Christopher Hitchens on Why Orwell Matters + Q&A (2002)

well thank you David for a very handsome dividend introduction I still feel that I must begin by striking a slightly solemn chord I hope words seem like a sententious one I mean if you ever notice our geographical position on this coast but if you were the fact that our society has recently both asked for unrequired the Solidarity of so many other societies I would like us to keep quiet for a moment and think about our Australian brothers and sisters and they've seen atrocity to which they've been subjected and also to think about the root causes of that atrocity which are the determination of some people not coexist with civil society and also the willingness of Australian soldiers to volunteer for the unhappy and belated but ultimately delightful independence of East Timor and independence that was greeted by the bin laden lists and their eyes as a crime against one of their favourite dictatorships so with that said I would just entreat a moment of reflection thank you and also solidarity in case some should be any antipodean listeners to this show I say show even though it's me doing it the Sun I thought I might begin by reading a poem which is the the introduction of my book on George Orwell it's written by Robert conquest a distinguished local resident professor at the Hoover Institution at Stanford Orwell early lived to be 46 I went to Bob conquests 85th birthday last year and was amazed as I say my dedication to him it's been the presence of such a great scholar and such a great man who has the rare quality of having been both premature anti-fascist and a premature artist an honest accommodation seldom met with in the same person as well as a wonderful poet a great critic perhaps the great historian of the atrocities of the 20th century and the man who has done the most along with Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in the last few decades to keep the very difficult and intricate form of the Limerick alive any one of these attainments I think might be enough for one lifetime he some years ago wrote a poem about Georgia will and to my boundless gratitude gave me permission to use it and I'm going to require that gratitude by as people something I say in this area sharing it with you moral and mental glaciers melting slightly betray the influence of his warm intent because he taught us what the actual meant the vicious winter grips its prey less tightly not all were grateful for his help one finds for how they hated him who huddled with the comfort of a quick remedial myth against the cold world and their colder minds we die of words for touchstones he restored the real person relevant or thing and thus we see not war but suffering as the conjunction to be most of horde he shared with a great world for greater ends that honesty a curious cunning that you you share with just the few who don't desert you a dozen writers half a dozen friends a moral genius and truth seeking brings sometimes a silliness with you askance like Darwin playing his bassoon to plants he too had lapses but he claimed no wings while those who drown a truths empiric part in different or dogma turned frenetic then whom no writer could be less poetic he left this lesson for all verse or art if in what I'm about to say I can arise to anything like that standard of evocation I shall be pleased to myself and I hope you'll be pleased with my subject I'm going to choose to begin in this way and I hope not to be thought opportunistic but in the last seven days we've been reminded very forcibly indeed it seems to me that the totalitarian principle that's to say the principle which enslaves one society the better to Commission aggression against others is not something that we can confined to the perhaps compulsory study of 1984 and of Animal Farm which is visited on schoolchildren in this country but it is a living vivid actual principle and a really clarifying threat I'm referring first to the unspeakable degradation that was inflicted last week by their big brother on the people of Iraq forced once again to gather adoringly unanimously and terrified and not only to turn out to vote 100% but to turn out to vote 100% the same way after what they've been through one felt they might have been spared this last shout shekhu style abnegation humiliation and second the discovery that the People's Republic of North Korea has all this time while its people have been starving and screaming with hunger and pain and the absence of all culture has been choosing to spend all its resources on the enrichment of uranium who will say in the face of this that the relevance of Georgia oil belongs in the past it so happens that I've been to both Iraq and North Korea I'm up to speed on the axis stuff have been for some time in my book I write about my visit to Pyongyang in this way in the closing months of the 20th century I can try to get a visa for North Korea often referred to as the world's last Stalinist stage it might as easily be described as the world's prototype Stalinist stage founded under the protection of Stalin and Mao and made even more hermetic and insular by the fact of a partition Peninsula that so to speak locked it in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea still boasted the following features at the end of the year 2000 on every public building a huge picture of the great leader Kim il-sung the dead man who still holds the office of president in what one might therefore term annette crock recei or a mozilla cracy all other senior posts are occupied by his son the dear leader Kim jong-il after all big brother as a term was a perversion of family values as well children marched a school in formation singing songs in praise of the aforesaid leader photographs of the leader displayed by order in every home a lapel button with the features of the leader compulsory where for all citizens loudspeakers and radios blasting continuous propaganda for the leader and the party a society endlessly mobilized