The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 02, 2026


Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore - ＂The Cauldron： The Making of the Modern Middle East＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1071)

My Chat with Alyssa Rosenheck, Author of ＂White. Blonde. Jew.＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1070)

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 8 minutes

Words per minute

165.26

Word count

11,389

Sentence count

305


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I'm delighted to report that I have joined as a visiting professor the Declaration of Independence
00:00:06.200 Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. The center offers
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00:00:25.640 nation as a political community and expresses fundamental principles of American freedom,
00:00:31.780 including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian values in shaping American
00:00:37.600 exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles,
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00:01:06.000 Hi, everybody. This is Gadsad. Today, I have another fantastic guest with me. I have an
00:01:10.620 eminent British historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore, which clearly is a made-up name
00:01:17.100 because that could only be the name of a Bond villain.
00:01:20.820 Please confirm that that's true, sir.
00:01:23.140 It's entirely true.
00:01:24.440 It's an entirely made-up name.
00:01:26.720 And it is indeed a very sinister conjunction of strange names and worlds.
00:01:35.660 Although you're already smiling too much for a Bond villain,
00:01:38.620 so maybe you're not a Bond villain.
00:01:40.480 I want to just, for the people who don't know who you are,
00:01:43.240 as I said, you're a very well-known author.
00:01:46.260 And actually, maybe later we'll talk about how you could navigate through nonfiction and fiction.
00:01:51.760 That's one of the rare feats that an author can do.
00:01:55.180 I only write nonfiction.
00:01:56.920 And so I'd be curious to know, you know, what your processes are in terms of each of these two genres.
00:02:02.380 But first, let me mention a few of the books that you've written about Catherine the Great, Stalin, Jerusalem.
00:02:09.220 You've done a biography on the holy city of Jerusalem, the Romanovs, Monsters, History's Most Evil Men and Women.
00:02:17.660 We can talk about that. But today we're here to talk about this beauty just came out not too long ago, The Cauldron, the making of the modern Middle East.
00:02:28.160 That seems like an extraordinarily ambitious project to take. Start us off, Simon.
00:02:33.920 Well, this is an insane project, but it's a sort of sequel to, you know, I wrote Jerusalem 15 years ago, which was, it's called The Biography of a City, but it's really a history of the Holy Land and the Holy City for 5,000 years.
00:02:53.080 so this is much shorter and um but really it comes about you know it's a it's a sequel to
00:03:00.120 jerusalem it's a companion volume but it's also um a reaction to what we've seen in the discourse
00:03:07.440 since since october 7th and it's really just a reaction to the sort of the tsunami the deluge
00:03:14.980 of ignorance and historical lies and idiocy um that we've seen and it's just really meant to be
00:03:22.820 a um it's meant to be an epic sweeping history of what really happened and how the middle east
00:03:30.940 was made and it's the sort of stuff that everyone should know you could read it as a guide um you
00:03:37.300 could read it as a sort of basic tour of the middle east it covers the whole middle east from
00:03:43.340 um it covers the whole middle east from morocco all the way to iran and from um turkey all the
00:03:51.840 way down to um down to Yemen and Sudan oh fuck what's am I gonna have to delete that or leave
00:04:00.060 it on because it's spicy you can leave it on it's spicy but something weird has happened and I've
00:04:05.520 cut off oh there you are yeah oh you can leave that on if you like I'll leave it on because I
00:04:11.000 like to humanize my uh my intellectuals and so I always respect an intellectual who's not just
00:04:17.500 pontificating with a pipe so thank you for that f-word there's no pipe here there's no
00:04:21.800 but but the book covers basically 19 countries or they're 19 now and the idea of it is just
00:04:29.380 is just to sort of say how the hell did we get here and it isn't ideological it's neither
00:04:35.960 capitalist neither imperialist it's not it's not pan-arabist it's not islamist it's not zionist
00:04:42.140 it's it's it's actually tries to um provide a balanced account and of course that's an
00:04:49.240 incredibly impossible thing to do in the Middle East. And one is who one is, one writes at a
00:04:55.540 certain time, and all of those things are reflected. But I really make a huge effort to
00:05:01.480 bring in opinions from all sorts of sides. And it really just explains how the Middle East of
00:05:09.180 1900 came to be the Middle East of 2026. We'll drill into all that stuff, because it's obviously
00:05:16.620 incredibly compelling stuff and as you said everybody should know that history but i mentioned
00:05:21.400 off air that i wanted for our listeners and viewers who may not be familiar with my own
00:05:26.180 personal history how much the book resonates with me because i mean you mentioned 19 countries
00:05:30.720 well many of those countries would literally be part of my personal history and that of my
00:05:36.740 ancestors let me just go through okay let me just you're living you are the cauldron i am the
00:05:42.660 cauldron all the cauldron maybe that's why i'm schizophrenic somehow i'm not uh but okay let's
00:05:48.900 go through it so i'm lebanese jew my family escaped lebanon at the start of the lebanese
00:05:53.580 civil war my wife's family escaped lebanon for similar reasons her ancestors escaped the
00:06:00.700 armenian genocide my wife is lebanese armenian so that would be towards the end of the ottoman
00:06:05.660 empire. My brother-in-law's family are Alexandrian Jews who escaped Egypt in the mid-1950s. My
00:06:14.400 grandparents, some of my grandparents were Syrian Jews who escaped Syria and then came to Lebanon
00:06:20.280 because of the rise in Jew hatred in Syria. And I'll just do one more, although I could give many
00:06:25.220 others. In 1970, when I wasn't yet six years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser, which you referenced and so
00:06:33.400 the whole Pan-Arabist stuff, died in, I think it was in September 1970. And the first vivid example
00:06:41.680 of Jew hatred that I can remember was as the people were sort of proceeding down our street,
00:06:48.160 lamenting the death of this great Pan-Arabist hero, they were screaming, death to Jews, death
00:06:54.420 to Jews, to which I turned to my mother and say, you know, I'm not even six years old. Why are they
00:06:59.140 screaming this? And she said, just put your head down. Don't look out on the balcony. So
00:07:03.100 you've basically written this book to honor my history yes simon yes yeah and it is actually
00:07:10.220 exactly that because all those countries that you're connected to i mean you know we begin with
00:07:15.560 the book really begins with the armenians for a start your wife's your wife's family and you know
00:07:21.400 then it moves on it goes moves on to syria to lebanon um and of course to egypt so all of those
00:07:26.700 countries and of course it has the lebanese civil war when you left um and so yeah you are the living
00:07:33.440 cauldron i am slightly i have a i have a slight cauldronish touch because the seabags and in my
00:07:40.260 bonvilla name um the seabags are moroccans and so and they lived in morocco for 500 years and um
00:07:49.440 And so, you know, when they arrived in London in the early 19th century, you will know this, Gad, because, you know, they had triple identities, as you did in a way, you know, because they had an Arab name, they had a Hebrew name.
00:08:06.280 And of course, they then had a British name and Jews who arrived in Jews who arrived from the Arab world in the British Empire often changed their names, for example, from Abdullah to Albert.
00:08:22.800 And and so and so anyway, so they arrived in Arab robes and, of course, very quickly changed into top hat and tails or whatever was that was the garb.
00:08:34.020 And then the Montefiores are from originally from Spain and Portugal, but originally, of course, much further, probably from North Africa.
