Christopher HItchens on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.

welcome to firing line i'm mike kinsley of the new republic magazine during world war ii harold mcmillan made his famous remark that from now on britain's role in the world would be as greece to america's rome teaching the brash young empire how it's done but these days most analogies between america and the roman empire are the decline in fall variety so what role does that leave for britain britain spent the 1980s in what the corporate world likes to call a turnaround situation it looked as if the country's long economic decay might be reversing and mrs thatcher margaret thatcher the prime minister became a leading player on the international stage but recent economic news has been discouraging mrs thatcher's polls are terrible and events at continental europe have led many to believe that germany and not britain is the european nation poised for renewed greatness christopher hitchens has vicious fun with the greece and rome analogy in his new book about britain and america he also has some vicious fun with william f buckley's anglophilia the book is called class excuse me blood class and nostalgia subtitle anglo-american ironies mr hitchens is a prominent british journalist who has lived in new york and washington for a decade now he is a columnist for the nation and washington editor of harper's magazine he embodies everything conservatives mean when they say america love it or leave it john o'sullivan by contrast embodies anglo-americans special relationship at its most inceptious it's incestuous only alastair cook has succeeded in having it for having it both ways for longer in the 70s mr o'sullivan worked for the daily telegraph in london then he was editor of policy review at the heritage foundation in washington then he was back at the telegraph in the times in london then he was editorial page editor of the new york post then he was associate editor of the london times and a special advisor to mrs thatcher in london in 1988 he came back to new york as editor of the national review and that's where he sits at least for the moment mr buckley japan and germany don't give any sign of even wanting america for their greece given that if everyone's being knocked down a peg doesn't seem to be there's much of a role after britain at all well i think that's really a theme that mr higgins plays with in his uh in his book his tendency is always of course disruptive and iconoclastic and but this is part of his um his voice setting so it shouldn't necessarily distract one from what he's trying to say the the thing about great britain i think is that uh um oh 40 years ago when i got out of college people were saying it it's it's over has anything nothing left to say but that doesn't seem really to have been the case it may very well be this is primarily as you acknowledge uh in some respects an accident of of of language john lucas once said the single most important fact the first 50 years of the 20th century future historians will note uh is that uh americans speak english and this most important fact of the last 50 years may prove to be that russians are white now that's that's that's a form of reductionism but it's something that launches is on the question of uh is england as as dead as she's supposed to be is she well i've said in the book not because just as people were beginning to write the old country off and as even churchill was admitting defeat which is what he did at his famous appearance at fulton in 1946 his last major speech last major speech in effect was he said you know we're we're through we've borne the heat and burn of the day the torch has to be passed but fortunately we have our american cousin and the british spirit is at work must enter this new and young and vigorous body and that will give us a further say and a further lease on life and the first stage in doing that really of course was what um someone well known to you james burnham called the receivership into which the united states took the british empire if you look at where american foreign policy is now concentrated from pakistan to palestine and so on it's an inheritance from the british empire and the other is obviously cultural um one of my favorite examples is to say to people well is george wallace a wasp and people say not really you know he seems to rather fargo chap and so on but i say he's very white extremely anglo-saxon very protestant were the things about george wallace you say is william buckley a wasp this absolutely is what's meant by wasp and i say well white enough but in fact irish and catholic in providence so wasp is a term of class as well as of ethnicity in america and that's impossible to understand unless you understand the special way in which america is appealed to by the british imagination cynically or nonsense i would say gentlemen both i would say genuinely that there is there is a real affection that's based on a common sacrifice in war on blood on language on literature and so on and there are certain kinds of emulation which i attack in the book i think a rather pathetic sort of showbiz attitude to the british royal family for example and in politics too easy a resort to things like kipling and churchill and the windier aspects of british imperial bluster when some piece of american foolishness needs to be defended overseas it's too easy to reach for this sort of stock of metaphors oh sullivan and his newspapers that do it all the time they say this is munich you know uh if we don't take our stand here america will be dragged in the mire they appeal to the churchill and the john bull spirit so we vanquish the falkland island exactly and the malvinas go down and so forth and that this is but this is testimony to an extraordinary durability of english imagery and and culture in america even though it's been mutated in this slightly suspect way sorry for such a long burst do you have a problem with that yeah i mean um if you read mr hitchens book i think you get a picture of the relationship which is half true or rather the half that's true is emphasis uh half that's true is neglected and the half that's not true is is emphasized now essentially england and america are two different powers they're two different states but the two constitute in a sense a single cultural community along with other countries and that political there's a political community there as well so that in england uh which is a kind of sub-theme not developed in the book the left has often looked to the united states it's admired american institutions it's admired republicanism uh the lack of an aristocracy uh what it misperceived as a as a classless society of course america does have classes as well