The Death of Europe, with Douglas Murray

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson we're shooting today in Fiesole a town in the hills above Florence Italy associate editor of The Spectator Douglas Murray writes for a number of publications including the Wall Street Journal mr. Murray is the author of a number of books including the strange death of Europe which appeared in 2017 and the madness of crowds gender race and identity which will appear this coming September Douglas Murray welcome it's very pleasure to be with you the strange death of Europe I quote Europe is committing suicide or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide whether the European people choose to go along with this is naturally another matter close quote we'll come to your argument in a moment but the book appeared in 2017 for now what do you make of what the people are willing to put up with two years after you published the book it's very interesting and in the two years since it came out as being coming out in I think it's now out in every European language so I've been pretty constant now in a different country every week in Europe and elsewhere and so I get a pretty good sense of where things are I would say there's several things that the direction of travel hasn't changed but some of those in positions of power have done things that I was surprised they would be willing to do to slow it down I'm thinking particularly of the fact that the book centers on the migration crisis of 2015 which I just see as a sped-up version of something that have been happening for decades but since 2015 the European leaders among other things did a deal with President Kaley Ferra and you know he now has a gun to europe's head that he knows he can fire at any point the point that i'm going to have to stop you from time to time to make sure that for an american audience were very explicit iran is president of turkey and the nature of the deal was we Europeans pay him huge sums of money and he stops boats leaving the Turkish shores for Greek island right and it is just as crude and straightforward as her he's not doing it out of a kindness of his heart right and things like that have undoubtedly meant that the flow of 2015 has slowed I mean the boats are still setting off from the North African coastline but nothing like the rate of 2015 so there have been some things like that that have surprised me all right little e out the basic argument so you're not concerned with any kind of temporary European melees or questions of slow economic growth which is a lot of what we hear on the other side of the big water again I'm quoting you Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself fight for itself or even take its own size in an argument by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive in Europe Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home close quote two years later you you stand but that's a very dramatic statement two years later you stand by that oh absolutely yes in the lifespans of as I say most people it would be a different place it already is and I lay some of that out in a most 'less detail in the strange death of Europe sometimes when things happen relatively slowly people get used to things they adapt I give the example of the census in the UK the last census in the UK which showed that in 23 out of 33 London boroughs people who identify as white British are in the minority in though its boroughs so that that in the lifespan of em you can either you know like that dislike it or feel so when lying about it but that's a massive change in just one person's lifespan already John Cleese tweeted as we tape this it was I think was last week John Cleese of Monty Python Fame tweeted London no longer seems to be an English city if I think that's a close yes close paraphrase if not a quotation and he was attacked words well the attack as attacks are on Twitter yeah but he was correct he was correct I mean by the way factual occurred what he said is effectively what he's boasted about by politicians including the mayor of London and the previous mayor of London they say you know it's an international city they're very happy about that but if somebody says well that means it's not an English city anymore then they attack somebody like whether John Cleese me or whoever for heresy and it's very interesting by the way isn't it I mean John Cleese was was attacked for the heresy of Life of Brian what 40 years ago he's attacked by the clerics now just said the clerics of the far left and the social justice movements and so on they just happened not to wear frocks like his previous critics but it's the same phenomenon I've debated and discussed these issues for years now and I know every one of the moves that people do the number of dishonest moves things like that's not the case okay that is the case that is the case but you shouldn't say it or that is the case and it's great suck it up so to continue with the basic argument this has come about this death of Europe or the death of you this has come about quote because of two simultaneous concatenation 'he's from which it is now all but impossible to recover the first is the mass movement of people's into Europe close quote so explain that 20 explain 2015 and tell us what that was what happened in 2015 remind us and that was a speeded-up version of what well again you're talking to a largely American audience here so fill us in in the aftermath of the Second World War most Western European countries decided that they wanted to invite migrant labour in to help rebuild the beginning the idea was that they wouldn't stay they would come and then they'd go home after doing the job unsurprisingly they did stay these large proportions of them did and gradually people started to be brought in even if there weren't jobs on to go to so for instance you imported large numbers of people from the Indian subcontinent to middle towns in the north of England when there were no mills anymore and then and the thinking on that was I'm not sure there was very much thinking it was what we call a cock-up view of history a succession of lazy and cowardly politicians who just found it easier to kick this one down the road and leave it to their successors to deal with we kept changing the story of