Christopher Hitchens - [~2005] - Why Orwell Matters

this is the kickoff event of the Orwell symposium and there are several things that are planned for this this is a part of an initiative that has been sponsored by and initiated by the National Council of teachers of English and it's actually entitled 1984 plus 20 which means that the college university and high school students across the nation right now are actually looking at Orwell's works and I think actually now is a good time to be doing this there is a sense of doublethink that many of us that are my age are beginning to feel particularly as we watch the news and see our nation yet again engaged in hostilities in Southeast Asia I mean Iraq yeah John got it there is a sense that we're repeating history here and I think Orwell was one of the people that asked us to think very critically of how those messages are sent by governments not simply our government but governments in general and I think now is a good time to start thinking about that and examining how we use language and why we use language in the way that we use language to represent events in the world so there are several planned events today our featured speaker is Christopher Hitchens we will on November 18th invite Philip winger and there will be a display of students scholarly works on December 1st and 2nd and there'll be more information posted about these events as they occur now there are also several people that I would like to thank who are the organizing principles behind this Debbie Edelman I know she's here Jim Allen dan Thorp I know I saw him earlier too Bob Dixon color Daniel Keyes Jason stark and Christine kick olds they're the ones that planned and and put together these events and believe me to do this kind of work takes a great deal of planning an effort on their part so it is my privilege now to introduce christopher hitchens he is an author of many books most notably and these are just a very few of them Callahan the road to number 10 hostage to history Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger no one left to lie to the values of the worst family and his most recent book as I understand it a long short war the postponed liberation of Iraq for many years he has been a columnist or contributor to such periodicals as the nation Vanity Fair The Times Literary Supplement and he has been a Washington editor of Harper's a book critic for Newsday and irregularly and he regularly contributes to the London Review of Books vogue I'm having trouble reconciling those two things and the new left review and The Times Literary Supplement he's been called and I hope he takes us as a a a compliment ass Arabic and nonconformist with a predilection for irony and satire he is often controversial and however having said that basic books had enough confidence in his 2002 book the one most at issue here why Orwell matters to order a very large first printing for a scholarly work the American Library Association's book lists as Hitchens clarifies all that Orwell accomplished and by extension of firms literature's unique and essential powers Christopher Hitchens well them Christopher if I may and ladies and gentlemen and brothers and sisters and I suppose any trisexual element present thank you for coming on such a beautiful afternoon and thank you for such a handsome introduction had no idea the American Library Association had said that here's my promise to you I won't leave here till there is no one present you can say they had a question that I didn't answer and not till gets the cocktail hour at any rate I won't do that a second I wouldn't come to a group of this kind without doing a little bit of homework about who you were and who you are and I've done some checking and I was told that the required lot of fuel here who knew about a well quite a lot of people who cared about a well quite a lot of people who didn't know about him quite a lot who didn't care and some who neither knew nor cared I'm going to speak at first to those who are in the latter category and see if I can win you over and in my effort to do that I hope I'll have something to say that's of interest to those who consider themselves experts on the subject or specialists or just interested and I make one other promise is there anyone here who's been told they have to come here by their professor or who's having to do it for credit well I just tell you now that I am an adjunct professor at new school University of New York and I'm I can sign a piece of paper if you want that says you don't have to stay I don't do captive audiences I said you don't do them in the name of war well so no one who has been till they have to be here has to remain let's just see now the doors have been locked as I requested yes very well all right I have to start with the disappointment I asked when I arrived does anyone happen to have a copy of my book I might not need it but I might and a very kindly professor here said he could go to the library and get it and the reason I most wanted it initially was for the photograph that's on the jacket so this is unfortunate how your library has has done this and I'm glad to think the book is that worth stealing that it would be this identifiable on a secondhand shop but I did in fact want to ask you to begin by inviting you to in a sense close your eyes and pretend you haven't had this as a subject before or as a syllabus matter before and actually just have a picture in your heads the one that I have all the time what you would have and perhaps some of you have seen pictures of the author is that of a slightly tall angular shy but not unconfident Englishmen with a hollow cheat look a rather dolorous look in some ways or the solemn look but yet it's not the look of someone with no sense of humor it's a look of someone who's been through quite a lot and has tried his best but there is a final element of pessimism to it as well as I think some of the that hard to understand handsomeness for which we English people are so and I think rightly famed it's an ironic look actually here's what it is and it's a look of someone who has suffered a great deal and I want to begin by proposing it in this manner there were three great subjects in the in the century that's just closed with rather a big slam of the door behind us that what what you've heard called the twentieth century some of you were you just born in it I guess and there were three as I say three great great dramas great crises great moral and intellectual and ideological confrontations in that period and you all have had to know about some of them and you'll carry on hearing about this by the way as you will carry on hearing about this author whether he's on a syllabus or not you'll wonder why he keeps coming up and part of my reply to that implied question is this of these three questions which were the right of European countries of white people in Western Europe to be exact the right of such people to govern the rest of the world to govern Africa and Asia and large parts of South America and Australasia as if it was right as if it was a birthright the grand confrontation between democracy and First National Socialism sometimes called Nazism or fascism totalitarian racists one-party military state concept organized for war organized for aggression and third and the one that ended most recently the confrontation between the democratic way of life and the Communist alternative where the citizen is declared to be the property of the state and the state promises in return for this trade to make the citizen better off better educated that are fed with better healthcare but eventually doesn't keep that promise either but retains its hold on the citizen as property I'm paraphrasing that that's roughly these were three these were the things that preoccupied anyone who could read or feel or think the last century and Georgia will got all of them right in my judgment this is of course of moral judgment of my own but I'm willing to back it up George Orwell's father was involved in the opium trade from then British controlled India to China in other words British gunboats and warships could force Chinese cities to buy in chinese waterways to be open to the compulsory trade in opium made in India and other British possessions in those days the Empire believed in the war for drugs nor the war on drugs not that smaller difference in some ways in those days they thought that if you gave people drugs who will keep them quiet as well as make money for the drug dealers in other words all wells family was built on a guilty secret a dirty secret the colonial secret and he himself volunteered in his early life to become a policeman in a part of that Empire Burma and now known as Myanmar and living under a stone-age dictatorship and by the experience I think of disliking his father and his father's business and feeling guilty about the source of the family income and feeling sick about the job he was doing he came to a very important conclusion which is a very modern one by the way in some ways post-colonial studies are founded by George Orwell and his writing and so many of the works now written about the relationship between power and race and gender or sex I'll put it this bluntly as this if you were in colonial Burma the most westernized Burmese man and you'd been to three European universities and he spoke English better than most English people do and you had five qualifications wouldn't make any difference to you you would never be allowed to enter the Englishman's Club in