Thomas Paine - Christopher Hitchens Lecture (Full)

his and gentlemen thank you very much for my patience I'm sorry to have kept you waiting it was entirely my fault it's a very great pleasure to welcome the festival's best friend he is incomparable in addition in intellect in the ability to challenge every accepted norm he is the great contrarian here to talk about Thomas Paine is Christopher Hitchens thank you Peter for that suspiciously terse introduction thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for coming I normally scorn and despise I think I normally scorn and despise the dog and pony show thee the teachers a the PowerPoint and several but this I couldn't resist and I thought we would go through it together I could share it with you it's a piece of poetry I came across in the work for this work if there isn't a pointer but I'm going to just point and ask you to memorize yes could you put it one going down one line know exactly where it was before exactly where it was before please the arrow this is why I don't do this stuff there's something now that's obscuring the second line and the arrow was just where it should have been can you hear me Oh for heaven's sake the nightmare of that of the demagogue nope if you can just get the garbage off the screen I can do the rest can anyone here okay leave it don't do anything now if you will just talks amongst yourselves reversing there will be actually while they do that we can we can just all read it together can we would you mind the pomp of courts and private kings come on give us some welly I prize above all earthly things I love my country the King above all men is praise I sing the Royal banners are displayed and may success the standard aid second verse this is just remember keep it there i fain would burnish mile from hence the rights of man and common sense confusion to his odious reign that first princes thomas paine diffusion ruin seize the cause the france its liberties and laws now in 1798 who here has read Thomas Flanagan's trilogy of novels about the liberation of Ireland the first one is called the year of the French ah well you should it describes the the rebellion that year of the United Irishmen fear bog wolf turned or Edward Fitzgerald some revolutions of revolutions mongke some revolutio ultra he this Irish revolution was basically premature it didn't much stand a chance but it was the germinal moment for later much broader and deeper movements and one of its leaders was a man named Arthur O'Connell who the British decided to put in custody and as he was being led away from his trial he capitulated he surrendered he gave in Easter all right you win I give up and he handed out this plank that you see a more or less total sellout but if he will now ladies and gentlemen read the first line of the first verse aloud the pomp of Courts and prize canes and then the first line of the second verse beginning i fain I prize above all earthly things I love my country the king confusion to his odious reign the Royal banners are displayed no wait a bubble minute players are seeing that photo princess Thomas Paine the Royal banners are displayed defeat and ruin seize the forms and may success the standard aid one of the mistakes made by the British establishment historically has to be to consider the Irish people as stupid we have paid a very high price for this stupidity I think the second version is much better don't you and also appropriate because with Thomas Paine we are confronted with a sort of figure in the carpet there's no real memorial to him in his country of birth there's no day that honors him he's not taught in the schools there's no real memorial to him in his country of adoption though he is really the unofficial founding father and undoubtedly the moral author of the Declaration of Independence he was a very obscure person we didn't know much about his early life he didn't write many letters or keep many Diaries and have an official biographer as you said the world was his country his mind was his church and his religion was to do good and he was made an honorary member of the United Irishmen very rare privilege for an Englishman to invited to do so of this wonderful Protestant Republican organization because of the tremendous success and appeal of his book the great bestseller the rights of man about which are published little study and though he's obscure and occluded in the way that we normally consider great men that theory of history he's still alive in what Yeats used to call the book of the people I would describe him in a way as a Promethean figure the concept of right onto he put pen to paper was something that was discussed among theologians and among the church of philosophers there was long argument as you know between john locke and thomas hobbes about whether there were such things as rights where they came from how they originated how they were to be defined and to whom they ought to apply a pain broke open this private discussion and decided to put it in front of the mass audience and he emerges at a time when the shape of the common man is changing the sir does an increasingly self-educated artisan class of people who can read and there are people who have dimly heard of Sir Isaac Newton and his discoveries of Benjamin Franklin and his discoveries about lightning popular working men's clubs and coffee houses convened to discuss science and reason and political justice and Paine emerges really as the perfect spokesman of this kind of politics and decides to say if there are to be rights and the ruling class can't very well say there are not was it's only a very brief time since they claimed that there was a divine right of kingship they can't say the concept is meaningless as as Marx and Bentham later do they have to say there is such thing Paine says if there are rights then they belong to all of us they are inherent and innate they come from a time before there were bishops before there were Kings before there were predator governments and they can and must always be asserted and this is the first time that the word rights and the words and the word man ought properly I think mankind what we would now call human rights first time those two words would ever appear in the same sentence a breathtaking idea and instantly taken up by millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic on both sides of the English Channel up until then popular rebels had usually been commanded by noblemen Llewelyn up Griffith in the present case Robert the Bruce even Oliver Cromwell was a nobleman or by agrarian types like what Tyler or right up to the Levellers and the diggers of the Cromwellian revolution of whom Payne had learned from his father his Quaker father in Suffolk the great tradition of English liberty before the Norman Conquest before the Norman yoke as it was so often called the who in a great line of Milton's which was or Welles favorite line incidentally I think it soon release a dance in anyway it's been good line of Milton's in its says that there's a justification