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

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Giles Udy is an English historian and the author of Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left. Episode Sponsored by Ridge Wallet: https://www.ridge.com/TRIGGER Use Code “TRIGGER ” for 10% off your order Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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They would lock people in there. The doors were studied just like. cheese grater. No food hole. Studied just like a cheese grater. Reason being, you want to bang on the door, say, please let me out. I want you to let me out. Your hands get torn. I just thought, what is the refinement of cruelty that enables you to design something like this? Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We are delighted to have a brilliant guest for you today.

He's a British historian and the author of Labour and the Gulags, Russia and the seduction of the British left. Giles Udi, welcome to Trigonometry. It's good to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you on. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. For anyone who's unfamiliar with you, your story, your work, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are?

What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, I had a probably conventional middle class background. I was shipped off to boarding school, spent 10 years there, messed up most of my time at school for like my air levels, got to uni, thrown out of uni for not working hard enough when I just kind of drifted. I drifted around, I did a few jobs. I ended up by working in the shipping industry for quite a while. And I did a number of things over the years. And that just continued a bit of this. I was helping to set up a business with someone. And then I spent some years in construction. building. And then about 20 years ago, I happened to take part in a trip to Russia. And I didn't know because actually I didn't really want to go by the end and I almost ducked out. I didn't know it was going to be the thing that changed the whole course of my life, the whole direction. And we were going with a party of people who were helping after the fall of communism just to rebuild independent churches because, of course, one of the pillars of civil society been completely ripped out under communism.

It was basically illegal to worship in a church. And so we went over there. I was just helping with a conference, you know, hanging around at the back, talking to people. And I did a bit of reading before I went. I'd missed, well, I didn't do history. I'm a historian now, but I didn't even do history at a level. I dropped it as soon as I could at GCSE.

And I had done some reading before I went. And I thought, this is astonishing. that any people can go through this kind of suffering for decade after decade after decade. The level of repression, the dictatorship, the fear, the deaths. I was just, how can you, how can you meet people today who've been through all of that? Or their parents have. You know, in those days, you could sit around a table in Russia with a group of just ordinary people, my age, and you'd say, so do any of you have any experience of the Gulag era and of, you know,

repression and what's happened to your family? And someone would say, oh, yeah, my, my, my, my, my, my, my grandpa's brother was shot. Yeah, well, well, my grandparents, they were in the camps. Oh, and once, chap, I remember saying to me, oh, yeah, Stalin wiped out half my family. And you go around the table and maybe a third of the people there would have us some story like that in their family background, fairly immediate family background. And of course, two, The thing about those things is, you know, you've got somebody who's been in a prison camp, a Soviet prison camp for 15 years. They come out and they are pretty damaged. So they have their own family or they have their own children.

Maybe they're reunited. So you've got kids brought up in that. And then it kind of goes on through the generations. Anyway, I was in this conference and I happened to make contact with some people who they came from this northern city way, way, high. up above the Arctic Circle. If you take a straight line from Afghanistan and you go all the way up to the Arctic Circle, then go 300 miles north, and you get to this crazy city in the middle of nowhere called Nairilsk. And it sits on one third of the world's reserves of Dickel. And I just got fascinated because it was one of the big, nasty Gulag centers. There were maybe four or five really, really horrible

complexes, you know, multiple camps. But I mean, this one was so isolated. And I just got fascinated by the story of it. And I got them eventually to be able to get me in. You needed a KGB permit to do so. And I'll come to that very, very briefly in a minute. But anyway, I just, I got transfixed by this story. This is a city that is 300 miles above the Arctic Circle. The permafrost is 300 meters deep. That's frozen, solid ice. Temperature goes down, never melts. Temperature goes down to minus 50 in the winter. Right now, they've just got two hours. of sunshine and they'll go through six weeks of dark and then you get to the summer and it's bright sunshine. I got there in the end and I remember sitting on the top of the

low of the nearest mountain, 1130 at night in bright sunshine. I mean the sun by then just goes round and the circle all the way around and doesn't stop. But as I discovered more and more about the city and its history and I I just thought oh wow there's a story to be told here because so many different groups of people over the 20 years or so that it was in existence, 20, 30, yeah, about 20, 25 years it was in existence. So many different groups of people have been there. Poles who'd been shipped out by Stalin, Russian prisoners of war, red army prisoners of war,

who'd just been dumped there, a lot of Ukrainian nationalist towards the end, Baltic people, old Bolsheviks, comrades of Lenin, from the old days, those ones that hadn't been shot, and a lot of them had been shot, but those ones, they were all there. And I just thought there's so many stories here. I've got to dig deeper. And I managed to get in the first year I couldn't get in. The first year I thought, I bet then I'd been reading so many memoirs.

So I thought, I need to follow the path of the prisoners. I need to understand what it was like a little bit of what they do. So I flew out to sort of the geographical center of Russia, Krasnayas, which is right in the middle of Siberia. and there I caught the last ferry north. I was the only English speaker on board. I didn't speak any Russian. I mean, my Russian friends think I was crazy to do it. But, you know, it's the story gripped me.

And it was a thousand mile journey north on this river. We just got no idea in this country. You know, the Thames is big. This is big. You get a thousand miles north. The roads run out at 300 miles. So then you've got nothing except for the river. And then that freezes from maybe October, November through till April.

And then these little villages, they're all isolated. But I knew the stories, even of the people who had been deported to those villages. And, you know, so we'd go all the way north and pass some of these places. There was one group of camps which I knew of. And, you know, it was an extraordinarily moving thing. We're in the middle of this river, which is a mile wide at that stage. And you just see this big blue cross among the trees. on the side and you think, wow, you know, shivers down my spine, even when I'm talking about it,

those sorts of things. So then I got into the city, this is going on a long time, I'll be as quick as I can. No, no, no, no. But I got into the city the next year and it was hard enough to get a permit. But it just so happened, the guy had made contact with, ran the local telephone company, and he had enough clout with the FSB, with the police to be able to get me a permit. It was a secret city. You weren't allowed in without a permit. And I flew in, I flew in from Moscow, and all the passengers were allowed to leave from the airplane. I was kept on the plane.

And then the police arrived to escort me on a military jeep through to the airport police station. And I was held there until these guys who I'd never met before, but just said, great, you come. We are happy to welcome you. Because Russians are actually very, very welcoming people. And the idea that anyone wanted to come from the mainland, as they'd call it, to this isolated place, they'd just thought it was just great. You know, come on, please, we'd love to have you. And so they came and collected me, and then we spent maybe a week, two weeks. Maybe I was just there for ten days.

I can't remember because it was quite a while ago. But they took me round to what still remained of these old camps. And, you know, wooden barracks decay. It's a vast mining centre. It's a strange place because there's an immense amount of pride there today. We live in the Arctic. This is great. We managed to stay here.

