The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Does the ‘Far-Right’ Pose the Biggest Threat Nowadays？｜ Interview with Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this interview. Today I'm interviewing Dr. Jeffrey Bale, who is an emeritus professor in the Non-Proliferation and Terrorism Studies program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

00:00:15.040 Dr. Jeffrey Bale, I'm very pleased to be interviewing you. Welcome to the Lotus Cedars.

00:00:20.920 I'm very pleased to be here.

00:00:22.700 Thank you very much. Would you tell us some stuff about your background?

00:00:26.420 Yes, I'm basically a historian. I received my BA in Middle Eastern Islamic and Central Asian History at the University of Michigan, and then I received my PhD in Modern European History at the University of California at Berkeley.

00:00:46.760 So I was trained as a historian, and originally I studied medieval Islamic and Central Asian history, and then at a certain point I switched over to modern history because I realized I was spending more time studying the world's most difficult languages than I was actually doing history.

00:01:06.220 You know, I studied Arabic and Persian and some Turkish in addition to several European languages so I could read secondary sources, and then I was at the point where I was going to have to learn Mongolian, and then if I wanted to do the eastern part of the steppe, I would have to learn Chinese and Japanese.

00:01:22.200 So I thought to myself, you know, however fascinating it is to study the nomadic tribes in Central Asia, I didn't want to spend like another 10 years just studying difficult languages and not getting around to doing history.

00:01:38.200 And then, of course, ultimately you start thinking, well, if you're really studying things that seem to have so little relevance to the present that maybe you want to do something, shift to a more modern era of history so that the things you're studying have more contemporary salience or more contemporary relevance.

00:01:57.340 Of course, of course, of course, of course, of course, of course, of course, of course, of course, of course, it turns out that the study medieval Islamic history has a tremendous amount of contemporary relevance and salience given the rise of Islamism and the threat of jihadist terrorism, but anyway, I shifted to modern European history and then I've always been interested in unusual topics and so my focus has really been on political and religious extremism of various kinds and then the other types of

00:02:27.340 subjects that I've been interested in are covert operations, covert actions, intelligence operations, terrorism, you know, all the kind of nasty, sinister topics that a lot of people prefer to avoid, so the whole topics that we're going to discuss, that's right, topics that we're going to discuss and that obviously have tremendous amount of relevance at the present time.

00:02:49.420 So, anyway, I think it just goes to show you that no matter how arcane your interests, you'll be surprised to discover just how relevant they might turn out to be, you know, depending on societal and political developments at the present time.

00:03:06.020 Exactly. So let me just say to the audience that my first introduction to your work was the book you have co-authored with Dr. Tamir Barron,

00:03:15.420 Coal Fighting the Last War, Confusion, Partisanship and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right, and I see you have further publications from Rutledge, The Darkest Side of Politics, Post-war Fascism, Covert Operations and Terrorism, Volume 1, and The Darkest Side of Politics, Volume 2, State Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Religious Extremism and Organized Crime.

00:03:42.180 Yes. And these are books, and I'm sure you have a lot of papers written on these topics.

00:03:49.180 Yes, articles and monographs, and I'm writing a new book, which is probably going to be my magnum opus, called The Other Face of Rock and Roll Rebellion, which is about the international fascist quote-unquote music underground from 1978 to the present.

00:04:06.980 So that's the book that I'm currently working on, and it sort of combines both my scholarly and academic interests on the radical right and also my lifelong countercultural rock and roll rebel lifestyle.

00:04:25.660 So I'm bringing them both together.

00:04:27.660 Because of that bizarre background that I have, I'm probably the only person who can really do this subject, you know, properly, because I'm so familiar with those types of music and also, you know, the subject, the various currents of the radical right.

00:04:44.040 So anyway, yeah, so I guess you could say there's somewhat unusual interest, but nevertheless, I think, unfortunately, highly relevant at the present time, given the fact that so many people are generating hysteria about the threats supposedly posed by the right and by the return of fascism and so forth and so on.

00:05:03.120 And that's really the reason why Tamir Baran and I wrote the fighting the last war, because we just felt that the literature on the radical right was just increasingly partisan, alarmist, and frankly hysterical.

00:05:19.860 A lot of the literature on the radical right, a lot of the literature on the radical right, written by academics, reads like the kind of blatantly partisan, alarmist literature of watchdog, anti-fascist watchdog groups like Hope Not Hate and the Southern Poverty Law Center and so forth and so on.

00:05:39.240 And in fact, in fact, there's been an increasing amount of blending between activists, anti-fascist activists and academics at conferences.

00:05:49.180 And for example, there's academic books that have chapters by anti-fascist activists who are not actually scholars.

00:05:59.660 I mean, some of them know a lot, but they obviously have a blatant partisan bias.

00:06:03.820 I mean, imagine the outrage if somebody was writing a book, somebody put together a book on the radical left, and amongst the people who were authors of that book were members of the radical, were figures on the radical right, or militant anti-communist activists.

00:06:21.300 I mean, people would be outraged and say, well, this isn't a scholarly book.

00:06:24.360 This is more like an activist approach.

00:06:27.040 And that's kind of what we see with a lot of the literature on the radical right now.

00:06:30.580 In fact, you can barely, unfortunately, you can barely distinguish between the activist literature on the radical right and the so-called, and the academic literature on the radical right now, because they share the same narratives.

00:06:41.780 They display the same hostility.

00:06:44.780 And, you know, they have the same bias in that, essentially.

00:06:47.420 Exactly.

00:06:49.420 So, I think that the term far right at the moment is one of the hot topics.

00:06:55.760 And also, the alarmism that you're describing with respect to the rise of the radical right.

00:07:02.140 So, on a daily basis, both on mainstream media and on social media like Twitter that constitute alternative platforms, we are bombarded with virtually endless people who are using terms like that.

00:07:19.740 Who are using terms like left, right, radical left, radical right, extremism, terrorism, far right, radical right, extremist right, and the same thing for the left.

00:07:32.380 So, I think that what we should do, or a good idea for what we do, for what we can do in this interview, is to try and put order into that chaos.

00:07:42.420 And, personally, I think that, as a historian, you are very well equipped to do this.

00:07:49.740 In a sense, I'm asking the right person to help me.

00:07:52.720 I hope so, yeah.

00:07:54.340 To help me put order into this linguistic chaos, because it seems to me that unless we combine our historical knowledge with our judgment of people's political and ethical statements,

00:08:07.540 we are going to just fall victims of sloganism, like Trudeau says, Trudeau is the leader of the liberal party.

00:08:19.300 Suddenly, everyone thinks that liberalism is what Trudeau is putting forward, which it is not.

00:08:24.540 I'm speaking as a classical liberal myself.

00:08:27.340 Trudeau is the last person I would refer to as a liberal.

00:08:31.320 We're talking about somebody who's an illiberal progressive, quote-unquote.

00:08:34.620 And, whenever I use the term progressive, I always put it in quotation marks, because, in my opinion, there's really nothing progressive about progressivism.

00:08:42.300 Exactly.

00:08:42.560 But, that's a whole other subject.

00:08:44.640 But, yeah, getting back to your point about the far right and the terms, and people toss around these terms, far right, extreme right, radical right, you know, without really being very specific.

00:08:55.180 And, frankly, even amongst academic experts, there's no consensus on what the terms far right and extreme right and radical right mean.

00:09:04.200 And, so that's one of the biggest problems.

00:09:07.820 I mean, if the experts can't even agree on how to precisely define and delimit these terms, then it's not surprising that activist types and other people who are less informed are going to be misusing and abusing those terms.

00:09:23.640 And, that's precisely what we see, as with the term fascism and so forth and so on.

00:09:28.480 So, maybe the best way to begin is to try to talk about the four main, the way, in terms of our categorization scheme, the four main elements of the right.

00:09:43.500 And, of course, I mean, we can talk about the ideas associated with the left and the right at the time when those terms were first introduced in the late 18th century.

00:09:55.040 If you want to get into the weeds of that, or we can talk, you know, clearly, if you're, let's just say, in the most general sense, that the ideas associated with the left are emerged from the European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.

00:10:12.720 And, and then, and then that movement, you know, promoted certain, certain core ideas, and so, and so that originally the term left, again, referred to people who supported Enlightenment ideas, and supported at least certain phases of the French Revolution, and as I said, who sat on the left side of the French Assembly, the States General and then the National Assembly.

00:10:40.760 And then the term right was applied to defenders of the Ancien Regime, people who were opposed to various Enlightenment ideas, and who were opposed to the French Revolution.

00:10:52.440 So, that, that's really where the terms left and right first, first used in a political sense.

00:10:59.200 Of course, of course, since then, the terms have, I mean, the left and the right have evolved or devolved, depending on your, depending on your perspective.

00:11:11.580 I mean, they've changed over time, ideas associated with the left and the right have changed over time.

00:11:17.740 And, and the problem, of course, is that some of the, the way that the left evolved, evolved in a direction that I think the, the Enlightenment intellectuals would have, would have found appalling.

00:11:35.300 So, for example, when you, when you actually identify the ideas associated with the Enlightenment, they can be used to support, on the one hand, the most radical forms of individualism, because one of the core ideas of, of the Enlightenment, along with rationalism,

00:11:54.300 the idea that humans are basically good optimism regarding human progress, was egalitarianism, of course, the term egalitarianism can mean many different things.

00:12:06.020 It can mean equality before the law, it can mean equality before God, it can mean equality of opportunity, it can mean equality of results, and so forth, and so on.

00:12:14.780 But in the Enlightenment sense of the term, the term referred to the, the idea, which was really probably the most radical idea in the history of political thought, that all individuals have certain intrinsic national, natural rights that cannot be abridged.

00:12:29.100 So this is the kind of idea, which is the basis for modern ideas of, of individual rights and individual freedom.

00:12:36.220 And again, it's the most radical idea in the history of political thought, because all traditional societies didn't have a concept that the individual had rights.

00:12:44.780 Separate from the community, and whatever rights the individual was thought to have, if they were not or never articulated, were always considered to be subordinated to the interests of the, of the community.

00:12:54.800 So the, the idea that individuals have certain rights that can't be abridged is really the most radical idea in the history of political thought, and it really, it really kind of undermines and subverts traditional societies, for that very reason.

00:13:06.460 But anyway, so on the one hand, you can have that kind of idea that emerges from Enlightenment thinking, and then on the other hand, you can have people,

00:13:14.780 misinterpreting the ideas of Rousseau, about the general will, and so forth and so on, where you end up with the most extreme forms of collectivism, in the form of communism, or, or collectivist anarchism.

