EZRA LEVANT | Britain's proud legacy: A feature interview with David Atherton
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
157.53108
Summary
A conversation with the curmudgeonly David Atherton, a British pundit and columnist, about everything going on in the United Kingdom, including censorship, mass immigration, and the Atherstone Ball Game, an old British tradition.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
You know, maybe I think too much about the United Kingdom. I'm not sure if that's true.
00:00:03.840
I like their poetry. I like their history. I like their architecture. I find their politics
00:00:08.320
interesting. It's a little bit different than ours, but close enough that I see the similar
00:00:12.140
themes. But mainly I find it, as I always say, a dystopian time machine. What happens there today
00:00:17.880
will happen to us in five years, especially on issues such as censorship and mass immigration,
00:00:23.000
which, by the way, are linked. Today we're going to talk to David Atherton, who's been really in
00:00:28.520
the front line of criticizing and punditing and journalism-ing. That's our feature interview
00:00:35.140
today. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
00:00:39.840
That's the video version of this podcast. It's eight bucks a month, which might not be a lot of
00:00:44.080
dough to you, but I tell you, it really adds up for us. It's how we pay our bills over here.
00:00:48.760
So please consider going to rebelnewsplus.com, clicking subscribe, and getting the video version
00:00:53.880
of this and helping Rebel News stay strong. All right, here's today's podcast.
00:00:58.520
Tonight, a conversation with the curmudgeonly David Atherton, a British pundit and columnist.
00:01:20.140
We'll talk about everything going on there. It's September 4th, and this is The Ezra LeVance Show.
00:01:24.960
You know, I'm born and raised in Western Canada, my family being out there since 1905. In Canada,
00:01:46.880
that makes me an old-timer. Of course, 1905 is just a blink of an eye in the history of the United
00:01:52.360
Kingdom, which goes back many centuries. And in fact, the history of the UK, in a way,
00:01:57.240
is the history of Canada, is the history of the West, the history of the rule of law, of parliaments,
00:02:04.000
of democracy. So many ideas, including economic ideas, philosophical ideas. And it was the mighty,
00:02:13.180
I think you could say the word race of Brits. I mean, it's an indigenous culture that had the
00:02:18.580
greatest empire known to man. And there was a fighting culture. If you go to the United Kingdom
00:02:22.880
today, you see many statues of lions at Queen Victoria's monument outside Buckingham Palace.
00:02:30.060
Giant lions. At Trafalgar Square, honoring the great hero who beat the Spanish. Lions. That's how
00:02:38.800
they regarded themselves. And I think that's how the world regarded them. Until very recently,
00:02:44.580
where they were told they should be hated, not proud. And they should, in fact, hate themselves.
00:02:50.660
And that the British Empire, far from being the greatest political assemblage in history,
00:02:55.620
was something to be ashamed of. Even though it brought democracy, the rule of law, and the English
00:02:59.960
language to the world, it's the reason why India has a space program. It's the reason why India
00:03:06.440
is a democracy. It's the reason why Canada is what it is. Just small examples. Anyways,
00:03:11.760
one of my favorite things to do is find old traditions in the UK and just wrap my mind around them. Like,
00:03:21.720
look at this. This is something called the Atherstone ball game. And it's a game. And it's played once a
00:03:31.960
year. And it's an enormous medicine ball. And really, there are no rules other than don't kill anyone.
00:03:40.680
It's a, it's a, it's sort of a, all against all. It's an old British tradition. And it's a little bit
00:03:48.920
crazy. And ethnically, those are indigenous Brits. That's, that's not a modern cross section of
00:03:58.800
central London. That's the Anglo-Saxons. That's the indigenous Brits. That's one of their fun games,
00:04:09.000
a little bit crazy. You can go online and Google Atherstone ball and get a real chuckle out of it.
00:04:15.680
And you can see that fighting spirit. There's some lads wearing track suits, having fun. Those are
00:04:21.060
marshals trying to make sure no one's truly hurt. What a hoot, eh? What a strange thing.
00:04:26.800
And I say that because I thought our next guest had a pen name named after the Atherstone ball,
00:04:36.000
because his name is David Atherton. But he assures me he is of no relation. Even though I put it to
00:04:41.000
you, he has that same fighting spirit of the Atherstone ball game and of Brits of days gone by.
00:04:50.060
His name is David Atherton. He's a broadcaster. He joins us now from London. David, what a pleasure
00:04:55.160
to meet you. And you, Ezra. Thank you very much for inviting me on. I don't know what that
00:04:59.500
introduction was about, other than I truly thought that you were a pen name named after that crazy
00:05:05.040
ball game. I don't know that much about the Atherstone ball game. I can't get anyone in my
00:05:09.540
family to agree to go on a tourist trip to see it firsthand. They don't find it as interesting
00:05:14.440
as I do. But that looks like a great game. Sure. Well, it's like a lot of games that, you know,
00:05:20.360
that Canada and North America plays and Britain plays. They come from the Middle Ages. In fact,
00:05:25.760
that game played in Atherstone. It was typical of the games that were played within village. Often it
00:05:30.500
was village against village. The idea was to take your ball or your object from one village to the
00:05:36.200
other and the other team does the opposite end of it. Now, where baseball is based on is
00:05:42.880
stall ball. It's a documented game in England in the Middle Ages. I think it's first documented in 1340,
00:05:48.660
something like that, whereby you literally had a three-pronged stall and people would throw a ball
00:05:56.120
at it and you did it with your hand. It's the basis of baseball and cricket to this very day.