by the known rules of ancient Liberty in other words there's an understanding that this is only temporary that the rule of the crown and the church can be transcended what are the achievements of pain in this way well he is the moral author of the American Revolution as I said he took ship with a letter from Benjamin Franklin to escape the ground down life he was living in England and he arrived in Philadelphia just on the cusp of the great conflict between the 13 colonies in the Penda mother country over unfair taxation and political repression and was the became the greatest pamphleteer not just of that but of any other time by writing two short pamphlets one called common sense and later one called the crisis that said that this dispute could not be solved within the bounds of the Hanoverian usurpation but in order for any measure of justice to be available to the American people they would have to break the connection with London break the connection with the king and set up a democratic republic up until then people like Washington even Jefferson Franklin Hamilton were landowners country gentlemen very loyal to the idea of England to the replication of English stock on the on the eastern seaboard of the of North America loyal to the crown slave owners to boot very vested in stability and property didn't see the logic of Independence at all but by the time Paine had finished and the mass audiences had heard him there was a definite and the British had acted so stupidly there was a an unstoppable consensus that this was a catalytic moment and though Paine managed excuse we failed that didn't manage to get claws into the Declaration of Independence that would have forbidden the slave trade so the original stain of America is transformed again and rebuilt into the new constitution and the new set of arrangements and there that's a tragic failure there is in the Declaration and later in the Constitution the enshrinement for the first time of the concept of a secular state where the government in the church have nothing to do with each other where the president is chosen by election and so the both houses of the legislature unbelievably revolutionary for its time and considering his work to be done Paine goes bankrupt if Nancy becomes very involved with the Marquis de Lafayette and the early the early framers of the coming Declaration of the Rights of Man they'd ride along in Paris and takes part very happily in the early years of the Revolution and believes it to be the consummation of the American idea the the new world coming back to redress the balance of the old and is given the key of the Bastille by the Marquis de Lafayette who takes it back across the Atlantic as a personal present to George Washington to whom he dedicates the Rights of Man and you can still go to President Washington's home in Mount Vernon in Virginia and see it hanging on the wall and then what is his what is his wound and sorrow but one of his best friends a man he hugely admires the man has been a friend of the American Revolution Edmund Burke unmasks his batteries and issues the most incredibly sulfurous diatribe against the French Revolution it was all this like a lover's quarrel this it's always well worth reading up again because from that debate we get effectively all of our definitions of left and right radical and liberal in in in Britain and perhaps in in the wider world to the English Tories claim Burke was one of their own but he was neither English nor Tory he was an Irishman secret Catholic wasn't able to mention his religion during the time of the penal laws had cleared marvelously for the oppressed people of Bengal and elsewhere in India against the East India Company had tried to get Warren Hastings impeached had supported the American Revolution was hoping by indirection to plead for Irish and but was utterly horrified by the overthrow of the church and the execution of the king in Paris and as everyone probably remembers in there as every schoolboy knows as some McCauley used to say mr. burke produced a moist tribute foaming li moist tribute to Marie Antoinette finding it impossible to imagine that to avenge even a look cast in her direction the sword of every gentleman in Europe wouldn't spring from its scabbard just a defender and that with the failure to do this the age of chivalry had died was gone and the age of saw fists and calculators and economists was upon us and paying commented on this lush and lachrymose description of the Austrian usurper Marie Antoinette and said mr. burke mourns the plumage and forgets the dying bird and the argument was off to the races and pain is it essentially wins it because he says feudalism is over now it wasn't just this king and this queen that was overthrown it was the hereditary principle in France they paid the price for the crimes of their ancestors among other things and from now on the word democracy will be a key word and up until then the word Democrat or democracy had always been used as an insult rather as Tory used to be or suffragettes or Impressionists the trick is to convert an attack word into a badge of pride and call yourself a Democrat who pain was the first person ever to use the word democracy and general credit in that in that form we owe him that much too but Burke has some important points to make as well including a very alarmingly prescient foreshadowing of the likelihood that the French Revolution will go bonaparte hist will become a military dictatorship and anyone who defends thomas paine and defends democracy still has to read that passage in Burke's book where he warns what will happen if the revolution goes on in this violent way so the point I want to make in that connection about pain is this he was elected as a deputy to the French assembly from the firm Calais he took part in all the earlier discussions and he opposed the motion put forward by Marat for the execution of the king on the grounds that France should start again without medieval forms of punishment particularly without the death penalty which pay nap or that it should remember that for all his faults the French King had helped the American Revolution that they risked starting off to blood early and to authoritarian and dogmatic away if they went on this manner and he very nearly got enough votes even though he mostly had to speak through an interpreter to have the execution council and commuted either to life imprisonment or to deportation exile on the model of the stewards and was very much attacked by Marat for this who never forgave him and said he had no right to speak because he was a Quaker which he actually was not by them it's not no longer a pacifist and as the wheel of the terror turned Thomas Paine was put in the Luxembourg prison and very nearly died there and was illness and neglect and also was very nearly killed executed while there managed was he knew the Bible by heart to write the companion volume to the Rights of Man which was the age of Reason which I'll come to in a minute but for now what I want to say is this late