00:08:43.220 And and then they went to Tuscany and then they went to Britain as well.
00:08:47.800 So that's how I've ended up British. So I am the ultimate, a sort of a sort of another Sephardic cauldron.
00:08:56.980 All right. Well, you know, almost a Mizrahi cauldron, shall we say.
00:09:00.580 although you don't have this glowing middle eastern skin that i do uh that's because that's
00:09:06.840 because my mother's family are ashkenazi ah there you go okay so so so the i'm about 50 50 i did the
00:09:13.200 i did the um test you know oh i'm 50 50 which is interesting um but anyway i'm the out so i'm i'm
00:09:20.540 the complete jewish world in fact but yes it's really interesting to talk to you for that reason
00:09:25.880 because you've you've seen this stuff and you've you've you've read it and you know the Armenian
00:09:31.600 story is very important today because um you know it's really the first modern genocide the first
00:09:40.600 real modern genocide and um and you know people often wonder and this is something that i you
00:09:48.620 know we've all talked about you know why did why was why were britain and france and america after
00:09:53.880 1918 so determined to dismantle the whole world of the ottoman empire and of course it no one
00:10:02.280 ever says but the real reason was that they regarded the entire ottoman leadership as war
00:10:07.560 criminals but you know before that concept had quite been um fully fully defined in international
00:10:14.260 laws it only was really after after world war ii but um and that's why they had no sympathy at all
00:10:22.060 And they tried to confine the Turks themselves into a very small band around Ankara, you know, between 1918 and 1922.
00:10:31.800 And of course, Ataturk foiled that plan. But the British and the French got, you know, the Levant.
00:10:41.640 They got Palestine. The British got Palestine and Iraq and the French got Greater Lebanon and Syria, as you know.
00:10:49.080 um but it's just interesting because the americans and you're you're are you in america now or canada
00:10:56.500 i'm a i'm a permanent resident i've gotten my green card on the track to becoming american
00:11:01.900 inshallah inshallah inshallah baruch hashem um so um so yeah so so it's kind of interesting
00:11:10.560 because of course you you will probably know this from your wife but very few again another
00:11:14.820 interesting thing is that, of course, because of the Armenian genocide, the Armenians, 1.1 million
00:11:21.360 Armenians were killed, but not just the Armenians, also Maronites, Christian Assyrians on the borders
00:11:30.660 of Iraq and what is now Syria and what is now Iraq. And of course, hundreds of thousands of
00:11:38.120 pontic greeks who lived around the black sea and they were all deliberately murdered and um and
00:11:45.480 it's interesting because you know the western powers were therefore determined to give the um
00:11:50.840 the remaining armenians what they could and so they um they they agreed that there'd be an armenian
00:11:58.200 republic in what is now eastern turkey and that which is very different from the soviet republic
00:12:04.960 of the soviet republic of armenia which now exists and um and president wilson of america
00:12:11.640 was going to was going to have an american mandate and it was known as the wilsonian
00:12:15.820 republic of armenia and of course that never happened right because wilson had a stroke he
00:12:21.960 went went back to america the congress rejected his his league of nations etc and so this never
00:12:29.160 happened and it was foiled by the Turks but it's just interesting that people regard the map of
00:12:36.140 these countries in the Middle East as kind of some sort of god-given um perfection that that was
00:12:41.820 inevitable and of course again we should talk about this because you know the map the map could
00:12:47.540 have been so different and I think that one of the things we're going to see in the next few years
00:12:52.840 is this map changing radically and the borders being redrawn.
00:12:57.620 How did you decide, so again, it's a truly epic narrative,
00:13:03.380 how do you delineate when the temporal clock starts
00:13:08.700 and which stories you're going to tell
00:13:12.000 versus the ones that you're going to exclude?
00:13:14.880 I mean, yes, you've covered 19 current countries.
00:13:17.420 You start at 1900.
00:13:19.200 through the domino effect why couldn't that clock have been pushed back to 1800 or you know i mean
00:13:27.120 so if we if we were doing a historical treaties of the last days of hitler in his bunker well
00:13:33.020 we've already delineated the geographical area the exact time whereas you could have started
00:13:39.040 anywhere and drawn the map anywhere you'd like what was that process of inclusion and exclusion
00:13:44.860 That's a good question. I mean, the fact is, I wanted it to be short enough and brisk enough and modern enough that people who have no idea about anything about the Middle East, and let's face, that is a lot of people, especially, that especially includes people who are now pontificating about the Middle East day and night.
00:14:05.320 And that includes most professors who teach in Near East studies programs.
00:14:08.940 yes that's right but so it had to be recent enough look most of these books always traditionally
00:14:15.060 start at the end of world war one with you know Sykes-Picot and and the British mandate in
00:14:21.860 Palestine because everyone's obsessed with that but actually you can't understand this whole region
00:14:26.960 unless you go back earlier because you can't understand you can't understand modern Turkey
00:14:32.880 you can't understand modern Iran you certainly can't understand modern Israel and or any of the
00:14:38.480 states around it um without going back earlier so it it could have been at 1800 it could have been
00:14:44.960 1850 but i wanted it to be as modern as possible and yet to include the ottoman empire and you'll
00:14:52.600 know this guy that a lot of there's a sort of fashionable view now that the ottoman empire was
00:14:58.520 this wonderful kind of um tolerant peace loving um its institution where which was later ruined by
00:15:05.740 the brutal Americans and British and so on. But anyone who knows anything about the Ottoman Empire
00:15:13.060 knows that it was always a pretty brutal institution. It was built on the enslavement
00:15:18.960 of Christian children who were recruited or rather kidnapped and brought to serve in its
00:15:28.020 armies and its harems and so on in its civil service and converted to Islam forcefully and
00:15:35.060 then brought up as Ottoman citizens who then became, often became the wife of its sultans
00:15:45.120 or even its grand viziers, its prime ministers.
00:15:48.060 But anyway, the actual truth of the Ottoman Empire is very different.
00:15:53.320 And many times it almost fell apart.
00:15:56.040 It was often enforced with brutal ethnic and sectarian massacres. And it was always about the supremacy of Islam and the Ottoman dynasty.
00:16:11.440 And if you accepted those two things, absolutely, you could live. But its tolerance was always conditional. By the last phase of the Ottoman Empire, say from 1878 onwards, another place I could have started.
00:16:27.140 But by that phase, the the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid, who was a fascinating character, he, you know, he really enforced his authority.
00:16:39.680 He kind of Islamised the Ottoman sultanate and he enforced his authority by playing off ethnicities and sex against each other in a series of brutal massacres starting in the 1890s and culminating in huge massacres of Armenians, but also Christians in Bulgaria and other regions.
00:17:01.180 And by the time World War One came about, the Ottoman Empire was led by the three pashas, Talat, Jamal and the famous Enver Pasha.
00:17:12.240 And they were proto-Nazis who were kind of believed in a eugenicist version of the Ottoman Empire, sort of, you know, the fittest eats the weakest philosophy.
00:17:25.700 and um and they were they they embarked on these massacres which we were talking about earlier that
00:17:33.280 the armenian genocide the pontic greek genocide and others so the empire that fell was actually
00:17:39.700 a pretty a pretty evil institution which is why the western powers who got so much wrong and i'm
00:17:45.660 not sort of apologizing for them because they screwed up badly in all sorts of ways but well
00:17:51.720 it's got to recognize it's a difficult region to govern, as we've seen. And one of the themes of
00:17:56.700 the book is, I mean, yes, the empire screwed up big time, but, you know, these countries have
00:18:01.880 all been independent now for getting on for a century. And many of them are essentially failed
00:18:10.000 states or close to failed states, including your native Lebanon. Yeah, I was going to say that
00:18:15.340 You mentioned sort of the myth about the lovely Kumbaya of the Ottoman Empire.
