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Douglas Murray: 'The podcasters have won' | UnHerd | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Douglas Murray: 'The podcasters have won'
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A lot of people are enjoying the
breakdown of all forms of authority. And
it's not necessarily for uncynical
reasons. Much of the counterculture is
not the counterculture anymore. It's the
culture because Donald Trump has won the
election. Because Donald Trump's won the
election. The podcasters have won. Joe
has probably more influence on public
debate than the Washington Post these
days. There comes a point to quote
Spider-Man I think where with great
power comes great
responsibility. Hello and welcome back
to Unheard. He has become one of the
most recognizable commentators in the
world talking about some of the most
controversial and difficult topics there
are. Immigration, Islam, Ukraine,
Israel, the list goes on. His new book
which I'm holding here on democracies
and death cults has already become a
bestseller. It has just been
enthusiastically endorsed by none other
than President Trump. And his
appearances on podcasts even in the last
week, like the Joe Rogan Experience,
have become talking points across the
world. But who is Douglas Murray? How
did this British intellectual become the
person we see all over our social media
streams every day at the moment? Well,
he's with me here in the studio at
Unheard, and we're going to do our best
to understand that question. Welcome,
Douglas. Very good to be back in the
Unheard studios. So before I dig into
this book that we're mainly talking
about, I thought it'd be really
interesting to just get a bit of the
history of how you got here because some
people won't know. So let's cast our
minds back to before we even met. I
think we probably met around 20 years
ago or something. But even before that,
you had written a book about Boosezie,
the lover of Oscar Wild. You were
studying literature. you seemed like you
were on track at that early stage in
your younger life to becoming a kind of
literary artistic person. What happened
since after that? I suppose well I I I
when I was at Oxford I um used to do
something quite rare which is I used to
buy and read the newspapers and took an
interest in the world beyond the
university. I wanted to write about
politics and international affairs in
particular. I was deeply gripped in the
1990s by the wars in the Balkans and uh
I I suppose I was lucky in having a
number of friends who I'd gravitated
towards mainly older uh from quite a
wide variety of backgrounds including
from parts of the Middle East and so on
and I had my interest peaked by events
there. So was there a point at which you
kind of made the decision that it was
going to be more politics? Well, I
suppose several reasons. One is that I
started to realize that everything I
love um culture, literature, uh art and
much more is history is all reliant on
politics. You know, you can't separate
out the two particularly in a age like
ours. Perhaps it was always the case.
One of Leo Strauss's pupils once said
that I think it was Harvey Mansfield
said that to the extent that there was
an overriding philosophy in Strauss he
wanted the world of politics to be
organized in such a way that it made the
world safe for philosophy. Yeah, I want
to see uh the world of politics arranged
in such a way that we can do culture. In
other words, that I'm interested, very
interested obviously in the ups and
downs, the twos and fros of
politics. But I was never so interested
in who was deputy under secretary of
works and pensions as I was in questions
of whether or not we were doing anything
meaningful, doing anything good, finding
things out, discovering things, creating
things. And uh I suppose I started to
notice that the conditions for that were
were far from optimal. Everything had
become or was becoming politicized. So
there's a kind of connection. I think
there's a very clear connection between
the two. And the people who I gravitated
towards, who I was interested in and who
to a great extent sort of mentored me
and uh encouraged me were people who
also made that connection like
Christopher Hitchens, Chris Hitchens,
Roger Scrutin. Can we just spend a
moment on them just before we So
Christopher, you you first met him in
your early 20s then when when you had
published that book. He reviewed that
first book and indeed my second book we
became friends I suppose because he'd
written nice things about me which is
often a good way to start a friendship.
But yes and then I was very fortunate in
my first internship uh at a small media
organization much like Unheard was many
years ago. It was a place called Open
Democracy which I think still goes. It
was a very unhappy place. It was a
collection of well left-wing mal
contents who had set up the idea that
you that they would do a uh an online
site where right and left politically
and culturally engaged at their most
honest and meaningful as opposed to the
most shallow. Of course, it didn't work.
It was a total bust. And not least
because if anyone uh even remotely
conservative as I then realized I was
with a small C wrote anything, you
immediately had thousands of leftwing
attack pieces responding to it. But I
was very fortunate that Sophie Scrutin
worked there. And one day I saw in the
office sitting there reading the
occasional contributor to Unheard, Roger
Scrutin, who very movingly noticed that
we had similar interests and concerns
and indeed loves. Uh we both had a deep
love of our country, a deep love of our
history and our culture, of our
buildings, of our literature, of our
music and much more. And he kind of
spotted me as I was on my £50 a week uh
salary to make coffee occasionally
venturing into writing uh political
pieces. And uh Roger, I remember one day
said to me, "You've probably worked out
by now, Douglas, that this place
consists of um about 50,000 leftists
versus us." And then he went on in a
very scrutiny way to say, "So it's a
fair fight."
Um and uh and he was a great great
influence and encourager. And uh so
they're the two that you Well, there
were others as well. the president of my
college at Oxford Anthony Smith uh was
an enormous encourager and he knew much
of that leftist generation from the 60s
who had come up James Fenton and Martin
Amos me and Mchuan he knew those people
who sort of come up and I found very
very interesting because they had let's
say liberal uh views on things but were
also shifting in an interesting way
particularly in the wake of 9/11 and so
yes I mean there was a whole generations
before me that I was very interested in
and very fortunate to it's not just luck
of course there's also that you orient
yourself towards people that you admire
and would like would like to be it's I
think probably not that well understood
about you that actually you have this
sort of origin in in culture music
poetry literature and the scrutin thing
is interesting because the the politics
kind of comes out of that that it's a
it's a defense of those things is the
where it starts I mean are we allowed to
swear on this program. Yes, please do.
Okay. I don't like people all
over my country. I don't like the thing
I started to see in the early 2000s in
particular, which was people, you know,
defaming Britain
um lambasting England in particular.
