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Nov. 25, 2015 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:16:40
Heart of Darkness

Adrian Davies joins Richard to discuss the recent Paris attacks, race and citizenship, as well as geopolitics and the future of Europe. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Adrian, welcome back to the show.
How are you?
Thank you very much, Richard.
Very well, all the better for speaking to you.
Well, thank you for that.
Well, where were you during the Paris attacks?
I guess this is the kind of question we ask.
Where were you when Kennedy was shot?
Where were you on 9-11?
Where were you during these shocking Paris attacks?
Actually, in the depths of rural Surrey, about 40 miles south of London, And I found out about it very late that evening, about midnight our time, France is an hour ahead of us.
When I got back, I'd been seeing an old Cambridge friend down there, and he told me this extraordinary news was coming through on his, I think he still uses the BlackBerry, about what was going on.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I think I might have mentioned this on an earlier program I did, but I had a very postmodern experience.
They actually happened while I was flying to Seattle.
Really?
Yeah, so I got off the plane, and there was kind of something in the air, and you could see these televisions where they were on CNN on silent.
You'd see these headlines, and then I started looking at my phone and saw what was going on, and then I was actually having to do some shopping for this project.
I won't go into the details because I don't want to bore anyone.
But we were actually in Ikea.
And, you know, Ikea is this wonderful place of Nordic affordable luxury, I guess, and efficiency.
But it's also a very postmodern place.
It's a big box store of consumerism.
It's people of all different, certainly all different nationalities in Seattle one.
And you see Indian, you see white people, you see Asians, you see...
A couple of blacks, even a couple of African Americans are into Ikea, believe it or not.
But we were kind of walking through this expression of the end of history, of cheap, affordable luxury goods with all sorts of different people buying.
But everyone was kind of whispering things.
It was kind of on everyone's mind.
I thought it was a very, maybe it was something out of a Welbeck novel or something.
You're in the seat of luxury, but then there's terror going on outside.
It's like a Welbeck novel without the sex, I guess, unfortunately.
So anyway, it seems rather mundane when I describe it, but it's actually quite memorable.
There was something a little surreal about it.
Yes, it sounds like an extraordinary experience, and as the old saying goes, did diversity vibrate for you?
Well, what are your thoughts about this?
I think we should just maybe start out with the big picture.
You know, when I spoke with my friend Romain, who lives in Paris, actually, in the tax, actually, a couple of them happened within walking distance of his apartment.
What we were saying is that, you know, a lot of these things, these events are significant, not so much for what happens, but how everyone understands what happens.
And with the Charlie Hebdo shootings, it became this, you know, very typical and very shallow call for, oh, we all support free speech and all this kind of stuff.
I don't think you can do something that...
Shallow for this event.
I think this event, it seems to have a kind of raw quality, a civilizational quality to it.
And so I think, in a way, the only interpretation of it is that we are into something here.
We are deep in a civilizational crisis and maybe a civilizational conflict.
Yes, I agree with you.
I think that the Charlie Hebdo episode was certainly different.
Charlie Hebdo was actually a disgusting magazine.
It mocked religious beliefs that are very sincerely held.
Christian beliefs more than Muslim beliefs, actually, although it mocked Islam as well.
There was, of course, one religion that it didn't mock, and if you mocked that religion, you were dismissed from the staff of Charlie Hebdo, so some animals are more equal than others.
The Mormons continue to have a great deal of hedonism.
Absolutely.
They and the Eskimos have a very, very special civilizational place that are above any form of criticism, sarcasm, or mockery.
But two of the three great monotheistic religions are, of course, exposed to ridicule, satire, and the insulting of their most cherished beliefs, and that is supposed to be one of our freedoms.
Of course, do that to the third, and you will be socially ostracized and utterly ruined.
But no, Charlie Hebdo is a repulsive publication, and its publishers had set about The response that they endured.
That, I think, was perceived by the French and, indeed, by other people, but particularly by the French.
So it wasn't, in a sense, directly threatening.
The conclusion you draw from Charlie Hebdo is if you publish a magazine that sets out to provoke and insult Muslims, surprise, surprise, they might react well, well, well.
That, of course, is not a source of concern to ordinary people who don't set about insulting others' religious beliefs.
This was a random attack, killing hundreds as a deliberate campaign of terror.
And it did affect ordinary people.
That was the point.
It wasn't targeted against a vitriolic and unpleasant magazine.
It wasn't targeted against a political or rather particular ethnic or religious group or whatever.
It was targeted against anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And it has undoubtedly had an effect, a very serious effect.
All this nonsense about people standing firm for our shared values is so much old tripe.
In fact, it has terrified people, and it will change behavior patterns very, very significantly.
How do you think that will happen?
We went through this with 9-11.
I think people have, in a way, kind of forgotten about a lot of those things.
People get on planes, everyone gets on the subway, people go to the...
Football matches and so on.
Do you think that this attack, and also just this sense that it's going to happen again, I mean, this was a highly organized affair, that it just seems like this is going to be the new normal, is that this happens every quarter or something.
Much may turn on that.
9-11 was an extraordinary event, but it has not been repeated.
Nothing of the kind has happened in North America since.
Now, how much impact the Paris atrocities will have may very well depend upon whether similar atrocities happen either in France or in other European countries again in the reasonably near future.
As you say, shocking though 9-11 was, in the end people...
Got over it, if I can put it that way.
I visited New York earlier this year, and people, I think, were more concerned about a repeat of the Ferguson-type Black Lives Matter riots in which people run amok and decide to trash any business that happens to have anything worth stealing because somewhere a white cop has shot a black suspect.
That was much more of a concern to New Yorkers at the time, so far as I could see, than a repetition of the 9-11 bombings, which have faded to some extent into history.
These events will also fade into history if they're not repeated, but the likelihood is that something similar will happen in another European country before too long.
