The Oxford Union Debate on Nuclear Weapons

If you’re still look­ing for things to do after being har­angued by street per­form­ing Esto­ni­ans later this even­ing, then head along to the Film Archive on Tarana­ki Street, where they’re screen­ing the fam­ous 1985 Oxford Uni­on Debate on Nuc­le­ar Weapons, in which our PM, Dav­id Lange debated and defeated the then Amer­ic­an Mor­al Major­ity lead­er, Jerry Fal­well, on the top­ic that “all nuc­le­ar weapons are mor­ally indefens­ible”.

The text of this debate recently turned up over at Rus­sell Brown’s Pub­lic Address blog, in the excel­lent NZ Argu­ment Sec­tion, so, if you can­’t make it along to the screen­ing, you can always relive the memor­ies with the full-text tran­scrip­tion, but, as is poin­ted out by Rus­sell…

His boom­ing voice and idio­syn­crat­ic, com­mand­ing phras­ing, can­not be cap­tured here, except through best efforts with punc­tu­ation.

The screen­ing starts at 6:30pm, and runs to 7:45pm. Entry by koha.