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Pandemic Failures and Grief
00:10:29
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| Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Professor Neil Ferguson is one of the world's most eminent historians, an authority on civilization, empire and war. | |
| As we all try to make sense of a world apparently on fire, he joins me live to try and explain it for us. | |
| Live from London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored. | |
| Well, good evening from my home in London, and I'll explain why in a moment. | |
| But welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored. | |
| Grief doesn't work differently in a war zone. | |
| Every number means a ripple of misery. | |
| A grieving mother or a devastated brother or son. | |
| Best friends whose laughter will never be heard together again. | |
| The scale of the grief in Israel and Gaza right now is incalculable. | |
| And among the dead are a simply staggering number of people who gave their lives for their duties and their jobs. | |
| More than 100 aid workers, more than 220 doctors, nurses and paramedics. | |
| And so far, 61 journalists have been killed too. | |
| Four Israelis, three Lebanese and 54 Palestinians. | |
| These were all people who put their safety on the line to keep other people alive and to show the world what's really happening. | |
| Now they've paid the ultimate price. | |
| Well this anchoring correspondent broke down in tears as they learned of the death of a colleague. | |
| Well as I say grief doesn't work any differently in a war zone. | |
| In fact it's more accentuated. | |
| The Committee to Protect Journalists said 68 media workers were killed worldwide last year. | |
| That makes the last month the deadliest in recorded history for journalists. | |
| Al Jazeera journalist Wail Dadu was broadcasting live when he heard the Israeli airstrike that hit the house his family were sheltering in. | |
| He was still on air when he took the call to say that his wife, his son, his daughter and his grandson had all been killed. | |
| I can't even begin to imagine how somebody like him had the strength to wake up in the morning after that and go back to work, but he did. | |
| His situation is a small window into the hellish world of journalism in the world's deadliest war. | |
| Reporting in a place like Gaza is extraordinarily complicated and absolutely vital. | |
| International reporters just can't get in freely. | |
| Neither Israel nor Egypt will allow them to enter unless they're closely guarded. | |
| I'm a local journalist gathering all of the footage that we're seeing, including those working for big Western media outlets, face the same life and death challenges as everybody else. | |
| They too will have family members under fire all day, every day. | |
| There is no safe place for any of them to go. | |
| The difference is that they run towards danger with cameras and microphones to help the rest of us understand the reality of this war. | |
| In a world where many people think being a war correspondent means sitting in their parents' basements posting waspish takes on Twitter, now X, they are maybe less appreciated, less noticed, but they've never been more important. | |
| Well, my first guest tonight, who I'll introduce in a moment, is the perfect person to talk about all this. | |
| But before I get to him, I just want to explain what I'm doing sitting here at home in West London. | |
| I've never done a show from my home before. | |
| I've got COVID, tested positive for COVID this afternoon. | |
| And I be honest with you, I didn't know what the new rules were. | |
| I didn't know if you're supposed to just crack on and go to work and merrily infect all your co-workers or be what I thought was probably the more responsible thing to do, which is to try and do it from home. | |
| So here we are. | |
| We've got a great two-man crew with me who both recently had COVID. | |
| So that's why they're with me. | |
| And we're going to try and get through it probably tonight, tomorrow and Thursday. | |
| And there's no reason why we can't because, let's face it, work from home is the new thing, right? | |
| Anyway, my first guest, like I said, is the perfect person, I think, to put real perspective on the state of the world right now. | |
| There are so many things I've wanted to talk to him about in the last few weeks. | |
| Of course, the Israel-Hamas war, Ukraine, what is going to happen there, his great friend, Henry Kissinger, who he's halfway through writing a momentous volumes of biography about. | |
| And what, of course, is happening in London tomorrow with Boris Johnson, our former prime minister, which brings the link back to COVID. | |
| Seems quite ironic that I go down with COVID, just as Boris Johnson will be facing the music at the public inquiry into COVID, where many, including me, believe that he made a series of shambolic errors and made some successful moves, like the vaccines, but made a lot of shambolic errors early on, which almost certainly cost many thousands of lives. | |
| So let me introduce my guest. | |
| He's one of the most eminent historians and frankly knowledgeable people that you'll ever see interviewed on television. | |
| He's Professor Neil Ferguson, and he joins me now. | |
| Professor Neil Ferguson, great to see you. | |
| I can't think of a better time to have you on the show. | |
| So thank you for joining me. | |
| We've got plenty of time to go through all these things. | |
| Let me start with COVID as I'm sitting here with it, this virus which brought the whole world to its knees. | |
| Boris Johnson up tomorrow in London in front of an inquiry. | |
| What's the point of this inquiry? | |
| Many saying it's got three or four years to run. | |
| By then, as William Hague, former leader of the Conservative Party here, wrote in the Times column yesterday, there might have been another pandemic. | |
| Should we not be working as a planet on how to prevent another pandemic rather than worrying too much about what happened last time? | |
