We Revisit Classic Debates To Ask Who Gets To Set The Limits On Speech

A private group chat joke turns into an arrest, a bond, and a courtroom spectacle and it forces a question most of us avoid until it hits home: what do we actually mean by “free speech” when institutions decide your words are dangerous? We use that story as a bridge into a fast-moving compilation of legendary confrontations featuring William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and Noam Chomsky, not for nostalgia, but to stress-test today’s arguments with the sharpest versions of yesterday’s debates.

We wrestle with Vietnam as a case study in empire, propaganda, and moral justification, then jump to the 1968 Chicago convention where protests, policing, and constitutional rights collide on live television. The heat is the point: you can hear how quickly “law and order” turns into permission, and how quickly “freedom” turns into labeling the other side as enemies. From there we track modern censorship pressures that do not always look like laws, including the Danish cartoons crisis and the way fear and intimidation can make editors and institutions fold without a single statute changing.

Finally, we dig into the hardest free speech knot of all: defending someone’s civil liberties without defending their ideas, and deciding whether media regulation helps or whether democratizing media power is the real fix. If you care about the First Amendment, political discourse, censorship, protest rights, or the future of open debate, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who disagrees, leave a review, and tell us: who do you trust to draw the line on speech?

Transcript

Opening And Carlin On Punching Down

SPEAKER_14 0:46

Welcome to the Deroma Claims. I'm your host Jerome Clay and a meeting of all Rainforest Travelism. We have one planet. Nobody's leaving. Let us reason together. Welcome to an episode of The Blast from the Intellectual Pass. I hope today we learn something. Let's get into the episode.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

But his targets are underdogs. And comedy traditionally has picked on people in power, people who abuse their power. Women and gays and immigrants are kind of, to my way of thinking, underdogs. Why does he get away with it, do you think, then? Well, because I've never laughed at jokes about the Well, he's appealing. I think he's appealing largely. I think his core audience are young white males who are threatened by these groups. I think a lot of these guys aren't sure of their manhood because that's a problem when you're going into adolescence. And the women who assert themselves and are competent are a threat to these men, and so are immigrants in terms of jobs. And I think that's what what is at the core of that experience that takes place in these arenas is a certain uh uh you know a a a sharing of of uh anger and rage and at these at these targets.

SPEAKER_14 1:51

So the last two people you heard speaking uh are speaking to us from beyond the late uh George Carlin speaking with the late uh Larry King. Exactly. What makes you think of anybody or anything that is may or may not be going on in this current period of time we're living in or not your heart. Again, George Carlin in conversation with Larry Kingdom. Let's have fun.

Vietnam And The Logic Of Empire

SPEAKER_06 2:43

I rejoice in your disposition to argue the Vietnam question, especially when I recognize what an act of self-control this must uh involve. It does, sure. It really does. I mean, I think that kind of issue very well.

SPEAKER_10 2:56

Sometimes I lose my temper. Maybe not tonight.

SPEAKER_06 2:58

Maybe not tonight. Uh because uh you without smashing the goddamn table. And what brought us to South Vietnam in the first instance, uh, in my judgment, was clearly uh a an uninterested, or I should say disinterested, uh, concern uh for the uh uh stability and possibilities of a region of the world.

SPEAKER_10 3:19

What uh period was what period do you feel that we had this disinterested relationship to Vietnam? No, at what period did we have it? Did it begin? Let's say 1951, for example? When we when the State Department bulletin points out that we must help the French uh reconquer their uh former colony and we must eradicate all Vietnamese resistance down to its last roots in order to reestablish the French.

SPEAKER_06 3:42

To increase my vulnerability, I wish we had uh helped the French. We did. We we supported.

SPEAKER_10 3:48

Well, but there's no point in helping somebody. It was hardly disinterested when we attempted as, you know, with with tremendous uh uh support, in fact, to reinstate French imperialism in South Vietnam.

SPEAKER_06 3:59

It was disinterested in this sense, and and I think this is an important distinction for you to touch on your book. It's a disinterested act uh if uh my attempt to help or your attempt to help a particular nation is in order to spare you the possibility of a great ordeal in the future uh which will harm you, your family, your children, your republic.

SPEAKER_10 4:18

And in that sense, not uh Nazi Germany was also disinterested. Yeah, in general, Nazi Germany was conquering Eastern Europe only in order to advance the uh values of Christian spiritual civilization and to restore the Swaves to their rightful and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_06 4:33

I follow you. I follow you. But uh if if you want me to pursue that digression, I will. Okay. But uh but let's suspend it for a moment.

unknown 4:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 4:41

I I'm distinguishing that kind of disinterestedness between the fact that with the But that's not a kind of disinterestedness.

SPEAKER_10 4:46

That you see, that's that's something which includes, as a special case, every case of military aggression and colonialism in history. That's all disinterested in your sense.

SPEAKER_06 4:54

Well, all right, let me simply rest my case by saying that there is an observable distinction by intelligent men between a country uh that reaches out and interferes with the affairs of another country uh because it has reason to believe that a failure to do so will result in universal misery, and that country which reaches out and interferes with other countries because it wants to establish Coca-Cola plants and chase national banks and and and whatever and exploit. And that is observable. It's a conceptual distinction.

SPEAKER_10 5:24

Well, let's distinguish between a conceptual distinction and a factual. Right. It is a conceptual distinction, but in actual fact, the history of colonialism shows that these two motivations can cur uh coincide. That is practically every um I mean there are exceptions, you know, the probably the Belgians and and the Condor are an exception, but by and large, the major imperialist ventures have been in the economic uh in the material interest or in the perceived material interest. I'm not interested in the mathematics of the interest.

SPEAKER_06 5:53

You have already conceded that it's not merely a conceptual difference.

SPEAKER_10 5:55

I say it is there are exceptions. There are a few exceptions. Like I say, let's talk about the exceptions then. Well, no, but the the exceptions are at the difference. No, wait a minute. The exceptions I I mentioned, for example, the Belgians and the Congo. There they didn't have they didn't even pretend to have a civilizing mission. There it was pure material self-interest. That these are the exceptions. There are, as far as I know, no exceptions on the other side. There are there are, I mean, maybe I've left out a case of history, but as I see the history of colonialism, the great mass of cases are cases where a powerful country was working in its perceived material self-interest and was covering what it was doing to itself and to the world with uh very pleasant phrases about uh preserving Christian values or uh helping the poor benighted natives or one thing or another. Now there are a few exceptions where there's pure predatory imperialism. No not even any pretense of doing anything, but these are quite rare.

SPEAKER_06 6:46

But uh it is it is also true, and I think manifestly true, uh, that uh uh there have been interferences with the affairs of other nations whose purposes were, in my judgment, manifestly benign. For example. For instance, the Truman Doctrine.

SPEAKER_10 7:01

Oh, I don't think that was manifestly benign at all. That was an attempt to develop an order. The Greek situation was benign, not at all.

SPEAKER_06 7:07

We were trying to say the Greeks' testimony is more interesting to me than yours.

SPEAKER_10 7:10

Which Greek testimony? The testimony of the thousands of people who are thrown into jail and uh Well, not not not uh I I grab not the testimony of the Greek communists who were beaten.

SPEAKER_06 7:19

Or the Greek peasants who were Well, I I there again, is it a conceptual difference that uh uh between the person who desires a life under some kind of freedom and one who desires life under some kind of freedom? Was it under communism?

SPEAKER_10 7:30

Well, uh no, for because there's no there's no such opposition in Greek. There was in Greece. There was a distinction between a very repressive regime which we instituted in 1946, and another regime, I don't know what it would have been, that would have grown out of a victory of the so-called communists. Now, if y uh you see what we did was had nothing to do with freedom.

SPEAKER_06 7:49

The number of people who were slaughtered in Greece, first by the communist insurgency, then by the Nazis, then again by the communists.

SPEAKER_10 8:01

Communist conquest before the Nazis insurgency prior to the Nazis. Yes, the Civil War of the uh early 40s. Your history is quite there was no communist insurgency prior to the Nazis. There were communist resistance bands fought against the matter of nomenclature.

SPEAKER_06 8:18

The point is that the the 40-year-old or the the 45-year-old Greek has fought three times uh in uh certain ventures there, in one of which uh they acknowledge that we bailed them. Who is they out? Uh who is they?

SPEAKER_10 8:33

The rulers of Greece acknowledge that. Not also the people. Oh, I'm not I'm quite unaware of that. I'm quite unaware that the people of Greece have spoken on this issue. Even Papangrail, you like him, I assume, because he hates us. No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_06 8:44

Oh, George Papangre was one of the people who was talking about we and I'm talking about Andrea, which makes it even easier. Because Andreas Papengray is both very both on record as being grateful to President Truman for his intervention in that part of the world in 1947.