00:13:27.320 So, so, so, in other words, ideas that are associated with both the left and the right, you develop in different ways over time, and, and they oftentimes develop in ways that are completely incompatible with each other.

00:13:40.300 So you can really see, for example, that, that the idea of, of the emphasis on the, on individual freedom, on the one hand, and the emphasis on collectivism, on the other, of the communist type, are completely antithetical to one another.

00:13:52.760 And yet both can be said to derive from, from some of the core Enlightenment ideas, you know.

00:13:58.060 And, and, and, and so that's one of the issues.

00:14:01.120 Now, so the first question, the first point I want to make here is that the political spectrum, the left-right political spectrum is kind of an overly simplistic spectrum.

00:14:08.960 Because it, it suggests that, it suggests that people who, who have left-wing ideas, quote-unquote, are on the far pole of a spectrum from people who have right-wing ideas.

00:14:18.760 So, that there's no areas where they can, where they can join or intermingle and so forth and so on.

00:14:24.320 And I think that's really a, a, a, a, a, not only an overly linear way to look at it, but a very simplistic way to look at it.

00:14:31.120 And I think that the more accurate political depictions of the political spectrum, spectrum, well, are like in more in a form of a circle.

00:14:40.400 Whereas on the top of a circle, you have like, the most totalitarian versions of the left and the right.

00:14:48.880 Like on the left side, you'd have communism be right adjacent to fascism, the totalitarian version on the right side.

00:14:55.400 And on the bottom of that circle, you'd have the most, the, the, the, the ideas on the left and the right that were the most, that emphasized individual freedom the most.

00:15:03.740 So, you, you, you, you, you would have like a classical liberalism and individualist anarchism on the left side.

00:15:11.100 And then on the right side, you'd have libertarianism, you know.

00:15:13.840 So, there you can see, you can, you can see the, so the, so they're the left and right are right next to each other.

00:15:18.220 You know, the totalitarian left and the totalitarian right are adjacent to each other.

00:15:21.920 They have much more in common with each other than they have with other elements of the left and the right.

00:15:26.380 And similarly, the anti-authoritarian elements of the left and right are, are close to each other.

00:15:31.080 And they have less, much more in common with each other than, than the more authoritarian and collectivist elements of the, of the, of the respect that they use.

00:15:40.360 So, let me just summarize and tell me if I'm summarizing incorrectly your point.

00:15:45.520 You would say that the initial distinction between left and right originates from the French parliament after the French revolution,

00:15:53.960 where the left described those who sat on the left side of the parliament and the right, those who sat on the right side.

00:16:02.520 And the left was generally speaking pro-French revolution, especially in, in its most radical forms.

00:16:09.700 And the right was the supporter of the old establishment.

00:16:13.440 Now, two questions.

00:16:15.800 Actually, actually, it really began a little bit earlier than that.

00:16:19.480 I mean, because there were people who sat on the left side of the spectrum who supported the left side of the assembly,

00:16:24.460 who supported the early phases of the French revolution.

00:16:27.080 But then they were shocked and horrified by, by the later phases of the French, the Jacobin terror and so forth and so on.

00:16:32.660 So, yeah.

00:16:33.380 But yeah, so it really began earlier than the French revolution and then continued throughout, throughout, through the revolution, the seating arrangements.

00:16:39.560 Exactly. So I have, I have a question here about the Enlightenment, because it seems to me that a lot of the times people are talking about the Enlightenment as if it was one movement,

00:16:51.220 whereas it's an umbrella term of plenty of movement.

00:16:54.720 So, for instance, the Scottish Enlightenment having Hume, Adam Smith and Douglas Stewart, Adam Ferguson,

00:17:02.360 they don't seem to me to resemble ideas of the left in any sense.

00:17:06.320 Well, no, I think that, I think that if you think of the, the main ideas of the Enlightenment as being one that promotes like not only the use of human reason,

00:17:16.880 the application of human reason to solve human problems, but also the importance of, of free, free debate and so forth and so on.

00:17:25.840 And, and, and, and the free exchange of ideas, you know, that's very important when we're talking about, you know,

00:17:32.160 remember like during, in, in 18th century France, a lot of the Enlightenment intellectuals met in these salons, you know,

00:17:38.340 they met to discuss issues and they met with people with very different ideas and they were having lively philosophical

00:17:43.660 and political discussions with, with other people and so forth.

00:17:46.980 So part of the whole Enlightenment project is, is really trying to break with the rigid orthodoxy,

00:17:52.200 rigid intellectual and religious orthodoxy that was, that was still, still, still dominant in, in the 18th century.

00:17:59.200 And so within that idea, if you, if you, if you, if you're a person who supports, you know, reason, reason, discussion,

00:18:11.360 and if you're a person who supports the idea that individuals have certain intrinsic rights,

00:18:15.040 and you're a person, you're a person who supports the free, free discourse and free association of ideas and so forth and so on.

00:18:21.240 And obviously that means that people can come, can come to different conclusions about, about political values, social values, and, and, and, and so forth.

00:18:32.120 So even, even amongst the French Enlightenment people, I mean, there were very, very great differences between Rousseau and, and, and, and other, other, other leading, leading Enlightenment thinkers.

00:18:45.660 And of course, as the Enlightenment spread elsewhere to Britain and Scotland and to continental Europe, and especially to America, I mean, the, the American founding fathers were mostly Enlightenment intellectuals.

00:18:57.280 Many of them had lived in France and, and so forth and so on.

00:19:00.300 And so even with the French and American revolutions, you can see a very significant difference.

00:19:05.200 I mean, the French Revolution had a much more collectivist orientation.

00:19:07.920 The Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 was much more collectivist in its, in its, in its orientation in the Declaration of Independence, which was, which had a much more individual, individualized focus.

00:19:19.480 So, so the point is, you can have, even amongst the same, the same intellectual movement, you can have very wide, wide range of opinions.

00:19:28.140 And the same thing would be true of the movements that arose in opposition to the Enlightenment, which would be like, for example, the Romantic movement in 19th century Europe, which, which basically,

00:19:37.920 emphasized the feelings and, and, and, uh, emotions in irrationalism, uh, you know, uh, more than, uh, as opposed to, uh, you know, overemphasizing reason.

00:19:49.420 Because, because one of the ideas that the, the, the, the people who were on the right, uh, adopted, uh, to oppose the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism was what I, what I call philosophical anti-rationalism.

00:20:01.200 It doesn't mean irrationalism, but it means the, the recognition that human beings are not rational calculators.

00:20:06.540 Human beings are, are basically animals with a, kind of a thin veneer of rationality, and they, they're driven by emotions and sentiments and unconscious drivers that they're not aware of.

00:20:16.800 And so, to thinking that human beings can just, are simply, are simply rational calculating machines that somehow can resolve every problem, and ignoring the, the under, the underlying, uh, behavioral drivers that human beings have, which are based on non-rational elements, uh, is, is a mistake, you know.

00:20:33.980 So, so, uh, so, uh, the romantic movement basically overemphasized, you could say, like the, the sentiments and the emotions and things, which, which provided great art and, and literature and things like that.

00:20:44.400 But politically, it led to all kinds of, you know, had very negative consequences, emphasizing the value of irrationality in politics is not usually a good thing.

00:20:52.660 Okay. Okay. So, we are, we have, let's say, uh, said that the distinction between left and right originates from the, from before the French Revolution, and it had to do with where people were sat in the French Parliament and the kind of policies they were putting forward.

00:21:09.960 That's right. So, how do we go from that to the far right? That is the notion that everyone has been talking about. What is it supposed to be?

00:21:21.300 Yes. Okay. Well, let me, let me just say one last thing about the, the counter-enlightenment, uh, ideas, which, which were, which were developed in response to enlightenment ideas.

00:21:30.620 And those, those, those include, uh, the idea, like I said, the philosophical anti-rationalism, the understanding that human beings are not a hundred, are not fully rational.

00:21:38.840 The idea that human, human nature is basically evil, you know, somewhat derives from the notion of the Christian notion of original sin.

00:21:45.800 Uh, and that means you have pessimism about human progress. If you, if, if, if you don't think that people can be completely rational and you think that human beings, uh, uh, uh, uh, are basically evil, then it's hard to have a, have a faith in, in, uh, you know, the, uh, human progress, inevitable human progress.

00:22:06.480 And then in response to the idea of, um, of, uh, egalitarianism, that's to say the idea that individuals have certain intrinsic rights, of course, the, the right counterposed the idea of elitism, that certain natural hierarchies, uh, needed to, needed to rule human societies and so forth and so on.

00:22:25.900 And then in, in, in, oh, yeah, I didn't mention what another key aspect of the, of the, of the, of the, of the enlightenment left, which was, uh, uh, cosmopolitanism, you know, the idea that, that despite all their differences, human beings everywhere are the same.

00:22:40.180 And, uh, so all human beings are part of the same family. And that's sort of an idea that's, that's associated with the enlightenment.

00:22:47.720 So human beings have more uncommon, despite all the observable differences, than, than they have differences.

00:22:53.020 In contrast to that, the, the right, uh, promoted particularism, you know, the idea that human beings, oh, their primary loyalty to their own communities, not, not to man, abstract, uh, universal man, you know, and so forth and stone.

00:23:08.540 So, so those are things that are kind of important to understand.

00:23:11.460 All right.

00:23:11.740 So let's get to the, the, the terminology now.

00:23:15.800 So, uh, as I said, when you're talking about the, uh, terms like the far right that are so, that are so casually tossed around.

00:23:23.020 Nowadays, really the term power right now has become sort of like the term fascism, which is, is basically, it's almost like an epithet.

00:23:29.940 It's become like an epithet, a term of abuse that's even, this really devoid of, of content.

00:23:35.300 You know, basically people call other people fascists who they really don't like.

00:23:39.660 That person has political views.

00:23:41.060 I really don't like him.

00:23:41.840 I'm going to, you know, he's like a fascist, you know, that person has political views.

00:23:45.280 I really don't like, I'm going to call him a far right person.

00:23:47.180 So nowadays the term far right is always used, for example, in the media almost to, to, to refer to almost everything to the right of progressivism, you know, including, including like, including, um, you know, uh, uh, moderate liberalism, you know, uh, and, um, certainly it's used for everything to the right of the center right of the establishment center.

00:24:08.100 Um, but, but, but that's just, uh, all that does is jumble together, uh, a vast array of different intellectual currents that exist on the right side of the political spectrum.

