Bart De Wever in gesprek met Douglas Murray

good evening uh ladies and gentlemen I was just told five seconds ago that I have to give an introduction I'll keep that very brief because you all came here to listen to the world famous author uh Douglas Murray uh welcome to you all at City Hall you are in the marriage room now Mr Murray this uh in the 16th century there was no marriage room because Civic marriage didn't exist yet people only married in church and in the 19th century this was refurbished as a marriage room and dedicated to marriages throughout time the ancient times Roman times Christian times modern times and then the French Revolutionary times and if you look at uh what we call the Phil Rouge of marriage is that it makes people look very unhappy throughout all the ages the painter never married himself but he hits a secret message about marriage in this room it's a room where we invite all famous people William of Orange uh walked through this room Winston Churchill was in this room Napoleon was in this room now you are in this room only the most important people come here people that we like to listen to you are the author of some World bestselling books that I thoroughly enjoyed reading um and that of of course inspired a lot of controversy as well which makes them even more interesting so we'll have a nice debate we'll let Mr Murray speak as much as we can you know I'm a politician I like to hear myself speak but this evening we have one hour it's a unique opportunity to hear Mr Murray speak please welcome him in City Hall and let's kick it off you very Mr do like I do I just saw the first time first time you saw Yes yes let me first ask you um in English it's the war West yeah you know what the AR West means yeah more like an attack is it just does that difference stand for anything you have that does this work it doesn't know if that works I think I to record it so I think I have to just I think that the uh the distinction may be rather difference I don't know um all translations of my books uh have slight variations I know when I wrote my book on migration strange death of Europe it came out in from say Lu Sude Y which was slightly stronger than the English one I have no say on translation well is it does there anything to do with the fact that in America and Great Britain where you come from it's more war than it is for example in Belgium Netherlands well that's quite possible I mean um you will know the situation in Belgium and the Netherlands myed when I do um but essentially what I describe in the book is being what I regard is being an allout conflict on all of the sources of Western Civilization lest anyone think that I'm overstating it I really do give chapter and verse in this book I think it's a movement that started in recent decades but it's sped up exponentially in recent years and when I say a war on everything again I'm not overstating it um a war on particular in America it has to be said in the English speaking democracies it's worse in my view but it's the war on everything to do with the foundations so um in Britain uh the the people who are most attacked are the people who we most rever uh the mayor mentioned Winston Churchill if you were trying to persuade people in Britain to come onto your movement you would think that attacking the most famous and rever hero of Britain would be unwise but this movement doesn't f that at all it goes straight for Churchill same thing in America you would think if you wanted to get people on your side with a political movement or political project you would not attack for founding fathers yet it is Thomas Jefferson George Washington and the rest who are all being daily attacked in the United States and what I stress about this is don't mistake this the simple historical revision or historical um to and fro I am all for that I welcome it uh I think that we always reapo the pass and through different lenses we reinterpret it and we look at it a new and that's as it should be but looking at our past through solely hostile lenses is a very peculiar thing to do I actually know of no other society that is engaged in this form of self-adulation uh again it's different from self-criticism self-criticism in any liberal democracy is absolutely right we should be self-critical but so self critical that you say there's nothing good about yourself now maybe I overstate that in Belgium maybe in Belgium you still have things you could hear around and I see the there shaking his head and I think but no doing thatou a second ago um a lot can be said without a microphone um but may maybe it's it's it's better here but I can assure you that in in America where I live uh this is uh nothing is good in the past the country shouldn't have been found Christopher Columbus shouldn't have set out or he should have set out and once he found America should have gone back to Spain and Portugal and said I didn't find it or there's a large amount of land but it has no potential um once you decide for instance that your Society has an original sin which is now accepted by so left and rights in America everyone says well the original sin of slavery and I always say well what's the original sin of other countries does everyone have one or is it just you what's the original sin of Uganda for instance or they edenic in some way and when I state it like that the point I'm trying to come AC bring across is it is a war on the foundations and the people waging have chosen their targets well because they've gone right for the root of the building the very thing that Society was proud of the things that people used to cere around they're the targets it's not Fringe bits and pieces around the edes it's the absolute center of the being of a society like Amer and possibly I I'll I'm going to ask the same question to the said in the first uh in in approval couple minutes yes but the difference Mr Mayor um between a war and attack I was thinking is it possible that it's worse in America because you you have read the book I think last year it was your favorite book in from 2022 I've read this week um and I I was asking myself is it worse in America and in Great Britain than it with us but you say no well I think that's funny because Mr Murray came into my office we had the coffee and the first thing he asked me is it just as bad here because I think in English speaking countries it's it probably worse and I had to contradict you uh it's come it came over the ocean quite rapidly uh we're copying uh the attack on Western Society in Flanders as well and one of the thesis that I defend in a modest book that I showed you is that it actually nowhere worse than here Flemish ident identity the attacking of our of our past it's an obsession we had a television show popular television show that a the story of Flanders where in know popular way historians told The Narrative