00:18:21.680 To that point, there's a great book.
00:18:24.080 I wonder if you know who the gentleman is.
00:18:26.140 He's a historian at Northwestern.
00:18:27.840 He's been actually on my show.
00:18:29.400 He wrote a fantastic book about the myth about the Andalusian paradise, right?
00:18:34.620 Where, right, his name is Dario Fernandez, I think, or maybe Hernandez.
00:18:39.240 And a fantastic book where he sort of shows that, to your point, when you said, you know,
00:18:43.640 you're sort of tolerated until you're not I mean know your place dimmi right that's the term for
00:18:49.080 the the people who the people of the book who are under Islamic dominion and people use that as you
00:18:56.300 know it's not true that Islam is ever brutal because oh look the Ottoman Empire was fantastic
00:19:01.440 the Andalusian Paradise was like hey you come from Lebanon Gadsad and you were perfectly fine
00:19:07.160 well yes I was perfectly fine until I wasn't and you just don't know when that day is going to come
00:19:13.160 Right. So how do you explain the fact that so many Westerners have a desperate penchant to want to believe all of those beautiful myths?
00:19:24.620 Well, it comes from it comes from self-hatred of the West and it comes from the new sort of new diktat that the whole of world history is about oppressed versus versus oppressor.
00:19:39.840 And if you start with the fact that the West is the oppressor and work backwards, you end up with a completely upside down and actually nonsensical gibberish of history.
00:19:50.560 And it's just an example of how the suppression of historical fact ground down by ideology, whether it's Marxist ideology, whether it's third worldist, anti-Western ideology, anti-colonialist, anti-Western ideology, you just get a nonsense out of it.
00:20:11.740 And, you know, and much of academia now is, you know, is controlled by that view.
00:20:20.860 And I think a lot of people don't even realise that they have that view.
00:20:24.980 You know, they think that they don't realise how affected they have been by the zeitgeist.
00:20:30.500 And it's true in academia, you have to be a bit of a resistor,
00:20:36.060 a bit of a fighter against the overwhelming conventional wisdom to really understand the
00:20:43.160 history of this region. But Andalusia is a great example of this as well, of course. I mean,
00:20:50.740 the Umayyads who ruled there were fascinating characters and amazing characters. Abdel
00:20:56.980 Rahman I escaped and partly he had to hide under a woman's, a beautiful cousin's robes,
00:21:02.900 a female cousin um but but there was a different the what but the thing that they had was even
00:21:10.160 though they were absolute supreme monarchs and that they ruled brutally anyone who crossed them
00:21:15.900 would be would be killed or crucified um but there was a sense of heterodoxy there which is different
00:21:24.500 from you know what you see today in islamism for example and i think that's what people mean but
00:21:30.400 they don't say that but you know and and then when you come to the the various kingdoms after
00:21:36.560 the breakup of the um the umid caliphate of of al-andalus when you come to the many kingdoms
00:21:42.680 that it broke up into you know there was there was a jewish prime minister there were two jewish
00:21:47.520 prime ministers of of granada um and one of them was one of the greatest um was was was samuel
00:21:56.960 Hanaguel, who was like Hanaguel, or you can put it in many ways, but he was known as Samuel the
00:22:03.280 Prince. And you probably know his poetry, God. Do you know it? It's amazing stuff. I don't,
00:22:08.020 but I need to learn it, apparently. Well, he was a hero because he was just one of these
00:22:13.100 extraordinary characters. He was a poet. He was obviously the leader of the Jewish community,
00:22:20.060 but he was also a brilliant poet. And he won the favor of the King of Granada, which was then a
00:22:26.140 muslim kingdom and he appointed him grand vizier but what was unusual about this is this happened
00:22:32.060 a lot in in islamic history but usually only after the the jewish leader had converted to islam
00:22:39.540 right and though that though they were always called jews by all the everybody else and they
00:22:43.840 normally were destroyed by their jewish origins they had to at least convert but he never did
00:22:49.380 convert and he he led the armies of the grenadian kingdom um and won many victories and many of his
00:22:58.520 poems are about a sort of sword swinging blood spattered um massacres of you know enemies and so
00:23:05.200 on and so he was very successful and he ruled the kingdom of granada he lived on the site of the
00:23:11.400 famous palace there in granada you know which is still there now and um and then and then when he
00:23:18.460 when he died his son became prime minister grand vizier but he was overthrown in an anti-jewish
00:23:25.580 riot and murdered along with many hundreds of the jews of granada so that was a nice story that
00:23:31.540 ended in a way that is more is more familiar to us well if we go further back uh i'm assuming this
00:23:39.140 is about what 16th century no this is this is like 10 6 10 15 oh so okay so then it's so what i was
00:23:46.420 going to say going back a hundred few hundred years is not true now maybe we need to move forward
00:23:51.060 rambam right maimonides was the personal physician of the sultan and he certainly didn't
00:23:59.480 exactly yes of saladin and um he advised saladin's nephew who was saladin's top henchman and top
00:24:07.820 general suffered from impotence and um and Maimonides who who is just is just one of my
00:24:16.200 heroes but not for this reason not for not only for this reason I should say but um but he he
00:24:22.980 recommended an incredibly um a very complicated cure for impotence um to to Saladin's nephew
00:24:31.000 um yeah it did work wow and like we should actually I haven't got it in front of me but
00:24:37.280 But it contained something like a lot of honey.
00:24:40.760 I think it contained bee stings, which I guess would awaken the dead.
00:24:47.360 And it's in my world book, I think.
00:24:52.220 I think I've got it in my book, My History of the World,
00:24:55.960 which has very many useful things in it, but particularly that.
00:24:59.900 And I'll send it to you later.
00:25:02.740 Yeah, that'd be wonderful.
00:25:03.400 I'm very drawn to guys like Maimonides, guys like Leonardo da Vinci, because in my own work,
00:25:12.340 I've always sought to be a complete unrestrained polymath, right? I publish papers in any field
00:25:19.080 that I want. When people thought professors should not be doing podcasts, I was doing it.
00:25:23.740 When people thought you shouldn't write books, you should only publish peer-reviewed papers,
00:25:27.960 I said, I don't care. So I'm very much of a free spirit. And therefore, I love great men of history who are not bound to a single area of excellence. Right.
00:25:38.220 So so Maimonides is this great rabbi, a great philosopher, but also a physician.
00:25:45.060 Da Vinci is an anatomist and a futurist and a painter and a sculptor. So I love these guys. Do you share that?