Rangoon in the capital of the country your net would never be allowed in by the front door you might possibly be allowed in on special occasions as a guest but you'd never get in there in your own country you would be considered alien because you were born there that that would be a good definition of racism I think however if you were the least educated and least empowered and least literate Burmese woman you could go into any Englishman's villa anytime you liked as long as as it was by the back door and as long as it was a money relationship and in fact in two worlds first novel burmese days he writes about a policeman who was clearly based on himself who has a live-in mistress and servant who he has quite clearly bought from her family he's not even renting her he's bought her she's in a feta slave and it's my strong opinion having studied this man's life and writing that he threw up the job we don't know why he never said he just resigned as a policeman and resigned from the colonial service and came home but I think that he was very afraid that he would become part of the dirty secret himself that he would either become a racist or a sadist or both by being in this situation and wanted to repudiate this in himself and by the way I think that's an important point on its own because many of you know what as it were the right opinion is to have on something or what the liberal or decent view is to take on a topic and would shudder from anyone who was a bigot and so you should and a lot of work went into creating a society where that choice was a fairly easy one to make but that wasn't the case with George Orwell at a time when assumptions of this kind were very common and the critical thing about it is he didn't face this prejudice in other people he wasn't a liberal humanitarian facing down policemen in Selma Alabama who had hoses and dogs on their side he was facing that policeman in himself he was wondering what it would be like to be that person and decided he'd have to vanquish it within his own personality and that I submit is often that the harder of the struggles to undertake and it's worth remembering how chaff that used to be at any rate what he understood when he'd done with this and he was then still quite young he had never been to university he'd never had any money he never had a safe or steady job was he knew that there was a filthy secret at the heart and that that secret was in a sense of pornographic secret that some people don't even need the excuse to wield power they won't even say we're doing it for your own good or to civilize your colony or to save you from communism or to save you from fascism or to liberate you from capitalism or anything this time no not even an excuse we're in Parkers we'd like it we're in power because we we enjoy punishing people we're empowered as we enjoy owning people we enjoy telling them what they can do we enjoy telling them when we feel like having sex with them and when we don't we do this for its own sake the pornography element of power is a very important thing to understand it's very common today among a number of dictators and despots it's an exercise of sheer cruelty and I think it was a tremendous advice to all well as a writer to have understood this right from the start just strip away the hypocrisy that underlies Authority and he'd done all this and come back to England who decided to go out to be a and then to take the dirtiest jobs he could find and pretend to be someone who was going to be arrested for drunkenness or and thrown in the cells for a few nights or sleeping in the Doss houses or hanging around among the unemployed he went native as we used to say as if he was in a colony but in his own country he'd done all this by the time that what we call the 30s the great political decade of the century had God had got underway so that when the grand confrontation of our democracy communism Stalinist and fascism Nazism hit not just Europe but the world he was ready for it in a way he knew he knew what the subtexts were and I believe that that helped him to be prescient it's an interesting thing about all well he went to fight against fascism in Spain against the assault of Hitler and Mussolini on the democratically chosen Republican government of Spain in 1936 he went to fight uh more more earlier than most people did he felt it evident to himself that he had to put his own body in in the way he had to become a soldier again and a policeman again in the sense a fighter disciplinarian again and try and organize a resistance he saw this coming more than more quickly than men men he did but you can read him exhaustively as I have done I can now claim to have read every word he's written he hardly writes anything about fascism at all he hardly writes a single essay saying why you should be against it he takes it for granted that when you look down the gun barrel of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and fascism and Nazism that you you don't need to be told what's wrong with it here's everything you hate here's every bullying father every crushed repressed mother every sadistic prison water every exploiting capitalist every racist and Jew Bator every every thuggin bully and sadist and exploit earth has ever been all rolled into one and then refined and double distilled and redone again save got the absolutely pure essence of everything that's hateful we tend to sneer more I've heard people say at the use of the word evil by politicians by politicians one should probably suspect the use of this word but it's not possible if you want to write more away or you want to write critically you want to write historically it's not possible to do without this word certain words are necessary we can't do without it indeed even the most delicate liberal these days we'll talk about the lesser evil which shall I say is at least a concession to the use of the word we can't take it out of our for cavalry well he was looking at straight in the eye and he took a bullet through the throat in Spain from the fascist side and he nearly got a bullet in the back from the communist side but before I get to that bit I just must tell you in case I'm sounding too solemn that the bullet that went through his throat from the fascist sniper hit him right there and it missed his larynx it missed his carotid artery it missed his spinal cord and it just grazed his vocal cords so that from then on he was spoke with a slight rasp in his voice and he had to go to a hospital because a bullet becomes in GeoNet one side and goes out the other means you have to lie down for a bit and everyone who came to see him knew that the bullet had gone right through it it missed his larynx missed his carotid artery in missed his spinal cord and only grazed his vocal cords and all of them said the same thing can you guess what it was that was lucky and he said if I was lucky I wouldn't have got shot in the throat at all in other words I should add and I should make it plain throughout this George Orwell had no belief in any kind of supernatural salvation have any sort he thought that this was the only world we had and we'd better make it the best we could and actually he said that the great problem of civilization and culture will be what to do what to do about language and morality and ethics what to do when religion is dead what to do when we know it's failed what to what to do in the post religious Society and that wasn't the least of his presences in my view well I mentioned I was going on to mention the bullet he nearly got in the back at the time when this tremendous menace of fascism this sadistic pornographic evil was assaulting civilization there were very large number of intellectuals and of East thetes that's not always the same thing artists and writers and intellectuals and painters they're not all to be grouped together as there sometimes are some painters have no idea what the hell is going on some have a better idea than many intellectuals do some intellectuals probably make good painters though they don't make very good thinkers but there was a widespread view among the the anti-fascist artistic crowd if you like that this was not a question that had no answer because there was already on the other side of the Ural Mountains an ideal socialist society that would outlive Orwell's imperialism the impaired we didn't like it would defeat that that it would outlive the capitalism that he didn't like when he went among the poor and the downtrodden of England and France and that it would defeat fascism by definition that under the leadership of Comrade Stalin a new world had been created in the East that all questions would be answered that no contradictions would exist anymore that exploitation by of man by man would cease and that this was not just a potential thing but an actual thing that this utopia was already present and there was the job of all decent progressive people to fight for it I think probably this might well open an argument between something me and some of you I think probably that Orwell's greatest achievement was to have been brave enough to say that it would be nice to think this especially faced as we are with this deadly foe but that what the Communists think is not just a deadly illusion in other words a romantic but wrong idea but it's a poisonous delusion it is a parody of reality it's a negation of reality and it will end up being evil itself that took a lot of guts in those days you must always think about thinkers and writers in the context in which they had to operate