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Jan. 30, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:05:47
Delingpod 54: Kristian Niemietz
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I love Denny Pole, come and subscribe to the podcast baby I love Denny Pole, unless another time subscribe with me I love Denny Pole, come and subscribe to the podcast baby Welcome to the Denny Pole, with me James Denny Pole
And I've been thinking a lot about this week's guest, especially over Christmas, when I happened to be reading the autobiography of a panzer commander on the eastern front and then later on in the Normandy landing.
So obviously my thoughts turned instantly to my old friend Christian Nemitz of the IEA. Hello and my special friend.
Now, special friend avatars who haven't heard Christian before.
I think this is your third time on the podcast.
And I have to say, Christian, I love you.
I love you slightly less now you've got rid of your girly hair.
I thought that was quite amusing.
You had girly long tresses, didn't you?
Yeah, there was household internal lobbying for a change.
Oh, was there?
Yeah.
What, you mean wife?
Yes.
But I mean, it's been the same for more than a decade.
And before then, it was a decade before that.
So yeah, once every 12 years or so, maybe it's time for a bit of an overhaul.
In German marriages, does the wife traditionally wear the lederhosen?
Well, my case is a bit complicated.
She's from Paraguay, South American.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, doesn't speak a word of German.
Paraguay?
Where all the...
I know, I know.
How?
It has been pointed out by Twitter detractors, but...
I bet it has.
Yeah.
No, I got there several decades after, so I'm one of the good guys.
And I don't think I've seen you since...
I had my two stints in Germany.
I lived in Frankfurt for, I don't know, a fortnight?
And then another week I went back with my mum.
And I so loved being in Germany.
Yeah, you're so interesting about it.
Yeah.
Do you think that's perverted of me, that I love the Germans?
Not particularly.
I guess we all have our strange preferences.
It's just that...
I mean, of all the nations on Earth, I think Germans are considered fairer game than most for a good piss-taking, aren't they?
I mean, you know, I obviously...
Well, I mean, nowadays you have to have some group that you're still allowed to make fun of, especially in this woke day and age where almost everything is a taboo.
So I wouldn't want to take that away from you.
We're pretty much the last people on Earth.
Well, maybe Americans, maybe Swiss people...
That could not be declared a victim group.
I wonder actually whether it's because I'm iconoclastic and perverse that I've chosen the group that you're supposed to hate and I think they're fantastic.
Because I think basically you Huns are like us.
I think you have more in common with us than say the French do.
Even though obviously the French had a period where they influenced us.
But Germans I think we're brothers under the skin.
Yeah, we are not that different.
And it's also interesting that even though in Britain there's a very well-developed stereotype, this is a typical German, it doesn't actually exist in reverse.
If you ask people in Germany, how do you imagine, what's the idea of the typical Brit?
Most people wouldn't be able to come up with much.
It's mostly, if you have, for example, a movie that is set in Britain and it's dubbed, nobody would make much of the fact that it is originally British or for, let's say, some...
Bands, rock stars, pop stars that are popular over there, you would barely mention the fact that they're British.
The assumption is they're more or less like us.
They just drink warm beer, which isn't really true anymore, but that's the idea, and speak English.
Sometimes random thoughts.
I hear voices in my head sometimes, and the random voices in my head suddenly said to me, run Lola, run.
Have you seen them?
I might have ages ago.
I used to live in the area where it was shot.
Oh, right.
Yeah, but how old is that?
14 years ago.
There's a film that special friends who haven't seen it should see.
I think it was directed by the guy who went on to direct Babylon Berlin.
Would that sound right?
Have you seen Babylon Berlin?
I think the first episode.
Not the entire season.
I think really just one.
And then, I don't know, something happened.
I think it was just a promotional offer where you could see the first one and then not carry on.
I'd love to see.
I liked the description because it's set in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So you have the Republic falling apart and the various factions all hating each other.
That's right.
That's right.
Obviously, it's the...
It's the ground that led to the rise of the Nazis, that chaos.
And I think it's fairly accurate in its depiction that the Communists and the Nazis were pretty much the same, just happened to pick one particular side, but ideologically there's not a cigarette paper between them.
And it was very expensive to make.
I think it's the most expensive German production, TV production ever, even more than Das Boot.
By the way, have you seen the shit new, the remake of Das Boot?
No, I don't think I've even seen the original.
Have you not?
I'm a bit behind the times when it comes to movies.
Netflix series, maybe.
I didn't even have a TV for many years, so...
I'm so sad you haven't.
I can never get my pronunciation of Das Boot right.
No, that's perfect.
Okay.
I know that you do a lot of movie reviews, usually calling out implicit left-wing biases.
I do.
And woke biases.
Totally.
And actually, that's what bothered me about the remake of Das Boot.
Was it woke?
It's woke, because what they do is they, first of all, they find a way of sneaking a woman on board a submarine, which would never happen.
I think they have lesbian relationships, they managed to shoehorn those.
The glory of Dustboard, the original, with Jürgen Prochnow, I think, as the U-boat commander, was that it's a man's world.
And, you know, you're under the sea in this claustrophobic hell, and you're rooting for these guys.
It's very compelling, and it's true to its subject matter, whereas the new version is like, let's try and impose 21st century woke values on World War II. Which never works.
That doesn't sound like the most obvious combination.
No, no.
I try to ignore woke stuff in movies.
If it's not too in your face, then I think you've just got to accept that that is the zeitgeist now.
And if you concentrate too much on that, it would ruin a lot of movies and series for you.
No, I would rather...
Up to a point, I ignore it.
Yeah, fine, I have to do that.
I would rather ruin the movie for myself than go with the zeitgeist, because I think actually...
No, I don't mean going with the zeitgeist, but I mean just more passively accepting that the Wokies have won and that is not going to change, I think, in our life.
No, yes, but I think that's the fundamental difference between you and me.
I say rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It may be that death is inevitable in the same way that woke is inevitable, but I will never, ever accept it, and I will always point it out.
