The Hitchens - Galloway Debate

[New_Iskander]

Honest assessment of Orwell record by one of his admirers:

George Orwell discomfited his friends, betrayed his class, treated women like chattel, loathed “pansy poets”, dissed “vegetarians, sandal wearers, feminists and other cranks” and touted for British Intelligence. He played fast and loose with the facts. His great epics of reportage of the 1930s included more invented and distorted facts than the entire fictional career of Jason Blair of the New York Times.

We should honour this man. He had a greater duty, an attachment to the truth that inspired two generations of dissidents in the moral swamp that passed for intellectual life in the Peoples’ Democracies, aka the Soviet Empire.

[BrainGlutton]

@New Iskander

Honest assessment of Orwell record by one of his admirers:

. . .He played fast and loose with the facts. His great epics of reportage of the 1930s included more invented and distorted facts than the entire fictional career of Jason Blair of the New York Times.

:dubious: For that I should like to see a cite; the linked article provides none.

[New_Iskander]

@BrainGlutton

:dubious: For that I should like to see a cite; the linked article provides none.

I don’t know what he is talking about. For that matter, I don’t know what Cockburn is talking about re. Hitchens. However, considering O’Farrell lionizes Orwell, those accusations seem to be brought up in order to throw them back in the faces of Orwell critics.

[Banquet_Bear]

@Sam Stone

George Galloway is a British Member of Parliament, and one of the founders of the Stop The War coalition, which is one of the more powerful groups in the ‘peace movement’. He’s no minor figure - he made headlines just a few weeks ago for appearing before a Congressional investigation into oil for food corruption. Rather than answer any questions of the Congress, he turned around and lashed out at them and called them names, to the great merriment of the anti-war crowd, including many on this board.

…I’m still curious Sam Stone, what questions did you feel that Galloway didn’t answer?

[Sam_Stone]

Oh, jeez. I don’t know. I formed that impression while reading the transcripts of the original hearing when it first happened. I’m not going to go back and parse through it now, so if you want to discount that point, go ahead. It’s pretty much irrelevant to the main point anyway, which is that George Galloway is an obnoxious tyrant-loving thug and always has been.

[jshore]

@Sam Stone

It’s pretty much irrelevant to the main point anyway, which is that George Galloway is an obnoxious tyrant-loving thug and always has been.

Oh…So, now after 3 pages we know what the point of this thread was. I thought it had something to do with a debate about the Iraq War and which of the two clowns won this debate.

This thread is being sold in about the same way that the Iraq War was.

[Sam_Stone]

Uh, right.

[waterj2]

Well, Hitchens and Galloway will be on Bill Maher’s show this coming week. That should be interesting, Maher might be against the war, but he seems like he would have more patience for a war supporter than for someone who supports the insurgency. Either way, it’ll give me a chance to see what these guys are like, as I know very little of either of them.

[mhendo]

@New Iskander

I’d be very careful making glib statements like this. Time was, glib tongues insisted slavery was “natural” for blacks.

Except that the term that BrainGlutton used was “normalcy,” not “natural.”

Normal and natural are not the same thing.

And it’s rather amusing that you accuse others of making glib statements, given your own rather glib comparison between Iraq and the antebellum South.

@Sam Stone

It’s pretty much irrelevant to the main point anyway, which is that George Galloway is an obnoxious tyrant-loving thug and always has been.

Really? That was “the main point” of starting this debate?

If that was the case, you might have done a better job of informing us of this in the OP. The thread is not titled “George Galloway is an obnoxious, tyrant-loving thug. Discuss.” The title is “The Hitchens - Galloway debate.” And, as far as i can tell, Post #1 in this thread (i.e., your OP) links to some audio files of the debate, and makes an assertion that the debate will be “great.”

Given all this, one might be forgiven for assuming that you intended this thread to be about the quality of the Hitchens-Galloway debate, and to involve an assessment of who came out on top in said debate. And yet when Banquet Bear asks you to give your insight into relative merits of the two men’s arguments, you then come out and claim that the thread was really about what an asshole George Galloway is.

It’s pretty lame when you refuse to engage a topic that you were responsible for starting in the first place.

[New_Iskander]

@mhendo

Except that the term that BrainGlutton used was “normalcy,” not “natural.”

Normal and natural are not the same thing.

And it’s rather amusing that you accuse others of making glib statements, given your own rather glib comparison between Iraq and the antebellum South.

Was there a secret terror movement aimed to suppress new-found freedoms of previously oppressed people in the antebellum South?

Is there a secret terror movement aimed to suppress new-found freedoms of previously oppressed people in the liberated Iraq?

[jshore]

@New Iskander

Is there a secret terror movement aimed to suppress new-found freedoms of previously oppressed people in the liberated Iraq?

The new Iraqi government might be doing pretty well on that score without any help from the “secret terror movement”:

The draft constitution submitted Monday stipulates that Iraq is an Islamic state and that no law can contradict the principles of Islam, negotiators confirmed.

Opponents have charged that the latter provision would subject Iraqis to rule by religious edicts of individual clerics or sects.

The opponents also said women would lose gains they made during Hussein’s rule, when they were guaranteed equal rights under civil law in matters including marriage, divorce and inheritance. The draft constitution says individuals can choose to have family matters decided by either religious or civil law.

Supporters say a separate bill of rights would protect women, and provisions of the constitution say no law can contradict democracy or that bill of rights.