SPEAKER_10 8:59

That issue. I really think we had no right to intervene in Greece in 1947. Indeed, why did we pull out of the Philippines, for instance? We pulled out of the Philippines because it became a bad investment. Why? Because American uh Americ if you look, American agricultural interests were very much opposed to the uh back in the in the mid-30s, they were very strongly opposed to the uh free trade relationships which allowed Philippine crops to compete with them. That's why we pulled out of the Philippines.

SPEAKER_06 9:23

Why do they why do these agricultural interests authorize us to intervene in South Vietnam? Well, they didn't. If you consider this this is because we didn't intervene on the basis of the critical dimension.

SPEAKER_10 9:30

No, I say that in the Philippines it was the critical dimension. Look, the world is a complex place. There are certain interests that were involved in the IT is a complex place. Well, there were certain interests that were involved in our Philippine venture. There are different interests that are involved in our Vietnam venture. You see, our Vietnam don't forget that with the Second World War, America's imperial interests expanded enormously. I mean, prior to the Second World War, we were a sort of a marginal imperialist power, except for the Monroe Doctrine. But since the Second World War, we became the world's major imperialist power. And Vietnam is simply one piece of an attempt to construct a very large integrated world system of which Greece was another piece. Well, first of all, uh you've now mentioned martial aid for the first time, and martial aid, Marshall Plan aid has to be distinguished quite sharply from the Truman Doctrine. Why? Why? Because the Truman Doctrine was a doctrine of military intervention, and the Marshall Plan was our first attempt at a majority. We do understand it. Sometimes a soldier can be as useful as a bushel of wheat, aren't you? Now look, nevertheless, if we're going to be at all clear about the American role, we're certainly going to distinguish between military intervention and economic intervention. They're very different in the way they function. Now the fact of the matter is that neither was disinterested in your sense, I don't think. But they're very different in the impact that they had. Uh the Truman Doctrine, I think, was a disastrous venture. I think the Marshall Plan uh was arguable. You're talking about a dream world. The real world is one because the real world is one in which the alternatives were bringing uh coming with a bayonet, which is on an American rifle held by an American-backed uh Greek soldier, and the alternative to that was giving the kind of aid which was used, in fact, to construct the kind of society in Western Europe that we wanted to see developed for. Now these are two very different things. It's a very different thing to introduce uh uh to uh run for the Greek army uh a counterinsurgency program with uh military support and many military men involved. That's one kind of thing, one sort of repression. But look, now let's let's be careful again. I mean there's a difference between first of all, I'm opposed to military aid to other countries, whether by us or by the Soviet Union. Well, let's come back to that because it's a more important thing. And that is that I'm even far more opposed to the uh imposition of regimes by foreign troops. Now, in the case of Germany, let's say in the case of France, the uh the uh Pétain government, the Pétain Laval government, the Vichy government was supported by German troops. Had the German mil they weren't throughout the country necessarily, because there was certainly indigenous support. But there's no question that if German military force had been withdrawn to the other side of the Rhine, uh then there would have been a an overthrow of the Vichy government, then France would have had some different form of government. Now, in that case, our invasion of France was, uh whether one likes it or not, was is it was in reaction to an occupying external force. It just pure confusion to identify that with the case of Greece when we were trying to liberate uh w we were trying to uh select the kind of society that Greek would Greece would have, and we were trying to save uh the rulers that we had designated as appropriate from their own population.

SPEAKER_06 12:24

In your book, uh, and that's where you're not willing to to be consistent in carrying out this argument, you you're constantly talking about our satellizing of places like uh uh Cuba and the Dominican Republic and so on and so forth. And yet we never occupied them in sense of what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_10 12:39

Well, we never occupied the Dominican Republic. We sent 25,000 troops there in 1965. No, no, no, no occupation. No, I'm talking about pre I'm talking about the American Marines were in there dozens of times. I didn't think of being invasive, and I don't think what to be. No, let me ask you this. Is it Pascal? It's not evasive at all. You know, we just simply repeatedly sent troops to Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc., etc. If you if you want to be serious about it, there's more evidence that South Vietnam tried to colonize North Vietnam than conversely. In fact, South Viet well, look, South Vietnamese commandos were going uh military forces, regular military forces were going north uh considerably earlier than than the time when we even proclaimed that the infiltration began from north to south. Did they bump into the refugees coming south? The refugees were coming south in 19 uh were going in both directions, in fact, in 1954 or 55, and according, at least according to Bernard Fall, the uh uh commandos began going north in 56 or 57. The first claimed infiltration from the north was in 59, and that was South Vietnamese coming south. So if we you know if one wants to talk about again the real world.

SPEAKER_06 13:47

Uh, have contributed to the continuing bloodshed, and the sad thing about it is not only the bloodshed, but the fact that they seem to dispossess you of the power of rationalizing.

SPEAKER_10 13:57

May I say something?

SPEAKER_06 13:57

Sure.

Conservatism Neocons And Power Politics

SPEAKER_10 13:58

I think that's about five percent true, and about or maybe ten percent true. It certainly is true. Why do you give that? May I complete a sentence? Uh it's it's perfectly true that there were areas of the world, in particular Eastern Europe, where uh where Stalinist imperialism uh uh very brutally uh took control and still maintains control, but there are also very vast areas of the world where we were doing the same thing. And uh there's quite an interplay in the Cold War. You see, the what you just described is a, I believe, a mythology about the Cold War, which might have been tenable ten years ago, but which is quite inconsistent with contemporary scholarship. Ask a Czech. Ask ask a Guatemalan, ask a Dominican, uh repo asked from the Republic, ask, you know, ask a uh person from South Vietnam, you know, ask. And yes, I was invited and was there for one uh one program. Uh that was it. Uh you can see the program I understand it's been uh now appears on the internet and so on. Uh at the end he said he was pretty angry. He said he would invite me back, but of course I never heard from him again. Uh he was uh he was the um maybe the leading uh figure in the uh so-called conservative movement. I don't think the term conservative is appropriate, but what's called the conservative movement, he was maybe its leading figure, he was maybe its leading intellectual, his journal was the House Journal, uh uh he was considered not by me, but he was considered to be uh witty, articulate, uh knowledgeable, and so on, and much respected. Again, not by me, but I'm giving the general impression. Uh the which calling his successors, I assume you mean the so-called neoconservatives, I mean they're even farther from conservatism. Uh they're just extreme radical nationalists. Uh uh Wolfowitz, uh Pearl, uh Cheney, uh the rest of them. Uh uh it it's it's defaming conservatism to associate them with conservatism. Uh conservatism has an honorable tradition, but it's not that. Uh the same is true of Reagan. Uh Reagan uh uh was uh uh believed in uh uh military violence and destruction. He Central America virtually destroyed, he supported uh South Africa's uh apartheid regime and violation of congressional legislation, uh uh supported its attacks on neighboring countries, they killed a million and a half people, uh supported the uh Israeli atrocities in Lebanon, killed tens of thousands of people, and so on. And internally, he was in favor of large-scale government intervention in the economy. I mean, Reagan was the most protectionist president in post-war American history, the double protectionist barriers, uh, called on the Pentagon to uh rescue deficient American management, uh so teach them uh modern uh management techniques so that they could save the economy from Japanese takeover. I mean, to call this conservatism is uh bad joke. Uh and then neocon so-called are in war extreme. Uh so by today's standards, Buckley looks pretty modern, I suppose.

Britain America And The Special Relationship

SPEAKER_06 19:07

Christopher How did we have an important fact of the first fifty years of the ninth twentieth century? Uh, is that uh Americans speak English. And the most important fact of the last fifty years may prove to be that Russians are white. Now that's that's that's a form of reductionism, but um it it's something that uh launches us on the question of uh uh is England as as dead as she's supposed to be. You see?

SPEAKER_09 19:39

Well, I've said in the book not, because um just as people were beginning to write the old country off, and as even Churchill was admitting defeat, which is what he did at his famous appearance at Fulton in 1946. His last major speech last made of speech, in effect, which he said, you know, we're we're through, we've borne the heat and burden of the day, the torch has to be passed, but fortunately we have our American cousin, and the British spirit, as it were, must enter this new and young and vigorous body, and that will give us um a further say and a further lease on life. And the first stage in doing that, really, of course, was what um somewhere well known to you, James Burnham, called the receivership to which the United States took the British Empire. If you look at where American foreign policy is now concentrated, from Pakistan to Palestine and so on, it's an inheritance from the British Empire. And the other is obviously cultural. Um one of my favorite examples I say to people, well, is George Wallace a wasp? And people say, not really, no, he seems rather a vulgar chap and so on. But I say he's very white, extremely Anglo-Saxon, very Protestant with the things about George Wallace. You say, is William Buckley a wasp? This absolutely is what's meant by wasp. And I say, well, white enough, but in fact, Irish and Catholic in Providence. So wasp is a term of class as well as of um ethnicity in America, and that's impossible to understand unless you understand the special way in which America is appealed to by the British imagination. Cynically or non-cynically, but I would say genuinely that there is there is a real affection that's based on a common sacrifice in war, on blood, on language, on literature, and so on. And there are certain kinds of emulation which I attack in the book. I think a rather pathetic sort of Chobier's attitude to the British royal family, for example. And in politics, too easy a resort to things like Kipling and Churchill and the windier aspects of British imperial bluster when some piece of American foolishness needs to be defended overseas. It's too easy to reach for this sort of stock of metaphors, as Sullivan and his newspapers that do it all the time. They say, This is Munich, you know, uh, if we don't take our stand here, America will be dragged in the mire. The appeal to the Churchilly and the John Bull spirit. So we vanquish the Falkland Islands. Well, exactly, and the Malvinus go down and so forth. And that this is but this is testimony to an extraordinary durability of English imagery and and culture in America, even though it's been mutated in this slightly suspect way.

