens supports Israel and denies the notion of occupied Palestinian territory, Why does Hitchen support Isreal and deny the notion of occupied Palestinian territory? viewing the British exit from Mandatory Palestine as having left a legal vacuum. how does Peter gain national sovereignty? upholding the principle of Westphalian sovereignty, which he described as that "you didn't interfere in foreign countries because you didn't like the way they were governed". Anything else I should know about this article Hitchens has stated his "love" for the United States and his support for the US's being the successor to Britain WHEN DID HE BECOME THE SUCCESSOR TO BRITAIN? I don't know. HOW DOES INTERNATION RELATION RELATE TO HITCHENS? Hitchens opposed the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War,
WHY DID HITCHENS OPPOSE THE KOSOVO WAR?
WHY DID HITCHENS OPPOSE THE KOSOVO WAR?
Hitchens opposed the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War, on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States, and opposes the British military presence in Afghanistan, arguing that it has no achievable aim. He believes in upholding the principle of Westphalian sovereignty, which he described as that "you didn't interfere in foreign countries because you didn't like the way they were governed". He urges better relations between the West and Russia, viewing conflict as unnecessary, and, while condemning the old Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and Vladimir Putin as corrupt, he states his "strong affection for post-communist Russia." Also, he endorsed the 2014 Crimea referendum. On Europe, Hitchens argues that the United Kingdom should negotiate an amicable departure from the European Union, whose laws and traditions he regards as incompatible with the laws and liberties of Britain, and with the national independence of the United Kingdom as a whole. Likewise, he opposes the Human Rights Act (which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law) and the European Court of Human Rights. Hitchens has described London as "the fifth state in the United Kingdom" and as having "an explicitly republican form of government." He views the Good Friday Agreement as a "surrender" of the British state to the IRA, and its referendum as "manifestly unfair", arguing that the Protestant community was "browbeaten" into voting for it, and that the British government was put "under huge duress, both from IRA violence and from the White House." He opposes Scottish independence, because of his affection for Scotland and because he believes that independence within the EU would not be independence at all, but he also said in 2014 that, having itself ceded power to the EU, the British government cannot argue against Scottish independence. However, he supports devolution for Scotland, having changed his mind, but he is ambivalent about devolution for Wales, and still "completely against" it for Northern Ireland, while predicting that the province will eventually be absorbed as a "special autonomous zone" of the Republic of Ireland. Hitchens has stated his "love" for the United States and his support for the US's being the successor to Britain as the world's leading power, but he has denounced "sentimental" attitudes towards the alleged "Special Relationship", arguing that the US rightly follows its own self-interest to the detriment of Britain. Hitchens supports Israel and denies the notion of occupied Palestinian territory, viewing the British exit from Mandatory Palestine as having left a legal vacuum. He also praises Israel's "European" culture, which he says makes Israel "the permanent ally, in the Middle East, of the world's lawful and free countries", and which he suspects is the main reason for the perceived hostility of the Arab governments. However, he condemns past Jewish terrorism and some Israeli military actions. CANNOTANSWER
on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States,
Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an English journalist and author. Hitchens writes for The Mail on Sunday and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. He has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, and the New Statesman. Hitchens has published numerous books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, The War We Never Fought and The Phoney Victory.

Previously a socialist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of them and opposed many of their policies. His conservative Christian political views, such as his opposition to same-sex marriage and support of stricter recreational drug policies, have been met with criticism and debate in the United Kingdom. His older brother was author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens has frequently criticised the UK's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular lockdowns and mandates that the public wear face masks.

Personal life

Early life and family 
Peter Hitchens was born in Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), a naval officer, was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. Hitchens had hoped to become a naval officer himself, but an eye defect prevented him from doing so. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973) had met Eric while serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens) during World War II.

As a boy, Hitchens wanted to be an officer in the Royal Navy, like his father. However, when he was 10, he learned he had a lazy eye that could not be corrected, thereby barring him from serving in the Royal Navy.

Hitchens attended Mount House School, Tavistock, the Leys School, and the Oxford College of Further Education before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.

He married Eve Ross, the daughter of journalist David Ross, in 1983. They have a daughter and two sons. Their elder son, Dan, was editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic newspaper. Hitchens lives in Oxford.

Religion 
Hitchens was brought up in the Christian faith and attended Christian boarding schools but became an atheist, beginning to leave his faith at 15. He returned to church later in life, and is now an Anglican and a member of the Church of England.

Hitchens has Jewish descent via his maternal grandmother, a daughter of Polish Jewish migrants. His grandmother revealed this fact upon meeting his wife Eve Ross. Though his brother Christopher was quick to embrace his Jewish identity following the principle of matrilineal descent, Peter noted that they were only one-32nd Jewish by descent and has not identified as Jewish himself.

Relationship with his brother 
 
Hitchens' only sibling was the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who was two years older. Christopher said in 2005 that the main difference between the two was belief in the existence of God.

Peter was a member of the International Socialists (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party) from 1968 to 1975 (beginning at age 17) after Christopher introduced him to them.

