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#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza Podcast Episode Description
Douglas Murray is the author of On Democracies and Death Cults, The War on The West, and The Madness of Crowds.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep463-sc
See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(02:04) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(09:31) – War in Ukraine
(13:17) – Trump and Zelenskyy
(27:47) – Putin
(48:40) – Peace
(59:25) – Zelenskyy
(1:13:11) – Israel-Palestine
(1:23:57) – Hamas
(1:38:30) – Corruption
(1:41:40) – Gaza
(2:02:18) – Benjamin Netanyahu
(2:19:29) – Hate
(2:43:59) – Iran
(2:54:48) – Interview advice
(3:09:12) – War
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#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza Podcast Episode Top Keywords
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza Podcast Episode Summary
In this podcast episode, the host engages in a conversation with Douglas Murray, an author known for his works on geopolitics and societal issues. The discussion primarily revolves around the complex geopolitical landscapes of Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and Gaza. Murray shares his insights from his visits to these regions, emphasizing the importance of firsthand experience and diverse perspectives in understanding global conflicts. The host echoes this sentiment, urging listeners to seek wisdom from multiple sources and engage with people who have lived in these areas.
A recurring theme in the episode is the need for reason and compassion in discourse, rather than succumbing to outrage. The host stresses the importance of intellectual humility and rigor in navigating the vast and often misleading information available online. He highlights the dangers of certainty among fools and fanatics, quoting Bertrand Russell to underscore this point.
The episode also touches on the significance of daily habits and rituals in leading a productive life. The host reflects on the fleeting nature of time and the long-term benefits of consistent practice, encouraging listeners to focus on their personal growth amidst the distractions of the digital age.
Additionally, the episode includes various ad reads for products like Call of Duty, Oracle, Element, and AG1, with the host sharing personal anecdotes and recommendations related to these sponsors. The host also mentions plans to explore technical and philosophical aspects of video games in future episodes, expressing admiration for the creativity behind immersive gaming worlds.
Overall, the episode combines geopolitical analysis with personal reflections on productivity and the challenges of modern discourse, offering listeners both insights and practical advice.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The War in the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his new book on democracies and death cults. We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics, and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly.
Speaker: 0
00:22
As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including on the next episode of this podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast, beautiful, dark land of the Internet.
Speaker: 0
00:44
It’s hard to know who to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others. Some are insightful and some are delusional. The problem is it’s hard to tell which is which, unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor.
Speaker: 0
01:08
I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and try to pick up wisdom from each. Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face to face with people who have spent most of their lives living there, whether it’s Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia.
Speaker: 0
01:31
Let’s try together to not be cogs in the machine of outrage and instead, to reach toward reason and compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The twenty first century is a new geopolitical puzzle all of us are tasked with solving. Let’s not mess it up.
Speaker: 0
02:03
And now, ladies and gentlemen, a, quick few second meh of your sponsor. Check them out in the description. It’s the best way to support this podcast. We got Call of Duty for video game fun, Oracle for cloud computing, Element for electrolytes, and AG one for multivitamin deliciousness. Choose ai, my friends.
Speaker: 0
02:26
Also, if you happen to be watching or listening to this on Spotify, I decided to start putting the same ad reads from me at the beginning as I do on Apple Podcast and the RSS feed since a lot of folks in the survey, lexfibrin.com/survey, said they actually like the random non sequitur things I talk about to my great surprise.
Speaker: 0
02:49
And they’ve also said that they’re happy to just skip when they felt like it. Some folks are some timers, meaning they listen to these ads sometimes. Some folks are every timers. They listen to all the ads. I do try to make the ad reads interesting and personal, often related to stuff I’m reading or thinking about.
Speaker: 0
03:10
But if you skip them and I do make it easy to skip by providing the tyler stamps on the screen and in the description. So if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. Sign up and get their stuff. I enjoy it. Maybe you will too.
Speaker: 0
03:26
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com/contact. And now onto the full ad reads. Let’s go. This episode is brought to you by Call of Duty Warzone and the return of the iconic Vodansk map. I have a long history with Call of Duty.
Speaker: 0
03:44
I’ve been a fan for a long time. I’ve been a fan of video games for a long, long ai. And I’m actually looking forward to doing many, many podcasts with video game designers, with engineers. It just brings me so much joy. And there’s technical, philosophical things to explore with video games.
Speaker: 0
04:03
How do you create immersive worlds that can be ultra realistic or ultra nonrealistic and super fun or super dark or terrifying or exciting or hopeful or ai? All of those worlds. The geniuses behind those worlds inspire me. I, admire. I respect.
Speaker: 0
04:25
I’m a big fan of the worlds that Call of Duty franchise has created, and the Verdansk map looks incredible. You can download Call of Duty Warzone for free and drop into the Verdansk map on April 3, rated m for mature. This episode is also brought to you by Oracle, a company providing a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services.
Speaker: 0
04:48
I think compute is going to be one of the resources that are most prized in the twenty first century. Whatever physical form, whatever cyber software form that compute takes, we do not know yet. Of course, there’s folks ai Oracle that are pioneering that, but it’s very possible in a in a century, in two centuries, we’re going to be surrounded by some orb where the computation is done maybe in deep space that’s orbiting Earth, something like this.
Speaker: 0
05:20
Maybe because of the the heat and the energy requirements, it’s going to be impossible to host it on Earth without destroying Earth. Of course, Earth is such a priceless planet for us humans, but I actually believe, maybe not in our galaxy, but certainly in our vicinity, it’s going to be very, very difficult to colonize other planets.
Speaker: 0
05:45
Of course, humans are incredible at doing the difficult thing, but we should protect this Earth. Anyway, props to Oracle for constantly innovating and building in this space. Cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. Offer is for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify at oracle.com/lux. That’s oracle.com/lux.
Speaker: 0
06:07
This episode is brought to you by LMNT, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that I’m drinking now because after I say the words I’m saying to you right now, I’m going for a long, long run along the river. And I’m listening to an audiobook by James Holland. It’s volume one of his trilogy called the war in the West. I believe it’s focusing on 1939 to 1941.
Speaker: 0
06:34
It’s just an extremely well written perspective on those years. So it’s the Western front. I think those years are really important to understand, the years leading up to 1939 and ’30 ‘9, ’40, ’40 ‘1 themselves, because there’s a lot of, let’s say, geopolitical negotiations, meetings, carrots and stakes that could have been done, a lot of insights, a lot of mistakes avoided.
Speaker: 0
07:01
It’s such an important moment to understand. Probably the most destructive, the most terrifying, the most earth shattering war this world has ever seen with the bigger than life personalities of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, FDR. I think James Holland calls it, the most dramatic set of events in human history. And, anyway, element before, element after, it brings me joy.
Speaker: 0
07:27
Watermelon salt is still and forever. The flavor of choice for me. Get a sample pack for free. And with any purchase, try to drink element Com / flex. This episode is brought to you by a g one, an all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance, my daily companion.
Speaker: 0
07:46
Again, after the run, I’m gonna make an AG one, put in the freezer, and, go take a quick shower, come back, drink the AG one. It’s gonna be chill, refreshing. I’m gonna reflect on the things I’ve read. Let my thoughts go to wherever they may go, and then get my lazy ass back to work deeply focused.
Speaker: 0
08:08
A productive life is built on a foundation of rituals, habits. It’s kind of incredible how fleeting life is. You know? The days go ai, the months go by, the years go by. But when you look at the individual day, there’s just a lot of time.
Speaker: 0
08:23
And if you have the patience to believe in the long term effects of daily rituals and daily habits, you’d be surprised. I am constantly surprised if I do a thing every day and I wake up two, three months after and just see how good I got at that thing. It’s kind of incredible. And then you, of course, have to protect that habit. It gets harder and harder every year with all the fascinating stuff going on online.
Speaker: 0
08:50
You just have to shut it all off and do the thing, do the habit every day. Anyway, they’ll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drink.ag1.com/Lex. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Douglas Murray.
Speaker: 0
09:15
What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from, your visits there? Just looking at the big picture of your understanding of the invasion of February twenty fourth twenty twenty two and the war in the three years since.
Speaker: 1
09:43
Well, I mean, several things. There’s, political angles which are forever changing. But on the human level, as as you know, if you visit troops, ai troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families. Ai by the way in which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise and and much more.
Speaker: 1
10:12
It’s very easy to get caught up in the tos and fros of today’s news. But, that to my mind is is that’s the single thing that struck me most in my visits there, is just, the the people I’ve met who who are fighting for a cause, which at that
Speaker: 0
10:34
level is unavoidable, undeniable. So the thing that struck you that’s different from the the media turmoil is just the reality of war.
Speaker: 1
10:45
Yeah. Of course. I mean, you know, people who have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the world having been liberated as in late twenty twenty two. All the people now, organized most recently there in recent weeks, who were just getting on with their job as soldiers, whilst the world was talking about them.
Speaker: 0
11:12
When were you there? In early on in this escalated war of twenty two?
Speaker: 1
11:18
Yes. First time was in I was with the the Ukrainian Armed Forces when they retook Kherson. And I was back in recent weeks and was there when the Trump Zelensky blow up happened. In fact, I was with, I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it.
Speaker: 0
11:38
How’s the morale? How’s the way the content of the conversations you’ve heard different on the from the two visits separated by, I guess, two years?
Speaker: 1
11:51
One level, I mean, nothing has changed much. You know, it’s a sort of it it’s not a a total standoff because intermittently each side gains territory from the others, but it’s it’s not I mean, there’d been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.
Speaker: 0
12:11
I think, my experience of the the soldiers, the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there’s a intense optimism about the outcomes of the war. There’s a sense that Right. Going to win. Yeah. And the definition of what win means was, like, all the territory is going to be one back.
Speaker: 1
12:34
Yeah. I Ai certainly, on the front lines facing Crimea was, became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late twenty twenty two would even be able to get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the ai, and I said I I thought that that was an overreach.
Speaker: 0
12:51
And, now Ai think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted. The morale Mhmm. The dreams, the certainty of victory has has maybe faded from the forefront of their minds.
Speaker: 1
13:14
Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.
Speaker: 0
13:17
What did you think of the the blow up between Zelensky and Trump as you’re, sitting there in the dugout?
Speaker: 1
13:24
Well, it is it was a very, disturbing place to watch it ram, perhaps anywhere would have been. Ai, I mean, obviously, it was a meeting that shouldn’t have happened. It was far too early.
Speaker: 0
13:38
Why do you think so? There’s not enough actual pathways to piece on the table?
Speaker: 1
13:43
Ai, I think the mineral deal I mean, I love the fact that everyone’s now an expert in eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits. But I
Speaker: 0
13:50
think, as I’ve learned, and we’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, I’m learning that everybody’s an expert on geopolitics and the history of war on the Internet.
Speaker: 1
13:58
And now mineral deposits, obviously. Yes. The Ai really speaking at the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here. But no. I mean, I I if what I could sai, the deal that that, the American administration was trying to, get the Ukrainian government to sign was sort of too early to, to force Ukrainians weren’t were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure.
Speaker: 1
14:24
And I think, certainly, Zelensky wasn’t expecting to shah wasn’t expecting to go until pretty much the day before, was obviously visibly tired and exhausted again as you are after that amount of pressure for that long ai. And, no. I mean, the thing that struck meh, and I I said this in my column in your post from there, that, the thing that struck me was I said to some of the soldiers I was with, you know, what do you make of this?
Speaker: 1
14:56
And, you know, one of them just said to me, well, you know, we’re advised not to meh follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this, you know. And, but of course, everyone has Instagram or scrolls. And among dog pictures and the, you know, the hot women or whatever is, you know, what happened in the oval.
Speaker: 1
15:17
And, but what struck me was this same guy and saying, I’ve got a job to do.
Speaker: 0
15:24
Right. And, there’s a clarity and a wisdom to that. But, your job is is is bigger than that. Right? It’s to understand the politics as well. What do you think about the politics of that moment? Because that was a real opportunity to come together and and make progress on peace. Right?
Speaker: 0
15:47
And it, from by all accounts, was not a successful step forward.
Speaker: 1
15:52
I don’t think by any account it was a successful step forward unless, to some extent, it was a play ram DC to say to Putin, look, we’ve daft off Zelensky and, you know, now give us something. That’s the only, remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it. But I think it was just one of those extremely, I mean, just awful political moments.
Speaker: 1
16:22
Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the the the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator, and people in the administration implying that Ukraine has started the war. And I think that’s that must be, for Zelensky, a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in.
Speaker: 1
16:57
And, I had significant sympathy for
Speaker: 0
17:01
him in finding it bewildering because it would be bewildering. I think the sad thing to me also on the mundane details of that meeting and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, I think it’s true that he was also exhausted. Yes. There was a dickhead of a of a reporter that was asked a question about outfit in a way that listen. Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker: 0
17:28
He’s an emotional being for better or for worse. And there’s a dumb dig head of a reporter Arya Taylor Greene’s boyfriend.
Speaker: 1
17:37
Oh, right. He is.
Speaker: 0
17:39
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
17:39
The things you know. See, you’re a real journalist. He’s he’s from one of the the new I’m all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing, but it means that you get some people in who are sort of yeah. From a blog landers, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it it means that you get somebody who will do something like that.
Speaker: 1
17:57
The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was the that guy asked vatsal, well, disrespectful question. And, I I think it was disrespectful. I’ll I’ll just I’ll very quickly say why. I mean, I think that I think that when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect or at least concession that the other man has come from the realm of war.
Speaker: 1
18:25
And that if you’re sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed and decimated and defenestrated and much more to a man who’s for whom none of that is metaphorical. I think that’s extremely hard to to accept. And I think that probably also at that moment, there was a sort of sense of, you know, Zelensky is being disrespected by being asked about what he’s wearing.
Speaker: 1
19:04
When does everyone knows? You know, Churchill during World War two used to wear his fatigues, on foreign visits. And it’s just that, it’s to remind people you’re coming from the realm of war. And I think that probably in that, in that moment, one of the things that would have been going through his head would be, but, I mean, if if if this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you know, you’d you’d hope hope your host stepped in and defended you.
Speaker: 1
19:30
I mean, if let me try this one out. I mean, if sai if a if a journalist in the Oval Office, if Putin was sitting there or a putative journalist said to Putin, you know, everyone knows you had a lot of facial work done. And, word is you’ve used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use. Can you comment on on that?
Speaker: 1
19:52
You you’d you’d you’d say, well, that’s a kind of disrespectful question for journalists to ask sana it’s a little bit, off of what needs to be gone over. And this is the same thing with Zelensky with the outfit. I think it was just petty and and, and threw things off in a bad way.
Speaker: 0
20:13
Yeah. And it was poorly researched because Ai think Zelensky was explained this, explained this, like, three years ago at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears, and he’s been consistent wearing the same
Speaker: 1
20:23
It’s also, by the way, it’s it’s an example of the frivolity of a lot of the of the attempts to attempts to understand what’s going on. I mean, my view is that is that since actually most people in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything. One of the things that we always do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, for I mean, every sai does it.
Speaker: 1
20:48
Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years. I I didn’t want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because it just it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama’s foreign policy.
Speaker: 1
21:08
It was just an easy shorthand. I think it’s the same. We’re we’re we’re always tempted to that.
Speaker: 0
21:13
But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin. I think Putin would have been able to, respond himself to that journalist effectively, and he would have done it in Russian.
Speaker: 1
21:26
Oh, yeah. The the language thing was
Speaker: 0
21:28
Yeah. So I wanted to sort of lay out several just unfortunate things that happen in these situations. Ai I think it happens in all peace negotiations, and it’s funny how history can turn on moments like this. I do think there’s a dickhead reporter ai with the fact that the, you know, with all due respect, but Zelensky’s English sometimes is not very good.