But at the same time as I went there, it was voted one of the ten most polluted cities on earth. You know, you come out of your flat in the morning, because they let me stay in a flat, and they've got a refining factory that refines nickel at one end of the city, and then they've got a refining factory that refines copper at the other end of the city. And they'd come out in the morning and go, Yeah, winds in the west, that's a copper factory. And then, no, it's the nickel factory. The pollution was so great.

But they took me around some of these ruins. And, I mean, someone were just, I think that the one that struck me most was they took me to a little outlying settlement. There's 120,000 people live in this city still. But you can walk across it in 20 minutes because it's just basically blocks of flats. And then huge mines and then some outlying townships. They took me off to a rubbish dump in one. And there on the rubbish dump, there was this concrete construction. And what it was, it was the remnants of a punishment cell block inside a punishment camp.

Now, minor infractions, or major infractions, you went into punishment camp. They had you working in the quarries, brutal conditions, run by convicts, just like the Nazi prison camps were run by capos, you know. horrible places. But this inside was the worst of the worst. And because it was built in concrete, it still survived. And you went in and one cell I remember was a single cell. It was just a man's length long.

And there was a barred door and then an outer door. And he'd be kept in there total dark. The rule for punishment camp blocks was that they took your clothes at the beginning of the day and you were allowed back to sleep in them at night. It didn't matter if there's no heating. That was it. But then down on one corridor, the main corridor, the cell's open. Now, I said it's going down to minus 50 in this place.

The cells were open, and they would lock people in there. The doors were studied just like a cheese grater. No food hole, studied just like a cheese grater. Reason being, you want to bang on the door, say, please let me out. I want you to let me out. your hands get torn. I just thought, what is the refinement of cruelty that enables you to design something like this and put it in as part of the process in which you repress people? I mean, that was the worst bit. But the long and the short of it was that I came back, but I went back

there a couple of times more, made lots of lovely friends. And I think probably then after a few years, You know, I said, I want to write the story of this city. I want to write the story of the people who've been there. I want to write the story of where they come from. Do you know the Latvian officer corps when the Soviets took over Latvia? They were marched out into a forest for joint exercises one day, and they were all shipped off in a cattle car. And they ended up in this place.

Now, this place from where they were was further from Cairo to Durban, never knowing whether their family would ever know what had happened to them. Anyway, I said to my friends, I want to write this story, and I was all getting ready. I got piles and piles of research, files full. And then I was doing a little bit of research, and I came across some newspaper cuttings of the Times. In those days, they used to produce what had been in Parliament the day before. And they were talking about this problem there was with timber imported from, the White Sea region. And it was actually bishops in the House of Lords trying to persuade the

government to do something about it. This was done about 1930, 31. And I thought, what's going on here? And another story took me off for the next 15 years, which is what actually became my book. And that was discovering that in 1930, Stalin deported one and a half to 1.8 million land. small-holding peasants, the Kulax. And kids learn about it in school nowadays, but they just know the number, right? And 250,000 of them were all sent up to this really, really isolated place. Again, really cold, just sub-Arctic, just all the way around the White Sea, which is the sea that is in between northern Russia and Finland.

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Charles, I'm going to interrupt you very briefly. I only to add that when you say the word deported, most people in the West imagine someone being sent to a different country, but what you mean when you say deported?

These are people in the Soviet Union who were taken from their small landholding as my family were in Ukraine and sent to this Siberian remote camp for the crime of having property. For the crime of having property, because property had already been banned under the 1980, Bolshevik then, later the Soviet, it had been banned

under the 1980 constitution. But until Stalin came to power, he hadn't actually got the power to really bring that into being. So he was nationalizing all farmland. And these people, they had lived in these villages, you know,

probably knowing nothing outside the village. Very primitive life, surviving just hand to mouth, one cow, one pig, whatever, having possession of machinery, a sewing machine was sufficient to get you picked up. I mean, a sewing machine, for good and sake, and they would be taken just at a few hours notice, not knowing what was going to happen, soldiers would just turn up, take them,

and then they'd be put on a cattle truck in whatever clothes they had, and then ship north. And the north was so isolated. It wasn't ready to receive any of any of these people at a year's notice, let alone a few weeks. And so they were just thrown out of it. into the snow. The conditions in the camps they were in were just appalling. Some of them, some of these kids, I've got photographs of kids who did not even have shoes. It goes down to minus 20 in the winter. Well, one Soviet official actually wrote reports back to Moscow and said, this is an absolutely ghastly situation. There are piles of excrement everywhere. We've got hundreds of people somewhere else all relying on a water supply from one well. We've got to do

something for his pains. He was eventually shipped off to the camps and I think he was shot a few years later. That just marked him out. So by the end of the first year, maybe 21,000, because disease and malnutrition, they usually went hand in hand. Of that 250,000 sent up there, maybe 21,000 were dead by the end of the first year. Absolutely awful. They were sent up there to earn foreign currency by cutting timber for the export trade. And we in Great Britain were the biggest customer. We took a million tons a year. It was about 500 million pounds worth of today's prices.

And the word got out, stiraways got on board, those ones that weren't found and shot. Others managed to escape over the Finnish border, actually slogging their way through the forest. Extraordinary stories, some of them there. and then they gave signed affidavits to diplomats in Helsinki. So the story started to come out, but it just so happened. We just got our second Labour government. And the whole history, as I was later to discover,

the whole history of the Labour Party in the interwar years is one really of believing that Stalin, Lenin first and Stalin were creating the utopian state. And so what happened is this massive campaign started. It's actually started by churchmen. But two, 300 meetings up and down the country in the first year, a massive rally with 5,000 people in the Albert Hall to launch it. We don't talk about it now because it's just one of those things that doesn't interest.

The historians are looking at that period. Their idea of a protest was a day of prayer, right? It was joined in by a million people around the globe. biggest protest against Soviet communism in history right until the fall of communism. In St. Peter's Square in Rome, 50,000 people gathered on a Wednesday for a mass. That's kind of the way people looked at church and religion in those days. Well, the Labour government did not want to know. They knew what was going on because I've seen the reports that came through.

But they either denied them or they were eventually pressed to have an inquiries. inquiry. And the foreign secretary told the cabinet, he said, if we do have an inquiry, it's going to show that forced labor is being used. But we can't do that. And we can't do that because it might affect our trade elsewhere in the empire. Actually, I've got the papers of the people from the trade ministry, the board of trade, advising him beforehand, that isn't going to be a problem. But that was a good excuse. So then they sent their spokesman to the parliament just about a a week later. And there they denied that there was any evidence for what was going on. A week before in cabinet, they'd actually been talking about how the Russian stirways didn't want to get sent back because they thought they were going to be shot. And the Home Secretary said, I think they're right, there will be. So I saw this extraordinary hypocrisy. And then, and eventually, eventually the Conservatives, you know, it's funny.

