TRIGGERnometry - The Best Conversation About History You’ve Ever Heard - Dominic Sandbrook

00:00:00.000 The mood music about history, which I agree, in the last, let's say, 15 years,

00:00:08.240 has been intensely moralistic.

00:00:11.360 Is that wrong? Like, should we not be trying to learn the moral lessons from the past?

00:00:16.260 The biggest killers were utopian idealists.

00:00:19.640 They were people who believed in a better world.

00:00:21.540 Hitler undoubtedly, you know, it sounds weird to say it, but he's an idealist. 0.81

00:00:24.640 Stalin is obviously an idealist. Mao is an idealist.

00:00:27.100 They think they are going to make a better world.

00:00:31.000 We now have a slightly sanitized and a self-deluding idealistic view of human nature

00:00:39.480 and of what we're capable of.

00:00:40.860 They've been completely insulated from the beast in other people and in themselves.

00:00:45.560 Knowledge of the beast is so important.

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00:01:48.880 Dominic Sambra, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:50.740 Thank you for having me.

00:01:51.360 It's a great privilege.

00:01:52.160 It's an honor to be here.

00:01:52.920 It's an honor for us to have you.

00:01:54.220 You're, of course, part of the hugely successful The Rest is History podcast with our former and future guest, Tom Holland.

00:02:01.380 And history has always been a fascination of ours.

00:02:04.080 Our audience love our history episodes.

00:02:05.860 It's great to have you here.

00:02:06.860 The thing we wanted to talk about with you is, I think, given the current political climate and everything else that's been going on,

00:02:14.760 a lot of people are kind of aware of the fact that the way history has been taught for quite some time now

00:02:19.700 has produced people who see a history, our history, the history of the West, the history of much of the world, really,

00:02:26.300 in very one-dimensional, black and white, quite moralizing terms.

00:02:31.760 Yeah.

00:02:32.160 And 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,

00:02:39.600 contextualize and add the nuance that I think history always requires.

00:02:43.600 So, first of all, how do we get here?

00:02:46.120 It's a good question.

00:02:47.120 I think it's not so much actually about how history is taught, but it's how we talk about history more generally.

00:02:53.620 So, I do a lot of talks in schools, events in schools, to sort of promote history and whatnot.

00:03:02.120 And I'm actually always struck by how enthusiastic the teachers are, how committed to history, but also how little time they have.

00:03:10.540 So, they have very little time.

00:03:11.720 A lot of children will only do history for two hours a week, let's say, or two 40-minute sessions.

00:03:16.440 So, they're not covering a huge amount of ground, first of all.

00:03:20.860 But I think the actual, the mood music about history, which I agree, in the last, let's say, 15 years, has been intensely moralistic,

00:03:30.660 certainly compared with when I was growing up.

00:03:32.740 By the way, before you get into that, maybe the right question, is that wrong?

00:03:36.640 Like, should we not be trying to learn the moral lessons from the past?

00:03:40.320 Is it just, like, evil reactionaries like the three of us who are like, you know, we can't judge people by the new standards?

00:03:46.420 Are we wrong to be moralistic about history?

00:03:48.920 No, I think that's a very good point, and not necessarily, right?

00:03:51.640 There have often been ages where people are very moralistic about history.

00:03:54.300 So, 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.

00:03:59.840 But the Victorians were intensely moralistic about history, and they really did tell it as heroes and villains.

00:04:05.400 So, there's always been a tendency within history, I think, to see it as black and white, you know, good is and bad is.

00:04:11.800 And that goes back as long as people have been writing history at all.

00:04:15.580 So, you know, if you read, I don't know, Roman historians, let's say, my co-presenter's favorite subject, Tacitus, Suetonius, or something,

00:04:26.460 those accounts are very moralistic.

00:04:28.580 You know, you've got bad emperors and good emperors.

00:04:31.500 And often, there's not much nuance when you're talking about Caligula or Nero or whoever it might be.

00:04:37.600 But I think when I was doing history, so let's say the 1980s, 1990s, the general discourse, I suppose, was not terribly judgmental.

00:04:51.040 So, in other words, there was no premium placed, there was no great value placed on you saying,

00:04:58.360 well, this person is a terrible person, and I want to tear them down, and I want to, you know, diminish them.

00:05:03.500 And this person, everyone has said this person is a great, Florence Nightingale, or whoever it might be. 0.98

00:05:07.820 And actually, they're a terrible person.

00:05:09.580 I think there was an awareness that we're all terrible people.

00:05:12.740 And so it's not actually a very interesting conversation to have.

00:05:15.760 And I was quite conscious when I was doing my PhD and whatnot in the late 90s, early 2000s, I did American history,

00:05:25.720 so listening to a lot of people coming from America, that there was a new mood coming in actually from America.

00:05:33.700 I think a lot of this has come from the US, which was much more moralistic, which was much more about,

00:05:40.160 I mean, there's a very famous example in the early 1990s, a huge argument about Thomas Jefferson.

00:05:45.720 Had he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, and therefore should Jefferson effectively be cancelled?

00:05:52.260 People didn't use that terminology then, but that conversation was already happening.

00:05:56.000 And that was a sort of harbinger, I think, of what was to come in the 2000s, then obviously even more so in the 2010s,

00:06:02.840 and then 2020, the kind of high point of it, the Black Lives Matter kind of George Floyd statue-toppling moment.

00:06:10.580 And for people of a slightly older generation like me, that's very disconcerting,

00:06:15.780 because I had grown up thinking, you know, very much history is warts and all,

00:06:20.380 but that doesn't mean, you know, you are open about violence and cruelty and all those things that happened in the past,

00:06:27.720 but you don't set yourself up as a hanging judge.

00:06:31.380 And I think it's a question of tone, actually.

00:06:34.300 It's not a question of what the story is that you're telling, but it's how you tell it.

00:06:38.020 So in other words, anybody who wrote about the British Empire, to give you an example,

00:06:43.240 anyone who wrote about the British Empire from the moment that it was happening knew that there was a lot of violence, right?

00:06:48.460 They knew that when the Indian mutiny happened and the British re-established their authority,

00:06:55.300 that there were reprisals and they fired people out for cannons and all of that kind of thing.

00:06:59.620 But for a long time, when people told that story, they sort of said,

00:07:02.500 well, obviously there were reprisals and very terrible things happened and there was a lot of savagery and blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:07:07.460 You know, that's not surprising because that's how people behave in history.

00:07:11.900 But I think what changed was the tone with which people described those events.

00:07:15.080 So suddenly instead of saying, you know, it's very, the grim things happen in history, history is often very dark, so be it.

00:07:22.020 People, there was a lot of suddenly then a weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and this is terrible.

00:07:27.320 How could this have happened?

00:07:28.380 We should tear down the plaques to these people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:07:32.340 Almost as though people were indignant and affronted and surprised that something so terrible could have happened in history.

00:07:40.380 Whereas I, when I approach history, think, of course people behave selfishly, greedily, you know, sadistically, because that's in us.

00:07:48.500 We would be no different.

00:07:50.160 And it's not our place.

00:07:52.180 Or it's actually, it's not even that it's not our place.

00:07:54.600 It'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.

00:08:02.580 So 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.

00:08:14.020 Well, I would almost say that it's a denial of human nature.

00:08:17.900 What's interesting to me, though, is how, why you think that tendency has happened.

00:08:23.300 I 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.

00:08:48.700 Almost every monument is to do with war.

00:08:51.880 And 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.

00:09:03.020 Is that why?

00:09:03.940 Yeah, I completely agree with you.

00:09:05.200 Sorry, it's very boring for you to have a guest on the podcast who just tells you that he's here.

00:09:08.000 No, isn't it?

00:09:08.420 It's great.

00:09:09.100 My ego gets bigger and bigger.

00:09:11.260 That's what we do.

00:09:11.940 We bring experts on to make ourselves feel good.

00:09:14.500 You know you'll already agree with me.

00:09:15.240 Right.

00:09:16.500 I mean, that is a podcast model.

00:09:18.360 Let's be fair. 1.00

00:09:19.240 I mean, we don't actually do that, but yeah, it's a pleasant change from arguing with idiots. 0.99

00:09:24.300 No, but I do completely agree with you. 0.99

00:09:26.540 I think what we have lost is somebody described it as a sense of the tragic.

00:09:32.160 So, 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.

00:09:40.300 But 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.

00:09:54.280 Now, 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.

00:10:03.880 In other words, I mean, you just think about it in terms, you don't have to go very far back in history.

00:10:08.020 So, go back to, let's say, the first half of the last century.

00:10:11.780 You've got two world wars.

00:10:13.440 You have in Central and Eastern Europe endless little conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s.

00:10:19.280 You 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.

00:10:28.900 Endless pogroms, ethnic cleansing, all of this kind of thing.

00:10:32.300 I 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.

00:10:44.080 And 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.

00:10:56.620 And a great example of this, from the period that I've written about, is the way that people thought about war and war crimes.

00:11:04.500 So, for example, in the Falklands War in the 1980s.

00:11:07.720 So, the Falklands War, by the standards of wars, is a really, really clean war.

00:11:11.940 It's been fought over islands where only a tiny population live.

00:11:16.040 The 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.

00:11:22.900 So, it doesn't feel personal for them.

00:11:24.900 They'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.

00:11:30.680 There are no war crimes against civilians because the civilian population is so small.

00:11:35.200 So, actually, it's a sort of, in inverted commas, a fair fight.

00:11:38.880 But after that war happened about, let's say, eight or nine years later, when servicemen started to write their memoirs,

00:11:47.300 they would describe things like, for example, cutting off ears of enemy soldiers who had been killed as souvenirs.

00:11:57.480 I mean, it sounds, a lot of people watching this will be like, wow, that's pretty horrific, right?

00:12:01.540 That you would take a trophy or posing for photos with dead bodies.

00:12:06.840 Those kinds of things.

00:12:08.020 Is that a war crime? 0.55

00:12:08.760 I mean, people, I guess, can make up their own mind about that.

00:12:11.780 But here's the thing.

00:12:12.780 When that was first reported, oh, whoa, oh, what terrible behavior.

00:12:16.880 How could we have behaved so badly?

00:12:18.340 This is unbelievable.

00:12:19.340 We have to have investigations.

00:12:20.720 And then furious arguments.

00:12:21.900 Other people say, no, that didn't happen at all.

00:12:23.840 But actually, if you read any account of previous wars, anybody who'd fought in previous wars would say,

00:12:30.080 I mean, as grim as this is, this is pretty standard stuff.

00:12:34.920 You know, Canadian soldiers at D-Day were notorious for, I mean, notorious is a very loaded word.

00:12:41.200 They were well known for, you know, taking ears, taking trophies, for being really kind of, you know, they were pretty hardcore.

00:12:51.900 Now, because it's World War II, it's the good war. 1.00

00:12:54.760 We don't make a great fuss about it.

00:12:56.440 But these things happen in wars, and people who had fought in previous wars were unsurprised by the reports coming from the Falklands.

00:13:02.480 They were like, come on, this is what happens.

00:13:04.360 You train young men to fight, you know, to do the most savage thing possible, to kill other young men.

00:13:11.040 And that line is always going to be a little bit more gray and a bit slippery than we would like.

00:13:16.820 Let's not, you know, be pearl-clutching about this.

00:13:19.460 But 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,

00:13:28.260 is that probably we have, we like our conflict now, very sanitized.

00:13:33.020 You know, we like it kind of...

00:13:35.280 With drones.

00:13:36.600 Yeah, right, exactly.

00:13:37.760 We like it at a distance.

00:13:39.400 We like to shy away from the kind of, the hand-to-hand, the physical nature of it, I guess.

00:13:45.640 And that goes back to your point about we have been incredibly fortunate to grow up in an age of peace.

00:13:53.300 And, you know, lots of people now have lived and died in this country or in the West more generally.

00:13:58.960 They've had the dream.

00:14:00.100 They've been completely insulated from the beast in other people and in themselves.

