School of War - Ep 193: Douglas Murray on Israel’s War and its Global Consequences

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Douglas Murray, journalist and author of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, joins the show for a wide ranging conversation that covers Death Cults, anti-Semitism, and recent shifts in the Right. ▪️ Times      •      01:42 Introduction     •      03:00 9/11 origins      •      09:50 It’s not 1939     •      13:45 Death cults         •      19:16 “I’m not a fascist, I’m an idealist.”        •      23:51 Vasily Grossman       •      37:05 What’s going on with the Right?          •      49:07 Nostalgia for the absolute      •      54:10 Regaining balance   Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Douglas Murray is a journalist and commentator and author of numerous books on the West in its future and the debates that are dividing it. After 10-7, he more or less moved to Israel for about a year, and his latest book is about the war there and its impact on college campuses and other institutions around the world. He's been on the road promoting it lately, and you may have heard about some of his encounters along the way with not only critics on the left, but also what I'll call the podcast right. we had a really interesting, really wide-ranging conversation. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in it. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the rain, the situation in France. A fight on the beaches. It's a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the field. for more follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today. Douglas Murray, he's a journalist, an author most recently of On Democracies and Death Colts, Israel, Hamas, and the future of the West.

Douglas, you've been on Rogan and Bill Maher and everything else in the last few weeks. Now it's time for the big time here on School of War. Thank you for joining. It's a great pleasure to be with you and your listeners. It will surprise no one who's listening to us to learn that you are English. Damn. Did I give it away? And, you know, you had what would generally be considered to be a good education there.

And yet here you are, a phylo-semite, a man of the right. These are not... No, semi, by the way. Oh, you don't. You don't. What's your... I'm curious. What's your quibble with the term?

I don't like the term phylo-Semitism because I believe it's always risking being the flip side of anti-Semitism. Hmm. Okay. But the Semitism attributes the same things to the Jews that an anti-Semite might but thinks that it's good. Oh, yeah. The Chinese is a fair amount. It's a pre-October 7th, the sort of Chinese treatment of Israel. No, I just, I believe.

I'm a defender of Western civilization. I'm a defender of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its values. I'd like to think I'm a defender of the truth, and that's what motivates me. Point taken, I think my question will still work, though, which is your intellectual trajectory is not the mainstream trajectory, I think, of probably a lot of the folks that you were in university with. What happened, you know, why did you end up, we sort of started this conversation right in the present?

How did you end up in Israel the first time? How did you end up embracing the kinds of arguments in front? that you've embraced? Well, several reasons. One that I've described before is that I was struck by something that happened after 9-11, which was the divide between people

who believed that America had it coming and that there could be some excuse for it. And those of us who just instinctively were like, absolutely not. Absolutely not. You can make any number of critiques of America, American foreign policy, American action, but don't you dare go down the root of saying America had it coming,

as the London Review of Books infamously put it in 2001. I noticed that there was this nascent anti-Americanism in Europe, which had been there forever, but had tickly been there since 1945 because the French, for instance, will never give the Americans, Canadians, British, the Allies. They'll never forgive them for us for liberating them. They would like to think they'd liberated themselves. As the Vice President would say, have they even said thank you?

The truth is that they have, but they probably can never say thank you enough. But they have, but it remains a lingering thing on the French. right as well as French left. And I noticed that that I came to research my first book in the United States as a teenager in the 1990s and immediately fell in love of America in a very deep way. I admire this country. I admired its virtues, its attributes, the enormous opportunities it gave to people who embraced it, who wanted to be part of it. This was maybe not a natural, it wasn't unusual, not the most natural sentiment for somebody brought up in Britain

in the late 20th century to have, but it wasn't uncommon by any means. But there were leftists and rightists who disdained America and who used the post-9-11 period to really sort of blossom in their dislike and hatred. But I always saw that the same people

who were against America, they always ended up. They were always against Israel. They were always sort of flying, you know, Palestinian flags and chanting for, you know, river to the sea and all that stuff. And they were always anti-British. And this line of prejudice, this line of hatred of, as I've seen it for some 25 years now,

goes from hating Israel, most of all, for reasons we can get into it, most of all, perhaps as the epitome, of the West as they see it, to hatred of Britain and Western Europe and hatred of America. But America is the big, the big one. And so I, you know, and I realized fairly clearly then that these people were against everything I loved, everything I care for, everything I think is good. They were against the society that I'm very grateful for.

my own country of birth, Great Britain and America. I think the world has been immeasurably better by having Britain and then America as dominant powers. And I think the people who think that we, the transatlantic alliance, have been the worst force, simply, among much else, never contend with the fact

that all of the rivals or competitors who could have taken the job would have been infinitely worse. I'd love to see the people who think that America is one of the great transgressors of human rights globally see what they'll do when they bring their human rights complaints to the Chinese Communist Party. So I think it's a long-winded answer to a short question, but it's a complicated question, and while I've thought about it, it's both complicated and simple. When somebody declares war on my society, I don't care for them.