for war its propaganda both hysterical and in reference to foreigners and foreign powers intensely chauvinistic and xenophobic complete prohibition of any news from outside or any contact with any other trees absolute insistence in all books and all publications on a unanimous view of a grim past a struggling present and a radiant future repeated bulletins have absolutely false news of successful missile tests or magnificent production targets a pervasive atmosphere of scarcity and hunger alleviated only by the most abysmal and limited food grandiose and oppressive architecture a continuous stress on mass sports and mass exercise apparently total repression of all matters connected to the libido newspapers with no news shops with no goods an airport with almost no planes a vast nexus of tunnels underneath the capital city connecting different party and police and military bunkers there was of course only one word for it and it was employed by all journalists all diplomats and all overseas visitors it's the only time in my writing life when I've become tired of the term Orwellian I might add here to interpolate I was in Czechoslovakia under the old communist police regime in the late 1980s and I resolved while I was in Prague to become the first reporter to write an article from their first writer to compose one that wouldn't mention the name Franz Kafka like Mr Amos I believe in the war against cliche and so what was my horror when I was arrested by the Communist secret police at a meeting of the charter 77 forces in a private apartment and when I asked them what is the charge I was told we're not telling you I had I ended up mentioning Kafka after all that and having quit to Pyongyang I was obliged to use the word Orwellian I'll just close by my last sentences on this in some respects the North Korean nightmare falls short of Orwell's dystopia the regime is too poor and too inefficient to provide telescreens or even wireless sets to most of its subjects in some respects however it is infinitely more forbidding Winston and Julia would have had no chance at all for a moment of private in the countryside literally over the lease of a crummy flat in some anonymous proletarian quarter of town nonetheless there really are hate sessions in North Korea during breaks in fact your office work and at an evening of mass games I was shown for multiple hypnotizing flashcards the hideous image of a grim-visaged enemy soldier hurtling towards me to be replaced by the refulgent and reassuring face of the great leader these are details what was entirely unmistakable was the atmosphere of a society where individual private life is absolutely pointless and where everything that is not absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden the resulting dankness and gin genus and misery would have been almost indescribable without reference to a certain short novel that had been bashed out on an old typewriter against the clock by a dying English radical half a century before so I've started in a way at the at the opposite end of my answer to the question posed by my book jacket which is why does all well matter because I believe that to answer the question one has to begin a little earlier than his partly Swiftian and partly dystopian novels his best-known work and most often cited in the United States a 1984 Animal Farm the the most concise way I can think of phrasing this is the following in in the century that's just closed behind us or we we rather hope has just closed behind us the 20th century the three great moral and political and cultural crises were these the end of Empire the end of the idea that the world was the property and the world and its inhabitants and resources were the property of white Europeans the question of fascism and national socialism the threat to civilization that was posed by that and the delusions of Stalinism George Orwell I propose as the only writer dearly some would say public intellectual the only person who managed to get all three of these questions right and I'll just begin first by saying how he did that or rather how he phrased it and then I'll say why think how he did it he was a British colonial official having had a fairly standardized what we call in England conventional upbringing we call it conventional because it applies to only about 5% of the population I think which is why we say public school when we mean private it's just it's another way of making Americans feel at home when they visit I like a lot of other successful writers who skipped university altogether partly out of poverty and became a colonial official the police official in fact in Burma and threw up the job for reasons that he never publicly stated but I believe I understand from a close study of his writing I think that he thought that if he kept on with the job he would become a sadist know that he would become a robot that he'd understood something very essential about what nietzsche called the master/slave relationship and also the the other term that's often used rather cheaply exploitation it was one thing to notice that the British kept Burma forcibly underdeveloped in order that its economy would be a blood bank for the British economy that was something in a sense any fool could see but there was exploitation of another kind as well and it took the following form the most educated the most integrated the most sophisticated the most qualified Indian or Burmese man however anglicized he may have become would never be allowed as a member of the English club to come and have lunch or dinner or a cocktail in European company that would never happen but the least qualified and least literate and least assimilation Burmese woman could be allowed into any Englishman's bungalow there any by the back door in fact Florrie the central character in wells first novel burmese days and the man who i anticipates by some decades the sweltering guilt-ridden anti-heroes of the later Graham Greene stories actually says admits to us through his author