most of the people with whom Orwell had to circulate coexist at least half believed some of that about Soviet Russia and it's for this reason that he always had a hard time getting his articles published his speeches heard or even his books in print and so I think I would nominate off his great achievements the novels one of which I know some of you have read one of which I suspect some of you have been told to read never mind it's better than not reading it at all and the one that I know you'll sure you you'll keep on hearing about as long as you can continue to breathe in argue which is 1984 and its partner novel Animal Farm in these two novels both of which Orwell thought of as total failures which he wrote when he was very ill the 1984 he wrote when he was dying of tuberculosis he exposed once and for all time the idea of the Stalinist utopia of the of the idea that the citizen if you will give up his freedom or her freedom for security if you'll give to the state his right to decide or her right to decide if you'll give them all that and grant them power then they will take care of his other needs they said this bargain is fatal you will end up with neither freedom nor security you will end up with neither freedom nor food neither freedom nor bread you'll end up being starved and bullied and told you're being well fed and you will not dare to point out the discrepancy between reality and the promise because that party says the promise is the reality and don't you dare go saying that you've confused the two it's more than your life is worth and he wrote this in such a way but I know I don't have to tell those of you who've read it as to make it almost terrifying indeed I still meet people younger than myself to whom 1984 is a date in their own past who find the book frightening because it is designed to foreclose hope entirely at the end of the book there is nothing left to live for the citizen is so much the property of the state that they're disposable they're smashed their personality is emptied their their emotions and fears even their sex lives are considered open available and contemptible by a party that runs everything his hope I think was to make the so frightening that it would mobilize people to resist it but it certainly had the effect on some I fear of making them feel there's nothing worth fighting for or the resistance is futile I don't know quite how to answer that question I think I should leave it open to you ladies and gentlemen I probably should ask since I didn't bring a timepiece how near I am to trespassing on my time very well well I didn't want to speak for very much more than half an hour 45 minutes because I imagined that many of you came here to speak as well as to listen and I promise you I can keep talking but I think there may be a they come a point where I should invite your your questions now how did how did or well do this I've what I've sketched may seem like a lot to say about one individual and and of course the last thing he would have wanted would have been to become a plaster st. figure or an object of hagiography in fact absolutely certain that had he survived the thing that would have most surprised him posthumously would have been his success and his fame as I began by saying he died young actually he died well let me put it like this he only made it just into the second half of the 20th century he died in early nineteen fifty at the age of forty six he only just made it in the second half of the last century that must seem to a lot of you as it does to me I was born in 1949 I look quite a long time ago in fact we are as bad as near to him as he was to Charles Dickens about whom by the way he wrote very well that's the leak of reverse memory you have to make but he's still very modern to us he writes about things we know he writes about machinery about modern tyranny about modern warfare but modern fear and threat about psychiatry about how did he manage to do this having died as he did of a disease that is practically Dickensian he died of poverty in fact he died of tuberculosis which is a disease we now think there was third world he died of the poverty of his country and his own life and he died of the lack of available medicine there was a treatment in the United States available free but he didn't know how to get it and probably couldn't have afforded he dieded to Kensie in death he died that the death that some of you who have the romantic dream of being writers which i hope you never give up may have imagined for yourself in the garret with no money but with the beautiful work just in the bottom drawer for someone to find don't give up that dream by the way if you have it if any of you have ever thought of taking up the craft of writing as a dissident as an oppositionist this the life I've just been trying to describe as an exemplary one and worth we will repay your study so how did you manage this how do you manage this extraordinary feat of being right when everyone else was wrong to put it bluntly I think in two ways one by life experience he did know that power was not its own justification the authority didn't come from God didn't come from tradition it came from people who wanted power he he understood that and he felt that he should never stop criticizing them and exposing them that's the first thing second he realized that often this trick is masked in language if you only read one essay of his you must read the one that's called politics and the English language in which he exposes the the fraud the the way in which you familial reality if I was to give you an example now I suppose I would say to take the the most recent most obvious one I don't think now that any member of any American administration would use the word collateral damage again to describe what it does describe civilian casualties those of you who know that expression or who've known how to see through it have done in your way in a well in job and you probably without knowing it oh it too or well that this is a capacity that you have but that's the trick in effect you find a you find a nice name for a nasty thing and you get it spread around by making it seem technical or technological if I could summarize it in one sentence that would be it he was he was onto that he knew every time that the Stalin regime said well you know in extraordinary times extraordinary measures must be taken he thought that his mass graves he knew without being told by reading their own propaganda that whatever the truth was the propaganda was lying and it was using nice words for for disgraceful things this is a trick that should never desert you you can all do it for yourself there's no reason not to do it interrogate what you read and what you're given in that spirit and you'll find it all the time it's remarkable to me in fact that that he was able to do this and to be considered exceptional for it but he did he did stick to it and he did therefore understand how great noble ideas can turn into their opposite and thus that in 1984 freedom is slavery and war is peace and people live with the negation because they believe thee they believe the party or the authority or the dictator who claimed it in the first place and they didn't have the nerve to to doubt it because if they were wrong if they had themselves been fooled then what would it make them I've taught up till now about power and I'll think I'll stop at this point and invite your questions by just saying this power is only what you allow it to be very many people put up with political lying and political illusions and political propaganda because if they were to denounce it they would have to admit that for many decades they had themselves been fooled that they had been taken for granted that they had allowed themselves so to speak to be deceived the con man's work is always done for him by the victim the victim doesn't want to go to the police and say I've been conned I was so stupid that I did this they don't wish to admit it so in a subtle and deadly way the dictator can dirty enough people up to make them all complicit in his rule or I suppose her rule can make them the the tortured yet willing masochistic complicit element in his own sadistic mania now what you can't necessarily do about power or about Authority you can do for yourselves and your fellow readers and for those students and fellow citizens you can resolve not to be a citizen like you can resolve not to do the work of power for it you can resolve not to let lies be told in your hearing you can resolve not to use sloppy language that is euphemism and then I think I'll leave it I think of this you'll realize that the reading of Orwell is not a exercise in projecting blame on others but is an exercise in accepting a responsibility for yourself and/or for yourselves and it's for that reason that he'll always be honored and also that he'll always be hated and I think he wouldn't have had it any other way and as a chronicler of his neither would I so I'm now your hostage there's and gentlemen thank you for being mine for a bit and we'll see if we can exchange the prisoner's dilemma and I'm all yours and thank you for coming again I meant to say thank you again for coming but I mean this subconscious Indian would it be right that I recognize questioners sir because who knows but that I've planted someone I might not be the right person to point to you trust me more fool you sir Dickensian well yes I'm sorry did I maybe slur that no yeah I think his death was Dickensian and it's it's touching in a way for