what we were doing as we as we were doing it I recount in the book we moved from the guest worker period to the multicultural period where you said yeah live in our country and sort of pretty much do what you like to the modern one which is become like us those are three totally different things in the course again of one person's life and I blame no migrant for being confused by that because we were confused but in 2015 the movement got to its height of total unregulated movement and this was the year in which it started off in the beginning of this decade we're in partly people coming fleeing Syrian civil war but then people from all across sub-saharan Africa North Africa the Middle East the Far East and I started traveling to the camps in southern Europe where people were arriving in I've been to many of the countries they were fleeing from and it was a veritable United Nations of people now in the eyes of some of the governments and many of the public it was all people fleeing the Syrian civil war but it wasn't it wasn't even by the EU zone figures at least 60 percent 6-0 percent of the arrivals in 2015 had no more right to be in Europe than anyone else in the rest of the world so an ankle of Merkel invited a million refugees refugees was migrants migrants let's call them lagers when she invited a million of them into Germany this is crude for I'll put it badly you sharpen up what I'm about to say because this is the emitter where an American would look at it the Germans are still acting in some way or another out of a sense of war guilt oh that's it that's straightforward oh the obscene straightforward I mean I no doubt about it this is a job for a psychiatrist in many ways look at the reception Munich station as 10,000 people are arriving every 48 hours or so at the height of the movement in 2015 they were coming up through the Balkans and up through Central Europe and there were crowds at Munich train station high-fiving the arrivals given them balloons teddy bears and what was it it's perfectly obvious it was Germans it at the sight of people breaking into their country rather than trying to break out right so but even at that even if it was a kind of act of German self-indulgence and act on acting out of work yield the whole argument was that these people were unfortunate that they were fleeing civil war and you're saying that 60% of them simply weren't a lot more than the 60% I mean what you get into in all of the issues with migration is and specifically European migration is people find it incredibly hard to know where you salami slicer issues so for instance they say yes we'll have people coming in who are genuinely fleeing a Syrian civil war for instance right well there's an argument about that as well you can look after 100 Syrians in a neighboring country for everyone you look after in Europe so it's not efficient in all sorts of ways whether or not it's humane but let's say that yes okay people freeing Syrian civil war then you have the people including the aid agencies and making the point well and one Afghan refugee made this to me to my face you said Syrians have only been at war for five years we've been at war for 15 years why should they have priority very good question so you go along that and then you get to the thing that all of the aid agencies and the NGOs and others have been doing for years which use you allied and rub out the difference between people fleeing war and people fleeing economic deprivation right now one of the reasons why I'm quite tough about this is because I know whether argument leads Gallup last year did a poll in sub-saharan Africa 1/3 of sub-saharan Africans want to move they're not going to go to Saudi Arabia they're not planning to break into Yemen they want to come to Europe now in my view that the catastrophe underlying all of this is the presumption that every country in the world is basically a country for the people of that country apart from Europe and Europe is a place for the wild alright a few figures from the book even as I was reading the argument these figures I takes a while to adjust again it's because an American our notion of what's taking place in Europe because I think but I found every one of these things shocking by 25th I'm taking these from your book by 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for Isis than for the British Armed Forces by 2016 the most popular boys name in England and Wales Mohammed mm-hmm by the middle of this century this is a projection by the middle of this century a majority of Austrians under the age of 15 will be Muslim and it is single digit numbers of years ago that every one of those was unthinkable correct yeah I mean I smile because I mean I find it you're used to it I find it if I didn't laugh I'd cry I've done the crying I mean the point about her this is is that again all of these things you're meant to not notice you're meant to not say it either you're meant to say yeah okay so Mohammed HAP's happens to be the most popular boy then what are you saying biggert what's wrong with that or they find ways around it you know no no it's it's just that we we counted the Harry's in a different way that year and so on all of these things there has been an enormous cost that people have been made to pay if they observe what's in front of their eyes and so we get used to this sort of just period of lying all right and that's why we've been in what is the or well it takes a great effort to see what is under one's nose right alright ii can cut concatenation again I'm quoting you douglas at the same time that we've had this influx at the same time europe has lost faith in its beliefs traditions and legitimacy Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for the past and there is also the problem of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin ok take us through that a little nut the German war guilt that's clear Britain seems to me to be a gift so again I'm speaking as an American what was the Churchill movie that was just a big hit last year we think of Britain's that Britain has no apologies to make no reason to feel guilty Neil Ferguson other people who've looked at the British colonies it did unbalanced its a transfer of human capital right there not impoverishing the people of Indians on the contrary I