00:14:04.620 So they've kind of lost sight of that, I suppose.

00:14:07.640 I love the fact that you use the phrase warts and all, which is famously Oliver Cromwell.

00:14:12.520 Yeah.

00:14:12.680 When a painter asked how he should have his portrait painted, he famously said, paint me warts and all.

00:14:19.240 Yeah.

00:14:20.100 And actually, he's a fascinating figure because on the one hand with Cromwell, you talk to my Irish family, for example,

00:14:28.580 and you can't hear anything but, you know, expletive, laden, invective from them, rightly so.

00:14:34.640 And on the other hand, father of democracy in this country, et cetera, et cetera.

00:14:39.360 But 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.

00:14:51.640 Yeah, you're right.

00:14:52.560 I mean, I think Churchill is a good example of this as well, right?

00:14:54.800 That people will say, oh, yes, Churchill, I know you say he saved democracy from Nazism. 0.67

00:14:59.080 But on the other hand, he said some very cool things about Indians.

00:15:01.860 You know, people are complicated.

00:15:03.540 And I think anybody who thinks at all seriously about human nature or about even the characters that you meet in great literature or something,

00:15:15.140 you don't even have to think about the people that you know.

00:15:16.740 You know that people are capable of tremendous things but also terrible things.

00:15:23.820 I mean, Cromwell, I think, is the most fascinating character in all English and, indeed, British history.

00:15:30.340 He's much more complicated than people think.

00:15:33.680 He's actually much more fun-loving than people think, by the way.

00:15:35.740 He didn't ban Christmas.

00:15:38.020 It's not Cromwell who bans it.

00:15:39.620 Anyway, we don't need to get into all that.

00:15:41.200 But, yeah, Cromwell can be a very savage character.

00:15:48.120 You know, when he's commanding at some of his later battles, people describe him kind of laughing as though he's drunk.

00:15:54.500 You 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

00:16:02.800 and his opponents are God's enemies and, therefore, they will be, you know, he will scythe through them as though through chaff or whatever. 0.69

00:16:11.200 So that side of Cromwell, lots of people might find very unsettling.

00:16:14.520 And 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.

00:16:25.660 You know, one of the reasons in the 1650s after he basically, he's got effectively supreme power.

00:16:31.380 And he wrestles with this issue about whether he should take the crown or not.

00:16:35.900 It's, you know, would that be too arrogant?

00:16:39.340 Is that what God wants for me?

00:16:40.600 Am I good enough?

00:16:41.360 All of that kind of thing.

00:16:42.400 You know, most dictators don't think like that.

00:16:44.340 Most dictators can't wait to get their hands on the ground. 1.00

00:16:46.540 So I think Cromwell's a fascinating character.

00:16:49.620 And 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.

00:16:57.340 Because, 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.

00:17:06.580 Would I like to see, I've got an Irish wife, would I like to see Cromwell's statue taken down?

00:17:11.960 No, absolutely not.

00:17:13.880 Because I think, as with all statues, it's a testament to a particular time period, that in which it was put up.

00:17:20.440 But also because I think big, it's good that people know about big, complicated figures like that.

00:17:25.860 And they appreciate precisely your point about warts and all.

00:17:28.600 I think that's true of Churchill.

00:17:29.960 It's true of Cromwell.

00:17:30.580 It's true of almost all of what we would think of as, in inverted commas, great characters in history.

00:17:37.080 They're always more complicated.

00:17:38.960 Absolutely.

00:17:39.620 And in particular, let's look at the British Empire.

00:17:42.360 Because, 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.

00:17:52.920 Right.

00:17:53.140 I'm like, compared to what?

00:17:54.460 The Belgians in Congo? 0.96

00:17:55.920 Yeah.

00:17:56.360 The Spanish Empire?

00:17:57.460 The Portuguese? 0.99

00:17:58.820 It smacks not only of ignorance, it smacks of a certain type of arrogance as well. 0.99

00:18:04.980 Well, that the British are, you know, not only did we have the greatest empire, but we were also the most evil. 1.00

00:18:11.940 The most evil. 0.52

00:18:12.800 I'm like, really?

00:18:13.360 It's a tremendous self-absorption.

00:18:16.920 And actually, it's something that we share, actually, with our American cousins.

00:18:20.960 You 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.

00:18:30.140 You know, indigenous people or people in foreign countries never have any agency. 0.99

00:18:34.420 It's always got to be the evil American puppet masters who have done it. 0.75

00:18:37.420 And 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.

00:18:44.660 Everything must be our fault.

00:18:46.920 Conflicts in the 21st century are because we drew the boundaries in the wrong places.

00:18:51.760 All of this kind of thing.

00:18:52.600 Now, on empires more generally, my view on empires is actually very simple.

00:18:57.680 The empire is the natural unit of human organization.

00:19:00.700 There 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.

00:19:13.260 But no model is really natural.

00:19:15.200 But empires, for most people who've lived and died, lived and died in empires of one kind or another.

00:19:20.860 You know, China effectively now is an empire.

00:19:23.940 The United States is obviously an empire, not merely a continental empire across its North America, but internationally.

00:19:32.320 Having an empire is in itself, I think, not illegitimate.

00:19:35.980 It's the way that most people have been ruled.

00:19:37.940 It's the way that the Romans or the Persians or whoever, the Ottomans, organized their societies.

00:19:43.920 One group dominating another, again, is not unnatural.

00:19:47.960 It's the norm in human history.

00:19:49.940 I 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.

00:19:59.820 Because 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.

00:20:07.600 So from the beginning, the British Empire is kind of an internal argument.

00:20:12.800 There are always lots of people in Britain who don't like the idea of colonization and of dominance and so on.

00:20:19.460 There are always ferocious arguments about it.

00:20:21.420 Some 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.

00:20:43.060 The 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.

00:20:55.160 But, 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?

00:21:18.220 And you had to choose an empire, a European colonial empire in which to do it.

00:21:22.820 I think the British Empire would be a pretty good place to choose.

00:21:26.360 I mean, it's definitely not the Belgian Congo, right?

00:21:28.640 It'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.

00:21:40.380 So, yeah, I think the British Empire, it's clearly not the most evil empire in history.

00:21:48.560 It's not dedicated to extermination or to violence in the way that the Third Reich is or whatever.

00:21:56.280 So those comparisons that you see quite a lot nowadays, especially online, just strike me as utterly bonfaces.

00:22:02.060 Well, 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.

00:22:16.140 And then these evil Europeans arrived and, like, started being violent. 1.00

00:22:19.840 Yeah.

00:22:20.280 Like, that's not entirely my reading of the Aztec Empire, exactly.

00:22:24.800 Right.

00:22:25.420 Do you know what I mean?

00:22:26.740 Like, 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... 1.00

00:22:38.260 No, no, no. There are very simplistic ways of talking about this.

00:22:40.460 So 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.

00:22:50.120 They were armed migrants, or you might call them colonizers, themselves.

00:22:55.800 They'd come from probably from what's now, roughly what's now Colorado.

00:22:58.900 They'd come south.

00:23:00.000 They'd subjugated people around them.

00:23:01.960 They ran this empire.

00:23:03.660 You know, they did sacrifice people to the gods.

00:23:06.940 They did all these kinds of things.

00:23:07.820 In huge numbers.

00:23:08.600 They were no strangers.

00:23:09.780 Exactly.

00:23:10.040 They were no strangers to violence.

00:23:11.320 Now, that's not to say they're terrible villains and the Europeans are great saints.

00:23:14.740 They're both complicated societies, capable of all the extremes of human nature.

00:23:21.300 I think that's my approach.

00:23:22.440 It's not to say, you know, because I've written about the Aztecs in a book for children.

00:23:27.480 It's not to say...

00:23:28.660 You probably have to sanitize that a fair bit, I'd imagine.

00:23:31.360 Actually, no, no, not at all, because kids love the violence.

00:23:34.000 Yeah, they do.

00:23:34.580 When I taught the Aztecs at school, the kids loved it.

00:23:38.740 Yeah, of course.

00:23:39.820 Why would that be worrying?

00:23:40.920 That's normal.

00:23:41.940 Kids, if you're standing in front of 40 10-year-olds and, you know, you've got 40 minutes,

00:23:48.380 if you're not careful, they will be very bored very quickly.

00:23:51.220 And the best way to keep them interested is to, you know, every few moments, every few minutes,

00:23:55.640 punctuate it with somebody having his heart ripped out or, you know, Henry VIII having an enema

00:24:01.200 or any of these kinds of details.

00:24:03.720 These kind of grim, gory details are sticking kids' mind.

00:24:06.240 They love it.

00:24:06.880 They love it.

00:24:07.400 Of course they love it because people are fascinated.

00:24:09.720 Right.

00:24:09.880 In many ways, kids are human beings at their most unseasoned – well, not many ways.

00:24:15.300 That's very obvious here.

00:24:15.920 They're most raw and unseasoned, right?

00:24:17.640 And kids are – why do kids love gladiators?

00:24:21.240 You know, they're not really interested in Roman baths or in Roman law codes.

00:24:25.740 What they like is the Colosseum and basically people, you know, gouging each other's eyes

00:24:30.640 out and whatnot.

00:24:31.680 Because kids, like all of us, they're kind of voyeurs when they look at history and they

00:24:35.160 love the extremes.

00:24:36.440 I think that's completely normal and natural and, you know, I'm not saying we should completely

00:24:43.320 pander to it and sink into the kind of pornography of violence when we talk about history.

00:24:47.660 But it's self-deluding, I think, to pretend that that's not why people are often interested

00:24:53.360 in history in the first place.

00:24:54.780 You know, when I fell in love with history when I was very small, it was knights, battles,

00:24:59.500 kings and queens, executions, all of these kinds of things.

00:25:03.880 If you had said to me, no, actually, little Dominic, age seven or something, it's much

00:25:09.600 better for you to learn about the suffragettes and the struggle for equal rights and all

00:25:13.320 of these things.

00:25:15.040 How many people are really going to be that enthusiastic about history?

00:25:17.860 That's not to completely dismiss those subjects and say don't do them later on.

00:25:20.700 But what gets you into history is narrative conflict.

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00:29:07.020 So I interrupted you when you were saying you wrote the book about the Aztecs for kids.

00:29:11.260 Yeah.

00:29:11.780 Oh, yes, you did.

00:29:12.460 Yeah.

00:29:12.600 So I felt with that, that, you know, you have two sort of complicated societies.

00:29:22.060 You have a conquest that actually is, again, very nuanced and very complicated because it's

00:29:29.200 actually not the Spanish just conquering Mexico.

00:29:31.860 The Spanish have loads of... 1.00

00:29:32.600 They actually have far, there are far more, the great battles, there are far more indigenous

00:29:39.520 Mesoamerican soldiers on the Spanish side than there are Spaniards, right? 0.54

00:29:44.520 There are internal struggles, there's internal dissension.

00:29:47.360 This is a clash of empires, a clash of colonizers, if you like.

00:29:51.500 So to see it really simplistically is, these guys are the good guys, these guys are the bad

00:29:55.720 guys.

00:29:56.160 Now, that's obviously how people initially told the story when it was told from the European

00:29:59.100 perspective, now the trend is to completely do it the other way and to say that everything

00:30:03.660 about the Spanish or other European colonizers is terrible and they're greedy and they don't 0.99

00:30:09.100 really care if their Christianity is just a pretext for their sort of ruthless mercenary 0.91

00:30:14.640 ambitions.

00:30:15.640 I think that's just as simplistic as the old stories, whereas the kind of Aztecs slavering

00:30:21.080 covered in blood and the Spanish kind of noble Christian warriors, they're both really

00:30:25.940 sort of silly ways to talk about history, I would say.

00:30:28.140 And I always remember when I was in Venezuela being pinned against the wall by what my uncle's

00:30:35.760 friend who told me and in great detail about how Francis Drake was a pirata, a pirate.

00:30:43.300 And I was like, well, I'm kind of seven years old, mate.

00:30:45.940 I don't really understand what you want me to do with this information.

