Judging Freedom - Globalism Effects on U.S. & Europe w/Alastair Crooke fmr Brit ambassador

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Globalism Effects on U.S. & Europe w/Alastair Crooke fmr Brit ambassadorSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 16th, 2023. Little Chris is here. I'd like to call today Big brain time because this is one of the smartest people that we regularly have on the show. My dear friend, Alistair Crook. Alistair, it's a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. You have a very, very interesting piece out this morning, or maybe it's not out yet, and you were kind enough to send us an advanced copy arguing about Western malaise. What is the Western malaise, United States and Europe, that you're sensing today?

Essentially two cultures that are about to collide, collide disastrously, possibly with violence, possibly, hopefully not, but they're different, slightly different characteristics. In Europe, one of it is the, if you like, sense of many Europeans that they've lost their identity, the identities that they carefully have kept over the centuries to protect themselves from conquerors and outsiders, to this new identity, which is one of diversity, transgenderism, and also a sense of the need to redress for past actions that Europe has taken. It's colonial past in a nutshell, and that needs to be addressed. But what is at the root of it is that Europeans

find that they are now just one minority amongst many. That's true in Germany. So that's Europe. America is slightly different. In Europe, is there a movement, what we call here in the U.S., which started like a lot of craziness here in California, for reparations to pay or compensate people today for historic injustices that were not visited upon them personally, but upon their ancestors many generations back? Is that happening in Europe as well, Alistair? Yes, not so much in Central Europe, but in England, certainly. That has been the case where families that have owned or transported slaves in the past or had plantations in the Caribbean, if you like,

which were run by slaves. So yes, it's here. It's not quite as pronounced as in the United States, but it has this different character in the sense that people are really getting anxious about, you know, who they are, because they're being offered an identity from the European Union, which is really just PR language for European values. And the real Europe is disappearing. The Europe of France, the Europe of Italy is now just a sort of tourist picture postcard. I mean, lived Europe is not the one that the tourist sees. That's brushed up for commercial reasons. You go to London, you'll probably not meet a British person in London. It'll be just entirely a globalist city. It could be anywhere. It's just another modern globalist city. It's not London in a cultural way. And also Rome is not necessarily, you know, Italian Rome anymore. It is a big change. And so people feel it slipping away. And then we have what we saw the summer in Paris,

what happens when it explodes because the immigration is quite, even if you take a country like uh like Ireland 14 are not native born coming from overseas much much higher in other parts of of Europe and then there are another four million um if you like uh immigrants refugees from Ukraine that have suddenly arrived on top of that but I've said to you before, every day in Italy, we get boatloads arriving, which have to be accommodated and included. And as the economy craters in Europe, which it is doing, of course, resentment at people, these people who come in, who get automatically given a salary, getting free

medical, getting free health services. It creates huge tensions within society. Are the, or is the push for reparations, I'm going to use the California term just as a handle, so we know what we're talking about. Forgive me for relying on anything from California, but is the push for reparations cultural or governmental? By which I mean, are people being embarrassed into addressing reparations or compelled to do so? The California push is one of compulsion. The government is going to take tax dollars and give it away. The tax dollars have their origin in tax payments by people who, when they made the tax payments, had no idea the money was going to be given away like that. No, it's not compulsion. if you like, about, if you like, diversity and all these woke issues,

which is used as a sort of form of compulsion, of shaming people, of cancelling them. And I think what is so different about now is it's not just that they mandate these values, but you're expected to adopt those values in your own lifestyle, in the way in which you speak and way in which you act, which is a further, if you like, level of cultural warfare, as was used, if you like, by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in China. What happens at a university, let's say a major university in Britain or England, University of Milan, London School of Economics, I'm thinking of top schools, where a student prefers to be called by a plural pronoun, they, as opposed to you, and the professor doesn't comply with that. What are the

