Douglas Murray interview: BLM

douglas murray hello hello thank you for uh taking the time meeting me here thomas docks in london lovely view of the of the palace of westminster we will be delving into the uh the heavy subjects of the day thank you for taking the time it's a great pleasure how's it going well you know as good as it can in these strange times yes indeed strange times and a new paperback for you the madness of crowds updated new material tell us about it what's new in it uh i've written a new chapter because there's so much has happened in the year since i wrote this i wrote the manners of crowd thinking it was sort of in part going to be able to be a warning you know that i could say look be be careful of the route we're going down we're going down this this route where we're digging down on all racial differences or sexual differences or gender differences and maybe maybe we should try a different route which is to try to get past these things i'm not sure my my warning was heeded which is sobering for any writer but but also of course has provided me with an enormous amount of new material because the things i was i was saying have just got worse in the year since and i should add a caveat to that which i think when we last spoke virtually i was of the opinion that well the covet crisis might dampen some of this down we'd we'd we're certainly at the beginning of the crisis look we were facing a problem that might be a generational disaster that's not to say it might not still be it but in different ways the way in which we thought at the beginning when people were talking about losing large percentages of their population and so on at that stage i thought well maybe maybe people won't have much time for sort of imaginary grievances if we've all got a real grievance um or all got grievances of our own and and so i thought maybe this stuff will go away a bit maybe we'll have people relying a bit less leaning a little less heavily on these differences between us maybe we will actually find an ability to come together as societies as people and then exactly the opposite turned out to happen which as i say is sort of the focus of what i've written that's new so we spoke when it first came out for about an hour i would encourage anyone to watch that if they want to get sort of a feel for the overall scope of the book the new material new events the one that obviously stands out to me would be the spread of the black lives matter movement because you know it's sadly it's a tale as old as time uh a black man is shot by the police in america there's outcry there's a protest but something different happened this time and the movement got take up and spread particularly in the uk but around the world in a way that i don't think it did before why do you think that is lots of things one is the nature of modern technology that a video of somebody being killed is inevitably much harder than a much more unpleasant much more visceral than reading in your morning paper as we did until this generation reading in your morning paper there's something terrible that happened so that's the first thing is the nature of the dissemination of the material makes these things a lot more raw i think the second thing is uh a specific issue to do with the times we've been in uh my own view was that at a certain point in the lockdown people were looking for a reason to break this isn't to ignore any of the legitimacy of parts of the black lives matter movement protests but rather just say that you could feel it we had been constrained in our houses for months if we had spoken last year and i said to you in uh in 2020 everybody who's not in a committed relationship will be forced by a tory government into celibacy for months on end you might have said to me you sure that's likely to happen and and all of the young people will take that you're absolutely sure yeah yeah sure no we wouldn't have seen that coming yeah so there was there was certainly a moment in this where people were looking for a a cause that trumped coveted to justify breaking lockdown and i think that is the part of the factor and then you get into the real complexity of what black lives matter and the movement is and what actually happened in minnesota and i think this is hugely contestable territory at this point um here's the biggest problem i think that exists with the blm protests uh they are essentially running against an invisible opposition that is there is a genius in the movement and i followed the movement pretty closely since it originally formed earlier this decade the the justification of the movement is yes there are cases in america where black people have been killed in highly questionable circumstances by the police now i say questionable because some of the circumstances in which this movement has found its raison d'etre have actually proved not to be what they were presented as i'm thinking of the shooting in ferguson missouri six years ago now where the claim was that the man who was shot had his hands in the air then at the subsequent trial it turned out that he had lunged for the policeman the arresting police officer's gun that makes the circumstances different but by that time the movement had already got another marta now as i say there is a legitimate question about policing in america and then there is what has happened in recent weeks and months and in my view black lives matter has been running against an effectively absent opposition i don't think there is anybody in british public life or american public life who says black lives don't matter or who doesn't think that something like what happened in minnesota isn't appalling so when when a movement says and claims its moral legitimacy from something that seems to be non-oppositional i start to get worried where is this opposition that is saying black lives don't matter and then you get to the oddity of the time with things like the stadium events now if it weren't for covered and completely empty terraces i don't think we'd have seen some of the phenomenon we've seen in recent weeks the other day there was a cricket match england was playing and the bbc announcer said and uh and now of course both teams will be taking the knee as if this was a a long-standing tradition that's always happened at the beginning say the beginning of all these football games i don't think this would happen if the terraces have been full it's happening in empty stadiums because it's very hard for people to judge when there is literally nobody in front of them what a particular mood is and here's a guess if i can say so what the mood is in the city we're sitting in now i would have thought that most people in britain and the polls show this are completely opposed to the actions of the minnesota cop who has as i say zero defenders he's in prison he's awaiting trial for murder and hopefully he'll get a fair trial but it doesn't look good for him we can say from the footage that anyone can see but i would have thought that public opinion this country does not believe that on the basis of that one cops behavior there should be a sustained war on for instance all of british history or claims made about all british people let alone and this is the most divisive and unhelpful one of all mass racial generalizations based on skin skin pigmentation but trying to pretend that for instance all white people are responsible for something like the