I agree.
Have you noticed, and I guess you could speak for England and Britain, and then you could speak for Europe, Have you noticed a kind of turn in political consciousness?
I mean, there is certainly a lot of talk that the Front National is going to do quite well in upcoming elections.
I believe they're regional elections, if that's correct.
Yeah, they're regional elections in France.
Well, the situation in France is a perfect storm from the Front National's point of view.
The president is a simpering feeble turn who looked utterly complete.
Completely shocked.
Well, in one sense, understandably so, but as if he had been bowled over, had no idea how to react to the events of last Friday.
He really is a dreadful political leader.
He makes Obama seem like Ulysses Grant.
He really does.
He is such a terrible president.
Marine Le Pen, on the other hand, came over very, very well indeed.
She made an extremely dignified statement, obviously very sincere, and came to the heart about how she shared the pain of those who had lost loved ones in the massacre, how she wept with France for her dead.
And she came over far, far better than the president.
There's no doubt that she looks like a president in waiting, and all on looks like a jerk.
That, frankly, he is a pathetic individual.
He's obviously unfit for the office that he holds.
The sinister person in France is his prime minister, Valls, who is someone who would like to create a total surveillance state inspired by left-wing ideology where dissent is equated to treason and essentially all the things that the system wouldn't Probably due in its last throes and death agonies before finally expiring.
The point is, however, that it's probably all too late for such things, frankly, now.
The socialist party, in fact, has no answers to the problems created by decades and decades of policies of denial about what has been...
going on in terms of demographic transformation of the country It is part of the problem.
It is not part of the solution.
It is nothing relevant to say, and it is becoming increasingly apparent to millions and millions of French people that the Socialist Party has nothing to contribute to the debate.
Do you see a kind of, maybe a realignment, a kind of collapse of that left?
Or is that, we sometimes, these ideologies have a kind of staying power.
Or they can kind of mold and change.
I mean, certainly the left has gone through a number of different mutations over the decade.
Or do you think this is a big shift?
Like, we're going to see, the Front National is going to come out of being this, you know, weird, beyond the pale third party or something, and it's going to be something that's a legitimate party for middle class people.
It came out beyond the pale a long time ago.
It's now probably the largest single party in France, although that is partly due to the divisions in the ranks of the establishment of Conservative parties.
But what is particularly interesting in France is that the Front National is now ripping into the white working class vote.
It's been doing that for a long time.
And it's particularly, in the last 10 years, has been more and more successful in doing that because it has added to its discourse against immigration, a relatively statist, welfarist discourse which is deeply appealing to ordinary French people.
This will, of course, shock many rightists, libertarians, Randians and so on in the United States.
And there is a genuine difference, I think, of outlook.
It's a legitimate difference.
Different peoples have different perspectives.
But undoubtedly to the white working class in France, the Front National is increasingly the party of not only national salvation, but frankly of class salvation.
They perceive it as representing their interests.
They perceive the Socialist Party as representing the interests of metropolitan elites that are alienated from the people.
And of non-European immigrant groups with whom they have absolutely nothing in common.
So, yes, things are changing.
They are changing very, very fast.
We can't know where this is going to end, but it will...
Not end well, I think, for the Socialist Party, which is losing its grip upon the working class vote.
By the million.
By the million.
That's very interesting.
Do you think these similar things are happening really across Europe?
I mean, maybe Germany is always a kind of an exception due to its history, where it seems like it's almost impossible for a real right.
Outside of the Christian Democrats to arise there.
But elsewhere, you see a lot of these things.
The Swedish Democrats, from what I can tell, are actually becoming a very powerful group elsewhere.
At the same time, I've heard this before in my recent memory.
This is it, the right's going to rise up, and so on and so forth.
But do you think it's real this time?
I think that the answer is it varies from country to country.
In France, the process is at a very advanced stage.
The Front National is probably the most professional, the most successful, the most credible nationalist party in Europe.
And really it has much to teach others.
Likewise in Austria, the Freedom Party has made enormous progress and is again...
Polling well over 30% of the vote across the country.
The Swedish Democrats, as you rightly say, they have truly emerged from nowhere.
Ten years ago, they were a marginal party with minimal support.
They're now serious players in the political game.
As far as Germany is concerned, I agree there are particular problems.
There is a historical, obviously, background, which is, to say the least, Not conducive to the emergence of a right-wing populist party because of things that happened in German history in the past.
What is interesting in Germany is the emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland, which I regard as a much, much more serious and credible candidate.
For the role of oppositional populist and rightist party than the much longer established National Democrats who are a marginalized and fringy neo-Nazi type group thoroughly penetrated by the security service and consisting largely of its agent provocateur who I would tend personally to discount altogether as a political force.
They have no real credibility amongst the German people and count for nothing.
The AFD is a much more serious party.
Also interesting there is the increasing disenchantment of the Bavarian CSU with Angela Merkel's CDU party, their long-term coalition allies.
They have truly had enough of Angela, who is a seriously, in my view, Mentally ill woman.
She is infected with intellectual syphilis and spiritual aids in the form of liberalism in a very advanced degree and demonstrates in her person all the things.
that are sickest and most unhealthy in the modern European psyche, uh, She really needs an appointment with Comrade O 'Brien and the rat helmet in the cellars of the Ministry of Love very, very soon in an attempt to cure her.
I honestly cannot think that there's any other way in which she could be cured.
That might work, but we'd really have to try that, I think.
She's a very, very sick...
She's totally given over to ethnomasochism, to self-hate, to a desire to destroy her own country and people, so far as I can see.
I mean, she is truly mentally ill and pathological.
She's actually a very good photographic negative.
Of the ultra-nationalist.
She has many of the same characteristics of the very people who she hates.
If you like, swivel around 180 degrees or put through a photographic negative, so that for her, it would seem the idea of virtue consists of loving every people but your own.
