Conversations with History: Christopher Hitchens

you welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies I guess today is Christopher Hitchens a man of letters he writes a regular column for Vanity Fair and for the nation he's the author of numerous books most recently letters to a young contrary in' and unacknowledged legislation writers in the public sphere he is the 2002 Sandford albergue lecturer at the University of California Berkeley Christopher welcome back as I say it well thanks welcome and nice to be back where were you educated well first of a series of boarding schools for boys prep school I was sent off when I was about seven the boarding school was family kept moving around the first place I remember actually is Malta when the British Navy still had a big base in Valletta powerfully influenced me I think my first memory is the Grand Harbor letter because I've always spent a lot of time in the Mediterranean in the Middle East and was felt kind of happy there and maybe it's because of this first memory but anyway we kept shifting so boarding school was the solution in those days I was the first member of my family to go to a private school and one of these was a school basically for the children of officers and Navy and Army people on Dartmoor Devon Jim then I went to school another boy saw a Methodist run pouring School in Cambridge between the ages of 13 and 17 and then I got true from there to Oxford University to to read philosophy and it's in England this is called a conventional education I think for the reason that it applies to only about one and a half percent of the population you've called yourself a rooted cosmopolitan and you speak of a potentially democratic and cosmopolitan patriotism this this this this in a way harkens back to this background you've just described yes I can't believe especially as you put it like that that it does not in some way because if you're partly English well I suppose in the way I'm holding English I mean one of the things about that is you don't have much of an identity crisis I think the white is but we do in fact the subject is the term is thought rot the laugh in English much but if you if you have have an admixture of refugee rootless Cosmopolitan's in your life and in your family background and if your main impulse as mine was I discovered quite young to move to United States somehow I always knew I want you to do that felt like I've been born in the wrong country even though I I love it and feels at home there yeah this is this is having both routes and cosmopolitanism I think by the way everyone should be so lucky that's how I thats how i hope globalization plays out that everyone knows where they come from and are secure in that knowledge but nobody has to stay put if they don't want to can you tell us about any politically formative experiences early in your life that really whether before you went to college or but we are after you were at the university that that really pointed you on the trajectory that your politics check well the background noise to my childhood my boyhood was the collapsing scenery of the British Empire the the last stages of it and the subsequent defeat in 1964 when I would have been I suppose 15 1449 of the long long reign with the post war in a Conservative Party and my the way I approach that was as far as my parents had been especially my father politically very conservative but as far as I could see they got nothing out of being conserved it's a museum rather as if they they were being taken for a bit of a ride by the monarchy of the Empire the Tory Party and so them the class system they I couldn't see where they got their share of it so I had a sort of rather pitying attitude to their politics I suppose and I think that therefore must have influenced me in looking as soon as I was old enough to make any inquiries to the left for company and for solutions and on the whole finding that I mean particularly reading the novels of George Orwell about the lower middle classroom I remember impressing me very much well this guy knows what it feels like in my family and he sees the contradiction but so there's no there wasn't a formative moment or a Damascus moment I don't think though I can remember deciding after reading a book by Arthur Koestler when I was quite young about capital punishment that I was that I was very much opposed to the death penalty I'm making that that's my first conscious political decision and I didn't realize but that was that was also going to put me to very much at odds with Amelia which I've been brought up now you in your new book you call yourself a contrarian and when what publisher does your publisher does okay and in but in an identifying or accepting that label you seem to be saying you're worn to it it's in you to be that way is that true I mean do you feel that about yourself what if you'll forgive just a moment of vanity part of that book of my letter story on contrary consists of an argument with my publisher about why I think about why I still think the title so because I think the word contrarian has something cringe making about it I see it's a bit like being a licensed gesture or permitting a permitted awkward customer or bad boy or loose cannon door that we have an interesting wealth very interesting to me the profusion of condescending terms we do have for descent but as I also point out if you say or the center or dissident you're claiming a term of honor that you can't just claim you may have to earn however yes the oppositional character I'm certain is innate in some people I'm not sure if it's innate originally in all people and only manifest in some I couldn't say but I do know for certain that it was innate in me and that this I seem to have found through going through life that one I naturally meet other people who feel the same it's very difficult to explain but you you recognize the symptoms of a fellow sufferer when you encounter one I know you don't like to be put in a political generation no I but but so let me ask you how do you think you were affected by the 60s well no I do I mean I think I've no choice but to put myself in a political generation and um but I'm glad you say the 60s because I think I've always thought that I wish I could