actions of that minnesotan cult and that's what starts to make me worried because i think what we're seeing there is not a remotely fair estimation it's not a call for justice it's a call for division at that point it's a stoking of division and about that i think we should all whatever anyone's political preferences or background we should be united in saying no they're there you don't get to go it's uh interesting i spoke to aphor hersh a couple months ago and you're you're both in agreement about that kovid had a role to play in the spread of black lives matter movement i thought that common ground could be useful in our in our current times but obviously different you differ on much else i think and i would would diverge after that after that at that point yeah she makes it but she makes an unnamed appearance in the new chapter in the matter yes because uh i mentioned the fact that when when the hardback of madison crowds came out i was given the gift of sam smith coming out as um something new that week i can't remember which sexuality he announced himself to be that week but uh i was non-binary that time and uh i said uh that i i'm just waiting waiting for explanation of what this is that as a gay man i i don't like this attempt to keep disappearing gay people and calling people genderqueer non-binary and a whole load of other stuff that as i explained in in one of the chapters in this book makes no sense anyhow sam smith gifted me his latest uh attempt to look at me by coming out as plural and uh um i mentioned them and i mentioned that uh i was in a radio discussion with somebody berating me for not giving sam smith the correct pronouns and the fact that this person berating me for this couldn't themselves not say him he and that person was of course afro hersh um so it's it's harder to maul the language than some of these social justice activists pretend it's not actually that straightforward to say um i am a fan of their singing they was good on the stage tonight more difficult um the part i wanted to ask you though is you mentioned they were you think they're a legitimate part of the black lives matter movement i think you touched on one which was um police brutality the state acting effectively as judge jury executioner for these people i mean is there an is there any other part of it you think is legitimate i i think by the way also we've got to be very careful about this i've been going to america for about 20 years i've always thought i think like every outsider who looks at america that gosh do they have deep problems i mean every country does uh they do have the they they have a racial problem that i would submit we don't have certainly don't have in the same manner and i don't think we have the same ferocity in a country like britain and there's lots of historical reasons for that i don't like the transplanting of a particular form of racial grievance in one country to another country i think it's an imperfect match to lay specific american problems on a country like britain and i think it does us a disservice but i think it's also important that people have a correct view of what actually is happening in america and what is not happening is as a lot of people have been presenting it that the police are just allowed to kill black people and i'm i'm not exaggerating this a prominent black politician in the states was quoted not long after the minnesota institute saying our children are not safe walking in the streets they don't know when they'll be gunned down by a police officer this is a deep disservice to american police officers i hold no special love or admiration i have no special connection with the american police force they operate in the most highly weaponized country in the world they never know when they pull over a car whether the person is going to reach into a glove compartment and have a gun they have far bigger for all sorts of historical reasons we can go into they all have specific issues surrounding the second amendment which means that they have a highly militarized citizenry which means that they have a highly weaponized police force there are something like 10 million interactions a year between the general public and the police in america and i think as my friend sam harris said in a very very measured and intelligent podcast which he released a couple of weeks after minnesota as he said this country cannot be on the precipice that every single one of those 10 million interactions every year goes well and i fear that there has been a perception that's been pumped out there about what is happening with american policing which is actually skirting around being able to address the problems that have been highlighted and is going to this unbelievably wide attack on american policing as a whole turns in has already turned into massive uptick in gun ownership the figures sales figures show this and anecdotally i have i have liberal friends in america who now are buying guns for the first time a friend told me the other day that she uh tried to get hold of somebody to teach her how to use a gun and the answer machine message at the government school said don't even try to get an appointment with us before the end of november this isn't good news but it's also the case this is happening not because of some imaginary fear in the heads of american people but because you see for instance in new york a doubling i think it was of gun crime every week through july august you see civil disobedience the police retreating you see for instance look what happens when the police retreat in portland oregon uh you see the citizenry and by the way that's in this is in a 92 white city so we're not really talking about uh sort of as it were a racialized version here this is just a people whipped up into behaving reprehensively situation uh irrespective of skin color uh uh in portland oregon you see people uh hauling motorists out of their cars and beating them in the head until they're unconscious finding an old woman in the street and assaulting her this is what happens when the police retreat in portland oregon you get vigilantes you get you get fascists militarized fascists dressed up and pretending that they are anti-fascists and calling themselves erroneously antifa um you see what happened in chicago a couple of weeks ago when uh one of the major shopping areas of the city is broken into and looted not very small fringes but by vast numbers of people that's what happens when the police retreat so the people who say we could solve all of our societal problems by not having police must be children must be children there cannot possibly be adults who know what happens also if from a perspective of the left in the uk for years the argument has been we should fund the police yes the the uh elements of the labour party in the uk switched on a dime from their usual thing which is tory government cuts mean that the police are underfunded on to defund the police it's not my job to explain the consistency of the sections of the labor party but i find that one amazing would you describe this government as a conservative government a name yes and in lots of their actions yes however to a great extent i think the current government is is i say this with a water metaphor positively laughing at my feet uh it's a drift uh it's a drift it's it's pulled and pushed around on the waves of the time now let's keep going i could i could i could