Triumvirate of Rationalism

Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell

Christopher Hitchens

Contents

I. Thomas Paine

II. Thomas Jefferson

III. George Orwell

Copyright

I.

Thomas Paine

The pomp of courts and pride of kings I prize above all earthly things. I love my country, the king, above all men, his praise I sing. The royal banners are displayed, and may success the standard aid: I fain would banish far from hence the rights of man and common sense. Confusion to his odious reign, that foe to princes, Thomas Paine. Defeat and ruin seize the cause of France, its liberties and laws.

- Arthur O’Connor (1799)

Thomas Flanagan wrote a trilogy of novels about the liberation of Ireland, the first of which is called The Year of the French. It describes the rebellion of the United Irishman in 1798: Theodore Wolf Tone, Lord Edwards FitzGerald. Some revolutions are revolutions manqué, some revolution trahie. 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.

One of its leaders was a man named Arthur O'Connor, who the British decided to put in custody. As he was being led away from his trial, he capitulated. He surrendered. He gave in. He said, "All right, you win. I give up," and he handed out this poem that you see, a more or less total sell out.

One of the mistakes made by the British establishment, historically, has been to consider the Irish people as stupid. We have paid a very high price for that stupidity. I think the second verse is much better, and also appropriate, because with Thomas Paine, we are confronted with a 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 don't know much about his early life. He didn't write many letters or keep many diaries. He didn't have an official biographer. As he said, the world was his country, his mind was his church, and his religion was to do good.

He was made an honorary member of the United Irishman, a very rare privilege for an Englishman to be invited to do so. He was honored by this wonderful Protestant Republican organization because of the tremendous success and appeal of his book, the great bestseller, The Rights of Man, about which I'm to publish a little study.

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," until he put pen to paper, was something that was discussed among theologians, and among the church of philosophers.

There was a 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. Paine broke open this private discussion, and decided to put it in front of a mass audience. And he emerges at a time when the shape of the common man is changing. There's and 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.

Paine emerges 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, because it's only a very brief time since we claimed that there was a divine right of kingship. They can't say the concept is meaningless, as Marx and Bentham later do. They have to say there is such a 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.

This is the first time that the word "rights," and the word "man," or properly, I think, "mankind," (what we would now call human rights) — the first time those two words had ever appeared together in the same sentence. A breathtaking idea, and instantly taken up by millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and both sides of the English Channel.

Up until then, popular rebellions had usually been commanded by noblemen. Llewellyn Griffith in the present case, Robert the Bruce, even Oliver Cromwell was a nobleman. Or by the agrarian types like Wat Tyler, or right up to the levelers and the diggers of the Cromwellian revolution about whom Paine had learned from 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. A great line of Milton's, which was Orwell's favorite line, incidentally, says that there's a justification by the known rules of ancient liberty. I think it's in Lusíadas. 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 Paine 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. He arrived in Philadelphia just on the cusp of the great conflict between the 13 colonies and the mother country around unfair taxation and political repression, and 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, which said that this dispute could not be solved within the bounds of the Hanoverian usurpation. That 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 eastern seaboard of North America. They were loyal to the crown, slave owners to boot, very vested in stability and property, and they didn't see the logic of independence at all. But by the time Paine had finished, and the mass audiences had heard him, and the British had acted so stupidly, there was an unstoppable consensus that this was a catalytic moment.

Paine failed, didn't manage, to get a clause 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. Though 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 and the church have nothing to do with each other, where the President is chosen by election, and so are both houses of the legislature. Unbelievably revolutionary for its time.

Considering his work to be done, Paine goes back across the Atlantic, becomes very involved with the Marquis de Lafayette and the early framers of the coming declaration of the rights of man, les droits de l'homme, in Paris, and takes part, very happily, in the early years of the French revolution. He believes it to be the consummation of the American idea, the New World coming back to redress the balance of the Old, and he's given the key to the Bastille by the Marquis de Lafayette. He takes it back across the Atlantic as a personal present to George Washington, to whom he dedicates The Rights of Man. You can still go to President Washington's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and see it hanging on the wall.

Then, what is his woe and sorrow? One of his best friends, a man he hugely admires, a man who's been a friend of the American Revolution, Edmund Burke, unmasks his batteries. Burke issues a most incredibly sulfurous diatribe against the French Revolution. It was almost like a lover's quarrel. 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 Britain, and perhaps in the wider world, too.

The English Tories claimed Burke as one of their own, but he was neither English nor a Tory. He was an Irishman and a secret Catholic. He wasn't able to mention his religion during the time of the Penal Laws. He had declared marvelously for the oppressed people of Bengal, and elsewhere in India, against the East India Company. He had tried to get Warren Hastings impeached, and supported the American Revolution. He was hoping by indirection, to plead for Irish independence, but was utterly horrified by the overthrow of the church and the execution of the king in Paris.

As every schoolboy knows (as McCauley used to say), Mr. Burke produced a foamingly moist tribute to Marie Antoinette, imagining that to avenge even a look cast in her direction, the sword of every gentleman in Europe would spring from its scabbard just to defend her. With the failure to do this, the age of chivalry had died, was gone, and the age of sophists, calculators and economists was upon us. Paine 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.

Paine essentially wins it, because he says feudalism is over now. It wasn't just this king or 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.

Up until then, the word "democrat" or "democracy" had always been used as an insult, rather as "Tory" used to be, or "suffragette," or "impressionist." The trick is to convert an attack word into a badge of pride, and call yourself a democrat. Paine was the first person ever to use the word democracy and democratic 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 Bonapartist, will become a military dictatorship. Anyone who defends Thomas Paine, and defends democracy, still has to read that passage in Burke's book where he warns what would happen when the revolution goes on in this violent way.

The point I want to make in that connection about Paine is this: he was elected as a deputy to the French assembly, from Calais, and he took part in all the early discussions. 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 Paine abhorred. That it should be remembered that, for all his faults, the French king had helped the American Revolution; that they risked starting off too bloodily, in too authoritarian and dogmatic a way if they went on in this manner. He very nearly got enough votes, even though he mostly had to speak through an interpreter, to have the execution canceled, and commuted to either life imprisonment, or to deportation, exile on the model of the Stewarts.

He was very much attacked by Marat for this, and he never forgave him. He said he had no right to speak because he was a Quaker, which he actually was not by then. He was no longer a pacifist. As the wheel of the Terror turned, Thomas Paine was put in the Luxembourg prison, and very nearly died there, of illness and neglect, and also was very nearly executed.

While there he managed, because he knew the Bible by heart, to write the companion volume to The Rights of Man, which was The Age of Reason. I'll get to that in a minute, but for now what I want to say is this. Late in his life, he wrote, "To have had a part in two revolutions is to have lived to some purpose."

I think that's a noble thing to have said, and been 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 males, but it was better than nothing.

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 Antislavery Society. He wanted the American Revolution to be more complete, and more radical, and wanted the French Revolution to be less fanatical, less dogmatic, less fratricidal, violating one of its three cardinal precepts of fraternity, and to stop the killing and the vendettas.

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. That, I've always thought was 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 the most dangerous place in which to do it.

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 age of the early romantics. The other two people who wrote replies to Edmund Burke, also heavily censored and persecuted by the reactionary government of William Pitt, were William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

It was probably William Blake that gave Paine the tip-off that he should flee England, and get across the channel as soon as he could, because 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, Edmund Burke favored, for all his broad-mindedness.

So he is part of that bliss within that dawn element in our history, in our culture and our literature, but he was also an eminently practical person. He had been a stay maker, a corset maker. After that, he had been a customs and excise official, having that in common with Robert Burns, oddly enough. He had also been a bit of a piss artist, having that in common with Robert Burns as well. Strange that there should be two drunken customs officials so much involved in our national romance with liberty, but he was also, as I say, a practical person. In part two of The Rights of Man, there's no more talk about how stupid the hereditary principle is. He deals with all that in part one.

He says to have a hereditary monarch is as absurd as having a hereditary mathematician, or hereditary poet. It's absurd on its face. He describes the injustices of the wars that are created by kings for their own vanity, and so forth.

Part two is charts, statistical tables. It's the design of a welfare state. The first time anybody had ever thought of it. He said why is it that 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 that when they're too old to work and their muscles are gone, they're thrown out on the parish to die? Why is it that people live like beasts in the city? How can this be?

He designs a welfare system whereby anyone at the age of the majority would receive a lump sum, on which to get married and to start their own business. 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, there is provision made for the elderly, and for widows, and for orphans. It's minutely costed, it goes through William Pitt's appallingly reactionary budget, and it turns it upside down. It's a very absorbing document to read.

I went to talk about Paine last week at the Institute for Public Policy Research. It's one of those rather suave Blair-project think tanks, a nice office in Covent Garden, that kind of thing. 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.

My mission statement, by the way, is that I don't leave if there's anyone around who can possibly say that I didn't answer a question. The other mission statement is that I presume that people come here to talk, as well as to listen, so I'll condense my remarks a bit, if I may. I should say perhaps a little, I want to say a lot, but I'll say a little about The Age of Reason.

In his early pamphlets, Paine was a bit of an opportunist, he who would sometimes say monarchy is condemned in the Old Testament. Which as you know, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. 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 sometimes, so there was a considerable shock when he published 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. That it's a plagiarism, based upon a hearsay based on a hearsay. He goes through it from 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, we're also seeing how there can't really be any revelation of truth, because those who report it can't be trusted. We cannot believe someone who says they've talked directly to God on their own unsupported word. Common sense, if you like, but very, very devastating. Once again, there have been many philosophers, Hobbes was probably one of them, of the ones I've mentioned, who were privately atheist. David Hume, I think it's almost certain, was. Some people think Francis Bacon was too. But you kept quiet about it. You did not say, except to philosophical friends.

Paine is the first one to go to a printer, and produce a cheap book anyone can read saying what the priests have been telling you is wrong. It's lies, and it's evil, and it's false. 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 that you can't really have the rights of man asserted without an age of reason that denies an interventionist God.

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 — none of which work.

For Paine to make this connection means that he's really the founding father, not just of the American Revolution and in part of the French one, but of what we call the Enlightenment. The realization that, precisely because we are alone, we must turn to one another.

Now, I can't say that Paine was an atheist, as I am. He actually wrote The Age of Reason to vindicate God. He was a deist. In other words, he believed there must have been a creator, because of the order in nature of the universe, though 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 religious and of the faithful. 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 Paine, and many others used to look at the rocks, and look at the rock formations in Virginia. They would think how did the sea shells 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. There you have it, if you like, the twinning of the two ideas.

In my opinion, if he'd done only these two things, and not just led the exemplary and creative life that he did manage to do, he would still deserve to be remembered as "The most useful Englishman there ever was," as Kenneth Griffith, that great Welshman once put it in a wonderful drama-documentary he did about Paine.

The most useful Englishman there ever was. I give him to you, ladies and gentlemen, Thomas Paine. Thank you.

Q&A

Q: 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 that it's going the other way? That now we're perhaps not happy to be associated with those who use the word democracy.

A: No. First, I agree with you that it's nice when that happens. I mean, it was clever of the Tories to take on this charge; and impressionist, also was the reviewist taunt; suffragette and so forth. We've had extensions of this, people recently 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. I don't think it should be used, but alright. You can see what the effort is being made there.

What we have done with democracy, I think, is to assume that it's only measurement of public opinion. That's another problem altogether. When I was young, there was quite an argument about whether or not newspapers should even publish opinion polls, because they were thought to be unscientific, and probably too easy to skew.

Now, newspapers commission expensive opinion polls, usually in concert with a television or broadcasting organization. They commission 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 a parody of democracy. It's not even populism, really. It's pseudoscience, for one thing, and it's anti-democratic for another. I fear people have got so attached to it that they've forgotten what it means, this word now, so it could possibly be that a new word is due. I'll brood on that. Popular sovereignty? No, it doesn't work.

Q:  Why do you think we don't honor Paine? If we were to redress that, what would be a fitting memorial?

A: The reason, initially, he wasn't honored, was because he fled the country. He would've been hanged if he stayed. He'd incited mutiny among the American colonists, and he took the French side fairly consistently during the Napoleonic Wars.

In fact, I cut a bit, I was going to say something about a couple of his downsides. One of them being that though he saw through Napoleon right away, he was still so wedded to the idea of France and its defense that he was willing to tolerate extreme measures of repression being employed, and he had always hoped that the French army would invade Great Britain and set up a republic there, as it had in other countries.

I think he'd been too long away from home, because… who here's read Patrick O'Brien's sea-faring novels? Nothing like enough! So you've got Flanagan now, and that's only a trilogy. With O'Brien, it's 20, I think, but they're quite short. They're brilliant.

But anyway, I'll tell you quickly, these are the new type of Britons, Linda Cully wrote so well about in her history a few years ago — who had drawn from all parts of the country, 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 below decks. They're all kinds of Cromwellian-type cult organizations and little splinter groups operating among the crews, and millennial leftovers, some of them from the 1650s and '60s. Very, very fascinating, and very democratical, as they would've said. Very radical, but absolutely no quarter given to the French.

Because what has Napoleon gone and done? He's had himself proclaimed emperor by the Pope. He's restored Papistry to France, and made himself an emperor, so they had no trouble at all, however radical they are, however hostile they are to the excise man, the press gang, the king and the rest of it — they're fighting against France.

I don't think Paine 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 after that. You shouldn't, of course, want one.

I'm never sure whether I should complain in Washington or not, that there isn't a plaque for him. Maybe it's best that there isn't, and he can be found in decoding poems like that. Probably that's best.

Q:  You mentioned that Thomas Paine wanted the abolition of slavery. I saw some drafts of the Constitution in the New York public library some years back. There, in one of the drafts, was the call for the abolition of slavery. I was looking at this draft to the Constitution, and there was the line. I was thinking, why was it taken out? Because if it had stayed in, the impact on American history thereafter would've been gigantic. I was blown away, looking at this line in the early draft, and I just wondered what happened.

A: It makes you weep. Well, there are two reasons why. One, very obviously, is the delegations from Georgia and the two Carolinas would not have signed the Declaration of Independence if it included that concept, the clause that Jefferson wrote in.

The other thing, as Jefferson pointed out, is that 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 with an interest, in other words, even in the more enlightened states, that didn't want to tamper with the trade, so they lost.

Much worse, I think, is the sequel, which is that as a result of the revolution in Haiti… I'm going to try this once more… who here has read Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James? Excellent, more than I thought. Get it read, though, 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 a genius general called Toussaint Louverture in what was then called Santo Domingo, what is now Haiti, around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. 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 Talleyrand to put the Louisiana territories up for sale.

