This comes from a post on Mediaite. The last interview Christopher Hitchens gave before his passing this week was with Richard Dawkins. Mediaite has a few clips, my favorite being Hitchens talking about the difficulty of pinning down his political philosophy, either left or right.
“I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.”
I think this is why I like him so much, even if I found him to be abrasive at times. He had the same starting point for his political philosophy I have for my own: oppose all totalitarians.
The one thing I might add to this quote is the political religion. You could add Lenin to that list of leaders.
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