00:02:32.160And what we wanted to explore with you is, A, you know, how that was generated and perhaps fill in some of the blanks and the gaps and, you know,
00:02:39.600contextualize and add the nuance that I think history always requires.
00:03:11.720A lot of children will only do history for two hours a week, let's say, or two 40-minute sessions.
00:03:16.440So, they're not covering a huge amount of ground, first of all.
00:03:20.860But I think the actual, the mood music about history, which I agree, in the last, let's say, 15 years, has been intensely moralistic,
00:03:30.660certainly compared with when I was growing up.
00:03:32.740By the way, before you get into that, maybe the right question, is that wrong?
00:03:36.640Like, should we not be trying to learn the moral lessons from the past?
00:03:40.320Is it just, like, evil reactionaries like the three of us who are like, you know, we can't judge people by the new standards?
00:03:46.420Are we wrong to be moralistic about history?
00:03:48.920No, I think that's a very good point, and not necessarily, right?
00:03:51.640There have often been ages where people are very moralistic about history.
00:03:54.300So, for example, if you went back to, a lot of people watching this, if they are evil reactionaries, will say, oh, we should be just like the Victorians.
00:03:59.840But the Victorians were intensely moralistic about history, and they really did tell it as heroes and villains.
00:04:05.400So, there's always been a tendency within history, I think, to see it as black and white, you know, good is and bad is.
00:04:11.800And that goes back as long as people have been writing history at all.
00:04:15.580So, you know, if you read, I don't know, Roman historians, let's say, my co-presenter's favorite subject, Tacitus, Suetonius, or something,
00:07:52.180Or it's actually, it's not even that it's not our place.
00:07:54.600It's a bit boring to say, oh, gosh, well, I'm so terribly moral and these people are so immoral and they live there and they go so compared with me.
00:08:02.580So obviously I think that's a really foolish way to think about human nature and a slightly, it's a very egotistical and self-promoting and pompous way to talk about yourself as opposed to the people who were your predecessors.
00:08:14.020Well, I would almost say that it's a denial of human nature.
00:08:17.900What's interesting to me, though, is how, why you think that tendency has happened.
00:08:23.300I mean, one of the things we might blame is the fact that we've had this massive period of, I use inverted commas when I say peace, but really, if you live in the West, if you've not voluntarily enlisted to go and fight, other than the war in Vietnam, which was many, many decades ago now, you've never really had to be confronted with the reality that if you, even I walk around London, we're sitting here in the heart of London.
00:08:48.700Almost every monument is to do with war.
00:08:51.880And yet no one in our, almost essentially the three generations that anybody will know themselves, their parents and their grandparents, has any experience of that really in the West at all.
00:09:19.240I mean, we don't actually do that, but yeah, it's a pleasant change from arguing with idiots.
00:09:24.300No, but I do completely agree with you.
00:09:26.540I think what we have lost is somebody described it as a sense of the tragic.
00:09:32.160So, for example, we no longer have coalitions with a sense of the tragic, a sense of how close we always are to the precipice, as it were.
00:09:40.300But not just actually to the precipice as in terms of, you know, our civilization could fall apart, a load of people would turn up in our village and kind of burn all the houses down and rape and ravage and behave really badly, but also how close we are to the beasts within ourselves, as it were.
00:09:54.280Now, I think if people who had been, who lived in societies that were geared for war and where war was a fairly regular occurrence, that would not be surprising.
00:10:03.880In other words, I mean, you just think about it in terms, you don't have to go very far back in history.
00:10:08.020So, go back to, let's say, the first half of the last century.
00:10:13.440You have in Central and Eastern Europe endless little conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s.
00:10:19.280You know, if you're really unlucky and you're living in what's now Eastern Poland or Belarus or Western Ukraine, you know, the borders are changing every few years.
00:10:28.900Endless pogroms, ethnic cleansing, all of this kind of thing.
00:10:32.300I mean, those are people who really do have a sense of the tragic because they know that things can change with dizzying speed and in a couple of years, the people who you've relied on all your life, who are your neighbors, may turn on you and try to kill you.
00:10:44.080And I think what's clearly happened is that we now have a slightly sanitized and self-deluding idealistic view of human nature and of what we're capable of.
00:10:56.620And a great example of this, from the period that I've written about, is the way that people thought about war and war crimes.
