00:04:24.020Anyway, Constantine is a translator, writer, social commentator, and is described as a Jewish-Russian-British comedian, which is a bit like one of those kind of jokes, a Jew, a Russian, and a Brit walk into a bar.
00:05:06.240It's available on the bookstore, so please go and get a copy.
00:05:09.400The way the Barney works is simply that I allow Constantine to do maybe a five-minute introduction, or as near to five minutes as we can get.
00:05:17.960Then I've got a whole series of questions which I've derived from reading the book, which hopefully will allow Constantine to draw out some of the more themes.
00:05:25.140If you haven't read it, you'll understand it maybe a little bit more.
00:05:28.160And then we come out to you, the audience, for your questions and comments on what you've heard and what you've read, yes, and more broadly.
00:05:34.260So, with no further ado, can we welcome, please, Constantine Kissin.
00:05:49.440One thing, I like disagreeing with people, so I'll immediately disagree with you in that you say the book is not about the war, and of course it isn't.
00:05:57.160But the main contention of the book is that what Frank Ferreira, who I just did a session with on Ukraine, talks about, which is what he calls the West's moral disarmament.
00:06:08.880And that is the complete loss of belief in our values, in the fact that they're important, in the fact, frankly, that they even exist.
00:06:16.580The idea that there's such a thing as British values or Western values is now something that a lot of people question.
00:06:23.140And my contention is, and has been from day one, and of course I wrote the book before the invasion of Ukraine, but people who've read it know that the preface essentially predicts what has happened.
00:06:35.600Because it is, in my view, inevitable that if the West weakens itself morally, economically, militarily, then the law of history is very clear.
00:06:47.760When the powerful forces that hold the current world order together abdicate their responsibility or abstain from that responsibility, then other people will attempt to fill that void.
00:06:59.240So it's unfortunately, because the situation in Ukraine is obviously very tragic, but it is unfortunately a very timely book, if I say so myself.
00:07:09.580But the point of the book is, I think, to remind people, most of all, that what we have in the West, the freedom, the prosperity, they didn't fall out of the sky.
00:07:23.400They're the product of centuries of intellectual debate, of actual war, of endless battles in order to attempt to work out what is a better way of governing than the way of governing that exists in most of the rest of the world, including the country from which I come, which is a strongman leader comes in, kills or imprisons anyone they don't agree with, and then they rule for as long as they can sustain that.
00:07:50.120That seems to me to be a better way of doing things.
00:07:53.140And I'd quite like people in the West to remember that and to be willing to defend that.
00:07:58.380So I wanted to write an immigrant's love letter to the West to remind people that, particularly young people who maybe haven't traveled very much, who haven't seen much of the rest of the world, who've grown up in comfort and prosperity,
00:08:10.400who don't really appreciate what we have here, how rare it is, how unique it is, and therefore how worthy of defending and protecting it is.
00:11:59.800We have to reclaim or, you know, the word woke, I think, is a very interesting one
00:12:05.520because obviously we all know it started out as a self-descriptor of people who thought that they were on the right side of history and blah, blah, blah.
00:12:13.380And then people like me started mocking it and then it became a derogatory term.
00:12:18.240And now it's kind of got to a point where I don't really use the word woke because I just think it's tarnished by all sorts of things.
00:12:23.960So these linguistic battles will always go on.
00:12:26.360My first invitation to people is, first of all, to recognize what is happening with language.
00:12:31.380So, for example, I always like to use this example, the term inclusion.
00:12:59.720And then the problem we've got is if you change the language, you can change the laws without legislating.
00:13:06.280And that's really the biggest problem.
00:13:07.900If you have laws that say people must be safe, right, that law is there to prevent violence against people.
00:13:16.140But if you change the meaning of the word safety, you've now got a law that is a law against people having the wrong opinions in public.
00:13:22.980So the first thing I think is we've got to be aware of it.
00:13:26.200And then, yes, culturally, satirists and, you know, podcasters and whoever can play with these other terms and make them terms of ridicule.
00:13:33.060So people can no longer have that shield of virtue when they're talking about being woke while advancing some very regressive ideas.