The Sixties Left And Vietnam Memory

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Sorry for such a long but Bill, you were as you read the kids who were in the street protesting, how much of it was relatively sophisticated ideology? They weren't just rejecting the straight-laced lives of their parents, but the whole notion, the whole Cold War notion, the communism was bad, we were good. And how much it was just kind of naivete, romanticization of the commies and so on.

SPEAKER_06 22:29

Well, you you you've asked the the hard questions, don't you? The fact the fact is that there was a kind of a listlessness uh in in the 60s, and that that uh listlessness uh um called for a kind of a masturbatory relief. People wanted to find if they could go ahead and get their kicks uh uh in in some way that uh they hadn't been getting them, and uh them also if they could write them to some uh to some ideal. In fact, what it was was was primarily self-concerned and uh an attempt to to to cast a noble perspective on what it is that you are up to you were engaged in narcissism for.

SPEAKER_09 23:12

Um literally as well as metaphorically with Mr. Baptist's characterization of it as masturbatory actually was quite celebrated for going the distance. Um perhaps um one of the great things about it was that it was the uh first generation, or perhaps one of the less great things about it, but at any rate one of the true things about it, one of the first generations to take the separation of sex and procreation for granted, which I think led to a great deal of jealousy, and standing, not to say envy, among preceding generations.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

It still came into wide use just about that.

SPEAKER_09 23:40

I think I think it might be worth making a distinction uh between being, as it were, a 68 or soissant huitard, as the more pretentious of us call ourselves, and a sixties person, because anyone born in the right boom bracket can claim to have been a sixties person. And the way it's all represented now retrospectively, airbrushed and rewritten is beads, caftans, exactly as Mr. Butley says, Make love, not war, Woodstock Nation, all that. Now that was sort of common generationally, as common as, say, James Dean had been a bit earlier. But the p the what we're talking about, I believe, is the sixties left. In other words, the attempt to uh block what we thought of correctly in my view still as a as an imperialist and aggressive and unjust.

SPEAKER_06 24:20

We we we had our burdens during the nineteenth century, we British, and during the first part of this century, our fleet uh tranquilized uh the world. We don't have any more. We were exhausted by the Second World War, plus the impulse to separatism, which I declined uh explicitly to endorse. You you've You got you got takeover in a sense. But but you don't say it in those words because it sounds uh it sounds uh like uh too much self-abnegation and politically is impossible to say. Is that not a fair reading of what he was saying in that first time?

SPEAKER_09 24:52

I would say it was, and in the same way as, for example, Kipling's most famous poem about which I have a chapter, is called The White Man's Burden. It's one of the few lines of Kipling everybody knows, take up the white man's burden. Now, people I found it surprised to find Kipling wrote that poem directly as an address to the United States. But it's obvious from the line, because you wouldn't you wouldn't talk to the country that already had the white man's burden, namely Britain, and tell it to take it up. What in fact is being said by Kipling to the United States is take over the white man's burden. It's made very clear.

SPEAKER_06 25:22

You you you've got you got take over in a sense. But but you don't say it in those words because it sounds uh it sounds uh like uh too much self-abligation and politically it's impossible to say. Is that not a fair reading of what he was saying in that first time?

SPEAKER_09 25:36

I would say it was, and in the same way as, for example, Kipling's most famous poem about which I have a chapter, it's called The White Man's Burden. It's one of the few lines of Kipling everybody knows, take up the white man's burden. Now, people have I found a surprise to find Kipling wrote that poem directly as an address to the United States. But it's obvious from the line because you wouldn't you wouldn't talk to the country that already had the white man's burden, namely Britain, and tell it to take it up. What in fact is being said by Kipling to the United States is take over the white man's burden. It's made very clear. And it was addressed to Congress in in the hope that Congress would an annex the Philippines, which it took.

SPEAKER_06 26:10

But when Kipling when Kipling uh wrote those lines, uh uh the historical perspective of say 150 or 200 years uh justified what uh you now I think uh uh consigned as an act of condescension. What whatever was going on in India, which nobody I know of defends, even you, uh stopped going on when the white men said, Don't do that. Don't no big widows burn themselves on the pile of the other world.

SPEAKER_09 26:38

Uh Marx himself said that the British influence on India was in some uh extent and degree a civilizing influence, that it broke up the caste system and and millennial slavery. Yes. Why do you say Marx was half Well it's it's not expected of Marx that he would have defended the British putting down the Indian mutiny, but he did do so. So I mean on the argument of evidence against presumed interest, it's more to be remarked upon than other cases. Kipling argues he was much more far-sighted than people give him credit for.

SPEAKER_06 27:05

Yeah, but you could see the exhaustion of that part. I didn't get the way in the way of Marx's proletariat uh thing. You weren't talking about the proletariat being put down. No, by no means. So then therefore you it it oughtn't to have surprised you that Marx would have made that comment. It doesn't I mean I guess a c The war in Vietnam.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

You oppose it on uh moral and ideological grounds as aggressive and imperialism. Yes. No. So my question is you really believed that? You thought that the United States was the the United States was the offending party?

SPEAKER_09 27:34

I would affirm it now. In fact, with greater knowledge and um infinitely uh larger depth of evidence to draw upon.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

But the Chinese, the Soviets uh supplying the North Vietnamese were the good guys in this one.

Culture Wars Accents Royals And Containment

SPEAKER_09 27:45

I think the hardest thing for you to get people to remember now, um even though they must remember it at the time or should, is that the official reason uh given uh for intervention in Vietnam, well there were several of them and they kept changing, but one of them was that it was to stop Chinese expansionism into the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. That's now considered so ridiculous and so self-evidently untrue, um that it's hard to remember that that was one of the official alibis. Are you saying that it was untrue and known to be untrue at the Well, whether or not Mr. Rashid believed that um the South Vietnamese um post-French colonial buffer state guaranteed and underwritten by the US was an insurance against Chinese expansionism or not, I don't know. But I do know that that's what he maintained. It seems fantastic. Kind of call. Well haven't until recently. No one in America sort of wants to borrow anything like the British National Health Service, for example, either, which would be another excellent bit of emulation. Instead, what you tend to get is what I got yesterday, actually, when by chance I had to call an emergency room in a hospital. And before I could blurt out why I needed one, the woman said, Where are you from? I just love your accent. It's real neat. Why don't you just keep talking? And I said, Well, madam, I know we have a reputation for the rightness, but I must insist on this happens to me a lot. And what it is actually is a kind of snobbery, a sort of etherology complex. Why can't I go into a supermarket without seeing a picture of Princess Diana who I left England to get away from?

SPEAKER_22 29:12

But then this cultural thing works reverse as well, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_09 29:15

Well, when I go exactly, Steve, and say, Oh, if I go back to England, what do I get? McDonald's hamburgers and American nuclear bases. So it seems to me there's something in the relationship that tends to reinforce the conservative and the commercial and the what shall we say?

SPEAKER_06 29:28

You would you'd delight in saying the reaction. I think it's odd to want to get away from Princess Diana. You do?

SPEAKER_11 29:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 29:33

Well I mean if she if she were frumpy, Frausy, and Banal.

SPEAKER_09 29:37

Well then I'd like to do the same thing as I suspect she'd like to do and get away at least from her husband. Um in other words, from the the uh popular celebration of of the House of Windsor. I could I could do the rest from that, and I thought I could get it in in the country of George Washington, which went to all this trouble not just to expel the monarchy, but to make sure it could never come back.

SPEAKER_06 29:59

But the the the godfather of that of that uh uh impulse was uh containment. The doctor of containment had been around uh since 1945, 45. Uh Czechoslovakia had uh provoked uh a re-invigoration of it, i.e., they must go no further. And uh behind that uh impulse is to be sure the a perfectly raw uh uh colonialism which is everywhere displayed, but also the threat of China doing their what they did in Korea ten years earlier.

SPEAKER_09 30:38

Um on this containment question. Yes. As well as containment, in other words, the reaction to the Stalinization of Eastern Europe. There was also something that had been going on during and after the Second World War, namely the, and unnoticed, because it could be assimilated under the rubric of containment or anti-communism, which was the United States becoming, without a vote or really much of a debate on the subject, the successor state to the former European empires. Okay, to the British in um part of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, especially after Suez in 56, to the French in Indochina, which isn't my main point.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

You and I could also get away with calling us an empire, right?