Speaker: 1
21:48
Yes. Sana apart from anything else, if he had agreed to have not done it in English, he would have bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
21:55
Yeah. And have the wit the guy is funny, witty, intelligent. You know, he could do that in the native language of whether it’s Ukrainian or Russian to be able to respond and get the interpreter. So all of that is really unfortunate because I think on those little moments, it’s it’s a dance, and there’s an opportunity there.
Speaker: 0
22:17
You know, the Republicans, the the right wing in The United States have a general kinda skepticism of Zelensky and, and but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way. It can turn. It can change. It can evolve.
Speaker: 1
22:30
It’s very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it’s happened?
Speaker: 0
22:34
I it the politics in The United States is so dumb that at the very beginning, it could just be reduced to, well, the left went Putin bad, Zelensky good, rah rah Ukrainian flags. Therefore, the right must go the opposite. Yeah. That’s ai. Is literally as dumb as that. Let’s each pick a side
Speaker: 1
22:56
and call the other dumb. I I had a a ai I used recently. It was, the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the means. It is sai like that, isn’t it? Because, yes, I mean, I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or ai flags or, you know, trans flags in their ai, then put Ukrainian flags in their bio despite almost certainly not knowing where Ukraine was.
Speaker: 1
23:22
And, if that happens, the inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren’t really thinking is to say, that’s really annoying. These people are really annoying. I’ll sock it to them. But that’s where you’ve got to try to rise above that and say, actually, funny enough, the fate of a country doesn’t depend on my tolerance for memes online today.
Speaker: 0
23:43
Yeah. So I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened between Zelensky and Trump. There could’ve been real camaraderie. I’ve seen the skill of that just recently having, researched deeply and interacted with, Narendra Modi. Here’s somebody who has the skill of, you know, for his country, for his situation, being able to somehow be friends with Putin Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
24:12
And friends with Zelensky and friends with Trump and friends with Biden and friends with Obama. I was very skillful. And that while still being strong for his country and ram, like, fundamentally a nationalist figure
Speaker: 1
24:29
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
24:30
Who’s, like, you know, very not globalist, not, anything but pro India, India First, nation first. In fact, nation first with a very specific idea of what that nation represents. Cool. And that, you know, Zelensky could do all of those things, but have the skill of navigating, the Trump ram.
Speaker: 0
24:54
Because every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated.
Speaker: 1
24:59
Yes. The obvious one. I mean, I don’t wanna make it sound like it was Zelensky’s fault, but, I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to to say yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and American people and American politicians from across the aisle for your support for my country in its hour of need.
Speaker: 1
25:16
We’re deeply grateful. And because he, for once, forgot to say that.
Speaker: 0
25:20
I I think it’s not that simple. I think there’s a
Speaker: 1
25:22
It’s not that simple. It’s one reason.
Speaker: 0
25:23
I think saying thank you, he didn’t need to say thank you. There is
Speaker: 1
25:26
Well, just that was ai Vance that was what Vance vatsal in off.
Speaker: 0
25:29
He he’s just picking a thing to leap on. There’s a whole energy. You have to acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Ai, buddy, buddy with the left for the last four years. There’s ways to fix that. Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
25:54
And you basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is, like, showing there’s many ways of doing that, but one of them is saying, feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world’s greatest negotiators. Right? Mhmm. I’m I’m glad we’re able to come to the table and negotiate together Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
26:14
Because I believe you are the great negotiator mediator that can, actually bring a successful resolution to like Yeah.
Speaker: 1
26:22
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
26:22
That’s true. Opposed to have an energy of, like, it should be obvious to everybody that Ukraine are the good guys and Russia is the bad guys. There’s this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there’s a new guy. You gotta, like, convince the new guy that this global mission that this nation is on, this war that is in in many ways the West versus the East, that this there’s ai, there’s whole histories here, that this is a war worth winning.
Speaker: 0
26:58
You have to convince them. Right?
Speaker: 1
27:00
Yeah. No. Sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the
Speaker: 0
27:12
war Right.
Speaker: 1
27:13
And Zelensky not Putin being the dictator. I I I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the president’s comments on that, saying that, the big picture of Putin, just saying, ai, this is this is a dictator. And, you know, I think that people can be, ai enough to be able to recognize that, you know, you can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn’t mean you have to fall for Putin.
Speaker: 1
27:40
And again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don’t have that capability.
Speaker: 0
27:47
Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin?
Speaker: 1
27:52
He’s a dictator who’s very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition. He’s kleptomaniac of his country’s resources, has enriched himself as much as he could, as he has with the cronies around him. He’s not just acted to, destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth, and, killed people on their our soil using, as it happens, weapons of mass destruction.
Speaker: 1
28:30
The use of polonium in the center of London, not good. The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming cathedral city like Salisbury, not good. If the sort of apologist of Putin would say, well, he’s just a sort of tough man who’s looking after his house business.
Speaker: 1
28:51
Well, I don’t think even if you think he has the right to do that, that he should be doing it in third countries deliberately using, weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British citizens. Yeah. I mean, that’s just for starters.
Speaker: 0
29:10
What do you make for, do you think he’s actually popularly elected? No. Do you think the the results of the elections are fraudulent? Yes. I mean Do you think it’s possible that it’s just that the opposition has been eliminated, and he’s legitimately popularly elected.
Speaker: 1
29:31
It definitely helps a chap if he’s killed all of his opponents.
Speaker: 0
29:35
Something about using the term chap in that context is just, marvelous.
Speaker: 1
29:39
But, you know, I know. I mean, but I mean, seriously, you you, if if if people are worried about this is another of the sort of slightly Alice in Wonderland things recently about Zelenskyy. People are saying, ai why hasn’t he’s a dictator because he hasn’t held elections during a total war of self defense.
Speaker: 1
29:56
And it’s like, well, you know, if you’re really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you’d at least notice that that that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense. But this doesn’t mean that you have to say that, therefore, they should have western style elections and and and freedom, that Russia is is ready to go and become a western liberal democracy.
Speaker: 1
30:22
It doesn’t mean any of that at all. It’s just at at least note that this is what Putin is.
Speaker: 0
30:29
What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in ’22?
Speaker: 1
30:34
It’s what he’s said for years, which is, the basically, the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.
Speaker: 0
30:40
Do you think there is empire building components to that motivation?
Speaker: 1
30:46
I would trust most ai friends in Eastern Vatsal Europe who certainly do think that. There’s a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on defense, and it’s because they’re very worried. I I I don’t think they’re faking it. I don’t think they’re faking it for me or for anyone else.
Speaker: 1
31:08
I think the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.
Speaker: 0
31:16
Do you think there’s a possibility that, the war continues indefinitely? Even if there’s a ceasefire and the peace reached, the war will resume. Meh. He will seek expansion even beyond Ukraine. Yes.
Speaker: 1
31:33
And, the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it’ll be a temporary pause, and whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the opportunity to advance again. Yes. Again, one of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine, that that’s all he wants, and that he has no history or of rhetoric or actions that suggest anything else.
Speaker: 1
32:05
And, again, it’s one of the reasons why it’s useful traveling to places and seeing things with your own eyes because I very much remember being in the country of Georgia, after Putin tried to invade in 02/2008. So Ai just again, people don’t have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause just to recognize that that it doesn’t seem to be the case, that that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin’s
Speaker: 0
32:33
vision. Do you see value and, maybe depth and power to the realist perspective of all this? You know, somebody like, John Mearsheimer’s formulation of all this, that, in these invasions of Georgia, of Ukraine, it’s using military power to expand the sphere of influence
Speaker: 1
32:55
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
32:56
In the region in a cold calculation of geopolitics.
Speaker: 1
32:59
It’s interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is there’s been an act of sort of necromancy of certain figures who were totally, totally debunked, in the area of Ukraine, Ai, and in the case of Israel, people like Finkelstein. And, it’s been interesting because these are people that one hadn’t heard of for some years because, they were not listened to for usually for good reason.
Speaker: 1
33:26
But, by the way, first of all, I’m very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because most people, to some extent, will say that they are a realist in foreign policy. Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.
Speaker: 0
33:46
I would like to meet them.
Speaker: 1
33:47
A surrealist foreign policy analyst.
Speaker: 0
33:50
We did mention Alice in Wonderland.
Speaker: 1
33:52
So Yeah. I mean, maybe we should introduce the term. But, I mean, if you wanna say if you want to look gimlet out eyed out across the world, you you you’re you’re a realist. I think the steel meh of their argument would be Russia has or believes it has a sphere of influence and is regrettable, but there’s very little we can do about that.
Speaker: 1
34:16
That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.
Speaker: 0
34:23
Well, to expand on that Meh, isn’t this how superpowers operate in the dark realist slash surrealist sai? Meaning, The United States uses military power to, have a sphere influence over the whole globe, really. China appears to be willing to use military power to expand its sphere of influence.
Speaker: 1
34:48
And political power. Yeah. More importantly, in the case of China. Political power. Non kinetic warfare to take over arya, Hong Kong being the obvious one.
Speaker: 0
34:59
Ai that, isn’t there always a kinetic threat?
Speaker: 1
35:02
Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers sana and, students arya protesting, of course. I just but but to go back to this, yeah, of course. Okay. Countries believe they have or or would like to have spheres of influence. I do think at some point that the so called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious, regime.
Speaker: 1
35:29
And it’s not I mean, it’s it’s not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if if Russia had if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kyiv in the first weeks of the war in ’22, he would have gone straight on to other places.
Speaker: 1
35:51
And, you know, maybe he would have done, maybe he would have taken his time, maybe he wouldn’t have done. And this is a very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year. You know, my friends in Georgia, I thought, were, wildly off the mark when they were believing that after 02/2008, they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership.
Speaker: 1
36:16
And I thought I thought that was completely unlikely, and I still think it’s unlikely and almost certainly undesirable for Europe and for NATO because you’ve you’ve got to be very careful as and obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been since the nineties is, you know, are you gonna set up a ai to start World War three?
Speaker: 0
36:35
And that’s not a small thing to consider. So what do you think the, the peace deal might look like? And what what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in in the coming weeks and months?
Speaker: 1
36:49
I just thought it would be, regrettably, the Ukrainians ceding some territory in the East. And then, making sure they rearm, during whatever peace period comes afterwards.
Speaker: 0
37:07
And probably all four territories of, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Ai.
Speaker: 1
37:15
You couldn’t lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on. But Ai I mean, I think that and I think the ease with which non Ukrainians are currently speaking about Ukrainian ceding territory is is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin’s bryden, and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine, and and and much more.
Speaker: 1
37:41
And, you know, I I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian occupied arya, And, it’s it’s it’s brutal for the Ukrainian to be
Speaker: 2
37:57
growing up in that
Speaker: 1
38:00
territory. So Ai when people say, well, obviously, you know, Donetsk has to be given to Putin. I I think that that is not as easy a thing if you’re in Ukraine as it is if you’re sitting in New York, say. And ai the way, I think that on the issue of there is a school of thought that that is that obviously, president Trump to some extent was was floating in recent weeks, which is that if if a deal is done, a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else, you get this great you get a kind of buffer zone of American businesses and investment, and therefore, American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to invade.
Speaker: 1
38:47
I don’t, follow that idea because not least there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast. And we know from Hong Kong and other places, just because there are international financial interests in the region does not mean that the dictatorship will not either, militarily or covertly take over.
Speaker: 1
39:10
I I don’t I don’t see American ai as being an effective buffer zone against Putin.
Speaker: 0
39:17
By the way, what did you, learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children ram those regions?
Speaker: 1
39:25
Well, I mean, it’s it’s it’s heartbreaking because the only schooling is, Russian schooling. Obviously, teaching the Russian language, Putin’s view of history, and effectively indoctrination. And and people can quibble with that term, but it’s Putinesque indoctrination schools.
Speaker: 1
39:47
And any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and, not go out. And there were I spoke to children and parents who’d had school friends, for instance, the Russians set up in ’22 and ’23, summer camps, for the children of some of the areas that have been ai, and the children went off to the ram, and then they didn’t come back.
Speaker: 1
40:12
But they were just stolen. I mean, it’s thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion. That’s not a small thing. It’s not got very much attention, but,
Speaker: 2
40:26
meh.
Speaker: 1
40:26
I mean, children who would hide whenever the Russian troops came to the door. One teenage boy who described to me how when his mother was out, a woman came around the house, knocked on the door, and, gave him his papers, and said that he had to attend the next week to sign up for the Russian army.
Speaker: 1
40:49
This is I mean, this is this is this is not good, and that’s obviously what life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine. I just I just have it in mind when people say things like, you know, well, obviously, these regions have to be handed over. It’s not it’s it’s very, very hard if you’re Ukrainian to concede to that.
Speaker: 0
41:13
Yeah. And even if they are, as part of the negotiation handed over, I think it’ll probably be generations or never that that could be accepted by Ukrainian people. Absolutely. And I would have thought never. What do we know about this kidnapping of children? The stories of the thousands of children that the the Russian forces kidnapped?
Speaker: 1
41:36
Some of them were in orphanages in Eastern Ukraine, not all, by any means, but some were. And it’s a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families. Many the Russians said, well, look at these Ukrainians. They don’t even look after their children. Therefore, we will look after them.
Speaker: 1
41:55
And I was I was recently, when I was there, looking into this story, because it’s it’s a very interesting question as to why it hasn’t had more attention. You know, one thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok Schoolgirls some twelve years ago now in Northern Ai, and the appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram, completely gained the world’s attention.
Speaker: 1
42:19
And I was very interested into why the Ukrainian children who’d been taken by the Russians had not gained similar attention. There’s a slight similarity with the war in Israel, which I’m sure we’ll come on to. But, I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages, and the Ukrainians knew this is this is my estimation of the terrain, is that Ukrainians knew that if they made a great deal about this, was it worth more than they did, that the that the children would effectively be the most effective bargaining chip.
Speaker: 1
42:53
And I do think there’s considerable truth in that. Because if you look at, for instance, the way in which, pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the kidnapped Israelis, you’ll see that it it’s it’s a pretty effective tactic for, any, to tout heroin regime or terrorist group to operate in a way that means that the population of the country you’re attacking pressure their government to do something in terms of concession.
Speaker: 1
43:29
It’s it’s a it’s it’s a very effective tool. And I think that story was partly played down, not just outside of Ukraine, but also within Ukraine, partly for that reason.
Speaker: 0
43:38
As a truth seeker, as a journalist, how do you operate in that world where, at least to me, it’s obvious that there’s just a flood of propaganda on both ai? Now, of course, when you go there and directly experience it and talk to people, but those people are still also swimming in the propaganda.
Speaker: 0
43:59
So unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it’s hard to know. Like, I I speak to people on the Russian side, and there’s they’re clearly first of all, hilariously enough, they almost always say there’s that there’s no propaganda in Russia.
Speaker: 2
44:13
Of course.
Speaker: 0
44:15
Which makes me ai, I mean, you you can be completely lied to. Maybe I am in The United States as well and just be unaware. Maybe Earth is run by aliens. Maybe Earth is flat. So I don’t know.
Speaker: 1
44:31
Maybe you’ve taken mushrooms.
Speaker: 0
44:33
I have before this, and I finally see the truth. And it’s you that are deluded, Douglas. Okay. But, back to the rounder discussion, rounder shells that we are. How do you know what is true?
Speaker: 1
44:48
You you can tell it when the bare facts become not true. Ai, you can tell it when somebody is willing to claim that everything caused the invasion of twenty twenty two except for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
Speaker: 0
45:09
Yeah. There’s a there’s a hilarious thing that happens. And I think you’ve actually speak about this that, people arya generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected leader. Always. Always. So the interesting thing that happens is these wise sages that do the narratives of, like, NATO started the war. Ai?