plumb and exploit this metaphor to go drowning in it uh um i tell you what i think happened i think boris johnson came in he's got lots of very good instincts uh um he's a very he's a liberal conservative um and he came with lots of good instincts i think he was not sideways by the covered issue and i think then his personal health obviously has knocked him badly i think he's taking him a lot longer to recover than anyone wanted to admit i think we're starting to get the old boris back but it may not be completely what he was i i'd like to think it will be um but it's definitely taken longer than anyone thought a criticism of that is that's what government is like i wrote this in one of the papers the other day this is what government's always like if you said to tony blair in 1997 uh you may think you're going to do x y and z but in fact you'll be drawn into a load of wars in the middle east i think tony blair said how does that happen so government is always like this you come in expecting to do a set of things and then events happen and you're you're bashed around and you have to find a way through it so i don't think we can have endless sympathy for um any government flailing you should expect to face problems and unforeseen circumstances this is especially unforeseen my concern about it is that it seems that the um the inclinations that would normally make conservative government behave in a certain way seem to be absent [Music] the obvious one is that the answer to everything is more spending that's traditionally not been a conservative answer uh conservatives tend to favor fiscal prudence over fiscal irresponsibility uh but the justification for that obviously is we're in highly unusual times i'm simply on on that basis i'm i'm very concerned that we have run up a debt that's unknown in peacetime for a pandemic that now appears not to be as serious as we thought at the beginning a a virus that isn't as lethal as we originally feared and uh which may well happen again and we've had three such viruses from china in the last decade do we run up world war ii levels of spending each time this happens i i don't see how we can and i think i think we probably said when we last spoke eventually the worry in all of this is this is just some kind of prelude and the main events coming the um there's a lot in in your answer that i that i want to go into because i would agree with you in terms of how boris has been behaving a couple times i've seen his eyes light up one recently was when he was asked about the proms and all of a sudden he was backed back to it back to himself and he was also his piece in the telegraph was quite vigorous around churchill and the the black lives matter protest finally finally this is a very important thing though i would say that you go well so obviously he was still ill but when when everything in the british past was being assailed when people were pretending that the country that led the world and the significant financial cost to this country led to the world and led the way in abolishing slavery was somehow only to be interpreted through the lens of slavery when every figure in british history was found not to live up to the standards of july 2020 you would have thought this was precisely boris's moment and when his own hero the person about whom he cranked out a book winston churchill his when his churchill statue is a sale that ends up how many blocks that you would've thought this must be boris's moment to speak and there was silence uh silence from leading conservatives silence from boris johnson finally there was statement but you know the cenotaph the cenotaph was attacked repeatedly the senate after the dead of the world wars i again you have to question firstly any intentions of people who would assail such a holy place in this country and every every nation every people have holy places for us in britain the cenotaph is one such place justifiably absolutely justifiably and there was something especially reprehensible by the way about the videos of some protesters taunting some young volunteers who turned out to be from the household cavalry who were clearing black lives matter graffiti off the cenotaph and said your precious monuments yes yes precious monuments and make no apology for that um but this should have been a moment which should have clarified things and the government in my view should not have waited days and been silent whilst the advantage was taken by the protesters my own view as i say is that this is partly because of the prime minister's own illness but also because of some wider trepidation and that trepidation can now be seen in a clearer light but the trepidation was clearly something along the lines of in the immediate aftermath of minnesota you could push back on nothing that the black lives matter protests were saying and that is absolutely wrong my friend eric weinstein made a very very important intervention around this point he said to my black brothers and sisters i have something to say if i cannot tell you that you are wrong you are not my equal if you cannot tell me i'm wrong i'm not your equal this goes everywhere and there has been an inability with all sorts of understandable justifications but an inability that has existed in recent months of anybody who is white to say no to anybody who is black even if that person is behaving representably for instance by erroneously thinking that attacking the cenotaph is a good idea in the cause of racial justice it doesn't need anyone to say no your entire movement is nothing it doesn't need that he needs somebody to say no that is absolutely the worst move you could make and yes i i think that it was revealing that there wasn't some kind of pushback but everybody was scared look at the most of the british press was scared people have this impression from the outside that all the british newspapers you know sort of uh um you know sharp toothed the british papers were scared at that moment because when when when civil disobedience starts coming and mobs start forming and police started being attacked and then police start retreating companies all companies like private individuals start to think of stepping back biting their tongue the yeah it's one of the infuriating things around this for me is we sort of churchill is either the greatest briton or a disgusting racist and it's like well it could be both history is grey it's complex there isn't there isn't uh i'm afraid that this generation has not been taught that uh i can say it absolutely as boldly as that and it's humility it's i think it was a rent you quoted last time forgiveness yes um and i now operate on the assumption that nobody knows anything and it's not a bad it's not a bad presumption to start with um and i'm enormously saddened by that fact um i was speaking to a 96 year old friend yesterday who made this point he said he said just find nobody knows anything nobody has any history now that might be a particularly strongly felt view when you're 96 because you've got a longer memory than most but as i say to the real problem is this if you don't know history if you don't know very much history or if you know tiny little glimpses of it what you do is you stand in judgment over your forebears and one suggestion i make i think in the matters of crowds about this and the forgiveness chapter is treating the past reasonably is among other things sensible because it gives