| Well, Piers, it's good to be with you. | |
| I think it's good that there is an attempt to work out what went wrong, what could have been done better. | |
| And let me just say that as I'm speaking to you from the United States, the UK is doing more in this respect than the US, because although there have been attempts to have an inquiry into the handling of COVID in the United States, there really is no interest in Washington in doing that. | |
| And so the only inquiries have been unofficial ones. | |
| I think there's a really important question that needs to be asked by every democracy, particularly in the West, because many Eastern democracies handled COVID quite well. | |
| Why did the public health systems do worse than was expected? | |
| Prior to the pandemic, Piers, the US and the UK were rated respectively number one and number two for preparedness in the event of a pandemic. | |
| Well, they clearly did not come in first and second in terms of their management of the COVID-19 pandemic. | |
| And I think there were two reasons for that. | |
| One was that the experts underestimated initially the seriousness of the problem. | |
| Even although it was clear that a pandemic was brewing in January of 2020, I remember making the argument that it was brewing in a column in January in the Sunday Times. | |
| The experts actually dithered in January and February and into March, and the public health bureaucracies were woefully unready when it became clear belatedly how big the problem was. | |
| The second issue, which I think is less important, has to do with leadership. | |
| At the time, and still, there's a great deal of criticism of Boris Johnson and of Donald Trump. | |
| And I think it's fair to say that they didn't do particularly well, but I don't think they were the real reason why excess mortality was so high in the UK and the US. | |
| So I hope that the conclusion of this inquiry is not that it was all Boris's fault, because I think that would be to miss the much more important point that the public health bureaucracies, and not only in the UK, also in the US and in many other countries, really underperformed. | |
| Are we prepared for another pandemic to hit us, do you think? | |
| I mean, there's been a lot of navel gazing about individual countries' performance, league tables and so on. | |
| But if there was to be another one next week, next month, next year, and apparently there's a 25% chance, according to the experts, there might be one in the next five years. | |
| Do you think we're ready for that to happen? | |
| Are we better prepared now? | |
| Well, I would hope so. | |
| One reason that countries such as Taiwan and South Korea handled COVID much better than the UK and the US was that they had learnt the lessons from SARS, which was really the trailer for COVID-19. | |
| And the countries in the West really hadn't because they thought, not having been much affected by SARS, that they should just worry about the next influenza pandemic. | |
| So I'm hoping that there is a realization that you don't get the pandemic you're expecting necessarily. | |
| But we can't really be sure if, for example, we would react more quickly to a new outbreak of a new disease. | |
| Remember, in some ways, the virus that caused COVID-19 was not an especially disastrous one by the standards of plagues in the past because it disproportionately killed the elderly. | |
| Imagine a virus that was as likely to kill the very young as the very old or to kill people in the prime of life. | |
| That was a much more common feature of pandemics in the past. | |
| And really, if you look at the infection mortality rate and then you adjust for age, for the number of days of life lost, then COVID-19 wasn't by any means one of the world's worst pandemics. | |
| Are we ready for something as bad as, say, the 1918-19 influenza? | |
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Migration Surprises Post-Brexit
00:07:38
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| I can't tell you that, Piers. | |
| The only consolation that I can offer your viewers is that we did at least learn in 2020 how to produce efficacious vaccines very quickly. | |
| And although there continues to be controversy about the vaccines, I'm one of those people who believes they played a vital role in limiting mortality. | |
| And they were the great success story on both sides of the Atlantic. | |
| And so, if nothing else, the most important thing in a pandemic is to get vaccines that work and get them quickly. | |
| So we at least proved that we can do that. | |
| And that was the one really good piece of news that came out of 2020. | |
| Yeah, and I would give credit to Boris Johnson for his work with that, unquestionably. | |
| Let me talk to, before we get to Israel-Gaza, which is obviously the biggest news story in the world at the moment. | |
| Let me just talk to you about this issue of immigration in the UK. | |
| Another big plan announced by the UK government by another Home Secretary, I think it's the fifth we've had. | |
| It was the third Home Secretary to go to Rwanda since they vowed to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. | |
| And so far, no asylum seekers have gone to Rwanda. | |
| But there's also a wider problem here, not just of legal migration, but sorry, illegal migration, but also legal migration. | |
| And it's affecting the whole continent of Europe and indeed wider parts of the world. | |
| What's your assessment of how we should deal with this new world of millions of people wanting to move to, in their eyes, a better place? | |
| Well, we do indeed, Piers, live in an age of mass migration, though it's not the first in history. | |
| If you look at the flows relative to population, they were comparably huge in the late 19th century. | |
| I'm myself an immigrant. | |
| I'm an immigrant to the United States. | |
| You might say I also was an immigrant to England from Scotland once upon a time. | |
| And I'm married to an asylum seeker. | |
| My wife, Ayan Hersey Ali, sought asylum in the Netherlands. | |