Welcoming the stranger, the alien, the person who has nothing to do with you, effectively countenancing the displacement of your own people.
Their replacement in their own country by aliens who have nothing to do with Germany, culturally, historically, ethnically, linguistically, religiously, or in any other way.
She is essentially pathological.
She is as pathological as the most rabid Nazi she truly is.
Just as, for example, for the craziest National Socialists.
Other European peoples, Russians, Poles, Czechs or whatever, were subhumans, even though they were to the naked eye utterly indistinguishable from the Germans and appeared to have reached a high cultural level and be as civilised European peoples.
And just as I say, it's the most insane of the National Socialists.
Every other European...
Nation would be treated virtually as untermension and beasts and whatever.
So to her, every other people is more virtuous than her own and to be preferred to her own in every way, to be invited to come to Germany and in effect replace her own people.
It's a similar kind of extremism.
Funnily enough, in this respect, well, it's not funny, it's not amusing, but it's ironic, I suppose.
It could be said that as we all become like the thing we hate, so in a sense has she, she has become a mirror image of the thing she most hates.
Yeah, I think what you're saying is actually quite insightful.
It's interesting.
I'll put a link to this.
I did an interview with Manuel Oxenreiter, and he actually gave a...
He's a very interesting man.
Yeah, very interesting man.
He actually gave a different portrait.
He almost portrayed Merkel as this hollow mensch who has no ideology and kind of tries to absorb all ideologies.
But I think I might actually...
It was actually originally a liberal idea.
is that Germany had a peculiar path into modernity and kind of married some things that were seemingly incompatible, like industrialization and the bourgeoisie and also a kind of sense of home and nature and tradition and so on.
It morphed into a kind of Nazi concept of German supremacy, from Luther to Hitler, like everything was leading to Hitler.
And in this funny way, the generation that came after Hitler...
They never overcame that or never really changed their mind.
They just changed how they thought about it.
So they almost do believe, they agree with Hitler that Martin Luther was just a preface to National Socialism, that all of German history is leading in one direction, and that is towards evil.
It's a funny thing, because it's very funny.
It's kind of like it's this, you're becoming your father, even though you're trying to rebel against him.
It is quite extraordinary that some 70 years after the end of the Second World War, there are people, and Merkel is one who was born some years after that war had ended, who are still incapable of moving on from the ideological struggles of that period.
I'm going to admire German National Socialism.
It led to...
Horrific war, the deaths of millions and millions of people, and from the point of view of the Germans themselves, the frustration of their countries, occupation and division by foreigners, their national humiliation.
It was an absolute catastrophe.
And I therefore can say that I have no particular regard for that regime, rather than the contrary, as I said, it was ultimately a disaster.
for the country that it led.
But nevertheless, it represents 12 years out of German history, which goes back, well, thousands of years.
Now, you can't possibly judge a nation by that period.
Right.
Nor indeed...
Can you understand the national socialist regime and the things it did wrong, though they were, without putting them into the context of the Versailles peace settlement and all the injuries inflicted upon the Germans by the victors in 1918?
So this kind of ethnomasochistic discourse to which Merkel subscribes is just completely crazy.
But none of this would matter were it not the fact that this, to my mind, Mentally and morally disordered woman is perhaps the most powerful person in Europe.
She has this year invited a million so-called refugees from Syria into her country.
I think it's much more than that.
It may well be more.
The original figure was 800,000.
I think they're talking about a million six, two million.
No one knows.
One of the things that's coming out even today in the British press is that the perpetrator or the ringleader of the Paris atrocities had travelled backwards and forwards between France and Syria several times without being detected by any of the security services, even though he was one of the most wanted Islamists in Europe.
Now, if that man could do that...
It makes you wonder how many people are crossing borders no one really knows.
Well, I think actually there's even something worse, and that is that I believe it was between one and two of the Paris attackers had some involvement in the refugee crisis.
And in a way, I think in a way the refugee crisis, as terrible as it is, I think in a way it's a kind of convenient way that we can not think about the real problem.
Because we can say, oh, in America all these governors are saying, We only want the Syrian Christians.
They're doing all this kind of stuff.
The fact is, most of these attackers were French citizens.
So I think in some ways people are avoiding the much deeper and more impactful and profound question, which is, and I did a quick blog in this, I think much more needs to be written on it, but it's what is the meaning of citizenship?
I mean, that notion of the citizen was deified during the French Revolution.
And it was a kind of idea whose time had come.
It was a new concept.
There's a lot about that that's admirable.
But I think in a way we're seeing the passing.
We're at the end of that era.
We're at the end of this post-revolutionary liberal era where I think that notion of the citizen is breaking down.
I mean, what does it even mean to be French if these people who are engaged in these terror attacks are French?
I mean, what does it mean to be American at this point?
I mean, people might have some...
When you say America, they might have some...
Motion in their head of picket fence and some white family smiling into a camera with a hot dog and a barbecue or something.
But that kind of thing is breaking down.
What does it mean to be American?
I don't even know.
I think this whole notion of a citizen has actually been brought into question by all this.
Well, this is one of the great issues for the future.
In European countries at present, we have an idea of nationality in most countries.
At any rate, it's based upon illegal fiction.
What is actually very interesting is that many of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were not French citizens.
They were Belgian citizens.
Now, this is particularly extraordinary as they are of North African descent.
And Belgium was never the colonial power in North Africa.
France was.
The Belgians had their colonies in hell holes such as the Congo and other such places.
What is now Zaire.
Rwanda, Burundi, they had their African empire, which incidentally they ruled with considerable brutality and very, very great severity.
I always liked Conrad's book, The Heart of Darkness.
In which the company that's running the rubber plantations with slave labor, where you get your limb lopped off if you don't work hard enough, is La Société Générale de Belgique, which owns about a third of the Belgian economy and whose principal shareholders are the Belgian royal family.
