TRIGGERnometry - The Truth about Communism, Gulags and the Left with Giles Udy

00:00:00.000 They would lock people in there. The doors were studied just like a cheese grater.

00:00:05.900 No, no food hole. Studied just like a cheese grater.

00:00:09.100 Reason being, you want to bang on the door, say, please let me out.

00:00:12.700 I want you to let me out. Your hands get torn.

00:00:15.440 I just thought, what is the refinement of cruelty that enables you to design something like this?

00:00:23.300 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:33.640 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:34.880 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:40.340 We are delighted to have a brilliant guest for you today.

00:00:43.160 He's a British historian and the author of Labour and the Gulags, Russia and the Seduction of the British Left.

00:00:49.320 Giles Udy, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:50.960 It's good to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.

00:00:52.760 Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you on. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

00:00:56.420 For anyone who's unfamiliar with you, your story, your work, tell everybody a little bit about who are you,

00:01:01.720 how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:06.360 Well, I had a probably conventional middle class background.

00:01:10.400 I was shipped off to boarding school, spent 10 years there, messed up most of my time at school,

00:01:16.020 flunked my A-levels, got to uni, thrown out of uni for not working hard enough when I just kind of drifted.

00:01:22.760 And I drifted around. I did a few jobs.

00:01:25.080 I ended up by working in the shipping industry for quite a while.

00:01:27.380 And I'd done a number of things over the years.

00:01:30.000 And that just continued.

00:01:31.520 A bit of this, I was helping to set up a business with someone.

00:01:34.320 And then I spent some years in construction building.

00:01:36.640 And then about 20 years ago, I happened to take part in a trip to Russia.

00:01:43.600 And I didn't know because, actually, I didn't really want to go by the end and I almost ducked out.

00:01:48.360 I didn't know it was going to be, you know, the thing that changed the whole course of my life, the whole direction.

00:01:52.380 And we were going with a party of people who were helping after the fall of communism just to rebuild independent churches.

00:02:01.300 Because, of course, one of the pillars of civil society had been completely ripped out under communism.

00:02:06.040 It was basically illegal to worship in a church.

00:02:11.200 And so we went over there.

00:02:13.260 I was just helping with a conference, you know, hanging around at the back, talking to people.

00:02:17.880 And I did a bit of reading before I went.

00:02:22.040 I'd missed, well, I didn't do history.

00:02:25.120 I'm a historian now.

00:02:25.880 But I didn't even do history at A level.

00:02:27.160 I dropped it as soon as I could at GCSE.

00:02:29.780 And I had done some reading before I went.

00:02:32.200 And I thought, this is astonishing that any people can go through this kind of suffering for decade after decade after decade.

00:02:41.660 The level of repression, the dictatorship, the fear, the deaths.

00:02:47.020 And I was just, you know, how can you meet people today who've been through all of that or their parents have or, you know, in those days you could sit around a table in Russia with a group of just ordinary people my age.

00:03:03.880 And you'd say, so do any of you have any experience of the gulag era and of, you know, repression and what's happened to your family?

00:03:12.800 And some would say, oh, yeah, my grandpa's brother was shot.

00:03:16.800 Yeah, well, my grandparents, they were in the camps.

00:03:20.780 Oh, and one chap I remember saying to me, oh, yeah, Stalin wiped out half my family.

00:03:24.640 And you'd go around a table and maybe a third of the people there would have some story like that in their family background, fairly immediate family background.

00:03:31.840 And, of course, too, the thing about those things is, you know, you've got somebody who's been in a prison camp, a Soviet prison camp for 15 years.

00:03:40.260 They come out and they are pretty damaged.

00:03:42.900 So they have their own family or they have their own children.

00:03:44.860 Maybe they're reunited.

00:03:46.060 So you've got kids brought up in that.

00:03:47.720 And then it kind of goes on through the generations.

00:03:49.540 Anyway, I was in this I was in this this conference and I happened to make contact with with some people who they came from and this northern city way, way high up above the Arctic Circle.

00:04:04.700 If you take a straight line from Afghanistan and you go all the way up to the Arctic Circle, then go 300 miles north and you get to this crazy city in the middle of nowhere called Narylsk.

00:04:16.500 And it sits on one third of the world's reserves of Dickel.

00:04:19.620 And I just got fascinated because it was one of the big, nasty gulag centers.

00:04:24.280 There were maybe four or five really, really horrible camp complexes, you know, multiple camps.

00:04:29.660 But I mean, this one was so isolated and I just got fascinated by the story of it.

00:04:33.660 And I got them eventually to be able to get me in.

00:04:36.980 You needed a KGB permit to do so.

00:04:39.860 And I'll come to that very, very briefly in a minute.

00:04:42.120 But anyway, I just I got I got transfixed by this story.

00:04:45.820 This was this is a city that is 300 miles above the Arctic Circle.

00:04:50.100 The the permafrost is 300 meters deep.

00:04:53.560 That's frozen, solid ice.

00:04:55.700 Temperature goes down, never melts.

00:04:57.440 Temperature goes down to minus 50 in the winter.

00:05:00.400 Right now, they've just got two hours of sunshine and they'll go through six weeks of dark.

00:05:06.100 And then you get to the summer and it's bright sunshine.

00:05:09.080 I got there in the end.

00:05:10.040 I remember sitting on the top of the of the nearest mountain, 1130 at night in bright sunshine.

00:05:14.140 I mean, the sun by then just goes round in a circle all the way around and doesn't stop.

00:05:18.220 But as I discovered more and more about the city and its history and I I just thought, oh, wow, there's a story to be told here.

00:05:25.340 But because so many different groups of people over the 20 years or so that it was in existence, 20, 30.

00:05:32.660 Yeah, about 20, 25 years, it was in existence.

00:05:35.120 So many different groups of people have been there.

00:05:37.720 Poles who'd been shipped out by Stalin.

00:05:42.240 Russian prisoners of war, Red Army prisoners of war who just been dumped there.

00:05:46.300 A lot of Ukrainian nationalists towards the end, Baltic people, old Bolsheviks, comrades of Lenin from the old days, those ones that hadn't been shot.

00:05:56.180 And a lot of them have been shot.

00:05:57.380 But but those ones, they were all there.

00:05:59.060 And I just thought there's so many stories here.

00:06:00.440 I've got to I've got to I've got to dig deeper.

00:06:03.420 And I managed to get in the the first year I couldn't get in.

00:06:07.520 The first year I thought I bet then I'd been reading so many memoirs.

00:06:11.540 So I thought I need I need to follow the path of the prisoners.

00:06:15.840 I need to understand what it was like, a little bit of what they do.

00:06:18.800 So I flew out to sort of the geographical center of Russia, Krasnoyeusk, which is right in the middle of Siberia.

00:06:27.680 And there I caught the last ferry north.

00:06:32.300 I was the only English speaker on board.

00:06:35.000 I didn't speak any Russian.

00:06:36.720 I mean, my Russian friends think I was crazy to do it.

00:06:39.000 But, you know, the story gripped me.

00:06:40.760 And it was a thousand mile journey north on this river.

00:06:45.840 We just got no idea in this country.

00:06:47.640 You know, the Thames is big.

00:06:48.660 This is big.

00:06:50.080 You get a thousand miles north.

00:06:51.880 The roads run out at 300 miles.

00:06:54.320 So then you've got nothing except for the river.

00:06:57.400 And then that freezes from maybe October, November through till April.

00:07:02.140 And then these little villages, they're all isolated.

00:07:04.600 But I knew the stories, even of the people who had been deported to those villages.

00:07:08.720 And, you know, so we just we go all the way north and pass some of these places.

00:07:14.240 There was one group of camps which I knew of.

00:07:16.200 And, you know, it was an extraordinarily moving thing.

00:07:19.420 We're in the middle of this river, which is a mile wide at that stage.

00:07:23.240 And you just see this big blue cross among the trees on the side.

00:07:28.300 And you think, wow.

00:07:31.100 You know, it shivers down my spine even when I'm talking about it.

00:07:33.800 Those sorts of things.

00:07:35.280 So then I got into the city.

00:07:36.800 This is going on a long time.

00:07:38.060 I'll be as quick as I can.

00:07:38.800 No, no, no.

00:07:39.480 But I got into the city the next year.

00:07:42.200 And it was hard enough to get a permit.

00:07:45.540 But it just so happened the guy I'd made contact with ran the local telephone company.

00:07:50.340 And he had enough clout with the FSB, with the police, to be able to get me a permit.

00:07:56.900 It was a secret city.

00:07:58.180 You weren't allowed in.

00:07:59.620 We were allowed a permit.

00:08:00.200 And I flew in from Moscow, and all the passengers were allowed to leave from the airplane.

00:08:06.180 I was kept on the plane.

00:08:08.180 And then the police arrived to escort me on a military jeep through to the airport police station.

00:08:14.540 And I was held there until these guys, who I'd never met before, but just said,

00:08:18.540 great, you come.

00:08:19.320 We are happy to welcome you.

00:08:20.680 Because Russians are actually very, very welcoming people.

00:08:24.080 And the idea that anyone wanted to come from the mainland, as they'd call it, to this isolated place,

00:08:29.420 they just thought it was just great, you know, come on, please, we'd love to have you.

00:08:33.500 And so they came and collected me.

00:08:35.200 And then we spent maybe a week, two weeks.

00:08:39.260 I said, maybe I was just there for 10 days.

00:08:41.060 I can't remember, because it was quite a while ago.

00:08:42.800 But they took me round to what still remained of these old camps.

00:08:48.960 And, you know, wooden barracks decay.

00:08:52.480 It's a vast mining center.

00:08:54.560 It's a strange place, because there's an immense amount of pride there today.

00:08:59.060 We live in the Arctic.

00:09:00.660 This is great.

00:09:01.400 We managed to stay here.

00:09:03.380 But at the same time as I went there, it was voted one of the 10 most polluted cities on Earth.

00:09:07.800 You know, you come out of your flat in the morning, because they let me stay in a flat,

00:09:11.800 and they've got a refining factory that refines nickel at one end of the city,

00:09:15.140 and then they've got a refining factory that refines copper at the other end of the city.

00:09:18.800 And they'd come out in the morning and go, ah, yeah, Windsor West, that's a copper factory.

00:09:23.840 And then, no, it's the nickel factory.

00:09:25.840 The pollution was so great.

00:09:27.320 But they took me around some of these ruins.

00:09:30.680 And, I mean, some of them were just, I think the one that struck me most was they took me to a little outlying settlement.