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. The idea came to him from Paine. Paine said, I think the French would give us the land, and we could start again.

He and Joel Barlow went to the President and said, there's a condition. We must start again without slavery. We mustn't have it in these new territories. We can begin again without the original sin. But just as the cotton interests had won the first time, the sugar interests in the Caribbean needed that crop brought in very quickly through Louisiana, and they continued to import slaves through New Orleans, so the chance was lost.

In fact, that makes the American Civil War inevitable, because new states are carved out of Louisiana, and by the time it's finished, there are as many slave states as there are free states. And there's only going to be one outcome. Reading back over that gives one the sense of the real lineaments of tragedy.

Tragedy is not when princesses are run over in Paris. The Greek tragedy is the fatal flaw in either the enterprise or the human being; and then there is the Hegelian tragedy, when two rights collide. That's when you get tragedy. This will meet both of those definitions.

Q:   Might "Capitalism" be the word that's usurped democracy? Second, are the rights of man compromised as a direct result of an expanding population?

A: Well, Milton Friedman's theory is that capitalism is the word for democracy. Just as you, as a consumer, have your way in the market by choosing how you'll spend your money, and on whom, or on which, as between any number of possibles. Let's say you do that with your vote. Your vote is like your dollar bill, or pound coin. Fatuous, I've always thought. Very, very simplistic, in that capitalism has shown itself more than able to coexist with extreme forms of dictatorship, from apartheid in South Africa to fascism and national socialism in Europe. There's nothing that seems innately, necessarily democratic about capitalism, with its persistent tendency to monopoly. That's the first point.

However, Paine, I think would be more likely to be with you. He was against government intervention where it could be avoided. He was for a 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, helped write them into the Constitution. And he was often quoted by Ronald Reagan, as a libertarian, for example, and as a foe of all tyranny. He is quite popular on the American libertarian right, if you're interested.

Your second question, is democracy compromised by an increase in population? No.

I mean, the population of Britain at the time Paine was writing was… I don't know, probably not more than 10 million. London was the biggest city in the world, and had 600,000 people. We have more of us with more rights now, as you can easily see. There were no rights, then, really at all. The concept wasn't known until Paine introduced it.

Q:  You suggest that Paine's way forward was to turn to one another. As a Christian, I believe that the basis of Christianity is just that. "Love thy neighbor" is a tenet that's observed by those who wish to turn to one another. What on earth, then, has happened to man's humanity to man? The world is full of man's inhumanity to man at the moment, so the opportunity that man has isn't strictly being taken up, is it?

A: The instruction to do right by your neighbor is actually from Rabbi Hillel, from the Babylonian captivity, who invented what's called the Golden 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 of Judaism in general. And it also asked you to do the impossible, it says you must love your neighbor as yourself. No one can be expected to do that, it's a ridiculous proposition. We're not so made as to do that.

We're also told 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 immoral, not just on its face, but because it can only be preached by someone who thought the world was about to come to an end, and was hoping that it would. Which is itself an immoral desire, yet is the eschatological pornography that underlies all religion.

You can go through the whole New Testament, as I have done, and as Paine did, and you'll find that people are constantly being commanded to commit genocide, and to impose slavery. Ordered, mandated to do that, and to have their children stoned if they're disobedient, and to do unbelievably awful other things, burn witches. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," all of that.

The document is of revolting evil, it's really a relief to know that there isn't a word of truth in the story, as Israeli archaeology has now conclusively proved. There was no exodus, there was no wandering in Sinai, all of that's all made up.

Good thing, too, 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 offering.

Making war on the dead, punishing the dead for eternity. You're welcome to your Christianity, sir.

Q:  Chris, you have contextualized Paine for us, 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 Paine be now, for us?

A: 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 republics within Europe.

We'd owe a huge amount to Paine, if that project was forwarded. In fact, we owe a huge amount to him that it was ever put on paper in the first place. It shows that it's not dreamt up by some group of chattering class people, that it's very deep in the grain and the grit of the English, and the British people.

It is part of our tradition. It is one that's buried, that's forgotten, but that is ineffaceable and ineradicable. No, there'd be no doubt that he'd be one of the founding fathers there. And Gerrard Winstanley, and Thomas Landsborough.

Q:  Can you be a bit more specific?

A: Can I be a bit more specific? Probably not. Not in the available time. But we could have a glass of refreshment.

Q:  It's clear that Thomas Paine was intellectually imaginative, but does that intellectual imagination actually reach to cultures where notions of liberty and democracy are not historically attractive, and are not currently attractive?

A: It's been my experience, and it was Paine's, I think, that even the most apparently unpromising societies are perfectly able to see the point that if there are to be rulers, they had better arise from the people. No one should find themselves living under a government that he hasn't chosen to put himself under, and no one should be denied the chance to change their government.

The great vice of Burke's book is that he says we did have one revolution in 1688, and retrospectively, even though it was an anti-Catholic revolution, he said that was all right. In fact, it was a glorious one, but he said that's once and for all time. It can never be changed anymore. The compact that it institutes is permanent and unalterable.

That's absurd on its face, even if the William and Mary settlement wasn't absurd in itself. People can get these points very easily, and that they want to be able to know what their rights are and to go to a court to assert them is something people are thirsty for in every place I've been.

I've never been anywhere where something like the American Constitution wouldn't be an improvement, in other words, because it's essentially simple. Paine was able to reach people who knew very little about books and ideas, but were learning to read, and they got the point right away.

If you can do it to a people as thick as the English, I think there's nowhere it couldn't take root. Thick and conservative, as the English.

Q:  Do you think that if Thomas Paine was alive today, he would speak out at peace rallies? Do you think he would be as critical of Islam as some have been of Christianity, or do you think he'd perhaps just be a newspaper columnist?

A: I don't know that he would've sunk as low as the latter. Thanks for asking, all the same.

Actually, I can't do this. I wrote a book about George Orwell once, and people said what would Orwell think about this or that? I said, it's not possible to tell, after a certain point. I'm not avoiding your question. Orwell died very young, but he'd written a great deal about the colonialism in Asia, and in the Middle East also, and had personal experience of it. I think it's possible to say, from knowing his work, and his mind, that he would've been opposed to the 1956 intervention at Suez, which we're having the 50th anniversary of this year. I think, without any doubt. It's also pardonable to say, plausible to say, that he would've 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, one just shouldn't try, I believe.

I do know what Paine's answer to Islam was, because it's in The Age of Reason. That's very plain. 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 than Christianity, usually of the worst bits. It's nothing but a knock-off. But it makes the same mistake as Burke did in that it says it's the final revelation. There's no need for anymore after this. You now have all the information you need, in other words, an explicitly totalitarian ideology. You would've had no doubt as to what he would think about that.

As for peace rallies, no. He had a very, very strong quarrel with his Quaker brethren, because they not only abstained 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.

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 pro so-called "insurgent."

It's led by people like George Galloway who are pimps for, and prostitutes of — an amazing double — fascists and a dictatorship.

Q:  That's not the case at all, because for instance, if Hans Blix had been allowed to carry on with his inquiry, we would've found out there were no weapons, and the whole thing was based on a spurious plan to go to war, that Bush and Blair hatched months and months before that. You don't have to be pro-Saddam to be anti-war, that's rubbish.

A: If you don't have to, why are you, then? I must say, I agree that you don't have to be, so why is your movement led by people who are?

Now, you do remind me to say something else, though. Paine definitely believed that the United States should be an imperial power for democracy, as did Jefferson.

He wanted it to be an empire for the export of revolution — to Haiti, to South America, up to Europe, to Ireland and beyond. He was very emphatic on that. And that's a problem for many people on the American left, because they have such a bad conscience about so many failed or criminal American foreign policies that they don'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. The ideas, of course, of the Declaration of Rights of Man are still with us.

The American Revolution is the only one still standing. You have to take it or leave it, but in my view, it requires thought and not jokes about the president's IQ.

Q:  Do you think the rights of man, or particularly women, have been increased after the invasion of Iraq? If so, has it been worth the price? Thank you.

A: I don't doubt it for one second, that there's been a night and day difference in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan. The flag that you can't see on my lapel is the flag of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party who's leader is now the President of Iraq.

Four years ago, Iraq was the private property of a psychopathic crime family. It was a mass grave underneath, and a concentration camp on top. It was mass graves, torture chambers, and every citizen was property of the state.

Now, the elected President of Iraq is the leader of a Democratic Socialist party that is the corresponding member of the Socialist International, who's people as late as 15 years ago 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 they are blasé, to put it mildly. I think it's the most important fact, thank you.

Very muted applause for that proposition, I can see.

There are those who say they can't tell the difference, and well, they probably can't.

Q:  I'd just like to make a comment, as a member of the anti-war movement, that there were lots of us that were incredibly disappointed when George Galloway was held up as some figurehead for the movement, and also that you've just dismissed a vast movement full of all sorts of people, with all sorts of beliefs, and not all of us agree with George Galloway.

A: 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, who's the organizer there; or George Galloway, or Charlie Donahue; take the other side in the war.

It's not anti-war to say, as Michael Moore does, that the fascist killers in Iraq are the moral equivalent of the Minutemen fighters who were led by Thomas Paine. I'm sorry. As well as being an objectively fascist position, that's also a revolting caricature, and also 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 a spokesman, then don't march like sheep behind their banners. Have your own show, for heaven's sake. Show a little pluck!

Mr. Galloway, I may as well say this, is just done. He gave an interview to a slime sheet called Gentlemen's Quarterly in America, where he was asked if only Blair was killed, would it be morally justifiable for a suicide bomber to take him out? Galloway said, yes, it would be. He said, 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. A little deniability suits him down to the ground. Then there's a row, as you can imagine. Then he digs up a statement, a rather vapid one made by Cherie Blair. Two nights ago he said, Cherie Blair once said that she sympathized with the despair of the Palestinian suicide bombers.

Thought, in fact, her statement didn't quite say that. It said that, as long as people feel they have no alternative, there won't be much progress. A pretty vacuous statement, but not as Galloway cites it. But look what's just happened. When he gets in trouble for his remark, approving the murder of a three times elected Prime Minister, when he gets in trouble, he hides behind the skirts of a woman who he's just called to become a widow.

Every time. 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 on his case. We're not done with George at all yet.

Q:  All that said, though, you have to agree don't you, that the price has been quite high, and the country is descending quite slowly into anarchy, and that indeed, the only part that could even possibly be credited with running itself is the part left well alone, i.e. the northern, Kurdish part of Iraq?

A: Well, left well alone in the sense that it's been taken out of the control of Saddam Hussein. 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 beggared and bankrupt. It was xeroxing its currency. It was completely privatized, everything in the state was owned by the crime family. They stayed in power through methods of divide and rule. By inciting, through different newspapers that they controlled, Sunni against Shia, Shia against Sunni, both against Kurds. If it had not been intervened in, had there not been intervention, there's every chance that Iraq could've become to the Gulf what Congo has become to Southwest Africa. A sort of vortex into which forces would certainly have been drawn.

Iraq would've been invaded all right, don't you worry about that, but it would've been invaded by Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Each with the most extreme client of their respective faction. We intervened far too late, it should've all been taken care of in 1991. Not my fault that it wasn't.

We may have intervened just before it went over the cliff. We don't know, but that it's a noble cause, and a just war, make no doubt. No doubt at all.

Q:  Christopher, perhaps we can come back to Thomas Paine.

A: By all means.

Q:  You were fairly quick in your apology that he didn't extend his definition of mankind to include womankind. Why do you, Christopher, think that the authors of the Declaration of Independence failed to see that self-evident fact?

A: It's really remarkable when you consider who some of their wives were, if only that. Abigail Adams, for example people of this kind. Not perhaps, Martha Jefferson, who was a bit of a mouse and recluse. It just didn't cross their minds at all.

Remember, Mary Wollstonecraft, who is Paine's emulator and writes her own very brilliant attack on Edmund Burke, publishes the Vindication of the Rights of Women when? To be absolutely honest with you, I don't know the exact date. After The Rights of Man I'm fairly sure, as the natural counterpart. And Paine would've accepted that. His relations with women were always very distraught, as it happens as well, very.

I don't know whether that has anything to do with it or not, but 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 thing would surprise him most would be that Canada has still not been conquered.

He would think what have the young men of America 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, is not mixed because there are no such things as races, but you know what I mean — 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 him. As it would have done Paine. 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 is sort of revived, as he was in the birth of the labor movement and the Chartist movement in England.

He's always been part of that unspoken history. Unsung, I mean, but not quite unspoken. Not forgotten. Brilliantly evoked by Edward Thompson in The Making the English Working Class. He's part of the collective memory of the educated working man, and for that reason, imperishable.

Q: Looking at applying the source of principles that came out from The Rights of Man to the sort of issues we have today, not what Thomas Paine would've said, 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 do we sort out, 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've spoken about today help us to understand those kinds of problems?

A: Well, on the matter of asserting civil liberty against the state, I would hope it was self-evident. I'm a very strong supporter of the regime change policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I hope tomorrow, soon in Syria and Iran. Not necessarily imposed from outside, but 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 actually very important, especially in times of combat, when the state has all the excuses it thinks it needs to coerce people, and to silence them, and to say it's for their own good. Just like Christianity, the worst thing about a dictatorship is that it's benign. That's the horrible bit.

The benign stuff is the revolting stuff. That, I hope, one could take as read. The reason I'm doing this now is that obviously, the great question in the world is the battle between the secular and theocratic forces. It's going to be that way for a long time.

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, the Palestine question. I once heard the late Abba Eban, a rather charming Israeli liberal politician, a former ambassador to the UN, former prime minister, say, "When you look to this problem, the first thing that struck you about it is how easy it is to solve."

I remember thinking, okay I'll listen to the rest of what he says if he says that. You have approximately equally balanced peoples, Jewish and Arab. Roughly the same number of them, with historic claims to the same land, and long historic attachments to it, but are not, by any means, completely compatible. There is a way of doing it. You can partition the place, at least to begin with, so that everyone is part of it. You can't have one group living on top of the other, that's out of the question. They must be living side-by-side, which must mean some form of partitioning.

Easy, everybody wants it. The majority of Israeli Jews consistently say they want it. Prime Minister Abbas says he's sure in a referendum the Palestinians would vote for it, too, which whenever they've been tested on it they have.

PLO supports it. The UN supports it. The EEU supports it. The United States supports it. The Diaspora Jews support it. Why can't we get it? Because there's a faction of messianists among the Jews who say God gave them the West Bank in Gaza. Not Gaza, but the West Bank, so there's nothing to negotiate.

It's not difficult for them to find Muslim counterparts who say you're quite right about that, God did distribute the land. He does make property deals, but in our favor, sorry, not yours.