The brothers fell out after Peter wrote a 2001 article in The Spectator which allegedly characterised Christopher as a Stalinist. After the birth of Peter's third child, the two brothers reconciled.

Peter's review of his brother's book God Is Not Great led to a public argument between the brothers but no renewed estrangement. In the review, Peter wrote that his brother's book made a number of incorrect assertions.

In 2007, the brothers appeared as panellists on BBC TV's Question Time, where they clashed on a number of issues. In 2008, in the US, they debated the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God. In 2010 at the Pew Research Center, the pair debated the nature of God in civilisation.

Christopher died in 2011; at a memorial service held for him in New York, Peter read a passage from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians which Christopher had read at their father's funeral.

Journalism 
He joined the Labour Party in 1977 but left shortly after campaigning for Ken Livingstone in 1979, thinking it was wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics, and coinciding with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement.

Hitchens began his journalistic career on the local press in Swindon and then at the Coventry Evening Telegraph. He then worked for the Daily Express between 1977 and 2000, initially as a reporter specialising in education and industrial and labour affairs, then as a political reporter, and subsequently as deputy political editor. Leaving parliamentary journalism to cover defence and diplomatic affairs, he reported on the decline and collapse of communist regimes in several Warsaw Pact countries, which culminated in a stint as Moscow correspondent and reporting on life there during the final months of the Soviet Union and the early years of the Russian Federation in 1990–92. He took part in reporting the UK 1992 general election, closely following Neil Kinnock. He then became the Daily Express Washington correspondent. Returning to Britain in 1995, he became a commentator and columnist.

In 2000, Hitchens left the Daily Express after its acquisition by Richard Desmond, stated that working for him would have represented a moral conflict of interest. Hitchens joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog in which he debates directly with readers. Hitchens has also written for The Spectator and The American Conservative magazines, and occasionally for The Guardian, Prospect, and the New Statesman.

After being shortlisted in 2007 and 2009, Hitchens won the Orwell Prize in political journalism in 2010. Peter Kellner, one of the Orwell Prize judges, described Hitchens's writing as being "as firm, polished and potentially lethal as a Guardsman's boot."

A regular on British radio and television, Hitchens has been on Question Time, Any Questions?, This Week, The Daily Politics and The Big Questions. He has authored and presented several documentaries on Channel 4, including critical examinations of Nelson Mandela and David Cameron. In the late 1990s, Hitchens co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell.

In 2010, Hitchens was described by Edward Lucas in The Economist as "a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behaviour at home and abroad." In 2009, Anthony Howard wrote of Hitchens, "the old revolutionary socialist has lost nothing of his passion and indignation as the years have passed us all by. It is merely the convictions that have changed, not the fervour and fanaticism with which they continue to be held."

Foreign reporting 
Hitchens first worked as a foreign reporter in the 1980s, mainly reporting from the Eastern Bloc, with his first such assignment to Poland during the Solidarity crisis in November 1980. He travelled to Japan and Germany during his time as an industrial reporter and reported from several other countries, including the US, Japan, and South Korea as part of the group of reporters accompanying Margaret Thatcher. After witnessing the Velvet Revolution and the Romanian Revolution, he became the Daily Express resident Moscow Correspondent in June 1990. He left Moscow (via the Bering Strait) in October 1992, and was briefly based in London during which time he reported from South Africa during the last days of apartheid, and from Somalia at the time of the United Nations intervention in the Somali Civil War.

In September 1993 he became the Daily Express resident Washington correspondent and, during the next two years, he reported from many of the 50 states, as well as from Canada, Haiti and Cuba. He continued his foreign reporting after joining The Mail on Sunday, for which he has written reports from all over the globe, including Russia, Ukraine (described by Edward Lucas as a "dismaying lapse"), Turkey, Gaza, a visit to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion, an undercover report from Iran (described by Iain Dale as "quite brilliant"), China, and North Korea.

Political views

Hitchens describes himself as a Burkean conservative, a social democrat and more recently, a Gaullist. In 2010, Michael Gove, writing in The Times, asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is "the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist." Hitchens joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003. This was when he challenged Michael Portillo for the Conservative nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999.

He has been consistently dismissive of the modern UK Conservative Party since the 1990s. This is because he believes that the party has since then abandoned true social conservatism. His view is that conservatism should embody a Burkean sense of public duty, conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty. Furthermore, this view holds a general hostility to hasty reforms and adventurism. This was central to his criticism of many policy proposals by the New Labour government, which he viewed as attacks on liberty and facets of a constitutional revolution. He believes the Conservative Party should be a defender of establishment institutions such as the church and the monarchy, but has shifted to social liberalism instead. He believes that atheism, along with cultural liberalism, are the causes of the systematic undermining of Christianity. Hitchens has written "The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This is not because they actively set out to achieve one." He also believes that the First World War and the devolution of marriage are the causes of the demise of Christianity in Europe.