00:09:39.820 There's 120,000 people live in this city still, but you can walk across it in 20 minutes,

00:09:43.940 because it's just basically blocks of flats, and then huge mines, and then some outlying townships.

00:09:50.300 They took me off to a rubbish dump in one.

00:09:53.460 And there in the rubbish dump, there was this concrete construction.

00:09:57.080 And what it was, it was the remnants of a punishment cell block inside a punishment camp.

00:10:06.220 Now, minor infractions or major infractions, you went into punishment camp.

00:10:09.700 They had you working in the quarries, brutal conditions, run by convicts, just like the Nazi prison camps were run by capos.

00:10:17.860 You know, horrible places.

00:10:21.300 But this inside was the worst of the worst.

00:10:24.400 And because it was built in concrete, it still survived.

00:10:28.960 And you went in, and, you know, one cell I remember was a single cell.

00:10:33.920 It was just a man's length long.

00:10:36.200 And there was a bar door, and then an outer door.

00:10:40.220 And he'd be kept in there, total dark.

00:10:43.260 The rule for punishment camp blocks was that they took your clothes at the beginning of the day,

00:10:47.940 and you were allowed back to sleep in them at night.

00:10:50.160 It didn't matter if there was no heating.

00:10:52.440 That was it.

00:10:53.620 But then down on one corridor, the main corridor, the cells were open.

00:10:58.800 Now, I said, let's go down to minus 50 in this place.

00:11:01.260 The cells were open, and they would lock people in there.

00:11:05.620 The doors were studied just like a cheese grater.

00:11:10.100 No food hole.

00:11:11.620 Studied just like a cheese grater.

00:11:13.320 Reason being, you want to bang on the door, say, please let me out.

00:11:16.920 I want you to let me out.

00:11:18.160 Your hands get torn.

00:11:19.660 I just thought, what is the refinement of cruelty that enables you to design something like this

00:11:27.520 and put it in as part of the process in which you repress people?

00:11:33.440 I mean, that was the worst bit.

00:11:34.560 But the long and the short of it was that I came back, and I went back there a couple of times more,

00:11:39.400 made lots of lovely friends.

00:11:41.200 And I think probably then after a few years, you know, I said, I want to write the story of the city.

00:11:48.900 I want to write the story of the people who've been there.

00:11:51.600 I want to write the story of where they come from.

00:11:55.520 Do you know that the Latvian officer corps, when the Soviets took over Latvia,

00:12:01.460 they were marched out into a forest for joint exercises one day,

00:12:05.180 and they were all shipped off in a cattle car.

00:12:07.240 And they ended up in this place.

00:12:08.960 Now, this place from where they were was further from Cairo to Durban,

00:12:14.040 never knowing whether their family would ever know what had happened to them.

00:12:19.920 Anyway, I said to my friends, I want to write this story.

00:12:22.420 And I was all getting ready.

00:12:23.560 I got piles and piles of research, files full.

00:12:26.220 And then I was doing a little bit of research, and I came across some newspaper cuttings of the times.

00:12:32.880 In those days, they used to produce what had been in Parliament the day before.

00:12:35.940 And they were talking about this problem there was with timber imported from the White Sea region.

00:12:46.140 And it was actually bishops in the House of Lords trying to persuade the government to do something about it.

00:12:51.760 This was around about 1930, 31.

00:12:53.500 And I thought, what's going on here?

00:12:56.380 And another story took me off for the next 15 years, which is what actually became my book.

00:13:01.280 And that was discovering that in 1930, Stalin deported one and a half to 1.8 million land,

00:13:13.820 smallholding peasants, the kulaks. 0.99

00:13:15.920 And kids learn about it in school nowadays, but they just know the number, right?

00:13:20.060 And 250,000 of them were all sent up to this really, really isolated place, again, really cold, just subarctic,

00:13:26.720 just all the way around the White Sea, which is the sea that is in between northern Russia and Finland.

00:13:32.920 Charles, I'm going to interrupt you very briefly, only to add that when you say the word deported,

00:13:36.440 most people in the West imagine someone being sent to a different country.

00:13:39.780 But what you mean when you say deported, these are people in the Soviet Union who were taken from their small landholding,

00:13:46.620 as my family were in Ukraine, and sent to this Siberian remote camp for the crime of having property.

00:13:53.900 For the crime of having property, because property had already been banned under the 1980 Soviet,

00:13:59.420 under Bolshevik then, later the Soviet.

00:14:02.020 It had been banned under the 1980 constitution.

00:14:04.360 But until Stalin came to power, he hadn't actually got the power to really bring that into being.

00:14:11.420 So he was nationalizing all farmland.

00:14:14.160 And these people, they had lived in these villages, you know, probably knowing nothing outside the village.

00:14:20.580 Very primitive life, surviving just hand to mouth, one cow, one pig, whatever, having possession of machinery.

00:14:31.020 A sewing machine was sufficient to get you picked up. 0.99

00:14:33.560 I mean, a sewing machine, for goodness sake.

00:14:36.140 And they would be taken just at a few hours' notice, not knowing what was going to happen.

00:14:40.080 Soldiers would just turn up, take them, and then they'd be put on a cattle truck in whatever clothes they had.

00:14:46.480 And then ship north.

00:14:47.920 And the north was so isolated, it wasn't ready to receive any of these people at a year's notice, let alone a few weeks.

00:14:56.100 And so they were then just thrown out into the snow.

00:14:58.540 The conditions in the camps they were in were just appalling.

00:15:01.920 Some of these kids, I've got photographs of kids who did not even have shoes, goes down to minus 20 in the winter.

00:15:09.340 Well, one Soviet official actually wrote reports back to Moscow and said, this is an absolutely ghastly situation.

00:15:19.060 There are piles of excrement everywhere.

00:15:20.880 We've got hundreds of people somewhere else all relying on a water supply from one well. 0.57

00:15:24.680 We've got to do something for his pains.

00:15:27.100 He was eventually shipped off to the camps, and I think he was shot a few years later.

00:15:30.700 You know, that just marked him out.

00:15:32.560 So by the end of the first year, maybe 21,000, because disease and malnutrition, they went hand in hand.

00:15:40.020 Of that 250,000 sent up there, maybe 21,000 were dead by the end of the first year.

00:15:46.160 Absolutely awful.

00:15:48.540 They were sent up there to earn foreign currency by cutting timber for the export trade.

00:15:56.500 And we in Great Britain were the biggest customer.

00:15:59.740 We took a million tons a year.

00:16:01.280 It was about 500 million pounds worth at today's prices.

00:16:05.980 And the word got out.

00:16:07.600 Stowaways got on board.

00:16:09.780 Those ones that weren't found and shot.

00:16:12.300 Others managed to escape over the Finnish border, actually slogging their way through the forest.

00:16:17.860 Extraordinary stories, some of them there.

00:16:20.100 And then they gave signed affidavits to diplomats in Helsinki.

00:16:26.980 So the story started to come out.

00:16:29.580 But it just so happened we just got our second Labour government.

00:16:34.200 And the whole history, as I was later to discover, the whole history of the Labour Party in the interwar years is one really of believing that Stalin, Lenin first and then Stalin, were creating the utopian state.

00:16:47.920 And so what happened is this massive campaign started.

00:16:54.220 It's actually started by churchmen.

00:16:56.220 But two, three hundred meetings up and down the country in the first year.

00:17:00.180 A massive rally with 5,000 people in the Albert Hall to launch it.

00:17:03.620 We don't talk about it now because it's just one of those things that doesn't interest the historians who are looking at that period.

00:17:09.280 Their idea of a protest was a day of prayer, right?

00:17:11.720 It was joined in by a million people around the globe.

00:17:15.060 Biggest protest against Soviet communism in history right until the fall of communism.

00:17:20.060 In St. Peter's Square in Rome, 50,000 people gathered on a Wednesday for a mass.

00:17:25.560 That's kind of the way people looked at church and religion in those days.

00:17:29.280 Well, the Labour government did not want to know.

00:17:32.800 They knew what was going on because they've seen the reports that came through.

00:17:36.600 But they either denied them or they were eventually pressed to have an inquiry.

00:17:46.340 And the Foreign Secretary told the Cabinet, he said, if we do have an inquiry, it's going to show that forced labour is being used.

00:17:54.480 But we can't do that.

00:17:56.360 And we can't do that because it might affect our trade elsewhere in the empire.

00:18:00.100 Actually, I've got the papers of the people from the trade ministry, the Board of Trade, advising him beforehand that isn't going to be a problem.

00:18:08.760 But that was a good excuse.

00:18:10.220 So then they sent their spokesman to the parliament just about a week later.

00:18:15.760 And there they denied that there was any evidence for what was going on.

00:18:19.640 A week before in Cabinet, they'd actually been talking about how the Russian stowaways didn't want to get sent back because they thought they were going to be shot.

00:18:26.900 And the Home Secretary said, I think they're right, they will be.

00:18:31.260 So I saw this extraordinary hypocrisy.

00:18:34.800 And then and eventually, eventually the Conservatives, you know, it's funny.

00:18:40.400 We talk about how unrepresentative the House of Lords was.

00:18:43.580 But the Labour Party had the majority in the House of Commons.

00:18:46.480 So they blocked every single possible possibility of a debate.

00:18:50.200 It was in the House of Lords that all this agitation was going on.

00:18:53.760 And really, I mean, I don't know what I think about the House of Lords today, but that's a fascinating challenge because they were the only people that were sticking up for the best part of one and a half million working class Soviet citizens who were oppressed by their leadership.

00:19:10.800 The privileged House of Lords and Anglican bishops.

00:19:13.060 And so the Conservatives managed to shoehorn the subject into one debate.

00:19:20.940 And we had one Labour MP, George Strauss, public school educated, like so many were in those days.

00:19:29.240 I mean, the deputy minister in the Foreign Office was an old Etonian.

00:19:34.060 Get your head around that.

00:19:38.680 George Strauss, he said, oh, no, no, he said, well, there may be there may be Labour camps going on, but conditions in Russian prisons are much better than in British prisons.

00:19:48.060 Yeah.

00:19:49.520 And then, you know, the the cream on the cake, the government statement by a guy called I think it was George Graham.

00:19:58.200 Um, he died, actually flew poor guy, but otherwise he'd have been a real high flyer.

00:20:02.740 So he he concluded the debate for the government.

00:20:06.060 And he said, um, the Soviets are conducting a very interesting economic experiment.

00:20:13.660 1.8 million people torn off their land at a few moments notice.