00:30:49.360 But it was a very powerful lesson for me because it made me understand, oh, the way that I see

00:30:55.660 Sir Francis Drake and I was taught in school, to a Latin American, he was a pirate, a plunderer, 1.00

00:31:02.380 a thief on a mass scale. 0.79

00:31:04.180 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:04.660 Exactly.

00:31:05.040 I think it's fascinating.

00:31:07.240 These lessons are really good, actually.

00:31:09.000 So you mentioned Cromwell.

00:31:10.220 Yeah.

00:31:10.440 If I was Irish, I undoubtedly would have a very dim view of Oliver Cromwell.

00:31:14.000 I'm not, so I don't.

00:31:15.920 You know, it's not that complicated.

00:31:17.280 People always, you know, looking at historical characters, you always have to be conscious

00:31:22.620 of where you're standing, right?

00:31:23.920 Where I'm standing, where you're standing will always be different places.

00:31:27.040 Just because, you know, not because of any differences between us, but nobody can be exactly

00:31:31.740 where you are, coming to it with the baggage that you have.

00:31:35.260 And I think actually, instead of, you know, these people get into really frenzied and fierce

00:31:41.040 arguments, which to my mind are actually unnecessary.

00:31:43.600 It's completely reasonable that people have different views about characters in the past.

00:31:48.380 And the idea that you, that one view must dominate, that it becomes intolerable for

00:31:53.620 anybody to say, well, actually, I quite like Winston Churchill. 0.95

00:31:56.260 I mean, that's obviously ridiculous.

00:31:58.140 You know, Winston Churchill, sure, I understand. 0.92

00:32:00.980 I completely get that if you're an Indian historian, you're going to look at different

00:32:07.080 aspects of Churchill's life and career that will jump out to you.

00:32:09.960 And, you know, you may regard him as objectionable.

00:32:14.200 That's fine.

00:32:14.840 I don't need to persuade you of silence.

00:32:16.940 You say your own thing.

00:32:18.460 But I think it's completely reasonable that people in Britain see Churchill as the incarnation

00:32:22.160 of the bulldog spirit, as the symbol of patriotism, as the symbol of winning the Second

00:32:26.040 World War or those kinds of things.

00:32:27.760 Why wouldn't we?

00:32:28.540 I mean, it'd be weird if we didn't.

00:32:29.920 And it's also as well acknowledging the fact that when you're dealing with these seismic

00:32:34.740 figures who changed history in such a profound way, they're going to change history in ways

00:32:40.620 that you perceive to be good, but also other people will perceive to be bad.

00:32:46.100 Yeah, yeah, of course.

00:32:46.740 And to take that on a little bit, it's mad to think that other, to reward people in history

00:32:54.160 purely because they agree with you.

00:32:55.780 In other words, to celebrate only the people who mirror your own prejudices and preconceptions,

00:33:05.580 right?

00:33:05.720 So in other words, to look back at the 18th century and to say, well, so-and-so is obviously

00:33:09.600 a good person because they believed in equality like me.

00:33:12.340 But this person, who appears to be very interesting and civilized and whatnot, is actually a terrible

00:33:17.680 person because they invested in the slave trade or whatever it might be.

00:33:21.860 We can be horrified by the slave trade and think that slavery is wrong and all those kinds

00:33:26.100 of things.

00:33:27.700 But you've got to grant people in the past their own agency, their own space, their own difference,

00:33:35.280 I guess, and sort of, and respect their difference.

00:33:39.600 I guess respect the fact that they, their moral world, their mental world, the baggage

00:33:46.280 they're carrying with them is completely different from ours.

00:33:49.740 And of course, what I always say, especially when I'm in schools, actually, and this always

00:33:53.140 makes the children kind of go, oh, is to say, you're not the end. 0.94

00:33:57.780 Like, there will be people who come after you who will say, you were bonkers and immoral

00:34:02.760 and wrong, and why couldn't you see that eating meat is morally wrong or getting on an 0.67

00:34:10.040 aeroplane is, you know, whatever, all these kinds of things that the kids will take for

00:34:14.080 granted, right?

00:34:14.920 It's a bright picture of the future you're painting that, mate.

00:34:18.560 Well, you know, I really realized, I was in Uzbekistan recently, and they have these

00:34:22.300 giant statues of Timur, they call them Timur Khan.

00:34:25.940 And he's called Tamerlane, but they don't like that, because that's Timur the lame,

00:34:31.140 because he's basically making fun of a disabled person at this point, right?

00:34:35.460 But if you actually look at what he did day to day, right, this is a guy that every time 0.96

00:34:41.160 he had an opportunity, he'd go and invade somewhere, right, kill all the men, the women, 1.00

00:34:45.960 whatever, right, come back home, and then he'd go and hunt and kill animals to chill out. 0.96

00:34:50.560 And that was basically what you did. 0.92

00:34:53.520 And that was the way that these people thought.

00:34:55.660 And when I thought about that, I just went, well, this person's brain worked so differently

00:35:01.420 to me and to anyone I am ever likely to me.

00:35:04.660 These are different people, like they think differently, the whole worldview is different.

00:35:10.680 But I guess where it leaves me, Dominic, and it comes back to what you're saying is a question

00:35:14.260 about the truth then, because you go, well, you know, everyone's got their own perspective,

00:35:19.580 everyone's standing in their own place. 0.98

00:35:21.920 And now you've got these morons on the internet going, well, actually, Winston Churchill's 0.99

00:35:25.860 the greatest villain of World War II. 0.99

00:35:27.940 And that just isn't true, right?

00:35:30.900 And that's not because they're standing in a different place.

00:35:33.320 It's just because they're wrong.

00:35:35.000 Yeah.

00:35:35.920 Unless they are standing in Adolf Hitler's place, at which point maybe they do. 0.94

00:35:39.920 Do you see why I'm getting there?

00:35:40.840 No, I do completely.

00:35:41.620 It's a really difficult one, actually.

00:35:44.460 And it's one that I kind of wrestle with a little bit.

00:35:48.220 Like, is there such a thing as historical truth?

00:35:50.840 I think to some extent, you know, the conversation that we've been having, you'll probably be

00:35:55.080 appalled by this, but to some extent, all of us living in the 21st century are postmodernists,

00:35:59.320 to the extent that we all recognize that there can be different accounts of something that

00:36:05.060 are all equally correct or all equally flawed.

00:36:08.280 Equally?

00:36:09.280 Yeah.

00:36:09.820 No, I don't recognize that.

00:36:11.200 No, I think you probably do, because I think you and I, I think you do without knowing it.

00:36:15.020 In other words, that you and I, you might, you might have a take on history, right?

00:36:19.420 And I might have a slightly different take on history, a slightly different take on history.

00:36:23.680 And we would say, well, we're probably not going to agree on this, but I can see where

00:36:27.020 you're coming from and where you'd say it.

00:36:28.520 And they're probably both reasonable narrative accounts of what happened.

00:36:31.540 In other words, just to give you a tiny, really petty and trivial example, if we were

00:36:35.360 both writing accounts of this conversation afterwards, we might write different accounts,

00:36:39.640 but they might both be right.

00:36:41.260 Okay, fine.

00:36:42.140 So, in other words, what's the true account of our conversation, even the footage that

00:36:48.320 you're doing right now, depending on the camera you choose, they might say, well, actually,

00:36:51.880 the camera didn't pick up that bit of nuance.

00:36:53.560 That was kind of lost on, you're right. 0.98

00:36:55.360 Or the conversation that happened before we started or whatever, when he called me a dick.

00:36:58.700 So it's actually hard to, it's very hard to get at what the truth, yeah. 0.92

00:37:02.060 That was a really exciting conversation.

00:37:03.940 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:05.400 It's really hard to get at what that truth would be.

00:37:08.940 However, at the same time as saying this, in other words, we can sort of see that you

00:37:14.820 can have lots of competing accounts that all have some validity.

00:37:18.980 So, otherwise, you would be able to write the definitive history book on the Crusades,

00:37:24.160 and nobody would ever write a book on the Crusades again, because that person would have published

00:37:27.480 the truth.

00:37:28.180 Okay.

00:37:28.400 That would clearly never happen.

00:37:29.540 There will always be lots of different books on the Crusades.

00:37:31.960 People will ask different questions.

00:37:33.000 People will see different things.

00:37:34.300 It doesn't mean that the others are wrong and untrue, but you can have competing versions.

00:37:40.560 But you can't then, what obviously I think most historians would say is, what you don't

00:37:44.300 want to do is open the door and say, well, they're all equally valid or invalid.

00:37:48.020 That was the reason I disagreed with you.

00:37:49.460 Because obviously that's not.

00:37:50.780 Because if I retold this conversation as, you know, a 644 black man came, sat down. 0.51

00:37:55.920 Right.

00:37:56.280 And we started talking about geography.

00:37:58.220 It's not true.

00:37:58.800 That's just factually incorrect.

00:38:00.420 Exactly.

00:38:00.700 Right?

00:38:01.260 Exactly.

00:38:01.620 So to give you an example of the Crusades or the Second World War, I think we could say

00:38:05.980 there are many different accounts that are often wildly different, but they're all valid

00:38:10.620 and they're all valuable.

00:38:13.520 But then there are some accounts that are not valid and valuable.

00:38:17.060 So there is a dividing line between truth and untruth, right?

00:38:20.220 So in other words, the Second World War, there are lots of different books on the Second

00:38:22.620 World War, seeing it from different perspectives.

00:38:24.140 Some that say, I could write a book on the Second World War saying a tremendous victory for democracy

00:38:28.820 and freedom, blah, blah, blah.

00:38:30.300 A Polish historian could write a book on the Second World War that says, well, hold on.

00:38:34.240 We ended up being conquered by Stalin.

00:38:35.860 Stalin's the big winner of the Second World War, not Churchill, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:38:39.200 You know, you can have different accounts that you could say, yeah, I can understand where

00:38:42.300 you're coming from.

00:38:42.860 That's valid.

00:38:43.500 That's also valid.

00:38:44.400 It's good to have different opinions.

00:38:46.160 Like people always do that about all kinds of things.

00:38:49.520 But there has to be a dividing line.

00:38:51.720 I think that's what most academic historians or scholars would say.

00:38:54.940 There has to be a point where you say, hold on.

00:38:56.940 You know, they didn't just sit there and talk about geography.

00:38:59.600 You know, there is right and there is wrong.

00:39:02.500 And this is what obviously has become more and more slippery in the last 20 years or so.

00:39:07.420 So the examples you're picking up, you know, people who are getting a lot of traction,

00:39:12.400 sometimes going on shows like this or on podcasts or whatever, saying, actually, you know, Hitler

00:39:17.800 is the great victim of the Second World War and Churchill is the villain, all of this

00:39:21.520 kind of stuff, right?

00:39:23.080 I think historians clearly have a duty to say, no, you're just wrong.

00:39:28.300 There is such a thing as fact.

00:39:30.420 I guess it's truth is a very loaded word.

00:39:34.020 I guess accuracy is maybe a more useful word in that context.

00:39:39.260 Say that's just not accurate.

00:39:40.560 It's just not correct.

00:39:42.400 Churchill clearly is not the villain of the Second World War.

00:39:46.460 Britain did not force Hitler into war, all of these kinds of things.

00:39:51.120 So I think it's slightly more complicated than to say true, untrue.

00:39:56.400 I think you can still have disagreements.

00:39:58.320 You can still have competing versions.

00:40:00.720 But what has happened, I think, because basically the technological change, it's a bit like the

00:40:06.920 invention of the printing press in the 16th century.

00:40:08.860 Technological change means that suddenly it's like the ground beneath your feet has become unstable.

00:40:15.700 You don't know what to trust.

00:40:17.080 There are loads of competing versions of reality, some of which are basically completely fraudulent

00:40:25.420 and founded on nothing.

00:40:27.900 And, you know, historians are – I guess it's also a bit of a problem that as academic historians have slightly vacated the field, right?

00:40:37.740 They don't – they're not quite as public-facing as they could be.