of all things that happened here the uh reaction of the intellectual leite the academic academic scholar historians was Furious they called this North Korean propaganda television it was an outrage the idea of telling people their history in a way that it is a story that they can comprehend that does not deconstruct things or destruct things but simply tells a story that might provide a sense of community maybe even a sense of pride is an absolute outrage was that a small group of academic oh but but but this is fued by a very very small portion of the population but they are of course uh very present in the humanities of our universities they're very present in the reduction in the uh reduction floors of our main uh quality medium who are present here uh today uh and they're certainly omnipresent in what we call culture makers uh there are people who think differently but they're wise and they shut up because speaking out against this way of thinking is very dangerous because you will get canceled and cancelling is um something very very if that happens to you it crushes you and so people are um either if I have a sympathizer in the cultural World they exist they exist very often they articulate their sympathy when I go to the toilet they follow me in the corridor not in the toilet but they follow me in the corridor and then they tap me on the shoulder say I'm all for you I'm all for you and they whisper but they wouldn't dare to repeat that if the colleagues in the cultural world would hear it whenever anyone does that to me as it where tap on the shoulder The Whisper I agree with you I just can't say it I always say ah I see you're a coward was asking you a question because on the scientific level I was LE at the University all I was wondering do we have the same problem because maybe first of all um can you describe what happens at for example Cambridge and oer that people know what talking about was quite chocked to to read all yes I mean these are of course the the academy as they called in America had endless books written about it and its Oddities in recent decades but um the the universities great universities like Oxford and Cambridge are just going through the same boring list of American cultural obsessions as everyone else Cambridge University uh recently ordered um an inquiry into whether the university had benefited from the slave tra historically um first of all of course when you said up an inquiry like that you sorry to interrupt you how does that happen what is the process the process is you get the set of pseudo historian um who are normally ignoramuses with uh deep Grudge to look at your past and find you guilty um because they do always find you guilty uh such things are never set up people like it's like setting up any there was a recent thing in the English Countryside the main English Countryside trusts ordered an inquiry as to whether they benefited from colonization and of course they get some jist um people who look at the English Countryside and say yes it is indeed racist and um they're always going to find that because that's what they're set up to do they were never set up it's like I'm going into a a court as a defendant and finding that the judge has dismissed the jury wants to go straight onto sentencing and is wearing a black cap um in other words they've already found you guilty it's merely a process rather like um uh um you know a court in former Eastern Europe they've decided we are guilty and then the question is simply what we do about it and um almost every institution has gone through this museums are one of my obsessions I'm great lover of the Arts and I find for instance that almost every major collection certainly in America and and in Britain as well and possibly again here is being re-evaluated again there's nothing wrong with reevaluating the past in art but when it means as it does at tap Britain for instance that you have artists Works a great work like sandley Spencer's Resurrection at cooker and you have beside it a description of Stanley Spencer that effectively accuses him of racism because there was nobody black in his village in England in the 1920s when he painted it it's really quite something when you you're not merely recontextualizing your collection you're attacking it I mean they found and this is one of my obsessions that comes across from culture chapter in the book take Britain again just to take one example um has closed a room with a with a mural by the great pre-war artist Rex Wisner it found that there is a single character in a corner of a corner of this beautiful mural down the 1920s that is of a child a black child being led in chains by a woman in a frilly dress Who's Laughing clearly for anyone who understands this the message of this is something like etin Arcadia ego but the tape didn't bother to work that out they just found it guilty of racism said that Rex Whistler was a racist and closed the room and here's one reason I mind that Rex Whistler had no children and there's no one to defend him because he died on his first day fighting in Normandy in 1944 how dare these people stand in such judgment on everything in the past they're not qualified to do it and yet in institution after institution it's what they're doing well if I go back to the universi for us o Cambridge big big big names in the world what happens it's very intelligent people start like spreading fake news that is that is what you are describing is it well yes it is I mean for instance there was a there's a I was the doctor myself some years ago in the ACT fact I was say the May was the last time I was here in this very Hall about 20 years ago at my college um at Oxford a a very very serious uh um ethicist called Professor Nigel bigger regious professor of Ethics at Oxford University that's quite a good title to hold you know this is somebody you listen to um the reg profess of Ethics decided after a discussion of colonialism in the last decade got very very out of hand said we should at Oxford University set up a course to study the ethics of Empire that was all to study the ethics of Empire we've got to work out what this was we're clearly in the middle of some kind of reapo to it but what what how do we do it we can't simply allow the voices who say there's no difference between for instance colonialism and Nazism to just keep getting away with that because that won't do and nor would it do if somebody came along and said everything about colonialism was wonderful why don't we do it again of course not but there's somewhere in the middle you've got to explore surely if you would really want to get to some kind of Reckoning with our past a truthful Reckoning rather than a hostile Reckoning and yet for suggesting that this should be done Professor Nigel bigger was defamed among other things by fellow colleagues as a racist and as being