| And so we as a family are hardly likely to be hardline opponents of immigration. | |
| That would be immense hypocrisy. | |
| I think there are a couple of really important points that are worth making here. | |
| The first is that if there's a sudden swing in net migration, if you suddenly go from relatively little to a lot to hundreds of thousands in the case of a country like the UK, you would expect there to be some kind of public backlash. | |
| And if anything, to me, the surprising thing about the UK today is that the public's been so tolerant of an extraordinary surge in net migration, which is certainly not, I think, what people expected to be one of the consequences of voting for Brexit. | |
| The interesting thing is that if you look at opinion polling, there's no real evidence of racism, of xenophobia. | |
| When British people complain about excessively large net migration, they're just complaining about the impact on public services, the kind of services like the NHS that come under strain when there are suddenly hundreds of thousands more people to serve. | |
| So I think one lesson of recent years is that one mustn't allow there to be such big shifts because while immigration is, I think, a necessary part of the way the world works, especially a world of aging populations in many developed countries, it's important to recognize that people shouldn't expect it to come in great surges. | |
| The second point is that I think you need to have a clear and coherent policy that the public understands. | |
| And I think at the moment in Britain, there's the very opposite. | |
| There's really considerable confusion. | |
| And I must say the swings in policy, as you mentioned, the regular changes in policy, the somewhat outlandish notion that people whose asylum cases are questioned will be sent to Rwanda, none of this has inspired public confidence, rather the opposite. | |
| And one must wonder why the Prime Minister would sack a Home Secretary who'd called for more restrictions and then just within a matter of days introduce new restrictions of the sort that I think Suella Braverman had called for. | |
| So this is calculated to confuse and disorient the public. | |
| As I said, the impressive thing to me is that the British public's remarkably tolerant. | |
| I sometimes read in the New York Times that Brexit was motivated by imperial nostalgia or Little Englandism. | |
| Turns out to be quite untrue. | |
| One of the least predicted consequences of Brexit was that migration into the UK shifted from being plumbers from Poland to being people from outside the European Union, from as far afield as Hong Kong and other parts of Asia as well as North Africa. | |
| And British people are remarkably tolerant of this. | |
| In fact, in many ways, I think they even welcome it when it helps keep the NHS working. | |
| So the key issue in Britain, I think, is that there are public services under strain, especially in the southeast. | |
| Housing, of course, is a huge problem, even without immigration in the southeast. | |
| And to me, the only surprising thing is that people aren't more indignant about this. | |
| Look at the Netherlands, to make one final point. | |
| In many European countries, this issue is causing earthquakes in the political landscape. | |
| New parties surging into positions of power. | |
| In Germany, the alternative for Germany. | |
| And what happens in Britain? | |
| Well, nothing much really happens because it's still a two-party system. | |
| And the arguments go on within the Conservative Party and within the Labour Party almost exactly as they did when we were kids' peers back in the 1960s and 70s. | |
| And you know, it's one of the reasons I've been so incensed about this whole Duke and Duchess of Sussex Oprah Winfrey racism row is that it painted this country as a hotbed of white supremacists and racists right from the very top with our royal family. | |
| When in fact, all the evidence points to the complete contrary, that we are arguably one of the most tolerant countries in the world. | |
| I agree with that, Piers. | |
| And in fact, if you look at the data, survey data and data on behavior, I think you can make a very convincing case that the United Kingdom is the most tolerant country in the world. | |
| And I always like to explain to Americans, you know, the thing about the English is that they really care a lot more about class than they do about race. | |
| I say this semi-jokingly. | |
| Actually, if you look at the data, Piers, it's very striking how much wider the disparities are in terms of income and quality of life between white and black Americans as compared with their British counterparts. | |
| And I would say one of the most striking features of our lifetimes has been Britain's transformation from an overwhelmingly white society into one that, particularly in the South, but not only in the South, also in the Midlands, is really extraordinarily ethnically and religiously diverse. | |
| And one might have said, as Enoch Powell, of course, did in the late 1960s, this will lead to terrible trouble. | |
| There'll be blood in the streets or in the River Tiber, as he said in his famous speech. | |
| And that hasn't been the case. | |
| Enoch Powell was actually wrong. | |
| Britain's accepted this very enormous change in its social aspect with remarkably little friction, in my view. | |
| I completely agree. | |
| Professor Ferguson, I'll take a short break. | |
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Escalating Wars in Ukraine
00:15:54
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| I'm going to come back and talk about two wars: Israel-Hamas, which is now raging all through Gaza, and of course, Ukraine-Russia, which people are pretty much ignoring at the moment, but really shouldn't be. | |
| We'll be back after that. | |
| Welcome back to Piers Morgan Uncensored, a rather rare, in fact, unique work from home edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored because I am currently suffering from COVID, but we'll man up and crack on. | |