I mean, for example, just on the way here, There was stuff kicking off on Twitter about the new David Copperfield adaptation, which has got an actor of Indian heritage, let's say.
I'm not sure what his actual background is, playing David Copperfield.
And of course, the Wokarati is saying, well, I think this is just innovative casting.
To which I say, look, fine.
If you want to make David Copperfield the movie relocated to India, that will be absolutely fine.
No one's going to be saying, oh, Dickens didn't say it in India, that's all wrong.
It's when you start dicking around, I think, with the period where you start saying...
Depicting Victorian England, and yet depicting a Victorian in England, a bit like the one that's constantly invented by Doctor Who, where there are many, many more ethnicities than there would have been in Victorian England.
That kind of thing.
That, I think, spoils it.
But what I really object to, and I think why we should fight this stuff, is they are doing it to screw us over.
They being the Wokarati, the Wankarati.
What they are trying to do...
Is to make us notice and make us be bothered and shove it in our face and say, we are the masters now.
Ah, Weltanschauung is the one you must accept.
Ah, okay.
So, like, Theodor Dalrymple has that theory that a lot of communist propaganda was in that style, that it was meant to be obviously wrong, but that was their way of saying, we can say what you want.
Contradict us if you dare.
Yes.
That was more aware of showing power rather than trying to be persuasive.
It's absolutely it.
Well done.
Thank you for quoting Dalrymple.
It is a power play.
And that's why we should resist it.
Not because we're racist.
Not because most of us are kind of saying, well, white culture isn't going to last much longer and it's a shame and we should all be marching against it.
I know a few of my followers on Twitter sort of think that.
I'm not really there, but I do think that one has a duty to resist the liberal left's power plays.
Anyway.
Well, it depends on what you mean by resist.
I mean, I love trolling woke people as much as anyone.
You're good at it.
You are good at it.
I hope so.
That's the way to stay sane.
I'm just under no illusion that that is going to make a difference.
I have sort of accepted that they've won.
I think I can't change that, but I think I can make sure that they're not enjoying it too much.
Right.
I've seen my role more in that.
No, well, that's very good.
But starting with a certain pessimism just means that you won't be disappointed if you don't get very far with it.
Yes, yes.
It is one of my problems with Peter Hitchens, though, that his position is the purest pessimism.
He hasn't got anything to offer.
He isn't offering us any hope that we can reclaim some of our culture.
And actually, Scruton, dear...
Much missed Sir Roger Scruton said to me before he died in a podcast that the only way he thought that we could reclaim the ground is if we have a war.
We need something that dramatic to remind us what it is that really matters in the world and what it is that is just kind of...
Well, he got a small victory in the end that at least he was readmitted to that government commission that he was sacked from after the doctored quotes from George Eaton at the New Statesman.
So, yeah, fair play to him in that regard.
But nonetheless, the whole Scruton episode tells you a lot about the difference in attitudes between left and right nowadays that He was accused of various things because of these, well, doctored quotes, really, very selectively quoted, changing the meaning.
And the government immediately sacked him and caved in as their way of signaling, oh, no, we totally regret this and we're so, so sorry about this, about hiring such a terrible man.
That wouldn't have happened if, well, we do have direct comparisons where somebody on the other side gets accused of things.
Corbyn would never have sacked his advisors, Seamus Millen or Andrew Murray because of quotes unearthed by some Times reporter or Daily Telegraph reporter.
Well, it's interesting you say that.
And actually, this brings us quite neatly on to your book on...
Give me the title again.
I've got it in my bag.
Socialism, the failed idea that never dies.
Socialism, the failed idea that never dies.
Now, it's a question often asked...
By people on our side of the argument.
How come it's okay to go round in a Che t-shirt or to put up a communist flag at your rally?
But definitely for Bolton to wave a Nazi flag.
Not by the way that I think I have an urge to wave a Nazi flag, because I think the Nazis were leftists rather than rightists, but that's another matter.
But I find it extraordinary, as I'm sure you do, that at some of Corbyn's rallies, for example, John McDonnell, that they were surrounded by hammer and sickle flags.
Now, how many people died in the Soviet Union under the hammer and sickle flag, for example?
In total, if you include Maoist China, Cambodia and various other regimes, it's around 100 million people.
Right.
Now, every one of those people was an individual just like us with hopes and dreams.
They weren't just kind of statistics.
They were real people.
100 million people sounds to me an awful lot to just kind of brush away like a bit of dust on your sleeve as though, well, yeah, you know, omelettes and eggs and all that.
Yeah, I mean, the left generally makes the mistake of equating intentions with outcomes.
That is why they're so prone to thinking that their opponents must be evil people.
And that is also how they judge ideologies like socialism.
They look at the original intentions of Marx and Engels, the way they describe it, and in those descriptions, in the way early Marxists imagined it, it sounds rather lovely.
And they then compare it to the reality and think, okay, there is such an enormous gap between these original intentions and the outcomes that are then delivered.
They just cannot have been honest.
They then believed that, right, these regimes, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, wherever, must have been led by people who corrupted Marxism.
They didn't believe in the real thing.
They just used it as camouflage, as a way to come to power, used it opportunistically, but didn't really believe it.
They just cannot imagine that you could start with We're good to have actual pure socialist intentions and then end up creating such terrible outcomes, whereas with other totalitarian ideologies, Nazis in particular, It is just easier to see the connection between the ideology and the outcomes.
There is just no way somebody starting with the worldview that Hitler had could produce nice outcomes.
It's just clear right from the start, if you try to implement this in the real world, it's going to be bloody, it's going to be gory, and it's going to lead to massacres and mass slaughter.
Whereas, even if...
Even in the early writings, I mean, they may not literally have said we're going to build gas chambers, but they just talk about other groups of people in a way that makes clear that this is a dangerous ideology, they're up to no good.
That's not the case with Marxists.
They can make it sound nice when they talk about it in very abstract terms.
Well, yes, but surely...
One of my previous recent podcast guests was Roger Morehouse, who's just written a book about the Nazi and Communist invasion of Poland.
