I don't think this writing reflects Hitchens particularly well. > Everything that distinguishes New Atheism from mere secularism... If I remember Hitchen's li

I don't think this writing reflects Hitchens particularly well. > Everything that distinguishes New Atheism from mere secularism... If I remember Hitchen's line of reasoning about secularism, it was that governments absolutely need to be secular - not just for the freedom of atheists, but for the freedom to practice one's own religion freely - which he was not against. A religious government will only govern for its own religion. > In fact, New Atheism was, at its root, not about religion at all. It was about science, and its original enemies were not fundamentalists of any faith but a group of atheist Marxist biologists. > Turns out it was bog-standard neoconservatism all along! in a 2010 BBC interview, [Hitchens] stated that he "still [thought] like a Marxist" and considered himself "a leftist". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens] > New Atheism came into its own during the Global War on Terror, when secular neoconservatives like Hitchens realized that the arguments being used against Anglo religious fundamentalism could be wielded very conveniently against Islamic radicalism. This offered a way to challenge the common antiwar framing of the US invasion of Iraq and other Bush-era military operations as a new Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Hitchens being pro-invasion of Iraq did surprise me, but I listened anyway. He didn't tackle the "Bush knowingly lied about WMDs and used the unrelated September 11 attacks to go to war with Iraq for its oil" (which is all we heard in our echo chamber, right?). He said that Saddam was a tyrant to his own people, and was into genociding the Kurds, hence the need for regime change. I believe he was also sympathetic to Palestine, saying that Israel wouldn't declare where their border actually was, so no meaningful peace talks could actually happen.