The Duran Podcast - Wars Built on Fictional Narratives w/ Neil Oliver

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Wars Built on Fictional Narratives w/ Neil Oliver

All right, Alexander, we are here once again on the Duran with the fantastic Neil Oliver. Neil, thank you for joining us. And before we get started, where can people follow your work? It's a pleasure to be with you both, gentlemen. You find me in the Neil Oliver channel on YouTube. I have a Patreon presence, patreon.com. You'll find me by name. And, you know, some of my material surfaces on X, on TikTok, on Rumble.

but YouTube and Patreon would be the primary places to look for me. But it's great to be with you both. It's great to have you with us. I will have those links in the description box and as a pinned comment as well. Alexander Neal, let's begin. Indeed, let us absolutely begin. It is a particular pleasure for me to have a program with Neil at this time. And the reason this is a particular pleasure is because in some ways the news has become so somber.

and it is necessary when news is becoming somber and difficult to deal to speak with somebody who can take us through these things and can help us to understand them by addressing the realities of what is happening. Because it seems to me that on multiple levels now, we are finally seeing a collision between narratives and facts. And I say this. We've now had a third article in a series about the fact that wars, the various wars that we are seeing being waged around the world are all going wrong. There was an article that appeared some days ago in The Spectator by Owen Matthews. The war in Ukraine is losing the war. Extraordinary mission. An article that has appeared in the Washington Post by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, the situation in Ukraine is becoming catastrophic. If things continue this way, Ukraine will lose. He's just been to Kiev. He was there in the middle of a Russian missile strike, the train station where he

arrived in the train were shaking under the weight of the explosions. This is the same train station that Boris Johnson would have gone to to take the train which took him all the way to the Polish border where there's now been a Russian drone strike on a locomotive that pulled one of the trains from that station. So Eric Schmidt, absolutely. appalled by what is happening, also saying in the Washington Post that the war is being lost. And now a third article in Unheard, which is, by the way, a sister newspaper magazine of the spectator, they're owned by the same person, by Wolfgang Munchau, German economist, fairly influential person. He says that the West is involved, caught up in two wars,

and both of these wars are being lost. And he said something very interesting. He said that the fact that we don't want to accept that we can lose these wars makes it unthinkable to us that we can lose them. But what is unthinkable can sometimes happen.

And if it happens, then if it happens, then if it, It is because we have not thought about it before, which is in effect an admission that narratives are colliding with facts. Facts which are also evident, visible in our own societies, in Britain. I've just been to Europe. I was in Belgium. I saw the situation in Brussels, which left me very depressed. I saw the situation in Germany.

We've seen electoral breakthroughs by the eye of day in eastern. Germany, which has shaken the whole political mood in Germany to an extraordinary degree. And we're seeing similar things begin to happen in Britain as well. So we are seeing, it seems to be a clash between facts and narratives. Would you agree? I would indeed, yes. Words that jump out at me from your narrative there, unthinkable, it strikes me, it didn't used to, but the more I think about it, it strikes me as a child.

childish thought. It's like putting your hands over your eyes and pretending something isn't there. How can anything be unthinkable? It's impossible. And I think there are various notions that have to be thought. I mean, I've said for the longest time that, you know, people say that cancelling debt is unthinkable, which strikes me as fundamentally silly. Just because you don't want to contemplate the reality of it doesn't make it unthinkable, far less undoable. I would say the way that the wars are unfolding, and you talk about the clash between narrative and fact, I think it's becoming apparent that the wars are unfolding the way that they are because they are fundamentally unjust wars, illegal wars, unlawful wars. and the narratives to get to the point that have been offered up and are still being pursued and perpetuated by the usual suspects are untruthful.

