Nderron jete Christopher Hitchens, dashamires dhe mbeshtetes i kauzes sone kombetare

[gaetano]

Shkas per kete teme u be nje lajm i hidhur qe sapo lexova ne BBC.



Nuk e di nese ky eshte nenforumi i denje per te hapur kete teme. Por meqe Hitchens ka shkruajtur dhe debatuar mjaftueshem ne mbeshtetje te ceshtjes sone kombetare vendosa te hap ketu.


Eshte per te ardhur keq qe shume pak Shqiptare e njohin kontributin e tij, per mendimin tim eshte nje hero i harruar, prandaj vendosa te shkruaj dy rreshta ne shenje respekti dhe per te shprehur mirenjohjen per kete Shkrimtar te madh.



Christopher Hitchens, gazetar, publicist, komentator, shkrimtar, shkurt nje nga mendjet me te ndrituara te koheve moderne nderroi jete sot ne moshen 62 vjecare.

Hitchens ka qene nje nga mbeshtetesit me te flakte te kauzes Shqiptare dhe ka shkruajtur nje sere artikujsh qe karakterizohen nga nje revoltim dhe indinjate e thelle ne lidhje me padrejtesite qe ju bene popullit Shqiptar. Per me teper ka qene mik i ngushte i Tony Blair dhe ka luajtur nje rol te rendesishem persa i perket bindjeve qe krijoi Blair rreth Kosoves qe me pas cuan ne nderhyrjen ushtarake te NATOs.


Per ato qe nuk e njohin, Hitchens ka shkruar nje sere artikujsh brilliante rreth Kosoves dhe Shqiptareve. Ishte nje nga gazetaret dhe komentatoret e mi me te preferuar jo vetem per mbeshtetjen she simpatine qe ka treguar ndaj popullit tone por mbi te gjitha sepse zoteronte nje intelekt te jashtezakonshem te ndertuar mbi nje kod moral te palekundeshem, shkurt nje shpirt fisnik me nje orgjinalitet dhe mprehtesi qe do ja kishte zili cdokush.


Ithtaret e letrave humben nje nga intelektualet me brilant dhe Shqiptaret humben nje mik dhe mbeshtetes te afte.

Rest in peace Christopher Hitchens and Thank You for your continuing support.

[gaetano]

Te me falni qe po postoj ne anglisht por koha e kufizuar nuk me lejon ti perkthej ne Shqip




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Christopher Hitchens dies after battle with cancer
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Vanity Fair's editor said those who read him felt they knew him
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Blair v Hitchens: Religion debate
British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he was suffering from, at a Texas hospital.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher".

He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar".

"Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970.

He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.

'Cynical contrarian'
He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.

In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: "I love the imagery of struggle.

"I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."

Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut short: "It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you thought it was."


"Prospect of death makes me sober, objective"
Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War.

He became a correspondent for the Socialist Workers Party's International Socialism magazine.

In later life he moved away from the left. Following the September 11 attacks he argued with Noam Chomsky and others who suggested that US foreign policy had helped cause the tragedy.

He supported the Iraq War and backed George W Bush for re-election in 2004.

It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian", another "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay".

But he could dish out scathing critiques himself. Bill Clinton he called "a cynical, self-seeking ambitious thug", Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Mother Teresa a fraudulent fanatic.

'A great voice'
He also famously fell out with his brother, the Mail On Sunday journalist Peter Hitchens, though the pair were later reconciled.

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He could throw words up into the sky, they fell down in a marvellous pattern”

Denis McShane MP
Hitchens could also be a loyal friend. He stood by the author Salman Rushdie during the furore that followed the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

Writing on Twitter after the announcement of Hitchens' death, Mr Rushdie said: "Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops."

The MP Denis McShane was a student at Oxford with Hitchens.

He said: "Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea.

"He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words.

"He would drink a bottle of whisky when I would manage two glasses of wine and then be up in the morning writing 1,000 perfect words.

"He could throw words up into the sky, they fell down in a marvellous pattern."

Prolific writer
The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist.

He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer in 2010, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises."

The author and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins described him as the "finest orator of our time" and a "valiant fighter against all tyrants including God".

He said Hitchens had been a "wonderful mentor in a way".

"He encouraged me and I shall miss him terribly and so will everybody who values the life of the intellect, of rationality of reason," said Mr Dawkins.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who once worked as an intern for Hitchens, said: "Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.

"My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I've ever done.

"He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing."

Hitchens wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic.

He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, How Religion Poisons Everything and a memoir, Hitch-22.

A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released this year.