you a it gives you a glimpse into how your own life is going to go the coveter is a good example we have no idea if the covered era is the um finale of something the curtain raiser the first act the prelude the prologue we don't know which act we're in we have no damn idea and here's the thing no one ever does no one ever does a certain humility is required in that situation how should you act as well as you can given the information you've got will you act perfectly even if you think you're the best person absolutely not and so you have to be very careful among other things of thinking you know what is right and imposing your concept of right on everybody else because you may turn out and historically there has never been anyone who has escaped this to be wrong so what i would what i was originally raised was sort of boris johnson's bright-eyed bushy tail when it comes to these culture war moments and i'm glad you raised coronavirus because in in my eyes when he starts talking about you know royal britannia at the last night of the proms does anyone care and is it a distraction from the worst excess death rate even if the virus isn't as bad as we thought it was is it a distraction from the worst excess death rate in europe the worst economic performance of a g7 country um my view is not i'll tell you why because at times of national crisis it's something very interesting is revealed and i think coronavirus did this we have been talking i think it may have come up when we last spoke uh we've been talking in the uk in recent years as us being a completely divided country yeah actually a conservative prime minister told the british public to remain in our houses and we did and we did uh who did we want to hear from the queen yeah okay so we were said to be this country that couldn't unite around anything and come a pandemic actually the british people turned out to have been storing away reserves of trust even whilst we've been playing a very frenetic political game that was divisive so there seems to me to be a cause of some optimism now how do you get those stores of trust and this is a particularly strong question to be thinking about in relation to america at the moment but how do you get such stores of trust you have things that unite people and how do you have things that unite people among other things the things that have united people before you so statuary is important not just because of the specific people it's put up to but because your forebears have regarded these things as being of worth um songs that have been sung books that have been long read plays that have been performed for centuries these things aren't just things you do away with because they happen not to live up to your precise ideology today but because the likelihood is that if there are things that people have found to be meaningful in the past you may find meaning in your own life you might find meaning in these things yourself now to that extent the songs that are sung aren't nothing you can't just invent them and you a um particularly silly bbc figure said on social media yesterday that if she were head of the proms she would ask for national competition to come up with new words for land of hope and glory and rule britannia which she said could unite our wonderful nation we already have words and they already unite the nation or they united the nation until the day before yesterday when a few male contents decided that the words meant something they don't mean and were sung in a manner that they don't sung it by the way what would the new words be to rule britannia oh you can just imagine the horror of some dope coming up with some absolutely bland asinine thing and then what and then we're all gonna be made to sing the new words it's pathetic but so no do these things do matter to that extent and and by the way we've seen in recent months you know if people say oh you're getting all slippery slow for me this is a very slippery slope america the monuments assaults started with general lee and so on they start with confederates in no time we saw thomas jefferson coming down in no time george washington coming down and major figures in the democratic party being asked whether they would approve of the bringing down of statues of george washington and thomas jefferson and these people ducking the question um so it happens very fast and and in america what's so concerning about this is if you don't believe in the founding fathers if you don't think the founding fathers were decent people if you don't think they had anything to tell you today if you think that the constitution of the united states should be rewritten and much more that is going on at the moment what is your country what is your country you know britain has a different history a very different history it's one of the interesting things about conservatism is that everyone's always conserving different things in different countries the left has a certain advantage in this regard which is the left always demands exactly the same things in lockstep everywhere always at the same time and that has a virtue but conservatives are always conserving different things and in britain we're conserving something different from what they're conserving in america and we have less rigorous we don't have the documents and we don't have exactly the the holy group of people that the american republic is based on but we have our own holy places we have our own effectively holy figures and yes like america to some extent we've seen every single aspect of that assailed and there's one other thing about that there is a very important divide people always need to keep in their minds when listening to a critic and in the age of social media everybody should mull on this there is a great difference between a critic who wishes you well and a critic who wishes you only ill and from the outside they can until you work it out sounds as an ill wind blows that was a big one that was a big one yeah i heard that one but it's still manageable yeah carry on douglas sorry it takes a certain care and a precision to work out which of these is which um because from the outside is where before you work out what's going on a critic who wishes you well and the critic who wishes you ill can seem to be the same thing let's assume our mothers uh your mother like mine is a wonderful woman um you should have seen that go on if your mother tells you something that she'd like you to change you're likely to listen to it because you know she wishes you only well if a stranger on a social media tells you the same thing that's also somebody giving you advice but you have to work out whether that person means you well or not yeah i mean we all have it some people you know i've i've had this throughout my career you you have at the same time somebody might say to you i thought you came across as too angry on this occasion and somebody else says you weren't angry enough and you have to work out who are you gonna listen to the answer is you listen to people it's not just you listen to your friends or you listen to your family you listen to people who want you to do well in your life and i think it's the same with nations listen to people who wish you well and here's the thing if somebody says to you you have no redeeming features as a person ollie nothing you never have none of your forebears have ever had any redeeming features you've all been disgusting would