consequences for the failure to conform to the most extreme and absurd demands of the cultural wokeism? And I'm picking university intentionally because that's the hotbed of where all this stuff happens. In the UK, which I can say very, because it's much clearer, you lose tenure, you lose your job, and the police have made it clear that this constitutes to misgender someone, as they call it, is abuse and a crime. It is a crime to misgender someone? Yes, it is a crime. To refer to a boy who wants to call himself a girl

as you or he as opposed to they? Yes, or to misgender them in other ways. There was a case in the UK just last week of a 16-year-old autistic girl pulled out of a cupboard by seven policemen because she had called one of the police women. She described her as, oh, she's like a lesbian nana, like her lesbian grandmother. And so seven police officers arrived at 1am to arrest this 16-year-old autistic girl, drag her off to the police station, and to charge her with this crime. In fact, they've now released her and sent her home, but they've decided not to prosecute it because it did raise

a great deal of anxiety in Europe that they could. I believe as we speak, someone is on trial somewhere in England silently reciting the Hail Mary in front of an abortion clinic. I mean, I realize the British don't have, you don't have a written constitution, but you have a tradition of the freedom of speech, which goes back far deeper than the American. Is this a function of Prime Minister Sunak's conservative government, or are these local rogue prosecutors doing this on their own? Is this a cultural milieu that British people have accepted? Yes. This is paradoxically being imposed by a conservative government, including sort of legislation on gender changes, taking away the rights of parents. Now in the National Health Service, the state health service, children can opt to change their genders by surgery from age seven.

It was lower than that, and they've u as it has in America, is captured not only the universities, captured schools, captured the health service, captured many areas. I mean, we see all the time problems because, you know, patients object to someone that they see as a man, but is posing as a woman and a nurse attending to them in certain cases. And so all of these things, yes, it is there. And this is the clash that's taking place, but it has this extra dimension of massive migration, which is coming in of people. And, you know, one of the things that's so striking, and I don't think is understood in the United States, how the world has changed towards Europe.

In Global South, in Africa, in other parts of the world, they say to them, mind your own business. We're going to do it our way. And don't you dare lecture us. And they say this to the face of the leaders of Europe. They don't defer to them. They don't treat them particularly courteously and respectfully. They say we're actually more interested in listening to Russia.

But this is a shock. And this is why you have in Europe and places in Paris and things. I mean, if there is a flare up in Niger, which may happen because the forces are gathering there, what is going to be the effect on the ground in Paris from these things because it's, you know, the feelings are running really strong in the immigration amongst the immigrant communities. Are the immigrant communities, and I realize this is a gross, I'm asking you for a gross generalization, by and large, culturally more traditional than the communities

into which they are attempting to assimilate? I mean, do the immigrants even tolerate the idea that one human being chooses to be called they, must be called they, under penalty of law? This is a very important point because there's two elements to this. They're quite separate. Now, traditional communities will not accept the transgender narrative and discourse. They refuse it, and that is a cause. They are very much against the government and causes them problems with the authorities and the police in other occasions. But the second thing that I was going to say is the immigrant community, particularly in France,

but it's the same in Italy because it depends where it comes from, but in France, from Algeria and places, I mean, are very strongly opposed to all forms of Western supremacy or colonialism. I mean, it is a very aggressive and quite hostile, if you like, feeling that is there. Just as you've had in some cases, we've had the first few cases of sort of mass looting of shops and things like that taking place in London. Before we elide over to Ukraine, because I have some questions I want to ask you about the Europeans accepting the miscalculations of their leaders in Ukraine. Do you tie the cultural wars today in the West to the cultural wars here 50 years ago in the late 60s,

the assassination of JFK in 63 and RFK and MLK in 68, the Vietnam War, the draft riots, the general cultural revolution of the late 60s. Do you see a tie between the teenagers who did that and the adults who are doing what they do today? It's not that sort of direct, but ideologically, yes, it's a new iteration. It espouses some of the original, if you like, principles of the 68 Rights, which don't forget we had in Europe, too. We had the revolution as well here. I mean, this was a, it was a pure, if you like, revolutionary utopian project to change the values of society and change the values. Well, now it's come in a different form with slightly different expanded emphasis on genderism, on transgenderism, and on diversity, and lbgtq generally so it's taken a very much wider one which is used much more to put compulsion on people as i say it turns it into a real culture war because if you