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HOME / FIGHTING WORDS : A WARTIME LEXICON.
The Serbs' Self-Inflicted Wounds
With Kosovo independent, Yugoslavia is finally dead.
By Christopher Hitchens|Posted Friday, Feb. 22, 2008, at 12:51 PM ET

Serbian protestors in Belgrade
Someone with a good memory of the conversation once told me how Lord Carrington, then one of the "mediators" of the incipient post-Yugoslavia war, came to the conclusion that Slobodan Milosevic was a highly dangerous man. Well-disposed toward Serbia (as the British establishment has always been), Carrington told the late dictator that he understood Serb concerns about significant Serbian minorities in Bosnia and Croatia. But why did Milosevic also insist on exclusive control over Kosovo, where the Albanian population was approximately 90 percent? "That," replied Milosevic coldly, "is for historical reasons." It's a shame, in retrospect, that it took us so long to diagnose the pathology of Serbia's combination of arrogance and self-pity, in which what is theirs is theirs and what is anybody else's is negotiable.
We used to read this same atavistic proclamation by the hellish light of burning Sarajevo, and now we glimpse it again through the flames of the blazing U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, and by the glare of similar but less dramatic arsons set by Serbs in ski masks in northern Kosovo itself. But it needs to be understood that "Serbia" itself has lost nothing and has nothing to complain about. With the independence of Kosovo, the Yugoslav idea is finally and completely dead, but it was Serbian irredentism that killed the last vestige of that idea, and it is to that account that the whole cost ought to be charged.
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Forget all the nonsense that you may have heard about Kosovo being "the Jerusalem" of Serbia. It may contain some beautiful and ancient Serbian and Serbian Orthodox cultural sites, but it is much more like Serbia's West Bank or Gaza, with a sweltering, penned-up, subject population who were for generations treated as if they were human refuse in the land of their own birth. Nobody who has spent any time in the territory, as I did during and after the eviction of the Serb militias, can believe for a single second that any Kosovar would ever again submit to rule from Belgrade. It's over.
But how did it begin? In fact, Kosovo has never been recognized internationally as part of Serbia. It was only ever recognized as part of Yugoslavia, and with the liquidation of that state Serbian claims upon its territory became null and void. A little history here is necessary.
During the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the then-distinct kingdom of Serbia, with some regional allies, did manage to invade and annex a formerly Ottoman territory that had been the scene of a Serbian military defeat in—wait for it—1389. (In that year, England was laying emotional claims to large and beautiful areas of France.) Serbian monarchist and nationalist propaganda hailed the "liberation" of the ancestral land, but the shrewdest foreign correspondent of the day took a different line:
Do not the facts, undeniable and irrefutable, force you to come to the conclusion that the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in old Serbia, in their national endeavor to correct data in the ethnological statistics that are not quite favorable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts?

Leon Trotsky, writing this in January 1913 as an open letter in the (Menshevik) paper Luch ("The Ray") was addressing the "liberal" Russian chauvinist politician Pavel Miliukov. So, as you can see, the arrogant Russian support for Orthodox Christian ethnic cleansing in the Balkans is not a new problem. (Under Russian President Vladimir Putin's pious rule, though, our own timorous press prefers not to call attention to the way in which Russian political thuggery is increasingly backed by an Orthodox religious hierarchy.)
The same Balkan war—as Trotsky had predicted—went on to draw in the whole of Europe and indeed the rest of the world, and by the time it ended, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had imploded entirely and there was to be a new state, Yugoslavia, where they had once jostled at the borders. You might argue that Kosovo was now part of Serbia by "right" of conquest (in other words, de facto), but in fact, not even Serbia had adjusted its own laws to make it a legal province de jure, and this was in any case moot because all future treaties and agreements were signed between Yugoslavia and the no-less-new state concept calling itself republican Turkey. Legal instruments agreed between these two entities recognized Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo, but solely in the sense that they recognized Belgrade as the capital of Yugoslavia. (For a more extended discussion of this essential constitutional point, see Noel Malcolm's Kosovo: A Short History.) Thus, and if we exempt some decisions made by Stalinist bureaucrats after the re-creation of Yugoslavia in 1945, Kosovo has never been treated or recognized as Serb territory within Yugoslavia and never at all by international treaties outside that former state. Even those hasty Stalinist decisions were later undone by Tito, who granted Kosovo a large measure of autonomy in 1974. It is very important to remember that Slobodan Milosevic launched his own petty and violent career, as the head of a Serb-Montenegrin crime family, precisely by cancelingKosovo's pre-existing autonomy in 1990, remaking himself as a nationalist demagogue instead of a Communist one, and bringing in the roof of the Yugoslav federation.
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You will by now have read dark remarks made by partisans of the Russian and Serb Orthodox viewpoint, to the effect that if one "secession" is allowed, then what is to prevent every Gypsy or Chechen or Ossetian from proclaiming their own statelet? You should, first, ask if the Bosnian Serbs ought not to have thought of this first and been better advised by the "realist" or Kissinger school that now weeps such hypocritical tears. You should, second, ask if you know of any case comparable to the Kosovo one, where a national minority was so long imprisoned within an artificial state.
Of course, one ought to acknowledge that this is a calamity for the Serbs and indeed an injustice in the sense of an insult to their pride and history. But the injustice was self-inflicted. I remember seeing, in Kosovo, the "settlements" for Serbs that the Milosevic regime was building in a vain effort to alter the demography. And who were the bedraggled "settlers"? The luckless Serbian civilians who had been living in the Krajina area of Croatia until their fearless leader's war of conquest for "Greater Serbia" had brought general disaster and seen them finally evicted from farms and homesteads they had garrisoned for centuries. Promised new land on colonized Albanian territory, they had been uprooted and evicted once again. Where are they now, I wonder? Perhaps stupidly stoning the McDonald's in Belgrade, and vowing fervently never to forget the lost glories of 1389, and maybe occasionally wondering where they made their original mistake.