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, 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 99,000 Jews when it's all over, to convert. The rest are going straight to hell, but we leave that bit out.

So theocracy and religion poison everything. They make it impossible for reason, for rationality, for justice, even to be heard let alone enacted. That's in an area where we have quite a lot of purchase and quite a lot of influence. What is going to happen 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 solved, the Al-Qaeda people would stop. How people can believe this in anti-war movement, I don't know.

Suppose Bin Laden's people have another try, and they really do smash up Kashmir and destroy its attachment to the Indian Union. The Indian Union will fall apart. The largest and most impressive multi-cultural, multi-ethnic democracy in the world will fall apart. The fighting and bloodshed that will be there will make 1947, 1948 completely forgettable.

That could happen. That's what they want. They're working at it night and day. This is a real struggle. They want to destroy everything we care about. They want to take away everything we have.

What is appalling is to see the capitulation of my profession, for example, which wouldn't coverage one of the Danish cartoons, which believes that the only problem in the world is avoiding the hurting of peoples' feelings. Well, I'm sorry. I didn't sign up for this to be inoffensive.

II.

Thomas Jefferson

Mr. Jefferson was in power almost continuously one way for another for a quarter of a century. Jefferson was slightly prone to self-pity, often saying that the burdens of office were too great, the appreciation of his efforts was insufficient, the bitterness of politics was too foul. He would constantly say, "I'd much rather be back on my farm in Monticello." He would now have said "In order to spend more time with my family." We would be able to add now that what we know, more time with his two families.

As it happens, he could easily have elected to do something other than politics and would have been, perhaps not as well known, but equally successful in the chosen field. He could have been an excellent lawyer. He was a very good lawyer. He took some quite early cases about emancipation. He could have been an extremely good librarian. His private library became the core of what is now the Library of Congress in Washington.

He designed a plow which dug a deeper furrow in the soil. He could have been and was a very good farmer. He wouldn't have been a very good wine grower. He never got Virginia wines up to snuff. In fact, they still rather lag, though I think they're better than the Connecticut chardonnay.

When he had to settle a minor point in a question about the rights of whaling -- whalers in the Moby Dick sense -- between his country and others, he decides he'd have to write a special treatise on it to study the whole matter properly before he gave his report.

He was a genuine polymath. The city of Philadelphia in that time, while it might not have been the equivalent of 5th century Athens, had become a magnet city for that kind of talent -- scientific, medical, philosophical, and so forth.

Obviously the best known to us of this pantheon is Benjamin Franklin, who has a reasonable claim to have discovered at least the workings of electricity and its connection to lightning. For example Joseph Priestley, who we can rightly call the discoverer of oxygen even though he believed in the phlogiston theory for most of his life, was a brilliant scientist. After his laboratory in Birmingham in England had been smashed by a mob shouting for the church and the king -- these were the supporters of Edmund Burke, not all of them were as polite and polished as Mr. Burke was -- Mr. Priestley decided to take his remaining instruments and his knowledge across the Atlantic and bring them to Philadelphia where he knew he would be welcomed. There one could have met people like Dr. Benjamin Rush, a very distinguished physician, also one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Thomas Paine came across there with a letter, an introduction from Benjamin Franklin, not just in order to exert his fantastic skills as polemicist and public speaker, but also in the hope of designing what would not have been tried before: an iron bridge. The bridge would span water and connect distant places and survive the winter, not cracking and splintering as wood would do. Bridge-building couldn't be a better definition of an enlightenment project. Bridges are dialectical by definition, they don't go only one way. An ideal occupation for Mr. Paine.

Jefferson was absolutely in his element in this world. I think there are two achievements that we can attribute to this enlightenment atmosphere, to the sort of authors and writers who they discussed in France and Italy. Cesare Beccaria, for example, whose book, On Crimes and Punishment had begun to revolutionize thinking in Europe, where up until then executions and torture of the most barbaric kind would be a very common place.

When Jefferson became governor of the state of Virginia he produced an almost model statute on crime and punishment. He didn't actually succeeded in abolishing the death penalty I'm sorry to say, but attempting a less retributive and more rehabilitating, more humane and more scientific penal system.

That would be an 'enlightenment achievement' and one that set a precedent across the United States. But the most important one, and probably the major subject of conversation in Philadelphia at that time, is this. Once we had begun to realize that the world was not flat, that the sun did not revolve around it, that diseases were not caused by devils or by sin and various other quite striking disclosures of the kind, they began also to think, as it were inevitably, that there might be another explanation than creation for the way the world was.

Deism was very common among this group, people who believed in the fact that the order of nature showed there must have been a God or at least a starter, but it didn't look as if this person or force took any direct interest in human affairs, did not intervene, did not ask or listen to prayers, was uninfluenced by sect or anything as backward as that. Notwithstanding this, it was probably necessary to have a separation in society and in government between the church and state. No other government before or since has ever deliberated on this point and resolved it in this way, an extremely revolutionary idea at that time.

The British crown had its own private church, the Anglican Church, which obviously was going to be disestablished in America. The fact that the crown wasn't going to have its own church anymore made it easier.

It was proposed -- I'm talking again about the deliberations in the Virginia Assembly by Patrick Henry and others -- let us instead have the government support not one church but all churches, everyone should be tithed for the support of all churches.

There was to that proposition in the context only one reply, which was that the government should support no church. Together Mr. Jefferson and his close lifelong friend, Mr. Madison, evolved the Virginia statute on religious freedom.

Mr. Jefferson only mentions a very small number of achievements. He thought he should only be remembered as founder of University of Virginia, author of Declaration of Independence, and author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. He didn't think it was worth mentioning that he had been a president twice and vice president and secretary of state and ambassador to France.

We can well see the salience that he put on this, and because he was in France, he wasn't present at the deliberations in Philadelphia that resulted in the constitutional convention.

I think it's obvious when you look at it that the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom is the embryo of the First Amendment to the Constitution which is, in my opinion, the amendment that outranks all the others -- which makes a clear separation between church and state, guarantees religious freedom by the only means by which it can be guaranteed, which is to say a secular state.

It also guarantees the right of free expression and free assembly. The extraordinary luck of having somebody who could, out of that intellectual foment of Philadelphia, take it out into politics, then into the law, then into a drafting committee, and finally into our Constitution is something that would be...certainly would made a book in itself. That's not all I want to say about him, but I've come back to it by another route.

War & Revolution

The second area where he was preeminent was that of war and revolution. In the first place he drafts the manifesto of the revolution -- most of it, at any rate -- and fails to get a clause condemning slavery from being adopted. Sorry, fails to get it adopted, probably because of the pressure of the Carolinas and Georgia delegations, but also because of the number of slave traders, not holders, in New York.

With that terrible initial defeat conceded, he announced, if you like, the first democratic revolution. Until that time, the word "democratical" or "democratic" was generally used as an insult, as the Greeks might have said, "ochlocratic" or "mobish" or "mob rule." To be accused of being democratic was to be accused of favoring essentially mob rule.

John Adams would have continued using it in that way for most of his life. The word "democracy" evolves as a non-pejorative positive word really out of the work of Thomas Jefferson and, in my opinion, the unacknowledged drafter of the declaration, Thomas Paine. This is the subject of my next book -- The Unacknowledged Founding Father.

The crucial thing is popular sovereignty and, for the first time, the idea that rights are innate in humans, not in monarchs, not in bishops, and not derived from the heavens. Though a creator is mentioned, it's not specified. Although they are common property, any human can claim them. This idea, which I believe is still in this revolutionary idea, was at that time extraordinarily so.

When Mr. Jefferson finally becomes president, the very first thing he does is to declare war. He does it without consulting Congress and he sends the American fleet with the Marine Corps way out, too far from land and too far gone in time for them to be recalled when he finally does tell Congress he'd sent them.

This is because he wanted to make absolutely sure that this war was a success. The war he declared is known to us as the Barbary War and largely forgotten now in our history, but of extreme importance not just as America's first war, but as a war of liberation.

The war was against what was vaguely called the Barbary States. These are more properly described as the states of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa, or what we would now call Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. Tripoli then would be Libya now, in other words. They were the Ottoman states. They commanded the entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules.

They were in an extraordinary position to impose their will on navigation. It's calculated now by the best historians -- a lot of this is quite recent work -- that between about 1750 and about 1820, about a million and a half Europeans and Americans were kidnapped by these powers, taken from their ships -- the ships were taken too -- and pressed into slavery.

You could avoid this if you paid a tribute to the roving potentate, the bey or sultan, which most European powers tended to do. There was a tariff for it, but the United States was in a weak position at that point to be paying the tribute.

The British Crown, which had up until then been guaranteeing American shipping, was rather vindictive, and probably in fact made bargains with the Barbary States in order that they would particularly pick upon American shipping, showing them what they'd lost by losing the protection of the Union Jack.

The situation was pretty desperate. These ships were very powerful, too. It's recorded that almost the entire town of Baltimore in Ireland was carried off, the entire population in one night by Arab slavers, and never seen again. They ranged that far north and all the way down into the Atlantic.

Jefferson had tried very hard to negotiate with the Barbary ambassador, Mr. Abdrahaman. He went to London to see him and said, "By what right do you do this to our merchant shipping? We did not take part in the crusades. We did not take part in the reconquest of Andalusia. We are not a Christian country. There is a treaty that still is the law of the land in this country, the Treaty of Tripoli which, among other things, states and has the full support of Congress and the Senate in stating the United States is in no description a Christian country." Worth remembering, by the way, when you hear some of today's blowhards.

Abdrahaman replied that this was irrelevant, that any non-Muslim could be taken into slavery according to the Koran, and all non-Muslims and other infidels were to be punished. If they didn't want to pay the special tax, they could expect to be treated as chattel.

It was decided not to be spoken to in this tone of voice. The fleet set sail and after a fairly prolonged bombardment and some very heroic operations now associated with the name of Stephen Decatur in particular, a change of policy was imposed. The practice of piracy and enslavement was given up.

It's the reason why the first line of the Marine anthem, "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli" is the line that it is, because that's the first time that the American flag was planted in war on another country's soil.

This was a very brisk start to Mr. Jefferson's presidential life, and he meant it to show that the American Revolution was not for Americans alone. That the ideas that it embodied were, he hoped, capable of universal emulation. He hoped that they would spread.

He believed that they had spread to France. He'd been disappointed by the defeat of his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, in the fratricide within the French Revolution, but nonetheless he believed that slowly and by degrees the American Revolution would export itself and could be exported by violence if necessary, or if negated.

I mention it because, among other things, we can say that at least partially it cancels the shame of the exclusion of the anti-slavery clause from the Declaration of 1776. At least Mr. Jefferson in his lifetime did put down one slave trade. But I'm coming back to that subject, too. That's war and revolution done for now, sketchily, I admit.

The Enlightenment & Nation-Building

In order for the United States to be a revolution that could be emulated and exported and fought for overseas, it had to be a serious continental power. This was Jefferson's main preoccupation throughout his life.

He had various principles, sometimes Federalist, sometimes anti-Federalist, sometimes Republican, sometimes Democratic. Any of these principles he would sacrifice if it gained territory or trade or power or influence for the United States. When this country began, it was to the northern American continent what Chile is to the other side of the South American continent -- a long, ribbon-like country trapped between the ocean and the mountains. Chile, very charming. 13 colonies, very charming, too. But you see how easily they might again have fallen prey to any renewal of violence between Britain, Spain, and France. It was a very tenuous existence.

For Jefferson, the absolutely critical thing was to gain control of the Mississippi. He thought, "If we can do that, we can become a real continental power." The term "United States of America," originally coined I think by Thomas Paine, weighed with him very much and he thought there should be more states.

He was always looking for expansion, first in the Northwest, but above all towards the Mississippi. He had been in favor of the French Revolution, and even its Bonapartist expression against the British Empire. He was never really neutral as between Britain and France, and had taken immense political risks to be identified with the pro-French faction. Nevertheless, the chance came in the early part of the last century when he wrote to the French government and said, "We want you to sell us New Orleans. We must have it and the Mississippi at all costs. We understand you're willing to sell." Again, the idea had been given him by Thomas Paine. "I think they're so broke now," said Paine, "that they would sell us Louisiana." Jefferson said, "If you don't do it, if you don't accept our offer, in order to gain control of the Mississippi, I'm willing to make a naval and military alliance with Great Britain," something that would have been unthinkable for him to say under any other circumstances.

Monsieur Talleyrand, Napoleon's chief politician, had to admit that they were so broke and so much in a hurry that he would give them more than they'd asked for. They'd give them every French territory in North America. He wasn't even quite sure of the full extent of it. But they could have the lot for a given price, which comes down to, if you take Henry Adams' beautiful formulation, doubling the size of the United States in one day at the cost of 10 cents an acre. The most extraordinary land deal in history. Almost makes you believe in manifest destiny.

Just a digression, but only a few years later, Mr. Lincoln's Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, is talking to his Russian counterpart, who says, "We've got this boring extension of Siberia on your side of the Straits called Alaska. It's no use to man or beast. Do you fancy buying it?" He said, "OK, I'll see what I've got on me."

Maybe God is on the side of the United States after all. Anyway, for Jefferson, this was the absolutely critical thing, and I don't believe in numinous dates or anything like that, even though Mr. Jefferson and I actually have the same birthday. But the birthday of the United States, the 4th of July, is also the date on which the Louisiana Purchase is announced in the Gazette in Washington.

Happier still, later in the afternoon of that day, Lewis and Clark receive their instructions to depart from Pittsburgh and go west. Jefferson's told them, "You will have to meet with, entreat with, many Indian nations and their leaders." He urges on them always to treat them with the greatest of respect, ask them to enter into negotiations with Washington. But he's able to tell Lewis and Clark what they can now tell these Indian leaders, which is, "Gentlemen, you already live in the United States of America. The reign of the emperor of France is over and will never come back. The Spanish are not coming back either. You are Americans already."

On that 4th of July he's able to send off the greatest Enlightenment expedition ever founded. Napoleon at around the same time sent all kinds of artists and scientists and geographers and seismologists and botanists and anthropologists to Egypt. We call that Orientalism. Occidentalism is what Mr. Jefferson was practicing.

He made sure that Lewis and Clark went to Philadelphia, the great city of the Enlightenment, for a long course in astronomy, stellar navigation, and in the curing of smallpox. A not-irrelevant digression here, Jefferson vaccinated everyone on his estate at Monticello, including the people who were his property, against smallpox. He was a great partisan of Dr. Jenner's invention. He even discovered a method by which it could be kept cool and not lose its force when it was being transported. There was a problem with it losing its potency. He discovered that by keeping it cold with water or ice, it could be taken quite a long distance. He arranged for Lewis and Clark to be taught how to administer smallpox injections to Indians, which is a small compensation for the terrible damage done to their culture by the smallpox that was brought to the New World by the colonists.