might as well write and so why would why would you include Britain Britain's the hard case for to understand why Britain should feel guilty yes or an existential fatigue there's several things one is the phenomenon that if if you or I were just to sum up all people across say Asia as having responsibility for the same thing people who say that's mad I mean you know you're not even picking out the important distinctions you're being very generalizing right but you can do that with Europe so you say we did the Holocaust in Europe you can even get away with that in London I'm sorry sorry we and then you take the other one post colonialism which you refer to post colonialism and post colonial guilt is suffered in always equal measure by for instance Britain which undoubtedly ran quite a lot of the world in the past and Sweden which did not so there has there's a strange thing that has emerged which I try to explain in the book where we end up some summing up ourselves by our collectively worst moments the flip side of that is we look at everyone else only by their best so recent years for instance we've heard an awful lot certainly since 9/11 about the Islamic neo-platonists no one talks very much by the Islamic neoplatonist until this last twenty years but the Islamic world is best represented by the Islamic neoplatonist where the whereas Europe is best represented by a schvitz well here you get to one of the problems of this is that we are uninformed yeah of course and it formed all of its uninformed and it's also imbibed by vast sways of the public and told to them by a huge amount of academics media politicians and others it's a I mean there's several reasons for that isn't there I mean one is that you can you can do that almost cost free as a modern politician can't you it's like the endless apologies for historical acts it can gain you something but it costs you nothing all you're doing is selling out and misrepresenting the past but you yourself might be able to polish a bit of your halo or burnish your reputation in some way but this is just one element of this it's this thing I describe as the sense of the story running out a couple of people have said and I'm very glad they pointed this out that in some ways it's it's the most original part of the argument of my book the immigration bit is important and people should know about it but this second bit the arts bit what is it about us that would mean this all happened not many people have I think written about and by the way I'm very disturbed about this because almost none of my critics and there are some sadly but almost none of them pick up on this thing almost nothing they go they go from me over the immigration but they never pick up on this but I have not to date had one critic who said you're wrong on the existential tiredness you're wrong on that our best days are all ahead of us any of that you don't I don't get any of that and that's a disappointment because rather hoping I would well alright so so let's let's take a moment help me think it through layman that I am that haven't thought about this in any great detail so what's the parallel what's the parallel of peril I don't know a 5th century Rome collapse of civilizational self-confidence they could think of course they could have kept the barbarians out of the city but they permitted the city to be sacked for reasons that don't make any sense all these years later and we get the same you can see why Europe would would have felt that the first world war was a catastrophe second world wars in some ways of reparation and in all the years since the Second World War the Germans have made this concerted effort to build a good society right there's been economic recovery of a cross of all kinds and instead of feeling a sense of pride and accomplishment it's just exhaustion well why why the why is is is this almost everything is still behind crime-scene tape you mentioned World War one borders okay I was in the Middle East's again recently in the Middle East most countries recognize borders to be a prerequisite for peace if you don't have borders you're in trouble Europe thinks that borders are the cause of war okay so that's just the beginning of geography problems move on we had Wars of Religion before we had the wars of nation-states some people forget that now but it means that religion also is to the great extent behind crime scene tape in the 20th century was Europe that came up with the two twin nightmares of fascism and communism so we're very distrustful of not just politics and political ideas but the philosophy and possibilities that might lead to them so it leaves you in this position where absolutely everything is still a crime scene and you're trying to work out how it happened and that's why whenever anyone mentions something like orders Angela Merkel and everybody else in any position of power here's but the strong borders would be a reason we go to war again that's what we did then mention I mean ideas for love this is why you're a-peein I mean this is a terrible thing to say for some philosopher friends but European ideas to a great extent of philosophy has become a game I'm not saying it hasn't in America as well hermeneutical game you know you can you can look at the game but you can't play it because you dint because you know what you might go back to I described in the book I had a sort of just terrible moment of realization about this some years ago a conference at Heidelberg and I just realized every single idea was off the tape not only the ideas the words you couldn't say culture I was almost meltdown when I did you can't use anything because everything might make us do it all again well it's not surprising in that situation that people would have a sense of weariness is that a bit is that something behind again you're having to explain all this to an American but is there some connection between the and the drive toward a European Union but somehow or other we can we can escape our past if I reinvent we can dissolve our identity we can dissolve our historical identity we can wash away our historical guilt in this new entity there is that there's also by the way I mean I was in Berlin again the other week and the German audience member pointed this out to me that there is also the finger even in