Last week, I appeared at the Oxford Union to debate the proposition: “This House regrets the founding of The United States of America.” Such is the extent of anti-Americanism out there that this was considered to be a reasonable debate topic by Britain’s best and brightest.It was an exhilarating and daunting experience. I do a lot of campus speaking and yet, going in, this felt like the functional equivalent of Rose Bowl. Ultimately, it turned out otherwise. But I only really realized that in retrospect. . . .
My colleagues in the debate were Peter Rodman, a former foreign-policy muckety-muck in the Reagan administration (and NR senior editor) and all around good guy, and Matt Frei, a convivial and charming Brit who covers the U.S. for the BBC. Plus there was one student debater on our side, an earnest and sharp young man who looked like he raced to put on his tux after arduous rehearsals for the Oxford theater troupeÂ’s edition of Godspell. Lanky and long-haired, when he first told me he was one of the debaters, I immediately assumed the hippyish fellow was the anti-American. Instead, he was on our side.
The defenders of the proposition were originally scheduled to be one student plus three invited speakers: two Islamist radicals and a bona fide Communist.
But the Communist chickened out at the last minute, reportedly explaining that he didnÂ’t want to debate because he feared his side would lose. Now, a few short points need to be made here. First, this was remarkably shabby on his part. Second, why on earth a devout Communist would shirk at the prospect of fighting for a lost cause is beyond me. I mean hasnÂ’t that ship sailed? And, lastly, the CommunistÂ’s cowardice was an enormous disappointment because Peter Rodman and I had prepared to debate a Communist. We yearned to debate a Communist. I mean how often do you even get to meet an actual supporter of Stalin and Kim Jong Il? And, yet, they dangled this bloody ideological chum in front of our eyes and then cruelly yanked the bait away at the very last minute, informing us less than an hour before the debate. They replaced the Communist with a Canadian which, even I had to concede, was a very poor substitute for a Communist. . . .
Go read the whole thing, which includes Jonah's prepaed text incorporating his anti-Commie talking points. A sample:
I don’t know how it is in Britain, but in America, Communists are nearly extinct. A few aging relics do linger on — like Japanese soldiers refusing to surrender long after the war. They live in an archipelago of academic backwaters, their bunkers brimming with yellowing copies of The Daily Worker and the Guardian, saturated with the strong stink of despair mixed with the suggestion of old urine.
Communists are more commonly seen as comic-book villains or mythical creatures rumored to have once existed in fairy tales or, perhaps, James Bond movies.
A Communist!? My goodness, were Dr. Doom, Lex Luthor, and Ernst Blowfeld unavailable? Did the most sagacious pundits of the Klingon Empire not return the Oxford UnionÂ’s phone calls? Do the Oompah Loompahs refuse to fly coach?
I’m sorry, but my honorable opponent’s party stands — as a matter of principle! — in lockstep solidarity with the murderocracy of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. He stands as the living exponent of the criminal tradition of Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung, and he dares damn the United States of America from the safety of history’s dustbin. Please.
Surely, this evening was intended as a gag.
At the risk of repeating myself, go read it all. It rocks!