Man with his burning soul Has but an hour of breath To build a ship of Truth In which his soul may Sail on the sea of death For death takes toll Of beauty, courage, youth Of all but Truth.
Blair argued for the proposition that religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it.
Preliminary results on the Munk website said 68 per cent of the votes backed Hitchens and 32 per cent Blair.
Both men gained about 10 percentage points from the pre-debate standings, when 21 per cent were undecided.
Hitchens argued that religion is divisive and causes conflicts or makes them worse.
Blair conceded that "horrific acts of evil" have been committed in the name of religion, but said people like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, who opposed religion, had been evil, too. "I agree in a world without religion, that the religious fanatics may be gone, but I ask you: Would fanaticism be gone?"
Blair pointed to the Northern Ireland peace process as an example of different religions working for peace.
Hitchens replied that 400 years of religious warfare in Ireland entailed "people killing each other's children depending on what kind of Christian they were."
"To terrify children with the image of hell … to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?" Hitchens said.
Blair said bigotry and prejudice are not "wholly owned subsidiaries" of religion. But he said the hardest argument he faced was the assertion that evil done in the name of religion is based in scripture.
The ancient religious texts contain many ideas that now appear "very strange and outdated," he said, but religions must be seen as a whole.
—By Stabler As most of us noticed, the Bluementhal affair never found it's way into "Hitch-22". Well, there's never room for everything, but since things have been kind of QUIET on the Watch; let's let Richard Thompson cover the whole thing.
Unfortunately, embedding of this video has been disabled, so you'll have to visit YouTube.
The greatest US-based British public intellectual of his generation, Ian Hunter, brings tears to my eyes every time I hear Soul of America. The lyrics of this song are open to manifold interpretation, but I very much like the way the creator of this video has chosen to illustrate the story.
Mark Feldstein's "Poisoning The Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the rise of Washington's Scandal Culture", argues well against those smitten fanboys who still insist Hitch's bloated doggerel is "good writing." The subject of the book is, of all things, the subject of the book, not the writer's assorted bigotries and dubious assertions. Sorry Hitchens fans, Feldstein seems to have gone in for the kind of "overly literal fact checking" Hitchens the "journalist" decries. When a point is in dispute (most notably weather Nixon gave Howard Hunt the order to murder Anderson) it is presented as such.
You want to read this book. Hilarious, frightening, stranger-than-fiction stuff on almost every page, Feldstein raises some terrible questions about the Nixon Era and leaves some for the readers to ponder themselves. Feldstein's premise, that Nixon and Anderson were different sides of the same coin, may not fully blossom, but it's at the very least an amazing compare and contrast.
Indeed, Hitchwatchers may find some interesting points where Anderson and Hitchens meet on the graft. Anderson had dogged Nixon for years by the time he became President, exposing the shady aspects of his early campaign financing and reaching a critical mass during the amazing but now forgotten ITT scandal of Nixon's first term. Anderson became a household name, liberal hero, and was on the cover of Time when it was still a mark of distinction. His often questionable scruples were no problem for his loyal readership.
At the height of his celebrity, however, Anderson damaged his credibility by printing falsehoods about McGovern's would be running mate, refusing to retract them even after they had been shown to be false. After somehow being left behind on the Watergate scandal, he tried to keep his mojo going by nonsensical attacks on Carter. Reliably far right ABC rewarded him with a silly regular segment on "Good Morning America" and Anderson spent years as a rather pathetic toady for Ronald Reagan, who stroked his ego and made him the high access equivalent of what Bob Woodward is now.
At book's end, of course, Feldstein notes that Nixon would somehow have his revenge through Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Hitch's pro-Iraq comrade Henry Kissinger. When Hitch first assisted Bush in getting elected (term one) and then flat out endorsed him (term two) he was clearly casting his vote in favor of Richard Nixon's far right conception of the Imperial Presidency; a notion of unrestricted power the man or woman in the White House is unlikely to ever give back without a fight.
Like Anderson, Hitchens got very rich. We should laugh mordantly, however, when Hitch now dreams in print of Kissinger's death. Those in Nixon's motley brood can now go to their maker with a sense of mission accomplished; and Hitchens was there to lend full support when the chips were up.
This is from the recent meeting at the Pew Forum. It's nice to see that since becoming a skinhead, Christopher has lost none of his bloodlust against the mullahs or his enthusiasm for Bolshevism. (The link will take you to a full transcript of the discussion.)
PETER HITCHENS: On the question of Stalin, yes, it is absolutely true that at that moment, when the mummy of Lenin had been dispatched, I think, to Kuybyshev and the Soviet government somewhere else, and the whole thing was in headlong, total retreat and Stalin’s pact with Hitler, which Stalin had believed in long after Hitler had ceased to do so, had been shown to be wrong, but to such an extent that Stalin would not actually order his own troops into the defense of the motherland because he believed the pact was still in existence for some days.
In the case of that, yes, he did call on the church. He also called on Russian patriotism, and statues of Mikhail Kutuzov began to appear in the streets. All this was dragged out because it was a matter of total desperation. What people should observe is that as soon as the danger was over, the persecution was redoubled, and particularly under Nikita Khrushchev. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a very severe persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union. It was purely opportunist, and it was the only moment at which they made that gesture at all.
So I don’t think it undermined — one small point I do want to come back to, by the way — Christopher was praising Kemal Ataturk for his treatment of the mullahs. And I often wonder how he views Stalin’s exactly parallel treatment of the same people in Soviet Central Asia at the same time, almost identical — ceremonies in which veils were burned in the public square, mullahs were indeed shot. Now, because that was done by Stalin —
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Only language they understood.
PETER HITCHENS: — was that bad, or was it OK?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Fine.
PETER HITCHENS: Right, OK. I’d like to have that settled. You’re never asked anything like enough about your attitude towards the Soviet Revolution, but —
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Fine, I’m long overdue. People will be nostalgic for it before long.
PETER HITCHENS: I’ll bear that in mind.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yeah, they will. Wait and see.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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