that he bought his Burmese mistress from her family that in other words he's living with a slave a sex slave this these two declensions of exploitation it seemed to a well and it seems to me condemned the system of imperialism morally as well as economically and politically and his decision to refuse it and to become instead a campaigner against it which now seems to us in retrospect to be rather common sensical if not morally obvious was at the time he made it in the early twenties a very unusual decision indeed it seemed to most people at that time that imperialism would last for many many more generations that it was rational and progressive and even liberal and that it was a gift from Europe to the rest of the world it was very well there were very very few who saw that it had a short time to live and that this time should be as far as possible further curtailed by moral critique and with that step or world took the side of the underdog and the oppressed for the rest of his life never wavering in this was determined as far as possible to share their suffering to look at the world from their perspective and I think that that aided him very powerfully first in understanding what is very present and vivid in the novelistic portrayals in 1984 the essential sadomasochistic quality of the of the master/slave relationship the pornographic secret that is at the heart of domination and to have understood that as someone who had been tempted by it the other way around in other words with looking at a figure who knew what it would be like to hold the other end of the whip to be the one wielding it rather than receiving it and understood the ghastly temptations involved in my opinion the great test of any writer any intellectual is their ability to handle contradiction the reason why all Welles prose retains for us the sinew and muscle that it does the the tensile quality that that it place is because we have a man arguing all the time with his own prejudices and his own fears his own bigotry his own shortcomings trying to argue himself in public out of these temptations once that's clarified I think it's very easy to see why he was so quick to detect the Menace of fascism at the really pornographic assault on European civilization that began a decade or so later and which also partook of the sadomasochistic and the and the cruel and as well well was again very prescient in pointing out took the doctrines of racism that had been evolved for purposes of colonial domination and did what he doll was feared they would do and applied them began to apply them to other Europeans as well it wasn't enough to describe other species of different colors as unto mention or natural slaves this doctrine this is a revolting irrational doctrine could also be applied to other Europeans and like Empire it would mean war not just in the sense of intending it but in the sense of in tailing it and so he went to Spain and became one of the first volunteers to feel the weight of a pack and a rifle on his shoulder and to physically bar the road to war and fascism as it tried to conquer European civilization and his account of that struggle almost unpublished in his own lifetime because of the publishers who wouldn't take it or the editors who sense of it or their people who wouldn't distribute it homage to Catalonia is still the the most imperishable account of being with a volunteer and a reporter in a context of war and revolution and it was while engaged in that struggle as if he didn't have enough so to speak on his plate that he became aware that there was a third great illusion or delusion or hallucination very prevalent among the intellectuals and those who imagine themselves to be emancipated rational and progressive and this great delusion was the one which stated that beyond the Ural Mountains in the far distant provinces of Stalin's Russia a new utopia was being created we're history would come to an end where human emancipation would be consummated there would be no more contradictions and the ideal society would come to birth and in trying to dispel this hallucination and also ensuring that more than a delusion more than an illusion it was a terrible lie and depended upon the suppression or distortion of some appalling truths Orwell was forced to confront physically as well as mentally and morally the consensus of the enlightened the beyond song who as some of you may have good reason to know are always the most intolerant people in society because they're sure that they're right and they're sure their motives must be ideal and the last jacket of his life is therefore spent in an imperishable struggle conducted almost entirely as an individual really only with a typewriter and an attitude against the tries on declar against the betrayal by society and its values as higher studies so of society in this house Farris excuse me abouts intellectuals now that any of those three things it seems to me will be enough for one lifetime but I must have before I trespass on your time which I think I'm about to do and I have a sense of a an unspoken message coming from mine well I would say why I thought must briefly say why I think one in one lone stubborn Englishman was able to do this it was enabled to do it and I will select the following as my provisional conclusion with some part of himself and with his long wrestling with love of literature and of the liturgy he was a convinced atheist I think by the way a Protestant atheist but still an atheist you may know the joke from Belfast about the roadblock now get stops or what religion are you oh I'm an atheist are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic actually happened to a Jewish friend of mine in Belfast only you used to make the life of Chinese waiters in Belfast very difficult to in the days of the roadblock his but he had a strong belief the the struggle the long struggle to have the Bible translated out of Latin where it was the possession of a priestly class or if you prefer the analogy of 1984 of the