We welcome Al Murray, the comedian who might just be your new favourite historian, to Decoding the Gurus. In a crossover you probably didn’t expect, we discuss World War II, Wehraboos, gurus, and the contemporary comedy scene... something for all the family.Along the way, we touch on British nostalgia, military fetishism, and self-styled “truth tellers”. A chat about history, humour, and hubris, not necessarily in that order.LinksWe Have Ways of Making You Talk – Al Murray & James HollandAl Murray’s YouTube channelFollow Al on X (Twitter)
Hello, welcome to the Coduna Gurus podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, the psychologist with me, Chris Kavanagh, an awful Irishman and the anthropologist, but also kind of now a psychologist.
And today, Chris, how's it going?
How's it going?
Are we a guru today?
Are we decoding a guru today?
We're not, but before you move on, Matt, we just have to notice that's probably the first time you refer to me as a psychologist.
So that's a cigar breaking moment there.
You've accepted it finally.
It's because I'm teaching foundational statistics.
That's what it's because.
But yes, I'll just savor that and then mention that, no, we're not, Matt, we're not decoding a guru.
We have a guest decoder, if you will.
We do.
We have a guest decoder.
And this person is, I think it's fair to say, a bit more famous than we are.
And we're very grateful for coming on our little show.
And he's most well known for a podcast about World War II.
We have ways of making you talk.
And I am familiar with this podcast because I am a history geek, as people know.
Mark Corrigan from Peach Show is basically my alter ego.
I enjoy that show along with other history shows.
And recently, we have been talking about this concept of wearaboos and historical revisionism and particular, you know, different perceptions of World War II, Chris.
That's right.
I might add, because it does seem worth just mentioning that while to you, Al is most famous for having a World War II history podcast for people from the UK, perhaps.
He might be known as a famous comedian as well, the pop landlord.
So that he has a sidekick where he has been a comedian and a dot.
So just mentioning in passing.
So thanks for coming, Al.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
I mean, what I've relieved though is you didn't actually call me a historian because that's the, in a way, that's the like you like calling you a psychologist.
You know, it's the thing where I go, I can't quite, I sort of have to call me a psychologist.
No, no, I think it's a very fair comparison because like you, Chris talks about statistics without without really having any real credentials in it, which I think is analogous.
Entirely.
No, I could feel you shying away from saying it.
And then that kind of passag acceptance of thanks for calling me that finally.
I mean, if nothing else, we could talk about the dynamic between you two for the next area.
That would be really very, very interesting.
But there are some listeners who would appreciate it.
But I think the map with the historian label, like it seems like if you do a podcast with history now, after a little while, you just get upgraded to your history, at least in the public consciousness.
Yeah.
And I've been published two or three times now, writing history books.
But even that experience I found, you know, with stand-up, when you first start doing it, you think, am I funny?
Who knows?
Then you find out and then you kind of get over all that thing.
In fact, the thing people always say, I've been doing stand-up for 35 years.
People say, oh, you're so brave getting up.
I really, I really am not.
It's just, that's my, that's a standard environment for me that I've carved out how it works.
I know how it works.
It's actually quite, it's actually sort of a safe space for want of a better parlance going on stage, right?
Whereas being a historian, you write a book and someone writes to you and says, my dad didn't do that.
And you're like, oh, fuck.
And I'm like, you know, correct it.
It's in print.
You know, you ring your publisher and they go, oh, well, there's nothing we can do about that.
Oh, no, gosh.
So quite different from a joke that doesn't land, you know.
Yeah, that, I do think this is surprisingly analogous because like, you know, we were talking, me and Matt, repeatedly on the material about like, I'm teaching some new courses this year and I'm having to go over all our material, right?
And I was like anxious about it in a way that I haven't been because I've been teaching the other courses I teach for many years.
But when you are in front of people and you end up, you know, teaching, it's just like, oh, no, I know this environment.
It's pretty much the same.
So that's like my safe space.
So yeah, that's the comedians, lecturers, you know, we're all the same.
Well, yeah, exactly.
If you put your hands in your pockets, you look confident and get through, get away with murder.
It's the truth.
And funnily enough, I found doing lately, doing book events, talking about the book, kind of going into the stand-up mode of talking about the subject rather than thinking, oh, no, I don't know.
I don't actually know what the tank production figures are for that year, you know, which my partner, James Holland, who I do the podcast with, he has this extraordinary retention and recall of information where he can tell you in that month the Americans are producing from this factory this many of this type of tank.
And then by contrast, you know, and it's, it's, it's sort of, it's sort of boggling to be around the way he just grabs this information and clearly has it in this incredible automatic filing system in his mind.
Well, that's that's that's perfect again, Al, because that's exactly how it is with me and Chris.
Chris has this has this like he's listened to like thousands of hours of this bullshit and he remembers every single thing that any of them has ever said.
Whereas me, I'm like you, I'm directionally correct.
I have the right, I have the vibe, but you know, he can dot the I's and cross the T's.
You know, that's our role.
Is it accurate that you've written like three books in the past three years?
Is that three and a half years?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Three and a half years.
Jesus Christ.
That's it.
You know, Gary Stevenson, he complains about writing one book and doing like a monthly, you know, YouTube video in his room with taffa kicks, but you've written three books.
Yes.
And I haven't heard you complain.
Two and a half.
I mean, well, if you'd spoken to me a year ago about the second book, you'd have, you'd have, you've got a rich scheme of rich seam of whinging.
And then, and then, but but, but, you know, the thing is, is what we're, what, what we're doing, I figured out my, and it's again, it's goes back, this goes back to the stand-up thing.
I figured out my voice.
I now know how to marshal the material within within my voice and my vibe, which is a great way of a great thing to call historiography.
Yeah, basically, that's my historiographical vibe, right?
I'm kind of not declinist, uh, blah, blah, blah, right?
But yeah, so I've kind of kind of got that worked out and how I like to tell the stories because I'm very much a believer in narrative history as much as any other kind.
And so if I'm going to, if I'm going to write, I'm going to try and tell a story or at least create an impression.
So that's why I've been able to write these books in such short order, I think.
Although I'm doing everything I can to avoid the next one I'm meant to be doing.
This is part of that process.
This is how long have you guys run to a long episode?
So that you help him.
Now, we told some of our Patreons that we'd be talking to, and they had some good suggestions for stuff we could ask you about.