00:11:04.500So, for example, in the Falklands War in the 1980s.
00:11:07.720So, the Falklands War, by the standards of wars, is a really, really clean war.
00:11:11.940It's been fought over islands where only a tiny population live.
00:11:16.040The two groups of people who are fighting over the islands, the Argentines and the British, most of them have never been to the islands before.
00:11:22.900So, it doesn't feel personal for them.
00:11:24.900They're almost fighting, it's as though they're fighting kind of, they've agreed neutral territory and they're fighting on this neutral territory.
00:11:30.680There are no war crimes against civilians because the civilian population is so small.
00:11:35.200So, actually, it's a sort of, in inverted commas, a fair fight.
00:11:38.880But after that war happened about, let's say, eight or nine years later, when servicemen started to write their memoirs,
00:11:47.300they would describe things like, for example, cutting off ears of enemy soldiers who had been killed as souvenirs.
00:11:57.480I mean, it sounds, a lot of people watching this will be like, wow, that's pretty horrific, right?
00:12:01.540That you would take a trophy or posing for photos with dead bodies.
00:12:56.440But these things happen in wars, and people who had fought in previous wars were unsurprised by the reports coming from the Falklands.
00:13:02.480They were like, come on, this is what happens.
00:13:04.360You train young men to fight, you know, to do the most savage thing possible, to kill other young men.
00:13:11.040And that line is always going to be a little bit more gray and a bit slippery than we would like.
00:13:16.820Let's not, you know, be pearl-clutching about this.
00:13:19.460But I think what that reaction suggests, and of course the reaction to what's happened since in stories coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever,
00:13:28.260is that probably we have, we like our conflict now, very sanitized.
00:14:20.100And actually, he's a fascinating figure because on the one hand with Cromwell, you talk to my Irish family, for example,
00:14:28.580and you can't hear anything but, you know, expletive, laden, invective from them, rightly so.
00:14:34.640And on the other hand, father of democracy in this country, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:39.360But what's really interesting is how we can't seem to accept that people like Cromwell, great figures of history, have this duality to them.
00:15:03.540And I think anybody who thinks at all seriously about human nature or about even the characters that you meet in great literature or something,
00:15:15.140you don't even have to think about the people that you know.
00:15:16.740You know that people are capable of tremendous things but also terrible things.
00:15:23.820I mean, Cromwell, I think, is the most fascinating character in all English and, indeed, British history.
00:15:30.340He's much more complicated than people think.
00:15:33.680He's actually much more fun-loving than people think, by the way.
00:15:39.620Anyway, we don't need to get into all that.
00:15:41.200But, yeah, Cromwell can be a very savage character.
00:15:48.120You know, when he's commanding at some of his later battles, people describe him kind of laughing as though he's drunk.
00:15:54.500You know, he's seized with this kind of martial spirit in the sense that actually we might find very unsettling now that he's doing God's work
00:16:02.800and his opponents are God's enemies and, therefore, they will be, you know, he will scythe through them as though through chaff or whatever.
00:16:11.200So that side of Cromwell, lots of people might find very unsettling.
00:16:14.520And yet, on the other hand, he's somebody who wrestles with his conscience, wrestles with what he thinks is God's plan, feels himself unworthy.
00:16:25.660You know, one of the reasons in the 1650s after he basically, he's got effectively supreme power.
00:16:31.380And he wrestles with this issue about whether he should take the crown or not.
00:16:35.900It's, you know, would that be too arrogant?
00:16:42.400You know, most dictators don't think like that.
00:16:44.340Most dictators can't wait to get their hands on the ground.
00:16:46.540So I think Cromwell's a fascinating character.
00:16:49.620And he's a really good example of somebody who, you know, there's a statue of him just down the road from us outside the Palace of Westminster.
00:16:57.340Because, as you say, he is seen as one of the, you know, the people in the Victorian period, in the late Victorian period, saw him as one of the great heroes of democracy in this country.
00:17:06.580Would I like to see, I've got an Irish wife, would I like to see Cromwell's statue taken down?
00:17:39.620And in particular, let's look at the British Empire.
00:17:42.360Because, as someone who has a South American background, I actually find it infuriating when people talk about the British Empire, and they're like, this is the most evil empire that's ever lived.