you say good what other advice do you have for me whatever advice do you have for me douglas you unfortunately this situation doesn't arise but if somebody says that to you about your country you have nothing good going for you you've always been bad everything that went before you is bad why are you listening to that person that person cannot be wishing you well if i said about any god knows you could do this on it to any country in the world if i selected i don't know china and said nothing good has ever come from china the whole thing's been disgusting they're appalling people they always have been they're all racists and they always were and the whole thing's got to be pulled down you might say this seems to me to be some kind of cynophobe at work here um as it happens that wouldn't ever be applicable because god knows you can make criticisms of china and chinese civilization and certainly of the current regime that runs china but to say that nothing good came from it that it's always been bad it would not be the statement of a critic who wished china well it'd be the critic of somebody who hated it who was some anti-china racist or something like this you could do this same exercise on every single country on earth what has happened in america for two generations now i would say is that people have been taught that their country is uniquely bad and that same thing has now been creeping into britain and i would argue into basically every other western democracy and it's got to be pushed back against anybody who says that the history of britain is slavery and racism does not wish britain well and i do not think should be listened to if they say there are elements of your past that we need to uh highlight and which may have been covered over in the past then we should bring to the for absolutely absolutely if they say look as it happens britain seems historically to have been much more tolerant than most countries in the world but there is this thing which we should address but i say absolutely i want to listen away but i am not interested and people should not be interested in listening to critics who are fundamentally dishonest and do not wish the country well i think a a gill said something similar um it was it was in relation to reading his postback people someone asked him you must have extraordinarily thick skin you know to say the things you're doing said no i have terribly thin skin right he said i cry all the time but i only pay attention to the views of my colleagues my close friends and my family those are the people whose opinions matter yes when they say something critical you think it's coming from a you know a decent place a place worth paying attention to and i um i wonder whether in these terms of history and and the sort of more critical look we're taking on it these days if whether that's a tonic to the myths the myths the national myths that we've been telling ourselves before which were perhaps slightly uncritical surely that can only be for the benefit it's it's it's a it provides a different way of understanding it's a different way of looking at things and having a plurality of opinion can only be a good thing i'm all for them for the widest plurality of opinion possible and there's literally nobody whose views i want to stop or suppress i think there is a major debate going on about which is it where interpretation of the past is the one that we should for instance teach young people about yeah um i don't think it is the case the curriculums i've seen [Music] from children i speak to i don't think it is the case that this country's history teaching for instance only teaches the good but you know here's one of the things people's people in recent months have been saying we don't teach enough about x event we don't teach enough about anything i was speaking to a friend's child recently who who described the fact that they had done the french revolution in one lesson i've spoken to friends in america spending friends in britain have no idea what happened at the french revolution by the way it's quite a useful thing to know about these days that one of the reasons why some of us were very concerned about the pulling down of statues was not just because it wasn't as one fatuous guardian writer claimed of me that i was sort of in support if oh if you're if if you're against the pulling down of the statue of a slave owner you must be pro-slavery it's like give me a break how can you be so dim how can you how can you try to reduce these things to that extent it wasn't because of that it's because we know from history that you start by attacking and pulling down statues by mob dictat and next you go for people as they have been doing in portland oregon so yes it's it's worth knowing about history but nobody is being taught about history most people know nothing about history if we walked around this city at the moment and asked people the most basic questions about history they wouldn't know them and that's not an insult to the people of london it's the case everywhere it's the case everywhere so the question is which bits of your history do you try to impart and in this country we get for instance and have done again in recent months that enormous criticism for allegedly teaching too much about the second world war is it a bad thing to teach about second world war i happen to think it's again like everything else it depends how you do it i think we are seeing a consequence of a lot of people who only know about the second world war and they think they know everything about it but what they know is or they think they know is that there are nazis and there are anti-nazis and you should be an anti-nazi brilliant brilliant it means everybody who you oppose is a nazi um everybody who disagrees with you is a nasty so yeah we we see all the time the consequences of bad history teaching is it bad that this country focuses on the fact that it stood alone against nazi germany no is it wrong to feel pride in that no you know it's all presented as if pride in a nation is always and only a bad thing pride in this nation was one of the things that made that possible sweden didn't have the same view the world would have been different as margaret thatcher famously pointed out in an interview if we'd have all taken the swedish view america took a different view america took a different view in the 1940s is it wrong for americans to feel pride in that no that's a very good source of pride now it turns out that america has been running off the exhaust fumes of that for seven eight decades now and that may be coming to an end as jonathan height among others as has suggested but it isn't bad to search for unifying stories in a country and and and they're not necessarily they're not false on these occasions it's it's not false to say to people there was a global slave trade everybody did it throughout all of human history and still do and and still do in some countries um and in britain we were engaged in the slave trade and like everybody else made some money from it and we also led the world in abolishing it at considerable financial cost that seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to teach and as far as i know that is what is taught in schools so i don't buy this idea that young people are somehow indoctrinated by this fantasy sort of alt-right patriotic view of history or something it's not it's not accurate these these