in his life he wrote that to have had a part a hand in two revolutions is to have lived to some purpose and I think that's a noble thing to have said and being able to say but I think it's better than that he had a hand in the revolutions within both those revolutions in America he was on the side of the common soldiers and wanted them to have the vote any adult male should have the vote I'm afraid it was only adult male but it was better than nothing and he wanted the filthy traffic in human beings to be stopped at once and was with dr. Benjamin Rush and others the founder of the American anti-slavery society so he wanted the American Revolution to be more complete and more radical and he wanted the French Revolution to be less fanatical less dogmatic the less fratricidal violating one of its three cardinal precepts of fraternity and to stop the killing and the vendetta so he wasn't just lucky enough to be a supporter and an inspirer of two revolutions but he was brave enough to take the opposition view within those revolutionary processes themselves and that I've always thought is the test of a revolutionary and a radical that they will do that that they will fight for their principles among their comrades which is often them as danger place in which to to do it you also I describe him I hope when I bring up all this and the brilliant irony of Arthur Connell and others there's obviously an element of the Romantic here it's almost like Che Guevara going from one country to another trying to spread the Promethean flame and he does belong very much in the in the age of the of the early romantics the other two people who work wrote replies to Edmund Burke also heavily censored and persecuted by the reactionary government of William Pitt were William Godwin at Mary Wollstonecraft it was probably William Blake who gave paying the tip-off that he should flee England and get across the channel as soon as he could that he was about to be arrested for seditious libel and had he been so would certainly have been executed which I'm very sorry to have to tell you Aaron Burke favor for all his broad-mindedness so he is part of that bliss was it in that dawn element in our history in our our culture in our literature but he was also an eminently practical person he'd been a stay maker of course at maker after that he'd be no Customs and Excise official having that in common with Robert Burns oddly enough also being a bit of a piss artist having that in common with Rob burns as well strange there should be two drunken customs officials so much involved in our our national romance with liberty but he was also as I say a practical part two of the Rights of Man no more talk about how stupidly hereditary principle is he deals with all that in part one he says to how the hereditary monarch is as absurd as having a hereditary mathematician or hereditary poet it's absurd on its face he describes the injustice is that the wars that are created by kings for their own vanity and civil part two is charts statistical tables a beautifully done design of who the is man we know where you live we know where your children go to school um it's the design of a welfare state first time anyone's ever thought of it said why is it and so many people in England work on the land where so much food is produced and they don't have enough to eat why is it the wind they're too old to work their muscles have gone they're thrown out on the parish to die why is it that people live like beasts in the city how how can this mean he designs a welfare system whereby anyone at the age of their majority would receive a lump sum on which to get married into started their own business and that would be more or less up to them to deal with he doesn't mention healthcare he's not that advanced quite but when they get too old to work this provision made for the elderly and for widows and for orphans since it's my newly costed Agosta wooden pits appallingly reactionary budget it turns it upside down and it's a very absorbing document to read I went to talk about pain last week at the Institute for IPP RS that the Institute for Public Policy Research yes it's one of those rather suave Blair Project think tanks nice office in Covent Garden that kind of thing and to my surprise I found that they were readying a document about a streamlined welfare state which would include the idea of giving people at the age of their majority a lump sum that would come out of an investment made for them when they were born and the whole glossy pamphlet begins with a long extract from Thomas Paine on agrarian justice so I felt I didn't have to make my point about his continuing relevance in these circumstances um my mission statement by the way is that don't leave if this anyone around here and possibly said in trance to a question and the other mission statement is I presume that people come here to talk as well as to listen and it's now five past twelve so I'll condense my remarks a bit right if I may I should say perhaps a little about his what I should say I want to say a lot I'll say a little about the age of reason in his early pamphlet Spain was a bit of an opportunist he would sometimes say monarchy is condemned in the old testament which as you know sometimes it isn't time's it isn't he knew he knew that his audience all knew the Bible and probably knew no other book he was very good at doing biblical allusions for propaganda purposes and a bit tricky about it some of the time so there was a considerable shock when he published her the age of reason in which he maintained that the Bible is a tissue of lies from the beginning to the end and full of evil and full of instructions that if followed would be disastrous and wicked and that it's a plagiarism based upon hearsay based on it hearsay it goes through it from everything everything all the things that we village atheists like - where did Cain get his wife - do you know how many other children the Virgin Mary had by the way do you know it's four it's all in there wonderful stuff but also saying how they can't really be any revelation of truth because it can't those who report it can't be trusted they we cannot believe someone who says they've talked directly to God on their own unsupported work common sense if you like but but very very devastating once again there had been many philosophers Hobbes was probably one of them with the ones I've mentioned who were privately atheist David Hume I think it's almost certain was that some people think Francis Bacon was - that you kept quiet about it you did not say except of philosophical friends Payne is the first one to go to a printer and produce a cheap book that anyone can read saying what the priests have been telling you is wrong it's lies and it's evil it's false and this is absolutely devastating quite a number of his radical friends won't talk to him after that but I think he's got there the main point which is you can't really have the rights of man asserted without an age of reason that denies an interventionist God is if the promises