They seemed to really hate this society
and and I love it and uh I wanted it to
go on and I always thought that it was
complete rubbish that uh the things that
were being told about it not least
because if we were such a horrible
terrible country with so little going
for us why was the world trying to come
here as I've often said you know you
don't have any very large in infusion of
people from the west trying desperately
to get into the freedoms of Pakistan uh
or Bangladesh and and and largely that's
because actually we people do know that
our society works or at least worked and
if if something works then you should
try to make sure it keeps going as
opposed to turning it over blowing the
whole thing up and um believing that you
can start again on the other side of the
detritus. So if we're going to try and
get from there to the book and today
there's a kind of middle section which I
think we should just spend a moment on.
You wrote a book in the mid200s,
neoconservatism, why we need it,
appeared at the Henry Jackson Society.
There was a sense that you were a
neocon, and that's always discussed.
I've actually seen in some of the
responses to your Joe Rogan appearance,
even just in a few days ago, it's the
same thing. Oh, he's a neocon. He's, you
know, he's he's there to push the neocon
agenda. How do you now think about that?
Do are you a neocon?
Well, I don't think in the sense that
people understand it now. I mean, my
book on it was mainly a an explanation
of what the neoconservative movement had
been, and I wrote it in part because it
was the other n-word in the 2000s. And
it's interesting that it's come back
again now. Uh, and now, just as then,
people didn't really understand what it
meant. it increasingly became and I
think it's become a sort of an
unsalvageable term because what it came
to mean was uh simply
warhawks and principally it was used as
a kind of Jewish warhawks thing. The
best definition of neoconservatism was
given by Irving Crystal. Irving famously
described neoconservative as a a liberal
who'd been mugged by reality. I remember
Irving once said to me, um, did you
spend any time on the political left,
Douglas, like we did? And I said,
possibly, but it was a matter of
minutes. So, I can't claim to have had
that sort of long left-wing gestation. I
guess what they would mean then is that
you, you know, supported the Iraq back
then. You know, I'm sure your views have
evolved about that. But there's still
the the core that remains is that you
seem to object as strongly now to back
then to a kind of relativism and moral
relativism. You prefer what you describe
as moral clarity. So saying okay these
two sides are not the same. There is it
may not be a goody and a baddie but
there is one that is preferable. Is that
is that the thread? I mean I think
there's lots of problems in liberalism
obviously is a shape-shifting word. It's
extremely difficult to pin down. kind of
means different things when you go into
different countries. You across the
border from America and to Canada and uh
well you still can for the time being
and you you liberal means a different
thing. Liberal party in the Netherlands
is the Conservative Party. The Liberal
Party in Australia is the Conservative
Party and and so on. If we have the sort
of
old school classical definition of
liberalism, it seems to me it's
obviously always had a set of inbuilt
time bombs. The liberal tendency of
understanding of course is very
important of openness very important but
but there is a moment where you open
yourself up so much whether it's uh in
your own uh inter interior world or
whether in the political world or in the
world of borders as a moment where you
open yourself so up so much that you you
you will no longer be able to defend the
thing that made you and I think that's
that's a problem which to be fair to
them a lot of left-wing and liberal
thinkers have tried to contend with. But
it's an innate problem and it ends up
with this sort of um who are we to say
on the societal issue. I'd say the
biggest problem comes in what I've
described as the movement from very from
one of our best qualities as societies
and I think the one of the best
qualities we can have as people which is
to be self-critical. But there's a
moment in self-criticism both personally
and uh
nationally where um self-criticism turns
into self-
laceration turns into self-hate. I said
this many years ago in a book I
contributed to I think I said in that
this was really one of the the questions
we had to think about which was we'd
spent already by then years in Britain
saying who are we? what are we? But what
does it mean to be British? And I always
thought that was a a really um
unsatisfactory debate, not least because
it was shallow and ended up with shallow
answers like, you know, to be British is
the Q or to be nice, you know, things
like this. This is this is it's really
pathetically shallow analysis.
And I used to say then that with
nations, as with people, um I think you
can make them have a nervous breakdown
quite easily. I mean, you have a sense
of who you Freddy says are, but if I
said to you, I maybe a poor sense and
it's not at all the sense that all the
rest of us have of you, but maybe that
you're living in wild blindness,
cognitive dissonance, terrible,
embarrassing. But you have a sense of
yourself. But if I wanted to to destroy
that sense of self, I think one way in
which I could do it would be to ask you
to lie on a psychiatrist's couch and ask
you all hours of the day and night, who
are you? What are you? What is the
essence of Freddy Ses? What is but I
don't understand. You're not giving me
the answer. It's not. And eventually I
think you we're hoping to find the
essence of Douglas Murray. Well, that's
why I'm deflecting on Freddy Ses. This
is a very it's a destabilizing
destabilizing process embassy
selfquesting. Yes. And I think that much
of your sense of identity as a country
and as an ind and and as an individual
is in just doing you know you are what
you do and what you have done. And so I
think there's been this endless sort of
demoralizing drilling down on ourselves
has made us both forget who we actually
are, lose sight of it, and have a sort
of existential crisis. And I uh I think
to be blunt I mean um neoonservatism in
the 2000s was I think it was my friend
Peter Teal who first made this
observation was sort of one of the few
intellectually coherent ways in which a
sense of reasonable responsible pride in
our own achievements and in our own
society could be defended
intellectually. So you don't disavow it.
You don't reject the label. I reject it
only because once a term becomes so
polluted that everybody thinks it means
something it doesn't. There's no point
much in using it. I I describe myself as
a small C conservative without any neo
in front of it. But if anyone wants to
shove the NEO in front, they they will.
If we fast forward to your conversation
on Joe Rogan last week, the thread
connecting back to those days is very
much intact, isn't it? like the the
reason Dave Smith and those people feel
so strongly about questions like Israel,
it very quickly goes back to Iraq,
doesn't it? So, they will look back at
what they consider to be the
neocon catastrophe and they'll probably
say that people like you have sort of
not learned the lesson adequately and
not stared in the face of that those
mistakes. rather presumptuous to say
that because I don't think there's any
mistake I've been involved in which I
haven't stared in the face of. How do
you now look back at that period? Well,
I think that it was a moment there were
two things that happened after 9/11. One
was that America quite rightly wanted
revenge on the people who carried out
9/11. And then secondly, America got
caught in something which actually
America does not want to do which is
remain in countries for a long time and
govern them effectively. Afghanistan got
dragged into that quite fast. Iraq did.