Yeah, we had him here on a panel.
Great.
And what was very interesting was, you know, if you put yourself in the position of...
Which part of Poland you would have been safer fleeing to under this kind of twin-pronged attack from Stalin and Hitler?
Where would you have been safest?
Well, obviously, if you'd been Jewish, you would be marginally safer under the communist.
They're not much.
If you were in any way a member of the...
The kind of upper classes or the upper middle classes, you definitely have been better off under the Nazis.
What I'm saying is, although the Nazis was an ideology clearly directed against certain declared undervention, the Jews and the Slavs, Is it not clear from...
I haven't read Das Kapital or any of the formative texts of communism, but is it not clear that there are class traitors who must be eradicated?
Sorry, a class enemy which must be...
Yes, that is always clear, and that is something that Lenin said in his early writings as well.
It's just that the difference is that the way he makes it sound is you would think, okay, this is a one-off thing, and maybe he's talking about a few hundred people.
But he makes it sound as if this is something that you resolve in the first couple of months after the revolution and then it will be roses and sunshine ever after.
So Lenin is already a little bit more militant because he anticipates that he might be in power in a couple of years.
I'm talking about a book that he wrote in 1917, a couple of weeks before he came to power.
And yes, he does very much say there will be counter-revolutionaries, there will be Capitalists fighting this and we have to oppress them.
So he doesn't say from day one it will all be jolly nice and everyone will get along.
But he also says we will need far less repression than a capitalist system.
So, he anticipates...
Ah, what aboutery?
Yeah, well, it's more that he thinks that there will maybe be a couple of dozen counter-revolutionaries, and in the first few days you shoot those.
He doesn't say shoot them, but he talks about them.
Delingpole, Rob Liddell, Brendan O'Neill.
Actually, would they kill Brendan, do you think?
Because Brendan keeps claiming to be a Marxist, doesn't he?
Yes, I can't see what's specifically Marxist about him.
I think it's more an attachment to that word.
But yeah, they would kill him too.
He would be on the list.
He would be on the list.
Would you be on the list?
Oh, absolutely, yes.
Very high up, I think.
I think, do you know what?
I think not just you and me and Brandon, but everyone listening to this podcast would be on the list because they'd have been corrupted by...
Well, either way, the list would get longer over time.
And that's what happened once Lenin was actually in power.
The way he anticipated it would be that you would have something...
An initial purge, but something that would be much smaller than what happened under Tsarism.
And, of course, the exact opposite happened.
The numbers of people arrested and shot or sent to Siberia was vastly greater than in the worst years of Tsarism.
And it got even worse later under Stalin.
So that is where the difference was.
It's not that Lenin said, we will never arrest anyone, we will never shoot anyone.
He does sort of allude to it.
But he clearly thinks it's going to be on a very minuscule scale.
And in that sense, it is fair to say he did not advocate mass slaughter.
So it's not there right from the start.
Whereas with Nazi ideology, it is an implication that there will be mass slaughter.
Right.
But I think, well, we're possibly splitting hairs here because it seems to me fairly much a given that anyone with an ounce of sense, Anyone with a grasp of history or an understanding of human nature...
You should be able to realize pretty much from the off that communism leads to bad, bad acts.
Yeah, I mean, we've tried it a couple of times and therefore it's a bit silly to say, oh, well, Marx didn't advocate this.
It doesn't matter what Marx originally advocated.
You can't just judge ideologies purely by the original intentions of the people who created them and then Ignore the next hundred years, pretend nothing else ever happened.
We wouldn't do this with any other ideology.
You wouldn't judge capitalism by just reading Adam Smith and ignoring everything that happened in the subsequent 200 years.
By the way, isn't capitalism itself a Marxist term?
I think so.
We should talk about free markets, really, because capitalism built into the very name is a sort of critique of it, implying that there's...
Capitalism.
Yeah, okay, but that's where my pessimism comes in again.
I think those terms, once they are set and in use, you can't shift them.
It's the same with neoliberalism.
For a while I resisted it because...
What even is neoliberalism?
Well, that's the trouble.
It's usually just used in a sense of bad and I don't like it.
Are we neoliberals or...?
I guess, yeah.
I've started to use the term because we can't change it anyway and if that is what's...
People mean when they say a free marketeer, then well, okay.
Call it that then.
I am a neoliberal then.
In your book, you talk about the three stages that pretty much every communist regime goes through in terms of its supporters and its public perception.
Just check me through them.
Yeah.
So, I mean, nowadays, if you...
The trouble, the frustration when you argue with socialists is always they will not recognize any real-world example.
If you bring up nowadays even Venezuela or North Korea, they will say, oh, come on, that's a straw man.
Obviously, that is not the kind of socialism that I have in mind.
Never accept any real-world example.
What I show is that this distancing from real-world examples is something that only happens after the event once a regime is already discredited, but that If you look at it historically, pretty much every socialist regime has gone through a period when it was widely praised by Western intellectuals.
That's the first period I'm talking about.
So the Soviet Union, what Sidney and Beatrice went?
Yes, that would be a great example.
They travelled to the Soviet Union, wrote a book about it and several pamphlets about how the Soviet Union in the 30s was a workers' democracy and it was all great and even Some of those writers were even glorifying the gulags or making excuses for that, either saying it doesn't happen or saying the gulags are actually pretty nice, they are rehabilitation centres.
Is that right?
Yeah.
A bit like the analogy would be the concentration camps with these brass bands playing and everyone having a happy time, allegedly.
Yeah, except in the case of the concentration camps that was a deliberate regime propaganda and to make it appear that way.
In the case of the gulags it was more that Western observers wanted to see it that way.
It's not that they just fell for Soviet propaganda and didn't know any better.
It's that they were so convinced that the Soviets were building a better society that they wanted There's no excuses for the bad stuff.
Right, right.
They convinced themselves rather than that they were deceived and misled by Soviet propagandists.
And another example, of course, would be Lincoln Steffens, the New York Times journalist who invented the phrase, I've seen the future and it works.
It was Lincoln Steffens, wasn't it, I think?