Speaker: 0
45:29
Which there is some interesting geopolitical depth and truth to that, ai, that NATO expansion created a complicated geopolitical context, whatever.
Speaker: 1
45:38
For sure.
Speaker: 0
45:39
But they forget to say, like, other parts of that story.
Speaker: 1
45:43
Well, meh. Of course. I mean and I mean, of course, to some extent, it’s it’s one that, you know, there there’s a there’s a the very the most irritating type of question asker at any event is the person who says, I was disappointed that in your thirty minute talk, you didn’t address x.
Speaker: 1
45:56
Yeah. And I tend to say, well, looking forward to coming to your next talk where in thirty minutes, you’ll cover everything that could possibly be covered. There’s always stuff that’s sana be left on the sides. There’s always gonna be stuff that’s left unaddressed. There’s always gonna be other angles.
Speaker: 1
46:09
There’s always gonna be somebody else who who who who has this interesting perspective, and you can’t cover it. Nevertheless, if you cover everything other than the central things then it’s suspicious. Many years ago I was at a debate in Bryden, and there was a debate about the origins of World War two and, Pat Buchanan, talking of necromancy, was one of the the the the speakers.
Speaker: 1
46:37
And, Andrew Roberts, historian, was one of the people on the other side. And at one point, you know, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining in Poland in the mid you know, something like this. And the moderator, I remember, it was just it was just a meh. And the moderator turns to Andrew Roberts and says, Andrew Roberts, why did World War two begin?
Speaker: 1
47:04
And he says, World War two began because Hitler invaded Poland. And it was a magnificent moment because everything had been a meh. They were just so lost in all the intricate and clever and interesting things that you can talk about about the origins of a war that you’ve you you forget to mention the thing that’s most important.
Speaker: 1
47:27
And, certainly ai experience as a journalist and ai is one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people are certain to tell you that what you’ve seen with your own eyes didn’t happen or hasn’t happened. And it helps to steal you
Speaker: 0
47:49
Yeah. For that moment. It’s a gradual thing that happens where the obvious thing starts being taken for granted, and people stop saying it because it’s, like, the boring thing to say at a party. And then all of a sudden, over time, you just almost start questioning whether whether, you know, like, the obvious thing is even true.
Speaker: 0
48:09
I don’t know what that how that ai in sai. Yeah. I think it does.
Speaker: 1
48:13
I I I think it does. I’ve observed it in a lot of different places, which is the important thing is the only thing you do forget. Everything else is what you remember. And some of us have, for some reason, ai in a way where we we don’t we try not to forget the important thing.
Speaker: 0
48:27
Remember the obvious thing. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
48:28
Yes. And as you say, no, I’m not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what is true. Because what a douchebag you’d be if you were that guy. Nobody likes Captain Obvious at a party. Okay.
Speaker: 0
48:41
Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator, a successful negotiator that brings a stable peace to Ukraine? It’s possible. We’ll have to see.
Speaker: 1
48:53
I think it’s just too early and complicated to tell. That he wants to bring a piece seems to me to be obvious. He stated it a lot of times. Whether he can, we’re just gonna have to see. It’s extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the piece still. And I would suggest that the most one not the the most difficult, but one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe.
Speaker: 1
49:24
I Ai just it doesn’t matter because we’ve we’ve we in the West, we some of the countries in the West have said it before that we’d secure their their speak, and we haven’t. And so what other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured?
Speaker: 1
49:53
I I can’t see.
Speaker: 0
49:55
I think, there’s not gonna be ever a guarantee that you can trust. Ai think the way you have a guarantee implicit guarantee is by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible. So you have partnerships with, the, The Middle East, you have partnerships with India, perhaps even with China, with The United States, with many nations in Europe.
Speaker: 0
50:20
All of which still suggests
Speaker: 1
50:22
that if there’s enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion.
Speaker: 0
50:31
There would be financial pressure. Yeah. There would be, you know, Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West. I I think a world that’s flourishing would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East. Thought it would be ideal.
Speaker: 1
50:56
It would be ideal if if if they if, the regime in Moscow wanted it. But that’s that’s not I mean, there again, you get into the thing of, you know, people accused of Russophobia, but I mean, the the I I do believe that after the fall of the wall, Russia was ill treated by the West, not treated with the, some of the courtesy that it required.
Speaker: 1
51:21
I do think that. And at the same time, that doesn’t justify, the actions of Russia in the last twenty years.
Speaker: 0
51:31
Right. But let’s descend from the surrealist to the realist. It’s very possible for Russia to, be on the verge of military invasion of these nations Mhmm. And that being wrong while also not doing it because they’re afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China.
Speaker: 1
51:52
It’s possible, but the alliance they formed with this sort of rogue alliance with China to a considerable extent, North Korea, not useful, and Iran is, something they seem to find bearable. It’s not a very good alliance in most people’s analysis, but it’s an alliance.
Speaker: 0
52:16
It’s bearable, but I don’t think maybe you disagree with this. I don’t think the Russian people or even Putin, wants to be isolated from the West. I think he wants to be friends with the West and with the East and with everybody. He just also wants Ukraine. Right? And there’s, how does the Rolling Stones song go? Which one? Not the satisfaction one. Sympathy with the devil? That’s the one. You got me on that one. No.
Speaker: 0
52:50
Like, there there’s interests, whether it’s expanding the sphere and influence. That’s one thing on the table. But that can be put aside if you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations. And, if Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations, then that prevents Russia from invading.
Speaker: 1
53:10
I think the premise is one that I’ve seen before. There was a famous, what was his name? Norman Angell. He wrote this book, which is a fantastic bestseller in his day, where he believed that Europe would be in a period of endless Kantian peace because the prospect of European powers going to war was so economically unviable.
Speaker: 1
53:34
The book was reissued after World War one, and I never got the second edition. But I assume it was significantly rewritten.
Speaker: 0
53:46
That’s a very ai cynical take that just because the book is wrong I’m
Speaker: 1
53:49
not saying just the book is wrong. I’m saying that the the the idea that that cooperation on an economic and other levels is any significant preventative device to madness breaking out is is not something I speak. Could deter some people. Right. It could deter some very, very rational, economically driven actors, but it it it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war and to invade and to go mad.
Speaker: 0
54:24
Okay. Well, I would argue that in the twenty first century, one of the reasons we have much fewer wars is because of the meh more well, so there’s a few tools here on this on the geopolitical stage. One of them is that you were just much more interconnected economically, globally interconnected, and that that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace.
Speaker: 0
54:48
There’s a lot of money to be made from peace. There’s also a lot of money to be made from war.
Speaker: 1
54:53
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
54:53
There’s just there’s a lot of, interest attention, and I I’m just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using. The alternative is what? Military force? That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one, but, unfortunately, it has its downsides also. And after three years of war Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
55:15
And the hundreds of thousands dead, You have to start wondering what are the options on the table.
Speaker: 1
55:21
I agree. I’m I’m obviously for economic cooperation. But ai only caveat is not to think that that is something which is of ultimate interest or even at the top of the list of interests of, despots, tyrants, extremists who sana something else.
Speaker: 0
55:48
Yeah. But, can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin? No. A lot of the ideas I hear about peace is Putin bad, victory must be achieved, NATO membership required. Yeah. Okay. This ai of like but what’s the what’s the you have to come to the table to to end the killing
Speaker: 1
56:15
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
56:15
Is one. And, two, have different ideas of how to, have a nonzero chance of speak. So that Don’t You know, the options are it seems to me the only option, not the only option, but the likeliest option is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There’s, of course, other radical options.
Speaker: 0
56:37
There’s, there’s, Russia joining NATO or something like this, or there’s, giving, you know, doing flirting with World War three, essentially, giving nukes to Ukraine or something like this. There’s, like, crazy stuff. Or a totally new military alliance with France and and and Britain and Germany and, European nations and Ukraine Mhmm. Or some weird network of Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
57:05
Military power that threatens Russia in some way, or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India, China, and Ukraine, something like this. Mhmm. Just some really out there ai. And I think that’s how the world that that’s how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.
Speaker: 0
57:26
And
Speaker: 1
57:26
Look. It could be. I I I I hope your I hope your idea is right. I think it’s about the what’s said in the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say, is and also never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world. And some people don’t dream as you dream.
Speaker: 0
57:55
I think we’ll talk about that. So in your new book, Death Gults, that one is a easier one for me to understand to the story that you’re describing. I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to leaders of major nations.
Speaker: 1
58:13
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m I’m I’m not by any means urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a meh madman who cannot be in any way understood.
Speaker: 0
58:23
I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.
Speaker: 1
58:28
From your lips to God’s ears?
Speaker: 0
58:31
Can you steal me on the case for and then against Zelenskyy as the right leader for Ukraine at this moment? Is he the right person to take it to the the the point of peace?
Speaker: 1
58:41
We’ll see. If if if if he can, then he then, of course, he is. You know, he deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril, for playing the international game of getting support for his country well.
Speaker: 1
59:04
And sometimes the person who does that, not there are many people like that, can be the person who also brings about a peace deal and sometimes not.
Speaker: 0
59:13
I think there’s a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering of the people, the land he loves, to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who, did the destruction and to be able to That is very hard. Compromise
Speaker: 1
59:33
on anything. That’s that’s possible. Again, it puts the onus on him though. Sort of slightly presupposes that Putin doesn’t have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard. I’ve noticed this in a lot of conflicts. It’s extremely hard, the way in which outsiders come in and others who haven’t seen what you’ve seen or gone through what you’ve gone through and say, you know, it’s time to get around the negotiating table and just, you know, you think you didn’t see what I sai, or you didn’t go through what I went through.
Speaker: 1
01:00:07
Who are you to tell me? It comes back to that thing, the the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace. The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables, but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things.
Speaker: 1
01:00:27
And it’s it’s very hard for somebody who hasn’t seen it to tell the person who has that they should
Speaker: 0
01:00:37
act differently. And the sad thing about humanity is both the the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are right.
Speaker: 1
01:00:48
Yes. Sai that’s a struggle. That’s definitely a struggle. It’s it’s it’s like asking somebody to forgive. I’ve seen vatsal a lot lot of ends of conflicts. People say, you know, the important thing is that we forgive and move on. And then the other person says, you know, your child didn’t die of shrapnel wounds.
Speaker: 0
01:01:11
Yeah. This is you know, I got a lot of heat for an interview I did with Zelensky. By the way, people privately, the people that meh me is is all love and support, and the people that disagree in Ukraine, Soldiers, people online are ruthless. They’re misrepresenting me. They’re lying. People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying? Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:01:30
Good god, Lex. You discovered a new, phenomenon.
Speaker: 0
01:01:35
I’m a real radical intellectual.
Speaker: 1
01:01:40
Nothing misses your eye.
Speaker: 0
01:01:43
I see the truth, and I’m unafraid to point it out. No. There’s a degree this this idea that you need to compromise with the person with the leader of a nation you’re at war with, and in so doing, to some degree, are forgiving their actions. Because the actual feeling you have is you want it to be fair, and the definition of fair when you’ve seen that much suffering Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:02:14
Is for him and everybody around him and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die because you seem towards suffering. But the the other side of that is, yes, there’s children that have ai. Mhmm. But you go coming to the negotiation table
Speaker: 1
01:02:32
other children from dying. Yes. Of course.
Speaker: 0
01:02:34
And so, like, there is just you had this kind of way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective, the that it’s naive to say to come to the negotiation table. And it is for a person from the land of war, but the very smart, intelligent, and non naive person from the land of peace that is often right in some deep sense about the long arc of history, for them, it does it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.
Speaker: 1
01:03:04
The one thing I would add to that though is, you know, don’t forget that it it also depends on whether or not there’s a clear shot of winning. Sure. If there’s a clear shot of winning, and that’s the most important. The most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that.
Speaker: 1
01:03:23
It’s simply winning and losing. And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you’re near it, then having somebody else come in and saying, why not stop just before victory is is is very hard. That’s one of the complex one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we’re talking about.
Speaker: 0
01:03:44
You know what’s the the other big complexity of that? Because the clear shot of winning is like a a man walking through the desert seeing water. It could be during war, it really is an illusion. So here’s what happens. The really complicated aspect of negotiation is in order to negotiate peace from a place of strength, you have to have victory in sight. Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:04:11
And so the temptation from that position is to non negotiate Mhmm. Is to keep pushing forward to achieve victory. And this, I would say, hindsight is twenty twenty, but this is the failure in twenty two and two occasions to achieve, to negotiate a ai in peace. One in the spring because there was a Ukraine was in a real big, I would say, position of strength have having fended off the Russian forces around Kyiv.
Speaker: 0
01:04:46
That’s one. And then as you mentioned, in the fall of twenty two with with her son and Kharkiv, had a lot of military success. They were in a place of strength.
Speaker: 1
01:04:57
Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:04:57
And from that place, they’ve decided to keep going because victory was in sight. But that was also an opportunity to make peace.
Speaker: 1
01:05:05
It’s perfectly possible. Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:05:07
That’s the hard thing.
Speaker: 1
01:05:08
It’s very hard. It’s it’s all hard. But I’m just again, it’s victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars. And you’re ai. They can also grind on because nobody has the capability to make a breakthrough. It’s the case I mean, the the the wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they sort of burn out after about ten years or so,
Speaker: 0
01:05:36
for similar reasons. When you’re in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won?
Speaker: 1
01:05:42
It’s a very good question. And,
Speaker: 0
01:05:45
you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or political leaders? Military and political leaders. It it just feels ai, like I said, man in the desert seeing water. I think there’s a sense that victory is so close. There are ai. There’s times in a war when you feel like victory is so close.
Speaker: 1
01:06:04
No, you’re right.
Speaker: 0
01:06:05
It’s an interesting insight.
Speaker: 1
01:06:07
Meh. It’s an interesting insight. It’s like the way in which, there’s a there’s a force in nature which is that if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you in to using it. Yeah. Extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say, let’s go back. Which is is meh. You’re right. No.
Speaker: 1
01:06:31
It’s it’s it’s one of many, many interesting aspects to warfare.
Speaker: 0
01:06:35
I think the sad thing about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader, which I would argue that Zelensky really ai Ukraine in this fight in the beginning of the war. You have to be that. And like you said, after you, the UMass, the army and have military success to be able to step back and make speak, that those two just don’t often go hand in hand because, again, as a wartime leader, especially one who has seen the suffering firsthand, walking away is, is tough.
Speaker: 0
01:07:19
Especially also combined with that, just the realities of war where there is probably corruption, that there is things you know, once the war ends, there has to be investigations. Because the war wasn’t won, you might not turn out to be, when history looks at it, the good guy.
Speaker: 0
01:07:37
And a leader doesn’t wanna a leader always wants to be the good guy. So there’s just all psychological complexities shah are and you look at this whole picture, in in a basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish, if you want humanity to flourish, you just ask the question, okay.
Speaker: 0
01:07:57
So what is the thing I would like to see?
Speaker: 1
01:08:01
There’s so many historical analogies you you can give, but just surely not rewarding Putin’s actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land
Speaker: 0
01:08:25
in the future. So yeah. And but this is nuanced because, like, you it’s very probably good to be the boring person at the party that says dictatorship’s sai. Democracies are good. Many of the ideals of the West are good.
Speaker: 1
01:08:42
Democracies are better. Better? Yes. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:08:46
That sounds like Animal Farm, but, yes, two legs better. But, yes, democracy is better. And, invading countries is bad, but World War three is bad too. So after you say something is bad, what’s the next step? Because military intervention in a lot of these conflicts
Speaker: 1
01:09:08
It’ll be about deterrence. Yeah. But what’s what’s effective deterrence? That we’re gonna have to keep going over for a long time to come.