00:18:16.920And actually, it's something that we share, actually, with our American cousins.
00:18:20.960You know, they love to—no coup can happen anywhere in the world, but the CIA's fingerprints aren't all over it, according to kind of, you know, very ultra-liberal kind of American commentators.
00:18:30.140You know, indigenous people or people in foreign countries never have any agency.
00:18:34.420It's always got to be the evil American puppet masters who have done it.
00:18:37.420And as you say, with the British Empire, there's a narcissism about some of the commentary about it, which is kind of, we have to be the most evil.
00:18:52.600Now, on empires more generally, my view on empires is actually very simple.
00:18:57.680The empire is the natural unit of human organization.
00:19:00.700There are others, of course, and we live in an age now where lots of people watching this will think of the nation-state as the most sort of obvious and natural model.
00:19:49.940I think what makes the British Empire quite really interesting and really unusual is that right from the beginning, it has the seeds of its own dissolution in it.
00:19:59.820Because one of the things that it exports is the idea of, you know, the rule of law, liberal democracy, all of those kinds of things.
00:20:07.600So from the beginning, the British Empire is kind of an internal argument.
00:20:12.800There are always lots of people in Britain who don't like the idea of colonization and of dominance and so on.
00:20:19.460There are always ferocious arguments about it.
00:20:21.420Some of the British Empire's most well-known, celebrated critics, Gandhi, a great example, these are people who are profoundly shaped by British institutions, British traditions, by the British idea of fairness and freedom and all of those kinds of things.
00:20:43.060The kind of rhetoric of liberty, if you like, that's not to say, of course, there's elements of hypocrisy and greed and all of these things in the British Empire, as there are in all human phenomena, all human institutions.
00:20:55.160But, I mean, to go back to your point about, you know, the Belgians, the Portuguese, the Spanish and so on, if you had, you know, it's a bit like the philosopher kind of John Rawls' famous sort of conceit, which is, you know, if you could choose, if you had to make a blind choice and you didn't know how rich you were going to be, you didn't know what you were going to look like, but where would you choose to kind of start again?
00:21:18.220And you had to choose an empire, a European colonial empire in which to do it.
00:21:22.820I think the British Empire would be a pretty good place to choose.
00:21:26.360I mean, it's definitely not the Belgian Congo, right?
00:21:28.640It's not, you know, you're not in Mexico in the 19, in the 1520s, kind of ravaged by smallpox with Cortez and the conquistadors rampaging around what becomes Mexico City.
00:21:40.380So, yeah, I think the British Empire, it's clearly not the most evil empire in history.
00:21:48.560It's not dedicated to extermination or to violence in the way that the Third Reich is or whatever.
00:21:56.280So those comparisons that you see quite a lot nowadays, especially online, just strike me as utterly bonfaces.
00:22:02.060Well, they are. And one of the things that also bothers me about this, and you mentioned, you know, Central America, for example, there is this sort of idea that, you know, everyone's living peacefully and singing Kumbaya and holding hands.
00:22:16.140And then these evil Europeans arrived and, like, started being violent.
00:22:26.740Like, you know, the more I read about the Native Americans in North America, I suddenly figure out, oh, they're not really, they weren't really, you know, they weren't really that peaceful or loving or...
00:22:38.260No, no, no. There are very simplistic ways of talking about this.
00:22:40.460So even the distinction between indigenous people and European colonizers is wrong because often, so to give the example of the Aztecs, the Aztecs had come from somewhere else.
00:22:50.120They were armed migrants, or you might call them colonizers, themselves.
00:22:55.800They'd come from probably from what's now, roughly what's now Colorado.
00:40:43.500So that allows opportunists and charlatans and whatnot to enter the conversation, dominate the conversation instead.
00:40:52.120And once you've left that arena, and if you're not very good at speaking to the public, then it becomes very hard to fight back against it.
00:40:58.260Donnie, I want to talk to you about the evil because a lot of people use that word, particularly to talk about events in history,
00:41:05.660whether it's the British Empire, whether it's Adolf Hitler.
00:41:10.460And Adolf Hitler, when we think about evil, we think about Adolf Hitler.
00:41:14.660And you look at these people and you go – in Hitler's mind, obviously what he did was horrendous and evil.
