TRIGGERnometry - Historian Roger Moorhouse Explains Russia⧸Ukraine Crisis ＊Special Live Recording＊

00:00:00.120 Hey Francis, do you like books?

00:00:02.800 I tried one once, wasn't for me mate.

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00:00:33.700 See, I know the word delve, so I do read books.

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00:00:48.820 She started a publishing company named Poppyfield Publishing 0.66

00:00:52.340 and her novels are a massive hit with fans who want to read books

00:00:55.640 that are a great read and are not woke.

00:00:57.960 Book one is Shadow Step.

00:00:59.680 And book two, Gather Shadows.

00:01:02.620 She's currently writing book number three, I Can't Wait.

00:01:06.000 I don't read books because I can talk to girls. 0.99

00:01:08.520 Your mum doesn't count, mate.

00:01:09.900 And by the way, J.S. Powell is a big supporter of Trigonometry.

00:01:13.080 She is a moderator on our channel and we really appreciate all her help.

00:01:16.980 You can find her books online at Amazon, lulu.com and other bookseller websites.

00:01:21.520 If you enjoy the books, please leave a review.

00:01:24.200 The links are in the description.

00:01:25.200 Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry.

00:01:33.560 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:34.760 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:36.060 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:41.220 As you know, with the events in Ukraine, there's been a lot of discussion and debate about the history of that country, the history of the conflict and how we are where we are.

00:01:49.520 And because of that, we are absolutely delighted to be joined today by a British historian who's written a number of books about that part of the world, about World War II, including this book, which I'm a huge fan of, The Devil's Alliance.

00:02:00.740 And Roger Morehouse, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:03.120 But before we welcome Roger, just to let you know that it is a live episode and we will also be doing super chats.

00:02:09.380 You get your chance to ask questions to Roger during the break.

00:02:12.820 So it'll be 50 minutes.

00:02:13.880 We'll have a quick break and then we'll be asking your questions to Roger.

00:02:17.000 So send us a super chat if you want that.

00:02:18.820 Apologies, Roger.

00:02:19.580 That's right.

00:02:20.280 Welcome.

00:02:20.860 So good to have you on the show.

00:02:22.100 I've been meaning to get you on for a long time anyway, but the opportunity is now presented itself.

00:02:26.800 Before we get into the subject we're going to be talking about, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:02:36.520 A twisted journey, a little bit.

00:02:38.720 Yeah.

00:02:39.780 Author and historian.

00:02:41.720 I studied in the early 90s at the School of Slavonic Studies in London.

00:02:47.260 Had a sort of fascination with central European history, particularly, which grew out of.

00:02:52.500 89, which is ironic, really, given what we're talking about now, because that's the sort of start point of where we're now potentially at the end of that sort of, you know, 30 year piece.

00:03:04.660 So I was fascinated by the events of 89 and that sort of inspired me to go to university, studied that and all carried on from there.

00:03:11.460 Ended up researching with one of my professors, the great Norman Davies, and then started writing in my own right as a freelance.

00:03:19.480 So I've written a few books.

00:03:21.760 Now I do also lecture as a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw.

00:03:27.660 And it's great to have you with us.

00:03:29.240 You've written a bunch of other books, including your latest book, which is called First to Fight, which is about the invasion of Poland in 1939.

00:03:37.700 And you've written quite a few books about the cooperation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany at that time, which I hear has has doesn't keep everybody happy, particularly on the eastern side of the world.

00:03:50.380 Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, particularly that one, the Devil's Alliance, which is the period of the Nazi Soviet pact, which is, I think, one of the most sort of crucial events in in World War Two, actually. 0.68

00:04:02.840 And that German-Soviet relationship is one of the most crucial great power relationships in the world.

00:04:08.540 But it gets, you know, routinely ignored in the Western narrative.

00:04:12.920 We treat the Nazi Soviet pact essentially like it's the last sort of chess move in the run up to war. 0.54

00:04:18.800 But it's actually the opening salvo in a two-year relationship between the two, between Moscow and Berlin, which is very thoroughgoing.

00:04:27.240 And there's collaboration. There's like four economics treaties in that time.

00:04:31.100 They collaborate actively in the destruction of Poland in 1939.

00:04:36.500 So there's it's a it's the forgotten great power relationship.

00:04:39.600 And that's the story I wanted to tell, which I think I did reasonably well.

00:04:43.280 Very well.

00:04:43.800 And there's the Russian narrative currently, which has hardened a lot under Putin in the last few years.

00:04:50.340 That came out in, I think, 2014 at the time and then since the Russian narrative on the Nazi Soviet pact has hardened a lot.

00:04:59.660 And it's very dismissive, really, of that, you know, particularly my effort to try and put it into a into a proper context.

00:05:09.500 They still very fixed on this sort of the immediate Stalinist justification for it, which came after 41, which was just to say that this was, you know, a defensive necessity that we knew Hitler was going to attack us and we had to do this.

00:05:24.560 It really isn't that simple. It's much more complex.

00:05:27.180 The reason I bring it up is the elements of that story that will become relevant when we start talking about the history of Ukraine, which is what I want to do now.

00:05:33.620 So prior to the invasion, as you know, Vladimir Putin made a speech in which he essentially made three big claims, let's say.

00:05:41.100 The first of which was Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin and allowed to be expanded by other communist leaders like Nikita Khrushchev.

00:05:49.060 And these are weak decisions made by weak leaders that resulted in creation of a fake country.

00:05:53.500 Essentially, that's the first argument. The second argument is that this led to the splitting up of the Russian people, the Russian nation, and a piece of the Russian nation was split off and glued together with pieces of Poland and pieces of Hungary, which is where we're going to come on to the Nazi Soviet pact potentially.

00:06:10.780 And the third argument is the eastward expansion of NATO since 1991 has is a threat to Russia.

00:06:19.140 Russia is about to be attacked by initially by Ukraine with Western help.

00:06:24.180 And this is Russia defending itself by sending peacekeeping forces into the Donbass.

00:06:30.740 We have seen how that has played out over the last few days.

00:06:33.900 So let's stick to the history first. What is the history of Ukraine?

00:06:38.040 Did it exist? Was it artificially created by Vladimir Lenin? Talk to us about that.

00:06:43.900 Yeah, that's that's a whole crock of nonsense, I have to say, for a start.

00:06:47.760 I mean, the idea that Lenin sort of creates Ukraine.

00:06:51.200 What what like all of these things, there's always a sort of a kernel of truth that they then elaborate and run with, you know, at the expense of everything else.

00:06:59.280 And in this case, the sort of kernel of truth here is that the early days of the Soviet Union of necessity, 0.55

00:07:06.140 this, you know, Soviet policy, particularly under Lenin, was very accommodating towards the nationalities of the Soviet Union,

00:07:12.460 particularly in the Caucasus, where you've got these sort of, you know, fractious Armenians and Azeris and the rest of it. 1.00

00:07:17.520 So but elsewhere as well. So it's very, very accommodating because central power, you know, during the Civil War was so weak.

00:07:23.980 And after 1918 onwards, after the revolution, you essentially had to make those concessions.

00:07:31.000 But they made it, you know, as part of, you know, part of the sort of almost the moral argument of communism was that we're going to be nice to the nationalities in the way that the Russian Empire wasn't.

00:07:39.780 And a lot of people bought into that very quickly at the end of the 1920s,

00:07:43.800 once Stalin's got back into power after 28 onwards, you know, that this tolerance of minority ideas and so on is completely crushed. 0.73

00:07:54.500 So anyone with any ideas about, you know, not necessarily separatism, but even, you know, a national policy in somewhere like Ukraine is crushed.

00:08:04.800 And you can see that as one of the drivers behind the terror famine, the holodomor of the early 1930s. 0.85

00:08:10.700 It's part of that, part of it's ideological and part of it is also an effort to crush Ukrainian national ambition.

00:08:18.420 So there's an element there where, yes, they were, you know, encouraging of national identity and national ideas in places like Ukraine after the revolution, but as a tactic.

00:08:28.960 But Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian national identity goes way, way back.

00:08:34.960 They go right back to Kiev and Rus, which actually predates Moscow.

00:08:38.440 So, you know, if you go right back to sort of 10th century Kiev and Rus, you know, if Putin wants to play, you know, who's the senior partner games, then, you know, Kiev wins hands down over Moscow.

00:08:50.540 So it's a nonsense to say that Ukraine has no sort of history beyond the 20th century.

00:08:57.300 It's a simple nonsense.

00:08:58.200 It seems to me, and again, correct me if this is wrong, we don't understand Putin and his actions and his attitude to Ukraine because we don't understand the culture.

00:09:10.920 We're not really taught about the Soviet Union.

00:09:13.700 So his actions to us seem completely bizarre.

00:09:17.600 Is that fair to say?

00:09:19.280 I think so.

00:09:20.120 I think there's two things here.

00:09:21.640 I think what one aspect is, and I sort of rail about this quite a lot, I have done almost into the void up until last week, is that we in the last certainly 20 years since Putin's been in power, and I think during the period of the Soviet Union before that, we in the West have fallen into the trap of treating Russia and before that the Soviet Union as if it's a normal state, as if it's a rational actor on the world stage. 0.56

00:09:50.520 And they aren't.

00:09:53.520 And we're now seeing the truth of that.

00:09:56.040 It behaves like a rogue state.

00:09:57.460 It behaves like an Iran does. 1.00

00:09:58.980 It's ideologically driven, and it behaves like Iran would do in the same way. 0.96

00:10:03.300 So we have to get our heads around the idea that Putin now and Russia's behavior is that of a rogue state.

00:10:10.440 And we're seeing that.

00:10:11.560 That's now an easier argument to make now than it was 10 days ago.

00:10:16.320 So that's one thing.

00:10:17.460 And then the other point is, and you touch on this, Francis, that we don't know enough about Soviet history in the West.

00:10:25.200 That, I think, is absolutely true.

00:10:26.540 There's been some shifts.

00:10:27.980 But I think that policy, whenever it was, that came in the 1990s with the educational reform where you've got this foregrounding of German history, Nazi history, with the Holocaust attached, which is all well and good. 0.96

00:10:40.360 But it leaves generations, certainly of British kids and others beyond as well, where there's sort of an imbalance in their knowledge of 20th century totalitarianism.

00:10:51.360 And I think you can see that playing out with a lot of the footage and stuff and a lot of the memes on social media and so on and the comparisons made in opinion pieces in the last week that sort of juxtapose Putin's actions with Hitler's from 1938-39.

00:11:07.780 And there's an argument to be made there.

00:11:09.320 There are parallels.

00:11:10.140 It's quite a strong one.

00:11:10.860 But, you know, Putin is playing out Stalin's playbook as much as he's playing out Hitler's playbook.

00:11:16.900 I mean, it's a totalitarian playbook, right?

00:11:19.120 And if we knew more than just sort of, you know, Hitler and Nazi Germany collectively, then we could actually make some meaningful comparisons and meaningful comments. 0.60

00:11:27.720 But we're kind of stuck in this world where the only point of reference that we have historically for the bad guy and the bad regime is Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, which is kind of rather silly.

00:11:38.300 We'll be right back.

00:12:08.300 Isn't it because we also had to get into bed with the Soviets in World War II in order to win? 0.59

00:12:14.840 Yeah, that's part of it.

00:12:15.820 Yeah.

00:12:16.040 So there was this shift.

00:12:16.960 I mean, it's interesting that, you know, talk about the Nazi-Soviet pact.

00:12:20.280 In that two-year period when they're collaborating, the West is pretty clear-eyed about what's going on.