The wars cannot achieve the ends that have been posited by those prosecuting them because they are fictional. you know, the narrative about why Ukraine started to happen was fictional from the start. You know, this ignoring of the fact that NATO and the West had provoked what happened for decades. And the very idea that it was the fault of, you know, a Russian leader intent on the invasion of and the reconquest of Europe. But anyone looking at that who wasn't hidebound by obligation to official narratives could see that it was completely bogus. Likewise, the attack on Iran, you know, the very predicated upon the idea that it was going

in to deal with nuclear threat. And yet that, as everyone could see, and had been told only months previously, we had been reassured by the same people that that nuclear threat had done. be negated. The, you know, the activity in, let's say, you know, what has been unfolding in Gaza, you know, and we were told that that was on account of what happened on October the 7th. And that was plainly an incomplete narrative.

I've been listening to you guys talking in, I think, in the last hours almost, but certainly a few days, about the cycling upwards, the escalation of the situation in the Middle East manifesting in what's happening involving Saudi Arabia and Yemen and the necessary or the inevitable consequences that that has on what's happening

between Iran, Israel and the United States of America. It's what happens when you lie. If you start out from a lie, all you can do is keep lying. and your lies become more and more Byzantine and you end up lying to the point where you trip yourself up. You know, the old adage about, you know,

if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Works is a very important axiom, you know, by which a sensible person might live. But I think what we're seeing happening in terms of the wars, the way the wars are bleeding into one another, literally and metaphorically, everything, you know, the way in which the supposed lines separating them into different wars, you know, that's all becoming increasingly porous and it's becoming more and more apparent that

the wars that are being pushed are about money, they're about position, they're about control, and because they're founded upon narratives which are lies, you get what we've got if you'll pardon the clumsy ungrammatical sentence at the end. I think that's an extremely good way of explaining it all.

That if you start with a fiction then you're going to go into an ever deeper fiction. You're going to go into an whole of unreality which you cannot get out of because ultimately you can't assess

things objectively. You can't make an objective assessment of Russian power or Iranian resilience or of the politics in Yemen or in the rest of the Middle East. Because if you start to do that, then you will end up at some point undercutting your own narrative construct. And that inevitably ultimately brings you to flawed decisions. Now, would you agree with me that when foreign policy is conducted in this way, it also inevitably affects domestic policy? There's a famous concept that was invented in Germany in the 19th century, which says that what shapes the character of a state is its foreign policy.

domestic policy ultimately is shaped around the foreign policy if foreign policy is based on narratives illusions and what you've described correctly as lies then domestic policy must go in the same direction

I just your sound just dropped out at the crucial point in the last few sentences there if you could just go back over that for me right what I was saying is that we've had there is a concept which goes back to the 19th century, to Germany, that foreign policy is what shapes the character of a state. If a state's foreign policy is based on deceptions and lies and narratives and fictions,

so inevitably will its domestic policy become, its domestic policy, politics will take the same turn? I am fascinated at the moment by the way in which I find myself falling into the use of cliches almost or at least well-polished, well-used phrases from the past. And I think it's because in a world of lies and a world of false narratives, when one clutches reaches out through the fog for something to hold on to, inevitably you come back to old truths. And, you know, when it comes to foreign policy, domestic policy,

well, you know, the Christian message about love thy neighbor and, you know, treat others the way you would expect to be treated yourself, you know, I think the consequences of doing the other are manifesting themselves all around us. You know, the way that the way in which we in the West, have treated our neighbours, let's say our neighbours in the, you know, in the Middle East, let's say the way in which we treated Russia during the 20th century. And then you most particularly post the fall of the Arnold Curtin, the Berlin Wall, when Russia, when our neighbour reached out an open hand asking for, you know, for help and

fellowship, it was, you know, it was thrown back at them. So when you behave like that towards your neighbours, I think it's inevitable that it will manifest in the way people are affected at home. And I think that's another one that comes to mind is chickens come home to roost. That's, I get you. I feel I find myself using these worn phrases

and terms that are thick with the patina of use and the passage of time, but it's because they are the truth. And we're seeing, we're seeing so much come home to roost. And it's, it has the, well, I can only imagine,

well, I'm making an assumption that it's the unintended consequence that people, when the lies, as we're seeing, when the lies have become so complicated that they fall apart under the burden of their own complexity, people end up seeing the truth. I was not anyone who paid any more than daily newspaper based reporting on the Middle East and the state of Israel and its relationships with the rest of that territory.