That's how I run things in my operations, but some people find that severe.
It's the way I'm doing it.
Leopold King of the Belgians was anxious to encourage high levels of production on his rubber plantations.
Sometimes, as Catbird, evil director of human resources in the Dilbert cartoons, will tell you, it is necessary to brand the employees with hot irons in order to encourage them to high levels of productivity.
Although they ran the African empire with methods that were certainly not those used in my old Kentucky home, they had nothing to do with the North African colonies that were entirely French, from which most of the...
Current terrorists and perpetrators of mass murder in Europe appear to be drawn.
And one asks oneself, how did these persons ever acquire Belgian nationality?
Presumably they just nipped across the border and settled in one of the immigrant ghettos in various Belgian cities where you won't be able to find a Belgian terribly easily because they're now entirely North African immigrant ghettos.
It shows that legal nationality has become completely divorced from the reality of nationality in Europe.
It brings me to a very interesting question.
One of the issues that have to be considered in the long term, and it's at present quite unthinkable to say this in Europe, I suspect that even the most, what can I say, the most serious nationalist parties in Europe would be Reluctant to broach this subject publicly, though many of them are now thinking it privately, but since we're talking about ideas, let's talk about ideas.
One of the things that we're going to have to consider is redefining the whole concept of nationality along lines that bear some relationship to reality instead of fantasy.
The British Empire once covered about a quarter of the globe.
The French Empire, though smaller, wasn't actually that much smaller in a geographical extent.
It was also a huge empire.
Small European states, Belgium and Holland, had quite substantial empires of their own.
In fact, every European country pretty well had an empire, with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries.
The reality is that we have shared our nationality with people who have, in truth, nothing really in common with us, beyond the fact that once upon a time, long ago, we were their colonial overlords.
That time has long since passed, before I was born, and I have turned 50, I regret to say, in the case of most British colonies.
We had substantially...
The French by about the same period.
There is no reason why we should share our nationality with a quarter of the globe, and one of the things that needs to be looked at is people who have acquired British or French or Belgian or other European nationalities by legal fiction, but who have no real connection with those countries beyond the historical accident that once upon a time they were their colonial masters.
People who essentially hate those countries, although they live in them and are happy enough to draw welfare and other benefits from them, will lead in the end to be stripped of their legal nationality, frankly, not to make too fine a point of it.
You cannot have, living in your society, millions of people who are different from you in every way.
They're different in ethnicity, they're different in religion.
They're different in culture.
They're increasingly different in language.
There are more and more places now where the language of the country is no longer really the language of the people who live in a particular area.
They'll transact all their business in Arabic or in an African language or in some Asian language.
In America, I know you have this phenomenon with Mexicans, for example, where you have effectively monolingual communities where that single language is Spanish, or what passes for Spanish in Mexico, which is not something that most Spaniards would consider to be Spanish, but leave that aside.
It's a phenomenon, really, of reverse colonialism.
Now, what will have to be considered?
It's presently unthinkable.
It'll have to be considered in the future.
It's completely redefining our law of nationality and saying that only those who are members of our community, that's those who share common descent, a common heritage and history, can be citizens of the state.
We are a long way from reaching.
A situation where that reform, which I consider to be in the end absolutely necessary, the redefinition of nationality, along the lines that bear some relationship to reality happens.
But one of the consequences of the unhappy events of a week ago is that several million, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of Europeans have come a little bit closer to thinking that.
I think that thought, which is, again, totally outrageous from the perspective of mainstream conservatives and liberals, I think that thought is going to have to become mainstream within our lifetimes.
And it is an idea whose time will come.
And I think it's actually, it might even be bigger, it might be more revolutionary than the way you're depicting it.
I think the nation-state, as it is, is in a way too big and too small.
It's encompassing all of these different people.
What does it mean to be an American?
Basically nothing.
You passed a civics exam or you've filled out a form, effectively.
But at the same time, in a way, what does it mean to be a Czech?
Or what does it mean to be French?
And those things are, in a way, too small.
They don't...
I think we're going to have to rethink even more.
I think we're going to have to rethink the nation-state and things like that, because the way history is pushing us is towards understanding ourselves as a race and civilization.
Yes, well, I agree with you about that.
That's a very, very complex issue.
Some of the nations, the nation states of Europe are very ancient.
The two that are really very ancient are England and France.
England became recognisably a nation, assisted of course by the fact that it was an island.
Long, long ago, long before the Norman Conquest, by well before the year 1000, there was an English state, recognising the English state, Really, Alfred the Great created the English state by welding together the seven disparate kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England in a kind of resistant front to Danish and Norwegian Viking invaders who'd conquered the larger part of the country.
And the idea of Englishness as a national identity emerged so long ago as that in opposition to the Viking invaders.
France again emerged as a nation-state a very long time ago under the influence of the French royal house and its ambitions, originally in a fairly small territory around Paris but later encompassing more and more territory.
Now, that is certainly not the case of other European nations.
The next to emerge were the Iberian nations.
Spain only really came to be as a nation-state with the union of Aragon and Castile in the 15th century.
Before then, it had been several Christian kingdoms and indeed several Moorish Muslim kingdoms constantly at war with one another.
The other European nations outside Iberia emerged even later.
Spain and Portugal, again, are quite old nations, relatively speaking.
Germany and Italy, for example, are not.
Germany, as a nation-state, really only emerged in the later parts of the 19th century as Italy.
There had been no concept since...
Well, there had been a concept of a German...
I mean, the word German, Deutsch, It is much older than that.
So there had been a concept of a different kind of nationality.
I think this is where, you know, and sometimes language fails us because you will use words like Germany and we'll have this notion of what that means.
But actually it's different.
It could have different resonances.
It did, but in a different way.
For example, in ancient Greece, a Spartan, an Athenian, a Theban, a Corinthian, We'd all, at another level, think of themselves as Greeks.