Uh I at any rate among other many other
things learned about the quicksand of
war. Unless you saw some of that up
close, unless you saw the debates about
it up close as well as the wars, you
it's quite hard to understand how that
happened. And it's sort of inevitable
that people would come in afterwards
who'd seen relatively little of it or
understood less who would understand how
that sort of thing happened. Would you
kind of look back at your younger self
and warn him about some of that? Would
you feel like you
also, you know, got too dragged into
that vortex? I don't think it's a
vortex, but I suffered from a type of
youthful optimism, which I don't
anymore, which included, you know, uh
that that America was capable of nation
building in a way that I don't think it
is because it doesn't have the desire to
stay involved. I mean, people may scoff
at this. I know they will. But I always
found one of the most moving things
anyone said about America was Coen
Powell who said at one point in the
2000s when people accusing America of
becoming an empire when America has gone
into countries to um to fight whatever
the cause uh the only land they've asked
for is the land to bury their dead. I
think that one of the things of the
breakdown of expertise that has uh
started to bed us in recent years
uh is a breakdown caused by the loss of
trust which is suitable on many
occasions in institutions and in the
idea of expertise. One of the issues for
the Republican party in America in the
last 15 years has been that nobody
wanted to hear from the generation of
foreign policy experts who were involved
in Afghanistan and Iraq. What that meant
was you had a whole generation of
expertise that was effectively sidelined
because it's like well you were
responsible for this and so you just
keep out and and that's undoubtedly led
to a darth of foreign policy expertise
in America. But you can understand the
impulse behind it. Absolutely. I
understand. And in a way that's what
your the Joe Rogan conversation ended up
being about quite a lot is to what
extent should there be a requirement for
expertise or authority to have these
conversations. Well, yes, and I'd add
the other one which is one that you were
very on top of which was the COVID
issue. And co obviously scrambled a lot
of people's minds in lots of ways
because there we saw something in real
time much faster fall apart which was
trust in expertise in science and that
one is has been I think especially
dangerous and demoralizing because all
of us know nothing humanities types had
always sort of held on to the hope that
uh at least the scientists you know the
medical experts knew what they were
doing and then um when a lot of them
showed that They didn't I think the last
area of true trust in expertise in our
society essentially almost like
evaporated. But just consider it for a
moment. I
mean I'd say two things. First of all I
don't actually think this is just about
anti- Iraq anti- Afghanistan. I think
there's a movement on the right that now
mirrors a movement on the left which is
essentially anti- US. And that's what I
mind. I don't at all doubt that our
societies need to
improve. I don't at all doubt that our
societies can do better. But for us to
do that, we have to
survive. And we have to do well. And I
say that in part because I know what the
rivals and competitors look like. And so
whatever criticisms I have of an era of
American dominance, I know that it's a
hell of a lot preferable to the era of
Chinese Communist Party dominance. And
therefore, I'm very very wary of those
people who seem not to just have
criticisms of us, but for instance,
think that all problems in the world are
made by us. And there's an inevitable
reason that people do that which is that
it's first of all it's the easiest one.
It's so much easier if you just think
that all problems are created by us
because that would mean that you don't
have to contend with the other ways of
thinking that exists in the world, the
other forms of governance, the other
forms of philosophy, religion and much
more which undergur other societies and
other groups. You don't have to contend
with that because you can just say well
it must mean something we did. If Edward
say had ever been right about
orientalism, this would be the moment to
accuse people of orientalism. Literally
looking around the rest of the world and
seeing only our own reflection in a way.
Not quite what say meant, but it's a
variant of it. So I I don't like the
anti-Americanism. I don't like the
anti-westernism. I don't like that uh uh
endless critique of that. But on the
issue of
expertise, I do think we have to find
some kind of reasonable attitude towards
this because we do recognize expertise
in certain areas and we we certainly
should be able to realize that there is
there are varieties of knowledge.
There's greater amounts of knowledge and
lesser amounts of knowledge.
Um, something that a friend of mine
pointed out to me over the weekend is
that although I mean Joe's a friend and
I was trying to be gentle with him about
what I regard as being a a dangerous
tilt that he and some other uh
podcasters are encouraging. What I
really maybe should have said then can
now is that um everybody recognizes
expertise in the areas they know about.
If you had gone on Joe Rogan and sought
to spend three hours talking about MMA
fighting wouldn't be very convincing.
That's my guess. I mean, it may may
surprise me, but I would think that
quite early on he would work out you
didn't really know what you were talking
about. And if you said, "Hey, I never
said I'm an MMA expert. I just want to
keep talking about it." Then at some
point they would have to call
on you and they'd get very annoyed.
Well, okay. Uh that's the same with lots
of other things. I get very annoyed when
I hear people who are in no way um
recognizably
historians, in no way
recognizably expert in the subjects they
talk about,
regurgitating false versions of history
that I saw debunked already in my
lifetime. I mean, there's an area of the
American right which is at the moment
simply reheating David
Irvingism. We saw that off 30 years
ago. Everybody knew that there was a
type of revisionist scholar who had a
very specific game in mind. And I say
it's a game, it's a very dark game. The
game that they engaged in and they're
engaging in again is you minimize the
the sins of the Nazis. You minimize the
crimes of Hitler. You maximalize the
criticisms of and the and the crimes put
at the door of
Churchill. You have this moment of
par and then you make the move which is
actually Churchill the allies
worse. And there is a part of the
American right that is indulging in this
stuff before. Again, as I say, David
Irving and others did this many decades
ago. You diminish the number of people
killed in the Holocaust. You maximize
the number of people killed in Dresden.
You say there's moral parity and then
you make the move which is actually the
allies were the bad. Do you think just
on that particular podcast, do you think
you made an error in that you allowed
yourself to be caricatured as someone
who was making appeals to authority and
kind of credentialism where maybe you
should have just said these are
ideas. they should be defeated rather
than being an expertise because there's
all these mashups that are now on social
media of you you having said earlier in
life things about rejecting the idea of
appeal to authority and saying I'll talk
about whatever the I want to talk
about certainly will talk about whatever
the I want to talk about. I don't
think that that precludes the idea that
that there are some things you're expert
in and some things you're not. I mean,
there's a technical issue with some of
these people, which is that they present
themselves in a shape-shifting light.