and it's perfectly true that conservative forces in america have looked back towards england uh and admired certain elements of english life and the imperial ethic was one of them willingness to play a major role in the world now um this it seems to me is evidence that the two countries will often be arguing and debating um but it's it's not exactly two countries it's two different political traditions in each country arguing it out now mr hitchins is an example just as much as i am and indeed uh mr kinsley is an example just as much as i am of the ability of the special relationship to be a left as well as a right-wing set of ideas so we're left and right and the fact is that the two countries um at different times have uh uh have represented the left or right at the moment for example now that the cold war is so to speak waning and your book is a very much a cold war book product i mean you're attacking britain in american terms for leading america into the cold war i think that's a mistake but i think the the the the uh it's a mistake to think we did it i mean the person who pushed america into cold war was joseph stalin who whose links with england are extremely remote now but the crystallization did come as a result of the fulton speech i think well i think it came as a fulton speech was at the time were considerably attacked and internally the truman administration was very nervous about it didn't welcome it thought the church was too extreme going off his rocker the american establishment reacted very very ambiguously to it it was only when everything that churchill said was confirmed by stalin and when you had the blockade of berlin the coup in czech slovakia and finally of course the invasion of korea by the north south korea by the north koreans that there was a a rallying to the standard raised by churchill but bear in mind john why they didn't like the speech because half of it sorry to borrow your analogy of the halves was was off its rocket was saying that the united states should make an alliance with britain against communism and the first step in this was for the united states to come to the rescue of the british empire the the the united states and the british empire including india and africa were to become the same condominium and it seems to me that what the united states took from the speech was what it wanted which was a clarion call against communism within and without um dumping all the sentimental appeal via rhetoric and tradition that they rescue the empire but but paradoxically or as i prefer to put it ironically um taking on an imperial character in doing this here in a nutshell i've always assumed that um there was a a certain amount of uh usopian language in the fulton speech uh in which churchill was saying something which is better communicated than expressed or at least more easier so namely we we had our burdens during the 19th century we british and during the first first part of this century our fleet tranquilized the world we don't have it anymore we were exhausted by the second world war plus the impulse to separatism which i declined explicitly to endorse you you've got you've got to take over in this sense but but you don't say it in those words because it sounds uh it sounds like too much self abnegation and politically is impossible to say is that not a fair reading of what he was saying in that first half i would say it was and in the same way as for example kipling's most famous poem about which i have a chapter is called the white man's burden it's one of the few lines of kipling everybody knows take up the white man's burden now people have i've found a surprise to find kipling wrote that poem directly as an address to united states but it's obvious from the line because you wouldn't you wouldn't talk to the country that already had the white man's burden namely britain and tell it to take it up what in fact is being said by coupling to the united states is take over the white man's burden it's made very clear and it was addressed to congress in in the hope that congress would annex the philippines which did but when kipling when kiplinger wrote those lines the historical perspective of say 150-200 years justified what you now i think consigned as an act of condescension whatever was going on in india which nobody i know of the fans even you uh stopped going on when the white men said don't do that don't don't make widows burn themselves on the power of the world marx himself said that the british influence on india was in some extent and degree a civilizing influence that it broke up the caste system and and millennial slavery yeah why do you say why does it marx himself well it's it's not expected remarks that he would have defended the british putting down the indian mutiny but he did do so so i mean on the argument of evidence against presumed interest it's more to be remarked upon than other cases he was much more far-sighted than people give him credit for he yeah but he could see the exhaustion of that this didn't get the way in the way of marx's proletariat uh thing he wasn't talking about the pro-terror being put down no by no means so therefore it ought to surprise you that marx would have made that comment it doesn't surprise me i guess i was hoping it might surprise you but can we get on to this passing the torch it seems to me the two points are important here first of all england used to be one of the greatest power in the world it is now a medium-sized power which doesn't mean to say it's not important in all sorts of ways but nonetheless it doesn't have the ground rule it had now what's missing in it seems to me in your book you talk about ties of blood ties of class class and ties of nostalgia you never talk about the ideas that to some extent unite england and america and which when england cease to be the predominant power in the world made it clear that the english would like to hand that torch onto america and not to anybody else it wasn't just questions of interest it was that in america the english saw and i think largely still do see a country which represented more or less the same ideals but they also see progeny they see progeny as well but it's much easier to hand on to a country which believes also roughly in free trade in democracy in a liberal international order and which has so to speak a stewardship view of the world rather than simply a plundering power and a record of stability and a record of stability and institutions which even when they differ as say the supreme court does nonetheless differ in a recognizable and understandable way so i think it was easy for the english well not easy there are elements of resentment and we used to run the show now we no longer do all those kind of