claims are being made by on unfair critics this um it's interesting you mentioned you know the darkest hour when we stood alone i've been thinking about this there was a p there's a piece in the new statement which i think you might have been referencing on this subject talking about the role of russia and why perhaps we don't wish to stomach the fact that comrade stalin was fighting the nazis alongside us we don't want to address that fact or perhaps the role of um polish fighter pilots in the battle of britain that actually post at the end of the war churchill gives a speech in the commons where he has to use the imperial language of the empire and to acknowledge the role of you know um yeah yeah the sort of colonial outpost in fighting nazi germany and then once he finishes giving that speech he's out on the balcony i think of the department of health or somewhere like that and he ditches that language and he starts talking about britain standing alone separate to those nations and i guess churchill has been pretty much the central figure he wrote the history a history of that conflict and he's shaped i think he understood the value of myth the importance of myth and how powerful it can be for a nation not just myth i mean myth implies um untruth sorry no i'm sorry i'm meaning sort of mythology yeah yes i mean that's absolutely the case that that it matters it matters who captures the narrative but i mean i didn't read the particular piece and the organ you refer to um but uh it's i mean this is this is another one i mean it's no secret what happened on the russian front in the world in the second world war now it's true that the further away from the war we've gone the more understanding there is among historians of the unbelievable sacrifice that was that occurred on the russian side by the way one of the reasons for that was that until um 1990 uh western historians didn't have access to the archives to find out the full details including the full knowledge of the deaths that were occurring at the russian front in that war but you know here's an example of why history is interesting i read a lot of russian literature in a lot of russian history i'm fascinated by the country and like a lot of people regard the russian novel as being essentially all you need almost all you need in terms of novels um here's the reason why one example of why history is so damn interesting you can you simultaneously have to accept the fact that one of the reasons why stalin is still consistently voted the greatest russian of all time is essentially based on the fact that the russian people still attribute to him the victory over nazi germany in world war ii and each time there is a poll of great russians to the dismay of many of us we see comrade stalin coming top again and we and if you ask how is it it always comes after the focus is on this simultaneously comrade stalin killed more people than almost any other dictator in history their chairman mao you could you could say has excelled him in mistakes how is it possible that russians are simultaneously able to keep in their heads the fact that stalin was the biggest mass murderer of russians and also the greatest russian of all time because it's complicated because it's complicated i once went to stalin's birthplace in i was in georgia some years ago you see in the aftermath of the conflict in south ossetia and uh took a new court to go to gauri to stalin's birthplace there's a museum there which they were trying at the time to change from a museum to stalin to a museum of stalinism and it was a fascinating thing for any historian to observe what this meant and at the end of the tour i said to the woman the georgian woman had been showing me around and doing the tour she'd clearly done for decades i said um but what do you think of stalin she said it isn't for me to judge i said no you must have a view and stalin of course from georgia killed more georgians by portion of population than any other area of russia so there's a lot of complexity in stalin and georgia and i was pushing this one but but no but what do you think of him and she said she said something so extraordinary she said i i think she said it to others as well she said she said he was like a hurricane it just happened that's an extraordinary thing uh and history is like that you have to live with it you judge it and you have favorites in it and favorite interpretations of it and but it's also damn complicated and what i worry about is that people are taught this simplistic versions and people say things like you know i never learned about this therefore someone else is at fault maybe you should do your own damn learning maybe you should educate yourself to use one of the voguish things the time people say in school i was never taught about x and therefore we'll learn something for yourself then read a book yourself you know i mean that's one of the other things this idea that you are educated from the age of you know five until 18 or 21 and then you're then you're set for life no education is something you you go on doing throughout your life so you say of course nobody's a nobody reasonable is opposed to us knowing as much as we can including contrary narratives and counter narratives and new histories and much more but it has to be seen in a proper light and in a benevolent light and in a light that is intended to bring understanding not to so division in order to gain a short-term political point it's interesting in in relation to stalin as well i'm sure if we were to go over to parliament square now we'd probably be able to find someone wearing a hammer and sickle in some way yes you wouldn't find anyone with a swastika on would you no no we because we're totally united in our in our belief and recognition of the horror of nazi germany contrary again to the certain type of activists at the moment there's no support for nazi germany in 2020 no open support i was at a far right march there in the summer was there any there there was a few nazi salutes going around yeah but it wasn't and and and any of those people do you think are remotely mainstream no no no it's this is the difference i think is you'll find them yeah they can turn over some rocks okay you can turn over some rocks and you can find some people who will do some of that tiny numbers i would suggest there's a few you know there's a few thousand of them there versus the you know to strike a different protest the black lives matter march far far better attended it's far more mainstream to bring us back to what we're talking about at the beginning yeah their ideas are far more popular than you you can tell that when you go to a march like that they are fringe they are minority you'll find nobody in the conservative party who who says you know well hitler might have gone a bit far but you know goring was good you will find nobody nobody in public life in britain to take century you'll find nobody who says um uh i wrote it somewhere the other day that you'll find nobody who says look the thing was it's true that post 1934 hitler went wrong but rome if only he hadn't been executed assassinated by hitler i i follow his now you do find you do find plenty of people still who are willing to say stalin led the communists in a bad direction maybe or he went a bit too far but trotsky that would have all been different i was at trot as it sounds like i've been doing a tour of communist bastards