pro-empire he uh had um endless attempts to cancel him from his job fortunately he's at the end of his career and didn't really care very much which is um something which I wish more people felt um but as I said at the time defending him if you if if you're going to weigh up a complex issue like the ethics of empire were there any good things what were the bad things where did it go wrong where might there have been things that were right or just to say it happened like all the history it happened if you can't have that discussion at Oxford University where do you want it to happen and the truth is that the people saying we don't want it there don't want it anywhere because like the 1619 project I just very quickly explain what that is the New York Times a few years ago launched a project called 1619 project that claims that America was founded in 1619 the stated aim of the 19 project is itself is simply to shift the founding date of America to the date that the first slaves were brought onto the continent by the Europeans but that is all it is for very quickly I may make this point the reason that they have that they have run so far so fast with this is that they make assertions that are provably wrong about the American past but refuse to debate the author of The 169 Nicole Hannah Jones always says I refuse to to platform my opponents and she does she has not yet put herself forward for any public discussion or debate that isn't that is critical but a lot tell us what happened to within New York Times CU they actually they gradually took away the evidence yes but you you documented all that I believe they explain was quite shocked as well it is it is very shocking the New York Times is regarded as a paper of record in America and so the main paper reorient in the entire Society to be about we started in sin slavery was where we started slavery is the story of our country rather than a part of the story um they did this they launched this project they made this assertion and promptly lied about what they' said I mean I have the receipts as it were they they even changed online the language they use and then said oh no we didn't say that you said it then you just unsaid it and hope we wouldn't notice um so there's a sort of De degree of duplicity in all this as well but but the main the main thing was to look at everything in current American life through this lens and find America guilty that included uh one of the contributors wrote that all of capitalism is descended from a plantation now uh as I point out in the war on the west uh the evidence was the the hit job the drive by shooting in question was performed by an incredibly inadequate soci ologist of incredible obscurity um his evidence was among other things that double bookkeeping the two col bookkeeping was used on plantations and he says in his in his hit job on capitalism every day that an an American sits down at their desk and uses word or any um program on their computer they are knowingly or otherwise engaging in a system descended from uh slaver now sometimes you have to wonder where to start with something this stupid but let me give it a go one thing he says is that well one thing he doesn't know is that bookkeeping was used in ancient Mesopotamia among other places um this is not something that was invented on the plantation um secondly he says that the accurate recording of facts is what these two things have in common well there might be a reason why any system that is accurate might survive longer and better than a system that is not accurate um and you don't need to bring slavery into it it simply has nothing to do with it the aim is there as in most of the other things I'm trying to describe in this book a simple attempt to say we've found the source of guilt and we have to tie every everything in the society gave to it I think it's an insane project of self-destruction but I'm amazed that it's been allowed such a clean run because its claims are as I demonstrate I hope so evidently faulty I still of the question what is what could be the motivation as well as for S of for an Institute a major Institute uh as a newor Ence consider as that you say it's an it's an intention it's intended to formalize the idea that's something ring intended to formalize the idea that the US was found original that intention where do you get that from um well the first thing is that it's completely clear from the various people I quote that um they are engaged not in a process of re-evaluation but an act of Revenge um I quote at one point brilliant Insight n from the genealogy of morals he talks he said people who talk of justice that mean Revenge um it's an incredibly pertinent insight for AG so a lot of people talking about Justice who mean Revenge one of the most influential writers in modern America um known by the name Ibraham X kendi has written um multiple attacks on America in and one of which he he says the answer to past discrimination is present discrimination the answer to past discrimination is future discrimination he makes it perfectly clear he says people were prejudiced against in the past and as a result we must be prejudiced in the present what does he mean by that it's actually at this stage really very very Sinister because at this stage in a country like America when the when this issue comes up it always gets on the issue of reparations reparations is of course the idea that you can pay certain communities to alleviate or somehow make up for historical sins suffered by their ancestors and in America this obviously means payment from uh Americans to Black Americans and if they descend it from sleds it's an it's an insane idea because you simply couldn't do it I mean you you have to work out the precise DNA of every American and among other things work out with every person particularly people who are black Americans whether they are actually descended from slaves or whether as in most of their cases they're descended both from slaves and slavers um that would be a problem what do they do do they get 50% discount um and uh but this this idea always follows on and what's so Sinister about is what you're really talking about is group punishment and I don't like that for any group I don't think that it's appropriate I I think that something that that did that to Black Americans would be Wicked and I think if we did it to other Americans would be Wicked but it's an obvious intention to divide and the reason I say that very quickly is because apart from anything else the reparations debate is now in America not even about transfer of money from white Americans to Black Americans it's about the transfer and nor is it transfer of money from descendants of people who did something bad to descendants of people who were wronged it's the transfer of money from people who look like people who did something bad to people