someone who wrote so much about the Victorian London of Dickens that he died of poverty and tuberculosis years before he needed to and of overwork I mean that's how Dickens his characters often check out in the debtors prison of a chill sorry I'm sorry if I gobbled that you're very polite go on listening up comrade I didn't everyone hear the question should I should I was asked to say why will directed his Chris's and only it's not as Russian noted Hitler's Germany and then I gentlemen did save me slightly by saying or had he misunderstood me well I put myself in your safekeeping ladies and gentlemen did I imply that he had no criticism of federalism did you think that - are you yes more like it alright you polite that's the problem with this country everyone is too polite too courteous to visitors you might have thought I hadn't made this point you might leave me wondering if I was that inarticulate that's not polite that's cruel not courtesy at all it's an abuse of hospitality what I did say sir and I apologize if I phrased it so poorly was that if you look in Orwell's writing for a direct attack on hitlerism you won't really find it he hardly mentions it in his writing except to assume that anyone of average emotional health regards it as he does as something evil to be destroyed he doesn't feel it needs to be a case needs to be made and it took me I've been reading him for years before I noticed that there is no Orwell essay against fascism there isn't one all he did was to take a rifle and go and see if he could stop it physically it was a vote more like a vermin control point I think during the night an ideological one whereas with communism you had to argue against the illusions of civilized people who thought that there might be a higher synthesis a better society available by following the lead of a one-party initiative and that took that did take dance and so I I really hope I haven't left anyone in a doubt on that point because I would be awfully sorry to do sir now I have the judgment of Paris I don't know who to choose sir well the gentleman asked was it a problem with stolen as communism or Marxism no I claimed in my book to be the first person to point out something again I should have noticed years before I did if you've read Animal Farm by the way could I have an idea of just for my own sake of show of hands of those who have read it ok that's great well then you know the you know the allegory now and and you may know something of the history of the Russian Revolution in the whatever view you take of the Russian Revolution it's inspired by Karl Marx who is very easily recognized as the dying old major it was wonderful when John Major was Prime Minister of England probably for that reason who makes the prophecy that one day the animals will throw off the yoke of speak and then there is a revolution and that is led by two pigs though wait I should do the Russian one first those Karl Marx then there's a revolution in which Lenin Trotsky and to a much lesser extent Stalin take part i which vanquishes the Czarist s-- and the foreign intervention from the west at some cost dissolves into fratricide and the toughest nastiest pig takes over and that is napoleon pig who vanquishes snowball pig that's two pigs Lenin and Trotsky or Stalin and Trotsky if you like where is either Lenin or Stalin you can't do this trick with two pigs you need three now there's a question in my mind about this which goes directly to yours many people on the left in all wells day and now now think that Leninism was one thing in Stalinism was another that Lenin was wanted a revolution and was not gentle about it but was not a toy and Stalinism took over this revolution and so to speak disfigured destroyed negated it others many conservatives to the stage no no it's the same thing Lenin and Stalin ISM of the same it's not completely possible to tell which Orwell thought but in my opinion the way he writes about it is as if to suggest that the snowball was right the Trotsky was right and that there had been an initial revolution that was worth fighting for was worth defending and that had been betrayed and I say that for several reasons as well as for the novel itself with its imperfect allegory one he's fought in Spain with a group that was roughly speaking Trotskyist that had a communist marxist position against fascism but didn't support Starling and nearest his life Fred the second is that the book within the book in 1984 the secret book that O'Brien purports to give to Smith the theory and practice of Gockel collectivism it's called and it's author's name is given as a manual Goldstein that text and that author are very clearly to me well I know I mean you can check it yourself that is a direct lift from revolution betrayed by Leon Trotsky that is that is war world version of that book and that author so I think that Orwell was not one of those who thought that Marxism and Stalinism were the same in fact very much to the contrary you just close a gesture the polite one I hope in that case welcoming one so see that's why I shouldn't be the one doing was the question heard by all okay well I'm going to put this to your arbitration as well as mine the gentleman wants to ask me about some contradictions in my own position about universal jurisdiction as it applies to Henry Kissinger and also my view about the war in Mesopotamia which I'm quite happy to do either now or afterwards but I don't think you'll think I'm avoiding your question I hope you were if I say that I'd rather be sure there are no more Orwell questions left before I do that because I'm just as happy to talk about myself trust me but there may be some people who want to exhaust the Blair question sir ah okay well it is coming then can you speak up not for my sake but for the others should I rephrase that question to was it her by all it was not well I might not be the best translator if it would see if I do this fairly the gentleman says that viewing the present circumstances he means right here of the convergence of business into monopoly and the fusion of that with state power and with warfare that he wonders if the 1984 analogy doesn't apply as well to our own system would that be fair Pressey okay well first I should give the ask me about all well notice my opinion I hope I'll give my own of course if you want there's no question that all well wrote 1984 in the way that he did in order to say what he feared would happen if there was a permanent three-way cold war where there were only three superpowers in the world and that they could all coerce their own populations by keeping them in a state of readiness and conscription and rationing and fear of bombardment some others which if they weren't real could be faked and that these alliances could shift they could be fighting another enemy but the internal coercion would be the same there's no question that that's what he thought would happen once the possibility of birth dictatorship and nuclear weaponry were brought together he wrote a brilliant piece called you and the atom bomb as its name is well worth looking up in about 1946 saying that the the prospect of nuclear power meant that that the danger of a existing dictatorship becoming permanent unassailable was greater than at any time since the Middle Ages and that this was far greater than the threat of anarchy would be and he put all of that into into the book and there's no question that that's what it's supposed to be based on the nuclear point being very important by the way I think because the world of 1984 which is the Devastator burned out england that would be part of the United States vs ionic empire after a nuclear war it's very specifically after atom bombs exploded it is very very clearly what it is so that's yes you're right in saying that all will have this theory of a which is borrowed partly from James Burnham and other writers of a state of the world being governed by three cynical empires who played each other off against the other were you asking me if I thought that describe the present situation not in the least no in my opinion it did for a while describe the Cold War quite well it was possible for example for the United States to make an ally of China having originally been willing to fight a nuclear war against because China there was more totalitarian and still is than the Soviet Union was willing to look at things more in the American Way for its own reasons I mean shifts of allegiance of that kind did take place as long as it was roughly speaking possible for the great power leadership's themselves to control events and just to anticipate this gentleman's question when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State he was able to pull off a unique double as far as I know no one else has ever done this well sector of state to be soft on fascism and soft on communism at the same time extraordinary he was always groveling two mouths a term and bargaining with him and it was groveling and bargaining with with Brezhnev in Moscow and every now and then stomping on the chileans or the East Timor ease or the Cambodians or people who couldn't hit my remarkable fact that still is the case actually the most of the business he does is with Communist China when it's not with corporations doing business in Chile but this is in a more plural world know that what we're faced with now is a different kind of mud judgment a different kind of totalitarian threat altogether one that is part state and part insurgent it has an old name jihad holy war its methods