00:12:27.220 Churchill in particular.

00:12:28.220 Yeah, Churchill and others.

00:12:29.640 But, you know, you can look at, you know, editorials and newspapers and, you know, across the West of the world talking about this, you know, it's referred to in one editorial as Tutoslavia.

00:12:40.000 You know, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as one entity, all the way from, you know, the Rhine, effectively, to Vladivostok, referring it to it as one entity, which, you know, to a large extent it was.

00:12:51.920 So they were collaborating.

00:12:53.920 And then you do have that shift with the Grand Alliance in 1941 of necessity, right?

00:12:58.280 And that necessitated then a huge kind of rehabilitation, a huge propaganda effort to rehabilitate Stalin in the eyes of the world.

00:13:08.040 You know, he was no longer the monster.

00:13:09.380 He was cuddly Uncle Joe.

00:13:10.640 He sat on the sofa with Churchill.

00:13:12.220 And that was kind of a necessity.

00:13:15.080 But, you know, that essentially was what stuck.

00:13:17.880 I remember publicizing that book in, you know, 2014, 2015.

00:13:21.880 And I was doing a public event and old chap stood up at the end.

00:13:27.600 And he was obviously the wartime generation.

00:13:30.060 He stood up and said, how dare you talk about Stalin like this?

00:13:34.220 So these ideas are still out there, that Stalin's somehow a good guy.

00:13:38.420 I mean, I find that absolutely astonishing.

00:13:40.360 And it's particularly prevalent on the left, who refused to condemn the Soviet Union many times, despite knowing that there were atrocities happening.

00:13:49.820 Yeah, this is one of those peculiarities, particularly the Cold War, that, you know, that sympathy for, and not you didn't even have to be a card-carrying communist, but just sympathy on the left, that socialism in the communist sense was seen as something that, yeah, it might have, you know, it might have broken a few skulls in Ukraine.

00:14:09.040 It might have, you know, made a few mistakes, but it was still something that was worth defending.

00:14:13.860 So you kind of caught yourself short of criticizing, even when it needed to be criticized.

00:14:21.880 So that meant, again, that imbalance is just perpetuated, that you've got all of this sort of study on Nazi Germany, on the Holocaust, all of which is right and proper, but it's not balanced out by a concomitant study of, you know, the Holodomor, for example.

00:14:35.500 You know, 4 million people died in the Holodomor.

00:14:37.800 Well, actually, there's some dispute about that.

00:14:40.120 Absolutely.

00:14:40.260 Even the Russian state Duma, I think, recently acknowledged there was 7 million.

00:14:44.020 Yeah, I mean, that's part of the point.

00:14:46.000 We don't know how many died.

00:14:47.180 It's huge.

00:14:48.040 I mean, a sort of a central guess figure is about 4 million, which is what I would give, but you're right.

00:14:53.380 It could be much higher.

00:14:54.460 Well, let's come back to the present day, because I think that's what a lot of people watching this and listening to this will care about, and rightly so, of course, with what's happening in Ukraine now. 1.00

00:15:02.980 Now, one of the things that, so the way I see the media landscape shifting in the last few days, even, is initially nobody knew what the hell was going on.

00:15:11.840 So Francis and I had a conversation, which I know you watched, and which I laid out some of my thoughts as a sort of amateur historian who's a big history buff and pays a lot of attention to it, and modern politics as well.

00:15:22.040 But there is a competing argument, which I'd like us to talk about, which says that Russia is not an aggressive country under Vladimir Putin.

00:15:31.140 It was not an aggressive country until NATO started expanding eastwards, and apparently, some people argue, the verbal commitments were given to Russia, to Mikhail Gorbachev in particular, that NATO would not expand eastwards, therefore sort of entering the strategic area of interest for Russia.

00:15:51.700 And instead, what happened was in 1999, Poland, which has a small border with Russia and a couple of other countries, were allowed to join NATO.

00:15:59.440 And then in 2004, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, countries that sit right on the border of Russia and form a corridor between Kaliningrad and Russia, very strategically important for Russia, were allowed to join.

00:16:11.020 And over time, this was an irritant for Russia. 0.84

00:16:14.840 This is the equivalent of, you know, Mexico entering a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, people argue.

00:16:21.800 And as a result of that and further encroachments, and now Ukraine sitting right on the border, part of the historical Russian sphere of influence, etc., NATO's planning to, they've said they would let Ukraine and Georgia in.

00:16:36.020 That's when Vladimir Putin went into Georgia, and now he's gone in Ukraine in 2014, when he could see that, you know, these people don't, the people who say this don't understand the history of modern Ukraine.

00:16:47.360 This was not a neutral government.

00:16:48.780 This was a Russian puppet who was about to be replaced with someone who was pro-Western. 0.76

00:16:53.380 And so when Vladimir Putin saw this, he saw a country on the border about to join NATO.

00:16:58.020 He went in and he tried to wreck the country to prevent it from being a bulwark against Russia for NATO.

00:17:03.600 So what say you to that?

00:17:05.380 I think the key phrase in all of that, I mean, there was a lot packaged in that, but the key phrase in there was the idea of a Russian sphere of influence, which is kind of an item of faith in the Kremlin still.

00:17:19.720 And it isn't for the rest of the world, effectively, and certainly for the world that we're talking about, the Baltic States, Poland, and now Ukraine as well.

00:17:26.100 And this is where I think we come back to that sort of wider issue of where we are in a sort of geopolitical sense.

00:17:35.880 We've had a 30-year peace, effectively, from the Cold War.

00:17:39.660 We in the West, you know, arrogantly, naively, whatever, we thought the Cold War was over in 1989-91, Soviet Union collapsed.

00:17:48.400 Places like Poland finally become independent, so, you know, 40-odd years after the end of World War II, when us, the British and the French, went to war to, you know, supposedly defend Polish independence and integrity.

00:18:03.120 That isn't actually restored until 1989, tragically.

00:18:07.020 But again, 91, Baltic States re-emerged as independent states and have flourished, done brilliantly.

00:18:12.320 So, you know, from the Western perspective, this is all good, right?

00:18:15.000 Russia is independent. Russia is under this strongman, but, you know, someone we can supposedly do business with, we thought.

00:18:24.600 Ukraine is somewhere in between independent states.

00:18:28.000 And we see that world as a positive development.

00:18:31.500 These are free countries that are, you know, forwarding their way, making sovereign decisions,

00:18:35.480 whether they join the EU like the Baltic States did, or join NATO, again, like the Baltic States did, and Poland.

00:18:41.340 And that, to us, is all fine and normal.

00:18:45.600 This is how normal states behave, right?

00:18:49.640 From the Kremlin perspective, they're still thinking in terms of a Russian sphere of influence that has been undermined, that has been damaged by that process.

00:19:01.140 So, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, obviously, you know, in 1989, they lose that effective control over Eastern Europe,

00:19:07.940 which they had through communism, through those satellite communist regimes.

00:19:11.500 And then the Soviet Union itself collapses.

00:19:15.000 For them, that is, you know, Putin said this, I think, in about 2000 or just before.

00:19:20.140 He said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe that happened in the 20th century,

00:19:26.420 which is saying something, right?

00:19:28.160 In World War II.

00:19:29.080 Yeah, that is Putin's mindset.

00:19:32.300 The collapse of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of his time, which is astonishing.

00:19:38.200 And what he's doing...

00:19:39.060 Why would he say that?

00:19:40.120 Because it is Russia losing that position of influence, that sphere of influence.

00:19:45.220 You know, Russian power, Russia as a great power, whether it's riding on the coattails of the Soviet Union,

00:19:52.600 that was effectively Russia writ large, right?

00:19:54.740 Effectively.

00:19:55.220 But now Russia is an independent state.

00:19:58.060 You know, it's not enough for the Kremlin to be within just the borders of Russia as it is.

00:20:04.080 That's not acceptable.

00:20:05.580 Why not, Roger?

00:20:06.200 Why not?

00:20:06.600 Don't we live in this wonderful world of peace and trade and we can all just exist within the borders that we have

00:20:12.360 and just be, you know, unicorns and rainbows and all that?

00:20:15.600 Well, yeah, we thought so.

00:20:16.680 We thought that was the world we lived in.

00:20:18.460 And it's not a ridiculous assumption, really.

00:20:21.980 It's a question of, you know, perspective for the Western world.

00:20:24.760 It's about, you know, sovereign nations and trading and all of that, which is all, you know, that's the world we live in.

00:20:30.400 And we're quite happy with that.

00:20:31.720 But you have to understand that from a Soviet, from a Russian perspective, Freudian slip there, 0.77

00:20:36.900 but from a Russian perspective, that's completely nothing.

00:20:39.180 That's not the way the world works.

00:20:40.520 The world works in terms of spheres of influence.

00:20:44.500 And particularly, you know, the example of Ukraine is absolutely salient here, right?

00:20:50.240 You can kind of justify letting go of the Baltic states, right? 0.99

00:20:54.660 Because they've got Russian minorities, but they're Lithuanians, they're Balts, they're Latvians, Estonians.

00:21:00.940 You know, they were never really with us from a Kremlin perspective.

00:21:05.900 And letting them go was probably, you know, easier than trying to keep hold of them in 1991.

00:21:11.300 But letting Ukraine go is unthinkable.

00:21:14.880 And it goes back to what you said earlier on about this idea of, you know, Russian nationalism isn't just Russia in its, you know, modern boundaries.

00:21:22.560 It implies a sort of claim to Ukraine.

00:21:26.140 It has this sort of greater Russian idea to Ukraine, also to Belarus.

00:21:31.200 So to let one of those two go is absolutely not acceptable from a Kremlin perspective.

00:21:37.320 And this is where, you know, Belarus, the problem with Belarus, again, from a Kremlin perspective, has kind of been solved, right?

00:21:46.980 You had that, the election of last year, Lukashenko's still there, you know, defying a lost election.

00:21:53.860 He's clamped down, thrown out those that, you know, legitimately should be the government.

00:21:59.580 So yeah, Lukashenko has done a brilliant job of going around the world and getting handshakes and photo ops with the rest of the world.

00:22:05.720 Well, I fear that's probably game over for Belarus, for the foreseeable. 0.98

00:22:11.420 So that, from a Kremlin perspective, is Belarus problem solved.

00:22:15.660 But Ukraine was edging towards some sort of, you know, looking westward increasingly democratic, reasonably successful functioning.

00:22:25.740 These are all things that the Kremlin can't accept.

00:22:28.500 But wasn't 2014 a coup supported by the CIA, I hear?

00:22:32.940 I mean, this is just, this is just, there's that great line, Kremlin 101 or Dictator 101 is kind of, accuse your enemy of what you're doing, right?

00:22:44.900 And that's a great example of this.

00:22:46.980 You know, I don't see West, the idea of Western meddling, it just doesn't really happen.

00:22:53.900 We don't have, we don't have the sort of, the brainpower and the will.

00:22:58.720 We just don't. 0.97

00:23:00.520 I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's rather ridiculous.

00:23:03.160 And I think, you know, that, that is a great example.

00:23:05.820 NATO, of course, is a defensive alliance, you know.

00:23:10.460 The Kremlin at the moment is doing a great job of advertising for NATO, right?

00:23:16.180 You can see the Finns and the Swedes are now thinking about that.

00:23:18.620 They're also being berated by, by Putin and saying, you know, you, you, if you watch it,

00:23:23.680 if you, you apply, there'll be trouble, but they probably will.