passions and irritants exist but nonetheless it was possible to say america is the country which we would like to see uh succeed us rather than any other power well i think that's true and i probably should have said more about it but it is noticeable what kinds of borrowing you in fact come across um for example um you know many people united states admire and i've noticed this especially since the televising of westminster parliament uh the tradition of the british question time where the prime minister just has to get up and take it and there's no evading it twice a week and i can see why americans admire because they can not easily imagine presidents reagan or bush surviving that and i think there's a it's a decent envy to have but you never get that kind of call or haven't until recently no one in america sort of wants to borrow anything like the british national health service for example either which would be another excellent bit of emulation instead what you tend to get is what i got yesterday actually when by chance i had to call an emergency room in a hospital and before i could blurt out why i needed one the woman said where are you from i just love your accent it's real neat why did you just keep talking and i said well madam i know we have a reputation for politeness but i must insist on this happens to me a lot and what it is actually is a kind of snobbery a sort of inferiority complex why can't i go into a supermarket without seeing a picture of princess diana who i left england to get away from but then this cultural thing works in reverse as well doesn't it well when i go exactly if i go back to england what do i get mcdonald's hamburgers and american nuclear bases so it seems to me there's something in the relationship that tends to reinforce the conservative and the commercial and the what shall we say would you delight in saying the reaction i think it's odd to want to get away from princess diana you do yeah well i mean if if she were frumpy frozen but now well then you might let me put it like this i'd like to do the same thing as i suspect she'd like to do and get away at least from her husband um in other words from the the uh popular celebration of of the house of windsor i could i could do with the rest from that and i thought i could get it in in the country of george washington which went to all this trouble not just to expel the monarchy but to make sure it could never come back let me suggest now you have an imperial presidency let me suggest why your book concentrates on the um cooperation between the right wing and both countries to promote an imperial ideal and why it neglects the left-wing interest in inspiring american democratic and republican institutions because this theme disappeared from british left-wing thought in the early seventies and is only now reappearing with the waning of the cold war when you've got charter 88 which although it borrows its name from czech slovakia nonetheless is a left-wing organization in britain designed to borrow american into political institutions and transplant them in order to prevent mrs thatcher continuing to run the country now now you neglect this because during that during the 70s and the 80s the theme of the british left has been that britain is an occupied country that america is an occupying power uh that were simply a province in in the american empire exactly sophisticated and moderate and entertaining version of that theory yeah that's fair enough i mean to the i but i'm a founding signatory of charter 88 and i think one can have it both ways in fact i'm wedded to the view both ways i think you can have an american constitution explicitly modeled on the american bill of rights which itself written by some very fine english colonists there's no need for national loyal ones on critically minded guys and um there's no need in other words for any national self-hatred about this and one can have that without having the presence of uh nuclear bases which are governed by no treaty and ratified binary parliamentary agreement uh which i think does qualify the country to be to be as orwell described it when it happened first occupied those were even in wartime people as a matter of fact what all will said was that he met a man he read a piece about her um in which a man said the american troops were in britain not to invade germany but in order to suppress a british revolution he said you have to be intellectual to say things like that no ordinary person could be so stupid that's uh that's that's true and i and i deserve it but you'll remember the the uh piece um about the soldiers in piccadilly and so forth and the the fact that that the troops and bases were welcomed so why in that case didn't the government be honest without saying we have allowed our children you're not suggesting the americans wouldn't go if i asked excuse me they came without me you're speaking awfully fast i don't always follow you are you suggesting that there's something surreptitious about the existence of nuclear bases in great britain in the book i quote the then secretary of defense forestall as you know came to a sticky end but was then in a lucid interval who said as far as he knew uh there had never before been an agreement by whereby one power stationed its forces on the church of another without a treaty without any formal written understanding of any kind many smaller and weaker countries such as the philippines have a ratified renewable agreement in the united kingdom just doesn't have this testifies in my view to the strength of the specialization people don't think of americans as foreign 46 he was a lawyer an international lawyer as a specialist and for him to say this is the first time that something has happened it does not suggest that it's outrageous by no means not of itself now the the fire bombing of dresden had never happened before and it was also outrageous but the uh the the evolution of of nato is not something that suggests other than that uh england as a partner to nato would have um carried its share of the responsibility to make nato effective uh speed then you in in your book you attach a kind of importance to that that uh is isn't uh earned that i can see well if i don't if i don't carry the point in that way i don't i'll be able to convince you now i think there is a difference though and i i make it by contrast with to go who wants to ask the commander of american forces in israel yeah can you tell me how many american nuclear weapons there are in france so the guy said i can but i'm not allowed to you're not allowed to know that and the girl said well right but no no french president will ever be talked to in those terms over again and meant it without removing france from the