SPEAKER_09 31:12

But also to the moment to the French in uh the uh and the Belgians in the Congo, to the French and Portuguese, and even in the Dutch in Indonesia. Remember the coup in Indonesia in 65. Now, the the origin of the what somehow called the morass or quagma in Vietnam is the decision by Eisenhower and Dallas to inherit French colonial rule in Vietnam. That's really the situation. The United States put itself in the position of being a classical colonial imperial. It was starting with I don't I don't myself believe that they had a prayer of reversing that verdict by continuing to bomb and destroy more of Vietnam than they actually did. And remember, they covered it pretty much from end to end. But don't you think we really said there wasn't enough violence used on the Vietnamese?

SPEAKER_06 31:52

Well, you it was it was suggested to President Eisenhower that we intervene to prevent Yen Ban Fu and he resists. He said no. So in in that sense, he said French colonialism has to look after itself. But looking after itself is different from being colonized by another entity to it, a Soviet, against which we were globally engaged. And it mattered enormously when looking down on the uh old um Vietnam, it appeared that Vietnam, the north, was supposed to be the aggressor to the south, threatening all that lay in the the West. You're speaking awfully fast. I don't always follow you. Are you suggesting that there's something surreptitious about the existence of nuclear bases in Great Britain?

SPEAKER_09 32:44

In the book I quote the then Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, as you know, came to a sticky end, but was then in a lucid interval, who said, as far as he knew, uh there had never before been an agreement whereby one power stationed its forces on the territory of another without a treaty, without any formal written understanding of any kind. Many smaller and weaker countries such as the Philippines have a ratified, renewable agreement. The United Kingdom just doesn't have. This testifies, in my view, to the latent strength of the special relationship.

SPEAKER_06 33:14

Well, Carl died in 46. He was a lawyer, an international lawyer as a specialist, and for him to say this is the first time that something has happened does not suggest that it's outrageous. By no means. Uh not of itself, no. The the firebombing of Dresden had never happened before, and it was also outrageous. But the uh uh the the evol the evolution of uh of NATO uh is not something that suggests um other than that uh England as a partner of NATO would have uh carried uh its share of the responsibility to make NATO effective. Uh it seems to me then you in in in your book you attach uh a kind of importance to that that uh uh is isn't uh earned the I can see.

SPEAKER_09 34:00

Well, if I don't if I don't carry the point in that way, I I don't if I'll be able to convince you now. I think there is a difference, though, and I I make it by contrast with de Gaulle, who once asked the commander of American forces in his. Yeah, can you tell me how many American nuclear weapons there are in France? So the guy said, I can, but I'm not allowed to. You're not allowed to know that. And de Gaulle said, well right, but no, no French president will ever be talked to in those terms ever again. And meant it. Without removing France from the West. He said, no, we we there are certain decisions we'll we will not find out have been taken for us.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

Closing questions on Vietnam. Do you wish, from this vantage point, that we had simply never gone in? Yes, you do. Christopher, let me ask you what you wish. Between the fall of Vietnam and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I counted them up, and there are at least nine countries at least nine, that fell under Soviet domination. Do you feel, as a coffee planter in Cuba and a Trotskyite, any responsibility for the period of misery those people, the people of those countries endured? Any personal responsibility? Yes, actually, any personal responsibility. You and you and the and the Generation 68, the protesters.

SPEAKER_09 35:13

I I really think it would be grandiose of me to accept any. Um, it's symbolic, symbolic. Morally, no, of course I don't, because I was a I was and always was a vocal opponent of that. And um I consider the revolution of 1989.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Of the Soviet Union? Yes. What do you regret that you did? Let me ask that. What do you regret that you did in the 60s?

SPEAKER_09 35:37

I think that I regret um the uh there was a slogan that was painted on the walls of Paris at one point in the Great Upheaval of May 68, which said, Take your desires for reality. I think there was a certain um uh Hellenistic utopianism around, which though I tried to You grant Bill's point about the self-indulgence. Oh, well I thought I did so except by substituting fornication for masturbation. Thought I'd already clarified that. All right, fine. Saying no, we went that it was going all the way, it wasn't uh it wasn't hellenism.

SPEAKER_06 36:10

And what do you regret that you did? Well, I I regret that I didn't uh sooner than than we did um come for with a countdown on the Vietnam War. We were always being told in 19 uh 60, 69, 70, we we got the w victories around the corner. And uh they they tend to say that persuasively. A lot of people were persuaded. I went to Vietnam three times and wrote back that it looked good. I was told it looked good. You regret trusting the government of the United States. Well, it it's that much the government that trusts it. It's uh in individual people working their own perspectives. Now you can call that government if if indeed you say, well, he works for the government, but I I I saw them and I thought I saw them making individual. I spent a night in in a bunker with General Abrams, and and he he wasn't giving me two and a half hours talk for the sake of uh of uh confusing me. He this is what he thought. And uh I haven't seen an awful lot of people, MacNamara is the great exception, because during that whole time, we were simply feeding American journalists and American surveyors stuff we knew wasn't true.

SPEAKER_09 37:27

I think it's greatly to the credit of the United States that the government felt it had to lie to the people about this war from the beginning. I my main regret is I didn't do more uh than I did to help the anti-war movement. It's still what a little I did do is still a great cause of pride to me. But I think, and I'm not searching for common ground in saying this, believe me, but I should have thought that one thing we do perhaps uh share is feeling that uh widespread distrust in the government isn't a bad thing. The fact that there was great disillusionment uh at that point may have struck you then as being a defeat, but surely um from a conservative point of view there must have been something sanitary.

SPEAKER_06 38:01

I keep saying that the presumption is that the state is in the business of aggrandizing its power and and ought to be watched. But the presumption taken to a certain point blinds you. Uh if in fact you simply refuse to listen to what is being said and then make your own evaluation. Barry Goldwater went over there. I saw him the day back he came back. He's a pretty experienced fellow, and he he thought this was 1967, he thought that the enemy couldn't continue to sustain uh the casualties that did. Now, that's a reasonable thing to say. You might have been said that don't be so there will never be any lack of people who will rise up and volunteer to commit suicide on behalf of a free Vietnam. You'd have been right.

SPEAKER_09 38:52

But it would have been you would have been swarming of the English, as uh Woodrow Wilson called in his history, and the presence of Englishmen in America. But the the reason why that's anti-dominant, the reason why that seems so imbricated, so natural to the whole texture of the thing, is is therefore what I mean by the the blood and nostalgia bit, if not the class.

SPEAKER_22 39:14

Not just, of course, the English, but the Scots Irish, the Ulstermen, were a major part of the early settlement. But again, people don't regard them as a separate group. They often describe themselves as Irish. I believe they're 57% of those who describe themselves as Irish in America. But uh they they're not Irish. Yes, that's right, and from Ulster. But they're not part of the Irish in the sense that they have this uh strong sentimental connection to Ireland uh which is sometimes expressed in sympathy for Irish republicanism.

Why These Old Debates Matter Now

SPEAKER_06 39:43

Well, thank you very much, uh Mr. Christopher Hitchens, author of Blood Class and Nostalgia, which you are authorized by Mr. uh uh by my confederate here to read, provided you mix it up with a few other books that I thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Gore Vidal And Buckley In Chicago

SPEAKER_14 40:01

So what you just heard uh was a compla uh compilation of uh intellectual clash uh of the late Christopher Hitchens and the late William F. Buckley, Jr. In the discussion, they talked about the special relationship between Britain and America, the legacy of empire, and the scars of the nineteen sixties. Uh Christopher Hitchens defended his book, Blood Class and the Sociology, arguing that the United States inherited the mantle of the British Empire. Buckley and Hitchens danced hard over the Vietnam War, the nature of the 1960s activism, and the cultural reason of the special relationship. Whether you are a fan of Buckley's conservative limited. The debate is a master class in political discourse, and it is something that I should have today. Never mind. That was a company compilation. That was not the entire discussion. The entire discussion was somewhere around an hour. Um I will like uh to say that William M. Buckley show fire in line is gonna be found online. And I like a lot of those debates that William F. Buckley had are still very relevant today. We're gonna stick with William F. Buckley in this uh set. We're gonna go to William F. Buckley debating the father of modern liberalism, Gor Vidal, at the Democratic National Committee.

SPEAKER_07 41:34

And to our two guest commentators, Wick and Gor Vidano, and to ask them uh what observations they've made about the security that we uh have seen all week at this convention and the events tonight on the streets beyond this uh convention hall. Uh who is first, Mr. Vidano first?