00:24:18.300 So, so, so, so using that term in such a imprecise way, uh, all it does is conflate and confuse reality.

00:24:25.620 So we have to distinguish between, between, between four different, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, types of the right.

00:24:34.200 But, uh, this is the categorization scheme that we've, we've outlined in our book.

00:24:38.460 First is the conservative right.

00:24:40.600 The conservative right is basically the establishment right, you know, basically a right that supports the system and, and supports various things that people tend to associate with conservatism, private property, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, strong military, uh, a limited government.

00:24:59.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah, on the one hand, limited government, but on the other hand, law and order, you know, so it's a little bit confusing there, uh, uh, uh, uh, and market economies and so forth and so on.

00:25:12.300 Okay.

00:25:12.580 The, the, the, the, the next category of the right is what I would call the dissonant right.

00:25:17.360 The dissonant right.

00:25:18.240 The dissonant right is all the currents of the right who, uh, are opposed to the establishment right.

00:25:25.200 But, but which do not actually, but, but, but are willing to work within the system, are willing to work within the system.

00:25:32.200 So, you know, it tends to be all kinds of, like, all kinds of currents on the right that are highly critical of the establishment right, uh, ranging from, uh, you know, paleo-conservatism to, uh, to, uh, libertarian and radical libertarianism.

00:25:47.300 And, uh, and, and, and a whole slew of other things that, uh, that, that we could enumerate and discuss.

00:25:52.260 But the point is that when we're talking about the dissonant right, we're probably talking about people who are highly critical of the establishment right, but who are, but who are perfectly happy to work within these, the democratic system.

00:26:05.280 Uh, they're not advocating, uh, the, the subversion of the overthrow of the democratic system, the dissonant right.

00:26:11.500 Then the, the next, uh, group would be the, the radical right.

00:26:15.100 And now we're moving into the, to the area, to, to the, to the views where they are actually advocating the, uh, the subversion and overthrow of the system.

00:26:23.360 These are people who are fundamentally opposed to the existing status quo in various ways.

00:26:28.660 And, uh, who therefore feel like the, the current system needs to be, uh, needs to be changed, possibly even overthrown.

00:26:36.980 Um, and here we're really talking about, uh, you know, radical nationalists, uh, Catholic ultra traditionalists, um, you know, uh, certain kinds of religious fund fundamentalists, uh, in Europe, royalist extremists, uh, uh, people who do not like bourgeois democracy and, uh, or, or people who are opposed to the, the baleful influence of big capital, um, and various other things.

00:27:02.280 Uh, and people who are willing, uh, uh, to, uh, to, uh, challenge the, the, the, the, the, the validity, uh, of the democratic system.

00:27:11.840 And generally that means proposing, uh, you know, to establish a more authoritarian political system, uh, that they can use to promote their agendas and, and mobilize people in support of, uh, social solidarity and, and, uh, whatever.

00:27:27.460 Uh, but the radical right is, uh, you could say that the radical right is, um, uh, despite it's, um, it's anti, anti regime and anti-establishment thrust, um, is reactionary.

00:27:44.360 It's reactionary in the sense that it wants to try to restore something that, uh, a pres, a presumed past golden age.

00:27:50.800 It wants to restore aspects of a presumed past golden age.

00:27:54.700 And so that, you know, that, again, it's backward looking in certain respects, even though it's willing to adopt modern methods of propaganda and agitation and, and subversion and, and possibly resort to violence.

00:28:06.400 So that, well, we met by the radical right.

00:28:08.720 So now we're talking about the anti-establishment, the right, uh, the, uh, the right that's not willing to work within the system.

00:28:14.660 And then the last category is the revolutionary right.

00:28:17.060 And the revolutionary right is like the radical right in the sense that it, it, it rejects the current system and wants to transform it.

00:28:25.620 But the revolutionary right is even more, as the name, uh, implies the revolutionary right, it wants to fundamentally transform the system.

00:28:33.180 So it wants to mobilize the masses in an, in an attempt to, to, to overthrow the system and really change the entire social and political structure, create a new revolutionary regime.

00:28:42.900 You know, so that's what we're talking about with the revolutionary and that, and what are we, what kind of movements would fall into the category of the revolutionary right?

00:28:49.260 Fascism.

00:28:50.180 Fascism would be a revolutionary right movement.

00:28:52.760 And so would Islamism. 0.97

00:28:54.480 So would Islamism. 0.98

00:28:55.360 And we'll talk later about Islamism.

00:28:57.560 But, um, so I have some, sorry, finish your sentence.

00:29:02.820 Go ahead.

00:29:03.240 No.

00:29:03.680 So I have some questions, particularly about the distinction between the dissident right and the radical right that you mentioned.

00:29:11.300 So, yeah, you are saying essentially that there are four categories in the right as you and your, and Dr. Tamir Barron are writing in your book, Fighting the Last War.

00:29:22.900 So we have establishment conservatives, then we have dissident right, radical right, and then revolutionary right.

00:29:30.580 So when it comes to the dissident right, would you, you said that they are highly critical of the establishment right, which would suggest that they do call for a change.

00:29:42.420 They do, but the problem with the establishment right is that, is that it, you know, if you think about the conservative right, I mean, supposedly the definition of conservative implies something about conserving something.

00:29:58.320 You know, the idea is that you want to conserve, well, let me just explain what I think conservatism is, and maybe that'll help clarify what we're talking about.

00:30:05.860 I mean, I would actually say that conservatism is more of like a kind of disposition, almost like a psychological disposition than an actual doctrine per se.

00:30:15.340 I mean, basically, a conservative is somebody, not somebody who's opposed to all change, but somebody who believes that whatever social and political changes occur should be gradual rather than sudden.

00:30:26.660 And that's one thing.

00:30:28.700 The second idea that one could associate with conservatism is that they believe that the positive elements of the past should be preserved in this process of change.

00:30:39.620 In other words, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

00:30:41.720 Let's not reject everything.

00:30:42.880 Let's not overturn everything.

00:30:44.220 As society is changing, you know, we want to preserve the positive elements in this process of gradual change.

00:30:51.600 So you could call, for example, the Soviet Politburo under Brezhnev conservative, because they weren't promoting revolutionary change.

00:30:59.680 They were part of the nomenclature.

00:31:01.640 They were part of the system that was in a privileged position, and they wanted to preserve their position within this system and so forth and so on.

00:31:12.040 So that's what I mean by conservative in general.

00:31:15.640 Conservative right is what we've already talked about.

00:31:18.940 Now, one of the main things that the dissonant right believes, all the different currents of the dissonant right believes, is that the establishment conservative right has failed to conserve anything of value.

00:31:32.960 That it keeps, it is incapable of resisting the push by the left to transform things, to make progress, to move toward progress.

00:31:47.980 And therefore, they feel that the conservative right has been corrupted and co-opted by its privileged position within the establishment to the point that it no longer is willing to really take a stand and oppose what they consider to be dangerous trends pushed by the left.

00:32:05.760 So the dissonant right, all the different guys, you're talking about race realists, you're talking about immigration patriots, you're talking about, you're talking about, like I said, radical libertarians, paleo-conservatives, neo-reactionaries.

00:32:17.940 There's a whole group of dissonant right ideologies that one can enumerate, but the main thing that they all share, they don't agree with each other.

00:32:27.720 All those different components of the dissonant right disagree with each other profoundly.

00:32:31.920 But the one thing that they agree with is that the conservative right is part of the establishment, has been corrupted and co-opted, and is not conserving anything of value.

00:32:42.100 Okay, so when it comes to the radical right, that you think is distinct from the far right, which you identify as...

00:32:50.740 Well, no, no, I don't use it from the far right at all.

00:32:53.600 In fact, I would say that what I call the radical right is the same thing as the...

00:32:58.420 You could use the far right and the extreme right as a synonym for the radical right.

00:33:02.740 Okay.

00:33:04.180 Okay, okay.

00:33:04.640 I think there's, I don't think there's any, any, any, the people who tried to distinguish between the far right and the radical right and the extreme right, to me, those distinctions don't seem to be spurious.

00:33:15.800 So from my point of view, I like, I prefer the term radical right, but I think it basically means the same thing as the far right and the extreme right.

00:33:24.500 Okay, so I think in your book, you draw a distinction between extremism of ends and extremism of means.

00:33:31.020 Would you say that this distinction is pertinent to the distinction between the radical right on the one hand and the revolutionary right, in that the radical is a bit more theoretical, whereas the others try to put it to action?

00:33:45.840 No, I wouldn't say that.

00:33:47.120 I would say that in both cases, we're talking about an extremism of goals.

00:33:52.040 And in both cases, we could be talking about an extremism of means in the sense that both, both might very well cross the threshold of violence and, and carry out violent actions against the system, or against their enemies, their perceived enemies in society.

00:34:07.040 So I think that both the radical right and the revolutionary right would be, you know, would certainly have extremist goals, and also be willing to use extremist means.

00:34:16.520 So the real difference is that the radical right is trying to restore something, something that they think existed in the past that has been lost.

00:34:24.760 So they want to restore national, they want to restore national greatness, for example, they want to restore like a, like a, like some kind of religion, religion, religion, religion, centric society, or they want to want to bring the kings back, they want to bring the royalty back or something like that, right?

00:34:46.000 Okay. I have two questions here. So when you, when you talk about people wanting to restore national greatness, it seems to me that this is something that virtually everyone says so.

00:34:57.460 So that would have to, to require a particular conception of what it means for that, for the nation to come back.

00:35:07.500 Of course.

00:35:07.920 Because a lot of people would, excuse me?

00:35:10.520 Yes.

00:35:10.960 So just, just wanting to make the nation, let's say, improve, doesn't seem to me to be particularly radical in itself.

00:35:20.760 Some forms of it, yeah.

00:35:23.220 I would agree with you.

00:35:24.600 Okay, yeah.

00:35:25.200 I would agree with you that it doesn't necessarily have to refer to some kind of, some kind of authoritarian or illiberal nationalism.

00:35:34.660 But when we're talking about the radical right, it does.

00:35:37.020 Yes.

00:35:37.240 And I think that's the point. When we're talking about the radical right, the kind of nationalism they envision is an illiberal nationalism, and it's an authoritarian kind of nationalism.

00:35:45.900 Whereas other people might be talking about restoring national greatness, but not necessarily having those illiberal and authoritarian dimensions to it.

00:35:56.980 Something like that, I would say.