And I had internalized the notion that Israel was the only democracy in that part of the world. You know, the idea that, you know, Israel had this inalienable right to exist. I had taken all of that on without questioning it. But because of the way in which the lying became so bloated to the point of collapse, someone like me, no kind of expert in Middle East politics, I began to look at things like the NACBA, and I began to look at things that the Dared Yes in Massacre, which took me all the way back to, you know, it only took minutes once I started looking,

you know, at the history of Israel. and its relationships, you know, to its neighbors. I thought, how can this be? You know, all of these stories began to open up to me, the assassination of Count Fokaradernod, all of the rest of it, you know, and the role played by Urgun and the Sterngang and all of the rest of it.

And I thought, that's surely an unintended consequence that because the narrative has become so ridiculous, so unbelievable, so obviously based on lies, as I say, you grope through the midst of it all and you come up with the truth. So I think there is an absolute, there is an inevitability that we haven't treated our neighbours,

as we would have wished to be treated ourselves, and as a consequence, chickens have come home to roost. And that's simply where we are now. And if that sounds like, you know, naive and worn out language to describe the situation, well, I can only apologise, but it seems to be the language that makes sense to me.

I think it is the language that makes sense to lots of people. Can we talk a bit about British politics? I know it's a dreary subject, but let's talk about this. We've had the removal of Kirstama. A lot of euphoria manufactured by the Labour Party around the fact. We have a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. He's not actually that new anymore. He's been around for several weeks now.

he was going to be a change to Kyr Starma. It was never clear what that change in fact was going to be. In fact, as far as I can see, there's been no change at all. I don't see any change in foreign or domestic policy at the moment at all. And is it in fact now possible for a political system which is as trapped inside this world of lies that you were talking about, is it even possible for it to change?

I don't have any faith in the vote. And I would go so far as to say that, I think for such a long time, beyond any of our lifetimes, democracy has been a lie in the way in which it has been applied. as a concept fine but the reality of democracy for longer than any of us have been alive it's so corrupted so rotten I don't see any way to fix the system that we have at the moment

you know over the Christmas period I had caused to have to you know to fix plumbing in my house I'll spare you the details but it was it was all down to a blocked toilet. And it occurred to me at the time that you can't fix that from the inside because you are literally drowning in shit. And that the only way you can fix a situation as bad as that is just to take out the old, leave a space, let the air clear and then replace it with something else entirely. What amazes me about British politics at the moment, really world politics at the moment,

is the way in which the speed seems to be approaching light speed, which is to say that things are moving so fast that their mass, their weight, you know, becomes almost impossible, and it's limiting. You know, we know that the speed of light is a universal constant. It took time for Boris Johnson to become uniformly ridiculous to the point where, He can never return.

It didn't take very long at all for Kierst Tharmer to become the most unpopular British Prime Minister in modern history, if not ever. Likewise, what's happened to people, the way in which things have speeded up around characters like Emmanuel Macron and Merz in Germany and the rest of them, the speed at which they reach maximum unpopularity

is almost instantaneous. And I would say that Andy Burnham arrived. He was completely unpopular, unwanted, ridiculous, the stuff of internet memes before he was able to get, he bought him onto the seat at number 10. And I think there's an, and it's true of everything, you know, it took a lifetime for people to come to terms with the, with the lie of the official narrative about John F. Kennedy. but by the time you got to 9-11, you know, people were questioning the veracity of the official narrative very quickly. And then when you, you know, when you get to something like Charlie Kirk and the official narrative there, people were, people had identified the false narrative instantly. It was happening in real time, you know, and you know, I've mentioned, I've stumbled into the territory of physics, I suppose, with talking about light speed. But, you know, Einstein in the world of physics talked about how you cannot look at anything in isolation.