Speaker: 0
01:09:16
My question is, how can we achieve peace in April, in May? Right? Not like the adults at the table all seem to tell me, well, it’s a process. It’s complicated. You know, there is it it just feels like this is a thing that might go into the next winter. And there’s still, maybe initial ceasefire, and the ceasefire is broken, and there’s more people dying. For sure.
Speaker: 0
01:09:43
And it it’s that mess, it seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying every single day.
Speaker: 1
01:09:52
I mean, of course, like, we all almost everybody, not everybody, but almost everyone would like the thing to stop immediately. Of course.
Speaker: 0
01:09:59
No. Like, I I think that is the boring thing at the party. Yes. But they don’t say it often enough. Not off there has to be
Speaker: 1
01:10:05
a frustration.
Speaker: 0
01:10:06
There has to be a frustration. I don’t understand why Putin, Zelensky, and Trump can’t just meet in a room together without signing anything. Leaders meeting and dis discussing and, like, the human connection. There there’s so many layers of diplomats. It’s the problem I have with the managerial class.
Speaker: 0
01:10:25
I don’t they don’t they schedule meetings really well. Sure. They don’t get shit done. And I I I would love it if people got shit done. So the soldiers get shit done. They have they’re fighting the reality of the war. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:10:39
And then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the on the scale of nations and geopolitics. But, like, this diplomatic meetings and
Speaker: 1
01:10:48
Ai. I Sai shah your frustration about it. At the same time, I think, Ai shah your frustration because I’ve seen it all a lot of it, you know, in my own eyes. I mean, there was tan and I was with the other week, and they were hit just after I left their bryden. And you wouldn’t believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. And I shah your frustration with that.
Speaker: 1
01:11:16
At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing is that you do and I’ve seen this elsewhere. You you you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can’t pressurize. That is one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply, you can put America can put extraordinary, diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military pressure on Ukraine.
Speaker: 1
01:11:54
And it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it’s much easier to pressure Zelensky. And that’s one of the many things that makes it harder, is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing, accepting the horrors of war, you know, we can linger, but you you accepting all that, if somebody says we’ve got to get peace today, and the three of them around the table, the most ai thing is that it’ll be that it’ll be the person who you can pressure most easily, who will be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim.
Speaker: 1
01:12:45
And that’s an extremely ugly and common thing to happen. Meh. And that’s the other boring thing to say. The boring truth that, the easy shortcut here is Yeah. Is to punish Ukraine. And You bet.
Speaker: 0
01:13:01
You just have to not
Speaker: 1
01:13:02
do it. Let’s keep being the boring people of the party.
Speaker: 0
01:13:05
Yeah. Well, nobody’s gonna invite us. Alright. Let’s go from one complicated conflict to, perhaps an even more complicated one. Israel and Palestine. Can you, take me through what happened on October 7 as you understand it and as you ai at the beginning of the book?
Speaker: 1
01:13:37
Well, the book on democracies and death cults is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that’s been going on since the seventh October, but the war’s been going on a lot longer. And also, I ai, on the what for me is one of the overwhelming questions, which I’m sure we’ll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world.
Speaker: 1
01:14:01
Obviously, on the seventh itself, it was a brigade ai attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and, attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things like the observation base in Nahalaz. They ran through the communities in the South, very peaceful, peacenik, effect free communities of the kibbutzim, as they’re called, the communities, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped.
Speaker: 1
01:14:43
And, of course, they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party and rampaged through that with RPGs and Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more. And, got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel, places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well.
Speaker: 1
01:15:17
We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the North. Hezbollah joined in the war within twenty four hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into Northern Israel ram Southern Lebanon. But the plan was that they would do the same thing from the North and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garot Israel from the center.
Speaker: 1
01:15:44
The interesting reason why Sai think it’ll be found out in the future, but why they didn’t coordinate better was Hamas didn’t trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were gonna do it that wouldn’t be in for that wouldn’t be intercepted.
Speaker: 1
01:15:58
The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms, knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn’t get close to that. But they got worryingly closer than people might have thought they were capable of.
Speaker: 1
01:16:20
I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most, catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state. And I think there are several reasons why. One is a perception problem. What a lot of military commanders and others ai to me is the conception.
Speaker: 1
01:16:42
The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in security military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and, you know, lining their pockets and living in, Qatar and becoming billionaires. But ai like many other terrorist groups and, you know, cults, that they would end up becoming just corrupt and not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary.
Speaker: 1
01:17:18
That’s the first thing, was there was just a massive error of the conception in Israel. And then then there are the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day. And there will be a there already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that, and there doubtless will be in the future as well.
Speaker: 1
01:17:44
The the single, thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way, was the number of people who described to me, you know, who survived the massacres in the South, who said that, you know, they’d said to their children, don’t worry. The army will be here in minutes, and they weren’t. You know? Meh places, it was many hours till the army got there. And there are reasons for that.
Speaker: 1
01:18:16
There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings. Other things were very I I discovered were very human failings. I don’t want to overstress the failure of the army because actually certain units and things got down very fast. There was a unit, Tuft de Vann, who got down to the junction, you know, by within about an hour and ninety minutes of the massacres starting and joined in the fight.
Speaker: 1
01:18:46
And then there were self starters ai I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just, like, broke orders and just ai the magnitude of what was happening and sai, we needed in the South. Go. And fought very hard for hours, days, in some cases. But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable.
Speaker: 1
01:19:07
I mean, as as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You you you know what it’s you can see it in hindsight, but you can’t see when you’re in it. And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, coming in with Israeli style, apparatus on them.
Speaker: 1
01:19:40
There’s a Muslim doctor I quote in the book Sai interviewed who describes how he was going to his he’s an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he was going to he’s a doctor. He was going to his shift at the hospital at 06:30 in the morning. The rockets start coming in because the rockets started first, and then the the full invasion.
Speaker: 1
01:19:59
And he described to me how, you know, he’s one of the members of this group, had the United Hat Salah, which is a first responders group. And, they sort of, you know, they get
Speaker: 2
01:20:11
an alert that tells them that, you know,
Speaker: 1
01:20:13
a car has crashed ai, and they they they put on their, you know, first aid kit and sai on and go. And he got one of those alerts sai one of the junctions and, realized there was a car, that something had happened, and there were some dead bodies. And he he stops, and he, sees these men dressed as soldiers. And they just start and he’s wearing his vatsal gear, and they start firing at him.
Speaker: 1
01:20:36
And he just thinks, what the hell? What the hell is going on? And, they turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They, used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air vatsal. And in the end, they shah him and left him, and he survived.
Speaker: 1
01:20:56
He’s a very, very brave man. So there was a lot of confusion like that. There’s a girl whose father, I interviewed, she was at the Nova Party, and, I met him at one of the reunions of the party in the weeks after, and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. And he described how in the last moments of his daughter’s life, shah phoned him on her phone ai a lot of people, and he reassured her that the army would get there and so on.
Speaker: 1
01:21:29
And her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap, and she was obviously panicked. And they’d managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to a, a community where they thought they’d be safe in the South Of Israel. And they were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman. And he wasn’t a policeman. He was Hamas, dressed as police.
Speaker: 1
01:21:50
And, she ai. She was shot and and killed as well. And, so there was a lot of confusion like that. It it’s, hopefully, we’re we’re, you know, the world will find out exactly what went wrong. Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe.
Speaker: 1
01:22:12
But Ai mean, it it it was a a complete catastrophe.
Speaker: 0
01:22:16
Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened? So there’s a a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land. Because it’s such a giant intelligence failure, it seems that there is some manipulation on the inside for political reasons or for
Speaker: 1
01:22:34
You don’t need to go into conspiracy land. I mean, I think there are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were trying that were withholding the information. I don’t know. Again, people will find out. There’s an awful lot of politics inside Israel, and, it’s it’s it’s hard to know that at this stage.
Speaker: 1
01:22:56
I think that most people are sort of still Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti Israel, who just believe that, you know, Israeli military and particularly intelligence dominance is so so strong that there must have been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened? I don’t think you need to go into that.
Speaker: 1
01:23:19
I think that I mean, for instance, some of the young women at the observation base have are on the record. They’ve said I’ve spoken to myself and they who said that they had been warning in the weeks running up to the seventh, that they were seeing, maneuvers and training by the bryden, which suggested that Hamas was was going to do something like this.
Speaker: 1
01:23:41
And and they say that they were ignored. Though you speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say the thing is that this stuff was happening all the time. So it’s very hard it’s very hard to know at the moment.
Speaker: 0
01:23:58
Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history, and, the governing ideology of this group?
Speaker: 1
01:24:08
Well, Hamas, in a way, quite easy to understand because they they say what their ambitions are. They say what their beliefs are. They’ve seen it said it from their governing charter onwards. And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as it were, in trying to understand them is that they they tend to do what they say and, act on what they believe.
Speaker: 1
01:24:30
The primary aim of Hamas is to destroy the state of Israel and then see. They’re not an unusual group, sadly. The the bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think, is that is that they really do mean what they sai, and that they really do mean what they say they want to do.
Speaker: 1
01:24:51
And I give a number of examples in the book of this. But Ai mean, the most, obvious is the case of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who is generally regarded as having orchestrated and and, arranged the October 7. He, we know a fair amount about him because he was imprisoned in Israel in the February for murdering Palestinians in Sana.
Speaker: 1
01:25:22
And, he was released in the prisoner swap for the he’s one of the more than 1,000, Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who was released in his in a swap for Gilad Saloni, the abducted Israeli soldier. And, Yahya Ai in prison in Israel, talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Yahya Sinwar had a brain tyler.
Speaker: 1
01:25:52
And, this this dentist identified this and, actually sent him to the hospital. Tyler Israelis famously, removed the tumor and and and saved Sinwar’s life. But this dentist used to speak to him in in the prison not fairly regularly and and has related, not least to the New York Times, his conversations with Sinwar.
Speaker: 1
01:26:12
And, Sinwar said in one of those conversations, he said, you know, he said, at the moment, you, Israel, are strong, but one day you’ll be speak, and then I’ll come. And, that’s that’s what he did.
Speaker: 0
01:26:32
Is it a hatred of Israel, or is it a hatred of Jews? Is it on the level of nations or the level of, religion? Both.
Speaker: 1
01:26:43
It’s both. I mean, it it it originates from a religious mindset, but it’s, of course, political as well. I mean, the Hamas Charter, of course, some people sort of think the Hamas Charter is of no significance. And I often notice this ai of hand that that that people do. Again, it goes back to what we’re saying earlier.
Speaker: 1
01:27:03
Forget everything other than the most important basic things. But the Hamas Charter, among other things, quotes the hadith that, you know, the end times will not come until all of the the the the rocks and the trees shout out, oh, oh, Muslim, there’s a Jew behind meh. Come and kill him. And, that that is so Hamas is both obviously anti Israeli, obviously, and anti Jewish, obviously.
Speaker: 1
01:27:31
It’s it’s, and ai the way, I mean, one of the many painful stories I tell in the book is of the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked. It’s not as if there’d be a right community to attack and a wrong community to attack, but that many of the communities they attacked were communities which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.
Speaker: 1
01:28:00
There’s a woman who whose name has become relatively famous since certainly, his famous ai is Robert Vinsilva, who was a peace activist who spent every weekend, driving Gazan children from, the border to if if they had very, like, rare medical needs that could not be seen attention to within ai Gaza would drive them to Israeli hospitals.
Speaker: 1
01:28:24
And she spent every weekend doing that. Worked for all of the sort of left wing peacenik organizations in Israel. And, you know, for a look for a while after the seventh, her neighbors and others thought that, she had been taken captive into Arya, and actually there was a hostage poster for her.
Speaker: 1
01:28:41
And there were appeals by the various peacenik organizations for Hamas to hand her over, but it turned out she’d been burned alive in her home. And this wasn’t discovered ai a long time because there was so little DNA left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers.
Speaker: 1
01:28:59
So there were there were a lot of just a lot of people in the Gaza envelope as it’s it’s called in Israel, in the area around Gaza who who would have been the people who, you know, wanted to live peacefully with, the Gazans someday. And those there’s a certain among the many it’s not an irony, but just among the sort of pains of the day is that is that sai so overwhelmingly, these these arya the people that that Ram brought hell to.
Speaker: 0
01:29:35
The response to October 7 by Israel, Can you speak meh the case that Israel went too far?
Speaker: 1
01:29:41
Well, the case that that started from very early on that that critics of Israel had was the the claim that Ai think I first heard it on about the October 8 before Israel had done anything in response, was the claim that, Israel must act proportionately in response. And I I have a critique of this that I’ve often expressed, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality in warfare.
Speaker: 1
01:30:09
And at the same ai, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately. And the proportionality of the rest meh of the rest of the world seems to think Israel should express in warfare is to is to have an equal, an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides. Ai don’t think there’s any, law of war that says that, you know, if you kill 1,200 people and you kidnap another 250 that, as it were, the other ai allowed to do the same back.
Speaker: 1
01:30:45
But that that’s what a lot of people think. And then when they see the death toll escalating on the Gazan side, they say Israel has acted disproportionately and has overreacted. That one is a is a is is tricky because, you know, it’s it’s it’s my belief that, I mean, again, this is a basic thing, but it has to be stated that 9,000,000 citizens of Israel, if you extrapolate that out to what the October 7 would have meant in American terms, you’d be talking about, a day on which if if the attack had happened in Meh, where 44,000 Americans were were killed in one day and ten thousand American citizens taken hostage, nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred, that America would not do whatever it needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who’d been taken.
Speaker: 0
01:31:46
So just on that point, I agree with you a hundred percent. America would do would hit hard back. And I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that. But it’s also possible that, the military industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means extend far beyond hitting back Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
01:32:10
And actually do a thing that’s destructive to everybody, including America financially and the flourishing of Meh and the flourishing of humanity broadly and the region and the stability and the war on terrorism, if that’s a real thing. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not maybe succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress. It probably made more terrorists than that.
Speaker: 0
01:32:37
So there’s a justified feeling of hitting back and, going after somebody like bin Laden in the case of nine eleven, and there’s just the actual implementation. Mhmm. And it seems like the implementation can sometimes, unintended or unintended have consequences that are bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes.
Speaker: 0
01:33:01
Now this this is a general statement. And now we’ll look at Israel where things are small land. Everything is very compact. There’s a lot of complexities that are well studied that we’ve talked about extensively.
Speaker: 1
01:33:19
Well, the two stated aims of the Israelis after the seventh were, to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamas. And many people said that you could do one, but not both. And Ai actually think they’ve gone a long way to doing both. By no means everything, there were still hostages as we’re speak, held in Gaza, including a young Meh.
Speaker: 0
01:33:45
And
Speaker: 1
01:33:46
the Hamas is not completely destroyed. It’s very, very significantly degraded, but it’s not completely destroyed. But those are the two aims. Ai believe that I mean, I’ve seen as much of the war as any outside observer. I don’t know. There might there are some exceptions maybe, but and so I think I can say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven’t done.
Speaker: 1
01:34:14
The the there there were various operations at the beginning, various, plans which didn’t happen, like storming straight in and getting, for instance, as many hostages as possible out of the Shefa Complex, which is called the hospital, but it’s also sai the very least the Hamas command headquarters.
Speaker: 1
01:34:37
And, there was a there was a plan to maybe go and, do that fast, but it was it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would be likely to happen. The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning. There was a a period of making sure that when they went into Gaza, they didn’t do so in any way blind.