00:13:40.000Because it's always done by the tolerant, isn't it?
00:13:41.720Most tolerant people are intolerant of me and you.
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00:15:11.920And as a matter of fact, there is a kind of a debate to be had as to whether we do have a free and honest media.
00:15:17.500Well, we don't, but compared to Russia, we do.
00:15:19.280Well, compared to, you know, yeah, compared to Russia, China looks good.
00:15:23.900But I mean, the point is, is that are you letting the West off the hook by making those low bar comparisons?
00:15:31.260Well, I think anyone who follows my work knows that I'm not exactly a big fan of the mainstream media.
00:15:35.840And I've been very critical about many of the things.
00:15:39.100In fact, there's a whole chapter in the book, which is a sort of reproduction of a long Twitter thread that went quite viral during the pandemic, in which I talk about how misrepresentation, false messaging on that issue and on many previous issues has destroyed our faith in the media, which now means that people, you know, there's this kind of online meme of I support the current thing.
00:16:03.780And now there's the I oppose the current thing and people will blindly believe or disbelieve things simply because the mainstream is advancing them.
00:16:12.060But people also should not be confused.
00:16:14.440When we talk about societies like Russia and China, there is a difference between a media landscape, which is increasingly misrepresentative and not entirely accurate and people choosing and picking what they want to hear.
00:16:26.600And the society like China or Russia in Russia, for example, there is no independent media anymore.
00:16:35.00080% of the Russian public get their news from television, and that is entirely controlled by one man and his cronies who are able to enforce a particular vision of reality on the rest of society.
00:16:45.800So this is kind of the issue that I address with the whole book, which is, yes, we have problems in the West.
00:16:54.160Yes, some of the ways that our institutions have allowed themselves to be degraded over time are really, really bad and dangerous.
00:17:00.660And I talk about it in the book, but we mustn't throw away the baby with the bathwater.
00:17:05.300We do need a mainstream media for all the excitement that people like me have about new media and the destruction of the old way of doing things and whatever.
00:17:15.240But we still do need mainstream publications that will spend a million pounds doing some kind of genuine investigative journalism.
00:17:21.580We still do need mainstream institutions.
00:17:23.760I mean, I think the BBC is beyond saving, but the idea of the BBC is actually quite a good one and so on and so forth.
00:17:30.820So, yes, we don't have the perfect media landscape, but it's nothing like these authoritarian countries.
00:17:37.780And again, we shouldn't take that for granted.
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00:18:25.900But is there a more worthwhile, how would you deal with people criticizing the press in this country, regardless of how you do it?
00:18:34.040But I mean, by then them saying, actually, we are freer than what's going on in Russia, therefore, we should have the ability to criticize the media in the West.
00:20:24.840But does that mean that you are kind of in favor – you know, by teaching the ills of socialism, it means that in praise of something else by comparative standards.
00:20:34.740So do you want to have a politicized education system, which –
00:21:54.020So, I just – I don't necessarily recognize the characterization of this being a left-wing – I mean, socialism and communism are different.
00:22:02.120Marxism and communism, in some respects, are slightly different.
00:22:09.140I think it's your phrase based on this conversation.
00:22:11.160No, I don't think – for the record, I didn't say that.
00:22:15.300But, you know, so I'm happy for you to put words in my mouth.
00:22:17.820But it's that idea about, you know, teaching the ills of socialism was kind of a striking phrase for me.
00:22:22.640I mean, if you say the horrors of Nazism, I kind of understand it.
00:22:25.740So, are you saying about teaching, you know, what happened under Mao's China or what happened under, you know, what happened under Stalinist Russia?
00:22:32.680Yeah, but it's not just about what happened under Stalinist Russia.
00:22:35.500You've got to understand the Soviet Union carried on after Stalin.
00:22:38.660And it wasn't particularly great after that either.
00:22:41.540And the point I think that people don't seem to have really grasped in the West is the idea of communism is evil in and of itself.
00:22:50.820And it leads to evil outcomes because it is an evil idea.
00:22:54.100The idea that you must force people to be equal is evil, whether you are looking at it through the lens of class or race or sex or gender or whatever other bullshit people have come up with.