And one of them I liked because it was quite topical because, you know, we had, what is his name?
Peter Hegseth, that American.
Yeah, you know, he gave that talk to all the American generals and he doesn't like fat generals.
So what's your opinion?
All fat generals?
Is there such a thing as a good fat general?
Were there any?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, the thing is, the thing is, there have been fat generals, there have been one-lunged generals, Norman Schwarzkopf, right?
Who I think, I mean, I'm older than you guys, but I remember the Gulf War I, the first Gulf War, Schwarzkopf was the guy, you know, that ran Operation Dessert Spoon, as you could say, given his girth.
And he was a fat general and he was regarded as a genius at the time.
So, you know, let's take pause.
And then Australia also has a real pedigree.
Mud Guts was his nickname.
I can't remember the general.
But he's this vast, this vast fat Australian general.
And you've got to admit that it doesn't.
The thing is, is once you've reached that level, the chances of you going having to do any running around, right, or cramming yourself into a foxhole, a slip trench, pretty unlikely, right?
So, you know, I think Hesket's probably got, he's probably got that wrong.
You know, Monty had one lung famously.
He'd been shot through a lung in the First World War, and the British Army was able to accommodate the guy and keep him going.
And he ends up our most successful field marshal in the war.
So, you know, but he was very skinny.
So I don't know if that really supports your argument.
He was extremely skinny.
But, you know, I'm sure if he'd had two lungs, he'd have managed to get fat.
I don't know.
Kublai Khan in the presentations I've seen.
He looks pretty, pretty chunky.
I mean, he's not a modern general, but he did pretty well.
I think, you know, I mean, when you can think about what the job actually is, you know, it's, I don't know, it's, it's, I think the problem is, I mean, if Esketh reminds me of anyone, it's that kind of Herman-Goering guy who regards the military as a great big train set to play with.
And he seems to be, he seems to be giving off that vibe.
Although the thing I really, really, really, really, really don't like is the immediate resort, resorting to the Nazis to explain modern history.
The problem that people seem to have.
You know, the last 20 years will tell you a lot more than Munich.
When people talk about Munich and appease me, they think, oh, for fuck's sake, right?
Can consider the last 15 years before you delve into the completely different set of power relationships that existed globally at the time to try and explain what a British government is doing now.
I mean, for heaven's sake, but yeah, fat generals are fine, I think.
And often, if the men like them, the men don't care.
It's the other thing from the history of warfare.
You know, if they think they're all right, they'll fight for them.
And that's what it matters.
And that's the thing.
That answers your question.
That makes sense.
You raised the specter of, you know, the Nazis, which was obviously going to come up.
And part of the initial thing that we found out that you had heard of the podcast at all was Matt complaining about, you know, accidentally sauntering into neo-Nazi content seriously.
Or at least very, very pro-German tank.
That might be the other way to put it.
But we did want to ask you about that because obviously in the content we're looking at, we're seeing people like Marturmead, Darryl Cooper, and revisionist history essentially reprising David Irvine stuff coming back to the fore.
But you, as a historian, podcaster, and in the podcast wave of history, you must have much more direct exposure to that.
So I'm kind of curious about your exposure or just general thoughts about the extent to which that is a problem, or is it just like a very online niche?
Or yeah, the weird arguments.
The wearaboo is, of course, the guy who won't hear anything against the German army.
Particularly the Wehrmacht, the German war machine, won't we hear anything against them?
And, you know, the thing is, is the thing is so much of this, and it's always, it's always existed this, and for obvious, for obvious reasons, you know, that there's a whole slice of people who don't want to don't want to face what Germany got up to, because you look at the contortions that go on when people try and address the imperial history in this country, in the UK, you know, lots of people don't want anything to do with it.
And of course, so you can see where the wellspring of it is, or well, the wellspring of it was immediately post-war.
You know, this extraordinary thing happens in Germany itself right at the end of the war when the Allies have laid waste to Germany in a way that I think often gets forgotten.
You know, if you were bought, if you're a German man born in 1921 or whatever, one in three of you were killed in the war.
It's like it's extraordinary.
Cities completely smashed and destroyed.
The country completely literally put to the sword in every way.
And almost immediately, right at the end of the war, or just after it, you get German people going, well, actually, we're kind of the victims in this because look at what's happened to us.
And they try and they try and insert some sort of victimhood into how they feel about the war, particularly as the horrors of the Holocaust are sort of making themselves known or making themselves known to people outside Germany, which I think is the sort of the important thing.
So you can completely see some of the sort of wellsprings of why people would engage in this kind of, the Wehrmacht weren't involved, which means my brother wasn't involved, which means my uncle wasn't involved.
There were good people.
There were still good people.
Whereas in fact, the vast quantity of evidence suggests the opposite.
It's just the army's entirely involved in all that sort of thing.
But this is mutated into this sort of extraordinary thing where if you even say, for instance, the historiography around May 1940, the German Blitzkrieg, if you want to call it that, and even that word in itself is amongst military historians is like a word wrapped in controversy.
No such thing as Blitzkrieg.
There's a really fantastic German author who's written a book called the Blitzkrieg myth.
I think he's called Carl Hans Friesler.
And his book says there's no Blitzkrieg.
It doesn't exist.
It's just the dice roll exactly the way the Germans need them to.
And it's pure fluke.
And their innovation of having tanks with radios and proper combined operations, as it will be called now, it just happens to work because the French do everything asked of them to deliver a German victory.
It's sort of, you know, blame the French.
So we're back in our happy place, right?
Anyway, the really interesting thing is if you people who question that, you suddenly get a whole thicket of guys popping up going, no, no, no, the Germans are exactly what they were doing.
And that is the sort of, that's the sort of starting point for all that.
But where that's mutated to is this really, really, really weird idealization of the German of the army.
And these people know they can't really include the SS, though by God, they try, right?
And this very peculiar phenomenon where, you know, James and I, James's angle, and he's more into this than I am.
His angle is actually, by the time the Allies start winning, the reason they're winning is not is not because of the sheer amount of stuff they've got, which is a sort of, which is a very popular argument about 20 years ago, you know, that they can now outperform industrially the Axis powers quite easily.
But James would say, yeah, that's not, that doesn't explain it because you've still got to fight well and you've still got to win and your fighting people are fanatical or entrenched at best in their, in why they're trying to fight on the Axis side.