Everything is connected to everything else. John Muir, the great Scottish conservationist, you know, intimately related to the foundation of national parks in the USA. You know, he said you cannot pick anything up in the world without finding that it's connected to everything else. And I think, you know, again, these are old hackneyed, well-worn, understood truth. But I think British politics and US politics and politics elsewhere have become ridiculous. And while many people keep their heads down, not so many people, not a majority of people speak out, in no small part because they have neither the time nor the opportunity to do so. But they know, I mean, I talk to people every day.

I know you guys do. And everyone can see that while we're continuing to be dragged through the motion, of the British political system. I think it's pretty fair to say no one believes there is any reflection of any kind of objective reality. It's just a puppet show.

It's just a pantomime. And the audience is, you know, the audience is just trapped in its seats with its eyes pinned open, like the, you know, what happens at the end of a clockwork orange. You know, we're just, we're forced to watch something

that is not our betterment. Indeed. Let's just to unpack some of that. I mean, if we're talking about collapse in popularity and warp speed, in Germany, Friedrich Mertz, 78% of Germans in an opinion poll said they want him to resign, as opposed to 14% who want him to stay. Now, that is unbelievable. That's impressive.

especially in a country like Germany, where political stability has been taken as an absolute given and something that everybody supposedly is required to preserve. This is the most astonishing implosion of a chancellor and of a government that I have seen in German history. There is an election coming in another East German lander in German state, which is Mecklenburg for poor men, which is in the north of East Germany, it's on the sea. And the politics there are very different from Saxon-Hald, in the sense that Mecklenburg for poor men, historically it's been a very left-wing area, whereas Saxon-Hald has been much more conservative. CDU is polling at 8%, Mecklenburg for parliament. I mean, again, an unheard of implosion.

And again, the IF days ahead, apparently, in that area, and cruising towards another big win. I mean, this is completely astonishing. If we take Britain, we've had the so-called Burnham Bounce, he's managed to increase support for the Labour Party to around from about 20% to about 25, 26, 27%. This is a bounce. 27% is worse than Michael Foote polled in the 1983 general election, which we probably both remember, which was seen by the Labour Party at that time.

as disastrous and as a near-death moment. And in Sweden, we've just had an election, the results of an election, which the left is supposed to have won. The Social Democratic Party of Sweden has polled 28% of the vote. In 1968, at the time of Targhe, Landa, it was polling over 50%. of the vote in Swedish elections. Again, it is imploding at an extraordinary speed. And if the left comes into power, it's only because all the other parties are imploding as well. So we are seeing across Europe a complete loss of confidence in the political system. And yet it survives.

I mean, at the moment, maybe in Germany with the eye of debt, there is a challenge. But everywhere else, it clings on. It's discredited. You talk to people. They all tell you that they can't stand them. And yet they're still there. Why? Well, I think it is a manifestation of a Stockholm syndrome of a sort.

As others have said, populations have wittingly or unwelcome. wittingly been in an increasingly abusive relationship with those who would lead them and those who claim to lead them. And I think there's a loss of morale and a loss of confidence that for busy people who are already struggling with the facts of life, with cost of living crises, and all of the rest of it, and burdened at all times by the perpetual anxiety born of threat of war as the propagandists have it and climate crisis and all of the rest of it, the effort and the confidence that it takes to break out and try something new is to fly in the face of the enervating toll that has been taken upon populations generationally.

It's to ask a lot of people that they set aside what they've known, what their parents knew, what their grandparents knew and so on for many generations. You know, how does one contemplate a replacement of the system? But you mentioned Michael Foote. We're of an age. And I remember when Michael Foote, really, I regret the way that I thought about Michael Foote at the time. But he was a laughing stalk latterly, you know,

the way in which the press lampundum, for example, you know, when he turned up at the senator for the laying up a wreath and he was wearing what the press described as a car coat and, you know, that he didn't show enough respect. And when he rose to speak in the house, you know, he was a very

erud, obviously an incredibly erudite and educated man. And I think a lot of what he said went over you know, went over heads and was certainly not helpfully represented by the press at the time. But,