of religion are true in any respect then there's no need for social reform there's no need for democracy the promise can be fulfilled in some other way by prayer for example or by good works or by faith and none of which work and so for paying to make this connection means that he's really the founding father not just of the American Revolution and of and in part of the French one but of what we call the enlightenment of the realization that precisely because we are alone we must turn to one another now I can't say the plane was an atheist as I am he he actually wrote the age of reason to vindicate God he was a deist in other words he believed that there must have been a creator because of the order of nature and universe but that this creator took no further interest in his creation didn't intervene didn't answer prayers he said that it was essential to defend the benevolent idea of the Creator from the appalling accretions of the of the religious and of the faithful so it's a very interesting book it's written just before Darwinism becomes available to anybody it's as far as anyone can then see people like Jefferson and Payne and others used to look at the rocks and look at the rock formations in Virginia and they think how did the seashells get so far up the mountains they had no idea they weren't to know as far as could be known in their time deism was a logical and defensible proposition and so there you have it if you'd like the twinning of the two of the two ideas and it might relieve my opinion if he'd done only these two things and not just led the exemplary and courageous life that he that he did manage to do and he would still deserve to be remembered as the most useful Englishman there ever was as kind of Griffith that great Welshman once put it in a wonderful drama documentary he did about about pain the most useful English man there ever was I give you children ladies and gentlemen Thomas Paine thank you is it on I like the notion of democracy being changed from a pejorative word to one which is a badge that we wear with honor do you think now it's going the other way that now we know perhaps not happy to be associated with those who use the word democracy um no I think it's well first I agree with you that it's nice when that happens I mean it was clever of the Tories to take on discharge in them and Impressionists also that was was that was the the reviewers taunt and the suffragettes and so forth and we have had extensions of this recently with people resuming the word queer for example if they're homosexual and even adopting a word that actually I do not use if they're black dead think should be used but all right you can see what the effort is being being made there what we have done with democracy I think is to assume that it's any measurement of public opinion there's not another problem altogether I mean when I was young there was a quite an argument about whether newspapers should even publish opinion polls because they were thought to be unscientific and probably too easy to skew now newspapers commissioned expensive opinion polls usually in concert with the television or broadcasting organization commissioned their own polls and then print their own findings as news on the front page when they've got nothing else to do this is this is the parity of democracy it's not it's not even populism really it's pseudoscience for one thing and it's some it's anti-democratic for another no I fear people have got so attached to it that they've forgotten what it means this work now so it could possibly be that one is due for a new word and I'll brood on that popular sovereignty knows it'll work why do you think we don't honor pain and if we were to redress that what would be a fitting memorial well the reason initially he wasn't on it was when he fled the country he would have been hanged at his stage he'd incited mutiny among the American colonists and he took the French side um fairly consistently during the Napoleonic Wars in fact I should because I thought I'd better hand the microphone over to you ladies and gentlemen I cut a bit I was going to say about a couple of his downsides one of them being that though he he saw through Napoleon right away and through the directory met him briefly and didn't like him he was still so wedded to the idea of France and its defense that he was willing to tolerate extreme measures being employed of repression and he always hoped that the French army would would invade Great Britain and set up a republic that it had in other countries and I think he'd been too long away from home because whose Hugh here's read Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels nothing like enough so you've got Flanagan now that suggests only a trilogy with Brian it's 20 I think with their quite short they're brilliant anyway I'll tell you quickly these are these are the new the new type of Englishmen no excuse me of Britain Google Indyk Hollywood so what about in our history a few years ago who drawn from all parts of the country of thinking of themselves as British for the first time singing the national anthem which has only just been more or less promulgated but they're very subversive projects there are all kinds of Cromwellian type Celt organizations and little splinter groups operating among the crews and millennial leftovers some of them from the from the 16 50s and 60s very very fascinating and very democratic all as they would have said on a very radical but absolutely no quarter given to the French because what is Napoleon gone and done he said himself proclaimed Emperor by the Pope he's restored Papists tree to France and made himself an empress so they have no trouble at all her however hostile to the excise man the press-gang the king and the rest of it they fighting against France and I don't think Payne realized this at all so there was an obvious sense in which it was easy for the Tories to indict him as a traitor I think that explains some of it then there's the atheism the public contempt for the church you don't get a plaque in Westminster alley for that and you shouldn't of course want one I mean I've never sure whether I should complain in Washington or not that there isn't a platform maybe it's best that there isn't and that he he can be found in decoding poems like that probably that's best you mentioned that total pain went to the abolition of slavery so I am over here I saw about so much light in my eye I might have put my shades on sorry you saw I saw the some drafts of the Constitution in your public library some years back don't know and there in one of the drafts was the ridicul for abolition of slavery and I was looking at this draft of the Constitution and there was the line and I was thinking why was it taken out because of it stayed in the impact on American history thereafter would have been gigantic and it was sort of blown away looking at this line in the early draft and I just wanted what happened it makes you weep well there are two reasons why one very obviously is that they the delegations