00:20:18.060 The Soviets are conducting a very interesting social experiment, economic experiment and deserve to be allowed to continue without outside interference.

00:20:25.740 Indeed, we will give them whatever support they need.

00:20:28.860 And I read that in Hansard and I just I couldn't believe it.

00:20:33.640 I thought, you've got all the evidence.

00:20:35.580 I've seen it.

00:20:36.380 I've now spent, you know, four or five, six years digging through records.

00:20:40.680 How could a British government actually take that stance?

00:20:45.680 I mean, we don't have a lot of faith in most governments.

00:20:48.460 We're always thinking something's, you know, that they're incompetent.

00:20:51.500 But that was absolutely deliberate cover up.

00:20:54.280 He knew I saw all the kind of documents that were getting sent to him.

00:20:58.920 I saw the reports that were coming out.

00:21:02.680 I just how did this happen?

00:21:05.160 So that took me on another little rabbit trail, which just ended up by meaning that my book was finally about 600 pages long or more.

00:21:11.180 Because I thought, how is it that we get to that in 1931?

00:21:17.060 That doesn't come as an accident.

00:21:19.820 What is it that was going on in the years before?

00:21:24.080 And how could people actually look at what was going on in Russia?

00:21:29.720 You know, people did know what was happening.

00:21:32.740 The stories were coming out.

00:21:34.040 They were horrifying right from the beginning.

00:21:36.100 I mean, for goodness sake, these people shot their royal family, men, women and children.

00:21:42.720 You know, everyone knew that.

00:21:45.560 And so then I just dug in and worked my way through all sorts of stuff.

00:21:51.880 And I couldn't believe that people could be so consistently praising a really evil regime.

00:22:02.060 There's just no way to describe it.

00:22:04.320 And just refusing to see the stuff that was going on that was wrong.

00:22:09.040 Because they believed that Lenin first and then Stalin was building the great communist utopia.

00:22:16.880 And we see this again and again through the history of the Labour Party.

00:22:20.520 My mother's Venezuelan.

00:22:22.760 They were all praising Chavez.

00:22:24.080 Oh, yeah.

00:22:24.360 Well, you'd know all about it then, wouldn't you?

00:22:25.460 Yeah.

00:22:25.740 So I saw them all praising Chavez and you saw Owen Jones and Corbyn.

00:22:30.220 And at that time, my cousin, who was a journalist, was telling me that Chavez's thugs were turning up at television stations

00:22:37.140 saying to journalists, if you carry on criticizing the government,

00:22:41.280 you're going to feel an unpleasant force around the back of your head.

00:22:45.200 But the entire Labour government were praising it

00:22:47.500 and saying that Venezuela was going to be the new socialist paradise.

00:22:50.860 I came across a newspaper cutting just yesterday, actually.

00:22:53.760 I don't know why it came up on my phone, which was exactly that.

00:22:56.780 That was a letter that Jeremy Corbyn and others wrote.

00:23:00.920 Tariq Ali, Tony Benn signed it way back, commending Chavez for closing down a TV station.

00:23:09.600 There you go.

00:23:10.340 Or they all write to The Guardian.

00:23:11.360 They all say, this is quite understandable.

00:23:13.260 And the same thing happened.

00:23:16.040 The same thing happened.

00:23:17.020 I mean, the guy who became the Labour Party chairman in 1946 was a man called Harold Lasky.

00:23:27.040 Incredibly famous.

00:23:28.140 He was professor of political science at the London School of Economics.

00:23:32.820 He was probably one of the two or three leading Labour intellectuals right the way through in the period

00:23:40.260 till maybe 1950 or so.

00:23:41.900 Now, 1946, he actually he was he was praising the Soviet Union and saying,

00:23:51.600 we quite understand that it is not a free society,

00:23:55.900 but we recognise the reason why the Soviet government needs to impose these controls.

00:24:02.540 And let's be clear, I'm just I'm really, really enjoying listening to you.

00:24:09.060 And I'm struggling emotionally because it's difficult for me because all of these places you talk about.

00:24:15.240 My mother grew up there.

00:24:16.920 No, she grew up there. 0.98

00:24:18.640 Her family were there.

00:24:19.800 They weren't there because they were in a camp or anything.

00:24:22.300 They were there in the 70s.

00:24:24.520 And it was a very they told stories about how obviously there's no vegetables, there's no fruit.

00:24:29.520 So you're not getting vitamin C is very difficult.

00:24:32.740 You talk about the permafrost.

00:24:33.980 Those blocks are flats.

00:24:35.340 They're not built on the ground.

00:24:36.660 They're built on metal stilts that have to be rammed into the permafrost.

00:24:40.880 And my family, my mother's family, they were Kulaks and their crime was they had a horse. 1.00

00:24:47.240 So people came.

00:24:48.160 Imagine just if one horse for people listening to this, imagine you have your house and you happen to have a horse and some chickens and whatever.

00:24:55.100 And people come along, oh, you've got a horse.

00:24:56.920 That means you're the oppressor.

00:24:59.000 You are the oppressor class. 0.97

00:25:00.780 Get out of your house, off in a cattle car. 1.00

00:25:03.340 You go to a camp somewhere.

00:25:05.500 And my grandmother, still alive, 95, living in Ukraine.

00:25:09.380 And she remembers her little brother starving to death on the way.

00:25:14.140 Yeah.

00:25:14.300 Oh, boy.

00:25:15.700 And this is what happened to millions of people.

00:25:18.480 Millions of people.

00:25:19.020 She's doing it to me, too.

00:25:20.200 I read these stories.

00:25:21.680 I read these stories and it's individuals.

00:25:24.860 It's just not tens of thousands.

00:25:26.660 It's not hundreds of thousands.

00:25:27.880 Yeah.

00:25:28.140 And we're just talking about one group, the Kulaks, right? 1.00

00:25:31.440 Because then you add to it, you talked about prisoners of war.

00:25:35.400 Let's make that clear for people.

00:25:36.880 What happened was you went to fight for your country.

00:25:39.980 You went to defend the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion.

00:25:43.680 You happened to have been taken prisoner.

00:25:45.500 Yeah.

00:25:45.900 And there's a disincentive to being taken prisoner to encourage you to fight for your country.

00:25:51.280 If you came back after having been captured by the Germans, what happened to you?

00:25:56.160 Yeah.

00:25:57.040 Straight into a camp.

00:25:57.940 Yeah.

00:25:58.140 Straight into filtration camps.

00:25:59.620 Straight into filtration camps.

00:26:00.660 Or shot, depending on what the circumstances are.

00:26:02.660 They shot 150,000 of their own people for military crimes during the war.

00:26:06.600 Can you imagine that?

00:26:07.540 150,000 of your own soldiers shot by your side.

00:26:11.520 Yeah.

00:26:11.940 Exactly.

00:26:13.480 And, you know, down my father's side, my grandmother was born in the Gulag.

00:26:19.600 So, look, there's so much to unpack.

00:26:22.580 Can we just, let's give people some figures and some big picture stuff, first of all.

00:26:27.540 Do you know the total number of people who were sent into the system?

00:26:31.120 Yeah, I do.

00:26:31.760 I do.

00:26:32.400 The best part of 18 million people were actually arrested individually and sent to Gulag camps. 0.68

00:26:42.320 The other form of arrest would be by administrative order.

00:26:46.320 Basically, an order was given, go and round up all of that area, that city, whatever, or that

00:26:52.320 ethnic group, particularly like in Crimea or people who'd come over with the original Germans

00:26:57.620 in Catherine and the Great's day.

00:26:59.540 And they were just deported right to the wilds of Kazakhstan. 0.68

00:27:03.920 Koreans on the Pacific shore also.

00:27:06.400 So, for there, you've got maybe 6 million deported.

00:27:10.940 And by the time you round off the figure, it's about 28 million people who were put under some

00:27:19.120 form of military imprisonment, under guard or some sort.

00:27:24.540 Half of the population of modern Britain.

00:27:27.180 Yeah.

00:27:27.820 In military imprisonment.

00:27:28.940 And if you're going to talk about the population in Russia at the time, somewhere between 1 in

00:27:32.620 7 and 1 in 10.

00:27:34.080 Right.

00:27:34.400 And of those, we are sure that about 2.75 million died.

00:27:39.900 I mean, you hear some huge numbers.

00:27:41.500 Yeah.

00:27:41.840 But 1 in 10 died.

00:27:44.420 If you talk about what happened to the people who were just deported en masse, it's about

00:27:50.540 1 in 6.

00:27:52.120 So, you're talking 6 million deported, men, women, children, and maybe a million don't

00:27:58.060 come back.

00:27:58.620 And for the rest, they're not allowed back for decades.

00:28:01.100 You know, way after Stalin, they're still trying to get their homes.

00:28:03.320 Poor Crimean Tatars. 0.99

00:28:05.120 They come back.

00:28:06.440 They don't get back until the 70s or 80s.

00:28:08.500 And, you know, now that, well, we won't talk about modern history yet because you can get

00:28:13.580 onto that.

00:28:14.120 But absolutely.

00:28:15.200 So, we've got 2.75 million.

00:28:17.620 And then in the year 1937 to 1938, the big, the great terror, the NKVD secret police figures

00:28:28.660 of those shot is just under 680,000.

00:28:33.620 Sorry, George.

00:28:34.200 What's NKVD?

00:28:35.540 Secret police.

00:28:36.340 I'm sorry.

00:28:36.780 Yeah.

00:28:37.040 Yeah.

00:28:37.180 You talk about all these.

00:28:38.620 They had different initials right the way through the history.

00:28:41.760 But the secret police shot 680,000 people.

00:28:47.660 And it's really hard to get a grasp of what that figure is.

00:28:51.180 But it just so happened that this summer, and you can look it up online and see it, they

00:28:58.780 created a monument in Washington to all the Americans who died in COVID up until that time.

00:29:07.640 One flag per person.

00:29:09.860 And they show you a great big wide angle.

00:29:12.440 The National Geographic have got it up.

00:29:13.780 Great big wide angle shot of all these flags, this whole sea of flags.

00:29:20.260 That was 670,000.

00:29:22.080 That was 10,000 less.

00:29:23.880 And when you see that photograph, then it really brings it home, really brings it home.

00:29:29.140 And that was just in that period.

00:29:30.100 And Giles, I have this experience of talking to people here in the West.

00:29:32.980 I remember my grandmother, she had very close friends here who loved her very much, actually

00:29:38.240 fled Nazi Germany, believe it or not.

00:29:40.840 And whenever she told them her story about her family, they always said, yeah, but why

00:29:45.360 were those people there?