Yeah. I owe, whatever my views are, started to crystallize as a consequence of conversations I had when I was living in your mother country around the time of the Iraq war, and I was ambivalent. I was ambivalent. I was pro-Afghanistan war and had sort of conventional American views post-9-11, but I was ambivalent about the invasion of Iraq as a young person. I remember being in the college bar in your country and saying things like, well, but, you know, Saddam Hussein's a bad guy.

Like, we can all agree on that, can't we? You know, without saying, and therefore it seems wise that we should invade. No, no, we could not. We could not agree at all on that. In fact, it turns out I was perhaps one of the few people in the room who seemed to believe this, despite what seemed like decent evidence to me. Well, one of the most interesting, thoughtful, reflective comments I ever heard about that period was actually from the novelist Ian McKeown, who made the observation that, I mean, he was against Iraq.

And maybe we can get into that because I think that the post-Iraq period is one of the things that is responsible for some of the noxious things on the right, as well as the left that we've seen in the last 18 months and perhaps two decades. But I remember in McKeown saying that the people who were against the Iraq war, when they were marching through the streets, they should have done so in silence, knowing that if they had their way, life for Iraqis would continue as hell.

I thought that was a brilliant observation because too few people actually took into account and certainly now very few people take into account what the nature of that regime was and what Iraq would look like today if Uday and Kusay Hussein had inherited it. It's a what if but everything looking back is. Some folks who I've spoken to in Israel, I suppose, this mostly comes from the IDF, have framed their fight in the following way that World War III has already begun, and Israel is fighting in some early stage of it, much as the 1930s were occupied with, you know, the Japanese war in Manchuria or the Spanish Civil War and various conflicts that ultimately sort of coalesce by the 40s. What's your reaction to that? Do you see a global element to this? I don't love the framing of that because I'm intensely resistant to the view of history

that seems to believe that the world is fated to always replay the 1930s and 1940s. I think one of the reasons why this isn't the case with some of the people you've spoken to necessarily, but I think there's a outside of the region in the wider world, particularly in the wider west, particularly America, you might say, there seems to be a fallback on the 30s and 40s comparison, I think effectively because nobody else, nobody knows any other history. And therefore, in the same way that anyone who's bad has to be Hitler,

anyone who's not opposing Hitler has to be Neville Chamberlain. And it's always a slide into 1939. I don't accept that. I don't like that framing just because I think it's too monotone. and it's not quite fit for the purpose of what we're in at the moment. Obviously, Israel is fighting a war against the terrorists, their enemy, backed by Qatar and the Revolutionary Islamic Government in Iran, which seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state and the destruction of the West

and sees the destruction of the Jewish state as the first thing they can achieve, because the other aims are much more difficult. It's obvious to me, and it's not obvious to some people, simply because some people don't realize what the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Government say. But this is what they say. And what their proxies and front groups and sympathizers in the West also call for, the various student groups in America

who's decided to side with the death cult of Hamas in the last year and a half, always call for the overthrow of America as well. They want the overthrow of the state of Israel and then get down to business with everyone else. So there's definitely a front line element of what Israel is fighting, for sure, for the rest of the West. Absolutely. But I don't see it in those terms.

Or at least, I mean, there are similarities, but I slightly just. resist them for the reason they said. This is something that you've been a student and a real dedicated analyst of for years and years now, which is this linkage between the Western left or the global left, if you will, and in the title of your book, and just a moment ago, you call the death cults of organizations like Hamas. I suppose the students, you know, who attempted to set up this encampment in Yale just a day or so

ago, I suppose that people like that would reject the term death cult. It's not that they would say they were embracing a death cult. Far from it, Hamas is a slur to call Hamas a death cult. This is a organization devoted to, we could do it a number of different ways, the liberation of the Palestinian people. And their enemies, they may not be nice socialists themselves necessarily. We can be realists as Yaley radicals. But they have our enemies. You know, our enemies. You know, our enemies. enemies are the modern nation state, capitalism, Israel is a particularly religious, nasty version thereof. And so they share our enemies. They want freedom for the oppressed people of places like Gaza.