Speaker: 1
01:35:01
But Gaza is a very built up area and population wise is is is, is densely populated, something, by the way, which the people who who claim frivolously that Israel has been committing genocide never take account of, which is the fact that the Arya population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 02/2005.
Speaker: 1
01:35:22
It’s almost doubled. But, meh, it’s sai densely populated area, and it’s an incredibly difficult place for the train of war because of one thing in particular, which is that Hamas goes back a bit to our conversation earlier. This is a much more extreme example. I mean, Hamas really don’t play by the rules.
Speaker: 1
01:35:42
In fact, they they use the rules of war, the laws of war completely to their own advantage. You know, it has to be reiterated. You are not meant to, disguise your army as civilians. You’re not meant to use places of care, like hospitals, as bases for your military operations.
Speaker: 1
01:36:08
You’re not meant to use schools and places of worship as operating centers of war. And Hamas does all of these things and has always done so. And it does so with the very obvious reason that for them, the whole thing is a two for one offer. You you you get to operate everywhere, and if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that this is a war crime because how could they attack this group of civilians?
Speaker: 1
01:36:44
These people who are dressed as civilians, these people merely fighting from a mosque, and so on. And that’s why that’s why everybody who’s been to Gaza who’s seen the fighting knows the same thing, which is this is just incredibly difficult, difficult warfare of a kind that that American troops have seen in the last twenty years in Fallujah and elsewhere.
Speaker: 1
01:37:12
Kurdish militias, Meh, saw when they were fighting as our frontline troops in the war against Ai, similar house to house, but by no means with the same entrenched bases. You know, again, it can’t be stressed enough that Ram has used the years since his ready withdrawal from 02/2005 to build this vast underground tunnel network.
Speaker: 1
01:37:39
And again, it’s obvious, but it has to be meh. When is when and I quote one of the Hamas leaders in the book saying this in an interview. When they build their tunnels, they do so in order that their tunnels are used by their Ram to store their weaponry, to secure their fighters, and to hold hostages.
Speaker: 1
01:38:02
They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of guards and civilians avoiding aerial bombardment. And, you know, the every difference in the world seems to me to exist between a country which does build, bomb shelters for its citizens and, a government which builds bomb shelters for its bombs.
Speaker: 0
01:38:31
Can you discuss the flow of money here? So how does Hamas how does Hamas, the leadership, use the money? So you started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there? Can you just lay it all out? Because I think that’s an that’s an important part of the picture here. It’s totally corrupt.
Speaker: 1
01:38:51
Every Hamas leader who’s, now dead died a billionaire.
Speaker: 0
01:39:00
With a b. With a b.
Speaker: 1
01:39:02
To say that they used Gaza’s resources or the the the resources that came into Gaza for their own ends is to just vastly understate matters. Ram used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to do the seventh and everything since. They militarized the whole of the Gaza.
Speaker: 1
01:39:34
They, by the estimations of troops I’ve been with there, they every second to third house had weaponry stashed there, bombs, RPGs, kleashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances, the network that they just embedded all these years was was total. They they they, you know, one of the many, many tragedies of this is that whatever you’re reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 02/2005, it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else.
Speaker: 1
01:40:17
It could have become a thriving state led. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It’s just that Hamas, like the PLO before them, decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian state. And that is to the great, great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza, to put it at its mildest.
Speaker: 0
01:40:44
So just to outline here, leadership of Hamas are stealing the money that gets sent by Qatar, by everybody. So they’re putting in their pocket and then By
Speaker: 1
01:40:53
the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well Yeah. But, I mean, it’s not just about stealing the money. It’s it’s about using the the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor. I mean, that’s
Speaker: 0
01:41:05
the rule. Those those two things. But the corruption is a signal from an economic perspective, but it’s just also a signal of deep moral corruption because they’re screwing over the Palestinian people. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:41:20
It’s a cynicism, sadly. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:41:22
Okay. And then with the money they do spend on the Palestinian cause, they’re not doing that to, build up No. Gaza. They’re doing it to, strengthen the militaristic capabilities Yes. Of the terrorist organization of Hamas. You have maybe you can correct me on this, ai said that the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas Yes. Because they’ve elected them.
Speaker: 0
01:41:57
They elected them.
Speaker: 1
01:41:58
The what ifs are endless, but very unwise of the George w Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza after o five. But Hamas were elected, and they then, 02/2007, killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Vatsal. Killed them, threw them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through the Sana, and from that point, they had total control.
Speaker: 1
01:42:28
And, you know, this is difficult because you you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment, if you talk about this. But it should be borne in mind that, you know, Hamas had effectively eighteen years to run the Sana.
Speaker: 1
01:42:54
And that’s that’s the ai that it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education. And in eighteen years, they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were were productive, productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world, and they didn’t.
Speaker: 1
01:43:25
They spent eighteen years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred, which obviously is was most dangerous to the Israelis. But it was obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza. And, you know, there is, there’s just if you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014 when Hamas started a war again, one of a set of rounds of war since 02/2005.
Speaker: 1
01:44:04
If you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014 going house to house and who were also involved in the war since 02/2003, They all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population. The marked increase in just, I mean, the most I mean, it’s so banal in a way to ai, you know, like the numbers of copies of Ai Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion.
Speaker: 1
01:44:34
There are so many what ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of using their time and power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize its population, and encourage them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel.
Speaker: 1
01:44:53
And then on October, they gave it their best shot. And ai the way, there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing, this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and IDF have done since the seventh. They have been fighting a house to house war against this terrorist group.
Speaker: 1
01:45:25
They do do aerial strikes. Gaza is is is very, very badly beaten up as, the buildings. I mean, the the the infrastructure that that existed, It’s, there aren’t many buildings standing. But this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It’s been extremely, concerted. It’s extremely, difficult. But when people say, well, this must be collective punishment. I think that the people who say that, ai, that’s not true.
Speaker: 1
01:46:05
And also, you know, there is not a hostage who’s come out who Donald Trump made this President Trump made this point recently. There is not a hostage who’s come out who I’ve spoken with who found any Gazan Palestinian who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them.
Speaker: 1
01:46:33
If you if you look at the footage from the seventh that Ram recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on, you will notice that the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified guards and civilians saying, why have you got this this Israeli girl who you’ve whose tendons you’ve cut, and why are you bringing her here?
Speaker: 1
01:47:00
It’s all celebration. It’s all celebration. And it’s the same with those couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held in who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.
Speaker: 0
01:47:19
Yeah. The celebration, I do wonder what percent of the the population they represent, but there’s something really dark. There’s several ways to explain the celebration. It could be that there’s a deep indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews, and there also could be a place of just deep desperation.
Speaker: 0
01:47:40
And it’s it’s a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you’re, on the side of fighting for freedom in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out of desperation, out of extremely harsh conditions. Because the way we’re ai speaking about this with the celebration, it’s very easy to project a kind of evil on the populace that Ai just I’m very hesitant to project, especially in the general populace.
Speaker: 1
01:48:16
You don’t have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words. What I’m sure you’ve heard the one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I’m sure you’ve heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the South Of Israel and, calls home calls back home.
Speaker: 1
01:48:37
Have you heard that?
Speaker: 0
01:48:39
Yes. I’ve heard
Speaker: 1
01:48:39
it. I quoted in the first chapter of the book. He he calls back home and he says, to his father who picks up he’s on WhatsApp. I think he’s he’s he’s on the phone. He’s saying, turn on to WhatsApp because I can show you. He says, I’ve killed 10 Jews in my own hands. Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews. And his father is is saying, where are you? Where are you? Go, I want to show you, dad.
Speaker: 1
01:49:03
I wanna show you. I’ve killed Jews in my own hands. Your son. Put mother on the phone. Mother comes on the phone. The brother comes on the phone.
Speaker: 1
01:49:12
This is, one of many, many stories from the day that suggests, something which I would say is not just indoctrination, but meh, evil.
Speaker: 0
01:49:32
First of all, those phone calls are somehow uniquely horrific. But I’ve also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and Russian soldiers to their parents. And they have not as intense and not as horrific, but they have a similar nature to them, which there’s an aspect of war where you, dehumanize the other sai.
Speaker: 0
01:50:02
Right? Sure. In order to fight that war. So we have to remember that that element is going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation.
Speaker: 1
01:50:13
It it it would be a strange type of, simple sort of, I don’t know, pride in war to go into an 80 year old woman’s house and kill her on her floor and then film her dead body and her body in its final moments and send it around to all of that woman’s friends on her phone on her Instagram account. It’s it’s you may have heard different things from me, but I ai, I I would be surprised if there were even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, mom, you won’t believe my luck.
Speaker: 1
01:51:02
I managed to rape
Speaker: 2
01:51:03
and kill this 80 year old woman. It’s that’s that’s quite unusual even in warfare.
Speaker: 1
01:51:14
And and that’s one of the things about Hamas and the what I described as the death cult types, which makes them different from other people.
Speaker: 0
01:51:24
But that’s the channeling of evil and hatred and anger in the human spirit, but that doesn’t make that person evil.
Speaker: 1
01:51:33
No. I disagree. Ai commit that once. I think that there is such a force as evil in the ai, and I think it, it can descend and it can be used. And it’s very hard to find a non theological way to talk about this. But of everything I’ve seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the seventh that cannot be described as anything other than evil.
Speaker: 1
01:52:00
The things that happened at the nova party were especially appalling. I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because, first of all, it’s sai sort of party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger, might have been at. And so everyone knows, you know, the the world of a dance party all night, you know, rave in the desert to commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to, you know, expand your consciousness and your love and all of that sort of thing.
Speaker: 1
01:52:36
The the fact that people doing that at 06:30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and
Speaker: 2
01:52:51
just massacring them and raping them.
Speaker: 1
01:52:55
And, I mean, I I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who ai, but, I mean, it’s beyond belief of almost anything else I’ve covered in war. And it’s because it seems sai, I mean, an armed an army facing another army is one thing. A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing.
Speaker: 1
01:53:25
A terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance, unarmed, and doing what they did is is is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere.
Speaker: 0
01:53:48
So that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of, Palestinians in Gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response? Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:54:01
What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there in, on the first time a couple of days early in into the the ground invasion, when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the, the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south deeper into Gaza and to try to stop Hamas leadership from making it south.
Speaker: 1
01:54:34
It actually it didn’t really work because they just they’d already got a lot of the hostages south. It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north, so as not to be dragged all the way in. In the end, it dragged all the way in anyway. But, yes. Sana Ai mean, watching the the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and, you know, everyone was being checked for bombs, suicide vests, checked for particularly young men of military age.
Speaker: 1
01:55:04
And, you know, I mean, you look at this tide of human misery, and you think this is terrible. But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been mis governing the place that they lived in. And, of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this.
Speaker: 1
01:55:29
At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point because of the the the fact that they elected a terror group to run their territory. And one of the things obviously is that, you know, a lot of people like to sai, and it’s true, of course, that that, you know, this didn’t all start on October.
Speaker: 1
01:55:59
Absolutely true. This particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October. It wasn’t wasn’t ai they were forced to liberate themselves or something as some of the defenders of Hamas claim. But the conflict, of course, goes back a lot earlier.
Speaker: 1
01:56:24
But it you you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called the Arab Israeli conflict, and now has become interestingly rebranded the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But there is one absolutely essential issue to this, which cannot be forgotten, which is, do the Palestinians want a
Speaker: 2
01:56:55
state, or do they want
Speaker: 1
01:56:58
to destroy the Jewish state? And if they want to destroy the Jewish state, as they’ve tried many times, it’s a disaster for them. It’s a total disaster for them. If they want to create their own state, they’ve already had several very good shots at it. One of which is Gaza post ai.
Speaker: 2
01:57:21
But they’ve never shown in their leadership the desire to live with a Jewish state, and that’s a catastrophe for the Palestinians.
Speaker: 0
01:57:34
Can you still mount the case of the lived experience of Palestinians and pro Palestinian voices that describe the Gaza situation as a occupation? The West Bank too, and, in the case of Gaza open air bryden.
Speaker: 1
01:57:49
The to take them in order, there’s nothing about Gaza that was an open air prison. They had, ability to trade. They had the ability to, to move in and out in increasing numbers. Egypt wasn’t so keen on allowing Palestinians, from Gaza into Egypt, still isn’t. But, at the time of the seventh, there was actually an interesting one of the things the international community was pushing for was for more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz Crossing and others to work in Israel, because they can make a better a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.
Speaker: 1
01:58:25
And, this the the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted. It was being pushed on Israel by the international community a little bit too fast for Israel’s comfort, but it happened. That completely came to an end, and that that dream is done, gone since the October 7.
Speaker: 0
01:58:47
Can you clarify the dream, the normalization or what
Speaker: 1
01:58:49
Normalization ram.
Speaker: 0
01:58:50
Between Gaza and Israel.
Speaker: 1
01:58:52
Gone. There will be Really? Yeah, no normalization. Not after that. And one of the reasons is the number of people, again, who I’ve spoken with who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to work in Israel, and these were their brothers and sisters and so on and so forth.
Speaker: 1
01:59:14
One of the reasons why the massacres of the seventh were so successful in the kibbutzim, the communities in the South, was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed house to house maps of those communities. Yeah. I I spoke with, with one man who his community, they had a security officer, chief, and, Ram came in.
Speaker: 1
01:59:41
They knew to go and kill him and his family first, and then which families. It’s just I’ve seen the maps myself. They were they came in with incredibly, accurate information about these communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the by the brothers, by the workers, by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out.
Speaker: 1
02:00:02
So there is nobody that will trust that ever again.
Speaker: 0
02:00:06
There’s a lot of Palestinians that have lived and flourished inside Israel. What are they saying? What are they feeling? And what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still camaraderie to some degree, or is it completely destroyed?
Speaker: 1
02:00:24
My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary. I mean, you know, if if you’ve worked ai somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you you will never trust again. And that particularly in a small country like Israel, the the word of that happening goes out very fast.
Speaker: 1
02:00:46
The very beginning, there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the, you know, 20% or so of the population who are Arab, Israelis. I actually think one of the few sort of positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has has ai and large held.
Speaker: 1
02:01:10
It’s not there hasn’t been an intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn’t been more activity terrorist activity in the West Bank in Judea And Samaria is because the Israelis have been very careful along with the Palestinian authority, to some extent, cooperating to keep that down.
Speaker: 1
02:01:30
But, you know, there wasn’t a a war on a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening. So I think that the sort of coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular as it could happen of, Muslim Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror and, as it were, sympathy with Hamas.
Speaker: 1
02:02:00
I was in the middle of one such attack myself, late last year, and, in a town called Hedera. And those things have happened, but they it isn’t it’s not that that particular catastrophe has not occurred.
Speaker: 0
02:02:18
Can we talk about, measurement Netanyahu? For a lot of people who spoke of evil, they refer to him as evil. On the spectrum between good and evil, as a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?
Speaker: 1
02:02:32
Well, he’s certainly not evil. Interesting if people, looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli ai minister. It would be sort of, telling, I would say.
Speaker: 0
02:02:46
Can we just actually linger on that point? There is a point you’ve made, multiple times, which is we’re more eager to to criticize and maybe even, over exaggerate the criticism of democratically elected leaders.
Speaker: 1
02:03:02
Yes.
Speaker: 0
02:03:03
It’s a dark, weird, other quality of, discourse at parties, aforementioned parties.
Speaker: 1
02:03:11
Isn’t it also is is I mean, not deliberately flippant for a moment. It’s a little bit ai, who do you show your worst sides to? The people you love. You because I you know, my intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because I I’m I’m if I’d express it to absolutely everybody I met at the party or a social setting, it would be it would be hard.