00:29:46.400 What did they do?

00:29:48.000 It was the sort of people.

00:29:49.240 Well, I think it's very difficult to imagine this sort of evil on this scale without thinking

00:29:54.520 that, well, these people at some level have done something.

00:29:57.840 So why were people in prison?

00:29:59.820 Why were they sent to these camps?

00:30:01.080 Why were they shot?

00:30:01.860 What had they done?

00:30:02.840 I think you probably have to go back to Marxism originally to see the really low value that

00:30:07.840 was put on individual human life.

00:30:11.320 Humanity was considered by Marx just really as a mass.

00:30:13.820 And for the sake of building the state, anything went.

00:30:19.780 I mean, he's quite clear in the Communist Manifesto, quite clear that all morality is,

00:30:27.180 as it is traditionally held, is abolished.

00:30:29.960 No eternal values.

00:30:31.860 Well, eternal values are kind of the ones that just come from the Bible.

00:30:34.380 You know, you can't, you shouldn't kill, you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't do all

00:30:37.020 the rest of this stuff.

00:30:37.680 And then what they then reconfigured it as is morality.

00:30:43.080 What is moral is whatever aids the revolution.

00:30:46.700 So by the time you've actually just literally abandoned every moral constraint, it justifies

00:30:52.940 any action for the sake of building the utopia.

00:30:56.640 Because the Marxist idea is that there is indeed a utopia we can build.

00:31:02.220 History has shown a series of conflicts between the classes and now we're on the last one.

00:31:10.400 And the last one is the proletarian versus the bourgeois, the capitalist.

00:31:15.540 And when that conflict actually breaks out into open warfare, as it must do, and the proletarians 0.98

00:31:23.120 rise up and deprive the capitalists, the bourgeois, of all their property and taken under their

00:31:28.520 ownership first, and that it goes to the state, then we'll enter this kind of heaven on earth.

00:31:33.100 I mean, Marx even used the phrase heaven on earth.

00:31:34.960 We'll enter this heaven on earth.

00:31:37.860 And it's a cult.

00:31:40.380 It really is a cult.

00:31:41.360 But it possessed these guys in Russia.

00:31:44.800 It possessed these guys in Russia. 0.84

00:31:46.560 And once they had the vision, you can't really back out.

00:31:51.160 As someone said, I don't know what it is.

00:31:52.840 Once you thrust the first bayonet in, in the cause of that, you can't take a step back.

00:31:59.960 And so they had this idea that everything needs to be taken under the control of the state,

00:32:04.900 under the control of people.

00:32:06.560 So all private trade was banned.

00:32:08.800 Private ownership of land was banned.

00:32:10.880 But then coupled with that, there was the possibility of any counter-revolution, of anyone

00:32:16.460 actually opposing the revolution.

00:32:18.520 And if you're going to impose this total control, which you believe is eventually going to somehow

00:32:23.940 morph into this wonderful period when crime is gone, and everyone lives happily, and we

00:32:29.920 all just share stuff because we want to, and no one hoards.

00:32:33.960 If you're gripped by this, then it's just a logical step to make sure that you get rid of

00:32:44.280 every person who might oppose it, every person who might oppose you.

00:32:49.780 And if you're Stalin, then it's not just the people who clearly are still part of the old regime, 0.69

00:32:55.800 because most of them have been killed or got rid of anyway, the aristocrats.

00:32:58.920 It's now people who might dispute you as being the person who could lead.

00:33:04.760 I mean, Stalin killed so many of his colleagues.

00:33:07.860 You know, there's one communist convention, if you like, that they were all at.

00:33:10.720 And you see the list of the high proportion that were just shot in the years afterwards.

00:33:16.120 But so there's about four purposes behind all this repression.

00:33:20.180 The first was to punish those who really were the enemies of the state, very few of them,

00:33:25.300 or were imagined to be the enemies of the state.

00:33:27.480 To terrorize the rest into compliance and to use that slave labor. 0.95

00:33:33.600 And it really was slave labor to build a new society, because if anything goes, then people are just marshaled.

00:33:43.180 Yeah, we're going to build a new factory.

00:33:45.400 Well, well, and in the case of Nurelsk, where these sits on one third of the world's reserve nickel.

00:33:51.140 And 98% of the world's platinum metals as well, by the way.

00:33:53.540 Indeed, quite possibly, yeah.

00:33:54.420 I mean, it was precious group metals as well.

00:33:57.620 Less needed in those days.

00:34:01.980 But nickel, I mean, you know, you strengthen tank armor with nickel.

00:34:06.760 You plate handcuffs with nickel, too.

00:34:09.880 And they needed a lot of those.

00:34:12.280 In the case of Nurelsk, it is so isolated, they couldn't mine it unless they had slave labor to do it.

00:34:20.900 And then they realized they needed geologists, they needed scientists.

00:34:24.720 So they just went up and arrested a whole lot of geologists.

00:34:27.340 And then they shipped them up there, officially as prisoners, but in practice, just scientists.

00:34:32.580 Giles, did Stalin really believe in this?

00:34:35.060 Or was he just a power-hungry maniac who had megalomaniacal tendencies?

00:34:41.920 Good question.

00:34:42.460 It would be really nice to think that it was, because then you could kind of excuse it.

00:34:45.980 And then you could also kind of just bypass the consequences of, wow, if one person can do that, if one state can do that, if one man can bring on board hundreds of thousands to actually sign up to this cause and believe it's totally fine for you to punish people in that punishment camp, I told.

00:35:04.700 It would be great.

00:35:05.600 But I don't think he was.

00:35:08.020 He genuinely believed what he was doing.

00:35:09.980 He was very, very well versed in Lenin and Marx.

00:35:16.040 He knew their theory.

00:35:17.780 And as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you know, the great author of the Communist Manifesto, has said, Stalin didn't do anything.

00:35:24.920 Or the Gulag Archipelago, not the Communist Manifesto.

00:35:26.860 I beg your pardon.

00:35:27.900 That is quite a slanderous statement right there, Giles.

00:35:31.900 Yeah, you see, I'm just thinking, I'm already thinking too far ahead.

00:35:34.440 You're on to Marx already.

00:35:36.220 I'm on to Marx already.

00:35:37.140 Now, I like to stay off Marx if I can, as long as I can for most of my life.

00:35:42.260 Yeah, the Gulag Archipelago, an astonishing, astonishing book.

00:35:46.020 And it's now in one volume, which Jordan Peterson has actually done the introduction for.

00:35:53.160 But, yeah, Stalin, that's where we were before I made that little mistake. 0.83

00:35:57.740 Little mistake.

00:35:58.220 If you go back to Stalin, as far as Solzhenitsyn was concerned, Stalin didn't make, did do anything that Lenin hadn't already started.

00:36:08.860 Lenin started the Gulag system. 0.72

00:36:11.640 Lenin ordered that the regime's opponents would be locked up in a concentration camp.

00:36:16.760 And up in one concentration camp, up near the Archanjosk, on the White Sea, Archangel as we know it, there was an old monastery.

00:36:27.460 They tended to use monasteries because they'd probably imprisoned or shot most of the inmates.

00:36:31.380 And they had thick walls and lots of cells.

00:36:33.540 There was one monastery, Chalmaguri, where over the early two, three, four years, just after the revolution, they shot 25,000 people there.

00:36:42.720 It really was a death camp.

00:36:44.440 The rest were all slave labor camps, for the most part.

00:36:47.260 They shot people before they came there.

00:36:49.780 But Lenin then issued an order, you know, within two years of the revolution, that every single city should have a Gulag camp, a concentration camp, which could hold 300 inmates.

00:37:02.340 So within a few years, there were 70,000 or so in camps around the place.

00:37:06.420 And then this extraordinary island, the Solovetsky Islands, group of islands in the middle of the White Sea, really became what, again, Solzhenitsyn called the first cancerous tumor that metastasized to be the Gulag archipelago.

00:37:22.140 But by 1929, 1930, there were maybe 60,000 prisoners there.

00:37:28.040 Stalin had just come to power, and that was when he really established the Gulag system on an official basis and gave it entirely to the secret police. 0.60

00:37:37.320 It had been under kind of dual management before, entirely to the secret police, and then they just expanded it from there.

00:37:46.200 Extraordinary.

00:37:46.680 I always think about this question, which is, why are we never taught this?

00:37:52.960 Why is it that the Nazi swastika is deservedly seen as a horrendous symbol of evil and of oppression, but the hammer and sickle, people just shrug their shoulders?

00:38:06.380 They do, yeah.

00:38:07.020 It's interesting, actually, just on that point, we do a Raw show where we joke about the events of the day, and for that we bought a Soviet hat, a sort of South American or Central American revolutionary hat with the star on it, and a German hat as well.

00:38:26.400 And the day that we bought it, Francis had a comedy gig that he was going to, and I gave him the South American hat, and he just put it on and walked outside and went to his gig, sort of for a joke between us.

00:38:36.640 But we're fine.

00:38:38.360 If I wear my Russian nushanker with the Soviet star, no one would give a damn.

00:38:42.420 If I wear the...

00:38:43.360 Che Guevara t-shirt, great.

00:38:44.840 Right, great.

00:38:46.260 Why is that?

00:38:48.160 It's a big question, isn't it?

00:38:49.440 It's a big question, isn't it?

00:38:51.960 You go back.

00:38:53.200 As far as the British left were concerned between the wars, everything Soviet was good. 0.99

00:38:58.420 You know, the spy Antony Blunt, who was later on revealed, he went up, he was in Cambridge in the early 30s.

00:39:04.060 He arrived in Cambridge, he had to leave for a term, he was going off studying somewhere.

00:39:08.480 He came back, he said, when I came back to university, everyone had become communist.

00:39:12.820 It was the end thing, it was cool then.

00:39:14.300 It was cool then, it was cool when I was at school.

00:39:16.880 Because most people haven't the faintest idea what it means.

00:39:21.520 They just think it's something warm and we're all going to share and whatever else.

00:39:27.540 So as far as the communism is concerned, leaving aside the Soviet symbols, as far as the communism is concerned, people do not know.

00:39:35.200 The communist manifesto is absolutely clear.

00:39:37.740 The abolition of the family. 0.66

00:39:40.280 You know, you say, oh, communists want to abolish the family.

00:39:42.800 Don't be so right-wing.

00:39:44.520 It's in there.

00:39:45.340 It's explicit.

00:39:46.020 Abolition of the family, abolition of all property ownership, all property ownership.

