Douglas Murray - Danube Dialogues by Danube Institute

[Laughter] welcome to the latest danube dialogue one of the series of podcasts that the danube institute is putting out on the internet with interesting people to discuss important ideas and some unimportant ideas as well now and then um i'm i'm today accompanied by my colleague the director of the institute ishvan kish and our guest is douglas murray who is visiting budapest as a resident fellow of the danube institute and who's been meeting people around the city and discussing politics and as far as we can do all of these things today in the conditions of the covid pandemic but first of all welcome douglas i hope you've enjoyed your time here thank you absolutely great pleasure to be with you both thank you well i'm just going to begin with the general question and then we'll get into a whole series of other other things but um gk chesterton wrote a book one something called what's wrong with the world now there's a hell of a lot of things wrong with the world i wonder what you what you would say is wrong particularly with countries like ourselves in western europe and the anglosphere well first i mean the um the thing that's most obviously wrong with the world at the moment is that the only economy that is coming out of 2020 in a state of growth is china which is a huge huge issue for all of our countries which i am i can't quite get over the uh problem of massively increased public borrowing or government borrowing and the fall off in gdp in each of our countries is is a a real cliff edge that i feel as we get to the end of 2020 that worries me enormously um then of course within every country we have our own problems i i returned before coming here to budapest so i was in america covering the elections for five weeks and america obviously has its own huge problems the main one i suggest is this problem they can't agree now on anything um i mean across the political divide they now can't even agree on who won this election which isn't the first time that's happened but it's now become a pattern and i think that if you if you have a country where the public don't agree on who won consecutive elections you're in really dangerous terrain um and and then you know we all have our own our own regional problems in the uk obviously struggling to leave the european union with or without a deal um that's taken up all the bandwidth of government energy until the covet crisis came along so all of these seem to me to be like these are layers upon layers of of troubles we're all struggling through well it's particularly difficult to solve those problems particularly the one you mentioned the extreme hyperpartisanship in the united states and the problems over the election if you don't have a people which thinks of itself as a as a people not of course united in every topic but nonetheless has been possessing a common identity a sense of fellowship a sense of destiny in as we go towards the future that seems to be the case in the united states seems to be the case it seems to me after brexit in england um it seems to me to be the case in a lot of west european countries but it doesn't seem to be the case to the same degree in central europe is that your impression i i think that is to an extent i mean obviously there's a lot of political opposition in countries like this one in the v4 countries there's obviously [Music] many many political disputes that go on i'm not sure that there are any as seismic as that that sort of one that goes 50 50 down the middle i mean obviously uh here in hungary whatever people think of him you know victor orban has won consecutive elections with no plausible argument that he did not deserve to win them um [Music] obviously in america there is this sort of 50 50 problem where um half the country thinks it's one election half the country thinks otherwise and unless there's a in fact i said before this is an american election unless there's a clear winner either way we're in trouble and it just has to be a really clear win now you might say of course that it was a clear win for biden and it's the trump team's job to show that it wasn't and they haven't done a great job of that so far but if nine out of ten trump voters i think the latest police show think that trump did win the election then you are into this terrible problem we had it of course as you alluded to in britain with the brexit vote where 48 48 52 wasn't seen to be a decisive enough majority um uh i don't know i mean we're we're all struggling it seems with with the one of the most basic problems of politics which is that sometimes your side loses um and if you don't know how to behave in defeat then you know then victory would be dangerous actually for you because there's almost nothing you wouldn't do so i'm very worried about that in all of our countries yeah and staying at this topic do you think that this might be because of identity politics so that for example in america or some of the western countries antipolitics is much more prevalent than in for example here in central europe and perhaps even multiculturalism because i think during the covet crisis america didn't really come together even the uk and france and and most western countries had this feeling that we are facing a crisis so we should stick together i mean perhaps it was stronger here in this region but i think it was still kind of strong in in france and the uk especially at the first part of the coveted virus and in america even at the beginning there was no uh solidarity really and now getting together by the people so do you think uh anti-politics or or multiculturalism could play a role in this well i think it plays a role certainly i mean once you divide people up by ethnic grouping and then the