In his book The Cameron Delusion, Hitchens argues that in the last few decades, the party has become virtually "indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour". He thinks the Conservative Party is now just a vehicle for "obtaining office for the sons of gentlemen" and he loathes the party. Hitchens's claim that the "Conservatives are now the main Left-wing party in the country" in his Mail on Sunday column has been met with much criticism.

He is in favour of capital punishment, and was the only British journalist to attend and write about the execution of British-born Nicholas Ingram in America in 1995.

He is opposed to the privatisation of railways.

Hitchens has been a prominent member of the campaign to clear the name of the late Bishop of Chichester, George Bell from allegations of child sexual abuse. He has argued that the Church of England convicted him in what he described as a kangaroo court, and stated his wish that allegations are not treated as proven facts.

Writings and thought 

Hitchens often comments on current issues and wider political and philosophical subjects.

He is a supporter of grammar schools.

War and terrorism 
Hitchens takes a critical stance on many wars. He was opposed to the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War, on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States, and opposed the war in Afghanistan.

He believes that the UK should never have joined in World War I, and is very critical of the view that World War II was "The Good War". His view on World War II is laid out in his book The Phoney Victory, in which he argues that the UK entered World War II too early, and that the UK overly glorifies World War II. He argues that while the allies were, indeed, fighting a radical evil, they sometimes used immoral methods, such as the allies’ carpet bombing of German civilians. He believes that Britain's entry into World War II led to its rapid decline after the war. This was because, among other things, it could not finance the war and was not prepared. As a result, it had to surrender much of its wealth and power to avoid bankruptcy. Hitchens' views on the UK in World War II been met with criticism by historians, with Richard J. Evans describing his book The Phoney Victory as 'riddled with errors'.

However, Hitchens is not anti-war since he believes that this position often leaves countries unprotected and defenceless in times of war. Instead, he argues that military power and the threat of war can be necessary deterrents against war.

Hitchens wrote about his concern of the use of security (anti-terrorism) legislation and increased police powers under New Labour, and how it has been used to suppress civil liberties; in Channel 4's Dispatches, Hitchens said the result of this legislation was that Britain ended up "sleepwalking into a Big Brother state".

European Union 

Peter Hitchens is very critical of the European Union and has argued for many years that Britain would be better off outside it. In 2017 he endorsed the Flexcit model proposed by Richard North and Christopher Booker as the most sensible and moderate way to leave the EU while remaining in the European Economic Area to preserve the economic benefits of EU membership. However, he did not vote in the 2016 UK EU referendum because he is critical of referendums. Instead of a referendum, he argued that a leave decision would be best done by voting into power a political party whose manifesto committed the country to withdrawal by an act of Parliament.

Vaccination

Hitchens promoted anti-vaccination views and misinformation about the MMR vaccine following the Lancet MMR autism fraud. He asked in a 2001 article: "Is it really our duty to risk our children's lives with this jab?" In 2013, he defended this earlier article, saying he was criticising "State bossiness in an age that has seen a catalogue of mistakes, panics and mysteries in the world of disease and medicine" and referred to the thalidomide scandal. He has defended discredited former doctor Andrew Wakefield.

After being vaccinated against COVID-19 in 2021, Hitchens rejected accusations he is an anti-vaxxer, but said that he was "more or less forced to have an immunisation I would not normally have bothered with".

War on drugs 
Hitchens has written about the enforcement of drug laws, most notably in his book The War We Never Fought (2012). He advocates harsher penalties properly enforced for possession and illegal use of cannabis, claiming that "cannabis has been mis-sold as a soft and harmless substance when in fact it's potentially extremely dangerous." He is opposed to the decriminalisation of recreational drugs in general. In 2012, Hitchens gave evidence to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee as part of its inquiry into drugs policy, and called for the British government to introduce a more hard-line policy on drugs. Hitchens disagrees with the notion of drug addiction, arguing that it goes against the notion of free will. He says: "People take drugs because they enjoy it."

LGBT rights and marriage 
Hitchens has strongly criticised the transgender rights movement, claiming that it promotes zealotry and that changes in traditional gender roles in society are "destroying truth itself".

Hitchens was one of the most outspoken opponents of same-sex marriage in 2013, the year before same-sex marriage was legal in Britain. However, in speaking to Guardian journalist Owen Jones in 2015, he said his real issue was with the decline of heterosexual marriage in society and the legalisation "of what was in effect no-fault divorce", and that same-sex marriage is "a side-effect ... It's a consequence of the collapse of heterosexual marriage, and I regret now getting involved in the argument about same-sex marriage, because it was a Stalingrad, a diversion. Why is one worrying about a few thousand people who want to have same-sex marriages, without being at all concerned about the collapse of heterosexual marriage, which involves millions of people, and millions of children?"

In 2019, the University of Buckingham organised a "free-speech society" after Hitchens' "no-platforming" by the University of Portsmouth over his views on gay rights, which they believed would cause conflict with LGBT events on campus. Hitchens was the first guest invited by the society to address students. In response to his being no-platformed by the University of Portsmouth, Hitchens was invited by the Archivist and the Head of History and Politics at The Portsmouth Grammar School to give a short talk on "The myth of Russian aggression" to Sixth Form pupils.

