This week on Uncommon Knowledge, an offering from the vault: Christopher Hitchens joins the father of us all, William F. Buckley, Jr., in reflecting on the Sixties on the thirtieth anniversary of 1968. A program filmed in 1998.
Buckley: There was a kind of listlessness in the sixties, and that listlessness called for a kind of self-indulgent relief. People wanted to find out if they could get their kicks in some way that they hadn’t been getting them, and if they could wed them to some ideal. It was primarily an attempt to cast a noble perspective on self-concern.
Hitchens: I think I’ll have to quarrel, literally as well as metaphorically, with Mr. Buckley’s characterization…the Sixties Left was an attempt to block what we thought of, correctly in my view still, as an imperialist, aggressive, and unjust war.