00:23:27.160 And why wouldn't they, given the current situation?

00:23:29.860 So if you offered a NATO membership to Ukraine now, they'd have your arm on, you know.

00:23:35.120 So he's the greatest recruiting sergeant for NATO membership that you could imagine.

00:23:39.900 So it's, it's a response to him.

00:23:41.620 It's not, you know, he's not responding to any sort of provocation.

00:23:45.540 NATO is a response to Russia. 0.86

00:23:47.360 So I'm going to make what could be seen as a cross illusion, but I think it's got merit. 0.98

00:23:51.340 It sounds like Russia is having this sort of weird midlife crisis where they're looking 0.92

00:23:56.160 back at their, you know, at their youth or their earlier times going, this is great, powerful.

00:24:01.280 Those were the days.

00:24:02.140 Yeah, those were the days.

00:24:03.160 This was great, powerful.

00:24:03.900 Stop being racist.

00:24:06.280 Russophobic, mate. 0.92

00:24:07.080 Yeah.

00:24:07.300 And they were looking back at the days and the halcyon days of the Soviet Union where they 0.85

00:24:11.100 were great and powerful.

00:24:11.940 They, they, they're looking at their place in the world, they're feeling diminished and

00:24:17.180 they want to impose themselves once again, despite the fact that the world's moved on.

00:24:22.700 I think there's a lot of that.

00:24:24.040 And you can see, you know, to, to, to coin a phrase, you know, Putin is, is wanting to

00:24:28.560 make Russia great again.

00:24:29.520 That's, that's, that's, that's where he's heading.

00:24:31.680 And you can see the same thing.

00:24:33.840 Historically, you can see the same drivers in Nazi Germany, you know, because that was a 0.76

00:24:38.280 great power, humiliated at the end of the first world war.

00:24:41.940 Um, populations outside of its, of its redrawn frontiers.

00:24:46.100 Taken away from it.

00:24:46.900 Taken away, you know, um, national humiliation.

00:24:50.320 And then you've got the great leader who comes in and restores, you know, Germans faith in

00:24:54.420 themselves and restores its position in the world.

00:24:57.180 Um, and then starts going after these irredentor and these disputed territories.

00:25:00.660 So there's, there's definite sort of parallels there, um, which is kind of, you know, from our

00:25:06.540 perspective now, uh, as of last week, uh, profoundly worrying.

00:25:10.380 I'm not, I'm not going to go down the route of saying this is world war three, but this

00:25:14.300 is certainly, I think, cold war two.

00:25:16.540 Well, a hundred percent.

00:25:17.920 So the one thing that I think differentiates Hitler from, from, I nearly said Stalin, from

00:25:23.080 Putin, uh, is he doesn't seem to have a racial animus.

00:25:27.300 Yeah.

00:25:27.700 Not, not in that conventional, not in the sort of conventional, you know, rabid sense

00:25:33.960 that Hitler did. 0.97

00:25:35.260 Um, I think Putin has, I mean, I, I, in terms of ideology, I would have said, I think up until

00:25:42.280 probably a couple of weeks ago, I would have said that Putin is kind of, doesn't really

00:25:47.160 have an ideological angle, um, apart from this sort of, um, you know, robber capitalism,

00:25:53.620 kleptocracy that he runs, um, and a, an aggravated sense of, of, of Russian nationalism.

00:26:00.420 Right.

00:26:01.180 Um, but then that, what happened last week kind of, I think, throws that idea that he's a

00:26:08.360 rational actor out of the window because that is not, that's not the behavior, behavior of

00:26:12.180 a rational politician.

00:26:13.520 Now he was getting what he wanted while saber rattling against Ukraine, but, you know,

00:26:18.180 he was getting the Western politicians flying to Moscow and elsewhere, you know, and talking

00:26:23.520 about redrawing the, the sort of, uh, security structure in, in Europe.

00:26:27.720 And he was already strangling Ukraine just by making sure that Western, Western companies 0.92

00:26:32.840 were leaving or they weren't going and investing there.

00:26:34.920 He was already doing what he wanted to do, which is making sure that he had Ukraine essentially 0.95

00:26:39.660 by the balls and it wasn't going to go anywhere. 0.69

00:26:42.180 Um, so, which is why up until Thursday last week, like many others, I thought he'd be 0.99

00:26:47.600 mad to invade.

00:26:48.300 He's not going to invade. 0.97

00:26:49.240 It would be ridiculous.

00:26:50.780 And then of course he invades.

00:26:52.480 So this is where we have to start thinking that actually there are some ideological drivers

00:26:56.820 behind this that, um, we can collectively weren't really seeing.

00:27:02.140 And this is why I think that, you know, there's an element here where some of those thinkers

00:27:07.000 around the Kremlin, um, are pretty close to what you could call kind of Russian fascism.

00:27:14.580 Uh, and this is where it gets much, much darker.

00:27:17.480 Um, and yeah, it doesn't have necessarily that racial element, but it is certainly a sort

00:27:22.400 of a greater Russian ambition, not uniting all the Russian people in one state, that sort

00:27:27.500 of thing, um, which is, you know, is, is sort of essentially one of the sort of ambitions

00:27:33.500 of classical fascism, you know, is ethno nationalism.

00:27:36.960 So you're on the same path.

00:27:38.440 But the thing that's worrying what you say about that, you think, well, then is another

00:27:45.260 world war inevitable?

00:27:46.540 Because if he's going to carry on encroaching once he's locked down Ukraine, he'll probably 1.00

00:27:52.060 think that is it then going to be right.

00:27:54.580 I've got what I want from here, but actually those countries over there, they were once

00:27:59.920 part of the Soviet union.

00:28:01.300 They should be part of Russia. 1.00

00:28:03.800 Let's go.

00:28:04.560 Well, this is, um, I would preface anything I say by again, reiterating that I didn't think

00:28:09.940 he'd invade last week.

00:28:10.900 So any, any of my predictions, I did let me answer that question, but my, uh, my gut feeling

00:28:18.200 on this is that, you know, as I've just said, there's this strong element of Russian ethno

00:28:22.520 nationalism, which from a, um, you can see from Putin's speech last week, very strongly

00:28:28.380 includes Ukrainians and Belarusians in that, in that sphere.

00:28:31.800 That's the world he's looking to reunite.

00:28:34.560 Um, or by definition, really, that means you don't want the Baltic States.

00:28:39.360 You don't want to go into Poland and so on. 0.93

00:28:41.140 Plus Baltic States, Poland, they're all NATO members.

00:28:44.940 So that would be a direct slap in the face for NATO.

00:28:48.800 NATO would be obliged to respond.

00:28:51.300 Um, so that would be a massive, massive step further.

00:28:56.760 So I can see, you know, as I said, that the Belarusian problem is, or Belarus problem has

00:29:03.260 kind of been solved from a Kremlin perspective.

00:29:07.040 And he's in the process of very bloodily and brutally solving the Ukrainian problem. 0.99

00:29:12.760 That was even the phrase that was used in, uh, or a speech from last week, um, which is

00:29:20.040 rather clumsy formulation, historically speaking, solving the, uh, Ukrainian problem.

00:29:27.080 Um, so to my mind, I think that's, that, that would be job done, but it does mean from

00:29:32.400 Western perspective, it means effectively that, you know, Ukraine is lost, which is, which

00:29:36.180 is a tragedy, um, because that we need to collectively stand up and, uh, I think defend that freedom,

00:29:45.220 which I've been amazed at what the West has done in the last week.

00:29:49.420 I think I've been astonished.

00:29:50.780 Me too, actually.

00:29:51.620 Uh, and, and positively, absolutely.

00:29:53.700 Yes.

00:29:54.080 Um, how much more we can do?

00:29:57.680 I don't know.

00:29:58.360 That's a question for the, for the strategists and the field marshals.

00:30:01.160 Roger, let's come back to the history a little bit, because we talked about the comparison

00:30:04.700 with Hitler's expansion following the humiliation of Germany.

00:30:08.440 And this is what I think a lot of sort of 22 year olds on Twitter who are now experts on

00:30:13.540 geopolitics don't seem to understand is that I would argue, and I'm, I, I've got to be

00:30:21.000 very careful about the way I phrase this.

00:30:23.100 So I'm going to preface this by using a bit of identity politics by saying that my great

00:30:27.280 grandfather died fighting Nazis, probably died in the Holocaust, Jewish, blah, blah, blah, 0.93

00:30:31.080 blah, blah.

00:30:31.400 But Hitler had quite legitimate reasons from his perspective to demand the Sudeten land, 0.97

00:30:39.240 to demand the Anschluss, to demand all of that.

00:30:42.200 Like there were Germans in the Sudeten land and they were being badly treated.

00:30:45.660 Right.

00:30:46.740 Yeah.

00:30:47.540 Um, the reason I bring it up is what I'm trying to get at is like people like Putin and who

00:30:53.540 others, they will make claims that have a kernel of truth.

00:30:57.100 Yeah.

00:30:57.220 It does not mean that the claim is true.

00:30:58.860 Yeah.

00:30:59.500 I think, I think you can actually draw a very close comparison between the Sudeten land

00:31:04.420 issue in 1938.

00:31:05.780 Yeah.

00:31:06.420 And Donetsk and the Anschluss.

00:31:08.360 Quite.

00:31:08.780 Now.

00:31:09.260 Right.

00:31:09.980 Or prior to last week.

00:31:12.020 Um, to a large extent, they're manufactured crises that you then are obliged to find a solution

00:31:17.860 for.

00:31:18.160 Um, the Sudeten land, uh, problem as it were, was, um, you know, ethnic Germans within that 1.00

00:31:25.880 sort of fringe of Bohemian Moravia, which is now Czech Republic, um, that bordered onto

00:31:31.440 Germany.

00:31:31.900 But actually the, all of their cultural references, they spoke German or rest of the course, but

00:31:36.940 all of their cultural references of the Sudeten Germans went southwards, went towards Austria.

00:31:42.040 So they, a lot of them didn't feel themselves to be Germans.

00:31:44.600 They felt themselves still to be Austrians because that was, you know, where they'd been marooned

00:31:49.420 from in 1918 at the end of the first world.

00:31:51.840 Um, so there's, there's a lot of diversity of opinion.

00:31:56.140 Yes, they spoke German.

00:31:56.980 This is, this is like Donetsk and the Hans, right?

00:31:59.420 Yes, they spoke German.

00:32:00.460 It didn't necessarily mean they wanted to go and join Berlin because they, they saw that

00:32:04.760 as, you know, that was Protestant country.

00:32:06.940 Those were the, the Prussians as they used to call them.

00:32:09.040 We, they were all sort of Catholic and they were very South German, more in common with

00:32:13.500 Austria, more in common with Bavaria.

00:32:15.540 So there are sort of profound differences.

00:32:17.380 Um, and what you have is, yes, you know, they're not well treated within, within, uh, pre-war

00:32:24.860 Czechoslovakia.

00:32:26.220 Um, but you've got the sort of creation of a problem that, that, that Stalin, Hitler then, 0.61

00:32:32.880 um, goes in and solves with the, with the annexation.

00:32:36.300 Um, so it's very analogous to Donetsk and the Hans at the moment, um, or up until last

00:32:43.200 week.

00:32:43.420 And what do you make of the, the, the, the sort of commensurate claims that Russia is

00:32:48.700 making that, uh, there's a genocide happening in the Donbass?

00:32:52.900 Uh, I mean, I find it difficult to entertain this conversation because I have family and

00:32:57.220 friends who do live there, who talk about it like, but, but you are here to give an objective

00:33:02.100 opinion about it.