00:40:40.520 They're not talking to the public.

00:40:42.460 Often they're talking to each other.

00:40:43.500 So that allows opportunists and charlatans and whatnot to enter the conversation, dominate the conversation instead.

00:40:52.120 And 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.

00:40:58.260 Donnie, I want to talk to you about the evil because a lot of people use that word, particularly to talk about events in history,

00:41:05.660 whether it's the British Empire, whether it's Adolf Hitler.

00:41:10.460 And Adolf Hitler, when we think about evil, we think about Adolf Hitler. 0.68

00:41:14.660 And you look at these people and you go – in Hitler's mind, obviously what he did was horrendous and evil.

00:41:23.120 But in his own mind, he thought he was doing good.

00:41:26.100 Yeah.

00:41:26.280 And if you look at a lot of these figures from history, they believe that they were doing some type of good,

00:41:34.020 whether it's the conquistadors, whether it's, you know, the Mayans who were praying to the god.

00:41:38.820 Why wouldn't you rip the heart out of a child? 0.85

00:41:40.440 You have to appease a god, otherwise we all die. 0.94

00:41:43.340 Yeah.

00:41:43.720 How do we reconcile that?

00:41:46.000 It's difficult, isn't it?

00:41:46.580 Even Bridget Phillipson thinks she's doing good.

00:41:49.280 I think – how do you reconcile it?

00:41:52.400 Do you need to reconcile it?

00:41:53.600 Do you need to – in the sense that –

00:41:56.280 Human beings never think they're the bad guys.

00:41:59.960 You know, that scene, the famous scene from the Mitchell and Webb sketch,

00:42:02.940 where they're looking at their Nazi soldiers and they're kind of looking at their badges and saying,

00:42:08.560 are we actually – are we the baddies?

00:42:10.560 Yeah, are we the baddies?

00:42:12.040 The skulls, like really?

00:42:14.100 Have you looked at our caps recently?

00:42:18.400 Our caps?

00:42:19.640 The badges on our caps.

00:42:21.900 Have you looked at them?

00:42:23.340 What?

00:42:24.060 No.

00:42:25.060 A bit?

00:42:27.280 They've got skulls on them.

00:42:29.680 Huh?

00:42:30.760 Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?

00:42:37.140 I don't, uh…

00:42:38.440 Hands.

00:42:38.840 Are we the baddies?

00:42:42.320 There's never a moment, I think, where people, you know, willfully, genuinely cast themselves as the villains.

00:42:52.860 So 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. 0.65

00:43:04.860 They 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? 0.66

00:43:18.400 Right? That's what Nazi ideologists think. It's what they tell their soldiers.

00:43:22.020 They'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.

00:43:36.700 I 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.

00:43:50.500 All 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.

00:43:59.400 If I can say that a monster and a Marxist on this show are two different things.

00:44:03.560 So 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.

00:44:12.800 He 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. 0.79

00:44:31.280 And he will have done tough work, you know, dirty work, but it had to be done.

00:44:37.180 That's what a lot of people think in history, that this was – you know, more interesting people.

00:44:42.740 Of course there are always people who are just sort of boringly greedy and venal and corrupt or whatever.

00:44:49.160 But somebody like Stalin, I think, is interesting and chilling precisely because he thinks he's on the side of right.

00:44:55.860 He's on the side of morality.

00:44:57.360 And it's the capitalists who are the bad people.

00:45:00.340 He's a good person.

00:45:01.420 Now, 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. 0.78

00:45:17.320 It's very shocking for us to think that people would think that they were the good guys.

00:45:21.740 But people in history always think they're the good guys.

00:45:24.280 They're always the heroes of their own story.

00:45:26.080 It's one of the reasons I always – I've talked about this a lot.

00:45:29.480 I don't fear evil people that much.

00:45:32.440 One of the reasons – they do exist, in my opinion.

00:45:34.960 There are people who are just –

00:45:36.060 Bad people.

00:45:36.960 Evil.

00:45:37.560 Genuinely evil.

00:45:38.540 People who like torturing other people or killing other people for the sake of it, right?

00:45:42.300 But it's very difficult if you're evil to motivate millions of other people to join you.

00:45:48.960 However, 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.

00:46:01.640 And 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.

00:46:16.160 And 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. 0.99

00:46:22.740 We'll just kill these people. 0.99

00:46:25.180 Those are the really dangerous people in history, aren't they? 1.00

00:46:27.600 The big killers, the biggest killers were utopian idealists.

00:46:30.860 Right.

00:46:31.300 They were people who believed in a better world.

00:46:33.180 Hitler undoubtedly – you know, it sounds weird to say it, but he's an idealist. 0.72

00:46:36.280 Stalin is obviously an idealist.

00:46:37.820 Mao is an idealist.

00:46:39.180 Pol 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. 0.97

00:46:49.420 And, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

00:46:51.780 That is the classic thing.

00:46:52.820 That's what the Jacobin thought in the French Revolution.

00:46:56.460 It's funny because I was rereading The Handmaid's Tale the other day.

00:47:00.860 You 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. 0.99

00:47:10.820 And she gave an interview about that when she said, you know, the real enemy here, it's absolutely not an anti-religious book.

00:47:16.440 It's not an anti-male book.

00:47:17.860 The 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.

00:47:27.560 And 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.

00:47:36.020 And I completely agree with you, and this is probably because I'm a very reactionary person as well, but the enemy is certainty.

00:47:43.540 The enemy is people who say, I know what should be done.

00:47:47.140 I know where right and wrong lie.

00:47:50.140 I know I'm a good person.

00:47:51.940 And that goes back to the point I was making earlier about, you know, losing the sense of the tragic.

00:47:56.120 And 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.

00:48:13.340 Because we know from history, by the way, that lots of unexpected people have that in them.

00:48:18.740 They'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.

00:48:37.380 You know, there's a lot about bankers.

00:48:40.260 But I think with all of us, knowledge of the beast is so important.

00:48:47.000 But let me push back on the idea.

00:48:48.980 So you talk about certainty and, you know, having that knowledge that we are all flawed and broken.

00:48:54.960 And I agree with you.

00:48:56.100 Yeah.

00:48:56.860 But look at Churchill.

00:48:58.960 Churchill was pretty certain.

00:49:00.760 He was the one raising the alarm in the 1930s, banging the drum.

00:49:06.020 He had made many mistakes, but he had that certainty.

00:49:10.700 Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

00:49:12.040 Yeah, 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.

00:49:21.620 So Churchill knows that he has a terrible screw up in him at any given moment.

00:49:26.860 You know, and his mad schemes, often they don't work.

00:49:29.920 Churchill, 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.

00:49:38.180 It'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.

00:49:52.680 You 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.

00:49:58.920 He's talking about the men he served with, Indians as well as British.

00:50:01.880 There's a kind of, there's a wryness to it and an awareness of kind of the complexity of human life and human nature.

00:50:10.320 So sure, Churchill has things he really believes in.

00:50:13.620 He really believes in the empire.

00:50:14.940 He believes in Britain.

00:50:16.460 He 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.

00:50:23.080 But 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.

00:50:37.420 I'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.

00:50:43.960 I think Churchill absolutely did have the sense, what I would call the sense of the tragedy.

00:50:47.000 So 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.

00:50:56.920 And I don't think he thinks, he thinks we're going to muddle through, you know, his famous catchphrase, keep buggering on, KBO.

00:51:03.600 You know, you keep, just keep going and you'll get there eventually.

00:51:06.840 But 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.

00:51:19.200 Churchill's not an idealist in that sense, I think.

00:51:21.560 His 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.

00:51:31.420 But not to an abstract noun.

00:51:33.580 He's not trying to remake the world.

00:51:35.060 And 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.

00:51:51.280 I think the issue is quite often what you're willing to do.

00:51:55.700 Yeah, of course.

00:51:56.460 In the service of that.

00:51:57.840 And 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?

00:52:13.060 Because 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.

00:52:21.300 So I think there's a couple of things.

00:52:22.220 I think one of them is seeing other people as expendable, other human beings' lives as expendable.

00:52:25.880 I mean, that's obviously what they're saying.

00:52:27.060 Stalin would have done.

00:52:28.600 So Stalin's thinking is, you know, I will make this better world. 0.63

00:52:32.060 Unfortunately, these X million people will have to go first. 0.99

00:52:35.580 But, I mean, you know, that's a price worth paying.

00:52:37.540 Yeah.

00:52:37.640 I 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?

00:52:47.900 Even 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?

00:52:53.120 You're always going to make choices.

00:52:55.020 If you're a sensible politician, I mean, obviously, if you're like Keir Starmer or somebody, you don't like making choices at all. 0.93

00:52:59.680 But most effective politicians know that they're always going to be losers. 0.89

00:53:03.500 Yeah.

00:53:03.600 There's always going to be people whose lives are worse, and you hope that there'll be as few of those as possible.

00:53:08.700 But once you're getting into the game of constantly saying, well, there's a price worth paying.

00:53:13.800 And fortunately, those people had to die or whatever.

00:53:16.120 I think that's very dangerous.

00:53:17.080 I think the dying part is where I'm aiming my…

00:53:19.860 And 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.

00:53:32.200 So, in other words, I would say, I mean, you obviously believe something strongly, right?

00:53:35.320 You have strong views.

00:53:36.660 But I would…

00:53:38.380 Well, I would assume or I would hope that you're aware that not everybody has those views and other views are available, right?

00:53:44.820 Of course, we all are.

00:53:46.340 So, I think it's being aware of the contingency of your position that if you were somebody else, you might believe something different.

00:53:52.320 And that's kind of fine, right?

00:53:53.980 I don't expect…

00:53:54.900 I don't think I have a hotline to God or to the truth and that, therefore, everybody should fall into line with me.

00:54:00.600 And they're just wrong and I'm just right.

00:54:02.320 I think that's the issue, isn't it?

00:54:03.820 Someone like Stalin or Hitler, they thought, well, I'm just right. 1.00

00:54:07.600 Because in both cases, actually, they were kind of scientific materialists to some degree.

00:54:12.060 They thought the laws of nature and the world, I know them.

00:54:17.580 You know, Karl Marx or whoever told me them and I'm just following those laws.

00:54:22.440 So, the other opinions are, by definition, illegitimate.

00:54:27.120 They are totally wrong and the people who are promoting them are liars.

00:54:31.520 And basically, I need to get rid of them. 0.70

00:54:34.340 Whereas in an imperialistic society, you're aware that there's lots of valid viewpoints.

00:54:38.740 And let's say Churchill, Churchill doesn't like Bolshevism, doesn't like socialism.

00:54:43.520 But he's perfectly happy to work with socialists in his war cabinet.

00:54:47.260 Clement Attlee will get on brilliantly with them.

00:54:49.380 And Churchill himself is ideologically complicated.

00:54:52.740 He's changed parties.

00:54:54.020 He was once very radical.

00:54:55.300 He ends up becoming much more conservative.

00:54:57.520 You know, he's conscious of the complexity of a kind of pluralistic worldview.

00:55:02.380 And that's what makes him, ultimately, I think, a very attractive figure.

00:55:06.960 Because I think what he's representing there is the kind of breadth that these monsters don't have.

00:55:14.040 They're narrow.

00:55:14.840 There's something claustrophobic, I think, about their worldview.

00:55:18.180 Because they exclude everything outside of it.

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00:58:30.100 And when we think about Hitler, 0.89

00:58:46.320 we think about the most evil man that has ever lived.

00:58:49.840 And I think, look, obviously, he's not...

00:58:54.200 Is that true?

00:58:54.780 No, no, no.

00:58:55.760 Sorry, no, I was checking myself.

00:58:57.860 I was saying, I was going to say, I don't know whether he is.

00:59:01.380 But the fact that it's in my head is partly a result of education.

00:59:07.300 Yeah.

00:59:07.440 And we think about him as the most evil man that ever lived,

00:59:11.300 even though Stalin killed more people, Mao killed more people,

00:59:15.520 and yet you talk to the average person,

00:59:17.600 and if someone says they're a communist, we just go,

00:59:20.620 okay, he's communist.