members of the inner party a secret book with knowledge arcane and limited to an elite where it could be read and understood by the people the long struggle of the Protestant revolution where men like William Tyndale was strangled and burned for the for the right to have a Bible that the congregation could read tune with all these things he understood intuitively what I think has now been confirmed shall we say scientifically that there is a connection between language and truth and logic that there is an Asian asked an instinct for language that makes us human and that along with that comes the wish for a clarity and honesty of expression that it matters in other words not what you think I've just given you three examples of how his opinions were the right ones and that's quite different thing saying or believing the right thing it's not what you think it's how you think it's whether you are willing to trust in what is innate in us in the struggle for liberty and the distrust of lies distrust of propaganda distrust of authority the lie of authority and the folded lie in the brain as Orden puts it in his wonderful poem September 1939 in understanding this I think he made it clear that one individual if possessed of love of language an understanding of literature and a respect for truth can prevail in a time when the mind is in Chains and when people's will to obey people's willingness to accept coercion has temporarily eclipsed their will to resist and since it seems to me that we're never likely to reach a time or a place where that example won't be of the first importance to us and since we happen to be in such a time in such a place now and since there is so much fear around us and so much propaganda in the language to which we're compelled to listen that I won't detain you any longer and saying why I think that my title while will matters is in that extent at least its own justification so with with great gratitude to you for inviting me into you ladies and gentlemen for coming I'll place myself at your disposal thank you our thanks to Christopher Hitchens journalist and author of why Orwell matters for his comments here today I'm Connie Shapiro president of the Commonwealth Club and I will conduct the question and answer section of this program we have many questions so if you would step back up here I will begin what would Orwell write about today will overthrown that one out because can I we know the rest of them no I'm just kidding well I think I began by saying what I thought he would he would already have known and would have hoped to make plain to others about the the survival into our time of the party state of the idea of the the leader worshipping centrally organized regimented society economy and the political system and how the existence of such regimes is not just a tragedy for those who live under them but a menace to those who live alongside them or have to temporarily to coexist with them I think that that he would have noticed that and I think he would have noticed in his struggle for truth and language that I was just mentioning probably the best-known lesson that he taught and the one that people have assimilated the best is the attack on euphemism pretty pretty pretty names for ugly things in other words thus I suppose the classic would be contemporary cars that would be collateral damage as a word for dead civilians most people I know I'm very pleased to say when they hear a trick like that attempted to be pulled on them will will reach for their all wealth somewhere in themselves they know that they know he put them on alert for a thing like that of course they're often not there's a lot to it in their own discourse for example facile anti-war people now say no war on Iraq or no war with Iraq well that sounds okay but since the argument is should there be a fight with Saddam Hussein it's doing no favor to the Iraqi people to say that Iraq has Saddam or Saddam is Iraq after all that's the proposition the Iraqi people were asked to validate in a hundred percent referendum last week so people who say Iraq when they mean Saddam Hussein are doing his work foreigner should be aware of it so it's one thing to be aware of the lies that power tells in South Trish's propaganda but one must also be aware of the facile or evasive things that one is inclined to say or let be said oneself do you feel as Orwell did in his time that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world well we'll wrote that when when he realized that what he sat down in homage to Catalonia was going to be believed by nobody that he was never going to be able to publish his findings about the attempt by Stalin to destroy the Spanish Republic and that to the extent he could publish them even in small magazines he wouldn't be believed and that the people who he knew who were witnesses were all either dead or in war in prison or on the run and he said it will it will come to a point where what the leader says is true is true and if he says it didn't happen in the past it didn't happen then either a little bit now and of course you can see there the germ the nucleus of 1984 occurring to him so it's a very suggestive excerpt from his work all I can say is that we now have the archives from Moscow and from Salamanca of the archives of the General Franco regime opened to us and it could now be independently confirmed and verified but every single assertion he made in that book is true it's all been he said all I know is what I saw and where I didn't see it myself I'm quoting people who I think are honest and reliable but I can do no better than that well and he thought it wouldn't work what does work has worked he has been vindicated there's now a square named for him in Barcelona that was opened by the mayor of Barcelona a couple of years ago plus a George Orwell and he might even have live to see it so I think what one must say is that even though there are people of course of another school now sometimes rather glibly called the postmodernist who deny