00:25:52.180 i totally believe that and i think it's i don't think one should be constrained by anything and
00:25:57.620 your irrepressible nature is one of your most winning features but um but i just wanted to say
00:26:03.560 what was what's interesting about samuel the prince this the character i described at the
00:26:07.980 court of the grand vizier of granada was that he's one of the very few jews who commanded
00:26:14.180 in battle you know who was a soldier really between there were others but he was one of the
00:26:20.680 very few between the you know the exile and the creation of israel um but another character that's
00:26:26.620 worth talking about since we're on this theme and we're just to jump because i know we want to jump
00:26:30.860 ahead a bit but one of the great characters i think who you i'm sure you know about but if you
00:26:35.420 don't um your your viewers might not is um is joseph nazi who was also known as joseph the prince
00:26:42.520 who was um the richest man in europe he was a jewish he was the heir to an amazing jewish
00:26:49.060 fortune that came from portugal and spain and holland and italy and they ended up um in the
00:26:55.420 ottoman empire and this was the moment when the ottoman sultans were saying you know that the
00:27:00.560 kings the christian kings of western europe are mad because they're losing their jews but their
00:27:05.080 losses are gained that they're welcome to live here and that was the ottoman empire at its best
00:27:11.380 and of course they benefited enormously from this influx of talent um from western europe which was
00:27:18.040 for expelling its dues um this is in the 16th century and um and and joseph the prince um was
00:27:28.120 this incredibly wealthy character who with his aunt who was called donna donna gracia um arrived
00:27:36.280 in these in this kind of fleet of his own private fleet and they were the kind of billionaires of
00:27:41.980 the day and they settled um in in istanbul in constantinople they built a huge palace called
00:27:48.260 belvue and um and he became the chief advisor um he became friendly with the old suleman the
00:27:55.960 magnificent but he really became the closest friend of um selim the second selim the blonde
00:28:02.740 as he was known also selim the drunk um because his mother was a his mother was a ukrainian
00:28:08.840 His mother was a Roxolana, the Ukrainian girl stolen from Ukraine, probably the most powerful Ukrainian in world history, who married Solomon the Magnificent and had his children.
00:28:25.940 And so Selim II was his son. And he was best friends with the most powerful Jew in world history until recently, perhaps. And he became the only Jewish royal, really, because Selim made him the Duke of Naxos and the Prince of the Seven Isles.
00:28:50.060 So he had a royal title. And Selim was going to make him king of Cyprus as well. So he was a very interesting character. But why he's also interesting is he demonstrates that Zionism or the Jewish relationship with Judea and Jerusalem and the Holy Land is a lot older than Herzl and Zionism because he asked Selim and the Magnificent and Selim, could he return Jews to the Holy Land?
00:29:19.120 And they said, sure. But they said, you can't have Jerusalem because that's one of our Islamic holy cities.
00:29:24.680 So he brought in large influx of Jews from Europe into Galilee and they settled there.
00:29:32.180 And he was a very interesting character, the Jewish Duke of Naxos.
00:29:36.600 But after his after his death, that tradition ended in the Ottoman Empire of powerful Jewish ministers and advisers.
00:29:44.300 And then if we jump, we keep rolling ahead. It was really in the 19th century that Jews could even become citizens of the Ottoman Empire after the Tanzimat reforms. And then we're virtually in the time of your family.
00:29:57.300 There you go. If I were to, I'm going to ask you to put on your hat of a movie producer, because I mean, just the way you're telling the stories, it's so compelling, right? I mean, you've got this fantastic character and this intriguing character. So I've got an X budget to make the next blockbuster movie out of all of these incredible stories.
00:30:20.540 Let me put back up the book here, The Cauldron. Go get it, people. You won't regret it.
00:30:25.840 What would be that first story? And I know I know it's impossible for you to choose because there's so many.
00:30:31.440 But is there that? I've got two answers. I mean, obviously, obviously, you know, many amazing movies have been made out of, you know, the Arab revolt, for example.
00:30:43.300 And, you know, Lawrence of Arabia is the most famous. But, you know, the book opens with Abdelaziz ibn al-Saud conquering Riyadh for the first time as a young man of 25 with just 30 friends and allies and fighters.
00:30:59.140 And that is an amazing story. They creep over the wall at dusk into the date plantations. They then creep into the harem of the governor and they wait with the women all night. And then at dawn, they jump out.
00:31:16.940 And as the governor comes out of the fortress to visit his harem in the morning, as you might, as you do, they jumped out and killed him.
00:31:26.340 And, you know, Abdulaziz, or Ibn Saud, as Western historians normally often call him, you know, he literally conquered Saudi Arabia, the whole of Saudi Arabia in 30 years with his own sword.
00:31:39.100 So that's an amazing story.
00:31:40.660 And that's probably, you know, that that's probably a story that also just, you know, it's an interesting story because I chose it because I didn't want this story to be all about the British and the Americans and all the things.
00:31:53.400 I wanted it. I wanted it also to be about the leaders of this region who changed the region and actually were very good at playing off outside powers.
00:32:03.000 people like the Shah and Nasser, Saddam, all of these people, Ben-Gurion, they were all brilliant
00:32:09.960 at playing off their patrons. And though the sort of simplistic Western history is that everything
00:32:15.740 was the fault of the Americans, and they always forget the Soviets, of course, who were even more
00:32:21.820 unpopular. And in fact, you know, I concentrate on the actual leaders. But of course, there's also
00:32:29.700 all those amazing israeli war stories you know um you know the somebody's already made a story
00:32:35.820 about the the the um the pages for example that's fascinating and there are many oh it just came out
00:32:42.300 yesterday i think yeah yeah but you know but but if you're asking about the whole region
00:32:47.280 um i think that the sort of the mini series that i want to make and write is gonna is called
00:32:54.080 the herods and it would tell the story of herod the great his son his grandson and it's such an
00:33:01.800 amazing family because you know herod the great so this is now going back to cleopatra era we're
00:33:08.400 going back we're going back yeah we're going back to cleopatra okay yeah he he was almost
00:33:12.720 cleopatra tried to seduce the young herod the great i don't know if any of you remember that
00:33:17.040 but herod the great is very interesting because you know he was he was a jew and of course in
00:33:23.040 those days, he was an, he was a, he was an Idumean Jew, which
00:33:27.900 was, they, that was a people that had been conquered by the
00:33:31.020 Maccabees and had converted only a couple of generations
00:33:34.260 earlier. But his mother was an Abatean Arab. So Herod the
00:33:39.920 Great is half Jewish, half Arab. So he's a sort of interesting
00:33:44.700 hero for our times. And of course, he, you know, he built,
00:33:49.040 he rebuilt the temple, he killed many of his sons, he married
00:33:52.500 10 wives he he fell in love with his his main wife who was um called mariamne and she was a
00:34:00.840 maccabean princess so she was a real jewish princess and um and then she was she tried to
00:34:06.720 she tried to betray him and ultimately he had her strangled and never recovered from having murdered
00:34:13.300 the woman he loved and it said you know he kept her body on honey in honey um to preserve her
00:34:19.560 beauty and you know that he wandered his his um palaces kind of sobbing but the Herodians were
00:34:26.740 really the second family of the Roman Empire in many ways the the Jewish princes or the Judean
00:34:33.040 princes were brought up with the Augustus's family and um he was succeeded by his sons
00:34:39.720 one of whom was Herod Antipas who had John the Baptist executed and who refused to try Jesus in
00:34:46.740 the 30 ADs and then the next generation had probably the most powerful Jew in history who
00:34:53.740 was Herod Agrippa who restored the giant Judean kingdom that Herod the Great his grandfather had
00:35:01.500 had and who was there who was best friends with Caligula and with Claudius and so when Caligula
00:35:07.440 was assassinated you may remember this scene I'm sure you remember it from the histories
00:35:12.480 but many of your listeners will remember it from the amazing bbc series i claudius
00:35:18.360 and if you remember in that herod agrippa was the jewish leader who was there and helped make
00:35:26.080 claudius emperor and as a result got an even bigger judean um jewish kingdom so he he is a
00:35:33.340 fascinating character and then his son and daughter they became kings of judea as well
00:35:38.800 and his daughter berenice became the jewish cleopatra you mentioned cleopatra but there
00:35:45.840 was a jewish cleopatra too um and she was princess berenice she was actually a queen twice she
00:35:51.760 married two kings and then she became the mistress of um of emperor titus and he wanted to marry he
00:36:00.300 was in love with her because she was the greatest beauty in the empire but the romans said this is
00:36:04.880 the jewish cleopatra she has to go and so um and so you know he dismissed her but that is the that
00:36:12.940 is the mini series we need to make if you're offering to back this with your vast fortune
00:36:17.560 no i was going to offer to play the most dashing character in whichever series you want to cover
00:36:25.460 you can play you can play you can play one of the herods for sure perfect uh earlier you mentioned
00:36:32.520 academia uh you know some of the difficulties and the narratives and so on if you don't mind me
00:36:38.440 asking is would this have been one of the reasons why you decided i don't think i'm going to go to
00:36:44.120 academic route and i'm going to find another way to share my ideas what was that a conscious
00:36:49.640 decision or you didn't get the dream academic offer talk us through that um no i um my my
00:36:57.400 My narrative, my trajectory has been a weird one, but it's quite common in England.