We talk about how unrepresentative the House of Lords was. but the Labour Party had the majority in the House of Commons, so they blocked every single possibility of a debate. It was in the House of Lords that all this agitation was going on. Really? I mean, I don't know what I think about the House of Lords today, but that's a fascinating challenge because they were the only people that were sticking up for the best part of one and a half million working class

Soviet citizens who were oppressed by their leadership, the privileged House of Lords and Anglican bishops. And so the Conservatives managed to shoehorn won the subject into one debate. And we had one Labour MP, George Strauss, public school educated, like so many were in those days. I mean, the deputy minister in the Foreign Office was an old Etonian. Get your head around that.

George Strauss, he said, oh, no, no, he said, well, there may be Labor camps going on. but conditions in Russian prisons are much better than in British prisons. Yeah. And then, you know, the cream on the cake, the government statement by a guy called, I think was George Graham, he died actually a flu, poor guy, but otherwise he'd have been a real high flower. So he concluded the debate for the government. And he said the Soviets are conducting a very interesting economic experiment. 1.8 million people torn off their land at a few moments notice.

The Soviets are conducting a very interesting economic experiment and deserve to be allowed to continue without outside interference. Indeed, we will give them whatever support they need. And I read that in Hansard. And I just, I couldn't believe it. I thought, you've got all the evidence. I've seen it. I've now spent, you know, four, five, six years digging through records.

how could a British government actually take that stance? I mean, no, we don't have a lot of faith in most governments. We're always thinking something's, you know, they're incompetent. But that was absolutely deliberate cover-up. He knew I saw all the kind of documents that were getting sent to him. I saw the reports that were coming out. I just, how did this happen? So that took me on another little rabbit trail,

which just ended up by meaning that my book was finally about 600. pages long or more. Because I thought, how is it that we get to that in 1931? That doesn't come as an accident. What is it that was going on in the years before? And how could people actually look at what was going on in Russia? People did know what was happening. The stories were coming out. They were horrifying right from the beginning. I mean, for goodness sake, these people shot their royal family, men, women, and children, you know, everyone knew that. And so then I just dug in and worked my way through all sorts of stuff. And I just, I couldn't believe that people could be so consistently praising a really evil regime. There's just no way, no way to describe it. And

just refusing to see the stuff that was going on that was because they believed they believed that Lenin first and Stalin was building the great communist utopia. And we see this again and again through the history of the Labour Party. My mother's Venezuelan.

They were all praising Chavez. Oh yeah, well you'd know all about it then, wouldn't you? Yeah. So I saw them all praising Chavez and you saw Owen Jones and Corbyn. And at that time, my cousin, who was a journalist, was telling me that Chavez's thugs were turning up at television stations

saying to journalists, if you carry on criticizing the government, you're going to feel an unpleasant force around the back of your head. But the entire Labour government were praising it and saying that Venezuela was going to be the new socialist paradise. I came across her newspaper cutting just yesterday, actually. I don't know why it came up on my phone, which was exactly that. That was a letter that Jeremy Corbyn and others wrote Tarik Ali, Tony Benn signed it, way back, commending Chavez for closing down a team. TV station. There you go. Or they were all write to The Guardian. They all say, this is, this is quite understandable. And the same thing happened. The same thing happened. I mean,

I, the guy who became the Labour Party chairman in 1926 was a man called Harold Laski, incredibly famous. He was professor of political science at the London School of Economics. he was probably one of the two or three leading labor intellectuals right the way through in the period till maybe 1950 or so. Now, 1946, he actually, he was praising the Soviet Union and saying, we quite understand that it is not a free society, but we recognize the reason why the Soviet government needs to impose these controls. trolls. And let's be clear. I'm, I'm really, really enjoying listening to you. And I'm struggling

emotionally because it's difficult for me because all of these places you talk about, Narealsk, my mother grew up there. No. She grew up there. Her family were there. They weren't there because they were in a camp or anything. They were there in the 70s. And it was a very, they told stories about how obviously there's no vegetables, there's no fruit. So you're not getting in vitamin C is very difficult. You talk about the permafrost, those blocks are flats. They're not built on the ground. They're built on metal stilts that have to be rammed into the permafrost.

And my family, my mother's family, they were Kulaks. And their crime was they had a horse. So people came, imagine just if for people listening to this, imagine you have your house and you happen to have a horse and some chickens and whatever. And people come along, go, oh, you've got a horse. That means you're the oppressor. you are the oppressor class get out of your house

off in a cattle car you go to a camp somewhere and my grandmother still alive 95 living in Ukraine she remembers her little brother starving to death on the way yeah oh boy and this is what happened to millions of people

millions of people doing it to me too I read these stories I read these stories and you it's individuals it's just not it's not tens of thousands it's not hundreds of thousands

yeah And we're just talking about one group, the Kulak, right? Because then you add to it, you talked about prisoners of war. Let's make that clear for people. What happened was you went to fight for your country. You went to defend the Soviet Union against the Nazi invasion. You happened to have been taken prisoner. Yeah.

And there's a disincentive to being taken prisoner to encourage you to fight for your country. If you came back after having been captured by the Germans, what happened to you? Yeah. Straight into a camp. Straight into filtration camps. Right. Or shot, depending on what the circumstances. They shot 150,000 of their own people for military crimes during the war.

Can you imagine that? 150,000 of your own soldiers shot by your side. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, down my father's side, my grandmother was born in a gulag. So, look, there's so much to unpack. Can we just, let's give people some figures and some big picture stuff, first of all. Do you know the total number of people who were sent into the system? Yeah, I do. I do.

The best part of 18 million people were actually arrested individually and sent to Gulag camps. The other form of arrest would be by administrative order. Basically, an order was given, go and round up all of that area, that city, whatever, or that ethnic group, particularly like in Crimea or people who'd come over with the original German. in Catherine the Great Stay. And they were just deported right to the wilds of Kazakhstan, Koreans on the Pacific Shore also. So for there you've got maybe six million deported.

And by the time you round off the figure, it's about 28 million people who were put under some form of military imprisonment under guard or some sort. Half of the population of modern Britain. Yeah, in military imprisonment. And if you're going to talk about the population in Russia at the time, somewhere between one in seven and one in ten.

Right. And of those we are sure that about 2.75 million died. I mean, you hear some huge numbers. Yeah. But one in ten died. If you talk about what happened to the people who were just deported en masse, it's about one in six. So you're talking six million deported, men, women, children.

And, you know, maybe a million don't come back. And for the rest, they're not allowed back for decades. You know, way after Stalin, they're still trying to get the homes. Poor Crimean Tartas. They come back. They don't get back until the 70s or 80s. And, you know, now that, well, we won't talk about modern history yet because you can get on to that. But absolutely.

So we've got 2.75 million. And then in the year, 1917, 1937 to 38, the big, the Great Terror. the NKVD secret police figures of those shot is just under 680,000. Sorry, Josh, what's the NKVD? Secret police, I'm sorry, yeah. You talk about all these. They had different initials right the way through the history. But the secret police shot 680,000 people.