that there's such a thing as objective truth anyway or verifiability in any case who have an effect less attitude towards reality but i whose tyranny is not anything like the same they only wear people down by boredom and and semi-literate prose rather than by boredom semi-literate prose and machine guns and rubber truncheon and concentration camps that no but it brought that it's right to assume that it will always be a struggle there will never be a point where everyone understands as a world with objectivity and truth is and these are given or April or I know you get you get what you fight for with that as you do with Rights one of our wells lasts writing was the problem with the left is that it tells lies about its past given your recent departure from the nation is this a sentiment with which with which you concur well I wouldn't I certainly don't think that the nation as a magazine tells lies about the past or indeed about the present I think it has illusions about both but individuals there do and the editorial the editorial style tends in that direction but it would be quite it would be force of me to say that this was a if it was a campaign of Lies it would be easy to express it's rather I think a campaign of comforting half truth such as the possibility of being neutral in a war between civil society and theocratic aggression I don't think there is a neutral position there and I'm rather glad that there isn't because I rather relish the confrontation but there are people who think that there is a mid-middle neutral position that one can be more neutral about it and there even some who I think are little shall I say euphemistic about the other side are willing to grant more for it or more to it than it claims for itself for example the idea that Osama bin Laden is an anti imperialist when he wants to when he wants to restore the caliphate I don't grant to someone he wants to restore the Caliphate that he's a hater of Empire I'm sorry I just went I won't do it all that he's a revolutionary when he's in fact a hired pimp for the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani secret police and his organization is partly a crime family partly a bent multinational corporation and partly a fascist - camerea so anyone who thinks that's radicalism is entitled to their delusion but not Ivan I want no refusing to work anymore for nation I simply announce to myself more than anyone else but to others if they're interested that I want no part of any of that continuing on the subject of the nation this person writes you quit the nation because they are anti-war don't you want to be the voice of a reason of reason they're well Navasky take you back if you say pretty please well like I hope no one would think I was being evasive for I said I thought I'd answer that question I might add though that of course the nation never tried to alter anything I said I'm and did were sweet in saying they wished I wouldn't go I suppose I might add one thing being anti-war is ok as long as people are pacifist I mean if someone says I'm a Quaker and I would rather die than hurt Osama bin Laden I can respect that position but people who are not pacifists and in fact our secret sympathizers of the other side and inventors of excuses for them shouldn't say that they're anti war I'm afraid that as I said before Orwell does not just expose the euphemisms and propaganda of power he exposes the glibness and fatuity of all of us and it's for everyone to look to their own language and people say there are war if they are Ramsey Clark for example let me just do this okay we're have it out of the way it was a petition the other day which some of you saw probably called not in my name addressed to the president all the people who don't want a confrontation with Saddam Hussein and idler first names I Marisa Tomei was one head as and it was another I'd actually don't think George Bush is going to war in the name of Marisa Tomei but I it's she may as well say that now whether they know it or not this petition is put together by a front Organization for the workers world party called the International Action Center whose chair Ramsey Clark is chairman of the International Committee to defense Lord I'm a Lhasa Fitch and I'm sorry that's not pacifism that's not anti-war it's a lie to say that and anyone who believes it is a SAP and that has to be said as often as possible will you be doing a monthly column in any other magazine well I see we're not gonna leave this they did ask me one they came that came a point when the the divine Katrina the fragrant gorgeous Katrina and the furry Navasky in our conversations they did say rather huskily is there anybody else and I said no there isn't and at that time I meant it - it's true has the advent of the computer drawn us closer to Big Brother watching us well you're asking very much the wrong person because I only know how to use the computer really as a typewriter in a telephone but my instinct is the same no I remember during the Tiananmen Square events in nineteen thirty 1989 the once I've been able to take my eyes off Henry Kissinger justifying the massacre on television though I have never forgotten him doing so and I think anyone else should I was amazed that on my recently acquired fax machine I could get direct people from Tiananmen Square was sending out faxes I thought that's amazing the censorship is now impossible and I've been in countries I had before being in countries as a writer where I couldn't transmit from where I was what I'd found out list with great luck maybe finding the right telex operator or getting someone who was flying out on a plane to take it but you could be there and unable to communicate I thought in a way censorship has been abolished now no government can say it controls information well of course the we've evolved hugely beyond the facts now with email and though that encourages the state to try and find means of keeping a surveillance of it and some control I think we have reached a point