from Georgia and the two Carolinas would not assign the Declaration of Independence if it included that concept that the clause that Jefferson wrote in and the other thing is Jefferson points went out those are many people who didn't own slaves but were very much involved in the trade of carrying them either up and down the coast or across the Atlantic usually from New York and Philadelphia so there were quite a lot of people in the interests in other words in the in the more enlightened States even that didn't want to tamper with the trade so they lost much worse I think is the sequel which is that when as a result of the revolution in Haiti who okay I'm going to try this once more who here is red/black Jacobins i CLR James excellent more than I thought get it read better the rest of you unbelievable history by a Trinidadian historian of the first black Republic ever proclaimed inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution led by genius general called Toussaint L'Ouverture in in what was then called Santo Domingo is now Haiti in the rather turn of the 18th 19th centuries this we owe a lot to this slave army because it completely destroyed along with yellow jack and cholera and a few other things a French fleet and a French army and it forced Napoleon and Charlie Ron to put the Louisiana cherries up for sale and Jefferson was clever enough to buy them thus doubling the size of the United States overnight for 10 cents an acre the best land deal in history and the idea came to him from Paine Paine said I think the French would give up they'd give us the banner we could start again and he and Joel Barlow went to the president has said Ben there's a condition which is we must start again without slavery we mustn't have it in these New Territories we can we can begin again without the original sin but just as the cotton interests had won the first time the sugar interest in the Caribbean needed that crop brought in very quickly from Louisiana and they continued to import slaves through New Orleans so the chance was lost and in fact that makes the American Civil War inevitable because new states are cloned out of Louisiana and by the time it's finished there as many slave as there are free states and it's only going to be one outcome so weeding back over that gives one the sense of the real lineaments of tragedy tragedy is not when princesses are run over in in Paris tragedy is well as the Greek one the fatal flaw in either the enterprise all the human being and this the daguerreian one that when two rights collide that's when you get tragedy and this will be so neat both those definitions hello my capitalism be the word that's usurped democracy and second are the rights of man compromised as a direct result of an expanding population well Milton Friedman's theory is the capitalism is the word for democracy because just as you as a consumer have your way in the market by choosing how you'll spend your money you know I'll on whom or on which as between any number of Possible's so you do that with your vote your vote is like your your dollar bill or pound coin Thatcher's I've always thought well very very very simplistic in the capitalism has shown it's off more than able to coexist with extreme forms of dictatorship from apartheid in South Africa to fascism and national socialism in Europe so there's nothing that seems innately necessarily democratic about capitalism with its persistent tendency to monopoly so that's the first point however pain would be more likely to be with you he was against government intervention work could be avoided he was for welfare floor and ceiling safety net but he was a small government man he didn't trust the state at all and wrote many safeguards against state power and for separation of power help right into the Constitution so and was often quoted by Ronald Reagan as a libertarian and for example and as a foe of alternis and is quite popular on the american libertarian right for your interest I can't but not sure I got your second question sir or second half this democracy July was it as I was like so much by increasing population ya know I mean the population of Britain at the time Payne was writing was I don't know probably not more than 10 million London was the biggest city of the world and had 600,000 people so we have there are more of us with more rights as you can easily see there were no rights that really it's wrong concept wasn't known until pain mister you suggest that term that pain pains way forward was to was to turn to one another as a Christian I believe that the basis of Christianity is just that that love is love thy neighbor is a tenet that's the top serve by those who wish to turn to one another and what on earth then has happened to man's inhumanity to man the world is full of man's inhumanity to man at the moment but o man's the opportunity man has isn't strictly being taken up is it the instruction to do right by your neighbor is actually from rabbi Hillel from the Babylonian captivity who invented what's called the building rule you don't do anything to another person you wouldn't want them to do to you Christianity is an inept plagiarism of that as it is a viewed as an in general and it also asks you to do the impossible it says you must love your neighbor as yourself no one can be expected to do that it's R it's a ridiculous proposition we are not so made as to do that we're also chose to take no thought for the morrow to care nothing for thrift or investment or education to give up everything a doctrine which must be amoral because not just on its face but because it could only be preached by someone who thought the world was about to come to an end was hoping that it would which is itself an immoral desire the eschatological pornography that underlies all religion it's not a religion of you can go through the whole New Testament as I have done and is painted and you'll find that though people are constantly being commanded to commit genocide and to impose slavery it ordered mandated to do that and to have their children stoned if they're disobedient and to do unbelievably other awful things burn which is thou shall not suffer which they all of that that document revolting evil is really relief to know that there isn't a word of truth in the story as Israeli archeology has now conclusively proved there was no Exodus there was no wandering in the in Sinai all of that's all made up good thing too but but there's no mention of hell no one's condemned to hell in the Old Testament at all not until gentle Jesus meek and mild are you condemned to burn forever if you don't agree with his preposterous offer making war on the dead punishing the dead for eternity you welcome to Christianity sir you piss you have contextualized pain for us in terms of the I'm here in terms of the American Revolution and the French Revolution if we were ever to have a revolution in Britain which perhaps might start with a written constitution how relevant would pain be now for us well I'm a founding subscriber of an organization