SPEAKER_08 41:55

I think uh there's very little that we can say after those pictures that would be in any way adequate. Uh it's like living under a Soviet regime here, the guards, the soldiers, the agents provocateur on the parts of the police who've seen the roughing up. The background of it is that uh they came here for a rally on the 25th of August at a convention, uh soldier field, a coalition for an open convention. They were denied the use of the field. It was a friendly, nonviolent demonstration. Uh, as a rule, the press is uh on the side of the police, but this time the police have seriously injured some 21 newsmen. And the press has, of course, reacted. And on top of that, the television is duly upset with Mayor Daly for other reasons. I'd just like to point out that picking up a newspaper at random on my way here, the Chicago Daily News is a companist called Mike Roiko, says Thomas E. Ferran, the U.S. attorney, says Chicago police have shown wonderful discipline in their handling of the Lincoln Park demonstrators. Ferran is either stupid or a liar. Or maybe he's been wandering around in the wrong part. Chicago's police, for his information, have been beating innocent people with, to coin a phrase reckless abandon. And he goes on to say that the biggest threat to law and order in the last week has been the Chicago police department. On an inside page here, we have one of the grisliest pictures I've seen in some time. Shows a group of police standing and laughing as they have thrown into the water a young man on a bicycle. And the note and the exception is the witnesses and the police then just stood back and laughed. The youth reportedly have just been riding through the park and not even been part of the hippie gathering.

SPEAKER_07 43:42

I wonder if we can let Mr. Buckley comment. Um the distinctions to be made, Mr.

SPEAKER_06 43:49

Smith, uh, are these number one, do we have enough evidence to indict a large number of individual Chicago police from it? Um what Mr. Burns showed us that we do. So as to March forward and say that in effect, we have got a police state going on here. We've got a sort of a fascist situation. One one young man approached me last night and said, Are you aware that Mayor Bailey is a fascist? To which my reply was no. And if that is the case, why didn't John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, whose favorite mayor he was, indict him as such? And teach us that we should all despise him as a fascist. The point is that a policeman violates their obligations just the way politicians do. If we could all work up an equal sweat, and if you all would be obliging enough to have your camera handy, every time a politician commits demability, as long as every time a businessman cheats on his taxes, or every time a labor union beats up people who refuse to join his union, then maybe we can work up some kind of impartiality and resentment. As of this moment, I say, go after those cops who are guilty of unnecessary brutality, develop your doctrine of security sufficiently so that when you don't have as many cops as you should have had, for instance, in palace in November of 1963, you don't go and criticize the FBI for not having been there, for not having taken sufficient security measures. But don't do what's happening here in Chicago tonight, which is to infer uh from individual and despicable acts of violence a case for implicit totalitarianism in the American system.

SPEAKER_14 45:48

And we would like to point out the fact that this is the third debate that uh Gorverdale and William Puckley had had. This was at the Democratic National Convention. Uh so they had a series running where they had a debate every night. This was the third debate of the Democratic National Convention uh Convention. This was August 28. I wanted to say this was in 1968. Uh so we're gonna get back to the collection for that. Sorry for that interruption.

Protest Rights Versus Order And Security

SPEAKER_08 46:35

There is a more important issue here. Going to be repeated across the country. We have the right, according to our constitution, of freedom of assembly. And if you want to hold a meeting for a peaceful purpose to demonstrate, you have that right. That right was abrogated by Mayor Daly, by his administration, by the uh Cook County Sheriff Joseph Woods. These people came here with no desire other than anybody's ever been able to prove than to hold peaceful demonstrations. I can prove it. How could you prove it?

SPEAKER_06 47:07

Very easily, by citing the recorded words of Mr. Hayden of the SDS, of Mr. Rennie Davis of the Coordinating Committee, whose object has been to, quote, break down the false and deceptive institutions of bourgeois democracy are sufficient to set in a revolutionary order. Anybody who believes that these characters are interested in the democratic process is deluding himself. I was 14 windows above that gang last night. These sweet little girls with their sunbecked dresses that we've heard described a moment ago. And the chat between 11 o'clock and 5 o'clock in this morning from 4 or 5,000 voices was sheer utter absurdity as directed to the President of the United States at the mayor of the city. Plus, also the intermittent refrain, quotes, ho, ho, ho, ho Chian Min of the NLF is sure to win. This is their way of accosting American society concerning their brothers, their sisters, their uncles, uh, their fathers who are being shot at by an enemy to which, wrongly or rightly, nevertheless, we are fighting. I say it is remarkable that there was as much restraint shown as was shown, for instance, last night, by cops who are out there for 17 hours without inflicting a single wound on a single person, even though that kind of disgusting stuff is being thrown at them and at all of American societies.

SPEAKER_07 48:35

Our reporter, Jim Burns, said there ought to be a different way to handle situations like that, too. I thought she would invent it. Why don't you ask him next time, maybe tomorrow, to tell us how to handle it?

SPEAKER_06 48:44

Because I'm sure the Republican Party and the Democratic Party would form a joint platform which would suggest how to do it. Every time we develop an instrument like Mace, for instance, uh, the purpose of which is actually to stop a situation when the law is on the side of stopping it without rendering permanent injury, that everybody goes hard mad at its use. What are we in fact supposed to use when they break law and order as handed down by judges? Uh the right to assembly is not absolute. The Supreme Court has ruled several occasions.

SPEAKER_08 49:16

Let Mr. Vidal have a chance. Uh, the right of assembly is in the Constitution. In the Bill of Rights. Nothing on earth is absolute. We live in a relativist world. However, it is the law, it is the Constitution, and uh, let us have no more uh sly comments in your capacity as the enemy of the people. Uh, by the way, you've got an invitation this afternoon I haven't passed on to you from Norman Mailer, our mutual friend who was out there, as was I on Monday night. And he said, You tell Buckley to come out here. He might be very interested to see how his beloved police are behaving. Oh, what is that? They are, you know, you said you were in the 15th floor. I don't believe you were there. And furthermore, when you start putting Tom Hayden and the other leaders of the new laptop who were involved in this, I suggest you get the folks right. They are talking about revolution, they are not talking about bloody civil war as you would indicate. Yeah, yeah. Well, until you get the exact truth. You're well known to violate the law, you should. For distortion. And leave it as a law. It is no violation of the law to freely demonstrate what you well know. Now wait a minute. The law is not something that you make up. No, it's something in the Constitution that you cannot interpret. They came here for free assembly. They came here to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, which you haven't loved. I'm sorry for that. They have not been allowed to hold a meeting in Soldier Field, which they should have had, could have had, would have had a peaceful demonstration. Instead, the police, fired by Mayor Daly and by a lot of jingles around here, have been roughing up everybody from the press to the delegates to the kids out there, and you are to sit here by and talk about it.

SPEAKER_06 50:48

Well, I'm going to talk to you about what the Supreme Court says, including Overwendell Holmes, whom presumably you also despise, but the first relevant decision 110 years ago says that the demands of rights of assembly are not absolute in the sense that, for instance, uh there is no obligation on the part of the city of Chicago to allow all these people to come into this amphitheater and demonstrate an extension of that piece of common sense shows the wisdom and the correctness of the federal court and the supreme court in the past to say that you cannot uh arrange a demonstration in such a way as to interfere with other people's freedoms. Mr. Burns admitted a moment ago that these people were interrupting the freedoms of people to cross the street.

SPEAKER_08 51:33

They were given a license to demonstrate a particular moment. However, when they were in the parks on Monday night when I observed them, I watched the police come in like this from all directions, standing. They were sitting there singing folk songs. There were none of the obscenities which your ear alone seems to have picked up. They were absolutely well behaved. And suddenly the police began, you'd see one little stirring up in one corner, then you would suddenly see a bunch of them coming into their nightclubs, and may I say, without their badges, which is illegal.

Provocation Flags And The Nazi Slur

SPEAKER_07 52:01

Mr. Vidal, wasn't it a provocative act to try to raise the VietCon flag in the park in the film we just saw? Uh, wouldn't that invite us raising a Nazi flag in World War II would have similar consequences?

SPEAKER_08 52:14

You must realize what some of the political issues are here, that many people in the United States uh happen to believe that the United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Viet Cong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and many other parts of the world. If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad. But I assume that for the point of the American democracy and some of the Nazi. Shut up a minute. No, I won't.

SPEAKER_06 52:44

Some people were pro-Nazi, and the answer is that they were they were well treated by people who ostracized them, and I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers.

SPEAKER_08 52:55

I know you don't know. Listen, you're crypto Nazis. Let's stop telling you in this goddamn face.

SPEAKER_06 53:10

Let's stay plastic. Gentlemen, let's let's officer Mark Breckens go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions to Nazis. You are not an infantry as a matter of fact.

SPEAKER_07 53:26

Mr. Vidal, what happened at Sharon? Wasn't it a provocative act to remove pull down an American flag and put up a VietCon flag, even if you disagree with what the United States is doing?

SPEAKER_08 53:35

It is not a provocative act. You have every right in this country to take any position you want to take because we are guaranteed freedom of speech. We've just listened to certain protests. Now let's not talk at the same time. Mr.