much more recently than Michael Foote, remember the heady days when politicians here, there and everywhere sought to court popularity. You know, when they went out of their way, you know, the baby kissing and the rest of it and the promise of jam tomorrow, but sincere or insincere, there was a desperation that seemed to, you know, to be about being popular. But now on the contrary, it feels as though the figures that appear behind podiums as prime ministers and presidents and the rest of it, it's almost as though they seek unpopularity. People like Kierstammer responded to opinion poll after opinion poll by-election after by-election in words to the effect of, I know you don't like me, but I'm not going anywhere and you're just going to get more and more

of me. And that's been true of people like Macron and the rest of them and Mertz. Merz in Germany or the German establishment seeking to make illegal almost IFD. They've gone about demonising those people, and yet in the next breath, they say that the IFD are anti-democratic. And, you know, I'm a card-carrying conspiracy theorists nowadays, and I would have to say that it does feel as though the system is being blown up in our faces in readiness for the people being told, now you see, the system's broken beyond redemption. So are you ready for the new thing? And the new thing is the fabled, you know, surveillance state and all of the rest of it, you know,

which is supposed to take the place of one man, one vote, democracy, as we have known it. But with the promise of security and then to all the chaos and control of immigration and control of inflation, you know, if you surrender to us the last of your freedoms, you'll be, you'll be, able to trust us. It does feel as though the unpopularity of all of these figures cannot be an accident, not everywhere all at the same time. Just to take out what you've just said, I was very recently in Brussels, a city I used to visit a lot, haven't been to for a very, very long time. On the one hand, I was profoundly shocked by the sense of social and economic decay in Brussels. I mean, the city that I remember, which is a very elegant north French, basically French-speaking city,

the city of Ere and Dintin and all of that, the way that seems to be going away. But the other thing that struck me is at the centre of Brussels, there are the headquarters of the European institutions, vast hulking things. And I've already mentioned this in various programmes. on the biggest of all, the Barleymont building, which is where the European Commission is based, you have a gigantic banner from top to bottom, which reads, democracy, what we protect. It has an extraordinarily threatening quality. I mean, that is the only way I can describe you.

This fortress-like building. I mean, it looks, I mean, you know, we've all seen the Pentagon, believe it, the Barleymont building is much more intimidating than the Pentagon is. And it's surrounded by building works where they're redoing all the roads. And it's quite obvious that they're redoing them in order to prevent demonstrators, being able to organize and meet around the Barleymont building and to protest EU policies. And it's exactly what you said, this chilling sense of an elite that is digging in and which is determined to maintain control. Because when they talk about what we protect, of course, what they mean by democracy is power by themselves.

You know, I am becoming increasingly unashamed. about falling back on things that people know. I've said, I used to say during the COVID era, not that we're out of it yet, but not by any stretch, but I used to say that what I was saying was reassuring to people, not because I was delivering, you know, the wisdom of Solomon, I was simply saying what most people already knew. And people are very strongly affected by hearing the truth.

You know, that's, it just, that's what makes people laugh. You know, when a comedian on stage says something, you laugh before you've really processed what they said. Your laughter almost happens first, and then you think about the opposite nature of the quip. And the truth is very effective, and it runs deep. And when you were talking there about, you know, describing a black Libyanka in Brussels, you know, an intimidating edifice, and yet surrounded by, you know, a sense of end times,

or more prescately of a tick, you know, buried deep in the flank of an animal. You know, I'm thrown back again into the, you know, the words I heard in my head where, you know, my name is Osamandia as king of kings, look upon my works ye mighty and despair. You know, and yet, you know, for the traveller in an antique land,

it was too vast and trunkless legs of stone surrounded by nothingness. You know, these words, they resonate with people because the truth runs through the planet like the invisible north-south axis about which everything revolves. And you can wrap it in as much artifice as you want. But inevitably, the people are simply seeing through it. And, you know, a time of apocalypse, for most people without thinking about it or properly understanding the word, they think only about sort of terror, you know, the horsemen of the apocalypse and all of the rest of it.