So there's a better explanation than that.
And the pushback to that, the idea that the Allies were actually good at fighting, can be quite, you know, the vehemence of that response can be quite surprising, really.
So it sits in the historiography.
It sits in the history of the historiography, but then it also sits outside it, where it's people who are just trying one way or another to idolize the Third Reich.
And that is where it gets, I can understand in a way, the opening parts of that direction of travel.
But where those people are now, I simply don't understand.
There is no better documented event than the Third Reich.
There is no historical event.
There's been no more powerful magnet for research, for parsing the entire thing, for slicing it right down into it.
And not just in mainstream scholarship.
So that's the other thing.
Historians tend to avoid wars.
They think they're sort of grubby, dirty, unattractive things.
But the Second World War has nevertheless attracted incredible historians of incredible caliber who really are researching the thing down to the finest atom.
And, you know, because of its moral locus in our culture, the war and the Third Reich's moral locus, people want to understand it and explain it.
So when you have someone pop up and go, well, you know, no one's ever really looked at this before, or here's a thing no one's really ever thought about when it comes to the Holocaust, to think that you, you are mad.
You're not just mad, but you're not just mad, you're lazy.
You're so, these people are so lazy and incurious and in their own little Merbius strip of, hey, you know, no one's ever, no one's ever thought that the Germans might have been human beings before.
Oh, right, really?
Okay, you know.
And I think when it tips into that, rather than sort of historiographical arguments, which are worth arguing with, because they're worth like arming yourself against and to make your own case.
But those people, there's sort of, there's kind of no arguing with them because they're not interested in the argument.
They're interested in loving the Nazis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so interesting to me, the psychology of it.
I mean, it's got these parallels with like lost cause narratives of the American Civil War.
Yeah.
And, you know, you know, if you're a German and you, you're a reenactor, you're not allowed to reenact as the Nazis, of course, in Germany.
So they tend to go to the American stuff and reenact as Confederates or reenact as Confederates in Germany.
That's an actual phenomenon, which I think is amazing.
That's super interesting.
Yeah, because I think there's certainly a spectrum there.
Like on one hand, you've got you've got straight up neo-Nazis, right, who are keen on history.
Like there's them.
But I get the feeling that there's also a spectrum of people who are, and there's a couple of things contributing to it.
And you can probably think of more, but the first one I think of is one, there's that kind of conspiratorial kind of sense, right?
The conventional narrative of World War II, right?
What they taught you at school, you know, they didn't tell you about this.
And then they'll go into some fine, like, cherry-picked stuff like lifted from David Irving or something and make out that there's some different narrative you haven't told about.
And the second part, which is appealing psychologically, conspiracy theory is very appealing.
But I guess the second aspect is that there's a kind of romanticism there too, right?
And, you know, like the Nazis were kind of romantics in a very bad way.
And they're, you know, the struggle, the cause, the great men, that kind of thing.
And I think that's kind of appealing too, don't you think?
Well, yes, absolutely.
I mean, I'll give it a batshit example from one of my adventures.
10 years ago, I ran for parliament, right, in South Thanet during the 2015 election in the same constituency as Nigel Farage, because his shtick as a politician was very much, he's just an ordinary bloke who drinks pints and tells it like it is in pubs, right?
So I thought, well, he's stolen my act.
I might as well engage on his terms, but in a political setting.
And it was really good fun.
And we wrote a manifesto that was just jokes and we were responding to the way the election was being done by everybody.
So if Labour pledged 5,000 nurses, we would immediately pledge 5,001, right?
Because of the sort of inanity of electoral politics, the way it's campaigned here.
Anyway, on my Facebook page, a whole load of people will immediately pop up going, I can't believe it.
You know, I thought you were a regular solid patriot like me.
And here you are, here you are, running the country down and a good, solid patriot like Nigel.
So immediately you'd have to go, A, it's a joke.
B, the point of a democracy is anyone can run.
That is the point of it.
And if anyone can't run, then it isn't one, right?
Okay.
And democracy can cope with being mocked, right?
Come on, lads, get with the program.
And one of the, and these are also the kind of people who say the great thing about this country, it's got the greatest sense of humor in the world until you start laughing at them, right?
Anyway, further, one of these guys, he's posting me and he's posting to me relentlessly.
And I did that thing, which you just, which really, my wife always says, why are you doing this?
Because it's good sport, right?
And I'd reply to him every night.
I'd reply to him going, sorry, Dave, that isn't the case.
This is what we're doing, you know, or whatever his name was.
And eventually one night he writes to me going, I know this isn't Almari.
I know it's some poor young woman writing for being forced to rock work for him who's sending this reply.
And I, you know, so conspiratorial thinking, right?
Immediately, right?
Can't be, can't really be me.
It's got to be someone else.
And then he said, well, I'm going to leave you with this.
And he posted a YouTube video about how the men fighting in the Wehrmacht against the Bolsheviks were true patriots.
And it's that kind of patriotism that really is the most inspiring thing, right?
And this is a guy who up to this point was all, you know, Union Jackson, a true British patriotism, has somehow, in his true British patriotism, flipped to supporting our most existential enemy of all time.
Right, well, but you're exactly right, because that was presented entirely.
And the thing is, what's so interesting about a lot of this is a lot of this is Nazi propaganda that's still working because Blitzkrieg was Nazi propaganda.
They spun this idea of Blitzkrieg out of their victories against enemies basically who hadn't been preparing with the same intensity as them for the three, four, five years, because the difference between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world was the rest of the world thought another world war would be a terrible fucking business and we'd rather not get involved in one.
Whereas they were like, well, maybe, maybe we can get away with it this time, right?
And the whole that Operation Barbarossa is presented, the attack on the Soviet Union is presented across Europe and to conquered Europe and to non-aligned Europe and to the Finns, for instance, as the opportunity to destroy Bolshevism, right?
And people do really take Bolshevism very, very seriously in Europe after the Russian Revolution.
And I think that we've got to remember that, you know, and particularly on the left, people have got to remember it was to an awful lot of people and not just people on the right and not just aristocrats and not just royal families.
It was a very, very scary and tumultuous prospect.
And so they present the war on the war, the war in 1941 against the Soviets as a crusade, essentially, as doing the right thing to save us all from this terrible threat.
And the thing is, loads of that lingers.