| I'm with Professor Neil Ferguson. | |
| Neil, I want to talk to you about two wars. | |
| Let's start with Israel and Gaza and what is going on there. | |
| I've spoken a lot in the last two months about feeling a real moral quandary about this. | |
| In the sense, I feel that Israel is absolutely morally justified to defend itself from future attacks of the kind we saw on October the 7th, and if it has a duty to defend its people, given that Hamas has said they want to keep doing it again and again and again, and they're a terror group who will clearly do that. | |
| But when you see the scale of what is going on in Gaza, the displacement of well over a million people now, the leveling of most of northern Gaza, and now they're heading into the south to do the same, and the increasingly shocking death toll of civilians, and in particular, children, in a place where half the population are children. | |
| You know, I'm beginning to have, like most people who defend Israel's right to defend itself, a real moral qualm about the scale of their retribution, which is how many people see it. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Well, I don't think it's just retribution. | |
| I think it's clear that Israel can no longer coexist with Hamas in control of Gaza. | |
| If anybody doubted that, then those doubts were surely dispelled. | |
| on October the 7th with the most hideous scenes of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. | |
| Indeed, it seemed to me that what Hamas were really trying to communicate was their intention to reenact the Holocaust. | |
| And I think every one of us, regardless of whether we're Jewish or not, has a moral obligation to ensure that there never is another Holocaust. | |
| And those who threaten to wipe Israel from the map are intending nothing less than a second Holocaust. | |
| So the issue is, can Hamas be destroyed, as it should be, at an acceptable cost? | |
| It's the same question that had to be asked when British and American forces were fighting an insurgency in Iraqi cities. | |
| It's the same question that had to be asked when it was Islamic State that was being wiped out. | |
| And since these organizations specialize in concealing themselves in densely populated urban centers, it's inconceivable that they can be defeated at zero cost to civilians. | |
| Now, the problem for Israel is that it's damned whatever it does. | |
| If it moves civilians out of the way, it's accused of ethnic cleansing. | |
| If it doesn't, it's hypocritically accused of genocide. | |
| So this is a very, very difficult, indeed well-nigh impossible situation. | |
| And it's not made any easier when the international community and indeed the US government leans on Israel to stop or pause or cease fire, because that only allows Hamas to regroup and it almost certainly prolongs the conflict. | |
| I want to add another point, Piers. | |
| This is not just about Gaza. | |
| It's also about the other areas where Israel is under attack. | |
| It's about the unstable situation in the West Bank. | |
| It's about the possibility that at any moment Hezbollah could launch a massive bombardment of rockets and missiles from Lebanon into Israel. | |
| And there's more, because there are also all kinds of forces in Syria that bear ill will towards Israel. | |
| The war has the potential to escalate and grow in multiple ways. | |
| We're in a kind of lull at the moment, incredible though it may seem to say that. | |
| And my fear is that at some point in the coming weeks, we'll see the next phase of the war. | |
| A new front will be opened up and Israel will be fighting not only in Gaza, but potentially elsewhere for its very survival. | |
| And I want to underline to your viewers, given the very small size of Israel and its vulnerability in a neighborhood where it's almost entirely surrounded by hostile forces, its very survival is at stake. | |
| So I think it's very important, particularly for people in Britain and the US, not to be swayed by the very clever propaganda that comes out of Gaza, often Hamas crafted, often Hamas authorized, which is designed to make you think there's some moral equivalence here, because there really can't be moral equivalence when Israel is retaliating for the appalling attacks of October the 7th. | |
| And that is a just war that is being fought right now. | |
| Is war ever clean? | |
| No. | |
| Are there civilian casualties in war? | |
| Nearly always, particularly in modern times. | |
| That's the reality. | |
| And I'm afraid we have more to face of this harsh reality because this war is only likely to escalate in the coming weeks. | |
| How does it end? | |
| I mean, you're a historian. | |
| You have covered many conflicts and wars. | |
| I just worry about whether Israel has an end game here that doesn't just involve, in many of their eyes, in the leadership, just taking over Gaza, for example, occupying it completely going forward. | |
| Do you see anything other than that happening? | |
| Well, there's no great appetite within the Israeli military for an occupation of Gaza because they have bitter memories of what that was like before and indeed what other occupations that the Israeli army, the Israeli Defense Forces have carried out in the past. | |
| But who has a better idea at this point? | |
| It's a little difficult to imagine the dust settling and a new force emerging to take the place of Hamas that isn't just as bad. | |
| It's not like the Palestinian Authority is about to be put back in charge of Gaza. | |
| Everybody knows that Palestinian authority is an oxymoron. | |
| Those two words no longer meaningfully belong together. | |
| There are some other options which I think need to be considered. | |
| After all, what's the United Nations for if it's not to send blue helmets into dangerous territories where the alternative is ongoing conflict? | |
| And that seems to me to be the kind of thing that should be under much more serious discussion at the moment, internationalizing Gaza. | |
