An Example of Christopher Hitchens’s Plagiarism

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I came upon the following example of Christopher Hitchens plagiarism in his National Book Award finalist volume, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).  Hitchens gives himself away by copying the misspelled names of several gods from his plagiarized source (discussion follows the comparative chart).  



This example of Hitchens’s plagiarism came to my attention when I was trying to make sense of his referring to the mother of the Hindu deity Krishna as “Devaka” rather than of “Devaki,” the latter being correct.  (Traditionally Devaka was Krishna's maternal grandfather, not his mother).

The source Hitchens plagiarized was the obscure 1930s work Essays on Freethinking by the atheist writer Chapman Cohen (1868-1954). What Hitchens did was simply copy what Cohen had written without acknowledgement and without an adequate grasp of its subject matter.  The result was that Hitchens copied over even Cohen’s misspellings of the names of the deities and other figures. 

These misspellings include: (1) “Devaka” (should be "Devaki"), (2) “Catlicus” (should be "Coatlicue"), and (3) “Agdestris” (should be "Agdistis").

Hitchens gave himself away as a plagiarist in this case by actually reprinting the plagiarized excerpt from Cohen in The Portable Atheist (2007).

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