Timothy Dwight, famous divine of the time, well-known as the founder of Yale still, took the view that vaccination against smallpox was an interference with God's design and shouldn't be practiced. I suppose he would have to be right, since it would have to have been God who designed smallpox in the first place. But this is the trap you dig for yourself as a creationist.

In all these other ways, Lewis and Clark became very highly educated people, trained in all these matters -- in navigation, agriculture. They were given seeds and plants to take with them. They were given instructions on how to keep cuttings and bring back specimens of botany on their return.

It was a genuinely scientific expedition, and of course by the time it was over, it could be safely said that the United States would one day extend as far as California and Oregon. Which of course it eventually did, though Mr. Lincoln's greatest ambition was to go to California, and even he as president never managed to do it. Nor, of course, did Mr. Jefferson.

But by the time the Jefferson presidency is over we know that there's going to be a major country called the United States of America. Everyone else in the world knows that this country cannot be messed around with militarily, and that it has a revolutionary manifesto somewhere about its person in the form of a Declaration and now a Constitution. The whole wheel of history effectively turns enormously in the Jefferson years.

Slavery

I left slavery to the last because I had to, but because also it touches all the other things I've mentioned. It's a consistent thread throughout the whole thing.

Jefferson tried when he was a young member of the Virginia House of Burgesses under British rule to have at least the right of manumission, as it was called, the right of a slave owner to liberate a slave. That was not a thing you were allowed to do in polite society. You weren't able to set that bad example.

He fought for that. He fought during the Declaration, as you know, to have a clause included that would ban not just the trade in slaves but also the holding of slaves. He didn't get that written in. He wasn't at the Constitutional Convention. He did succeed in having slavery prevented in the Northwest Territories in that ordinance, or tried his best to do so, passing the relevant legislation.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he writes such good abolitionist prose that you don't really need after you've read it to read even Frederick Douglass of Maryland. All the arguments against slavery are in there already.

Not just the degrading effect that it has upon the slaves themselves, which is, so to speak, taken for granted, but the extremely degrading and dehumanizing effect that it has on those who profit from it and who hold other people as property. It's probably not been put any better or more tersely.

We can add with pride that the slave trade of the Barbary States is put down by American force. Good.

But when the United States is doubled in size by the Louisiana Purchase, and when a whole new world and a chance for another whole new start is presented, Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, two of his closest friends, go to the president and say, "Look, Mr. President, we can start again. Do not have any slavery in the new territory. Don't bring any slaves into Louisiana. Don't unload anyone at New Orleans. That has to stop. Go and get some good thrifty German immigrants and settlers. Get them settled on the land, and allow freed slaves from other states to come and be given land grants in Louisiana. We can start again."

Jefferson said no, because he was afraid of what had happened in Haiti. He was afraid of the Haitian Revolution. Which, again, negates his general support for revolutionary activity. If it wasn't for the Haitian Revolution there wouldn't be the United States, because if it wasn't for the Haitian Revolution, to which we are in an unacknowledged debt, if it wasn't for the heroic slave rebellion of Toussaint Louverture, Napoleon wouldn't have lost his army in the West Indies, wouldn't have gone bankrupt, wouldn't have needed to sell Louisiana. Never forget this. But Jefferson didn't like the idea of a black rebellion. He didn't want to see that spreading to the Carolinas.

The Enlightenment, the discovery of wonderful new techniques, isn't always progressive, it isn't always revolutionary, it isn't always emancipating. Mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin is a wonderful discovery. It really is, but unfortunately it makes cotton a lot more profitable. Cotton is never going to stop being labor-intensive. So there's a wonderful new invention that actually doesn't emancipate people, it rather continues to hold them in slavery.

The cotton interest had dominated to that point, but now the sugar interest takes over. If the sugar harvest isn't cut and brought in quickly, then the Caribbean islands, still outside the American orbit, they'll dominate the trade instead, so Jefferson decides to capitulate and the chance of a second new start is lost.

Consciously lost, because he had the advice and the pleas of Paine and Barlow not to do it. Because of the enormous size of the Louisiana Purchase, it means it's going to be carving and cloning into new states all the time and has already begun to do so.

It means that by the end of this process -- in other words the vast addition of territory and the huge extension of slavery -- that very soon, in fact pretty nearly by the time of Jefferson's death, it would have been the case that the number of slave states and the number of free states would be approximately equal, a state of affairs which is later echoed in a very momentous speech by Abraham Lincoln who says that he doesn't think the Union can long endure half-slave and half-free.

An admirer of Jefferson has to concede that this was the state of affairs gifted to Mr. Lincoln, passed on to him by Mr. Jefferson. This is a terrible irony for those of us who believe in the American ideal.

Jefferson is fascinating while still paradoxical, and I believe that he illustrates that history is not a morality tale but a tragedy.

Q&A

Q:  I recently heard that in the Declaration, the first line, Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and unalterable," and then, Franklin revised it to say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Jefferson's original formulation doesn't sound as enlightened as Franklin's. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that. Words are symbolic of their underlying experiences, so I think it's a distinction with a difference. Initially, it had "sacred and unalterable" and now it says "self-evident."

A:  You're quite right. Though "sacred" doesn't necessarily have to have a secular meaning, you're certainly right to the best of my knowledge. I have a feeling it's in Jerry Weinberger's excellent new book on Benjamin Franklin, but anyway, the term "self-evident" is his. Remember, this is quite an impressive drafting committee they've got there. They have Franklin and Jefferson and several other gifted people, but they also have the collected works of John Locke, which if you look at and then compare with the final document, it's an extraordinarily deft bit of plagiarism.

Word for word almost is the bit, for example, which says that people likely often will put up with a tremendous amount of oppression and inconvenience if they see no other way of living. You can load them with more and more taxes and chains, and so forth, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, and so forth, culminates, then they'll rebel. That's almost word for word from Locke's Treatise on Civil Government.

If Franklin had been the chief drafter instead of just one of the committee, there might even have been a joke in the Declaration, but with Jefferson you could be absolutely sure there would not be. One of the sad things about writing about him is to discover that, really, he had no sense of humor at all. The proof of this is that he thought Tristram Shandy was a hilarious book and would read it aloud to his wife and have her, Martha, Sally's half-sister, read it to him on the long winter evenings. You just have to picture that for a laugh fest.

Q:  Aside from your birthday on July 4th, what was the primary interest or stimulus for you to tackle or study and then write about Jefferson?

A:  Jefferson isn't born on the Fourth of July and neither am I, so I may have run those two things together. In fact, though I was born April 13th and so was he, he was actually born on April 20 something, he was born under the old calendar, I often wonder what the astrologists did, the horoscope artists did whenever one had to shift over a zodiac or two, so Jefferson would have stayed on Aries, I think. On his tombstone it gives both dates.

Why was I interested in him? I would never have dared propose writing a book about him, I don't think, but when I was approached and asked to do so, I thought, yes, almost immediately, because everything one writes about America is in some way writing about Jefferson.

As I say, Washington's is a necessary presidency to study. There are several others' I'd say were necessary, obviously Lincoln, certainly Roosevelt. These are quite short intervals of time. Jefferson's right there from the beginning.

The Declaration, prior to that the preparation for the revolution, the committees of correspondence, the final appeal to King George, the Vindication of the Rights of North Americans. Then Paris, where he helps to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man, first time ever such declarations have been made in French soil and it becomes a universal declaration. Then secretary of state, then vice president, then the Alien and Sedition Acts contest, all of this, then the war with the Barbary States.

The attempt to use international sanctions for the first time ever as a means of preventing war, the reason why his second term is such a disappointment, because he thinks that the economic warfare argument, that the boycott, the embargo, will bring an end to the war between Britain and France and the constant raids on American shipping.

I actually do think if it had been given a bit more time, it might have worked. It's the first time anyone's tried that, let alone as a super power.

Then in retirement, writing more papers than most people could read in their lifetime, designing a wonderful library, helping out the Library of Congress after the burning of 1812, the University of Virginia, and The Jefferson Bible which I recommend that everyone should get hold of a copy of. I think the Unitarian Church has published a good edition edited by Forrest Church. Jefferson took the Bible in one hand and a pair of scissors...no, a razor blade in the other and cut out all the bits that were mad or immoral or mythical or self-contradictory or otherwise wicked or absurd, leaving him with, as you can imagine, an extremely short book but quite terse. This was his contribution to enlightenment. He didn't dare publish it in his lifetime, but that was just one of his retirement jobs and he could do it in all the relevant languages as well, it's a parallel text. That's why I wanted to write about him.

Q:  I'm wondering if another reason for your writing this might have something to do with past being prologued for the future. I heard you say that Jefferson was in favor of exporting democracy through violence, starting a preemptive war overseas without consulting Congress, his attitude towards religion. These strike me as vaguely familiar concepts today. I'm wondering what you think Jefferson's attitude might be towards the current political frame of mind.

A:  I'm glad I didn't trail that coat in vain. The thing about it is, as you know, this past as prologue stuff is all very well, but it's very difficult to ask what anyone would do much beyond their own lifetime.

I wrote a book about George Orwell once, he died in 1951. I said, from what he wrote about and the topics he'd written on, I disagreed with Mary McCarthy and others who thought he would have supported the Vietnam War if he'd still been alive.

I thought I could prove it because of what he'd written about Indochina and because of what his attitude to empire as well as to communism was. I thought I had a reasonable shot of saying that.

That's only extending matters by a couple of decades, really. What he would have thought much beyond 1984, as it were, is pretty imponderable. With Jefferson, therefore, it's very much harder.

If he was to come back, I think the things that would astonish him would be most of all what we call mixed -- I think it's a silly term -- marriage. In other words, he would be amazed to see how many descendants he and Sally had and where they were living and with whom and how many of them had been living on the white side of the color line.

Since at least the census of 1820, all his children by Sally were registered as white in that headcount, for example. The extent of that would amaze him, as would the present aspect of American womanhood.

There's something amazing about his indifference on this. He never says anything about the rights of women, it doesn't seem to interest him at all. He thought they were great and he thought they were doing perfectly exactly where they were. He would be astounded by American girls, shall we say, the girls these days, and he would be appalled that we had not yet conquered Canada.

"You mean to say that the British flag still flies over North America?" He would say, "Have the young men of America being asleep? Where is their honor, where is their fire? It's a disgraceful state of affairs."

What he would have said about our current difficulty I really don't know. He certainly had had a warning from Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli, in the meeting they had with John Adams in London, of the menace of radical Islam. He'd been told in terms, "The Koran gives us the right to make you slaves or to kill you and we claim it as a religious right on behalf of our Kings." The combination of the two would have been very powerfully nauseating to him, obviously, and so, yes, one can extrapolate to that.

I think you used the term preemptive war. You see, as with Iraq, since there's been fighting going on all this time anyway, never stopped -- it wasn't even really a ceasefire in 1991 -- the word preemptive may be the wrong one. If 1.5 million Europeans and Americans have been enslaved by this country and it's been going on as a regular business, stopping it by a surprise naval attack isn't really preemptive. In fact, you should be impeached if you don't do it.

You have to be able to know who your country's enemies are and deal with them, by force and with brio, and that's what he did. But I know that that spirit is not the current one. He wouldn't have any stomach for that. Many people, in fact, rather as the Greeks used to be so frightened of the Furies that they wouldn't name them, they wouldn't say, "the Furies." They'd say, "the Eumenides," the kindly ones. Call them that, they might make nice. It was under the breath, it's like Voldemort. People now call Mr. Zarqawi an "insurgent," with his plan for an ultimate caliphate based on the pitiless imposition of Taliban law, and with the intention of annexing and overcoming all of its neighbors, and who uses the methods of beheading and torture as sectarian warfare and sabotage of schools and hospitals and even mosques.

Trying to make nice with whom is pointless. They're trying to hope that we don't have to fight these people as they're scared of them. This is contemptible, I don't think I need Jefferson's authority to say that.

Q:  Could you elaborate on your knowledge of his poetry writing, when he started and over his lifetime? Jefferson poetry?

A:  I don't know any Jefferson poetry. I know that he had a great command of it. He'd be able to quote a lot of it from Latin and Greek as well, but if he wrote any, I feel lamentably ignorant of the fact. He doesn't seem to me to be the poetic type, I have to say.

There is a ghastly little sample of verse, very near the end of his life. I think it's in verse. It's a sort of very sickly thing about his dead children being angels or...I can't even bear to think about it actually. It's written to try and cheer up his younger daughter about her dead sisters. It's the product of a weak moment. Sorry I can't be of any more help.

Q:  Just curious about what happened to those 1.5 million people that ended up in North Africa. Did they blend in with the population, are some of them still enslaved? We know what happened to the blacks here in this country, what happened to whites that ended up there?

A:  There are a number of memoirs of them, because some escaped. Unlike those Africans who were unlucky enough to be taken into the middle passage and then to America -- dying in huge numbers on the way and never seeing Africa again -- these people could be ransomed.

In a town like this at about that time, there would have been at every Sunday service a short talk about what was happening and a request for money to try and redeem or ransom people. It was partly a racket, a protection racket as well. You could pay not to be enslaved, and if you were, you could pay to be ransomed.

Some of them were ransomed and we have extraordinary memoirs of them. Off the top of my head, I should be able to recommend at least one book. There's a book called Captives by a very good English historian called Linda Colley, who's greatly enhanced on knowledge of this period. I think that gives the best account.

Many of them were put to work in the desert and elsewhere and died as slaves, were worked to death. Many died in jail where they were held as possible objects of bargaining and ransom. They were kept in a cellar until someone would raise the money for them. Often they died from the maltreatment there.

Some of them, the young ones, were sold into prostitution, child brothels in the ports along the North Africa coast. That's the story. It's rather I'm afraid as you would expect. There are, I've noticed, quite a lot of very light-skinned people especially in Morocco. It's conceivable that there's a certain amount of that, because there would have been no prohibition of any kind on intermarriage.

Not that there really was in America either. There was at least no prohibition on inter...I won't use the word "racial" because I don't believe our species is subdivided into race, but you know what I mean. Black-white sex was not illegal in anyway, at least not in one direction, if you follow me.

Don't have to draw you a picture, there may have been some of that, too. With many we just don't know, they vanished. They vanished from history, too, until recently.

Q:  None are enslaved today, is that so?

A:  No. There is still slavery in North Africa as before. It's almost always licensed by the Koran. There's some in Chad, there's a good deal in Sudan, of course. I'm sure it's not still legal in Morocco or Algeria or Libya or Tunisia, no, but in the Saharan Belt there's more than just people trafficking. There's actually indentured slavery, yes.