this stage the Germans want to lead the way you know they just want to they just want to leave the way in masochism and more but that that in the German instinct to dominate even in the new era is obviously still there and also the European Union provides something to do I mean I was having this debate a while ago with the former Polish foreign minister who who said yes we've got to keep moving EU has to keep moving it's got to have purpose it's endlessly on words and on words and my view is as a skeptic of that particular project is how about that it moves until the point to which you lose the public for instance how about that but but that's of course that's so that's a mad xenophobic British view of course all right you have a new book coming out the book is entitled the madness of crowds gender race and identity and although you do not I don't recall reading anything in the book that suggests you were thinking of it or you want readers to think of it as the second in a in a kind of bookend one does in many ways follow on the other yeah at my judgement quote we are going through a great derangement people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational feverish herd-like and simply unpleasant and you examine the identity politics of gays women racial minorities and trans yes and the ways in which they're all mad yes so Kay's quote the madness of crowds the single factor that is most clearly helped to change public opinion about homosexuality in the West has been the decision that homosexuality is in fact a hardware rather than a software issue close quote if that's extremely striking when one's reading the book I explained that I think this particular thing goes through each of them like everyone I've been trying to work why people have become so unhinged in recent years it's not just social media I go into some of that in the book but it's it's I think you go something like this we've tried to make the fruits of a liberal ethical system into the foundations of one okay yes sir for instance gay rights of which gave myself a supporter of gay rights I you know think it's all good but it's it's a great product of liberal rights it's a it's a hideous foundation for them same thing with for instance women's rights great supporter of women's rights very glad is it Sam glad we're here rather than a hundred years ago but can it be the basis of a moral system or an ethical system one of the reasons why I think we've being becoming deranged on this is precisely as you mention this hardware/software thing this the problem is something like this one of the few things we can all agree on is we shouldn't be mean to people because of something they can't help right it's one reasons why we dislike it when for instance somebody's rude about somebody who's disabled or talking to them about it it's a horrible thing to do now things that people can possibly affect where if your occurs a question doesn't mean that we should be rude or unpleasant or anything else but there's a you're in different terrain so most rights movements have moved towards this thing of born this way the Lady Gaga view all this way means not my fault nor my fault crucially a counter to lifestyle choice and I think lifestyle choice is something worth countering on this occasion but born this way says nothing I can do about it so be nice and this has been adopted recently by the trans movement which says we are born trans from childhood we're trans so be nice now I explained why this has happened with trans it's fascinating I think but at the same time we are making things that are undoubtedly Hardware issues gender sex into software so things we know effects software meaning malleable things and too much a personal will by call all environmental it's why the trance issue by the way which is such a minority of a minority issue has become so huge because it's demanding two things simultaneously it's saying something that we're not sure about is absolutely fixed and one of the very few things we are sure about sex differences for instance it's totally a choice you could be a woman there this hour if you'd like right and and that sort of thing is de ranging for papi because because it's asking us to take part in something we know to be a lie and if he's among other things enormous ly demoralizing to people to be made to lie and why should it be why should it be that there is no it's a it's it's it almost as though there's no cultural immune system that's right that what would have been what would have been scoffed at laughed at single digit number of decades ago what certainly would not have been championed by the BBC yeah now someone makes a claim Douglas Murray would say but but that but that's not so that you don't have any scientific evidence to suggest that at all and the trans says no no I was born this way and you need to accept it and within twenty seconds the BBC that's in an official position why what what happened what change what is why what what eliminated the cultural immune system to craziness is that in my being too you know you're understating it Oh forgive me go ahead the first thing is all the adults left the room that's a big problem it became increasingly hard secondly to hold concrete ideas up in public people can sustain the most extraordinary abstract idea as we see it every day but they're finding it extremely hard to hold onto concrete ideas because the concrete idea can have a personification right in front of you in the age of social media so it's not you're not talking about people in the after that the person is there you're talking about this person for instance so it's rather like borders people find it hard to hold onto the hard concepts but there are a whole set of other things as well one is and I think this is absolutely crucial we underestimate the move that has been played by what was a very fringe movement in academia that is now absolutely rampant across America and Europe which is sometimes called social justice warrior is a sometimes called an intersectional ism and so we didn't take this very seriously but it should be taken seriously in my view because it is it is probably the single idea since the Cold War ended that has made most headway and which makes the largest claims for itself it it is an attempt this thing of this