00:35:58.480 Right, right. So, let's go to the other term of abuse, fascism.

00:36:05.000 Okay.

00:36:05.220 To my mind, when we're talking about terms, there's a distinction between the conventional meaning that the term has, and the technical or personal meaning that something means when they use a word.

00:36:17.880 So, for instance, a lot of texts start with authors defining their terms.

00:36:23.800 I'm just particular, I'm reminded, for instance, of Thomas Reed, who in the essay of the active powers of man starts by saying,

00:36:31.760 by the liberty of the will, I understand the power that man has over the determinations of his will.

00:36:39.840 So, in that sense, he's introducing a term, and he says precisely how he conceives of it.

00:36:45.720 We could say that this is the personal meaning.

00:36:48.180 And then we also have the conventional meaning, which is the meaning most people associate with a word,

00:36:52.980 and that refers to the common aspect of language, because as social creatures, and we need to use language that is a public institution,

00:37:02.560 if Wittgenstein is correct, that has a sort of, let's say, social aspect into it.

00:37:09.440 And there's the meaning most people associate with a term.

00:37:13.880 Now, to my mind, the term far-right has connotations to fascism.

00:37:20.700 But a lot of people write, excuse me, yep.

00:37:25.300 I think that's deliberate.

00:37:26.840 In other words, I think that a lot of people who use the term far-right as an abuse are trying to associate it with fascism, actually.

00:37:33.620 Okay.

00:37:33.980 They're trying to suggest that anybody that they label far-right is akin to fascism or a proto-fascist.

00:37:41.540 And that's part of the whole attempt to delegitimize and demonize all elements of the right that the left and the establishment don't like.

00:37:53.960 But that comes when people don't define what they mean by the far-right.

00:37:59.480 That's correct.

00:38:00.560 Because they could just use it as a smear.

00:38:02.480 Because, for instance, you gave your classification, and whether people agree with it or not,

00:38:08.260 they can say that, for instance, they can use that classification and judge future statements you may make about whether particular people or movements belong to the radical right or not.

00:38:19.580 But a lot of people, politicians, journalists, activists, they are making statements on a daily basis about the far-right, and they do not define it.

00:38:31.280 So I think that, would you say that they do it in order to create maximalist smearing?

00:38:37.980 Absolutely.

00:38:38.700 Absolutely.

00:38:39.740 No, I think that's precisely the point of it.

00:38:41.580 The vaguer the use of the term, the vaguer, the more expansive the application of the term can be.

00:38:50.140 And I think, therefore, I mean, essentially, the term far-right essentially refers to any belief system or any movement that the current regnant establishment,

00:39:02.280 which I would call the progressive globalist establishment, and people on the left don't like.

00:39:08.260 Okay.

00:39:11.560 Question now.

00:39:12.820 How big of a threat is it?

00:39:14.260 If we believe mainstream media, it is the major threat in the Western world.

00:39:20.000 And we could say that very frequently they react to a lot of killings of people by scaremongering about the far-right.

00:39:29.420 So, for instance, last Friday, we had stabbings in Solingen, in Germany, at a diversity festival from someone who seems to be an Islamist. 0.74

00:39:41.440 And the establishment response to that event was to just scaremonger about the far-right.

00:39:48.420 So, it seems that every chance they get, the establishment, as people who represent the establishment in the Western world,

00:40:00.800 they're trying to constantly pay their taxes, let's say, intellectually speaking.

00:40:06.400 They constantly think they have to talk about the dangers of the far-right.

00:40:09.900 So, they create, if people take their words at face value, they would think that the far-right, or the radical right, let's say, is the greatest threat right now in the Western world.

00:40:22.520 What do you make of this, and how do we assess threats?

00:40:25.300 All right, well, there's a whole bunch of things that we need to unpack here.

00:40:31.060 First of all, let's talk about the biased coverage of the events, like, for example, the attack in Solingen.

00:40:38.640 There's two issues that are involved here.

00:40:40.840 After every jihadist terrorist attack, after every jihadist terrorist attack, the main concern of the media seems to be,

00:40:49.320 oh, my God, what about the far-right response to this attack?

00:40:52.400 They're more concerned about the far-right response to a jihadist attack than they are about the jihadist attack itself and the threat of Islamism.

00:41:01.480 And let me just point out, and this is something that we make very clear in our book,

00:41:05.560 Islamism is the most dangerous revolutionary right movement in the world. 1.00

00:41:10.280 Let me say that again.

00:41:11.660 Islamism is the most dangerous revolutionary right ideology and movement in the world. 1.00

00:41:15.600 And it's committed hundreds, tens of thousands, over probably 200,000 people have been killed just since the 1990s by jihadists in various parts of the world, mostly in the Muslim world, right?

00:41:28.900 44,000 terrorist attacks or something.

00:41:31.180 People are calculating, I don't know how, if they're using the correct definition of terrorism,

00:41:34.840 but the point is that the Islamists have carried out an enormous number of mass casualty attacks all over the world and have killed tens and tens of thousands of people.

00:41:46.640 You would think that any sane person would be thinking, well, if I'm concerned about the right, my main concern is going to be about Islamism. 0.96

00:41:53.820 But no.

00:41:54.420 After every jihadist and terrorist attack in Europe or in the U.S., what is the media talking about?

00:42:01.120 Oh, the Islamophobic backlash, you know, or something like the imagined Islamophobic backlash.

00:42:07.260 So the first point is that they're not even identifying Islamism as a revolutionary rightist ideology, which is just mind-boggling to me.

00:42:18.340 So in other words, but it actually makes sense from their point of view because they're always trying to portray Muslims as victims.

00:42:24.420 You know, Muslims are always innocent victims and jihadists who carry out violence have nothing to do with Islam, blah, blah, blah. 0.96

00:42:32.420 All this is nonsense. 0.90

00:42:33.820 And we can get to Islamism a little bit later.

00:42:37.020 But the point I'm trying to make is this kind of coverage is completely dishonest because, number one, it's not focusing on the perpetrators of the attack who are Islamists,

00:42:48.280 who are revolutionary rightists of the most dangerous kind, who are living amongst us in Western societies and are being incited by Islamist groups and jihadist groups all over the world to carry out attacks on infidels. 0.55

00:43:04.840 That's an omnipresent and ever-present danger in every Western country.

00:43:08.820 That's where the security focus should be, not on the Islamophobia backlash and the supposed threat from the domestic right.

00:43:19.600 I mean, that's basically a canard.

00:43:21.680 You know, I don't mean that the domestic radical right and the revolutionary right don't constitute a threat, but that threat is consistently exaggerated,

00:43:33.960 whereas the threat posed by Islamism and jihadist terrorism is consistently minimized or ignored.

00:43:42.440 That's the reality.

00:43:43.240 Why would you say does this happen?

00:43:45.720 Okay, sorry.

00:43:46.660 Well, yeah, let's do these things in order.

00:43:50.180 First of all, let's get back to fascism because, you know, one of the main narrative tropes that one finds in the media, you know,

00:44:01.480 there's all this drum beating about the fascism is on the march, the fascism is returning, blah, blah, blah.

00:44:08.420 And, of course, people who they don't like, politicians that they don't like and boomers they don't like, 0.84

00:44:13.740 are falsely smeared as fascists all the time by the mainstream media, by establishment politicians, and, of course, by the radical left.

00:44:22.580 And, once again, we're dealing with the term, which is essentially an epithet, you know,

00:44:29.320 and it's something you really hate, you call it a fascist.

00:44:32.160 Well, you know, the problem is that 99% of the time when people call somebody else a fascist, it's inaccurate.

00:44:42.700 It's inaccurate.

00:44:44.140 And the reason is because most people don't even know what fascism is.

00:44:47.900 This is the fundamental problem.

00:44:50.420 I mean, most people, when they think of fascism, they just think of, oh, this horrible, they think of Nazism.

00:44:54.640 Basically, most people think of fascism, they think of Nazism.

00:44:56.540 Oh, this totalitarian regime, the mass murdering regime, and, yeah, I mean, Nazism was one of many fascist regimes that did commit these horrible atrocities.

00:45:09.440 But the point is that this is the image that people have in their mind, you know,

00:45:14.540 that the goose-stepping Nazis are going to be marching on the streets and, like, overthrowing democracy and all.

00:45:22.380 I mean, it's just completely absurd.

00:45:23.820 So let me just say a little bit of something about what fascism is, and then I'll talk about the real threat posed by the fascism and so forth and so on and the radical right.

00:45:36.940 Okay, so, again, fascism is another term that even experts don't agree on, how to define.

00:45:44.320 And there's a, you know, a very large number of definitions of fascism that have been generated by people who are specialists.

00:45:54.440 And I would say the three main type, the three main ones we want to talk about, one would be like Roger Griffin's definition.

00:46:02.860 Roger Griffin has tried to create, who's a good friend and colleague of mine, has tried to create, like, a consensus definition of fascism.

00:46:09.900 It hasn't succeeded, but his idea is that fascism is a kind of palingenetic form of alternational, palingenetic, you know, means we're obsessed with national rebirth.

00:46:21.660 So it's an anti-liberal form of nationalism that's obsessed with national rebirth.

00:46:30.820 And that is true.

00:46:32.340 That is one component of fascism.

00:46:33.840 So the illiberal nationalism is one component of fascism.

00:46:37.920 But in Griffin's definition, he doesn't include the other component, which I'm going to get to momentarily.

00:46:42.660 The more common definitions of fascism are kind of laundry list definitions of various characteristics of fascism.

00:46:50.760 The problem with those laundry list definitions is that they commingle ideological beliefs of fascism with the characteristics of fascist regimes.

00:47:01.300 And so they get all muddled and confused.

00:47:04.280 Let's just be straightforward.

00:47:05.700 If you really want to understand an ideology, you have to focus on the core beliefs and you have to focus on it in the movement phase before any of these movements succeed in taking power.

00:47:16.200 Because once the revolutionary movement takes power, then it becomes compromised and it has to institutionalize itself and so forth and so on.

00:47:23.700 So to really understand the core of an ideology, you have to go back to the very earliest movement phase of these kinds of movements.

00:47:35.180 So just with respect to fascist regimes, we can say that fascist regimes are very similar to communist regimes.

00:47:42.660 They're totalitarian regimes that aim to control every aspect of life and transform the consciousness of everybody.

00:47:53.020 And, you know, as determined by a party state.

00:47:56.440 You know, so if you look at the literature on totalitarianism in the 1950s, people will recognize these fundamental similarities between fascist and communist regimes.