Speaker: 1
02:03:40
I mean, there’s a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. And something similar happens in international politics. You you pressure the people who will listen. I mean, it’s it’s one of the I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last year, you know, people sort of ignoramuses and the governments in places like Britain, you know, will sai, we need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do x.
Speaker: 1
02:04:14
And you go, well, you know, in part, that’s because they will listen. If you go, we need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad, and they shouldn’t be doing this.
Speaker: 0
02:04:30
Right? What the hell do you
Speaker: 1
02:04:30
think they’re gonna do? They’re they’re gonna listen to you? Think you give a damn? You’re talking totally different worlds. Not just a different language. It’s a different world. And ai the way, that happens in Israel. I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the hostage families forum came about, I spent a lot of time there. A lot of got to know a lot of the families, and, they’re remarkable.
Speaker: 1
02:04:52
But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them they protest outside Netanyahu’s house. They you clacks and horns to make sure he doesn’t can never sleep. They, will, you know, put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands and and so on.
Speaker: 1
02:05:12
And I have, you know, I think as much sympathy as as you can for these families. The plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, an hour is intolerable. But there’s a reason why the families protested Netanyahu, and that’s because Sinwar
Speaker: 0
02:05:39
didn’t
Speaker: 1
02:05:39
care. That wouldn’t work. If you said, you arya you, you know, understand my plight. I’m a Jewish mother and my daughter is think. You think Sinwar, the heads of Hamas, care? You think the leaders in Qatar who host them care? The Qatari Emir’s mother when Sinwar was killed praised Sinwar.
Speaker: 1
02:06:06
Indeed, you couldn’t talk that language to these people, but you can talk that language
Speaker: 2
02:06:11
to the ai prime minister of Israel because that first of
Speaker: 1
02:06:16
all, he’s somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured. And secondly, he’s simply the only person you can pressure. There’s no one else. Hamas doesn’t care. Hezbollah doesn’t care. The Iranian revolutionary government doesn’t care.
Speaker: 0
02:06:29
Yeah. We still let’s just sort of sai, once again, the, the obvious thing that, ai it is possible to discuss, Hamas, soldiers as freedom fighters, I’m not one of the folks that can take that perspective. It’s a tough one to take.
Speaker: 1
02:06:48
I don’t see how you can call them freedom fighters.
Speaker: 0
02:06:50
So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war. There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. And if you fully load that into your brain in a in a real way, not in not using the words of good and evil, but in a in a very deep human sense, from that place, from that place of desperation, when your home and your family is destroyed, doesn’t matter ai, doesn’t matter if there’s evil all around you that caused it, doesn’t matter.
Speaker: 0
02:07:22
The the facts are the facts. And from that place, somebody who’s fighting for you can feel like a freedom fighter. I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience, but Hamas is very clearly since we’re talking about Netanyahu, Hamas is evil.
Speaker: 0
02:07:45
Okay. Now you can still, in that context, discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for this moment and whether he goes too far, whether he’s too politically selfish in the decisions he makes, whether he’s too much a warmonger, whether he’s utilizing the war, for his own political gains and is, not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but more caring about his own political, maintaining power.
Speaker: 0
02:08:25
That’s a perspective that I ai speak, man. That’s a perspective worth discussing, and that’s a perspective many in Israel hold when they criticize Netanyahu. He’s increasingly less and less popular.
Speaker: 1
02:08:36
That’s wrong. Pending polls last month when he’s in Washington, he showed him at an all time high.
Speaker: 0
02:08:40
You know?
Speaker: 1
02:08:40
But you were saying?
Speaker: 0
02:08:41
I I make my own poll, and according to my poll, I’m the greatest I’m the nicest and the coolest person in the world. A % of people agree.
Speaker: 1
02:08:52
So I didn’t mean to laugh that much. Yeah. This you laughed
Speaker: 0
02:08:56
a little too much. Too long. It’s more than the joke. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
02:08:59
But you were saying I mean, the the Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:09:01
Okay. Let’s steel man the criticism of Netanyahu. Can you and then steel man the case for him that he’s the right leader actually at this moment.
Speaker: 1
02:09:09
The the the most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is is, that the seventh happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Golda Meir, who is a very distinguished prime minister of Israel and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the the political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion, by Israel’s Arab neighbors happening on her watch.
Speaker: 1
02:09:37
And, and I would have thought that most critics, fair minded critics of Netanyahu ai Israel without would always hold that against him. The, I suppose that the one of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the seventh because of the judicial reforms.
Speaker: 1
02:10:03
I think there’s a strong case with judicial reforms in Israel, but, it’s a sort of niche Israeli governance issue, which we don’t have to get into. The point is is that Netanyahu and his government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms, And, it was very ai. And on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend, there were protests.
Speaker: 1
02:10:28
And the, police were tired because they’d spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, not to say ai, but sometimes violent. And, you could say, well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, ai don’t you stop? There is a claim by some people that one one of the things that prompted the seventh was that Hamas and his backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population, you know, a significant chunk of it every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services, and so on, and thought, good, now’s the time.
Speaker: 1
02:11:11
In other words, what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier when he was in, in, prison in Israel was, you know, this thing, one day you’ll be weak and then I’ll strike. Maybe that is one of the things that thought. Israel was very weak. It had been divided and therefore, the time to strike.
Speaker: 1
02:11:32
There’s an argument against that, which is that this the the seventh was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways. But you could use that. You could say, look, this is, you know, if you your your nation was divided, don’t push through anymore on that. There’s there’s lots of things like that.
Speaker: 1
02:11:53
You could say that that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception. You could, there are critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet who thought that he was too focused on on, Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah. Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. So I there’s them and many other criticisms that people make of him.
Speaker: 1
02:12:22
I would say I’ve interviewed, I think, every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much. And, I have to say, I don’t think there’s any of them that wouldn’t have responded similarly to the October 7 to the way
Speaker: 0
02:12:36
he has. Can we okay. So that’s inside Israel, outside of Israel. You know, despite what he said, he is one of the most hated people in the world, just the raw quantity. Not not relative. He’s loved by a lot of people, but there’s a lot of people that, you know, there’s a lot of psychological effects that might explain that.
Speaker: 1
02:12:57
I mean, it’s sort of strange to to to if if if if there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of eight to 9,000,000 people.
Speaker: 0
02:13:07
Yeah. That that might mean something more than, hatred of the the military actions and the policies of the one person. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
02:13:15
I mean, you know, there’s
Speaker: 1
02:13:17
a there’s an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There’s a lot of wars in the world. It’s it’s always of interest to me. And, obviously, some of the one things I go into on on democracies and death cults is this question of, like, why is this so galvanizing for so many people?
Speaker: 1
02:13:32
And I think that is a very, very interesting question. Like, why? By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else like that when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy in the last thirty years or so. It’s very interesting.
Speaker: 1
02:13:51
There’s a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz. Yeah. And they they will say, well, you know, Wolfowitz. Ai meh deputy undersecretary of defense under George w Bush? You think he guided everything? Why would that be?
Speaker: 1
02:14:16
Other than the fact that his name, as Mark Sai once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish. I mean
Speaker: 0
02:14:27
it’s a good line.
Speaker: 1
02:14:27
I do and I do so I do think that the the there are very deep things at play.
Speaker: 0
02:14:35
It’s a good line.
Speaker: 1
02:14:35
You know, the the the the there are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, for a lot of people, is a ai of devil. And you have to say, well, why is that? Now, of course, some people will say, well, that’s because he, his terrible hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth.
Speaker: 1
02:14:56
The case of Netanyahu is that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people,
Speaker: 2
02:15:08
and that that’s his life’s mission. And on that basis,
Speaker: 1
02:15:14
I think he’s been, by any measure, a historic leader. He has warned the world about the threat from the Mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. And after the seventh, he has held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep, international pressure at a tolerable level to do all sorts of things, but most importantly, to oversee the two war aims that he set out at the beginning.
Speaker: 1
02:16:00
I thought let me just express this to you. I thought, like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was they’re all dead. They’re all going to be dead. We’ll never see them again. And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis.
Speaker: 1
02:16:18
But although there arya still hostages being held, and as I’ve always said, the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back, or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back. Nevertheless, because of the actions of not just Netanyahu, but the Israeli government, most of the hostages have been returned, did not expect this to happen.
Speaker: 1
02:16:50
And Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded. And you end up in the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like. But they are not anywhere near the capability they were in November of twenty twenty three. Their leadership has almost all been killed.
Speaker: 1
02:17:17
The second tier of leadership, almost all gone. And, this is a just response to what Hamas did. The moment Netanyahu’s reputation in Israel was a little low early on because of what had happened. But and there’s no doubt, and as I I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean, there’s general Sai had this phrase, you know, from defeat into victory.
Speaker: 1
02:17:51
Israel isn’t at victory yet in this conflict. But, when in September, there were a set of operational successes so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just, like, everyday’s news was There was one day Ai remember when after the, after the Assad regime ai when, the Israeli air force took out the entirety of the Syrian air force, in a day because they didn’t want it falling into the hands of the new Jihadist administration in Syria.
Speaker: 1
02:18:23
It was story number four on the BBC News website. The leadership of Hezbollah, gone. Gone. The the the second and third tiers of Hezbollah, gone or wounded. Iran’s Rolls Royce destroyed.
Speaker: 1
02:18:46
These are very, very significant military achievements and are, in my mind, a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state. Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold firm as Netanyahu has? I don’t know. But I do know that any of them would have done something similar or would have tried to do something similar.
Speaker: 1
02:19:21
Because there’s no country on earth, no democracy on earth, which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.
Speaker: 0
02:19:29
To the point the underlying point you made of why do so many people wanna call him evil? And so the implication is it’s not just a hatred of Israel. There’s an ocean of hatred for the Jews. Yes. Why is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?
Speaker: 1
02:19:53
I would say there’s one reason in particular. It’s a stupid and gullible person’s easy answer. Why is why do certain things happen in the world? What is what is our explanation of chance or unfairness or any number of things? Easiest easiest stupidest person’s explanation is there’s a small group of people doing it.
Speaker: 0
02:20:23
Let’s not say stupidest because there’s something in the human mind that craves a nice clean theory of everything, right, that explains all the it’s not just
Speaker: 1
02:20:32
stupidest Let me rewrite it. Lowest grade.
Speaker: 0
02:20:35
Right.
Speaker: 1
02:20:35
Because I The lowest grade.
Speaker: 0
02:20:37
That Sai have that desire too to simplify ai. Like Be a bit anti Semitic? What? Yeah. We’ve all we’ve all been invented into meh here and there and just get a few vodkas. I mean, no. To find I mean, maybe it’s a mathematician in meh. They just, like, to find a simple explanation for everything. Right.
Speaker: 0
02:20:56
That actually, it’s that’s nice for every
Speaker: 1
02:20:58
Yeah. Yeah. No.
Speaker: 0
02:20:59
No. Historians do
Speaker: 1
02:21:00
this. Absolutely.
Speaker: 0
02:21:01
Like, I agree. Analyzing why the Roman Ai collapsed. It’s so nice to have one especially if it’s a counterintuitive explanation. It’s one of the favorite go tos. Right? It’s an explanation for all the problems in the world.
Speaker: 1
02:21:14
It’s the lowest resolution analysis imaginable.
Speaker: 0
02:21:17
Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why did my wife cheating on me? Why did I lose my job? Why bryden not get the job? Because so even on the personal level
Speaker: 1
02:21:27
Oh, especially on the personal ai. Why did I not get everything? Somebody must have held me back.
Speaker: 0
02:21:33
Yeah. And it’s just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go to throughout history. You just always return back to the hits, I guess. And I what is it special about the Jews as a group that people love to hate? Is it just because it’s small number of people
Speaker: 1
02:21:49
I think several things. Successful. One is small and without by any means saying this is a general rule, but, disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times. Prominent is what I would use. Prominent ai beyond their numbers in certain places. It’s not a full explanation.
Speaker: 1
02:22:15
I mean, you know, all sorts of historic reasons why Jews were involved in banking. But then there were also historic reasons why the Scottish people, my own, were involved in banking. And to this day, you don’t find many people who play more international finance problems on the Scots.
Speaker: 1
02:22:33
So there were just, like, easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me.
Speaker: 0
02:22:39
We should also mention, you know, banking for some reason. Money is a thing that people go to, but, Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences and, engineering, mathematics Yes. And the arts and so on.
Speaker: 1
02:22:52
A sensible person would try to work out why that is and and see what is replicable. A,
Speaker: 0
02:23:01
I
Speaker: 1
02:23:01
don’t wanna use the word stupid again now. A different type of person I’m triggered already. A different type of person would look at that and say that must mean they took something from me. And, that’s, you know, the the most zero sum game there is. Ai it’s an endlessly fascinating subject because it seems to me that antisemitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable, temptation of the human spirit at its ugliest and cheapest.
Speaker: 2
02:23:34
But but it it because it’s back in our day,
Speaker: 1
02:23:39
it bears some analysis again. And I would say two things about it. One is, as I and others have said many times in the past, one of the fascinating things about anti semitism is that it it it it can cover everything at once. So the Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor, both for being the Rothschilds and for being Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms.
Speaker: 1
02:24:10
They can be hated for being religious and for being anti religious and producing Marxism, for instance. Hated for religiosity and secularism. They can be hated ram, most recently, not having a state and therefore being ruthless cosmopolitan, and also hated for having a state.
Speaker: 1
02:24:36
And that makes it something very unusual actually in the history of human bigotry and,
Speaker: 0
02:24:47
you
Speaker: 1
02:24:47
know, bias and ugliness. But the real thing is one of my great heroes, Vatsal Grossman, says at the center of life and faith, almost everything that is worth saying about antisemitism. And it’s Grossman’s genius that he could say in three to four pages what most people couldn’t say in an entire life, even after ai of study.
Speaker: 1
02:25:10
But there’s this passage in the in Ai and Faith that I quote in my book, which is Ai just bowled me over when I read it some years ago. When he says, you know, the interesting thing about antisemitism, he says you can meet it everywhere in the, in the Academy of Sciences and in the games that children play in the yard.
Speaker: 1
02:25:31
But Grossman’s great insight is he says everywhere it tells you, not about the Jews, but about the person making the claim. And the most important gift he gives in his analysis is when he says describes it as a mirror to the person who is making the claims, culminating in this phrase I’ve been trying to make popular, which is he sai he says, tell me what you accuse the Jews of.
Speaker: 1
02:25:58
I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of. It’s a searingly brilliant insight. The, the the Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power. The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes. The Turkish government accuses, the Jewish state of being, guilty of occupation. Do you know Northern Cyprus?
Speaker: 1
02:26:35
Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the nineteen seventies. Cyprus is an EU member state, and Turkey is in NATO. So you can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state, like the people who accuse Jews of something, almost without fail, is the thing they’re guilty of.
Speaker: 1
02:27:03
Look at, the supporters of Ram and Hamas. One of the things they say is that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing.
Speaker: 2
02:27:18
Hamas? Hello?
Speaker: 1
02:27:22
What were you doing on the seventh? If you sai, there are these crazy guys online who claim repeatedly claim that for some reason, Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet them, whether in a prison or on the battlefield or in a hospital. It just it erupts occasionally. These these people go around and say, oh my god. The Ai, a rapist. Excuse me?
Speaker: 1
02:27:49
You you’re the ones who spent the years after 2016 saying, believe all women. Then from the October 7 said, believe all women except for Jewish women who say they’ve been raped or seen their friends raped. And then you say, The Jews are rapists. You’ve been carrying water for rapists and then go and accuse the Jews of rape. I mean, it just works.