who look like people who suffer that is I shouldn't need to say it an impossible task and yet in California the mayor ordered an inquiry into this and the inquire came back once again it'll be surprised to hear with the confirmation that America and California had indeed benefited from slavery and that therefore every black uh American in California should be given I think at one point it was something $10.4 million um and even the the the governor of California sort of realized ah this might not work um as the Great American comedian Dave Chappelle said um the Great black American comedian he said if if we do get reparations like that buy shares in Nike so should there be another way to pay off any debts or are you saying there is no debt left well let me put it this way when it comes to my own country of birth Great Britain if um there is a debt to be paid from what we benefited from in the slave trade or colonialism I like is there according to you well I don't believe in this idea I don't believe in this concept of moral debt I think it is apart from anything else an entirely anti-christian idea uh in the Christian ethos we had the idea the sins of the father were not placed on the shoulders of the son to live in a society where the sins of the great great great great great great great great great possible Uncle should be put onto the shoulders of their potential relative is insane by the way again very quickly this is not theoretic the British museum the British Library a few years ago decided to come up with a list of authors who may have benefited from slavery and put them on a black list one of them was the great late poet laurate Ted Hughes died in 1998 was very fortunate enough to hear him do AO incle before his death Ted Hughes was born in 1934 why did they find him guilty because they claimed that an ancestor of his in the 16th century had been a slaver well actually Ted Hughes was born in poverty in the north of England in the 1930s and it turned out the person they claimed was a relative wasn't even a relative but who are these people who run libraries where you where you poly cancel authors because of because of associations with people they never knew and it turned out to be faulty so I don't like the concept that we do this strange historical um retribution on people but what I would say is if we are going to do it let's do it in every Direction um everybody in Africa voler famously gave one of the greatest uh um attacks on the hideousness of the slave trade in k um what many people don't know is that in one of his letters volter said the only thing even more reprehensible than what the Europeans are doing with the Africans is what Africans are doing to their brother and sister Africans and if you read the very few Memoirs we have like that of eana slaver who ended up freeden in Britain who wrote the most fantastic gripping Memoir uh in the 18th century um if if you read his account of his capture in in Africa it was it was raiding parties from neighboring Villages that go in and steal people um and they would steal their fellow Africans sell them onto um a black African slaver and he might sell them on to the Europeans or he might sell them on to the Arab slave market where I think it's thought that this sacks very quickly it's thought that maybe up to 11 million people solds across the Atlantic and the transatlantic slave TR hideous threed it's thought that up to 18 million were sent uh East into the Arab slave trade why do we not know about that because the Arabs castrated all of the men and inured there wer wouldn't be any more um now uh if the Europe if the Americans had to pay reparations for a slave trade what are the Arabs to do um if uh if uh Black Americans are to benefit from uh payment for something that happened hundreds of years ago 1 million Europeans were seized by the barbery Pirates in North Africa were seized from across the underbelly of the Mediterranean France now mod day Italy uh and indeed as car where is Cornwall and isand in in Europe about a million uh uh Europeans were stolen uh from their Villages and sold into slavery uh by North Africans okay is the government of Tunisia going to cough up should we demand that the current Administration in Libya hands over some cash to us in Europe I mean it would make sense if we're going to start doing this and what do we do about the people who are descended from the people in Africa who did the slaving I mean surely they have to pay surely we've got to squeeze money out of Africa I mean you see the insanity of this this is literally a way to divide everyone all the time for the rest of time nobody could claim that anything like healing would come from this and by the way that's usually the point of reapo history is to say let's find a way to approach it in a reasonable light so that we can reasonably reflect on the goods and evils of the past but it's a very strange project yeah just want to take you back to our country Mr Mr talking about preparations about universities like Oxford and kingridge New York Times um I must say that I feel a difference really you can you can something otherwise but can you make that comparison like to our country well if you talk about the 1619 project of the New York Times just simultaneously with that project knu wrote in an edito that racist thinking is in the Flemish DNA which seems to be more or less the same thing and uh if you ask what's the intention behind all this I think there is an intention it's not some exaggerated stage in emancipation movements that we will pass on and will wake up to live in a better world where everybody's more equal and and so on and so on the intention is of course to attack any metaphysical framework behind our identity that's the intention to destroy after they chased CS as Community builder of the premodern world now they want to chase national identity in the nation state as Community builder of the modern world and arrive in a world without identity and that's why there's so figuris and what why it's such an obsession do we have the same thing about slavery if you walk into the next room you look at the ceiling there's a sentence on the ceiling that our ancestors painted in the 19th century and it says in in people are free and not slaves it comes from a law book that was printed in the 16th century where the first city in the low countries who had printed law the Consin in pra and it was a printing of oral law that already existed in which slavery was forbidden and that law was also applied in ANB we have cases of Portuguese uh Tradesmen coming in bringing in slaves one of the slaves run away the Portuguese came to the city magistrate and said I want him back they put a question before the high court of justice and they said well no it's forbidden slave is free and I always notice when I have t our ancestors were enormously Pride