Douglas Murray on the death of Europe & identity - BQ #11

imagine if the gay rights movement had said we're here we're queer and there's no such thing as penises or vaginas you said what you you're saying what to get make america great again no no no hello this is stephen edgington for the sun and today i'm interviewing douglas murray douglas murray is one of the leading thinkers of our times he is an author and a journalist author of the madness of crowds and the strange death of europe we're going to be talking all about those two books and how the world has changed since they were published douglas murray thank you very much for joining us so since your book the strange death of europe was published in 2017 we've seen brexit obviously we've had the voting breaks in 2016 but now we finally left the european union and it looked for a time that that wasn't going to happen so how's your view of the strange effort europe any of the kind of themes in that change since we've left the european union well no because the book had nothing to do with brexit really it had very little to do with britain's membership or non-membership of the eu i say at one point in the strange death of europe that all of the problems that i see and saw europe going through britain was going through and able to go through whether we were in the eu or out of it what i was describing in the strange death of europe which came out i think three years ago now was a malaise that lies far deeper than brexit i mean um the issues that i raise issues to do with immigration and integration for instance predated british membership of the eu and would would post-date it as well it's it's about the fact that these choices are in your hands and you can make good ones or bad ones now and that that obviously makes some difference but the none of the trajectories i described in that book have changed the effect of anything in news in recent days from the greek turkish border has showed it's um possibly even starting to ramp up again as you say are we seeing the cycle repeat itself because we've seen in 2015 huge levels of of migration and then the kind of dip and now is it is it coming back is it going to be a forever cycle and this endless and this endless immigration well uh the point is it will be until we address the issues i tried to get people to think about in that book which i'm very glad did did provoke a lot of thinking and discussion not least among the public but also who who the reception among whom was just terrific but also among members of the political class across the continent um the book came out i think has now come out in every european language and everywhere i go i speak to politicians in the relevant countries and i'm always very um moved as well as impressed by the fact that at least there is engagement with what i've been saying uh some sometimes as a writer you wonder if you're being read you know so it's a it's a pleasure when you discover you are um but what i have found is the beginnings of an attempt to engage with the deeper questions i'm trying to urge people to consider and i don't yet see a widespread enough desire to do that the cycle you refer to the potential of endlessly going around the same thing only occurs because we're not willing to engage at the deeper level and i would say that that level includes very very basic questions the most basic of which is can europe be a refugee camp effectively for the entire world the answer to that surely has to be no but for the time being our politicians have to pretend that the answer is sort of yes if need be and the bigger questions just haven't gone away you know a statistic i've been fond of citing in the last year has been this one from a poll that showed that i think one third of people in sub-saharan africa want to move and as i said when i cited this statistic in doha about a year ago they don't want to go to the middle east and there's not much chance of them moving in large numbers to america there is a very significant likelihood they will move in large numbers and want to move in large numbers to europe and i should stress by the way that i mean i don't blame any person for that of course they would of course people want to make the best for themselves and for their families and nobody can blame any individual migrant for that we would do the same in their position it's just that things have fallen out like this and it happens that europe is what it is and sub-saharan africa is what it is what do you do about that well that's probably a set of questions too big for anyone to engage in at the moment which is probably why i can't get enough people to address the questions we need to be addressing in order to have any chance of stepping out of this cycle you've painted a rather bleak picture there of the future and of our current situation obviously your book was all about integration and the problems with that and various issues as you say to do with mass migration into europe in a very long period of time but i want to get back to brexit because i don't think that i don't think that one can be so sweeping and take it to one side and say it has no relevance or has no effect on that issue that you were talking about because if you're seeing millions of people in britain who are seriously seriously angry with the current situation and a huge part of that anger comes from the causes and the problems that you raise in your book surely that and you know for example that there's some some material things come out of it like a points-based immigration system no more mass migration no more open borders with the european union surely those things and the fact that people are angry and are recognizing these problems and maybe they're being listened to so surely those things mean that brexit can only be a good thing and maybe a turning point well the point it could be or and it couldn't be i mean to my mind the the great argument for brexit was simply we would like the keys to our own house back thank you now those keys are in the process of being returned finally but it doesn't mean that britain will there after only be governed by sensible key owners or reasonable and responsible caretakers don't forget that the migration that made people in this country really start to worry began under a landslide elected labor government after 1997. that wasn't the eu that did that to us that was us that did that to us so we shouldn't we shouldn't think that i i strongly urge people against thinking that brexit having been voted for and now hopefully have happened or it has happened but hopefully also going in a good direction i strongly urge people not to think that therefore they don't need they sort of need they can take their eye off these concerns i mean the polling shows as you know that um immigration as a source of concern among general public in britain has gone down quite significantly in the last several years and my interpretation of that is because and i feel a certain amount of this myself that well brexit did something must have done something and so it's sort of like a release of air from a radiator but as i say that still means you can make all the same mistakes if you're unwilling to address the deeper underlying questions and i'm quite infused by what has already come out on this but but we still do sorry to hark on about this but we still do have this situation where it is exceptionally hard for public figures to sustain in public truths that the