homes kind of um i was in mexico the other month just before lockdown and uh happened to i took the time to go to trotsky's villa you'll find plenty of people still i mean that's basically a museum in favor of trotsky um you'll find plenty of people in britain you'll find plenty of people in the labour party still who think that trotsky you know was a good egg you can go on and on with that why john peterson i talked about this a couple of years ago a discussion basically because we almost learned one of the two lessons of 20th century we almost learned very nearly learned party examples like you just gave me we very nearly learned the lesson of the appallingness of fascism it's pretty well learned and we didn't really learn where the left goes too far where it goes wrong and we should have done by now and i think it's reprehensible lazy and in many cases malevolent that that lesson hasn't been absorbed i think there's um that incredibly extreme view is fringe for me um which one the uh the far right right nazism i think that you know you're talking it's a very small number of people there but not as large but i feel like when you slide the sort of the strength of the sentiment away from you know um outright racial superiority and you perhaps get more towards xenophobia i feel like that's quite a prevalent emotion in this country xenophobia yes and i feel like it's been i think it's been the four in the last month really when we've been looking at what's been happening in the english channel and the migrant crossings there you know in terms of the scale of the great great movements of people around this continent it's not a lot and even when you're talking the scale of you know how many asylum claims we process compared to our european neighbours we don't do a lot but this this there's some symbolism isn't there of 20 guys in a dinghy heading towards the white cliffs of dover and it just touches on something in us i'm not sure it does okay go on um there is no there's public disquiet about these crossings i think what 4 000 people so far this year which as you say is quite small um on the other hand you either have borders or you don't if you don't have borders you don't have a country so it's not it's not a small thing to be concerned about but i see no uh uh public protest i see no um uh i don't see people coming out on the streets i don't see anyone smashing anything i don't see anything being pulled down what you describe is concerned pieces in some of the papers some concern on talk radio stations and callers and and yes i mean the polls show the public are worried about it but it's not it's not some galvanizing issue and by the way just one other thing which is of course as you know um i've written about this a lot in recent years particularly my book estranged death of europe and the reason why the numbers are what they are and that they're not equal to our neighbors is a very straightforward reason which is we're the furthest country away from where people are coming in you know the reason why we process fewer asylum applications is because we are literally the last place you can get to for geographical reasons it isn't the british people are just bastards who want to keep migrants away and stop people claiming asylum there's a reason why greece and italy and the other frontline countries have more people applying in season and under that is rocket science um it was extraordinary how nigel farage managed to get the whole british media dancing to his tune but on this subject he went there filmed the boats and the next day you know three different news crews are off doing the same thing well i was almost showing them up at their own game uh yes i mean i well that's one possibility my own suspicion is is that the media has well no my knowledge is the media has certain things it's willing to report and some things it isn't and sometimes that's simply because it doesn't see a particular story or recognize it um every story that catches on somebody has to bring to its attention uh i mean there's all sorts of scandals happening all the time around the country you must get this i get my my post bag my virtual post bag you've always got people who have very often very um you know sincere problems they'd like to bring to the forefront and have in the news and and it doesn't get there there's a limited amount people can write about it always requires something to happen to cause something to become newsworthy and uh people weren't focusing through most of kovid on this particular issue and yeah farage should be given credit or blame whichever way you look at it for bringing that issue up by the way i mean you know all of the questions i raised in my book on this in the strange deaths of europe remain unaddressed and i think it's a shame and i don't say that for personal reasons i say it for societal reasons i think it's a deep shame that we've still not as a society had the deeper debate and thinking we should have on this question because here's the way i put it in a nutshell um would we like to be a country where people who have just had the worst imaginable luck in life could find refuge and shelter yes and actually all the opinion polls including in recent weeks show that can we take them all in no so what do we do nobody knows because nobody's interested in having the discussion i've been trying to encourage people to have are you totally happy with the idea that we have a parallel asylum system in which young fit men who can fight their way to the front are disproportionately likely to get asylum are you happy with that probably not what's your solution nobody's thought about it so we don't have one no none of this is a new problem everything i'm describing here is a moral discussion and and a practical discussion that has been waiting there to be had for decades you know i have i have a favorite example of it actually the courts have ruled in a way that slightly solves this now in the uk but many countries in the world it's not great to be gay a number of countries it's still not just illegal but you can get the death penalty assuming that the same percentage of the population in those countries are gay as here something around two to three percent of the populations of each of the countries where it is still possible that to be killed for being gay should be given asylum in the uk now will that happen of course not of course not so this is a we have this this balance and everybody who wants to sound nice in public life will say well of course anybody anybody who's facing repression anywhere should come here maybe this is one of the reasons why you have these people who think that our our societies are uniquely unpleasant and bigoted and so on because they have this totally false idea of what the rest of the world is like and what our capability to solve the problems of the west rest of the world actually are it's something like that i'm uh this conversation is fascinating douglas i'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable sat on this uh this wooden pew so we'll hurry things along um the last thing i wanted to talk to you about is the american election my question to you is by donald trump first which one would you vote for and then who do you think is gonna win i'm gonna duck i'm actually always a bit cautious about any declaration of voting intent yeah of course um i don't think it's straightforward i certainly don't