And it's really hard to get a grasp of what that figure is, but it just so happened that this summer, And you can look it up online and see it. They created a monument in Washington to all the Americans who died in COVID up until that time. One flag per person. And they show you a great big wide angle, the National Geographic have got it up, great big wide angle shot of all these flags, this whole sea of flags. That was 670,000.

That was 10,000 less. When you see that photograph, then it really brings it home. Really brings it home. And that was just in that period. And, Giles, I have this experience of talking to people here in the West. I remember my grandmother, she had very close friends here who loved her very much. Actually, fled Nazi Germany, believe it or not. And whenever she told them her story about her family, they always said, yeah, but why were those people there?

What did they do? It was the sort of people, I think it's very difficult to imagine this sort of evil on this scale without thinking. that, well, these people at some level have done something. So why were people in prison? Why were they sent to these camps? Why were they shot? What had they done? I think you probably have to go back to Marxism originally

to see the really low value that was put on individual human life. Humanity was considered by Marx just really as a mass. And for the sake of building the state, anything went. I mean, he's quite clear in the Communist Manifesto, quite clear that all morality as it is traditionally held is abolished. No eternal values. Well, eternal values are kind of the ones that just come from the Bible. You know, you shouldn't kill, you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't do all the rest of this stuff.

And then what they then reconfigured it as is morality. What is moral is whatever aids the revolution. So by the time you've actually just literally abandoned every moral constraint, it justifies any action for the sake of building the utopia. Because the Marxist idea is that there is indeed a utopia we can build. History has shown a series of conflicts between the classes, and now we're on the last one. And the last one is the proletarian versus the bourgeois, the capitalist.

And when that conflict actually breaks out into open warfare, as it must do. And the proletarians rise up and deprive the capitalist, the bourgeois of all their property and taken under their ownership first and that it goes to the state. Then we'll enter this kind of heaven on, I mean Marx even used the phrase heaven on earth. We'll enter this heaven on earth. And it's a cult. It really is a cult. But it possessed these guys in Russia. It possessed these guys in Russia. And once they had the vision, you can't really back out. As someone said, I don't know what it is. Once you thrust the first bernet in in the cause of that, you can't take a step back.

And so they had this idea that everything needs to be taken under the control of the state, under the control of people. So all private trade was banned, private ownership of land was banned. But then, coupled with that, there was the possibility of any counter-revolution, of any. actually opposing the revolution. And if you're going to impose this total control, which you believe is eventually going to somehow morph into this wonderful period when crime is gone, and everyone lives happily and we all just share stuff because we want to and no one hoards, if you're gripped by this, then it's just a logical step to make sure that you get rid of every person who might oppose it, every person who might oppose you. And if you're Stalin,

then it's not just the people who clearly are still part of the old regime, because most of them have been killed or got rid of anyway, the aristocrats. It's now people who might dispute you as being the person who could lead. I mean, Stalin killed so many of his colleagues. You know, there's one communist convention, if you like, that they were all at. And you see the list of the high proportion, they were just shot in the years afterwards. But so there was about four purposes behind all this repression. The first was to punish those who really were the enemies of the state, very few of them, or were imagined to be the enemies of the state,

to terrorise the rest into compliance and to use that slave labor. And it really was slave labor to build a new society. Because if anything goes, then people are just marshaled. Yeah, we're going to build a new factory. Well, and in the case of Norelesk, where these sits on one third of the world's world's result of nickel. And 98% of the world's platinum metals as well, by the way. Indeed, quite possibly, yeah.

I mean, it was precious group metals as well. Less needed in those days. But nickel, I mean, you know, you strengthen tank armor with nickel. You plate handcuffs with nickel. And they need a lot of those. In the case of Narelsk, it is so isolated, they couldn't mine it unless they had slave labor to do it. And then they realized they needed a geologist. They needed a scientist.

So they just went up and arrested a whole lot of geologists. And then they shipped them up there. Officially, his prisoners, but in practice, just scientists. Charles, did Stalin really believe in this? Or was he just a power-hungry maniac who had a megalomaniac? tendencies. Good question. It would be really nice to think that it was because then you could kind of excuse it and then you could also kind of just bypass the consequences of wow if one person can do that, if one state can do that, if one man can bring on board hundreds of thousands to actually

sign up to this cause and believe it's totally fine for you to punish people in that punishment camp I told it would be great but I don't think he was. He genuinely believed what he was doing. He He was very, very well versed in Lenin and Marx. He knew their theory. And as Alexander Soljanitsyn, you know, the great author of the Communist Manifesto, has said, Stalin didn't do anything. Or the Gulag Archipelago, not the Communist Manifesto. I beg your pardon. That is quite a slanderous statement right there, Jals.

Yeah, you see, I'm just thinking, I'm already thinking too far ahead. You're on to Marx already. I'm on to Marx already. Now, I like to stay off Marx if I can, as long as I can. for my life. Yeah, the Gullag Archipelago. An astonishing, astonishing book, and it's now in one volume which Jordan Peterson has actually done the introduction for. But yet Stalin, that's where we were before I made that little mistake. A little mistake. If you go back to Stalin, as far as Solzscheon, it was concerned, Stalin didn't do anything that Lenin hadn't already

started. Lenin started the Gulag system. Lenin ordered that the regime's opponents would be locked up up in a concentration camp and up in one concentration camp up near the Archanjusk on the White Sea, archangel, as we know it. There was an old monastery. They tended to use monasteries because they'd probably imprisoned or shot most of the inmates and they had thick walls and lots of cells. There was one monastery, Chalmaghuri, where over the early two, three, four years, just after the revolution, they shot 25,000 people there.

It really was a death camp. The rest were all slave labor camps. For the most part, they shot people before they came there. But Lenin then issued an order, you know, within two years of the revolution, that every single city should have a Gulag camp, a concentration camp, which could hold 300 inmates.

So within a few years, there were 70,000 or so. in camps around the place. And then this extraordinary island, the Solovetsky Islands, group of islands in the middle of the White Sea, really became what again, Solzhenitsyn called the first cancerous tumour that metastasized to be the Gulag archipelago. But by 1929, 1930, there were maybe 60,000 prisoners there. Starnan had just come to power. And that was when he really established the Gulag system on an official basis. and gave it entirely to the secret police. It had been under kind of dual management before entirely to the secret police,

and then they just expanded it from there. Extraordinary. I always think about this question, which is why we never taught this? Why is it that the Nazi swastika is deservedly seen as a horrendous symbol of evil and of oppression? but the hammer and sickle, people just shrug their shoulders. They do, yeah. It's interesting, actually, just on that point, we do a raw show where we joke about the events of the day,

and for that we bought a Soviet hat, a sort of South American or Central American Revolutionary hat with the star on it, and a German hat as well. And the day that we bought it, Francis had a comedy gig that he was going to, and I gave him the South American hat, And you just put it on and walked outside and went to his gig, sort of for a joke between us. But we're fine.

If I wear my Russian Nushanka with the Soviet start, no one would give a damn. If I wear the... Che Guevara t-shirt, great. Right, great. Why is that? It's a big question, isn't it? It's a big question, isn't it?