Speaker: 1
02:28:16
Every way you do it, it works. I do think the thing of psychological projection in the case of Israel is is ai. I mean, it is wild. By the way, there’s an interesting thing on this that I bryden to get into in the book, which is this thing of why did so much of the world respond the way it did.
Speaker: 1
02:28:37
I mean, we’re sitting in New York. There was not one protest against Hamas in New York after the October 7. The Believable Women crowd didn’t come out against Hamas’s rapes. The, Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to the killing of Israeli children or anything.
Speaker: 1
02:28:57
Nobody did it. Nobody did it. The one thing that did happen very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who’d been attacked. And as I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from here in Times Square on October. October the freaking eighth, the protests are in Times Square against Israel justifying the attacks that were still going on.
Speaker: 1
02:29:22
And this is this is something that deserves deep self examination on behalf of people in the West who’ve who’ve seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society. I mean, degraded parts, but parts, bits of the universities and so on. And I think there’s an explanation for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection.
Speaker: 1
02:29:44
When you and I last talked on camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West. And I remember saying to you there that, one of the things I was talking about in that book was the deeply, deeply, wildly biased, unfair, and inaccurate estimation of the Western past.
Speaker: 1
02:30:04
Whereby, you know, America’s original sin had to be ai, and the original sin is slavery. So America has an original sin. Does Ghana have an original sin? No one knows. No one really would think it polite to point one out.
Speaker: 1
02:30:20
And, you know, you go on and on with these these things that I identified in the war in the West, these these these sins of the West. And they have in recent years been reduced to the claim that countries like the one we’re sitting in are guilty of what? Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and a couple of others you can throw in probably.
Speaker: 1
02:30:52
One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was the the one of the deep problems of setting up that system of thought, pseudo thought, non thought, would be thought, is that there’s nothing you can do about it. Even if it was true, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Speaker: 1
02:31:14
If it turned out that your ancestors in the eighteenth century once owned a slave, what are you gonna do? There’s no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven because you didn’t do it, and there’s no one in life who could accept the apology. And I remember setting it up there in the war on the west.
Speaker: 1
02:31:33
Sai ai up like this this very, very risky, dangerous, unforgivable, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our societies. But I would say that since October, there has been an answer for a certain type of person, which is, I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white supremacy, ai, ethnic cleansing, and more.
Speaker: 1
02:32:09
I’ve been told all of these things. I have been put in an un get outable of situation of moral burden that can never be relieved ai I can’t ask anyone’s forgiveness and nobody can forgive me. But, here’s a country which I can accuse of all of these things in the here and now. Load my energies, my guilt, my burdens onto.
Speaker: 1
02:32:45
And what’s more, I might be able to end it. And by doing sai, would relieve myself. And in other words, to slight just to I quote I tweak Grossman with the people in America and elsewhere who’ve fallen into this trap. I tweak him by saying, on this occasion, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’ve been told you’re guilty of.
Speaker: 0
02:33:16
Yeah. It’s an interesting kind of projection. Just to observe some of the, sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of engagement online. Mhmm. Is this so I watch it like a curiosity, like I’m an alien observing Earth. Is this dangerous to you, or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters, you know, let’s say, cosplaying as, Nazis? It’s just Could be both.
Speaker: 0
02:33:50
Fun to trigger the libs?
Speaker: 1
02:33:53
It could be all of those things. I think it is and a lot more. I mean, taboos, you know, taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. And I suppose there are some people online who have grown up knowing that, you know, since the Holocaust, antisemitism was taboo, and they’ve run out of it goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit, you know, the they sort of run out of they’ve got bored of that.
Speaker: 1
02:34:23
Mhmm. You know, holocaust schmollocourse. They’d say, you know, Ai got it. I I’ve heard enough about that. I’ve and maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction as a result, but I don’t think that’s the main I think that’s like a detail compared to the real thing.
Speaker: 1
02:34:41
The real thing is that anti Semitism is back. And, there is a certain type of person who’s loving it.
Speaker: 0
02:34:49
Is it really back? So I I watch it all.
Speaker: 1
02:34:50
Well, it never goes away. It’s just that it’s just that it’s it’s it’s it’s since the seventh, I think that it’s had a great resurgence. And this isn’t to sai, and I’m just sort of assume ai doesn’t mean that any criticism of Israel is anti Semitic. No, it doesn’t. But sai I have often said, if you don’t ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, not any interest in, genocide in Sudan, killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen.
Speaker: 1
02:35:22
But on the October 8, on the street with a placard attacking Israel, I’m sorry. You’re an anti ai, for sure. You may not know you are, but that’s what’s motivating you.
Speaker: 0
02:35:33
It gets a lot of engagement. I watch it. It does. I watch it.
Speaker: 1
02:35:36
But it Ai mean, it’s it’s one of several things you can always see get huge engagement. I mean, it’s like if you if you say that there’s, like, a massive pedophile ring run by prominent politicians, it might be total vatsal horse shit. It’s ai be total horse shit, but it’ll also get a hell of a lot of engagement.
Speaker: 0
02:35:55
Yeah. But that’s still the so the pedophile ring, like, Epstein Island, that kind of stuff.
Speaker: 1
02:35:59
All which is very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:36:01
And and it’s ai, great. Alright. Cool. Let’s let’s get behind that conspiracy. But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews is still that’s the greatest hits still.
Speaker: 1
02:36:13
It is. And, I mean, you see it with, I mean, some of the people who’ve made minor celebrities themselves with a sort of made up version of history, with a smattering of this and a little bit of vatsal, and then just asking questions, and, you know, I’m not saying, but and all there are certain, you know, rhetorical ai of hand that have helped this along.
Speaker: 1
02:36:37
But as I said earlier, it’s just of the the lowest grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning. And, I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in the case of Israel is so extraordinary. Is the number of otherwise semi intelligent people who will tell you that the problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians another state.
Speaker: 1
02:37:10
And that if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world. And irrespective of the fact that the Parisian is being given to several states, the explain the the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous.
Speaker: 1
02:37:42
There is no reason why if, the Palestinians got another state, either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Meh, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else.
Speaker: 1
02:38:10
It it it would solve the the most likely thing is you simply have another failed Arab state run by a sort of proxy of Tehran. That’s the best case scenario. And by the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause ai Salman Rushdie, He said recently, he said there was he said, I’ve always been a supporter of the Palestinian people in their cause, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it would simply be at best another front for the Iranian regime in Iran.
Speaker: 1
02:38:42
At best. So why the passion about why the unbelievable wild passion about this? Why the and and I sai, some of it can be, should be argued out, and so on. Some of it can be explained. But but there’s definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply at that level of this excites something within me. This excites something within me.
Speaker: 0
02:39:10
Yeah. There there’s some there there’s some there’s something compelling to people about hating Jews.
Speaker: 1
02:39:15
Look at the look at the prominence of of of of or or, you know, semi prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that nine eleven was an inside job and somehow it’s done by the Israelis. I mean, or the Jews. I mean I mean, look at the, like, this this shit is going around.
Speaker: 0
02:39:31
I have to admit, you know, I’m I there’s a part of my brain that’s pulled towards conspiracies. There’s something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for things, what’s really going on behind the scenes. Because the real world, when you don’t look into conspiracies, first of all, it’s complicated. Second of all, it’s ai boring. It’s a bunch of incompetent people.
Speaker: 1
02:39:52
Usually opening up Pandora’s boxes they don’t understand.
Speaker: 0
02:39:55
Yeah. It’s a bunch of buffoons. And I’ve been, I mean, I’ve I’ve I’ve, walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people. And, like, the thing I learned is they’re just human beings. There’s not Mhmm. I’ve yet to be in a room where exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are plotting.
Speaker: 0
02:40:16
You never got that invite? No. In fact, like, a lot of people in the positions of power, they’re just not good Ai mean, I’m just continuously disappointed that they’re not ultra I love competence. Yes. The places where I’ve seen competence inklings of it is in, low level, ai, soldiers. Mhmm. Like, low level, what do you call that?
Speaker: 0
02:40:40
People that do stuff with their hands. So, builders of different ai, like engineering Mhmm. Ai craftsmen. Like, I’ve seen Yes.
Speaker: 1
02:40:46
Because you’ve got because you’ve got a very specific task that could be highly complicated. Yes. But you get to apply yourself to and to solve.
Speaker: 0
02:40:54
Yeah. Over years, you’ve master it. It’s passed across generations and so on. But, like, states ram and, like, that that ai of stuff
Speaker: 1
02:41:03
Well, it’s it’s a because there’s so many variables. I mean, this is this is one of the reasons when you were trying to lure me onto the prognostications on Ukraine, Ai was like, I just I’ve seen enough to know that Ai just don’t know because I know the amount of things that can change all the time.
Speaker: 1
02:41:17
I was some years ago, I was talking to a a a former public servant in The UK when, Boris Johnson was ai minister when COVID started. And I mentioned to this friend, I said, well, you know, it’s it’s pretty bad luck for Boris that, you know, he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit.
Speaker: 1
02:41:39
And then there’s a global pandemic from Wuhan, you know, and he’s got to, like, mug up on that and then gets it really wrong. But, anyway and I was really struck by the fact this man, a man of great insight who happened to disagree politically, but said to me, but Douglas is always like this.
Speaker: 1
02:41:58
And he said, you know, look, Tony Blair came into power in September wanting to reform education in The UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East. And I I I do I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy theories, not to say that there aren’t some that do actually turn out to be, you know, to have something in them.
Speaker: 1
02:42:26
And that that happens. A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true. Lab speak.
Speaker: 0
02:42:32
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
02:42:33
But but in general, the the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is, as I say, it’s a very low grade, low resolution look at the world by people who clearly have never seen the wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and the number of events. I mean, I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to meh, I won’t name the country, but said to me, can you help us out with with just how to cope on the about with the the day to and understand the day to day struggle we’re having with the cycle.
Speaker: 1
02:43:18
And I said, well, ai, what are you talking about? And they said, our experience in government is that every day, something comes up which we have to firefight. And that’s what we do that day. And then the next day, something else comes up, which we have to firefight. And we we’re not getting our policies.
Speaker: 1
02:43:39
And and I and I just thought, for me, that rings an awful lot truer than that that country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family telling them yeah. I just you know, it’s like, come on. So the you know, that’s
Speaker: 0
02:43:59
I I do before I forget when I ask you about Iran. What role do they play in this conflict? Shah a it it’s fascinating how it seems like Iran is, fingerprints are everywhere in the Middle East. And it’s also fascinating that you know, I have a lot of friends. My best friend is Iranian.
Speaker: 0
02:44:22
It’s fascinating that the Islamic revolution in Iran took the country from the leadership perspective backwards in such a drastic way and that they’re still in power. That confuses me because I know now it’s possible. I don’t know the people of Iran. Sorry to make the obvious statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran, and a lot of them everybody I know there opposes the regime. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
02:44:49
And they’re brilliant
Speaker: 1
02:44:52
Yes.
Speaker: 0
02:44:52
Educated, thoughtful, worldly people. And it it confuses me that there’s this this is one of the, I would say, one of the greatest nations on Earth. It’s one of the great cultures of Earth. Cultures. Like, the peoples of Iran.
Speaker: 1
02:45:09
Yeah. I agree. When you
Speaker: 0
02:45:10
look at vatsal, and then you look at the leadership Mhmm. When they’re behind most of the terror groups In the region, certainly. Yeah. Can you just speak to that, and how is it still the same regime sai 1979?
Speaker: 1
02:45:26
I know. As you know, I start on democracy’s death cult with the the flight taken via Atoll Khomeini Khomeini or other, from Paris to Tehran.
Speaker: 0
02:45:35
The flight that you say you wish never happened.
Speaker: 1
02:45:38
I think it’s one of the two worst journeys of the twentieth century.
Speaker: 0
02:45:42
What’s the other one? What’s it?
Speaker: 1
02:45:44
Lenin’s train getting to Petrograd. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker: 0
02:45:48
it’s always about the transportation.
Speaker: 1
02:45:50
It’s sai yes. I know. I’m I’m really a transport guy. No. I, wait till my book of 10 best journeys Yeah. Across the world. No. Just as the train to the Finland station brought the basilisk of Bolshevism into Russia, so the flight coming from Paris bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran brought the basilisk of Khomeiniism, the most radical form of Shiite Islam, to Tehran and to Iran.
Speaker: 1
02:46:24
And it’s one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there. Like you, actually, I have a lot of Persian friends and ai the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in pre revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and and and and so on.
Speaker: 1
02:46:46
Her father had been in Ayatollah before the the overthrow of the Shah. But and, you know, everyone had criticisms of him. But, when you saw what came after him, it just, it was among other things, what I learned from her and other friends from that region was that I suppose two things.
Speaker: 1
02:47:08
One is, of course, is that it’s a sort of central conservative insight. You know, things can always be worse. They can always be worse. Never say this is rock bottom because yeah. You know, like, you might have a shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells, but you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini butchering them all.
Speaker: 1
02:47:32
And, including the people who helped him get to power, like the communists and the trade unionists who who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the Ai until he didn’t need them anymore. But the other thing I learned from that particular friend and and others was that was this this thing that and, again, it’s very hard for the western mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as fanaticism, real fanaticism, and real ideological and real religious fanaticism.
Speaker: 1
02:48:06
And the thing that I describe leads to the death cult mindset. That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the West to forget because we haven’t seen it in a while. You know, we get very, distant echoes of it in our own ai, really. And we’re highly attuned to hear
Speaker: 2
02:48:26
them, which is good in some ways. But, Homanism
Speaker: 1
02:48:35
not only vastly sai back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979. And your question of why gets to one of the really the biggest questions really that that has to be under the answer to which has to be understood, which is it’s what soldier Nitin says at one point in Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, when we heard the footsteps on the staircase, and the knock was on our neighbor’s door, and we knew our neighbor was being taken away, why did we not stop them?
Speaker: 1
02:49:18
And in the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, you know, it it’s the same answer as whether it’s Ram governing Gaza with the the the peep whoever the people in Gaza are ai would have liked to have seen them overthrown. You know, people don’t realize that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you.
Speaker: 1
02:49:52
And that, you know, when the green revolution in 02/2009 started in Iran, why was it put down? Why didn’t it work? Ai, like you, the ai the sort of Iranians who I really hope one day get their country back. Why did all these smart young students and others why after they came out, why was it put down?
Speaker: 1
02:50:19
It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head, and they’ll take you to a prison as they did with the Iranian students, and they’ll rape you with bottles and kill you. And even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again.
Speaker: 1
02:50:41
You know, we know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality. And that’s how they sai in power. And one other thing on that, by the way, which is I was I was reminded of this the other day, but, you know, thinking about this sort of, you know, what Ai just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we just, you know, we like to think everyone thinks like us and, you know, we’d like everyone to sort of be like us.
Speaker: 1
02:51:20
And we we believe fictions that we’re taught in films like, you know, everyone basically wants the same things as us. And you go, you haven’t stepped outside the walls of the city, if you think that. But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of ai why we sort of single singly fail to understand that this is possible.
Speaker: 1
02:51:43
And, humanism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are not that far in our past. I mean, you know, there’s a moment in, when Ariana Fallaci interviewed Ai in 1979, ‘1 of the very few western journalists to do so.
Speaker: 1
02:52:13
She says to him, these people in the street, this movement, this revolution, you’ve begun. It’s guided by hate. It’s hate. It’s all hate. And Khomeini says, no. No.
Speaker: 1
02:52:28
It’s love. It’s love.
Speaker: 2
02:52:32
And and it’s actually
Speaker: 1
02:52:36
a scene that that that appears in the satanic verses of Rushdie where that exact same thing happens. But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but how can you explain to a western mindset that that’s that’s something that’s going on? There are people directed by this hate that calls itself love, this this and I was reminded of a book I haven’t read since I was probably a teenager or something.