SPEAKER_06 53:46

Buckley, certain acts that are lawful or nevertheless provocative. I'll give you an example. George Lincoln Rockwell wanted to go uh to uh Manhattan in a state of hate Jews rally, see? Now, Mayor Wagner said, no, you can't. Now, some people, the American Civil Liberties Union, said, well, uh, George Lincoln Rockwell has got a right to go there under the Constitution. Uh I theoretically has a right, but there is no question that it would have been provocative. I, for one, I have to confess that I I would have been uh discreetly on the side of people who threw tomatoes and maybe something even a little tougher at George Lincoln Rockwell. Now, here's an example of a right, but nevertheless, as you point out, a provocation. One doesn't go to Manhattan uh and come out in favor of bucks. I think that the whole point of the American system is, and this is something that a lot of people don't understand, that the reason we succeed as a society is because we exclude certain things. We exclude genocide, we exclude class hatred, we ought to exclude. And whether it's fighting a mattox here or fighting people who come out in favor of the of who of who's men uh in Lincoln's or the whole purpose of American society is that we're in favor of people who want to be free, not in favor of people who want to despise anybody else or commit America to genocidal policy. Mr.

SPEAKER_08 55:03

Vidal? You uh what more to say on the subject? I think we've seen uh questions of Mr. Buckley on this issue, the infantry warrior, which uh he never saw shot fired in anger. I would point out that uh I come back and keep asking me, Howard, about this provocative act. There are many acts which provoke. But if you're going to have freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, you must be able to say it. That is the whole point of this country. And once this is abrogated, then I think we might just as well stop these wars of freedom. We what are we doing fighting in Vietnam if you cannot freely express yourself in the streets of Chicago?

SPEAKER_07 55:40

I think, uh, I think we've run out of time, and I uh thank you very much for the discussion. It was a little more heat and a little less light than usual, but uh it was still very worth hearing.

Student Arrested Over A Private Joke

SPEAKER_14 55:52

Now, granted, um, like I said, the father of uh what I consider the father of modern liberalism versus the father of what I would say uh modern conservatism. Uh the late Gore Vadow. The late William M. Buckley, the late Gore Vidal versus uh the still current uh uh Noam Chomsky, who is not in good health right now, and about 96 years old, uh not able to speak at the moment. And um the uh late Christopher Hitchen. Um breaking boy. Let's get into this.

SPEAKER_01 56:53

This is a crazy, crazy story that is unfolding down in Florida. This college student has been arrested for a joke she made in a private group chat involving Netanyahu. Um this is a local news report. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

SPEAKER_00 57:08

Seven news obtaining some bits of that chat. It seemed a student wanted the event rescheduled and wrote, quote, Netanyahu, if you can hear me, dropped some bonbons for other capstones students in Ocean Bank Convention Center. Other students wrote they didn't take that text lightly. She later in the chat wrote, quote, I wrote a dumb joke that should not have been made.

SPEAKER_20 57:30

I can understand your position and you're saying this is a joke, but to an objective person, it's not a joke, and there would be another probable cause.

SPEAKER_01 57:41

You think this is a credible threat? Are you kidding me? I mean, it's just insane. It's clearly a joke. You can think it's not a funny joke or wasn't good in taste. Who cares? Who cares? You really think this girl is like in touch with Netanyahu to bomb this center or whatever? That's insane. A threat is supposed to be, you know, clear and credible and actionable. Like that you have a time and a place and the ability and means to carry it out. She's charged, and then this judge doesn't immediately throw this out, just complete insanity.

SPEAKER_18 58:09

This woman is literally charged with threats to kill or do bodily harm with prejudice and has a bond set at$5,000. So, I mean, the fact I mean she's in an orange jumpsuit. Sorry, nuts already. We're way beyond anything which is remotely acceptable. So, and if anybody has uh contact for legal defense or anything, let us know. Send us an email. Uh maybe we'll we'll uh send her some money. I or I will pledge to send her some money uh for her legal defense if somebody from her team can get in touch.

Denmark Cartoons And Media Self Censorship

SPEAKER_09 58:34

I'm sure everyone here remembers the uh assault on the tiny European democracy of Denmark last year. Why was uh economy subjected to a campaign of international sabotage backed by not just movement but the states? Why were its embassies burned down in countries where demonstrations aren't normally allowed? Why it was all this because this Prime Minister could not be forced or persuaded to um censor cartoons in the afternoon press in Copenhagen because it's against Danish law for him to do this. So you and I are members of this great profession. Did the Los Angeles Times publish those cartoons?

SPEAKER_03 59:15

No, it didn't, but I wrote I wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times that began. The editor of the Los Angeles Times will not allow you to see these cartoons. Hola. And went on to argue that it was a great breach of faith with the people of Denmark and with Danish democracy, and that column appeared as one of two I did about this, and about the the cowardly surrender.

SPEAKER_09 59:39

It was one of about five that did, and I remember them I remember it vividly because you you and I were in such a small minority. In a media totally dominated now by image. Totally dominated by images. It was not considered uh appropriate to tell the American public. Here's a story, it's all about the fight over some pictures, but we're not going to show you what the pictures are. The um image-dominated press said, no, we're not gonna show you. Neither out of solidarity with our Danish colleagues, which would be a good point, or just to show you what the out of fear of the religious, or it's out of fear of offending them, which comes to more or less the same thing. It's blackmail. United States. People say to me, why do you keep mentioning the extremists? Because the extremists are the tale that wags the whole dog. And my profession proves it, and your culture proves it, and you were humiliated because the extremists have the initiative and because it hasn't started yet. Who condemned what? I remind you, individual Scandinavians who were murdered in Afghanistan everywhere from Afghanistan to Nigeria by this historical pre-arranged campaign. Twenty-one ambassadors of Muslim so-called Muslim states. How dare they call themselves Muslim? In what sense is Egypt a Muslim country? You can't denominate a country as religious, waited upon His Holiness the Pope.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:20

Well, and in fact, in fact, two leading Egyptian newspapers, as I pointed out in my column, did run the cartoons. They're braver than the American ladies.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:29

But his holiness the Pope condemned what? The cartoons. The State Department condemned the cartoons. Not the violence, not the campaign of intermination. It's the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned the cartoons. Every church I know of condemned the blasphemy of the cartoons, not the campaign of murder and sabotage. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the barbarians are not at the gate. They're not out the gate, they're well inside. And who held open the door for them? The other religious did. Same with Salman Rushti. When the when the the Ayatollah Khomeini offered money, money publicly in his own name, without shame, for spawning of murder of a novelist who wasn't in Iranian, who lived in England. A pretty radical attack of what we think we live by, what our constitution stands for, what Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Payne thought it was worth fighting for. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York, the Chief Rebbe of Israel, It's only this the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury all condemned what? The novel. The author for blasphemy. Now get used to this because you may be living in the last few years where you can complain about it. Because the religious really mean this, you know. They are not just joking, they really mean to abolish everything you care about, and they want to take away everything you love and to destroy everything you have, to replace it with a stone age ideology derived from the desert of Palestine, in a very bad time in human history. Now, just because they were there first, they think they own everything, and they think they have the right to tell you what you can think, who you can sleep with, what you can eat, what you can read. And they claim the right to make you afraid even to read in the United States of America this year. So I don't want to hear from anybody that my book says, well, don't judge religion by its extremes. Okay? Don't do that.

SPEAKER_10 1:03:47

I don't mind the denunciations, frankly. I mind the lies. Well, I mean, intellectuals are very good at lying. They're professionals at it. You know, wonderful technique. There's no way of responding to it. If somebody calls you a, you know, an anti-Semite, what can you say? I'm not an anti-Semite or you know, somebody says you're you're a racist, you're a Nazi, or something, this you always lose. I mean, the person who throws the mud always wins because there's no way of responding to such charges.

SPEAKER_15 1:04:11

Professor Chomsky seems to believe that the people he criticizes fall into one of two classes liars or dupes. Consider what happened when I discussed the case of Aubert Forison. Let me recall the facts.

SPEAKER_10 1:04:29

Let's not go into details, please, because we have not been important. Yes, but I have only one question for you to all question. Do the facts matter or don't they matter? Of course they do. Let me tell you what the facts are. No, no, this is an this is an important one. Have a lot to do with the topic.

SPEAKER_12 1:04:54

Your views are extremely controversial, and perhaps one of the one of the things that has been most controversial and you've been most strongly criticized for was your defense of a French intellectual who is suspended from his university post for contending that there were no Nazi death camps in World War II.

SPEAKER_16 1:05:11

My name is Robert Forison. I am 60. I am university professor in Lyon, France. Behind me, you may see the courthouse of Paris. The Penis de Juicy. In this place, I was convicted many times at the beginning of the 18th. I was charged by nine associations, mostly Jewish associations, for uh inciting hatred, racial hatred, for racial defamation, for damage, by falsifying a story.

SPEAKER_15 1:05:57

Professor Chomsky and a number of other intellectual scientific respected professor of literature who merely tried to make his findings public.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:12

Perhaps we can start with just the story of uh Robert Foreston and uh your involvement more than five hundred people.