00:37:03.780 I've got quite a few friends who are, you know, quite well-known historians who just never wanted to do the academic route.
00:37:10.940 No, I was just like, I would have been very bored by all the intrigues and rivalries of academia, which I know you are familiar with.
00:37:20.940 Let me interrupt you. Henry Kissinger famously said, and I might get some of it wrong,
00:37:24.680 never are the battles so fierce as when the stakes are so low that's right it was he said
00:37:30.740 so many hilarious things and that's one of his best and so true so i never wanted to do that
00:37:35.820 but what happened with me was after um after cambridge i actually went into investment
00:37:41.360 banking weirdly and and and because i you know my family were bankers and i wanted to follow them
00:37:48.440 but i wasn't obviously i was completely i was completely hopeless at that um that's another
00:37:53.580 story and but then i was always obsessed with russia and russian history and i'd studied
00:37:58.600 russian and then the soviet union began to break up so then i i went out to the soviet union
00:38:05.720 which was just falling apart and i was a war correspondent i wrote for all sorts of people
00:38:10.980 including the new york times the new republic the times of london um the telegraph in london and so
00:38:17.100 on and for five years I was I saw I witnessed all of the wars and battles at the end of the
00:38:24.880 Soviet Union you know the Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan which is which is which
00:38:30.620 is very relevant today because of the rise of Azerbaijan which is discussed in the book but
00:38:35.740 also you know the storming of the White House with Yeltsin in 1993 the the war in in Grozny
00:38:43.980 I was in Grozny. And so I had an amazing, you know, for somebody who'd come from a very middle class, very boring English upbringing at boarding school and that and all that.
00:38:54.780 You know, this was my kind of fantasy to be to live a life of adventure.
00:38:59.160 And there's also no better training to be a historian than to see a great empire fall.
00:39:05.860 and you know and and i saw that you know really on the ground um you know you know going around
00:39:13.540 the soviet the former soviet union as it fell apart and i knew all the leaders um i knew shevard
00:39:18.700 nazi i knew alief the present president's father um i traveled a lot with shevard nazi i knew the
00:39:25.100 first president of georgia um so i i really had a fascinating time i remember driving around with
00:39:31.500 the leading warlord in georgia um in a kind of um convoy a scene a bit of a lebanese scene but a
00:39:38.120 convoy of um mercedes and with all with guys right and jeeps with guys riding with machine guns on the
00:39:44.880 outside and a bit like a sort of druze warlord and i remember that he's one point he said to me
00:39:50.920 said what kind of music do you like and i said i don't know i i like i don't know what do you mean
00:39:54.800 and he said like he got a cassette it was the age of cassettes and he put it in and it was dark side
00:39:59.600 of the Moon by Pink Floyd and he had speakers on the outside of the cars and of the jeeps and as
00:40:05.940 we went through villages you could hear the Dark Side of the Moon playing hauntingly across the
00:40:12.140 beautiful mountains of Georgia and I remember amazing thing happened once I remember I was in
00:40:17.780 the Asetian War which was the first secessionist war now pretty much forgotten in Georgia and I
00:40:25.520 remember i was with the georgian partisans and soldiers and and a whole lot of them had been
00:40:30.680 killed and they said do you want to come to the funeral supper and i said yeah i'll come to the
00:40:34.280 funeral supper this is in 1991 and i went to the funeral supper it's an amazing scene you know like
00:40:39.940 there's a beautiful round church on a georgian church on a mountaintop a bit like the armenian
00:40:45.840 churches that you you will know and um there was a table laid with a huge feast on the top of this
00:40:53.340 mountaintop and everything was green and gorgeous and high and the men lent their kalashnikovs
00:40:58.340 against the tree and we sat at the table and we began to eat and there were toasts and I gave
00:41:03.260 speeches um you know sort of increasingly tearful speeches about the young men that had been killed
00:41:10.060 and then after a while I said to them you know were the young men buried um earlier and then and
00:41:15.660 I said because because you know um you know we I must have missed the funeral and they said no no
00:41:21.300 No, they're here. And they lifted up the tablecloth and they were under the table, which is a Georgian tradition.
00:41:29.960 So I had many adventures that as you're telling all these incredibly compelling stories, is there a memoir in the future that we should be expecting?
00:41:40.620 Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to call it Monty Fiasco and it's going to be going to be my many, my sort of rise and fall.
00:41:47.100 um but anyway so that's how i became historian and after that i had a few moments in this um in
00:41:53.620 this kind of picaresque progress where i was almost killed and was very frightened to be honest
00:42:00.960 and i sort of felt you know i was being paid like the spectator magazine or the new republic was
00:42:06.720 paying me kind of like literally 200 for these articles and after someone put a gun against my
00:42:12.640 head all and I literally there were several there were three occasions where I literally
00:42:16.840 I had that sort of there's a feeling that you have when you literally feel a sort of deep
00:42:22.880 sickness a sort of nausea and you suddenly think like oh my god this you know I could be I could
00:42:29.700 be about to be you know I could be about to be killed now and I haven't done anything I'm really
00:42:34.760 frightened um and and i'm just not sure there's anything i can do and you know they i i just
00:42:42.240 suddenly thought like and i haven't done anything and i'm you know and i haven't done anything that
00:42:46.040 will last and and i you know as i sat there i just i just sort of and i panicked and i thought like
00:42:50.860 i've got to stop doing you know doing this you weren't married yet no i wasn't married yet so
00:42:57.140 i thought like i haven't had children i haven't written any books i've just written these articles
00:43:01.980 which is sort of not you know not really appreciated and i paid 200 and i'm i might be
00:43:06.880 about to be killed and i'm i'm very frightened in a which is a sort of terrible sickness that
00:43:12.080 really overcomes you and so then i i i wrote my first book which was katherine the great and
00:43:17.920 and potomkin prince potemkin um which i wrote in the russian archives and it's really about i mean
00:43:25.800 it's about their amazing relationship and i was really the first to study their archives for a
00:43:30.620 very long time. And, you know, they had all these passionate sex letters, but they also had amazing
00:43:36.160 letters, you know, 40 pages long, deciding on policy on everything. And they were an amazing
00:43:42.620 partnership, much more equal than Cleopatra and Antony, for example, or any of the other
00:43:48.680 partnerships in history. But they also were the people who conquered the Crimea and South Ukraine.