And it was a light that I first noticed
in America. You could say John Stewart
started it, where he started off as a
funny comedian and ended up being a
barracking bore really about politics.
The first person I noticed who did this
same move in the UK was Russell Brand.
He used to infuriate me that he had that
that the media so much the media fell
for this trick of saying I'm going to
explain to you how the like the global
revolution is working or I'm going to
explain to you how to how to rearrange
the economy. And then if you remember
Evan um Davis on Newsight once invited
Russell Brand on and asked him about his
views on the economy and at one point
showed a chart and Russell Brand
memorably said uh I ain't got time for
no charts. I'm a comedian. M
well this is something I've had my eye
on for a long time which is this is a
very specific
trick. I'm a comedian. I'm going to tell
you about serious stuff. If you counter
me on the serious stuff and I'm wrong. I
say I'm just a comedian. The reason it's
kind of put people's backs up is because
it sounds elitist. It sounds like stay
in your lane. First of all, I don't mind
at all putting people's backs up. It
doesn't bother me. I don't think anyone
engaged in public debate should worry
about that. But it sounds like to people
that oh you're saying you know only
people with the right letters after
their name or the right degree and they
will then say well you know you began
life as a cultural person you're talking
about policy. It might sound like that
to some people but everything sounds
like something to to somebody. Some
people could fundamentally might try to
be missing that point which is everybody
has the right to talk about anything
they want. But if they
sustain an interest in it and stay in
the field and keep doing the move of I'm
not an expert. I never claim to be an
expert. Well, but I'm talking for 5
hours or I'm talking for a year and a
half about a conflict in an area I've
never been to. There are certain
standards we used to have. For instance,
in journalism, it was funny. I saw
somebody sent me over the weekend a
media report from somewhere said that it
was outrageous that I said that that I
have this rule of trying to make sure I
don't talk about countries I haven't
been to. They thought this was
preposterous. This used to be a
completely normal standard in the media.
They're trying to get you on Iran on
that one. I've seen Oh, are they? You
haven't been to Iran. Ah, how can you
talk about Iran? Interesting. Well, I'd
say two things to that. One is the only
time I applied I wasn't allowed a visa.
I've been to about every country I can
uh which I haven't been barred from
which is fortunately only a couple. But
you'll notice for instance that I will
criticize the Iranian regime for its
public
pronouncements. But I don't think you'll
ever find me explaining exactly what
people are feeling on the streets of
Thran. I wouldn't presume to say that
because I don't know because I've not
been there because the regime won't
allow me in. So there are certain
standards that are meant you're meant to
adhere to. The late Robert Fisk used to
be rather on the borderline of being
allowed to continue writing journalism
because he kept on being found uh
writing about countries he wasn't
sitting in as if he was there. But if
you were reporting on a foreign
conflict and talking about it at length
as if you had firsthand expertise and
you never been there in
journalism, even in our own you'd get
called out. You should you wouldn't just
get called out. You wouldn't do it. You
wouldn't be allowed to do it. wouldn't
be published if if you were a
historian making really wild claims that
were not backed up by any of the primary
or secondary sources, you would not be
regarded as a historian. If people
misunderstand this, they should simply
think of the areas in their life which
they know about and whether or not they
would tolerate the endless churning
around of about it. If you're a
plumber and somebody comes along who
knows nothing about plumbing but claims
that they can sort out this house's
plumbing, how long is it into the
disaster until you identify that they're
not qualified? If you're going into an
operating theater for brain surgery, at
what point after the brain surgeon who's
meant to be operating you on you says,
"I'm just the comedian." Do you say,
"Would it be possible to get a better
trained person?" And if that if that
sounds like an appeal to expertise, I'm
sorry. We all in our lives appeal to
expertise.
And I think
that I'm sure some people are trying to
misunderstand this. Some of them may
genuinely be misunderstanding it. Some
of them may be deliberately
misunderstanding the point. But if they
think of the things in their lives which
they rely on and they trust in and they
believe in and need, they would not be
playing this game. One other thing on
that which is of course what is actually
happening underneath that seems to me to
be that a lot of people are enjoying the
breakdown of all forms of
authority and it's not necessarily for
uncynical reasons. I think frankly it
points to something quite important
beneath that as well which
is much of the counterculture
particularly in America less so in
Britain much of the counterculture is
not the counterculture anymore it's the
culture because Donald Trump has won the
election because Donald Trump's won the
election the podcasters have won Joe has
um probably more influence on public
debate than the Washington Post these
these days and and there that's great. I
love it. I love the guy. But there comes
a point to quote Spider-Man, I think, uh
where with great power comes great
responsibility. And when you get the
power of actually getting the megaphone
in the public
space, you should exercise your use of
it judiciously. And it seems to me that
uh exercising it by inviting people on
who have invented views of history, have
claims about things in the present they
have simply not seen or reported from or
been to or done anything about is not
the best use of it. And before you know
it, you know, everyone ends up just
endlessly speculating and riffing on
things they just don't know about. And I
I I you know if people want to think
it's elitist to believe in expertise and
I you know fine. Final question before
we turn to your very much firsthand
accounts of what you saw in Israel when
you were talking there about the the
plumber who would be found out. I
couldn't help but think of President
Trump in a sense and I want to know what
your views are on that
because do not the same kind of
principles apply that you need a certain
level of responsibility and expertise to
do a job like that and you can look at
the whips soaring in the financial
markets the general kind of chaos the
appeals to a lot of these kinds of
characters that you're talking about who
have a somewhat upside down version of
politics or history that is absolutely
infused in this administration and come
to the same conclusion I mean, President
Trump has endorsed your book. How do you
feel about being seen as close and
supportive of someone who might fit
exactly that description? I don't agree
with the the chaos, particularly. I
mean, the tariff thing has led to some
market chaos. There's no doubt about
that. I think in the long term, he's
quite likely to be right. It's only I'm
I'm for American jobs coming back to
America, just I am for British jobs
coming back to Britain. I don't agree
that it's chaos otherwise, particularly
in DC. I think actually in the almost
100 days since the the president has
come back to office, it's been very
disciplined, very impressive, done a
remarkably large number of things in a
very short space of time, mainly by
presidential order. I think he's got a
very good
cabinet and where there are people in it
who I, you know, have been skeptical of,
I've said. So I mean um at the New York
Post we were very critical of RFK Jr.
being put forward for health principally
because some of his views on
vaccinations have been I think deeply
troubling. So you're not worried that
the sort of anti-expertise culture has
literally taken over the administration?