proud in the 19th century because there's nothing exclusively wisdom about slavery except the abolition of slavery that's exclusively wisdom and our ancestors were extremely Pride that we were forerunners of this abolition that it was already banned here in the Middle Ages the risk of becoming a slave as anop system citizen was bigger than being a slave in ANP a lot of an citizens have been slaves because 25% of all the ships we were a seaf fairing City on the Mediterranean were captured by Pirates they had a high risk of being sold off on the Alger slave market as a slave until the end of the 18th century there were more white slaves in the world than people of color and if you ask people what do you know about slavery they say ah we put people on boats transatlantic it's all our fault we're the only ones who did it no we're not the only ones who did was it bad yes it was bad was it terrible yes it was terrible but it's quite an evident truth to discover that in the past our ancestors were less nice this lies to poor people people with other sexual orientation less nice to women less nice to people of color but that's true for the entire Humanity not just for us saying that the only thing that you can derive from history is a sense of Shame and that you should apologize for 3,000 years for the 3,000 years of History like Mr Infantino are you a soccer fan Mr Murray probably not you're a cultivated man so probably not I can I I can Fake it Well the FIFA president when we went to Qatar for the world championship and there was some criticism on the slave labor the slave labor nowaday slave labor in Qatar and said those European you have to shut up because for the 3,000 years of History so since the attack on Troy we went we derailed and we have to say sorry for 3,000 years more that's it they silence you they you of any sense of community any sense of identity and they make you weak and speechless for the entire rest of the world but is that truly like a systemic intention by by K for example oh it's it's not like they're meeting somewhere in secret but uh post post modern thinking it of course there's something bigger behind it it was not illogical after not illogical after the second world war that uh fukko would Proclaim man to be dead after n proclaimed God to be dead Fuko said manage that as well because without God we didn't do much better we had concentration camps we had the gak so the ideologies that clinged to nation states like Nazism led us to terrible places so fukko said we have to attack any metaphysical framework that creates Community because at the end of the day it's just a question of power the power of white heterosexual men who have the power who construct identity just to exclude other people and at the end of the day massacre them so we have to rob that creative power of community building and then we will wake up in a much better world where every individual is the measure of him or herself that's the deconstruction of postmodernity that created a vacuum a void no identity and that void was filled by woke saying deconstruction is not enough we have to destruct if Western Civilization is at the basis of everything that's gone wrong in history at the basis of everything that is wrong and will destroy the planet through climate change that's also our responsibility then we have to stop western civilization in its tracks and that's the intake ention and that has become uh a way of thinking that is so dominant in all Progressive circles that you can find in Europe that it's it's not like it shows its face wherever if you know how to look at it it shows his face everywhere every day I see it every day well I was going to say that that's the crucial thing is that it's the same record is played everywhere that's one of the giveways um again um the example I gives of um of this idea that there is something racist in the DNA of a particular people apart from the fact by the way that that's a very racist claim itself apart from that fact the question again I always have is compared to who compared to what if you are a black African you go to live in Saudi Arabia you will be discriminated against because you are of a darker skin than the locals as I say to this day the word for Arab in the word for Africans rather and slave black and slave is the same word in Arabic ab ab plural they literally today describe in the Middle East black Africans using the word slave in China as made aware of this some Years Ago by a great late uh colleague of mine who born that um the words they use to describe westerners are entirely racist words like there one of the words translates as ghost because they think that Western skin is pale particularly pale and they describe as ghost the point is is that Europeans are effectively non people well that's quite racist I would have thought um and it's the same across the world and as you say you got to keep in mind with all of this compared to what it's a very odd thing for the generations have come along look at the past and find the past guilty for not being like us well amazingly enough in the 16th century not everyone was in favor of gay marriage amazingly enough in the 15th century not everyone was on board with women having the right to vote partly because nobody had the right to vote but I I mean you can do that process any but the question is then to what end and if you wanted to balance it out again on an issue like slavery you would say okay our society may have benefited from slavery um but if in the case of the UK you have to add in the cost of abolishing the slave trade because when King George III signed the abolition of slavery act in 1807 he also had to pay for the Royal Navy to police the high seas not just to stop British slave trading which which was stopped but to stop trading of slaves anywhere in the world and the Royal Navy was still doing this to stop Brazil's slaving into the 1880s and we lost thousands of sailors and a massive amount of the national debt was spent abolishing slavery again not just across the British Empire but across the globe now some credit surely would be ACR if you want the debit side F but surely there's some credit acrw the British public like the public here paid much higher taxes on Goods after the abolition of slavery because we had we were buying goods in foreign markets only from places that were not slaving so every household in a country like Britain was paying more for goods throughout the 19 century that would have to be added in but you never hear that added in because nobody SE seems to want to add it in because it makes it complicated I want to go to one example um thatly surprised me in your book W Churchill maybe it's an idea to First explain what what happened what happened to him yeah he was cancelled well um yes 20 years ago we had in Britain uh the greatest Britain uh I think you