that all well would never have predicted or being able to predict where it's possible to say that censorship is only really a platonic concept now it's it's it's a wish in the mind of the state and of the authorities but but almost nobody now depends upon Orthodox sources of information probably the best thing that's happened in my working lifetime in politics and the English language Orwell goes after those who would use language to cover up rather than reveal within universities are we working are we making progress toward teaching students to think and write clearly well I can only speak for the classes that I teach myself at the new school in New York and I know that they come there this is a graduate class at the Liberal Studies department that most of these graduates come for remedial treatment because they they know that they've been betrayed by their education so far they've neither been taught to think nor to read and so I don't know what's going on I don't know what happened to them before they got this far but I know they're in trouble if they're coming to me and if they're willing as they were to seek help at stage one of course of admit you have a problem if it's that bad it must be very bad and I also know that it ought to be easier than it is out of a say there would be a probable 15 in the first class the first meeting that we had the struggle to find a reference and at an allusion a literary allusion that they'll all get that everyone will understand so there'll be a common reference point is is increasingly difficult and dispiriting Lee so and actually George always one of the few handholds but that's only because he's been inculcated in school for a long time basically as part of the instruction in the orthodoxy of the Cold War and that of course is to do him and his work a huge disservice but at least it means that yes along with Huck Finn the Catcher in the Rye The Simpsons and usually Gatsby everyone's read it but after that you can't trust a thing and this is this seems to me as a terrible cultural disgrace and it comes from praising students for working so well I'm doing so well and being so good and everyone wins the prize and everyone's great and the worst thing is to upset anybody well they they don't get that for coming to me either in November in 1989 a group of university students in Czechoslovakia were preparing a stage performance of Animal Farm when the system finally crumbled how much delusion do leaders in North Korea and Iran live under you know to mention another great resident of this area excuse me I've already mentioned Robert conquest I could give you the example of cheslav nuage who I suppose we would now have to say was in every sense the laureate of Poland poetic and literary who's been living in Berkeley for a long time and in 1951 he wrote the captive mind and he was then still a cultural official in the Stalinist party that ran Poland 1951 is the year after all well died and 1984 was published and in the capture of mine Jewish rights that within certain circles within the Polish communist leadership this book 1984 was passed from hand to hand in illicit translation by people who trusted one another as have you read this and they were all astounded by how it described and captured the texture of life in a closed society and he adds me Rashad's they were all astounded later to find that the author the English author of this had never lived under the Stalin is nor even visitor of the Soviet Union they that case how does he know how it feels how does he know how it smells and tastes now remember MIOSHA is discussing passing a book from hand to hand a secret book within the inner party the book is 1984 which is about the passing of a secret book from hand to hand within the inner party one year after it's written and hasn't been published in most of the West it's a the people in Poland got the point right away I don't think any one writer in the century has ever paid a greater compliment to another even if it's unintentional than that and so yes of course people do know of course that you know we're all mammals there's nothing racially or genetically different between ourselves and North Koreans Albanians Iraqis so and everyone everyone has a rough sense of when they're being lied to when they're being got out or coerced or exploited the bet we take that that the right bet would be on their emancipation must be the right one the bet we check that their leaders deserve better treatment must be the wrong one always is always has been the wrong one I would add only that actually all well had though he'd never been to Stalin's Russia he did have an idea of what a totalitarian society could be made up of because he'd been a victim of a very sadistic colonial English boys school when he was very small he'd been a colonial policeman he'd been subject to a purge and a witch hunt in Spain and he'd seen how easy it was to control the colonial subjects and the unemployed with only a few determined officials so in fact by summarizing everything he had learned in his other struggles he was able to make a reasonable guess again because of antropomorphic ability if you will of what this kind of thing might be like and we I think are entitled to do our best to do the same do you feel like a lefty these days it seems like many countries have have drifted towards libertarianism well I wish I would the question I want to stand up and say who's drifting towards libertarianism it would cheer me up [Music] it doesn't seem to me like that I wish it did unless the question of means which he may or she may that there's a generally widespread admission that the dirige East economy weather merely stage if I'd and part if I door semi nationalized so has diminishing suffering from diminishing returns I mean that's I suppose generally true and that may go to the point of whether one feels like a leftist or not gotcha though they might flush him out Jennifer table pick that up should I be your ventriloquist the comrades has that he's