00:59:21.680 When someone says they're a Nazi...

00:59:23.580 Yeah.

00:59:24.620 How many conversations with Nazis are you having?

00:59:26.720 Yeah.

00:59:27.700 Quite a lot, mate, with our fan base.

00:59:29.780 No, but genuinely, do you know what I mean?

00:59:32.540 No, I do know what you mean.

00:59:33.320 I think it's a really funny thing.

00:59:34.320 You know, I often tell this story, I was backpacking in Bulgaria

00:59:38.580 with some student friends in the 1990s.

00:59:43.240 And we were in this village, and there was a bloke there,

00:59:46.340 he was, like, selling old communist memorabilia.

00:59:49.100 And we were looking through it, because, yeah, we were interested in history,

00:59:51.360 we were kind of looking through it, oh, look, there's a Medal of Stalin,

00:59:53.380 there's all this kind of thing.

00:59:54.220 And this bloke said, they have other tray.

00:59:56.600 And he kind of pulled out this other tray underneath it,

00:59:59.600 this is, like, the real tray.

01:00:00.740 And the real tray was full of, like, SS stuff. 0.75

01:00:04.220 And we were like, oh, no, put it away, put it away, terrible.

01:00:06.680 I'm not interested in that.

01:00:07.860 But afterwards, we were talking about it,

01:00:09.780 how our reactions were different, right?

01:00:12.820 The communist stuff to a Brit in the 1990s was kind of slightly comical, right?

01:00:18.980 You could have a hammer and sickle T-shirt as a student,

01:00:22.360 and people would kind of, you know, or CCCP or whatever,

01:00:26.460 and no one's going to think anything of it, really.

01:00:28.800 You know, it's a bit of an affectation.

01:00:30.120 You're sort of showing off a little bit,

01:00:31.720 but it's an aesthetic thing as much as anything.

01:00:36.300 Obviously, you know, a swastika T-shirt,

01:00:38.860 walking into a studio with a swastika T-shirt is pretty punchy,

01:00:42.900 and you're going to get a very different kind of reaction.

01:00:45.740 And I think, obviously, to some degree,

01:00:47.900 that reflects the fact that for us in Britain,

01:00:52.140 Nazism was the real enemy. 0.92

01:00:54.500 We're very conscious of the death toll.

01:00:57.180 It seems nihilistic and horrendous and utterly beyond the pale, right?

01:01:02.180 If somebody wears a swastika T-shirt, I think you pretty much say,

01:01:05.520 okay, that's it.

01:01:07.360 It's inconceivable to me that one of my friends would come in with a swastika T-shirt.

01:01:11.060 Unless they're Hindu. 1.00

01:01:12.560 Right.

01:01:12.840 Well, I guess that's – you're trying quite hard there, I have to say.

01:01:16.820 Or a famous rapper.

01:01:17.960 Yeah, dance. 1.00

01:01:19.020 You're wearing that hammer and sickle T-shirt in Poland 1.00

01:01:22.560 or in, you know, the former occupied Eastern Europe,

01:01:26.700 or you're walking around with a Khmer Rouge T-shirt in Cambodia or something.

01:01:32.260 I mean, that's obviously going to have a very, very difference.

01:01:36.360 So it does slightly depend where you're standing.

01:01:37.900 Is that because there's also a perception of intentionality?

01:01:41.540 There is the sense – I think most people fundamentally don't understand

01:01:45.440 the thing we've been talking about in this conversation,

01:01:47.760 which is the Nazis were also well-intentioned.

01:01:50.620 Right.

01:01:51.040 They think the Nazis were just evil.

01:01:53.440 Yes.

01:01:53.720 Whereas the communists were well-intentioned.

01:01:56.060 I think you're right.

01:01:56.600 And the things that they did were kind of like,

01:01:59.220 well, they were trying to do good,

01:02:01.520 but then they just put these people in camps.

01:02:02.940 And also, I think the other thing as well,

01:02:05.760 the difference is communists killed millions of people, Mao and Stalin.

01:02:10.500 A lot of the deaths were actually through incompetence

01:02:13.260 and the inability of the economic model that they were applying

01:02:18.300 to actually feed people, basically.

01:02:19.700 Yeah, right.

01:02:20.200 So they do kill people deliberately.

01:02:21.720 Of course they do.

01:02:22.600 Stalin's purges, the Great Terror.

01:02:24.980 But that doesn't compare to marching 7 million people,

01:02:29.420 if you include all the different groups, into arms.

01:02:31.680 Yeah, exactly.

01:02:33.040 Do you know what I mean?

01:02:33.480 Exactly.

01:02:33.940 There's not quite the same industrialised, deliberate,

01:02:39.420 methodical apparatus of extermination.

01:02:42.400 But the really controversial thing I wanted to ask you

01:02:44.560 is when Francis said,

01:02:45.440 Hitler's the most evil man, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

01:02:46.900 He's the most evil man. 0.97

01:02:47.740 From my reading of World War II, 0.81

01:02:50.680 I know this will be controversial.

01:02:52.900 I'm not sure what the Japanese did in World War II

01:02:56.540 wasn't worse than what the Germans did. 0.86

01:02:58.280 I think the death toll of the Japanese don't have 1.00

01:03:02.020 an exterminatory programme in the same way

01:03:04.020 that the Germans do. 0.99

01:03:05.220 The Japanese, so if you're,

01:03:06.460 imagine you had a Japanese guest, right,

01:03:08.280 a sort of nationalistic Japanese guest.

01:03:11.380 That guest would say to you,

01:03:12.620 I can't believe I've degenerated to impersonating.

01:03:15.920 I hope you don't do the accent, 1.00

01:03:17.820 because that really would take us out of the line.

01:03:20.460 He would presumably say,

01:03:22.240 look, we're doing what European colonialises.

01:03:24.640 Yeah, where are you, I'll do it again.

01:03:25.860 We're butchering millions of people

01:03:27.360 with shovels and bayonets and all.

01:03:29.380 He would say violence happens, people,

01:03:30.820 but he'd say, did not Dominic say earlier in the show?

01:03:33.240 Right.

01:03:33.660 That violence happens and bad things happen

01:03:35.560 in all empires and so on and so forth.

01:03:37.160 Why are you judging us by different standards?

01:03:39.380 Yeah.

01:03:39.980 He would probably say that.

01:03:40.900 But wouldn't that have Hitler say that too? 0.96

01:03:42.620 No, because I think Hitler, 0.98

01:03:44.460 I mean Hitler might, 0.99

01:03:46.120 but Hitler has an exterminatory programme, 0.84

01:03:50.080 which very few other empires do.

01:03:51.860 That's fair.

01:03:52.160 So to give you an example that you mentioned,

01:03:54.200 which is the Spanish in the Americas,

01:03:57.820 the Spanish, a lot of people die

01:03:59.620 when the Spanish arrive.

01:04:01.260 Loads of people die,

01:04:02.480 and they die through disease,

01:04:03.800 they die through massacres,

01:04:05.820 all of those kinds of things.

01:04:06.920 But the Spanish really don't want to kill a lot of people.

01:04:09.080 What they really want is workers,

01:04:10.340 and they're gutted when all these people start dying

01:04:12.400 in the Caribbean or whatever.

01:04:13.580 So the so-called genocide that the Spanish carry out 1.00

01:04:16.520 in the Caribbean, the Taino people,

01:04:18.460 when there are none of them left, right,

01:04:20.540 within a couple of decades.

01:04:22.540 And the Spanish were really disappointed

01:04:24.320 because they'd wanted these people

01:04:25.640 to be working in the gold mines and whatnot for them.

01:04:27.620 They don't want to go to the Americas 0.99

01:04:29.120 and kill loads of people. 0.78

01:04:30.720 It's not part of their programme.

01:04:32.480 They want to make loads of money, 0.89

01:04:33.560 and if they have to kill a few people, 0.99

01:04:34.980 fair enough. 0.99

01:04:36.040 As they say, that's part of the game.

01:04:37.680 But they don't have a genocidal programme.

01:04:41.060 The Third Reich is unusual 0.95

01:04:42.480 in having a deliberate genocidal programme.

01:04:45.820 Even the Mongols weren't really genocidal. 0.99

01:04:47.820 They were like, either surrender or we'll kill you. 0.87

01:04:49.520 Right, exactly. 0.99

01:04:50.020 But if you surrender, we'll...

01:04:50.760 Yeah, exactly.

01:04:51.400 Sacking your city is just part of the course, right?

01:04:53.220 Right.

01:04:53.380 That's what they think.

01:04:53.980 So that's what makes the Nazis kind of different. 0.70

01:04:56.880 I think it makes them...

01:04:57.700 Yeah, it makes them really chilling and unsettling.

01:05:00.400 And there is a sort of...

01:05:02.060 This application of the apparatus of industrial modernity 0.97

01:05:07.720 to killing people. 0.80

01:05:09.060 Yeah. 0.93

01:05:09.300 I think that's what a lot of people...

01:05:10.420 It's like, you know, you think about some of the most...

01:05:13.380 You know, some of the most chilling films

01:05:15.500 about the Holocaust.

01:05:16.920 There's the film Conspiracy,

01:05:18.020 which is about the Van Zee Conference.

01:05:19.660 And it's literally just people sitting around a table like this

01:05:21.820 talking about, you know,

01:05:23.360 how they're going to organise the infrastructure.

01:05:25.360 Yeah.

01:05:26.220 Or the film...

01:05:27.200 I can't remember the title now,

01:05:28.420 where you never see it, but you hear it,

01:05:30.960 where it's set just over there.

01:05:32.340 It's the Camp Commandant at Auschwitz.

01:05:35.220 Very recent film, did really well.

01:05:37.720 And, again, you don't see what's happening in the camp,

01:05:41.020 but you see the banality and the ordered, methodical,

01:05:45.500 almost sort of humdrum nature of the apparatus of killing.

01:05:49.680 I think that's what we find really terrifying about the Nazis.

01:05:53.740 And that's different, I think, from...

01:05:55.220 Let's say Stalin's great terror,

01:05:59.000 his...

01:05:59.540 I mean, it's not unlike other terrors in history.

01:06:01.820 There's a sort of an ad hoc nature to it.

01:06:04.720 You know, there's a...

01:06:05.720 It's a regime trying to purge people within it.

01:06:08.500 We've seen it many times in history.

01:06:10.140 It's on a much bigger scale, of course.

01:06:12.280 But it doesn't have that kind of...

01:06:14.460 Quite have that cold...

01:06:15.440 It's kind of like the French Revolution

01:06:17.220 and what happened after it.

01:06:18.360 Because, basically, you've got a bunch of these, like, 0.99

01:06:20.040 crazy lunatic revolutionaries, 1.00

01:06:21.620 and you can't really run a country like that. 1.00

01:06:23.240 So you have to kill them off, 1.00

01:06:24.320 and then you kill off the people who killed them off 1.00

01:06:26.500 until you really... 1.00

01:06:28.740 It's the idea of the enemy within.

01:06:30.440 Yeah.

01:06:31.040 I think the idea of the enemy within

01:06:32.340 is a very...

01:06:35.200 The traitor within 0.96

01:06:36.160 is a really dangerous one.

01:06:38.600 Once you go down that road,

01:06:40.240 it almost always happens with revolutionary regimes.

01:06:42.560 They're in battle from the very beginning

01:06:43.940 because they've got the old regime.

01:06:45.800 They're worried they're going to come back,

01:06:46.920 or they've got foreign adversaries.

01:06:48.880 They've got foreign adversaries... 0.84

01:06:50.580 adversaries,

01:06:51.620 as they did in the French Revolution.

01:06:53.340 So I'm getting so excited

01:06:54.340 talking about the French Revolution

01:06:55.860 that I can't even speak.

01:06:58.380 And then when you start looking at your kind of...