find out the name of the person who said that all the kinds of human solidarity the generational is the lowest because what you have to do except have an accident of birth I mean to be a 60s person all you have to do is be born in a certain year like slight wine except not as good to be a 68 swass or which are we even have a french term for it now you have to have been someone who in some sense felt or saw the 68 crisis coming and was in some sense ready for it or if not that was totally swept up and it realized that here was a crux moment to hinge a hinge here and I'm lucky in that I made my decision that I thought it was going to be key in 67 I mean that the year I went to Oxford actually and joined a small of Trotskyist Luxembourg Astorga NIH's ation which in the next year quadrupled no much won't reveal its membership in the other sense of the 60s I was rather cold towards things like drug-taking which i think is a pathetic pursuit to the mistake of work for play to the cult of youth to all that sort of rather bogus utopianism I never felt very strongly about I just did think it was a year to be compared with 1848 as a European and international revolution and what do you think were the consequences of that period I don't mean to say by the way by that I was against sex or rock-and-roll right it was a sudden out of that yeah but a lot of what people were now and what is now sold and marketed as the 60s so I mean my hair very much the same length I say when it beats that's what I have contempt for narcotics that kind of stuff and for gurus so who and I very actually one of the things that I spent a fair much time doing is defending a certain interpretation of the 60s especially the 68 from the cheap and illusory and often bogus mm-hmm stuff that is described as Hana businesses it's a way that let me show confrontation in my life which I if you don't mind yeah nope--like might help yeah as focused on another question which I'm hoping again raster's the main the most famous person of my class at Oxford or my generation was William Jefferson Clinton mm-hmm so when people started to say both for him and against chip were at least he or she sure does express the spirit of the 60s I thought no no not while I'm around he's not going to get away with being the exemplary 60s but mm-hmm that's a big difference that's a one of many quarrels between him and me and it was because his whatever in whatever respect he identified with the white things of the 60s he later announced that identification and when he was doing that he was going along to get along as well or getting a lot of get along and yes sure I mean I actually know why he can claim not to have inhaled mm-hmm because I remembered anything well he he's allergic to smoke as it happens but he's not allergic to brownies into which large numbers of leaves can be mashed and Mainland that's right so the clever responses but shows the essential cheapness and dishonesty of the guy and he was I would say a draft dodger rather than an anti-war person and in other way in every in other words he's the he's the cheap and nasty version of something that actually was in many ways culturally well worth having and what do you think the what what had an enduring effect from that period in terms of our outlook on the world the 60s well I think myself that that it exposed the hollowness of the Cold War in two ways one it it said that the may or may not be a struggle with authoritarian communism but you can't in the name of that justify something like the devastation like chemical pollutants and napalm and phosphorus if the people when landscape of Vietnam nor can you justify having in Europe governments like that of General de Gaulle General Franco general Salazar and general Papadopoulos who for European governments of NATO lights nothing we got rid of all their more the 68th generation got rid of all that lot and we at least contributed to stopping and unjust aggressive war but the the people who I got to know in Cuba and Czechoslovakia and Poland knows also in that era probably convincing the promise in what may have been even more important way and it was that the last seismic echoes of that are I think what took place in 1989 it's indirect and it's always unintentional but many of the same people who I've met then became part of the leadership of that great movement of emancipation and also you could tell from the style of the people in the streets of Berlin and Prague and Poland that here blue jeans rock and roll posters of John Lennon and so forth yes that they had they'd noticed that there was something liberating about this too so in a way the best of indication didn't come to me till I was 139 for me but it was well worth waiting for as a man who studies history that you were ready to wait that it took longer than it should have well Hegel says somewhere that the out of Minerva doesn't take wing until dusk the Owls don't fly to exhaust get dark in other words is I was it's an overused image in some ways but it's always been attractive to me because it is only at the close of an epoch that you can really say that it wasn't epoch at all you can give it some kind of measure and depth and yes I don't think the owls of 68 I became Minerva like until 89 and even Timothy got now she took the same view in a funny way from a more conservative position than I did diagnosed it roughly and we managed to do it in a hieroglyphic and I don't believe in numerology but if you put if you write the letters nice if you write that as a 69 68 and 89 then turn them upside down there the same so when did you decide to become a writer I don't think it was this may sound I hope it doesn't sound solipsistic whip it was so decided for me I think and I believe it's true of anyone who makes it their life it isn't what you do is what you are mm-hmm in other words that somehow you've always known anyways I certainly felt that I'd always known not just that it was all that I wanted to do or felt I had to do but probably all that I could do I still can't imagine what it would be like doing something else I mean I'm sure sure I could be saying a lawyer of some kind but I just don't know what it would have no idea what it would be like and if I was doing it I feel like a sort of a conehead you know wondering if all the people around me would noticing that he's enormous by having that one of us but he's not really what how do they do it I have no idea I only know one thing now you have a view of almost a political philosophy of personal philosophy and I'm just curious as to how that relates or is it totally intertwined with your sense of yourself as a writer you say I think if the position of the independent mind or writer means anything at all it means acceptance of individual responsibility so talk a little about that that in other words the trajectory of your your personal evolution is is intimately tied with the way you write and what you write sure and I suddenly the form it took with me when I was much younger was that I hoped to become a voice for a movement that I would be one of its champions in print for awhile from between 67 and about seventy four or five I was a member of a Marxist organization as I told you rather odd post Trotskyist Rosa Luxemburg this group which I'm not sorry I'd was involved with I learned a lot from it but I probably stayed too long in and one of the things that taught me was you mustn't become or try and become a party liner however good the party may be as a writer you that's a betrayal and I wrote some good polemics and powerful cheering in that period but I wouldn't want to reread you any of it anymore and I know I think would anyone else so that's been probably an emancipation of myself from politics has been involved here and I suppose also more confidence that people would actually care to read something by me that wasn't just an argument a little discussion or a review or not about public affairs at all you you wrote somewhere and I can't recall where this was you said I don't think liberals make very good writers I think liberals are always trying to have it both ways I think it may have been in the Berlin review maybe or maybe not no I'm sure actually that some of the letters the letters okay yes yeah I think it's true in the that's part of my critique of as our Berlin who's often praised is a great stylist as well as a great thing is actually here is a guy who is not willing to be brave and not willing to make enemies but who wants a reputation both for being even-handed and objective and fair-minded by the way those three things do not never have meant the same though they're often used interchangeably that's what I meant it's what I put other I think a bit too casually in the in this excerpt you you mentioned so so how do you write you does it cut the words flow easily do you get your best ideas and a crowd or do you like the solitude and the drink and the quiet I like all of the above I Polly I need all of the above but and I hope it doesn't sound glib to say but I don't find the production of words very difficult either when I'm talking or writing and indeed the only thing I find difficult is not doing it it's keeping quiet or not or not writing I'm not really happy when I not doing it so I'm very lucky on time to be doing this the only thing I'm able to do or something that isn't really even in ability I mean it's more like a knack I'd have to qualify for it so that's luck if you like what what can I say but but so what happens a little much more how do you envision your audience as you write do you do you think about that person out there I mentioned that you you write for both the nation and Vanity Fair at one level that sounds like two very different audiences maybe not there with the nation I have a very good idea of the sort of people who who are reading me and indeed have met I've been doing the call over 20 years I probably met quite a lot of them a fair proportion not that many readers and I know I know exactly what a nation reader is like and writing a column of about a thousand words every other week which is what I've been doing for two decades is no more really demanding than writing a letter to an intelligent and humorous friend would be over a thousand words or so if you can do that the columnist and you can and you can spare chunks of explanation because you know you know the person knows the point you're trying to make with Vanity Fair the readership is so enormous that it's very important that I don't try and think who the audience is there again I try and write to for everyone to read as if I was addressing an intelligent and humorous friend there this time I wouldn't have to stick to date as I would with the nation that that person is probably quite political and fairly firmly to the left you don't have to make that stipulation all you need to do is to talk to everybody as you would talk to your smartest or wittiest how and the great discovery you make is that that's how people quite like to be torture if they suspect for a moment that you're thinking we'll wait a minute there are lots of trailer-park readers of Vanity Fair I'd better put in something for them they'll sniff you out in a second as they should they'll know right away if you are being in the least bit condescending and so that's how I write know the rest of time a writer please myself actually I don't care if anyone else likes it or not I think if I like it who knows I'll try it on the others but I'm not trying to write to win them over please them all solo nothing you quote Orwell saying the prime responsibility lays and being able to tell people what they did not wish to hear yes that was Wilson or made 2 or 3 rather cryptic but very very memorable statements about what it means to be Roger who has any oppositional character or intention or any impatience with the reigning errors of the time one was he said he knew when he was quite small that he had certain literary ability and what he called a power of facing unpleasant facts I loved I wanted to call my book on him a power of facing only publishers again wouldn't hear of it and was quarreling with publishers about this kind of thing because I thought it's nicely phrased you could have said an ability to face or the power to favor a power of facing for my attention unpleasant facts he found that he could look them in the face and he thought what if I can why draw the people let themselves off this elementary task maybe I could help them to do it yes for me anyway it's a very enjoyable to find that I've noticed something usually staring you in the face another thing that all well says is the hardest thing to see is what's right in front of your nose and pointed out to people and see the contortions they'll go through not to see a point well we'll talk about that in a minute because especially the intellectuals yeah yeah who are good at self-deception also there are the good at fooling others or themselves or well if they're not good at it they're very wedded to it there there's a in your other book which is called unacknowledged legislation writers in the public sphere you you in the introduction you talk about the purpose of the book end of a course you are teaching at the new school and you say how often when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter it was individual pens which created the moral space for a true argument so this relates to what you've just said about showing things that appear not to be there yes the name of the book that you just finally mentioned is also the name of course I teach where it comes from it in the new school in New York and originally it was specifically about American writers and their contribution as public figures as ethical figures because this country is a written country it's based on documents it's the only Republic that is its you know it is composed and therefore it's subject to rewrites and updates and revisions to work in programs and that could be that can be inscribed on its history for example I gave is this Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush and a few other pamphleteers and polemicists did complain about slavery and proposed that it be banned in the declaration of dependence or failing that by the Constitution they lost between them and the rise of the anti-slavery movement of Benjamin Lloyd Garrison and other there's a lapse of about forty to forty five years I feel you can vary but there's a whole amazing chunk of time when millions of slaves are born and died on American soil and nobody mentions it it's because everyone's agreed that arguments over we had a quarrel about that settled it we as people would now say we put that behind us and moved on and at the time the main imperatives are domestic consensus and also national security against outside threats it's in no one's interest to bring it up again suddenly a couple of writers decide wait a minute this is a subject we can't be leaving out garrison is one type of obscure Quakers and then of course Frederick Douglass was one of the one of the great original American right but in between the parties and the rest of interests in in the society there was a complete agreement wasn't that there's nothing worth talking about so there's that there there's Mark Twain having a one-man more or less one-man pen campaign against American Empire in 1898 the spanish-american war very popular agreed to by all parties Twain satirizes it very bitterly very brilliantly number of other such cases let's talk a little about the relationship between truth and power because a lot of of your writing is really shining a light on power the statements of power and so on that that's really a central struggle in your work is it not will you put that rather flattering me I must say I mean it's not it's not absent from what I say no I mean I think power has to be ready to justify itself has to be forced to do so at all times and we we shouldn't ever make any assumption of anyone's right to rule and we certainly mustn't let them make such an assumption sure as for truth and power someone who I've worked with quite often Noam Chomsky especially recently makes a very good point that speaking truth to power may be too flabby a statement indeed it must be pretty flabby book almost everyone uses it now in a rather approving way that's always a bad sign for the whelen everyone can say and he said why do we think that power doesn't know the truth why don't make the assumption that does know the truth it doesn't need to be told it it just interprets processes it differently think that's a perfectly good point - spoken by power would be nice to see every night that mm-hmm truth outed by power would be good in fact that's partly what one tries to wring out of them this is some admission or some clarity now one one of the the areas that you have focused on in several small books or the icons of a popular culture or of political power and essentially pricking the balloon of illusion around them Quentin being one what wood is involved in in that work program I mean does it flow naturally from all that you've said about yourself a contrarian a person who looks at things from the side and what is it about our culture and our political system that creates these icons well if you cannot leave the second question yes as Austin go back it has occurred to me that I wasn't fully aware of this while I was doing it that of the three main targets that I've had or feel people be nice enough to credit me with mm-hmm over the last say decade or so mother Teresa the so-called mother Teresa of Calcutta the new Democrat mr. Clinton and the supposed people's Princess Diana Spencer all of which were quarrels between me and populism Oh Jane because I think it's it's easy to say that you distrust the government you distrust the state again that's something almost no one will take you up on but if you say that you you're very often pretty sure that it's the majority is wrong and the way that public opinion is constructed that's wrong the way that popular mandates are construed that's wrong then you can be accused of being an elitist or a snob and so and then you know you're onto something so what I realized was that in doing these three things I'd written basically been settling an account with liberal illusions food okay wake up any liberal or don't even wake them up just walk up and say you're opposed aren't you religious fundamentalism of course I am yeah was one of the most okay things a liberal can say well Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a fanatical fundamentalist I mean Lee she took the most extreme line a line far more extreme than her own church on all matters of economics of morality of politics of authority so proselytizing among helpless people who are able trying to bribe them with handfuls of rice into it and laughing praising the Duvalier family because it was stood up for the catholic interest in haiti fawning on Nancy Reagan Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and it all this was right there for anyone to see they wouldn't see it there because no no she's a saint she's doing work with the poor that it was in fact the poorest of the poor was the matram so they didn't hear that she was a fundamentalist they thought she was on our side 16 same with the people's princess the ludicrous idea that the people's position can be passed on by hereditary succession but they were sure she was no no if you asked them why you for monarchy and hereditary power no this year people's princess yes then the big white whale Clinton what about someone who is you know war criminal a taker of bribes and foreign dictatorships almost certainly erased a rapist plausibly accused anyway by three believable women of rape executed a black man who was so mentally that he was unable to plead or to understand the challenge well you'll gets all that right but you're for it when it's someone who you think is in your Democrat well again you know as sometimes people my birthday's have come up once everyone's making it too easy for me but all these targets were left alone mm-hmm and unguarded so I thought well I'd be untrue to myself if I didn't take at least a second look but it was liberal allusions in all three cases and most recently because I wouldn't say the Noam Chomsky was an icon it would be rude to say that none true and his nor is it true that he's a guru certainly he doesn't want to be one or cult leader but he does have the status of something very like a an intellectual leader at authority among a large very large number of people especially on campus I did think it was necessary to have a fight with him about the the insinuation no actually sometimes the assertion that the inhabitants the United States of America were morally equivalent to the membership or from the al-qaeda organism so that was probably the bitterest of them all and he lost me the most trials mm-hmm but but I guess the the interesting became question becomes why do groups whether in the case of Chomsky the left or in inque in the case of liberals Clinton and so on what what is the dynamic that puts these icons before us well as them I know I'm sure what the answer to that is it's the same vicarious impulse as makes people think which is my main critique of religion that they can cast their sins say onto a scapegoat figure who will then take their sins away I mean can you imagine a more repulsive idea I cannot more a bigger abdication of what we call personal responsibility it's a horrific idea but it's pretty preached by our churches many people don't have time a to follow say politics all the time or as much as they should they're aware that they don't but they think what I'll do is I'll find a candidate I'll give him my vote and then he can do the projects for me I'm not going to do anything about the third world myself I can't it's too much it's awful I know I should do something but I can't but here's this woman in Calcutta who claims to be a saint well I give sent her a quid or a dollar or at least pretend that I thought she was doing it because the rich world has a poor conscience she can get on with doing that for me and all for Princess Diana perhaps would be the auxilary now sure after the crippled children's it's being Valerius it's letting other people lead your life for you and make your decisions for you you slightly relieved you hope you've made the right call it's a bit like celebrity culture actually it's taking people and judging not their reputation by their actions for their actions by their reputations so you're living a little through them no this is I'm against the virtual life I'm against the vicarious life I think people should get a life of their own so that's what I'm really arguing with them to do and because of that one can be accused of being the snob or superior type and so on earth as I save them an accusation that increasingly delights me it sounds like you're saying that what you're witnessing there or what is behind what you're witnessing is an abdication of responsibility certainly it's right it's a willing surrender I'd want to say it's almost a pleasurable masochistic surrendering it will leave that to bill or mother T whoever it might be sure you know that's handing it oh then we can go on with doing I'm never sure exactly what they get I mean what are they doing with the rest of their lives these people I'm not sure but I do know this that if you point out then that they've been fooled they just gave their savings to someone who's a swamp real estate artist they do not thank you for pointing it out again much more likely to blame you then the person who's just defrauded or deceived them why because they don't like to be told that gullible people like to think that they're smart and why is that is it or you you surprise yourself in the fact that a British lefty has wound up in the United States writing about American politics no not at all nothing the United States is fantastically hospitable in the first place inside which is very hospitable to writers and in the third place this may be a privilege that it's just purely Akamai but it's it's very hospitable to English people and because the big secret of the United States is class and Empire okay where everyone knows there is a class system in an empire but it's not officially admitted in Luud whereas in England those are the subjects that we're brought up inhaling with our milk of Armagh Mars but we know something about it and we can Intuit it it's part of our instinct as well as our as our education actually it does give you a slight edge in arguments about the by the United States I think I think that's the key myself rather than any literary ability which is often what Americans believe they think that the prediction will elegant and ironic than they are it's not true at all the British are very crude a very on ironic very literal mind the most part but I don't want everyone to find out by the way that but this I don't at this trade secret I see long may the illusion of me because it long made the illusion the British people have sort of a clearer hold on the oxford english dictionary persist I see I see but also I thought you were saying you didn't want to give the trade secrets away that that this is a field where there's a lot of work to have to hurt mrs. this child is only what bloody elite like which is very possible or even less than you said recently that in an interview that I saw you you're a socialist living in a time when capitalism is more revolutionary yes talk a little about that and what it tells us about your politics can I just add to my husband Thomas Paine a greatest Englishman of his time in perhaps all time was also the greatest American of his time and his pamphlets probably first used the term United States of America so it may be for that reason too that English FTS feel at home here and to my point then about what my own politics are I remember writing that or something like it I may possibly have said Marxist living in a time where early capitalism appears to have revolutionary potential because it's easier to say that I still think like a Marxist politically but as I do it's the way I was trained and I think the material conception of history hasn't been bettered as an explanation the way things happen but the prescriptive bit what should happen or what's going to happen seems to me to have dissolved rather so that to say the one is a socialist is more like expressing an attitude than really a politics and the came at time actually when I was writing the letters to young contrarian when I thought look this is for the young and it actually is written to students of mine I didn't address it I always have them in mind individuals when I'm writing well you mustn't you mustn't try and fool anybody if you're going to do that you mustn't like Lee Jung and if I if you've concluded that there is no longer an international social experiment that it's not going to revive you're really only being opposed or if you say but your socialist nonetheless that's the position I'm in now but I miss it and miss it like an amputated limb I missed the fact I missed the way that they used to be an international left and I'm I'm very distressed and appalled of what's rushed in to fill the vacuum of the critique of liberal capitalism because what's full come in to fill that gap is much more something like theocratic primitivism if not worse fascism there is now the alternative to the globalized capitalist structure that's an even greater reproach if you like but one must look with hats in the same well what what how do you account for the failure of the left to deal with the events of 9/11 does it relate to this is good well yes I think I mean I suppose I'll accept your question in the form in which you put it I don't think all the left fail at this point right yeah the part that there was a tremendous failure involving a large element of the left to think of it as something new even or to think of it as something dangerous and yes I think it honestly was people many people said well at least it's anti-globalization now that should have warned people of how callow and facile their critique was is it what if this could be a part of it maybe there's something wrong with your critique man because if you never mind what the Taliban al-qaeda forces want to do to you we'll just take a look at what they've done to the societies they can influence societies webcasting it concept the concept of time and the future in the past as far as possible abolished first task of a totalitarian regime everything that isn't forbidden is compulsory everything isn't compulsory is forbidden the objection of women or another and of the sexual instinct another unfairly sang of the totalitarian impulse the destruction of all art and culture and music arm and the and the very rapid immiseration of everyone so that the hope I suppose would be there be so poor and so ignorant that they wouldn't even know that this was a they were living in a bad situation I probably however there have been enough education well certainly I don't see enough education enough culture enough experienced people to be able to survive it but that's no thanks to the people who try to impress it so I've personally find when there's a confrontation between everything I love scientific inquiry reason cosmopolitanism secularism emancipation of women and if there's the things I love by the way and everything I hate Stone Age fascism religious and some I fight it's a no-brainer I know exactly which side I'm on I knew right away I thought exhilaration on the 11th of September 9 so I feel slightly ashamed to say that in view of the fact it's only lost their lives that David when the day was over and I'd been through the gamut of rage and disgust and nausea and some not fear I will claim for myself not afraid of people like that I'm very angered by them but there was something I hadn't analyzed that when I went into it in myself I was pleased to find it was exuberant I thought ok right I'll never get bored with fighting against these people and the defeat will be absolute will be complete and it is because that event dispelled the illusions about what the adversary was up to yes in part and because it made people value or which had the potential for making people value things like science reason secularism I would prefer to say myself atheism but they were listening secularism the Enlightenment that people things of you'll take for granted rather as when my friend Salman Rushdie was threatened with murder for money for bounty I hope theocratic leader on the 14th of February 1989 I thought well ok this is easy to decide but a lot of people then would say but what about Muslim sensitivities made me not offended some people that said just listen to what you say just just thank you much any idea what you sound like when you say that we had to put up with a fair bit of this this time too and then I've also felt that we owed the people of Afghanistan but debt we had let these Taliban characters take over their lives in their country because they were the clients of our filthy Pakistani military clients I thought well here at last one can point out to people we have to cancel this appalling debt and remove this foul regime and I'm only sorry it didn't lead to