Environment 
Hitchens rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has criticised wind power in the United Kingdom and argued in 2015 that its expansion put the UK at risk of blackouts.

Rhodes Must Fall movement 
Upon reporting on the third day of Rhodes Must Fall protests at Oxford University in June 2020, footage of Hitchens strolling through the streets of the university, followed by protesters who opposed his presence, emerged. One video, edited and set to "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, went viral and was watched nearly one million times. Speaking to Mike Graham on talkRADIO, Hitchens described the protests as "the Establishment on parade".

COVID-19 pandemic 
Hitchens has repeatedly criticised the British government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. His statements casting doubt on the scientific efficacy of pandemic restrictions have been described as misinformation by several sources.

He has particularly criticised COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK, suggesting they would have negative consequences and questioned their epidemiological efficacy. Hitchens also criticised Imperial College London modelling, which suggested that there could be up to 500,000 COVID-19 deaths if the government did not impose a lockdown.

He has been a proponent of Sweden's response to the pandemic.

He has been against the mandatory wearing of face masks during the pandemic, referring to them as "face muzzles" or "face nappies". He also believes that government mandates to wear face coverings are oppressive.

Publications 
Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of Britain (1999) and A Brief History of Crime (2003), both critical of changes in British society since the 1960s. A compendium of his Daily Express columns was published as Monday Morning Blues in 2000. A Brief History of Crime was reissued as The Abolition of Liberty in April 2004, with an additional chapter on identity cards ("Your papers, please"), and with two chapters – on gun control ("Out of the barrel of a gun") and capital punishment ("Cruel and unusual") – removed.

The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way was published in May 2009, and The Rage Against God was published in Britain in March 2010, and in the US in May.

Hitchens's book The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs, about what he sees as the non-existence of the war on drugs, was published by Bloomsbury in the autumn of 2012.

In June 2014, Hitchens published his first e-book, Short Breaks in Mordor, a compendium of foreign reports.

The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion was published in August 2018 by I.B. Tauris. It addresses what Hitchens views as the national myth of the Second World War, which he believes did long-term damage to Britain and its position in the world. It was negatively reviewed by the historian Richard Evans in the New Statesman, who described the book as "riddled with errors".

Bibliography 
 
 The Abolition of Britain (1999)
 Monday Morning Blues (2000)
 A Brief History of Crime (2003), updated in paperback as The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (2004)
 The Broken Compass (2009), updated in paperback as The Cameron Delusion (2010)
 The Rage Against God (2010)
 The War We Never Fought (2012)
 Short Breaks in Mordor (2014)
 The Phoney Victory (2018) 
 Unconventional Wisdom (2020)

See also 

 Christian right
 Traditionalist conservatism

References

External links 

 
 
 
 
 
 

1951 births
Alumni of the University of York
British anti-communists
British male journalists
British people of Polish-Jewish descent
Conservatism in the United Kingdom
Converts to Anglicanism from atheism or agnosticism
Critics of atheism
Critics of Marxism
Daily Express people
Daily Mail journalists
English Anglicans
English bloggers
English columnists
Former Marxists
Former atheists and agnostics
British social commentators
Living people
People educated at The Leys School
People from Tavistock
People from Sliema
Socialist Workers Party (UK) members
20th-century British writers
21st-century British writers
Labour Party (UK) people
Conservative Party (UK) people
Critics of multiculturalism
English anti–Iraq War activists
British male bloggers
Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British-American author, polemicist, debater and journalist who in his youth took part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, joined organisations such as the International Socialists while at university and began to identify as a socialist. However, after the 11 September attacks he no longer regarded himself as a socialist and his political thinking became largely dominated by the issue of defending civilization from terrorists and against the totalitarian regimes that protect them. Hitchens nonetheless continued to identify as a Marxist, endorsing the materialist conception of history, but believed that Karl Marx had underestimated the revolutionary nature of capitalism. He sympathized with libertarian ideals of limited state interference, but considered libertarianism not to be a viable system. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he supported the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. After 9/11, Hitchens advocated the invasion of Iraq. In the 2004 election, he very slightly favored the incumbent Republican President George W. Bush or was neutral and in 2008 he favored the Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Political orientation

First principles
Alexander Linklater has summarized Hitchens' basic intellectual outlook as follows:

British republicanism
Hitchens was a vocal supporter of republicanism in the United Kingdom, advocating the abolition of the monarchy, and in 1990 published the book-long polemic The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish. His 1998 documentary Princess Diana: The Mourning After accused the British media of playing an essential role in creating a national, unchallengeable, and at times hysterical cult of personality surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, whereas previously they had been extremely critical of her and the monarchy after she had separated and divorced from Charles, Prince of Wales, and was having an affair with Egyptian billionaire Dodi Fayed. Hitchens claimed the public were behaving irrationally, and that many appeared to not even know why they were mourning. He also scrutinised the level of censorship against criticism of Diana and the monarchy but was accused, in a review by The Independent, of exaggerating on this point.