don't reflect these things in what you say how you act and in your personal stance you are cancelled or you lose your job so there is no legal compulsion, but there is a very strong compulsive element in it. And the immigrant community that's traditional won't accept that. And at the same time, you have another immigrant segment of the community who just does not accept Europe, doesn't accept its values, doesn't like it. I'm going to ask again for a generalization. How do the non-elites, non-elites in Europe, accept the miscalculations of their leaders vis-a-vis the Ukraine war? How does the average working class Italian, German, Brit, French, Frenchman, accept the fact that their tax dollars, not to the extent the Americans

are, but measurable nevertheless, are being used to fight this fruitless, useless bloodbath that has nothing to do with the security of Western Europe? Well, I'll just take it with Germany as just one example, just for saving time. But in Germany, the latest poll shows that four out of five Germans do not trust their government. Four out of five Germans do not trust their government. The Alternative für Deutschland, if you like, the opposition element, has come out with a paper just today saying, just last week, a formal document that has been adopted by them, saying that the project of the European Union has failed.

It has failed on climate. It has failed in terms of the economy. It has failed in its economic policies and its foreign policy. And they've said, we don't want to leave the Europe, but it must be completely reformed within to a federation of sovereign states. So it's a complete rejection. And now the AFD has the most support. I mean, it is one of the biggest parties, not quite the biggest, but it's the second biggest. It's very significant and growing more and more. So that,

I think, gives you an example of the change that is taking place in just one country in Germany, not that different in France. Is it fair to say that there's a general perception that Western leaders miscalculated Russian strength, Russian resolve, and Western and NATO and Ukrainian weakness? Complete, complete miscalculation. They just, they didn't do their homework. I mean, you know, I've said it before, it's the time, you know, they thought that financial war would bring Russia down in a jiffy. It didn't happen. They thought that cutting themselves off from Russian energy would destroy

Putin's Russia. It hasn't happened. They thought then that the Ukrainians would literally knock Russians for six and that they would drop their weapons and run for their lives. I mean, this is what they said at the time. They were wrong. They were wrong on every single account. And now we have a business model that is completely broken. Deindustrialization of Europe is advancing very quickly. Just to give you a little snapshot, this year in Italy, you know how Italians, better than many, rely on their August holidays. This year in Italy, 41% of families couldn't afford to go on holiday in August. I mean, this is something that is deeply sort of traditional, deeply close to Italian culture. August is for the beach. 41% couldn't do it. 45% of Italians are having difficulty in making ends meet from month to month.

Here's a clip of someone, you'll know who it is as soon as you see him, largely agreeing with what you said because he's saying it in Russian. I'll read the subtitles for the benefit of our friends who are listening rather than watching the program. We can clearly see where the policy of adding fuel to the fire in the example of Ukraine by pumping billions of dollars into the neo-Nazi regime, supplying it with equipment, weapons, ammunition, sending their military advisors and mercenaries. Everything is being done to ignite the conflict even more,

to draw other states into it. Hotbeds of tension are also smoldering, and although the security challenges in each of them have their own characteristics, all of them are generated by geopolitical adventures, selfish neo-colonial actions of the West. NATO member countries continue to build up and modernize their offensive capabilities and make attempts to transfer military confrontation to outer space and to the information space. They use military and non-military means of pressure.

And all of this is happening amid the destruction of the arms control system. The United States seeks, among other things, to adjust the system of interstate interaction that has developed in the Asia-Pacific region. President Vladimir Putin. Your thoughts, Alistair? I think that's, I think what he's saying is very true. As the offensive has effectively petered out, I think it may continue for another three or four weeks

before the rains come. But we've seen, and I mentioned last week, we had the Black Sea War with these maritime drones being used to attack Russian shipping and to attack Russia and its most vulnerable port in the Black Sea, where most of its trade has taken place and produced a strong reaction from Russia. In fact, I think in the last few days, the Russians have destroyed all of those maritime drones, probably donated by Britain. But they've destroyed, as far as I understand, all of them.