And particularly if you are someone who is fully signed up to hate communism, like an awful lot of right-thinking people who don't see themselves as right-thinking people who don't know what communism is, after all, because it's long gone as a prospect, right?
Or even a thing to look at properly.
You can see that appeal.
You can completely see that that propaganda has been incredibly powerful and lingered.
And I think, you know, as you said, they were romantics, the Nazis, absolutely.
And they were very, very good at transmitting that romanticism and plugging in.
I mean, and I think this is what's so interesting about them.
They were very good at plugging into old, deep European currents of expression, not of nation, perhaps, but of sort of chivalric notions.
And they're also really brilliant at plugging into old European hatred, which is how they're able to amplify anti-Semitism to where they get it to, and how they're able to take this idea of a European culture that needs defending from, again, defending, because Bolshevism, after all, to them is Jewish, Judeo-Bolshevism.
They're interchangeable.
And so, and that, that, again, you end up, you end up, that's where you end up if you investigate what this wrote what this romantic notion of of nation and patriotism that the Nazis are transmitting and that these people have grabbed on to.
Yeah.
I mean, the ironies abound because, I mean, on one hand, the transposing to the present day, I'm personally incredibly hawkish about Ukraine and Russia's current thing.
But at the same time, there is a kind of a similar narrative to the one you describe, which is this kind of preserving Western civilization, i.e.
European civilization against its enemies.
And it's kind of the same kind of people that are prone to romanticize World War II.
Well, yeah, well, absolutely.
I mean, the thing is, everyone says everyone, you always say your enemy is decadent.
You always say your enemy is decayed and collapsed into a decayed moral state, don't we?
I mean, that's what people say about Russia.
It's that it's collapsed into our idea of a moral decay.
And they're saying we've collapsed into their idea of a moral decay.
I mean, this is all conflict as culture as conflict, route one.
But I think, yeah, and that's definitely what people are tapping into.
But I mean, you look at the, you know, you can, then you get into those people who say, well, Churchill started the Second World War.
And you think, well, think about a job doing that because he wasn't prime minister.
Come on, stop being so lazy.
I think you can construct an argument at least.
The parallel about like being frustrated with laziness, like I endlessly complain to Matt about this.
And I see, like we talked to Flint Debo, you know, the archaeologist who dealt with Graham Hancock.
And it's a really consistent complaint.
It's like there's like an endless appetite for people talking about, you know, how nobody studied World War II or that like we're going to do a 12-part series reassessing Hitler's role in it and finally looking at it.
And an incredible lack of interest in the actual like effort that would be, you know, to go and even just like something very simple, like watching a documentary series about World War II.
Like that, you're not even talking about getting into the archives.
It's just like the basic thing.
And we find that with the guru type people, that there's almost this kind of sense that other people might need to do that, but in a part because they have such an ersat understanding and like a different way of looking that they don't really need to do the, you know, the research in the same way other people have done.
So yeah, I wonder if it's like that kind of attitude amongst alternative historians and alternative archaeologists and the secular guru set.
Well, I think it kind of must be.
Although, I mean, it's very interesting.
You mentioned David Irving because earlier, because he is the guy, he is the guy that people run back to if they want to say, particularly, you know, like a thing like Dresden, when people talk about the bombing of Dresden, it's always Irving's research.
And Irving, for a very long time, had this reputation.
He was the only guy who really, whoever went, you know, they'd say this.
He's the guy who went to the German archive.
He'd go into the German archive and he'd find the stuff and he could speak German.
There was always sort of incredulity in the British historical kind of side of things.
He can speak German, this guy, and he's going to the German archive.
Whoa.
You know, like it's like his cheat code.
But then it, then, of course, it turned out that he was making up the, or at least misquoting stuff, misdirecting in his footnotes and all this sort of thing, and was doing exactly what you're talking about, where the case was too much for him.
Making the case was the point.
And if he found the evidence, he'd use it.
And if he couldn't, he wouldn't.
And I think that cherry picking, and it's the, you know, if you're cherry picking from David Irving, who was cherry-picking anyway, you know, these are extremely delicious cherries, aren't they?
They're irresistible, but quite misrepresentative of the harvest, as it were, of cherries in general.
Because, I mean, this is the other thing.
You know, the war is, the war is so complex.
And as I've, I mean, inevitably we've been doing the podcast now for longer than the Second World War endured.
Who are the real?
Again, this feels like us.
We'll spend 40 minutes talking about a 10-minute bit of content.
Go on, go on.
And the thing is, as I get further into it, I feel like I do know a lot more about it than I did when I started, but I feel like I know a vanishingly tiny amount and that there's so much, so much to take on.
There's so much to think about.
And, you know, we end up down these rabbit holes.
And I think that's a very interesting thing in the study of history, that very often the rabbit hole can be so interesting and tempting in itself that you use that to explain everything else.
And I've been guilty of that myself along the way where, you know, I ended up having, this is how dry someone came.
I didn't really read this book the other day about British tank production and industrial policy during the Second World War.
You know how to live.
Honestly, Hycro Steel produced by the English Electric Steel Company between the world.
Anyway, it doesn't flake, man.
Anyway, the point is, I read this book and was so taken with its approach.
I've gone and come up, you know, we did it on the podcast the other day.
And I know we're going to get some, we're going to get some knowledgeable pushback.
I've gone, this is just the other way of looking at this completely.
It flips on the head, the established way of looking at it.
No one's ever really thought about it like this before.
You know, and everyone wants a shortcut, right?
Everyone, or shortcuts are tempting, right?
And if you can get down one, you'll take it.
And I've been doing this myself.
And so you can completely see the appeal of it.
But you've got to read the flipping books, lads.
This is the thing.
You know, I mean, when I listen to one of those sense makers conversations and they're tossing these ideas around that are like, oh, yeah, of course, it's, and that, that fake agreed vocabulary where they, they nod, then the yes anding and the nodding along, I think is, you know, you could do that in improvisational comedy because that is what you do in improvisational comedy.
you do yes the point is to make people laugh i think i think you'd appreciate them as a good fictional character um If only they were fictional.
But another thing I wanted to ask you, because you've covered it quite recently, is The Babylon Britain.
So it's, you know, everyone knows the Babylon Britain.
Good, good, stirring story.
You know, great, great story on any level.
But there's one aspect of it that I think is super interesting, and I bet you do too, which is the kind of contrast between the sort of management style, for one of the better phrase between the two sides.