Those people would be the descendants of the same profiteers. We know the names of the people who became rich in West Africa by selling their kinsmen. We know what the family fortunes are in West Africa in a lot of cases and in particular the case of Hisab Benin, for example.

If the reparations argument which some people want to reopen -- which I consider a very interesting argument -- is ever reopened, the question of who should be paid will be very hard but possible to decide. But who should pay would be interesting, too, we would know in some cases which African potentates and which great fortunes should be made to cough up some conscience money.

I say bring it on because it's very educational. Unless I'm mistaken, most people in this room don't know this already. My general experience is people don't, it's true and it's worth knowing. I think it would instruct our children in what the past of all this was.

Q:  I'm curious to hear your views on the thing that was probably the most popular thing that Jefferson did in his lifetime, and in retrospect still doesn't seem like a terribly great idea, and that was his embargoes.

A:  I did mention embargoes a bit, saying it was the first time that anyone tried to use economic diplomacy instead of warfare as a composition of a dispute. The problem with it really is that the United States has a coastline and a border that's far too long -- at least did then, including with the awful fact of Canada that Jefferson resented so much.

If you're in upstate Vermont, and someone comes around from the excise office and says, "You can't trade this way anymore because the president wants to give a peace agreement between Britain and France and the United States." They're going to say, "Well, I'm just waiting till you leave." It's not popular at all.

Jefferson thought, "Okay, that will happen, of course." If you will resent it, which they really did, especially along this coast, the Maryland coast, he thought, "No, never mind, it will have a long run effect." People will start going for what we would now call import substitution.

Instead of importing things, they'll start to try and manufacture them for themselves. There was in fact quite a lot of import substitution done. People did begin to invest in the idea of making it in America instead of importing it. The argument still goes on, of course, but in the end the Congress just lost patience. It was too unpopular, and we'll never know if it would have worked.

The French, the Bonapartist side, was weakening at that point considerably. Paine and Jefferson also discussed setting up something like United Nations, an international confederation to put down things like piracy, but also to avoid war, to mutually reduce the size of navies to avoid wasteful competition, and to try and open up Spanish America by getting Spain to loosen its hold on the Southern Cone. That didn't come to anything in their lifetimes, either.

Q:  What do you think Jefferson would think about the Iraq adventure that we're in now?

A:  Let me see. I'll have to submit myself to the safekeeping of others in the audience. Would you, ladies and gentlemen, not say I had already answered that question?

Audience:  Yes.

A:  I'm relieved. Sir, pay attention in the back. [laughter]

Q:  Did anything surprise you in doing your research writing this book about Jefferson? Any surprises?

A:  Yes. I thought I knew about the Sally Hemings relationship as more or less everybody now does. There's a small group that says that the DNA evidence isn't completely conclusive because it could have been another male Jefferson at around the same time around the same place.

That may not even be technically true, but if it is I don't think that it can possibly cancel the argument that my friend Annette Gordon-Reed made in her brilliant book which I strongly recommend. It's just called Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Story.

She did all this work before the DNA test was run. When you know that Sally was not just his property but his wife's half-sister, in other words, Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson had the same father, and grandfather, both of them English. That she was a privileged house servant who was in the room when Martha died and heard Jefferson say to his wife...he promised he'd never marry again. That they meet on French soil where slavery is illegal and though he doesn't need any extra staff at the American Embassy, he asked if she'd like to stay and perhaps join his staff.

Then his letters show expenses for clothing for her and for a separate place for her to live. I don't think I need to draw you one of those pictures I keep mentioning. The critical thing to know, and that Annette discovers so brilliantly, is when Jefferson's little daughter died, he couldn't stand it. There had been so much death, he said he must have the remaining one brought to him in Paris, where the older one already was.

He said, "You must send her over. I can't bear it any more of this. I want to have them with me." He sends this to his cousins, the Eppeses. He says, "You might send old misses," and he mentioned some old slave woman who's a stout, respectful person, "to bring the child across." While the letter is in transit, he doesn't know that older woman has become pregnant again. She can't make the trip.

Without consulting him, his cousins say, "Well, the only girl we can think of on the strength, the only slave we've got who could do it who's smart and bright and reliable and so on is Sally. We'll give the child to Sally and they'll cross together."

Jefferson meets them, not knowing who is going to be escorting his daughter. The plan had been for the other slave woman to go home on the next boat after delivering his daughter. He doesn't let Sally Hemings go home. He asks her to stay. Though I defend him to the last ditch as a secularist, here's what I think. I think that when he saw Sally getting off that boat, he thought, "Oh, maybe there is a God after all." That's what I think he said. It couldn't really be any plainer.

None of this really though was a surprise. I felt I knew all that, but what I realized as I went through it, and with the help of Annette Gordon-Reed and her extraordinary scholarship on this, is that we're accustomed to argue it like this, "Would Jefferson have done this? Could he have done it?" All that. Partly with the rather woeful implication that he wouldn't have lowered himself with either a black person or a slave, depending on what adjective to Jefferson you take. Would it have been, as it were, beneath him?

Garry Wills, a historian I normally admire and have learned a lot from, makes the outrageous suggestion that Sally Hemings was a prostitute, that she would sleep with anyone on the estate for money, for which there's no evidence at all.

There's nothing to support such an opprobrious charge. But what if, as Annette proposes, what if Sally Hemings had a say in this? What if she thought, "Here I am in Paris. He's asked me to stay. Slavery isn't legal here. My brother's here working as a cook, being taught to do French dishes. It's a lot nicer than a mountaintop in Albemarle County, Virginia. The guy's obviously under pressure. He's a widower, but he's still, as it were, a man. I could do worse, it's an upgrade." What she may well have said to him is, "Okay. But if I have any children, they're not going to be slaves, Mr. Jefferson, sir."

That seems to be what the bargain was, because all her children were freed, his children by her were free, and so was she. And no other slaves were. In law, you may not say that acting as if you've made a bargain proves that you made one, but you can adduce it as evidence that a bargain was made.

If you look at it like that and if you image her as a partner in it -- which I think it's only fair to do, since she was obviously a very smart and tough and brave girl -- then you think, and this is what I propose in my book, why not consider her not as a buried scandal or as an object of shame or disgust, but as one of America's founding mothers?

Now buried under the Hampton Inn, I think it is, or a Ramada Inn in Charlottesville, under its parking lot. Maybe we could do something about that.

In closing, Lucian Truscott III, who's a direct descendant through the Coolidge family of Thomas Jefferson, a senior member of the Jefferson Family Association, which meets every year at Monticello, he refuses now to go to any more of the family reunion events because they won't allow Sally's children to be buried in the family graveyard on the mountainside.

They still won't. But he has produced, with Annette's help, a wonderful book of photographs of all of the descendants all around the country, several dozen of them that we can trace. That's the perfect refutation, that book, of Jefferson's belief that if the slaves should be freed, they'd have to depart from the United States once they are free. They couldn't stay on once they've been freed. There couldn't be free black people living in the United States. It's the perfect refutation in practice of the pessimism that poisoned his life, that's such a blot on his record.

Sorry for a long answer, but a lot of that was new to me as I hope and believe it may be to you. I thought it was worth a speculation.

III.

George Orwell

I want to invite you to close your eyes and pretend you haven't had George Orwell as a subject before. Just have a picture in your heads. Perhaps, some of you have seen pictures of the author, a slightly tall, angular, shy but not unconfident Englishman with a hollow-cheek look. A rather dolorous look in some ways, or a solemn look, but yet it's not the look of someone with no sense of humor. It's the look of someone who's been through quite a lot and has tried his best. There is a final element of pessimism to it as well, and some of that hard to understand handsomeness for which we English people are so, I think, rightly famed. It's an ironic look, actually. It's the look of someone who has suffered a great deal.

I want to begin by proposing it in this manner. There were three great subjects in the century that's just closed with rather a big slam of the door behind us, the 20th century. There were three great dramas, great crises, great moral and intellectual and ideological confrontations in that period.

These three questions were:

1. The right of European countries to govern the rest of the world, to govern Africa and Asia and large parts of South America and Australasia as if it was a right, as if it was a birthright.

2. The grand confrontation between democracy and first, national socialism, sometimes called Nazism or fascism. Totalitarian racist, one party, military state concept, organized for war, organized for aggression.

3. Third, the one that ended most recently, the confrontation between the democratic way of life and the communist alternative where the citizen is declared to be the property of the state. The state promises a return for this trade, to make the citizen better off, better educated, better fed, with better healthcare. Eventually, it doesn't keep that promise either, but retains its hold on the citizen as property.

These were the things that preoccupied anyone who could read, or feel, or think in the last century. George Orwell got all of them right, in my judgment. This is, of course, a moral judgment of my own, but I'm willing to back it up.

George Orwell's father was involved in the opium trade from, then British controlled India, to China. In other words, British guns and warships could force Chinese cities to buy, and Chinese waterways to be open to, the compulsory trade in opium made in India and other British possessions. In those days the empire believed in the war for drugs, not the war on drugs. Not that small a difference in some ways. Those days they thought that if you gave people drugs they would keep them quiet, as well as make money for the drug dealers.

In other words, Orwell's family was built on a guilty secret, a dirty secret, a colonial secret, and he, himself, volunteered in his early life to become a policeman in a part of that empire, Burma, now known as Myanmar and living under a stone-age dictatorship.

By the experience of disliking his father, and his father's business, and feeling guilty about the source of the family income, and feeling sick about the job he was doing, he came to a very important conclusion, which is a very modern one, by the way.

In some ways post-colonial studies are founded by George Orwell and his writing. Many of the works now written about the relationship between power, and race, and gender or sex...I'll put it as this bluntly as this: if you were in colonial Burma, the most westernized Burmese man and you'd been to three European universities, and you spoke English better than most English people do, and you had five qualifications, it wouldn't make any difference for you. You would never be allowed to enter the Englishman's Club in Rangoon, in the capital of the country. You'd never be allowed in by the front door.

You might possibly be allowed in on special occasions as a guest, but you'd never get in there. In your own country you would be considered alien because you weren't born there. That would be a good definition of racism.

However, if you were the least educated, and the least empowered, and the least literate Burmese woman, you could go into any Englishman's villa any time you'd like, as long as it was by the back door, and as long as it was a money relationship.

In fact, in Orwell's first novel Burmese Dayshe writes about a policeman, who is clearly based on himself, who has a live-in mistress and servant, who he has quite clearly bought from her family. He's not even renting her, he's bought her. She's in effect a slave. It's my strong opinion, having studied this man's life and writing, that he threw up the job. We don't know why, he never said, he just resigned as a policeman, and resigned from the colonial service and came home.

I think that he was very afraid that he would become part of the dirty secret himself, that he would either become a racist, or a sadist, or both, by being in this situation and wanted to repudiate this in himself.

By the way, I think that's an important point in on its own, because many of you know what, as it were, the right opinion it is to have on something, or what the liberal, or decent view is to take on a topic and would shudder from anyone who was a bigot, and so you should.

A lot of work went into creating a society where that choice was a fairly easy one to make, but that wasn't the case with George Orwell at the time when assumptions of this kind were very common.

The critical thing about it is that he didn't face this prejudice in other people. He wasn't a liberal humanitarian facing down policemen in Selma, Alabama who had hoses and dogs on their side. He was facing that policeman in himself. He was wondering what it would be like to be that person and decided he'd have to vanquish it within his own personality.

That, I submit, is often the harder of the struggles to undertake and it's worth remembering how tough that used to be. At any rate, he was then still quite young, he had never been to university, he'd never had any money, never had a safe or steady job.

What he knew was that there was a filthy secret at the heart of power and that that secret was, in a sense, a pornographic secret, that some people don't even need the excuse to wield power. They won't even say, "We're doing it for your own good." Or to civilize your colony, or to save you from communism, or to save you from fascism, or to liberate you from capitalism, or anything of this kind. Not even an excuse. "We're in power because we like it. We're in power because we enjoy punishing people. We're in power because we enjoy owning people. We enjoy telling them what they can do. We enjoy telling them when we feel like having sex with them or when we don't. We do this for its own sake."

The pornography element of power is a very important thing to understand. It's very common today among a number of dictators and despots. It's an exercise of sheer cruelty and I think it was a tremendous advantage to Orwell as a writer to have understood this right from the start. Just strip away the hypocrisy that underlies authority.

He'd done all this and come back to England, and decided to go out to be a tramp and then to take the dirtiest jobs he could find, and pretend to be someone who was going to be arrested for drunkenness, or thrown in the cells for a few nights, or sleeping in the dosshouses, or hanging around among the unemployed. He went native, as we used to say, as if he was in a colony, but in his own country.

He'd done all this by the '30s. The great political decade of the century had got underway, so that when the grand confrontation about democracy, communism, Stalinism, fascism, Nazism hit, not just Europe but the world, he was ready for it in a way. He knew what the subtexts were and I believe that that helped him to be prescient.

It's an interesting thing about Orwell. He went to fight against fascism in Spain, against the assault of Hitler and Mussolini on the democratically chosen republican Spanish government in 1936. He went to fight more early than most people did. He felt it evident to himself that he had to put his own body in the way.

He had to become a solider again, and a policeman again, in a sense. A fighter, a disciplinarian again, and he tried to organize a resistance. He saw this coming more quickly than many did.

You can read him exhaustively, as I have done. I can now claim to have read every word he's written. He hardly writes anything about fascism at all. He hardly writes a single essay saying why you should be against it. He takes it for granted that when you look down the gun barrel of Hitler and Mussolini, and Franco and fascism, and Nazism that you don't need to be told what's wrong with it, that here is everything you hate.

Here is every bullying father, every crushed, repressed mother, every sadistic prison warden, every exploiting capitalist, every racist and Jew-baiter, every thug, and bully, and sadist, and exploiter there has ever been all rolled into one and then refined, and double distilled, and redone again, so you've got the absolutely pure essence of everything that's hateful.

I've heard people sneer at the use of the word 'evil' about politicians. Politicians probably want you to be suspect about the use of this word. But it's not possible to do without this word if you want to write morally or you want to write critically or you want to historically. Certain words are necessary. We can't do without it. Indeed, even the most delicate liberal these days will talk about the 'lesser evil' which, shall I say, is it least a concession to the use of the word. We can't take it out of our vocabulary.

Orwell was looking it straight in the eye. He took a bullet through the throat in Spain from the fascist side. He nearly got a bullet in the back from the communist side.

Before I get to that bit I just must tell you, in case I'm sounding too solemn, that the bullet that went through his throat from the fascist sniper missed his larynx. It missed his carotid artery. It missed his spinal cord and it just grazed his vocal cords so that from then on he always spoke with a slight rasp in his voice.