SPEAKER_23 1:06:25

Fine. Uh mostly uh we need a day.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:35

What happened to the other four hundred and ninety-nine of them? How come we only hear about Chomsky's signature? Well, I think it's because Chomsky has in himself a kind of political power.

SPEAKER_10 1:06:50

I signed a petition calling on the tribunal to defend his civil rights. At that point, the French press, which apparently has no conception of freedom of speech, uh, concluded that since I had called for his civil rights, I was there for defending his thesis.

SPEAKER_15 1:07:05

So he saw then published a book in which he tried to prove that the Nazi gas chambers never existed.

SPEAKER_16 1:07:13

What we deny is that there was an extermination program and an extermination actually gas chambers of gas bands.

SPEAKER_15 1:07:26

The book contains a preference written by Professor Chomsky in which he calls for a relatively apolitical sort of liberal communist is a man, you is a man, imagine the man, I am a man.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:45

Are you a Nazis? I am not imagining. How would you describe yourself as a political that you wrote?

SPEAKER_10 1:07:56

That's not the preface that I wrote because I never wrote a preface. He's referring to a statement of mine on civil liberties, which was added to a book in which first on 2015. But we stopped I was then. By the person who organized the petition to write a statement on freedom of speech. Just banal comments about freedom of speech, pointing out the difference between defending a person's right to express his views and defending the views expressed. So I did that. I wrote a rather banal statement called Some Elementary Remarks on Freedom of Expression. And I told him, do what you like with it.

SPEAKER_21 1:09:04

So Pierre produced a book which all the arguments of Florison were to be put in front of the courts. And we thought uh wise uh to use the text of Lawren Chomsky as a kind of warning, a foreword, uh to say that it was a matter of freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of research. Why did you try at the last moment to get it back from that?

SPEAKER_10 1:09:30

That's the one thing I'm sorry about. But this is real, that's nothing. It's not even if I tried to repeat. No, I didn't. See, in fact, take a look at what I I wrote a letter which we've been publicized, in which I said, look, things have reached the point where the French intellectual community simply is incapable of understanding the issues. At this point, it's just going to confuse matters even more if my uh comments on freedom of speech happen to be attached to this book, which I don't know, didn't know existed. So just to clarify things, you better separate them. Now, in retrospect, I think I probably shouldn't have done that. I should have just said fine, then let it appear, because it ought to appear. But that's uh apart from that, uh I regard this as not only trivial, but as compared with other positions I've taken on freedom of speech, invisible. I do not think that the state ought to have the right to determine historical truth and to punish people immediately. I'm not willing to give the state that right, even if it happened to state. But I'm saying if you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. I mean, Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech but views he liked. So is Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of freedom of speech. There's two positions you can have on freedom of speech, and you can decide which position you want. With regard to my defense of the utterly offensive, the the the people who express utterly offensive views, I haven't the slightest doubt that every commissar says you're defending that person's views. No, I'm not. I'm defending his right to express them. The difference is crucial, and the difference has been understood outside of fascist circles since the 18th century.

SPEAKER_24 1:11:15

Isn't there anything like objectivity of scientific objectivity in reality as a scientist?

SPEAKER_10 1:11:20

But I'm not saying I defend the views. I look, if if if somebody publishes a scientific article, which I disagree with, I do not say the state ought to put him in jail.

SPEAKER_24 1:11:30

All right, but you don't have to support him right away and say, you know, I support him just for the state of anybody saying that whatever he wants to do.

SPEAKER_10 1:11:39

And charged with falsification, then I'm gonna defend him even to disagree. Oh, you're wrong.

SPEAKER_24 1:11:46

But when did you like support him in the world?

SPEAKER_10 1:11:47

When he was brought to court. And in fact, the only support that I gave him is to say he has a right of freedom of speech, period.

SPEAKER_17 1:11:54

There is no doubt in my mind that the example that I gave about the stories that the Holocaust did not exist, is that is that a typical example about the American.

SPEAKER_10 1:12:03

How much of the American press believes that tourists not has anything to say? Or any press. How much of the press in France I followed. What percentage would you say? I'll tell you. Is it higher than zero? Is it higher than zero? I'll tell you. Have you ever seen anything in any newspaper or any journal saying that this man is anything other than a lunatic?

SPEAKER_17 1:12:21

I'll try to answer. I'll try to answer. I think that uh I just followed the case. That's a simple question. I followed the case five or six years ago, and I happened to see that uh Norm Cholsky was in for strong criticism, even from some of his supporters, for doing something which could be interpreted only in terms of a campaign against Israel.

SPEAKER_10 1:12:40

Going back years, I am absolutely certain that I've taken far more extreme positions on people who deny the Holocaust than you have. For example, you go back to my earliest articles, and you will find that I say that even to enter into the arena of debate on the question of whether the Nazis carried out such atrocities is already to lose one's humanity. So I don't even think you would discuss the issue if you want to know my opinion. But if anybody wants to refute Forison, there's certainly no difficulty in doing so.

SPEAKER_14 1:13:55

It is important service of member people of the Holocaust to adopt the central doctrine of their murderers. Gnome Chomsky. So, um, in this vein Um of going back and forth from the past to the present, etc. I think that we and I get to do this sometimes because it shows to me sometimes that the fights that we think are so new. Uh what actually is they're they're re- their fights we are rehashing from the sixties, from the seventies, from the eighties, from the nineties, from the two thousands when I was in high school, and even with the rise of Trump the 50s.

Who Decides The Limits Of Speech

SPEAKER_05 1:14:54

That was uh David Cesarani against the proposition, now for the proposition, Christopher Hitchens.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:07

Well now, Mr. Chairman, uh ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. Hope I may say comrades and friends. Um okay, then fire. It's not that crowded theater, but fire again. You see, um, if you remember the appalling judgment actually rendered by uh Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in that case, he was comparing the action that I've just uh imitated to the uh action of a group of Yiddish-speaking socialists who gave out a leaflet in Yiddish only, opposing Mr. Wilson's war and uh actually calling attention, as they were, to a major conflagration raging in Europe in which they did not think the United States should become in order. Be very, very, very careful when people give you arguments from authority or tradition that suggests that free speech can be limited by higher authorities like the Sainted Holmes, because that's what you'll get. The end of it is a group of Yiddish-speaking radicals told they can't hand out a leaflet in Yiddish on a major question of the day. That's always how. It will end, no matter how high-mindedly, or creepily, or sinisterly, it's pr it's presented to you. Um, my favorite crowded theatre story is actually about the terrible Broadway production of the Diary of Anne Frank. Some people may remember it in the 60s. It was a production famous for its longueur. In the third act, as the German soldiers came pounding on the door and stamping into the parlor, someone in the front row shouted, She's in the attic! Call me old-fashioned if you will, ladies and gentlemen. But as you will see, I don't think the joke is really a joke unless it's at somebody's expansion. Now, if you're thick skinned and broad-backed enough to take that, I might have a bit more for you. The real question, utterly, utterly dodged by David in his shady remarks, is this. Who's going to decide? We've already found that Oliver Wendell Holmes isn't competent on the point. Who will you appoint? Who will be the one who says, I know exactly where the linen should be, I know how far you can go, and I know when you've gone too far. And I'll decide that. Who are you going to, who do you think, who do you know? Who have you heard of? Who have you read about in history who you'd give that job? I would say, just for this evening, I wouldn't give it to anyone who's spoken so far on the other side. Now, actually, I do know a bit about Nilton and quite a lot about Thomas Paine as well. And Mr. Payne actually updated and I think improved John Milton's Ariop Gitga, which is the classic case of free expression. And those of you who know Arielpa Gitga and Paine's commentary on it will know that it recommends free speech in this way, not for you, but for the people you are listening to and the people whose comments you hope to hear in return. For your own education, for your own enlightenment, and for your own elucidation. As Mr. Payne says, uh, commenting on Belgium, one of the uh advices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions because they deny they deny themselves the right and the means of changing. Should this not be as plain as could be? Uh the the free interplay of ideas is not something that those of us who wish to speak or unload our opinions insist upon for that sake. It's because we want to hear what is said in response, however unwelcome it may be to us. Thus, the defense of any one opinion or form of expression is a defense of all of them. The classic statement in modern times of this, in my view, would be Ariel Nile's book Defending My Enemy when he describes the decision of the American Civil Liberties Union, which I'm a supporter. Take the case of the American Nazi Party and its right to uh parade swastikas through the town of Skokie, Illinois, a favorite retirement community for those who'd survived the final solution. Um ACLU lost a lot of members on that proposition, but we did the right thing by the First Amendment. In the book, he has a wonderful extract from um Robert Bolt's play Man for All Seasons, which some of you will have seen at least in celluloid form, where if you recall, uh Sir Thomas More is talking to one of the witch hunters and prosecutors and says, uh, so you'd cut down, um you'd cut a road through the laws, would you? To get after the devil? And the witch hunter and prosecutor says, I'd cut down, I'd cut down every law in England to be bad. And Thomas Moore said, That's worth knowing. And when uh the devil turned round to meet you and had you at bay, where would you look for shelter, Mr. Prosecutor? The laws all being flat and cut down. Where would you turn that? It's impossible ever to think of infringing the right of anyone else to free speech without arranging, in a sense, calling in advance for this to happen to you. Two. It's quite different, obviously different, from any question of information. Information may be classified, and information may be copyrighted. Every word said on that score by the first speaker on the other side was a complete waste of her breath. Because it's not what we're meant to talk about. We're meant to talk about the expression of opinion and conviction, not breach of copyright or leaking of classified information. If we'd wanted to talk about that, we would have phrased the motion differently. Um there have been some bad signs lately. A lot of slippage in what I would have thought were the pedantic obviousness of the points I've just made. The imprisonment of David Irving in Austria for a thought crime for the possibility that he might, while in Austria, have given a speech saying that he doubts some of the verdicts of history, uh, as well I consider it to be about the final solution. Uh no victim to this crime. Um the Austrian consul called me up, weeping with self-pity when I point when I pointed this out in the Wall Street Journal, said, but we thought finally Austria would be popular. She had done something that you would all like. So gemutlik. The land, the land that survives on the myth that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Viennese, the land that had Waldheim as its chancellor and uh has York Heider as a member of its government, can revenge itself on a defenseless British academic and jailer. This is a standing disgrace. And their attempts to extend similar thought crime laws to other topics of historical importance, the most depressing of which recently is the decision, provisionally at any rate, by the French parliament, to criminalize discussion of the Armenian massacres, considered by me and most others to have been a planned genocide in the early part of the 20th century. Now you can't take the contrary view. You couldn't, for example, argue, as you can, that actually in the provinces of Turkey where uh Russian forces were not engaged, um, Armenians were not massacred. In other words, it could be that it's partly an act of war as well as an act of ethnicity. Speculations of this kind would now be at your own peril. The law on which it's modeled, the Loire Geisot, which criminalizes in France's discussion of the Holocaust as well, is um named for the French Stalinist, uh Monsieur Guysot, who sponsored it, and whose spirit, and the spirit of whose uh hero, is present in all of these and other such uh discussions. One, okay, um, I stipulate that all of these things, when they happen, offend me very much. I'm offended by them, I want you to understand. It goes to the core of what I do and what I am. First Amendment doesn't just provide me with a living, the First Amendment is my life. When it's infringed, I am offended. I had claimed the right to be offended. I do not claim the right to go burn down someone else's place of worship, to threaten their religion with violent reprisal, to picket their home, to publish their name in threatening terms on the internet. I won't do any of that. It doesn't mean I can't be offended, but it does mean that I'm even more offended by those who claim the right not just to be offended, but to seek violent reprisal, as is so uh vividly currently being done by the votaries of the Prophet Muhammad in recent Christopher. Uh inform you about about which you already know, and to which I hope I will be asked to return. Thanks very much.