state for good and ill where you think they should vote according to that then you're already in a world of pain um uh you're right that in britain for instance there was unity uh i think it's fallen apart a fair amount not not not completely but there was a considerable degree of political unity at the beginning and civic unity i'd say as well um as and that's gone on it's rather surprised some of us i'm i'm rather heartened by it you know um uh america didn't have that because it's in an election year and the chances of the democrats trying not to politicize covid or indeed the republicans was virtually nil and so there was not a second in which this wasn't seen through that lens but the the the the question i think both we're all getting at is um really the question of what unifies a people um now i would say that that the importance of agreeing on recent events is is just a microcosm of the much bigger question which is some agreement on the past um if you if you don't have your past i wouldn't say right but in some perspective um it's very hard to have a future um i'm thinking particularly of course of america where the the dispute that has emerged is about the fundamentals of the nation and this is this is what is so dangerous in america is that there's a dispute over basically the legitimacy of the state you know a portion you might say it's a minority of the left but it's it's a significant minority now think that the whole land is stolen that it would have been better if the pilgrims had not set out that it would have been best of all if once europeans discovered america they turned around went back home and said nothing to see there uh it's a large piece of real estate with no promise and and um and this this seems to be the view of a significant chunk of people and and indeed that the founding fathers were no good they were just slave owners that the constitution was just written by white men and and once you go down this route you know you you can't agree on anything in the future because you're in total disagreement about your legitimacy in the past you know if if people decide that you're in trouble well that arises from and contributes to the related notion that the when immigrants arrive in a country they should in general assimilate to the culture of the country and in the last 30 years we've decided not to believe that partly because we don't believe in ourselves as you've just um pointed out but that leaves a really very difficult and serious problem which is how do you cope with the communal tensions which haven't been you you which are not um which are stopping the unification of the country in the psychological sense when how do you deal with problems like that which president macron has just had when um somebody um an islamist an islamist fanatic beheaded the young teacher obviously that's a real problem for a democratic country that wants to have good communal relations yes yeah i mean it's it's um sub-optimal as they would say isn't it um the problem is that there are not very many options available uh for how to unify i mean you can you can unify along ethnic grounds and that's a known problem uh it has some advantages at times of peace but it's also got very obvious problems as we know from the last century you can unify around um confession professionalism around faith grounds you can that also has its problems as we know from centuries of european history but it's also got its advantages you can you can have a national idea and i mean that's that's what that's what france is relying on that's what america obviously relied on and and i think should continue to rely on an american idea you know we have our family fathers we have our founding constitution our principles and we will go on from that uh france obviously is um particularly interesting on that isn't it because it's done that several times in the last uh few hundred years um it's sort of but it sort of does it in a way of restating it's almost like a software upgrade you might say um and and what's been fascinating actually in recent weeks watching the fallout of the uh the murder of party and the murder of the worshipers in nice is is is that fact that the the french identity uh retains uh a potency which seems to have escaped the american left i mean not just that they don't feel themselves but they don't seem to have much sympathy with their counterparts in france they don't seem to have sympathy with the left for instance which which you know believes in organizing long trade union lines but also believes in patriotism for instance the american left can't seem to do that and it seems to have not only no understanding but no sympathy really with the french left that can still do not that all of it does it but it can still do that and this is i think one of the most striking things it's caused president macron to actually have to phone up the new york times and instruct them about how they've got his whole country wrong not just him but his country and that that i think it's a fairly unprecedented situation but i think it's necessary i think it was bold and good of him to do that um but it speaks to a problem that that's that's come from america on that and spilt out well one way of course of trying to produce unity is to have an immigration which is limited in so that when people arrive they arrive to a country in which they are a minority and being a relatively small minority it's impossible to think of changing that country you have to adapt to it naturally and in a way that's what we did until i suppose the 90s and when we suddenly produced suddenly developed mass immigration in a way we hadn't before and i wonder whether or not the i wonder why the idea of having a steady but limited um number of immigrants arriving