is why the endless thing women gays race trans endless injection of these things into every single public discussion every political discussion the fact that we had a we had a defense secretary in Britain who had to resign a couple of summers ago because 15 years earlier he'd been found to have touched the woman's knee and she asked if he would take his hand off her knee and he said yes of course and he did but 15 years later he has to resign the woman wasn't bothered at all as journalists said you know told him I smacked him in the face if he ever did that again and but but this stuff is sort of what the point is is everywhere and and and the other thing sorry is that it's it's even in you know people people have been saying to me for years oh but it's just you know it's a bit of academia and you over focus on that it's just you know some West Coast liberal you know loopiness know almost every multinational every corporate yes every government that's right they are all committed to this now the commitment to being diverse being absolutely woke as we call it on all of these issues and the problem about it is I think it's going to undo all the good that was done and there's that there's there are some very clear examples of that by building resentment yes all right take your obvious ones which I mentioned in the research chapter it's taken what 50 years to move for Martin Luther King's central moral insight about the nature of somebody's character at being the way you judge them not not some characteristics color does not matter right character is all that's a Luther King jr. well today not so there was a lecture given the other week at Boston University from an academic who is it George George Washington University I think ya know Washington State University she gave election which she said people who'd judge people by the content of their character rather than their skin color are dangerous skin color is meant to be everything and like god we are hurtling there it's a total inverse total inversion alright question I'm about a generation older than you are as best I can work it out as I was coming up the general feeling among sensible people the general feeling was young people go to university for four years and yes yes yes of course the universities are dominated by the Liberals but the kids are smart enough to figure that out and the moment they leave University to get jobs they start paying taxes they go through what people have gone through for the the struggles of forming families and so forth they become quite sensible hmm and you're saying maybe yes at one point maybe not but for sure now the universities are actually acting as transmission belts yes for lunatic ideas across the rest of the culture from universities to major corporations to the media yeah it's it's everywhere I mean and how did that happen again universities really did used to be it is sort of it the crazy uncle it's all your children there because they could avoid the nonsense and you know humor them right now they're dangerous well it goes back to say I think there's an extraordinary lack of courage in our cultures at the moment the simple courage to say what's true and this this has an extraordinary effect because of course it means that if you're weighing up whether or not you should go with a mob mentality a crowd a mentality or something or not if there's basically no benefit to telling the truth but there could be a huge personal cost to it you just weigh it up and is it worth doing or not is it if you saw what happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen college who who refused to take part in a racist endeavor that the college wanted everyone to take part in which was to make all white people leave campus for the day if if you saw that he and his family ended up being drummed out not just of the University of a but of town and you are another academic you thought I'm not sure I want to go in with this new era of race baiting that's disguised as anti racism and you saw what happened a Brit why would you do what he did or not almost certainly not and this isn't just because most academics are carrots it's and most people are most people aren't in a position in their lives and their jobs in their and so that's categories right and that's why I say I mentioned them somewhere in the madness of crowds that I discovered when I was writing it from a friend in the British Army that there's a British Army device called the great Viper which the American military also has but it's it's it's a device you you you pull on the back of a truck to a minefield and you you fire this missile it's got a long long rope at the back filled with explosives in it falls across the minefield very beautifully and then explodes and it can't clear the minefield as a whole but it can clear enough room for trucks to cross and I said that but the point of me writing the madness of crowds was to be this great Viper I want to try to clear a path for other people to be allowed to cross now of course the problem is I don't know my agent points out we don't know if you survive that on the analogy may may be unwise but but I think that's what people need to do at the map we need to we need to open up a path for sensible people to be able to say things about sex the relations between the sexes and much more but we all knew until yesterday yes from the madness of crowds back to the strange death of Europe I have a question that I want to ask but I'm afraid to ask it because I'm I'm sure that it's so hugely politically incorrect far away all right all right I will this is just between the two of us show the madness that you just described what do Muslims make of this when they watch all this their populations growing in Africa or the Middle East is it I mean the the the what comes across to us every so often videos and so forth there will be some and mom denouncing the West is decadent but if decadence if cultural decadence means anything right it means something pretty close to what you're describing yeah yeah experimenting on children and yes yeah like making everything sexual and yeah yeah of course of course I mean well I always think that but what I'm worried about is that conservatives find themselves edging toward the position of saying well you know those Muslims