Labour Party
In 1965, Hitchens joined the Labour Party on the very first day he was eligible to vote, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organization was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam". Since then he stated he had "re-enlisted a few times" back into the Labour Party. In a 2001 interview with Reason, he said that, in 1979, despite being a member of the Labour Party, he wasn't going to vote for them, nor could he bring himself to "vote Conservative." He abstained from voting. Hitchens stated that by not voting for the Labour Party he was effectively voting for Margaret Thatcher to win, which he said he had "secretly hoped would happen." In a 2005 Vanity Fair article, he endorsed Tony Blair in the 2005 general election, mainly due to his support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a 2009 Slate article, he described that in the late 1970s the Labour Party moved to the right and stated that the downfall of the Labour Party came about upon Gordon Brown's becoming Prime Minister.

European Union
Hitchens was a supporter of the European Union. In an appearance on C-SPAN in 1993, Hitchens said, "As of 1992, there is a now a Euro passport that makes you free to travel within the boundaries of... member countries, and I've always liked the idea of European unity, and so I held out for a Euro passport. So I travel as a European."

Speaking at the launch of his brother Peter Hitchens' book, The Abolition of Britain at Conway Hall in London, Hitchens denounced the so-called Eurosceptic movement, describing it as "the British version of fascism". He went on to say, "Scepticism is a title of honour. These people are not sceptical. They’re fanatical. They’re dogmatic".

Northern Ireland
During a debate with George Galloway in 2005, Hitchens revealed that he was "a lifelong supporter of the reunification of Ireland". Many times, when discussing "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland, Hitchens would refer to their location as simply "Ireland", rather than "Northern Ireland", as for example in an article written for Slate in 2007, discussing the power-sharing and devolved government in Northern Ireland and describing it as "an agreement to divide the spoils of Ireland's six northeastern counties". During the IRA bombing campaigns on Great Britain, which began in the nineteen-seventies, Hitchens claimed that he had "kept two sets of books: I didn’t like bombs, I didn’t like the partition of Ireland."

Libertarianism and capitalism
In a 2001 interview with Reason, Hitchens said he had been interested in libertarian ideas when he was younger, but set aside those interests in the 1960s. He stated that capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist", but added, "I don't think that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system, are by any means all resolved." He also stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies." He also said that libertarians did not have a clear foreign policy stance.

In a 2001 C-SPAN appearance, he told a caller:

In a 1986 video debate on Socialism vs Capitalism with John Judis VS Harry Binswanger and John Ridpath, Hitchens said:

Objectivism 
Hitchens said of Objectivism, "I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough".

Marxism and socialism
In a 2001 interview with Reason, Hitchens said he became a Marxist and a Trotskyist in his teens, beliefs that further developed during his time at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1966, he was demonstrating in Trafalgar Square against the Vietnam War. In 1967, he joined the International Socialists while at Balliol College, Oxford. Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism. Shortly after he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect". This organisation is now known as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. He became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." He was also drawn into the political left by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation." He also said in the same interview with Reason that he could no longer say "I am a socialist". Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system.

In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating, "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist". In a June 2010 interview with The New York Times, he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist". In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system that he called for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was. Hitchens was an admirer of Che Guevara, yet in an essay written in 1997, he distanced himself from Che, and referred to the mythos surrounding him as a "cult". In 2004 he re-emphasized his positive view of Che, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do – fought and died for his beliefs."

He continued to regard Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin as great men, and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernisation of Russia. In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church, describing the church's power as "absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".

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."

According to Andrew Sullivan, his last words were "Capitalism, downfall."

American presidential endorsements

President Bill Clinton
Hitchens became increasingly disenchanted by the presidency of Bill Clinton, accusing him of being a rapist and a liar. Hitchens said the missile attacks by Clinton on Sudan constituted a war crime.

2000 United States presidential election

Hitchens supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 US presidential election. He elaborated on his support for Nader in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv, indicating that he was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore.

In 1999, Hitchens wrote a profile of Donald Trump for The Sunday Herald. Trump had expressed interest in running in the 2000 presidential election as a candidate for the Reform Party. Of Trump, Hitchens said, "Because the man with many monikers in many ways embodies his country and because this election cycle is now so absurd, and so much up for grabs, it is unwise to exclude anything... The best guess has to be that here's a man who hates to be alone, who needs approval and reinforcement, who talks a better game than he plays, who is crude, hyperactive, emotional and optimistic." Hitchens had previously written that Trump demonstrated "nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much."

President George W. Bush 
Prior to the September 11 attacks in 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was critical of President George W. Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He also criticised Bush's support for intelligent design and capital punishment. Hitchens defended Bush's post-11 September foreign policy, but he also criticised the actions of US troops in Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and the US government's use of waterboarding, which, after voluntarily undergoing it, he argued was definitely torture.

2004 United States presidential election
Hitchens supported George W. Bush in the 2004 US presidential election. He made a brief return to The Nation just before the election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".

2008 United States presidential election

Hitchens supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. In an article for Slate he stated, "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity." He was critical of both main party candidates, Obama and John McCain, but wrote that Obama would be the better choice. Hitchens went on to call McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace". Hitchens also wrote that "Obama is greatly overrated" and that the Obama-Biden ticket "show[s] some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience".