you may have heard of called Charter 88 which has campaigned with some success for the idea of a written Bill of Rights and which I think would involve inevitably as the discussion went on the transformation of the country into a republic or perhaps a federation of Republic's within Europe and we do a huge amount to pain when if that project was was forwarded in fact we are a huge amount to him that it was ever put on paper in the first place it shows that it is part it's not it's not dreamt up by some group of chattering class people that it's it's a it's a very deep in the grain and the grit of the of the English and the British people it is part of our church it's the one that's buried that's that's forgotten but is interface' Belen a radical or no there'd be no doubt that he'd be one of the founding fathers there and Jared Winn Stanley and Thomas Waynesburg can I be a bit more specific probably not well not not in the available time that we could have a passive refreshment um it's it's clear that Thomas Paine was intellectually imaginative but does that intellectual imagination actually reach two cultures where notions of liberty and democracy are not historically attractive and are not currently attractive well it's been my experience and it was pains I think that even the most on apparently on promising societies perfectly able to see the point that if there are be rulers they had better arise from the people that no one should find themselves living under a government that he hasn't chosen to put himself under and the one should be denied the chance to change their government it was the great vise of Burke's book as he says that okay we did have one revolution in in 1688 in retrospectively even there was an anti-catholic revolution he said that was a right in fact was he was a glorious one he said but that's once and for all time it can never be changed any more the compact that it Institute's is permanent unalterable well that's a that's absurd on its face even if the william and mary settlement wasn't absurd in itself but people can get these points very easily and the idea they want to know what their rights are and be able to go to a court to ascertain is something people are thirsty for you know replace not be and I've never been anywhere where something like the American Constitution wouldn't be an improvement in other words because it's essentially simple and plain was able to reach people who knew very little about books and ideas but who were learning to read and they got the point right away so if you can do it to the people as the English I think there's no where it couldn't take root thick and conservative do you think that if Thomas Paine was alive today he wouldn't speak out at peace rallies do you think he'd be as critical of Islam as perhaps some would be of Christianity Oh or do you think he'd perhaps just the newspaper columnist I don't know the he would of sunk as low as the latter thanks for asking all the same well I actually I can't do this skit I read a book about George Orwell once and people say well what would all have thought about this or that and I said it's not possible to tell after a certain point and he died Orwell died I'm not avoiding your question all died very young but he'd written a great deal about the colonial ISM in Asia and in the Middle East also and had personal experience of it and I think it's possible to say from knowing his work and his mind that he would have been opposed to the 1956 intervention sewers which were having the 50th anniversary this year I think without any doubt and I think it's also pardonable to say plausible to say that he would have been opposed to the French and American attempt to keep colonialism going in Indochina I think one can do that anything much later than that it's one just shouldn't try I believe I can I do know with what pains attitude to Islam was was it sin was in sin the age of reason that's very plain I mean he didn't know that much about it but he could see that it is what it is which is an even more vulgar plagiarism of Judaism and Christianity usually of the worst bits it's nothing but a knockoff but it makes the same mistake as birthdate and it says it's the final revelation there's no need for any more after this you now have all the information you need in other words an implicitly explicitly Church had a share in ideology so it would have had no you had no doubts as to what he would think about about that as for peace rallies no he had a very very strong quarrel with his Quaker brethren because they not only abstain from the war against the British crown in America but they actually in the end called for people to keep their oath of allegiance to the crown so as so often with pacifists they weren't really neutral they were on the other side just like today's anti-war movement is not anti-war at all it's pro Saddam Hussein and and Pro so-called insurgent and it's led by people like George Galloway who are pimps forum and prostitutes of an amazing double fascism and dictatorship that fester on earth but he just not the case at all because for instance if Hans Blix have been allowed to carry on with his inquiry would have found out there were no weapons and the whole thing was based on a spurious plan to go to war the bush and Blair hatched months and months before that you don't have to be Pro so down to the ante war that's rubbish you don't have to with why are you that I I must say I agree that you don't have to be wise Oh movement led by people who are now on the that you do remind me to say something else their pain definitely believed that the United States should be a an imperial power for democracy he was as do Jefferson he wanted it to be an empire for the export of revolution to Haiti to South America beyond to Europe and to Island and beyond he was very emphatic on that and that's a problem for many people on the American left because they they have such a bad conscience about so many failed or criminal American foreign policies that they didn't believe their country should be or is or even could be a vector for these ideas but here's the situation comrades brothers and sisters friends the Russian Revolution is gone the Chinese Revolution has mutated into a sort of market Stalinism the Cuban Revolution is moribund I say nothing against the French Revolution but its ideas are not really represented by France anymore in any important way with the ideas of course of the Declaration of the Rights of Man a store with us the American Revolution is there anyone still standing you have to take it or leave it but in my view it requires thought and and not jokes about the president's IQ do you think that the rights of man or particularly women have been increased in after the invasion of Iraq and if so has it been worth the price I don't I go - it for one second there's been a night and day difference in in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan the flag that you can't see in my lapel is the flag of for the capture Union of Kurdistan the party whose leader is