00:41:23.120But in his own mind, he thought he was doing good.
00:42:42.320There's never a moment, I think, where people, you know, willfully, genuinely cast themselves as the villains.
00:42:52.860So to take your example of the Nazis, we did an episode of The Rest is History about Nazi ideology and about why they thought they were – you know, they were doing not God's work, but they were doing science's work, actually.
00:43:04.860They thought life was racial struggle and they believed that they were, you know, operating in the cause of racial hygiene and that they would leave Germany a better place and the world a better place, right?
00:43:18.400Right? That's what Nazi ideologists think. It's what they tell their soldiers.
00:43:22.020They're soldiers, they're soldiers, even as they're carrying out what would strike us as appalling atrocities on the Eastern Front, they sort of will write in their diaries and their letters, they'll say, well, it sounded, you know, might sound grim, but it kind of had to be done and it's better that we've done it.
00:43:36.700I think there are – it's very hard to find people in history who say, I know this is evil and I'm actually a terrible person, but does Stalin think he's a bad man? I would say not.
00:43:50.500All that we know about Stalin is that – you see, I don't think Stalin is, in inverted commas, a monster. I think Stalin is a Marxist, which is slightly different.
00:43:59.400If I can say that a monster and a Marxist on this show are two different things.
00:44:03.560So Stalin thinks – he takes his Marxism very seriously. I think the recent scholarship on Stalin has really emphasized the extent to which he's a true believer in his own ideology.
00:44:12.800He thinks he's operating, again, not unlike the Nazis, following scientific laws that will lead to human progress and that the world will be a better place and that collectivization or purges, getting rid of enemies, all of these kinds of things, that ultimately the world will be better afterwards.
00:44:31.280And he will have done tough work, you know, dirty work, but it had to be done.
00:44:37.180That's what a lot of people think in history, that this was – you know, more interesting people.
00:44:42.740Of course there are always people who are just sort of boringly greedy and venal and corrupt or whatever.
00:44:49.160But somebody like Stalin, I think, is interesting and chilling precisely because he thinks he's on the side of right.
00:45:01.420Now, Hitler undoubtedly thought of himself as a good person, as somebody who would be rewarded by posterity for having done what had to be done to make Germany safer, cleaner, happier, racially pure, all of those kinds of things.
00:45:17.320It's very shocking for us to think that people would think that they were the good guys.
00:45:21.740But people in history always think they're the good guys.
00:45:24.280They're always the heroes of their own story.
00:45:26.080It's one of the reasons I always – I've talked about this a lot.
00:45:38.540People who like torturing other people or killing other people for the sake of it, right?
00:45:42.300But it's very difficult if you're evil to motivate millions of other people to join you.
00:45:48.960However, if you have a very persuasive story about why certain evil things need to be done for the greater good, that's when you can persuade yourself into ignoring rules, conscience, whatever.
00:46:01.640And you can lead millions of people behind you, which is why I am always very wary of people who have this very strong sense of certainty about the fact that they are leading us in the right direction.
00:46:16.160And just this one time, we just need to ignore the rules of normal behavior just to get to – you know, we'll just suspend democracy for a bit.
00:46:39.180Pol Pot, when Khmer Rouge came in in Cambodia in the 1970s, year zero, emptied the cities, started again on the land, they think they are going to make a better world.
00:46:49.420And, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.
00:46:52.820That's what the Jacobin thought in the French Revolution.
00:46:56.460It's funny because I was rereading The Handmaid's Tale the other day.
00:47:00.860You know, Margaret Atwood's sort of feminist sort of science speculative fiction book, which lots of people watching this will have seen the TV adaptation.
00:47:10.820And she gave an interview about that when she said, you know, the real enemy here, it's absolutely not an anti-religious book.
00:47:17.860The real enemy is, and I quote, utopian idealism because the people who are the oppressors, who run the regime, think they are doing the right thing.
00:47:27.560And I think all great, you know, dystopias, 1984, Brave New World, whatever, the villains, as it were, are people who think they're good people.
00:47:36.020And I completely agree with you, and this is probably because I'm a very reactionary person as well, but the enemy is certainty.
00:47:43.540The enemy is people who say, I know what should be done.
00:47:51.940And that goes back to the point I was making earlier about, you know, losing the sense of the tragic.