I don't know.
I think he's not in the book.
But either way, there would be thousands to choose from.
George Bernard Shaw!
Absolutely.
He was one of the worst, yeah.
Now, isn't that extraordinary?
One of the points I really liked in your excellent book is where you point out that one of the reasons that these apologists...
Actually, what's the word you use for the people who support...
Pilgrims.
Pilgrims.
One of the reasons that these pilgrims keep on doing this is that there were never any penalties for being wrong.
We don't look back on George Bernard Shaw and think that stupid Pratt sucked up to the evil communists and by the way he wrote a few plays which weren't bad.
We think of him as George Bernard Shaw, intellectual and playwright.
There are no paybacks, are there?
No, almost never.
And that's the point that Thomas Sowell also makes, that if you're a public intellectual, you live in a world in which there are no feedback mechanisms in the way that you have in almost every other job.
If you screw up, then you get sacked or you lose money, something bad happens.
Eric Hobsbawm, order of merit.
He was actually made an OM. Or was it a Companion of Honour?
He got one of the highest honours in the land anyway.
Either way, even if it's not a formal title, these people would normally be very highly regarded public intellectuals.
They still get their columns and the opportunity to give guest speeches and get invitations for TV shows.
There are even the most extreme examples.
There is a Swedish guy, Jan Myrdal, who was the son of a Nobel Prize winning economist.
He praised the worst regimes in the world.
Cambodia, Albania, absolutely, yes.
Maoism.
He was a repeat pilgrim.
He was one of the worst.
Most of the pilgrims have one place that they idolize and then later in the second surge fall silent on it.
But he was a repeat offender.
He traveled to all of those places.
And the worse they were, the bigger the famines and the more people were killed, the more he was in favor of them.
And to this day, I think, at least in Sweden, he is a respected public intellectual.
He is the sort of A person you would invite on a TV show and their equivalent of Question Time.
And you would say, wow, here's someone who castigates capitalism, the conscience of the nation.
Great.
Somebody who dares to speak out.
He would be celebrated in that way.
There is just no feedback mechanism for a socialist pilgrim that we would say, okay, these people praised some of the worst regimes in the world.
Clearly, their sense of judgment can't be that great.
Maybe we shouldn't listen to them all the time.
Yeah, maybe they shouldn't be on the BBC all the bloody time, for example.
I I call these people...
Care Bear Communists, or the current incarnation, because you think of Alexandria Occasional Cortex doing her...
You can trust me in my political views because here's a video of me dancing when I was a student, and I'm quite cute, and so this enables you to ignore all the inconsistencies of my left-wing, my hard-left ideology.
Over here you've got people like...
Aaron Bastani.
He looks like a big worked out lad.
He looks quite sort of amiable in real life.
Have you met him?
No, I haven't.
Is he not amiable?
I don't know.
Never met him.
I think I've brushed past him in the corridor.
I've got nothing against him.
Personally, he doesn't seem to be a sort of...
He's not...
Particularly malicious or vindictive in the way that some of the worker are.
Some of them seem quite likeable.
Yeah, and Grace Blakely.
I mean, she's really fit.
I'm not sure whether she'd be fit to...
I don't think she's fit to expound on economics on TV, but she's always on TV. She's always on Sky News, talking to that crypto commie Adam Bolton, who pretends like he's a normal, neutral figure, but he's...
Clearly, I mean, that's the thing.
That's where this resurgence of socialism, that's what it is, essentially, that there are these figures that the media can't get enough of.
Paul Mason?
Absolutely.
What was the economics correspondent?
Yes, yes.
He's a full-on commie.
Yes, it was less clear at the time, I think.
It's more afterwards it came out fully that he was in some Trotskyite group before and has reverted to form.
I mean, he's a pure Trotskyite.
What's the difference, by the way, between a Trotskyite and a...
What's the other sort?
And a tanky.
A tanky.
A Stalinist.
Well, a Stalinist would be someone who defends the Soviet Union without any qualifications, say even in the Stalin period or perhaps especially in the Stalin period.
Those were the best times.
So that's Eric Hobsbawm.
I think even he had some regrets later on.
He said, yeah, that's what we thought at the time.
He didn't quite point out, didn't quite clarify, do you still think that or not?
But there are examples of that, people who still defend Stalin and The Soviet Union was great, especially in the Stalinist period, and it was all justified.
And then there are people who say it was initially a noble project, but then it went wrong.
Those are the Trotskyites.
Paul Mason is one of those.
He celebrates the Russian Revolution.
He says the revolution itself and the early days of the regime, that's all great, but it got corrupted later on.
That's the point that Trotsky himself made.
He was, of course, the first because he got sacked and had to escape.
And he said it was all jolly nice in the first eight years or so.
And then with his sacking, everything went down the drain.
And Paul Mason does more or less the same thing, except he says it started a bit earlier than that.
Right.
I'm just thinking aloud here, but I've noticed a sort of...
A thread here.
A lot of the sort of public figures, the media figures, who are Trotskyites, commas, Are really quite personable and agreeable in the flesh.
So Alexandria, occasional cortex.
My daughter watched a film about her on Netflix and thought, you know, she's great.
I don't think my daughter's a communist, but she presents quite well, I think.
There's Owen Jones, who...
Okay, he can be quite feisty in debate, but he's amiable in the green room.
Grace Blakely comes across just like a nice pretty girl who went to university, upper middle class girl.
Erin Bastani talking about fully automated luxury communism.
It's like, how do you explain that?
Disjunct between the niceness and agreeableness of their personality and the absolute abhorrence of what it is that they're trying to inflict on the world.
Well, you would only really notice it if they were actually in power.
I don't have a problem acknowledging that socialists can be nice people, but I guess a lot of the people who were involved in socialist regimes would also initially have been nice people.
It's just that at one point they were faced with a choice, either revert to authoritarian measures in order to keep the system going, stabilize it, or admit to yourself that it was all a big mistake and allow it to dissolve.
And then that just never happens.