The American Revolution
After his disenchantment with socialism, Hitchens increasingly emphasized the centrality of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution to his political philosophy. As early as 2002, Hitchens wrote, "as the third millennium gets under way, and as the Russian and Chinese and Cuban revolutions drop below the horizon, it is possible to argue that the American revolution, with its promise of cosmopolitan democracy, is the only 'model' revolution that humanity has left to it". His enthusiasm for the U.S. Bill of Rights contrasts with a dim opinion of constitutional politics on the other side of the Atlantic. Hitchens notes, "the utter failure [of the EU] to compose a viable constitution" and the "brevity of the British constitution, perhaps because the motherland of the English-speaking peoples has absent-mindedly failed to evolve one in written form".

Columbus Day

Historian David Stannard interpreted an essay by Hitchens: as follows:

Foreign policy

Bosnian War
Hitchens cited the Bosnian War as monumentally changing his views on military intervention, commenting that for the first time he found himself on the side of neoconservatives. In an interview with Johann Hari he said:

Hitchens argued that the choice in Yugoslavia was between a multi-ethnic plural democracy led by Muslim president Alija Izetbegović in Bosnia and a fascistic, nationalistically inspired ethnically cleansed state driven by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević. He called Milošević a fascist and a "national-socialist", and condemned his war crimes in the Yugoslav Wars.  In God Is Not Great, he wrote about Christian Orthodox Serbian and Roman Catholic Croatian nationalism- and religion-inspired crimes against the Muslim Bosnians, at the hands of proponents of Serbian Chetnik revivalism, those in support of Croatian Ustashe revivalism and those for a Greater Serbia, during this period which are "often forgotten".

Kosovo War
Hitchens heavily supported western military intervention in Kosovo. He deplored Slobodan Milosevic's regime since the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars and the atrocities committed in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. Hitchens saw Milosevic and his nationalism as the prime catalyst for the break-up of Yugoslavia. He also highlighted the hypocrisy of Milosevic's regime in their concern about the Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia while at the same time suppressing autonomy for the 90% of Albanians in Kosovo.

After the war, Hitchens supported Kosovo's independence and criticized the burning of the US Embassy in Belgrade as a response to it:

Gulf War
Hitchens deplored and opposed the 1990–91 Gulf War in which the US expelled Iraq from Kuwait after a seven-month invasion and occupation of its neighbor undertaken in an effort to absorb it as its 19th province. He contended that President George H. W. Bush's supposedly principled enthusiasm for the "cause" of "liberating" Kuwait was nothing more than realpolitik. In the continuation of a national policy dating back to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in 1972, the latest "cause was yet another move in the policy of keeping a region divided and embittered, and therefore accessible to the franchisers of weaponry and the owners of black gold".

However, after the war, Hitchens scolded those within the US who had opposed the war by observing that "the peace movement in this country in my opinion acted in a very narrow, isolationist, and almost chauvinistic way. It said that a war was more or less alright with it as long as it could be guaranteed in advance that American casualties could be kept low... I thought that was a dishonourably narrow way of approaching the question. ... When large numbers of Iraqis were turned into soap...and many others, as we've since found out, were bulldozed and buried alive and in other ways done away with and people don't even want to think about the body count ...because they’re afraid of what they might find out."

Israeli−Palestinian conflict

Hitchens described Zionism as "an ethno-nationalist quasi-religious ideology" but argued that Zionism "nonetheless has founded a sort of democratic state which isn't any worse in its practice than many others with equally dubious origins." He stated that Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory in order to achieve security for Israel is "doomed to fail in the worst possible way", and the cessation of this "appallingly racist and messianic delusion" would "confront the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews". Hitchens contended that the "solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists" and wondered "What did they imagine would be the response of the followers of the Prophet [Muhammad]?" Hitchens bemoaned the transference of Arab secularism into religious terrorism as a means of democratisation: "the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad".

On 14 November 2004, Hitchens noted:

Hitchens had previously collaborated on this issue with Edward Said, publishing the 1988 book Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.

Hitchens had said of himself, "I am an Anti-Zionist. I'm one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians."

A review of his autobiography Hitch-22 in The Jewish Daily Forward refers to Hitchens "at the time [that he had learned that his grandparents were Jews, he had been] a prominent anti-Zionist" and says that he viewed Zionism "as an injustice against the Palestinians". Others have commented on his anti-Zionism as well. At other times - for example, speaking at 2nd annual Memorial for Daniel Pearl, and in print in an article for The Atlantic - he had made comments against the terrorism against Jews in the Middle East. Hitchens stated "But the Jews of the Arab lands were expelled again in revenge for the defeat of Palestinian nationalistic aspirations, in 1947–48, and now the absolute most evil and discredited fabrication of Jew-baiting Christian Europe – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – is eagerly promulgated in the Hamas charter and on the group's Web site and recycled through a whole nexus of outlets that includes schools as well as state-run television stations".