And like we're saying before, there is This kind of narrative of blitzkrieg and like amazing tactics and glamour and breakthroughs.
And they were so amazing.
And people like the French and are very bad.
But what's so sort of funny to me is just how inept the German organization and planning was.
And it wasn't entirely their fault, but it is in contrast to the doubting system and stuff.
Which sort of, I mean, I know it's dangerous to draw narratives and stuff like that from these stories, but it did sort of strike me as kind of like you could think of it as a bit of a contrast between a kind of like a liberal technocratic approach to things where you actually consult with people and you actually have experts and you listen to feedback versus these sort of bloviating blowhards,
Goering, much like our gurus, just spawning in, being incredibly lazy and just sort of sweeping their hand to say, go do it and living it at that.
Like, yeah, what's your take on that?
No, I think, I think that's it.
That's it in a nutshell.
But I think what's so interesting is that for a very long time, people haven't wanted to tell it that way around.
And the British version of the Battle of Britain or the British mythical version of the Battle of Britain, really stuck like glue for ages was poor little Blighty defending itself.
We've only got a handful of fighter planes.
They haven't had any training.
You know, they're stuck up in the air and the ruthless German efficient war machine, all this sort of stuff.
And actually, it's the other way around, that the ruthless, efficient war machine is fighter command at that stage with its doubting system, with its early warning system, and its way of delivering force as best it can and all this sort of stuff.
And that is the product of committees and of lobbying and of technocratic people making technocratic decisions and being allowed to get on with it.
And really fascinatingly as well, because there's a point where Max Beaverbrook, who's like the most amazing, weird figure.
And when people want to talk about, you know, Churchill as this fantastic war leader, just look at the people around him.
I mean, you know, Brendan Bracken, for instance, is this absolutely extraordinary Anglo-Irish Australian.
I mean, he's the free.
Right?
Yeah, there we are.
Who is the world's most persistent liar, right?
He's amazing.
He claims to be an orphan, then his mother turns up.
His dinner party trick during the war is to say, oh, my brother died at Norway.
And they go, oh, that's terrible, Brent.
And the next dinner will be going, my brother died in the battle for France.
And they all know it's, they all know he's like, anyway, but the point is, there are people like that around Churchill, but he's using them and containing them.
So there are bloviating, difficult people on the Allied side too.
But because it's a liberal system, it can cope with them.
So for instance, Max Beaverbrook comes in as Minister of Air Production and he says, we're only going to build the three types we need from now on.
We're cancelling all development.
We're cancelling everything else.
And what happens is those companies that are developing, say, the Lancaster, which we end up having to use in large amounts or the Mosquito, they carry on developing them because they think, well, we're not really going to do as we're told, thanks very much.
Whereas on the other side of the fence, if Goering issues Einbefeil, that all aircraft have to be designed to be dive bombers, all the aircraft manufacturers, oh, God, we've got to start again.
We've nearly finished this plane.
It's nearly brilliant.
But now we've got to, now we've got to do what the mercurial, misguided opium addict has told us to do.
And you're, you know, the guy running the German Air Force is a junkie politician.
He's, he's, I mean, he's very clever going, but he's also, he's also all over the place.
So, I mean, the extent to which people are allowed to contradict themselves within the Nazi system is really quite fascinating.
You can literally say one thing one day and another the next, and everyone has to do as they're told.
And so the Luftwaffe is chaotic, entirely chaotic.
It can't, you know, the progress of the Battle of Britain is it can't make up its mind, A, what its task is, B, whether, B, whether the thing it's doing it for is ever going to happen, the invasion of Britain, because that's all like, no one's made their mind up.
And then they can't pick which target to strike in Britain to bring about whatever it is, the first thing that they haven't decided on, and so on.
And the chaos, the chaos very much plays to the British advantage.
And it's the opposite of the plucky few and the ruthlessly efficient German war machine.
How different the legend is from the story, from the history, it's really striking.
And I think talks speaks to what people use history for, because I'd rather that we were plucky and the underdog in that story than the ruthlessly efficient war machine, which is what Britain was at the time and went on and certainly went on to be.
But yeah, I mean, it is also, but it is also liberal democracy versus autocratic basket full of lunatics.
And, you know, and again, everything reveals, history reveals something about the past, at least, maybe what there is to learn, but maybe not.
Because, you know, you could say that liberal democracies are now sort of constipated in their inability to make decisions.
You know, you could argue that too.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's so dangerous to sort of make those broad sort of conclusions.
But it is tempting, isn't it?
Because when you look at the sort of, it was almost run in a feudal kind of fashion, wasn't it?
The Nazi war machine.
There were these, you know, these fiefdoms and, you know, people like, you know, backdoor deals and so on.
So it had a feudal character to it, which is fundamentally less efficient, you're tempted to conclude.
But in that culture, they're still able to, you know, and you say, I think it's interesting you say feudal, because they're able to amplify the kind of those old European feudal ideas of war and conflict that they then milk for their purposes.
So they are thinking that frame.
I mean, I think the other thing is really, I mean, there's a Study Blue, which is the intelligence officer, Beppo Schmidt's assessment of the Royal Air Force before the Battle of Brin.
It's basically a bloke going, yeah, I reckon they've got like 300 of those.
Yeah, I reckon that.
Well, maybe, but maybe, maybe 150.
But, you know, they've probably got another 40 of those.
And it's all made up.
Yep.
And it is a bloke, literally.
It's a dude going, yeah, I reckon.
But that's a perfect illustration, because, of course, what counts in a feudal type system is loyalty and telling the boss what he wants to hear.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
You know, at the start, you mentioned all of it, like the kind of concern around that there only is like one historic event, which anybody draws parallels to, which tends to be World War II, right?
Yeah, right.
And for good and for ill.
But at the same time, Matt and I, we are guilty of this in our own ways, but in part because we noticed that, like, people like Jordan Peterson, who, you know, present themselves as being students of history, like you said, you know, kind of aware of the horrors of the communist regimes and writing the foreword to the Gulag archipelical.
But at the same time, they seem to have, like, they display the characteristics, you know, that would have set them up.
I'm not saying to be good Nazi officers.
I'm not suggesting, you know, like such a character.
But I mean more like what Matt's talking about, like all the stuff around Trump, all the thing in the guru sphere, it does feel very, very feudal, very personality focused and very deferential to big men authority figures.