00:47:56.120And one of the things that I think the sense of the tragic makes you aware of is your own weakness and frailty and your own, you know, that I think if we're honest with ourselves, we know that we could be greedy and corrupt and violent and sadistic.
00:48:13.340Because we know from history, by the way, that lots of unexpected people have that in them.
00:48:18.740They're kind of all those people who previously had been a boring bank clerk in Hanover, but actually suddenly for a few months in 1941 or 1942 turn out to be the most unbelievable sadistic killers and then go back and be a boring bank clerk again for the rest of their lives.
00:48:37.380You know, there's a lot about bankers.
00:48:40.260But I think with all of us, knowledge of the beast is so important.
00:49:12.040Yeah, but what Churchill believes in is, first of all, Churchill is very aware of his own flaws and his own frailty precisely because he's made so many mistakes.
00:49:21.620So Churchill knows that he has a terrible screw up in him at any given moment.
00:49:26.860You know, and his mad schemes, often they don't work.
00:49:29.920Churchill, I think, has a, it's one reason I'm always slightly baffled by the intense antipathy to Churchill by sort of the more sort of woke element.
00:49:38.180It's that I think Churchill, of all historical characters, has a very kind of generous human sense of his own frailties, the qualities and frailties of others, how complicated life is.
00:49:52.680You know, you only have to read his memoir, My Early Life, when he's talking about, you know, serving in the northwest frontier in India.
00:49:58.920He's talking about the men he served with, Indians as well as British.
00:50:01.880There's a kind of, there's a wryness to it and an awareness of kind of the complexity of human life and human nature.
00:50:10.320So sure, Churchill has things he really believes in.
00:50:16.460He believes that Britain stands for freedom and that the Nazis are bad people and that Hitler is a threat to democracy and all of those kinds of things.
00:50:23.080But I don't think that is, I don't think that flows from that sort of intensely moralistic, slightly self-promoting certainty that we're talking about, which is the sense of I'm a good person.
00:50:37.420I'm a really kind and, you know, a generous person and I'm on the side of the angels and all of that kind of thing.
00:50:43.960I think Churchill absolutely did have the sense, what I would call the sense of the tragedy.
00:50:47.000So in other words, Churchill believes that, you know, life can be pretty brutal and because he's seen war up front, you know, he knows how tough it can be.
00:50:56.920And I don't think he thinks, he thinks we're going to muddle through, you know, his famous catchphrase, keep buggering on, KBO.
00:51:03.600You know, you keep, just keep going and you'll get there eventually.
00:51:06.840But Churchill doesn't think, you know, I will lead the world into a place where everybody, you know, there'll be kind of lambs gambling in the fields and everybody will be singing Kumbaya and all of that kind of thing.
00:51:19.200Churchill's not an idealist in that sense, I think.
00:51:21.560His life, he is devoted, he's devoted his life to kind of quite concrete things, to Britain, to its empire, to, you know, its traditions, its history, all of that.
00:51:35.060And I think one of the other things, because I agree with Francis in the sense that I think quite often the people who really do make a difference in the world, the people who have very strong faith in things that they believe in, that they want to bring in, the changes they want to make, etc.
00:51:51.280I think the issue is quite often what you're willing to do.
00:51:57.840And if you're willing to violate particular standards and norms and rules about not hurting other people, not killing other people, not, you know, disenfranchising other people in order to achieve your goals, that's where I see the distinction, right?
00:52:13.060Because if you firmly believe in a particular worldview, well, that's fine, as long as you're not willing to use that to hurt other people.
00:52:21.300So I think there's a couple of things.
00:52:22.220I think one of them is seeing other people as expendable, other human beings' lives as expendable.
00:52:25.880I mean, that's obviously what they're saying.
00:52:37.640I think once you're using that sort of language, you know, politicians always, by definition, a political leader will have to make bad choices that would involve some people getting hurt, right?
00:52:47.900Even if it's in a very small way because they're going to lose a benefit or they're going to pay the tax or something, right?
00:53:17.080I think the dying part is where I'm aiming my…
00:53:19.860And I think the corollary of that, to go back to your point about certainty, I think there's a difference between believing something strongly and being suffocatingly certain about it.
00:53:32.200So, in other words, I would say, I mean, you obviously believe something strongly, right?