are what you might call populistic or guerrilla like but its aim is the restoration of an empire that is gone the Ottoman Caliphate which was an empire of religion and an empire based on monotheism is by definition totalitarianism because as all well was I think very quick to realize the the origin of worship the origin of the need of people this is what I was caution you against don't worry there'll always be people who want to to have the will to power would what you have to worry about is how many of you have the will to obey I mean if you want to be taken care of and looked after how many of you want to be part of a servile system where you trade your freedom for security that's the dead you into something of not well the religious dictatorship promises all that and an extra life on top with sometimes depending on which monotheism it happens to be virgins thrown in I think virgins are overrated myself both among men and among women but I don't think that the Islamic fanatics have read the Jewish commentary on this which says that with every virgin comes a mother-in-law but that's about the only joke you can make about this kind of thing you're up against something that is deeply subversive and nihilistic would also fantastically authoritarian and wishes to have state power wishes to have absolute power over you in your private and public life it's the most totalitarian threat you could face and it deals in the most nihilistic methods in order to achieve its aim and of course it is self-destructive it will of course fail it will of course destroy itself it will of course destroy the religion and the Muslim society there purports to uphold of course this is all axiomatic we've known it forever or Jihad's have always failed for this reason but that it's to be compared with halliburton as you implied is frivolous quite frivolous purely frivolous drop it you'll feel better now I thought I thought the lady here was know there are a lot of people making vague gestures of me in that case I'm not I thought this didn't happen in this part of Illinois bring it on you when you say he in this case do you mean oil or Transkei now well if you don't mind a correction rather than a clarification it would simply be wrong to say that all that exists me the Trotsky was analogous that would be not the case he was a Bolshevik till possibly not till the day he died but until about the last day he wrote anything he regarded himself as a Marxist and a Leninists and as the rival of Stalin for that role I think he had a very libertarian streak in his personality and it shows in his writing and his attitude to literature and many other fine things about him but no his neither best friend nor worst enemy would say he was he was an anarchist of Orwell it could be said that he was certainly could be said he was critical of all state systems yes but his ideal at least at the point when he died Orwell's ideal would have been the British socialist welfare state of the post-war period which he thought managed to combine a great year of equality and fairness and redistribution with a great deal of personal liberty and at that point he was probably right probably hadn't been combined better in any European Society before and there are still many many people in England who are nostalgic for it even though there are very few who would not think of that as a model that's what I mean by him being poised but he now passed enough future tonight I hope does that you're looking still as you're looking quizzical at me which I don't I don't blame you for it blame myself phone no you'd have to make that four yes look I'll tell you the best book to read on this if you like there's a book by Felix Moro called revolution and counter-revolution in Spain written from the left opposite well you should also read that scene it's the second best book is the best book is homage to Catalonia but George Orwell which can I take it that you're Fred no well it would be four forces there was the there was of this who supported the Franco rebellion against the Republic which actually were themselves made up of several forces the Catholic Church the Nazis the monarchists and some others and then opposing this were several forces the Catalan and Basque nationalists the Spanish Socialist Party the Spanish Communist Party the Spanish anarchists who were very strong in Catalunya and the Spanish Trotskyists the partido opera unification month Easter as they were known the poom with whom were well fought whose militia he actually joined in the Lenin barracks in Barcelona of which there were photographs and it's a it's whether it's a brilliantly interesting story and many people think that homage to Catalonia is the best book ever written by four by a foreign correspondent I still meet people when I go to Afghanistan or or Bosnia or Kurdistan people who are starting off in life and want to write about warfare warn revolution men and women and some photographers as well as writers but almost invariably one of the books that made them want to do this is homage to Catalonia it's a fantastically good verb and it would clear up your misunderstanding about the anarchists well some of its overdue and some of its unnecessary oh the gentleman wants to know what I think about the Patriot Act we're done with oil I I guess I'd be getting to the point where people think I was avoiding the question if I went on saying that I wouldn't have that I'll be quick on the Patriot Act that the CIA and the FBI could not legally share information on conspiratorial nihilist organizations which was the case all right until three years ago if they had information they were not legally obliged to share it with the other in fact in some cases they were prohibited from doing so because they the one policed foreign policy in one police domestic policy I don't think yeah I don't know maybe I would get an argument here but I don't think anyone thinks that that shouldn't have been stopped there needed to be some new law to make that the same policy okay which is in conformity with the idea of a fight against early war because the war started on our soil not on anyone elses unique in that way there were other things that we'll put into the bill that I know the FBI FBI has been wanting to put into every piece of legislation since the Clinton anti-terrorism death penalty Act of 95 for example can't we had just have roving wiretaps so that we only ask a judge once and once he's given it once we can apply it to any phone the guy ever uses say or warrantless searches in public housing or things of this kind they've always wanted that or looking at library records and they've and there was a big fight in Washington about whether or not include these on the coattails and some of these clauses have been grandfathered so to say in other words they have to revert it on again they're temporary they're not part of the law yet they have to be reconfirmed in another Congress some was struck down and some are going to have to be redone and I would only amend the Constitution which i think is a perfectly good document the way it stands one way which is to say Congress shall make no law within six months of any act of violence because all the worst legislation in our history is always calm as a result of panic and you'll generally find there's already enough law to punish people who fly airliners into skyscrapers it's already illegal but I'll never be afraid to speak up not for my sake for your friends the question is warble - all the first thing as far I give up with all well what he might have said about this or that roughly now because he would have been a hundred last year and until recently it was plausible to guess because he died so young but wrote so much what he would have said for example I am practically certain I can't be absolutely sure but I've had this argument with many right-wingers I am certain that he would have opposed the American war in Vietnam because he'd seen colonialism in Asia up close he hated it he knew a lot about it he knew a lot about the French colonial role in Indochina it would have been obvious to him the American War there was a successor to it he would have been at least critical of that probably earlier than most people were because many people came to the war not knowing that's how it started but we can what so one can with knowledge of his writing one can push it to a certain point I don't know what he would have said about Cuba but I will say that it's against his theory because his theory is that no there is no accidental sudden threat of a thermonuclear war between the great powers because that would suggest they really meant that they hated each other that they weren't just doing this to stay in power that they were just running a cold war that was about itself I mean if they were get willing to kill everyone on the planet over whether Cuba was communist or not that would have to mean they were sincere we don't want to make that assumption nor in a way should we though it shows you how little fanaticism you need to do a great deal of damage that the Kennedy administration signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that it wouldn't try to invade Cuba again is a matter of record now they denied it then but we know it's true I mean the part of the stand down over the emergency stand down over Cuba was an agreement that the Russians would take their missiles out of Cuba which they'd be very mad to put in there and in return rule rather without mentioning in the same breath it wasn't supposed to be