| That seems the kind of end game that would make much more sense to me than an Israeli occupation that would almost certainly just become a succession of terrorist attacks and countermeasures. | |
| Yeah, I agree. | |
| Just want to turn briefly to Ukraine, because obviously Ukraine has almost been forgotten at the moment at a very worrying time if you're President Zelensky with American financial support for their military endeavors, looking like it's pretty perilous in terms of future financial input. | |
| Where are we with this Ukraine war? | |
| Is it, as some people fear now, inevitable that there will have to be some kind of deal that involves Putin swallowing up some, if not all, of the land that he has barbarically stolen? | |
| Well, Pierce, 20 years ago, I wrote a book called American Colossus, and I argued there that one of the problems of American power is the attention deficit disorder that kicks in, usually after a couple of years of any engagement. | |
| And even when the engagement isn't one that involves American troops in the front line, and sure enough, American interest has been on the wane in the course of the last several months to the point that there are real question marks over the continuation of American aid. | |
| And American aid is pretty crucial both militarily and financially. | |
| In the European Union, too, as well as in the UK, one has the sense, and a Ukrainian friend said this to me yesterday, that people's interest has just wandered. | |
| My friend was saying that the CNN operation in Kyiv has been relocated to the Middle East as a kind of symbol that a new story is in town and the old story is no longer really getting the ratings. | |
| This is very concerning for any friend of Ukraine. | |
| And I consider myself a staunch friend of Ukraine. | |
| I've been to that country almost every year for the past decade because the scenario isn't inconceivable that they could lose this war. | |
| Russians are amassing firepower. | |
| They have greater raw resources. | |
| They have the capacity to launch an air war against Ukraine in the coming weeks that could paralyze Ukraine's electricity system if it's successful. | |
| And so it's not so much that there's going to be some nasty compromise deal. | |
| I don't think President Putin's interested in negotiation. | |
| He's playing for higher stakes because he senses that the politics in the West is going his way and he has a shot at victory if he's patient. | |
| And that's the thing that really concerns me. | |
| We sort of lost interest. | |
| We're focused on the next war, the next shiny bright object. | |
| And while we're not paying attention, we could see Ukraine defeated. | |
| And Piers, mark my words. | |
| If Ukraine is defeated, that will send a signal, not only to Putin, it'll send a signal to Xi Jinping in China. | |
| It'll send a signal to the Ayatollahs in Iran. | |
| It'll send a signal to Pyongyang, to North Korea. | |
| And the signal will be the West is weak. | |
| It cannot sustain its commitments. | |
| It can't even hold Ukraine up in the face of a Russian attack. | |
| And that will spell the beginning of a very dark age in which the 2020s will start to feel an awful lot like the 1930s. | |
| So the stakes are extremely high. | |
| And I urge people, do not lose interest in Ukraine. | |
| It is vitally important that Russia not win this war. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| It's about freedom and democracy. | |
| And we used to go to world wars to preserve and defend that. | |
| And it's terrifying to me to see so many people who are prepared to let Putin take what he's stolen. | |
| We'll come back after the break, Professor Ferguson, talk about two very divisive polarizing figures, arguably the two most polarizing of the last 50 years. | |
| Henry Kissinger, a giant of modern history, who you've written a compelling biography about. | |
| In fact, you're halfway through, I think, a series of volumes. | |
| And also Donald Trump, who is poised to make potentially the most sensational comeback in American presidential history. | |
| Could that happen? | |
| I'll ask you after the break. | |
| Welcome back to Piers Morgan Uncensored, live from my home, because I've currently got COVID. | |
| Professor Ferguson, I'll talk to you about two very polarizing figures. | |
| One who sadly died in the last few days, Henry Kissinger, who you've been a biographer of, who I don't think I've ever seen anyone who got such extraordinarily different obituaries, depending on what media you were looking at or reading at the time. | |
| He was either a despotic monster and warmonger, or he was one of the pivotal and great figures of modern times. | |
| I know that you sit more in the latter, but do you understand why he, even in death, incited such an extraordinary range of opinions? | |
| Yes, I think I do understand that, Piers. | |
| I've spent a good chunk of the last 20 years working on Henry Kissinger's life. | |
| I'm in the midst of a second volume of his life as we speak. | |
| And one of the striking features of that extraordinary 100-year life was how polarizing Henry Kissinger was. | |
| From a very early stage, he had critics on both the right and the left. | |
| Over time, the left became somehow more and more vituperative, especially after the end of the Cold War. | |
| And an old friend of mine, Christopher Hitchens, did a great deal of damage in this regard with a rather hastily written book called The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in which he made the claim on the basis of almost no evidence that somehow Henry Kissinger was a war criminal. | |
| Well, that really caught on. | |
| And for a generation who really didn't know a great deal about the Cold War, it became convenient to say that about Henry Kissinger. | |
| Now, in reality, that really doesn't make any sense at all because the kinds of things of which Henry Kissinger's accused, using bombing against civilians in Cambodia, for example, or supporting right-wing governments in Chile, are the things that secretaries of state have done pretty much throughout the period since 1945. | |