He had to go to hospital because when a bullet goes into your neck on one side and goes out through the other, it means you have lie down for a bit. Everyone who came to see him knew that the bullet had gone right through him. It had missed his larynx. It had missed his carotid artery. It had missed his spinal cord and only grazed his vocal cords.

All of them said the same thing. Can you guess what it was? "That was lucky." He said, "If I was lucky I wouldn't have gotten shot in the throat at all."

I should add, I should make it plain throughout all this, George Orwell had no belief in any kind of supernatural salvation of any sort. He thought that this was the only world we had and we better make it the best we could.

Actually he said that the great problem of civilization and culture will be what to do about language and morality and ethics. What to do when religion is dead. What to do when we know it's failed. What to do in the post-religious society.

That wasn't the least of his presciences in my view. I was going on to mention the bullet he nearly got in the back. At the time when this tremendous menace of fascism, this sadistic, pornographic evil was assaulting civilization, there were a very large number of intellectuals and aesthetes. Those are not always the same thing. Artists and writers and intellectuals and painters, and they're not all to be grouped together as they sometimes are.

Some painters have no idea what the hell is going. Some have a better idea than many intellectuals do. Some intellectuals could probably make good painters though they don't make very good thinkers.

There was a wide spread view among the anti-fascist, artistic crowd, if you like, that this was not a question that had no answer because there was already on the other side of the Ural Mountains an ideal socialist society that would outlive Orwell's imperialism, the imperialism he didn't like. It would defeat that. That it would outlive the capitalism that Orwell didn't like when he went among the poor and the downtrodden of England and France. That it would defeat fascism by definition. This artistic crowd believed that under the leadership of Comrade Stalin a new world had been created in the east, and that all questions would be answered and no contradictions would exist anymore. That exploitation of man by man would cease. That this was not just a potential thing, but an actual thing. This utopia was already present and it was the job of all decent, progressive people to fight for it.

This might well open an argument between me and some of you. I think probably that Orwell's greatest achievement was to have been brave enough to say that it would be nice to think this, especially faced as we are with this deadly foe. But what the communists think is not just a deadly illusion -- in other words a romantic but wrong idea -- it is a poisonous delusion. It is a parody of reality. It is negation of reality and it will end up being evil in itself.

That took a lot of guts in those days. You must always think about thinkers and writers in the context in which they had to operate. Most of the people with whom Orwell had to circulate at least half-believed some of that about Soviet Russia. It's for this reason that he always had a hard time getting his articles published, his speeches heard or even his books in print. But I think I would nominate his novels to be his greatest achievements. One of which I know some of you have read. One of which I suspect some of you have been told to read. Never mind, it's better than not reading it at all. I assure you that you'll keep on hearing about as long as you continue to breathe and argue; the novel 1984 and its partner novel Animal Farm. Orwell thought both of these works as total failures. He wrote them when he was very ill. 1984 he wrote when he was dying of tuberculosis. But it is in these two novels that he exposed, once and for all time, the idea of the Stalinist utopia; that is, the idea that if the citizen will give up his or her freedom for security, and if he gives to the state his right to decide or her right to decide, if all that's given to the state and they are granted power, then they will take care of his or her other needs.

Orwell said this bargain is fatal. You will end up with neither freedom nor security. You'll end up with neither freedom nor food, neither freedom nor bread. You'll end up being starved and bullied and told you're being well fed and you will not dare to point out the discrepancy between reality and the promise because the party says the promise is the reality. Don't you dare go saying that you've confused the two. It's more than your life is worth.

He wrote this in such a way that I know I don't have to tell those of you who've read it, as to make it almost terrifying. Indeed, I still meet people younger than myself to whom 1984 is a date in their own past, who find the book frightening because it is designed to foreclose hope entirely. At the end of the book there is nothing left to live for.

The citizen is so much the property of the state that they are disposable. They're smashed. Their personality is emptied. Their emotions and their fears, even their sex lives are considered open, available and contemptible by a party that runs everything.

His hope, I think, was to make this so frightening that it would mobilize people to resist it but it certainly had the effect on some, I fear, of making them feel there's nothing worth fighting for or that resistance is futile. I don't know quite how to answer that question. I think I should leave it open to you.

How did Orwell do this? What I've sketched may seem like a lot to say about one individual. Of course, the last thing he would have wanted would have been to become a plaster saint figure or an object of hagiography. In fact I'm absolutely certain that had he survived, the thing that most surprised him posthumously would have been success and his fame.

As I began by saying, he died young. Let me put it like this, he only made it just into the second half of the 20th century. He died in early 1950, at the age of 46. He only just made it into the second half of the last century. That must seem to a lot of you as it does to me. I was born in 1949, quite a long time ago. In fact we are about as near to him as he was to Charles Dickens, about whom by the way he wrote very well. That's the leap of reverse memory you have to make.

He's still very modern to us. He writes about things we know. He writes about machinery, about modern tyranny, about modern warfare, about modern fear and threat, about psychiatry. How did he manage to do this having died as he did, of a disease that is practically Dickensian? He died of poverty, in fact. He died of tuberculosis which is a disease that we now think of as third-world.

He died of the poverty of his country and his own life and he died of a lack of available medicine. There was a treatment in the United States available for him, but he didn't know how to get it and probably couldn't have afforded it.

He died a Dickensian death. He died the death that some of you who have the romantic dream of being writers, which I hope you never give up, may have imagined for yourself: in the garret with no money, but with the beautiful work just in the bottom drawer for someone to find.

Don't give up that dream by the way, if you have it. If any of you have ever thought of taking up the craft of writing as a dissident, as an oppositionist, the life that I've just been trying to describe is an exemplary one and will repay your study.

How did he manage this? How did he manage this extraordinary achievement of being right when everyone else was wrong?

I think in two ways. One, by life experience. He did know that power was not its own justification. That authority didn't come from God and didn't come from tradition. It came from people who wanted power. He understood that and he felt that he should never stop criticizing them and exposing them. That's the first thing.

Second, he realized that often this trick is masked in language. If you only read one essay of his, you must read the one that's called Poetics in the English Language in which he exposes the fraud of euphemism; how it is used to mask brutal reality.

If I was to give you an example now I suppose I would say, to take the most recent, most obvious one, I don't think now that any member of any American administration would use the words "collateral damage" again to describe what it does describe. Civilian casualties. Those of you who know that expression or who've known how to see through it have done, in your way, an Orwellian job, and you, probably without knowing it, owe it to Orwell, this capacity that you have.

That's the trick, in effect. You find a nice name for a nasty thing and you get it spread around by making it seem technical or technological. If I could summarize it in one sentence that would be it. Orwell was on to that. He knew every time that the Stalin regime said, "Well, in extraordinary times extraordinary measures must be taken." Orwell realized that meant mass graves. He knew without being told, by reading their own propaganda, that whatever the truth was, the propaganda was lying about it and it was using nice words for disgraceful things.

This is a trick that should never desert you. You can all do it for yourself. There's no reason not to do it. Interrogate what you read and what you're given in that spirit and you'll find it all the time. It's remarkable to me in fact that he was able to do this and to be considered exceptional for it and for him to stick to it.

So Orwell did therefore understand how great, noble ideas can turn into their opposite and thus that in 1984, freedom is slavery and war is peace. People live with the blatant negation because they believe in the party or the authority or the dictator who claimed it in the first place. They didn't have the nerve to doubt it because if they were wrong, if they had themselves been fooled, then what would it make them?

I'll end by just saying this. Power is only what you allow it to be.

Very many people put up with political lying and political illusions and political propaganda because if they were to denounce it they would have to admit that for many decades they had themselves been fooled, that they had been taken for granted, that they had allowed themselves to be deceived.

The conman's work is always done for him by the victim. The victim doesn't want to go to the police and say, "I've been conned. I was so stupid that I did this." They don't wish to admit it.

In a subtle and deadly way the dictator can dirty enough people up to make them more complicit in his rule. They can make them the tortured, yet willing, masochistic, a complicit element in his own sadistic mania.

What you can't necessarily do about power or about authority, you can do for yourselves and your fellow readers and fellow students and fellow citizens. You can resolve to not be a citizen like that. You can resolve not to do the work of power for it. You can resolve not to let lies be told in your hearing. You can resolve not to use sloppy language that is euphemism.

Then I think I'll leave it at this. You'll realize that the reading of Orwell is not an exercise in projecting blame on others. It is an exercise in accepting a responsibility for yourself or for yourselves. It's for that reason that he'll always be honored and also that he'll always be hated. I think he wouldn't have had it any other way. As a chronicler of his, neither would I.

Q&A

Q:  What do you mean by the phrase "He died a Dickensian death?"

A:  Well. I'm sorry, I maybe slurred that. I think his death was Dickensian and it's touching in a way for someone who wrote so much about the Victorian London of Dickens.

He died of poverty and tuberculosis years before he needed to, and of overwork. That's how Dickens' characters often check out. In the debtor's prison, of a chill. I'm sorry if I garbled that. You are very polite to go on listening after that.

Q:  Why do you think they directed criticism only against Stalin in Russia and not against Hitler's regime in Germany? Or did I misunderstand that?

A:  Did everyone hear the question? I was asked to say why Orwell directed his criticism only at Stalin's Russia and not at Hitler's Germany. Then the gentleman did save me slightly by saying or had he misunderstood me. I put myself in your safe keeping, ladies and gentlemen. Did I imply that he had no criticism of Hitlerism? Did you think that, too?

Q: You said that the criticism was taken granted.

A:  That's more like it. Or are you too polite? That's the problem with this country, everyone is too polite. Too courteous to visit us. You might have thought I hadn't made this point. You might leave me wondering if I was that inarticulate. That's not polite, that's cruel. That's not courtesy at all. It's an abuse of hospitality.

What I did say sir, and I apologize if I phrased it so poorly, was that if you look in Orwell's writing for direct attack on Hitlerism, you won't really find it. He hardly mentions it in his writing except to assume that anyone of average emotional health regards it as he does, as something evil to be destroyed. He doesn't feel the case needs to be made.

I had been reading him for years before I noticed there is no Orwell essay against fascism. There isn't one. All he did was take a rifle and go and see if he could stop it physically. It was more like a vermin control point than an ideological one.

Whereas with communism you had to argue against the illusions of civilized people who thought that there might be a higher synthesis, a better society available by following the lead of a one-party initiative. That did take guts and nerve.

I really hope I haven't left anyone in any doubt on that point because I would be awfully sorry to do so. Now I have the judgment of Paris. I don't know who to choose. Sir?

Q:  Was it a problem with Stalinist communism or Marxism?

A:  The gentleman asked if it was a problem with Stalinist communism or Marxism. I claim in my book to be the first person to point out something that, again, I should have noticed years before I did.

If you've read Animal Farm... By the way could I have an idea of a show of hands of those who have read it? OK, that's great. Then you know the allegory. You may know something of the history of the Russian revolution.

Whatever view you take of the Russian revolution, it's inspired by Karl Marx who is very easily recognized as the dying old major who makes the prophecy that one day the animals will throw off the yoke.

Then there is a revolution that is led by two pigs. There's a revolution in which Lenin, Trotsky, and to a much lesser extent Stalin take part. This revolution vanquishes the tsarists and foreign intervention from the West at some cost.

It dissolves into fratricide and the toughest, nastiest pig takes over. That is Napoleon Pig, who vanquishes Snowball Pig. That's two pigs, Lenin and Trotsky, or Stalin and Trotsky if you like. Either Lenin or Stalin.

You can't do this trick with two pigs. You need three. There's a question in my mind about this which goes directly to yours. Many people on the left in Orwell's day and now, think that Leninism was one thing and Stalinism was another. Lenin wanted a revolution and was not gentle about it, but was not a tyrant. Stalinism took over this revolution and disfigured, destroyed, negated it.

Many conservatives to this day think, "No, no. It's the same thing. Leninism and Stalinism are the same." It's not completely possible to tell which Orwell thought. In my opinion, the way he writes about it is as if to suggest that Snowball was right. That Trotsky was right.

And that there had been an initial revolution that was worth fighting for, it was worth defending, and that had been betrayed. I say that for several reasons as well as for the novel itself, with its imperfect allegory.

One, he's fought in Spain with a group that was, roughly speaking, Trotskyist. It had a communist-Marxist position against fascism but didn't support Stalin. He risked his life for it.

The second is that the book within the book in 1984, the secret book that O'Brien purports to give to Smith The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, its author's name is given as Emmanuel Goldstein. That text and that author, it is very clear to me, I know, you can check it yourself, are a direct lift from Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky.

That is Orwell's version of that book and that author. I think Orwell was not one of those who thought that Marxism and Stalinism were the same. In fact, very much to the contrary. That was a gesture. A polite one I hope in that case. A welcoming one. Sir?

Q:  I'm wondering if you might discuss what appear to be some contradictions in respect to the argument made about universal jurisdiction in the trial of Henry Kissinger and your public statements about the war in Iraq.

A:  I'm going to put this to your arbitration as well as mine. The gentleman wants to ask me about some contradictions in my own position about universal jurisdiction as it applies to Henry Kissinger and also my view about the war in Mesopotamia, which I'm quite happy to do either now or afterward. I do think you'll think I'm avoiding your question. I hope you won't. If I say that I'd rather be sure there are no more Orwell questions left before I do that because I am just as happy to talk about myself. Trust me. There may be some people who want to exhaust the Blair question. Sir?

Q:  [question about 1984's application to modern America]

A: The gentlemen says that viewing the present circumstances, the convergence of business into monopoly and the fusion of that with state power and with warfare, he wonders if the 1984 analogy doesn't apply as well to our own system. Would that be a fair summation?

You asked me about Orwell, and not just my opinion, I hope. I'll give my own, of course, if you want. There's no question that Orwell wrote 1984in the way that he did in order to say what he feared would happen if there was a permanent three-way cold war, where there were only three super powers in the world.

They could all coerce their own populations by keeping them in a state of constant readiness and conscription and rationing and fear of bombardments from others. Which, if they weren't real, could be faked. And that these alliances could shift. They could be fighting another enemy but the internal coercion would be the same.

There is no question that is what he thought would happen once the possibility of both dictatorship and nuclear weaponry were brought together. He wrote a brilliant piece called You and the Atom Bomb--it's well worth looking up-- in about 1946. In it, Orwell says that the prospect of nuclear power meant the danger of an existing dictatorship becoming permanent and unassailable was greater than at any time since the middle ages.

This was far greater than the threat of anarchy would be. He put all of that into the book and there's no question that's what it's supposed to be based on. The nuclear point being very important by the way, I think.