But their primary loyalty would be to their city-state.
So, I agree, in Germany, long before Bismarck's time, there was a certain sense of cultural unity.
But there was no political unity.
And ever since the Reformation, Germany had been bitterly fractured and divided along religious lines with rival power centres.
Vienna and Berlin for Catholic and Protestant states.
So the emergence of Germany as a nation-state in many ways was a rather artificial nation-state, in fact, that came about through Bismarck's political intrigues.
And in many ways, as a reaction to Napoleon's invasions of Germany, in which he inflicted the most terrible things upon his subjects, largely conscripted as the Grand Armée and sent off to Russia to die for Napoleon's imperial ambitions.
Nothing to do with some unfortunate Württemberg who was pressed into the army and sent off a couple of thousand miles away to die of hunger and cold, fighting a war that he didn't understand for an emperor whose language he couldn't speak and whom he probably loathed and detested with good reason.
So, yeah, that was in the background.
Coming back to your idea, yes, I'm not...
By any means opposed to the idea of overarching European identity and to that extent I disagree with the little Englanders of whom we have altogether too many in this country who are apt to think that anybody on the other side of the channel is...
I would say mitigation.
The second worst nation in Europe in this respect is France, where, again, very few people can speak a foreign language, and if they can, it's usually English, not another European language.
It leads to a very narrow sense of identity.
If you're not capable, literally not capable of speaking to people in the country next to your own, certainly not in their language nor they in yours, it leads to a measure of estrangement, a lasting estrangement.
Now, I'm all in favour of the idea of an overarching European identity.
I'm not sure I'm in favour of the idea of an overarching European state.
I'm not sure I'm necessarily against it.
I keep an open mind on this subject.
But any form of European unity would have to be a much looser European union than that which the architects of the present...
entity that calls itself the European Union, which involves a high measure of political, social, economic and solid centralisation.
I think we don't know what kind of political form will come into being.
And I would say that I think this...
This holds, and there's some exceptions to this maxim, which I'm going to say, but politics is really, it lags behind social and cultural change.
Yes, I absolutely agree with you about what you say, that politics tends to lag behind cultural and, if you like, That lag slowly work itself out over the next 20 or 30 years.
Yes, I think what a European Union might be, we just don't know what it is.
But I think we're both on agreement.
I might be more wildly enthusiastic about a European super-state than you.
That's because you live in Montana and I live in Europe.
It's very easy to have idealistic views of other countries.
My late father, who was a convert to Catholicism, used to act lyrical about Ireland, the land of saints and scholars.
This is very funny.
He was an English convert to Catholicism.
He taught in a Catholic school where 90% of his colleagues were Irish.
One of them said to him, have you ever been to Ireland?
He said, no.
He said, it's a land of drunkards and layabouts.
And the only people who do any work are the Protestant minority.
This was a Catholic Irish woman from a rural area explaining reality to him.
In many respects, a great respect for my late father, who's a very great man in his own way.
But in that regard, he didn't half remind me of communists who waxed lyrical about the Soviet Union without ever having been there.
The view of it taken really from his ideal of how it ought to be, not the reality with which those who grew up there were much more...
Familiar.
Right.
You know, Napoleon was an outsider.
Certain other historical figures were outsiders.
Outsiders, yeah.
You know, that's how it goes.
Well, indeed.
And look what Napoleon ultimately did for France.
Much the same as that other outsider did for Germany, which is to say reduced the country to rack and ruin with the Cossacks encamped upon the Champs-Élysées.
Much as I say, it's that other outsider we used Germany to rack and ruin with the Cossacks encamped on the understate Linde.
It didn't end terribly well for either state, did it?
That's a touché.
France and the Ancien Régime, I think, for all the fault of the Bourbon, at least in her such unrealizable ambitions as a little Corsican did, and look how those ended.
I'm very cautious about people who have...
That's one of the things that I've learned at the age, to be very cautious about people who have great ideals for their nations, those great dreams.
Well, it was the same Emperor Napoleon who once remarked about, indeed, about the Russian campaign, a million dead, what's that for a man like me?
Well, for a million dead, it was quite a lot, wasn't it?
But yes, while I think some of the efforts, some of the endeavours to create a European state in the past have been somewhat catastrophic, the idea of at least some measure...
of unity between the European nations is in principle a noble ideal, one to which I subscribe.
We certainly don't want any more of the kinds of fratricidal wars that tore Europe apart in the 20th century, and indeed before that in the 19th century.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Germany and France, it not only would strike people as terrible and tragic, but it would almost strike people as ridiculous.
It doesn't make sense.
And I think that's actually a very important historical development, the fact that it just doesn't make sense.
It's not in the realm of possibilities anymore.
And that's a good thing, and we should look at that of where is all this leading?
No, I absolutely agree to you about that.
That's a very, very positive thing.
A very positive thing, indeed.
There is almost no chance of another conflict of the kind that we saw in 1914, 1918, 1939, 1945 between European states, or indeed of the kinds, let's say, that we saw in the 19th century, the Franco-Prussian War, etc.
Thankfully, that time is past.
I think it will never come again.
I hope it will never come again.
And that is a very, very good thing.
Not all the developments since 1945 have been negative.
That is a big positive.
I do not believe that we shall see such things again.
I'm very happy to say.
I agree.
Well, we're much more likely to see a catastrophic civil and social disorder within the disintegrating states whose multiracial, multireligious, multicultural polities fall apart.
I agree.
I think that is where the arrow of history is pointing.
This is a little bit less now, but actually in 2014, I was almost thinking that we were about to see a repeat of 1914 with all of these tensions between Washington and Europe and Russia and this battling over Ukraine.
It kind of reminded me of some damn thing in the Balkans.
You know, it was this little conflict that was about to spread.