probably had it here number of countries around Europe we it and there 10 television programs of the shortest the greatest Britain who ever lived rather unsurprisingly in 2000 I think it was the British public voted again Winston church was the greatest Britian who ever lived um I think the only nearest Contender was the Unknown Soldier but um it's a very moving idea um now 20 years later bizarrely an appalling act by a policeman in Minnesota with the killing of George Floyd leads to this what I describe in the book is this very Swift Stampede and importing of a very specific culture war and policing issue in America onto not just everything in America but everything in the west and that end up with the first well I actually attended the first BLM protest in London in 2014 to cover it and I knew then that we were in trouble because about a thousand people were marching down Oxford Street and one of the chants in those days was the claim that people said hands up don't shoot it was claimed that an unarmed black American had been shoted by police in Ferguson Missouri in fact it turned out not to be true but anyway as in he hadn't put his hands up um and then was shocked but anyway one is the early protesters of BLM said hands up don't shoot there they were walking down oer streets chanting hands up don't shoot all accompanied by unarmed British police officers who couldn't have shot them if they wanted to my point is is that there is this importation of of something from American culture which may or may not fit American culture I don't think it does but it certainly doesn't fit onto our culture before you know it after the killing of George Floyd wison church is suddenly in the cross wires in in in the shooting site and the protesters the protests in London started to deface the statue of Winston Church they insisted that he was a racist he was a colonialist he was Pro Empire he held views that we don't hold in the 2020s and what was that based on um well it's based largely on the fact that Winston Churchill is accused of having Victorian values which isn't surprising because he was born in Victorian England it might be odd if you had Victorian values and you were born in ANP in 2010 but it wasn't strange if you were born in England in the 19th century and there those values included a relief an Empire a belief that the British were a force of good on the globe and and should have an Empire and this is the vment the globe as well as Britain there are very specific allegations made against him which are totally untrue and which I prove some length but the basic accusation is Churchill was a racist Churchill was a excuse me was a proponent of Empire and they even accuse him of being a genocid this because of the 1943 Bengal famine when many Indians died um because of a without getting into the details because of a a food shortage which people now accuse Winston Church of being responsible for when in actual fact all the documents show that he diverted grain from Australia to get to Bengal in times try to make up for the terrible famine that was going on that nobody denies went not Bengal but these anti-church of Protestants decided he was guilty of genocide and then before you know it and they got there in no time at all Churchill was as bad as Hitler once you are there it's it you're in an upside down world where nothing can make sense but my point is again is why would you choose this figure of all figures to attack and the answer seems to me to be because these cultural revolutionaries wish to attack our holiest places of course and like all um people who desecrate shrines in history they want to find the places that are most home that's why they go for Thomas Jefferson and get Thomas Jefferson statue removed from City Hall in New York and other place that's why even the Senate after the dead of the two world wars in whiteall was attacked by the BLM protesters and when the next day some members of the household Cavalry on their own time young men and women all sorts of backgrounds turned up and cleaned the Sena of the graffiti on their own time some of the BLM Protestants shouted at them abused for doing this and said you and your precious monuments and as I say in the book but yes we do have precious monuments we do have holy places and we have the right to believe in them to hold dear to them to find sucker and relief from them and not to have them assailed by people wholly Unworthy of them I think every society has that right and I think we do too L well when you talk about the BLM protests in America after the terrible thing that happened to George Floyd they kind of flew over the ocean and we saw them here as well and I thought that was very strange because it was the first time that I saw the anger of people that had never been slaves against people that never had slaves people that even can faintly claim to be The Offspring of slaves in Europe people who came in very recent imigrant movements from the 1950s 1960s were in the street in Anger against the society that except accepted them that had the openness to accept immigrants and gives them more chances than whatever Society you can imagine on the world they were angry at us and there of course you see the other side of the of the midal if you destroy your own identity if you have an obsession with proving that you are a very bad person that your ancestors were very bad persons then there must be victims of your identity and those victims if you treat them as victims they will start to behave like victims and then you are in a very SL slippery slope towards what I call the worst form of racism you can have because before you know it you have people saying well learning Dutch in Flanders but that's racist why would you ask people to learn Dutch uh learn to write and read correctly but that's way too hard for immigrants you shouldn't ask that uh and everything's even proper mathematics becomes race saying one and one is two well that's a western side of looking at mathematics there must be other perspectives as well it's it's total lunacy and this has Grave consequences this is the reason why the level of our education the quality of our education has gone down because if somebody's a victim equality of chance is not enough it has to be equality of outcome equality becomes Equity it's not something you have to work for not something you have to work it's something that has to be given to you as a Vengeance as a compensation and Liberty Freedom becomes the enemy but freedom is a power tool of the dominant class of the white males they use Freedom they have freedom they have privilege they use the freedom just to impose norms and values to exclude other people and make them correspond with the way they live and they want and they think so freedom is bad and uh equality is not something you can work on under the kopa of Freedom which