think it's as straightforward as a lot of my friends do um i have to say here's a warning i think it's perfectly possible this is the first election in the history of the public which is not settled in 2000 you remember the hanging chads in florida problem which ended in the bush gore election highly contested for uh the fact that in the end it was it was resolved and resolved in the favor of george w bush was a reason that many people in uh his first term in office kept insisting he was not a legitimate president um which they were wrong on but it was my point is is that when you have a contest over there here's one possibility it's possible in the election in november there will be contested ballots in numerous states and for different reasons that there will be allegations of voter fraud uh postal mail fraud they're already being made you know they're coming right so both sides have been doing it by the way uh they said before the last election donald trump i thought um very wrongly said before the last election that uh he would see if he would accept the result i thought that was a terrible low uh i think that uh canned that until then had had not said that as far as i know uh had always said of course they would accept the result of the election as it was the person who didn't accept the result of the election was hillary clinton uh who has spent the last four years pretending that donald trump only got into office because of the russians which is absolute bs and i say that in and regret that in part because i think that she and the democratic party have missed the opportunity to course correct by telling themselves a lie about how donald trump got into office and they should have contended with the serious problems from their term in terms in office that led to that and that's the risk right they're still asleep at the wheel they're still so they've spent four years telling themselves a lie however this election uh donald trump's speech at the republican convention on monday night uh he kept saying to his audience be prepared for them to steal it this worries me very very much but then the democrats are playing the same game not quite as verbosely it has to be said at quite such a high level but they are playing the same game so we do see a scenario where neither side will concede and that is a nightmare that is a nightmare um both sides will come to the absolute nadir of this era we have lived in this era for a few years where one problem that i think people have not contended with enough is not just that everyone's got their own versions of history now but that everyone is got their own versions of facts and one other to add to that is when something happens we don't agree that it's happened and that's that's the one that's the one that's the worst that a video even a video can come out i've written about in the past recent years in germany and indian america i preferred earlier to the ferguson shooting things happen and people disagree on what even a video of the thing she said this is this is very very dangerous terrain that we've been in for a long time but if the american election was not conceded by either side then we'd be in this even worse terrain where you where you didn't accept a vote which you didn't win now some of us would say that the remain side in the uk has been in that position for some years many people say as i just did that democratic party was in that position post 2016 but for that to be across the board something that happened that's that's the basis for civil war um i'm very worried about that um but but just the other point to make on that is iris even if one side because whoever wins that needs to be a clear victory in november whoever wins i'm much less concerned about who wins than the fact that whoever wins it has to be a clear victory um but whoever wins what we've been discussing today doesn't go away because you now have a significant portion the figures vary a significant portion of americans who don't believe in the founding ideals of america um certainly 70 of self-described liberals recently said that they would like the constitution to be rewritten and if i think all of all of the i don't like to be alarmist but all of the conditions are in place in america for effectively civil war because there is a total divide over what the country is half of the country thinks let's say half it's not half and half but a significant portion of the country thinks that america basically has nothing going for it it would have been better if columbus had never sailed out it would be better if the founding fathers had never been born the whole thing's been a disaster and another portion of the country believe i think rightly that america has had its problems but the broadly speaking it's been a force for good in the world but these are becoming irreconcilable positions and that's a problem because there's a problem for anyone who loves america it's a problem for americans themselves the bigger problem to stand back from that is if you thought the american wild order wasn't to your taste you'll love the chinese one you'll love it you'll love it when you bring your human rights complaints to the chinese communist party see how they treat the people of hong kong you know and and and these are muslims or the weak and muslims and you know this is this is this is what i say about the worry about the ignorance that is going on at the moment everybody has complaints about the american era but in the views of many of us who've traveled widely and looked around quite a lot it's a damn site better than anything else that's on offer and the era that went from british dominance in parts of the world to american dominance in the same reasons regions was a pretty peaceful handover pretty much the most peaceful handover in history i don't see an era of american decline and the decline of american power as being a peaceful one if it happens and i hope it doesn't it will see the rise of other forces which those people who thought america was a bad deal will rue when they come across it but it's not like they haven't been given a warning it's just they've been given warnings they've deliberately ignored to pursue some weird and basically vitriolic political propaganda of their own watching um watching events happen and then disputing whether they happened or not i mean it's pure orwell which i don't like saying really i find it's cliche it's sadly it's almost cliche to describe something as orwellian but there's a reason for that and it's because his writing was timeless and dare i say it perfect other good political writing segway douglas murray's new book the madness of crowds with new material um douglas thank you very much for taking any time to speak to us it's a huge pleasure i appreciate it thank you you

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 890,021

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, douglas murray, the madness of crowds, douglas murray interview, douglas murray strange death of europe, china, coronavirus, wuhan, donald trump, donald trump who, donald trump china, covid-19, douglas murray identity politics, douglas murray 2020, douglas murray jordan peterson, social justice, sjw, 2020 interview, black lives matter, george floyd, jacob blake, kenosha, minneapolis, boris johnson, joe biden

Id: Nmbd60apsfQ

Length: 69min 43sec (4183 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020