isn't seen as part of the solution to this well as i think with david goodhart who's spoken here before hasn't he a fellow british writer who summed it up eloquently by saying that basically in post-war um we'd all underestimated the number of people who might want to come to our countries and overestimated our capability at integrating them and that that's that's that seems pretty accurate to me um by the way i think it's just quick a number of things to say about that what one is as i say the strange death of europe and not not forget i mean you know this well john i mean you know at the beginning actually in western europe the assumption was not the migrants would all stay yeah you know uh the guest workers in germany and in britain were not expected to stay um which you might say is a rather obvious error um in that why wouldn't you uh if you'd come from a bangladeshi you know hill town and you'd found yourself in a you know you know in the town of the north of england uh of course you would decide that having left a sort of third world society being a first world one would want to raise your children there uh this wasn't foreseen it seems by the politicians and so the story changed the story changed from well we're not expecting them to stay 2-0 they're staying um and then that the oh they're staying included well get on with whatever you want to get on with as long as it's within the realms of the law broadly and then it's only in the last two or three decades that this thing of oh and become like us has has has emerged and that's why it's been a rather weak a weak thing to argue on because it wasn't what we used to argue it wasn't what we used to well for a generation or two it wasn't what we used to urge you know how was your book received in the main because it was of course well received been that it sold a lot of copies but would you say the reactions to it by reviewers and by the general public was what you wanted uh that's some stage the strange death of europe uh yes i'd say so i mean it was um i was this is vaguely of the opinion that because i was telling a truth that was unpleasant that i would be excommunicated from whatever polite society still existed and i found it wasn't the case i found there was a much much more receptive audience at every level i could think of actually of general public readers um a reader reaction and even you know reviewer reaction i had thought that it might produce you know a sort of set of people taking the opportunity to show that they did not agree with these these truths that were being uttered so reprehensibly and and that didn't happen really quite a lot of people came out to say that you know he's on to something at least how many countries did it was it published in i think it's published in well it's been published in about 30 or 40 different languages i know it's been published in every european language and um uh quite a lot of other places and and i i suspect that that's because you know migration is obviously one of the great questions of the 21st century because our species has never had the capability to move around with such relative ease or with such relatively little costs and um and also of course um we've never had the ability until the last generation to to see how other people live um you know uh quite often people thought that their own lot was perfectly all right it was all that they knew um it's only in in this generation that people have grown up knowing for instance their cousin who moved somewhere else has things that they would like and that those things might not be that great of course in our eyes um working for a gang in a in a south um italian city um it doesn't seem to us to be the best life but it might look uh when presented on the mobile phone to a relative is as a step up yes and also there's another element in this which is it's now possible to move to another country and still in certain important ways remain at home the internet um the liberal liberalism of a country means that your newspapers can be published locally there is your religion can be practiced freely which isn't true of course in other countries for uh for for everybody you don't have to learn the language you don't have to accept the customs you can still do your own things sometimes even use your own laws because the general law just doesn't care if you're using your own laws so yes i was always worried about that feature of things because i wondered whether or not it didn't mean permanent balkanization of a country like the united states and britain but um it seems also that the attraction of a modern liberal society to people who come into it means that at least by the well you get the second generation which becomes pretty well um pretty well adapted to it but then the third generation starts to develop kind of well tries to recover its parent's identity yes i i think of this like um a river with an awful lot of currents tormenting underneath you know the direction of the river may be clear but there's an awful lot of churn um and the churn that goes on on this i'm so pleased you say that because the churn includes for instance the following um temptation admiration and disgust all at once uh for instance i mean quite a lot of people suggest that an assimilation is a point i've made before but quite a lot of people suggest that an assimilation success story is basically to take a devout muslim and make them into a social liberal um which which is now in my view is in all sorts of ways a form of progress um they may not feel that their family certainly may not feel that um i would i i would you know be pleased if somebody after living in a liberal society in in the proper sense the term for time um themselves became tolerant and and and in that way liberal