general public know and that's the problem that's a problem let me do it in a redux um a politician from some unnamed party says what about the poor and the children what does the restrictionist politician say in the face of that now they do have answers but who's got a stronger hand at the moment in that argument who's got a stronger hand it's still the argument for anti-restriction and by the way there's a very interesting if i say so myself i think point to be made about this actually a point i've lifted from my friend eric weinstein um there is still a linkage in the political debate the public debate between restrictionism on immigration and xenophobia and this is a very interesting and difficult fact and at this stage by the way it's pretty pathetic that that linkage still remains it should be the case by now that people can recognize you may be a restrictionist on immigration and even a xenophile i would put myself in that category you know it's not like i it's not like i only want to speak to english people and eat english food and read only english literature and listen only to english music etc etc i mean come on come on who really thinks that well a lot of people who want to win the argument on immigration like to pretend that that's the case i'm not a xenophobe i'm deeply interested in the world's cultures i spend most of my life traveling around all over the globe to find out about them and more but i believe that it's impossible to have a system of immigration in my own country that effectively means that the world can come here if it's in need and i think that it's an example of the terrible failure of our political discussion our media discussion and much more that we are still able to have this point of totally fatuous linkage i suppose the the problem that you have there is that we live in a democracy and people sometimes make the wrong choices and you know those choices might conflict with what you believe and but finally brexit is perhaps giving us that chance to be as you say the holder of those keys yeah and we can get it wrong absolutely that can only be a good thing i know nothing i've said today or at any other point i think would suggest that because this country has the opportunity to vote in terrible people that means we should be run by jean-claude juncker i might i trust you haven't come if you have come away with that impression then i'm sorry i'll find a way to disabuse you of it later are we moving in the right direction on the top on the topic of immigration at all well i mean as you say there is this interesting thing that when the public get an opportunity to sort of when there are straightforward moments when like the 2016 referendum uh there does seem to be a an ability to sort of finally and we say kick the political class where it hurts because of immigration and other issues they just didn't listen to us on um but i mean everywhere in europe i see i see the same trends and i see the same lack of adaptability i mean you you get someone for instance that take the example of meteorologini in italy the former uh interior minister now out of office but um salvini in office stopped the boats from landing which by the way if the eu is not going to do that if frontex isn't going to do that then i think a unilateral move by the italian government is totally permissible well mr salvini currently has the threat of prosecutions hanging over him and the possibility of going to prison for i think 15 to 25 years over that so it's still the case as i say that politicians who do what must be regarded as the right thing that is upholding the rule of law not allowing the borders to be eroded there must be something wrong if a politician who does that who's popular and is voted into office risks going to jail must be and we'll see what happens on the greek border uh this is developing all the time i see someone's just been shot by a greek border guard and that's the sort of thing that can lead to almost anything happening it can lead to a total loss of confidence by all the politicians it can lead to a lot of confidence by the police it can lead to anything can you i know you've painted a really bleak picture again which is fine but what i find really interesting is that yeah and you i'm sure you will do it more in this interview what i find really interesting is that you see governments all over the world all over europe that will probably tend towards more your side of the argument than the complete opposite of this sort of woke left identity politics kind of the argument you've got donald trump in america you've got boris here you've got salvini and various other people governments in europe who again are saying similar things to you so why are we in such a bleak situation when many many of the governments are basically on your side um well as i say i mean it's not an entirely bleak situation what i'm trying to bring across is the fact that for as long as the deep substructure arguments are not addressed you remain incredibly vulnerable you can put it another way this is by the way this is partly the fault of the way in which we absorb news now um [Music] if a terror let's say that that the greek border tomorrow uh a greek policeman shoots a child okay you and i know that any politician who is a restrictionist on immigration is going to be basically personally blamed for for the sort of thing that has led to that so the most powerful people in the world may have a restrictionist view and that view will be vulnerable to the actions of a single greek policeman at any moment always versus when for instance the manchester arena bombing occurred in 2017 who which politicians were held that accountable for allowing a libyan whose parents were involved with an al-qaeda-affiliated islamist group who got to sign him in britain it appears because they had fallen out with gaddafi because they were two islamists for gaddafi but they found asylum in the uk tell me which british politician ever ever had to answer for that give me one name of a politician in the uk who even was under some tough questioning who even the press who even the press said hold this minister responsible this happened on their watch did it happen no no what we were told was to sing oasis songs and to forget about it so i i come back to this point if that's the field of the argument still it doesn't matter if you had the white house it doesn't matter if you had number 10 downing street it wouldn't especially matter even if you had the european commission in brussels if you're enjoying this interview we do them every week it's a series called burning questions don't forget to subscribe below to the sun's youtube channel so you can catch every single interview it's absolutely fascinating the kind of um the distance between having political power and let's say having social power over the whole of um our societies yes can you talk about some of the institutions there and you mentioned the press that's perhaps one of them that leads to this um leads to this picture that you're painting where you can't say certain things about immigration you can't blame those ministers who may be responsible for the things that you were talking about you can't have these proper arguments because we have got to a point where cancel culture people are ousted there are mob hunts witch hunts you know mobs of crowds come after you talk about that in your next book which we're going to talk about in a minute but can you talk about some of