And it might be a lack of imagination, but, like, for me and Matt, we probably equally reference the French court.
I don't even know if the French court's true that bad.
But we constantly reference French courts and also the kind of personality cults that exist around dictators and totalitarian regimes.
So I wonder, do you want to chastise us for drawing those comparisons or do you think there's, you know, a kernel of truth in them?
I think, well, it's human behavior, isn't it?
There's a kernel of truth in all of it.
This is the thing.
Although, again, this is the thing James Holland always says.
He says, you know, he doesn't think the history repeats itself.
He says, you know, he doesn't think the history of the world.
He doesn't think that that thing of history rhymes, which is too neat, right?
Too much like a greetings card.
But the fact is, is human beings and what they want hasn't changed that much.
They may refract it through different belief systems or worldviews.
Because after all, the thing to remember about a medieval court is they don't believe in demons.
They think they're real.
You know, their view of the universe might be different, but they still get jealous.
They're still hungry.
They're still attracted to power.
And I think power is what this is all about, really, when you look at this.
Last year, or this year, Jim and I did this book about the end of the war, about the surrenders at the end of the war.
And the first surrender was in Italy.
But there's a side story to the Italian surrender, which is these two SS officers, Calton Brunner and Wolf, who are the two deputies, Himmler's two deputies, right?
And that's classic Nazi divide and role.
You give two people the number two position so that they basically intrigue against each other rather than you.
And that's why, you know, that's why there are so many people in the frame to succeed Hitler as Führer in the event of his departure, because then they can all just get on with fighting each other and they have to come to him for the nod on anything.
Anyway, Calton Brunner and Wolf are in direct competition with each other.
What's really interesting about them is they are absolutely died in the wool, ideological Nazis.
They are totally bought into the program, both involved in the Holocaust and so on, right up to the moment where they realize it doesn't serve them any advantage.
And then they are going to see Alan Dulles in Bern in Switzerland on secret trains to try and get themselves out of the noose they know is coming.
And I think so much of this is about power is that people are a golden law in human behavior.
Some people are drawn to power and will do anything to get their hands on that power.
And of course, the minute the power sluices out of the Nazi system, those two guys immediately, they go to the Americans because they go, well, that's where the power is.
And you see so many people, after all, East Germany is, I think, an interesting example of you have a society that is as cashed in on Nazism as anyone else.
You know, Prussia voted for the Nazis, is what people in Bavaria would say, you know, turning itself into the DDR kind of overnight, right?
And yes, there are dissidents and people who don't fit in, but an awful lot of people, they go, well, that's where the power is.
And I think one of the things I love about the Second World War as a topic is you could just read about the economics if you wanted and not hear a shot fired, as it were, on a page.
You could just read about the technology.
You could look at the newspapers.
You can do anything with it.
And the study of power and how power manifests itself and what it does to people, what it makes them do, or what they think they need to do to get themselves close to it, is as much part of the story as anything else.
And I think, you know, you can see it in the gurusphy.
Power is influence.
Influence is power.
People are drawn to one another.
They're drawn to each other's power and they back each other's power up.
I mean, you did have a really great episode a while ago.
You were saying where they're all going, well, I've been on his podcast.
He's been on my podcast.
They've been on their podcast.
That shows I must be good because I'm drawn to the people where the action is, where the power sits.
And I think that's the sort of thing that really leaps, that really leaps out as a comparison.
But you can do that with, like you say, with the feudal court too.
Yeah.
I had a just a follow-up.
I'll just a quick one before I forget, which was like when you were talking at the start there about like comedian, you know, performing on stage and finding your voice and all that kind of thing.
Like, I don't have an idealist image of comedians, but I did have the general view that like if there was a like a group of people that were going to take the piss out of politicians, that that would be comedians, right?
And then I've witnessed, like, you know, you know, you had the Riya comedy festival, but that's, that's kind of understandable.
That's just people being motivated by their own pocketbook.
I understand that.
But the bit, the bit that I'm a little bit more, and I'm curious about your thoughts on, is like, I seen Jimmy Carr, right?
And I've seen him do like stand-up where he's very quick-witted, very self-deprecating, and like, you know, very whatever, acid-tongued.
And then I saw him on Joe Rogan, basically prostrating himself at Rogan's feet, talking about, you know, I've started doing cold plunges.
This is great, all this.
And then talking about comedians as like philosophers and it should be taught in schools as like a stand-up needs to be a foundational subject.
And I've seen that so much from a whole, you know, like there's the field comedian set to podcaster, which is a thing in itself.
But there is also the thing where there's genuinely, you know, comedians with skill and yet they seem to have kind of lost their bite or kind of they take themselves too seriously.
And now it's part of the deal of a comedian is you have to be self-deprecating because as soon as you come across as like, you know, genuinely arrogant and not playing an arrogant character, you're an arsehole.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting point because if you're of the left and you take yourself seriously and talk seriously about things and you're a comedian, no one bats an eyelid.
And in fact, it's kind of you'll hear all those if you're because I've always said I'm a, you know, as a comic, as a comedian, I'm a floating voter or I'm a culture war conchie.
You know, I'm not taking a side.
I'm here to, you know, if there's a Labour government, it's my job to take the piss out of them.
If there's a Tory government, it's my job to take the piss out of them.
If I'm a, if I'm a comedian who takes the piss out of politicians, right?
That surely stands to reason.
And you do get this thing where people hit the buffers when you get a left-wing government here where they don't quite know.
You see people unable to, oh no, you know, I've got what I want.
Now, what do I do?
It's got an element of that.
But you're absolutely right.
Your job is to take the piss.
And the minute you take yourself seriously, you're not a comedian anymore.
You could take what you do seriously, fine.
But the minute you're taking yourself seriously, I think you're kind of, or you're in trouble.
It's going to get more difficult.
And this is a thing.
I mean, I often, because I've been involved in free speech arguments here, you know, there's this Twitter joke trial ages ago, which was when a guy did an ill-advised, it wasn't an ill-advised speech.
I mean, it was just a, it was a tweet.
It was about how he was going to blow an airport up if this girlfriend's flight was delayed.
And it's obviously a joke, right?
Anyway, and it ends up at the high court.
We end up with the appeal court and all this sort of thing and it goes away.
And I always worry about being a comedian and getting involved in free speech arguments because very often what I'm trying, what I'm deploying those arguments to defend is knob gags, right?