Because the world in 1984, which is the devastated burned out England that would be part of the United States, the Oceanic Empire, after nuclear war. It's very specifically after atom bombs have exploded, it's very clearly what it is.

You're right in saying that Orwell had this theory, which was borrowed partly from James Burnham and other writers, of a state of the world being governed by three cynical empires who play each other off against the other. Were you asking me if I thought that described the present situation? Not in the least, no, in my opinion.

It did for a while describe the Cold War quite well. It was possible, for example, for the United States to make an ally of China having originally been willing to fight a nuclear war against it. Because China there was more totalitarian, it still is, than the Soviet Union. It was willing to look at things more in the American way, for its own reasons.

Shifts of both allegiance of that kind did take place as long as it was, roughly speaking, possible for the great power leaderships themselves to control events.

Just to anticipate this gentleman's question, when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, he was able to pull of a unique double. As far as I know, no one else has ever done this while Secretary of State. To be soft of fascism and soft on communism at the same time. Extraordinary.

He was always groveling to Mao Zedong and bargaining with him. And always groveling and bargaining with Brezhnev in Moscow. And every now and then stomping on the Chileans or the East Timoris or the Cambodians or people who couldn't hit back. Remarkable. It still is the case, actually. Most of the business he does is with communist China when it's not with corporations doing business in Chile.

This is in a more plural world. The world we're faced with now is a different kind of totalitarian threat altogether. One that is part state and part insurgent. It has an old name "jihad," holy war. Its methods are populistic or guerrilla-like, but its aim is the restoration of an empire that is gone, the Ottoman caliphate. Which was an empire of religion.

An empire based on monotheism is by definition totalitarianism because as Orwell was very quick to realize, the origin of worship, the origin of the need of people--this is what I was cautioning you against-- don't worry, there will always be people who want to have the will to power. What you have to worry about is how many of you have the will to obey? How many of you want to be taken care of and looked after? How many of you want to be part of a servile system where you trade your freedom for security? That's the danger.

The religious dictatorship promises all that and an extra life on top. With sometimes, depending on which monotheism it happens to be, virgins thrown in. I think virgins are overrated myself, both among men and among women. But I don't think that the Islamic fanatics have read the Jewish commentary on this which says that with every virgin comes a mother-in-law.

That's about the only joke you can make about this kind of thing. You are up against something that is deeply subversive and nihilistic but also fantastically authoritarian. It wishes to have state power, wishes to have absolute power over you in your private and public life. It's the most totalitarian threat you could face.

It deals in the most nihilistic methods in order to achieve its end. And of course, it is self-destructive. It will, of course, fail. It will, of course, destroy itself. It will, of course, destroy the religion and the Muslim society that it purports to uphold.

Of course, this is all axiomatic, we've known it forever. All jihads have always failed for this reason. To compare that with Halliburton, as you implied, is frivolous, quite frivolous, purely frivolous. Drop it, you'll feel better.

A:  Ma'am? There are a lot of people making vague gestures at me in that case. I thought this didn't happen in this part of Illinois. Bring it on.

Q:  [question to clarify Orwell, Trotsky, and anarchism]

A:  Well, if you don't mind a correction rather than a clarification, it would simply be wrong to say that Trotsky was an anarchist. That would not be the case. He was a Bolshevik. Possibly not until the day he died, but until about the last day he wrote anything he regarded himself as a Marxist and a Leninist and as the rival of Stalin for that role.

I think he had a very libertarian streak in his personality, it shows in his writing and in his attitude to literature and many other fine things about him. But no, neither his best friend nor his worst enemy would say that he was an anarchist.

Of Orwell, it could be said that he was critical of all state systems, yes. At least at the point when he died, Orwell's ideal would have been the British socialist welfare state of the post-war period which he thought managed to combine a great deal of the equality and fairness and redistribution with a great deal of personal liberty. At that point, he was probably right.

They probably hadn't been combined better in any European society before. There are still many people in England who are nostalgic for it even though there are very few who would now think of that as a model. That's what I mean by him being poised between our past and our future.

Does that answer it? You're looking quizzical at me which I don't blame you for, I blame myself for.

Q:  [off-mic question]

A:  No, you would have to make that four. Yes. Look, I'll tell you the best book to read on this, if you like. There is a book by Felix Morrow called Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain. Actually that's the second best book. The best book is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell which, can I take it that you've read? No.

Well, there would be four forces. There were those who supported the Franco rebellion against the Republic which actually were themselves made up of several forces, the Catholic Church, the Nazis, the Monarchists and some others.

Then, opposing this were several forces, the Catalan and Basque nationalists, the Spanish Socialist Party, the Spanish Communist Party, the Spanish anarchists who were very strong in Catalonia and the Spanish Trotskyists, the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, as they were known.

The POUM, with whom Orwell fought, whose militia he actually joined in the Lenin barracks in Barcelona, of which there are photographs.

By the way, it's a brilliantly interesting story and many people think that Homage to Catalonia is the best book ever written by a foreign correspondent. I still meet people when I go to Afghanistan or Bosnia or Kazakhstan, people who are starting off in life and want to write about warfare or war and revolution. Men and women and some photographers as well as writers, but almost invariably one of the books that made them want to do this is Homage to Catalonia. It's a fantastically good book, and it would clear up your misunderstanding about the anarchists.

Q:  [question about the Patriot Act]

A:  Well, some of it's overdue, and some of it's unnecessary. Oh, the gentleman wants to know what I think about the Patriot Act. We are done with Orwell? I guess I'd be getting to the point where people think I was avoiding the question if I went on saying this. I won't have that.

I'll be quick on the Patriot Act. The CIA and the FBI could not legally share information on conspiratorial and nihilistic organizations, which was the case until three years ago.

If they had information, they were not legally obliged to share it with the other. In fact, in some cases they were prohibited from doing so because one policed foreign policy and one policed domestic policy.

I don't think, I don't know... maybe I would get an argument here, but I don't think anyone thinks that that shouldn't have been stopped. There needed to be some new law to make that the same policy. Which is in conformity with the idea of a fight against Holy War, because the war started on our soil, not on anyone else's. It's unique in that way.

There were other things that were put into the bill that I know the FBI has been wanting to put into every piece of legislation since the Clinton Anti-Terrorism Death Penalty Act of '95.

For example, why can't we have roving wire taps? We only ask a judge once, and once he's given it once, we can apply it to any phone the guy ever uses, say, or warrantless searches in public housing or things of this kind. They've always wanted that. Looking at library records. There was a big fight in Washington about whether or not to include these on the coattails. Some of these clauses have been grandfathered, so to say. In other words, they have to be voted on again. They're temporary, they're not part of the law yet. They have to be reconfirmed in another Congress. Some were struck down, and some are going to have to been redone. I would only amend the Constitution, which I think is a perfectly good document the way it stands. Which is to say, Congress should make no law within six months of any act of violence because all the worst legislation in our history has always come as a result of panic. You'll generally find there is already enough law to punish people who fly airliners into skyscrapers. It's already illegal.

Q:  [question about how Orwell would view the invasion of Iraq]

A:  I give up on Orwell as to what he might have said about this or that, because he would have been a hundred last year. Until recently it was plausible to guess, because he died so young but wrote so much, what he would have said.

For example, I am practically certain, I can't be absolutely sure, but I've had this argument with many right wingers -- I'm certain that he would have opposed the American war in Vietnam because he'd seen colonialism in Asia up close. He hated it. He knew a lot about it. He knew a lot about the French colonial rule in Indochina. It would have been obvious to him the American war there was a successor to it. He would have been at least critical of that probably earlier than most people were because many people came to the war not knowing that's how it started.

One can, with knowledge of his writing, one can push it to a certain point. I don't know what he would have said about Cuba, but I will say that it's against his theory. His theory is that, no, there is no accidental sudden threat of a thermonuclear war between the great powers. Because that would suggest that they really meant that they really hated each other. They weren't just doing this to stay in power. They weren't just running a Cold War that was about itself. If they were willing to kill everyone on the planet over whether Cuba was Communist or not, that would have to mean they were sincere.

We don't want to make that assumption. Nor, in a way, should we. It shows you how little fanaticism you need to do a great deal of damage.

The Kennedy administration signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that it wouldn't try to invade Cuba again is a matter of record now. They denied it then, but we know it's true.

Part of the stand-down, the emergency stand-down over Cuba was an agreement that the Russians would take their missiles out of Cuba, which they'd been very mad to put in there. In return, or rather without mentioning it in the same breath, it wasn't supposed to be a bargain, but by coincidence the United States would remove its missiles from Turkey which was on the Russian border and would undertake not to try another Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

That promise, as far as I know, still holds, by the way. I think that is still a treaty with Russia, not just with the Soviet Union.

You're right, but you should have left the assassination out of it because it makes you sound weird. Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean that. Could possibly make you sound weird to someone who's only meeting you for the first time.

Q:  [off-mic question]

A:  They have let us find out about, yes. If Kennedy was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, if it wasn't a lone gunman job, which the overwhelming evidence says that it was. If it isn't that, it was a conspiracy, it was certainly by his former associates in the Mafia.

That would be, by far, the next best theory. He would have asked for it because he had used them and dropped them. They don't like being used and dropped. Everybody knows that. He shouldn't have been using them as president, should he? The nostalgia for Camelot is a continuing mystery to me.

Q:  [off-mic question]

A:  Now, you see why I fear there might be a planted question. What could be a more agreeable conundrum than this? Actually, that accusation was not made by my critic, it was made by one of my most knee-padded admirers, David Brooks, who in a review, a long review, said it doesn't matter what Orwell thinks anymore. It matters what Hitchens thinks. That's too much. I still think that, I honestly do.

Autobiographically, it was useful to me that I come from a family very similar to Orwell's. They were a military family of the low middle class that never made any money out of the empire but felt loyal to it. It was afraid of falling back into the toiling classes, wanted to distinguish itself from them.

That bit, when I first started reading his social novels, I thought, "This is impressive." I was about 14. I thought here's a guy who seems to understand my family, which I despaired of any novelist ever doing.

There's that and a certain attitude to Englishness, perhaps. We seem to have some of the same taste in prayers, but otherwise the hell with it. My God, I was lucky enough to get out of this and get to university. He never got to university. He's one of the many great writers who didn't. Gore Vidal is probably the best known currently. Don't overrate this university business, by the way. If you can write, you don't need to go. If you can't, you don't need to go either. It's overrated.

There, I would say, all resemblance ends. I mean, I've been quite lucky, not just with my health which I abuse, but it hasn't caught up with me yet. I've made always a certain amount out of writing. If I want to get my opinions inflicted on people in print or in the radio or TV, I can do it. No one's ever really seriously tried to censor me. There have been occasions where people tried to trip me up.

I've never been the victim, as Orwell was, of people who wanted to keep his work out of print. I've never had to suffer for what I do, in other words, let alone live in poverty and curable illness that's created by poverty. No, no, it would be indecent in that way to mention us in the same breath. Certainly, it would be indecent for me to do it. Again, this topic seems so arbitrary, but there's something very convincing about your chapeau.

Q:  [off-mic question]

A:  Was that scheduled? Well, Orwell was very in favor of what he called the United Socialist States of Europe. In other words, he hoped there would be a European Union. He hoped it would be of the socialist kind.

He rather favored the UN and super national authority, especially to control things like fissile material. That's the first thing.

There was a lot of talk about world government in those days, humanitarian talk, especially between the two World Wars. We must get a world body together that stops this happening again.

When you use the words 'global economy' as if it's new, it seems ridiculous. I think to him and to a lot of the people writing at the time and since. J.A. Hobson, who's a great liberal Victorian writer about world political economy, wrote a book about imperialism which was published I think it must have been 1899, not later than 1902...describing the fact that the world already was a global economy. This was a cliché to Hobson.

The reason we remember Hobson's book is partly because it's the one from which Lenin plagiarized about half of his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. People think that it's a new idea that we live in a globalized economy. We all live, if not in the same society, at least, in the same economic system. This idea was old when my grandfather was in the Army of India. It was completely familiar to Orwell.

Of course, extraction and refining are often done in different parts of this economy, and the profits are not exactly evenly shared. We've been living in the same world economy two World Wars ago. Now people use the word globalization as if it was a sinister innovation. They should just catch up, I would suggest. Begin to catch up.

If you want me to go on about this, I'll say one more thing, which is when I was very young, even younger than I am now, the Port Huron Statementwas published as the founding document of the then New Left. This was 1962 in Lake Huron, Michigan. It's worth reading now. A couple of people who wrote it are still around actually. You can see them speaking at anti-globalization rallies, like Tom Hayden, for instance.

It's worth looking at this document again, actually. I remember disliking it at the time. It essentially says it is a revolt against capitalism, but it's a revolt against bigness. It's a revolt against economies of scale. It's a criticism of the 1880 large society. It has the natural corollary: what would be better? Let's get back to that nice agrarian system that we used to have in the old days where everyone knew their neighbor and could milk each other's cows?

For myself, I can't think of a more ghastly way of living, even for a day. Even if I liked the idea, I do know that it's impossible. It's not even utopian. It's a reactionary fantasy. To call it progressive and regard globalization as reactionary seems, to me, to be one of the many, many ruling mistakes of the current moveon.org element in American leftism.

You didn't ask me that bit, but I thought I'd throw it in.

Q:  [off-mic question]

A:  I've known people like that all my life. I've been in media for years. I've met many unscrupulous frauds. Michael Moore is just another one. He's a dime-a-dozen crook and liar and conscienceless huckster.

This Snowden surprised me. I mean, I know there are such people. It's a disgrace to my profession though. I take it a bit more personally than others do.

Q:  [off-mic question]

A:  Very well, I don't normally want to answer a question with a question, but I just want to ask something. Does the name Robert Fisk mean anything to this audience? No? Not at all. I'm relieved in a way to hear that.

That makes my point harder to make. Robert Fisk is a correspondent for the Independent London. He has a cult following in this country through his website and other things. He's a reporter of the Middle East, and he would be to print journalism what Michael Moore is to documentary. Usually, you find people have been reading or passing on his stuff. Anyway, he's the most scornful possible about the president, and the neoconservatives, and the moralism thing itself.

Because I have a good memory I remember him writing about Kuwait, when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein, and going into Kuwait City after the Iraqi Army had been thrown out, and finding the cellars full of tufts of bloodied hair, and fingernails, and the looting, and disfigurement, and what was vulgarly called "The Rape of Kuwait" at the time.

Describing it, I must say, he was a good journalist in his day. Very well. This absolute prince of the nonjudgmental, and the anti-American, finished his description of Kuwait City after Saddam and said, "You just have to be able to smell it, and feel it, to know that something really evil has been happening here."