in a certain sense but but but that's quite different from making them for instance british because not everyone in britain is liberal um neither of us are completely uh liberal um and and this replicates country after country so if if that's the best one can do um you're in trouble and and that in a way is seen as being the best we could do yes yes staying at migration do you think the mentality of especially politicians changed a bit uh since the migration crisis of 2015 because back then we had a couple of countries like hungary who strongly said that we don't need nice migration it seems that a lot of these countries actually change their policies even though if they're not publicly admit changing them so do you think your book and the whole crisis changed a bit this perception and could perhaps covet change the perception about mass migration i'm not sure covered will uh it well actually it's not true there's one thing that's very striking about the covered thing which is um did anyone ever think until this year that you would read a line like justin trudeau just ordered that no more foreigners should be allowed into canada i i mean you know it's it's worth noting in a way that that once there was a once the pandemic in the way we first understood it feared it feared what it might be governments across the world did do what i think was necessary and say actually nobody you know citizens returning from abroad fine but now now that was very striking because of course that was not an attitude that people took in 2015 about the migration crisis and and so my point it demonstrates a certain wider breadth of political action than we might have ever predicted was possible until this crisis so there is something in that as for the um as for the sort of wider question and i'd love to hear what john thinks about this but i i think that there is a change um but it will never be admitted uh um my spectator colleague matthew paris said um in a column somebody with whom i'm generally in disagreement but uh um wrote in a comment a while ago that you can you can tell when politicians have changed their mind best when they say that they wouldn't do something a second time that they've done before they very rarely say the first time we did this was a terrible mistake um what they say is well now circumstances have changed we wouldn't do this again so for instance some people would say we shouldn't have a second lockdown if you say but does that mean you shouldn't have had a first lockdown they say no they're the first lockdown it was definitely a good idea but the second i know not so much was because of certain circumstances it's the same with a migration crisis if you said almost any politician in europe including angela merkel or jean-claude juncker or the sort of the wildest uh people on that side of the argument if you said would you do it again now let's say 2020 2021 presents us a wonderful opportunity to have the same crisis and um they'd be unlikely to say oh yes definitely we do that again they say you know for some reason it's different this time and we don't feel the same but they will not concede that 2015 was not wise to some extent the way bureaucracies deal with the uh the with the immigrants and is to in a way that emphasizes the uh the unlikelihood of their changing or their assimilating in a way it turns out to be false um if you look at the census for example in the united states um it describes everybody who's got any well as the old racist one drop of blood uh any any um non-white blood so to speak in them they're all counted as minorities now those people of course um are whites and asians um uh families um asian american families a whole series of mixed marriages producing children and most of them it seems feel themselves to be part of what used to be thought of as the great american white majority but is now simply seen as the great american majority the term white is dropping out in that sense because um after all well these people are not descended from the mayflower but on the other hand they they don't feel themselves to be members of a minority unless they are strongly encouraged to feel that way by bureaucratic rules and political rhetoric and the raising of con and events like for example the the the murder of george floyd who who immediately became a symbol of what was still wrong with race relations so i i tend to think that if we stand back a little a little bit from these current controversies we still see the power of the american idea to assimilate people and the power of american culture to to make that change internal and permanent but in a way by the way that doesn't um prevent um a muslim believing in islam or or a strong catholic uh believing in in fairly tough restrictions and uh moral rules of the catholic church this is a very important point the um uh roger scrutin of course made this famous statement that the that the nation state was the widest application of the first person plural of we of who who we are the widest application of personal possession of something which you may yourself not have personally contributed to or indeed personally been responsible for but which you can say we did and uh what john's just referred to is very important because in the american context this has been on the great geniuses of american assimilation integration somebody literally i've heard it myself who has literally just become an american citizen that says well when we did this now that that that is it's one of the most beautiful things to see in the american context uh uh i have i it's so unusual i think in the european context by comparison that actually when it does happen i'm deeply moved and deeply struck by it some years ago i did a panel in london with trevor phillips the