And if you're in that situation you find reasons to convince yourself that you're on the right side of history and you have to carry on.
You're doing something that is ultimately going to be beneficial for mankind.
I don't think Hugo Chavez was a bad guy, for example.
Who?
Hugo Chavez.
Oh, Hugo Chavez, you're right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, exactly.
I'm glad you mentioned Chavez because, of course, in the early days of Chavez, I remember Owen Jones and I think Corbyn as well went over there as election observers and they came back writing wonderful stories about how...
Yeah, they were classic pilgrims.
This was another one of those waves.
This is the classic honeymoon period.
That's the first stage that I describe in the book.
The socialist regime goes through those stages, honeymoon period, and then later retroactively disowning.
And Venezuela was absolutely a textbook example of that.
You had from the mid-2000s until just after Chavez died, 2013, you had loads of Westerners.
Traveling over there could have been as election observers, could have been just as political pilgrims, and coming back and saying, well, these people, they're building a completely new type of socialism.
This will have nothing to do with all those nasty old-school commie regimes that you're thinking of.
This is now the real thing.
And after the economy fell off a cliff, 2013-14, The usual excuses and whataboutery began.
And it's now reached the stage, once again, this is stage three, the final stage, it wasn't really socialism.
Yes, yes.
And the honeymoon period, how is it that...
They are able to get this period.
I mean, given that we know socialism doesn't work, what economic anomalies lead to a situation where commie socialist countries briefly flourish?
Was it the oil in Venezuela's case?
In that case, yes.
It was the oil and the fact that they didn't go the whole hog straight away.
Chavez was initially elected in 1998.
He took office in 1999.
He didn't do very much in the beginning.
He was not a socialist right from the start.
He was a conventional populist.
It was then that when he started with price controls for basic goods, once that led to shortages, that's when he thought, oh no, we have to go further.
We now have to directly control The businesses and then at some point we have to take over the business and we have to take over the entire supply chain and that's how he became more socialist because he tried milder interventions first, they didn't work and he doubled down.
He had very much a Ken Livingstone personality that when it goes wrong you double down and that's how they ended up almost accidentally with the kind of system that they have now.
Yeah, that was propped up by the oil price.
The reasons differ.
In the case of the Soviet Union, it was a genuine first wave of industrialization.
What state-run economies are often good at is mobilizing resources quickly.
You could say that about a wartime economy.
That's why in times of war, planning is appropriate.
That's where even I wouldn't trust the free market to deliver.
And that's what happened in the Soviet Union in the 30s.
They just put all the resources into industrializing the country or rather militarizing it.
And you had a forced reallocation from agriculture to industry, from the villages to the cities.
And they could just copy production technologies from the West that already existed.
And I think they even had Western engineers and even Western managers coming over and teaching them how to do it.
They were able to benefit from catch-up growth.
In that sense, it can work for a short time, but what you're never going to get is a developed consumer goods industry.
The Soviet Union was always rubbish at raising living standards, but they were good at militarizing the place.
And that's how they could then become a global superpower.
That's why they became such a big player in the Second World War then.
Yes.
And I suppose that in that period, The fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had similar enthusiasts, didn't they?
Because they would have gone through the same process.
After the chaos of Weimar, Germany must have suddenly looked virile and economically powerful again with the growth of all this money being pumped into shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing.
Italy, for a while I imagine Mussolini looked like he was...
Vaguely competent.
Yeah, I mean, the American president at the time referred to him favourably.
Who was the president?
Not Woodrow?
No.
The second Roosevelt, it would have been.
Would it?
FDR. Well, he was unsound, wasn't he?
I guess.
I don't know a huge amount about him.
He gets far too much credit for...
There is this kind of argument, beloved by the left.
It's...
He's one of their justifications for Keynesian spending, that World War II was kind of good because all that mobilising of the economy got America out of the Depression.
Yeah, that was the thinking.
And there was a reference to fascist Italy at the time because that's what they did, a kind of proto-Keynesianism.
And in that sense, yes, it had its initial appeal.
Well, actually, you're quite good on your Austrian economics and your Hayek and stuff.
What is the argument against that, that massive state spending is good because it generates growth?
How would you counter that?
It depends on the initial situation.
In America's case, it was meant to be a way to get out of a recession, get the economy back on track, whereas in the Soviet Union it was about building up something that had never existed.
So those are different cases.
If you're dealing with a recession, this mobilizing resources stuff is Works if you assume that there are just loads of idle resources lying around and nobody is doing anything with them.
And that is mostly psychological.
Everyone's pessimistic and the government needs to give it a push.
That's Katie's argument, isn't it?
Yes.
Whereas an Austrian economist would say, no, there are good reasons why nothing much is happening at the moment.
There was a period of over-investment, of...
Of bad investments that have to be liquidated and you're not going to do that by just pushing up demand.
You have to go through the hangover in order to cure yourself.
Yes.
So that would be the counter argument.
The Keynesian argument makes sense if you believe that it really is just that there's a shortfall of demand and all you need to do is raise demand and then everything is solved.
Hasn't that been tested to destruction, that theory?
Well, I guess it's often been done in places where the economy would have recovered anyway and then the Keynesian stimulus program may get the credit because, of course, economies don't stay in recession forever.
They recover anyway after a while and it's quite hard to say, is it because of the Keynesian stimulus or is this just the natural rebounding that you would expect?
And you also get cases like in Japan, where they've run a deficit for ages, and purist Keynesians would still say, yeah, they haven't spent enough.
It's not real Keynesianism.
They have to go further.
But I don't dispute that if you're starting with nothing and you want to industrialize a country quickly, like Starland did, then that could work for a while.
Counter-argument would be, of course, that there are also Examples of non-socialist economies doing that as well, or better.
Hong Kong started from a low level after the Second World War, industrialized very rapidly, and doing the very opposite of what the Soviet Union did.
So I'd rather be like Hong Kong, industrializing in that way, than in the Soviet way.
Well also, if you compare the two, you compare what Hong Kong has achieved between, say, 1917 as a base point, and now, I mean, the GDP per capita, insofar as that's a valid metric anyway, but...