a bargain but by coincidence the United States would remove his missiles from Turkey which is on the Russian border and would learn to take not to try another Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that promised as far as I know still holds by the way I think that is still a treaty with Russia not just with the Soviet Union so yes you're right but you should have left the assassination out of it because it makes you sound weird okay excuse me I didn't mean that could it could possibly make you somewhere to someone who was only meeting you for the first time doesn't have anything to do with this sensation probably doesn't have anything to do with it that we have seen that they've let us find out about yes if Kennedy was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald if it wasn't a lone gunman job which the overwhelming evidence is that it was if it isn't that who it was a conspiracy it was certainly by his former associates in the Mafia is that would be by far the next best theory and he would have asked for it because he had used them and dropped them and they don't like being used and drop everybody knows that and he shouldn't have been using them as president should he the nostalgia for Camelot is a continuing mystery to me this is why I need someone else to point I can do whatever you whip lashing myself like this one oh hell professor doctor now you see why I feared there might be a planted question what could be a more agreeable conundrum than this actually the accusation was not made by my Critic was made by my one of my missed knee padded admirers David Brooks who in a review long review in the week so that it doesn't matter what oh well thinks anymore matters what Hitchens thinks oh that's too much and I still think that I honestly do autobiographically it was useful to me that I come from a family very similar to all wells enable a military family of the lower middle class that never made any money out of the Empire but felt loyal to it and there was afraid of falling back into the toilet glasses you know wanted to distinguish itself from them that that that bit when I first started reading his social novels and I thought this is impressive I was about 14 I thought here's the guy he seems to understand my family which I despaired of any no less stellar doing so there is that and a certain attitude to Englishness perhaps and we seem to have some of the same taste in prose but otherwise the hell with it my god he I was lucky enough to get out of this and get to university he'd never got to university it's one of the many great writers who didn't go through allas probably the best-known currently don't over don't over rate this university of business by the way if you can write you don't need to go if you can't you don't need to go either so it's it's overstated then but that there I would say all resemblance ends I mean you know I've been quite lucky not just with my health which I abused but it hasn't caught up with me yet but I've made always a certain amount of writing I now do a reasonably well if I want to get my opinions inflicted on people in print or in the radio TV I can do it no one's ever really seriously tried to censor me I mean they've been occasions where people trying to trip me up and I've never been the victim of any cabal people as a well was who wanted to keep his work out of print I've never had to suffer for what I do in other words let alone live in poverty and curable illness that's created by poverty no no would be it would be indecent in that way to mention us in the in the same breath certainly would be indecent for me to do it again with sahabat seem so arbitrary but the your there's something very convincing about your chapeau was that terrible okay well well well was very in favor of what he called the United Socialist States of European love us he hoped there would be a European Union I he have to be of socialist kind he rather favored the UN and supranational Authority especially to control things like fissile material so that's the first thing there was a lot of talk about world government in those days so humanitarian talk especially between the two world wars you know we must get a world body together that stops this happening again but on that when you use the word global I should I think I should just say that too I think that's a him and to a lot of the people writing at the time and since the use of this word as if it was new would seem ridiculous J a Hobson who was a great liberal Victorian writer about world political economy wrote a book about imperialism that was published I think it must have been 1899 not later than 1902 describing the fact that the world already was a global economy that this was a cliched to hobson the reason we remember Hobson's book is partly because it was the one from which Lenin plagiarized about half of his book on imperialism the highest stage of capitalism people who think that it's a new idea that we live in a globalized economy and we all live if not in the same society at least in the same economic system strike me as weird this is that this is the oldest type it was as the idea was old when my grandfather was in the army of India and was completely familiar to a well of course you know extraction and refining are often done in different parts of this economy and the profits are not exactly evenly shared but we've been living in the same world economy two world wars ago and now people use the word globalization as if it was a sinister innovation they should just catch up I would suggest begin to catch up if you want to go on about this I'll say one more thing which is where I was very young even younger than I am now the Port Huron Statement was published not very far from here actually as the founding document of the then-new left this was in 1962 hang on they make Huron Michigan it's worth reading now written by a couple of people who wrote it are still actually around and you can see them speaking at anti-globalization rallies like tom hayden transom it's worth looking at this document again actually I remember disliking it at the time it essentially is a revolt it says it's revolt against capitalism but it's a revolt against bigness and so revolt against economies of scale it's a criticism of the alienated large Society and it has the natural corollary what would be better let's get back to that nice agrarian system that we used to have in the old days where everyone knew their neighbor and could milk each other's cars for myself I can't think of a more ghastly way of living even for a day but even if I liked the idea I do know that it's impossible so it's not even utopian it's it's a reactionary fantasy and so to call it progressive in the regard globalization as reactionary seems to me to be one of the many many ruling mistakes of the current more on.org element in american leftism you didn't ask me that bit but I thought I'd throw it here you again if it's about Dealey Plaza know I've known people like that all my life I've been in media for years I I've met many unscrupulous frauds Michael Morris just another one he's trying to do so an unusually serious moment but he's a dime a dozen croak and liar and consciousness huckster but this doesn't surprise me I mean you know I I know there are such people so disgrace to my profession though so I take it a bit more personally than others too well just ever see if there's anyone hasn't asked a question yet you haven't fallen sir yes very well um I'm not I want to just don't normally want to ask answer a question with an answer but I just want to ask something does the name Robert Fisk mean anything to this saurian no not at all I'm relieved in a way to hear that but so it makes my point harder to make um Roy Fisk is a correspondent for the independent London he has a cult following in this country through his website and other things his reportage in the Middle East and he he would be to print journalist or Michael Morris to documentary I'm I usually find people have been reading or passing on his stuff anyway he's the most scornful possible about the president and the neoconservatives and the moralism of thing that's all but I remember because I have a good memory I remember him writing about Kuwait when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein and going into Kuwait City after the Iraqi army had been thrown out and finding the cellars full of tufts of bloodied hair and fingernails and looting and disfigurement and what was vulgar we called the rape of Kuwait at the time and describing it I must say he's a good journalist on his day very well and this this absolute prince of the non-judgmental and the anti-american finished his description of Kuwait City after Saddam and said that you could you just have to be able to smell it and feed it to know that something really evil has been happening here he couldn't think of another word and he's not a man without a thesaurus you had to use that word now just because I believe in the devil doesn't mean I have to believe in God right just the implication of your question the argument for the existence of God comes from the argument from design as far as I know but with this wonderful arrangement surely someone must have designed it what as long as people say that it was Satan I don't care but you'd be amazed how much the Christians object if you interpret the argument from design in that way basic mustn't just have been designed it must have been designed by one of us no that's not doesn't hold at all who's designed it