Tony Blair, Christopher Hitchens Debate Religion

AMY GOODMAN: I­­s seven years after the invasion of Iraq. You’ve moved from Blair in this country, and in the United States it’s gone from Bush to Obama, who then expanded the war in Afghanistan. What is your assessment of the United States?

JOHN LE CARRÉ: I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media. I don’t know what the percentage now is, but I believe it’s still something like 65 or 70 percent of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in the Twin Towers. Am I right in that? Something like that. Well, we haven’t gone as far down that road yet, but we do have pretty horrendous manipulation of the media by our various press barons, and we have enormous intrusions into our domestic affairs by the Rupert Murdoch empire. I find that very scary—you know, former Australian, now an American, dictating to Brits what they should be thinking. I find that very, very, very unsettling, and I oppose it wherever I can. Therefore, as I say, I share the frustration, I think, of very many Americans, that when something is clear common sense, when there’s a great humanitarian need, somehow or another, it’s the conservative voice, the orthodox voice, the chauvinistic or the patriotic voice, that outshouts other people’s decent thinking processes. I thinks it’s crudely put, but it’s a very crude situation, that it’s—the feeling, I think, that many of us have of Obama is that the good things he would really like to do are being frustrated, and now his own Democratic Party is not helping or supporting him and that the corporate and other lobbies are tying his hands. I think that’s the most charitable perception that one can make.

 
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