August 29, 2006
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debate
I heard a story today that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a live, televised, uncensored debate with US president George W. Bush. Here’s one article about it:
http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27268043.shtmlWhat I found most disturbing about this is not the call but the way the offer is being looked at or I should say looked down at by the people commenting upon people. The reporter I was listening to on the radio called it “midieval”. That just didn’t make any sense to me so I just had to go look up the world “midieval”. I found three definitions: generically ‘like the middle ages’, cruel just like the middle ages, and ‘outdated’. Well none of these three definitions seem to be particularly applicable to an open televised debate. Debates aren’t outdated, they aren’t cruel, and they certainly didn’t happen very frequently during the middle ages so how exactly can the Iranian president’s offer be considered midieval. If it is midieval then so too must our regular debates held for candidates for office.
Here’s the thing. You can’t really turn around without hearing all kinds of horrible things being said about the Iranian President though the bulk of it consists of name calling and has very little in the way of verifiable details. So, if the Iranian president really is some kind of modern incarnation of Hitler, why is he calling for a debate exactly? I don’t get it. Debates are tricky business, they could secure you more power or they could back fire and turn your populace against you. And if you are a racist megalomaniac surely you’d find your strategy to be a lot more direct than televised debate. Murder, torture, secret prisons, death squads that kind of thing is the more expected route to power. So perhaps the plan to have a debate comes from some simpler mental perspective. Perhaps Ahmadinejad just thinks that a debate would be a good thing. He thinks he can convince people and he thinks he is right and that people will agree with him when he lays out all the facts and tells the world the honest truth (or at least his version of it). Now he may be delusional about that but this is not the delusions of a mad serial killer but rather the delusions of a person a little too optimistic about the possible impact of his own words on the engrained belief patterns of the masses.
So maybe it is a cynical power ploy, maybe it isn’t, but regardless it strikes me as a perfectly reasonable and non-harmful proposal on its own face. Why don’t we have debates between national leaders? Why don’t we have them all the time in fact? I personally would be thrilled if we got to hear the leaders of our nations have to justify their actions and beliefs to an audience consisting of the politically aware citicizens of the entire world. If such debates were to occur and they aren’t shams and they involve real discussion of real issues, I can only imagine they’d be a great thing for the world, giving everyone a more balanced and inclusive perspective of the world and making nations that are distant unknowns to us seem a little more real to us.
Regardless of whether the US accepts or rejects this particular offer, we should think seriously about the possibility of having live big translated televised debates moderated by the UN between national leaders of various states. This would just be a good thing for the spread of democracy world wide.