00:06:02.440
You know, it's a little bit grubbier than the fancy jousting contests in medieval days where
00:06:08.080
knights in shining armor, where there was a lot of rules. I don't think there's a lot of rules
00:06:11.480
in the Atherton's ball. Anyways, I apologize for spending so much time on it. It's just my way of
00:06:16.720
laughing at myself because I thought you were such an iconic Brit. I've been following you on Twitter
00:06:21.460
for years and I thought there's no way this is a real guy. I thought this is someone playing the role
00:06:27.880
of a Brit who refuses to accept the decline and dismemberment of the country.
00:06:36.820
Sure, yeah. I'm a bit of a student of history. And, you know, it is, what's the word, fashionable is the word I'm looking for.
00:06:46.140
For the Marxists who have strolled through our institutions and run culture in this country,
00:06:52.100
to denigrate Britain to the nth degree. When I think, you know, of course individual atrocities were committed by the British Empire,
00:07:00.720
but also at the same time, we exported democracy, the freedom of the individual. We exported engineering, medicine.
00:07:11.820
We built, for example, 41,000 miles of railways in India in Victorian times. And they've only added 30,000 since we left in 1947.
00:07:22.020
Also, for example, in India as well, we brought eight times more land into farming.
00:07:27.100
And in the time that Britain was in India, the population doubled.
00:07:32.120
You know, I think we've done a lot of good for the world.
00:07:35.340
And most of the places that we have gone to, we have left something behind of our British, English and British common law.
00:07:41.600
Yeah, I think you can track pretty much the most successful, newly independent countries of the world
00:07:47.440
are the ones that were under British government.
00:07:53.160
If you look at the contrast of the Spanish and the Portuguese empires of South and Central America,
00:07:58.760
many only recently became vaguely democratic in the 1970s.
00:08:04.740
And much, much, much of South America is still still run by despots and dictators.
00:08:09.840
You know, you look at the way how easily Brazil has turned into a bit of a tyrannical type.
00:08:17.700
They banned X, they banned free speech, and I think they banned Bolsonaro for the next election as well.
00:08:24.460
You know, our freedoms are hard fought, and they're so easy to lose.
00:08:30.920
I mean, I was going to say, look at the Middle East.
00:08:33.340
Would you rather be in Jordan, which was British, or Syria, which was French?
00:08:37.740
Would you rather be in the Bahamas or in, you know, in Haiti?
00:08:47.020
I looked up their GDP, their head figures on that the other day.
00:08:51.360
Haiti is $1,600 per year per person, and the Bahamas is $38,000.
00:08:57.880
That's the difference between British and French rule as well.
00:09:01.540
You know, I sometimes talk about, and this is apropos of nothing,
00:09:05.040
I'm just going to enjoy having a conversation with you, but I do promise our viewers,
00:09:08.540
I'm going to bring it back to the current events in the UK.
00:09:10.900
We're going to talk about the current abominations being emanated from Parliament
00:09:16.440
And I just want to enjoy my Anglophilia for a little bit.
00:09:23.200
Everywhere you go, colonization and empire are in disrepute,
00:09:26.040
disrepute, but if someone was truly interested in multiculturalism
00:09:31.740
and truly interested in history, they would see how astoundingly moral it was.
00:09:42.440
whose capital, Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City.
00:09:45.660
When they reconsecrated the Great Pyramid there,
00:09:50.120
they killed, according to one reputable scholar, up to 80,000 people.
00:09:58.200
They cut them open, pulled out their beating heart,
00:10:03.280
That's why Mel Gibson made his movie Apocalypto,
00:10:06.320
to show the absolute horror of pre-imperial Mexico.
00:10:12.560
And whatever you want to say about the conquistadors,
00:10:16.900
but when they came, they saw, they thought they were in hell.
00:10:33.920
they were cultural practices like sati, like burning widows alive.
00:11:09.620
We never touched the caste system or anything like that.
00:11:15.580
had about no more than 10,000 civil servants and something.
00:11:19.700
Sorry, I think 10,000 civil servants ran the empire.
00:11:22.500
And there were only about 100,000 troops in India
00:11:25.020
over a population of something like 300 million.
00:11:42.580
you could go and speak to the local commissioner
00:11:52.720
there was nothing they could do about it at all.
00:12:03.580
Now, he uses some language that we don't use these days.