former head of the commission for racial equality um i'd said the man on the political left but what i regard as being the the liberal good decent left uh which knows that there are problems on on on all of these in all of these areas and on this panel as we were talking about trevor's own parents had come from i think the west indies in the post-war period um just in passing um trevor we were talking about the 17th century 16th century in england and then the elizabethan period and trevor said well when we were when we were doing x referring to something in the elizabethan age and i was i was struck by it because of how unusual it was um and how wonderful it was but just how uncommon it was to hear a black british person of any political threat there are many people who would do this it just doesn't happen very often to say in the elizabethan era we and now that would seem to me to be the demonstration of successful uh integration into into the body politics you're absolutely right but the but if mark stein were here he would respond to what you've said by saying that the um the british imperial identity as it took shape in the 19th 20th centuries was in fact the first multicultural identity and people did think of themselves as being certainly for example well the new zealand isn't an easy case but i think something like an enormous percentage a quarter of the male population male population left new zealand to fight in both wars uh but that was also true for people from the west indies they came over to volunteers and i think it was two and a half million indians volunteered in the second world war to fight for king and country so i mean in a way um the the experience of diversity we're now having is our second experience of it um and we forgot about it somehow in the meantime it's a it is a very interesting them and markers causes is very strong on this and i'll just finish on this point uh by saying that somebody we have seymour martin lipset the canadian sociologist once asked the question what is the um feature that most successful third world democratic governments have and he said they're all former british colonies and now i'm not saying this in a jingoistic way i'm simply saying that that creating that kind of identity um was was was is a quite an interesting feature of the anglo-sax of the anglo-american world and you see it in all the countries i think if you have a very uh very strong um identity which you think about a lot it's a bit more it's a bit harder for people in countries of that kind which have a adamantine identity or i'd have to say a muslim identity which is also extremely strong and and defense minded um so it's extremely easy for for as i say the english-speaking world to adapt uh and to welcome adaptation i don't think that's true for for everybody but um just turning more to europe i mean could this happen with the european union so could i mean i myself have some existence of a european identity so despite being i'm probably saying a nationalist i still think that we have a lot in common but it seems that i mean the european union leaders are trying to kind of force on us more rule-based and law-based values than actual values which are based on moral things for example uh christian rules for example so if you look at europe they don't really focus on on these values they focus more on things like liberal democracy rule of law which might bind us together i'm not really sure that that will work and i'm a bit also skeptical about doing the whole european identity thing because if you look at the studies for example made regarding the european parliament for example because i have ideas that these parties could do a whole list or a transnational list and these studies show that for example a german social democrat would vote for a german conservative rather than to vote for a hungarian or a french social democrat so um it seems that there's still no really sense of european identity in this regard but is it possible and do we even need it really well um it's possible i i don't see why it's so desirable obviously the people who do think it's desirable think it's desirable because it will solve other problems i mean this human and others onwards is clearly the driving force and and it has some moral force of itself if you step out of the 20th century and you know don't realize that our continent had problems you know in in trouble again they they the founders of the european union and the ongoing the the most persuasive advocates of the european project the ones who don't as it were disguise what they're trying to do um i clearly think the european union is an answer to the problem of nationalism as they see it um and it seems to me to be a pharisee for quite a lot of reasons one is that it's it's it it wasn't nationalism per se that caused the problems of the disasters of two world wars in the 20th century uh a form of nationalism um and i would say particularly german nationalism um but to blame nationalism per se is as i've said many times like blaming love for the trojan wars and therefore trying to ban love um uh everything can go wrong uh uh but it seems to be the european union seems to be an attempt to stop the nationalism problem re-emerging by dissolving the national feeling in europe into a wider european identity and and and the problem which is as you put your finger on with the constitution and much more is that is that they are in the realm to to misapply allow straws quote about another context they are in the problem of somebody trying to build a tent on extremely wide but shallow ground if you want to do something that is going to encompass everybody from poland to portugal uh sweden to greece um you you are already dealing with a very wide terrain not just