we have been doing since the 19th century you talked about women's rights gay rights uh the Flemish movement labor work they had through generations work towards equality no it has to be given to you and the one of the fastest ways to do that is to take Freedom away the way in in the last few decades decades how Western Society have become less free than they were in the 1960s 1950s it's very Troublesome it's already in our legislation the the moral High Ground that these people take to judge to condemn and to cancel in society but more and more in courts as well it is really undermining in my view democracy and any sense of justice and fairness can you imag fig Church oh you name him name same I would say Henry conans because there's no people that owes more to one author than the Flemish people in their symbols and of course conans was not a scientific historian he wrote a narrative that was uh directed towards the 19th century flish which was a very very poor country second trade citizens with no language rights and he said I want to make a better Belgium not a better France a better Belgium by promoting the Germanic side of the country and saying this is valuable as well and he wrote stories that people read that were read to people saying we have an identity we have an history to be proud of he was of course as you say the first pillar they wanted to attack he has been degraded to a second rate H at right writer no literal qualities who wrote lunacies about about historical facts who's doing that well I can um name a few but maybe that's not the most useful uh answer I can give you at a certain point after postmodernity turned into woke these kind of attacks became the most logical thing you can do because as you said if you want to destroy a house if you would want like to destroy this city hall it's in the seller that you have to start look for the pillars look for the foundations what are the stories people tell each other from generation to generation who give you a sense of identity a sense of Pride attack those stories attack Z pit you don't know him oh you do know him you don't him attack him because why is he so useful to attack can a tradition change yes it can change society changes and traditions change as well if it's an organic process it's a dialogue if there's consensus about it I'm I'm not worried about the appearance of Black Pete but the way they attacked him is simply saying your childhood was racist your parents were racist your culture is racist your grandfathers were parents were racist that's what they're saying you you have to be feel guilty about your ancestry about everything that you are and you have to let go of it that's what they're aiming for that's why they're attacking conscience the fact that that he's been called Ruth beat now is that a sort of a surrender I wouldn't call it the I would have been more happy if that would have been the result of u a more consensual dialogue but I don't consider it illogical that Traditions change if a tradition doesn't change it becomes folklore it has to keep a meaning and of course if you are a city that is diverse we have to make it work it's what you write in your book as well whether you like it or not you have to make it work my idea of making it work is creating a community enter inviting people around the table to participate in the dialogue that creates Community creates identity and these those these people have a say as well and if they say for mil child it would be better if he doesn't is is is unable to let to believe that this black pit is is is somebody to ridicule my child that would be that would be nice we're pretty friendly people if you would have asked this in a nice way was okay why not Santa Claus used to have a cross he used to be a pure Catholic figure mostly now he has lost his cross because we're not so Catholic anymore and so Traditions can change they can evolve but it's the narrative behind the way they attacked that bothers me a lot and that tells a lot about this this this aggressive movement um let me just add one thing to that I may um imagine what we might be doing if we weren't doing this is one of the challenges I I try to put out there um I one one of my colleagues spectator in London has a great uh journalistic rule which I try to follow as well he says every single Society in history including our own societies have done things in the past which we look on with just amazement and often horror um in Britain an average an average uh child in the north where there were mines would be sent into mines at 10 years old average life expectancy in those communities for a man was 28 um was that person very free were they in control of their lives they weren't forly enslaved no they didn't have it easy but let's just let me just return to this issue every society does things which we look back on with horror why don't we assume that we are not super Superior to everybody born before us and it is likely we are doing things now that our successes will look on with equal awe and horror and my colleague's suggestion is try to work out what they are now and try to stop them preemptively let me give you one example there are more slaves in the world today than they were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade I've met slaves in my travs in Africa in the Middle East I've met people born as slaves in the 21st century this is a horror going on in our time and if we weren't talking about Black Pete and a whole range of other relatively frivolous issues we could solve that issue of slavery today but we don't let me throw one other one I i' i' recently written a certain am about euthanasia I was rather amazed uh earlier this year when that poor young girl who survived the Brussels Airport attack was euthanized and I have to tell you that in America among other countries we looked at that story with utter horror and I would suggest preemptively on behalf of people who come after us that people may well be surprised that in Belgium in the 21st century you could not execute a terrorist but you could kill his victim I would have thought most people morally would find there to be something very peculiar in that but why do we not interrogate ourselves the answer is it's harder it's harder than looking at anyone who went before us and say we're so much better than you may just um go to the end of your book cuz we would like to know how to solve all this I'll give you five minutes well let me um first of all say you have to answer things at the depth of the charge that have been put before you I tell a story it's familiar to anyone in politics but I was some time ago at a private event now made unprivate but anyway uh in which a minister in Britain was asked about house building and the fact that young people can't get on the housing ladder in the UK and he answered by talking about