Then they have new weapons coming. The Germans are thinking of longer range cruise missiles, the Taurus type, which has got a 500 kilometer range. They're going to probably give that. It isn't a final decision yet. It depends. America is thinking of ATAK-M, another longer-range missile. All of these things are going to just prolong the war

because, in fact, I mean, we're at the cusp of really an implosion, the Ukrainian implosion, because the military is almost at the point of complete paralyzation. You know, when the center goes, when it, if you like, just implodes, then everything just stops functioning. It's complete paralysis. I've seen that before happen in a state where suddenly just, and I couldn't understand, suddenly everything stopped. There were no planes flying around, no tanks moving. It was over. And I think we're getting quite close to that point now.

All the reserves, they finally used the last reserves, the 46th Brigade and others, in this little village which is barely six kilometres over the border from the contact line, no one near the defensive lines of Rabotino. And they're starting to use the Challenger tanks, which the Brits, I think, asked them not to use if possible. They didn't want to see them damaged. So I think this really is not to use it, possibly. They didn't want to see them damaged. But so we're, I think this is the last, this really is getting to the last row.

So then probably we will see fairly shortly the Russian offensive. The Russians have been pretty clear that they wanted to see that the resources of the Ukrainians have been exhausted. And Shoigu said that two days ago. He said they're almost exhausted. Now we see they are being deployed or the last resources are in play.

And so I think we're closing in very much on the moment when Russia will decide. We don't know when, we don't know in what form, but an offensive will probably follow from Russia with some objective, which again is not always very clear, but I think will mean that the end of the, if you like, the whole structure of Kiev, the whole apparatus will collapse. And we're there. I mean, in a sense, you can't help feeling, you know, they are still fighting and they're still, and many Russians are saying, but I mean, why did the Ukrainians go on with these sort of, you know, little fights here and there? And there's no obvious explanation. I mean, they may be trying to find a little weakness or a wedge or something like this. Well, at some point, at some point, the generals are going to say we have to stop.

We can't we can't continue to send our boys into certain slaughter. Before we go, I can't resist running this tape for you of President Zelensky doing his best Claude Rains imitation of catching Humphrey Bogart gambling in Casablanca. I'm making an allegory, of course. President Zelensky claiming he's rooting out the corruption. There are 112 criminal proceedings against officials of the territorial recruitment centers. 33 suspects, regional, city and district military commissars, employees of the military medical commissions, abuses in different regions. Some took cash, some took cryptocurrency.

That's the only difference. The cynicism is the same everywhere. Illicit enrichment, legalization of illegally obtained funds, illegal benefit, illegal transportation of persons liable for military service across the border. Our decisions are the following. We are dismissing all regional military commissars. All right, this was last week. This was last Friday, so five days ago. I don't think anybody would take that credibly because of the endemic corruption, but looking at it politically or even culturally, is he trying to get people's minds off of the certain defeat that you predicted, along with a lot of our other colleagues, is coming soon? I think, look, I think it's possibly

directed at the fact that in the United States, more than anywhere else. People are saying, yeah, but I mean, where did all that money go? I mean, why do we not even know how much of that, you know, money that was originally set aside? Was it $113 billion or something like that? Where is it? And now it wants more. How much have we spent? And so I think it's partly an effort to say, oh, we're in fact cracking down

on corruption. But really, I mean, Ukraine is probably the biggest criminal event that we have seen in the century of money laundering, of corruption going right up to the top, of diversion of weapons and of simple stealing of money and transferring it over abroad. It is a huge boondoggle. Alistair Crook, only you can say these things the way you do, and we're deeply grateful for it. Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you at the end of next week. Thank you very much. Of course. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. If you like what you saw, help us reach our goal of 200,000 subscribers by Labor Day. That's the first Monday

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