let's see do you mean it do you want us to follow the inference of the argument from design you want us to really follow this induction no they don't they say we take credit for the good bits they take credit for the bad bit that's the evil one now I hope that all of you fell out of your strollers seeing through the fallacy of this kind of religious piffle and if you hadn't fallen out of your strollers it's time to fall out of your whatever's in that parking lot seemed like extraordinary stuff to me the word virtue in a Greek word for it means does doesn't mean goodness it means strength it means integrity it means the willingness to stand up for things a certain intellectual and moral honesty and moral courage yes I do think evil if that doesn't imply the existence of it requires the cultivation on yea overt you yes but not in its denatured sickly herbivorous a Christian sense of being a good boy because otherwise I'd have no I'd have nothing to offer ah then I'm sorry because I gave a say too melodramatic on steel question but but it's always good to get that out of the way no he did I see now what you mean I mean I did say I'm sorry I was slow on the object I did say that he thought there was a dirty secret of the heart for power and your watch already asked me as does that have to be true no I don't believe it does know I mean I know that there are people who go into politics for disinterested reasons at least sometimes for idealistic ones I know I know that they do I've met them I'm amazed they to it i'm impressed when i meet them but but i would vouch you know without being naive that i do think that it does have that effect and sometimes they even win and sometimes they'd rather quit than do something with it for me they would rather resign i've seen all of this happen and i believe it's possible yeah i mean the what is latent and in aging ours the temptation in other words to be virtuous it may not be as strong all the time but it's as at least as in age however there is no question of being in office or being in power can has effects on even the least ambitious people which they are not always aware so I think it's right to be skeptical always if you will so it's for them to prove that they have not succumbed rather than for us to trust them not to do so would that be a fair reply well yes I probably should do this and then this gentleman will think he's had an answer to his question - um I've been in two places early in my life where let me back up one sentence someone like John Burns of the New York Times I don't know if you read him is extremely brilliant and graphic and brave writer who shouldn't be mentioned same breath as myself but someone like him or not and or someone like myself will go a long way out of our way to avoid using a cliche it means a lot to us don't use other people's words it means you're not thinking means you're not trying so if iced if I was to describe you and say that you'd won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature and save the child from drowning and published a brilliant thriller and that was a saying these three taken together are and you were to turn the page and find out said no mean achievement I hope you feel disappointed I would in myself one must try not to use the borrowed term really hard try not to do it if you visit North Korea which I have done or Iraq under Saddam Hussein which have done and which John burns in the latter case has done it is not possible to write about it or to describe any aspect of it without saying it's 1984 you can't do it try as you may it's not part of my general theory my general theory is that the cliches are buried inside the keyboard somewhere your fingers touched the keyboard the cliche goes up through your arms into your brain and down onto the paper that's why I keep reading people saying things like national health care for all or you know god knows what it would be it's not like that it's that there's only one comparison you can come up with a sadomasochistic tariff for its own same and the and the total rot and decay and murder of the principle of society along with the principle of the individual I tried but I mean you have to believe me I tried but it wasn't possible to do now here's the question if you confront it with something like this as pathologically evil as that what is your what is your wish what should be your view is it is it possible to coexist with this kind of thing I would say not because it's inherently aggressive one thing we know about fascism is it is organized for it is not the case that it just wants to have a private population of its own to keep in a torture chamber and toy with as it likes it will it will always be found to build an army about twice the size of its economy to Menace the neighbors indeed to do what the East Asia Oceania Eurasia analogy suggests to keep people in the state of permanent threat of war and to make it real to make good on it used to be said in the 30s by the left quite correctly fascism means war well that meant was it intends it it also implies that it it necessitates it it's true Saddam Hussein was forever making war on his neighbors in poor preparing to do so and he become the host or from innumerable international gangster organizations and he was engaged in a restless search for the thing that would make that most toxic of or which is the fusion of the to the catastrophic weaponry with nihilistic terrorism as well as as a backup an aggressive totalitarian state I think this should all have been stopped in 1991 if this should all have been stopped in 1991 his regime should have been taken out there and that the 12 years in which we subjected the Iraqi people to sanctions plus sit down and let the can be run by a racketeering United Nations that was actually running a blood for oil program are completely shameful devastated Iraqi society made it more prone to the kind of mullah dominated fascism that now threatens in and didn't buy us any time so that would be my throat clearing opening paragraph on this point the American and British forces who were fighting now to show that we can learn how to fight in the most difficult imaginable conditions and I don't mean just the climatic ones I mean in a you know failed state that was becoming a rogue state and a rogue state that was becoming a failed one of the most difficult possible conditions with Islamic Jihad as the main threat and enemy and with regime changes the objective our fighting a battle which has to be fought anyway and don't tell me that what they've been learning from it isn't going to be needed again because it is this is most unbelievably good use of the Armed Forces it's the it's the training for them in at last the first time I can ever remember in the right war and the next war and the current one and my opinion is the casualty figures are too low but they will get better and they will improve fewer of hours and more of that and nothing else will do but that it shows what happens if you let things run if you let it slide and if you let people like Saddam Hussein get to the manic stage I wish I could do more I wish I could do more to forward this war but I won't do anything to undermine or defame it I didn't think that would completely unseal question gentlemen wants to know if I would make the West the enemy of the good or the good the enemy of the worst so familiar question I don't know why I didn't mention Romo Garvey maybe you were going to do it the test by which a state can lose its sovereignty is fourfold you surrender your sovereignty as a state and you open yourself to international intervention or unilateral if that cannot be mobilized on four conditions one repeated invasions of neighbours aggression against neighbors second violations of the Genocide Convention which oblige the signatories to prevent or to punish genocide third violations of the non-proliferation treaty governing weapons of mass destruction and fourth a state sponsorship of international gangsterism Iraq had done all four of these things repeatedly was planning to do them again its sovereignty was gone it was over it was under international sanctions there they were run by a racketeering group with United Nations that was trading a rocky blood for oil those were still legal sanctions it also had no-fly zones policed by aircraft governing its north and south extremities were northern southern thirds actually to prevent a repetition of genocide it was not recognized really anymore as a legitimate government and it was harboring continuing to harbour international terrorism and refusing to come into compliance with the resolutions governing weapons of mass destruction now there you tell me any other regime that's guilty of all there's four things all the time for 12 years the remarkable thing is this was at this incredible offense the international community was allowed to go on as long as it was the other remarkable thing is the pathetic excuses the euphemisms for power the cover-ups for power the excuses made for Saddam Hussein that are made by by the critics of the war if any other country does anything like this yes it should undoubtedly the same policy should be used but you've more or less thrown away that chance by saying that it's Halliburton unilateralism not you but the anti-war movement has made it much less likely that a subsequent offender could be brought a book after all the Sudanese who are in front of our eyes using death squads to commit ethnocide in Darfur being handled multilaterally and by the UN and every interval