been um that he's been a fan of Janis Miller for a while we profanely he calls a comedian rather than a philosopher and satirist a civilian and he's noticed that having at one point we know sort of Farish 60s or RJ these are my words but he's now more of a libertarian rightly yeah I noticed the same thing and I think it would be true it would be true of me in some ways too yes if that's what you meant sure but when I work as I have been recently with the Kurdish rebel opposition or the Iraqi underground I feel much more like a transcript what as I used to much more then I would if I was carrying a placard around the street saying give Saddam Hussein another chance and it see how any I didn't see how anyone could do that and call themselves a leftist I'm sorry not while I'm around they can't any on September eleventh related question do you find any significance between Louis Freeh former FBI directors disdain for the Clinton administration his resignation right before September 11th and the frustrated resignation from FBI and subsequent death of FBI agent Joe O'Neill well I know both the stories quite well and it would take a while to summarize there Neil one for anyone who doesn't know it but I'll do it in this sentence I think mr. O'Neil had become persuaded a long time previously that the al-qaeda network was a serious threat and had was being consistently underestimated by the administration and made himself obnoxious with inside the bureau by making this point in saying that there was a cover-up involved say in Yemen with the USS Cole that generally under estimation of a threat he then made the crucial mistake of leaving some secret documents in his briefcase in a hotel in the conference in Florida which gave his enemies an excuse to fire him for a breach of security and he said well the hell with you anyway I can get a better job in the public sector and in the private sector and I'll carry on my campaign from there and on the 1st of September became the 2001 became director of security for the World Trade Center I was last seen entering tower 2 it's like it's the nearest I've ever got in real life in a study to the Sherlock Holmes Moriarty global mutual combat there were unfortunately only one of them falls into the Reichenbach so far though I actually think for other reasons we won't be hearing from this to bin Laden again I think he's under the rock I'm digressing only a little I hope no it's certainly there was nobody who took the struggle against Islamic fascism seriously could have been contend with the performance of the Clinton administration which didn't take it seriously it was culpably neglectful of it and in its one counter stroke alleged counter stroke are committed an atrocity by blowing up a civilian facility in in Sudan on presidential order on the pretext that it was a nerve gas facility but without demanding an inspection note well if it wasn't nerve gas facility it could hardly have been folded like a tent and moved into the desert could it no inspection was required no warning was given no reference to the United Nations was made or to Congress every liberal in the country mr. tension for that I don't have the paradoxical effect I call it paradoxical any way of making mr. bin Laden look good a pretty difficult task in the context No well as with the whole eight years of mr. potentially in foreign policy those years were eaten by the locust at best and these were eight years we couldn't have afforded so mr. free and mr. O'Neal didn't get near and I think criticizing how unbelievably squalid and pointless that period in American political life really was and how on self-critical its supporters by the way still are they still think they're only a Floyd a recount away from having me improve right what can you do with such people I leave the question with you ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters you've written a book calling for criminal charges against Henry Kissinger recently however the u.s. sought to extend to exempt American officials not just American soldiers from the International Court of Criminal Justice how does this affect the effort to bring Kissinger to justice well in the following way that's I think of great moment and I say that quite independent of my own campaign though I'll just tell you in case you want an update that since the book came out and since the campaign began Henry Kissinger was visited by the gendarmerie in Paris and the Ritz Hotel and summons to court to answer questions about Pinochet and the disappearance of French people in that terrible immolation and fled town but the warrant is still extant for when he comes back he's been sought for questioning where the magistrates in Chile where I've been to testify against him charge Kuzma and the man charged in the Pinochet case and judge Rodolfo Corral the main judge in the death squad case in Argentina is also seeking his testimony an attempt was made to have a charged issue a bench warrant for his arrest in London quite recently and will be repeated if he tries to return there the Brazilian government asked him to cancel an official visit to Brazil a few weeks ago on the grounds that his immunity from prosecution couldn't be guaranteed some of the oxygen from around the guys being sucked out I'm glad to say and he's not free to travel anywhere without consulting lawyers each time and there are some countries he wouldn't dare go to and the some I haven't mentioned where self evident he wouldn't try and take a holiday in any case so this is not good enough but it's a start in other words the that something like a consistent human rights ethic of international law touching war crimes and crimes against humanity is beginning to apply to him he's also being sued in federal court in Washington DC by the relatives of people him piece who were murdered on his orders in Chile unfortunately that suit was filed on the 11th of September 2001 and hasn't had all the coverage I would have liked for it but we are working on it now very