the cultural institutions which you might think is causing these problems well it's almost too broad a question to answer um my own view is that and i explained the strange death of europe this is it isn't an accident or a plot it's a result of history having happened and being interpreted the way in which it has and that's beyond any one government or individual to turn around you know i'm like it's always hardest to argue against something that has a point okay you're really lucky when you've got an opponent who doesn't have any justification for their views and i've had a few of them um the opponent you don't want is one that's not under nothing and the people who say have said in recent years we can't we shouldn't talk about immigration are not entirely on to nothing okay because it is true that publics well let me put it this way it's true that some people in the public can turn nasty yeah and you wouldn't want to be the person the politician or anyone else who had even given a nod and a wink to that happening you know like there are people out there who actually hate i know people because of the color of their skin for instance i think those people are reprehensible and pitiful but there are people like that out there and you don't want to have a discussion on immigration that gives the nod and the wink to somebody like that to think that they're superior to somebody because of their skin pigmentation or their parentage or something so that's why it's harder than it should have been is because particularly in europe and let's face it particularly in continental europe it's not like i spend a certain amount of time in germany i'm very interested in the german political situation it's understandable that the german political elite is worried about the rise of the right and what it sees as far-right parties it's not like they're on to nothing in fearing that now i think they interpret it wrongly i think they should try to work out what and i've written this before i wrote it in the strange death of europe i think they should try to work out what is actually reprehensible far-right neo-nazi-like ideology and what is totally should be totally legitimate mainstream conservative and center-right right-wing thought and in germany those two are being let's say inaccurately um untied from each other for all sorts of reasons but it's not an it's not an impossible to understand fact that the german political class might be worried about this you know i mean if you if you organize an anti-immigration anti-mass immigration protest in munich or dresden you can't be sure who you're going to attract and you can't be sure that you're going to want the support of some of the people you're going to attract so this is this is one of the things i've shifted my mind on a bit in recent years is i used to say like why don't they allow this i think i can see why i've spoken to enough politicians across the continent and seen enough of history myself to know why i just think that they are doing it in a way which is actually going to make it worse because they have repeatedly toxified made toxic some opinion that should be regarded as totally mainstream i think there's a similarity there between your argument on in the strange death of europe and your argument in the madness of crowds because both opponents of you in those two uh arguments may have something that is true in what they're saying and especially let's talk about the man as a crowd especially those kind of identity politics woke types as it were they i mean if black lives matter they have legitimate grievances about black people getting killed by cops that's just one example and then there's a whole series of these examples where you know as i'm sure you would agree they come from complete grains of truth and then your arguments are they may extrapolate that and and have the wrong solutions i want to quote you a uh a guardian review of your uh book which called uh the madness crowds a right-wing diatribe i don't know if you've read this this review but i want your response to it it says scratch beneath the surface though and his account of recent history is clear authorised by left-wing academics minority groups have been concocting conflict and hatred out of thin air polluting an otherwise harmonious society for their own gratification and i think that also goes down to what you've just mentioned there about the kind of history of where these views come from it's not just something that's recent phenomena it's not just something that affects one institution like the bbc for example or another but it has this whole kind of social history and it's all built up to the situation now can you respond to that is that an accurate accurate view of where you think these problems have come from that was the guardian that was the guardian surprisingly lucid writing for the guardian um well by the way there's a um i should mention that there's a site there's a difference between by the way among other things and obviously the madness of crowds is about all the identity politics madness that's going on at the moment but um there's a tonal difference that quite a lot of readers have noticed between these books the strange death of europe is in many ways a very bleak book um because i looked at the facts in the face and i found them bleak um the madness of crowds is if i say to myself quite a funny book i did the audio book myself and i did an awful lot of laughing um not actually i should stress as i did to the sound engineers and not because of the any of my jokes particularly but because of the craziness of the things that i'm running the absurdities yeah and um there's even a difference when i talk about it i'm conscious even now that um that i'm not only amused but much more positive about the targets i'm talking about in the madness of crowds and that's because i think this is eminently winnable when the facts are bleak it makes me quite bleak when when an argument is eminently winnable i cheer up because i see i see the possibility of imminent victory i i don't think that the the madnesses that i write about in matters of crowds and madness has been going on around sexual identity and uh um you know sexual sexuality the madness has gone around about the relations between the sexes between men and women the madness about race in recent years and especially the madness about trans i i don't think these i don't think my opponents are going to win i don't think they're going to persuade enough people that you know physical physical um and anatomical facts are of no relevance i don't think they're going to manage it i sort of pity them for trying i sort of admire them in a way for trying it's extraordinary to watch people argue in face of the facts but um but uh the uh to go back to the the thing you cited yeah i think that what what i what i lay out is the fact that these are the madnesses i described the matters of crowd are sort of invented yes i mean they're not very natural for phenomena you you need to be educated into stupidity of this kind nobody of their own volition would say that you know sex is not sex but gender and gender is a social construct like you you have to have taken out loans or your parents have to have remortgaged the house in order for you to go away and call it to college and become that stupid you know you have to be taught that i'd be surprised if anyone heard it down the pub you know or in their social life from anyone who hasn't had the