No, not at all. I mean Pete Hexith is
the expert in the military served in it
for many years and is very impressive
guy. No, I I don't think that Trump is
anti-expertise like that. And obviously
he's not anti-expertise in the
presidency because he's done it before.
And one of the striking things of course
is that he actually he having had four
turbulent years to begin with, he's come
back with an agenda that he's very clear
on and seems to be able to institute
which he couldn't first time. Let's talk
about Israel and talk about this book.
I'm going to hold it up again for the
people who haven't seen it. On
democracies and death cults. This is the
very opposite in a sense in that it's
absolutely full of your
firsthand experience of what you saw in
Israel. So it you can really sense that
you took the decision to kind of go
towards this tragedy and understand it.
I'm talking about the 7th of October.
Understand it very deeply and make sure
that you knew what you were talking
about. There's a quote actually you say
I decided in short not just to work out
what had happened but to become a
witness. Yes. That quite sort of
powerful word bearing witness. It
clearly moved you very deeply. Um tell
us a little bit bit about that
experience. I was in New York on the 7th
of October and there were two reasons
why I decided to go to Israel as soon as
I could and to uh cover the the the
atrocities that happened and interview
the survivors uh the families families
kidnapped, the wounded in the hospitals,
the dead in the morgs and much more. and
also then to be with the IDF, embedded
with them in Gaza, in Lebanon and
elsewhere because I wanted to see the
atrocity as much as I could of it
firsthand in order that yes, I could
sort of bear witness to it as it were
and partly that was out of an instinct
that the world was going to move on very
fast because that happens in Israel
related wars. A lot of the media will
focus very briefly on the thing that has
started the war. It's an attack on
Israel and then we'll and this happened
on the 8th with the headlines around the
world were world fears Israeli response
blah blah blah blah blah and they're
always obsessed with the response but I
wanted to see the response as well and
got to see uh a lot of that up close. So
yes, I think that as well as trying to
work out what had happened uh on the
atrocity, I wanted to work out what was
happening in the war. Again, why I
slightly resent people who haven't tried
to do any of that or haven't put in any
of the hours or the ground work and the
leg work sounding off about things they
haven't seen or known. And you were
evidently very personally moved by it.
Well, yes, I was moved by several
things. I mean, one was just the scale
of the atrocities and the barbarity of
them. The thing I say early on in the
book, the thing that first struck me
when I saw the atrocity videos and saw
the sites was the sheer orastic delight
in death that Hermes demonstrated that
day. Um, it is it was a level of evil
that is um is hard to comprehend. And
I've spent the last year and a half
trying to comprehend it again. But I
mean, I quote early in the book one of
the young Hamas terrorists who quite a
lot of people may have heard the call by
now. It was in the 47minute video. This
young man calling back home to his
parents in Gaza saying, "Father, father,
I've killed 10 Jews with my own hands.
With my own hands, your son has killed
10 Jews." And put put WhatsApp video on.
I'll show them to you. and and he says,
"Oh my gosh, this is wonderful. Let me
call your mother. Mother, mother, your
your son has killed. A thrill and a joy
and a boastfulness in the savagery,
which is of a kind which we did see with
ISIS. We saw it with al-Qaeda and Iraq.
But this was a sort of next level or at
least a more organized level when 4,000
terrorists broke into Israel, invaded
Israel, and and went massacring their
way through the communities in the
south." and and and one I suppose which
I mean there were many stories that that
deeply affected me but one was meeting
the survivors of the Nova party because
this was just a dance party where you
know hundreds and hundreds of young
people were dancing in the early hours
of the morning when when this death cult
came and and raped and beheaded and
murdered and machetied and shot and
chased and machine gunned across fields.
as they were running and kidnapped
and and I was
amazed that the
world's sympathies didn't linger for
much more than a second on these on
these young people who had gone through
this because I thought this is something
that any of us would know people at or
friends would have been at in in any
other country and you know the survivors
of the Ariana Grande suicide bombing in
2017 the concert in Manchester. You
know, the world only has sympathy for
the victims there. The world only has
sympathy for the Pulse nightclub victims
or the victims of the batter theater
attack in Paris. So, I had this follow
on thing which really impelled me to to
spend the next year and more there,
which was why is the rest of the world
found this such a challenge? Why has the
rest of the world in a fight between a
democracy and a death cult decided to
empathize with the death cult and not
with the democracy? And this this seems
to me to point to one of these things
that I have spent much of my career
trying to alert people to, which is this
hatred of ourselves and the hatred of
things in ourselves. I regard Israel as
being a central part of Western
civilization, a central pillar of the
Judeo-Christian
culture. And so when I see people in
cities like the one we're sitting in
marching by their hundreds of thousands
against Israel and in large number in
support of Hamas, I don't just know that
it's an assault on the Jewish state, the
one Jewish state. I know that it's done
by people who also hate this country and
hate America. And of all the protests
I've seen and been to in Britain and
America and Canada and Australia and
everywhere else in the West actually in
the last 18 months, I think
that extraordinary backlash at home is
one which I wanted to not only uh
identify but to explain which I think I
do. Mhm. What do you say to the critique
or the criticism that in a way you've
got too close to it? You've been
spending so much time in Israel. You've
obviously been personally very moved by
those stories and the book is very much
from the point of view of is it's it's a
pro-Israel book. It's a it's an
explanation of their action. It's
certainly not pro- Hermes, but there's
very little almost nothing on the
response in terms of, you know, the the
people who have been killed in the
counter attacks. You know, you asked Joe
Rogan to be fairer. Um why why is there
not more in the book trying to
understand how Palestinians have
experienced the last year and a half?