00:39:52.700 Little corner shop.

00:39:53.980 Wouldn't exist in Soviet Russia.

00:39:56.200 Taken out of your hands.

00:39:57.400 If you were actually trying to set up a private business, throw you into prison.

00:40:00.220 Well, that was a crime under the Soviet statute, yeah.

00:40:02.200 Exactly, yeah.

00:40:02.800 So abolition of property, abolition of the family, abolition of religion, big, big, big one, and abolition of morality.

00:40:13.640 Those are in the communist manifesto.

00:40:16.900 And I feel you've kind of got to go up to a Trotskyite today and say, do you want to do that?

00:40:21.100 Do you believe, as Marx said and as Trotsky endorsed, the only way to transform society is by violent revolution?

00:40:32.240 Because Marx was actually explicit.

00:40:34.700 You know, violence is the midwife of the new society.

00:40:37.460 There's only one way you can get there.

00:40:39.180 It's bloodshed.

00:40:41.460 You need to ask these people, do you really believe that?

00:40:45.740 Because that's what these people, you supposedly follow, are actually preaching.

00:40:52.440 I'm writing a book at the moment.

00:40:54.580 I'm about 80% finished.

00:40:55.880 That was my lockdown one, really, to get...

00:40:58.200 I got stuck in Wales for eight weeks, which was really pretty remarkable.

00:41:02.780 And I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.

00:41:04.300 And I'm 80% finished on a book on exactly this stuff.

00:41:08.600 There's about 300 different quotes from Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky.

00:41:12.740 And it's just written to say, this is what it is.

00:41:17.220 Do you really believe this?

00:41:18.760 But they don't.

00:41:19.600 But it's something nice and warm and fuzzy.

00:41:22.060 And socialism is well different, no, to a Marxist.

00:41:25.660 Socialism and communism are interchangeable.

00:41:28.020 And no, it's not social democracy.

00:41:31.160 Social democracy is Scandinavia.

00:41:33.560 And they say, let's keep the capitalist system, but let's temper it to make sure it's fair to the disadvantaged.

00:41:39.620 That is not what socialism is.

00:41:42.020 It's democratic socialism, Jeremy Corbyn.

00:41:44.360 Oh, democratic, that must be good.

00:41:45.920 No, it's exactly the same.

00:41:47.720 It's communism, it's socialism.

00:41:49.180 It is what is in the manifesto.

00:41:52.120 Well, but Jeremy Corbyn wasn't suggesting putting people in gulags, was he?

00:41:55.060 No, he wasn't.

00:41:55.840 No, he wasn't.

00:41:56.360 But that's where people in his situation need to be confronted.

00:42:00.960 He wrote, he spoke about Marx.

00:42:03.580 He said, Marx's philosophy and his insights are really brilliant.

00:42:07.920 Well, OK, his insights are the only way to transform society is through violent revolution.

00:42:12.740 Yeah, class war.

00:42:16.320 There's a disconnect somewhere.

00:42:17.620 And there's a lot of romanticism in it.

00:42:19.340 OK, there's a lot of romanticism in it.

00:42:21.020 And I think that's why some people, as far as communism is concerned, actually say, oh, yeah, yeah, it's great.

00:42:27.000 We're all going to share everything.

00:42:28.520 Of course, may I digress just a little while?

00:42:31.040 Of course.

00:42:31.420 We're all going to digress into what actually happened when they really did try and do something in the kibbutz system in Israel.

00:42:38.060 Because, you know, the kibbutzes were set up to actually work out a little local version of communism. 0.98

00:42:45.220 It was great to begin with.

00:42:47.120 But then it got to the stage where nobody wanted to take the garbage out.

00:42:50.320 And they then started employing outsiders to do the dirty jobs. 0.96

00:42:54.480 Because they were all meant to be sharing it.

00:42:56.040 Everyone was meant to be doing everything equally.

00:42:57.700 But there were actually things they didn't want to do.

00:42:59.380 So they started employing outsiders. 0.56

00:43:01.540 And then the kids were all shipped off to communal quarters and taken away from the family.

00:43:07.840 Because, I mean, I could go up on a rabbit trail.

00:43:12.280 I won't.

00:43:12.920 But when you read what the Soviets talked about as far as education and children, we need to nationalize children, said one communist leader's wife.

00:43:22.140 We need to take them away from the harmful influence of the family.

00:43:24.900 I mean, I read those bits and I get angry because I really do think it's so inhuman.

00:43:28.860 But back to the kibbutz. 0.97

00:43:31.040 Ah, I'll get to the end of it.

00:43:32.640 Back to the kibbutz. 0.99

00:43:33.540 And then the women didn't like having communal clothing. 1.00

00:43:35.660 They didn't like wearing clothes and then putting them back into the communal wash house and then just being given something that was at whatever their size.

00:43:42.500 And, you know, those ordinary human things, you can't marshal people en masse, just doesn't work.

00:43:53.420 People aren't like that.

00:43:54.420 They're different.

00:43:54.860 And there are freeloaders.

00:43:56.600 They found freeloaders.

00:43:58.220 The idea of the communist utopia is that there'll be no freeloaders.

00:44:01.020 Everyone will automatically just have so much philanthropy in their hearts.

00:44:05.300 They just want to help everyone.

00:44:06.920 No, there's freeloaders.

00:44:08.200 You know, crime, according to Marx, comes only because people are warped by the possession of private property by others.

00:44:17.020 And the moment nobody owns private property, then crime will disappear.

00:44:21.460 Well, we know that that's just, you know, it's counterintuitive.

00:44:24.440 It just doesn't work like that.

00:44:27.260 You know, Charles, I've lived in many different places.

00:44:30.120 Ironically, I would say the Soviet Union, even in my childhood, which was in the 80s, was the most doggy dog. 0.85

00:44:39.880 Yeah.

00:44:40.320 Man against man.

00:44:42.100 We're all, in Russian we say, we're all wolves to each other. 0.97

00:44:47.080 Yeah.

00:44:47.540 That's the attitude.

00:44:49.240 Man is wolf to man.

00:44:50.040 Man is wolf to man.

00:44:50.920 Right.

00:44:51.060 That's the right way of saying in English.

00:44:52.600 Um, the thing about this ideology is, is just not, it's great.

00:44:59.400 It's just not compatible with humans.

00:45:01.340 Yeah.

00:45:01.840 It's brilliant.

00:45:02.600 It sounds incredibly good.

00:45:04.900 Yeah.

00:45:05.160 It's just not compatible with human beings.

00:45:07.340 Do you think that is part of the appeal?

00:45:10.320 And that is why to this day, there are people who say, well, I'm a communist.

00:45:13.960 They'll go on TV in this country and they'll say, I'm a communist.

00:45:16.220 I'm literally a communist.

00:45:17.840 And I mean, it's maybe not a fair question to ask you.

00:45:22.020 What do you think she means by that?

00:45:23.560 When she says that, Ash Tarker, I'm literally a communist.

00:45:26.820 Because I know what that would mean to me.

00:45:28.820 Yeah.

00:45:29.120 I know what it would mean to me, but I don't think she has any idea really what she's talking

00:45:32.440 about.

00:45:32.780 And, and, and, and, and I can't see inside.

00:45:37.720 I can't, because I find it so hard, I actually can't see inside the minds of people who are,

00:45:44.940 you know, full luxury, automated communism, um, uh, and all the rest of this.

00:45:49.900 I, I, I can't, I can't get my head.

00:45:51.560 We've invited her on because I want to ask her this question and not in any hostile way.

00:45:55.040 I just, I wonder what they mean.

00:45:56.480 Because it's fair to exchange ideas.

00:45:58.140 Yeah.

00:45:58.400 It's fair to, you, you, you, you, you defend them.

00:46:00.480 If you're, if you're in a respectful environment, it's great.

00:46:03.480 It's great.

00:46:04.000 Go for it.

00:46:04.720 And then, and then, but then you see, you do get the denial that comes in.

00:46:08.020 And this is, this is the other part of your question, which I, I haven't kind of yet answered.

00:46:12.540 You know, you get a Seamus Milne who, who worked very closely with Jeremy Corbyn, um, talking

00:46:17.680 about the great social advances for women that took place, um, in the Soviet Union.

00:46:22.340 Well, it's great.

00:46:23.120 Social advantages for women. 0.97

00:46:24.580 Yeah.

00:46:24.760 Yeah.

00:46:24.880 What was going on at the same time?

00:46:26.640 I mean, you know, uh, as you say, a dog eat dog society, because for, uh, 70 years,

00:46:34.260 they have had the heart ripped out of property rights, of, of, of all moral rights.

00:46:43.140 I mean, you know, all, all moral standards, just, just taken away.

00:46:46.500 It's, it's the revolution, the revolutionary theory is that, that whatever suits the revolution

00:46:51.220 is okay.

00:46:51.780 So then that becomes whatever suits me is okay.

00:46:54.200 Um, yeah, I'll just take what I want.

00:46:55.760 I mean, after all, it all belongs to all of us.

00:46:57.900 Everything's belonged to the state now.

00:46:59.200 So why not just take it?

00:47:01.320 And then I'm not going to work because I'm going to get paid anyway.

00:47:04.260 Um, and the incentive is gone because, uh, and, and, and, and on, but, but, but, you

00:47:09.900 know, there's a, there's, there's, they cover up, they call all these excesses, um, what

00:47:19.240 is it, the word, the communist party of Britain today.

00:47:22.880 Fascinating.

00:47:23.520 You, you need to find their manifesto, the road to socialism.

00:47:27.020 Uh, I, I, I picked up a version, which was, um, you know, maybe 10 years ago or so, but

00:47:34.520 it gets revised every so often.

00:47:36.260 And, um, you know, they, they, they address Stalin's excesses and they say just, you know,

00:47:41.620 these were kind of accidental mistakes in the progress of communism and what Stalin did.

00:47:47.880 Well, they won't say, they won't say it's not real communism because actually they're

00:47:52.520 kind of Stalin apologists.

00:47:54.200 But this is what you get a lot of the time.

00:47:56.400 Not real communism, not real communism, not real communism.

00:47:59.080 So, so, so what was it that went on in Cambodia with Pol Pot?

00:48:03.960 It wasn't real communism.

00:48:04.980 I mean, three million people were killed.

00:48:06.040 That's not real communism.

00:48:07.120 Real communism is just nice and warm and fuzzy.

00:48:10.840 And no, it isn't.

00:48:11.740 Because if you're going to control and take over every single part of the state, if you're

00:48:15.900 going to take over private property, if you're going to take over everything that any corporation

00:48:19.860 owns, you have to do it by force.