00:23:05.440The idea that you must put your hand on the lever and take from people who have drive and ambition and creativity and whatever else,
00:23:14.680and you must take from them as much as possible and give it to people who have none of those things and who are not contributing to society.
00:23:22.300And we should just be very clear about it.
00:23:24.200And the reason it's evil is not that it's not a good thing to redistribute wealth and income from one group of people to another.
00:23:30.200It's the amount of tyranny that it takes to achieve is inevitably going to lead to millions of people being killed, as it has done every time it's been tried.
00:23:41.400I don't recognize that characterization, but fair do.
00:23:44.060Although I recognize Stalinist purges and also Maoist purges as being one of the greatest crimes of society.
00:23:53.200Sorry, Austin, this is what people don't understand.
00:23:56.200More people died in Soviet Ukraine alone from an artificial famine created by the incompetency of the communist state than the Nazis killed during the entire occupation of the Soviet Union.
00:25:38.560It is a fair line of attack because I am known for pointing out the hypocrisy of people who say one thing and do another.
00:25:46.200And I think people like Bernie Sanders who went on holiday – not just on holiday.
00:25:52.000His honeymoon was in the Soviet Union, right?
00:25:55.180While people from my country that I come from were starving, were impoverished, were struggling to have basic necessities.
00:26:05.140He was there being given a tour by people he thought were just ordinary citizens who were actually KGB agents whose only job was to take around gullible Westerners like Bernie Sanders.
00:26:17.520And then he now is a multi, multi, multimillionaire who preaches socialism for everybody.
00:26:22.480It's hypocrisy and it's complete nonsense.
00:26:24.180I have much more respect for a Marxist like Cornel West, for example, who actually lives with the things that he preaches.
00:26:32.220My issues were people who are being inconsistent with the very principles that they espouse and in the process impoverishing all laws.
00:26:44.820Anyway, so the next question is comedians being targeted.
00:26:49.820It's kind of interesting that there's this kind of shtick that comedy or comedians are the last bastion of free speeches, which is actually quite interesting, isn't it?
00:26:59.660And just take a look in the last year, two years or so, comedians getting canceled left, right and center.
00:27:05.540And it's the idea that comedians should be allowed to say things in the context of a comedy routine, which kind of pushes the bar, pushes the boundary.
00:27:12.280So do comedians, should comedians have bigger room for maneuver than, say, me and you in this room?
00:27:23.520Why has it occurred that comedians seem to be in the forefront of actually challenging those kind of very woke speech code boundaries that we're all having to put up with?
00:27:33.000Well, the truth is that, Austin, most comedians are nowhere near challenging the woke boundaries of the modern society.
00:27:39.260They are actually enforcing them on other comedians.
00:27:41.500The few of us, people like myself, Francis, Andrew Doyle, Leo Kersnick, I mean, I can go on for a while in this country who are doing that, have all been pushed out of the mainstream comedy industry one way or another and have had to create things outside of that in order to even get our voices heard.
00:27:58.840But the reason that we are constantly – we use irony and satire a lot.
00:28:08.360And in a society which deliberately misrepresents jokes as somebody's actual opinion, comedians are obviously going to find themselves in the firing line pretty quickly.
00:28:18.400And, of course, comedians – the job comedians are actually supposed to have, in my opinion, is to push back against the dogma of their day, the dogma of the comedians who – the dogma that existed 20 and 30 years ago.
00:28:34.360When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Bill Hicks and George Carlin and others who were pushing against the Christian right, who were the ones saying, you can't say that, you can't do this, you can't – whatever.
00:28:44.660They've been replaced by a religious left.
00:28:47.300And it's the religious left that is enforcing its dogma on everybody at the moment.
00:28:52.280And it's – and the comedians who are attempting to challenge the dogma of the day find themselves up against that.
00:29:08.060What about – well, let me give you two quotes in the book which I just wanted to resolve for me.
00:29:13.260One is where you say more and more comedians are self-censoring for economic reasons and promoters are unlikely to rebook the act if they perceive it to be divisive.
00:29:23.080Then you say the beauty of capitalism is that consumers assert their democratic power with every penny they spend.