And that's the grounds for the alliance. This death cult business is sort of right-wing propaganda. Why is it not right-wing propaganda? I mean, another way to ask the same question is, why do they believe that this alliance will end well for them? Well, I mean, first of all, by not thinking about it in any serious way, it's interested me for a quarter of a century, the way in which some people in the West can use any act of terrorism against the West, whether it's 9-11 or the invasion of Israel on 7th October,

as what a late friend of mine described as a megaphone for their own prejudices. If Osama bin Laden brings down the Twin Towers, we will interpret it as being an anti-capitalist movement, or if Hamas invades Israel, we will see it as an anti-colonialist movement. That's just, it tells you only about the person who suffers from this delusion. It tells you nothing about the person who carried out the act of war and terrorism. I describe Hamas Hezbollah as death cults, because that's how they describe themselves.

They literally worship death. They glorify death. They love death. Hassan Nazraala, the now late leader of Hezbollah, who he might say got what he wanted, said many times in his adult lifetime, that the Israeli and Western love of life is our greatest weakness. And that it's a weakness because, as opposed to our love of life, They, Hezbollah, the jihadist movements, worship death. They love death. It's what the leadership of Hamas has said for a decade.

Same thing. You can go back right to the founders of Hamas. They all say the same thing. We love death more than you love life. And if you look at the actions of Hamas on the 7th of October, actions which they broadcast, gleefully filmed themselves with gopros and cameras and iPhones and much more. If you look at their own video of their actions,

you can see this in real time. The terrorists on 7th were literally worshipping, glorifying in death. There's a phone call that I cite at the beginning of the book, which your listeners are probably aware of, but many people in the wild world are not of a young Hamas. terrorists from Gaza phoning his family on the 7th, from one of the kibbutzs, one of the communities in the South that they'd invaded, and saying to his father, father, father, your son has killed 10 Jews.

Father, with his own hand, your son has killed 10 Jews. Get mother on the phone. Turn on to WhatsApp video I can show you. If you look at the videos of Hamas, for instance, trying to take the head. of a young man who's lying prostate on the floor in front of them and trying to take off his head with a shovel. All the time they're screaming with elation. Al-Awaqba.

Al-a-a-a-a-ha-ba. I describe them as the death cult because that's what they are and that's what they describe themselves. If Hamas presented itself as a social justice movement and hid its actions and didn't say what they wanted, I think some of the misunderstanding in the West,

much of the West, would be, as it were, easier to understand. It's just that they do say it, and they do do it all. And as ever, I'm slightly amazed that the people who have been brought up on a cheap reading of Edward Said's orientalism do not realize the extreme, extraordinary oddity of them in the West imposing their interpretation of Hamas onto Hamas when it doesn't fit Hamas, when they literally will not listen to the words that they say or don't believe the words they say or say,

they may say that they worship death and they may act to kill as many people as possible in peaceful communities at a dance party. They may say that and they may do that. But I, I, at Yale, at the age of 19, have a much better understanding of what they really mean and what their aims really are, which is simply the liberation of people or an anti-colonialist struggle or a struggle against white supremacy or any of the other things that people have tried to fit onto Hamas in the last 18 months. it's a very, very interesting corner, which obviously I go into in the book in some death, to not just ask the question of why this mishearing, misinterpretation has been happening in America in particular, but why it's happening.

Yeah, not to violate your point about over-reliance on World War II analogies, which I take, but, you know, when Stalin and Hitler engaged in, their period of cooperation, at least they had the decency to be deeply cynical about it. Whereas the old kids, it's idealistic, you know, it's heartfelt. Well, as I say in the book, I mean, there's this, from the, even from that period, I mean, there are, you know, I say that throughout history there have been death cults, they have been movements, religious movements and a sector movement that have also fought this, fought this war

against people who love life in the name of death. A pertinent one that is on my mind often, which I'm about to break my own rule, but it's a sidebar of the catastrophe of the 20th century, perhaps. But when Franco was rising to power in Spain in the 30s, the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unimuno, who wrote the tragic sense of life.

Famously, Spanish history, famously, finds himself at the Univocan, He's been teaching at lecturing to students, and because he's against the Francoism, because he's against the Scipian military dictatorship that's coming, fascism that's coming, the students end up chanting to the professor, Viva la Muente, Viva la Mueirae, long-lived death, long-lived death. Unimuno leaves are stating, this is a necrophilic cry, but he loses. They win. But many people, as I try to bring across in the book,

in some examples people won't be familiar with, maybe, many people have done, continue to do terribly wicked things in the name of social justice or wrapped up in social justice. There's this case I go into in the book, which I just think is very telling of what happened that the 1950s, 60s, the 70s, German left, the left that actually believed that if they had one aim and they weren't wrong in this,

and this isn't a bad aim to start from, is don't be Nazis. Some members of the German left end up being the leaders of the hijacking of the plane that ends up being diverted to Entebbe. And as I relate in the book, these people started off believing, let's not be Nazis.

We end up hijacking a plane and separating out the Jews from the non-Jews on the plane in order to kill the Jews. And there was a Holocaust survivor on the flight who had a tattoo on his arm that he shows to one of the German leftists

who's hijacked the plane. And he says, something along the lines of, you know, I had hoped that the German people had changed. And the hijacker in question, who was a revolutionary leftist, says, effectively is dumbfounded by this claim. What are you talking about?

I'm not a fascist. I'm an idealist. I'm murdering you for entirely different reasons. Totally different reasons. Why would you draw any comparison between Mengele doing a sporting mission in Auschwitz and me doing it for totally different reasons on a plane in Uganda? I give it as an example because it seems. So relent to me of what is happening in our era, where in the name of all of these anti-impression

movements, liberationist movements, that they've tried to impose on Hamas and Hezbollah's aims, they end up supporting genocidists, would-be genocidists, and just time it again, they reveal nothing about Israel, nothing about the Jewish state, and everything about themselves. Well, it's a good illustration of the fact that, you know, as an ethical principle, don't be a Nazi is necessary but not sufficient. Exactly. You can start with it, but there's going to need to be more. There's going to need to be more, and that's something I wish more people realize. Let me ask, your example points to something important, which is the shapeshifting, malleable quality of anti-Semitism itself and the striking fact that Hitler and a Stalin, a left and a right,

a German radical and a Hamas terrorist, all kind of end up in quite comparable places when it comes to Jews or to Israel. You cite in the book, you won me over with this, not that I wasn't already an admirer of your work, but you cite on a number of occasions Vasili Grossman, who deserves more attention, I think. By the way, I'm very proud to say,

I just heard yesterday that apparently on Amazon where you can, of course, buy this book because in all places where books are sold, one of the books that people are buying along with it or after it, after my book, are works by Vasily Grossman. I feel a quiet but deep pride in that. You didn't tell them that it's like a thousand pages long, life and fate. I don't think you mentioned that in your book.

I kept that bit quiet, but enormously moved, if I've done anything, to help bring his work to a wider focus, because it took a long time for his work to get out of rush, and a long time for it to get into English. And yes, his work is absolutely vital, one of the great writers of the 20th century or of any time. We should probably do a whole episode on him at some point here on the show, but you point to a passage in life and fate

where he gives an outline of anti-Semitism, and he is a man who knows of what he speaks, as a journalist in Stalin's Russia. His mother's killed, of course, by the Nazis, and this is chronicled in fictional, but only slightly fictional form. in the novel. Talk a bit about Grossman's view of anti-Semitism and, you know, feel free to say things about Grossman. I think the world needs to know. Well, Grossman's a great hero of mine because he

felt the compulsion to see and chronicle his time in all his horror and glory. He covered the Battle of Stalingrad. He was also the first journalist in Treblinka. And actually the epigraph, the epigraphy the epigraph on democracies and death cults is from Grossman's account of his entry into Drablinca where he pieced together what had happened, where the Germans tried to cover it over to some extent ineptly, where he says, you know, you might ask what's the purpose of all this, why remember all this? And he says the writer's duty is to recount these things and these civilian's duty is to learn them. He, like Life and Fate is really Grossman's greatest attempt to write a modern war and a piece.

