Matt Johnson Didn’t Read My Hitchens Book Very Carefully

About a month ago, I was one of three guests on Iona Italia’s podcast. Two of us had written books about Christopher Hitchens and the other was planning to do so. The recording ended up lasting for several hours but we all agreed to scrap it and rerecord since at least a couple of those hours largely consisted of me and the other two guests yelling at each other about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and it wouldn’t have been especially fun for anyone to slog through as a listener.

One of those other two guests, Matt Johnson, just wrote a review of my book for Quillette. Most of the substance of that review is about what you’d expect. Mostly he seems upset that I didn’t emphasize the points he thinks should be emphasized (and that presumably will be in his one book) and befuddled about why I’d choose to write about Hitchens even though I’m neither a hater nor an uncritical admirer and I spend most of my time evaluating his arguments (and those of his interlocutors) and exploring the underlying subjects rather than just describing what Hitchens himself said.

All I can say is that (a) part of the reason I find Hitchens fascinating is that he wrote about so many subjects I’m interested in, (b) evaluating arguments is kind of my thing, and (c) a big element in why Hitchens still matters to me is that I have severely mixed feelings about him. I admire him in many ways and I always learn from engagement with his work but I also think he got important thinks wrong and that he severely lost the plot on foreign policy in his final decade. I wanted to grapple with all of that in a way I haven’t seen anyone do in the (surprisingly little) that’s been written about the man since his death.

Johnson doesn’t find that project interesting and disagrees with me about Hitch’s foreign policy positions. Fair enough. If he’d just expressed his disagreement with the substance of the book I wouldn’t bother commenting at anything like this length. But in taking me to task for the things I said (or that he somehow decided that I meant) in my book Johnson is just severely inaccurate about details that are easy to objectively check and I damn well am going to comment at length about that. A few examples: