Hitch-22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens in conversation with Austin Dacey, June 13, 2010

so please just give him a big round of applause for austin desi and Chris returns [Applause] good evening Christopher Shalom you write in your book that you only attend synagogue to go to the about our Bar Mitzvah of a friend or to debate the faithful so I I think we've discovered there do circumcisions I don't do genital mutilation you'll you'll never find a secular humanist moil difficult to reverse never by crackling from oil either now I've been asked not to be too sympathetic with you bring it on then I don't know if your choice of wardrobe is is helping or hurting [Applause] you know mrs. natural once wore the same dress and evening wear the majesty of the Queen was and she sent a letter round to Palace the next day saying perhaps we should coordinate in the future so that we don't do that and the Queen wrote back to say Tamara she doesn't notice what other people wear room for only two queens at one time you're welcome to it now in keeping with not being too sympathetic allow me to just get this out of the way as an aspiring writer myself who who strives for eloquence and and pertinence and public appeal I want to tell you and I I think I probably speak for others here in the audience just how much I will always hate you for putting me to shame now hitch 22 we know what a catch 22 is what kind of a predicament is a hitch 22 pitch 22 is a borrowing from my late friend Joe Heather of the paradox but in a minor key my sage was the end of the book that having had there is loyalties and commitments and allegiances in my life very few of which I'm ashamed of I've arrived at a position which is shared by I think a fair number of people here now has almost he's always known as a faction in American culture international actually of people who are sure only of being unsure who are certain really only about the uncertainty principle who in a Socratic way that isn't too arrogant most impressed by how little we know we know indeed how little we know about so much more and more and who are if you like adamant to doubt and that might sound like soft optional I suppose but in fact it's not because this this couch is HISHE is the commitment against all the forms of modern totalitarianism which made up of those people who already have all the information that they need who think that maybe one book could be enough who believe they have the truth in fact believe it's been revealed to them who think they're already qualified by their own definition to tell other people what to do and so that the commitment against that form of totalitarianism which is principally if not exclusively theocratic in our time is the course of my life and it's what I learned in the rest of the book the rest of the book just leads up to that adventures in Poland at the beginning of solidarity or Zimbabwe or Argentina during the reign of the death squads all these other things North Korea all of these are ways I found out for myself that whatever your other positions are they must be consistently an authoritarian that's the original enemy of humanity and in fact was original in its theocratic form too so that's the idea I was wondering if the title also owes to a word game that you've played with many of your friends Salman Rushdie martin amos and yes he does as a matter of fact there were various rude word games and some slightly more elevated ones that we used to play just to try and build some linguistic muscle you know all these things are useful always looked at the language one of the games that some uninvolved us i should probably skip the rude ones and listen it wants to ask me about them later I know people don't come here for a smart or filth but a gaming someone invented was titles of books that didn't quite make it to the publisher the big Gatsby I remember was one for whom the bell rings good expectations portrait of a woman that was mine actually mr. Shivaji uncle Tim's cabin you see how it goes and one of them was hitch twenty-two and I remember thinking I might need that one day and I think I can work out a means of fashioning it two days in the life of Ivan Denisovich someone was also the master of naming Shakespearean plays after the fashion of Robert Ludlum style novels yes I mean they have a whole chapter about mr. Sir Salman as as he probably shouldn't be called he's the only person I've ever forgiven for accepting a knighthood from majesty mr. Rushdie has no chapter in my book the importance of him his work understand he took for free expression against theocratic barbarism is right here regard as a master of the language and once asked by an anti Ludlum fan who anteater not naturally loved in fact and actually loved amidst who didn't just dislike the books but couldn't stand the titles we I can't even they're so bad you can't even remember them the Eiger sanction although the born inheritance so you know what it's like he was asked well what would a Shakespeare play sound like if it was written by Ludlum or what would its title be and what I promised Lee with no more notice than I've given you he was asked what would Hamlet be and he said the Elsinore vacillation and I thought I thought you can't do that twice man it admire you though I do and actually what about Macbeth I said to him he said the Dunsinane reforestation we went through the Rialto sanction the kerchief implication what whether one of them bad all of the titles didn't make it was Romeo and Julie come to think as well he's some it was amazes me that his first language is not English he owns the language like no other writer as no other writer does but his first night with his audio astounding thought well congratulations on the book you you write so beautifully about your life although then again you were blessed with exceptionally good material it's it's an exceptional life you seem to have been that all the wrong places at the right time whether it was planting coffee at a communist war camp in Cuba to being paddled by Margaret Thatcher you know and always always surrounded by this glittering cast of characters Rushdie Edward Sayid Ian McEwan our name is James Benton Susan Sontag Paul Wolfowitz and it strikes me that that catch-22 is above all a story of friendship a story about loyalty to friends and loyalty to causes and about the testing and the shifting of those loyalties and one of those of course is religion you were best known these days as an enemy of religion and you say in your memoir that as a convinced atheist you ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is the root of religious evil as it is the root of these monotheism's and yet you go undefined much to admire about Jewishness I was wondering if I could ask you to read that section to give the audience an idea of what I'm talking about oh yeah in her preface to his collection of essays the non-jewish Jew tomorrow Deutsch a widow of the great Isaac relates the story of how her husband future biographer of Leon Trotsky studied for his Bar Mitzvah considered but the brightest boy in any year Sheva four years gone by or four miles around he was set to speak to the following question somewhere in the looped intestines of Jewish law there is mention of a miraculous bird which visits the world only at intervals of several decades and then only very briefly on its periodic landings delivers the news behind a beak full of spit this avian drool if you can seize hold even a drop of it has wonder-working properties now comes the crucial question surely you saw it coming is the bird spit to be reckoned as kosher or as traif the boy Isaac spoke for several hours on the rival theories of this dispute and on the competing commentaries on those rival theories and of course on the commentaries on this commentaries he used to say later that such onerous mental and textual labor did not serve to train and mind at all but rather like the rote memorization of the Quran stultified it I'm not sure that I agree much of my Marxist impersonalist life has been spent in apparent hair-splitting and logic chopping and I still feel that the sheer exercise can command respect it may even build muscle yes thank you I think I do think that still it's an extraordinary number of secular and atheist philosophers Spinoza would be very good example would be the classic one in fact had that kind of rabbinical and Orthodox training that I believe does change and help to shape the mind positively particle Judaism that does one particularly good thing it's people in what the heresies are it teaches the students about hellenism and how to avoid it about the awful temptations of being an apt across the the Jewish word for a heretic is app Icarus epic it means epicurean student of Greek philosophy you've already aroused their curiosity it's going to be very hard to do that and then repress it and so I think it's probably not an accident that the Jewish people are probably the most self emancipated from religion of any of them or of monotheists or person or atheists groups and afterwards the least we so say we can do we invented this curse of monotheism in the first place the least one can do is emancipate oneself from it and then point the way for other people to do the same you say we well by Mosaic law and by Israeli law and by the Nazi party's Nuremberg Laws I would count as a Jew I didn't have any very great respect for any of these laws but if it means anything yes I mean my mother's family is from that rather dubious bit of the frontier between Germany and Poland where Helen Thomas thinks we should all go back to live every time that border shifts as you may have noticed catastrophe ensues for civilization it's not as bad for the Jews when the German Polish border gets moved it's bad for everybody including Germans and poles and Russians and everyone else and I have a chapter in my book about going back to this awful Shadowland to try and see if any of my ancestors survived which of course none of them none of them did the survival of the Jewish people means a lot to me now as you just pointed out this this critical dialectical method this skepticism really that you identify as a Jewish characteristic it has at least as much claim as you say to be classical Marxist or a Socratic yeah characteristic why the loyalty to Jewishness as such I just think that no-go monotheism's Russell Russell is right about this all religions are equally wrong and in the same way because all of them involve a surrender of reason to faith and that's the terrible danger and an insult to one's own self-respect and and to the only faculties that make us different from other primates Judaism at least does not proselytize doesn't care whether other people are Jewish or not it used to there were times when it was more proselytizing they were horribly recorded in the Old Testament Jews don't proselytize now except among other Jews so that's an advantage Jews didn't make me ridiculous mistake of saying the Messiah has already arrived I mean come on you know let's all you need to do is tune your ears to get pick up the good news that's already been swirling around for 2,000 years and so on and it's and there's a dialectical training in Judaism that I think is useful that's the furthest I want to go on that I think but I think I would have said that in any case even if I had because for most of my life I didn't know that my mother's family was from Poland he was a family secret and my mother wanted me to pass and wanted herself to pass wanted me to become an English gentleman so you can all be the judge of how well I've worked out and so I didn't I don't feel in though I don't think with my blood I don't think with my jeans and I don't like people to do it but I feel I owe a little bit to the traditional EE all the same and are and when the survival or security or dignity all the Jewish people is anyway threatened or in question I hope I would take it personally anyway a Jew until the last anti-semite dies yes at least yeah now another area in your life where you say you've kept two sets of books two accounts two lies is in the area of your forgive me your sexuality to two sets of date books in fact some for males and some for females you write a fascinating description of the same-sex activity Steve exuberant bisexuality of your school days and and some interesting goings-on at Oxford as well and I wonder if you might read a little bit of that but I can remember it I can do it I hesitated a bit about putting that in but I thought I would for this other one it would be probably interesting fuel to read of a life you know series of institutions in a country where both sexuality is almost mandated this is actually not very common and it's not and is no longer the case I mean all that's over now I mean those boarding schools are all co-ed and so forth and I wish them joy of it but I thought well since I remember the last lot of boys who had to go through this monastic hothouse I might as well set it down as it was and then I thought the other reason for putting it in apart from what I hope might be intrinsic interest was and as illustrating might divide itself is that there are people still who want to criminalize homosexual or bisexual behavior considered a disease or disorder and I thought the least one could say was that I learned this much anyway which is it's not just a form of sex it's a form of love and as such it deserves respect and protection it's amazing how this very obvious point it still hasn't been taken up properly or enthusiastically and I think the argument will be better conducted if more heterosexuals like myself admitted what I know to be true and the majority of cases actually that they've all been a little bit gay one time or another we'd be better off if that God was honestly said so I said it as salaciously as I dare I have to say it feels as if it happened to somebody else but but that's the point of writing a memoir and while while the good mr. Hitchens is too modest to read it I can assure you it's very good and you should get the book and read it for yourselves in the privacy of your own home you write movingly about your affection love for Martin Amis which you even suggest would have grown to be more than merely friendly had it not been for the fact that quote my looks by then had declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me [Applause] well again I felt I had a duty to history there because not to speak necessary to critically about gay life but there's a narcissistic element to it and I think it's a it's overwhelmingly more than any other kind of sexuality is dependent on being young is that what you say you're glad not to be gay yes because I wouldn't I don't think I'd want to be old in gays on that I hope I'd don't upset anyone needlessly yeah i i i almost even felt at the time this is as it were not me but but it'll have to do and with them with close male friendships such as the one i've had all my life with martin i once or i said to ask myself is it possible to have a heterosexual relationship with it with with a guy and the answer is no it isn't but i thought it was worth trying and the solution to it was to have a very long dialogue which i try and reproduce about the wonders of womanhood very very very extended very intense very complex they or inspired on going chat about the female mystique that was the that was the best way of doing it the straightest way of doing it and what what were the results will there's a very solid result which I have in the book but I definitely they won't want me to read it no one wants to hear what it's like going to a massage parlor with Martin a nurse do they it's not this kind of audience I could do a bit of it if you like I don't know where it is should normally full open up they say there's no index here if I can find it quickly I'll do a stave of it do you want to must be something while I love you wrote the pill you can identity in the chapter where you answer the Proust questionnaire yes you say that you admire most in men the ability to think like a woman yes you also you also say that you were been invited to all of the the female dominated literary salons in Washington DC once yes that's a borrowing from what Oscar Wilde said about Frank Harris that he was invited to all the great salons at London once but it is virtually true of my Georgetown life I've found the bordello scene if you if you want it we wanna know now I've lost it again yeah sorry I had it in my hand go on with so yes with Anna MA as Jung called it I mean I admire a woman who can think like men and men who can imagine what it's like to think like women and I'm sure if I if I could have one wish it would be to spend a little time being female as long I think it would have to have the option of reverting but I mean yes that's what I most like to know is what it's like to be female I think it would be time well spent even if it was time spent away from American womanhood alright in the midterm I thought we were going to talk about secular humanism sexual you've been the mid-term churning x' in the midterm churning x' of what was to become his breakout novel money martin required his character to visit a brothel or bordello he even had one all picked out its front name was the Tahitian adaiah polynesian themed massage parlor on lower Lexington Avenue and you he informed me a will coming with me I wanted to say something girl if like have I ever refused you anything but instead settled for something rather more butch like do we know the format this joint I could not possibly felt less like any such expedition I had a paint stripping hangover and a sour mouth but he had that look those set purpose on his face that I well knew and also knew could not be gainsaid how bad could it be pretty damn bad as it turned out of the numerous regrettable elements that there to make up the unlawful carnal carnal knowledge industry I should see you out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that's often worn on the faces of its female staff some of the working hostesses may have to simulate delighted or even interest itself a pretty shriveling thought but when these same ladies do the negotiating they can shrug off the fake charm as a snake discards an unwonted skill I suppose they know or presume that they've already got the despised male client exactly where they want him as it happens this wasn't true in our case I would gladly have paid not to have sex at this point and not it needed only to snap his fingers in order to enjoy filled female company but the cynical little witches of the dahi sure were not to know that they were being conscripted into the service of literature it was well served by Jean Tarrou in the plague I think but attendance of lectures in an unknown language will help to hurt ones awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time I once said the experience of being waterboarded and could now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim forced to go on enduring what is unendurable but not even the lapse of time between then and now has numbed my recollection of how truly horrible it was to be faking interest in someone who was being paid and paid rather more incidentally than I could afford to feign her contempt he was interested in me the multiplier effect of this mutual degradation gave me dry heaves and flop sweats and I began to fear conveyed the entirely misleading impression of my being a customer who is convulsed by the hectic sickness of lust it was the cash question there that saved me the some presence of mind I had for once pre-emptive margin in the bar of the dump where the gruesome selection process began by swiftly pointing to the prettiest and slenderest of those available who also possessed one of the most vicious looking smiles I've ever seen on a human face once removed to her sinister cubicle we commenced to bargain or rather in a sort of squalid reverse eagle every time I agreed to the price she added some tax or in post or surcharge and bid me higher clad by now only in some sort of exits are wronged and equipped only with a dank ziploc bag containing my credit cards and money one was obliged to check everything else before entering the humid bar I will release started to count out the steepening fee which was the only thing in the room that showed any sign of enlarging itself I don't think I can bear to do the rest of the thing the reason the reason I [Applause] then he's not put it in was actually that is the most pristine moment in the book and remember this a lot of bordello stuff in in myself but its pristine in this sense I learned from it that time can really be regained if you if you go to the end of that chapter it's a it gets much more scholarly but then you need to pick up a copy of Martin's novel money and even have the page reference in there for you and see what a marvelous fictional passage he wrought out of this dross it's the it's the best attempt I've ever taken part in to turn base metals into gold and to recover what was a totally wasted morning and lunch time and make it seem after all to have been worthwhile so in search of lost I missed so my favorite book of the Federal Register - impaired you it can happen but the price can be steep it certainly is some of the most pungent language in the book I was wondering where the showers are oh boy there's something playing right on me but what really struck me about that was that apart from the staff and Susan Sontag appearances by women in the book are really quite fleeting with the great exception of your mother why is that well there's Mahna that's not nothing does Jessica Mitford who is in some ways the in later life is her mother I never had this quite a lot about Susan let me think who else Rosa Luxemburg of course these are not people who are members of your circle wasn't that's not my fault George Eliot I'm trying to think of the people if you mean writers and females of interest it influenced me who I couldn't have known I would certainly give her as my favorite favorite much most revered novelist and I think there are some general nonspecific or non named homages to the feminine if I could say that for myself there are emerges two non named females yes there was a rather nasty review in The Guardian I think you remember it which contains a following passage when the invasion of Iraq was first debated one couldn't fail to notice the preponderance of left-wing men of a of a certain age who came out in support of the war radicals as adults but often from conservative backgrounds now beginning to confront their own mortality and preoccupied by masculinity and legacy their palpable thrill about military might suggested that deep down they secretly feared progressive principles were for now here was their chance before it was too late to prove their manhood yeah that's not even good there's an example of what it is is it I mean in other words it's very very insipid pop psychology and it's clearly written by someone who hasn't bothered with my chapter on Iraq which is a long one maybe longer than people want but describes the experience of having been going there since the middle 1970s when Saddam Hussein first seized power and going through the experience of war and fascism and genocide in Mesopotamia and concluding finally that civilization wasn't compatible with the continued private ownership of the rug by a psychopathic crime family there was for example willing to not just willing to eager to did blow the well heads off the pumps of the Gulf and flood the whole place to a Gulf of Mexico extent on purpose and then set the rest of it on fire in defeat after the evacuation of Kuwait in 1991 the the sheerly evil sadistic psychopathic nature of unlawful power the wish to see that combated and defeated has I think very little to do practically nothing to do with the shrinkage of my own damn gonads or whatever it is she she may be she would be accidentally right if you if she guessed this which she didn't she could be coincidentally right but it would any be by coincidence I say in the chapter on my father who was a very morose very conservative very reactionary very pessimistic a lifetime Navy officer that though I thought he'd been exploited by the Navy the crown the monarchy the Empire the establishment in a very brave phyto in the war against Hitler and had in a sense been beached and abandoned downsized when the war was over and had nothing to show for it and though that had a big influence on moving me to the left I do by any means despise the the martial virtues that he had the the bravery and the sense of duty and valor in fact you regret in the book that you feel you lack the courage to take up arms in the struggle against tyranny yeah I mean dr. Johnson says that every man thinks of himself meanly if he hasn't been a soldier all been to see how much the form in which my father soldiering occurred I actually don't think that I would really think meanly of it if I would have been able to do it and it sucked it but that should I knew about myself and I was quite young there was no possible way I could be a soldier let alone spend my life on a ship I so it wasn't that I could have done it but I showed the duty I just wasn't born to do anything like that so I don't feel I flunked it or dodged the draft no ID what I have there is I have a great respect and admiration of people can do it as I do for people who can be revolutionary guerrilla fighters and so I spent a lot of time people who are willing to lead a life of clandestinity and permanent danger and risk torture and so forth full time I've seen enough of that also to know that I couldn't do it now your father your father was not a man of the world he's no he was very much thought he was from a very Baptist family very Hampshire South of England conservative peasantry people who were brought in to build the Royal dockyards enforcement and then to serve the Navy and he actually I think he rather gave up on his his early very early strict Baptist upbringing he felt I think I know that because the cinetic dope that I'd put in the book I wish I had when I was young he used to make breakfast himself early in the morning my mother didn't like to get up early my father was was making strong tea and baking's down in this old kitchen range I am reading the Daily Telegraph and I thought I wasn't an early riser either but I thought one day it might be nice to go down and have breakfast with the old man he might like it so in my pajamas I've had it down and there he was with his Tory newspaper and his eggs some tea and so on I think good morning daddy and he looked at me I said Jesus Christ this is the Lee family prayers next and from this I learned two things well learned one thing I'm not doing that again and I guessed another thing which is what his family life probably had been like with his rather tyrannical old man where they did have family friends I also realized he'd spared me all that he never tried any of that on me I'm not the religion victim I might as well mention it now I was never injured or upset or abused by it I have no no grievance against it really in fact a rather I rather enjoy talking to leaders people studying their books and their works and so even attending their services as long as they don't involve genital mutilation or human sacrifice or anything like that and so what was it that drew you to the left in at an early age well partly it was the time in which I was born I was born in 1949 so by the time I was old enough to think about anything there was the the ending was occurring a very very long period of conservative rule in post-war Britain and the other thing that was happening was that the final end of the British Empire Varys there was still some brushfires going on in the colonies in places like Cyprus and Malaya in which my father's service was involved and so and I generally felt myself on the other side of these wards I was for the insurgents and I thought it was why did why did they go on fighting over the Empire is obviously over it's ridiculous so I got to formulate anti conservative positions like that on my own and then I suppose when I was about when his mid-teens I became aware of the insanity of things like the nuclear Menace and the possibility that that might be a thermonuclear exchange over Cuba but I might be killed because of President Kennedy's ego I thought this is absurd it is wicked I hardly started my life this guy thinks he could risk a nuclear war because he's messed up his Cuba policy very much as did everything I read and could find out who will see on the TV about the war in Vietnam so I was sort of I was the perfect age to be around in 1968 and that was a very very shaping here for me and I write I hope not to great length about what China recalls are people who don't remember it or who do what that was like the feeling that I wish everyone could have once in their lives that you're young ish and the u.s. living in a revolutionary man the world could could really change on its axis for the better and you could have a part in that it's a great feeling so not just left but revolutionary and this you say is due to the influence in large part of a man named Peter Sedgwick yes and you met by chance in the winter of 1966 yeah I was introduced by Peter Sedgwick to a the left within the left which I'm sure some people here have had some experience of in other words not being a member of the Labor Party which is a kind of very traditional social democratic rather establishment party and never having any temptation at all to join the Communist Party because again if you were brought up when I was brought up you knew about the Hungarian Revolution for example before you knew about the Bolshevik Revolution you saw the consequences of communism before you studied there are deals of it and I was in Cuba in fact when the Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia so there was never any temptation in that direction but there was a sort of red thread that did go back to before the Russian Revolution which is exemplified in the names anyway of Leon Trotsky Rosa Luxemburg Victor Serge CLR James very important influence on with the great Trinidadian the marxist author and also great writer about cricket who whose book black cherubims is the history of the nearly real history of the slave rebellion creation of the second republic in this inner spirit the Republic of Haiti with Toussaint L'Ouverture this was a tradition that they don't teach you in school and what it meant was which is also very useful for me not unlike some of the Talmudic disputation is that all all the most interesting fights are within the left its revolution within the Revolution which I you never can involve a safe position that you just hold it's a continuing struggle that's what I liked about speaking of the left within the left I read hich 22 alongside this book an opposing man by Ernst Fisher if you could say a word about Fisher you've called his autobiography one of the greatest of the 20th century yes I recommended in the book and I recommend it to you and especially was an Austrian who are trying to see if I could condense this he witnessed the end of the austro-hungarian Empire in the first world war in which he'd been a soldier he saw the collapse of post-war Austrian democracy in the face of fascism and he saw the repeated refusal of the Liberals and the Social Democrats to fight back against Hitler and his proxies in Austria and having seen that and realized that it was probably final he decided to go to Moscow and join the hardline of the other side and that's where he made his big mistake he became a pamphleteer he became a fan on time like yourself in your Oxford he did he did the broadcasts from Moscow in German that Stalin had broadcast to the advancing German soldiers telling them to surrender that if they carried on none of them would get back alive they'd been betrayed by their insane leader Adolf Hitler that if they didn't leave Stalin they would all die there that they should instead surrender should their officers join the Red Army and build the world revolution is pretty good broadcasters matter of fact quite muscular quite pithy but he he also came to Mauritania see to understand that Stalin himself was building an absolutely hateful and ruthless dictatorship there was in the end killing all of those vicious friends if they even said a word out of time so it's a tremendous it's a it's called an opposing man it's a terrific record of having to keep two sets of books in there in the midnight of the 20th century and by the time he said those are the people and those people are kind of gold standard to me people who managed to do that survive with their principles intact I'd like to talk about his principles I mean at the moment he was sitting down to write this I think you were you were probably on your way to to Cuba or you would be there soon he talks about the the the tectonic effect on his thought of of the invasion of Czechoslovakia yes saying that in Czechoslovakia we had seen that socialism is possible and then just moments later we had seen that it was impossible you've had a similar you know realization when you were in Cuba yeah I went to Cuba in the summer of 68 because the there was a work camp that had been opened for young revolutionaries in Pinar del rio and the Cuban government basically said if you can get through the blockade you can get to the island you can come to this camp and we'll show you the revolution which was then very young I mean Guevara had only been murdered a few weeks before the word was out that was this was a new kind of revolution it wasn't like going to East Berlin or Warsaw or something and Nilo keen to see if that claim was true or not and it could be a small thing or it can be a big one and in my case there was a small thing first arrived at the airport got there on some bucket shop charter flight greeted by sexy on Cuban comrades music playing frozen daiquiris handed out welcome to Cuba it was not a bit like crossing the Berlin Wall maybe this is good and they said can we have your passport yes then after an interval another daiquiri so okay can I have my passport back no why not well we keep that for you we take care of all that for you till you leave I don't like should be separated from my possible well you are separated from that's up to us not you so instant feeling no I don't like that micro and then well we everyone knew there was going to be a fight between the Czechs rushon ISM and I thought the Russians were going to invade Czechoslovakia no one was quite sure whether Castro would support it or not if they did I thought he would when it came to it he supported them very enthusiastically who much more than he had to it wasn't just a pro forma thing so it was quite useful to me to be that way disillusion that young if you see what I mean just illusion and needn't be negative well the mood that the trying to live without illusions is very important the mood of an opposing man is I think one in large part of disillusionment it's it's sober its searching it's a painful self interrogation and confession he he he dredges up a pamphlet that that he wrote called destroy Trotskyism yes while he was observing the the show trials in Moscow but he said some terrible things on Stalin's behalf and I wanted and he did try and atone for that I want to read you him reflecting on sure his pamphlets from 3637 today after 30 years I forced myself to read what I wrote then confronting my recalcitrant memory with the printed word if I voluntarily subject myself to this torture it is not for the purpose of self-mortification but in order to determine the lengths to which a man can go who though neither stupid nor vicious deliberately ceases to see to listen to think critically now in Fischer's judgment he was willfully blinded and corrupted by power yes blinded by his hatred of Hitler and he he concludes this arresting chapter with this arresting sentence even that realization does not suffice to exonerate me now you by contrast right that you hope and believe quote my advancing age has not quite shamed my youth you described your break with the trotskyist left by saying it didn't so much I didn't so much repudiate a former loyalty like some attention-grabbing defector as feel it falling away from me that's more or less right and I I couldn't exempt myself from self-criticism if I if I asked myself of the time I spent on the left is the son I haven't I haven't anything to atone for that this other Fisher did actually being a convinced Stalinist and NEA as he rightly says not even the fact of being anti Hitler will will X Kalpana from that but I can remember something and it comes back to me occasionally very vividly which is that I was quite friendly with the son Bob we African National Union Robert Mugabe is party during the time of white rule in colonial Rhodesia as it was then called and with other nationalists - and revolutionaries there and I'd spent quite a lot of time there during the independence war and so on and I knew a few things about Mugabe and his entourage that I should have made more of now that I think about it and that when I ask myself why I didn't say more about it it's almost certainly because I didn't want to as they say give ammunition to the enemy I thought it was my time that southern Africa was liberated from from white colonial rule and I didn't want to put a spoke in the wheel and of course now I feel terrible about that because well I feel terrible who cares what I feel but I mean the it's not about my it's not a parade of my feelings but the way that so many of my bravest friends in that movement being killed in tortures and exile by Macaulay it would be to say that that that would be to say enough I think about why I'm ashamed of that and what about Trotsky's and again the fact that the motive was supposedly a good one it doesn't doesn't get you out of it but your motives were pure that you you could justify it to yourself that it was in a good cause that that makes it worse of course because that means you're defaming or you're disfiguring a good cause and that's what one mustn't do either what about Trotskyism in in response to your line that you didn't repudiate like some attention grab yes Hector Theodore Dalrymple reviewing his 22 for first things wrote first things yeah I never could notice with that magazines call first things the last things was so averse to attention nor does it seem to have occurred to him that a defector might just wish to draw attention to his defection because he had come to the conclusion that his previous commitment was dangerous and evil well here I have to put myself in the hands of the audience or any other audience who might read me or followed my stuff I mean if it if it would seem to people that one took up or dropped positions for a fact will say all adopted all abandoned causes according to whim just so as to have something to say or something to write about then if that's what I if that's the impression I gave it would be too late to change it now I actually don't think it is the impression I gave even to my enemies and the so the way I propose it is this everyone does contain contradictions everyone does change their minds everyone does have to handle mutually exclusive positions or promptings the the question is whether they realize that they're doing it or not it seems to me that's the test so no regrets about devoting much of your adult life to defending Marxism no absolutely not I still think like a Marxist I still think he's one of the best most original critics of religion there's one of the first things that drew me to him I'm not that I don't call myself a socialist anymore because it seems too much like an affectation but is it true what that you're a socialist no during all this I'm talking about the long drawn-out torture of the Iraq debate during all this I never quite lost the serial sense that I had become in some way a pro-government dissident and that of all the paradoxes of my little life this might have to register as the most acute one but it was the demonstrators in the streets I was teaching at Berkeley for much of the first spring of the Iraq war who struck me as the real conformists of the scenario accused of becoming a seller by working for the interwar Yugoslavia public Rebekah West's guide and covert Laura Constantine in black lamb gray Falcon confesses that yes for the sake of my country now perhaps a little for the sake of my soul I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition yeah deeply serving opposition yes I think that for a lot of people their self-respect almost depends and often the sort of the self-respect the reputation helps say in front of their students it depends to an extraordinary degree in what they were probably called not selling out so that long after there's the smallest chance of them being anything like a real revolutionary is completely evaporated and they've it's become totally manner istic that's the one thing they couldn't give up they would feel that they wasted their lives doing that and I would I find that many of them wasting their lives by not doing it isn't their ascend and yes after the incredible assault on our civil society in September 2001 I found myself perfectly able to see the world from the viewpoint of the policeman and to feel that it was in some way a responsibility to be able to do that and say that people who are looking for reasons to blame the United States for this are being that not even frivolous I mean not even flippant being contemptible and yeah if I knew how to help the authorities I would and I would I'll go further and say that of my of the students I have and younger friends people have maybe advised all the most idealistic ones I know and the most intelligent as well in many cases toughest minded have decided to join the armed forces I never expected that I'd be saying this either and are guarding us while we sleep and actually fighting against the theocratic fascists ruffman at the ready [Applause] and you found your deep Putin piece now in opposition to something else and that is theism in particular Islamism now you're sticking it to the man in the sky and his his Viceroy is on earth of theocracy now well it's strike one he has no choice I mean they they imposed themselves on us I've I I would like not to know what His Holiness the Pope believes all his theology is I'd like it to be a private matter within him and his God he won't let me do that he insists on it so I have to know his pathetic beliefs and I have to know their wicked consequences if if I was a if I was a Muslim and I thought look there's one book that says that the Prophet Mohammed contain has brought us all the truth we need and if I had dropped his precepts and I follow some very simple steps I'll get to paradise suppose I believed such a contemptible pathetic thing wouldn't it make me happy shouldn't it make me happy it doesn't seem to make them happy why doesn't it make them happy they can't be happy as what everyone else believes it too I should say that's a very bad sign of a pathological insecurity among other things and so until they agreed leave me alone I'm not going to give them any peace it strikes me that the the the cause of defeating theism and the cause of defeating Islamism and defeating theocracy might not be the same in that many of those on the front lines of this struggle against Islamism and theocracy are themselves believers in fact they're often the first to be persecuted under such systems the Baha'i or the cops of Egypt for example were denied equal citizenship the Ahmadiyya Muslim community should know Pakistan who were who are persecuted under it's blasphemy laws but they're not organizing under the banner of atheism they're not fighting for unbelief as such but for freedom of belief do you think that atheists risk trading efficacy for the deep peace of opposition is it well so that I exactly see the the thrust of your question but there are people who will look out for cops other cops for example well for the Ahmadiyya Muslims for for the persecuted Shia or for those who are persecuted by the Shia these calls don't involve me except or shouldn't accept that they do because they want to bring these quarrels to our streets they're awful that we're not being attacked by the Muslim world we're being drawn into a civil war within the Muslim world actually several civil wars within it which is deeply offensive and very dangerous in these circumstances since I only have one voice and one life I'm not going to say well can't we all get along because at first I know we can't and second I think that the only correct reply to this cacophony of competing fears UM's is to say how much better and more beautiful and more satisfying and more morale is the view that we are not created but there we are evolved that we are responsible for ourselves and to others and that we render we're one species and that these differences are trivial when they're not vicious and that the only form of liberation consists in thinking for yourself and that we'd be better off not being afraid of a celestial dictatorship of any kind now that's what I think and I people say well wouldn't it be better if you made a bit nicer I'm sorry no I don't think that it would we have to hold up the bit than whatever what is invariably a better alternative and also be aware that if the the others had the whip hand if the if Egypt was a Coptic majority society Muslims would be persecuted in it there's no question about that no it was over differences in your stance to Islamism that you and Edward Sayid began to drift apart yes if you tell us about that yes what Edward was of secularists to his core and had never been a Muslim anyway he was one of the what was once a very large Palestinian Christian minority and of that a member of a minority of it because he was in Anglican that most Palestinian Christians are Greek Orthodox but he was an Anglican from Drew from Jerusalem and he didn't like Islamism at all but he couldn't bring himself to criticize it except as a manifestation of something else in other words if there's a sheer theocracy been set up in Iran it's only because the West's supported the Shah true but only half true if Hamas is a problem in the Gaza Strip which he was very quick to see that it was totalitarian racist party making quite big strides well that's because the Israelis sometimes encourage it as a means of breaking up the PLO true that only half true he couldn't bring himself to criticize it except so to say instrumentally couldn't criticize it face on and and in its own terms and I began to find that was a refusal of the main of the main question but still you said that he was family to you as all for yes family to you well chief friends of God's apology to family so what was it that finally ended differential he he reissued his book Orientalism on it's I think 25th anniversary in paperback and I I was asked by the Atlantic Monthly to review it and in the course of this he said that he believed that the you know the States Armed Forces had deliberately destroyed the Iraqi National Museum on the first day of the occupation as a means of depriving the Iraqi people of their cultural perhaps Romanian reducing them to status of colonial beggary and servitude and I thought that was an enormous amount of untruth to pack into such a short stay I just couldn't take seriously anyone who would say something so wickedly untrue so that enough a couple of related matters meant that we we couldn't speak to each other as civilly or as warmly as we had before he accused you of writing something racist what he didn't do that he didn't quite have the nerve to do that but he quoted something in a Saudi he wrote a peaceful Saudi rag in London he would seem he alluded to various remarks unsighted as having a racist character to them one of these remarks had been made by me he had the grace I like to think not to accuse me of being a racist but I I take that word very seriously I presume that someone who thinks you might be a racist doesn't want to be a friend I mean that would certainly be my view so that was another cause of fraud yes so it would have been a cause of Shallah or heat if he had accused me at that but he he didn't and that was for you of a boundary condition on yes on friendship and loyalty too because if he'd said oh come on I didn't really mean to say you're a racist that would have maybe respect me even less because the word learn that can't be used lightly it has to it has to hold its full value it has to hold that the complete integrity of its coinage if a word that becomes cheap and we've all lost a very important term of condemnation and it would it just becomes vulgar abuse and then a hope compass point has been abolished so I think that has to be that boundary has to be patrolled as all boundaries of meaning have to be patrolled very rigorously yeah I do do you think that Orientalism stands up well today I think it's a it will always be thought of as a book that made people think about the position in the world just the name itself I mean the way we call it the Near East or the Middle East it's not the Middle East except if you live in a certain quarter of the world I was used the example of do people here still read Robert Hughes great Australian art critic used to be the only reason to read Time magazine weh-weh a great marsupial ladies and gentlemen Robert Harrison up in Australia where he couldn't help noticing that his family were very angry sized would refer to Indonesia for example as the Far East when it was in fact their immediate north so the shifts in perspective the Deadwood Trotter a person was good but he was very very very limited in who he blamed for this kind of thing and he basically thought that the only race is so colonialists in the world were the British and the French and this isn't quite true you were but it's a good starting point there's a very good commentary and critique of it by Eva rock called defending the West very scrupulous reading of Edwards primary sources and commentaries and an extremely good rebuttal of a lot of it I would to give one example that I made use myself I mean it says that Germany German Orientalism doesn't quite count in the same way as French and British German oriental scholarship wasn't directed at the foundation of an empire and in the Levant well it well that's only true if you forget that Germany had an alliance with the Turkish Ottoman Empire was trying to build a Berlin Baghdad railway for the Kaiser and that the last time there was a jihad proclaimed real serious one in the world was in 1914 by the Caliphate against Britain where they lost not just the war but the whole empire that's what bin Laden is still fighting to get back that explains a lot and it would leaves all that out so which I would regard as a criticism they take heart by the way ladies and gentlemen all proclaimed jihads have always failed and always will because they all demand the impossible and so in the end what will happen to the people who proclaim them as they'll start cutting each other's throats because someone hasn't been godly enough in the ranks and they need we need to renew our commitment to suicide and self-destruction so if you hold so there's no point in saying let's pretend that there's a spiritual side to this no just wait it out keep your secular and materialist how to dry be proud of the tradition of reason and science and resolve not to give one one inch to it in particular thank you in particular turned giving away the wisdom on so promiscuous the respect they say you should respect you no no don't no respect no respect [Applause] and as living proof that jihad must fail even work is it been work if you don't know is most famous as the author of why I'm not a Muslim and yes originator of really the entire apostate he's written a shelf of books that everyone here should have he is alive and with us in Temple tonight Oh [Applause] we we are now gonna open the floor to your questions and mr. Hitchens is going to prepare us for that with a brief reading which based on rice every article in review and book that I've ever published has constituted an appeal to the personal persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it I never launched a little essay without the hope and the fear because the encounter may also be embarrassing that I shall draw a letter that begins dear mr. Hitchens it seems that you are unaware that it is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with the reader that's their cue okay in that spirit in the spirit of collaboration here's a question oh you the ventriloquist yes okay you don't trust them in other words from Tim a psychiatry resident at Harvard Medical School yes definitely not to be trusted what advice can you give those of us aspiring to be the next generation of future leaders in the Atheist movement don't have any apply the great thing about being atheist is you don't have to join anything [Music] imagine saying five times a day isn't this gold business you have once and pointing in the right direction to say once the century is enough for that then you get on with your life the whole point is to stay out late on Friday night and gol B been late on Sunday movie or and thinking I mean I it's interesting question is whether this is or should be a movement I guess there should be one but but there's there's a there's an are any looking there some way if there's an irony lurking there I'm sure you will find him if the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was an ethical act or moral imperative what of all the other despots in the world shall we overthrow them all who's next michael nord columbia yes will the reverse conditions under which the law says the government has lost its sovereignty and can be subject to international intervention very quickly invading and occupying the territory of neighboring states committing genocide especially if your signature as we are the Genocide Convention which mandates action to either to prevent or that can't be prevented to punish violations of the principles or practices that there's no peripheral nuclear non-proliferation treaty and giving aid and comfort and material help to international terrorists nihilist organizations so Iraq is the only Saddam Hussein's Iraq is the only case I know which would broke all there's several times and intended to go on doing so if it had survived Iran meets two or three of those and wants to meet another the other words it wants it wants the illegal weapons and is already sponsoring the illegal international theocratic terrorist groups in order to invade and occupy the territory of neighbors John there it has a clear and stated intention of taking over Bahrain Dubai and possibly Saudi Arabia and other neighboring Sunni Arab territories so that you can see it one country has not yet overly the Genocide Convention how the worst place in the world is North Korea by far well said the most worshipful stage in the world the most dear sick state in the world actually when I was young shall I just quickly tell you about North Korea when I was young and they made me attend Chapel which I'm glad they did every day I learned a lot from it I could easily imagine what hell would be like I could do that so without being told in a sense because I could never imagine what heaven would be like it was very interesting that no Christian has ever managed to come up with a good description except that of eternal praise unending praise round-the-clock full-time praise and thanksgiving forever and you think not only wouldn't does that sound like hell but but also it sounds or it sounds somehow impossible and who would want to just be the recipient of this the Godhead surely after the first ten billion years of it would get even he'd get bored with it so the mind became a blank at this point couldn't form a conception area in North Korea I've seen it done that's what it is to be North Korean is to be starved and terrified and asked to be and asked to be grateful for it and thank the divine leader for it round the clock if you think about it North Korea is the weird place it's some president is a dead man of one thing Kim Jong Il is still the president of North Korea he's been dead for 15 years it's a neck Rock recei direct fan autocracy Missoula Posse and his son the Dear Leader the score near the rock we have now is considered to be his reincarnation so you see where I'm going with this very prompting there just one short of a Trinity now it's the most perfectly religious state I've ever seen it's reduced the size of its population by six inches in the last couple of decades that's what you have a star people really brutally to do that and all the surplus has gone on building illegal nuclear weapons and we're all hostages of the slave system because they will starve their slaves more if we are nice to them and if we mean to them they will explode a nuclear weapon so you should worry more about the countries you can't do anything about than the ones that you can't is there in your future I went to North Korea determined that I wouldn't use the term 1984 in my report whatever it whatever happens I'm not going to do it I'd once gone to Prague under the communist regime and thought whatever it happens I'm not going to mention Kafka I'm going to be the first writer who doesn't put character in his project and I went to this opposition meeting which I thought was well protected and completely secret but the secret police knew about it in the broken the sámi against the wall and said you're under arrest and I said what for and they said we don't have to tell you that I thought they make you mentioned after the break the way the great thing about terrorism is it is a cliche it's a terrible so terrorism is a terrible bore it's a cliche in itself it rings cliches out of you of course I had to say 1984 once I was in Pyongyang you can't not do it it's actually but the Big Brother problem is the problem we're all United about here that's the problem to begin with is the wish for a large supreme anonymous bully to take your responsibilities away from you that is that's the problem to begin with it's a criticism that recurs throughout the book of totalitarian regimes they're just too dull for you dull imagine what person could be like was like mmm what it's like now speaking of Persia here is a question from someone from what is arguably the most secular humanist population on earth an Iranian yes an Iranian socialist an atheist I was wondering if you would comment on the trend among Western Baptists to side with Islamism over socialist and Marxist parties in the Middle East from Arash Karimi yeah if it's one of the most depressing of recent phenomena I think I mean I can quite see why hundreds of thousands of people would feel impelled say to fill the streets for policies would either effective kept Saddam Hussein in power I wouldn't have done it myself thank you very much but the would that there would be no demonstration in favor say of the secular Kurdish leftist parties in Iraq there's what demonstrations solidarity with the Kurds not one not one ever that's shameful I think absolutely shameful I the American campuses are not that hard to hold demonstrations on except for demonstrations by Iranian students I have not seen a mass demonstration flavor of the Iranian democracy movement at all ever and I think that's a great source of shame as well and I have a feeling and it's only a feeling but it's a very strong one that in some part of the liberal and left awareness there's a feeling that people who in countries like this who opposition movements that look upon the United States with a friendly eye which most of the Iranian opposition does are somehow in authentic they can't be kosher if they're like that and I think that's a very sick and masochistic feeling and needs to be rooted out and it really alarms me for example that a goodly proportion of what seems to me to be the American liberal conscience regards the Turkish fundamentalist sponsorship of racist totalitarian party in Gaza as a progressive movement and never say never has never says a word about the struggles of the PLO my old friends in the PLO to try and build up a society on the West Bank and to begin as they are doing to lay the foundations of a state there that's somehow that's not exciting that that isn't there are not enough Kalashnikovs on the t-shirt there this is a disgusting and promiscuous attitude I think do you have an opinion probably not always about the Cordoba Initiative I think they're already too many houses of worship in New York City and I don't think a house of worship is at all the apt means of memorializing commemorating and kneeling whatever word you want the corpses of thousands of people who were killed by the faith-based a terrorist organization so that's the first thing saying these if what I've read is true about the supposedly sponsoring a mom of this mosque who didn't believe that al-qaeda had blown up the World Trade Center in the first place I don't know that what I've read about him is correct but it wouldn't be the first time this has happened then I don't know what he's doing in New York in the first place and the third thing is that he's got apparently a present 50 grand or something to spend on this shop front loss but the idea is for an Islamic Center that will cost some about 50 million I'd be very interested to know where that money's coming from right and I'm practically sure I can tell you and again I don't think I'm ready for any more Saudi madrassas in the United States or anything remotely resembling it I think the money that Saudi Arabia is allowed to spend here is is disgraceful and insufficiently supervised and that there should be no more sorry money spent on for example distributing extremist currents in our prison system along with extremist Imams to work on violent prisoners no more of that [Applause] no more not another dime of Saudi money stood in that way in this country at least until we're allowed to open the Thomas Paine Thomas Jefferson Center in Riyadh Saudi Arabia I my expense is this with any thinking person of any faith you've got a much better chance of convincing them of the non-existence of the supernatural the truth of science and reason than you do of converting them to a whole other religion which isn't much progress in any case so the fact is I think the problem is the other way everywhere I know about in Europe which is where she's been able talking the Christian Church is holding the door open for the Islamists all the time who in Britain says it's time we had Sharia law for Muslims only so that it's no longer true in England that the law covers everybody in the same way special courts to move the Archbishop of Canterbury's for that because they think the enemy of their right the enemy is secularism and any faith is better than not they make it absolutely plain look what happened when the Ayatollah tried to murder Salman the Cardinal Archbishop of New York the corner of the time His Holiness the Pope the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel and the Archbishop of Canterbury all made stateless is solidarity with Khomeini not what with the murder directly but saying the problem was not the offer of money for murder the problem was a blasphemous novel is what I call reverse ecumenism when the real principles are down they all these guys will all stick together as they will at the UN on women's rights or gay rights because of them they are they are all they're all part of the same flock of crows as far as I can see and I say the hell with it now Sam Harris famously has a soft spot for Buddhism or some meditative traditions question I heard that sam harris disagreed with your view of buddhism and that the two of you were due to meet so that he could quote enlighten you on the subject did this discussion take place yet and if so have you changed your view of buddhism in any way you know what the buddhist says to the hot dog vendor don't even tell me you know what what does the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor don't you hear me make me one with everything do you know what the priest says to the hot dog vendor made me one whatever things that's really part one that's part one the slathered dog is given to the Buddhist third the hot dog vendor and the Buddhist hands over a $20 bill starts to munch nothing happens munches again nothing happens he says to the vendor what about my change and the hot dog vendor says change comes only from within if sam harris thinks this anything to be said for buddhist meditative practice then then yes it's true I did say I would love to have a talk with him about it I mean if that's his view I'd like to hear it better elaborated we haven't had that moment yet I was sent by its author a recent book called confessions of a Buddhist atheist I'm sorry our general member his name the book is now out it's very good it's the memoir of European who spent a great deal of time in Korea in Burma in Sri Lanka and Tibet really mastering Buddhist practice and meditation and all of these things and he says that it would be possible because Buddhism after all claims not to be religion to make it into a useful spiritual practice or some such on the condition that they repudiated the two great things that make it cruel cruel and stupid which is the theory theory the claim of reincarnation and the general theory of the Dharma said if you could purge it of these accretions of barbaric stupidity then the thing could could be decalcified if you like okay that kind of thing as Thomas Jefferson says neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg let them charge if they want but I think probably the thing that Sam is advancing wants to discuss where I wouldn't be called wouldn't consider myself qualified is in his work as a as a neuroscientist and and in the question of whether there can be a cognition independent of the brain that's a very fascinating Soviet but I really don't dare to pronounce on it I suspect not that I'm not going to be drawn onto territory well not qualified well I dare say we are running out of time I wanted to thank everyone barely got my trousers off you know I have I have got some Robert Ludlum versions of of your book I wanted to try out please would you enjoy we've got the Christopher identity the Amos papers the Mesopotamian vindication yes panned by your critics as the Baghdad intransigence and of course my personal favorite the Oxbridge buggery [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] too much [Music] exist [Music] and you actually love it love it [Music]

Channel: David Snider

Views: 72,383

Rating: 4.8850574 out of 5

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Id: AJYqZ_gVP-I

Length: 91min 52sec (5512 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/count_of_wilfore]

I’m sure we’ve all seen this image of Hitch reading his memoir. Well, this is the actual event!

I was looking for a statement that I recalled Hitch making, when a divine intervention occurred in my search. It was posted 5 days ago so here we are, ladies and gentlemen, yet another unseen Hitch video.

[u/dcdave14]

A few words about my video: Christopher Hitchens is my favorite writer. Recording this video was a great opportunity to see and meet my hero. His work meant a great deal to me, and losing him was very terrible. I kept this video to myself for ten years to hang onto some piece of him, but I'm now happy to share this recording with everyone.

The event was held on an unusually humid and hot day, and the inadequate air conditioning and stage lights added to the speaker's discomfort. Hitchens looks like he's baking but everyone in there was moderately uncomfortable. I think he held up well in the spotlight, with the private knowledge that he was facing a serious crisis. The last few minutes are actually my favorite moments, where he warmly greets his book's buyers with kind glances and smiles. Long Live Christopher Hitchens!

[u/Accipiter1nisus]

I just don't understand why doesn't more people rioting against the churches and those cults that religion is creating and accepting. No one with an intact mind can never accept that thing's / horror like this is still happening around us. I mean, I am really starting to hate religious "authorities", big time, fucking sadistic people!

The last half hour, really raised my blood pressure and we can actually blame christianity for the position we are giving islam in our society's, "parallel Justice systems" "let them judge there own" wtf!

A couple of days ago I saw a picture(in another sub) of the queen of England with the context "protector of the faith) I mean:/ no wonder why their offspring are starting to get hot and running away. Here's another monarch in Europe bowing for some shithead in the name of christianity. https://www.nrk.no/norge/xl/_-kongen-hindret-et-reelt-skille-mellom-kirke-og-stat-1.12748098

This has nothing to do with the concept of democracy, this is nothing more than "by force", you listen, or you suffer.

Sincerely fuck off to all of them!

[u/PADYBU]

What a gift this is! Thank you all who are involved in bringing it to us

[u/tompez]

a few weeks before he's diagnosed, I don't enjoy these appearances because of how unwell he looks, I think he loses some of his lucidity also.

[u/MorphingReality]

A myriad of birthdays have come at once!

[u/-tiberius]

This is 5 days after his appearance on the Daily Show promoting Hitch 22. He was in the hospital and diagnosed with cancer a week before this appearance. Odd that I remember that, but then again, I still have a bottle of JWB I bought the morning I learned he'd died.

[u/lamby]

Austin Dacey is a little ... confrontational … here :)