Well, I do of course um I do do that. I
spent plenty of time in the West Bank,
Judea and Samaria, and spoken with many,
if not most, of the Palestinian
leadership over the years. Gaza, I've
been to many times. Uh it's it's tricky
to get uh access to the people that
Hamas doesn't want you to get access to.
That's for sure. But I'm not at all
hiding the perspective of which I come
from. I said from the beginning of this
conflict that I'm not a six of one half
a dozen of the other person. The
sufferings of the people of Gaza have
been brought upon them by electing Hamas
by then by Hamas starting endless wars
against their neighbor and that has
brought and I've seen firsthand a lot of
devastation to Gaza. But the cause of
that devastation is Hamas.
If they if they had used their 18 years
of governance in the Gaza to bring up a
new generation of Gazins to believe that
they should live in peace beside their
Jewish brothers and
sisters, history would be different and
Gaza would look different today. But
they didn't take that choice. I believe
that uh it's perfectly true that some
people will write a completely uh
morally neutral view of this, but I'm
not morally neutral on it because I
believe that it's an extremely clear
choice. I'm not saying this is true, but
I'm wondering would it have been
strengthened to include more sort of
evidence signposting of the fact that
you've spent time thinking about the
experience of the other side? Maybe you
could have talked to relatives and
friends and people who are in touch. I
think I've done plenty of that and I
quote plenty of the leadership. As I've
said before, there is a a technical
problem of reporting from Gaza, which is
there's two ways in. You can go in with
Hamz or you can go in with the IDF. And
my preference was for going in with the
IDF. By the way, the journalists who
have gone in with
Hamas get a much more one-sided view of
it because Hamas, if if you go in with
the IDF and you criticize Israeli
actions, you'll you'll be lorded. If you
go in with Hamz and criticize Hamz,
you'll add to the number of hostages.
Um, I don't I I don't take that as a as
a valid critique. people know where I'm
coming from and I don't hide where I'm
coming from on this because I think this
is we started this conversation thinking
about who is Douglas Murray you know
what is the kind of your what is your
intellectual approach to these problems
and I think that is really at the heart
of it that what you would call moral
clarity you know rejecting the both
sidesism the relativism which made you
have strong views on Iraq back in the
2000s and means that you have strong
views now that's your sort of trademark
is that you you look at a problem you
say okay I've decided that this is right
and I'm going to say that with without
fear or or without caring if people
don't like what I have to say and some
people experience that as a kind of
black and white a sort of manian
worldview where you're dividing into
goodies and baddies. Yeah, I I think any
reader of this book will see that I
uh I express among other things deep
sympathy and empathy with the people of
Gaza
uh where it is
appropriate. But I'm also not by any
means blinded by moral relativism about
it for lots of reasons. One is that when
the Gaza was given, handed over to the
Palestinians in 2005 and the then
American administration very unwisely
encouraged elections in Gaza and Hamas
won and then killed their fatar
opponents and then never had another
election. Um when they did that they
made a set of very very serious
mistakes.
But if you look at the footage from the
morning of October the 7th and you see
the footage of for instance raped uh
Israeli girls being paraded through the
streets of
Gaza or girls who've had their tendons
cut so they can't run away being taken
on the back of jeeps or indeed the mut
mutilated body of Shani Lau. If you see
the footage of these girls and others
being taken into
Gaza, 80some year old Israeli pensioner
on a buggy, you will see the citizens of
Gaza in their entirety and the visible
ones um celebrating. They celebrate
this. Um the men will hit the naked
bodies of the women or beat them or spit
on them. Um and uh there is this
societal glorification in
death and the Israeli hostages that have
been released and there are still dozens
in captivity as we speak one and a half
years
on. If you speak to the the the people
who have been
released from captivity in Gaza, none
have stories of any Palestinian in Gaza
showing them even the least bit of
humanity. And I would submit that this
tells us not just something but quite a
lot. if a truck came down the road now
in
Westminster with any type of terrorist
group parading the bodies of raped
girls. I think even in London today we
would expect that the public would turn
on the people doing that would stop them
from doing that and would hate them for
having done that.
I'm not sure that sitting in London
people realize the extent to
which Sinoir and the leadership of Hamas
spent their 18 years of governance in
the Gaza trying with considerable
success to create a generation of
sociopaths.
So do you think most people in Gaza are
sociopaths? I think that the generation
that has grown up under Hamz has been
taught that and um it's much to the
detriment of the Palestinian cause that
that's the case. As you point out those
videos, people cheering. Do you think
it's more than 50% of the if you were to
guess of the inhabitants of Gaza who are
sufficiently supportive of what you call
a death cult that you can fairly call
them bad people? if the Palestinians in
Gaza can rise up against Hamz. And there
was an attempt the other week by some
people it seems, including a very brave
young Gazan man who uh was promptly uh
tortured and murdered and his body
dumped on his family's doorstep. You see
several things. One is of course the um
the the grip that Hamas still sadly even
after the decimation that Hamas
leadership has suffered in the last 18
months, they still have a grip on the
Gaza. And as long as that's the case and
as long as the hostages are still there,
the war can't
end. Uh because those are the two stated
war war aims of the Israelis. The second
thing is that it is the nature of
totalitarianisms that and of death cults
when they own a society run a society
that rebelling against them is can be
usually is deadly. We speak on the the
day that the news comes out of Mario
Vargas Loa's death. I recently read his
great masterpiece, the feast of the goat
in which he talks about the Trillo
dictatorship in the Dominican Republic
from the 30s to the 60s and it's among
other things a brilliant reminder of
exactly this that a dictatorship can you
know people say why don't people rise up
you know one reason is that the people
who rise up get disappeared and that's a
hell of a lesson uh to keep everyone
else down so it's possible that the Gaza
has a significant number of people who
would like Hamas to be overthrown, but
they just don't have the capability to
do
it. Everything I've heard first and
indeed secondhand suggests that that's
just not the case. If there is a
rebellion against Hamz now, it will be
in very large part simply
because some Gazans may by now and have
have got wind of the fact that uh the
destruction of Gaza, significant amounts
of Gaza is caused by Hamas starting a
war. So you it sounds like you do think
most people at least we can't be certain
but it would appear to you that most
people within Gaza are supportive of
this death cult. Uh it seems that way I
have to say and I would just add that
even after these years of indoctrination
funded and fueled among other things by
our taxpayer money at UNRA and other
organizations that were meant to oversee
the education of of um of
Gaza what textbooks you see that they've
been using. I'd like to think there
could be a d-radicalization process, but
I think I think there's no one capable
of the job. I don't think that there is
a
burgeoning liberal civil society that
wants to live in peace with their
Israeli neighbors. And until such a time
comes about and until such a generation
emerges, I do believe that the conflict
continues. And that is why I've said
completely openly from the beginning, my
hope always has been that this is not
the eenth Gaza war, but the last one.