01:07:02.220 You look internally,

01:07:04.080 and you look at domestic opposition,

01:07:05.800 you say,

01:07:06.120 well, these people are not just, you know,

01:07:08.140 critics or opponents. 0.95

01:07:09.200 They're traitors. 0.97

01:07:10.660 And they're a threat to our revolution. 0.99

01:07:12.620 Then they've got to go.

01:07:13.360 And you see that again and again.

01:07:14.780 And what's really interesting

01:07:16.740 and worrying at the same time

01:07:18.600 is you look at our economy,

01:07:20.080 which is faltering, to put it mildly.

01:07:22.540 Yeah.

01:07:23.240 People are getting poorer.

01:07:24.300 People aren't going to be able to...

01:07:26.200 I'm intrigued about where you're going to go with it.

01:07:28.220 Yeah.

01:07:29.960 Are you going to ask the key question,

01:07:31.700 which is basically,

01:07:32.340 is Keir Starmer Stalin?

01:07:33.460 Yes, exactly.

01:07:34.160 I don't think he's that competent,

01:07:35.700 if I'm going to be honest with you,

01:07:37.040 or has the courage of his convictions either.

01:07:39.380 But I guess my point is,

01:07:41.280 do you get concerned

01:07:42.800 when you see us enter

01:07:45.540 these kind of economic times

01:07:47.100 where richer and poor,

01:07:48.940 the gap is getting ever wider,

01:07:50.600 people are struggling economically,

01:07:52.520 that we're going to enter

01:07:54.280 more turbulent times.

01:07:56.080 And these are the times

01:07:57.500 where utopianism,

01:08:00.400 socialism,

01:08:01.940 you know, 0.98

01:08:02.620 these people are bad.

01:08:03.940 That's going to start to creep in

01:08:05.600 as people look quite naturally

01:08:07.080 for someone to play.

01:08:08.880 Am I concerned about it?

01:08:10.340 I think it will happen,

01:08:11.280 but I'm not concerned about it

01:08:12.340 because I think that's history.

01:08:13.960 That's just what happens. 0.99

01:08:15.720 That's a really shit reason 0.99

01:08:17.160 not to be concerned about it. 0.98

01:08:18.700 I mean, no offence.

01:08:20.540 My entire family is going to get wiped out,

01:08:22.540 but that's history, mate.

01:08:23.640 You know, don't worry about it.

01:08:24.780 That is what I think.

01:08:25.460 That is what I think.

01:08:26.100 What do you mean that's what you think?

01:08:27.060 I think that's what I...

01:08:27.740 I think that's what...

01:08:28.360 You have children, right?

01:08:29.420 Yeah. 0.92

01:08:30.040 What if they all get killed?

01:08:31.160 Are you not concerned about this?

01:08:32.220 Well, I always say to my son,

01:08:33.140 you know,

01:08:33.360 the lesson of history

01:08:34.140 is your neighbours 1.00

01:08:34.800 will probably try to kill and eat you, 1.00

01:08:36.080 so make sure you kill them first. 1.00

01:08:39.520 He is right-wing. 1.00

01:08:40.440 But I think that's like complaining

01:08:43.760 and you're not concerned

01:08:44.520 that very soon, you know,

01:08:46.060 the summer will be over

01:08:46.920 and winter will come.

01:08:48.040 I'm like, of course,

01:08:48.800 I'm not concerned about it.

01:08:49.700 I mean, I know it's going to happen.

01:08:51.240 It'd be a waste of time

01:08:52.160 to lie awake worrying about it.

01:08:54.000 I think people who, like us,

01:08:57.460 you know, born in the post-war period,

01:08:59.880 grew up in the years of affluence,

01:09:03.080 sort of came of age

01:09:05.860 in the post-Cold War era,

01:09:08.840 end of history,

01:09:09.480 you know, liberal democracy.

01:09:13.400 We still,

01:09:14.860 even though we intellectually

01:09:15.880 maybe think,

01:09:16.860 oh, yeah,

01:09:17.240 I know that's not the norm

01:09:18.300 and I know history is much darker,

01:09:20.200 but I think still instinctively

01:09:21.800 we kind of think,

01:09:22.520 it'd be nice if it was like that

01:09:23.960 all the time, you know?

01:09:25.180 It'd be nice if it was just

01:09:26.120 economic growth

01:09:27.160 and everybody was happy

01:09:28.920 and we were all friends.

01:09:30.280 It would be nice,

01:09:30.780 but it's never going to happen.

01:09:31.900 The 21st century

01:09:32.680 will see loads of wars

01:09:33.720 and disasters.

01:09:36.680 There'll be a lot of,

01:09:37.860 you know,

01:09:38.100 am I worried about people

01:09:39.200 being scapegoated

01:09:39.940 or whatever.

01:09:41.000 I mean,

01:09:41.280 I guess it's sad

01:09:41.960 that it happens.

01:09:42.900 It is sad that it happens

01:09:44.160 for the avoidance of tapping it.

01:09:46.460 It is sad that it happens,

01:09:48.080 but it's going to happen.

01:09:49.360 Like,

01:09:49.520 history's not going to stop.

01:09:51.100 There will be people

01:09:51.800 who are tremendous villains

01:09:53.140 who will come to power

01:09:54.560 and there will be,

01:09:55.980 you know,

01:09:57.300 massacres and stuff

01:09:58.780 because human nature

01:09:59.740 because human nature

01:09:59.760 is never going to change.

01:10:01.020 People will always

01:10:01.820 keep behaving badly

01:10:02.860 and stuff will keep happening

01:10:05.380 and there'll be migrant crises

01:10:07.620 and there will be coups

01:10:09.620 and there'll be a revolution somewhere

01:10:11.220 and all of those things

01:10:12.360 will happen.

01:10:13.060 Am I concerned about it?

01:10:14.420 Not really

01:10:14.940 because I spent all my life

01:10:16.420 reading about it,

01:10:17.740 about it happening in the past

01:10:19.200 and I know that history

01:10:20.400 is not suddenly going to stop.

01:10:22.040 You know,

01:10:22.220 I'm not Tony Blair

01:10:23.140 or Bill Clinton

01:10:23.800 thinking that,

01:10:24.860 brilliant,

01:10:25.520 the world is perfect.

01:10:26.420 We're in 1999

01:10:27.180 and let's hope

01:10:28.920 that, you know,

01:10:29.520 nothing ever happens.

01:10:30.220 The world was pretty good

01:10:31.420 in 1999.

01:10:32.740 Don't you think?

01:10:34.240 It really was.

01:10:36.060 It was a great time.

01:10:38.100 It was a great time.

01:10:39.760 I guess it kind of was,

01:10:40.660 but I mean,

01:10:41.040 maybe we,

01:10:41.480 obviously we think that

01:10:42.240 for very contingent reasons.

01:10:43.960 You know,

01:10:44.140 there are lots of places

01:10:44.740 where it wasn't great.

01:10:45.820 Yeah, we don't care about them.

01:10:46.860 I'm talking about for us.

01:10:48.160 Yeah, it was great for us.

01:10:49.160 I think this is

01:10:50.240 precisely the problem, right?

01:10:51.920 This is the problem

01:10:53.080 about us having

01:10:55.080 a slightly starry-eyed

01:10:56.180 view of humanity

01:10:57.380 and how history works

01:10:59.420 and what the future will bring.

01:11:01.000 You know,

01:11:01.160 that sort of sense

01:11:01.800 that people have now

01:11:02.580 where they sort of,

01:11:03.380 you know,

01:11:03.920 you talk about,

01:11:04.880 oh, Britain's in such a mess,

01:11:06.280 the Western world

01:11:07.140 tearing itself apart,

01:11:08.160 we live in an age of populism

01:11:09.220 and polarization,

01:11:10.160 isn't that a terrible shame

01:11:11.220 and blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:11:12.740 And often I'm like,

01:11:13.940 you know what,

01:11:14.380 when we talk about

01:11:15.160 how terrible everything is,

01:11:17.260 most people in history

01:11:18.400 would say,

01:11:19.020 well, A,

01:11:19.240 those things are completely normal.

01:11:20.800 I mean,

01:11:21.040 that's just life.

01:11:22.240 And B,

01:11:22.860 you've got all those things

01:11:23.920 that we always had

01:11:24.940 but also you're living

01:11:26.000 until you're 80

01:11:26.680 and you have central heating

01:11:27.800 and you get to go on holiday

01:11:29.140 all the time

01:11:29.780 and you,

01:11:30.380 you know,

01:11:30.580 all this kind of thing.

01:11:31.180 And your children survive

01:11:31.920 into adulthood and all of that.

01:11:32.940 What are you whinging about?

01:11:34.120 You've got all the...

01:11:34.980 I think what people

01:11:35.880 are whinging about

01:11:36.680 and I don't blame them

01:11:37.800 is that things are moving

01:11:39.060 in a downward direction.

01:11:41.280 Right.

01:11:41.860 That's what people

01:11:42.560 are whinging about

01:11:43.240 because objectively speaking,

01:11:45.320 I completely agree with you.

01:11:46.580 Life's f***ing great.

01:11:47.800 If you,

01:11:48.000 and I,

01:11:48.380 my pinned thing on my Twitter

01:11:49.800 is the West is brilliant.

01:11:50.920 There's a clip of me

01:11:51.480 talking about why we're all lucky

01:11:52.580 and we are lucky

01:11:53.620 to live here.

01:11:54.500 But I'd quite like

01:11:55.360 my children and grandchildren

01:11:56.560 to also feel lucky

01:11:57.740 to live where we live.

01:11:58.900 And that's what people

01:12:00.080 are concerned about.

01:12:00.780 Of course.

01:12:01.080 I understand why

01:12:01.620 they're concerned about that

01:12:02.360 but...

01:12:03.580 But your point is

01:12:04.540 that there's nothing

01:12:05.420 you can do about it.

01:12:06.540 I don't necessarily think that.

01:12:07.640 There'll be lots of winners.

01:12:08.880 There always are.

01:12:09.540 You know,

01:12:10.860 the nature of being a parent

01:12:11.640 is you want your children

01:12:12.560 to be among the winners

01:12:13.680 and not the losers.

01:12:14.660 Indeed.

01:12:15.060 But ultimately,

01:12:15.720 the nature of being a parent

01:12:17.040 is also realizing

01:12:17.780 that you can't control

01:12:18.660 your child's destiny.

01:12:20.320 So,

01:12:21.360 to some degree,

01:12:22.200 you do your best

01:12:22.960 but there's no much point

01:12:24.980 worrying about it.

01:12:25.780 I just always think,

01:12:27.480 you know,

01:12:27.860 a thing that always

01:12:29.060 plays on my mind,

01:12:30.920 I think about this a lot,

01:12:32.040 is what it would have been like

01:12:33.120 to have been

01:12:33.700 a German

01:12:34.600 in 1910.

01:12:36.160 You live in

01:12:37.000 a newly unified country

01:12:38.360 where life really has

01:12:39.120 got a lot better

01:12:39.900 in the last few decades.

01:12:42.180 You live in one of the

01:12:42.820 most sophisticated,

01:12:44.540 civilized...

01:12:46.100 The German people

01:12:46.660 were amazing.

01:12:47.360 This is the thing

01:12:47.860 that we all lose

01:12:48.540 because of everything

01:12:49.740 that happened after 1910,

01:12:51.180 quite rightly.

01:12:51.900 They were an amazing people.

01:12:53.360 Right.

01:12:53.700 So advanced

01:12:54.780 in so many different...

01:12:56.240 Yeah.

01:12:56.720 Like,

01:12:57.020 reading about the...

01:12:57.940 They were...

01:12:59.160 You kind of read it

01:13:00.060 and you go,

01:13:00.420 Hitler kind of had 0.97

01:13:01.520 a bit of a point.

01:13:02.140 This was like

01:13:02.660 a superior race 0.97

01:13:03.520 to some extent

01:13:04.200 in terms of

01:13:05.240 all the industrial development...

01:13:07.820 I'm joking,

01:13:09.020 obviously,

01:13:09.380 but you know what I mean.