That in Hong Kong is way higher than in Russia even now, isn't it?
Oh yeah, of course.
I meant only when you're limited to the first 10 years or so.
If you could, in principle, have a planned economy for 10 years and then dismantle it, which you can't, of course, because once you've got these bureaucrats in place, they will stay there forever.
But in theory, if you could build up a Stalinist bureaucracy for the first 10 years of industrialization...
And have an inbuilt mechanism that it then decomposes automatically.
Even if that were a possibility, I would still oppose it, because even then, Hong Kong or Japan, after the Second World War approach, would be better and more sustainable.
I was fumbling my way to probably a less subtle point than yours, but it's basically this.
If you look at the most successful nations in the world today, They are the ones that follow the free market model, not the Keynesian model.
Why is this not obvious to bloody economists and politicians?
To economists, it generally would be.
See, I thought economists are bloody evil.
In my experience, they have no clue.
Okay, you've got exceptions like Ruth Lee.
Who else?
Yeah, there are a lot of...
Look at Krugman.
But even Krugman wouldn't say that...
His Keynesian stimulus policies are what makes a nation prosperous in the long term.
He would say if you're in a slump, that is the way to get out of it.
But if you want long-term prosperity, then you need other things.
You need proper institutions.
He would not be a massive interventionist and I don't think he would be in favor of nationalizing stuff, for example.
He would not be a socialist.
He would probably be very comfortable with a large welfare state, so Swedish, Danish type social democracy, what some socialists sometimes revert to rhetorically, but want to go much further in reality.
That's something I guess he's comfortable with.
And that can be okay if you get everything else right.
That's the reason why Sweden and Denmark are doing okay economically, because they get virtually everything else right.
Are they doing okay still?
I mean, isn't Sweden a bit stuffed?
I haven't looked at the latest figures.
There's nothing special about them.
They're not the miracles that left someone to see in them.
But they are prosperous economies.
They're certainly not basket cases.
Right.
Yeah.
I see.
I don't want to get too niche, because I imagine that lots of special friend avatars haven't even bloody heard of Grace Blakely and Peron Bastani, but they've both written books in the last year, sort of celebrating socialist economics.
Have you read them, and do they stand up at all?
I've read Bastani's book.
I'm going to read Blakely's at some point, and I would imagine that to be marginally better.
Barstani's?
No, it doesn't stand up to anything.
It's fully automated luxury communism.
It's basically the idea that the world is falling apart now, or capitalism is falling apart, and the technologies that we're currently coming up with, such as artificial intelligence and maybe asteroid mining, And cheap communication that is somehow going to make communism work.
Why exactly doesn't become clear?
It's just this is something that's different now.
And socialists have done this before, saying, yeah, okay, it didn't work in the past, but that's because it was premature.
Now is the right time.
And he does this too.
It's just in his case, he says technology is the factor that is going to make it work now.
But the idea that This time will be different because X, because something has changed that isn't new.
And he's just in that category.
It's a silly book.
Silly, but the problem is that some people are going to read that nonsense.
I'm less worried about them.
I think once you read it, it quickly becomes clear that this is all overhyped.
I would worry more about the ones who get caught up in the hype.
And who then don't go on to read it.
That's the whole secret of the current crop of prominent socialists.
There's a massive media hype around them.
As you said, they're on TV all the time.
They come across as quite likeable.
And that is the big change compared to, let's say, five or six years ago.
If you had asked random members of the public what's your idea of a typical Marxist, I guess most would have described some crank standing outside of a tube station trying to sell the socialist worker and shouting at random people and never getting noticed.
That would have been the popular image.
And now what's happened in the meantime is that socialism has become hipsterized.
Yes.
It's now associated with people who you would want to be in charge of a marketing campaign.
If you were running a craft beer brewery or a kimchi manufacturing company or a sourdough bread bakery.
Yeah, or a club in Dorfston.
Yes.
Shoreditch.
Those would be the sort of people you would want to be in charge of that marketing campaign.
People who come across as hip and trendy.
And affluent indeed.
Yes.
I guess, yeah.
And those are now the people who have made socialism hip.
That's what it is, millennial socialism.
It's the hipsterization.
You're no longer thinking of the greasy-haired crank who stands outside of the tube station and doesn't sell the socialist worker.
You're now thinking of the hipster socialists.
That's the image boost.
It's not that they've come up with any new theories.
Right.
And just entertain a theory of mine, which is that...
We on the right, not you and me, because we're actually quite special and we understand about Hayek and stuff.
But I mean, people notionally on the right, for example, the Conservative governments we've had in the last decade, have helped bring this crisis about by failing to do sensible things that you might associate with a Conservative government. have helped bring this crisis about by failing to do
So, for example, quantitative easing has created this massive inflation in asset prices, which has meant that the rich have got richer.
People who've already had money in the stock markets have benefited from the boom in stocks.
But the kids, the millennials, I suppose, have been left behind and can't get on the housing ladder.
So in other words, the conservative regimes, by doing not conservative things, have created an environment perfect for the bacteria of communism to breed and flourish.
Yes.
I think even if they got everything right, there might still have been some resurgence of socialism, because it also happens in places that are doing well.
I think even Switzerland has its small socialist movement.
It does.
I mean, proper socialists, and there, come on, this is the most fantastic example of capitalism in action.
How can you live there for even a day and still believe in socialism?
But apparently it does.
Ideas can be fashionable.
But of course they have a stronger pull if they can raise some real issues.
So I don't fully buy the idea that if everything was fine with capitalism that socialism wouldn't exist.
I think there would still be a demand for it.
There might still be...
You might still recognize, okay, yeah, capitalism sort of works, but I still don't like it.
You can still have an emotional resistance.
And that's why you get socialist movements now also rising in, for example, in Chile.
That this is the closest thing in South America, at least, to a free market success story.
They are vastly richer than all their neighbors, but even there, the young are going socialist.
So it's not just that, but it helps them if they can rhetorically refer to real problems.