You might say that quite a lot of people had tried to follow in the footsteps of Tolstoy, but Grossman is one of the few that actually does. And one thing that blew me away when I read, Life and Fate, which a late Persian friend of mine described to me years ago before I read it as one of the two absolutely essential novels of the 20th century, the other being the leopard of Giuseppe de lappard of Giuseppe de la Padoza but she had a very high

literary bar. But in the middle of life and fate, this vast Tolstoy-like account of the era, he did something I just was flawed by which is at the midnight of the 20th century he

takes three or four pages out of the narrative to look into the question of anti-Semitism. And to my mind, he says almost everything that needs to be said, because the subject of anti-Semitism is both fascinating and endless, limitless, and yet he encapsulates it. And one of the many things he says, which I just was so struck by,

is, you know, he describes as we know, and as America civil society has demonstrated in, and British civil society has demonstrated in the last 18 months, We know he says that anti-Semitism can be found in the Academy of Sciences and in the Games children play in the schoolyard. But the great insight he gives, the great insight he makes, is that everywhere it tells you nothing about the Jews and only about the person who suffers from it.

And this is such a brilliant observation. He ends up with this titanic phrase where he says, he describes it, antisemitism as a minute. to the failings of a society or an individual, and grows to the phrase, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I'll tell you what you're guilty of. And it is so striking.

He gives the examples that are available to him in his time, writing in the 50s. But, and of course at that point, he gives examples of the anti-semitism that went on in 19th century, Russia, the obvious recent example of the Nazis who accused the Jews of being racist and of seeking world domination. So one of the things that I thought about a lot in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon,

and when I made trips back to the United States, other countries in the West, was, okay, tell me what you're accusing the Jews of, and I'll see what you are. I know I'll see what you are. And what I saw is the Grossman's rule applies everywhere. The mullahs in Tehran accuse Israel of being a colonialist power, which is, of course, only a description of themselves.

Because since 1979, the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran has not only colonized the great culture, civilization of Persia, But it has also been busily colonizing Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza. So when they say the Jewish state is colonialist, this is a mirror. They're describing themselves and their own ambitions. When President Erdogan of Turkey says that Israel is an occupying power, he is holding up a mirror at himself. It is President Erdogan, who continues to see after more than half of the world, a century the illegal occupation of the north of Cyprus. A NATO member is still illegally occupying

half of an EU member state. It is Turkey that is an occupying power, and it's Turkey historically that has sought to be an occupying power, not least in one of the longest lasting and largest empires in history, the Ottoman Empire, which President Edouin would love to reconstitute. ask ourselves what the people in the West accuse the IDF of. And this is by no means. I always have to add the caveat, but of course it's not the case that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is not the case that any criticism of the IDF is antisemitic.

But if you are focusing on on the one Jewish army in the world and accusing them of the most lurid things, the most lurid actions, I think that we can say, of course, this is a form of anti-Semitism, which, again, holds up a mirror only to the person who's making the allegations. Consider, for instance, the accusation that the Israeli Defence Force deliberately kills civilians. This is said by people who are on the side of Hamas who deliberately kill civilians, where the IDF seeks to minimize any civilian casual. Hamas seeks to maximise.

When people accuse the IDF of being baby killers, they do so in defence of a group of a death cult that sought on October the 7th to kill babies. Not as a collateral of their war aims, but as the war aim, consider the people who have accused the IDF soldiers of going into Gaza and seeking to rape Gaza and women, and women, a claim so lurid and ridiculous

that it should have fallen apart on first inspection. But the claim was being made that the IDF were rapists by people who were supporting or covering over or excusing away, Hamas' deliberate rape of Israeli women on the 7th of October. All of these allegations are things that Hamas seeks to do and the allegations are being made against the IEA. And I'd just add one other twist to that, which I give in the book, which is I spent a long time thinking how this applies to many of the student protesters and others in America and Canada and Australia and elsewhere.

Because obviously something has been going on, something far beyond just a mere deep interest in a relatively minor war, actually, in the Middle East. I mean, the same people, if you take him as his top, topmost casualty figures for the last 18 months of war, which is around 50,000 people, which includes their fighters, as they call them, their terrorists, their leadership and much more. Even if you were to take that figure, that's an average six months of killing in Syria every six months for the past decade. So I'm not being in any way diminishing the war in Gaza, but I'm just saying, I mean, it's odd. that people would fixate on this and have spent no time fixating on Yemen Syria or anything else and I was thinking about why are they doing it

what is behind it and Grossman's rule applies again except with a tiny twist because as I wrote in my last book my previous book the War on the West about the anti-Westernism inside America in particular the anti-Americanism within America that had been brewing on the left I said that this attempt to instill a sense of historic guilt

on young Americans and other young Westerners was bound to blow out somewhere because a generation or more had been told they were guilty by dint of actions taken, not even by necessarily by their own ancestors, but by people who'd lived in America before them, that modern American born in the 21st century should be deemed guilty of the crimes of slavery or colonialism or white supremacy or ethno-nationalism or genocide, of course.