It feels like it feels like a terrible waste of proper arguments that are about important things in order to defend my right to call someone a dickhead, right?
It always feels a bit, you know, like, you know, of a waste.
But the thing is, but I'm going to arrive at my point, don't worry.
But the thing is, no, no, but the minute comedians start talking about truth to power, you know, they think they're important.
The minute comedians start saying, you know, it's up to us to stand up and tell it like it is.
I thought that was journalism's job, right?
You know, the minute that language gets involved, and I think it's very, very interesting that what's happening on the sort of right-hand side is that what they're doing is they're not telling truth to power.
They're sucking up to it really.
And so much of the language around comedy about punching up, who says we're punching?
You know, like, why do you have to bring violence into this?
I'm taking the piss.
I'm flicking V's.
I'm blowing raspberries.
But so much of the language has reached that point that now that people on the right are doing the sort of opposite, it makes them look.
I mean, you know, I mean, I find it all, I find it, I find the part of the problem is a lot of these arguments around comedy are no conversations comedians never have.
I don't, you know, at a club, we're not sat while they're waiting to go and go, you know, so tough.
I've had a hard week telling truth to power.
I don't know about you.
You know, you obviously haven't been in the green room in the Austin Carnegie series.
Exactly.
But I think one of the things, I think one of the other things that's also happened is the people on the right, and this is the thing that really, really boils my piss, have completely adopted the language of offense for themselves.
It used to be the left were humorless, right?
And that was kind of like priced in.
And you weren't allowed to make jokes about vegans.
Oh, whatever, you know, like, fine, that was all part of the deal.
But now that they're taking offense on the right, they're meant to be the tough guys.
They're meant to be the guys who, it's just a joke, buddy.
Take it, you know, which is what they've used.
They've used themselves to defend themselves from all sorts of things.
And they've abandoned that.
and it's pathetic watching them crying to their I don't know no it's true We've seen a lot of that, like a lot of importation of things that we've previously associated with, I don't know, whatever, wokelift type stuff.
The right in America have really picked up on all those things.
I'm thinking of the Charlie Kirk thing recently, for instance, a lot of the language they were using there.
Well, no, because We did, I'm working on this spitting imagery boot, which is the old British satirical puppet show.
And we're doing it online now.
We're doing it on YouTube because we don't, means we don't have a broadcast to deal with.
And we did a thing, the Charlie Kirk mourn-a-thon, right?
Nothing says mourning like pyrotechnics.
You know, Trump going, saying, I dodged my bullet, just saying, you know, because he would say that.
He said, I prefer guys who don't get injured or whatever.
He said, that's a wounded veteran.
You know, and then about saying about his wife, look, she's newly single.
How about that?
You know, it's just occurred to me.
She's hot, right?
Because, and we don't have to change anything.
We just have to have him say it, right?
And it's completely in character.
And we had a load of pushback going, why are you mocking a man's death?
And we were not.
We were not.
And they know that.
They know that.
You know, we were mocking the, I think we called it Charlie Palooza.
You know, we were mocking that because that's what it had become, right?
And I think the way they've taken on the language of offense, it saddens my soul because they're meant to be, how am I meant to look to the right for like moral toughness and resilience if they're all crying about jokes?
No, no.
Well, Chris and I were just recording our supplementary materials and we had Eric Weinstein talking to the English bloke.
What's his name, Chris?
Piers Morgan.
Piers Morgan.
Yeah, yeah.
And speaking of free speech, Eric was giving him, was saying, look, there are people that you shouldn't be talking to.
You know, you just shouldn't have, you shouldn't be platforming these kinds of people.
It's like, oh, dear.
Well, in Eric's case, it means like he's not talking about, you know, the various virulent anti-Semites that he always saw, the conspiracy theorists.
He means the various physics professors and whatnot that have said that he's starting to criticize.
He's personal enemies.
That's what he means.
Yeah.
Well, Al, Al, Al, we can't let you go before I ask you, you know, one final question from, you know, and, you know, you can feel free to put your pub landlord persona on to answer this one if you want.
The question is, who were the best Allied infantry in World War II and why were they Australian?
Many people have been asking me this question and I've agreed to pass it along to you.
Well, if you consider the Australian as the refraction of the perfect Englishman, sent abroad with a sprinkling of Irish people to keep them on their toes and then cooked in the perfect environment for hardening them, toughening up for battle in disgusting places, then that explains it.
It was all part of the deep imperial project to create the finest fighting soldiers of the times.
The blossom of the empire.
I like this out of that.
I like that as a final question, but I have a sort of downer question to give to Al as well, because I'm just curious.
Al, like in this ecosystem that we've talked about, and with your pub landlord character, right, and the rise of reform and stuff, is it possible for that character to, you know, like, how, how can he exist when there's so little humor around, you know, the whole reform thing?
And whatever you do with him, I guess it kind of feels like you're either going to upset the reform voters or like not being taking the threat seriously enough.
So I'm kind of curious, like, what do you do?
Well, I mean, that's a really, really, really good question.
And I've found that, I mean, I think that I think the thing is, I've been doing what I've been doing for such a long time that the people who know what I'm about are on board.
So I haven't got to sort of, I haven't got to kind of re-configure it because I'm writing a show now.
I'm going out in January.
So I've got to write a new show.
And last year, in the last tour, I had a thing about the Rwanda policy and I, you know, which is, which is this idea that anyone coming to Britain illegally said to Rwanda immediately, right?
So a whole thing about that.
And basically, what the landlord said was, before we start sending those people who, because I could do a whole thing about how, you know, they at least want to come here, but, you know, they're actually, they're trying to get here.
You know, they're brave as well.
They're rowing across the English Channel.
They've no regard for health and safety.
That's a good thing, right?
All these things.
Because the great thing is you can, you can, you can, because it's all contradictions.
You can use the different, you can use them to argue in any way, you know, that healthy disregard for health and safety there is very much a thing.
Again, like it's a kind of tough guy right wing position, I think, really.
You can say it's a killjoy thing or you can take it more, you can take it further.
But basically, if you're rowing across the English channel without a life jacket on, you're, you're made of the right stuff, right?
People need to remember this.
So I had a routine about how basically, um, before we send those people to Randall, we need to clear house.
And you can immediately go, Jesus Christ, what did what do you mean?