The housing crisis in particular.
I've been on panels against socialists where they would bring that up and get a lot of nods and applause from the audience, which is kind of a shame.
In reality, there's nothing that socialism could do to alleviate that problem.
What we need is, first of all, not have loose monetary policies like quantitative easing that you mentioned, but also, and even more importantly, just build loads of houses.
I think we've talked about that in the first podcast.
Get rid of planning restrictions.
There's nothing special about the housing market.
There's no reason why the private sector shouldn't be able to provide the housing that people clearly do demand.
But that means it is quasi-socialist policies which have caused the problem, which makes it very odd that young people now think socialism is the solution.
But, I mean, that's unfortunately the way this works.
Not everybody looks at an economy thinking Okay, here are sectors that are fairly market-based, such as in smartphones.
Nobody complains about how we're getting terribly ripped off in the smartphone market and it's absolutely terrible.
Yeah, it works.
Exactly.
And then there are sectors which are nationalized and sectors which are somewhere in between.
If we did it that way, it would become pretty clear.
Smartphones, market-based, good.
Pubs, market-based, good.
Breweries, market-based, good.
Housing market.
Hmm, lots of state intervention doesn't work, bad.
NHS, almost entirely state-controlled, also bad.
If you look at it in this cross-sectional way, you would quickly realize it's the nationalized or the half-nationalized state-controlled sectors that cause all the problems.
Therefore, that is what needs addressing.
But I guess a lot of millennials just look at it from an overall perspective and think, okay, I pay a vast amount in rent.
I can't get a GP appointment.
I pay too much for university.
I'm against capitalism.
Yes.
You pointed out, you quote Jonathan Haidt's research on this, that people form their...
I've got this wrong.
People form their gut views based on their emotion and then use their rational brain not to provide counter-arguments but rather to reinforce their initial gut position.
Yes.
Yeah, that's what happens.
That is the psychology of socialist pilgrims.
That they travel to these places and already have the preconceived idea that they want to see a paradise in the making, and then they look for reasons and convince themselves.
And a lot of, more generally, anti-capitalist arguments are like that.
It starts with an emotional dislike of capitalism, and then you look for reasons, but if one of those reasons falls apart, Socialists would not question their judgment.
They would just justify the same thing in a different way.
Yes, you mentioned that.
I like that bit in the book where you talk about how the critiques of capitalism vary from age to age.
So originally it was about how the workers are oppressed and impoverished and then During the 80s and 90s consumer booms, we were suddenly told, no, the reason that capitalism is bad is that consumerism is shallow and godless.
Yeah, that was in the 60s already.
Once you have a reasonable level of prosperity, the allegation changes from capitalism leads to mass poverty and misery to capitalism leads to too much consumption.
Too much consumption, yes.
It's just never right.
Once that mass poverty that really did exist in Victorian Britain is no longer there, the allegation just changes from, ah, but now the workers have too much stuff, and it's tacky stuff, and they go to the shopping centre.
It's all awful.
Yes, I remember that being a particularly fashionable view sort of among spoiled middle class households, you know, this idea that consumerism is, all the things that's brought them there, wonderful white goods and everything, that they nevertheless think is rather distasteful.
Yeah, I mean, anti-consumerism is always very much about the abstract.
Once you ask an anti-consumerist to identify specific products, then it's always a different story.
They can't do that.
They talk about shopping, binges in the abstract.
But I have yet to meet an anti-consumerist who leads a frugal lifestyle themselves.
Of course, they are all fairly affluent people who quite enjoy their relative affluence.
And good on them, why not?
Yeah.
It's always other people's consumption.
That's consumerism.
The stuff that I buy never is.
And then we moved on from that to a view that globalism was exploiting the third world.
We were living off the backs of the exploitation of the third world.
Yeah, I remember that very much when I was an undergraduate, early 2000s.
That was Naomi Klein had just become a massive figure.
That towering intellectual Naomi.
Yeah, it was absolutely mandatory to have her book.
No logo.
Absolutely everyone was a Naomi Klein fan and everyone was joining the anti-globalization movement at the time.
The idea was that, yes, okay, we're doing okay in the Western world, but it's all just because we're exploiting China.
And then, at some point, perceptions shifted.
People started to see China as an emerging market rather than an exploited underdog, and the anti-globalization movement pretty much evaporated.
But there was never a period of reckoning.
These people didn't ask themselves, why did we get this so wrong?
And they weren't asked about it either.
It was more that they just moved on to more generic left-wing causes.
But you have these various waves.
In different ages, different periods, capitalism is under attack for different things, often mutually exclusive allegations.
But there is always something.
And if one of those reasons falls apart, then rather than questioning anti-capitalism, the anti-capitalists just move on and attack capitalism in a different way, in a different rhetoric.
And that's what happened.
They had this surge of the anti-globalization movement from late 90s to mid-2000s or so, a bit later, for a bit more than a decade.
And then it just got gradually absorbed into other movements.
I think I know what you're going to say here and it's going to depress me.
But how are we going to win this one?
You think, don't you, that these kids aren't going to grow out of this thing?
No.
I get this response very often that people on our side of the argument would say it's just a phase that they're going through.
They will grow out of this.
I don't buy that.
I would buy that if we were talking about teenagers here.
But we're talking about millennial socialism.
That's a real phenomenon.
We can see that in the opinion surveys.
Millennials are people who were born between 1980 and 2000.
They're not kids.
They are people up to the age of 40 now.
And there isn't much of a change in attitudes Within that age group, 18 to 40.
Later on, people become less socialist.
Yes, if you look at older cohorts of Generation X and baby boomers, they are more anti-socialist.
And wasn't there at one point hope for Generation Z? Yes, it's too early days.
But I would say if...
If this is something that isn't just concentrated among students, but is still prevalent among people in their late 20s, 30s, maybe even early 40s, when are they going to grow out of that?
They will never grow up.
They're like little woke Peter Pans.
Yeah, it could be.
That is because...