00:33:02.880 So what do you make of the claims that there's been a genocide, thousands of ethnic Russians

00:33:07.960 are being annihilated every day?

00:33:09.820 Yeah.

00:33:10.380 I mean, as far as I can tell, there's been as absolutely no proof of that.

00:33:13.740 Right.

00:33:13.920 I mean, I haven't seen any proof anywhere, uh, serious proof.

00:33:17.580 Um, the problem you have with this is that, you know, you look back again to the sort of,

00:33:22.660 um, the, the halcyon days of the European dictators in the 1930s and forties, they're constantly

00:33:28.880 inventing problems like these that then require a solution.

00:33:33.040 Um, so, and again, sort of false flag operations, which we saw last week as well, you know,

00:33:38.920 that ridiculous false flag, again, I think it was in Donetsk Oblast, wasn't it?

00:33:42.740 There was, um, you know, some burnt out truck with a body in it that, you know, the skull

00:33:47.400 of which had patently been used for, had already been autopsied.

00:33:50.900 And they were saying this was a result of Ukrainian violence against Russians.

00:33:54.680 I mean, it's the clumsiest sort of false flag you could possibly imagine.

00:33:58.420 Oh, you know, supposed provocation.

00:34:00.860 This is what these regimes do.

00:34:02.960 It's part of the playbook.

00:34:04.360 And this is why actually, you know, I'm always wary of this idea of, um, you know, history

00:34:09.360 as a sort of a, uh, a teacher in a way, you know, because we're, we're constantly, I

00:34:16.200 think to some extent abusing history in the Western world.

00:34:19.980 But this is a good example where a good knowledge of that period and how these regimes functioned

00:34:25.840 as a matter of course.

00:34:26.800 You look at the Gliwitz incident in 1939, 1939, you know, the run up to the night before

00:34:32.320 the German invasion.

00:34:33.560 You look at the Maynila incidents. 0.51

00:34:35.240 Hold on.

00:34:36.240 Sorry to interrupt.

00:34:36.760 I'm so sorry to interrupt.

00:34:37.740 No one knows in the West and my experience, because I tried to talk to people about this

00:34:41.040 Gliwitz incident.

00:34:41.900 About Gliwitz.

00:34:42.380 So, so most people in the West think that World War II started when Germany invaded Poland.

00:34:48.020 Yeah.

00:34:48.900 What they don't know is World War II started, if the Nazis had won, the history books would

00:34:53.500 read, when Poland invaded Germany.

00:34:55.580 Yeah.

00:34:55.740 Tell us about that.

00:34:56.800 Yeah.

00:34:57.140 The night before.

00:34:57.880 So the, the German invasion of Poland, of course, is dawn on 1st of September.

00:35:02.680 The night before, 31st of August, there is a raid on a German radio station in the town

00:35:09.580 of Gliwitz, which was about five kilometers from the Polish border.

00:35:12.680 It was in Germany, about five kilometers from the Polish border.

00:35:15.620 It's now Gliwitz in southwestern Poland.

00:35:19.360 And a group of about eight men in civils, so not in military uniform, burst into this radio

00:35:25.820 station, fire a couple of shots into the air, tie up the station personnel, who are Germans, 0.96

00:35:30.720 of course, put them in the cellar, and then start to try and broadcast an incendiary message

00:35:36.080 message in Polish.

00:35:37.080 One of them spoke, spoke Polish, which basically said, you know, we're the advance guard.

00:35:42.240 We're waiting for the, for Polish forces and we're advancing on Berlin and, you know, down 0.94

00:35:46.140 with Hitler and down with Nazism. 0.53

00:35:47.360 Of course, they're all SS men, right? 0.81

00:35:51.840 They, they don't actually manage to, to broadcast their message.

00:35:55.600 They cock it up.

00:35:57.280 You get a lot of white noise, apparently.

00:35:59.100 Apparently there was nine seconds of the message was heard.

00:36:01.300 And then after that, it was white noise.

00:36:02.560 Nobody knows why.

00:36:04.720 Anyway, they don't know that.

00:36:06.000 They think they've done their job.

00:36:07.500 They leave the site and they leave one guy, a rather unfortunate Pole, who had been a Polish 1.00

00:36:13.180 agitator in German upper Silesia called Franciszek Honiok.

00:36:16.580 And he's left behind and shot.

00:36:19.280 He'd already been drugged and he's left, shot and left behind as, you know, bloody proof

00:36:24.600 that this was a Polish operation, right?

00:36:27.760 And then, of course, the following day, if you jump forward to nine o'clock the following

00:36:32.060 day, Hitler makes a speech in front of the Reichstag, German parliament, in Berlin, where

00:36:37.680 he says, you know, we are fighting back since 545.

00:36:41.020 So he's weaponizing that, that spurious false flag operation from the previous night.

00:36:48.180 This was, it was an idea that came from Himra and Heydrich, apparently.

00:36:53.360 Soviet Union did the same in Finland?

00:36:55.460 Soviet Union did the same in Finland, I was going to say.

00:36:57.840 So the Mainila incident in Finland, 30th of November 1939, the Red Army shells its own border

00:37:05.140 post, kills about, you know, three or four Red Army men, shells its own border post, and

00:37:11.880 then blames the Finns, and then invades Finland in response.

00:37:15.200 I mean, this is how totalitarian powers behave.

00:37:18.960 And I think what's fascinating is that back in the day, in 39 and beyond, you know, I mean,

00:37:25.600 Gulf of Tonkin is another one in the 1960s, not just totalitarians do this.

00:37:30.220 But back in the day, because of how broadcasting works and how information gathering works and

00:37:36.860 the rest of it, you know, the outside world didn't know the truth, right?

00:37:41.000 So you're kind of left with just accepting, or not, the official account, right?

00:37:46.280 But now with, you know, social media and the rest of it, which is a very, very democratic

00:37:50.760 form of communication, it's very, very bottom up, you know, you can have people on the ground,

00:37:56.400 like that example last week that I mentioned, you can have people on the ground filming it

00:37:59.980 and going, this doesn't look like an ordinary corpse, this is actually, this has already been

00:38:03.580 autopsied, what is it doing here?

00:38:05.260 And immediately the narrative kind of, it's destroyed, right?

00:38:10.140 So that might have worked, that might still work for domestic Russian consumption.

00:38:16.280 You know, if they showed that on, on Russian TV and said, you know, this is proof that

00:38:21.920 these, the Ukrainians are doing dastardly things, then maybe that works in Russia. 1.00

00:38:25.520 It just doesn't work for the outside world anymore.

00:38:28.000 That's the difference.

00:38:29.260 And the worrying thing is, is that we talk about Hitler and we're making these comparisons

00:38:35.600 and the more comparisons there are, and the more specific comparisons there are, the more

00:38:42.080 worried and anxious I become.

00:38:44.340 And then you think to yourself that on top of that, Russia's got, isn't it the highest 0.98

00:38:49.640 amount of nuclear weapons or the second highest amount compared to the United States?

00:38:54.020 At least Hitler didn't have nukes. 0.96

00:38:56.300 Yeah, true.

00:38:57.140 That is the sort of great sort of specter hanging over all of this.

00:39:00.080 And I mean, this idea, if we accept, as I kind of described earlier on, if we accept that

00:39:07.640 Putin is motivated more by ideology than we've traditionally thought, like, as I said,

00:39:14.060 we just thought he was a Russian nationalist and a kleptocrat, right?

00:39:17.600 But if there's more going on than that, more ideological kind of background, if you like,

00:39:23.640 then I don't know if that makes the prospect of him pressing the button more or less possible.

00:39:33.200 It's certainly worrying. 0.93

00:39:35.160 I'd still cling to the hope that he's not that mad and his ideology isn't that ridiculous 0.83

00:39:40.740 that it would drive him to that.

00:39:42.580 But as I said, I didn't think he would invade Ukraine in the first place.

00:39:46.080 Well, let me make Francis slightly more depressed than he already is by saying I've spent the

00:39:50.020 last few days, I'm grateful to be able to speak Russian to understand the country having

00:39:55.300 lived there and being from there, et cetera, watching Russian television, state television.

00:40:01.120 And for people who are listening to us, they should understand Russia isn't like Britain 0.90

00:40:05.920 or in America in the, like, we think everyone in Britain's on Twitter, they're not.

00:40:10.500 But in Russia, the overwhelming majority of people get their news from mainstream television

00:40:14.480 in a way that people in this country no longer do.

00:40:16.400 I've been shocked by how religious it is.

00:40:20.700 Religion never used to get talked about.

00:40:23.080 And Kutin mentioned the religious split in the Ukrainian and Russian churches in his speech.

00:40:28.280 There is a very clear signaling that there's a religious element to all of this.

00:40:33.340 And that worries me tremendously, I have to say, because, you know, it becomes like a crusade.

00:40:37.760 Right.

00:40:37.940 And if you're going to press a button to kill everyone in the world, we know that ideologically 0.95

00:40:42.920 speaking, there's a very good way of, you know, doing that.

00:40:46.020 But let's come back to a bit more sort of historical conversation.

00:40:50.120 I'm putting arguments to you that I see people out there putting, which just boggles my mind.

00:40:54.660 So Ukraine is a country that elected Vladimir Zelensky, who's a Jewish comedian, president. 0.94

00:41:02.940 And it's full of Nazis, apparently, Roger. 0.88

00:41:06.400 Yeah. 0.98

00:41:06.940 Everyone's a Nazi.

00:41:07.660 Now, look, there's some things we should address, because in Western Ukraine, there is a history

00:41:12.560 of fascism, and there were some people who collaborated with the Germans, and not only

00:41:16.540 for pure convenience, they collaborated with the Germans because they were fascists. 0.56

00:41:20.260 They believed in it.

00:41:21.860 That was their ideology, Stepan Bandera, undoubtedly a fascist.

00:41:24.820 There's no question.

00:41:25.900 And there's some people in Ukraine who want to deny that.

00:41:28.040 And there's some mistakes have been made about sort of trying to clean up his past, which

00:41:32.180 I think was a mistake.

00:41:33.640 And there's a battalion. 0.71

00:41:34.860 There's a battalion, which is full of neo-Nazis.

00:41:37.420 In Ukraine.

00:41:38.100 So how do we square all of that?

00:41:39.540 How do we square that circle?

00:41:40.380 Yeah, I think that, I mean, that, to some extent, that's sort of, you know, the Pravi

00:41:45.840 Sector and the Azov Battalion and so on.

00:41:50.500 I think to some extent, that tends to happen when you have a state, you know, being invaded

00:41:56.500 by its neighbor.

00:41:57.320 It's kind of almost a, you know, it's a natural reaction.

00:41:59.440 We would have probably, if we were invaded by Scotland, we'd have a battalion of EGL boys

00:42:04.940 up there, you know, doing the same thing and waving flags and saying unacceptable things.

00:42:09.360 So it's to some extent that, again, it's a reaction to circumstances.

00:42:13.180 And again, I mean, every country has that in it.

00:42:16.280 And it's part of the spectrum of politics.

00:42:19.060 We can not like it, but it's there.

00:42:20.400 It doesn't mean that the entire country is run by and, you know, dominated by Nazis. 0.97

00:42:25.880 It's a ridiculous extrapolation. 0.73

00:42:28.500 So I think, you know, in the modern sense, I think, you know, yes, it's there. 0.88

00:42:31.660 But, you know, to say that that's how the country is run and that's who Zelensky is, is nonsense.