01:13:10.080 They were incredible.

01:13:11.160 Right,

01:13:11.380 of course.

01:13:11.780 And so,

01:13:12.840 that's 1910.

01:13:13.800 If someone says to you then,

01:13:14.880 well,

01:13:14.980 how do you think

01:13:15.340 the future will play out?

01:13:16.500 You'd be like,

01:13:16.820 well,

01:13:17.020 it'll probably be like this.

01:13:18.080 Yeah,

01:13:18.220 it's going to be great.

01:13:18.820 Like,

01:13:19.460 we're...

01:13:20.080 And actually,

01:13:21.100 you know what?

01:13:22.140 You could not conceive

01:13:23.440 of how terrible

01:13:24.180 it's going to be.

01:13:25.400 No, no.

01:13:25.560 So,

01:13:26.260 looking forward,

01:13:26.960 do I worry?

01:13:27.740 Looking forward to the future?

01:13:28.720 I just think it's unknowable.

01:13:30.760 And there are societies

01:13:32.480 right now

01:13:33.220 that seem

01:13:34.220 sophisticated,

01:13:35.760 safe,

01:13:36.700 united,

01:13:37.780 that may well,

01:13:38.460 you know,

01:13:38.680 in 2050,

01:13:39.420 you'll be talking about it

01:13:40.240 and saying,

01:13:40.840 my God,

01:13:41.560 who knew that

01:13:42.200 Belgium would have a civil war 0.81

01:13:44.440 that would last 20 years

01:13:45.420 or whatever.

01:13:45.980 I mean, 0.92

01:13:46.120 silly example, 0.94

01:13:47.200 but you just simply 0.95

01:13:48.540 cannot predict

01:13:49.340 what will happen.

01:13:51.140 And do I worry about it?

01:13:53.020 I don't really worry

01:13:53.840 because I just think

01:13:54.360 that really is a waste of time.

01:13:55.860 That's a really interesting

01:13:56.660 way of looking at it.

01:13:57.720 Maybe as we wrap up,

01:13:59.100 the one thing

01:13:59.580 I...

01:14:00.460 it's probably worth asking

01:14:01.700 as well is,

01:14:02.920 you know,

01:14:03.280 you've delivered

01:14:04.500 a masterclass

01:14:05.580 of presenting

01:14:06.420 the tragic vision.

01:14:08.140 Thomas Sowell talks about

01:14:09.120 this kind of being

01:14:09.860 the core of the more

01:14:10.980 right of center,

01:14:11.820 the more conservative

01:14:12.520 worldview, really,

01:14:13.980 which is human nature

01:14:15.540 is what it is.

01:14:17.780 Technology changes,

01:14:18.900 therefore we express

01:14:19.700 human nature

01:14:20.320 in different ways.

01:14:21.120 Yes, exactly.

01:14:22.300 Oh,

01:14:22.800 before we get to that,

01:14:23.620 actually,

01:14:23.800 something else I was

01:14:24.340 going to ask you,

01:14:24.960 which ties into this.

01:14:27.080 Do you think

01:14:28.040 that nuclear weapons

01:14:29.620 fundamentally changed

01:14:30.980 the course of human history

01:14:32.280 because this peace dividend

01:14:33.720 that we've had

01:14:34.240 is actually because

01:14:34.940 of nuclear weapons?

01:14:35.720 Yes, I do.

01:14:36.340 Is that why?

01:14:37.280 I do.

01:14:37.820 I think there would have been

01:14:39.240 a third world war

01:14:39.880 with that nuclear weapon.

01:14:40.460 That makes sense.

01:14:41.080 There's no question in my mind.

01:14:42.120 I think there would have been

01:14:42.740 a war,

01:14:43.020 maybe not immediately.

01:14:43.860 Well, we'd be in one now,

01:14:45.240 right?

01:14:45.920 I mean, Russia, Ukraine

01:14:47.000 probably would have become...

01:14:48.280 Yeah, it could be.

01:14:48.980 It could be.

01:14:49.560 I think there would definitely

01:14:50.260 have been a war

01:14:50.940 probably over Berlin

01:14:53.560 and maybe it would have been

01:14:55.160 delayed until 1960,

01:14:57.140 61 or something like that.

01:14:58.360 Right.

01:14:58.520 But it would have come.

01:15:00.720 Then human missile crisis,

01:15:02.120 obviously what holds them back

01:15:03.200 is the fear of nuclear annihilation.

01:15:05.220 Again, in the early 1980s,

01:15:07.360 you know,

01:15:07.820 you could have a multiple

01:15:08.640 world war

01:15:09.460 during the Cold War

01:15:11.560 and every time

01:15:12.580 they're held back

01:15:13.340 by nuclear weapons.

01:15:14.480 It's so fascinating.

01:15:15.440 It's almost like human nature

01:15:16.640 in that way

01:15:17.040 where like the worst thing

01:15:18.140 is also the best thing

01:15:19.120 because nuclear weapons

01:15:20.400 probably will lead

01:15:21.200 to the annihilation

01:15:21.900 of all humanity

01:15:22.500 at some point.

01:15:23.180 It's very possible

01:15:23.900 in my opinion.

01:15:24.620 but also it's why

01:15:25.920 we've avoided

01:15:27.720 a global war.

01:15:28.940 Yeah, I agree.

01:15:29.480 It's so weird.

01:15:30.560 But anyway,

01:15:31.000 coming back to this tragic vision

01:15:33.000 which you presented,

01:15:35.480 I feel like

01:15:36.420 the way we talk about

01:15:38.160 modern things

01:15:39.140 that are going on,

01:15:39.940 conflict in Russia

01:15:40.900 and Ukraine,

01:15:41.420 in Israel and Gaza,

01:15:42.840 is partly because

01:15:44.060 we've lost that.

01:15:48.260 Right?

01:15:48.620 Yeah.

01:15:48.740 Do you get where

01:15:49.580 I'm going with this?

01:15:50.700 I do.

01:15:51.240 Yeah, I do.

01:15:52.640 Sorry,

01:15:53.100 I was distracted

01:15:54.020 by the fact

01:15:54.400 that I was resting

01:15:54.860 my foot on your foot 1.00

01:15:55.760 and I thought

01:15:56.100 it was part of the table.

01:15:56.760 I quite enjoyed it.

01:15:57.360 And actually,

01:15:58.000 there's quite a lot

01:15:58.540 that happens under the table

01:15:59.680 that you're going to do it.

01:16:00.800 You don't get that

01:16:01.400 on every podcast, do you?

01:16:03.400 You go and tell Rogan

01:16:04.480 you're not going to get that.

01:16:05.480 Yeah, people always go,

01:16:06.260 why haven't you got

01:16:06.740 enough female guests? 1.00

01:16:07.600 It's because of him.

01:16:09.280 Listen,

01:16:09.900 I can't help you.

01:16:10.600 Women aren't into 1.00

01:16:11.260 that sort of shit. 1.00

01:16:12.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:16:13.360 Sad.

01:16:13.840 It doesn't often happen

01:16:14.620 on podcasts

01:16:15.480 where the host

01:16:16.820 is playing footsie

01:16:17.420 with you under the table.

01:16:18.300 But yeah,

01:16:18.700 it's something

01:16:19.240 we give you the special three minutes.

01:16:21.080 So in the sense

01:16:22.020 that we're talking

01:16:22.460 about those wars

01:16:23.120 and we're surprised by them,

01:16:24.180 we're surprised what happened

01:16:24.980 and we're very moralistic

01:16:25.900 in the way we interpret them.

01:16:26.560 And the way we talk about them,

01:16:28.100 you know,

01:16:28.580 genocide,

01:16:29.580 like everything's a genocide now.

01:16:31.160 Yeah.

01:16:31.520 Do you know what I mean?

01:16:32.120 I do.

01:16:32.460 I do know what you mean.

01:16:33.220 There's the language of,

01:16:36.760 we're sort of,

01:16:38.120 we're horrified,

01:16:39.060 we're surprised,

01:16:40.360 we reach for extreme language

01:16:41.740 to describe what we're seeing.

01:16:43.640 Yeah,

01:16:43.840 and I think maybe

01:16:44.420 the war in Ukraine

01:16:45.120 is a really good example of this

01:16:46.320 because Putin,

01:16:47.660 if he was here now,

01:16:48.460 would say,

01:16:48.980 and he said it himself,

01:16:50.960 you know,

01:16:51.260 I'm doing what Peter the Great did.

01:16:52.580 I'm doing what Catherine the Great did.

01:16:53.960 I want to make Russia strong

01:16:55.100 and that's my job

01:16:57.000 and I really would like

01:16:59.300 an outlet on the Black Sea.

01:17:00.760 You know,

01:17:01.200 I'd like Crimea

01:17:01.840 and actually I'd really like

01:17:03.300 Ukraine to be a puppet state 0.95

01:17:04.640 and that's what empires do.

01:17:05.900 We want puppets, 0.92

01:17:06.480 we want to be a puppet state. 0.56

01:17:07.960 And this is our sphere of influence

01:17:09.400 and we'll do whatever the hell we want.

01:17:10.720 We'll do what we want

01:17:11.380 because that's what big powers do.

01:17:12.860 That's exactly what he would say

01:17:14.260 and he would say,

01:17:14.960 look at you having a hissy fit about it.

01:17:16.520 Now, 0.98

01:17:16.760 I think Putin's a terrible man, 0.64

01:17:18.820 very committed

01:17:19.980 to the defense of Ukraine,

01:17:21.380 but I think

01:17:22.100 pretending that Putin

01:17:23.900 is something abnormal

01:17:25.100 is a weird way

01:17:27.340 of thinking about it.

01:17:28.020 Like,

01:17:28.220 I've been very,

01:17:29.020 very pro-Ukraine

01:17:29.720 but on the basis

01:17:30.620 of exactly what you're saying,

01:17:31.880 which is,

01:17:32.320 of course he's going to do that,

01:17:33.640 that's why he can't be allowed to do it.

01:17:35.340 Yeah,

01:17:35.640 exactly.

01:17:35.940 Do you know what I mean?

01:17:36.840 It's the most obvious thing in the world.

01:17:38.860 He wants to conquer that country

01:17:40.460 and it's not in our interest to let him.

01:17:42.060 Yeah,

01:17:42.420 that's exactly my,

01:17:43.400 I wrote this column

01:17:44.480 actually before the war happened

01:17:46.460 just as he was gearing up

01:17:47.700 and there were people saying,

01:17:49.840 oh,

01:17:49.880 he's not going to do it,

01:17:50.580 he's not going to do it,

01:17:51.220 or is he going to do it?

01:17:51.920 And I said,

01:17:52.440 I wrote this column saying,

01:17:53.520 I think he is going to do it

01:17:54.560 because thinking about Putin

01:17:56.040 and the way he sees the world,

01:17:57.960 why wouldn't you do it?

01:17:58.860 Right.

01:17:59.060 He thinks the West

01:17:59.640 is really divided and weak.

01:18:00.980 It was about the point

01:18:01.940 where I get the example

01:18:03.360 at the time,

01:18:04.440 there was a massive hullabaloo

01:18:05.600 about Boris Johnson

01:18:06.420 having a cake or something

01:18:07.620 to do with COVID

01:18:08.580 and I was like,

01:18:09.000 he looks at the West right now,

01:18:10.100 Joe Biden is 3,000 years old,

01:18:12.060 Boris Johnson is battling

01:18:12.980 with a cake or whatever,

01:18:14.360 why wouldn't you,

01:18:15.320 if you're him

01:18:16.020 and you have that ruthless,

01:18:17.520 cold-blooded,

01:18:18.660 amoral view of human relations

01:18:20.360 and all you care about

01:18:21.600 is basically old-fashioned

01:18:23.080 Russian imperialism,

01:18:24.100 why wouldn't you do it?

01:18:25.760 Totally.