I think that's lessened a little bit.
But actually, I did want to shift gears a little bit into foreign policy before we put a bookmark in the conversation.
I can remember, when I was just out of college, there was this, you know, so-called Great Atlantic Divide between America and Europe.
And it was mostly over the Iraq War, where Europeans, you know, European leaders, it was named Villapin.
Gosh, that seems so long ago now.
Dominique de Villepin, who actually was a foreign minister of France who resisted the Iraq invasion.
And there were all these books written about Mars and Venus and all this kind of stuff.
And I almost took the European side.
Not almost.
I did take the European side in this debate.
I would say that certainly that tension lessened for quite some time.
And there was actually a lot of collaboration between America and Europe in engaging in totally pointless and stupid and destructive wars like overthrowing Gaddafi's regime in Libya and so on.
And they seem to have wanted to do that to Syria.
But they were prevented doing that by a number of forces, including Russia actually coming back onto the scene.
But do you think there are, I don't know, it seems like Washington has just been playing with fire.
It's been playing this really dangerous game by jumping on the Arab Spring, by throwing money and weapons at moderate rebels and some, you know, pointless effort at overthrowing.
the Assad regime in Syria.
What's going on is almost beyond credence.
It truly is because The foreign policies of America and its European allies, or the unkind would say satellites, in the Middle East truly defy belief that they have plunged into a maelstrom of ethnic and religious conflicts that they can scarcely begin to comprehend.
That would be bad enough.
In itself, were it not for their own complete lack of logic?
So, for example, in Iraq.
Iraq is a totally artificial state.
It has no reality.
It's a collection of lines on the map drawn by the British.
When they agreed with the French, under the famous or infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, how the Allied victims of the 1914-1918 war would divide up the spoils of the Middle East, which were effectively the spoils of the Ottoman Empire, which they correctly anticipated would collapse.
They correctly anticipated the Arabs would no longer tolerate their Turkish overlords, and they decided that they would set up It
has different peoples.
It has Arabs and Kurds, who are not.
The Kurdish is an Indo-European language, for example, Arabic is a Semitic language, so the Kurdish is more closely related to English than it is to Arabic.
It has no religious unity.
It's bitterly divided between the Sunni and Shia sects, who have complex theological disputes about the correct interpretation of Islam that are not easy for Christians to understand.
Anymore, the Catholic-Protestant dispute is no doubt easy for Muslims to understand.
And the result, therefore, is that the state divides upon both religious and racial grounds, although the divisions are somewhat different because the Kurds are Sunni Muslims.
It's the Arab population that's religiously divided.
The Kurds are actually religiously homogenous.
They're all Sunni Muslims.
The Arabs are divided between Shia and Sunni.
Now, what is so bizarre?
Is that in Iraq, the Western coalition led by the United States overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein, who managed to maintain some kind of peace, although only by brutal repression, between the different ethno-religious groups.
And what they have installed is a sectarian government dominated by elements of the Shia community who are the majority in numerical terms and were long oppressed by the Sunni minority who the British had in fact placed a leadership role in Iraq.
The Iraqi army was created by the British in the 1920s and it was officed almost entirely by Sunni.
What is so strange about this policy is that Syria is a mirror image of Iraq.
In Iraq, the Sunni are the minority but have long dominated the state.
In Syria, the Sunni are the vast majority but the Alawite sect has dominated the state since the advent of Hafez al-Assad, the President Bashar al-Assad's late father.
In most of these countries, it doesn't matter who the majority is, it matters who controls the army.
So the result is that our glorious leaders are supporting the minority...
Sorry, let's get this right.
They're supporting the Shia against the Sunni in Iraq, where traditionally the Sunni were the leadership group.
They are supporting the Sunni against the Alawites and various other dissident sects, plus non-Muslims, Christians, Druze, etc.
in Syria.
Thus, they are supporting different sides in the sectarian conflict in adjoining countries.
Now, you tell me the logic of that.
It is beyond my comprehension.
Incidentally, one of the interesting and deeply unattractive, to my mind, aspects of the last week, very, very revealing about the inner psychology, even of our opponents.
It is that the horrific Paris massacre was not the only horrific massacre that week.
Earlier that week, of course, Islamist elements had downed the Russian jet over Sinai.
But there were two other horrific massacres.
One was in Baghdad, where they are routine.
The other was in Beirut, where members of an extreme Sunni group Blew themselves up in front of a Shia mosque on Friday night.
Explain their actions in this way.
Our knights of jihad waited till a large number of the heretics had gathered outside the house of apostasy, that is to say the Shia mosque.
Then they blew themselves up, taking themselves to heaven and the heretics to hell.
Now, this got a couple of column inches in the English press.
It's atrocious sectarian mass murder cum suicide.
It doesn't matter because everybody involved in it, they're all just Arabs.
That's the attitude, the real attitude of the Western press.
Curiously enough, they do not believe that brown lives matter, actually.
They are such hypocrites.
That for all their unctuous, fawning, ostensible multiracialism and multiculturalism, the truth is they expect such things to happen in Arab countries and they don't really care about them.
They're only really upset, exorcised and agitated when such things happen in rich Western countries.
I actually find that quite disgusting.
It is absolutely appalling that we are not exercised by the crimes committed by these crazed sects in other countries.
It only matters when it happens in a Western country.
It's not the case at all.
Undoubtedly, these extreme groups do need to be eradicated.
And to that extent, I actually agree with our establishment just for once.
And I do not agree that it only matters when they commit atrocities in European countries.
But we have made things much worse in the Middle East.
We have taken away, we have swept away those rulers who, brutal and cruel and tyrannical and corrupt though they might have been, We're better than what has come after them.
Gaddafi was a monstrous, insane person.
He's truly out of his mind.
But Libya is in a worse state now that lunatic has been removed from office and killed.
Undoubtedly.