importantly and to answer your question lady's question more directly well the gentleman's question in a recent blog article by Elizabeth Becker in the New York Times and in some other report charge that's come into print in the legal journals it's been made very clear by senior members of the administration that their reason for wanting to withdraw the American signature from the International Criminal Court is the protection of Henry Kissinger they're they are aware that this could be a grave embarrassment to the Republican Party and to the Bush administration and as they think because they want to implicate all of us in his crimes the United States now think about that for one thing think about the insult that that involves for American society American culture for everyone here who pays taxes or thirds but it's much worse than that think about what they haven't done for Saddam Hussein what's the obvious thing the US administration should have done by now it should have asked his indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity asked its ambassador of the United Nations to lodge this complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee or perhaps made an application to the Hague for a warrant for his arrest it's the first thing you would think that a government bent on regime change would do why haven't they done it because they can't do it because they've thrown away for to defend Kissinger they throw away a weapon that could have punished Saddam was saying thus Henry Kissinger helps to projects determines that I was saying this is not an irony or a contradiction it's what you would expect because those of us who believe in a consistent human rights ethic and a consistent international law it would obviously have gotten both by now if you're not going to get both you have to be against getting either so the consequences of this are unbelievably serious and it seems to me that any one of you who knows who that congressman is or even their senator should be making a fantastic stink about it because the protection of Henry Kissinger is endangering civilization in a very direct sense even more than his protection was was an offense to it before now this is we are now where we are really playing for real with all this is not rhetorical talk anymore all of these things matter very much and and it's it's a gigantic responsibility both of these cases that's fallen upon American society and isn't being properly discharged is the American public's willingness to give up or restrict their civil liberties a short-term dementia it's never clear to me whether people know how much they've given up for example if a lawyer now wants to arraign somebody and have them held indefinitely and and increase the charge of their conviction the chance excuse me of their conviction on let's say at best circumstantial evidence the main resort of prosecutors now is not to anything that a change general Ashcroft has recently done the main resort is to the what's called the effective death penalty and anti-terrorism Act was passed by almost the whole Congress under the initiative of President Clinton a few years ago which as you may remember also in order to increase the number of offenses for which the death penalty could be applied and very greatly shortened the appeal process if not abolished it in many cases nobody noticed that going by because it was considered to be a necessary law and order measure for the re-election of President Clinton to a second term people who will give up their civil liberties for reasons like that for reasons a short-term and opportunist and cheap as that one are obviously going to be pretty easy to Stampede when planes full of human beings have flown into buildings full of human beings but let's not be in any doubt as to where this rod set in or to who so for who is responsible for it do you think we are becoming a society of sociopaths you know I sometimes get asked oh I did until recently because I've written books against people like limbs in other Teresa Henry kissing isn't there anyone you like and now I could say well I've written this book about someone I think it's rather good maybe I'm not as gloomy a person as you think or as negative but I must say all your questions of rage of press couldn't we have an upbeat question no no no we're not we're not but I think by no means is the United States becoming a society of sociopaths or is in a danger of doing so I'm afraid there the traditions of generosity and tolerance and pluralism and non-judgmental ISM all of which are in their way we're civilized accomplishments are sometimes used to use to negate themselves I used to make people think what perhaps I'm not right in thinking that some people are bad and some people are good some people should be shot and some people should be spared you who would I be to make that call I wrote a piece in this weekend's Washington Post saying them George Bush made a terrible mistake by saying that Saddam Hussein and Kim jong-il were evil but does everyone every educated thoughtful tender minded liberal knows how to titter at such moral absolutism we all know how to snigger evil huh he's painting it in black and white we all know how to jeer at that what he should have said is attacking Saddam Hussein would be the lesser evil then every liberal would have been eating out of his hand lesser evil ISM we can do we can name evil we have the concept all right but we only we only mentioned it in order to make accommodations with it now you're talking much better than cowboy rhetoric isn't it or is it how sure are you of that better be sure question is whether you have the fortitude the self-confidence and I would say the self-respect to say your own culture is worth fighting for and that the this enemies must be defeated some people really feel that they're being kind of judgmental if they say that Thanks

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Length: 55min 50sec (3350 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2017