00:42:37.560 Historically, it's, I mean, it's more complicated.

00:42:41.960 And you mentioned Bandera.

00:42:45.440 We have to bear in mind, I agree with what you say actually about Bandera and the way

00:42:50.160 Ukraine in groping its way towards the symbols of nationalism and creating its nation and its

00:42:58.540 national myth and so on, which every nation has to do.

00:43:01.580 You know, you have to sort of find your heroes and so on.

00:43:03.720 And you have to create a usable myth of your existence, which, incidentally, what's going

00:43:09.380 on now, brutal and bloody and murderous, though, is a brilliant foundation myth for a future

00:43:15.600 Ukraine, you know, and there will be statues of Zelensky in a future Ukraine without question.

00:43:21.620 So this is a little bit, to my mind, the echo here is a little bit of the Warsaw Rising in

00:43:27.300 1944, which I'm not, I don't want to damn and sort of prejudge what's going on in Ukraine,

00:43:32.720 but was ultimately doomed.

00:43:34.200 But as a brilliant kind of uprising against German rule and instantly against the possibility 0.75

00:43:41.160 of Russian rule, Soviet rule, but was doomed and was betrayed and, you know, hundreds of

00:43:47.140 thousands killed.

00:43:49.060 But as a sort of foundation myth for the democratic Poland that emerges in 89, you know, it's

00:43:55.940 tremendously powerful.

00:43:56.920 And I think you're kind of seeing an analogous situation here as well.

00:44:01.160 I mean, hopefully it's not going to be another 40 years, but you're seeing an analogous situation.

00:44:06.400 So every country needs to find its, you know, usable history.

00:44:10.260 And I think that's reaching for Bandera is profoundly questionable.

00:44:15.580 Yeah.

00:44:15.740 I think wrongheaded.

00:44:16.660 Yeah.

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00:44:48.360 Same with banning the Russian, not banning, but not using Russian language in official

00:44:52.380 documents.

00:44:53.140 Yeah, that doesn't help.

00:44:54.300 There's no question that in the desire to build the nation, there have been mistakes.

00:44:58.640 Absolutely.

00:44:59.160 No question about that.

00:45:00.280 Yeah.

00:45:00.520 And that's not the same as what people are saying.

00:45:03.440 So I'm a Russian speaker.

00:45:04.460 I don't speak a word of Ukrainian.

00:45:05.960 My wife, she speaks Ukrainian, but she's a Russian-speaking Ukrainian.

00:45:09.400 Most of my family are Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

00:45:11.700 Some pro-Russian, by the way, some pro-Ukrainian, not a single person would claim to have ever

00:45:16.500 been discriminated against for being a Russian speaker or of Russian ethnicity in Ukraine.

00:45:20.640 That's just a lie.

00:45:22.100 Now, mistakes have been made.

00:45:23.600 I agree.

00:45:24.080 And glorifying people like Stepan Bandera was a mistake.

00:45:27.420 I think I'm not to defend Bandera, but I think as well, we have to, again, a common problem

00:45:32.980 is to look back at the sort of maelstrom of Central Europe in 1942-43, right, the height 0.90

00:45:40.520 of the Holocaust, the height of, you know, various, you know, Central Europe is a mess 0.99

00:45:45.040 in that period.

00:45:45.860 You know, there's sort of pockets of Polish occupation or Polish populations still there,

00:45:51.820 you know, in a Ukrainian sea and vice versa.

00:45:54.640 It's all mixed up.

00:45:55.700 And then Jewish populations all over that are being slaughtered, right?

00:46:00.020 And Bandera effectively hitches his wagon to the Germans because he thinks he might be 0.72

00:46:03.800 able to create some sort of Ukrainian statelet out of it.

00:46:07.680 He might be able to, you know, ride the Nazi tiger to some form of Ukrainian statehood, right? 0.53

00:46:14.320 And he misjudges it, right?

00:46:16.100 But, Roger...

00:46:16.740 And he ends up in Sachsenhausen.

00:46:18.120 He does.

00:46:18.660 But I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want everyone to be clear about this. 0.96

00:46:22.640 He was a fascist. 0.85

00:46:23.860 Yeah.

00:46:24.260 It's not that he saw an opportunity and so he went, oh, let's just join these guys.

00:46:29.100 I know they're bad, but it's okay.

00:46:30.400 No, no. 0.95

00:46:30.980 He was a fascist. 0.83

00:46:32.040 Yeah. 0.80

00:46:32.320 He wanted the same thing in Ukraine that they were doing in Germany.

00:46:37.320 Yeah. 0.99

00:46:37.540 And he wanted to eliminate the Jews. 0.99

00:46:39.380 He wanted to eliminate the Poles, right? 1.00

00:46:41.860 That was the ideology.

00:46:43.360 This is not a good person to be making international heroes.

00:46:46.200 But I think there's a peril in here.

00:46:48.940 I agree with all of that, Constantine, but there's a peril here of looking back and judging

00:46:53.780 people in 42, 43, in that absolute maelstrom of war in Central Europe, which is unbelievably

00:47:01.040 brutal.

00:47:01.880 Yeah.

00:47:02.420 And judging them by our sort of comfortable...

00:47:04.640 I'm not judging him.

00:47:05.480 I'm judging the people who've tried to make him into a national hero since.

00:47:09.060 Yeah.

00:47:09.320 I agree.

00:47:10.000 Okay.

00:47:10.320 I was going to say, the thing that I find, because obviously, with your history and your

00:47:17.260 knowledge of the region, I'm looking at this very much through the eyes of a complete layman.

00:47:21.940 The thing that I find worrying is that you're making parallels again and again with World

00:47:28.760 War II, the beginning of the World War.

00:47:30.480 And for somebody who doesn't know a lot about World War II history, a lot of it is to do,

00:47:36.920 I think, with complacency.

00:47:38.380 Complacency with people like Chamberlain, who don't realise the rising threat of Nazi Germany,

00:47:44.440 who don't understand what they're dealing with, with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

00:47:50.100 Are the same mistakes being made again with Putin and his party and Russia in general?

00:47:54.220 I think we have been remarkably complacent in dealing with Putin and Russia, particularly

00:48:01.960 since the turn of about 10 years ago.

00:48:07.500 I mean, the invasion of Georgia was 2008.

00:48:11.480 We should really have seen the writing on the wall then.

00:48:16.460 Prior to that, maybe it's acceptable that you could have said, you know, Putin's a tough

00:48:20.600 guy, but he's okay.

00:48:21.560 And, you know, he's for stability and the rest of it.

00:48:24.220 I mean, he comes to power in 2000, kind of promising Russians, you know, stability and

00:48:28.640 prosperity and all the Western things that they wanted, right?

00:48:33.120 And look where he's taken them 22 years later.

00:48:35.980 But we should have seen the writing on the wall, certainly 2008, if failing that, with

00:48:41.760 the Euromaidan in 2013-14, we've just been too slow.

00:48:50.100 We've been too slow in actually recognising that threat.

00:48:52.680 There have been enough voices.

00:48:55.420 I mean, I'm a small voice, but I've been sort of consistently critical.

00:48:58.980 And it comes through in my books as well.

00:49:00.840 You know, I do see the Soviet Union and, by extension, Russia as a sort of malevolent 0.99

00:49:07.140 player in the region.

00:49:08.380 And that's sort of fed by the history.

00:49:12.220 And it's just plain to see.

00:49:13.720 And once you've seen it, it's one of those things you can't unsee, effectively.

00:49:19.100 There have been a few, you know, statesmen of that region.

00:49:25.020 There have been a few journalists that specialise in that sort of region.

00:49:30.040 People like Edward Lucas has been brilliant on this and consistent on this all the way through.

00:49:34.220 So there have been voices, but they just tend to get dismissed.

00:49:37.740 And people say, well, you're just being Russophobic.

00:49:40.300 You know, we can do business.

00:49:41.800 You know, the Germans with their wonderful phrase, they had this wonderful phrase up until

00:49:45.400 last week of Wandel durch Handel, which means change through trade.

00:49:50.740 Right.

00:49:51.140 So we'll trade with the, we'll do trade with the Russians. 0.99

00:49:54.540 But in that way, by showing them the benefits of being part of the club, we will change

00:50:01.440 them for the better.

00:50:02.740 Right.

00:50:03.440 That has crashed and burned as of last Thursday.

00:50:06.880 But isn't there also...

00:50:08.540 Francis, before you jump in, I'm really sorry.

00:50:10.080 Just a reminder, guys, everybody, if you want to ask questions of Roger or of us, send

00:50:13.520 in the Super Chat, send in the PayPal.

00:50:15.340 Our team will collate them.

00:50:16.460 And after we have a break in a few minutes, we'll come back and answer all those questions.

00:50:19.760 Sorry, carry on.

00:50:20.320 No, it's cool.

00:50:21.980 We're sitting here in London. 0.55

00:50:23.220 London, let's be honest, a lot of people in London have got very rich, very fat of Russian 1.00

00:50:31.540 money.

00:50:32.060 A lot of it incredibly, incredibly dodgy.

00:50:35.080 Wasn't it as well?

00:50:36.680 It wasn't in a lot of people's best interest, dare I say, a lot of politicians to criticise

00:50:41.860 Putin, to criticise Russia when we had all that money being funnelled into the city of

00:50:46.300 London.

00:50:46.940 Yeah, I think there's a danger here of kind of seeing patterns that are working.

00:50:53.220 They weren't necessarily apparent in retrospect.

00:50:57.480 I mean, some people were saying that, and I mentioned Ed Lucas, he was saying that all

00:51:00.240 the way through.

00:51:01.400 It's been consistent.

00:51:02.780 But, you know, it's all very well in retrospect to sort of pull these things up.

00:51:08.340 Hold on, Roger.

00:51:09.100 Come on.

00:51:09.700 This guy has poisoned people on the streets of the country. 0.99

00:51:13.360 He's killing off his political opponents.

00:51:14.860 He's exiled anyone.

00:51:15.600 Like, these are just, I'm putting the counter-argument, right?

00:51:18.740 He's destroyed any sort of democratic opposition in Russia, whatever.

00:51:22.660 He's shut down every satirical program that exists.

00:51:25.180 He's now shut down every independent media channel in Russia as well.

00:51:29.640 Like, now, here's the question, really, is could we have done anything?

00:51:34.060 That's a different conversation, right?

00:51:35.500 Because can you do some of the things that we're now doing because he poisoned one guy

00:51:39.380 in Salisbury?

00:51:40.760 I think that should have been a shift.

00:51:42.640 I think Salisbury should have been a shift that we actually put into place meaningful

00:51:47.580 sanctions at that point, which I don't think we did.

00:51:49.520 Over one guy.

00:51:50.380 This is the paralysis of the West.

00:51:51.880 It is, but it's also, you know, that using chemical weapons effectively, you know, on

00:51:57.860 foreign soil is astonishing, astonishing thing to have done.

00:52:03.980 And that, you know, it was good to see at the time, you know, I remember Theresa May being

00:52:08.380 very firm in the House of Commons, but I don't remember what followed on from that.

00:52:12.220 I don't think there was much in the way of real sanctions by way of punishment.

00:52:16.600 So there's a lot of words, not much action.

00:52:18.900 So that, I think, should have been a turning point.

00:52:20.680 But to address, you know, the previous point about that sort of infiltration of Russian

00:52:24.660 money, of influence, all of that, I think that's something that we have to be careful

00:52:30.620 now that we don't sort of throw out the baby with the bathwater.