But it is just revealing. It's a time in which hidden things are seen. And that can be, might seem intimidating and frightening for people confronted with, you know, seeing through and contemplating new things to replace old. but it can also be a very enlivening and exciting process. You know, it fuels in so many ways that the time is coming inevitably when a dead skin must be sloughed off or a constricting carapace on a, you know, on a crab or a lobster has to be shed to enable growth. You know, that's what it feels like. And that's why the, you know, the nature, the false nature of these, people that we describe myself, I don't know, but I increasingly describe them as puppets,

because they are as hollow and as empty as that. Let's talk about war, because Putin has now given his starkest warning that if we send, if Europe sends troops to Ukraine, they're at war with Russia. He actually said that, and he said that, said it as simply as that. That's not been reported. at all in our media in the West. I haven't seen any article about this in Britain. Now, it turns out that the reason he did that is because at the last meeting of the European leaders

who make up the so-called Coalition of the Willing, this thing that Macron-Stama put together, they actually apparently went even further than we were told about sending troops to Ukraine. and they apparently discussed sending troops to Ukraine even before a ceasefire was in place. Now, there has been no public discussion of this. There's been no public discussion of this in Britain, and it would be our troops that would be sent. Our prime minister just went to this meeting.

Apparently, he nodded along, Macron, and, Ursula von der Leyen, they were all the people who were making the decisions. I mean, we are being maneuvered into a conflict with even less discussion than the wars between, within the great powers, at the time of the July crisis in 1914, which led to the First World War, when people always complained that it was the lack of democracy that led to the First World War. I mean, that was far more debate than what we have to do. What do you make of this?

I say it won't happen. I say it can't happen. It's very hard, it's very hard when the drums and the sabres are beaten and rattled, you know, so determinedly by people. rightly or wrongly or from institutions that people are still pre-programmed to trust like the government, like the military and all

of the rest of it. It's very hard to fight against it. What they say sounds like it must be. But I absolutely think that this saber rattling is a last gasp. After all, they have nothing else they can do.

They have exhausted everything else. They're on railway tracks, heading towards buffers, but they can't get off and they can't, they can't, they won't apply the break. You know, there's nothing else for it, but you're polling everywhere, in Germany, you know, you mentioned, you know, Germany, which has always been a sort of a vanguard of, of serious, sensible behaviour and serious, you know, sensible politics and all of the rest of it. But polling amongst the young there, you know, they've got absolutely the young, the people who would bear the brunt of kinetic war, you know, have absolutely no inclination towards it

whatsoever. And that I suppose where it's a war, if it's a war about missiles and drones and AI and satellites and all of the rest of it, we haven't, we the people don't have our hands on the buttons and levers that make those things happen. So, you know, mushroom clouds could form over European cities and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. But all of this incessant push to involve the people. In Britain we're being told, you know, prepare for hardship. You know, every British citizen must be in a state of preparedness,

you know, must train themselves, you know, setting aside food and water and all of the rest of it. Nobody believes it. Nobody is buying into this. And particularly the younger generation who would be expected to, you know, you know, to be a part of it. We don't have a military of that sort. I don't claim to know what things covert,

black ops type shenanigans, MI6 and the rest of it are and always have been involved in around the world and, you know, what troubles are stoking, fomenting and all of the rest of it out of sight and out of mind. But in terms of mass military, you know, as people like George Galloway routinely report, you could fit the British Army in a football stadium. We don't have a Navy.

The whole thing is farcical. And the same is true. The same is true across Europe. There's neither the will of the people, you know, nor do they have the ordinance or any of the rest of it for kinetic war. We're existing in parallel worlds at the moment. We've got politicians who lack any vestige of authenticity. You know, they're so obviously, you know, just mouthpieces.

for the delivery of other people's words, you know, and they are saying the things they're saying and prognosticating the kind of, you know, you know, Armageddon's that they're talking about. But at the same time, the mass of the population do not invest it with any reality because there is none. I think you're absolutely right. And can I say it's a profoundly important point

and exceptionally well said. They are in a different reality. I was listening to the NATO Secretary General, Mark Ruta, who is, by the way, a politician. He was Prime Minister of the Netherlands for years, I think the longest serving modern Prime Minister of the Netherlands. And he was saying, you know, Russia is weak. We are strong. There's a war between us and then we will win easily. We've had Don Radek Sikorski, the Foreign Minister of Poland.