And I said in the War on the West, using Hannah Arendt as a crutch, not something I usually would cite, but a particularly fine essay of hers on the nature of forgiveness, I said there that the danger of what was being set up in this thought system that I described in the War on the West was that there's no way to alleviate the guilt because nobody is alive who did these things and nobody is alive who suffered them. So you get this impossible to unlock guilt complex shoved onto Western mankind. And what we have, I think, seen since the 7th

is a massive form of projection from some citizens in the West, particularly America, sort of people who shut down the main station in New York the other week again. It's not just campuses. They accuse Israel of genocide. They accuse Israel of being colonialists.

They accuse Israel of being racist. They accuse Israel of being white supremacist. They accuse Israel of crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing and so on. And I just started to notice but all these are the crimes that you've been

taught you're guilty of. All of these are the crimes you've been taught erroneously most of the time, that your country is guilty of historically. And even where it is guilty of it historically, you've been taught it is your responsibility. It's your fault. You're born with this guilt. So the vast projection of what we have seen, the psychologists would call it projection, is astounding to me. And that's why I just have this final twist on gross. which is tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you've been taught that you're guilty of. You have spent much of your career beating up on the left. We have spent much of this conversation beating up on the left of late and you'll you'll know where this question is going.

Some of your tangles have been on the right. I am curious, you know, what is going on with the right? I mean, my experience of it is in the United States. Perhaps you can bring new of how this plays out in the UK and Europe as well. The right is newly curious about open to flirting with, in part, embracing, isolationism, forms of anti-Semitism, some quite outright and obnoxious, others that sort of hide the ball and are a little bit more complicated in a boring way, in my opinion. What's going on? What's going on with the right in the United States, Douglas?

Well, if I can perhaps presumptuously give my take on this, and I know that some Americans don't like hearing their country talked about by somebody with my accent or background. On the country, I think there's always a reserve spot in the American discourse for at least one person with your accent to be a kind of, I'm not sure what the noun is I want here. It's the Christopher Hitchens spot, if you will. Well, I don't like to think of that because there's a big shoes. But, well, nevertheless, what I think has been going on is Iraq and Afghanistan did end up as quagmias, as you know, as well as anyone. And the quicksand of war drew America in. And a generation of foreign policy experts who had called for both wars and supported both wars and overseen. both wars were seen to have mucked up badly.

And I noticed as Trump was coming on the scene, but one of the reasons why he was doing so well in the primaries and so on, was because we didn't really want to hear more from the Bush family, you know. We didn't really want to be offered another Bush. there was a period in the GOP where, you know, is Jeb next? And I mean, I and others was a sort of, what, does this family have to keep

giving us presidents? What's so great about them? And you could say the same about the Clintons. There was a sort of, you know, it's Hillary's turn. And then if it's not Hillary's term, maybe we can hang on for Chelsea. And I think it was Mark Stein

who mentioned around that time. Maybe we should just wait for the bushes and Clintons to intermarry and just start a monarchy. But Trump was the one who seized on the understandable dissatisfaction of many people on the right and the left with the direction of the American foreign policy. And one of the things that then you saw happen was that everybody of an older generation

was effectively, and you might say, justifiably compromised by that period of America, state building, rather failed state building, not completely failed, but significantly failed state building. And you look at the landscape now, who is there of an older generation who's not tainted by that? The GOP itself, you know, I know it's been the case for years. Nobody wanted to hear from them.

And again, it's understandable in lots of ways. but it meant that there was this vast vacuum of senior statesmen who were in any way respected or who anyone wanted to hear from. And now, I think one of the many things that's happening is the inevitable retraction that happens after a period like 2001 to 2020, 2016, wherever you want to draw it. You might say to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. an inevitable retraction and a belief that since America didn't do everything it wanted to do, that wasn't as successful as it could have been in these theatres of conflict and post-conflict,

that therefore really America was no good at this. And in the end, perhaps America is no good. What I notice is that this is among much else. There is a form of isolationism which I understand, I don't respect it, because I think that the isolationists of our time have this deep problem at the center of it. And I've said this many times to people in the Republican Party in recent years,