00:52:34.120 Because what the Western model is built on is, you know, rule of law and property rights

00:52:38.740 and all that sort of thing.

00:52:39.940 So in the sort of rush to punish, you know, Russian oligarchs and the rest of it, which 0.63

00:52:45.100 I'm fully on board with, we still have to make sure that we go down the right routes

00:52:49.960 and the right processes and it's above board.

00:52:52.060 Because, you know, if we end up behaving like, you know, a Russian autocrat and just 0.72

00:52:57.940 throwing people out and doing things extra legally, then we're no better than they are.

00:53:03.500 So I think we do have to make sure that our response is legal.

00:53:07.600 Anything that screws over Chelsea Football Cup, mate, is all right.

00:53:10.300 It's got to be good.

00:53:10.680 It's a good thing.

00:53:12.060 Well, on that happy note, Roger, we're going to get some questions from our audience and

00:53:15.240 we've got a bunch of other things that we want to ask you as well.

00:53:17.780 But we're going to go to a quick break and we're back in a couple of minutes, guys.

00:53:21.000 Send in your super chat, send in your PayPal's and we'll get your questions out to Roger.

00:53:25.260 See you in a couple of minutes.

00:53:27.660 Hey, Francis, would you like to learn another language?

00:53:30.340 No, mate.

00:53:31.380 Already know foreign languages perfectly.

00:53:34.460 Oi, Gary, who is la biblioteca?

00:53:37.940 You can't go on holiday, mate, without knowing where the swimming pool is. 1.00

00:53:41.740 La biblioteca is the library, you idiot. 1.00

00:53:44.120 Exactly. 1.00

00:53:45.340 You can never be too far away from knowledge and sexually frustrated librarians.

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00:56:21.740 Hello.

00:56:22.400 Welcome back, everybody.

00:56:23.400 We're going to ask some questions of Roger and have another conversation, which has been absolutely brilliant so far.

00:56:28.560 Francis, fire away. 0.99

00:56:29.420 The first question is we've got one from regular Icky Ike, and he says,

00:56:33.560 I'm sure Putin doesn't believe his own propaganda, but if you're swimming in misinformation, can't it corrupt your perception of reality?

00:56:43.120 Could Putin absorbing a bit too much of the Kremlin Kool-Aid have led to his overreach?

00:56:49.340 I think that's a pretty fair assumption, yeah.

00:56:52.940 And you can see that from a lot of that sort of footage of the last few weeks of the sort of theatre within the Kremlin,

00:57:01.420 of how he is presented and how he's presented with other people, that ridiculously long table, for example.

00:57:06.380 And then sitting there in the hall, you know, distanced from his oligarchs and his ministers and so on.

00:57:14.460 And this COVID paranoia that he evidently has as well, that everyone has to, you know, provide stool samples and, you know, two weeks of isolation or whatever it is.

00:57:25.260 I mean, it's insane.

00:57:26.180 But I think that there's an element of that where he has, whether it's just psychological or it's also COVID related,

00:57:33.600 that he's effectively isolated himself and isolated in that rather delusional world.

00:57:39.500 So I think that's quite a strong case for that being correct, yeah.

00:57:42.620 And if that is the case, then surely doesn't that make him even more dangerous?

00:57:48.640 Yes.

00:57:49.840 Because it makes him, the chances are that if he's isolated, he becomes ever more irrational. 1.00

00:57:55.260 He becomes ever more erratic and therefore more likely to do something stupid. 1.00

00:58:00.640 Yes. 1.00

00:58:01.940 Right.

00:58:02.920 Sorry, Francis.

00:58:03.920 I agree.

00:58:04.880 Absolutely.

00:58:05.660 You're doing to him what I did when we had our chat.

00:58:08.620 I saw that and you depressed him.

00:58:10.820 And I mean, I agree.

00:58:12.040 I watched that and I agreed with an awful lot of what you said.

00:58:15.660 Steve asked what I think is actually a very fair question.

00:58:18.360 He says, of Putin's three justifications that he gave NATO, I mean, he doesn't mention the fact,

00:58:24.900 that Ukraine belongs, according to Putin, to that part, belongs to Russia.

00:58:28.540 But he says, NATO, Nazis and Kosovo, we haven't addressed the Kosovo precedent.

00:58:34.620 Can you talk about that?

00:58:36.080 Because that's not something I know a lot about.

00:58:38.580 And I'd love to understand.

00:58:40.020 Some people are arguing that what happened with Kosovo being split off was a precedent for what Putin is doing.

00:58:47.980 He went, well, if you're doing this, then I'm going to do this.

00:58:50.060 Can you talk about that?

00:58:50.940 He talks as well about, you know, the bombing of Belgrade.

00:58:52.400 Tell us what happened in Kosovo as well.

00:58:53.820 Yeah.

00:58:54.100 Oh.

00:58:55.520 Because, right.

00:58:56.240 No one knows.

00:58:56.960 I don't know.

00:58:57.040 Yeah.

00:58:57.460 Well, I'm not sure I know.

00:58:58.460 And that's going back to, you know, the end of the Yugoslav wars.

00:59:02.860 That was the NATO, first of all, no fly zone.

00:59:06.400 And then the bombing of Belgrade, which was deemed necessary at the time.

00:59:12.800 There were obviously voices of dissent.

00:59:14.880 And then the same thing with the creation of Kosovo, which, to a Serbian mind, Kosovo incidentally has a sort of almost mythological element.

00:59:27.460 It's a mythological territory for Serbians, right? 1.00

00:59:30.080 For Serbs. 0.81

00:59:30.920 So you can see there that that is something that is still a sort of running sore for Serbian nationalist sensibilities.

00:59:38.860 And there's a close affinity between the Serbs and the Russians, as, you know, pan-slavs and all of that.

00:59:44.100 And historically, there's always been close ties.

00:59:46.460 Serbia was one of those that actually came out last week and didn't support sanctions against Russia.

00:59:51.560 So, you know, you can see those links are still there.

00:59:56.100 But, you know, if we accept that that's an example of sort of NATO overreach,

01:00:01.940 it's where NATO ceased to become, in one example, it ceases to become that purely defensive alliance I was talking about.

01:00:10.240 It actually was offensive in that case.

01:00:13.860 Then, you know, we can look back and say, yes, you know, mea culpa.

01:00:17.240 So maybe that was the wrong thing to have done.

01:00:19.160 But we were trying to, you know, it's a humanitarian mission, trying to essentially finish a civil war.

01:00:24.280 So that, I think, you know, is something we can argue out in the West with sort of free discussion of events.

01:00:34.440 But for then, for the Russians to use that as justification, you know, our error is allowing them to do what they're doing. 0.61

01:00:42.020 The same thing as using the invasion of Iraq, for example, and say, well, you invaded Iraq. 0.94

01:00:48.960 Well, that's the most ridiculous excuse in the world. 0.80

01:00:51.600 Why is that? 1.00

01:00:52.200 Because Iraq was an absolute shit show. 1.00

01:00:54.280 So why would anyone want to use that as a sort of, you know, as an excuse to do the same thing when it's preposterous? 0.99

01:01:00.920 Yeah, you know, it was a it was a mistake.

01:01:03.440 Absolutely.

01:01:04.060 But why would you want to then go and do a mistake and claim that that's your justification for doing it?

01:01:09.240 This is something we haven't covered and we haven't talked about the West's role beyond the NATO conversation.

01:01:15.640 I want to talk to you about this, because, as you know, in that conversation Francis and I had,

01:01:19.700 I was putting very strongly the case that the West has undermined its own moral authority.

01:01:25.440 Yeah.

01:01:25.700 There's no question about that.

01:01:27.020 Right.

01:01:27.420 And so even in the eyes of our fellow citizens.

01:01:30.460 Criticism of Russia in the situation can sound a bit hollow because of the immoral, illegal, you know, improper, whatever word you want to use.

01:01:43.140 It's actions that we take time and time again in the last 20, 30, 40, 50, 70, 200, 500 years.

01:01:50.660 Yeah.

01:01:51.320 Number one.

01:01:52.360 Number two.

01:01:53.080 The other thing about the West, which, as you know, you I think we all feel strongly about, is the constant undermining of the values of our civilization from the inside and therefore withdrawing from the world.

01:02:07.540 And so we sort of hint to Ukraine that it can come and join the family of Western nations, but we don't do it properly.

01:02:13.760 We just hint.

01:02:14.740 We say, well, yeah, you're welcome, but we're not actually going to help you make that a reality.

01:02:18.780 What is the West's role, in your opinion, and what mistakes do you think we have made that have caused this to happen or have contributed to what's happening now?

01:02:26.880 Yeah.

01:02:27.440 I mean, I think absolutely we make mistakes.

01:02:29.860 You know, that's every nation, every political entity makes mistakes.

01:02:34.180 The great thing about the Western model is that we can recognize them.

01:02:39.920 We can discuss them freely.

01:02:42.500 We can, where necessary, vote out those responsible.

01:02:46.300 We can prosecute those responsible.

01:02:47.780 But we don't, do we?

01:02:48.960 We don't.

01:02:49.540 We don't take, you know, Tony Blair to The Hague, but, you know, we can vote him out of office, for example.

01:02:55.640 You know, so nothing's perfect, but, you know, which system do you want to live under?

01:03:00.120 You know, do you want to live under Putin's system?

01:03:01.680 This kind of annoys me, this knee-jerk thing that you see a lot at the moment.

01:03:06.640 There was a great piece, Douglas Murray did a great piece today, I think it's in The Spectator.

01:03:11.820 Very good piece, What the Right Gets Wrong About Putin.

01:03:13.300 Yeah, talking about, you know, the American right kind of swooning for Putin.

01:03:17.240 I think, what are you wishing for yourselves here? 0.99

01:03:20.280 This is ridiculous. 0.96

01:03:21.160 I mean, however much you find, you know, the modern Western world with all of this woke, you know, nonsense in many cases. 0.98

01:03:29.160 However frustrating you find that, a viable alternative is not supporting an autocratic madman, right?

01:03:39.160 The fact that you don't like that and he doesn't like that stuff doesn't make you allies, right? 0.96

01:03:45.000 He would have you shot.

01:03:46.420 Yeah. 0.84

01:03:46.920 We have to understand that.

01:03:48.340 And I think that...

01:03:49.480 He is quite good on the trans debate, though.

01:03:51.060 Yeah, he is.

01:03:52.140 He's very red-pilled and based.

01:03:54.260 But on that point, though, and I think we've seen this in the last week, this has been, I think, a very valid and valuable wake-up call for the Western world.

01:04:05.080 Yes.

01:04:05.320 To actually look at, stop looking at our navels and stop talking about, you know, for once, microaggressions and, you know, transgender toilets or whatever it is.

01:04:16.960 And actually look at what values we hold in common.

01:04:20.680 And are they worth defending?

01:04:22.340 And the rest of the world has stood up in the last week, last year, last week, rather, and said, yes, they are worth defending.

01:04:27.540 You know, those basic freedoms, democracy, you know, freedom, rule of law, all of that stuff is worth defending.

01:04:34.860 My big concern with what I'm observing in the last week is that, look, the anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-establishment left has always been very open about hating the West, hating the Western values, cozying up to dictators, whether it be in the Soviet Union and Venezuela or whatever.

01:04:54.040 Because, ideologically, they're motivated by the belief that the West is evil, what it does around the world is evil, and any evil that happens around the world is inevitably a consequence of Western evil.

01:05:05.480 Yeah.

01:05:05.580 So, when Venezuela goes down the toilet, that's not because of what people…

01:05:09.080 It's sanctions.