who says, you know, we could knock out all of Russia's refineries within six days or whatever it was. It would be an absolute walkover. We would triumph over the Russians in no time whatsoever. Mind you, I mean, he's talking about a nuclear power as well, something that never, it seems, enters into his considerations. And the fact that the true state of all our militaries in Europe, completely refutes this entire narrative construct. It still doesn't seem to shake them.

They still persist with it. I was reading, I don't know if you read him at all, Simon Tisdell in The Guardian, who says that we can't allow the Russians to go on bombing Ukraine. We must conduct airstrikes against Russian missile and launch facilities, including within Russia itself, apparently, you know, we can do that and we can succeed against the Russians. And again, he seems oblivious to the fact that the United States has failed

to knock out Iran's missiles and capabilities. And we're talking about power vastly stronger than Iran. The time of apocalypse is so, it's quite a sight to see. You know, I grew up thinking American military was, you know, was invincible, could do what it liked. Now, that's gone. That's gone. The adventure in Ukraine, followed by the adventure in Iran, that is gone. And as I said earlier, you know, the idea that, you know, Israel as the good guy and the democracy and all of the rest of it, that's gone. All at the same time. I mean, one of those edifices of the familiar landscape falling over in a year would have been impressive.

but for two of them to go at the same time, you know, that, that is impressive. But I think it's, I think it simply comes down to these people having nothing else left. You know, they don't have anywhere else to go. And I don't know if you, I'm not sure if your microphones were picking it up through my microphone, but my wolfhound was howling because she's behind a closed door. I don't know if you heard it. But my, my dogs are huge, you know, and they don't, in the, our bigger dog in particular, around other dogs, she didn't do anything because in the manner of the world heavyweight champion of the world, they don't have to.

You know, they don't, it's, you know, it's small yappy type dogs, your Jack Russell's and the rest that do the small man thing out and about. You know, Irish Wolfhounds don't have anything to prove and they just don't. And, you know, that's an analogy I think is opposite. And you've got, you've always had, Russia, it's a big dog. it's a really big dog and there was another big dog around which did bark and did bite but as it turned out it pushed its luck

too far and that other big dog in the form of the United States of America has as it's big but but that's all Russia however now stands alone well Iran's making a pretty impressive fist of the same fight but

you know Russia can put it's you know another old adage that we used to that's been well used. You know, Europe has been writing checks that the European body cannot cash. It's all bravado. It's all braggadaccio. And in the case of America,

America has revealed that, you know, it can't really throw a punch. I'm sure there was a time when it could, but that time has passed. You know, and for people, for people in northern Europe to be posturing as though they can take on Russia. It's just embarrassing. And most of the world's taxpaying populations are just looking

on at it blushing on their politicians' behalf. Again, I agree. Let me just take some of your points just a little bit further and draw a little bit on your background as an archaeologist and also gives every archaeologist a sense of cultural history. Do you see in the events that we are seeing play out now some of the outward manifestations of other periods when there has been visible decline? I'm going to give an example of what I was thinking. I was talking about the Barlemont building in Brussels

and what a monstrous and frankly intimidating building it is. If you look at the surviving structures, buildings of the late Roman Empire, the Palace of Diocletian in Split, the house of Galerius, the palace of the audience chamber of Galerius in Thessalonica, the gate at Trier. I mean, the thing about them is that they are very massive. very intimidating, very frightening structures. Perhaps that is a reflection, ultimately a weakness of a society that is in fact becoming nervous

and is losing confidence. Is this also visible now in our buildings and our structures? Is the Balimont building perhaps? And not just the Balimant building, but all the other horrible buildings. There are lots of horrible buildings in Brussels that the EU and NATO bureaucracies are spawning. Are they all manifestations of this? The fact that they are being aggressive in their architecture in that way tells us that there is a kind of doubt and lack of self-confidence just below. What are your thoughts about this?