| So to put it really crudely, they're either all war criminals, or as seems more likely, none of them is. | |
| This is a really important point to make. | |
| But the second point I'd make is that if Henry Kissinger had not been Jewish, I do not think the vituperation would have been anything like as serious. | |
| There's no question in my mind that part of what motivates people to hate Kissinger is conscious or unconscious anti-Semitism. | |
| And it's been very obvious since his death that people have been prepared to say absolutely shameful things about him literally within days of his death. | |
| And I don't think that you find that kind of thing without there being some element of anti-Semitism. | |
| And that, I think, is the harsh reality. | |
| I mean, of course, the irony is that the second person I want to talk to you about, Donald Trump, is somebody who almost certainly, when he dies, and he's not Jewish, will get almost exactly the same kind of polarized coverage of his death. | |
| But let me ask you, instead of that, about the prospect of him potentially winning in 2024, you've got to say, looking at the Republican polls for nominee and then looking at the matchup polls between Trump and Biden, if indeed Biden is the Democrat nominee, and I know that you share my view, I think that he should stand aside. | |
| But if it is Biden-Trump, Trump has a very good chance of winning, doesn't he? | |
| At this point, if it goes all the way to a rerun of 2020 and it's Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the ballot, then I think Donald Trump has a better than 50% chance of winning, especially if it seems clear the U.S. economy is going to slow down in the coming year, if not go into recession. | |
| Trump is polling strongly in the swing states that are really going to be decisive, as they always are, in the close elections that we have these days. | |
| But American politics is an unpredictable game, partly because the stakes are so high. | |
| And I don't rule out an upset on one or possibly both sides. | |
| Don't rule out Nikki Haley as a contender for the Republican nomination. | |
| There are plenty of Republicans in those key early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, who have some doubts about whether they really want Donald Trump all over again, whether they're ready for another four years of fire and fury. | |
| And then on the Democratic side, there's really widespread concern that Joe Biden is over the hill and should not be the candidate. | |
| They just can't work out quite how to get him to step aside the way, say, Lyndon Johnson did in 68, when it was clear that he was going to struggle to win, not because of age, but because of Vietnam. | |
| So I'm not ready to say this is a two-horse race and Trump is going to get re-elected. | |
| I think it's much too early to make that kind of confident judgment. | |
|
Gaza Images and Moral Clarity
00:04:56
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|
| There are surprises ahead. | |
| But at the moment, the base case is that it's Trump Biden. | |
| And if it is Trump Biden, then I think Trump has to be the favorite. | |
| Yeah, I completely agree. | |
| Professor, I've got to leave it there, but thank you because when I discovered I had COVID today and felt, to be honest, pretty rough and knew I couldn't do much of my normal over-animated talking and I realized you were my main guest, I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that I could just basically tee you up and let you talk and the viewers would be a lot more interested in what you had to say than anything my croaky voice could come out with. | |
| So I appreciate it very much indeed. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Get well soon, Piers. | |
| I'll try. | |
| Well, uncensored next, Prince Harry back in court again. | |
| Two biological men dominate a women's race. | |
| Again, lots to discuss with my PAC, Konstantin Kissing, Ava Santina. | |
| Well, welcome back to Uncensored from my home in London, where I have COVID, but we're battling on here, as I would expect people to do, even if they're working from home. | |
| Joining me now is my PAC, legal journalist Ava Santina and the author, podcast, host and comedian Konstantin Kissim. | |
| Well, welcome to both of you. | |
| So, Konstantin, great to have you finally on the program because I can finally hold you to account for something that you tweeted to me. | |
| I was just curious, really, what you were thinking when you did this, because I tweeted this after a few days of the war. | |
| The appalling images and accounts of what innocent Israelis suffered on October the 7th are utterly heartbreaking. | |
| And so are the appalling images and accounts of what innocent Palestinians have suffered since then. | |
| If you disagree with any part of this, you have no humanity or moral compass. | |
| And you replied, the appalling images and accounts of the Holocaust are utterly heartbreaking. | |
| And so are the appalling images and accounts of what innocent Germans in Dresden suffered. | |
| If you disagree with any of this, you've lost your humanity. | |
| And I've got to say, in the moment, I was a bit annoyed by it. | |
| And then I thought longer about what you were saying. | |
| And I thought you made a very good point. | |
| And it's a point that many people, I have to say, mainly on the Israel Defence Force side, have made quite forcefully since, which is that if this war was being waged on social media, if World War II was being waged the same way with social media the way it is, then would the actions of the Allies against German civilians be judged differently? | |
| And I think they probably would. | |
| I think you're right. | |
| Well, yes, I think I am right, Piers. | |
| But also, the other thing I would say is I share the moral quandary that you were talking about with Neil Ferguson earlier. | |
| Nobody can look at the pictures of what we're seeing from Gaza and be in any way happy about what is happening. | |