00:43:55.220 And of course, when I published the book, the new young president of Russia was, you know, who we all regarded at that time as obviously a kind of liberal friend of the West and a reformer, asked a lot of questions about it.
00:44:12.520 it wasn't yet translated into Russian.
00:44:15.100 And so they approached me and they asked me
00:44:16.880 to write an essay about how
00:44:20.580 Katherine and Potemkin had taken Ukraine.
00:44:23.260 And of course, this was Vladimir Putin.
00:44:25.500 And this is 25 years ago.
00:44:27.400 So it's good.
00:44:28.240 And he liked the book so much that he said,
00:44:30.740 I want to give you a reward.
00:44:32.760 I didn't meet him personally,
00:44:34.740 but his people said, he wants to give you a reward.
00:44:38.000 We're about to open Stalin's archives.
00:44:40.440 This is in the year 2000.
00:44:43.400 Would you like to be one of the first people to see them?
00:44:46.740 That's what led to your books on Stalin.
00:44:49.560 I said, fuck yes, you know.
00:44:51.200 And I went and I went and I wrote my books on Stalin, yes.
00:44:55.780 Now, do they have sort of the first right to say,
00:45:00.580 oh, page 167, you wrote this, take it out,
00:45:04.680 or you had complete free reign?
00:45:06.960 No, I had complete free reign,
00:45:08.240 and it was the most amazing experience
00:45:09.880 because I was literally sitting in the archive
00:45:13.280 of Marxism-Leninism Institute,
00:45:15.300 which was the sort of party archive.
00:45:18.300 And, you know, everybody was,
00:45:20.400 well, I had my own private room.
00:45:21.980 You know, these archives have kind of endless rules
00:45:24.800 and, you know, that you can only take out one paper a day
00:45:28.960 and all this kind of stuff.
00:45:30.040 But I had no,
00:45:30.880 because I was the president's favourite at that point.
00:45:33.560 I had no limits.
00:45:34.520 I had my own room.
00:45:35.620 All the other people were working in a horrible,
00:45:37.280 you know, horrible kind of reading room.
00:45:39.340 and they had to go to the canteen I had everything given to me and people would come to me and go
00:45:43.980 like there's an amazing file you should see and I just it just blew my mind because every file just
00:45:50.860 opened up a mystery that no one knew it because you know everyone thought of Stalin until then
00:45:55.580 as a sort of Mephistophelian machine but with no personality because there were no letters or
00:46:01.280 anything you know but I but I was reading thousands of his letters handwritten you know
00:46:06.820 and so when I published the book they hated it and by then Putin had started on this was by the
00:46:14.480 time I published it in 2003 he was already showing autocratic tendencies and they hated the book
00:46:22.960 because it showed Stalin as a sort of as a brutal autocrat and so when I wanted to write the next
00:46:30.280 book which was young Stalin I wrote them in the wrong order they wouldn't help me at all and
00:46:36.200 And, you know, they said, I went to them and I applied through the normal way, through my contacts in the Kremlin.
00:46:42.820 And they said, absolutely not. You know, this book is this book is, you know, an abuse of the memory of Comrade Stalin, literally.
00:46:52.240 And so when I went to the archive, I said, but I asked to see the director and I said, but you gave me that amazing room and I had all of my, I just want my, I'd love my access back.
00:47:02.800 and they said we don't remember that with a slight smile on their face but they literally said we
00:47:08.760 we don't remember that and those we don't you were your memory hold in vivo yeah i was erased
00:47:16.320 i was erased like that famous photograph of stalin and yezhov you know where he appears once
00:47:21.540 with yezhov and once without all the famous photos of mau and malzi tung and lin biao so i was kind
00:47:28.280 of erased, but I was able to write young Stalin because I went down to Georgia and I knew the
00:47:34.800 president of Georgia then, Saakashvili, and he enabled me to work in the archives there. And
00:47:40.640 there I found amazing things that basically proved that Stalin had organised the famous bank robbery
00:47:47.400 in 1907, where about 100 people were killed in the shootout, but he got the equivalent of something
00:47:53.700 like 50 million pounds for lenin for lenin i mean he wasn't he wasn't a criminal i mean he was he
00:47:58.820 was always a marxist and he was working for the party but he was the guy who was now talk about
00:48:03.780 people who could do more than one thing you know lenin used to talk about people he used to say
00:48:08.580 most of the most of my comrades are tea drinkers and you know who were who were often jewish
00:48:13.860 intellectuals chattering in cafes like like zinoviev and kamenev but then he had the practici
00:48:19.940 who were kind of people who could kind of, you know, beat people up and, you know, shoot people
00:48:25.380 and that sort of thing. But Stalin was both. That's why he was special. And Trotsky was also
00:48:31.180 both. Trotsky could command an army, but he could also write a brilliant book. And even though
00:48:36.920 Stalin has a reputation of being much more brutal and much more sort of clumsy and rough,
00:48:43.560 he also could edit he was also could edit a newspaper write an essay but he could also
00:48:50.400 arrange a bank robbery or an assassination and that's why they were the two the only two of
00:48:55.500 lenin's comrades who were allowed access to his office at any time without an appointment amazing
00:49:00.840 i'm about to show you because you're we're talking about polymath i've never shown this in public yet
00:49:05.580 but i'm doing i'm going to do a an episode oh my god is this i'm putting on my glasses
00:49:10.100 You ready? This was one of two gifts that was given to me by my family for my recent birthday. It's a rare first edition, sort of art deco of, you know, meditation by Marcus Aurelius. Now, I love Marcus Aurelius, as obviously, you know, I mean, here's this most powerful guy in the world at the time, but who's annoyed that people are coming to bother him to do
00:49:40.040 emperor things because he'd rather be sitting and thinking and philosophizing and writing
00:49:46.300 meditations. I'm thinking, what a cool guy. This is a guy that I want to have dinner with.
00:49:51.320 So then that leads me to the next question. I asked you about which movie you'd want to make
00:49:55.760 out of all the unbelievable James Bondish characters in this book. You're going to go
00:50:01.680 out to dinner with three guys from this book. Who are you picking? Oh, definitely. Ataturk.
00:50:09.120 OK. Ataturk Reza Shah, the founder of modern modern Iran and the father of the father of the Shah of our era.
00:50:18.940 Ataturk Reza Shah and and Abdelaziz, the first king of Saudi Arabia.
00:50:24.800 Wow. I'm sorry. Do they have any personality traits that are common to them and hence that draw you to them?
00:50:33.540 Yes. And I would add in Abdul Hamid, the last great sultan of the Ottoman Empire to this dinner. But they do, they all have, they're all, they're all ruthless characters. But they, they also, all of them were nation builders with a, with a conception of power and how to use it.
00:50:55.480 And the first three all changed their countries completely. The last one I mentioned, Sultan Abdul Hamid, failed. But, you know, Abdul Aziz, you know, started off as a 25 year old climbing over through a date grove and ended up as the king of a new kingdom named after himself, Saudi Arabia.
