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.