Gone : Jonah Goldbert

Excerpts from Jonah Goldberg's account of how his recent debate went at the Oxford Union where he stood against the proposition: “This House regrets the founding of The United States of America.” Jonah and his teammates faced off against, as he describes his opponents:

Two Islamist radicals and a bona fide Communist. But the Communist chickened out at the last minute, reportedly explaining that he didn’t want to debate because he feared his side would lose.

As Jonah goes on: "They replaced the Communist with a Canadian which, even I had to concede, was a very poor substitute for a Communist."

Here is his account of what happened:

The first [Islamist] to speak, was the head of the now moribund British Islamic Party, David Pidcock. He turned out to be something of a quintessential leftwing loon. He began by talking about how George W. Bush’s grandfather was a primary financial backer of Hitler’s rise to power. He also explained how great the U.S. Constitution is and how much he has advocated it as a model for the Muslim world. But then he explained that he was saddened by the fact that the U.S. Constitution had been suspended. I expected this to be a lead-in for his denunciations of Guantanamo and the Patriot Act. Instead, it was the prologue to a long explanation of how the plutocrats in America had conspired to create the Federal Reserve which has ruled America from behind the scenes ever since. Or at least I think that’s what he was saying. As I commented, I fully expected him to start ranting about how the Fed is sapping our precious bodily fluids.
Jamal Harwood, the other Islamist and head of Hizb ut-Tahrir (read about this “peaceful” group here and here) was a much more serious and philosophically consistent fellow but, also, not a particularly impressive speaker either. Going in, I had assumed that the Islamists would be at minimum good talkers because demagogues always are. Instead, both men were oratorical mediocrities. They were outclassed in every way by the students on their side.

Anyway, as Jonah goes on:

...the gist of Harwood’s indictment of America was that America represents modernity and individualism, and these things are bad. If you believe that modernity and individualism are bad, that’s a perfectly legitimate argument.
...For example, Harwood went on and on about how America is selfish and crime-ridden. When I rose on a point of information to ask if he was aware that Americans are in fact vastly more charitable than Europeans and that crime rates in America compare very favorably with those in much of Europe, he said he didn’t care because he was hardly there to defend Europe.
...Anyway, we won the day by a margin of 2-1. The Islamists brought some Muslim supporters with them, the source of pretty much the only applause they received.

Here are some excerpts from his prepared remarks, which he says he "tried to stay away from" so he could "speak off the cuff as much as possible":

When I learned that tonight’s proposition would have as its champions two passionate defenders of sharia law and the hijab plus one spokesman for the Communist party, it dawned on me: “Aha, this is all a joke.”
...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...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.
...And then there are my other “honorable” opponents: The gentlemen representing the “moderate” face of political Islam. The Islamic Party of Britain holds that open homosexuals may receive the death sentence. Hizb ut-Tahrir openly desires a world — not merely a United Kingdom — where rejection of Islam by its adherents would bring a death sentence, and where Jews and Christians must live in official ghettos.
Both represent theocratic visions that make President Bush’s supposed “theo-conservatism” seem like a lapsed Unitarian’s weekend hobby. Indeed, despite some vein-popping hysteria here and in Europe, the fact is that America is no theocracy, and it mixes religion and government less [than] you folks in Britain and Europe do.

...The proposition is not that the Bush presidency, the war, slavery, or even disco should be regretted. It is that the United States of America should be....
Let me just note that if the ugly fantasy at the heart of the proposition were somehow made real and America had never been born, then a lot more than democracy and freedom would suffer. America is the engine of global prosperity — a job we inherited from Britain. From penicillin to the iPod, the artificial heart to rising crust pizza, jazz and the Simpsons to the Marshall Plan, America — through its ingenuity, openness, generosity, and adherence to the liberal principles it inherited from this great land — has championed the relief of man’s estate (in the words of Francis Bacon) and the liberty to let your freak flag fly (in the words of David Crosby).
Yes, anti-Americanism fashions itself a form of anti-globalization. But this is most often a ruse. Do keep in mind that my opponents represent a truly tyrannical form of globalization. Whether it’s “Workers of the World Unite” or the World Caliphate, the choice they are presenting is globalization for losers, while America, to the extent it
represents globalization at all, offers the globalization of liberty. The mere fact that you had to select three men from outside this heritage to defend the proposition, is proof enough that it is indefensible from within it.

But do read his whole account as I haven't done it justice here.