Saddam Hussein was far saner than Gaddafi, but he was even more cruel and brutal.
The overthrow of his regime has unleashed...
Hell for the order of the Iraqi, regardless of religion or ethnicity, because the country is now absolutely unlivable.
Frankly, the late Hafez al-Assad, in my view, was a great man, a great Arab nationalist and patriot, and a staunch resistor of Zionism.
And there was much to commend him, and his son is a far more estimable man than either Saddam Hussein or Muammar al-Gaddafi.
And if the regime in Damascus is eventually overthrown at the moment, it seems to be doing rather well in its war against the terrorists, the life, the lot of the ordinary Syria will be far worse than it is now.
But our rulers in their insanity would like to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and replace him presumably with I don't know what.
It really is.
Some religious maniac.
I think it's almost worse than how you're describing it.
Because it is almost as if Washington and its allies or vassals are going after the most civilized people in the region.
I mean, at the end of the day, Iran, I agree, I would prefer not to live under any kind of theocracy.
And certainly I would not want to live under...
A state that is at least somewhat controlled by religious people.
But nevertheless, Iran, again, if you go see images of Tehran, it's easily the most, far more European, so to speak, civilized than anything in Saudi Arabia or beloved allies.
That partly reflects upon the people.
The Iranians, again, are a people.
Linguistically and culturally much more akin to us than the Arabs.
Iran actually means Aryan.
Some people forget that.
The language is an Indo-European language.
The people are culturally closer to us.
But Washington wants to promote the Arab Spring.
I don't want to exactly go to their conspiracy theory about ISIS.
But at the same time, I have no doubt that all of this funding of moderate rebels...
Which was this buzzword for a while.
Basically, all of this stuff has probably ended up in the hands of ISIS.
That's what Washington is pursuing.
There aren't any moderate rebels except in a relative sense.
For example, al-Qaeda and the Taliban have condemned ISIL.
For being too extreme.
However bad you are, there's always someone more extreme.
My favourite example was the Peruvian guerrilla group, the Sendero Luminoso, a shining path.
They first proclaimed themselves to be Maoists, but the Chinese government repudiated them because they were so crazy, the Chinese didn't have anything to do with them.
So Sendero then decided they would embrace Pol Pot's version of Marxism-Lendism.
But wait for it.
Pol Pot condemned them because they were too cruel.
I'm not joking.
So however insane you are, there's someone worse.
Now, if you're taking ISIL...
Let me jump in real quick.
Keep in mind that Richard Spencer was imprisoned by the notorious fascist Victor Orban.
He's that bad.
He's that bad.
It's that ironic.
But if you take ISIL as the paradigm of extremism, Compared to them.
Slightly less crazy fundamentalist groups appear relatively sane.
But this is like saying that Stalin was sane compared to Trotsky, and Trotsky was saying compared to the anarchists.
You know, these things are very, very relative.
Which is true.
Yeah, I say, compared to the Sendero Luminoso, Pol Pot, the Cambodian Revolution were relatively sane.
They were moderate mass murders.
Very relative.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We need to get this in perspective.
There are no moderate rebels.
There's no one in Syria who wants to create a British or American-style liberal democracy or who believes in multiculturalism, who believes in universal tolerance and so on.
This is just nonsense.
What would replace the regime of Bashar al-Assad were it ever to fall would be some kind of theocratic state in which Christians, non-Sunni Muslims, and indeed Jews would be hideously oppressed.
All which groups are much better off under the present government than they would be under a religious totalitarian...
That's not to say the present government is perfect or that it hasn't done things in the past which were manifestly wrong and so on.
But it's merely to say that whatever its faults and whatever its past errors, it presides over a system that is relatively tolerant of a plurality of religious beliefs and relatively westernised.
And better than any likely replacement.
Our governments, the British, the French, and above all the American, have destroyed relatively stable, relatively westernized, relatively sensible regimes in some parts of the Middle East.
Furthermore, they only pay lip service to their supposed beliefs in democracy.
Anyhow, for example, the American government has not only tolerated but has funded and supported the overthrow of democracy in Egypt by General Sisi, who overthrew the democratically elected regime of the Muslim Brotherhood and created a military dictatorship led by himself.
My view on that is that General Sisi is a far, far better ruler than the man who he replaced.
If I were Egyptian, I'd be a strong supporter of General Sisi.
But you cannot pretend to be a Democrat and support a military coup against the Democrat and the elected government of the country simply because you don't like the answer the people gave when you held an election.
But that is actually the kind of person who governs us.
I needn't dwell upon the support of the British, the Americans and others for the Saudi regime or for various regimes in the Gulf states, many of which have a minority sectarian base and are in effect royal dictatorships.
Where dissent is punished with considerable cruelty.
Although, in fairness, unlike Saudi Arabia, few of the other Gulf states use crucifixion as an ordinary method of punishment, I suppose.
They're relatively moderate.
That's one way of looking at it.
How often do you hear an American or a British politician talking about the methods that are used in Saudi Arabia to repress political or religious dissent?
Not often.
Money talks.
Money talks.
So our rulers are hypocrites, as well as vandals.
And many of the dreadful things that we see happening now are the result of the Second Iraq War, which destabilized the whole region.
They have no understanding of the different sensitivity, cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic, Of the Middle East, which are enormously complex and require a lifetime study to begin to understand.
And they blunder about there as if you can rule Iraq in the way you can rule Iowa.
It doesn't work that way.
It just doesn't.
The worst part of it is that everyone who knew anything about this, in the State Department, in the CIA and elsewhere, It was just ignored by George Bush when he decided to launch the war to turn Iraq into a Western liberal democracy.
We now see the consequences of it and the terrible things that happened in Paris.
In a way, one of the spin-offs of that.
Yeah.
I mean, do you think there are people in Washington and Foggy Bottom?
No, I think on the contrary.