01:18:26.000 And that's,

01:18:26.660 so I think,

01:18:27.960 so when people are,

01:18:28.600 it's Putin mad,

01:18:29.640 he's not mad,

01:18:30.740 he would say,

01:18:31.780 I'm doing exactly what

01:18:33.160 empire builders have done

01:18:34.920 all through history.

01:18:36.080 No,

01:18:36.280 I don't want his empire

01:18:37.080 to succeed,

01:18:38.300 I don't like it,

01:18:39.020 so I think we should stop him.

01:18:40.300 Right.

01:18:40.660 But I don't delude myself

01:18:41.880 about what the nature of the game is.

01:18:43.060 It's why I never used 0.99

01:18:43.560 all this bullshit language 0.98

01:18:44.640 about like, 0.99

01:18:45.280 it's an illegal war,

01:18:46.600 what do you mean?

01:18:47.640 Yeah,

01:18:48.000 I agree with you about that.

01:18:49.080 What does that even mean?

01:18:50.300 I think that,

01:18:50.840 I agree with you completely

01:18:52.020 and I think most people who,

01:18:53.880 I don't want to completely

01:18:55.420 go down the road

01:18:56.100 of saying might is right,

01:18:57.660 but,

01:18:58.100 most wars that have ever been fought

01:19:00.200 were,

01:19:01.480 in averted commas,

01:19:02.300 illegal wars,

01:19:03.260 right?

01:19:03.460 A hundred years war,

01:19:04.700 a legal war,

01:19:05.520 I mean,

01:19:05.700 maybe Edward III

01:19:06.820 would have said it was

01:19:07.660 because of his claim

01:19:08.300 to the throne of France,

01:19:09.480 but come on.

01:19:10.680 You know,

01:19:11.320 this is the point

01:19:12.120 about the conservative view

01:19:13.360 of human nature,

01:19:14.000 I suppose,

01:19:14.380 right?

01:19:14.600 That people will

01:19:15.380 try to do what they can

01:19:16.880 to maximize their own power

01:19:18.280 and their own stability

01:19:19.140 and security

01:19:19.840 and we shouldn't be surprised

01:19:21.440 when somebody

01:19:22.600 who is not our friend

01:19:23.720 tries to do that,

01:19:25.600 you know,

01:19:26.020 when tries to benefit

01:19:26.960 his own country

01:19:27.660 at the expense of others.

01:19:29.080 Putin would say,

01:19:30.300 you've misunderstood the game.

01:19:32.000 You don't understand the rules.

01:19:33.700 I'm playing the game properly 0.99

01:19:34.980 and you clowns in the West, 0.99

01:19:37.240 you know, 1.00

01:19:37.480 preening yourselves

01:19:38.200 about your principles

01:19:39.040 have misunderstood

01:19:39.980 what we're all doing.

01:19:41.440 And it's also as well,

01:19:42.460 like you use the word amoral,

01:19:44.040 I imagine Putin would push back

01:19:45.420 on that and go,

01:19:46.080 I'm not amoral,

01:19:47.200 I am doing something

01:19:48.160 very moral

01:19:48.700 which is the best

01:19:49.380 for my country.

01:19:50.700 Yeah,

01:19:50.980 he would

01:19:51.340 and that's a fair point.

01:19:52.840 I think one thing

01:19:53.980 that's I think really interesting

01:19:55.140 that we have lost

01:19:56.000 is a sense of national interest.

01:19:58.100 There's a famous interview

01:20:00.660 of the story often told

01:20:02.240 somebody sitting next

01:20:03.560 to the then

01:20:04.440 cabinet secretary,

01:20:06.100 I think it was

01:20:06.400 Sir Gus O'Donnell

01:20:07.200 and they asked him

01:20:08.260 what's more important

01:20:09.060 in your view

01:20:09.600 for you to do

01:20:10.220 as the British cabinet secretary

01:20:11.280 is it Britain's interest

01:20:12.600 or the world's interest

01:20:13.560 and he said

01:20:14.040 I'd like to think

01:20:14.900 it's the world's interest.

01:20:16.020 I'm like,

01:20:16.420 well,

01:20:17.340 I think it should be

01:20:18.100 Britain's interests.

01:20:19.380 I think,

01:20:20.080 again,

01:20:20.680 you're misunderstanding

01:20:21.460 the nature of the game

01:20:23.040 you're playing

01:20:23.540 because let me tell you

01:20:24.420 the Chinese aren't thinking 1.00

01:20:25.920 oh,

01:20:26.540 I'll do what's in Britain's interest. 0.90

01:20:28.040 If you're not thinking it,

01:20:28.880 nobody else is.

01:20:30.220 And I think we have

01:20:31.200 partly as a result of

01:20:33.520 the understandable

01:20:35.860 revulsion

01:20:36.900 of the excesses

01:20:37.620 of nationalism

01:20:38.140 in the first half

01:20:39.320 of the 20th century

01:20:40.180 partly because we've built

01:20:41.640 this kind of

01:20:42.380 liberal rules-based

01:20:43.780 international order

01:20:44.660 and so on

01:20:45.120 that so many people

01:20:45.740 are very committed to.

01:20:47.060 We have actually

01:20:47.860 lost sense of the fact

01:20:48.780 that there is a competitive

01:20:50.000 element to world affairs

01:20:51.180 in which basically,

01:20:52.600 you know,

01:20:53.080 you do what you can

01:20:54.220 for your team

01:20:55.300 and that that means

01:20:56.840 another team

01:20:57.480 will lose out.

01:20:59.140 And that's,

01:20:59.840 again,

01:21:00.000 that's the nature

01:21:00.620 of the game.

01:21:01.420 Dominic,

01:21:01.720 it's been great

01:21:02.120 having you on.

01:21:02.700 We're going to head over

01:21:03.320 to Substack

01:21:03.880 where our audience

01:21:04.720 get to ask you

01:21:05.340 their questions.

01:21:06.640 But before we do,

01:21:07.540 the last question

01:21:08.180 we always ask is

01:21:08.880 what's the one thing

01:21:09.520 we're not talking about

01:21:10.660 that we really should be?

01:21:11.560 So it's something

01:21:12.440 that you've actually

01:21:12.980 alluded to already

01:21:13.680 so I was gutted

01:21:14.340 when you brought it up

01:21:15.140 because I was

01:21:15.820 freeing and priding

01:21:16.880 myself on having

01:21:17.920 thought of this.

01:21:19.220 It's actually

01:21:19.860 nuclear annihilation.

01:21:20.980 I think

01:21:23.000 it's interesting

01:21:24.440 how much

01:21:26.000 for me

01:21:26.900 growing up

01:21:27.440 in the early 1980s

01:21:28.600 this was a constant threat.

01:21:30.860 You know,

01:21:30.980 it was on TV,

01:21:31.960 there were dramas

01:21:33.320 about it,

01:21:34.540 there were people

01:21:35.320 protesting about

01:21:36.020 nuclear weapons,

01:21:37.380 you know,

01:21:37.500 it was Ronald Reagan

01:21:38.060 going to press the button,

01:21:39.020 all of this kind of thing.

01:21:40.180 And now,

01:21:40.660 of course,

01:21:41.120 we live in an age

01:21:41.880 where we don't really

01:21:42.480 talk about it

01:21:42.980 very much at all.

01:21:44.200 As an omnipresent

01:21:45.100 theory,

01:21:45.500 it has vanished,

01:21:46.480 yet there are

01:21:47.100 more countries

01:21:48.540 for nuclear capability

01:21:49.680 and to go back

01:21:51.840 to the whole argument

01:21:52.580 about human nature,

01:21:54.440 nuclear weapons,

01:21:55.260 I do think,

01:21:55.900 probably have saved lives

01:21:57.040 since the Second World War

01:21:58.480 and prevented wars,

01:21:59.840 but human nature

01:22:00.760 being as it is,

01:22:02.180 one day people

01:22:02.880 will use them.

01:22:03.920 And they'll use them,

01:22:05.060 I think,

01:22:05.340 out of fear

01:22:05.960 because I think

01:22:06.560 that's how war starts.

01:22:08.100 They will use them

01:22:08.800 not because they are mad

01:22:10.640 or because they're evil

01:22:11.980 but because they're frightened

01:22:13.340 and they feel

01:22:14.620 they have no alternative.

01:22:16.440 And especially in a world

01:22:17.940 where AI

01:22:19.500 will be running

01:22:20.520 a lot of these

01:22:21.060 defense programs,

01:22:22.120 I think once that

01:22:22.840 process starts,

01:22:24.600 it will be very

01:22:25.520 difficult to stop.

01:22:27.220 And it's a bit like,

01:22:28.320 you know,

01:22:29.160 if you're a sort of

01:22:29.840 existentialist philosopher

01:22:31.100 or something,

01:22:31.740 you think to yourself,

01:22:32.800 how can people walk around

01:22:33.840 knowing that they're

01:22:34.340 all going to die?

01:22:35.200 Like,

01:22:35.400 why are they bothering

01:22:35.940 buying a sandwich

01:22:36.580 from Pret-a-Manger

01:22:37.200 and making plans for Sunday

01:22:38.800 when actually their own

01:22:39.580 inevitable extinction

01:22:40.380 is coming?

01:22:41.400 And the reason is,

01:22:42.160 of course,

01:22:42.420 your own inevitable extinction

01:22:43.560 is too big a thing

01:22:44.580 to think about

01:22:45.140 and it will paralyze you.

01:22:46.880 And I sometimes wonder,

01:22:48.920 you know,

01:22:49.140 will our descendants

01:22:49.860 living in their

01:22:51.240 kind of irradiated ruins

01:22:53.140 say,

01:22:54.360 how could they walk around

01:22:55.620 saying how brilliant

01:22:56.820 life is,

01:22:58.100 you know,

01:22:58.900 knowing that they're

01:23:00.080 sitting on all this stuff,

01:23:01.700 that one day probably

01:23:02.580 it will go off 0.98

01:23:03.320 and it'll kill everybody

01:23:04.500 and destroy civilization?

01:23:06.440 And the answer is,

01:23:07.400 I guess,

01:23:07.840 that we're mugs,

01:23:10.860 you know,

01:23:11.280 we're blind,

01:23:12.180 we're willfully blind

01:23:13.240 to the potential

01:23:14.080 that this stuff has.

01:23:14.960 And also,

01:23:15.320 there's no one

01:23:15.620 inventing it,

01:23:16.140 right?

01:23:16.560 Never going to go away.

01:23:17.440 We're just stuck with it now.

01:23:18.720 So,

01:23:19.000 yeah,

01:23:20.080 that's a cheery thought.

01:23:20.960 You really are an optimist.

01:23:22.180 Yeah,

01:23:22.380 we're all going to die

01:23:22.860 in a nuclear holocaust. 0.80

01:23:23.780 Enjoy.

01:23:24.080 But you seem to believe

01:23:25.020 that there will be

01:23:25.600 people who live after that,

01:23:27.360 which makes you an optimist.

01:23:28.180 Yeah,

01:23:28.380 sort of mutant,

01:23:29.080 mutant,

01:23:29.540 half crab, 0.98

01:23:30.160 half human,

01:23:30.920 scuttling in the ruins.

01:23:31.760 And on that,

01:23:34.120 no,

01:23:34.520 I'm not happy,

01:23:35.080 no,

01:23:35.500 head on over to Substack

01:23:36.880 where Dominic's

01:23:37.580 going to answer your questions.

01:23:39.960 Are there any key moments

01:23:41.680 in history

01:23:42.240 of what-if scenarios

01:23:44.080 that you believe

01:23:44.840 could have dramatically

01:23:45.620 altered the outcome

01:23:46.540 of a particular battle

01:23:47.900 and in turn

01:23:48.980 changed the course

01:23:50.320 of a war?

01:24:01.760 A claims program

01:24:12.060 for harmed Canadians

01:24:13.400 has begun

01:24:14.220 as a result

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01:24:18.600 before November 20th, 1998

01:24:21.200 and were diagnosed

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TRIGGERnometry - August 24, 2025

The Best Conversation About History You’ve Ever Heard - Dominic Sandbrook

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