of time given by the negotiation is being used to complete the ethnocide so I hope that those who like multilateralism like what they're getting that they won't be able to say that for the people of Darfur as for Saudi Arabia one of my reasons for supporting the regime change in Iraq is of course that it undercuts the Saudi Arabian political and economic monopoly in the region if we recuperate Iraqi or the Saudi monopoly is almost gone furthermore there's an incitement to its large Shia proletariat to have Democratic stirrings of its own and though I know that the administration couldn't say that openly I know that it was a good reason to support the policy and it was the reason why the Saudis opposed it as they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan so yes in a way you can have it both ways you can both undermine the other ones you mentioned as the dictatorships in Syria and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon without actually saying so but above it was above all an international responsibility to bring to book the most delinquent regime on the planet now everyone heard the question well I became a journalist so I wouldn't have to rely on the press for information so I don't really know the article question I'm not a reader or consumer of this stuff I don't know what it would feel like to be one I don't watch the television at all I read the New York Times every day a quick flap through only to find out what everyone else thinks the news is so I know roughly what arguments I'm going to be meeting at 6 o'clock that evening at some cocktail party in Washington and invariably it is drawn from the New York Times op-ed page or some report it's pathetic I prefer to find out from other sources I ask people I think no I do a lot of reading I do a lot of traveling and I get people sending me useful things by email and I think I can now pretty well winnow the stuff that's half paid from the stuff that is better cooked thus for example I mean I knew six months ago and I published it too but no one took me up on it that Saddam Hussein's former chief nuclear physicist was good a publisher book about something that I knew was true anyway that he concealed he buried himself but nuclear centrifuge along with the blueprints that allowed it to be restarted and that because he couldn't tell this to the inspectors because Saddam had his family in custody when he waited till after the inspectors had gone in the regime had gone and then he told the US Marines where to dig it up okay now I know this and you can now read a book where he's published called the bomb in my garden it's buried under the orders of Chris I Hussein the adorable guy who would have succeeded as well as had a fratricide of Shakespearean proportions with his psycho brother who died if we'd let it run and kept them in their box for God's sake well now I know all this I'm just giving you one example but I can still read every day and hear from everyone I meet the window the mass destruction found in Iran what am I to do with ignorance like this my attitude to consensus has always been the same people who think in herds behave in herds I done bother me to anticipate a question you might ask why does the administration not say any of this why can it not make its own case that's a very good question it's an impeachable incompetent administration in my opinion the reason is I think I can I really think I can tell you this believably the hatred and division within the administration particularly between the Defense Department and the CIA but also between the State Department and both of these is now at such a perch of intensity as I've lived in Washington nearly a quarter of a century I can't believe people talk about the bush team as being on message and presenting United Front I've never seen fratricide like this within an administration before no allegation made even about dr. Abadis revelation would not have leaked published against it by another of the agencies in the paper the following day if the administration wanted or any wing of it wanted to take credit for they would simply deny each other's disclosures and say this is based on shoddy science or faulty intelligence and it's not worth the trouble of doing that they've stopped doing it so it's actually I find rather terrifying to live in Washington at a time when democracy and democratic and open argument a self self prohibited in this way and the most arrant nonsense and most changer solutions can be spread and that the only power that is fighting against holy war and dictatorship can be mocked and derided in this manner and that it's put it like this you know the United States must be in a really poor shape if I'm having to defend it if it's being left up to me you know that some kind of a crisis is hit but I will do it because I you know I believe I've I can stick up for myself and my sources but I understand your bewilderment I honestly do and I sympathize with it but you must you know help is on the knot on the way never is on the way it's at hand if you want it you can go you can make your own investigations for example I just asked you all to do this thought experiment dr. Bailey's book would take you less than a day to read you read it and talk to the next person who says to you there were no WMD in Iraq see what you think about that person now now if you remember and just think just look at them and think where did this person just get off saying whatever one says well it wasn't just work it's no it's not his work it's the center fish yes the centrifuges you can read up about it in any in innumerable reports I can give you all the details if you wish yes if the centrifuges are something you can't fake by the way you don't have to be a physicist to know this this is the crown jewels of physics if you can get a centrifuge that will spin it will separate uranium doing it tech took about half the Iraqi national income there had to be bled out of the country for years we knew they were trying it where we knew we knew they knew they'd got one we just didn't know where it was this this is what you need if you can't separate uranium you'll know where it's worth burying crucial thing also is what about do you have anyone who can started again well they had some scientists with brains and they had the blueprints and they varied them along with it yes it's very important it's extremely important that plus the element in the K report which you can read anyway like which generally concludes that the administration's accusations were at fault the ones made in public of the UN has a very long annex about the attempt a Saddam Hussein's people in March of 2003 to by missiles directly off the shelf from North Korea a meeting we know happened and we have the Iraqi evidence for it of the record of the meeting in Damascus it failed by the way because the North Koreans ran away they were panicked by the arrival of the coalition but I will tell you two things about one thing rather about these two things the centrifuge and the missile purchase from North Korea we wouldn't have known about either of them without regime change Abady would never have told anyone if the regime had gone on the inspectors would never have found it bricks would never have had a chance he wasn't even asking Scott Ritter was on the take as you know and the North Korean stuff would not have been uncovered in the both party archives so regime change if you want disarmament throughout you have to have a regime change now it's disarmed I agree but to believe it before would be to say you took Saddam Hussein's word for it that would be I think a little bit credulous and incidentally nobody said before that it was disarmed nobody no body at all Hans Blix his book says he went into the war believing that they were concealing which they were I had to argue without he walk movement people every day before the war saying you can't invade Iraq because he has too many weapons of mass destruction you notice how this consensus is formed now if there are no WMD it doesn't prove the rocks disarmed it proves the disarmament was wrong excuse me that's doublethink cheap doublethink - and it's its opposite would involve well of course we do it hadn't got any weapons that govern the dictatorship told us it didn't have any do I can I have a hand for anyone who can see the fallacy in that argument we're here to talk about an honorable author who could work this out for himself didn't need arguments for a from authority who could use his own live to determine questions like this and on the whole did not trust psychopathic homicidal dictators with weapons of mass destruction and whose instinct on this was run no please no thank you well sorry not in here Vanessa there will thank you for staying also those of you did how many of that lot were coerced I want were you going to sorry but I'm not willing on system sigh was this America okay well put it like this I will sign books if the receipt is produced and if the book is by me this by John Updike I weren't tempting though that would be no thank you so much

Channel: TheHitchensArchive

Views: 549,824

Rating: 4.832684 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell

Id: rY5Ste5xRAA

Length: 93min 19sec (5599 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/m007368]

I wish I could articulate half as well as he does. Always amazed at how clearly and effortlessly he describes topics.

Thanks for the post; I had never heard this speech.

[u/Tulanol]

Yep best debater I have ever seen. He is missed 👍