00:29:29.040So you have this kind of consumer power which you describe – the first quote seems to be kind of cancel culture that people are cancelling you and not coming to your show.
00:29:39.720But then the beauty of capitalism, people are allowed to do that.
00:29:42.400Is that a contradiction or is that –
00:29:43.840No, there's no contradiction because the comedy environment in this country is a complete cabal.
00:29:48.840It's a monopoly run by a handful of people who decide who gets which opportunities.
00:29:54.400And if the comedy industry in this country, as it has done, decides that the most important thing about a comedy show is that it's diverse as opposed to that it's funny,
00:30:04.380then you end up with the comedy shows that we've ended up with.
00:30:07.060And then what happens is they get canceled by the market.
00:30:09.180But first, the ideologues who are booking those shows and making those shows, they get to impose their will on a show like Mock the Week, which inevitably gets canceled.
00:30:18.780They get to impose their will on a show like The Mash Report, which I actually wrote on for a while, which inevitably gets canceled.
00:30:24.540They get to impose their will on a show like Live at the Apollo, which will soon be canceled because no one watches it anymore.
00:30:29.920So you've got a deluded monopolistic cabal that runs the industry, and then you've got the market which punishes them for the things that they're doing that don't actually meet what people want to watch.
00:30:41.680And I always have to say this because it always sounds like I'm sort of whining and complaining.
00:30:57.460It's just that much harder, and because of that, a lot of people are terrified.
00:31:01.660They won't cross any lines, and I can tell you there are hundreds of comedians in this country who would love to be able to do the jokes that they want to do,
00:31:08.420but instead they're going around doing dick jokes because it's the only thing that's acceptable anymore.
00:31:16.980Finally then, which follows on from that, I suppose, you say towards the end of the book, you say that your status as an immigrant means that you're protected from the worst of cancel culture.
00:31:27.460And you describe yourself as Teflon-courted, untouchable immigrant.
00:31:34.240Well, I look at Lebedev and think it didn't work for him, did it?
00:31:36.640But I mean, does it make, I mean, would that assume that then you're a bit too obliging?
00:31:43.840You're too, dare I say, tame to be cancelled?
00:31:46.120Are you too, I don't know, are you too much engaged in supporting the Western model?
00:31:53.220Never been described as tame before, I promise you.
00:31:56.640It's not a quality people usually associate with me.
00:31:59.660No, I think the point I'm making about sort of immigrant privilege, if you like, in the context of this conversation is,
00:32:05.120I don't believe that I would be sitting here having this conversation with you if I was a British-born straight white man, that great evil thing.
00:32:13.620Because the book would never have been published in the first place.
00:32:15.960And it wasn't particularly easy to get it published anyway.
00:32:17.920People don't know this about the creative arts and publishing in this country in general,
00:32:23.440but there's literally like one literary agent and one publisher that will publish books like this one.
00:32:30.780And so we live in a very restricted environment.
00:32:33.500And the only reason even those publishers and even those agents and even those people are able to work with someone like me,
00:32:39.940is they can go, well, guys, guys, guys, he's not white, it's okay.
00:32:44.260And that to me seems like quite a big problem.
00:33:49.220I think there's quite a lot of people in this country of every background who are very patriotic about Britain.
00:33:54.480But they are concerned about being – because, you know, being patriotic has been confused with all sorts of, you know, xenophobia, racism, whatever.
00:34:05.960But in terms of the Solzhenitsyn comparison and Orwell, I mean, those are two people that I have read.
00:34:14.300So, I feel very British about trying to compare myself to people that I consider great.
00:34:20.040I think I actually – while I'm a – you know, Solzhenitsyn is one of the most formative influences on my thinking, and I quote him in the opening of the book.
00:34:31.580And I actually try to avoid repeating his mistake because the mistake that he made is when he was released from the camps.
00:34:40.180He was able to publish the Gulag Archipelago, and he was eventually invited to go to the West.
00:34:47.100And he went to America where he started lecturing Americans about what was going wrong with their society.
00:34:52.820And Americans don't like that, which is why I've come to Britain, where you love being told how terrible you are.
00:34:59.340So, I can tell you how to right your wrongs.