00:48:22.300 No one's going to give up all that stuff.

00:48:24.620 You have to do it by force.

00:48:26.040 You have to be prepared to use force and you have to then keep force in there.

00:48:31.700 Marx was very explicit.

00:48:33.340 He said, when you got people who are resentful and hating something, don't stop it.

00:48:39.840 Actually use it, encourage it, because that's what we want to have weaponized.

00:48:48.420 And we see that in left-wing politics today, weaponized hate.

00:48:53.580 If you believe that class war is the only way through to the new utopia, you're not interested

00:49:01.100 in compromise.

00:49:02.480 You're not interested in coming together, in finding a middle ground.

00:49:06.560 You're not interested in the sharing of ideas.

00:49:09.320 You don't actually want a rapprochement.

00:49:11.640 You believe class war is going to be what is going to finally go into violence.

00:49:17.300 And then when we have the revolution, you will take power.

00:49:20.740 You will take the property of the elite, the privileged, the wealthy, whatever they are.

00:49:25.500 And then you will run it differently.

00:49:27.380 No, they'll run it with the same human frailty as anyone else will.

00:49:31.540 And actually, because then by then, they've actually got to run it for the whole country.

00:49:35.700 They will be making decisions.

00:49:37.680 I mean, this was the thing in Russia, wasn't it?

00:49:40.380 You know, one factory somewhere in the middle of nowhere is told how many tins of baked beans

00:49:44.860 it's going to produce for the year.

00:49:46.200 And that's it.

00:49:47.740 And if that's not enough, well, you don't get any more.

00:49:50.200 And someone else has to produce all the concrete.

00:49:52.760 And someone else has to produce all the tractor tires.

00:49:55.600 And everything becomes socially planned.

00:49:57.980 And then that's why you get conscripted labor, forced labor moved.

00:50:01.960 Because if you're putting a new factory somewhere and you don't have the labor for it,

00:50:07.180 well, you've got to move the labor. 1.00

00:50:09.320 So you just round up a whole lot of people.

00:50:11.280 You just reassign them for something.

00:50:13.060 So then you can't choose your career.

00:50:15.100 No, no, you can't be a doctor.

00:50:16.120 We've got enough doctors already this year.

00:50:18.740 You can be a plumber.

00:50:19.960 We've got a plan.

00:50:21.180 We need 3,000 plumbers in the next three years.

00:50:23.620 You can be a plumber, but you can't be a doctor.

00:50:25.340 Or you want to be a plumber.

00:50:27.140 You can't be a plumber.

00:50:27.760 You need to be a doctor.

00:50:29.740 It's not a kind of privileged thing on the scale of professions.

00:50:34.140 That's how the control filters in.

00:50:36.100 Even if you're just going to have all this happening in a peaceful way without the violence,

00:50:41.560 you still have to have total control over your population.

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00:52:07.100 But we've seen these ideas.

00:52:10.940 They're like herpes.

00:52:12.280 They go underground for a bit, and then they just flare up.

00:52:15.700 In the summer of 2020, with the BLM marches and, you know, abolish capitalism.

00:52:20.580 Abolish the family.

00:52:21.640 Abolish the family.

00:52:23.020 And I was there, and people who I thought were my friends, I mean, they're not really

00:52:27.000 friends with me anymore because they got upset because I criticised BLM, but they were 0.96

00:52:30.360 going to me, oh, this is brilliant.

00:52:31.520 I'm like, so what's in Venezuela?

00:52:33.680 Didn't really end well.

00:52:35.300 Didn't really end well.

00:52:36.160 But we see it again and again and repackaged in a different way.

00:52:40.580 And the leaders of BLM, right, when actually talking about themselves, oh, you know, we're

00:52:45.520 well-versed in communist theory.

00:52:46.940 Well, they said we are trained Marxists.

00:52:48.640 We're trained Marxists, yeah.

00:52:49.720 Yeah, yeah, of course they are.

00:52:50.080 And that's when I was like, look, I don't care.

00:52:52.260 I believe Black Lives Matter, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:52:55.380 Yeah.

00:52:55.940 Small letters.

00:52:57.200 Small letters.

00:52:58.000 But if you were talking to me about being a trained Marxist, then you want to abolish it.

00:53:00.880 Yeah, let's, yeah, you're not for me.

00:53:04.180 Yeah, I see where you want to end up.

00:53:06.300 You want to end up with the overthrow of society as it is now.

00:53:09.420 And you will do whatever you can.

00:53:12.280 And, I mean, Trotsky was the one who said, you know, we'll deceive anyone we want to

00:53:16.740 because we'll hide our aims.

00:53:19.160 Trotsky was explicit on that.

00:53:20.760 You know, we're going to dupe all these people in the West.

00:53:24.340 We're going to dupe all our opponents because it's quite all right just to lie and deceive

00:53:29.080 and work our way in there to do stuff.

00:53:30.900 So you don't believe these people when they say, oh, no, no, no, we only want to do this.

00:53:33.980 We only want to do that.

00:53:34.740 No.

00:53:35.180 If they are doctrinaire Marxists, they'll, they'll not have any moral qualms about doing

00:53:41.380 anything in order to be able to get their aims.

00:53:43.720 And it's interesting you're adding somewhat to my historical understanding because I always

00:53:47.280 thought the main reason that, uh, that the West failed to recognize the evil of the Soviet 0.99

00:53:53.020 empire was that we needed, we, the West, I now consider myself part of the West, I suppose.

00:53:58.740 I don't.

00:53:59.240 The West, there we go.

00:54:01.100 The West needed the Soviet Union to win the war.

00:54:04.060 Yeah.

00:54:04.460 We needed the Soviet Union and Stalin to win the war. 0.51

00:54:07.180 And we did.

00:54:07.620 And if it wasn't for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't have happened. 0.96

00:54:10.420 Right.

00:54:10.520 So, but what you're telling me is even in the early thirties, when there was no need

00:54:17.880 for that whatsoever, there was no war, certain people in the West were ignoring it, covering

00:54:25.500 it up.

00:54:26.260 There's a guy, I don't remember his name now, who won a Pulitzer for covering up the, yeah,

00:54:31.740 the, the holodom or the starvation of the Ukrainian peasants.

00:54:35.780 At the highest level in the Labour Party.

00:54:38.340 I mean, the great Labour saint, I think he's got buildings named after him somewhere around

00:54:43.260 here, George Lansbury.

00:54:44.960 Uh, he became Labour leader in 1933.

00:54:48.000 Uh, and, and he said, the story about slave camps in Russia is an absolute fabrication.

00:54:54.080 I, I, I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact quote, but you know, he said, it's

00:54:57.940 absolutely not true.

00:54:59.040 It's a free, it's a, it's a completely free state.

00:55:01.020 And then Clement Attlee, and, and he's really interesting because he totally turned around

00:55:05.040 after the war.

00:55:05.720 But Clement Attlee in 1937, at the height of this 680,000 people being shot, okay, he

00:55:11.660 goes off to the, uh, Soviet embassy for the anniversary, uh, dinner of the 20th celebration

00:55:18.660 of the, um, of the revolution.

00:55:21.120 And he gives a speech, and I've seen the, the transcript of the speech, and he says, you

00:55:24.920 know, people hate the Soviet Union.

00:55:26.860 But they, they, they really hate the Soviet Union because they don't want to see a nation

00:55:32.600 go forward based on social justice.

00:55:36.240 And you think, whoa, 680,000 bodies is a lot of bodies.

00:55:41.700 They're still uncovering them.

00:55:42.760 It's a lot of justice, yeah.

00:55:43.860 You, you, you, you go to, you go to Kiev.

00:55:45.640 Kiev is the most extraordinary city because you've got Babi Yar there where 30,000 Jews

00:55:49.360 were shot by the Nazis.

00:55:50.140 But you go outside to Bokhivnia forest and, uh, the, the NKBD, the secret police planted 0.96

00:55:55.420 trees over maybe a hundred thousand dead, including some of the polls from Katyn.

00:55:59.940 After the war, Clement Attlee, absolutely brilliant.

00:56:03.980 What had happened, I think, is that he'd been in the wartime cabinet with Churchill and

00:56:07.800 they saw what the Soviets were doing.

00:56:10.100 He and Ernest Bevan, who became his foreign secretary in the first Labour government after

00:56:16.280 the war, um, what Churchill wrote about the, um, about Warsaw and how the Soviets backed

00:56:25.220 off at the last minute in order to make sure that all of the Polish resistance were wiped

00:56:30.900 out by the Germans and refused to allow Allied, uh, supply drops to go via Soviet aerodromes in

00:56:39.860 order to be able to keep these people going.

00:56:41.960 The Red, the Red Army called on the Poles to rise up and then they stopped outside the

00:56:47.040 city.

00:56:47.700 So these people were wiped out.

00:56:49.860 Polish history is resonant with events like this.

00:56:52.680 But so Churchill said, I have, I have never spoken or seldom spoken to a cabinet that was

00:57:00.360 so sombre and so angry over what was going on.

00:57:04.740 Attlee was there, Bevan was there.

00:57:06.200 And then you get to the post-war period and Attlee is absolutely determined he is not going

00:57:11.540 to let communists in to the Labour Party.

00:57:14.240 He is meeting with the head of the security services to talk to him and find out where

00:57:20.200 communist infiltration is going on.

00:57:22.460 And Ernest Bevan writes a report for the whole cabinet in 1947-48, a couple of them, where he's

00:57:28.500 talking about the threat to civilisation because of what's going on with the repression of the

00:57:33.120 Eastern European countries and saying this is a threat to world civilisation, what's happening

00:57:38.120 with all these poor people in country after country, you know, Poland and Hungary and

00:57:41.820 Romania, Bulgaria and all these states actually being taken over by communists and supposed

00:57:48.700 free elections being completely fixed and whatever else.

00:57:50.960 It's fascinating because that was the Labour Party at its best.

00:57:54.680 That was the Labour Party at its most admirable, really saw the world as it is.

00:57:59.980 It's interesting listening to you talk because it's difficult for me because it's my family

00:58:04.080 history.

00:58:04.520 But also, I also notice as you talk that the exact same thing, maybe with not so much the

00:58:11.360 cover up, but apart from that, it's happening right now with Xinjiang in China.

00:58:15.020 Yeah.

00:58:15.140 And in Hong Kong and potentially in Taiwan eventually, hopefully not.

00:58:20.800 Hopefully not.