SPEAKER_19 1:23:28

That was Christopher Hitchens for the call for a lawsuit, and that lawsuit was not pursued. And uh basically the community felt that their hurts and their uh and their concerns were not being addressed. And and they went overseas and and they sought support from overseas, and then the whole situation was a very good thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:46

So wait, wait, no, it's a good thing. Christopher Christopher's turn to let Christopher respond.

SPEAKER_19 1:23:52

I'm just I'm just wanting the point. What I'm saying is that had it been addressed at the local level, it would have never become an international phenomena that it became. It should be addressed at the local level, like Sydney did. When when the Philadelphia Inquirer decided to put out, publish that same cartoon, they called the Muslim community and said, We want to do something about this and we want to create dialogue. Now that was responsible. That was socially responsible.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:13

Christopher, go ahead. When uh when Dr. Samuel Johnson had finished his great uh lexicography, the first real English dictionary, he was visited by various delegations of people to congratulate him, including a delegation of London's respectable womanhood, who came to his parlor in Fleet Street and said, Doctor, we congratulate you on your decision to exclude all indecent words from your dictionary. And he said, Ladies, I congratulate you on your persistence in looking them up. Um I think anyone who understands that story, which I'm pleased to see up all you as he does, will see through the sinister piffle we were just uh treated to just now. If people are determined to be offended, if they will climb up on the ladder, balancing it precariously on their own toilet system to be upset by what they see through the neighbor's bathroom window, there's nothing you can do about that. The imams in Denmark did the following. First, they invited the intervention of 22 foreign ambassadors in Denmark's internal affairs. Itself a disgrace, the Danish Prime Minister quite rightly repudiated it. Then they added two cartoons of their own, drawn by them, one of them showing the Prophet Muhammad in the shape of a pig. Then they shot those around the Muslim world until they could get kindling going under the embassies of a small democracy in the capital cities of countries where demonstrations are normally not allowed. They violated Danish diplomatic immunity, they tried to sabotage the Danish economy, there were random pogroms and attacks on individual Scandinavians, and David Cesarini says he doesn't like the reminiscence of the 1930s that is inscribed in the cartoon. I don't like the reminiscence of the 1930s that is involved in a kristal nacht against Denmark, put up by religious demagogues and thugs. That's what needs to be.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:05

David Cesarine against the proposition. Finally, for the proposition, Christopher Hitchens.

SPEAKER_09 1:26:12

Uh the real question, or if you like subtext question before us, is this is nothing sacred. What we've really been discussing is the old question of whether or not there is such an offense as blasphemy or profanity. Now, if I don't tell you exactly what I think about the simpering speeches that we heard from the other side, I'm not censoring myself. I'm just being polite and civil and saving some of your time. What I will not prevent myself from saying, or will and will not let anyone else prevent me from saying, is the following. It is wrong, and always has been, for churches, powerful, secular human institutions to claim exemption from criticism, which is what's really being asked here. If there's going to be respect, it has to be mutual. Does Islam respect my right to unbelief? Of course it does not. Does it respect the right of a Muslim to apostatize and change belief? Of course it does not. I have had to have, I can name now four or five friends, six or eight, maybe, if I have time, five or six of whom you would certainly have heard of, who have to live their lives under police protection for commenting on Islam, for having an opinion on it. And this is getting steadily worse all the time. And it's grotesque. Here is an enormous religion with with gigantic power that claims that an archangel spoke to an illiterate peasant and brought him a final revelation that supersedes all others. It's a plagiarism by an epileptic of the worst bits of Judaism and Christianity. That's obvious. Do you think how long do you think I'm going to be able to say that anywhere I like? It would already be quite a risky thing to say in quite a lot of places. I did not come to the United States of America 25 years ago to learn how to keep my mouth shut. And I'm going to reject, I'm going to reject all offers that I change that policy. However, simple England they are doing.

Media Power And The Case For Democratization

SPEAKER_10 1:28:08

Where do you think how and who do you think should regulate the content of the media? Well, I'm personally very skeptical about any form of regulation of any kind of speech. Now, the media don't even begin to approximate freedom of speech. I mean, this is the kind of freedom where people who own the place set the rules. So that's not real freedom. Nevertheless, the idea of X, even in that kind of system, heavily skewed towards uh extreme wealth. Personally, I'd be reluctant. I'm very reluctant to see any kind of regulation take place. Freedom of speech is a really important value. We've over the centuries, we've, particularly in the United States, uh won a lot of we won substantial freedom of speech, and we think we ought to uh preserve it. However, with regard to the media, I think it's a much more serious question. Should the media be democratized? I mean, if the media are are institutions of private power, we can be quite sure that they're going to have have a particular take on things. They're going to give a picture of the world which by and large reflects the interests of their owners and their advertisers and other centers of power in the society. And that means that the attitudes and the points of view and interests of the general public are going to be marginalized. Uh, and I think the answer to that is not, you know, regulation, it's democratization. The specific question of violence on the media to harden. Uh, I uh I I think you uh you have to have a balance between uh, which is not easy to just determine between allowing full freedom of expression and imposing some restrictions on what people are exposed to. So, for example, even the most passionate advocate of freedom of speech does not believe that, say, I have a right to uh go into your living room and put up a pornographic poster or something. That's an in that's you might say my inability to do that's a restriction of freedom of speech, but I think everyone agrees with that. Uh when you move to a uh say poster in Times Square uh saying, I don't know, some obscene thing or disgraceful thing, uh the issue becomes more complex because it's not really private space. It's just the space where you are. Uh and the conflict between the right to private space and the right to freedom of speech begins to be ambiguous. When you go to the media, it becomes even more ambiguous. Uh it's in a sense private space. I mean, that's given the way that society is, you just kind of you know, you're comp well, you're not compelled, but you're at least driven. Driven to being exposed to it. And therefore what's on it is a kind of involvement in your private space, but at a more remote step. It's at this point that values become difficult and decisions become difficult. However, my own bias at least would be against. Now I think uh uh the by the the bird proof has to be on anyone who wants to introduce any form of regulation, in my opinion.