| But I think if we're being honest, let's look at what the Allies, Britain and the Americans, did during the last year of World War II. | |
| We dropped more than a hiroshima a day on Germany for a year non-stop in order to win that war. | |
| And I think if you look at it from Israel's point of view, imagine what the equivalent of that would be here in the UK. | |
| It would be the equivalent of, say, the IRA during the Troubles, invading northern England, killing over 8,000 people, taking 1,000 people hostage. | |
| What do you think Margaret Thatcher would have done? | |
| I think we have to be clear about the moral, the inability to make a moral comparison between these two while having every bit of compassion for innocent civilians who are caught up in this. | |
| Ava, my whole issue here is, and whenever I talk to anyone from the Israeli government and I ask them a straightforward question, how many Hamas terrorists are you actually killing? | |
| It's pretty clear from their answers they don't know. | |
| I mean, they kind of, they try and faint it a bit and try and make out they know, but they don't actually know. | |
| And what we do know from the admittedly Hamas-run health authority, but their numbers are not being contradicted by independent bodies, is that the number of civilians dying is massive. | |
| And if you can't provide evidence of how many Hamas terrorists are getting killed, then the moral position that Israel finds itself in in terms of public opinion around the world starts to erode quite fast, I think. | |
| Well, the problem that you have there is that Israel and the IDF won't allow journalists to go into the Gaza Strip. | |
| And that's also being aided by Egypt, who also won't allow journalists to cross the Rafah crossing. | |
| So it's very difficult to independently verify what is going on on the Gaza Strip. | |
| But also back to what you were just talking about there with Constantine, I would say in terms of the scale, it's very similar to what happened in Dresden, but you would never have that now because we've got the Geneva Convention in place and you've also got the European Court of Human Rights. | |
| And those two pieces of legislation should tell us that the killing that is going on in Gaza is absolutely atrocious and is in violation of international law. | |
| Constantine, I want to talk to you about Prince Harry. | |
|
Racism in Women's Sport
00:08:06
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| It's not a subject I ever willingly bring up from a sense of personal joy about wanting to discuss him. | |
| However, he keeps putting himself back in the news and he's in court again in London today, demanding to have royal protection whenever he and his family are in the UK, despite quitting the country, quitting royal duty, and spending the last few years trashing the family and the monarchy. | |
| Should he be entitled to have royal protection? | |
| Well, actually, even in the core case that is now happening, one of the things that is clear is that he was being offered protection as any high-profile public figure would be in the UK. | |
| It was simply not at the level that a working royal would be offered. | |
| And Piers, you say you don't bring this up willingly. | |
| I don't really pay much attention to these people, but I do remember distinctly some time ago them quitting public life and moving on. | |
| And since then, all we have seen is them complaining about one thing after another. | |
| First, there was the fake racism about the baby, now it's this, and it just never seems to stop. | |
| And it seems to me that they quite enjoy their attention. | |
| I know that's a cynical interpretation, but it just seems to me that they can't live without the attention and they're courting it deliberately. | |
| Yeah, and Ava, you know, I talked with Neil Ferguson about this secondary issue of the way that they tainted with that Oprah interview the entire country via the prism of our figureheads, the royal family and the monarchy, as a bunch of callous racists. | |
| When in fact, you know, this is from a historian like Neil who knows better than most what a racist, intolerant place looks like. | |
| And he, you know, by any normal metric, Britain is one of the most tolerant places in the world. | |
| I think that you, I mean, I think you know what you're saying there. | |
| You know, you've made a decision that the royal family haven't done anything racist and there's not going to be any further scrutiny of whether, you know, anyone in the royal family said something to upset Meghan. | |
| But look, you know, we were all there for the last couple of years and the couple of years leading up to their, well, sorry, not a couple of years, but the couple of months leading up to their wedding. | |
| We do know how the press treated Meghan Markle and we do know that there were a lot of allegations made against her that I'm sorry, they could be called racist. | |
| You know, she had a very terrible time. | |
| Quite one. | |
| Look, I'm not going to go over old accusations. | |
| I mean, there was... | |
| Well, name one. | |
| All right, okay. | |
| So her skin colour was, you know, she was called exotic. | |
| That was a pretty racist thing to say. | |
| And, you know, that was Rachel Johnson. | |
| The reason I told you that was the same thing. | |
| I apologise if anyone was on. | |
| I think that Rachel has, yes, has, you know, corrected that in, you know, the years that followed that. | |
| But, you know, there were many, there were accusations leveled at her that were completely unfair. | |
| I mean, there was a two-page spread given to her consumption. | |
| These were avocados. | |
| It was totally ridiculous. | |
| But they weren't racist. | |
| And my point is, if you go back and look at the press coverage on the wedding day, for example, I know I wrote The Mail on Sunday's big piece on it. | |
| Everyone was welcoming in this country the idea of a biracial marriage into the royal family. | |
| Not everyone. | |
| It's a big tinge of racism. | |
| Not everyone. | |
| Yes, actually. | |
| No, pretty much everybody. | |
| That's like a lot of people. | |
| Not all fans of the Premier League aren't racist. | |
| And we do know that people who comment on it, you know, all the footballers' Instagrams after every single match do put racist comments on there. | |
| But you can make an argument that the Premier League itself is not racist. | |
| Look, I think there was a level of introspection that was leveled at Meghan Markle that was totally unfair, totally uncalled for. | |
| And no wonder she basically had a breakdown, had to leave the country. | |
| Yeah, I don't think it was that at all. | |
| I think she was a very cynical person who decided to hook her claws into Prince Harry as a meal ticket for life, dragged him back to California for the good life in the mansion where they trade off their royal titles for hundreds of millions of dollars. | |
| And I think it's despicable. | |
| However, we can agree to disagree. | |
| Maybe on this one, we might find some agreement. | |
| Constantine, Once again, this issue of trans athletes competing in women's sport has reared a very ugly head in terms of what happened in Illinois in a cycling competition, a women's cycling race, where the gold and silver medals were won by two biological males identifying as trans women. | |
| Now, this is the latest in a long series of these farcical results in women's sport, which are clearly eroding the fairness and equality and integrity of women's sport. | |
| And my question is simply, why are we still allowing this to happen? | |
| Why, A, are official sports bodies not just banning it completely when there's such an obvious disadvantage to women born with female biological bodies? | |
| But secondly, why aren't more women standing up? | |
| Is it because the ones who do get crucified at the altar of trans activism? | |
| Well, I hear Ava tutting next to me, so I'm fearful of what I'm about to say. | |
| But look, first of all, on the trans women in women's sports thing, we're all looking for the next hot. | |
| I don't know what to say. | |
| I mean, it is so obvious. | |
| We have had Richard Dawkins on trigonometry, Sharon Davis, the former British Olympics women, detailing bit by bit by bit every way in which men have a physical advantage over women when it comes to physical competition. | |
| And by the way, you don't need to be a scientist. | |
| You just need to have a brain, look around to know that there is a physical difference between men and women. | |
| As for why more women don't stand up, look, first of all, I think we should acknowledge there are many, many very courageous women who have spoken out about this. | |
| And I just mentioned Sharon Davis, but I could give you a list as long as my arm. | |
| But I do actually agree with you. | |
| J.K. Rowling. | |
| Yes, of course. | |
| I generally don't buy into the sort of allegations that men and women are treated differently in lots of different fields. | |
| But I do think actually on this issue, it is true. | |
| Women, I think, are perceived as being slightly more vulnerable. | |
| And the very hateful, bigoted trans activists that go after people, especially online, they do seem to target the women more. | |
| So I think it's actually on the men and the women in this case, but particularly on the men to stand up and lead in saying this is completely ridiculous and it needs to end. | |
| Okay, Ava, my question for you. | |
| When was the last time a trans man competed against biological men and beat them? | |
| I just don't think that we would have that level of introspection. | |
| It's probably that journalists aren't trying to hunt out that story because they don't think it's going to make headline news. | |
| No, no. | |
| At the moment. | |
| No, Ava, Ava. | |
| It hasn't happened. | |
| That's why no one's written about it. | |
| Okay, look, at the moment... | |
| No one writes about trans men winning against men because they don't beat them. | |
| Piers, at the moment, we are currently, you know, we're currently witnessing the trial of Brianna Gay, who was, you know, a young trans girl who, you know, sadly lost her life. | |
| And, you know, we'll have to see what comes out of the court. | |
| I can't say too much more on it. | |
| But also, you know, a colleague of mine just returned from a young trans boy who'd taken his own life. | |
| The way that we are treating trans people in this country is disgusting. | |
| There are such a small proportion of them and I don't understand why we won't leave them alone. | |
| Ava? | |
| Yeah, but one of the reasons why trans people are getting a hard time is because of this ridiculous defense of the indefensible over the issue of trans athletes in women's sport. | |
| It makes an absolute mockery of all trans people. | |
| I know trans people who wish this would all just go away, that trans people would stop trying to fight at this ridiculous altar of unfairness and battle for their own fairness and equality. | |
| Because I think what they are doing is that they're not. | |
| No, I think what they're fighting for is just to be recognised and just to be left alone. | |
| You know, it doesn't need to be this headline, media, speculation, insanity all the time. | |
| If perhaps the media showed some care for them every other day of the year, then maybe we could have a sensible conversation about sport. | |
| Maybe I could, you know, start talking to you normally about perhaps what is going on, you know, with the cycling. | |
| But frankly, I don't really care when I know that trans people are taking their own lives every single day. | |
| What about the women who are competing in these sports and who are not getting an opportunity to compete fairly so? | |
| We've run out of time, guys. | |
| Constantine, I've loved having you back. | |
| Please come back again soon. | |
| Ava, always good to have you. | |
| We'll agree to disagree. | |
| Thank you very much indeed for watching from my home here in London. | |
| I suspect I'll be here again tomorrow night and Thursday night from COVID Central. | |
| Whatever you're up to, keep it uncensored. | |