00:48:09.600 And that's absolutely true.

00:48:11.500 So we don't have to talk about the regime.

00:48:13.240 Let's just stick to the ideology.

00:48:14.640 So the ideology is one part of it is this illiberal nationalism that, like Griffin emphasized.

00:48:21.920 And the other part, which Zeb Sternhell, who is, I think, the most insightful scholar on fascism, is that illiberal nationalism is combined with a non-Marxist socialism, a non-Marxist form of socialism.

00:48:35.560 And, by the way, Sternhell's conception is, in fact, supported by many fascist intellectuals.

00:48:42.560 I mean, I've read a lot of literature produced by fascists and neo-fascist intellectuals.

00:48:47.120 And these people are extremely anti-capitalist. 0.95

00:48:50.860 You know, the idea that fascism is pro-capitalist, this ridiculous idea that the Marxists are always peddling, is just complete nonsense.

00:48:57.420 The fact is that the visceral anti-capitalism is a key aspect of fascism.

00:49:03.100 Now, the kind of socialism that the fascists are promoting, obviously, is not the same thing as Marxism.

00:49:08.880 Because we're not talking about the class warfare and the expropriation of private property or anything like that.

00:49:16.280 What we're talking about is creating, like, an organic national community in which no groups are allowed to exploit other groups.

00:49:23.700 So you can't have capitalists exploiting workers in a fascist state, because that would disrupt the social solidarity and the unity of this organic community.

00:49:34.840 And, therefore, if capitalist enterprises behave in a way that the fascists regard as anti-national, then they're going to be politically disciplined.

00:49:44.460 In the worst case scenario, they'll take all the bosses of these firms out and line them up against the law and shoot them.

00:49:49.160 So the difference is that fascism is not promoting, like, a classless society, but rather an organic community where all the different components of society work together harmoniously, like the organs of a human body.

00:50:02.820 So it's not some kind of leveling classless society.

00:50:06.800 And for that reason, they're perfectly willing to leave the means of production in private hands, as long as it's politically subordinated to the interests of the nation, which means as determined by the party.

00:50:20.640 Right?

00:50:20.760 So that's the difference.

00:50:25.760 So there is this kind of non-Marxist kind of socialist idea, the idea that capitalists, the big capitalists, what the fascists call plutocratic capitalists, cannot be allowed to exploit people or damage the interests of the nation.

00:50:41.980 Okay.

00:50:42.960 So one last...

00:50:43.640 As defined by the party.

00:50:45.540 Yes, as defined by the ideologues or by the party, if they take power.

00:50:49.780 So when you think about every fascist movement, every genuinely fascist movement, and by the way, this constellation of elements from the left and the right first came together in France in the early 20th century.

00:51:03.620 But when you think about every fascist movement, every fascist movement has a left wing and a right wing.

00:51:09.600 And that's because they appeal to different kinds of people.

00:51:12.140 Certain elements within the fascist, who joined fascist movements are primarily, find the nationalist elements of fascist ideology the most appealing.

00:51:22.840 And other people who joined fascist movements find the social revolutionary and anti-capitalist elements the most, that's what they approve of the most.

00:51:33.460 So in every group, including Nazism, there's a left wing and a right wing within the fascist movements.

00:51:41.200 And those factions are struggling for dominance.

00:51:45.560 As it happens, because of the conditions of interwar Europe, the political conditions, the right wing elements within those fascist movements tended to come to the fore and ultimately outmaneuver the left wing elements and oftentimes purge them and massacre them.

00:51:58.140 As in the case with the SA was massacred by the SS and so forth and so on.

00:52:03.400 And the Straser brothers were exiled by Hitler.

00:52:08.940 So that's the thing you have to understand.

00:52:10.740 The goal of fascism is to bring together different currents to the left and right wing thought and to forge a new revolutionary synthesis capable of mobilizing a revolution against both bourgeois parliamentary democracy and also opposed to communism,

00:52:27.240 which is internationalist, because obviously, given the emphasis of fascist on nationalism, that's antithetical to the communist notions of destroying nation states and creating an international classless society.

00:52:40.140 So fascism and communism are rival revolutionary movements.

00:52:44.640 It's not that one's counter-revolutionary and one's revolutionary, both revolutionary movements, but they're antithetical in terms of their goals.

00:52:51.300 Okay, now, getting back to the question.

00:52:56.020 So now we want to talk about whether fascism and radical right constitute a serious threat in the post-war period.

00:53:08.940 And here we have to distinguish between a political threat and a security threat.

00:53:14.220 From this point of view, a political threat?

00:53:16.200 No, no.

00:53:17.420 The fascist and radical right movements are tiny fringe groups on the margins of every Western society that have no institutional base of support.

00:53:30.040 They have no resources and they have no mass base of popular support.

00:53:35.280 So they're tiny fringe marginalized groups.

00:53:37.260 There is no chance that fascist group groups are ever going to seize power or come to power in Western democratic societies.

00:53:48.360 So anybody who claims, and that's been true ever since the end of World War II. 0.90

00:53:52.160 So anybody who claims that fascism is on the march, that fascism is returned, that fascists are going to destroy democracy, those people are either living in a fantasy world or they're lying.

00:54:10.260 They're lying for political advantage.

00:54:13.380 I have a question here.

00:54:14.960 Sorry, finish your sentence.

00:54:16.160 Yeah, there's two exceptions, I mean, to what I'm saying as far as political threat.

00:54:22.460 In the early post-war era, there were some political parties that were established by former fascists and former Nazis.

00:54:29.340 So, for example, in Germany, you had the NPD.

00:54:32.180 The first one established was the MSI, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, established in Italy in the mid-40s.

00:54:38.640 And then you had the NPD, the Nationaldemokratische Apartheid Deutschland, established in the early 1960s.

00:54:45.600 And there were some smaller parties that fascists, the ex-Nazis, had tried to create before that.

00:54:53.880 Those parties never, I mean, the MSI was the one that had the most influence, but even it didn't have much influence in the electoral sphere.

00:55:01.660 They elected local people, but it didn't have a strong president, never was able to form a government, was never part of a coalition government or anything like that.

00:55:10.860 So there were a couple of political parties created by fascists that were participating in elections, but they didn't have much popular support.

00:55:20.100 The much more dangerous group, the much more dangerous exception, is that during the Cold War, and this, especially in Italy, but also in the Iberian Peninsula and in Belgium and in parts of Latin America, radical right paramilitary groups, including neo-fascist groups, were covertly infiltrated and manipulated by factions of the Secret Service.

00:55:47.880 They had different motivations, but they had different motivations for supporting these groups.

00:56:17.400 But this is all well documented, and in the first volume of my book, The Darkest Sides of Politics, there's whole chapters devoted to this subject, and there's a huge literature in Italian on it.

00:56:28.960 So this is not anything fantasy.

00:56:31.280 There's been judicial case after judicial investigation after judicial, about these terrorist attacks and about the links between various groups and other groups outside of Italy.

00:56:41.160 So the only reason I mention this is the only time that these neo-fascist groups had any political impact was precisely when they were working together with actions of the Secret Service.

00:56:56.600 And because the Secret Service then gave them cover, they were able to get away with carrying out actions without being arrested and prosecuted and so forth and so on.

00:57:03.600 And so they created a climate of instability, which people within the establishment in various countries tried to exploit in order to reinforce their own power and to keep the communists from winning elections in Italy and so forth and so forth.

00:57:17.600 But apart from those exceptions, if you think about the entire history of the West since the end of World War II, there has never been a threat posed by tiny fringe groups of fascists, ever.

00:57:32.080 Okay, now let's get to the question of whether there's a security threat.

00:57:39.580 Well, yes, whenever you're dealing with extremist groups, even small, unpopular fringe groups, there's always a security threat in the sense that radicalized individuals or small cells of people can organize violent attacks against their opponents.

00:57:56.860 And certainly, when you're talking about the radical right and the revolutionary right, those fringe elements in Western societies, they have the capability of carrying out acts of violence and terrorism.

00:58:09.880 I mean, most of those attacks, and again, I'm excluding the ones that were coordinated and organized in part with the help of the secret services, most of the violent attacks that have been carried out by domestic radical rightists have been relatively simple and unsophisticated.

00:58:28.960 You know, like a guy will go into a public place with an automatic weapon and start shooting people or something like that, or they'll assassinate like a designated political enemy, or sometimes they'll try to carry out a bombing or something like that.

00:58:43.520 But generally speaking, we're not talking about sophisticated operations when we're talking about the kinds of attacks carried out by the domestic radical rightists.

00:58:55.440 Right. Now, there are some exceptions. Of course, we have Timothy McVeigh, who was a military veteran, who was able, who had knowledge of explosives, who was able to carry out the devastating bombing of the in Oklahoma City.

00:59:05.300 We have Anders Breivik, who came up with a very sophisticated, clever way of carrying out a mass casualty attack.

00:59:13.920 So there are exceptions, but by and large, the violent actions carried out by domestic radical rightists tend to be small scale, not particularly sophisticated, and they don't fundamentally threaten the stability of the state.

00:59:31.080 So why is it that we constantly listen about the far right and to scaremongering about the far right?

00:59:38.540 Because it's basically mostly propaganda, and it's mostly exaggeration. And that's just the reality of it.

00:59:45.540 And in our book, Fighting the Last Word, we have a whole chapter where we compare the threat, the relative threats of the domestic radical right and the Islamic radical right, the Islamists.

00:59:58.100 And there's simply no comparison. The security threat posed by Islamists, especially by Islamists waging military jihad, is vastly greater than the threat posed by domestic right-wing extremists.

01:00:15.460 Statistically, and in every other way.

01:00:18.460 Because also, we could talk about jihadist attacks. Many of these jihadist attacks, most notably 9-11, but also the March 11th bombings in Madrid, the 7-7 attacks in London, the attacks in Paris.

01:00:31.940 I mean, many of these jihadists, especially, as well as many other parts of the world, many of these attacks carried out by veteran battle-hardened, operationally sophisticated jihadist groups have been quite elaborate, well-planned, and sophisticated operations.

01:00:49.580 Much more on a much higher scale than anything that the domestic radical right has carried out.

01:00:54.700 So, why would people who are supporting the establishment not highlight this danger?

01:01:02.280 Well, there's a whole series of reasons. First of all, why are they highlighting the danger of the domestic radical right? Because it serves their political interests.

01:01:13.340 It serves their political interests to whip up hysteria and alarmism about the threat supposedly posed by fascists and the far right.