And then it's people who, people who don't stop at zebra crossings, people who, people who, you know, vapors for two, what is it, too scared to smoke, too weak to quit.
People who, and a whole long list of like annoying things.
So you can use that energy, that idea of having to send people somewhere else and flip a whole load of other things into it.
So the, so it is, I don't know that it's any trickier than it, than it, than it ever has been.
And in a weird way, kind of the hardest time was when for writing stuff, because I came up with the Punlander when we had a conservative government in the last bit of the 90s, before we got Tony Blair.
And the first two, three years of Blair were difficult because basically people thought, well, we've got past obloviating right-wing people.
We're kind of in a, we're kind of in a more stable position.
What's he going to take the piss out of?
And then, of course, we have all these wars that were quite useful for writing jokes about, you know, that's business, man.
You think some events will help.
But I think, yeah, it is an interesting time, but it doesn't, to be honest, it doesn't worry me too much because I'm so with the character, we're so we're so weighted in with the bullshit.
I can, I know, I think I can pretty much sell it any way I want with the audience.
And the, and the feet, the other thing, I think what is also happening with reform, and I hope I'm right about this, is it's the two parties.
You know, the two parties have failed or appearing are appearing to have failed so spectacularly.
It isn't anyone.
It feels to me at the moment like an anyone but them vote.
It really does, rather than a, I need, we, we need to set fire to some immigrant hostels this afternoon vote.
It does, it does feel, it does feel like that.
And it might, and it, it may not feel like that in a couple of years' time, of course.
Um, but that's how it feels to me.
But I might be, you know, I've been wrong before.
Yeah.
Every chance of doing it again.
Yeah, that, that reminds me of the one nation phenomena in Australia, where, you know, similar, similar kind of xenophobic kind of note.
But, you know, it really, you know, and it worried a lot of people because you have this big, suddenly this big swing and this big sort of jump.
And, but it really did reflect, in hindsight, just a, just a general disgruntlement with the two major parties who are boring and incompetent in all the normal ways that they tend to be.
Yeah, you've been faced over and again with the same bullshit.
And you can, you can completely, I mean, I think what's interesting is that reform is still, it's around Farage and his ability to get away with political outcomes that are disastrous and spring up smelling of roses is quite, it's quite extraordinary.
You know, Brett, he did Brexit and we seem not to have quite figured out how good an idea that was yet or admitted it.
And, you know, that's entirely him.
If it's anyone, but he said, that seems to have been landed on the Conservative Party.
They seem to be having to take that body blown now.
But I don't know, it could all change.
And after all, when people talk about this government being unpopular, you know, the Thatcher government before the Falklands War was colossally unpopular and had done things that had really caused massive economic upheaval.
And then the other side of the world, you know, a fascist junter that was in trouble completely rescued her.
And I mean, I'm sure some sort of wearaboo equivalent will pop up and tell me that's not true.
But, you know, that's quite a conventional view of events.
And that's been forgotten.
You know, Thatcher, the Tories think Thatcher was amazing full stop, whereas in fact, she was disastrously unpopular until Fortune came to her rescue.
Yeah, I mean, I like, you know, speaking, you know, you mentioned before, histories are so interesting.
There's just like the details and all of the little things.
And I've been on a deep dive into kind of 1970s Britain, like before Margaret Thatcher.
And the God.
I know.
It was like a dark time.
Like it was an incredible time in many ways.
And that was the that was the scene that was set.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's all and it's and it's as ever, it's a big economic event.
So it's the oil crisis and the, you know, just tosses, tosses all of Western Europe into chaos.
And it was, I mean, I remember, I mean, again, I'm old.
I remember the power cuts.
I remember the lights going out and all this sort of thing that we had in the early 70s.
And you've got, and you also had, you know, what was happening in Northern Ireland at the same time.
You had IRA bombings in the UK mainland every week.
You had strikes all over the place.
Yeah.
And the government, the British government not just not knowing what to do in Northern Ireland either.
And, you know, sending shop troops and stuff to police people.
A wildly stupid thing to have done.
I agree.
You only depended on Chris.
You only depended on Chris.
You look at it and you think, what were they thinking?
And they weren't.
They obviously weren't.
They just had no idea how to deal with it at all.
Even though, you know, you're into your what?
100th year of the possible discontent in that part of the world.
I mean, you know, anyway.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
So the scene, the scene of the 70s, when it's set for, you can see why, again, you can see why Thatcher would get in, but then her medicine is almost disastrous for her.
I mean, I really sort of always shy away from this, but it would really be great if more people knew more history is how I end up saying in sort of a boring way.
I think that's an excellent note, Endon, because I totally feel the same way.
I never, like at school, history was really boring.
They had terrible history teachers and I hated it.
I didn't study any history at uni.
And I've just been reading books and just consuming it in podcasts and in any form I can my entire adult life.
And yeah, as a middle-aged psychologist these days, I'm like, you can tell a lot about, you know, human nature and how things go on in societies and in any way we organize ourselves by seeing ourselves in all these different contexts and all these different scenarios throughout recorded history.
So I endorse this.
This is DTG endorsed.
That's right.
Yeah.
So you can, for people that don't know, they're already hard at the start, but Al has a podcast.
We have ways of making you talk.
100 books more to come.
Yeah.
And is a comedian on occasion.
So yeah, plenty of places to check him out.
And we appreciate you coming on and talking about.
I love your work, fellas.
I love that someone has grasped the nettle and walked into the fire of bullshit so that someone else doesn't have to do it.
I think it's, you know, when I listen to, when I listen to, if I've got a really long drive, I'll put some sense making on.
We're actually going to speak to face to face with a sense speaker later in the month.
So that will be.
It's going to be wild.
Yeah.
But I got to say too, Al, but like when, you know, I was having a little rant about the wearaboos and stuff like that.
And you, you popped up in my Twitter replies, I think, and with some comment.
And it was so cool because, you know, when you listen to, we listen to a podcast.
Oh, this person actually listens to our thoughts.
So yeah, it's a whole parasocial thing.
And all of the gurus do it, right?
This sort of mutual masturbation and stuff like that.
Well, that's what we're doing here, right?
So I can say I was on their podcast.
We'll get you on.
We'll get you on iOS to talk about psychology.
I mean, I can complain about Tom Holland.
Yeah, we want to talk about this thesis where everything is all due to Christianity.