He couldn't think of another word, and he's not a man without a thesaurus. You had to use that word. Just because I believe in the devil doesn't mean I have to believe in God, which is the implication of your question. The argument for the existence of God comes from the argument for design, as far as I know. With this wonderful arrangement, surely someone must have designed it. Well, as long as people say that it was Satan, I don't care. You'd be amazed how much the Christians object if you interpret the argument from design in that way. They say, "It mustn't just have been designed, it must have been designed by one of us." No, that doesn't hold at all.

Who's designed it? Let's see. Do you mean it? Do you want us to follow the influence of the argument from design? Do you really want us to follow this induction? No, they don't. They say, "We take credit for the good bits, they take credit for the bad bits. That's the evil one."

Now, I hope that all of you fell out of your strollers seeing through the fallacy of this kind of religious piffle. If you haven't fallen out of your strollers, it's time to fall out of your whatever's in that parking lot. It seemed like extraordinary stuff to me.

The word "virtue," a Greek word, doesn't mean goodness. It means strength. It means integrity. It means the willingness to stand up for things. A certain intellectual and moral honesty and moral current.

Yes, I do think evil, in effect doesn't imply the existence of it. It requires the cultivation of virtue. Yes, but not in it's denatured, sickly, herbivorous, Christian sense of being a good boy. Otherwise, I'd have nothing to offer.

Orwell thought there was a dirty secret at the heart of all power. What you're basically asking me is does that have to be true? No, I don't believe it does. I know that there are people that go into politics for disinterested reasons, at least, sometimes for idealistic ones. I know that they do. I've met them. I'm amazed they do it. I'm impressed when I meet them, but I would vouch, without being naive, I do think it does have that effect. Sometimes, they even win, and sometimes they'd rather quit than do something wicked. They would rather resign. I've seen all of this happen.

I believe it's possible, yes. I mean what is latent and innate in us, the temptation, in other words to be virtuous, may not be as strong all the time, but it's at least as innate. However, there is no question that being in office or being in power has effects on even the least ambitious people of which they are not always aware.

I think it's right to be skeptical, always, if you will. It's for them to prove that they have not succumbed, rather than for us to trust them not to do so. Would that be a fair reply?

Q:  [question about invasion of Iraq]

A:  Yes, I probably should do this, and then this gentleman will think he's had an answer to his question, too. Someone named John Burns at the New York Times,  I don't know if you've read him. He's an extremely brilliant and graphic and brave writer who shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as myself. Someone like him, or not and someone like myself, will go a long way out of our way to avoid using a cliché. It means a lot to us. Don't use other people's words. It means that you're not thinking, it means you're not trying.

If I was to describe you, and say that you'd won the Nobel peace prize for literature, and saved a child from drowning, and published a brilliant thriller, and these three taken together are, and you turn the page and find it said "no mean achievement," I hope you'd feel disappointed.

I would in myself. One must try not to use the borrowed term. It's really hard, try not to do it. If you visit North Korea, which I have done, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which I have done and which John Burns and Valasquez has done, it is not possible to write about it, or to describe any aspect of it without saying it's 1984.

You can't do it, try as you may. It's not part of my general theory. My general theory is that the clichés are buried inside the keyboard somewhere. When your fingers touched the keyboard, the cliché comes up through your arms, into your brain, and down onto the paper. That's why you keep reading people saying things like, "National healthcare for all," or God knows what it would be. It's not like that.

There's only one comparison you can come up with: sadomasochistic terror for its own sake, and the total rot, and decay, and murder of the principle of society, along with the principle of the individual. I tried. You have to believe me, I tried, but it wasn't possible to do.

Here's the question. If you're confronted with something like this, as pathologically evil as that, what is your wish? What should be your view? Is it possible to coexist with this kind of thing? I would say not, because it's inherently aggressive. One thing we know about fascism is that it's organized for war.

It is not the case that it just wants to have a private population of its own to keep in a torture chamber and toy with as it likes. It will always be found to build an army about twice the size of it's economy, to menace the neighbors. Indeed, to do what the Oceania-Eastasia-Eurasia analogy suggests, to keep people in a state of permanent threat of war, and to make it real. To make good on it.

It used to be said in the '30s by the left, quite clearly, fascism means war. What that meant was it intends it. It also implies it. It necessitates it. It's true. Saddam Hussein was forever making war on his neighbors, or preparing to do so. He had become the host of innumerable international gangster organizations, and he was engaged in a restless search for the thing that would make that most toxic of all, which is the fusion of the two.

Catastrophic weaponry with nihilistic terrorism as well as, as a backup, an aggressive totalitarian state. I think this should all have been stopped in 1991. This should all have been stopped in 1991. His regime should have been taken out then. In the 12 years in which we subjected the Iraqi people to sanctions plus Saddam, and let them be run by a racketeering United Nations that was actually running a blood for oil program -- completely shameful. It devastated Iraqi society. It made it more prone to the kind of mullah dominated fascism that now threatens it, and didn't buy us any time. That would be my throat-clearing opening paragraph on this point. The American and British forces are fighting now to show that we can learn how to fight in the most difficult imaginable conditions.

Not only just the climactic ones, I mean a failed state was becoming a rogue state, and a rogue state was becoming a failed one. The most difficult possible conditions. Islamic Jihad was the main threat and enemy, and where regime change was the objective.

Our fighting the battle which has to be fought anyway. And don't tell me that what they're learning from it isn't going to be needed again, because it is. This is an unbelievably good use of the Armed Forces. It's training for them, at last, for the first time I can remember, in the right war, and the next one, and the current one.

My opinion is the casualty figures are too low, but they will get better and they'll improve. Fewer of ours and more of theirs. Nothing else will do. It shows what happens if you let things run, if you let it slide, and if you let people like Saddam Hussein get to the manic stage. I wish I could do more to forward this war, but I won't do anything to undermine or defame it. I didn't think that would completely answer your question, though.

Q:  Based on the logic of putting forward the justification for the war, would you then also support bilateral British-US military action to overthrow the junta in Burma and Myanmar, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, Castro, anyone who would warrant it?

A:  The gentleman wants to know if I would make the worst the enemy of the good, or the good enemy of the worst. It's a familiar question. I don't know why you didn't mention Robert Mugabe, maybe you were going to do it. The test by which a state can lose its sovereignty is fourfold. You surrender your sovereignty as a state and you open yourself to international intervention, or unilateral intervention if that cannot be mobilized, on four conditions.

One, repeated invasions of neighbors; aggression against neighbors. Second, violations of the genocide convention, which oblige the signatories to prevent or to punish genocide. Third, violations of the nonproliferation treaty governing weapons of mass destruction. Fourth, state sponsorship of international gangsterism. Iraq had done all four of these things repeatedly, and was planning to do them again. It's sovereignty was gone. It was under international sanctions. Though they were run by a racketeering group of the United Nations that was trading Iraqi blood for oil, those were still legal sanctions.

It also had no-fly zones policed by aircraft governing it's north and south extremities, north and southern thirds actually, to prevent the repetition of genocide. It was not recognized any more as a legitimate government, and was harboring and continues to harbor international terrorism, and refused to come into compliance with the resolutions governing weapons of mass destruction.

You tell me any other regime that's guilty of all those four things, all the time, for 12 years. The remarkable thing was this incredible offense to the international community was allowed to go on as long as it was. The other remarkable thing was the pathetic excuses, the euphemisms for power, the cover-ups for power, the excuses made for Saddam Hussein that are made by the critics of the war.

If any other country does anything like this, undoubtedly the same policy should be used, but you've more or less thrown away that chance by saying that it's Halliburton unilaterally. It's not you, but the anti-war movement has made it much less likely that a subsequent offender could be brought to book.

After all, the Sudanese who are in front of our eyes using death squads to commit ethnocide in Darfur are being handled multi-laterally, and by the UN, and every interval of time given by the negotiation is being used to complete the ethnocide.

I hope that those who like multi-lateralism like what they're getting. Though they won't be able to say that for the people of Darfur.

As for Saudi Arabia, one of my reasons for supporting the regime change in Iraq, is, of course, that it undercuts the Saudi Arabian political and economic monopoly in the regime. If we recuperate Iraqi oil, the Saudi monopoly is almost gone.

Furthermore, there's an incitement to its large Shi'ite proletariat to have democratic stirrings of its own. Though I know that the administration couldn't say that openly, I know that it was a good reason to support the policy. It was the reason why the Saudis opposed it, as they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan.

So, yes. In a way, you can have it both ways. You can both undermine the other ones you mentioned, as the dictatorships in Syria and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, without actually saying so. It was above all international responsibility to bring to book the most delinquent regime on the planet.

Q:  With all the information in the media, where would one find the truth? If the media is controlled by advertising, or the people in power give you what they think you can handle, where do you go to find the truth?

A: I became a journalist so I wouldn't have to rely on the press for information. So I don't really know the answer to your question. I'm not a reader, or a consumer of this stuff. I don't know what it would feel like to be one. I don't watch the television at all.

I read the New York Timesevery day--a quick flip-through-- only to find out what everyone else thinks is the news, so I know roughly what arguments I'm going to be meeting at some cocktail party in Washington. Invariably it's drawn from the New York Timesop-ed page or some report. It's pathetic.

I prefer to find out from other sources. I ask people who I think know, I do a lot of reading, I do a lot of traveling, and I get people sending me useful things by email. I think I can now pretty well winnow the stuff that's half-baked, from the stuff that is better cooked.

Thus, for example, I knew six months ago--and I published it, too, but no one took me up on it--that Saddam Hussein's former chief nuclear physicist was going to publish a book about something that I knew was true anyway, that he concealed, he buried himself, a nuclear centrifuge along with the blueprints that allowed it to be re-started.

He couldn't tell this to the inspectors because Saddam had his family in custody. He waited until after the inspectors had gone, and the regime had gone, and then he told the U.S Marines what had jiggered up. Now, I know this, and you can now read a book that he's published called The Bomb in My Garden. It's buried under the orders of a guy called Qusay Hussein, the adorable little guy who would have succeeded, as well as had a fratricide of Shakespearean proportions with his psycho brother Uday, if we'd let it run and kept them in their box for God sake.

Well now, I know all this but I'm just giving you one example. I can still read every day, and hear from everyone I meet that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. What am I to do with ignorance like this? My attitude to consensus has always been the same, people who think in herds behave in herds. It doesn't bother me.

To anticipate a question you might ask, why does the administration not say any of this? Why can it not make its own case? That's a very good question. It's an impeachably incompetent administration, in my opinion.

The reason is--I think I can tell you this believably-- the hatred and division within the administration, particularly between the Defense Department and CIA, but also between the State Department and both of these, is now at such a pitch of intensity. I've lived in Washington nearly a quarter of a century. I can't believe people talk about the Bush team as being on message and presenting a united front. I've never seen fratricide like this within an administration before. No allegation made, even about Dr. Obeidi's revelation, would not have "leak" published against it by a number of agencies in the paper the following day if the administration wanted, or any wing of it wanted to take credit for it. They would simply deny each other's disclosures, and say this was based on shoddy science or faulty intelligence, and it's not worth the trouble of doing that. They've stopped doing it. It's, I find, rather terrifying to live in Washington at a time when democracy and democratic open argument is self-prohibited in this way. The most errant nonsense and most dangerous solutions can be spread. The only power that is fighting against Holy War, and dictatorship, can be mocked and derided in this manner. Put it like this, you know the United States must be in really poor shape if I'm having to defend it.

If it's being left up to me, you know that some kind of a crisis has hit. But, I will do it. Because I believe I can stick up for myself and my sources. I can understand your bewilderment, I honestly do, and I sympathize with it. Help is on the...well, it's not on the way, it's never on the way, but it's at hand if you want it. You can make your own investigations. For example, I'll ask you all to do this thought experiment. Dr. Obeidi's book would take you less than a day to read. You read it, and the next person who says to you there were no WMD in Iraq, see what you think of that person now. Just look at them and think, "Where did this person just get off saying what everyone says?"

Q:  Have you seen this guy's work?

A:  Well, it wasn't his work, it's the centrifuge.

Q:  Have you seen it?

A:  Yes. The centrifuges you can read up about it in any numerable reports, I can give you all the details, if you wish. The centrifuges are something you can't fake by the way. You don't have to be a physicist to know this. This is the crown jewels of physics, if you can get a centrifuge that will spin, it will separate uranium. Doing it took about half the Iraqi national income. That had to be bled out of the country for years.

We knew they were trying it. We knew they got one. We just didn't know where it was. This is what you need. If you can't separate uranium, you're nowhere. It's worth burying.

Crucial thing also is do you have anyone who can start it again? Well, they had some scientists with brains and they had the blueprints and they buried them along with it. Yes, it's very important. It's extremely important.

That plus the element in the Kay Report, which you can read any way you like, which generally concludes that the administration's accusations were at fault, the ones made in public of the UN, has a very long annex about the attempt by Saddam Hussein's people in March of 2003 to buy missiles directly off the shelf of North Korea. A meeting we know happened and we have the Iraqi evidence for it, the record of the meeting in Damascus. It failed by the way, because the North Koreans ran away. They were panicked by the arrival of the Coalition.

I will tell you two things. The centrifuge and the missile purchase in North Korea, we wouldn't have known about either of them without regime change. Obeidi would never have told anyone if the regime had gone on. The inspectors would never have found it. Blix would never have had a chance, he wasn't even asking. Scott Ritter was on the take, as you know. The North Korean stuff would not have been uncovered in the Baath Party archives. So if you want disarmament of Iraq you have to have regime change.

Now it's disarmed, I agree. But to believe it before would be to say you took Saddam Hussein's word for it. That would be, I think, a little bit credulous. And incidentally, nobody said before that it was disarmed. Nobody. Nobody at all. Hans Blix's book said he went into the war believing that they were concealing, which they were. I had to argue the anti-war movement people every day before the war saying you can't invade Iraq because he has too many weapons of mass destruction. You notice how this consensus is formed now. If there are no WMD it doesn't prove that Iraq is disarmed, it proves the disarmament was wrong. Excuse me. That's doublethink. Cheap doublethink, too.

It's opposite would involve "Well of course we haven't got any weapons, the dictatorship told us it didn't have any." Can I have a hand from any one who see the fallacy in that argument? We're here to talk about an honorable author who could work this out for himself, didn't need arguments from authority, he could use his own loaf to determine questions like this and on the whole did not trust psychopathic, homicidal dictators with weapons of mass destruction. And whose instinct on this was right.

Triumvirate of Rationalism

Collected speeches of Christopher Hitchens

Copyright 2016 All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-63535-693-9