Christopher Hitchens Quotes

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism.

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

The real problem with the Republican Party is that for decades it has shifted constantly to the right politically. Consequently, the Republican Party is picking up a very different demographic than it used to, a less well-educated demographic of people who are more prone to authoritarianism.

Left-wingers and right-wingers come together when they become extreme enough. The Nazi Party was called National Socialism, very similar to Stalin's Communism, with the addition of 'the Fatherland.'

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.

It is no accident that Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot and other butchers of note took special pains early in their despotic careers to suppress religion and undermine the traditional family. Theophobes would find such a characterization truly horrifying, but it's true. This explains why theophobia - while popular in faculty lounges, journalism seminars and Hollywood bacchanals - has not and probably never will attract a public following of any appreciable influence or size.

I don't think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability that we're seeing right now. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States.

In his book Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson referred to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini as the three devils of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Nietzshean dogma influenced each of them.

Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.

Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs.

For the Fascist, everything is the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.

I believe that the president's (Bush) leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers.

The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.

Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.

For the average American, the message is clear. Liberalism is no longer the answer. It is the problem.

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

Libertarianism and communism are equally crazy in opposite ways. Libertarians believe that it is possible to privatize everything without anarchy, while communists believe that it is possible to socialize everything without tyranny.

The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history's rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind's problems.

It is not the conservative psyche that needs analysis. Conservatives were right in the Cold War --so right that liberals are pretending they were with us all along -- and they are right about Iraq. It is Leftists who need to account for their consistently disgraceful positions throughout the Cold War and into the War on Terror.

I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.

The ruling family in Kuwait is good at blackmail, exploitation, and destruction of their opponents. They had perpetuated a grave U.S. conspiracy against us.... stabbing Iraq in the back with a poisoned dagger.

I'm getting a little tired of politicians trying to prove how 'moderate' and 'centrist' they are by taking more of my money and freedom. Where's this center - somewhere between Lenin and Stalin?

Jean Kirkpatrick [is] the chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration.

Fascist is not just an epithet. Fascist is a proper noun that means a specific thing. It's a real thing. It's not always referring to ancient history.

We know that England is crying for a leader, and that leader has emerged in the person of the greatest Englishman I have ever known, Sir Oswald Mosley... When the history of Europe comes to be written I can assure you that his name will not be second to either Mussolini or Hitler.