I think the people in the State Department and the agency didn't want this kind of chaos and gave good advice which was ignored because of the kind of people who have political purchase in Washington.
It was more the advocates of regime change and the new millennium that you need to be concerned about than the Traditional, if you like, experts on foreign policy.
Their expertise was largely ignored.
I wouldn't be subscribing to conspiracy theories that blame some of the more traditional organs of the American state for what's happened.
I think on the contrary, they gave good advice against it and they were ignored.
It really is a neoconservative.
We all know what that's a euphemism for.
A neoconservative political project to which fools subscribed.
So you think there's a kind of Israeli-Zionist interest that wants either chaos or some kind of terrible, theocratic government?
I think it would be simplistic and reductionist to explain things in that way.
There is a danger.
In going down that road, in which everything is explained by some kind of overarching Zionist conspiracy, I think that politics and history are much more complicated than that.
I think a further element, although that is an element, and certainly I think it was a powerful factor in attempting to overthrow both the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Assad regime in Syria, father and son.
It eased that Zionist agenda.
These were states that were leading the struggle against Israel, the Arab nationalist polities that were opposed to Zionism.
But there are other factors, one of which is the millenarian and messianic idea that the whole world can be remade in the shape of America.
Now, that is a doctrine to which a great many people have subscribed.
In influential circles in the United States, and it has done more harm than anything else, in my view.
Now, undoubtedly, there is a large overlap between that and the Zionist lobby, but it would be too, I think, too simplistic, too reductionist simply to say that this is all a gigantic Zionist conspiracy.
That is much, much more complex than that.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are people in Israel, and, you know, if I were to conceive of an Israeli foreign policy, I would be supporting Assad's regime in Syria.
You know, he's stable, he's a civilized man.
Even if you disagree with him, you could at least deal with him.
He's sane, and he's likely to keep his word.
Those are two big factors, and anything that comes after him won't be.
But so far as Israel is concerned, I have no particular interest in that country.
It pursues its own policies.
I don't think that the lines it pursues are necessarily necessary.
its own long-term interests it seems unable to make a lasting peace with its neighbors which cannot be in its own long-term interests right i don't think as i say that everything that happens in american politics can be explained by the machinations of the zionist lobby and
Nevertheless, it would be both dishonest and cowardly to pretend that that lobby does not exercise a disproportionate influence upon American foreign policy and directs that foreign policy in a direction which is the interests or perceived interests, often wrongly perceived interests, of the State of Israel rather than the United States of America.
That is a particularly American problem.
And one that the American people are going to have to solve.
The influence of that lobby on American foreign policy is plainly contrary to the American national interest and needs to be broken, although that will not be an easy thing to do because it has bought so many American politicians with campaign donations and other associated bribes.
But that is not the only factor.
It feeds into and links up well with the messianic view that Western liberal democratic values and institutions can be exported to other countries.
Oh, no, they can't.
They only evolved in England very slowly over many centuries.
They were taken to North America by the colonists, where they then developed.
But really as a continuum of institutions and ideas they brought over with them from England, where they had evolved over long, long centuries, you cannot suddenly transform a tribal, religiously based, sectarian society, which is what most Arab societies are, into a British or American society, because Arab societies only evolved.
In that direction over a very, very long period of time, not without terrible internal convulsions of their own in past centuries.
So the idea that things which happened in England over hundreds and hundreds of years can be replicated in an Arab state in a few years is just madness.
No sensible person can believe that.
Apparently most of our rulers do.
I think, sadly, a lot of these illusions will have to be shattered by chaos and blood because I don't think we're going to convince them through reason.
One of the things I've learned as I've got older is that what Lenin called objective factors are very, very important.
Of course, nobody a fool could think that they aren't important, but what I'm meaning is that other factors such as ideology, correct analysis, and so on, are perhaps less powerful than we think,
that it sometimes takes really brutal external facts to impinge upon your little closed bubble world before you realise how things are.
Now, coming back to where we began, some of those very cold, harsh realities are coming home to an awful lot of European people now.
One of the things which is going to come home to them is that their feeble, incompetent, yet at the same time paranoid and tyrannical rulers are unable to protect them from the consequences of the nightmare that they have unleashed upon most of the continent.
That is going to be very good for the souls of the people of Europe.
They will have to think about that and come to appropriate conclusions.
Well, let's leave it at that, Adrian.
I can't think of a better conclusion.
So we'll put a bookmark in it, but thank you, Adrian.
It's always good to talk to you, and it's always fun to have you on my podcast.
It's always good to speak to you.
I only wish I'd been able to attend your conference in Washington, which I hear is enormously successful.
Unfortunately, October is a very...
Busy and difficult month for lawyers in England is when our court term begins.
We do most of a year's work in one month, as a result of which I wasn't able to come over.
But I'm going to try and urge you to do a conference in some other month than that most overloaded month for American patriotic conferences.
Adrian, I'm sick of hearing this excuse every year.
You're going to have to get your priorities straight.
It's true, I'm afraid.
What we're going to have to try and persuade you to do is to hold it a little bit earlier in the year, say September, and I'd be absolutely delighted to come over to Washington and join you there.
That would be absolutely marvelous.
I hope it was a great success and everyone who attended it very much enjoyed it.
I knew to be congratulated on organizing it.
I'd say just push it forward a few weeks in the year so we don't have this October conference season with every patriotic group.
And I'll look forward to seeing you then.
And I hope we shall be able to persuade you to come over to England before too long.
Well, I want to.
That is one place in Europe where I can legally enter.
Yes!
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, as I say, bearing in mind that Syrian terrorists seem to be able to cross borders in Europe freely, despite not being...
But Richard Spencer, no.
You ought to be able to do it, but then on the other hand...
Mass murderers, on the one hand, and those who express ideas contrary to the ideas of European political elites are treated very differently, as we all know.
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