misfortune of being fed gender queer studies theory and some you know impossibly bad college somewhere in uk or america um so i think people are taught this stuff and there's all sorts of reasons for that um and i think the consequence is that it's pulling us apart i think it's i think that you know one of the ways i i'm trying in the discussions around this i'm doing a lot of public discussions about this as you know um including a tour of the uk in the next couple of months with comedian andrew doyle um and one of the ways i'm trying to encourage myself and others to think about this is say what do we agree on now i reckon that one of the things we agree on in this society pretty much is certainly my own view nobody should ever be held back from achieving anything they can achieve if they have the right competencies because of some trait that they have no say in so no young woman should be prevented from doing any job she is competent at doing or performing any tasks she is confident performing because she happens to be a woman and the same if it's worth saying probably is with a man um nobody should be prevented from or in any way held back from what they can do because they happen to be gay or they happen to be black or anything like that it's it's it's an absurdity as well as a sort of moral offense among much else but there is a massive difference of opinion going on about first of all the extent to which that remains an issue in our societies some people see it as some remaining issue in certain places i'd be among them and some people see it as being a demonstration of a system that is so oppressive patriarchal racist and much more that you have to tilt over the whole damn thing and start again i'm not with them and i think we also have this is a long answer to your question but i think we also have the problem of of of the media what age that we are in the i don't mean the media i mean the way in which we absorb information which means that a bad thing happening in one country can be portrayed as if it is symptomatic not just of that country but of all developed countries so you know the uh vaguely literate review you just quoted to me my si you say it cites black lives matter now you see black lives matter is a response to a very specific situation in america there's a dispute to be had about cases like this in america and there are people who claim that when one police officer does something wrong in america it is a demonstration of the innate remaining racism in america okay that's a specific argument in america does it mean that we live in countries like not just america but britain and all other democracies in an incredibly racist system and so on i just it's one of the ones that there may be something in it but not that much and if you ask and sure how how do you have the confidence to say that i'd give two answers just for starters the first people come here people come here they want to come to america from all over the world they want to come to britain from all over the world if we were unusually or excessively racist countries that simply would not be the case you did not see large numbers of people trying to break into nazi germany in the 1930s there's a reason likewise there is a reason why the world wants to come to britain and america so i refuse to hear the argument i refuse to believe or be cajoled into the argument that is being made by some of the people trying to whip up race hatred in our own era in their own particular way and the second example i would give is you know maybe there aren't quotient per capita satisfactory representations at every board level in every company in britain or america of sexual minorities women and racial minorities and trans people but you know um countries like britain and america are very unlike countries like say china and india in all sorts of ways and let me give you one example of why you can and people do from every imaginable background get to the absolute top of british society it's something of which i'm very proud i think most british people are very proud that's not the case in china it's not the case in india look at the indian or chinese governments do you see them as you know rather remarkably multicultural or female dominated or anything else no i'm not saying we can't do things better but the idea that there's nowhere worse is such a dishonest thing to claim that i do judge the people who make those claims and i wonder whether they're talking about my society as critics wishing to improve it or as enemies wishing to destroy it you know i find really hard to argue against when they make their arguments and i'll give you two examples of this one i was at an event a book it was a book launch um about uh what was it even about the about a world war ii book and there's this woman there i met she was australian she came up to me this was in london and she said well after got after chatting for a while she said um i'm australian and i've been here for a few years and i feel that british people don't want to be friends with me and i said well why do you why did you say that why do you say that she said well because i'm australian and i think the british people don't want to accept me because i'm australian i think that they are being in their own way racist towards me and she said i've spoken to many australian people like who say similar things i said wow i would never personally do that to an australian i would never personally sure what an odd situation for you to be in and for me it was like wow how can that be the case um and that's the hardest thing because you can come to someone and they say well my experiences show well actually i've grown up and i've had people hold racist abuse of me i've had all these terrible experiences and it's like well is our society racist that's that's one thing two they say it's invisible they say you're racist but you don't even know it and then you go am i racist is the decisions that i'm making every single day racist somehow or is it not and and they say this this permeates throughout the whole of society you you don't even know if you're being racist because you know you come up you come from white privilege you come from a white background so those two things people having their own experiences which are perfectly legitimate i'm sure very much are true in their own cases and also they say well these things are invisible so how could you possibly say that they don't exist um several things firstly let's take your australian woman because she's useful because i assume that we can keep race out of it or at least keep skin pigmentation out of it okay there might be lots of reasons why she's found that to be the case i i love australia incidentally and i have a lot of australian friends who i may be about to lose but let me give you a couple of examples of what else might be going on it may be that for instance she's a bit loud and forward for people here it's possible i'm not saying it's the case with everyone but it's possible it's possible she's that some british people still don't find let's say a particular type of australian entirely to their taste i i it's impossible to do this without making wild generalizations let's let's let's say for instance she i mean i know a lot of good aussies including a good lot of good aussie drinkers let's say she's a good aussie drinker she was right okay good so i'm not on to nothing who when she gets drunk gets drunk in a particular way and it's