Clive Davies has comments from people who were in attendance at the big debate between far, far left British politician George Galloway and just plain far left-wing British journalist Christopher Hitchens in New York the other night. Some of the commentators remarked about the crowd's responses. Unsurprisingly, some of the Galloway supporters were notable for their abominable rudeness in general and for this reaction in particular. It is as incredible as it is disgusting:
The guys behind us, greying, rumpled academic types, were definitely Galloway dittoheads. Some were downright rabid. When Hitchens requested a moment of silence for the Iraqis who were sadistically murdered by the insurgency, they were among those shouting "NO! NO!" When Hitch praised the US for making life better for the Afghan people, they shouted "Who cares?"
Well, of course lefties, or at least these representatives of it, don't care about the plight of real people. How else to explain the left's indifference to the atrocities committed by communist governments throughout the twentieth century that resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people and the suffering of untold millions more. The misery continues today in the gulags of China, North Korea and Cuba, but if the left has ever expressed any outrage about these awful abuses the sound of their protest hasn't carried to our ears.
Another member of the audience, himself a man of the left, makes this observation:
I've got lots of mates on the left... who are democratic and civil in the best sense, highly attentive to what other people say and respecting someone else's right to disagree and to say so. But tonight demonstrated that some on the hard left, the ones who congratulate themselves that they are not evangelical fundamentalists, and who tell themselves that they are the more sophisticated, more nuanced ones, are the ones who turn out to be the most intolerant, the most intimidatory and the most anti-democratic in their attitude to debate. And in their tactics. They turned up not to hear and engage, but to shout down people who disagree. Because, you see, they are so, so right that there isn't time for this messy dialogue thing.
For a more detailed report on the debate read Alex Massie's column at National Review Online. According to Massie the vitriol flowed freely between the two antagonists, making the debate a contest to see who could deliver the most cleverly devastating insult.
For example, Massie writes:
Citing Hitchens's transformation from an opponent of the 1991 Gulf War to an ardent supporter of regime change in Iraq now, Galloway claimed that "What you have witnessed is something unique in natural history - the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug" and that "the one thing a slug leaves behind it is a trail of slime." Later, Galloway accused his opponent of "Goebellian" tactics and asked, "are there any depths to which you will not sink? You've fallen out of the gutter and into the sewer."
Sounds like it was a lively, if not a particularly edifying, evening.