west he said no we there are certain decisions we'll we will not find out have been taken for us the british government in um in other words is quite prepared to find out second what american military and nuclear policy is even though it's committed its country and its national territory as a forward basin i mean it may not be as well known here as it is in england with your audience but a lot of british people don't like that and i'm well did you all tell spanish and gibraltar do you all tell spain what you got in the world huh well i'm for though i'm for the restoration of all these uh anomalies um to their to their uh but but but uh the fact that rightfully really i think makes uh makes a bit more of a of a template uh for that which is surreal the fact of the matter is that we guarded the peace in europe for 40 years through a series of arrangements some of which were anomalous as for instance de gaulle separation uh from uh formal separation but we kept the peace and all of a sudden things have got to go our way well let's say even say your way um europe now uh but but you seem to be you should want to go back and say ah but they there were certain uh legal anomalies and solar systems here that uh historically disturbed me well they can disturb you it seems to be only if you're you insist on a kind of a reading of history that history doesn't ever lend itself to it doesn't strike you then that the this what we've been talking about this uh unspoken treaty nuclear treaty suggests uh an amazingly deep latent connection between the two countries who does that's all i'm really saying it does and in fact there's one that i applaud incidentally i never thought of myself as an angry affiliate and i i've been denouncing an angle for which i god knows i'm not but that's irrelevant uh we have common interests and also we can communicate uh i don't read german journals but i read english journals and uh uh isn't that one of the reasons why there is a more natural affinity than there would be say with uh germany and also one i think which is going to develop because i um i don't think we've reached the end of this story though mr hitchens may it seems to me that with the development of europe the reason why the americans always wanted the british in the european community was because they would represent they thought the ideas of free trade and free markets which would mean that the community would never be closed to american goods in american capital and so on and that is now going to become very important as the european community grows incorporates the with the threat of 1992 with the third of 1992 and if britain now has a distinctive role in this area i would say it is to represent the ideals of free trade and free markets within the community which might develop in an antarctic and protectionist direction and eventually to lead with the reduction of tariff barriers between the two sides of the atlantic to the development of some kind of economic equivalent of nato which the americans would benefit from the british would certainly benefit from but so would the europeans that's just not enough about my book i'm afraid i think it's all good stuff but i mean it's not enough about me you haven't even said whether you liked it oh i did like the book it's uh and what spot but i have to ask first thing i have to ask the question that was the famous question that was asked in the lady chatterley trial would you let your wife or servant read this book i think would you let someone know a lot about the subject already read it i'd have doubts they get a very distorted view i think i'd let them read it in the in the event of giving them five other books four of them by bill on that on that note of a plug for your employer let me ask mr buckley how do you react to mr hitchens charge that you're masquerading as a wasp or at least to his more serious point underneath it that one of the cultural ironies is america's borrowing of a british class snobbery that is many people think is manifested among other ways in in the way you talk well i i can't think of a single occasion in my public or private life in which i have tried to disguise the fact that i'm a roman catholic i'm a professing roman catholic to the extent that that excludes me from being a wasp it's it's the loss of the wasps not of the catholics so uh uh i will watch to simply become um a word as far as i can see that simply designates uh uh people who are really traditionalists and i suppose non-jewish or i don't know i i can even imagine i can even think of some jews who i think of as wasps i would have thought a wasp means someone who is not an accredited victim yeah yeah yeah that would be a joe serbian uh uh it certainly would i could just hear him saying it um i've campaigned for some time to drop the w um because i think it's superfluous i think one could reasonably say these people are asps there are no basps so it's a work of super irrigation but um it's noticeable that you can be without offense even though hyphenations in decline called an italian american or a greek american german american but the idea of an english american is that something axiomatically absurd about it that i think is interesting again it doesn't offend me it intrigues me there is i think this is because what the is because they have the incidents originally of english settlers yes the original settlement um the swarming of the english as uh woodrow wilson called in his history and the presence of englishmen in america but the reason why that and they're dominant the reason why that seems so so imprecated so natural to the whole texture of the thing is is therefore what i mean by the the blood and nostalgia a bit if not the class not just of course the english the scots irish the ulsterman were a major part of the early settlement but again people don't regard them as a separate group they often describe themselves as irish i believe they're 57 percent of those who describe themselves as irish in america but they're they're not irish people yes that's right and from ulster but they're not part of the irish in the sense that they have this strong sentimental connection to ireland which is sometimes expressed in sympathy for irish republicanism well thank you very much mr christopher hitchens author of blood class and nostalgia which you are authorized by mr uh uh by my confederate here to read provided you mix it up with a few other books thank you ladies and gentlemen you

Channel: James V

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Keywords: Firing Line (TV Program) William F. Buckley, Jr. (Author) Rider Factor HItchens Christopher Hitchens Hitchslap Hitch

Id: lUH4RzAofv8

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2013