not completely to the taste of british drinking styles okay maybe that's why now is that racism no it's a judgment of a kind is it a nice judgment not for her no um i can imagine scenarios i i i will refrain from being too graphic about it but i can imagine a scenario where uh i'm uh in australia and i find it slightly hard to make australian friends for i don't think i would particularly i can imagine this scenario some people might think a bit of a stuck-up brit he's not that you know he's not very forthcoming he doesn't tell me much about his life when we have conversations after a friendship of five minutes for instance um these things are hard and i think it's not correct to interpret that as a racism thing there are several things that are going on here and this gets to the second point you make um i think our understanding of this is rather subtly but interestingly off um it's possible it's quite likely we have prejudices that we don't want to face up to and that we have things going on in our heads that are that we're not proud of um and something like racism exists in every society on earth i mean is there racism across africa you bet look at the riots in south africa a few years ago not caused by white people hating black people but by black south africans turning on black africans from a neighboring country who they didn't like didn't think should be there this isn't a noble instinct this is one of the most savage and base instincts of our species um believing that only we suffer from it and that it's that it's sort of a terminal condition of the white western european particularly male is an unfair characterization of it i regard racism as among among much else as being an exceptionally ugly human instinct but it's it's like other ugly human instincts could you eradicate it entirely and completely probably not has anyone done a better job of trying that than us probably not so i remain i would go back to this point i remain suspicious of people who wish to portray the countries that are visibly and provably struggling with that instinct and trying to at least minimizing it and minimizing it pretty damn well i remain suspicious of the people who portray those societies in an especially racist light you know go to any number of other countries around the world as i have been i've traveled exceptionally widely on every continent in my life go to any other place and report back to me about racism there and then tell me the disaster's got a problem when it's provably better than anywhere else here's another area where i think they have a pretty strong argument and you know hopefully you're going to dispel my the other one wasn't that strong well i mean it's it's kind of an emotional argument they make the racism one which i think is in itself it appeals to your kind of emotive oh by the way i should have said sorry yeah the appeal to self yeah of course we've got to be very suspicious of that when people say i'm correct and you're wrong although you don't know how you're they're asking you to take this on trust which i wouldn't do i think it creates a self-doubt in your you know because you didn't have that experience and it's like well you know that's why i think it's strong it may not be strong materialistically but it's strong emotively and that and again i want to go into another emotive argument that i find quite strong you probably don't but please clear my doubts um i am a i have a childish love of history i mean it's something that a big party well i mean a romantic love of history is probably a better way to work rather than a rash sort of it's rather irrational i would say anyway um so therefore i think that um this argument about the judgment of history and the eyes of history looking at the people looking at our conversations now in the future is interesting because and you talk about this in your book a little bit you talk about the civil rights movements of the 1960s for example were fantastic movements which we can all agree now looking back on them those arguing for civil rights were the right people they were in the right of history and those people the segregationists the homophobes and the people in power at that time were completely wrong and you know absolutely were wrong now we come to today and i know that you'll have you'll have some fantastic arguments against this but it's difficult to know because they make this argument for example with trans rights that you sir are simply a segregationist from the 1960s but equivalent to today you are the same people who said that gay people shouldn't have those rights you are the same people who were who we can look back on and now and say you are completely wrong how do we draw the line to say well actually this movement has gone too far how do we know when that movement has gone too far without the benefit of hindsight i'd suggest that you have at least two good things on your side that you should use as much as possible first is your eyes and the second is your reason very suspicious of people who pretend that they have an exclusive tap-in to the continuum of history that they uniquely have witnessed not just each step of the past but each step of the future there's a deep underlying fallacy at work there which is worth pointing out first which is possibly among other things the education you've had the misfortune of imbibing yourself i i don't blame you individually i think almost everybody in britain and indeed in most of the western world has imbibed this but this is the narrative of history as a narrative of emancipation so that the story of our species is one of just getting freer and freer and that when we were in caves trans people just had the misfortune of not having access to clinics and and the gay cavemen just didn't have anywhere to hang out and the women cave women who wanted to hunt just weren't allowed they were held back from the hunting and the women who wanted to go and gather fire were not allowed and and happily over a certain period of time all these wrongs have been gradually righted and everyone has become freer and freer until we are where we are now and now there may be just a few more things to free up and then we are in nirvana okay that's the interpretation of history that has been taught for a generation in britain and in other countries and i think it's a pathetic fallacy i think it's an unbelievable reduction of history and a deep misinterpretation of what history is um there are people who for instance still portray the 20th century as a history of emancipation we had the suffragettes we had the gay rights movement we had uh the civil rights movement and these are the bits of history that we need to learn from and copy and yes we also saw two world wars that did more than anything in human history to nearly wipe us out where do we fit that into that story you know how the hell do you make that work they don't that's a different story somehow because the real story we want to concentrate on is the history of emancipation by the way a history in which in particular in america people are taught that the main reason that we fought world war ii was to stop the nazis persecuting the jews flat out wrong flat out wrong but that's the sort of thing you need to do you need to manipulate history in order to fit into the interpretation of history that you've already put over it so the first thing is that the second is i said to you you should use your eyes and use your reason let's just let's take the