have a point oh yeah of course you can hear that already in Europe I you know you can do oh yeah you can hear a little bit um in America as well yes it's it's not an attractive route to go down it is enough warning against it but my gosh you can see people people doing it there was a school in Birmingham in England earlier this year where lots of the parents protested outside of school because they didn't want their children to be taught about being gay in in classes to teach the children about sex education basically and I know quite a lot of people including social conservatives who said I don't know which side should we be on and look it's if if a culture pretends this is a consistent thing in the strange death of Europe and the madness of crowds if if a culture pretends that it is this cheap ridiculous highly sexualized race obsessed totally evidently self contradictory thing then it's hardly surprising if it doesn't survive and it doesn't particularly deserve to my own view has always been that it's just absurd to think this is the some of what we've had and that's that's the obscenity of this really and that's that's why I also I say at the end of the madness of crowds I want young people in particular to get fast ways out of this shortcuts out of this madness how to how to just get that out of your brain and get on to the life you need to live and one of the things I keep coming back to is that we should have been asking this question much more all on these years of saying compared to what so if there is a Muslim protest outside the kids primary school because they don't want them to learn about gay find out what it is they do want what it is that they do want and if it is that they want Saudi more is on these sorts of things and punishments of then that's as well to have that out because then we can make a clear decision but this is the case on all of them when people tell us what a patriarchal and bigoted society we live in and how terrible how there's a war on women in the war on gays the war on trans and a war on blacks and one everybody and against everybody else compared to when compared to what where's your place where's your Nirvana because if you can't point to something that's at least semi Nirvana like then I see no reason why we should try this wholly new experiment in reality what the people do if you say compared to what they tend to in your country as in mine sort of reveal the foundations and say you know Cuban health cares particularly good and so on you know actually literacy literacy standards in communist Russia are very very impressive you know so they give away what they really want but that's the point is if we keep saying compared to what we know what we're running against and we know what they're trying to do and at the moment we're just in this fog of not realising the seriousness and the specific nature of the attempts that are being made to totally undermine rewrite and destroy everything that I think people of any political direction in our countries would have thought of until recently as at least a pretty good deal I'm happy to say but sorry to say that you've given me just another very powerful I managed it okay Douglas back to the strange death of Europe again it's been two years since you published the book a couple of questions on the way things have been going since I quote the book though to begin with from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 up to the late 20th century the nation-state had generally been regarded not only is the best guarantor of the constitutional order and liberal rights but the ultimate guarantor of peace yet this certainty is also ended Central European figures like Chancellor Kohl of Germany in 1996 as long ago as 1996 insisted that and here you quote Kohl the nation-state cannot solve the great problems of the 21st century close quote okay but brexit and the and the recent European elections discuss well brexit was a an attempt by the British public a majority the British public to reassert their belief in the nation-state I voted brexit like most of my fellow countrymen and I did so I think for the same reasons as most of them which is that I thought we'd lost we'd lost our understanding of how we were governed and that this was absolutely central it's one of the reasons why we've had a pretty peaceful country Britain for some hundreds of years Parliament was elected by the people was accountable to the people and if it let you down you chucked them out and this wasn't so with the European Union we felt and I know lots lots of people who think very differently to that but most of us in Britain felt we didn't know how we were governed we didn't know how to get rid of them we didn't know who they were once they were put there we didn't know who put them there so the brexit vote you'd say this is he from the point of view of the argument in the strange death of Europe this is a hopeful sign the British public at least are not remaining entirely supine well except that I mean I was a huge part of the brexit vote because losing control of our borders was one part of the wider loss of control people were clearly objecting to but I say in the book in advance of the BRICS that just because you have national autonomy does not mean that you might not make the same route across decisions I mean we were perfectly able under the Blair government to have a appalling relaxed immigration policy where 50,000 people are coming in every six weeks which was the same numbers of Hyuga noses came in and 1680s so you know the numbers went up thanks to the labor government and if you got a Labour government like that again the numbers would go up like that again and even a Conservative government's basically not being able to restrict the immigration very much in the UK but yes the brexit vote was some kind it was a shout of a reassertion that we would like to be governed in the way that we thought we were governed alright Doug was the last question actually let me give you a quotation and then a little vignette let me tell you a little story and then hand it to you and the quotation again is you again from the strange death of Europe promised throughout their lifetimes that the changes were temporary the changes were not real or that the changes did not signify anything