You go back. As far as the British left were concerned between the wars, everything Soviet was good. You know, the spy Anthony Blunt, who was later on, revealed. He was in Cambridge in the early 30s. He arrived in Cambridge. He had to leave for a term. He was going off studying somewhere.

He came back. He said, when I came back to university, everyone had become communist. It was the end thing. It was cool then. It was cool then. It was cool when I was at school. Because most people haven't the faintest idea

what it means. They just think it's something warm and phasing. We're all going to share and whatever else. So as far as the communism is concerned, leaving aside the Soviet symbols, as far as the communism is concerned, people do not know. The Communist manifesto is absolutely clear.

The abolition of the family. You know, you say, oh, communist wanted to abolish the family. Don't be so right-wing. It's in there. It's explicit. Abolition of the family, abolition of all property ownership, all property ownership. Little corner shop wouldn't exist in Soviet Russia. Taken out of your hands.

If you were actually trying to set up a private business, throw you into prison. Well, that was a crime under the so. statute, yeah. Exactly, yeah. So abolition, abolition of property, abolition of the family, abolition of religion, big, big one, and abolition of morality. Those are in the Communist manifesto. And I feel you kind of got to go up to a Trotsky eye today and say, do you want to do that? Do you believe, as Marx said and as Trotsky endorsed, the only way to transform society is by violent revolution

because Marx was actually explicit you know violence is the midwife of the new society only one way you can get there is it's bloodshed you need to ask these people do you really believe that because that's what these people

you supposedly follow are actually preaching I'm writing a book at the moment I'm about 80% finished that was my lockdown one really to get I got stuck in Wales for eight weeks, which was really pretty remarkable, and I just wrote

and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And I'm 80% finished on a book on exactly this stuff. There's about 300 different quotes from Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky. And it's just written to say, this is what it is. Do you really believe this? But they don't.

But it's something nice and warm and fuzzy, and socialism is well different, no to a Marxist, socialism and communism are interchangeable. And no, it's not social democracy. Social democracy is Scandinavia, and they say, let's keep the capitalist system, but let's temper it to make sure it's fair to the disadvantaged. That is not what socialism is. Democratic socialism, Jeremy Corbyn, oh, democratic, that must be good. No, it's exactly the same. It's communism, is socialism. It is what is in the manifesto. Well, but Jeremy Corbyn wasn't suggesting

putting people in gulags, was he? No, he wasn't. No, he wasn't. But that's where people in his situation need to be confronted. He spoke about Marx. He said Marx's philosophy and his insights are really brilliant. Well, okay, his insights are the only way to transform society is through violent revolution. Yeah, class war. There's a disconnect somewhere. And there's a lot of romanticism in it. Okay. There's a lot of romanticism in it. I think that's why some people, as far as communism is concerned, actually say, oh, yeah, yeah, it's great. We're all going to share everything. Of course, may I digress just a little while? Of course. Digress into what actually happened when they really did try and do something in the kibbutz

system in Israel because, you know, the kibbutzis were set up to actually work out a little local version of communism. It was great to begin with. But then it got to the stage where nobody wanted to take the garbage out. And they then started employing outsiders to do the dirty jobs because they were all meant to be sharing it. Everyone was meant to be doing everything equally. But there were actually things they didn't want to do. So they started employing outsiders. And then the kids were all shipped off to communal quarters and taken away from the family.

Because, I mean, I could go up on a rabbit trail, I won't. But when you read what the Soviets talked about as far as education and children, we need to nationalize children, said one communist leader's wife. We need to take them away from the harmful influence of the family. I mean, I read those bits and I get angry because I really do think it's so inhuman. But back to the kibbutz.

I'll get to the end of it. Back to the kibbutz. And then the women didn't like having communal clothing. They didn't like wearing clothes and then putting them back into the communal washhouse and then just being given something that was at whatever, over their size. And those ordinary human things,

you can't marshal people en masse just doesn't work. People aren't like that. They're different. And there are freeloader. They found freeloaders. The idea of the communist utopia is that there'll be no freeloaders. Everyone will automatically just have so much philanthropy in their hearts. They just want to help everyone. No, there's freeloaders. You know, crime, according to Marx, comes only because people are warped by the possession of private property by others. And the moment nobody owns private property, then crime will disappear. Well, we know that that's just, you know, it's counterintuitive. It just doesn't work like. that. You know, Charles, I've lived in many different places. Ironically, I would say the Soviet Union, even in my childhood, which was in the 80s, was the most doggy dog, man against man. We're all,

in Russian we say we're all wolves to each other. That's the attitude. Man is wolf to man. Man is wolf to man. Right. That's the right way of saying in English. The thing about this ideology is just not, it's great, it's just not compatible with humans. Yeah. It's brilliant. It sounds incredibly good. Yeah. It's just not compatible with human beings.

Do you think that is part of the appeal and that is why to this day, there are people who say, well, I'm a communist. They'll go on TV in this country and they'll say, I'm a common. I'm literally a communist. And I mean, it's maybe not a fair question to ask you, what do you think she means by that when she says that Ashdarka, I'm literally a communist? communist. Because I know what that would mean to me. Yeah, I know what it would mean to me, but I don't think she has any idea really what she's talking about. And I can't see inside,

I can't, because I find it so hard, I actually can't see inside the minds of people who are, you know, full luxury automated communism and all the rest of this. I can't, I can't get my head. We've invited her on because I want to ask her this question and not in any hostile way. I wonder what they mean. Because it's fair to exchange ideas. Yeah. It's fair to, you, you, you, you defend them. If you're, if you're in a respectful environment, it's great. It's great. Go for it. And then, and then, but then you see you do get the denial that comes in. And this is, this is the other part of your question, which I haven't kind of yet answered.

You know, you get Seamus Milne, who, who worked very closely with Jeremy Corbyn, talking about the great social advances for women that took place in the Soviet Union. Well, it's great. Social advantages for women. Yeah, yeah, what was going on at the same time? I mean, you know, as you say, a dog-eat-dog society, because for 70 years, they have had the heart ripped out of property rights, of all moral rights. I mean, you know, all moral standards, just taken away. It's the revolutionary theory is that whatever suits the revolution is okay. So then that becomes whatever suits me is okay. Yeah, I'll just take what I want.

after all, it all belongs to all of us. Everything's belonged to the state now, so why not? Just take it. And then I'm not going to work because I'm going to get paid anyway. And the incentive is gone because and on. But, but, you know, there's a, there's, there's, there's, they cover up. They call all these excesses. What is it the word? The Communist Party of Britain today, fascinating.

You need to find their manifesto. the road to socialism. I picked up a version which was, you know, maybe 10 years ago or so, but it gets revised every so often. And, you know, they address Stalin's excesses, and they say just, you know, these were kind of accidental mistakes in the progress of communism and what Stalin did. Well, they won't say, they won't say it's not real communism because actually they're kind of Stalin apologists. But this is what you get a lot of the time. Not real communism, not real communism. Not real communism.