but, you know, it's an inevitable conundrum for them. They want America to remain the world's dominant power, but they don't want to be involved in the world. This seems to me an irreconcilable problem for them. Not a problem for me, it's a problem for that. And because, for instance, you know, If the American Navy isn't going to be responsible for keeping open the world's waterways

along with his allies, the Chinese would love to keep open the world's waterways and do what they like after that. But I believe this is an inevitable, understandable reaction to the post-Afghanistan post-Iraq period. But then there is this movement within it which reaching back for people they can see as heroes are simply reaching back to the Buchananite right of America

that was always there, the Rand Paul right, might say, the rompaw ride, rather. And they would like, they do want forebears, they do want to see a line of intellectual and moral dissent, which they are a part of. I'm not using the word dissent there in a negative way, I'm not reflecting it, but they would like to see a line of transmission that justifies the position there now in. Now, one of the many things that is now very, very interestingly happening on part of the right,

one might be exaggerating its intellectual importance or its political influence, but is the line of transmission, which is now going back to the early 20th century, that America should not have got involved in World War I, and indeed should not have got involved in World War II. The line of this is that America could have left the communists and the fascists to thrash it out. You would have not needed to make any alliance with Stalin, and the communists and the fascists could have drawn themselves, could have fought themselves to a draw.

And this is, of course, a mildly interesting intellectual game to play. There is lots to be said in criticism, and much more. But there is one extra thing, which I think is also happening now, which is a desire to downplay the crimes of fascism. You can see this with a flirtation on a part of particularly the Catholic right in America with Francoism,

a flirtation that was always there, but has become a little bit more overt on the fringes of the right in recent. years, and they essentially, as far as I can see, their dislike, their desire to downplay, for instance, the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler, and to upplay criticisms of Winston Churchill, for instance, which used to be a left-wing vice and is now also a right-wing vice, is motivated by a dislike of national socialism because the... they destroyed the idea of ethno-nationalism for everyone. In fact, they destroyed the dream of nationalism for everyone.

And that every American nationalist has been effectively on the back foot since 1945 because you can always be tarred legitimately or more often completely illegitimately with nationalism in its 1930s and 40s German four. I think this is one of the things that is going on. I think it could be a harmless piece of intellectual history that's being rehashed. Or it could actually be something rather sinister. And I think in parts it's the latter. And my belief is that people on the right should call this stuff out when it's here.

Even that term I use call out, I dislike it myself, but identify it, let's say, criticize it where you see it. And that we should do it because every... Everything that people like me have accused the left of in recent years, we have accused them of in part because they have been so unwilling to draw boundaries on their own side. No one to the left of me. Solidarity with everyone on our own side. Look at the joy, the rapture with which people like me have been able to use the squad against the Democratic Party in recent years.

There's literally nothing better for a Republican than Rashida Thalphiard. Tlai, or a O.C. These are gifts to the Republican Party. All the Republicans have to do is to say, look, look at them, look at crazy Bernie Sanders. That's the real Democrats. Well, if there's no expression of hygiene or no desire for a type of hygiene or distrust of hygiene on the right, the same thing will be done. And the same thing should be done by the left, by the Democratic. and others against the right. If there are no guardrails at all, no red lines at all, and you just gleefully lift up all the sluces

and allow the sewage to just flow, then the right will be where the left has been in recent years. And I, at any rate, don't want to see that happen. and sometimes that's something which, you know, gets me criticism from people who might be ostensibly on my side, but I don't really care. I just think that's what has to be done. These guys on the, what you called the Buchananite or the Ron Paul Wright, they remind me of at least until very recently. They have a hopefulness about them now, but until very recently they remind me of the protagonists in Evelyn Wa novels about World War II.

So if you think of men at arms or something like that, you know, the protagonist is what it is. It is. It is your Persian friend's identification of two novels. It's a short list. It's hard to do, too. The protagonist, you know, he's reflecting on his country going to war against Hitler. You know, his Protestant country is going to go to war against a right-wing power in cooperation with left-wing totalitarianism. And so from his perspective, which I take to be more or less was perspective at the time.

It was. You know, all of this is happening centuries downstream of total political catastrophe, the loss of Catholic England. What's being fought over today are just various versions of evil? So where am I even to situate myself? I've lost my own country a long time ago, and I'm being asked to be patriotic for a political, religious program that deserves nothing from me. And until very recently, that's, you know, that's the Buchananite right. And for them, the catastrophe was World War II. I guess that not so much that it was a great global tragedy, which of course it was in every way,

but that in the end, the isolationist, though they won the political argument, were sort of shown to be wrong by events themselves. And we fought the war that the American role in the war was perceived, correctly, in my view, as heroic. And a world order was established with a kind of America at the set, with an America at the center of it that was of a kind that was just utterly objectionable. to this political trend. And so that's why you see the Daryl Cooper's of the world works so hard to relitigate World War II.