01:01:22.440 Which they, and then they, because they use the term fascism and the far right so indiscriminately, it basically applies to any, anybody that they don't, any, any, any opponents that they don't like.

01:01:33.500 That they're, and they're trying to create like this, this, this, this fear amongst the population to justify, to, to, to, to, to, to, to make it easier for the state to carry out authoritarian acts of repression and censorship against their domestic opponents.

01:01:49.420 So, that's why they're, they're, they're, they're exaggerating the threat of the domestic radical right.

01:01:54.020 Why are they minimizing the threat of the Islamic radical right?

01:01:57.640 That's a, a, a harder question to answer.

01:02:01.060 But in a way it isn't because part of it, to be quite frank, is the shocking levels of ignorance that most people in the West have about Islam, about the history of Islam, about core Islamic doctrines, and about Islamism, the ideology of Islamism, and about the currents of Islamism, and, and, and so, so forth.

01:02:20.900 But, you know, the, you know, the, the average person in the West, especially including those that work in our security agencies and our intelligence agencies, doesn't know hardly anything about Islam.

01:02:29.960 I mean, that's the reality of Islamism. 1.00

01:02:31.780 And one, one reason is kind of, you use kind of, you can, you can sort of explain it from a historical point of view, because remember that the, the great expansion of the national security state in the United States and in other Western countries occurred during the Cold War, when, when, when, when Soviet Union and, and, and the Warsaw Pact and, and Communist China were the, were the main strategic enemies of the West.

01:02:53.860 And, and therefore, most of the people who were recruited into security and intelligence agencies, to the extent that they had academic training, were trained in Russian studies or Chinese studies or, or, you know, those kinds of issues.

01:03:08.240 And that was, that was appropriate.

01:03:10.580 The problem is, after the Cold War ended, you still have all these people who have high-level analytical positions in, in, in, in Western governments.

01:03:19.540 And, and, and, and their areas of expertise are Eastern Europe, Russia, Eurasia, East Asia, maybe Latin America, where there's, where there's communist guerrilla movements in Latin America.

01:03:31.640 Very few of them had any expertise of, about, about the, about the Middle East or the Islamic world.

01:03:38.180 And, and that became really painfully evident in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.

01:03:43.920 First of all, the 9-11 attacks should never have happened, because it was obvious to anybody who was paying attention to what the Islamist groups were saying, to what al-Qaeda and other, other jihadist groups were saying, that they were, they had been talking about carrying out a, a major attack on U.S. soil for, for, for years.

01:04:01.940 And they had planned several operations to hijack planes and to blow them up in the midair and all this kind of stuff.

01:04:08.760 They had escalated attacks on American and other Western countries' facilities in various parts of the Islamic world.

01:04:14.820 And they were constantly talking amongst, within their own chat sites and in their own statements, psychological statements, their own pronouncements about, about attacking the great Satan, the U.S. and its allies.

01:04:26.080 And so I, I taught a class that used the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and 2000.

01:04:32.320 I taught for a year there, and I taught courses on terrorism, and one of them was dealing with Islamism.

01:04:41.560 And I was warning everybody, look, these people are going to carry out an attack on American soil.

01:04:45.180 It's just a question of time.

01:04:46.820 And, you know, a lot of people thought that I was being overly alarmist.

01:04:49.320 Well, they can't really, either they didn't really mean it, or, or they can't really, they don't have the capabilities of doing it.

01:04:55.300 And I said, first of all, you have to understand when you're talking about extremists, ideological extremists are true believers.

01:05:01.480 They're true believers.

01:05:02.720 When they say, when they express views about something, you should always take what they say seriously.

01:05:08.680 Always take what extremists say seriously.

01:05:11.100 And if they're directly threatening to, to carry out attacks, you better take that seriously.

01:05:15.160 And whether they have the capabilities, well, clearly they ended up having much greater capabilities than anybody anticipated.

01:05:23.720 I mean, the 9-11 operation, the most sophisticated and spectacular terrorist attack in the history of the world.

01:05:30.300 I mean, and, but the point is that there were a lot of people in the, in the Western intelligence and security agencies who, who really didn't understand the severity of the threat.

01:05:41.720 Okay, question here, because this is something that the audience is going to think about.

01:05:47.580 What you're saying about the expansion of the national security state during the Cold War seems to me to explain the kind of downplaying of the Islamist threat up until 9-11.

01:06:00.620 But it seems to me that post 9-11, or at least not necessarily the immediate years afterwards, but it seems to me that right now there, there is yet again, another effort to downplay, to downsize the threat that you also talk about in the book.

01:06:18.580 So what is it that happened after 9-11, what happened and why do you think that there are people who are carrying on, downplaying the threat of Islamism in the U.S.?

01:06:31.680 Okay, well, there's a, there's a number of reasons for this.

01:06:33.880 And, and in fact, I talk about it in, in, in, in several chapters of the, the book, The Darkest Sides of Politics, the second volume, I talk about precisely these issues.

01:06:46.220 First of all, you have to understand that in the West, even after 9-11, there were a lot of people who didn't really understand the real motivations of the Islamists.

01:06:57.680 You know, a lot of people, especially on the left, and even people in the establishment, said, well, the only reason they attacked us was because of a foreign, they didn't like our foreign policy.

01:07:07.180 You know, yeah, and of course they didn't like a foreign policy, but that's not the reason they were attacking us.

01:07:13.200 I mean, all you have to do is read what the Islamists themselves say about what their motivations are, which completely refute these kinds of naive ideas, that they were only attacking us because they didn't like our foreign policy.

01:07:23.500 Okay, so there were a lot of people who thought not only that they, that it was, it was a response to Western foreign policy, but that we somehow deserved it.

01:07:31.900 You know, somehow we deserve to be attacked because of the, you know, the, the ham-fisted way that we've intervened in the, in the, in, in the affairs of other countries.

01:07:41.420 So even after 9-11, there were a lot of people who were trying to, who, who were mischaracterizing the motives of the Islamists and trying to almost make it seem like it was, it was the fault of the West that, you know, began, this has to do with the regnant ideas in academia, where there's, there's a, there's a, you know, there's been a long,

01:08:06.740 anti-Western sentiment.

01:08:08.020 Yeah, the anti-Western ideas are permeate the entire Western educational system.

01:08:12.980 There was a long march of, of new leftists through the institutions in the, in the seventies and on.

01:08:19.660 And they basically, there's been institutional capture of, of, of the educational system in the West.

01:08:24.660 And, and so a lot of ideas are, there's a lot of anti-Western ideas that are, that are, that are, that are, that are, that are, that are, that students are indoctrinated to believe.

01:08:34.260 And a lot of those students, then they, when they graduate or they go through, go to graduate school, then they end up going into other spheres of life.

01:08:41.660 They go into work, they go working for the government and they still have these, these, they've been indoctrinated with these anti-Western beliefs.

01:08:47.780 And so they, they, they have, they're also predisposed to kind of believe that somehow the, the West is responsible.

01:08:54.120 The U.S. and the Western are the evil forces that are somehow responsible, you know, and, and, and without really understanding the, the nature of our enemies, even though the, even though our extremist enemies make it painfully clear what they believe, you know, day in and day out.

01:09:09.260 Okay. Okay. So, um, after 9-11, of course, you did have, um, belated recognition of the Islamist threat and that, then you had like this huge reorganization of the U.S. government, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was a, by the way, turned out to be a disaster, um, for various other reasons.

01:09:27.400 Uh, and there was a, they really, they really ramped up their, their, uh, they really hardened, they wanted to harden the target in the, in the United States and, and other governments in the West are trying to harden their countries to make them more, more difficult targets for the, uh, the jihadists to attack.

01:09:43.840 And that, those were all perfectly legitimate responses.

01:09:46.780 And then, of course, unfortunately, uh, in the U.S., we all, we had the, uh, uh, the neocons, uh, uh, who were running Bush's foreign policy, which caused, uh, uh, which led to, um, uh, terrible mistakes, uh, uh, like the invasion of Iraq, um, uh, and also, uh, the way that we dealt with the situation in Afghanistan.

01:10:10.400 I mean, we needed to do something to de-get rid of the Taliban, but we didn't need to have a hundred, we didn't need to have tens of thousands of troops there, you know, boots on the ground and all that stuff.

01:10:19.300 And then going after Saddam, and Saddam is a bad guy, sure, getting rid of Saddam, you know, you could be, you could certainly make a moral justification for it or any kind of justification for it. 0.85

01:10:29.080 But, but, but the problem is that Saddam and the Ba'ath Party were, are, are secular Arab nationalists.

01:10:36.260 They're not Islamists.

01:10:37.140 They have nothing to do with the jihadists to that.

01:10:39.580 And the neocons were trying to conflate the threat, the threat posed by Saddam with the jihadist threat by claiming that the, the, the, the, the Iraqi regime was, was, was secretly working with Al Qaeda and all this kind of nonsense.

01:10:52.760 And that, and then claiming that the, that they had weapons of mass destruction, you know, they were using all these pretexts to justify this invasion of Iraq, which they wanted to carry out anyway.

01:11:01.140 So they wasted all this resources and this, and this bumbling invasion.

01:11:05.020 And then the, the, the policies they adopted, the debaacification, which is complete catastrophe, which led, the result of this was that we presided over elections that led to Iranian back to Islamist parties winning the elections in Iraq. 0.72

01:11:17.600 I mean, you, you, I mean, if you tried to screw the situation up in Iraq, you couldn't have done a better job than you did with the Bush administration.

01:11:24.220 So, but that's a whole nother issue.

01:11:26.840 Anyway, once Bush was out of office, though, and in part his reaction against the failure of the, the, the aggressive neocon foreign policy in the Middle East, Obama comes into office.

01:11:39.020 And Obama, you know, was, was much more of a progressive and a person with very naive views about the world.

01:11:47.160 You know, if we just were nice to other people, they just, they'd be nice to us, we could all just get along if we apologize for the bad things we did, you know, we could reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood, we could do all these things.

01:11:58.320 So, once the Obama, once Obama took office, there was a fundamental change in the American policies toward the Middle East and, and even toward the Islamists.

01:12:07.760 You know, we were, the idea was we could partner with, quote unquote, nonviolent Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, you know, against, against the violent Islamists like Al-Qaeda.

01:12:18.680 And, I mean, it's just completely delusional, completely delusional beliefs.

01:12:24.040 Was there a focus that, for instance, if they, if they, if they killed Osama bin Laden, that that was it?