That's a very interesting thought. You know, I must and will think about that for the rest of today. But in the short term, my immediate response to it is, you know, some of the architecture that you're describing and others, you know, there are great aqueducts and bridges and other features of Roman endeavour. And they still stand. But I would say they stand for something quite. different. Apart from anything else, there is a beauty. There is, they inspire, in many instances, perhaps in most instances, those fragments and where they're intact. They inspire all. And no matter what a person thinks of, you know, what was the glory that was Rome, there's something,

there's something very deserving about their fame. and the longevity, the immortality of the legend, I would say. When Rome was over or over in the West, I mean, obviously, you know, Rome and the West just reinvented itself as Christianity. You know, the purple of the emperors became the purple of the, you know, of the, of the, of the bishops and the rest of it. And the, you know, Rome continued in the east, you know, those business as usual for much longer. But in the West, you know, where the where the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the peoples that replaced Rome, you know, the Huns and the rest of the so-called barbarians, they couldn't erase the edifices of Rome, you know, the aquedots and the rest of it. It was beyond them. The mass of them, even to be rid of them, was impossible. You know, and they built lean-toes against them. And they lived much smaller, less impressive, you know, lives in their, their shadow and I would say that the kind of glass and steel carbuncles that have gone up in in Brussels and London and elsewhere they lack that and I would say that they will not last you know

you're you're not you're not going to see those buildings last they will be erased you know I suppose for for many people that's modernist architecture is is typified by like Corbusier, you know, that kind of brutalist architecture. These things will not last. You know, Corbusier, you know, it means crow-like, I think, was a nickname that he took from his grandmother's maiden name and so on. And they will not last in the same way. So, you know, while we look back at the wonders of the ancient world,

you know, the great pyramid is still there in large part, you know, still the most massive structure and the man-made structure on the face of the earth, still there and the greatness that was Rome and the and the and the creations of the Greeks you know the creak these things

continue to emit a fade they radiate faintly you know like like like dying stars but there was a real greatness there and I think that greatness and that beauty

born of a grand dream is just not there in the thinking that has left as things like the buildings you're describing in Brussels and elsewhere. They are, they will not last for that reason. I mean, another, another example of these terrible buildings is the chancellery in Berlin, at least I find it terrible, which is absolutely enormous. I mean, it's far, you know, where Mitz says his office, it is far bigger than the White House or anything about that. It is, it is, it is, it is, it is, he's, you know, it is, huge and it is again done in this awful sub-modernist style.

Last last question for me. Neil, again, you've studied societies, you studied change in places, you've tracked change. When change comes, does it come fast or does it come very slow? And is he going to come fast or slow with us? I think the change that matters will be instantaneous. I think there will be a bright flash of inspiration, I suppose. That will then, you know, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

There's another cliche. But that will, I think that will be the effect. But I think the, you know, when you wake up, you wake up instantly. You're a bit befuddled and you're not quite sure where you are. You don't know what day it is. And are you in your hotel room or are you at home, all that vagueness? But you know, you're either asleep or you're awake and then you put the day together. You gradually piece it together, go and look at the stationary to find out where you are.

That kind of thing. It begins to take shape. But I think financial change, I think everything's going to come back to money. And I think because it's kind of boring for most people to contemplate matters economic, far less matters, financial. I think what's unfolding in the financial world, I think that when that bubble bursts, which it will, as a mathematical inevitability, that's going to happen overnight.

You know, people are going to go to bed on a Sunday and they're going to wake up on a Monday. And I don't know what the consequences of that will be, but it will be a change like that. And so that would be my answer to that question. I think the aftershocks and the creation of the next thing, the something else, that will take longer. But I think the change will come like a spark.

Neil, that is a brilliant end to a wonderful programme. Thank you very much. And look forward to having more programmes and discussions and conversations like this with you again. An hour well spent for me, gentlemen. Thank you for having me.