The expansion in university attendance, that means there is a larger, longer time of your life that you spend with peers who have a strong influence on your political outlook, that there is a greater need to conform and that you develop your views in that way and then it just gets locked in and it stays that way.
You won't change later.
Whereas if you had I mean, there's much greater peer pressure in terms of political opinions at university than there would be at work, normally.
At a normal workplace, you may not particularly care what your colleagues think about politics.
Not here, of course, but this is not at a place that is specifically dedicated to political ideas.
But generally, in most jobs, you probably don't know specifically What do your colleagues think about politics, where they stand?
Whereas at university, you would know.
It would have a strong influence the way your age mates, your fellow students think.
There would be a pressure to conform.
If you develop your views in that way and stay in that environment for long, then you could form a habit out of it.
I'm torn here, Christian, because on the one hand, part of me would like a kind of...
What's that movie where, once you're over thirty, you will get killed?
Logan's Run.
We need a kind of millennial Logan's Run, where all the millennials go into this sort of dome and get just kind of evaporated.
But what would we do for our kimchi and our sourdough loaves and our craft beer?
Yeah, the hipsters have done...
And our folk rock.
They have done some good things, the hipsters, especially the craft beer revolution.
I'm a massive beer snob.
Of course you are.
In that sense, no, I mean, not just because of my origin.
I would even say because of the craft beer revolution, Britain is now generally ahead of Germany beer-wise.
Oh, I think so.
And we're ever behind you on gin as well.
I mean, the gin revolution has been fantastic.
Yeah, that's good stuff as well.
There, I'm not yet a connoisseur.
I couldn't tell you the difference between different types of gin, but generally a good thing that it is happening.
So the hipsters have also the way they convert boroughs.
I used to live in Stoke Newington, which was a borough or a part of borough which was then hipsterising.
And that did mean great restaurants opening up.
And this is your property prices, I imagine.
Well, I don't have a property of mine.
No, in common, you and I have that thing.
I'm talking like a German now.
I'm moving my sentences in the wrong order.
But yeah.
That's interesting, yeah.
But I just want them to stay out of politics.
That's the thing.
I want hipsters around.
I want them to open pubs.
I want them to open breweries.
I don't want them to have political opinions.
Their political opinions are completely worthless.
A classic example of this before we go.
Simon Pegg.
Simon Pegg, the guy who we loved, he was in Spaced.
Who is that?
He's in Shaun of the Dead.
He's an actor, script writer.
Is he the lead actor?
Yeah, but he's now Tom Cruise's kind of techie sidekick in Mission Impossible.
So he kind of lucked out by landing a Hollywood role.
So he's now much bigger than he would have been.
He would have been a kind of likeable.
Culty English actor.
And he signed this letter, also signed by the worst person in the world, apart from George Soros.
Four readings and a funeral.
What's his name?
My brain has edited him out.
You?
Richard Curtis.
Richard Curtis.
The Abomination of Desolations.
Richard Curtis also signed this letter, which was demanding that millionaires pay more in taxes and avoid tax less.
And the world would be a much better place, and actually it would solve climate change as well, apparently.
What would be your quick answer to why we don't need to tax the rich more?
Well, he can...
First of all, the tax take...
I don't know where he lives, but here, in this country at least, the tax take is pretty much the highest it's ever been throughout history.
So it's not that we're undertaxed.
Yes, throughout history.
That's an extraordinary thought, isn't it?
So even in the days of King John, people would have been taxed less.
Yeah, that, I don't know.
Since records began.
Yeah, yeah.
You're talking about sort of post-industrial.
Yeah, I guess beginning...
Well, the tax rate at the beginning of the 20th century, I think, was about 10-15%.
Yeah, government spending was in that ballpark, so it must have been.
Yeah, given that the budget would generally have been balanced.
Sounds about right.
So that golden...
When we build our time machines, I'm sure you're working on it at the Institute of Economic Affairs, because it's the kind of thing you wonky people do.
It's not going to be a very good one.
Is it not?
I guess not.
Can we not...
Can we...
We need to go back to the beginning of the 20th century, but somehow ensure that World War...
This is a subject from Mark Miller to write a graphic novel about this, where somehow we avoid World War I, which is a massive waste of life and material and everything.
And all the bad stuff followed from it, the development of terrible political ideas.
Without World War I you would not get fascism and you would not get Soviet Union either.
And everything that followed from that, the whole of Eastern and Central Europe going socialist later, You wouldn't even have had the row about whether the Sikh soldier should have appeared in a truck in 1917, the movie, and Lawrence Fox either.
That wouldn't have happened had World War II, were able to disinvent World War II. An added bonus.
There'd be so many benefits.
I feel ashamed to say this to a German, but...
As I've got older, I've got much less pro-war.
I used to think war was cool.
I used to think war was a test of the manhood.
I took the Churchillian line.
Winston Churchill.
I'm just reading Andrew Roberts' biography of him at the moment.
In his youth, he was desperate to get out to wherever the action was because he wanted to see what it was like to be shot at and to prove his manhood and stuff.
And I'm sure...
If you survive, it is good for that.
If you survive intact and mentally intact as well.
But otherwise, what a waste.
You think about the flower of the youth that were wiped out.
Imagine what they would have done.
Imagine how much more advanced the world would be now.
If we hadn't had those wars.
Yeah, it also leads to terrible ideas flowering and you get a big expansion in state activity which then doesn't fall back again to the pre-war levels.
And yeah, I guess one in particular was a game changer in that respect.
And it was all the fault of your lot.
Rude, but it bloody was.
I know.
Would you like to apologise to the special friends now for the damage your people have inflicted on the world?
Not specifically, but if I could undo it, I think there would be a strong case to be made for that.
I'll take that as an apology.
Thank you, Christian Nimitz.
I didn't even mention that you're from the Institute of Economic Affairs.
What's your title here?
Head of Political Economy.
I think that's the English translation of Obergruppenführer, is that right?
Same ballpark.
Same ballpark.
Slight a different remit.
Excellent.
Well, thank you for listening everybody and until next time.
Bye.
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