the collapse of the Pakistani one you right in talking about our present times you say the next phase or epoch is already discernible it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human rights and to match the globalization of production by the globalization of a common standard for justice and ethics does this help us understand why a big a piece of your enormous output is devoted to looking at human rights violations the hypocrisy of those in power with regard to those issues if you say so I would take it as a comfortable yam in the to go to stay rather with globalization for a moment it seems to be obvious and obvious for a long time the whether you call it globalization or not the world has increasingly become one economy we all live in the same economy Seoul is a bit more than others but it is interdependent and recognizable aside well does that mean we all live in the same society shouldn't didn't mean that no it doesn't know all enough it doesn't quite mean that some of us have different kinds of societies within this which are better off than the others and have more claim on human rights and justice so I think if we're going to have it what we're always being told of the benefits of it one way we should be allowed to claim on our own behalf and that of others the account part that's there for what politics is to me which isn't therefore antique globalizing and it's cutting with the grain and saying this should be properly shared and administered and then there's the exciting thought because of universal jurisdiction which is a concept that's come into common use in international law now and the abolition of sovereign immunity has a defense for crimes against humanity that some even the largest most powerful and the wealthy state of them all and the one that now most insists that there's a common standard for human rights and international law would say well we would agree to apply these tenders to ourselves an elementary point but one that needs to be fought over and is that what is involved in a project like your book on Kissinger that called the trial of Henry Kissinger my campaign to get kissing a boat within the orbit of law is something I'm very proud of not because I think it was morally or ethically right but because I think it was somewhat prescient when I wrote I decided if I would wrote a book that was called something like why Henry Kissinger as a scumbag has done some filthy things so one thing I'd still be writing it mm-hmm and it would be a shelf law that would never end it'd have to be updated every time I have the Library of Congress or the State Department Declassified a new document by the way another there's another chapter of horror each time that happened well now let's get let's go with what we know and say why not let's apply to this the standards have been established in the Pinochet and Milosevic hearings and see if they and they do basically and I may have made the odd false analogy here and there and I've been I've had some very intelligent critiques from lawyers about how I might have refined the point but but generally yes it fits and it involves also the most colossal question our human rights campaigns and human rights hearings and human rights tribunals and procedures to be applied only to losers and or to small countries or small political leadership is it just a means of cleaning up the the nastier element of the small fry or is it really supposed to apply to the whole of humanity and in the case of Henry Kissinger but four dramatize it like this never before has anyone this senior in in the government of a country on the winning side of a series of wars have been asked to account for his behavior and for the things he ordered and authorized and covered up though these are so far only tentative lawsuits mainly requiring information they have within them the potential they forced the question on the United States and its citizens do we expect to abide by the standards we impose on others well there couldn't be a more important question than that there is another measure of course which is I simply think that the the mere continued existence of this man in this culture and the way he's formed on by my profession the press and another profession of which I'm a part I remember the Academy and another profession we which I'm concerned the publishing industry all of whom have colluded in his lies his forty lands his falsified publications that that that's something that it on aesthetic grounds are learned when it makes one to term it so to put it right it sounds to me like in your work you're obviously a journalist but only part journalist I mean the journalist who goes out and and does the digging and finds the evidence for example in the Kissinger book gathers the information that is is coming out and so on but on the other hand somebody who's really very theoretical who sees a big picture and and and relates that research to I I mean this is an obvious point on the one hand but on the other hand many of your colleagues don't do that in the American press well you keep putting me in this fulls position of asking questions which allow me to answer by saying well you know how right you are saved on and there should already be a statue to me in Lafayette Square and I mean I find it so difficult you're pushing in an open door okay it's more like this look as to the digging I mean I acknowledge in my kissing a book most of the spade work on the kissing and stuff which on by other people or is bought at the sacrifice of other people's lives in other words we we know of certain terrible atrocities which Gerson committed so I mean I'm simply assembling raw material which was very dearly bought and yeah it's true I didn't when I thought to myself and I wouldn't it would it be nice to do an investigation into the crimes of a recent Secretary of State I wonder which one I'm sure if I dug into the life of Cyrus Vance I'd uncover all kinds I didn't I didn't need a roadmap to decide which one it was going to be no I mean one one is not flying completely blind and so there's that but by the way the court interests of the chomskyan worldview I would have done just as well to investigate Santos pants because they're it's all the same it's the system of any one