Speaker: 1
02:53:02
It made a great impression on me then. Did you ever read the the tragic sense of life, Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish existentialist philosopher who died in the thirties? Unamuno had a encounter with students at the university in the thirties when he realized I mean, this is the the the early period of the Francoists, de Rivera and all those people.
Speaker: 1
02:53:24
Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up from the eager students who have fallen into this sort of phalanges, Francoist ideology already. They end up chanting in front of him as he’s trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life. They end up chanting in front of him, viva la muerite. Long live death. Long live death. And he tries to explain them this is this is a necrophilic chant.
Speaker: 1
02:54:01
Yeah. But those young men in pre Franco Speak shouting long live death, They have their counterparts today. They are the people who’s who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, we love death more than you love life.
Speaker: 0
02:54:25
Yeah. That’s the line you return to. That’s a really difficult line to load in. Because if you base your whole existence on that notion, then, well, you’re a danger to the world. That’s a good foundation for committing evil. I I have to ask because you mentioned that interview. You had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7.
Speaker: 0
02:54:57
And I’ve been very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders. It looks like I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and others. One, I have a general question about how do you interview people like this. Maybe to put your historian hat on of, like, how do you approach the interview of world leaders such that you can gain a deeper understanding in the hope that that adds to the compassion in the world?
Speaker: 0
02:55:28
So I have I have a deep sense that understanding people you might hate helps in the long arc of history add compassion to the world. But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of context. And, you know, maybe it’s more useful to think about from a historian perspective of how you, need to interview somebody like Hitler or Stalin or Churchill, FDR during World War two.
Speaker: 0
02:56:02
It’s not you know, I think about this a lot, especially if it’s, you know, two, three, four, five hour conversation. Well, there’s
Speaker: 1
02:56:12
a lot of, weight on you when you do those conversations.
Speaker: 0
02:56:17
Isn’t there? From where? So, like, where who’s watching? Is it historians twenty years from then?
Speaker: 1
02:56:23
Who knows? I mean, the whole data might be wiped. I I Sai suspect there’s a weight on you because every major world leader you interview, and you’ve done some amazing ones, but I mean, you you presumably, you have a set of people saying you’ve got to ask him about this. You’ve you you can’t not address this.
Speaker: 1
02:56:46
And and that’s a very challenging one because, of course, although in in an interview with a politician, it should not should not be supine, nor can it be endlessly interrogative because that you’re not the prosecutor, and they don’t have to be the guilty party answering to you.
Speaker: 1
02:57:09
And I’ve noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others, who go in with a set of sort of those things. And and they and and at some point, the other party can just just, I don’t need this. And people criticizing you don’t realize that. You just can’t do that.
Speaker: 0
02:57:28
Yeah. I suppose why journalists behave the way they do. Although, I have increasingly less and less respect for the journalists, the average journalist. I have more and more respect for the gray journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases, because a lot of the journalists seem to be sing signaling to their own in in group.
Speaker: 0
02:57:49
Mhmm. But there is a lot of pressure on people in that situation to ask the what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question? The adversarial question that the the world leader, the person is ready for. They’ve answered that question.
Speaker: 0
02:58:10
And what you’re trying to do, I is, I guess, one, to signal that you’ve asked the question and to push them.
Speaker: 1
02:58:18
Yes. Yes.
Speaker: 0
02:58:19
Two, you’re trying to, like, just create ram. Because, really, what people that ask you to ask that question, they want you to embarrass that person. They hate them, and they want you to, like, make them piss their pants or something or just start crying and run out of town. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:58:37
Walk out in a way that it’s embarrassing for them. They could be like, look at that pathetic person. Mhmm. And that reveals to me nothing, except maybe the weakness of the interviewee that they can’t stand up to a tough question.
Speaker: 1
02:58:55
Yes.
Speaker: 0
02:58:56
But mostly, like, I’m I’m starting I I had to do a lot of thinking because you meh attacked a lot. If you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually have a chance to reveal who the person is.
Speaker: 1
02:59:10
There there’s a very interesting line that Robin Day, who ai quite a distinguished interviewer back who was very distinguished interviewer back in the day, sai about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in The UK. Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians but carefully, said the problem with the new approach as he sai it from the nineties of political interviewing was, he said, if you think the person you’re speaking to is a liar, you should get them to reveal that they’re a liar.
Speaker: 1
02:59:37
Don’t just call them a liar. Yeah. Yep. And I think that is again, it’s something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don’t realize is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn’t do anything. And it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that’s that’s something else.
Speaker: 1
03:00:04
But, yes, I mean, I can I I hear you? You’re you’re obviously, you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It’s also difficult because one of the things that I don’t think anyone really understands is that is that
Speaker: 0
03:00:19
in the end, it’s just you.
Speaker: 1
03:00:21
Yeah. I’m sure they you have this about Putin. Like, people say, I I know exactly how you can do that. They could give endless advice. At the end, it’s you sitting down talking to him. It’s it’s like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people
Speaker: 0
03:00:40
have done it. In person, it’s actually pretty difficult as I mean,
Speaker: 1
03:00:44
it’s very difficult because you’ve got all this weird behind the scenes stuff as well. You’ve got all of the games that people play.
Speaker: 0
03:00:50
Ai mean, yeah, with, you know, I interviewed Zelensky. I’m pretty fearless in general, and he was a very human and Yeah. Fascinating human. But there is soldiers with guns standing all around.
Speaker: 1
03:01:03
And you didn’t have anyone? You no one was hacking on your side?
Speaker: 0
03:01:06
I I had, one friend, security person who’s also Ukrainian, so you never know. You could turn on
Speaker: 1
03:01:13
You’ve been infiltrated. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
03:01:15
No. I mean, that doesn’t have any effect. And ai the way, I should mention that, because it’s it’s hilarious to me. But, process wise, with Narendra Modi and with anyone, they don’t they said it was scripted and all this kind of stuff. I would never do anything scripted. They don’t get to have a say in anything. I ask to have complete freedom. Sometimes you’ll have people on the team very politely nudge, like, hey.
Speaker: 0
03:01:44
Can you, and I’ll very politely say thank you, you know, ai, smile, but that doesn’t mean I have to fucking do it. I Ai could do whatever the hell I want. Right. You so the calm this actually by the way, with world leaders, it doesn’t happen. It happens more with CEOs because they have, like, usually PR and comms people. They’ll just be, like, very politely, hey.
Speaker: 0
03:02:05
You know that
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03:02:07
thing Yes. Yes. Yes. About
Speaker: 0
03:02:08
about, you know, when they that sexual assault, harassment charges they’ve had.
Speaker: 1
03:02:13
Yeah. Isn’t that Could we just there’s no reason
Speaker: 0
03:02:15
to really linger on that? Well, yeah. You don’t
Speaker: 1
03:02:18
have to do that. Yeah. One of my favorite things anyone has ever said in effect or I mean, I ai it it’s only ever happened in I know a couple of cases of this happening in private. Some friends some, a friend of mine months years ago was debating against the this is before the the war the civil war in Syria, was debating something to do with the Middle East.
Speaker: 1
03:02:36
And one of the people on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London. The then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. And, my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad senior’s massacre of the Palestinians in Hama, where they killed, like, 10,000 Palestinians in a day.
Speaker: 1
03:02:55
And my friend starts talking about the Hama massacre by, Assad senior. And the the big fat Syrian ambassador, like, stands up to respond, and he says, that is that is none of your business. And my friend was like, oh, I thought we were gonna get into denial.
Speaker: 0
03:03:14
Let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu, because I also have the opportunity to do a three hour interview with him at this stage. And I’ve been if I’m just being honest, very hesitant to do it. And I just don’t know how a conversation there could, help add compassion to the world.
Speaker: 0
03:03:40
And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large number of people that will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to post about it and to accuse you of things. In some sense, I don’t wanna lose the part of me that’s
Speaker: 1
03:04:02
that’s vulnerable to the world. People have very little understanding of things if they’re willing to say that because you’re sitting down and talking with somebody, you are ergo platforming them, advancing their calls, being used, being a shah, or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which Ai think is something you do expertly.
Speaker: 1
03:04:25
And another thing your critics wouldn’t realize is is that they, you know, life is long. And, you know, hopefully, god willing, we’re both around for a long ai. And therefore, you don’t blow everything up at the request of some twat online. Mhmm. But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their opinion and no one else’s, really.
Speaker: 1
03:04:53
And and keep and you just keep your own guiding light. That’s what’s always done it for for me is that I I I’ve always said I just don’t really I wouldn’t care if I was the only person with my opinion, and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn’t meh.
Speaker: 1
03:05:11
That’s not ai I’ll send you Churchill’s great speech on the death of Chamberlain. I mean it. He says the he says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelensky, but he because because because one of Churchill’s greatnesses was his magnanimity.
Speaker: 1
03:05:33
And, when his great political opponent, Chamberlain, died in 1940 and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, He could have used the opportunity, and we might even say that some politicians in our day won’t be able to resist the opportunity. He could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right. And Chamberlain didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and he’s tyler us into this meh.
Speaker: 1
03:06:00
And you should have all listened to meh, because that would have been a good time. Yeah. It would have been a good time to say that that would have been one for the win, as they say. But Churchill doesn’t do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the ai and how you can do it successfully.
Speaker: 1
03:06:23
He very movingly says he doesn’t even mention the name of Hitler. He says what were Neville Chamberlain’s flaws. He says desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace. And he says and he is the curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man. And that but then he has this great passage where he Churchill says, beautiful, resonant passage, about how he says it’s not given to men happily for them, for ai, life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events.
Speaker: 1
03:06:58
And he sai, and for one phase, men seem to have been ai, and in another, they’re proved wrong. And then there’s a, and there’s a different scale of values emerges. And he sai he says, what is the worth of all this? He says the only guide to a man is his conscience. The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and the sincerity of his actions.
Speaker: 1
03:07:19
And in fact, he’s he he says it doesn’t matter what happens. If you have this meh finishes it. He says, however the fates may play, that if you have this shield to guard you, he sai, you march always in the ranks of honor. All that can guide a man is is that if you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it’s a challenge.
Speaker: 1
03:07:52
And then you get buffeted by the tos and fros of the waves of popular opinion. But, and that’s dangerous. But if you keep sight and hold on to what you believe, a million billion foes don’t matter.
Speaker: 0
03:08:11
Yeah. That is the path. We were talking offline about the great biography of Churchill. Churchill himself made mistakes and admitted the mistakes and was, ai, we can even say was proud of the mistakes. I mean Learned from them. Learned from them. That’s all the best you could do. The worst you could probably do is being afraid of making mistakes.
Speaker: 1
03:08:32
That’s what t r ai about the meh the man in the arena speech.
Speaker: 0
03:08:37
T r. Yeah. The old t r. Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but in the end, some of the greatest humans ever created. Norm Macdonald, Churchill, and Tim
Speaker: 1
03:08:56
Horton. Norm? I think we did it before coming on air.
Speaker: 0
03:09:00
Oh, before coming on air. Yeah. Well, he’s always and everywhere in the in the air around us. One of the one of the great comedians. Ai. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on? Human civilization. You’ve, been covering some of the darker speak. The madness of crowds, the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars.
Speaker: 0
03:09:26
Sometimes when the sun shines through the clouds and and there’s a smile on Douglas Murray’s face, what’s the source of the smile and the the warmth?
Speaker: 1
03:09:37
Endless numbers of things. Endless numbers of things. Sai mean, I get I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually. That’s one of the way that’s just the best thing ever. I was in Kiev the other speak, and I was asked to speak to some students at the university.
Speaker: 1
03:09:59
And irrespective of
Speaker: 2
03:10:02
the rather, you know, tricky situation that they are in, it’s just great
Speaker: 1
03:10:08
to, as you know, to speak to a roomful of students about things and then hang around afterwards and just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do and remembering what you were like at their age and how goofy you were and how much you were sana get wrong and how much, you know, you had to learn and how much you were gonna enjoy it and and seeing the the opportunities they have in front of them if if things go right and and, just smart young people giving enormous encouragement all the time. It’s it’s that’s the best thing.
Speaker: 1
03:10:47
I mean, it’s just
Speaker: 0
03:10:48
Yeah. They’re, you could see endless possibility in their ai, and there’s, they’re not, like, bryden by, let’s say, the cynicism that builds up.
Speaker: 1
03:11:01
Even the cynicism though, I mean, you can resist that. I mean, I’ve got quite a deep wellspring of it. But Ai mean, you can’t only fall into that because there’s so much else it doesn’t cover. It’d be like spending your life being ironic, you know.
Speaker: 0
03:11:23
So that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly. Mhmm. Ukraine, Israel. Has that changed you? Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?
Speaker: 1
03:11:43
That’s a very difficult question to answer. Ai don’t know. Differs day to day.
Speaker: 0
03:11:51
So sometimes there’s a heaviness there because of the Sure. You’ve seen.
Speaker: 1
03:11:55
Yeah. I I at times at ai.
Speaker: 0
03:11:57
You regret some going as much as you have to the front lines?
Speaker: 1
03:12:04
No. No. One of the reasons why war is for a writer kind of the ultimate subject is because you see ai, weirdly, at its ultimate. Very, very strange, strange thing. But, you know, it just it is is the truth. Death, when it’s in front of you, is something which gives, terrible clarity to everything.
Speaker: 1
03:12:41
And, it it it you see how people will love and even sometimes laugh more. How they’ll, there’s an essay by Montaigne that’s always on my mind, why we weep and laugh at the same time. Everything’s just more. And, and people the real thing is the people you sai, the the the very, very best of people ram the very worst, and they’re beside each other.
Speaker: 0
03:13:18
There’s some, so I’ve gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine. And there is some level of, like, all the bullshit niceties or whatever it is of of, civilian life is all stripped away.
Speaker: 1
03:13:34
It just
Speaker: 0
03:13:34
seems more honest somehow.
Speaker: 1
03:13:36
Yes. Absolutely. I I Ai absolutely. Well, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And and then there’s the wild clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of the of Ai joked I think I mentioned the I joked about this to some Ukrainian soldiers in ’22 because they wanted a cigarette.
Speaker: 1
03:13:57
And, and and we and we stepped outside. I accompanied them outside because they weren’t allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, which there were rockets falling.
Speaker: 0
03:14:11
Yeah. It’s like Yeah. And I said to him, ain’t
Speaker: 1
03:14:14
it strange that fear of secondhand smoke sai superseded this, but it it, I I don’t know. It’s just
Speaker: 0
03:14:26
Sai ai the humor in that, when you’re on the front line, when you’re fighting in a war, the humor of that is somehow just perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that. Yeah. And the absurdity of life is just Yes. Right there. And ai so honest, and it’s so beautiful.
Speaker: 0
03:14:43
And that’s why a lot of soldiers are traumatized. They’re destroyed by war, but they also miss it.
Speaker: 1
03:14:49
That’s right. That’s right. Absolutely. Oh my god. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker: 0
03:14:53
There’s an intimacy to the whole thing.
Speaker: 1
03:14:54
Absolutely. Well, that’s right. Ai mean, everyone says, you know, I never felt more alive. You know? Yeah. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do anything different.
Speaker: 0
03:15:06
Well, I hope just like Churchill, you keep fighting the good fight and not listening to anybody, and I’ll try to, learn to do the same. Douglas, I’m a huge fan. Thank you for doing this.
Speaker: 1
03:15:19
Been a great pleasure, and right back at you.
Speaker: 0
03:15:21
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Bertrand Russell. The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Speaker: 0
03:15:44
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time ai.