Well, I wouldn't say they work so hard, but they work... Work at it, at least. The work amateurish. It's an important part. It's an important part of the project because they see there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity to reset the whole conversation. Absolutely.

And there's many things to be said about that. I mean, one is... Even in war, one said that there was... no, not much point in voting conservative in Britain. Even then, he said there's not much point in voting conservatives, because whenever the conservatives got under power, they didn't even manage to turn the clock back even five minutes. Now, that's a really conservative point of view. And points among other things to one of the tensions that always exists within conservatism, which is the extent to which it can ever be revolutionary or whether,

whether it can ever really set the clock back or whether you just have to keep fighting the next battle you'll lose and then defending a status quo that is some way downstream from the status quo you wanted to defend. There's one of the, I just lay it out as an observation, one of the curiosities of the people who do want to relitigate all that sort of thing. It is both interesting. and totally futile.

As my late friend, Clive James once said, you know, we're here because history happened. It's really, you know, the question is, well, what are you going to do about it? When I've seen the extremely fractured and I think now are the defeated, entirely defeated, but lackluster, less, more lackluster than they were even a few years ago, Catholic right in America, the fringes of the Catholic, right, toying with things like the imposition of Catholic law in American states, you just sort of think,

you guys are nowhere near, any world in which that's going to happen. I remember slightly taunting one of the proponents of that some years ago on stage in America, with my observation that, you know, I wasn't in favor of what they were doing, because although I wasn't alive in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, I have read about it. And I know what happens when the settlement about religion that we came to gets reversed.

And by the way, all of those Catholic types would be, if they got what they wanted, they'd all be hanged from the lampposts. Totally. For me, instantaneously, this is constituted. Catholicism itself is, I don't know. They hanged by episcopalians as heretics. Yeah. Yeah. It's a straight, the revocation of liberal.

It's this strange juxtaposition of the revocation, the call for the revocation of liberalism by a tiny religious minority. What's interesting about it among many other things is it's actually against what popes have said. I think it was in Ratzinger, when he was pope, just before he was pope. No, one of his encyclicals, I think, is Deus Karatass. Have I got the right one? Anyway, he says, no, the church does not desire political power.

It does not desire, say, over the secular laws and the governance of the country. That's 20 years ago. And so I think that's, but one might be spending too much time focusing on a minority of a minority. But nevertheless, it is interesting when you see whether some of the energies are being expended on your own political side. But yes, one of the things you see is this desire to trace the perfect intellectual journey, a sort of version of the Whig version of history on the right. And another is then of some people to reset it. But maybe this is too fatalistic thing to say for a conservative and conservatives, dislike it, but you never can reset it like that.

And much of what is going on is what Steiner would have described as nostalgia for the absolute. Yeah. A difficulty with accepting the complexity of the modern state. Yeah. And look, I mean, I am a Catholic, but I'm similarly bemused by the views that you point to and have never fully understood how it's meant to practically work. Nevertheless, they come from a place as to, as oftentimes do sort of phenomenon on the right like this from a place of disappointment or or discussed with what liberalism can't provide a society. And that does seem to me to be the actual role of a healthy conservatism.

Yes. Semi-revolutionary society like the United States. To introduce into American politics or liberal politics what just, you know, pluralist. mechanisms can't. There has to be a way of regaining balance. Yes, and what's more, so much of this is for the private realm. You know, the acceptance that the state cannot litigate affairs of the soul. Now, that's for the individual to do. Maybe this is my scrutinianism coming out, But, you know, many of these dreams, even if you did dream them, if you wanted to dream them,

they're to be litigated within the heart of every individual, not at a state level or at a legislative level. If people want to be good Catholics, they should be good Catholics. And they should show by example what a good Catholic life looks like. if people want to be something else, they should live it. And I find that the, it's just such an elementary error to think that the affairs of your own heart and soul

must be therefore imposed on others because we've simply, we've been through this. Douglas Murray, author of On Democracies and Death Cults, Israel Hamas and the future of the West. It's been a really, really interesting conversation. and I am grateful to you for making the time. I'm grateful to you and your listeners. Thank you.

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