In Slate magazine, Hitchens pondered the notion that, instead of curing antisemitism through the creation of a Jewish state, "Zionism has only replaced and repositioned" it, saying: "there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews." Hitchens argued that instead of supporting Zionism, Jews should help "secularise and reform their own societies", believing that unless one is religious, "what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place?" Indeed, Hitchens claimed that the only justification for Zionism given by Jews is a religious one.

Kurdistan
Hitchens was a longtime observer of Saddam Hussein's regime, and publicly called for his removal, albeit only beginning in 1998. This led him to support the establishment of a self-governing state for the Kurds with political autonomy, if not full independence.

He also wore a lapel pin with the flag of Kurdistan on it, to show his solidarity with the Kurds.

War on terror

11 September attacks

In the months following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and the proper response to it in a highly charged exchange of letters in The Nation, including discussion of whether any comparison could be legitimately made between the 9/11 attacks and the 1998 Al Shifa bombing by the U.S. Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his former colleagues.

War in Afghanistan

Hitchens strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan, particularly in his "Fighting Words" columns in Slate.

Iraq War
Hitchens employed the term "Islamofascist" and supported the Iraq War, causing his critics to consider him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refused to embrace this designation, insisting, "I'm not any kind of conservative". In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues, and characterized himself as an unqualified "supporter of Paul Wolfowitz." He referred to his associations as "temporary neocon allies". In this period he opined that "the Bush administration [...] has redefined the lazy term 'conservative' to mean someone who is impatient with the status quo."

In the years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in response to his novel The Satanic Verses, Hitchens became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican-right that promoted pro-liberalism intervention, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz. Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.
 
Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and participated in public debates on the topic with George Galloway, Scott Ritter, and his brother Peter Hitchens. In its obituary of Hitchens, The Economist wrote that, "on the most consequential political issue of the last decade of his life, the bullshit got him."

Human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and Haditha

Hitchens criticised human rights abuses by US forces in Iraq but argued that conditions had improved considerably compared either to Saddam Hussein's previous regime or to previous US military actions in Vietnam.

In 2005, Hitchens criticised the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib but argued that overall "prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad", arguing that "before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp."

In a 5 June 2006 article on the alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Hitchens argued that whether or not a massacre had taken place, comparisons with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam were "so much propaganda and hot air" that ignored substantial changes in the rules of engagement and US Army procedures and training designed to prevent and discourage such an event. He argued that lesson had been learned such that "as a consequence, a training film about My Lai – "if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up" – has been in use for U. S. soldiers for some time".

Pre-war American and British Intelligence
In a variety of articles and interviews, Hitchens asserted that British intelligence was correct in claiming that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from Niger, and that US envoy Joseph Wilson had been dishonest in his public denials of it. He also pointed to discovered munitions in Iraq that violated U. N. Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687, the cease-fire agreements ending the 1991 Iraq-Kuwait conflict.

On 19 March 2007, Hitchens asked himself whether Western intelligence sources should have known that Iraq had 'no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.' In his response, Hitchens stated that:

Saddam Hussein
In July 2007, the New Statesman printed selected portions of a 1976 piece by Hitchens which they claimed "took a more admiring view of the Iraqi dictator" than his later strong support for ousting Saddam Hussein. In this Hitchens pointed to Iraq's military strength, oil reserves and young leadership to argue that Iraq was "a force to be reckoned with" and described Saddam Hussein as a leader "who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser." He also argued:

He argued that the means through which the Baathist regime rose to power were similar to that of Iran: having crushed any political dissent and notions of an independent Kurdish state. He stated that the Ba'ath party "point to efforts made by the party press to stimulate criticism of revolutionary shortcomings" but that these "fall rather short of permitting any organised opposition". He claimed that Iraq defended this by claiming "that the country is surrounded by enemies and attacked by imperialist intrigue" but that this had led to the repression of Kurdish nationalists.

Waterboarding
Hitchens was asked by Vanity Fair to experience waterboarding for himself at a U.S. Army training facility. In May 2008, Hitchens voluntarily underwent the procedure. Hitchens stopped the procedure after 11 seconds and subsequently endorsed the view that it was "torture." He concluded, "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

Lebanon
Hitchens described Lebanon as "the most plural society in the region" and criticized the Syrian regime for continuing to manipulate the country by proxies and by surrogates notably Hezbollah and the SSNP.

Hezbollah
In an article written on Slate, Hitchens stated:

Domestic policy

Civil liberties

Abortion

Hitchens stated, "[an] unborn child seems to me to be a real concept. It's not a growth or an appendix. You can't say the rights question doesn't come up. I don't think a woman should be forced to choose, or even can be", and, "as a materialist, I think it has been demonstrated that an embryo is a separate body and entity". Showing a desire to recognise the unborn as a life, he also affirmed a need for the right to abortion, stating, "the second-best fallback solution, which may sometimes be desirable for other reasons, is termination of pregnancy... all thinking people recognise a painful conflict of rights and interest in this question".