00:51:16.780 You know, Reza Shah, what a trajectory. I mean, even Napoleon started as a sort of minor nobleman in Corsica.
00:51:24.000 But he started as a peasant soldier in Iran and ended up as the king of Iran, the hereditary king of Iran.
00:51:32.780 You know, Ataturk was the most successful general in the Ottoman Empire in World War I.
00:51:39.620 He was also had a very, very complicated sex life with a lot of lovers and, you know, but he was also a heavy drinker.
00:51:47.640 And there was a great there's a great story where where Nuri al-Said, the prime minister of Iraq, later the prime minister of Iraq, remembered having a sort of drunken brawl with him where they managed to break a bottle over his head in the sort of in the festivities.
00:52:05.960 But, of course, he ultimately created the Turkish nation and created the Turkish Republic, which is now so important.
00:52:13.540 And I would add Abdul Hamid, the last great Ottoman emperor and sultan and caliph, because he was so complex.
00:52:23.580 You know, he loved Sherlock Holmes. He wrote love poetry in literary Persian.
00:52:29.520 um he he he loved Verdi's operas and built an opera house and put on translated the lyrics into
00:52:36.500 into Turkish um he had lots of many lovers um he he but he also had he was also incredibly
00:52:44.740 ruthless dictator who killed a lot of opposition people and he also was the founder of really the
00:52:50.640 first secret police service in um the Middle East and as you know that this sort of Mahoubarat
00:52:57.400 i was gonna say i was gonna say do you know what the arabic word is very good yeah um but he founded
00:53:04.060 it and he had such a good secret service um which was known as the yieldies agency after his palace
00:53:10.140 which you can still see in istanbul but he had such a good service secret service that it said
00:53:15.760 and this is a sort of downtown abbey kind of detail it said that he had an agent in the
00:53:21.480 telegraph office of queen victoria's buckingham palace so that he knew what everyone in europe
00:53:26.800 was doing before and before before they did so he's an amazing character i'd have to i'd have to
00:53:32.620 add ben gurion to that list of course because the dinner is going to get bigger and bigger yeah
00:53:38.180 but go ahead yeah but we and there's the two of us too of course but can i bring charles darwin
00:53:43.980 and oh so my guys would be well king solomon because i mean tons of wives wise and tons of
00:53:54.580 concubines, the ladies' man, the wisest man, big king, so I've got to bring him.
00:54:01.120 I'd bring King David, then.
00:54:04.040 Oh, okay.
00:54:04.780 Geez, that's going to be one hell of a party, let me tell you.
00:54:08.060 And Herod, and the two Herods I mentioned.
00:54:11.320 Amazing.
00:54:12.440 Do you, as I listen to you with, I mean, I'm not trying to just sort of flatter you,
00:54:16.760 you're sort of your really towering historical knowledge.
00:54:20.940 Do you get frustrated when you see in the brosphere all of the guys who pretend to be historians, you know, that go on, you know, Joe Rogan's show and suddenly they're historical experts in areas that they know nothing about?
00:54:37.740 Does that frustrate you or does that give you the opportunity?
00:54:41.240 Oh, let me get on those shows so I can negate the stupidity.
00:54:45.860 Well, it does irritate me, of course, because, you know, the one of the things I don't know if you saw, read the book of Omar Muhammad, who wrote The Mosul Eye.
00:54:56.660 Do you know who I mean?
00:54:58.000 He was on my show before he was cool.
00:55:00.280 Good. Yeah. Well, he's very cool.
00:55:03.260 He is very cool.
00:55:04.140 Of course, of course. But, you know, what he really demonstrates is that, you know, the the the penalties in the West for standing up for the truth and saying this is a lie.
00:55:14.120 This is not true. They can be they can be brutal and they can be lethal, but usually they're not.
00:55:20.740 And not as lethal as as commenting about what's happening via ISIS and Mosul while the commander of ISIS is in the next door.
00:55:30.280 that's right so he's a hero who teaches us all a lesson and and you know it's like don't be
00:55:36.700 intimidated by a lot of morons who are demonstrating outside your university um have the courage and i
00:55:43.100 say this to all the sort of you know mainly white middle class kind of managers and professors at
00:55:50.040 the universities of the west it's like you know grow some courage show grow a pair show some
00:55:55.400 courage and you know stand up for stuff you know is wrong and is untrue um and don't bend before it
00:56:03.040 because you're bending your knee um before before history really so yeah i mean and by the way just
00:56:09.840 to go back that wasn't the reason i didn't go into academia academia was was was of course a world of
00:56:15.480 um as kissinger described you know petty rivalries as it always has been as all organizations are in
00:56:21.920 fact um and i'm very lucky that i can live my life without any you know i'm a i'm a i'm a self
00:56:27.380 i'm a village industry basically and um this is my factory that i'm talking to you from and and i
00:56:34.320 don't work for anybody which is which is the dream and that's what i wanted in life i'm probably
00:56:39.040 unemployable um but so i never tried to become an academic um and i was very lucky i you know
00:56:47.520 The Stalin book, which was my second book, became a sort of global phenomenon and was sold in many, many countries.
00:56:56.200 And so I could, I was lucky I could become an independent scholar, as we call it in England, pompously.
00:57:03.120 That's amazing.
00:57:04.780 Yeah, so I never had to do that, but I would be put off academia now.
00:57:09.380 And the interesting thing about academia, and here comes to this comes to your theme and your brilliant idea of suicidal empathy, which is which which by which you've done a great service to us all, by the way.
00:57:23.580 But and I salute you. But, you know, the thing is, and I don't know, we could we could talk a lot about this.
00:57:32.960 But, you know, when I was in when I was in academia, when I was studying and doing my, you know, doing my undergrad at Cambridge, you know, there wasn't this problem.
00:57:42.840 But somewhere in the early 2000s, a nascent egg, nascent eggs, eggs that have been but have been laid really in the 60s, suddenly started to rather like the sort of, you know, like, you know, like the mythical eggs that suddenly gave birth to soldiers.