gay one first let's do the gay versus trans like there were some there is some pathetic conservative party gay group who are affiliated with the conservative party who knows about these people who cares but there's some no official gaze on twitter or something yeah they may even have a real existence uh the official gaze of the conservative party wrote the other week when i wrote something critical about some of the oh about this sinister children trans movement mermaids uh this gay official legacy conservative thing said um that i was just saying about trans what people have said about the gays and this is an example of people incapable of using their heads and i'll tell you one reason why to begin with the gay rights movement and the gay liberation movement was asking one thing in particular of the rest of society it was saying we exist we always have existed and we're just asking you to allow us to get on with our lives and to pursue life and indeed love in the way we have to do it and you don't need to change anything you don't need to change anything you just need to allow us to be what we are and the moral force of that argument in the end was was accepted now i don't deny the trans movement i write about this in matters of crowds the trans movement has learned quite a lot he's trying to learn quite a lot from the gay rights movement and he's trying to copy what was successful in it that's why they're trying to portray themselves less as sexual beings than as totally non-sexual beings and there's a whole fascinating and rather gynecological uh avenue i can go into on that but that that is the trans movement is not doing what the gay movement says it's saying we are here we have always been here to which i say possibly and then and you need to change a lot to get around that so imagine if the gay rights movement had said we're here we're queer and there's no such thing as penises or vaginas you said what you you're saying what we're here we're queer but women don't exist oh not sure we can give you that one guys we're here we're queer and you've got to totally change the language oh not sure we can do that okay that's the first thing that's the first thing the second thing that's worth highlighting on that disappears you of the notion you you suggested at the start is if we actually instead of doing this from this you know liberation history interpretation and then people are whatever you they claim they are how about using our heads a bit how about for instance actually interrogating questions like trans children you know the week in which we're speaking there's news that's just come out of another case of a person who was believed to be a trans child taking legal action against the tavistock clinic in london by the way i i predicted all of this in the madness of crowds i said this was going to be start to happen this was going to start happening i predicted that the trans thing will end up falling apart in a horrible number of litigations and this is this is this is happening this this young person who was put on hormone blockers among other things says it just all happened so fast nobody asked me enough questions and i've heard this firsthand from lots of people i've interviewed exactly the same thing that's why i knew it was coming now if somebody says to you if you question whether trans children exists you are being transphobic anti-trans or disappearing trans trans peop kill themselves or other people kill trans people sure you might back off from the argument should you no no you shouldn't you should look at that you should use your head you should use your reason you shouldn't be subject to moral blackmail i don't like the tone of voice in any way that this is described in i don't like the teenage girl suicidal tone of do what i want or i might harm myself i don't think that's acceptable in a society any more than it's tolerable in an individual blackmailing everybody else in society with the possibility of your own self-harm no no and there need to be more people who say no we are going to look at this seriously we do not believe that doing a mastectomy on a child or promising a child a mastectomy is simply the latest portion of the civil rights movement which we have to agree to no and i don't think that people should be bullied into this again pretty bleak picture there of the trans movement absolutely and realistically you may say that and there's a video um possibly there's a video on twitter of um a a a young girl and a trans person dancing have you seen this video dancing around them maybe perhaps i shouldn't ask this question if you haven't seen it but basically the the question is that this this trans person is is making a sexual dance around this young i would say toddler girl at this party and it's gone viral on twitter because a lot of people are saying well why did no one intervene why was this allowed to happen why has it suddenly become acceptable and my question to you is why because surely 10 years ago 20 years ago adults in that party perhaps would have thought this isn't necessarily the best thing in the world for a young child to experience could i answer that by going to quite this is quite a deep level of our species we are deeply heard animals to such an extent that we pick off people who are outside of the herd we target them what's happening what happens on social media which we talk about as if it's a new phenomenon is one of the oldest phenomena of our species one of the most deeply ingrained phenomena we pretend that we like dissidents and we don't every society crushes it if they can for as long as they can every group does it look at the catholic church look at the catholic church there were so many people who permitted what we agreed was one of the worst things that anyone could do which was to harm a child and good people good people thought it was more important to cover that up and even risk letting it go on than to allow a pr blow to occur against the catholic church were they bad people the people who did this no they're the same people as everybody else they were protecting what they regarded as sacred sacred values exist always the interesting question is how do you identify what they are in your own time and do you allow people to run in any way against them now 50 years ago the church might have been regarded as one of the institutions so important to protect that you would allow morally reprehensible things to be done and to be covered up in order to protect the institution we might say i don't take a low blow against the media competitor of yours but we might say that the same thing existed in the bbc light entertainment division for quite a long time i don't doubt by the way the same thing has happened in some degree in different areas in every media organization in the world as in every other effectively closed group we protect ourselves in this way now it happens at one of the sacred values of our own age alongside anti-homophobia anti-racism anti-sexism anti-misogyny and so on has become trans where trans people have slightly like gay people become this magical fairy pixie dust people who the gods have graciously granted us by the way which has a long lineage in in world history i mean i say world history because every country has versions of it so it's obviously quite deeply ingrained in us this but it's it's a particular thing in our own era and there are various views about why that is camille paglia says that it's something that happens at the end of civilizations that we become particularly interested in crossing across sexes why the late roman antiquity was particularly interested in hermaphroditism and so on there are lots of interesting explanations why it might be the case but at the moment trans is one of the sacred values of our time so if you see something in a social context which even goes against a very deep feeling of your own morality protect the children perhaps the deepest instinct we should could have certainly the most important one to have and one of the new sacred values is dancing around it most well most a lot of people will allow the current sacred value to override their deep moral instinct and then years later when all stands in a different light they will feel shame about that as somebody who doesn't have a particular or has a slightly unusual like a lot of people do i do and i don't have no herd instinct of course i have some will do but as somebody has a slightly lower herd instinct on a lot of things you know i my own opinion's enough for me i don't care if i'm the only one who holds it um i recognize that for the time being i can see which are the things that we are making into our gods and i can see the ones that i know we are going to be embarrassed by in our own lifetimes and i think that the self-appointed task of people like me then in an era like this is to identify those and try to get people off them as early as we can so let's have a reasonable discussion about the reasonable things that might be existing in trans and let's do that before we do mastectomies on the young i want to delve into yourself in a minute talking about as you just mentioned there you'll kind of fire your kind of purpose on this earth why you spend so much time and energy and passion talking about the issues that you do but before we do that i want to ask a very brief if you could answer very briefly and then we'll talk about some perhaps more happy uh topics to end the interview on because i like to end the interview on a more happy and optimistic note i'm a bit of a naive optimist um is our society at the end of days are we facing that catastrophe that rome that rome had for example um there is no short answer to that there are different views on this and i'm not sure entirely which one i subscribe to the normal point to make is that the roman empire it's four centuries between the reign of nero and the collapse of the empire and when people say this can't go on you have to be very careful about what this is and what kant is doing in that sentence things can go on an awful long time you know um in an allegedly unsustainable manner i think that i think there is also an inbuilt problem you said a short answer but it's impossible to answer a point on civilization because grief is possible i think there's also the problem of what a friend of mine the tech world describes as the the risk of self-fulfilling prophecy on these sorts of things say that our civilization is exhausted and tired and you might make it so um look there's a new book about this that i've just been reviewing that diagnoses this society as being sort of decadent and of course the misunderstanding about decadence is that it's well there's a lot of problems about the word now but um there is an there is a perception that decadence immediately leads to collapse and therefore to change and renewal which is not entirely true historically we tend to think of fantasyla paris or weimar germany you know but actually decadence is a is something that can be sustained for an awfully long time i'm not making a moral judgment when i say decadence by the way i'm saying that things like the very bad signs in our own society of having for instance the biggest most powerful and richest entertainment complex the world has ever seen pumping out film after unwatchable film in which characters invented for cartoon books two or three generations ago now are endlessly cycled around in hybrid formats battling each other or with each other against another foe invented a couple of generations ago the point being a society that makes bad films may not be decadent but one that just keeps repeating the same material almost certainly is um so i can see that i can see and and when i'm given the opportunity can speak about the chances of renewal and i can see exactly what they are and i can also see the cycle of endless repetition and lack of creativity and lack of purpose and lack of drive which i fear is one of the distinguishing factors of our age but then you can say that it is in each age until something new is born i want to get back to a smiley happy douglas who i saw earlier in the interview talking about how this is a fight that we can win so can you give people some reasons to be optimistic why why should we opt to be optimistic about this fight because it is a winnable one well by the way the first thing i say the reason to be optimistic is because of this i mean i mean we are we are the luckiest people in history you know my late friend clive james once said to me he said his generation he was born in 1939 and he said um you know that buster keaton film by bus to keep the black and white forward busking stand the doorway and the it turns out the thing behind him that looks like a house is a cut out with a scenery set and it comes i can't move it and it starts to fall forward and remember it goes all the way over and it crashes little and he's standing in the doorway and misses him and clive said to me once you know um that was my generation he said the whole damn house fell in and it missed us that was he was right to have been born then to miss the war to have benefited from the fruits of post-war peace and prosperity was incredible luck unprecedented in human history really and we who come after that have even more luck the chance of us needing for instance to be signed up and recruited in an army and fighting people hand to hand till one of us dies is not impossible but it's very small we live in in cities where when there isn't growth we think it's unnatural we live in societies so free that we spend an inordinate amount of our time talking about our oppression there are people who who are wanting for things of course i think that's perennial um and we have people in we have people who are homeless and people who can't eat but the society is set up in such a way that we don't have starving everywhere and we have help for people and we have a situation we moan about but where the ill can get treated without needing to pay anything and we have access on small devices in our pockets to everything that has been written said composed and sung in a way that our forebears would have found impossible to imagine in a lifetime so we have the greatest luck in human history the question i have about that is then why aren't we doing more and that's what i'd like us all to be thinking about is and this is why i'm sorry to go back and beat you up a little bit more about this but your your narrative of oppression and um and escape from oppression history may have stuck us in this idea that that's the most important thing we focus on like what we focus on is more and more emancipation and my suspicion is that to the extent that that was certainly worth doing in certain places that storyline may have been running down or out or there's not that much more to do i don't want to sound complacent on this but there but that that story has had its time and that a new story of equal fire and significance that arouses similar passions in a different direction needs to be released and that it could be if we weren't stuck on defunct track lines so we have a hell of a lot to be positive about and grateful for if nothing else the opportunity that we're the one era in history where you can grouse about your lot and people listen to you i think in my defense it's a pretty damn uh powerful narrative that one that one that one is taught um so you're right and uh and you are taught it and i was taught it and we all you know young people today all come out of school with these we've all come out of school with these um very very similar mindsets to history and it's something one when i didn't go to university but when i left school and you read history books different history books the ones you aren't taught it's absolutely fascinating to see perhaps reality versus what the narrative they they teach you by the way isn't that wonderful when that happens it's a it's a brilliant uh feeling and it's like opening your eyes to a whole new world which is why i also love doing these interviews because i learned so much and i want to finish the interview i know we're running out of time um about you and yourself and i think that you don't talk about yourself very much and i understand why because it's all about different bigger issues than you but i want to understand and i think lots of people will be curious about this where does the this come from this brilliant intellect you are one of the biggest if i may say intellectuals of our time in the western world i think that's pretty pretty much true you've sold millions of your books you've got you've obviously hit on something that people were interested in but where does it come from within you talk about your background and where does this where do you think this comes from well if we can say so first by the way that the thing of not talking about myself much is is deliberate for various reasons but one is that i i honestly was either trained or trained myself to believe that arguments from self were not that valid which turns out to be exactly contrary to the main belief of the era which is that arguments himself are the most valid thing and in fact maybe the only valid thing so but i honestly don't believe that i don't i don't i don't find arguments from self persuasive in fact i i feel a certain contempt for them to tell the truth and and i think there's by the way there's a deeper reason for that which is that i do believe that we're more than our characteristics and i do believe that we're more than our life experience so that when somebody says let me tell you about me i think that is that can be very interesting but there are also more interesting things than you you know and it would be like one of the things in us that i say somewhere i think in the matters of crowd we we revolt against ourselves when described merely as consumers for instance and that's because that doesn't do it for us and i suggest that people feel that same element of revolt about being described just as a woman or a man what do you as a woman think about this excuse me what do you as a gay think about this what do you as a a black person or person of color think about this i i encourage people to have some revolt against that because it's not the essence of what we are and what we can do with our lives and what we can achieve um what uh i'm not in a good position to say why i'm what i am i'm probably in the worst position i could defer to almost any expert in the world other than myself on that subject um but there are certain things i know by now about what drives me i know i'm driven by a dislike of lies and untruths i find there to be something not just irritating but demeaning about them uh i know i'm driven by i'm driven by an attraction to difficult things that's definite i know that one of my earlier books was on one of the ugliest things that happened in the northern ireland conflict and which i went into an infinite detail and i remember a friend saying why would you have done this book next because it's so difficult because it's so painful and ugly and needs to be looked at but i suppose yes the things which make other people sometimes turn away and go oh why do you want to do that but i am interested in you know i'm interested in in people and i'm interested in our time and i'd interested in looking at what we're going through as if we'd already gone through it um taking a step back and seeing what's actually motivating us and driving us and i'm just interested in the whole thing you know i i never feel like i can read enough or know enough or met enough people or have traveled to enough places you know i said to a friend recently you know the interesting thing about traveling is even the boring places are interesting because it's interesting nothing's happening there i won't say what they are of course those boring places because i don't need to make any more enemies i'm going to drag this out of you douglas i'm going to drag this out of you i want to know some specific antidotes and anecdotes about about you right you have this innate uh curiosity it seems to me that seems to one thing that drives you you love going around the world you love experiencing meeting new people you you you're so curious about everything that must have come from somewhere were you curious as a child did you ask questions to the waiter did you in the restaurant did you go out there and speak to the lollipop man or what was what was going on did this always happen or did it was a gradual journey um always wanted to get out there into the world i always wanted that i wanted to see as much as possible and the truth is that at the deepest level i can explain about myself it's because i never wanted to miss a thing i never wanted to miss a thing whatever it was that we can see and go through and try to understand i wanted to see and go through and try to understand it's probably one of the reasons why throughout my life i've always had most of my friends an awful lot older than me it has the disadvantage among other things of going to more funerals than one would like to go to but it has the incalculable advantage of meaning that you are learning from people who know more than you've known yourself i ca it's one of the things i can never understand that more people don't do i can understand why people only have friends of their age group why wouldn't you want to have a better sweep and understanding you know so probably that has always been there yeah and you know i obviously most people not like that um maybe it's better for the world they're not i don't know um but it is i don't i'm not i'm not joking about it it is incredibly hard to work out what actually fires you up but i don't think i'm that unusual [Music] i'm just incredibly lucky among other things that i've been able to write all my life i've never been beholden to anyone or anything i've made a career made a living without having to tell untruths and i wish everyone had the same freedom and on that douglas murray thank you very much for joining us it's a great pleasure you

Channel: The Sun

Views: 849,040

Keywords: The Sun, news, breaking news, Douglas Murray, the madness of crowds, identity politics, free speech, politics, europe, debate, identity, immigration, brexit, gender, culture wars, the strange death of

Id: QKQGDZ2MJow

Length: 75min 45sec (4545 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020