00:58:21.500 But do you think, like right now, we don't do anything about what China is doing because

00:58:28.240 we can't.

00:58:29.200 Yeah.

00:58:29.620 Isn't that basically why we don't do anything, right?

00:58:31.980 But I don't think we are seeing, well, actually, now that I think about it, we are seeing people

00:58:38.760 trying to run cover for this.

00:58:40.700 We see American celebrities who are being paid by China to, but why was the cover up?

00:58:47.960 Why were they so keen in the 30s and others later?

00:58:51.340 I mean, if you read the preface to Animal Farm in which George Orwell talks about how difficult

00:58:57.560 it was to get it published because it was perceived that he was criticizing the Soviets,

00:59:01.920 which of course he was, right?

00:59:04.720 Why was that all happening, Giles?

00:59:06.700 Is it just because these people thought, well, we are, we're socialists, we believe in the

00:59:10.880 working class and we've got to, you know, this is the utopia they're creating? 1.00

00:59:14.340 Or was there a more nefarious agenda?

00:59:16.280 Was it Soviet infiltration?

00:59:17.680 Were they funding these people?

00:59:19.420 Well, there's so many different ways I can answer that because, because a little rabbit

00:59:25.580 trail, go back to the 1920s.

00:59:27.220 The British Trades Union movement was working hand in glove with Russians, officially Russian

00:59:34.320 trade delegates, but actually just Russian espionage, in order to be able to try and bring

00:59:38.720 the whole nation through to revolution.

00:59:40.820 We nearly had a revolution in 1920, in order to be able to stop British support for the

00:59:46.960 Poles. 0.96

00:59:48.320 So there has been this, and I've just gone off on that rabbit trail too far.

00:59:53.540 No, that's fine.

00:59:54.280 My question was, why were they covering this up?

00:59:57.380 Why were they not challenging them more robustly?

00:59:59.900 Which are two separate questions, of course.

01:00:01.360 You look through the 1930s and you get people like the guy who was the editor of Major Left

01:00:12.940 Wing Journal.

01:00:14.660 Ah, it's gone.

01:00:15.440 Anyway, very important man, well known in Labour intellectual circles, was basically saying,

01:00:21.300 you know, it's not really our part to criticise the people who are trying to build communism

01:00:28.440 in Russia.

01:00:29.600 Yeah, OK, things aren't going well, but we understand how in a revolutionary period, you

01:00:35.460 know, lives will be lost.

01:00:37.560 But the most important thing is, what's going to be the end result?

01:00:42.220 OK?

01:00:43.240 The same old thing, you know, if we're going to, you want to make an omelette, you've got

01:00:46.980 to crack eggs, kind of stuff.

01:00:48.780 So there were these apologies going on.

01:00:50.740 Um, there's no doubt that people were being totally duped, uh, by what was happening.

01:00:58.020 Uh, uh, Stafford Cripps, the, uh, shadow attorney general in the 90, early 1930s, 1933, 3036

01:01:09.580 actually, probably round about then.

01:01:11.060 He was actually saying in Parliament where, where they were talking about some British engineers

01:01:16.400 who'd been arrested and their Russian counterparts were very likely to be shot.

01:01:20.640 And there was even a possibility that these British engineers would be shot on spurious

01:01:24.800 charges.

01:01:25.720 This is the attorney, shadow attorney general, stood up in Parliament.

01:01:29.060 He said, but you know, if the Russian system is a system of justice, as I believe it is,

01:01:33.080 then if the death sentence is passed, it must be carried out.

01:01:36.520 That's only fair.

01:01:38.660 1936.

01:01:39.380 People misunderstood, uh, what Soviet justice was.

01:01:44.000 They thought of law as being impartial, but they didn't even read the most obvious statements

01:01:52.360 made by Soviet leaders, which was that the courts were there entirely to be the servant

01:01:57.440 of the revolution.

01:01:59.200 Law, according to Marx, bourgeois law is entirely fixed by the privileged class.

01:02:06.280 It's entirely created for the, for the protection of their property.

01:02:09.120 That's why you see today, um, very little respect amongst the left for the courts.

01:02:15.300 I mean, we could talk about Rittenhouse, but we won't talk about Rittenhouse.

01:02:18.840 But I mean, I mean, look at that courts fair.

01:02:21.720 No, the courts are the creation of the oppressor class for the fulfillment of their purposes.

01:02:27.760 So then you have the police, um, defund the police.

01:02:30.980 Uh, yeah, um, then you have abolish the army, get rid of the secret services.

01:02:36.600 All these are considered to be the organs of the state solely there to protect the privileged.

01:02:41.580 That's hardwired into the whole doctrine.

01:02:43.860 So, so were, were, were the Russians, to, to answer your question, involved in actually

01:02:49.240 working with people?

01:02:50.980 Yes, but British communists saw them as colleagues.

01:02:54.160 You know, communism, communism has no national borders.

01:02:57.460 Communism has no national boundaries.

01:02:58.740 Another reason why you'll find on the left particularly, they don't care about immigration.

01:03:02.820 They don't care about national boundaries because in fact, there is only one nation.

01:03:05.940 That nation is the working class, the international working class.

01:03:09.120 Um, and they want to do anything they can to break down any sense of national identity as

01:03:13.600 well as the family in microcosm in the major.

01:03:16.500 It's, it's the nation that has to be broken down.

01:03:18.940 So, so yes, but, but I mean, these, these, these are our colleagues.

01:03:22.380 These are the people that we are working with to build, well, communism.

01:03:25.560 So, so on the one hand, there is, yes, there's the espionage side.

01:03:28.740 You know, there's the people they, they managed to get in the foreign office and elsewhere

01:03:32.100 and, and, and the Cambridge seven and all that.

01:03:34.780 It was at seven.

01:03:35.420 I can't remember offhand.

01:03:36.520 Um, but, but for the most part, these people and British trades unionists in the period I

01:03:41.820 don't really cover, but through the seventies, you know, all that industrial unrest, um,

01:03:46.580 they'd be quite happy sitting and having a cup of coffee with, with somebody from the

01:03:51.360 Soviet embassy because they're our chums, they're our friends.

01:03:54.540 So, I mean, that's part of your answer.

01:03:56.640 Charles, isn't the problem this?

01:03:58.520 Well, I, I used to live in Wimbledon and there was a lovely coffee shop near to me run

01:04:03.360 by a, the manager was a Cuban guy.

01:04:05.460 And I used to go once or twice a week, we used to sit down and we used to talk, we used

01:04:10.940 to talk about Cuba.

01:04:11.920 We used to talk about communism.

01:04:12.780 We used to talk about his experiences growing up.

01:04:15.640 And I remember saying to him, Joel, why is it that communism is so appealing to people

01:04:19.980 in the West?

01:04:20.500 And he said to me, the thing is, Francis, is talking to somebody about communism is

01:04:26.820 like saying to somebody who grew up talking to a Western about communism.

01:04:30.400 It's like saying to somebody who grew up in a very rich, privileged part of the city,

01:04:36.200 don't go into the rough part of the city.

01:04:38.540 Don't go into that alley.

01:04:40.040 They've had no experience of it.

01:04:41.280 They don't understand it.

01:04:42.120 He said, it's only when they're in down the alley, it's only when they're turning around.

01:04:46.200 It's only when they see someone coming for them.

01:04:48.720 And it's only when they feel the blow to the back of the head, will they truly understand

01:04:52.080 what communism is.

01:04:53.200 You've got it exactly.

01:04:54.380 You've got it exactly.

01:04:55.180 And that's one of the reasons why actually it's so interesting to see people who have

01:05:00.080 come from Eastern European countries coming to this country and settling here because 1.00

01:05:05.400 they carry a totally different experience.

01:05:08.000 They understand what it's like.

01:05:09.560 You go to those nations now, they are under no doubt whatsoever that the regime that continues

01:05:16.740 basically on some of the same principles and is still run by a former secret policeman

01:05:21.440 is capable of what it was capable of before.

01:05:24.780 You know, they have a whole history of suffering, your own family.

01:05:28.180 You know, you can see through this.

01:05:30.200 Someone walks down the street and they've got the Che Guevara t-shirt on them.

01:05:34.960 You just say you don't understand what lies behind this.

01:05:38.460 And I think that's what drives me with all of this is that for each of us, you know, there's

01:05:44.960 different things that we can do.

01:05:46.480 But I am just passionate that the real story is told, that people understand what lies behind

01:05:52.380 these ideas that are so cool.

01:05:54.640 You know, I signed up to be a communist when I was at school.

01:05:57.800 I just thought it was really cool.

01:05:58.960 I bought my communist manifesto.

01:06:00.460 I never read it.

01:06:01.460 I don't understand.

01:06:02.220 It was completely beyond me.

01:06:04.040 But just because it seemed to be cool.

01:06:06.460 And we need to...

01:06:08.220 I think I just like to be able to catch people before they really get swept up in it and say,

01:06:12.940 OK, do you really want to buy into this?

01:06:15.480 Do you really understand what it is you're buying into?

01:06:17.600 And I want the general public to know what they would know in Ukraine today, for instance.

01:06:23.560 You know, they have a history.

01:06:25.220 They know today, four o'clock when I'm meant to be here.

01:06:28.220 Today's the annual celebration of the Holomodour. 0.99

01:06:32.080 Lighting a candle at four o'clock.

01:06:33.900 I changed my Twitter picture to a candle today because these are the things we need to keep

01:06:43.040 commemorating.

01:06:44.280 And we need to keep talking about this.

01:06:46.040 Kids need to be educated about this stuff today.

01:06:49.440 They have no idea.

01:06:50.840 I mean, this is why it was a privilege.

01:06:52.180 I visited a school this week.

01:06:54.120 I did a number of...

01:06:55.880 Was asked to speak to a number of classes, all ages, right the way from 14, right the

01:07:00.700 way up to those who were leaving and going on to uni, and talked to them about this.

01:07:04.860 And I think for some of them, even though these subjects do come into their school curriculum,

01:07:09.620 it's the human experience of what people went through that really, really hits them.

01:07:14.100 Oh, my goodness me.

01:07:14.980 And I have this thing.

01:07:16.420 I put up these faces on the screen.

01:07:19.100 I put up these faces of people.

01:07:21.000 And then the caption says,

01:07:22.620 Fyodor, someone, peasant, shot for counter-revolutionary activity.

01:07:29.260 And then you see this woman come up. 1.00

01:07:30.940 She just looks like a good, ordinary farm laborer. 1.00

01:07:34.980 Laborer, and shot, and this state, and whatever else.