00:58:05.740 um you know they suddenly started to give rise to to this this this um wave of opinion and this
00:58:14.060 kind of ideological army that gradually took over um all the institute many of the institutions
00:58:21.160 academia and the reason why they were able to is because and this is this is a key point that
00:58:26.780 we should talk about more on another occasion perhaps because we're probably running out of
00:58:30.920 time which is they used the vocabulary of and the and they they used um the lexicon of and of
00:58:40.200 humanitarianism and of um anti-racism and of anti-colonialism but they concentrated on
00:58:47.920 humanitarianism and anti-racism and so when people were looking at it from the outside
00:58:52.800 politicians for example or um the administrators of these universities um they could in their sort
00:58:59.300 of naive in their naive and careless way they could think like well we're only just these people
00:59:04.680 seem to be quite um ideological and passionate but they're using the language of anti-racism
00:59:10.280 and humanitarianism and who can who can be opposed to such a thing and one of the challenges that we
00:59:16.540 now have and you've contributed to this um with the idea of suicidal empathy but we need to we
00:59:23.160 need to work more and i think the biggest challenge now is to realize that the entire
00:59:28.920 structure just as the entire structure of international law has has been in part
00:59:34.580 captured by anti-western um uh ideology ideologists um and by the governments of
00:59:44.040 dictatorships who don't share the values of the liberal democracy so um in in our own societies
00:59:52.400 and our own civic societies um that the language of anti-racism and of humanitarianism
00:59:59.280 and and and of and of opposition to anti-semitism for example has been kidnapped hijacked and um
01:00:08.940 and has been kind of stolen um by by people who are in fact racists and anti-humanitarians and
01:00:16.780 the champions of ideas and movements that are completely opposed to the societies that are
01:00:22.580 protecting them. And therefore, we really need to work on creating a new vocabulary that really
01:00:30.100 captures what's happening here. Because obviously, we always say this is Orwellian, but that's not
01:00:34.260 enough anymore. We need to do better than just saying it's Orwellian. It is Orwellian, but it's
01:00:39.560 much more than that and we need to we need to evolve a new lexicon that describes what's
01:00:46.180 happening here and i think that is the big challenge of people like like you and i who
01:00:51.460 are commentating on this world and and of historians and and also of podcasters and the
01:00:58.620 you know the people you were you know joe rogan the people who were interested actually interested
01:01:02.880 in the truth and are interested in facts and sources um you know uh you know they they may
01:01:08.480 great popularists and popularizers that's great i'm a popularizer myself and i believe in that
01:01:14.080 but anyway but to answer your question just further i mean i think i think it's it's most
01:01:19.520 it's extremely irritating the sort of fake the fake historians um who are commentating um who
01:01:26.640 are sort of actually comedians alleged comedians since these i think i know who you might be
01:01:31.440 talking about well you know it's it's it's a phenomenon i'm not really talking about any one
01:01:36.800 person because i actually i don't know all these american um podcasters but the point is it's it's
01:01:43.800 it's just a phenomenon of people who are kind of become commentating on history um and i hope that
01:01:50.320 my my books but also my you know conversations with with um luminaries like yourself you know
01:01:57.080 will you know will be seen by people who become curious and look up um and look up my books for
01:02:03.680 example that's why i do what i do right because i can sit down and have a conversation with you
01:02:09.060 and reach 20 30 50 000 people how long is it going to take me to be reaching that many students in a
01:02:15.280 classroom and so i agree with you so let me ask you this uh because i i think you've been very
01:02:19.760 gracious with your time and and we do want to wrap up although i could keep you here for another
01:02:23.720 10 hours given your what you've just commented about the universities given your brilliant
01:02:30.120 historical treaties of the past 126 years in the middle east are you hopeful about the state of
01:02:37.900 academia and are you hopeful about the middle east answer them in whichever order you want
01:02:43.400 well i think there's two that's there's two questions which are linked and i explain
01:02:49.220 how in the in the conclusion which um if which i i ask everyone to read because it links up the two
01:02:56.280 in the new era and so that we're seeing that once we saw the westernization or the western conquest
01:03:02.320 of the middle east we're now seeing the middle middle eastization of at least some of western
01:03:07.220 society and that's an interesting phenomenon that um that could be that that could enrich our
01:03:14.000 societies it could also destroy them so that's one of the the um uh that's one of the dilemmas
01:03:20.320 that we face um and um and it you know what you say about universities is really a question about
01:03:26.560 civic society and you know i always say i can't tell i can't tell um you know the the ayatollahs
01:03:35.040 or the generals who are running uh they're running iran how to how to fight their war i can't tell
01:03:40.160 the houthis i can't tell netanyahu um or eisenkot um but my own civil society there i can i can have
01:03:49.280 an influence and in the civil societies of the west there's no excuse not to not to challenge
01:03:55.360 um the the capture uh the ideological capture of our great institutions and i also believe
01:04:02.340 um yeah universities like cambridge and harvard have great names but you know we we we live in
01:04:10.740 ingenious dynamic fluid societies with many many independent institutions and independent
01:04:17.900 leaders, some of whom are politicians, some of whom are writers like us, some of whom are
01:04:25.100 billionaires. And all of these people have will. And we need, in our civic society, in civil society,
01:04:32.260 we need to remake the institutions if we've lost them. You know, we need to, if Harvard and
01:04:37.200 Cambridge, when they're wonderful old names, but if they've turned against the values that we want
01:04:42.260 our children to be taught then we need to found new universities if our big newspapers
01:04:48.240 have been have been captured by young ideologues who share none of the values that we share
01:04:56.000 and who are going to be destructive to our our freedoms and our existence of our civil society
01:05:02.940 and our liberal democracies then we need to find new institutions and people are doing that
01:05:07.760 So I have hope that in the end, people will gather together. And I mean, this, you know, this, it takes time to do these things. But I think in the end, there will be a recreation of many new institutions. And I encourage that. And I think if Harvard is lost to us, we'll find a new Harvard.
01:05:30.000 Your lips to God's ear. And I should mention, there are pockets of resistance and optimism within the existing rot of academia. So I'm currently in the American South. I joined University of Mississippi. I'm at the Declaration of Independence Center. And there are several sort of freedom-loving institutes that are being founded within the greater rot. So I think I do share your optimism.
01:05:55.820 them uh so let me just let me just finish by saying so these institutions that's that that's
01:06:01.180 part of the point i mean you know there are many i know many wonderful people in harvard for example
01:06:06.980 i mentioned harvard i know many wonderful people in cambridge um so these institutions are still
01:06:12.740 alive and they're not lost but um but there's also a lot of space for new places where you don't have
01:06:18.960 to fight the battles that the people the sensible people there are fighting um so that's so that
01:06:23.920 there's plenty of hope and the other the other the other part of this is the middle east and at the
01:06:30.400 moment um you know we're in a period of war and a period of a reconjunction um a reformation of
01:06:38.280 the entire structure state structure in all sorts of ways i go into it all in the in the book we're
01:06:43.560 into a also a period where there's a there's a convergence of there's a convergence of theaters
01:06:50.460 as i call it where you know suddenly the middle east isn't just sort of from saudi arabia and
01:06:55.420 iran to israel and egypt it now includes india and pakistan includes russia and ukraine it includes
01:07:02.180 the sahel east africa so it includes south sort of the byzantine theater of south europe greece and
01:07:08.800 and israel and turkey so um so we're really in an interesting time i think um i think that even
01:07:16.860 though we're at the nadir of relations between palestinians and israelis after october 7th
01:07:22.540 after the the ferocious gaza war when so many civilians have been killed in both in both of
01:07:29.580 those events um everyone is traumatized and we're still seeing that in you know the results of the
01:07:35.340 israeli election for example but the bottom is often a good place in history to start negotiating
01:07:41.900 again to start talking so there's also a huge opportunity for the in the remaking the middle
01:07:47.540 east um so ultimately i i am hopeful um i don't think in the next few months uh we have a very
01:07:55.580 erratic administration of of course um and you know israel now has no no kind of uh you know
01:08:03.060 the new the new coalition is being negotiated there may be another election but this is a
01:08:08.760 great opportunity for you know the moderate muslim states and for israel um to to um make
01:08:17.060 you know to reform the region and at some point the iranian dictatorship the iranian islamist
01:08:23.120 dictatorship um will fall and um when that happens that will remove um one of the one of the darkest
01:08:31.160 tyrannies that we've seen in the middle east and that's saying something so yeah ultimately hope
01:08:36.860 well what a wonderful way to end our chat my publicist had said you should speak to simon
01:08:43.560 she was not lying what a treat it is to speak to you simon please come back anytime you like and i
01:08:48.960 hope to meet you in person soon stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline thank you so much
01:08:53.080 for coming on thank you