Europeans discovered that in the lifespan of people now alive they would become minorities in their own countries close quote now here's the little story I'll tell you ages and ages ago when I was at Oxford myself I knew Malcolm Muggeridge the great British journalist and Malcolm Muggeridge used to say that he often used to say surveying what he even then saw as the decline of the West used to say that he felt himself in the same position as a Roman in the fifth century yes and he had a particular affection for agustin in North Africa looking across the Mediterranean at the decline of the culture that he loved and hearing about the sack of Rome and yet Augustine cut led a good life as witnessed that he comes down to us as st. Agustin so the question is you've said this is almost impossible to reverse you've said that even this the political movement the populist movement of the recent years it's very complicated unlikely to get it quite right so if it's over Douglas if it's over if in your lifetime it's over how does Douglas Murray lead a good life what is what is the definition what what components of fighting back of resignation do to the two to two right-minded Europeans somehow or other rear step establish some kind of analog to the Benedictine monasteries where these try to keep the person what will constitute a good life if as you argue it all just winds down my own view is that it should should partly be done by living the life that we thought to be a good life until yesterday we're very unlikely to come up with an entirely new definition or invention very unlikely that we're going to invent new God's very unlikely we're going to come up with new religions found like you again we're sitting here in Florence very unlikely again we all do anything this good again so why don't we have the recognition of what a good life was that was very recognizable until yesterday now that can't be done Roger Scruton and I were talking about this recently this time the great conservative philosopher this this can't be done by government diktat it can't be done because the presence of the United States or the Prime Minister of Great Britain says that it should be so certain things they could not do that might make it easier but this just comes from people it comes from individuals and people leading by example I when I discuss many of the things that came up in the strange death of Europe sometimes people say to me you seem well some people say but you know you don't seem as het up about it and that must mean that you know it's over because otherwise you would be more yes there's a different we fight fight and resignation yes there's a difference between those two and you work out don't you as an adult what its worth wasting yourself on and what points you should keep making and when you've made them enough and when you've hit yourself your head against that wall enough and you just have to work it out and I've said everything I can to try to warn my fellow countrymen and Europeans and Americans and others who've taken the book to heart of what I think is happening but I don't intend I've done my best shot at it and my own view is that after that you have to live the life that you ought to live in the civilization you enjoy and you see there's so many small the enjoyment obviously isn't it one of the problems one of the things I wish one could communicate better to people is that all the things that they think are excluding people are not they're offering people the best chance they'll ever have in their lives to get to civilization or civilization to get to them and when people rail against things like this city we're sitting in think that it Pitta Mises capitalism and patriarchy and races and more and more I just think I wish more people could take the attitude that I've taken throughout my life to these things which is you don't have to be tub-thumping you don't have to be a wild flag waving patriot or anything like that but your attitude should be gratitude hmm I mean it's not as if this is nothing the city we're sitting in is enough for a whole lifetime and a very very well lived lifetime and it's all there all of the literature the books the art the 4/4 music everything it's there and all you have to do is to reach out and take it and be part of it and that seems to me in this culture of hatred and this this thing I go into in demands of crowds of this just endless zero-sum hatred and bitterness and blame just to turn that around and say how about feeling grateful because what we have is a blip in human history to have the right to have and we would be so damn stupid to give it away for nothing Douglas Murray author of the strange death of Europe and the madness of crowds thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation on Peter Robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 3,289,204

Rating: 4.7473335 out of 5

Keywords: immigration, Europe, death of Europe

Id: eQXHc-tJMXM

Length: 47min 16sec (2836 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Skepticizer]

In his most recent book he comes out against identity politics, which is disingenuous. It's probably an optics move in his case, but railing against identity politics is a typical conservative trope these days. You can't beat the left's anti-white identity politics with a rejection of identity politics in general. The only way to beat them is with pro-white identity politics. Rejecting identity politics is just another way of cucking. Conservatives are yet again making the same mistake that their reactionary progenitors made during the interwar period. You can't beat a leftist revolution with a counter-revolution. You need a parallel rightist revolution that's just as radical, or even more radical. This is why the reactionary monarchists failed and the fascists took over. And yes, make no mistake about it, the anti-white left is a revolutionary force. The only other revolutionary force that can crush it is the radical right.

[u/[deleted]]

Great interview until the he starts talking about being grateful. What a god damn lazy boomer attitude. This is why this is happening. This attitude of nothing will ever change and just be lazy about it. God damn that last part pisses me off.

[u/[deleted]]

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