geographically but culturally i mean we know in this in this bit of europe alone you can go not very many miles and find very different cultures very different histories very different stories very different experiences to do this as a continent wide level you've got you're dealing with exceptionally wide social historical religious and many more terrain but when it's that wide it's inevitable that the only foundation foundations you can put down are shallow you you couldn't possibly i mean you can't do what the french republic does and say you know uh leicester and and and so on and this is these are our our our foundations you can't do what the founding fathers do and say you've got to you've got to do this sort of rather weak foundation building and then pretend that it's deeper than it is i think the american um anglo-american political theorist shirley robin letwin got something important right when she said that the superiority of a liberal society she meant a classical liberal society not current american liberalism but the superiority of that society is shown by the fact that it can allow communities within its legal jurisdiction to exist which deny or oppose to the the the structure the meaning and the values of the society as long as they don't engage in active war against it so that for example in america you could have both religious communities like the amish on the one hand and utopian communities which existed all over america in the 19th century on the other hand in the soviet union as late as 1961 the i think the uh six six people were executed for making and selling pencils and um in in turks turkey people were executed for wearing the affairs as late as 1930. so i mean you know that i think makes the case quite succinctly for for a tolerant liberalism of an old-fashioned kind um so that that might if if europe were to develop politically along those lines it would be easier but unfortunately in all countries it seems um when there are certain people arrive who want to impose a very narrow concept of their values on everybody else i mean the the undertow of your question this one is obviously that um what's going on at the moment in in the european union i'm very wary about touching on this not least because i and my fellow countrymen made our feelings about the european union plane by voting to leave um and and after that i sort of think it's it's somewhat rude to leave a club and then tell the members of the club still in how to behave or or even tell you much what you should do um you know we made us our own view clear um that said um clearly there is a presumption at the european level that there is an obvious direction of travel and that this neighborhood is filled with slow learners yes um you know and that and that uh the visigrad countries in particular must be regarded as um sort of slowest kids in the class um i personally find this tone from brussels and berlin predominantly are offensive um reductionists generalizing all the things that they tell us not to be i think it's filled with a lack of empathy and sympathy for specific issues in this neck of europe i think it shows a lack of imagination i think it shows a lack of self-criticism um you you should only berate people for being slow learners if you're absolutely sure that what you're teaching is correct and if i were jean-claude juncker i i would i think right now i have a degree of self-doubt and i envy his lack of self-doubt in some ways um uh but but you should have self-doubt um are we sure that we've got absolutely we've got everything right enough to treat people in this manner now there may be things that they are right about uh i don't doubt that but but but to think that that is on almost every area of cultural political life is i think to create among other things a problem that is going to grow and grow yes that can i bring up a topic which um is very very recent and would have seemed four or five years ago it would be not something which was likely to create enormous political problems for our societies but which has emerged recently and produced a very dramatic changes in people's moral attitudes in some in some political parties and communities and and um nobody quite knows how to deal with it and that is the transgender issue which all of a sudden which you wrote which you write about very interestingly in your latest book um madness of crowds among other topics but um how do we understand that issue because the old understanding all of us i think would have had would be to say some people are born into sex it's a terribly difficult it's a terrible situation for them and if they're not treated decently and we have an absolute moral obligation to make life uh as is and to adapt as much as we can for their needs that's not really the issue is it no actually it comes back to this this very interesting thing um we're circling around um we you know which is sort of what society ought to be um and what its limits and uh can be and what it can tolerate and what it can't what's fascinating about the trans issue which has caused so much pain really um is that yes i mean as i say in the madness of crowd something exists there's obviously an intersex issue which is a very sub optimal position for anyone to be born into um and deserves deep sympathy compassion and probably better public knowledge about it um but but beyond that what's so difficult what's proved so painful about the trans issue is that us you know i i think uh i think it's it's found no better than me it might be challengeable um many people in eastern europe as well as western europe are sympathetic to people who say look this is my life my choice um it's nothing to do with you it seems to me to be quite an important moral argument to say look you know if some