Khalilzad, speaking to CNN early Tuesday, called the proposed constitution a “very good” draft that guarantees equal rights for all. An American serving as adviser to the Kurds, Peter Galbraith, disagreed that the charter protected women’s rights and condemned what he called the Bush administration’s “hypocrisy” on that issue in the constitution.

(bolding mine)

I also read in a column in The Nation (by Katha Pollitt?) that even the woman who sat next to Laura Bush at the state-of-the-union (you know, with the purple finger et al.) is now condemning the resulting Constitution. And, some other woman who Bush had once claimed once called him “my liberator” is basically saying that all is lost and that she is planning to leave Iraq.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is more to life, New Iskander, than is dreamt of in your philosophies.

[BrainGlutton]

@New Iskander

Is there a secret terror movement aimed to suppress new-found freedoms of previously oppressed people in the liberated Iraq?

Actually, no, there isn’t. “New-found freedoms” are not what the insurgency, by and large, is fighting against (though the insurgency is an alliance of such diverse factions that generalization is problematic – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_insurgency#Composition). What they are fighting is the status quo, and good reasons they have, too. See post #100. If you want to defend “freedom” in Iraq, it’s not the insurgents you gotta watch out for, it’s our allies, especially the Shi’ites.

[jshore]

Here is the relevant section of Katha Pollitt’s column:

“We have lost all the gains we made over the last thirty years,” said Safia Taleb al-Souhail, last seen sitting in the balcony with Laura at the State of the Union address, smiling and waving her purple finger. “It’s a big disappointment.” Even blunter words come from Dr. Raja Kuzai, an obstetrician and secular Shiite who served in the assembly’s Constitution-writing committee and, as the President tells it, greeted him as “My Liberator” when she visited the Oval Office in 2003: “I think it is over now,” she writes in the San Antonio Express-News. “I want the American people to know that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain. There will be no future for our children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq. The future is for the clerics. They will lead the country… This is not the democracy we dreamed of. This is the dictatorship of the majority!” Dr. Kuzai has announced that she is leaving Iraq.

[New_Iskander]

@jshore

The new Iraqi government might be doing pretty well on that score without any help from the “secret terror movement”

What’s so unusual about that?

Along with secret terror of KKK, there was also legal terror of Jim Crow laws.

After the American Civil War most states in the South passed anti-African American legislation. These became known as Jim Crow laws. This included laws that discriminated against African Americans with concern to attendance in public schools and the use of facilities such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, cinemas and public baths. Trains and buses were also segregated and in many states marriage between whites and African American people.

Jim Crow laws were tested in 1896 by Homer Plessey when convicted in Louisiana for riding in a white only railway car. Plessey took his case to the Supreme Court but the justices voted in favour of the Louisiana Court. William B. Brown established the legality of segregation as long as facilities were kept “separate but equal”. Only one of the justices, John Harlan, disagreed with this decision.

There is a long road ahead, my dear chicken-livered doom-sayers.

[BrainGlutton]

@New Iskander

What’s so unusual about that?

Along with secret terror of KKK, there was also legal terror of Jim Crow laws.

There is a long road ahead, my dear chicken-livered doom-sayers.

So somebody who in 1865 predicted it would take another 90 years (which it did ) for things in the South to get any better would have been a “chicken-livered doom-sayer”? :rolleyes:

[jshore]

New Iskander: Did you notice the part where the rights of woman looks like they are taking a large step back from the gains made during the era of Saddam?

So, let’s see, we have spent > $200 billion, > 1800 American, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi lives, and angered much of the Arab and Islamic world (as well as alienating many of our allies) to create a society in which:

(1) there is at least somewhat less oppression and torture

(2) there are actually less rights for women

(3) there is much more instability, terrorism, and random violence

(4) basic services, such as electricity, are still not being reliably provided for about 2.5 years after the war itself supposedly ended

(5) there is massive unemployment

If acknowledging these facts makes me a “chicken-livered doomsayer,” I prefer that to living in a fantasy world.

[BrainGlutton]

@New Iskander

Along with secret terror of KKK, there was also legal terror of Jim Crow laws.

But those were not enacted until after 1877, when the federal government gave up on the social-revolution efforts of Reconstruction, and handed the Southern state governments back to the local aristocrats – facilitating the continued economic colonization and exploitation of the South by Northern business interests and the survival of Jim Crow well into the 1950s.

If there’s any parallel between the situations, then in the present one, our government has decided to skip the Reconstruction phase and go straight to the cynical-resignation-and-exploitation phase. Why is this comparison supposed to make us feel hopeful about the occupation?

[New_Iskander]

@BrainGlutton

So somebody who in 1865 predicted it would take another 90 years (which it did ) for things in the South to get any better would have been a “chicken-livered doom-sayer”? :rolleyes:

No, that would be somebody who clucked, “It’s never gonna work!”

[New_Iskander]

@BrainGlutton

If there’s any parallel between the situations, then in the present one, our government has decided to skip the Reconstruction phase and go straight to the cynical-resignation-and-exploitation phase. Why is this comparison supposed to make us feel hopeful about the occupation?

Don’t blame me. I didn’t demand “to bring boys home”.

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

:dubious: For that I should like to see a cite; the linked article provides none.

Well, here’s an example…inaccuracies in his The Road to Wigan Pier.
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ctc/docs/wigpier.htm