01:07:38.460 And it just goes on like that.

01:07:39.840 And they're, whoa, these are people.

01:07:42.180 This is real people.

01:07:43.040 This is real lives.

01:07:43.880 And they're still finding the bodies all over Eastern Europe.

01:07:46.700 They are.

01:07:47.060 And I suppose the question there, Giles, is why have we not got a Schindler's List for the Soviet Union?

01:07:54.320 Why is it not part of our culture?

01:07:56.220 Why have we not trained ourselves to recoil in disgust from all of these symbols and from this history, which we don't get taught?

01:08:03.700 Because the Soviets were on our side at the Nuremberg trials. 0.57

01:08:07.560 The Soviets were able to claim victor status against fascism.

01:08:13.320 And that's the mantra today.

01:08:16.140 We're anti-fascists.

01:08:17.800 Before we could be anti-racists, the buzzword was anti-fascism.

01:08:21.780 Now anti-racism has taken the place of that.

01:08:24.380 But that's the anti that we're part of.

01:08:26.840 So they were part of it.

01:08:27.740 You know, I went to a meeting at the European Parliament some years back, which was held by Eastern European politicians.

01:08:37.660 And the title was, Why Was There No Nuremberg for the Crimes of Communism?

01:08:42.120 Right.

01:08:42.500 And they're joyful should be.

01:08:43.900 Yeah.

01:08:44.780 Well, I mean, to say those particular politicians, the Soviet Union took half of Poland before it was ever attacked by Germany.

01:08:55.200 It also annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, murdering tens of thousands of people in offices, as you say, and lots and lots and lots.

01:09:04.180 And we could go on.

01:09:07.580 It's very difficult.

01:09:10.820 And, you know, as you know, I'm writing my first book about my experiences in Russia and the West and what I'm seeing happening here.

01:09:16.820 Which I'll be very interested to read because it's a fascinating idea.

01:09:19.440 Yeah.

01:09:19.920 But the thing that I'm trying to we've been trying to address on the show for the last three and a half years is, you know, two people who, broadly speaking, consider themselves sort of center left, maybe more center for me, center left for Francis.

01:09:32.260 Always sensible about this sort of stuff.

01:09:35.380 We suddenly saw these very radical ideas about race, about sex and gender and sexuality, the just entering the public sphere, entering our world, comedy, the media, the political discourse suddenly turned in this way.

01:09:54.900 Which, to us, people who come from these countries, was really, really troubling. 1.00

01:10:00.880 Are you troubled by what is happening at the moment?

01:10:02.840 I'm very troubled by what's happening.

01:10:04.240 I also see some familiar patterns.

01:10:06.460 We're back to the same old oppressor, oppressed.

01:10:09.460 We're back to the fact that those who are the oppressed class are irredeemable. 1.00

01:10:15.160 People, they can never repent enough because they are, they are tainted by their very act of being.

01:10:23.740 That's, that, that, that, that's, that's way back there.

01:10:25.680 You know, the capitalist was irredeemable.

01:10:27.980 Working class criminals were irredeemable because they were just, they were just corrupted by capitalism. 1.00

01:10:32.080 But, but we have that same thing.

01:10:34.060 We have, we have the, we have the dispute over truth.

01:10:36.960 You know, this idea, this idea that, that, that, that, that if you are a white male, you can have no idea about what real truth is.

01:10:45.720 Truth is whatever the oppressed feel is their truth.

01:10:49.680 Because you will always be tainted by your colonialist attitudes or by, by whatever it is that's driving you to keep your privilege.

01:10:58.340 Well, that's just, that's just a straight transfer from Marx.

01:11:01.640 And I'm not saying that what's going on with wokeism or whatever you want to call it is Marxism.

01:11:07.060 But it, you might say it's kind of like.

01:11:09.400 Why are you not saying that?

01:11:10.320 Because a lot of people are saying that.

01:11:11.380 Well, I know a lot of people are saying that.

01:11:13.300 And I'm just trying to be, I'm just trying to be careful.

01:11:16.340 What I was about to say is I think probably they are, you know, third generation down, cousin, one off.

01:11:22.940 In other words, the ancestry is still there.

01:11:25.760 Haven't they just traded?

01:11:27.020 This is where I might disagree with you and correct me.

01:11:29.100 I'm very open to be.

01:11:30.440 I'm quite prepared because I'm still thinking through these ideas myself.

01:11:32.780 As am I, as am I, hence the question.

01:11:34.500 To me, all I see is they've swapped capitalist bourgeois for white or male or straight or whatever you want.

01:11:44.960 And they've swapped working class, oppressed, subjugated for ethnic minority, sexual minority, female, etc. 0.69

01:11:55.540 Or woman, whatever that now means.

01:11:57.940 To me, I don't see any difference in that sense.

01:12:00.580 I think I'd go along with that.

01:12:01.440 I think I'd go along with that.

01:12:02.260 I'm just conscious at the same time we've still got conventional old-fashioned Marxists alongside that.

01:12:06.740 That's why I call them neo-Marxists.

01:12:08.400 We're neo-Marxists, yeah.

01:12:10.560 So we've got the Marxists and the neo-Marxists.

01:12:13.080 I'm totally with you.

01:12:13.980 I don't think there's anything I would disagree with on that.

01:12:17.040 So what do we do about it, Josh?

01:12:18.780 Oh, wow.

01:12:19.560 What does one do about it?

01:12:20.980 What does one do about it?

01:12:22.040 Well, it needs courage, first of all.

01:12:24.380 It needs courage from people.

01:12:25.320 I mean, like you guys, you know, you stood up, weren't really aware of what you were doing.

01:12:30.320 You just, no, come on, I'm not going to stand for this.

01:12:32.340 And then bang, boom, whatever happened to you and your various careers as they exploded or imploded, rather.

01:12:39.680 And I think it needs people everywhere who see what's going on.

01:12:44.080 It needs them to say, no, I'm going to stand against this.

01:12:48.240 Someone said the other day, you know, the frog in the hot water saucepan is just absolutely a fiction.

01:12:55.000 I don't care if it's a fiction because that's actually what is happening to a lot of people.

01:12:59.480 They are backed into a corner and they're just, oh, I can't be bothered to fight this.

01:13:04.460 It's such an overwhelming torrent.

01:13:07.720 How can you stand up?

01:13:08.580 And I think people need to, I tell you what I would like to see.

01:13:12.900 I would like to see a movement actually founded which could draw together all these different constituencies.

01:13:21.660 You know, we've got mostly gender critical feminists who are really able to stand up against the trans issue. 1.00

01:13:29.180 We've got other people from different areas of life.

01:13:32.960 I would like to see somehow if we could get some kind of coalition of people united.

01:13:38.640 I talk to people.

01:13:39.660 I go to say, you know, we have dinner, 13 people around a table, some names and faces that are quite well known there.

01:13:46.180 And we're all saying, what should we do?

01:13:47.880 I'm talking to someone else.

01:13:50.120 He said, I'm meeting with a whole lot of people and we're all, everyone's just wringing their hands.

01:13:53.720 And they're just saying, what's going to happen?

01:13:55.500 What can we do?

01:13:56.340 Is there anything we can do?

01:13:57.020 Is it just, you know, is it?

01:13:58.280 So I don't know what a movement looks like, but you see what's happening in America among parents.

01:14:06.760 Now, you see, parents is ordinary people who say, no, you're not going to do this stuff to my kids.

01:14:12.380 And I am going to stop it happening.

01:14:15.120 I am going to publicize it happening.

01:14:16.920 We've got Christopher Ruffo doing all his incredible work.

01:14:20.080 And as a result, because of his prominence, he's getting all these secret documents leaked to him from one place after another.

01:14:26.020 I think that's absolutely brilliant.

01:14:27.520 And, you know, people may criticize Americans for their independence and their belligerence and whatever else.

01:14:34.000 But there's something in the American character which says, uh-uh, I'm going to stand up against this.

01:14:38.860 They didn't realize it's part of their culture.

01:14:40.760 I think we're much more compliant here.

01:14:43.200 Well, you know, I mean, teacher knows best.

01:14:44.740 I mustn't really complain about what teacher does or whatever.

01:14:47.120 I'd like to see not just the intellectuals alerted to this.

01:14:53.200 Because in a way, in some places, they have quite a limited, I mean, you have a big constituency.

01:15:01.660 But, you know, if you're a university professor, there's a limit to the influence you've got.

01:15:05.760 But if, you know, you're a whole movement of ordinary people out there, the general public, that's when this stuff starts to catch on.

01:15:13.280 What it looks like, I've no idea.

01:15:15.640 But it's been something I've been mulling over now for two, three years.

01:15:19.040 So maybe we do need a revolution.

01:15:20.420 Maybe we do need a revolution, yeah.

01:15:21.760 We need a peaceful, respectful revolution, but one that's got courage.

01:15:26.140 Perfect.

01:15:26.700 And on that note, Giles, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:15:30.100 If people want to find you online, where would be the best place to do that?

01:15:33.280 I am on Twitter, at Giles Udy.

01:15:35.200 And, of course, people should buy the book, Labour and the Good Lakes.

01:15:37.620 Yeah, well, it's just being reprinted in a couple of weeks' time.

01:15:39.620 So it'll be out, new edition.

01:15:41.440 My publishers took one look at the thick brick and said, we just can't afford to do that again.

01:15:44.960 So I'm actually doing it myself.

01:15:46.220 So they'll be on my website shortly.

01:15:48.040 Well, our final question, as you know, as always, is what's the one thing no one is talking about that we really should be?

01:15:54.720 What we've just been talking about.

01:15:56.260 So we have been talking about it, which is good.

01:15:58.620 And we need to do a lot more of that.

01:16:00.220 Fantastic.

01:16:00.540 Well, we're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals.

01:16:02.960 But in the meantime, Giles Udy, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:16:05.540 It's been my real pleasure.

01:16:06.480 I've just loved the time.

01:16:07.880 It's been great having you on.

01:16:08.980 And, of course, thank you so much for watching and listening.

01:16:11.700 We'll see you with another brilliant episode.

01:16:13.880 I was going to say like this one.

01:16:14.940 I probably won't be quite like this one.

01:16:16.480 I won't be crying nearly as much.

01:16:18.160 We'll see you with another brilliant episode or Raw show.

01:16:20.640 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.

01:16:22.500 And if you like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:16:26.880 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:16:29.660 We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview.

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TRIGGERnometry - December 06, 2021

The Truth about Communism, Gulags and the Left with Giles Udy

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