of us are gay it's none of your business uh um it doesn't harm you you know nobody's making you gay um now the problem with the trans bit is that it says um or at least not everybody's transferred a very vocal trans lobby says um we are trans and therefore you men and women do not exist and that's the the step that has made this different from everything else um you know i think i say some in the matters of crowds that if if if the gay rights gay liberation movements of the 60s and 70s have said you know we're here we're queer and as a result there are no such thing as men and women um i think the argument would have been less persuasive no such thing as feminists and no such things as straights yes absolutely exactly as a result you're all gay i mean that would have been a harder sell and um and i think that is actually the problem in this is that is and i noticed it first as i say in the mountains of crowns i've never first with with friends who are scientists who had no um particular beef with any of this had not taken any interest in it but started quietly over the last decade to say to me i can't do this and when i asked you know when i sort of tried to get to the root of the problem it was it was that they didn't hate it of anyone what they have a hatred of is being told to say things that they know go against the scientific method because they'd never been asked to do that before and and it was quite right that they rebelled now what's so interesting about it is that others find that it has also trodden across their terrain as you say the feminists say actually um those of us who fought for women to be allowed to achieve what they're capable of in their lives resent it to now be told we don't exist or that somebody who was a man until yesterday is just like us uh and yeah and that's defeating you in olympics or something yeah exactly yes pummeling you to a pulp in the cage fighting arena um the this is this is the the root of it is that it actually walks against the decent type of liberalism that europeans have tried to in instill which was you know if if what i do does not harm you then it is effectively not your business and um and and and that's that's why the transgender issue has become so painful so um i mean because people say to me you know but how why is it come about because this is this is less and less less than naught point something percent of the population in any way identify this and that's what it is it's that it is a claim by a tiny minority but which affects everyone um and and one other thing so is that of course the demoralization that comes from this i've referred this before but the demoralization of any society and again i mean post communist societies know this that there is a demoralization to being told that you should pretend that you agree to lies um it's it's it's a deep insight of solzhenitsyn and many others that that that if you say to people you must on a daily basis agree to this lie it's not just it's not that you make the lie that you know also to be a lie true it's you make the person subservient and that might sound bizarre why would transgender you know group want to make people subservient i don't think they especially do but i know that a lot of people seize on arguments like that say you know admit say that men and women don't exist for instance in order that that almost anything can be demanded of you next that's why i won't do it yes well quite so and in fact i know from talking to people who are old enough to have lived under communism and who have since come to the united states or to britain that they recognize uh this rhetoric that is used as a way of forcing them to surrender their original their sorry their own ideas and opinions and indeed individuality the other writer you mentioned solzhenitsyn i think vaclav havel in his essay the power of the powerless makes this point that your power is the power to insist on not telling lies and and um unfortunately it turns out that there are far more many far more people who are prepared to tell lies or are frightened into it than we might have imagined i think but i would i absolutely agree i would add what's so exciting is there is an intellectual fight back yes you know and this is um this is terrific i think i think that there is um a greater understanding maybe now from outside this country like this precisely this strange canada and rodriguez recent book is maybe one example um there is a um a serious intellectual fight back i'd say from from the right also from the left uh saying um no um you you've overreached and we're going to push back and in a practical way the battle has moved to the courts where people are absolutely entitled to say and now do that whatever you feel about yourself this is a child this child below the age i would say of 18 but we might save 16 um cannot be entitled to uh and certainly shouldn't be encouraged to take a life-changing decision which is irreversible and which all uh the experience of other people who've done it is often a decision they come to regret and and that seems to me such an important principle it's another way of protecting the innocent um that that i'm i'm glad to see it's now emerging in the courts and serious battles have been fought over it i'm slightly surprised that when people are concerned about other uh attacks on the innocence of children that this um has not in the sense this hasn't occurred earlier really good well thank you very much douglas for being here yes we've really enjoyed it and it's been a wonderful time in many ways and can't wait to be back

Channel: Danube Institute

Views: 113,371

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Id: 9jjt-S-NxaI

Length: 47min 32sec (2852 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021