So what was it that went on in Cambodia with Pol Pot? It wasn't real communism. I mean, 3 million people were killed. That's not real communism. Real communism is just nice and warm and fuzzy. And no, it isn't. Because if you're going to control and take over every single part of the state, if you're going to take over private property,

if you're going to take over everything that any corporation owns, you have to do it by force. No one's going to give up all that stuff. You have to do it by force. You have to be prepared to use force. And you have to then keep force in there. Marx was very explicit. He said, when you got people who are resentful and hating something, don't stop it. Actually use it. Encourage it because that's what we want to have weaponized. And we'll see, we see that in left-wing politics today. Weaponize hate. believe that class war is the only way through to the new utopia. You're not interested

in compromise. You're not interested in coming together in finding a middle ground. You're not interested in the sharing of ideas. You don't actually want a rapprochement. You believe class war is going to be what is going to finally go into violence. And then when we have the revolution, you will take power. You will take the property of the elite, the privilege, the wealthy, whatever they are, and then you will run it differently. No, they'll run it with the same human frailty as anyone else will. And actually, because then by then, they've actually got to run it for the whole country. They will be making decisions.

I mean, this was the thing in Russia, wasn't it? One factory somewhere in the middle of nowhere is told how many tins of baked beans is going to produce for the year, and that's it. And if that's not enough, what do you don't get anymore? And someone else has to produce all the concrete. and someone else has to produce all the tractor tires. And everything becomes socially planned. And then that's why you get conscripted labor, forced labor moved,

because if you're putting a new factory somewhere and you don't have the labor for it, well, you've got to move the labor. So you just round up a whole other people. You just reassign them for something. So then you can't choose your career. No, no, you can't be a doctor. We've got enough doctors already this year. You can be a plumber.

We've got a plan. We need 3,000 plumbers. in the next three years. You can be a plumber, but you can't be a doctor. Or you want to be a plumber, you can't be a plumber, you need to be a doctor. It's not a kind of privileged thing on the scale of professions. That's how the control filters in, even if you're just going to have all this happening in a peaceful way without the violence, you still have to have total control over your population. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets, giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be? My old wallet was massive, so it brought all the ladies to the yard, which was a huge distraction

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Use a code trigger and get 15% off your Ridge wallet offer expires on December the 7th, so you better be quick. But we've seen these ideas. They're like herpes. They go underground for a bit and then they just flare up. In the summer of 2020 with the BLM marches and abolished capitalism. Abolish the family.

Abolish the family. abolish the family. And I was there. And people who I thought were my friends, I mean, they're not really friends with me anymore because they got upset because I criticized BLM. But they were going to me, oh, this is brilliant. I'm like, so it's in Venezuela. Didn't really end well. Didn't really end well. But we see it again and again and repackaged in a different way. And the leaders of BLM, right? When actually talking about themselves, oh, you know, we're well-versed in communist theory. Well, they said we have trained Marxist. We're trained Marxist. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's when I was like, look,

I don't care. I believe black lives matter, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Small letters. Exactly. But if you were talking to me about being a trained Marxist, I see what your agenda is. Yeah, let's, yeah, you're not for me. Yeah, I see where you want to end up. You want to end up with the overthrow of society as it is now. Yeah. And you will do whatever you can. And, I mean, Trotsky was the one who said,

you know, we'll deceive anyone we want to because we hide our aims. Trotsky was explicit on that. You know, we're going to do. dupe all these people in the West, we're going to dupe all our opponents because it's quite all right just to lie and deceive and work our way in there to do stuff. So you don't believe these people when they say, oh, no, no, no, we only want to do this. We only want to do that. No, if they are doctrinaire Marxists, they'll, they're not have any moral qualms about doing anything in order to be able to get their ends. And it's interesting, you're adding somewhat to my historical understanding because I always thought the main reason that the West failed to

recognized the evil of the Soviet Empire was that we needed we the West. I now consider myself part of the West, I suppose. I don't. There we go. The West needed the Soviet Union to win the war. We needed the Soviet Union and Stalin to win the world. And we did. And if it wasn't for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't have happened, right?

So, but what you're telling me is even in the early 30s, when there was no need for that whatsoever, there was no war. certain people in the West were ignoring it, covering it up. There's a guy I don't remember his name now who won a Pulitzer for covering up the Durante, yeah, I'm saying. Yeah, the holidom or the starvation of the Ukrainian peasants. At the highest level in the Labour Party, I mean, the great Labour saint, I think he's got buildings named after him somewhere around here, George Lansbury.

He became Labour leader in 1933. and he said the story about slave camps in Russia is an absolute fabrication. I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact quote. But, you know, he said it's absolutely not true. It's a completely free state. And then Clement Attlee, and he's really interesting because he totally turned around after the war. But Clement Attlee, 1937, at the height of this 680,000 people being shot, okay, he goes off to the Soviet embassy for the anniversary dinner.

of the 20th celebration of the revolution. And he gives a speech, and I've seen the transcript of the speech. And he says, you know, people hate the Soviet Union. But they really hate the Soviet Union because they don't want to see a nation go forward based on social justice. And you think, whoa, 680,000 bodies is a lot of bodies. They're still uncovering them.

It's a lot of justice, yeah. You go to Kiev. Kiev is the most extraordinary city because you've got Bubby Yar there where 30,000 Jews were shot by the Nazis, but you go outside to Bikivnia Forest and the NCBD, the secret police planted trees over maybe 100,000 dead, including some of the poles from Katyn. After the war, Clement Attlee, absolutely brilliant. What had happened, I think, is that he'd been in the wartime cabinet with Churchill, and they saw what the Soviets were doing. He and Ernest Bevin who became his foreign secretary in the First Labor Government after the war. What Churchill wrote about Warsaw and how the Soviets backed off at the last minute in order to make sure that all of the Polish resistance were wiped out by the Germans

and refused to allow Allied supply drops to go via Soviet aerodromes in order to be able to keep these people going. The Red Army called on the Poles to rise up and then they stopped outside the city. So these people were wiped out. Polish history is resonant with events like this. But so Churchill said, I have never spoken or seldom spoken to a cabinet

that was so somber and so angry over what was going on. Attlee was there, Bevan was there. And then you get to the post-war period And Attlee is absolutely determined he is not going to let communists in to the Labour Party. He is meeting with the head of the security services to talk to him and find out where communist infiltration is going on. And Ernest Bebin writes a report for the whole cabinet in 1947, 48, a couple of them, where he's talking about the threat to civilization because of what's going on with the repression of the Eastern European countries and saying this is a threat to world civilization what's happening.

with all these poor people in country after country, you know, Poland and Hungary and Romania, Bulgaria, and all these states actually being taken over by communists and supposed free elections being completely fixed and whatever else. It's fascinating because that was the Labour Party at its best. That was the Labour Party at its most admirable, really saw the world as it is.

It's interesting listening to you talk because it's difficult for me because it's my family history, but also I also notice as you talk that the exact same thing, maybe with not so much the cover-up, but apart from that, is happening right now with Shenjiang in China.

Yeah. And in Hong Kong. Yeah. And potentially in Taiwan eventually, hopefully not. Hopefully not. But do you think, like right now, we don't do anything about what China is doing. Yeah.

Because we can't. Yeah. Isn't that basically why we don't do anything, right? But I don't think we are seeing, well, actually, now that I think about it, We are seeing people trying to run cover for this. We see American celebrities who are being paid by China to...

But why was the cover-up? Why were they so keen in the 30s and others later? I mean, if you read the preface to Animal Farm, in which George Orwell talks about how difficult it was to get it published because it was perceived that he was criticizing the Soviets, which, of course, he was, right? Why was that all happening, Giles? Is it just because these people thought, well, we're socialist, we believe in the working class and we've got a, you know, this is the utopia they're creating?

Or was there a more nefarious agenda? Was it Soviet infiltration? Were they funding these people? Well, there's so many different ways I can answer that because, because Little Rabbit Trail, go back to the 1920s, the British Trade Union movement was working hand in glove with Russians, officially Russian trade delegates, but actually just Russian espionage. in order to be able to try and bring the whole nation through to revolution. We nearly had a revolution in 1920 in order to be able to stop British support for the polls. So there has been this, and I've just gone off on that rabbit trail too far. No, that's fine.

My question was, why were they covering this up? Why were they not challenging them more robustly? Which are two separate questions, of course. Yeah, yeah. You look through the 1930s and you get, you get, you get, people like the guy who was the editor of major left-wing journal. Ah, it's gone. Anyway, very important man, well-known in Labour intellectual circles,

was basically saying, you know, it's not really our part to criticise the people who are trying to build communism in Russia. Yeah, okay, things aren't going well. But we understand how in a revolutionary period, you know, lives will be lost, but the most important thing is what's going to be the end result? Okay? The same old thing, you know, if we're going to, you want to make an omelet, you've got to crack eggs kind of stuff. So there were these apologies going on. There's no doubt that people were being totally duped by what was happening.

Stafford Cripps, the Shadow Attorney General in the early 1930s, 1933, 36 actually probably around about then. He was actually saying in Parliament where they were talking about some British engineers who'd been arrested and their Russian counterparts were very likely to be shot and there was even a possibility that these British engineers would be shot on spurious charges. This is the shadow attorney general. Stood up in Parliament, he said, but do you know, if the Russian system is a system of justice as I believe it is, then if the death sentence is passed, it must be carried out.

That's only fair. 1936. People misunderstood what Soviet justice was. They thought of law as being impartial. But they didn't even read the most obvious statements made by Soviet leaders, which was that the courts were there entirely to be the servant of the revolution. Law, according to Marx, bourgeois law, is entirely fixed by the privileged class. It's entirely created for the protection of their property.

That's why you see today very little respect amongst the left for the courts. I mean, we could talk about written house, but we won't talk about it written house. But, I mean, look at that. Courts, fair? No, the courts are the creation of the oppressor class for the fulfillment of their purposes. So then you have the police, defund the police, then you have abolished the army, get rid of the secret services.

All these are considered to be the organs of the state solely there to protect the privileged. That's hardwired into the whole doctrine. So were the Russians, to answer your question, involved in actually working with people? yes, but British communists saw them as colleagues. You know, communism, communism has no national borders. Communism has no national boundaries.

Another reason why you'll find on the left particularly, they don't care about immigration, they don't care about national boundaries, because in fact there is only one nation. That nation is the working class, the international working class, and they want to do anything they can to break down any sense of national identity, as well as the family in microcosm, in the major,

it's the nation that has to be broken down. So yes, but I mean, I mean, these are our colleagues. These are the people that we are working with to build, well, communism. So on the one hand, there is, yes, there's the espionage side. You know, there's the people they managed to get in the foreign office and elsewhere and the Cambridge 7 and all that. Was it 7? Can't remember our fan.

But for the most part, these people, and British Trade's Union is in the period I don't really cover. But through the 70s, you know, all that industrial unrest, they'd be quite happy sitting and having a cup of coffee with, with somebody from the Soviet embassy, because there are chums, they're our friends. So, I mean, that's part of your answer. Charles, isn't the problem this? I used to live in Wimbledon, and there was a lovely coffee shop near to me, run by a, the manager was a Cuban guy,

and I used to go once or twice a week, we used to sit down, and we used to talk about Cuba, we used to talk about communism, we used to talk about his experiences growing up. And I remember saying to him, Joel, why is it that communism is so appealing to people in the West? And he said to me, the thing is, Francis, is talking to somebody about communism is like saying to somebody who grew up, talking to a Western about communism, it's like saying to somebody who grew up in a very rich, privileged part of the city. Don't go into the rough part of the city. Don't go into that alley.

They've had no experience of it. They don't understand it. He said, it's only when they're down the alley. It's only when they're turning around. It's only when they see someone coming for them. And it's only when they feel the blow to the back of the head will they truly understand what communism is. You've got it exactly. You've got it exactly. And that's one of the reasons why actually it's so interesting

to see people who have come from Eastern European countries coming to this country and settling here because they carry a totally different experience. They understand what it's like. You go to those nations now. They are under no doubt whatsoever that the regime that continues basically on some of the same principles and is still run by a former secret policeman is capable of what it was capable of before. You know,

they have a whole history of suffering, your own family. You know, you can see through this. Someone walks down the street and they've got the shake of our t-shirt on them. You just say, you don't understand what lies behind this. And I think that's what drives me with all of this, is that for each of us, you know, there's different things that we can do, but I am just passionate that the real story is told, that people understand what lies behind these ideas that are so cool. You know, I signed up to be a communist when I was at school. I just thought it was really cool.

I bought my communist manifesto. I never read it. I don't understand. It was completely beyond me. But just because it seemed to be cool. And we need to, I think I'd just like to be able to catch people before they really get swept up in it and say, okay, do you really want to buy into this? Do you really understand what it is you're buying into? And I want the general public to know what they would know in

Ukraine today, for instance. You know, they have a history. They know today, four o'clock when I'm meant to be here. Today's the annual celebration of the Holamador, lighting a candle at four o'clock. I changed my Twitter picture to a candle today. Because these are the These are the things we need to keep commemorating and we need to keep talking about this. Kids need to be educated about this stuff today. They have no idea. I mean, this is why it was a privilege. I visited a school this week.

I did a number of, was asked to speak to a number of classes, all ages, right the way from 14, right the way up to those who were leaving and going on to uni and talk to them about this. And I think for some of them, even though these subjects do come into their school curriculum, It's the human experience of what people went through that really, really hits. Oh my goodness me. And I have this thing. I put up these faces on the screen. I put up these faces of people.