incredibly specific issues of planning regulation and I said to his advisor afterwards you know what that's such a mistake because people who can't get on the housing ladder or can't own are like become resentful and resentment cannot be answered by simple tweaking of planning laws you also have to have a serious answer to a serious Faith now our eror is filled with resentment and the problem with resentment is again it makes you effectively a victim you can blame anyone for whatever doesn't go right in your life and as everybody here knows we all live lives in which something goes wrong I mean our whole lives end in a thing that goes High wrong um we could be enormously resentful about that and about everything but I say that we have to answer charges of resentment which is what underlies all of the things we've been talking about this evening we have to answer it with something of equal profundity and the thing that can answer resentment that only one thing and that's gratitude it's gratitude now this is an extremely hard thing to feel for some people um nich of I referred to earlier says that the person of resentment has one particular problem in their life which is that really somebody needs to at some point stand over their life and say you are right somebody has destroyed your life somebody has held you back the person is you now n has no idea who can say this he says this is the hardest thing any human being could ever hear the least likely thing they want to be told n has an idea that a secular priest could do it it's unclear really what he meant but the point is you'd have to have somebody in the society willing to turn around and say that if if you haven't got everything you wanted it is possible there are other people who've caused that but it is equally possible that you have caused that in your life entire now how do you get to a position of gratitude let me give you one very practical example one reason why I feel gratitude for the society I live in and why I don't want it to be pulled apart and dismantled and deconstructed is because I think on balance it's good why do I think that it's not for jingoistic reason or anything else it's because I've traveled an awful lot on this planet I've been to some very bited countries I've seen some very bited people and reported and written from some miserable places and when I there in these places I always think how lucky I was and it is luck in one way simple luck where we're born but as one European politician said to me some years ago I think you're wrong Douglas on the issue of LA because it's not just La the fact that the society you are born in is what it is is because actually your predecessors made prudent decisions and did things that were better than some decisions made elsewhere let me give you one very obvious example the energy reserves of Venezuela are pretty much the same as the energy reserves of Norway sadly the people of Venezuela who I don't blame and my God what a nightmare that country is in they made bad decisions with the people they elected and the people they elected made even worse decisions and before you know it the whole thing fell through the floor and that has happened in the last 10 years Norway is doing pretty well got a great Sovereign wealth fund and much more so my point is it it's not just luck it's not just happen STS but how you make this clearer to people being encouraged to live lives of resentment I think that is one of the first answers is to say compared to what I have a friend who's a head mistress in a school in London in the very prived area every child is of an immigrant background and every child is uh from a port background and they because of the Fantastic teaching at this school the children in school have the best imaginable education and they are outperforming private schools and other schools all the time in exam results but I once said to my friend I said what when you have a child who is like really playing up is there anything you find to be consistently useful to turn their life around and she said actually there is one thing I encourage their parents to take them back to their country of origin to meet their cousins and if you have grown up in London even in a poor part of London in the 21st century you have lots of reasons to feel resentment as we all do and you could live a life of resentment or you might go to Bangladesh and meet your second cousins and realize that you have some things to be grateful for the thing about GR UD is that once once you can feel it you discover it's the world's greatest and freest commodity I am walked through the square here tonight and I say hav not been here for 20 years with wonderful memories of this city I look through this sare wow I mean I could look at the square and I say now we have to do an audit what is the guilt of this Square this Cathedral spy was almost certainly not built by voluntary labor laborers paid a fair days wage for fair days work it was it was it's possible it was maybe maybe this is so maybe maybe the stone was quarried in an unethical manner no it's possible it's possible that carbon emissions were let off in the building of that Cathedral he got me there you know it's it's possible that there was a carbon footprint that was not offset by the people who built the cathedral that's true and for this reason we must look at it as an act of guilt we could do this all the time but just stand back and Marvel at the works of man it's a much better way to look at the world it's like looking at a person you can always find something wrong with somebody and find much wrong about myself but it's a strange way to approach life it's a much better way to look for the good in people to find it where you can to bring it out of people it's a different way of looking at the world now I have lots of practical things I could suggest other than that and some people might say that's just too big and too vague an idea but my point is that it isn't it's a fundamental idea the era of deconstruction should in my mind be replaced by an era of construction again instead of tearing down the past we should be making the present instead of attacking everything in our history we should be making history we should not be telling young people that they are born into this oppression and this guilt and much more we should be saying you are born with the greatest lottery ticket you could have had not just in global terms but in historical terms take the ticket and run with it as far and as fast as you can and make something of your life that would be an [Applause] idea how can you say something sensible after that ladies and gentl thank you for joining us thank you and thank you thank thank you thank [Applause] you

Channel: N-VA

Views: 63,827

Keywords:

Id: H7PTd60dI9E

Length: 64min 37sec (3877 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023