01:05:10.040 It's sanctions.

01:05:10.960 It's all of that, right?

01:05:11.940 So, and look, people, it's a free country.

01:05:13.940 You believe in whatever you want.

01:05:15.120 And those people, some of them are great people.

01:05:17.800 Some of them are smart.

01:05:18.860 Some of them, I don't agree with them.

01:05:19.960 I think they're badly wrong, but that's what they think. 0.98

01:05:21.860 But what hadn't occurred to me, and what I think we're starting to see now on some parts of the right, is they hate the West too now because of all this work shit. 0.98

01:05:33.040 Because of all that stuff, yeah. 0.99

01:05:33.740 And so, they will side with anybody who just says, yeah, men are women, women are women. 0.96

01:05:39.720 That, to me, is a pretty fucking low bar, Roger, for supporting somebody. 0.96

01:05:43.600 I agree. 0.97

01:05:44.460 I agree.

01:05:45.080 Women are women and men are men. 0.71

01:05:46.720 But we've got to reach further.

01:05:48.640 We've got to have a bit more ambition and a bit more aspiration about who we want to be representing our values.

01:05:54.580 And if, you know, this is the point I've been making for years now.

01:05:57.440 I'm sorry that I'm ranting, but I feel strongly about this.

01:06:00.020 It's like, you know, we talk so much about racism and sexism and homophobia in this country.

01:06:04.580 Well, you want to go and look at Russia?

01:06:06.860 What happens to gay people there? 0.94

01:06:08.040 Or China, whatever. 0.96

01:06:08.880 Like, these countries are not better.

01:06:10.960 They're not better.

01:06:11.900 And I say that to you if you're woke or if you're anti-woke.

01:06:15.560 You've got to remember that, you know, you don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater.

01:06:20.580 And I think we're really, really in danger of doing that, particularly people who, you know, I feel it.

01:06:25.340 I felt it.

01:06:25.800 With Francis and I, we're having a very honest conversation about this last night.

01:06:30.480 You know, I think lockdown broke a lot of people's brains, mine included.

01:06:35.120 I found it very difficult to just hold myself from going over into sort of conspiracy and madness because what was happening around us made so little sense that you could.

01:06:48.360 I think everyone felt a desire to kind of reach for an explanation. 0.59

01:06:51.980 And if what's happening in front of you is so ridiculous, it's natural then to seek ridiculous explanations for what's happening.

01:06:59.400 And that is a big concern for me in terms of the ideological space that we're now in.

01:07:04.000 I agree with all of that, Constantine.

01:07:06.280 The only thing I'd say, again, is that in the last week, the way the West has responded has been hugely heartening.

01:07:13.680 Yes, for me as well.

01:07:14.820 We have, you know, rediscovered the wood for the trees.

01:07:18.680 We now know what we stand for, you know, and it comes back almost to that old sort of Polish line, you know, for your freedom and ours.

01:07:26.040 You know, we are, right, we're not sending NATO in.

01:07:31.160 We're not allowing the Ukrainians to NATO. 0.99

01:07:32.520 That would be kind of suicidal to everybody, I suspect.

01:07:35.920 But we are arming the Ukrainians. 1.00

01:07:38.620 We are assisting in any way possible.

01:07:40.740 And everyone's shoulders to the wheel, you know.

01:07:43.800 And we finally, it's almost like, I think woke has almost been like an autoimmune disorder.

01:07:50.140 It's like lupus.

01:07:51.260 You know, when you've got, when there's nothing else going on, your body attacks itself.

01:07:54.520 Yes.

01:07:54.660 Right, we've suddenly found out that there is an external enemy and we've got to concentrate on that.

01:07:58.980 And hopefully it means we can concentrate a bit less on the navel gazing in the process.

01:08:03.300 There's also one country who we haven't spoken about, who are, I'm sure, looking at this with a very keen eye and it's China.

01:08:12.180 What role do you think they're going to be playing and what do you think they're going to be taking out of this?

01:08:16.620 I think they're watching very closely, you know, because, of course, they have their claim to Taiwan.

01:08:23.220 That's their sort of piece of iridenta in the world.

01:08:28.520 And they're going to be watching very closely as to the Western reaction.

01:08:31.460 And I think, again, I think they will be held back, actually, by that reaction, by the strength of that reaction.

01:08:43.440 Because if you look, all the stuff we've said about the Western world being divided amongst itself, you've got, you know, the Brexit thing, you've got the woke stuff going on.

01:08:50.940 And, you know, the Western world in the last sort of five, six, seven years has been, you know, kind of as divided as I can remember it in many ways, probably since the Cold War, when we had those great chasms in sort of opinion and so on.

01:09:07.880 And yet in the last week, almost complete unanimity, except for the fringes, you know, your Diane Abbots and so on, who still want to come out and stop the war and the rest of it.

01:09:19.080 And again, the analogous on the right, which we talked about, but I think that they're fringe voices, real unanimity.

01:09:26.120 And I said that, that, that sense of this, we will defend.

01:09:30.260 And I think it's admirable.

01:09:31.380 And that, that is a strong message to China as well.

01:09:34.280 So I think they've got a really careful watching brief on what's going on.

01:09:38.960 And I think they will be, their hands will be stayed by what they've seen to some extent.

01:09:44.560 I hope.

01:09:44.800 It's interesting watching Russian TV, as I said over the last week, because that tells you what the regime is thinking, right?

01:09:50.220 Because it's, that's where it's coming from.

01:09:52.560 There's a tremendous amount of cozying up to China going on. 0.98

01:09:55.580 Tremendous amount.

01:09:56.820 But the Chinese have played a very closed hand on this one.

01:09:59.880 They haven't supported Russia outwardly.

01:10:02.600 They keep talking about how there needs to be peace and whatever.

01:10:05.620 So we wait and see, as you know, in the chat we had a week ago, I was perhaps a bit doom and gloom about things.

01:10:13.240 I've been surprised, as you have, by the response from the West.

01:10:16.380 And also the Chinese don't seem to have jumped on this as the opportunity to think this is the time to go for the jugular, which is a relief. 1.00

01:10:22.540 I think if the West had hesitated, the way that I would have expected, and certainly Germany would have, I thought Germany would be the brake on any sort of serious EU involvement.

01:10:32.120 Had that happened, then I think you might have seen some Chinese action elsewhere, because they're just exploiting the opportunity. 0.96

01:10:38.880 That's why I think that they're staying at home.

01:10:40.580 So there's a bunch of questions that have flown in.

01:10:45.240 Kat says, with the 10 Aussie dollars, says, what are your thoughts on the cultural sanctions currently being implemented by the West, such as banning Russian artists and athletes?

01:10:54.440 Historically, has this been useful?

01:10:57.780 It's tough on the individuals themselves, who in some instances, you know, we don't know, but in some instances are, you know, blameless in all of that.

01:11:08.360 But so that there's going to be collateral damage, of course.

01:11:12.380 But then you look at something like the boycott in South Africa that were running through the 1980s up to the end of apartheid, which by all accounts, you know, that cultural isolation, sporting isolation worked.

01:11:26.780 So it's got to be, I suppose, part of the toolkit of the West.

01:11:33.320 We have to, I think we do have to hit quite hard.

01:11:36.260 And if that means, as I said, some collateral damage along the way, then that's regrettable.

01:11:43.200 But it probably has to be.

01:11:44.580 But I don't imagine you'd support banning Fyodor Dostoevsky's work from some Italian universities.

01:11:50.980 See, I would argue that.

01:11:53.100 Unless it needed a trigger warning.

01:11:55.160 Yeah.

01:11:55.980 I'll tell you what, Russian literature from that period needs a lot of trigger warning. 0.64

01:11:59.720 But what I would say is, I think it's very important that sanctions are targeted at people who are supporters and abettors and whatever the right words are.

01:12:11.340 People who are allowing this to happen by their support.

01:12:14.600 Yeah.

01:12:15.060 Rather than just random Russian people who happen to be.

01:12:17.880 That makes it sound like a lynch mob, which is not.

01:12:20.400 I mean, there was that example of the Munich conductor who essentially refused to come down either way, refused to condemn it.

01:12:28.560 And he was sacked, which I think is probably pretty heavy handed.

01:12:32.260 Yes, I agree.

01:12:33.260 I think friends of the regime are legitimate targets for me.

01:12:37.480 Having said that, you know, I mean, I understand the West's desire to do everything we can.

01:12:41.560 And I think we're both encouraged, all three of us are encouraged by the response.

01:12:45.380 But also, like, sending oligarchs back to Russia is actually what Putin has always wanted.

01:12:49.680 He wants that money back in Russia.

01:12:51.700 So I don't know how much punishment there is.

01:12:53.500 And of course, just punishing, like, Russian people in the West. 1.00

01:12:56.740 Most of them are in the West because they don't like the regime.

01:13:00.040 So you're sending Putin's critics back to Russia to punish him?

01:13:04.020 But that, again, goes against everything that, you know, the Western model should be.

01:13:09.020 In an ideal world, you know, whatever happens with Ukraine, but in an ideal world, there has been a sort of a growing middle class in Russia who have contacts and they have feelers out in the Western world.

01:13:21.100 They know what the West is like.

01:13:22.600 They don't necessarily buy the propaganda.

01:13:25.060 And you need to give them a workable model for them to say this is what we want Russia to be, right?

01:13:30.760 We don't want to, as you say, throw the baby out of the bathwater and start, you know, arresting people in the street and, you know, breaking our own laws to basically, you know, punish random Russians because that's not sending a positive message.

01:13:43.820 So it has to be, you know, legal and sort of commensurate.

01:13:48.280 So what do we do with a channel like Russia Today?

01:13:51.800 Yeah, that's a good question.

01:13:53.000 I mean, that's one that...

01:13:54.600 Which has been banned.

01:13:55.600 Has been banned now.

01:13:56.460 Yeah, of course.

01:13:57.300 And I think that's probably fair enough.

01:13:59.540 Yeah.

01:13:59.820 It's a, you know, complete propaganda mouthpiece.

01:14:04.860 I was asked to go on it years and years ago and said absolutely, absolutely not.

01:14:09.100 And they never asked again.

01:14:11.780 Yeah, I think that's probably okay.

01:14:14.540 That's, that's...

01:14:15.960 Because this is where it is.

01:14:17.500 We are in Cold War II.

01:14:18.980 And I think we have to accept that shutting off your enemy's propaganda is probably quite a good idea.

01:14:25.380 It's interesting.

01:14:26.460 I'm, I'm instinctively very hesitant to approve of that for the reasons that you gave earlier, actually, which is, that's a very un-Western thing to do.

01:14:36.100 But I think if we accept the thing that you and I both have actually said, there's an argument to be made, at least.

01:14:41.720 I still, I think I would, I would resist that temptation.

01:14:44.620 But I think reasonable people can disagree about that one.

01:14:47.380 Yeah.

01:14:47.660 Yeah.

01:14:48.600 So Maverick Christian, what a name.

01:14:50.620 Well done, Maverick Christian.

01:14:51.660 He asked the question, why did practically every expert get it wrong on the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

01:15:00.640 Yeah.

01:15:01.080 And not that I'd call myself an expert, but me too.

01:15:04.660 And I think it's that question we addressed at the beginning, is that we're kind of thinking in terms of Putin being a rational actor.

01:15:13.860 And he, and he is getting, he was getting everything he wanted by saber-rackling, by, by sort of throttling Ukraine and getting all of that sort of Western attention, which he wants. 0.63

01:15:25.500 He wants to be reminded that Russia was a great power and a big player in the world and all of that.