And then the caption says, Fyodor somewhat peasant shot for counter-revolutionary activity. And then you see this woman come up. She just looks like a good, ordinary farm laborer and shot and this state and whatever else. And it just goes on like that. And they're, whoa, these are people. This is real people. This is real lives.

And they're still finding the bodies all over Eastern Europe. They are. And I suppose the question there, Giles, is, why have we not got a shindler's list for the Soviet Union? Why is it not part of our culture? Why have we not trained ourselves to recoil in disgust from all of these symbols and from this history, which we don't get taught? Because the Soviets were on our side at the Nuremberg trials.

Yeah. the Soviets were able to claim victor status against fascism. And that's the mantra today. We're anti-fascists. Before we could be anti-racists, the buzzword was anti-fascism. Now anti-racism has taken the place of that, but that's the anti that we're part of. So they were part of it.

I went to a meeting at the European Parliament some years back, which was held by Eastern European political. politicians, and the title was, why was there no Nuremberg for the crimes of communism? Right. And their joy will, should be. Yeah. Well, I mean, to say those particular politicians, the Soviet Union took half of Poland before he was ever attacked by Germany. It also annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Estonia, murdering tens of thousands of people in officers, as you say, and lots and lots and lots.

so we could go on. It's very difficult. And, you know, as you know, I'm writing my first book about my experiences in Russia and the West and what I'm seeing happening here. Which I'll be very interested to read because it's a fascinating idea. Yeah, but the thing that I'm trying, we've been trying to address on the show for the last three and a half years is,

you know, two people who broadly speaking consider themselves sort of center left, maybe more center for me, center left for Francis, always sensible about this. the sort of stuff, we suddenly saw these very radical ideas about race, about sex and gender and sexuality, just entering the public sphere, entering our world, comedy, the media,

the political discourse suddenly turned in this way, which to us, people who come from these countries, was really, really troubling. Are you troubled by what is happening at the moment? I'm very troubled by what's happening. I also see some familiar patterns. We're back to the same old oppressor. Right.

We're back to the fact that those who are the oppressed class are irredeemable. They can never repent enough because they are tainted by their very act of being. That's way back there. You know, the capitalist was irredeemable. Working class criminals were redeemable because they were just corrupted by capitalism. But we have that same thing. We have the dispute over truth. You know, this idea that if you are white male,

you can have no idea about what real truth is. Truth is whatever the oppressed feel is their truth, because you will always be tainted by your colonial estitudes or by whatever it is that's driving you to keep your privilege. Well, that's just a straight transfer remarks. And I'm not saying that what's going on with woke. or whatever you want to call it is Marxism. But you might say it's kind of like...

Why are you not saying that? Because a lot of people are saying that. Well, I know a lot of people are saying that. And I'm just trying to be... I'm just trying to be careful. What I was about to say is I think probably they are, you know, third generation down, cousin, one off. In other words, the ancestry is still there.

Haven't they just traded? This is where I might disagree with you and correct me. I'm very open to be... I'm quite prepared because I'm still thinking through these ideas myself. As am I. As am I. Hence the question. To me, all I see is they've swapped capitalist bourgeois for white or male or straight or whatever you want. And they've swapped working class, oppressed, subjugated for ethnic minority, sexual minority, female, etc.

Or woman, whatever that now means. To me, I don't say any difference in that sense. I think I'd go along with that. I think I'd go along with that. I'm just conscious at the same time we still got conventional old-fashioned Marxists alongside that. Yeah, that's what I call them neo-Marxists.

Yeah, that's that, yeah. So we've got the Marxist and the Neo-Marxist. Yeah, I'm totally with you. I don't think there's anything I would disagree with on that. So what do we do about it, Josh? Oh, wow. What does one do about it? Well, it needs courage, first of all.

It needs courage from people. I mean, like you guys, you know, you stood up, weren't really aware of what you were doing. No, come on, I'm not going to stand for this. And then bang, boom, whatever happened to you in your various careers as they exploded or imploded rather. And I think it needs people everywhere who see what's going on. It needs them to say, no, I'm going to stand against this. Someone said the other day, you know, the frog in the hot water saucepan is just absolutely a fiction.

I don't care if it's a fiction because that's actually what is happening to a lot of people. They are backed into a corner and they're just, oh, I can't be bothered to fight this. It's such an overwhelming torrent. How can you stand up? And I think people need to, I tell you what I would like to see. I would like to see a movement actually founded which could draw together all these different constituencies. You know, we've got mostly gender critical feminists who are really able to stand up against the trans issue. We've got other people from different areas of life.

I would like to see somehow if we could get some kind of coalition of people united. I talk to people. I go to say, you know, we have dinner, 13 people around a table, some names and faces that are quite well known there. And we're all saying, what should we do? I'm talking to someone else. He said, I'm meeting with a whole lot of people and we're all, everyone's just wringing their hands. And they're just saying, what's going to happen? What can we do?

Is there anything we can do? Is it just, you know, is it... So I don't know what a movement looks like, but you see what's happening in America among parents. Now, you see, parents is ordinary people who say, no, you're not going to do this stuff to my kids. And I am going to stop it happening. I am going to publicize it happening.

We've got Christopher Rufo doing all his incredible work, and as a result, because of his prominence, he's getting all these secret documents leaked to him from one place after another. I think that's absolutely brilliant. And, you know, people may criticize Americans for their independence and their belligerence and whatever else. But there's something in the American character which says, I'm going to stand up against this. They didn't realize it's part of their culture.

I think we're much more compliant here. Well, you know, I mean, teacher knows best. I mustn't really complain about what teacher does or whatever. I'd like to see not just the intellectuals alerted to this. because in a way, in some places they have quite a limited I mean, you have a big, you have a big constituency.

But you know, if you're a university professor, there's a limit to the influence you've got, but if you know, you're a whole movement of ordinary people out there, the general public, that's when this stuff starts to catch on. What it looks like, I've no idea, but it's been something I've been mulling over now

for two, three years. So maybe we do need a revolution. Maybe we do need a revolution. Yeah, we need a peaceful, respectful revolution, but one that's got courage. Perfect. And on that note, Charles, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online, where would be the best place to do that? I am on Twitter at Charles Udi.

And of course, people should buy the book Labor and the good. It's just being reprinted in a couple of weeks' time. So it'll be out new edition. My publishers took one look at the thick brick and said, we just can't afford to do that again. So I'm actually doing myself. So they'll be on my website shortly. Well, our final question, as you know, as always, is what's the one thing no one is talking about that we really should be.

What we've just been talking about. So we have been talking about it, which is good, and we need to do a lot more of that. Fantastic. Well, we're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals, but in the meantime, Charles Udi, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been my real pleasure. I've just loved the time. It's been great having you on.

And of course, thank you so much for watching and listening. We'll see you with another brilliant episode. I was going to say like this one, I probably won't be quite like this one. I won't be crying nearly as much. We'll see with another brilliant episode or Raw Show. All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time. And if you like your Trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe

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