individual I don't quite obviously believe that anything individuals do count and make a difference in sort of individual character but yeah I would the reductio ad absurdum would be why didn't I do Madeleine Albright also as fans I've discovered equally bad things not so this is this is a truly spectacular case of an international rolling crime wave associated with one man but I look I would far rather be I've recognized all disgust for what had written in the same year about Oscar Wilde or actually poll or Patrick O'Brien or Arthur Conan Doyle because this is what I really do missed most of the time and it takes it's much harder to vote a much more reading and much more thinking but politics you know is someone no one can abstain from but it shouldn't it shouldn't be much more than 25% of anyone's life I don't think and let's talk about this other part of your writing which we really haven't addressed and that is a really a scholarly effort to understand some of the great writers of our time is that kind of work different and in what ways is it different from writing about public issues well I mean it's true I in my main collection of work on that on that kind of topic I do say that the public's fear of these things is always important and someone who's got no knowledge of or interested in politics would be slightly not necessary blind in one eye but perhaps a little nearer or long sighted it's necessary to have that so if you're reviewing say Patrick O'Brian's wonderful sequence of novels about Napoleonic war at sea if you don't know something about what was going on then or what the struggle was between the French Revolution and Napoleonic successions to it and the British Empire yeah the novels would be that much less interesting indeed I begin the argument there by saying that actually the Napoleonic Wars should be called the first world war that was the first global war there ever was but with someone like Anthony pol for example who's written this extraordinary novel sequence about English life social life in the upper class in the sort of routine classes anything in the 20th century the game if you don't know some social history you'll be extent disabled but it would be quite possible to read it I think for pleasure allure just as what it reveals about human nature and human motivation he's he's comfortable I think too George Eliot in that way of having some some guess about what makes people behave the way they do and knowing what life is like if if students were to watch this tape this this partial rendering of your intellectual journey is there one lesson that you think they might draw from your journey that stands out well the only ones I would think you'd be interested in hearing from me would be those who have writing in mind as a career I would expect and I do I do draw students sometimes to my class in New York for that reason and yes I do have advice that may sound incredibly tautological but isn't you should first ask yourself if you really have to write in other words not is it something you'd like to do I've heard could be rewarding or enjoyable or you think Mike has it ever occurred to you that you have no choice but to write there's always someone when I say this in a roomful of students she looks at me suddenly as of how did you know that that that's how I do that and if that's true then it's fine it will work you will get it done now you may not be a howling success at it but at least you will know you're doing what you're supposed to be doing them it's a pleasure lots of people don't have and conversely if you don't feel that you might want to try something else because I doubt you'd be able to survive the disappointments that are notable there so it may sound to this or not who are immune that that's to all that's so easy to say but actually it took me a long time to work it out and I found that it it works as advice to those who need it I also get the sense one final point here that that you really engagement with the world is very important for you as a writer and your willingness to follow your thoughts where they lead and actually to change your thinking on what particular issues is that fair the game it's rather if I may say so sir it's rather generously phrase I look yes if I if I come up against a pile of evidence that makes it seem as if my first assumption was untrue I would rather change the Assumption than try and change the evidence yes it's a maybe that's why you've never gone into government and so that's but but I do know that there was it may seem obvious when I say it and flattering when you say I do know that for a lot of people that isn't easy they would rather continue battering themselves against the power of the evidence they really would even if they wear themselves out and as for going out and having a look for myself well I think it's essential part of being an internationalist is wanting to see how other people in societies are just are and how they look and feel and and I think some of the happiest as well I was well as some of the most miserable ones have been trying to do that from North Korea to the Congo which are the two places of depressed me most and maybe see how our miserable human life can be made to be by other people not by just the misfortunes of our nature or nature of mother nature to you know the wonderful pleasure of going back because I have two countries than I first knew when they were dictatorships or colonies and friends of mine were in jail or annex on going back and finding them out of jail and sometimes in power though always aware that they might themselves one day repeat the mistakes still being able to have seen that happen a few times has been I think that the highest of of the pleasures that go with this kind of right Kristopher on that note I want to thank you and I hope I'll get you to come back in November when you're back on the campus and at that time I'll have a set of more hostile questions okay thank you very much and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history you

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Keywords: writer, dissent, cultural, icons, literature, public, affairs

Id: 93vTib-WWvs

Length: 58min 9sec (3489 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2008