01:15:29.480 And it seems unthinkable that he would want to launch full out, all out war.

01:15:36.800 It still seems unthinkable.

01:15:38.120 I mean, like, like, like Constantine said, it's like, you know, he's almost wake up.

01:15:41.600 It's like a dream.

01:15:42.420 It's mad.

01:15:45.560 That said, there were enough voices amongst the sort of intelligence community and so on who'd seen various briefings.

01:15:54.280 And I listened retrospectively, actually, earlier this week, I listened back to a podcast, American intelligence community podcast, which had three or four commentators on there.

01:16:06.900 And they all differed.

01:16:07.660 I mean, they all say, oh, no, I don't think he's going to invade because he's getting what he wants, that argument that I gave.

01:16:11.740 And this predated the invasion.

01:16:14.280 And two of them said he wasn't going to invade and two of them said he was.

01:16:17.840 So there were voices that were saying, you know, the intelligence is such that, you know, this is not a drill.

01:16:24.280 So there were voices there that were saying that.

01:16:27.120 But as I said, I think the rest of the world just assumed that, you know, he was effectively Iraq.

01:16:32.840 If you actually look at Putin's history, former head of the KGB, you look at, you know, the case of Alexander Litvinenko, you look at the poisons in Salisbury.

01:16:43.260 This isn't a man who values human life very highly, particularly if it's if it means that he can eliminate them in order to get what he wants.

01:16:52.340 But again, this is I'm sorry to say this with you there, Constantine.

01:16:57.640 But this is kind of also an element of the Russian psyche.

01:17:02.820 A hundred percent.

01:17:03.520 You know, I don't want people to be under any doubt about what you're saying.

01:17:06.920 Yeah, it's a hundred percent.

01:17:08.200 I mean, you've got to understand this is a country that killed 20 million of its own citizens only 70 years ago, 80 years ago, whenever it was. 0.63

01:17:16.300 And you go to it, you go to the thing that always surprises me in a way is you go to any of the Red Army's cemeteries.

01:17:23.900 There's three in Berlin from the Battle of Berlin in 45.

01:17:27.100 The biggest one in Treptor Park, which is spectacular, sort of monuments and all sorts of things.

01:17:33.340 Gigantic.

01:17:33.960 But they're mass graves.

01:17:35.640 They're mass graves of 5,000 people each in each of these mass graves, right?

01:17:40.540 So the idea of the individual, and they're not repatriated.

01:17:44.720 I mean, the way that Americans repatriate their dead from war as a matter of routine.

01:17:48.960 And Russians don't do that, right? 1.00

01:17:52.640 Not only do they not do that, they put them into mass graves.

01:17:55.740 So there are no names, right?

01:17:57.560 We don't know who they are.

01:17:58.980 Which to a Western mind, with all of its individualism and all of that, is kind of completely anathema.

01:18:04.220 It's kind of, wow, that's punchy.

01:18:07.240 You know, that's just the way it works.

01:18:09.480 It's the way it worked in 45.

01:18:10.960 It's the way it works now.

01:18:12.000 And that comes direct from the Soviet lens, doesn't it?

01:18:15.620 Where the individual is not important.

01:18:17.120 That's on my shoulder than that.

01:18:18.400 I think it goes way back.

01:18:20.140 He's much older than that.

01:18:21.260 Much older, yeah.

01:18:22.380 And so what do you think about?

01:18:23.040 You can see this in...

01:18:25.040 The long, hard winter.

01:18:27.040 Yeah, I think it's, you know, man is...

01:18:29.780 The individual is kind of expendable.

01:18:32.560 There are greater goals to be had.

01:18:36.300 And we get them by moving together.

01:18:39.340 And if the individual falls off the side, then so be it.

01:18:42.500 It's that classic kind of, you know, communitarian mentality that the community is everything the individuals love.

01:18:52.300 There's another piece to it as well, which is Russia is a massive country.

01:18:56.080 And because of that, logistically, it was very difficult to govern.

01:19:00.100 And what you therefore needed is very strong central leadership to prevent the regions from becoming, you know, mini-tardums in which the local uppity king would do whatever he wanted.

01:19:12.380 And because of that, this is the anecdote I always use to explain this, to try and explain this to people, is one of the huge names in Russian history is, of course, Ivan the Terrible.

01:19:24.780 He's not called Ivan the Terrible in Russian.

01:19:27.980 It's not an inaccurate translation.

01:19:29.900 This is a man who killed his own son in a fit of rage, who, as a kid, tortured animals, who did all sorts of atrocious things.

01:19:36.960 In Russian... 0.99

01:19:37.520 Textbook psychopath. 1.00

01:19:37.880 Textbook psychopath. 0.67

01:19:39.540 In Russian, he's called Ivan the Fearsome and revered.

01:19:44.160 Yeah.

01:19:44.740 Stalin has a 50... 0.91

01:19:45.860 Stalin has a higher approval rating in Russia today than Joe Biden has in America or Boris Johnson has in this country.

01:19:51.480 Yeah.

01:19:52.420 That's the mentality.

01:19:53.820 And nobody in the West can understand this because you can't.

01:19:57.300 You can't.

01:19:58.200 If you operate under the Western moral framework, it's impossible to understand people who would bury 5,000 soldiers who secured victory in the deadliest war in the history of humanity.

01:20:07.880 In a mass grave.

01:20:10.040 You can't imagine that.

01:20:12.100 Yeah.

01:20:12.600 You know, in an ideal world, in an ideal world, they carry on the negotiations, which I think have been rather kind of cynically led, particularly on the Russian side so far.

01:20:23.320 That's a ruse to buy time, reorganize, whatever it is.

01:20:28.420 But anyway, at the moment, those negotiations, in an ideal world, you might see Ukraine being able to fight them effectively to a standstill or make the costs so great that Putin is ready to make some sort of deal.

01:20:42.040 And I think the best they could probably achieve from the Ukrainian perspective is a return to status quo. 1.00

01:20:47.860 So you can have Donetsk-Luhansk, you can have Crimea, but Ukraine is allowed to exist. 0.60

01:20:55.220 Now, whether it can exist with an independent, sovereign government is a quite open question.

01:21:00.200 But that's what it should demand.

01:21:02.620 Right?

01:21:02.720 I think anything else is kind of, you know, requiring it to be in a sphere of influence, pandering to Russian paranoia is a hollow victory.

01:21:16.500 So, for Ukraine.

01:21:18.000 So, that's an ideal scenario.

01:21:20.340 I think that's about as good as it's going to get.

01:21:21.880 The other side of the spectrum, the realistic side of the spectrum, is, I think, the destruction of Ukraine and occupation of Ukraine, which is going to be bloody. 0.51

01:21:37.100 And Ukraine's democratic ambitions, its ambitions to join the West, Western world in general, are going to be put back by decades.

01:21:47.240 So, it's very dark.

01:21:52.760 We're in a very dark place at the moment.

01:21:55.180 And this is why I say this is Cold War II.

01:21:58.740 We can't afford, I don't think, the West to, whatever happens in Ukraine, when it's over, go back to some pretend normal.

01:22:09.800 Because that would not be acceptable.

01:22:12.080 And it would be a betrayal of all of those brave Ukrainians who have fought like they have.

01:22:17.660 With that ambition of fighting for their sovereignty and their freedom and to decide their own future.

01:22:24.720 If we then carry on business as usual, Wandel, Deutsch, Handel, there's a betrayal of them.

01:22:32.280 And that shouldn't happen.

01:22:33.620 So, you know, we do need to carry on that fight.

01:22:37.340 Do you think the West, I mean, we've all been surprised in the last week by the resolve of the West.

01:22:42.180 But do you think if Ukraine is overrun, you know, Russia annexes the eastern and central part or installs a puppet government, do you think the West has the appetite to maintain these sanctions in perpetuity?

01:22:57.280 I hope so.

01:23:00.320 Honestly, I hope so.

01:23:03.840 And as I say, I don't think we can, in all conscience, go back to business as usual and sort of normalization.

01:23:10.560 Because you'd have an effect in a regime like Lukashenko in Belarus, in Ukraine.

01:23:17.140 I think that's probably the most likely outcome, which is horrible to say.

01:23:23.020 And to me, that is a tragedy for Ukraine.

01:23:31.460 And it's something that we should carry on, you know, carry the torch effectively for the freedom of Ukraine.

01:23:42.360 We certainly bolster our defenses on that eastern frontier.

01:23:45.200 You know, Poland has to make, you know, realize that it's a frontier country now, which I said that last week prior to the invasion.

01:23:55.420 It already has felt that way with Belarus and with the manufactured migrant crisis of a few months ago.

01:24:02.860 But Baltic states, Poland, you know, all those NATO members on the eastern fringe of Europe, we have to make sure that that is an inviolable line. 0.82

01:24:14.880 But no further, no step further.

01:24:17.480 But that means putting NATO troops on the ground.

01:24:19.100 That means putting troops on the ground.

01:24:20.020 Absolutely.

01:24:21.100 Absolutely.

01:24:22.040 Isn't that going to be seen as an antagonistic gesture?

01:24:24.480 Yeah, I think we're past that now.

01:24:26.300 I think we're way past that.

01:24:28.120 It's the same thing.

01:24:29.660 You go back to the parallels.

01:24:31.500 You talk about 1939.

01:24:32.380 The British and the French prevailed upon the Poles in three days before the German invasion.

01:24:37.720 They said, do not mobilize because it would be antagonistic to Germany.

01:24:41.500 You know, we're past that.

01:24:43.220 Yeah.

01:24:44.000 All right.

01:24:44.800 Roger Morehouse, thank you so much for joining us.

01:24:47.020 I'm going to lift this book again because it's really brilliant.

01:24:50.200 The Devil's Alliance.

01:24:51.160 The other stuff you've written is great as well.

01:24:52.680 But this, I think this gives a little bit of a better understanding of what we're dealing with.

01:24:57.240 I think it's very important for people to read this book and understand the history of that part of the world.

01:25:00.880 And it's beautifully written as well.

01:25:03.000 Really easy read.

01:25:04.020 So I recommend it.

01:25:04.700 The Devil's Alliance by Roger Morehouse.

01:25:06.440 Roger, thank you so much for joining us.

01:25:08.160 Thank you for watching.

01:25:09.240 Guys, just so you know, there will be no Raw show tonight because I'm on question time.

01:25:12.780 So check that out and boo at home and throw whatever you want to throw.

01:25:17.620 But we will see you tomorrow with our Raw show and the rest of the week will be as normal.

01:25:22.000 So thanks for joining us, Roger.

01:25:23.220 Thank you.

01:25:23.800 We'll see you very soon.

01:25:24.880 Take care.

01:25:25.340 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:25:27.840 Hey, Francis.

01:25:28.820 Would you like to learn another language?

01:25:30.880 No, mate.

01:25:31.580 Already know foreign languages perfectly.

01:25:34.660 Oi, Gary.

01:25:35.760 Uwe, le biblioteca.

01:25:37.720 You can't go on holiday, mate, without knowing where the swimming pool is. 1.00

01:25:42.000 Le bibliotec is the library, you idiot. 1.00

01:25:44.600 Exactly. 1.00

01:25:45.560 You can never be too far away from knowledge and sexually frustrated librarians.

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TRIGGERnometry - March 04, 2022

Historian Roger Moorhouse Explains Russia⧸Ukraine Crisis ＊Special Live Recording＊

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