now the president of Iraq and four years ago Iraq was the private property of a psychopathic crime family was it was a mass grave underneath and a concentration camp on top mass graves and torture chambers and everyone the citizen property of the state now the elected president of Iraq is the leader of a Democratic Socialist Party that's the corresponding member of the socialist international who's whose people that was little latest 15 years ago earlier searching at latest refused were being subjected to genocide with advanced industrialized weapons of mass murder there are some people who say they can't see the difference I think that they are blase to put it mildly I think it's the nurse to me very muted applause for that proposition I can see there are those who say they can't tell the difference and will they probably can't I just like to make a comment as a member of their anti-war movement that there were lots of us that were incredibly disappointed when George Galloway was held up for some figurehead for the movement and also that you've just dismissed a vast movement full of the ground sorts of people with all sorts of beliefs and not all of us agree with George Cameron I didn't dismiss it I said if you think that why don't you have your own demonstrations that are not led and spoken to by people like Ramsey Clark in the United States as the organizer there or George Galloway of Caracalla who take the other side in the war that's not it's not anti-war to say as Michael Moore does that the the fascist killers in Iraq are the moral equivalent of the Minutemen fighters who led by Thomas Paine I'm sorry as well as well as being an objectively fascist position that's also a revolting caricature and not an anti-war one it's pro-war but on the other side if you don't like these people you don't want them to be the spokesman then don't march like sheet behind their banners have your own show for heaven's sake show little pluck we saw what got away it may as well say this even it's not on the so but it'll go away it's just done you gave an interview to a sign she called gentlemen's quarterly in America he was asked if only if only Blair was killed would it be morally justifiable for a suicide bomber to take him out no I said yes it would be Vee says though I'm not advocating it no he's not of course he wouldn't be as brave as that he's just pre approving it little deniability suits him down to the ground well then there's a bit of a rose you can imagine and then she digs up a statement rather vapid one made by Cherie Blair which he two nights ago he said well Cherie Blair once said that she sympathized with the despair of the Palestinian suicide bombers and though in fact that statement didn't quite say that it said that as long as people feel they have no alternative the work there won't be much of a very much progress pretty back your statement but not as Galloway cites it but just look what's just happened when he gets in trouble of his remark approving the murder of a three times elected prime minister he gets in trouble he hides behind the skirts of a woman who is just called to become a widow so now every time the man the man has no shame and every time I think you can't go any lower he makes a fool of me but I'm honest I'm on his case okay we're not we're not done with George at all yet all that said though you have to agree that despite the new government I'm over here no other side other side oh right hello you have to agree don't you that the risk has been quite well the the price has been quite high in the country is descending quite slowly into anarchy and then indeed the only part that could even possibly be created but with running yourself as the part left well alone I the northern Kurdish part of Iraq well left well alone in the sense has been taken out of the control of Saddam Hussein which it had been actually for a while and was that was the experiment in regime change before hand but I can't disagree with what you say but my estimate of Iraq five years ago was that it was an imploding society already it was bigger than bankrupt it was it was xeroxing its currency it was the private property he was completely privatized everything in the state was owned by this crime family they stayed in power by methods of divide and rule by inciting through different newspapers that they controlled Sunni again sheer sheer against Sunni both against Kurds mainly arseny the the place was good if it had not been intervened e'en clumsy phrase I apologize had there not been an intervention there's every chance that Iraq could have become to the Gulf War Congo has become to Southwest Africa a sort of vortex into which forces would certainly been drawn a rot would have been invaded all right don't you worry about that but it would have been invaded by Turkey and Iran and Saudi Arabia each with the most extreme client of the respective faction we intervene far too late should have all been taken care of in 1991 not my fault that it wasn't but and we may have intervened before window just before it went over the cliff we no but that it's a noble cause in the just war and make no doubt no doubt at all Christopher perhaps and come back to Thomas Paine by all means you you were fairly quick in your apology that he didn't extend his definition of mankind to include women kind why do you christopher think that the authors of the Declaration of Independence failed to see that self-evident fact it's really remarkable when you consider him some of their wives were if only that I mean Abigail Adams for example people of this kind not perhaps Martha Jefferson who was a bit of a mouse and a recluse but it just didn't cross their minds at all remember Mary Wollstonecraft who is paint simulator and and writes our own very brilliant attack on heaven but publishes the vindication of the rights of women when to be able to be honest with you I don't know the exact date after after the rights of man I'm fairly sure as the natural counterpart and pain would have accepted that his relations with women were was very distorted as it happens as well very I don't know whether that has anything to do with it or not but it's it's an extraordinary deafness among that whole revolutionary generation if you could bring Jefferson back now to play the game I said I wouldn't play what would surprise him the most thing was surprising most would be the Canada had still not been conquered he would think one of the young men of America had been doing are they asleep the Union Jack still flies over a whole chunk of North America this is outrageous that would really upset him mixed marriage as we call it it's not mixed in because there no such things as racist but you know what I mean would it would amaze him including the number of his own descendants who can now be identified through DNA and American womanhood would absolutely shatter him shatter health as it would have done pain but when all I can say for this lot is that when the Seneca Falls conference is convened just before the Civil War and women start