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Christopher Hitchens: Why Kosovo still matters
Christopher Hitchens Jul 27, 2010 – 1:49 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 27, 2010 1:50 PM ET

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Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images)
A Kosovar ploughs a potato field near the village of Kcic
The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague — to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful — was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?

This line of thinking is wrong twice.

To begin with, there is no actual or theoretical world in which Kosovo could possibly have continued to be ruled from Belgrade, let alone considered part of Serbia. In the first place, the international treaties that originally recognized Kosovo as a constituent of Yugoslavia did just that: It was a member of a wider post-1918 federation and not a segment of just one province of it. (For the legal details of this crucial distinction, see Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History.) Even the old-style Yugoslav Communists granted Kosovo the status of an autonomous region in their 1974 constitution. It was the great crime — one of the many great crimes — of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to negate both these previous agreements. Almost as soon as he seized power in 1989, he repealed the autonomy of Kosovo. And he went on to destroy the entire Yugoslav federation in a mad and genocidal effort to put a conquering “Greater Serbia” in its place. The independence of Kosovo is the closing act in the defeat of that wicked and crazy scheme. The Albanian majority would no more agree to a restoration of Serbian sovereignty than Poland would seek to fuse itself with Russia or Germany.

As for the question of “precedent,” which is constantly and hypocritically brought up by Russia and China, one is forced to ask, “What precedent?”

Moscow and Beijing were the protectors and armorers of Milosevic while he sought to bring ethno-fascism to Europe, and both of them have restive minorities within their own borders or territorial claims against near neighbors. Would their line on Tibet or Georgia really change if the ICJ had ruled either way? The question answers itself. It’s risible enough that either regime pretends to take any notice of international law.

What, then, of Catalonia and the Basque region and Quebec and Scotland? These are very ancient and complex questions, none of them having anything at all in common with the recent history of the Balkans.

Experience seems to teach us that nations within larger nations do not embark on the course of secession lightly. If Spain or Canada or the United Kingdom were now treating their minorities with anything like the violence and bigotry and contempt with which Serbia handled Kosovo, then there is more than enough in the history of the Catalans and Basques and Québécois and Scots to suggest that they would have rebelled unstoppably by now. What seems to “brake” this nationalism, at least in the European cases, is the continued appeal of membership in a larger European Union that requires member states to respect smaller nations and remote regions. And this opportunity is now available to both Serbia and Kosovo as well, in a way that it could not have been while the Milosevic regime was violating every known principle of law. Meanwhile, the idea of Catalans or Scots rallying for independence under the slogan “Remember Kosovo” is barely even a fanciful one.

Apart from the peaceful and uncontested separation of the Czechs and Slovaks in the early 1990s (also conducted within the framework of potential European integration), in recent history I can only think of two actual “secessions” on what you might call European soil. Both were completely fraudulent and lawless. The first was the creation of a Turks-only statelet on the territory of Cyprus in 1983, and the second was the proclamation of a Serbs-only statelet in the territory of Bosnia a decade later. Neither “coup” was in any way the work of the inhabitants: Both were made possible only by the presence of invading and occupying troops. Neither ever secured, or will ever secure, international recognition. So much for “precedent.”

There is no need to romanticize the Kosovo state. At least two aspects of it need real and critical attention: its policy toward the Serb-majority enclave around the city of Mitrovica, and its attitude toward the treasury of Serbian religious and national architecture that stays on its soil. But the international community is in a far better position to safeguard and negotiate these matters than any fantasy of restored Serbian “sovereignty.”

We lose something important if we forget Kosovo and the harrowing events that finally led to the self-determination of its nearly 2-million inhabitants. Long deprived of even vestigial national and human rights, then forced at gunpoint onto deportation trains and threatened with the believable threat of mass murder, these people were belatedly rescued by an intervention that said, fairly simply, there is a limit beyond which law cannot be further broken and conscience further outraged.

There is no oil in Kosovo. The state interests of Israel were not involved. There were no votes to be gained; rather to the contrary, in fact. A large proportion of the victim population was and is Muslim. The least embarrassing way of phrasing this is to say that American and European honor was rather hastily saved, and a horrible threat to the peace of the region removed. Many brave and principled Serbs have good reason to recognize that a menace and an insult to their country, too, was abolished in the process.

That was then. Now it seems incautious to speculate how far a rogue regime can go, and still feel itself immune from reprisal or consequence. The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have sapped and eroded our confidence. The dictators in Iran and North Korea sense this, and probe, and often find only mush. And as in the case of Kosovo then and now, Russia and China can be counted on to provide the protection and the excuses.

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