Hitchens opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and instead hoped for science to develop new solutions to unwanted pregnancies "that will make abortion more like a contraceptive procedure than a surgical one." He strongly criticized the encouragement of sexual abstinence within the pro-life movement of the Christian right, and the equating of contraceptives to abortion, as expressed by Mother Teresa and representatives of the Roman Catholic Church.

Capital punishment

Hitchens was a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. In a 2001 interview with Reason, Hitchens recalled that this was the very first issue on which he ever decided to take a stand in his youth. The reason for his opposition to capital punishment was that it gave too much power to the government. He later publicly opposed use of the death penalty for Saddam Hussein, an issue he discussed at length in his November 2006 essay "Don't Hang Saddam" for Slate.

Drug policy
Hitchens has called for the abolition of the "War on Drugs," which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley. Hitchens favored the legalization of cannabis for both recreational and medicinal purposes, and said, "Marijuana is a medicine. I have heard and read convincing arguments and had convincing testimony from real people who say that marijuana is a very useful medicine for the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and for glaucoma. To keep that out of the reach of the sick, it seems to me, is sadistic".

Genital integrity
Hitchens was a genital integrity activist, strongly criticizing the tradition of both male circumcision and female genital mutilation. In accordance with his antitheism, Hitchens described the tolerance of metzitzah b'peh (a Jewish tradition of sucking blood from the penis after the removal of the male foreskin) as "another disgusting religious practice".

Gun rights

Hitchens philosophically supported gun rights and was generally opposed to gun control. On the subject of the Second Amendment, Hitchens argued that as both an outright ban on guns and relying on a citizen militia for the national defence were equally idealistic and utopian, and that as gun control created a duopoly of force between the state and criminals, it would be more desirable to encourage training among average citizens so they might develop a better relationship with firearms. Although Hitchens repeatedly stated a broad support for the right to keep and bear arms, he was not an enthusiastic advocate and he rarely publicly discussed his views.

LGBT rights

Hitchens was a supporter of LGBT rights. He opposed sodomy laws and supported same-sex marriage. He argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage was the "socialization of homosexuality" and "demonstrates the spread of conservatism" among the gay community.

NSA warrantless surveillance

In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organisations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.

Voting rights

In March 2005, Hitchens supported further investigation into voting irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election.

Religion

At the New York Public Library in May 2007, Hitchens debated Al Sharpton on the issue of theism and anti-theism, giving rise to a memorable exchange about Mormonism in particular.

In God is Not Great, Hitchens contended that,

Hitchens was accused of "anti-Catholic bigotry" by others, including Brent Bozell and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge. When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile".

In 2005, Hitchens praised Vladimir Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition." In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."

On 4 April 2009, Hitchens debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig at Biola University on the topic "Does God Exist?" before both a live and closed circuit audience of over 15,000.

Islamism
Hitchens was deeply shocked by 14 February 1989 fatwa against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie. He became increasingly critical of what he called "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face": radical Islamists who supported the fatwa against Rushdie and sought the recreation of the medieval caliphate.

Hitchens is often credited with coining the term "Islamofascism", but Hitchens himself denied it, attributing its coinage to Malise Ruthven.

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC, in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Mormonism
Hitchens was extremely critical of the doctrinal claims of Mormonism and opposed the candidacy of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a practicing Mormon.

References

Sources

External links
 

Political views
Political views by person A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq is a collection of twenty-two articles originally written by Christopher Hitchens for the online magazine Slate. The articles support the impending American-led invasion of Iraq and were written between November 7, 2002 and April 18, 2003.

Background
In the preface, Hitchens is typically unapologetic about his pro-invasion stance (a stance which solidified the author's break with the anti-war leadership of the American left), stating:

Among the many individuals credited in the introduction are Barham Salih (a member of the Iraqi National Assembly and former prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), Kanan Makiya (author of a number of books, including 1989's best-selling Republic of Fear) and Ahmad Chalabi (former deputy Prime Minister of Iraq).

Contents
The essays are constructed in highly polemical prose, and heap especial scorn on what Hitchens sees as the sickly masochism of the dovish Left, systematically addressing and dismissing the most popular of the antiwar arguments while tendering ordered expostulations of his own position.  Turkey and France were heavily chastised, while a qualified defence of George W. Bush is mounted, in one essay against the charge that the US president merits the appellative "cowboy" and in another that he rushed his nation into war.

"I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors," wrote Hitchens in 2008, "and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity."

Responses

Hitchens is seen by many as a "liberal hawk", comprising left-leaning commentators who supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. This informal grouping includes the British writers Nick Cohen, Johann Hari, David Aaronovitch, Norman Geras, Julie Burchill, and the Canadian Michael Ignatieff (see Euston Manifesto). Neoconservatives of the last decade are hesitant to embrace Hitchens as one of their own, in part because of his harsh criticisms of Ronald Reagan  and his refusal to associate himself as such.

Despite his many articles supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the 2004 US presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for George W. Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".

References

2003 non-fiction books
Books about the 2003 invasion of Iraq
American history books
Books by Christopher Hitchens
English-language books