to attach themselves to the claims of right being made by slaves and others Thomas Paine is always mentioned in their discussions he's sort of revived as he was in the birth of the labor movement in the Chartist movement in England he's always been part of that that sort of unspoken history but unsung I mean but not quite as both and not forgotten that is very evoke by I would Thompson in making the English working class he's part of the the collective memory of the educated working man and for that reason in perishable mats um up here on the on the decking I'm sorry to like an interrogation enemy I can't see very well beyond these right I think what's more important is my question ah Maggie could you give it some welly so yes is that better much good looking at the applying the sorts of principles that came out from the rights of man to the sort of issues we have today not what Thomas Paine would have said but how can we learn to apply them for example about the way the individual human rights are often trodden over and are given less weight than the sanctity of the state the preservation of borders whatever goes on in between them about how to be so tight for example what goes on in the Congo and the misery there or if we look alternatively now we have a world fight between Islam those who want Sharia law those who don't and we're all caught up in it how do these principles you spoken about today help us to understand those kinds of problems well on the matter of asserting civil liberty against the state I would hope it was self-evident I mean I am a very strong supporter of the regime change policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and I hope tomorrow and soon in Syria and in Iran not necessarily in person outside was supported by the international community I'm also a plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Department of Justice and the National Security Association for warrantless wiretapping I'm a named litigant in that suit which will be heard in a federal court in Michigan next week it's a it's very important especially in times of combat when the state has only excuses it thinks it needs to coerce people or to silence them inter say it's for their own good just like Christianity the worst thing about his dictatorship is that it's benign that's the horrible bit that the nine stuff is the revolting stuff so that I hope one could shake us read the reason I'm done during this book now is that obviously the great question in the world is this is the battle between the secular and theocratic forces and it's going to be that way for a long time and I've got a red light here now but I'll just say this if you take the best-known dispute and the longest-running one that goes back to the League of Nations and Palestine question I once heard the late Abba Eban Robin charming was very liberal politician former ambassador to the UN former foreign minister say that when you looked at this problem that the first thing that struck you about it was how easy it is to solve remember thinking okay I'll listen to the rest of what he says if he says that even though you have approximately equally balanced people's Jewish and Arab roughly the same number of helmet with historic claims to the same land and long historic attachments to it that are not combining is completely compatible but up there is a way of doing it you can you can partition the place at least to begin with so that everyone is part of it you can't have one of them one group living on top of the other that's out of the question it must be living side by side which must mean some form partition easy everybody wants it majority of Israeli Jews consistently say they wanted prime minister Abbas says he's sure in a referendum the Palestinians would vote for it to which whenever they've been tested on it they have a PLO supports it the UN support City use the court said the United States supports it the diaspora Jews support it why can't we get it because there's a fraction of mass scientists among the Jews who say God gave them the West Bank and Gaza not Gaza with the West Bank so there's nothing to negotiate and it's not difficult for them to find counterparts Muslim counterparts who say you're quite right about that God did distribute the round he does make property deals but in our favor sorry not yours and then just as if that wouldn't be bad enough the Christians to the rescue the American fundamentalist Right comes to the aid of the extreme Zionists and says you not one inch can be given away because it must all be kept in trust for the Messiah who's coming soon who will only want I think it's 99 thousand Jews when it's all over to convert the rest are going straight to hell but we leave that bit out in the interests of so that theocracy and religion poisoned everything they make it impossible for reason for rationality for justice even should be heard let alone enacting and that's that's in an area where we have got well and that's in an area where we have quite a lot of purchase and quite a lot of influence it's all well what is going to happen when the when when bin laden's forces try again to take away Kashmir it's Kashmir they care about by the way not Palestine they occasionally use Palestine and some fools believe that if Palestine was so the al-qaeda people would stop how people can believe this I don't know Comanche war movement but wait if suppose bin lands do you'll have another try and they really do smash up Kashmir and destroy its attachment to the Indian Union Indian Union will fall apart the largest and most impressive multicultural multi-ethnic democracy in the world will fall apart and the fighting and bloodshed they will be there will make 1947-1948 completely forgettable that could happen that's what they want they're working at it in night and day so this is a real struggle they want to destroy everything we care about they want to take away everything we have and what is appalling is to see the capitulation of my profession for example which wouldn't publish one of the Danish cartoons which believes that the only problem in the world is avoiding the xxx of people's feelings what I'm sorry I didn't sign up for this to be inoffensive and now becomes a time which every speaker knows when the audience stops looking at this watch that starts shaking and there comes a time when the red light stops being

Channel: hitch archive

Views: 422,351

Rating: 4.8418312 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher Hitchens (Author), Thomas Paine (Author), christopher hitchens lecture, rights of man, free speech, liberty, american democracy freedom, founding fathers, Freedom, american history, United States Of America (Country), History

Id: MWxpkcQUCeo

Length: 61min 54sec (3714 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This tom pain sounds pretty interesting, someone should make a user name about him

[u/dborrus]

Any one have the slides for the powerpoint he's using? It's a bummer I can't follow along

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