This isn't the third Lebanon war, but
the last one. For that to
happen, the leadership of Hamas
Hezbollah has to be not just defeated
but to be seen to be defeated. which is
why the um intelligence and military
successes against Hezbollah in September
last year were so striking because you
know it was Hassan Nazala the late now
head of Hezbollah who said many many
times in his misspent life that he said
the uh the weakness of the infidel he
said is that they love life whereas we
love death and this is a weakness we can
use against them. The leadership of Hamz
said the same thing. They always said,
as jihadist groups and death cults like
them always do, they said, "We love
death and you love life, and that's how
we're going to win." What do you say to
people who sympathize deeply with what
you've written about in this book, are
completely appalled by the events of
October 7th, also realize the depth of
the problem, how farreaching it is
within societies like Gaza, and yet
still find it morally unconscionable to
kill as many people as the Israelis have
found it necessary to do in their
counter assault. Is holding those two
positions simultaneously just both
sidesism and lack of moral clarity or
can that position be a respectable one
to you? I I understand it and I disagree
with it. I understand it because I think
a lot of people are very very
misinformed. The they've done two
things. One is that they've embied Hamz
figures about the dead in Gaza, which by
the way Hamz revised down quickly the
other week. If the CIA were to release
figures, skeptics across the West would
say, "Ah, but how can we trust the CIA?"
I think although it's not so degraded in
this country in terms of the trust I
think that if MI5 released a set of uh
uh figures for the dead in say our or
MI6 released figures for the number of
people that our armed forces and the
French Americans killed with our Kurdish
brothers and sisters in uh in Syria and
Iraq in the last decade. I think that if
if if MI6 released the figures, there'd
be significant skepticism about it. So
why does why again and this is a sign of
what I was trying to describe earlier is
why is the skepticism towards our own
side but not against people who profess
themselves to be our enemies and that is
the case with her when when Hermes
releases figures and the BBC and others
just report the figures as if they're
the
figures that's it's a it's an important
detail but it's not you can have the
argument about the figures but clearly a
lot of people
to some people's mind. Many too many
whether it's 10,000 or 50,000. It's
still so far beyond what would be
morally acceptable. Well, it's not of
course because we've morally accepted
that for many years in conflicts which
we support. Nobody wanted to know how
many people we killed in uh ISIS
controlled territories after the attacks
on Paris and elsewhere. We just did. We
weren't interested and nobody bothered
to find out. We trusted that the Kurdish
fighters did their job and gosh did they
do their job. But we didn't work out
what the collateral damage was in places
like Mosul. And that's because we wanted
ISIS
annihilated. We didn't want them to be
able to rampage through Paris and other
places. Well, the Israelis have the view
that they also don't want terrorists
rampaging through their towns and cities
and parties and much more. You can get
on to the actual figures. the best
figures we have for any western military
expert. John Spencer from West Point who
some people are dismissive of because
again he's not Hamz. So why would we
trust him? He's merely an American
military expert. His figures he says
that it's about a one:1 terrorist to
casualty terrorist to civilian casualty
ratio. Maybe that's the case. I I would
very much hope it's the case and it
would be the lowest such case of
collateral damage in warfare in our
lifetimes and certainly much lower than
what the British and American militaries
have been willing to tolerate in terms
of civilian casualties in war. I agree
in that of course many people who are
not actual fighters at the time
terrorists in Gaza will have been
killed. That is all down to Hamz because
Hamas have used the conflict as they
always do to hide in civilian buildings,
dress in civilian clothes, uh uh torture
people in civilian houses, fire RPGs for
mosques, launch rockets from hospitals,
um use hospital basement as storage
points, use churches as arms dumps, and
so
on. If you do that, you will inevitably
invite civilian casualties. And that's
what Hamas wants. Now, that produces a
serious problem for the IDF, the
Israelis in their in their response. My
observation is that they have performed
as well as a as an army could in those
exceptionally trapped, deliberately
booby trapped situation.
But when people say, "I just can't bear
the idea of civilian suffering. Can't it
all just stop?" I have a challenge for
them which I've put out a number of
times. I have yet to hear an answer for.
Israel is a country of 9 million people.
Britain is a country of well almost 70
million people these days I think. What
would it be? It would be
about 9,000 British people being
murdered in one
day and about 2 and a half thousand say
kidnapped.
What would you
do? Extrapolating out by population.
What would you do actually if even
though Israel is much smaller than the
UK, what would we do if tw if not 22
people as the girls who were massacred
at the Manchester Arena bombing were
killed, but if 1,200 people had been
killed on British soil in such a
barbarous way in their homes and much
more, what would we be? What would we
do, even much bigger a country as we are
than Israel, if 250 British citizens
were kidnapped into territory very near
to this country were were were known to
be being tortured and raped and
brutalized for 18 months, what would we
not do in Britain to get them back? And
let me put it the other way round. If
anyone
has a better
way of getting back the
hostages and killing or capturing the
leadership of the group that carried out
these
atrocities, please send it to me and I
will send it on to the chiefs of staff
in Israel and to the Israeli war cabinet
because I know they would be fascinated
and interested to know if there was such
a policy. I hear occasionally from
comedians and
types that negotiation is the way to do
it and they point to the fact that in
some of the pauses in the fighting
Israel has managed to get some of its
hostages back. That's true. What they
utterly utterly fail to
understand is that no hostages have been
given back because Hamas has suddenly
turned into a liberal group. They have
been given back because young men and
women of the IDF have been fighting for
18 months in Gaza and in Lebanon to
exert kinetic military force to force
Hamas to give back the hostages.