01:12:31.740 It was all just credited to a person rather than to something deeper?

01:12:37.200 That's exactly right.

01:12:38.600 I mean, in other words, the point is that Obama and the people in his administration had no understanding of Islamism at all.

01:12:44.980 In fact, they were both Islam apologists and Islamist apologists.

01:12:48.720 I mean, this is the problem.

01:12:49.580 I mean, many people in academia and the media and in the foreign policy and even in the security establishments in Western countries are not only Islam apologists, but Islamist apologists.

01:13:02.520 And part of the reason why they are Islam apologists and Islamist apologists is because they don't understand core Islamic doctrines.

01:13:08.700 They don't understand the historical developmental trajectory of Islam. 1.00

01:13:13.720 They don't understand the core aspects of Islamist ideology.

01:13:16.920 And so they're basically living in a fantasy room.

01:13:19.860 They're living in a fantasy room.

01:13:21.700 That's part of it.

01:13:22.620 So part of it is sheer ignorance about, about the nature of the enemy.

01:13:26.020 Part of it is political correctness.

01:13:28.360 I mean, there's no other way to characterize it.

01:13:30.600 You know, there's this sort of view that, that the, the West is like these evil imperialists and all the, everybody else in the world is like innocent victims of imperialism.

01:13:39.380 And there are oppressed people in the West has oppressed them and wherever we, wherever we should have sympathy for the oppressed people.

01:13:45.340 And even if the oppressed people are, are, are trying to carry out mass casualty attacks against us.

01:13:50.220 I mean, it's just like this kind of, this kind of like 12 year old, emotionally overwrought view of the world that so many people in our supposed political elites actually adhere to.

01:14:02.420 I mean, it's just, I mean, I don't know what else to say.

01:14:07.260 I mean, I just, I, I, I'm shocked at the, the degree to which so many people in our security and intelligence agencies seem to be utterly clueless about the nature of Islam and the nature of Islamism.

01:14:21.020 I have a particular example to share with you that I presented upon, I presented a segment on.

01:14:30.200 So there is a appointee of the Biden-Harris administration to the nuclear security wing of the Department of Energy.

01:14:39.360 Her name is Sneha Nair and she's promoting queer theory. 0.97

01:14:45.180 Queering of the nuclear.

01:14:47.120 Yes, queer theory as necessary and essential for improving the U.S.'s national security culture.

01:14:53.280 And she has a document that I read part of it.

01:14:57.160 I had the bad fortune to read a bit of it.

01:15:01.460 And it's, if you read between the lines, it sort of says, if you think that the major threat isn't the far right in the U.S., then essentially you need to be reeducated or removed from office.

01:15:16.440 Yeah, exactly.

01:15:17.140 Well, let me, let's, let's talk a little bit more about the disastrous policies adopted by Obama.

01:15:25.660 And let me just say something.

01:15:27.160 I don't want people to think that, like, you know, that I'm a conservative or a person on the right.

01:15:32.260 I'm not a conservative.

01:15:33.580 I'm actually a classical liberal.

01:15:35.500 I voted for Obama's vice.

01:15:37.280 I'm just going to say that.

01:15:38.780 I mean, now I regret it.

01:15:39.800 But the alternatives were so, you know, it was so bad that I felt, you know, I generally voted Democratic until very, until recently.

01:15:47.020 And then I changed in 2016.

01:15:48.480 But, but the point, the point I'm trying to make is that Obama turned out to be a disaster.

01:15:55.280 I mean, not only was he a foreign policy, was he naive in terms of his foreign policy, but he, in his effort to fundamentally transform America,

01:16:03.980 he egregiously politicized the government, American government agencies.

01:16:11.120 I mean, you know, he, he appointed various kinds of people with radical ideas in, in, to various federal, federal agencies.

01:16:21.800 And those people, and the result is that the, that the federal bureaucracy is now highly partisan.

01:16:29.780 And it's gotten worse and worse.

01:16:31.260 And he also promoted this, this, the equity agenda.

01:16:34.320 It wasn't, wasn't quite called DEI back then, but, but that was the beginning of all this.

01:16:40.480 I mean, well, beginning goes back to affirmative action.

01:16:42.920 But the point I'm trying to make is this whole diversity, equity, inclusion agenda.

01:16:46.380 That's now the rage in government agencies.

01:16:48.160 I mean, I, I, I just read a book by J. Michael Waller called Big Intel or something like that, where he, where he talks about, like, the, the, the, the, the, the priorities within the U.S. intelligence agencies now is diversity, equity, and inclusion.

01:17:05.220 That's the priority.

01:17:07.180 I mean, you know, not merit, not, not actually protecting American security, but like, you know, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

01:17:16.360 You know, I mean, it's just, it's just, it really shocked me to the extent how far the rot has spread here.

01:17:23.120 You know, this is a systematic attack on meritocracy.

01:17:25.960 And, and anyway, so we were, this is the world we're living in now.

01:17:29.480 We're living in a world, and look at the British government.

01:17:31.600 I think you can make the same argument that you've got a lot of very partisan people in the British state, the, the, the, the, the, the bureaucracy of the British state now.

01:17:39.800 Who are pushing progressive globalist policies, are promoting, you know, various harmful things, like we can talk about mass and mass, mass migration, open borders, all this kind of stuff.

01:17:56.480 And these are people who literally do not understand the nature of the threats that we're, that we're, the West has faced.

01:18:03.440 So, so I'm a bit conscious about time, and I think we should move to the last question.

01:18:10.260 Okay.

01:18:10.780 And I will just make a short introduction to it, because to me, the answer is a bit obvious, and I'm, I'm sure you will think the same.

01:18:21.600 So, I, I come from Greece, and in the 90s, we had some trouble, our neighbors had some trouble.

01:18:29.260 So, there was the breaking down of Yugoslavia, and the, the notion of balkanization comes from there.

01:18:37.600 So, that was a sort of, you could say, in a sense, multi-ethnic or multi-cultural setting that was just unbelievably volatile.

01:18:48.360 It was just, it, it was a disaster.

01:18:52.260 So, what does the misunderstanding of Islamism imply for the European multiculturalist project that seems to me to be advocated primarily by a lot of European leaders, not necessarily by European people?

01:19:10.360 What does that imply for Europe?

01:19:12.900 Well, I think it's a disaster.

01:19:14.480 But I think we can actually go back and talk about the whole balkanization thing.

01:19:18.640 I mean, this is, the balkanization thing goes back centuries.

01:19:23.180 You know, you had this constant invasions and migrations in the Balkan area, and then people would create states, and it would, it would incorporate all kinds of different ethnic and cultural groups within the same state.

01:19:34.180 And then the areas were conquered by the Ottoman Turks.

01:19:36.380 I mean, so you just have this, these polyglot communities and states, and the rise of micronationalism, and so forth, and so on.

01:19:45.560 And, and, and by the way, this is something that is common throughout history.

01:19:49.220 Whenever you have large imperial polyglot empires, whenever you, whenever you have, like, nation, national borders that include very different ethno-cultural groups that don't necessarily get along,

01:20:01.820 and may even have a long historical past of hating each other and fighting each other, I mean, you're, you're basically creating unnecessary divisiveness and strife within your own, within your own country.

01:20:13.920 So, if you have a situation like we have now, where, where Western elites, and only Western elites, by the way, are promoting, like, mass migration of people from, from third world countries into the West,

01:20:34.100 I mean, you are essentially repeating the left, the mistakes that, the historical mistakes that many other empires have made, and many other regimes have made, many, many other states have made,

01:20:49.880 you're basically creating a situation that, where you're going to have increased divisions, internal divisions, you're going to, you're going to undermine and weaken national sovereignty.

01:20:59.800 Uh, this is going to lead to, to, to, to not only political, uh, uh, strife, but it's also going to lead to possible, uh, violent conflict between different components of your own national, uh, community.

01:21:13.320 Um, and look, the real question is, why, why would it make sense for any Western country?

01:21:20.700 The West has created the world's greatest civilization by any objective measure.

01:21:25.100 Uh, uh, uh, freedom, uh, freedom, uh, freedom, social mobility, technological development, uh, uh, uh, pluralism, uh, uh, uh, I mean, on, on, on virtually any measure you want to, you want to use, the West has created, arguably, the world's greatest civilization.

01:21:42.160 Why would you want to import vast numbers of people from the world's most backwards, dysfunctional, and corrupt parts of the world? 1.00

01:21:50.740 Um, people from, from cultures that have a tribal mentality, people from cultures that have religious views that are completely incompatible with your own, with Western values.

01:22:01.540 Why would you want to incorporate huge numbers of people from these regressive cultures without vetting them properly, and then allowing them to, to come to your country and to providing them with huge amounts of benefits for free? 1.00

01:22:16.840 Um, and, and, and encouraging them, um, and encouraging them as, as, as per multicultural ideology to, to form their own separate communities, essentially, to, to, uh, you know, to, to, to idealize their own group, uh, the whole toxic identity, you know, it's promoting toxic identity politics. 0.52

01:22:36.000 That's really what multiculturalism is, it's promoting toxic identity politics, it's encouraging other groups to, to, to promote their own selfish, narrow, ethnocultural interests.

01:22:47.960 Everybody except the majority population, the majority population can't, can't promote its own, its own ethnocultural interests, but every other group in the West is encouraged to, to separate itself and to, and to promote its own, its own, uh, uh, interests.

01:23:02.960 I mean, that's a recipe for disaster, it's a recipe for social dissolution, it's a recipe for, uh, the, the collapse of social solidarity, and I think, frankly, this is part of the agenda of the elites in Western countries, the, part of the agenda of, of, of, of, of globalist elites is to, um, is to basically undermine national sovereignty.

01:23:24.840 They want to create a borderless world, they have this bizarre, this fantasy that they're going to create a borderless world, and that everybody's going to be like a Benetton commercial.

01:23:32.960 Everybody's just going to get along harmoniously, and love one another, and, you know, I mean, it's a, it's delusional.

01:23:39.900 I mean, uh, do you see any possibility that this might change in the future?

01:23:45.020 No, I don't.

01:23:46.360 I mean, here's, here's what I see happening.

01:23:48.660 I think we, what we're seeing in the West is a cycle that we've often seen in the past, and that is that the, uh, elites who are, who are now in charge of the West have abandoned the values that have made the West great.

01:24:01.480 And they're promoting an institutionalizing policies that are catastrophically harmful, especially to the majority, uh, population, the, the middle class and the working classes of their own countries.