But if various comedians and others have
a different plan, I'm all ears. Final
question before I let you go. And in a
way, it returns to where we started. In
this book, you write, "Friends and
family occasionally remarked that I had
changed. Readers sometimes noticed it
too. Has this past couple of years
changed you? And if so, how?" Very much
so, actually. And uh the book finishes,
as you know, on a rather positive note
because of the two conflicts I've
covered in the last couple of years, the
Israel Gaza conflict and although I've
managed to spend less time there, the
Ukraine Russia conflict, I've been
deeply inspired by being with frontline
fighters in both uh war zones. I've
covered many war zones before, but both
of these wars have felt different to me
for various reasons. And really it's
because it's it's uh people in societies
I recognize as being similar to our
own being tried and tested and raising
themselves to the moment. I was with a
unit at the in the zone between the
Ukrainian and Russian front lines the
other week in Ukraine whilst uh uh they
were launching drones against the
Russian lines which were about a
kilometer and a half away from us. And
when you see these young Ukrainian men
and women,
uh, you know, who have families
and sometimes, you know, 20 km, 30 km
behind where we were, they're all doing
the sort of jobs that we do or our
friends do or people we know do. And and
here they are in uniform because their
country's been
invaded and they're not willing to see
that happen. And so they fight. It's the
same with the young generation in
Israel. My belief has always been that
those of us who grew up in the wake of
World War
II always had this question in our heads
which was we knew the stories from our
parents' grandparents of what they had
done in the 1930s and 40s to stop
Hitlerian
fascism. And there was always this
question that that was on all of our
minds. I think it was sort of in our
hearts as well, which was could we do
it? Could we do it?
And the further you come away from
conflict, the more you inevitably sort
of ask yourself that question, then
doubt it. And I give examples in the
book of horrific polls which opinion
polls which have been carried out in the
UK and the US in the last few years
asking if young Americans or young Brits
would be willing to to to to stand and
fight if their country was invaded if
our country was invaded in this way and
the results are not good. They say no.
They mainly say no. Yeah. uh
particularly people in the age that our
forebears went off to fight in 1914 18
and
193945 which was you know 18 to 40
pretty much the 18 to 40 age group in
the UK largely says that they wouldn't
fight even if our country was under
existential threat and I think there's
several reasons for that one of course
is that we have been as I said earlier
demoralized as a country if you've been
told your country is rotten why would
you lay down your life for it I mean it
would be ridiculous so I think the
demoralization and the the attack on
ourselves, our past, our culture, our
history can be said to have some very
serious effects. But the good news is
that I had heard for years in Israel a
similar thing. Now they have
conscription uh of course and young
people go into the army and they serve
their army service and then are in
reserves and so on. So it's different.
People who had fought in the wars when
Israel was invaded in 1967, then again
when Israel was invaded in
1973, remember October the 7th happened
on the 50th anniversary of the Omapour
surprise attack on Israel. The one thing
about the jihadists are very very keen
on
anniversaries. So it was one of many
failings that I identify in the book on
the Israeli side. Again, it's worth
pointing out I'm very critical of where
the Israelis made mistakes on the
seventh. I've been deeply moved by the
fact that the younger generation in
Israel, the people I've seen on the
front lines are much more. They are of
the generation whose whose elders
thought they'd become weak, too li
liberal, decadent, just wanted to party
in Tel Aviv, just wanted to be on Tik
Tok and Instagram. And I've been
enormously encouraged by the fact that
these remarkable young men and
women have risen to the moment and shown
themselves to be magnificent warriors.
Absolute warriors, fighters, and not
crucially with hate in their hearts, but
with a knowledge of what they're
fighting for. They know what they're
defending. They're defending their
country, their people, their families,
their faith, their tradition, their way
of life after it's been so barbarously
attacked. And one of the questions I
pose and I hope answer in the book, but
one of the questions I I suppose I'll
leave you with is this thing that
connects a lot of what I've written
about in my life essentially comes down
to this question of would we be willing
to take our own side in an argument
ever?
and much of the intellectual rot I've
written about in my career and much of
the thought rot I've written about that
is the question you have which
is would you be able to would we be able
to think our way out of that if a moment
of trial came or would we stay indulging
in this culture of boring victimhood and
uh oppressor oppressed you know the
person who can claim to be most
victimized wins the the biggest minority
wins and and and so Do do we want to be
like that which western men in
particular have been told they should
play and you know it's also that it's
part of the war on masculinity the
dampen it down toxic
masculinity. Can't we just be more
empathetic and take on various presumed
female traits? Can't we can't we realize
that we've been the bad guys, etc., etc.
You can do that if you want, but it's a
total losers
game. And I would like instead of
blaming the young Israelis who have been
so heroic in my observation in the last
18 months, I'd like to think instead of
blaming them, people should emulate
them. They've been remarkable and we'd
be so lucky as to produce people like
that. Douglas Murray, thanks for your
time today. It's a great pleasure. That
was Douglas Murray, someone who is
currently all over a lot of people's
social media feeds. He's arguing and
talking a lot about Israel, a lot of
very contentious, difficult topics and
many people might be coming into contact
with him for the first time at the
moment. So I thought it was interesting
to remind people of his history and
rather than being just a one issue
person, look back at how he formed the
world view he now espouses. something
that started years ago writing and
thinking about culture and poetry and
music, writing books and biographies
about cultural figures. How that sort of
gradually evolved into his political
worldview, his foreign policy worldview,
and this search for moral clarity,
deciding who's right and who's wrong,
being a kind of guiding principle of his
writings and talking ever since. I
thought that was really interesting.
Thank you to him and thanks to you for
tuning in. This was unheard.
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