01:24:15.100 And as a result, uh, because they've abandoned the values that have made their civilization great, um, uh, they're creating all kinds of unnecessary problems and harming their own population.

01:24:28.300 The result is, is growing popular dissatisfaction and growing popular resistance, growing popular resistance to the, to the, the, the, the delusions and the fecklessness of, of, of their own elites.

01:24:41.660 And, and, and, and as the popular dissatisfaction becomes, uh, becomes more acute, then these elites feel more threatened and then they start behaving in an increasingly authoritarian fashion, uh, using repression and censorship and so forth to try to, to try to maintain their power.

01:25:01.700 And so, but as they, as they, as they resort increasingly to authoritarian undemocratic measures to, to maintain their power, they lose more and more of their legitimacy.

01:25:11.640 And so it's a downward spiral that they're, that, that I, that ultimately they're not going to be able to escape from.

01:25:18.300 So either we're going to end up with an extremely authoritarian regime run by technocratic elites, which is really seems to be the globalist, uh, the globalist, uh, ideal, or we're going to have total social societal collapse and, and that may, may end up in some kind of civil war situation.

01:25:36.500 I mean, I, I don't see, I don't see any other real, real option.

01:25:39.960 I, I, I, I feel like a Roman citizen in the year 450, 26 years before the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

01:25:46.640 That's the way I, I feel at the moment.

01:25:48.480 And let me just say one thing about globalists, because the term globalism has been misunderstood and, and, and mischaracterized.

01:25:55.400 You know, some people have been inclined if you use the term globalists, it's like secretly anti-Semitic, some, you know, that kind of nonsense.

01:26:01.080 What, what do I mean by globalists?

01:26:02.520 What I mean by globalists is people who see themselves primarily as citizens of the world rather than citizens of their own country.

01:26:10.400 They see themselves primarily as citizens of the world rather than citizens of their own country.

01:26:14.800 They have more in common with each other than they have with the citizens of their own country. 0.96

01:26:19.480 And in fact, they have, they have contempt for the, for the citizens of their own country and the values of the citizens of their own country who they regard as parochial, ignorant, and uneducated. 0.96

01:26:29.900 They're not enlightened. 0.96

01:26:30.740 They consider themselves enlightened.

01:26:32.680 Enlightened cosmopolitans and their own citizens to be backward deplorables. 0.95

01:26:37.400 And that's basically their attitude toward their own co-nationals.

01:26:42.560 And so consequently, they're promoting various kinds of policies that are destructive, multiculturalism. 0.94

01:26:48.860 And multiculturalism is an ideology.

01:26:51.660 Multi-ethnic is a different thing.

01:26:53.760 Multiculturalism is an ideology.

01:26:55.200 It's an anti-Western ideology.

01:26:56.540 Where people in the West are supposed to celebrate diversity, celebrate every other culture, whereas everybody else can demonize the West and blame the West for all their problems.

01:27:06.000 So it's a one-sided kind of tolerance.

01:27:10.640 The West is supposed to tolerate everybody else, but nobody else has to tolerate the West. 0.61

01:27:14.720 I mean, that's really what multiculturalism boils down to.

01:27:19.600 So promoting multiculturalism, promoting mass migration from the most regressive culture. 0.99

01:27:26.540 Regions of the world.

01:27:29.720 Which is leading to radical demographic transformation.

01:27:33.040 And then now we have the two-tiered justice that we see in Britain and we've seen in the United States for a while, but especially since the Biden administration has taken office, where designated opponents of the regime are subjected to brutal repression, to lawfare, to censorship, to all kinds of authoritarian controls.

01:27:58.040 Whereas people that the establishment likes are allowed to run amok and get away with violence and social disruption and so forth and so on.

01:28:10.140 I mean, where certain people are prosecuted for nonviolent crimes more severely than other extremists who carry on violent attacks are prosecuted.

01:28:18.800 I mean, it's just, I mean, we really lost the plot here.

01:28:22.980 So this is the world we live in now.

01:28:24.960 And I don't see the only, there's only one way that the West can save itself as far as I'm concerned.

01:28:30.180 Because we're, we're, we're, now we're in a spiral of demographic and cultural collapse.

01:28:36.440 I mean, every institution of the West is under attack by its own elites.

01:28:40.140 The history of the West is being rewritten.

01:28:41.900 The traditions of the West are being attacked and undermined and denigrated in every sphere.

01:28:48.920 So, I mean, how long can a society last when, when, when its own elites are denigrating its, its core values and its core traditions and its core institutions?

01:28:57.600 I mean, it's not going to last long.

01:28:59.760 And people.

01:29:00.200 And people.

01:29:00.360 That's on people.

01:29:00.900 Yeah, exactly.

01:29:01.560 So, so we're, the only way that this thing can be, can be turned around is, is for people to vote these, these globalists out of power.

01:29:14.340 That's the only way that that, and there is a national, that the nationalist and populist parties have to, have to get so much support that, that, that, that when, when the elections come around,

01:29:29.780 the current regnant elites can be ousted from power, democratically. 0.50

01:29:34.820 I mean, that's the only way that the situation can change.

01:29:38.020 But even then, look at how, look how hard it is.

01:29:40.180 I mean, look at the situation in France with the Résol de Mont-Massionat.

01:29:43.380 You know, they, they, they, they, the party with the, with the largest single number of votes.

01:29:47.440 And yet the entire establishment, you know, joined ranks and, and prevented them from taking power.

01:29:53.780 They form a code, a code sanitaire, you know, to, to block, to block the, the, the ability of, of anti-establishment movements and parties to, to, to come to power.

01:30:06.560 And I think something that a lot of people think is that parties that claim to be anti-establishment are, are a bit compromised.

01:30:14.660 That's sadly what is in a lot of people's minds.

01:30:19.040 So, for instance, I'm thinking of Georgia Maloney.

01:30:21.200 A lot of people had high hopes for her and they were let down.

01:30:27.660 Absolutely.

01:30:28.460 So, would you say that the only way that this could turn around is, for instance, if Trump gets elected and a lot of anti-globalists, in the sense you defined, parties, start gaining support from that.

01:30:42.660 That's the only way in which this could be turned around.

01:30:46.980 And that's exactly what I think.

01:30:48.240 Let me make another very important point.

01:30:51.880 You know, patriotism and moderate nationalism are not radical right ideologies, even though the left tries to portray them that, you know, patriotism and moderate nationalism are centrist beliefs that the majority of citizens in every nation state have.

01:31:10.260 They're common sense belief, people who love their country and, and, and, and, and want it to, to improve.

01:31:18.980 I mean, those are, those are, those are just common sense beliefs that the majority of citizens in every country accept, including every Western democratic country.

01:31:30.540 Yet, yet, yet these kinds of ideas like patriotism and even moderate nationalism are smeared now as being far right and so on and so on.

01:31:37.480 I mean, this is the kind of, this is the kind of propagandistic climate that we live in now.

01:31:41.280 And look, let's face it.

01:31:42.600 The mainstream media is nothing more than a propaganda mechanism, a propaganda organ of the, of the progressive globalist establishment.

01:31:51.200 Which now includes not only progressives, but the corporate establishment, the corporate establishment is another problem, but the corporate establishment used to, there used to be two components of the global establishment, the progressive and the corporate.

01:32:01.680 Now they're basically merging together.

01:32:04.280 They're jumbled together.

01:32:05.180 You can't even distinguish between two different elements within the globalist elites that have different agendas, even if they're promoting the same policy for different reasons.

01:32:14.460 Now they're increasingly promoting those policies for the, for the same reasons.

01:32:19.160 So, so yeah, so that's what I see.

01:32:20.620 I see that, I see that either, unless these, unless these elites can be voted out of office democratically, which I think is going to be a very difficult thing.

01:32:31.180 I think that we're, we're going to either end up with an increasingly authoritarian, technocratic, administrative elite, which rules on an authoritarian, censorious way, and to suppress any kind of dissent, or we're going to have, we're going to have social breakdown, and we're going to have like some kind of civil war.

01:32:53.600 I mean, I'd be the last person who would advocate that.

01:32:56.600 I mean, everybody knows that civil wars are tragic events, they'd have catastrophically harmful, they'd lead to millions of deaths and disruptions in their lives and even, even more people.

01:33:05.520 I mean, nobody in their right mind would, would promote, would promote civil wars or, or this kind of social breakdowns or, or, or, or violent conflict between different components within the national community.

01:33:17.420 No sane person would promote those things because they'd lead to disaster for everybody. 0.99

01:33:21.700 But, but unless people who are running Western countries wake, wake up and, and take their heads out of their asses. 0.90

01:33:28.400 I mean, I, I really feel like, uh, you know, we're on a downward trajectory and I don't really see any way to, uh, to, uh, to, um, you know, block it. 0.84

01:33:39.800 I mean, I wish I could be more optimistic, you know, but, uh, you know, one thing that studying history does, it, it, it, it, it, it turns you into, uh, a bit of a, uh, uh,

01:33:51.300 a cynic and a pessimist because you see human beings making the same mistakes over and over and over again and never learning from their, never learning from their mistakes.

01:33:58.840 You know, you know, those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat their mistakes.

01:34:03.160 I mean, that's, you know, it's, it's an old, old saw, but it, but it, but there's a certain amount of validity to it.

01:34:08.960 And I, I just feel like, uh, we live in a world where elites live in a fantasy world.

01:34:13.720 The elites live in this little insular bubble, but they just talk to each other and they can not only don't listen to what their constituents say, but they don't want to hear what the constituents say.

01:34:26.120 Um, you know, they have contempt for their own citizens.

01:34:28.560 And I mean, when you have elites that are that out of touch with their own, with their own people, I mean, that's a recipe for disaster.

01:34:36.600 No matter what happens, it's, nothing good can come of that.

01:34:41.100 Right.

01:34:41.580 On that note, I want to thank you very much for joining us and for this interview.

01:34:46.600 You're welcome.

01:34:47.400 You're welcome.

01:34:48.240 To the audience, I hope you enjoyed it and, uh, see you soon.

01:34:58.560 To the audience, I hope you enjoyed it and, uh, see you soon.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 09, 2024

Does the ‘Far-Right’ Pose the Biggest Threat Nowadays？｜ Interview with Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 09, 2024

Does the ‘Far-Right’ Pose the Biggest Threat Nowadays？ ｜ Interview with Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Does the ‘Far-Right’ Pose the Biggest Threat Nowadays？｜ Interview with Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale