TRIGGERnometry - "The West Has Lost Its Confidence" - Frank Furedi

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

SPONSORED BY: Epoch Times, an online news source that presents clear, fact-based journalism without spin. Go to: http://epochtim.es/triggernometry to find out more! SPONSORED BY: easyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Frank Furedi is a Hungarian-Canadian academic and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He is well known for his work on the sociology of fear, education, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and the sociology of knowledge. He is a prolific writer, his most recent book being, 'The Road to Ukraine: How the West Lost its Way'. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ 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. 00:00 Intro 09:13 Similarities Between World War 1 and the War in Ukraine 16:24 The Aftermath of the Soviet Union’s Collapse 31:13 Destructive Division in the West 35:12 Russia’s Future after the War in Ukraine 47:11 Is the West the Deciding Factor of Ukraine’s Future? 56:47 Is this War the Wake-up Call that the West Needed? 1:04:02 What's the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suddenly we find that, especially with COVID and the Ukrainian war, that suddenly the world is breaking up and everybody is looking at what side they should be on. They could pretend that it's us in the United States, we run the world. And now, all of a sudden you wake up a morning and you realize that you're just a large regional power. And I think for those people, a lot of those people, that came as a bit of a shock.

and they basically began to sort of blame the West for the predicament they were in. You can't blame the war on this single individual. There's a whole system at play there. There's a lot of interests that are work. And if Putin is taken out, then somebody else will replace him, who might smile a little bit more than Putin does. But essentially, things will pretty much remain the same.

One of my fears is not just simply what Russia is doing in Ukraine. One of my fears is what will happen if Russia implodes, the Federation implodes, because the Russian Federation is by no means as coherent and stable as it looks. A lot of the republics, you know, sort of that exists within the Russian Federation are dying to get out of that Federation. They're all looking somewhere else. Hey, Francis, do you like journalism? Of course!

So who's your favourite journalist then? Superman. What? Superman. Superman isn't a real person, Francis. He's an alien, he's not a journalist, and more importantly, he's fucking fictional, mate. If he was fictional, then why did Frederick Nietzsche write about Superman,

otherwise known as Ubermensch, in his seminal work, thus spoke Zarathustra, published in 1883, but still widely quoted today by both students and intellectuals alike. Sometimes, Francis, I feel as if I have no clue who you really are. But if you do like journalism, then you have to check out the Epoch Times. The Epoch Times, unlike most media organisations, is produced without the influence of any government, corporation or political party.

They distill a story down to the fact and get readers as close to the truth as they can. The articles are free from the influence of big tech, corporate media, and socialist and communist forces as well. The Epoch Times believe, the more facts you have at your disposal, the better able you are to preserve your rights. Here's what the readers say about them. The articles present a factual picture of the news from a conservative and American perspective. I feel the Epoch Times is the only publication out there that gives me factual information about stories in the news that other outlets and publications belatently report with liberal political biases.

Go to EpochT-I-M-D-S-forward-slash Trigern-S-T-Rawrash Trigern and click the link. That's epoch, tim, eP-P-O-C-H-T-I-M-E-S-S-S-T-O-N-E-S-T-O-Matry. 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.

Our brilliant guest today is an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, and a prolific author, not least of his latest book, which is this, the road to Ukraine, how the West lost its way. Frank Ferreidi, welcome to Trigonometry. Real pleasure to talk to you guys. We've been meaning to have you on for a while,

and this is a good opportunity to do that. Before we get into talking about your latest book, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been your journey through life leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, it all began in 1956 in the Hungarian Revolution when my parents and I were very active fighting the Russians and decided to leave when the revolution was crushed.

Ended up in Canada. I grew up in Canada where I studied politics and decided to come to London to do my PhD. The plan was to go back to Canada, but I just kind of never went back. I realized I was a European and got involved in radical left politics at that stage in time, a student radical.

I'm one of those 60s persons that has no regrets. I really enjoy those years. They were real good fun. And then gradually, with the passing of time, the world changed, I find myself being drawn more and more a slightly different direction than even a greater direction towards becoming much more interested in old classical liberal ideas. And at the end of the day, I became very active politically

and commented on political cultural issues. whilst being a professor at the university. And today I've got the honor of being called in any day of the week, a Marxist by some people and a fascist by other people. But I just think I'm a regular guy, you know, sort of with strong views. Well, welcome to the club. I think we all get called that. When was the last time you were called a Marxist, mate?

Exactly. Yeah, that is true. That doesn't happen to us too much. A left-wing shield. Yes, neoliberal, that's just what your girlfriend. calls you. Anyway, Frank, you've got a book out as smooth as that transition is, which is called The Road to Ukraine. And one of the things you talk about is our inability to understand the role of the past in forming the present. And you talk about how this conflict has its roots in World War

1, which, let's be honest, wasn't covered heavily in the mainstream media news coverage of this conflict. So take it away. Well, the way that I look at it is that in the first world, war, everything became disrupted in Europe, particularly, all over the world. So you had the Russian revolution that kind of kicked in as a result of that, the breakup of the different empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the German Empire, they're all kind of disintegrated. And this led to us a chain of events where all kinds of national, ethnic conflicts became very, very important.

They were all unresolved, which meant that nobody was surprised when the Second World War broke out. And people thought, well, that might bring things to an end. History is probably going to become easier from here onwards, but then the Cold War kicked in. And what happened was that when the Cold War finished, and in particular when the Soviet Union disintegrated, a lot of people imagined that that's history, that's the past,

I mean, now live in a new world. And they imagined that, you know, They had this fantasy that somehow Europe was going to become peaceful. Books were written with the title how wars had become obsolete. How we're not going to have harmonious existence. The Germans in particular imagined that they could somehow seduce the Russians by through economic trade, that somehow economic trade would lead to democracy and it would lead to the liberalization of cultural life, both in China and in Russia.

And then all of a sudden we realized that wars, you know, which were not supposed to happen, are very real and are very contemporary. And what I'm arguing in the book is that by forgetting what history was about, I called historical amnesia, we somehow lost our way and failed to realize that there is a legacy there. There's a burden of history there that we've got to engage with a little bit more sort of creatively than we're doing at the moment. Otherwise, we're going to be called unaware as we did when Russia invaded the Ukraine. Isn't part of the problem, Frank? I know Constantine always talks about this, is that we believe in the West that everybody thinks like us.

And the reality is that they don't. They see the world in a different way. They have different goals. And as a result, they're going to do different things. I think that's true. And that need not be a problem. I don't think there's any need for everybody to kind of talk to the same screen. So I got no problem with that.

I mean, you go to Russia or when you go to East Europe, there's something nice in their particular interpretation of the world, the way they see things. But I think where there was a problem was imagining that somehow, through the imperative of the market and through economic relations, that somehow consumerism and capitalism would seduce everybody to become just like we are. and that somehow that would transcend their historical and cultural legacy and not really understand that when you sit down with a Russian or a Polish person or a Latvian person, you're talking to somebody who sees the world from a very different perspective

than somebody living in Manchester. Frank, so how is that manifested? Let's come back to World War I because you've got these huge empires that collapse, they leave a lot of simmering national conflicts. How is that related to the war in Ukraine? I mean, I think I have an interpretation, but tell our audience. Well, I think that the Ukraine became this battlefield for competing national interests. And during the 20th century, it was dominated and invaded by a variety of different nations

from the Germans to the Russians, to the Czechs. The Hungarians went in there as well. And the Ukraine wasn't really a nation, you know, in the sovereign sense of the term. until much, much later, even though it a very strong national movement in the Ukraine that hoped that after the First World War, Ukraine would be given self-determination. The Russians, the Soviet government, promised them this new Ukrainian federation, which would be almost like a nation, but it really wasn't. But what was interesting is that when you go to Ukraine, it is like a very layered society

with different historical interest in it. And I remember because I started off the book with my trip to the Ukraine, the Ukraine, and I was really walking around in a place in a place in Transcarpathia, which I heard so much about from my parents. And there are these different layers. You see, you know, like you go to the church, and on the church door it says there's a mass for in Slovakian. On Monday, on Tuesday we have a mass for the Hungarians.

On Wednesday it's for Ukrainians. And even now, it's got these different layers of historical influences. And I felt that when I went into Ukraine, I just stepped into history. It really had an emotional, psychologically, sort of unexpected impact on me because I felt that I was time traveling. I was going back and forth, at least in my own head, because I was seeing traces of the past, everywhere that I went, that were not always Ukrainian, but the Ukrainian was in there.

and I could really understand why it is that Ukraine had this very difficult predicament and is going to have that difficult predicament unfortunately for some time to come. And you say that, and we're looking at the First World War, what are the other parallels that you see between what happened with the First World War and the current situation, Frank?

Well, I think the main parallel with then and now is not so much the First World War but the years leading up to it. Because years leading up to it was, I'm talking about essentially from about 19, 10 to 14, were years when the old order was breaking down. You know, we had this golden era in Europe. And all of a sudden that golden era was coming to an end, you had internal domestic tensions.

Can I just stop you there? Because I don't think a lot of people will know about this. What do you mean by a golden era in the early 20th century? Well, the late Victorian era ends in the 19th century. And if you go anywhere in Central Europe, you'll find these beautiful buildings. And they were all essentially built between 1890 and 1905, roughly. Because that's really where, due to the Industrial Revolution, due to the relative economic prosperity, not for everybody,

but for the middle classes, really began to kick in. That's the beginning of what we call consumer society in Europe. And everybody's saying, this is really incredible. Now, some bohemians feel upset because life's too easy, and you have the new avant-garde kind of emerging at that time. But by and large, this was an unprecedented era of peace. I mean, decades and decades of peace in inverted common in Europe. And why does this start to break down?

I think it begins to break down because national tensions and rivalries, principally between Britain and Germany, but then also within that kind of context, you have a lot of confidence. and the Olympics begin to emerge. And nobody knows who's going to be on what side. Because until that point, Britain, the British Empire, is the hegemonic power in the globe. It's losing its economic muscles. So what you then have is a situation where, for example, new alliances get created. And nobody knows who's going to be on what side. So just to give you an example, you know, sort of when the war breaks out, Italy is not yet clear, you know, whether they're going to be on the side of the Austro-Hungian Empire and Germany, or whether they're going to be

with England and France and America? And the very last minute, they change. And you have all these, you know, Turks begin to change. Everybody's positioning themselves. And so you have this kind of world that you cannot predict how it's going to unfold. And to me, the situation today is very similar in the sense that that ethos of globalization that we were let to believe would last forever. where national interest and the nation's state would diminish significantly,

suddenly we find that especially with COVID and the Ukrainian war, that suddenly the world is breaking up and everybody is looking, you know, what side they should be on and people wonder whether, you know, Taiwan should be defended or not defended, people are wondering whether Europe should make an effort to pull together or, you know, are the Germans and the French just going to go their own way? So it's a very kind of fluid dynamic situation. And it just so happens that in the middle of that, you got this war in the Ukraine.

And it just so happens, in the middle of that, we discovered this week that Armenia and Azerbaijan, which are not small insignificant states, are filing a little mini-war, a kind of a side show which could turn out to be even more significant than the war in the Ukraine itself. I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.

So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need a knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminated. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on. Pick up these may apply. And it's interesting where we're talking about that because... You're talking about, you know, the decades of peace and prosperity, and it seems that, well, it doesn't seem, that's what we've enjoyed here. Do you think that people get lulled into a sense of security thinking, you know, there's good times, nobody's at war, therefore we've eliminated war?

I think there is that problem, particularly in the Anglo-American world. And in the book, I talk about the geopolitical illiteracy that you have in Britain, where you have a foreign office where I meet guys from the foreign office and they don't speak a foreign language. Really? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the foreign office was famous for their, you know, Arab speakers.

The Times last week reported that we haven't got enough Mandarin speakers in the foreign office. And this is obviously very serious matter because China is one of the big issues of our time. So we have this geopolitical literacy where people are not very good at anticipating and calculating. And I think that our elites have become uniquely ineffective in dealing with geopolitical issues. And what is the role of the Cold War and the post-Cold War period and what's happened? Because, you know, people argue that, I mean, I have some difficulty with this argument, but do people do make the argument that, you know, Russia wasn't treated the way it should have been treated

after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We needed a Marshall plan. We needed to help Russia onto its feet. And later, in fact, NATO started to encroach on Russia's strategic interest. And this is the cause, sort of like Western arrogance and lack of respect for Russia. I wouldn't put it like that. There is a Western influence there, which wasn't very helpful. And that happened in the Yeltsin period.

You had the major liberalization of the market. and you had the privatization of the nomenclature, the old Soviet elite, who'd basically managed to appropriate for themselves all the state property, all the state resources, and essentially ripped it off. The creation of the oligarchy. Exactly. So people often understand that the West was quite complicit

in the creation of the oligarchy. And I think in that sense, they probably imagine that they would turn out to be good old capitalists, like a Rockefeller was or whatever. But what they didn't really understand is that by doing that, you essentially undercut the possibility of a genuine democratic transition because you created the basis for an oligarchical society and an oligarchical state. And oligarchies, in general history, are very rarely open to democratic pressure. They're not going to be particularly accountable.

So I think that was a problem. opportunity was lost at that particular moment in terms of having a much more both hands-off attitude, but also, I think, not encouraging this kind of, because a lot of the American other companies went in there to encourage the rise of the oligarchy. So I think that was a tragedy.

And I think the second thing, it's not so much that Russia needed a martial plan, I think that there should be much more of an effort to try to bring, Russia into NATO. So for example, I remember I was involved, after 9-11, I was involved in a NATO consultant group consisting of Westerners and Russia, Russians. And we were discussing how to deal with a common problem, which was global Islamic terror, which was as much a problem for them as it was for the West. And we had no problem cooperating. Obviously, we had very different

interest and all that. But I kind of wish that we had created much more space where there could have been sort of a kind of dialogue going on, which might have limited the possibility of what eventually then occurs, where you have the unrestrained emergence of grievance politics by Putin, where his kind of Russian identity politics is allowed to flourish. And all that the West does is kind of watches it, you know, sort of and doesn't really understand that this is a very, very dangerous development. But surely, Frank, as well, we didn't just watch because I think it was during Tony Blair's regime.

We allowed billions of dirty Russia money to flow into the city. So we were also in cahoots. It was in our interests as well. Well, that's what I was getting at earlier on. I was talking about the privatization of the nomenclature. Because when you look at all the foreign energy companies and the foreign investment bankers and the way that foreign service provided,

the big four, like KPMG, all these big organizations went into Russia because the way they looked at it, they could clean up and they did really, really well out of that whole situation. And they created what they thought was just like a Comprador, subservient, oligarchical class and not understanding that the state, in essence, had not changed all that much. It was privatized economically, but politically, the layers of the state from the past were still in place.

And although the KGB might have changed its name and although different institutions had a different facade, the fundamentals of that state structure, of that authority and structure remained behind this liberalised sort of economic visage. Hey Francis, do you like locals? I live in London, mate. So obviously not. The only pleasure I get from the locals is when we share an intimate moment as we watch a Japanese tourist get trapped in a tube door.

That is good. But I wasn't talking about their locals. I was talking about our community on locals. You mean the one where you get phenomenal behind the scenes content when you... where you get to ask incredible guests like Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Bill Burr, Sam Harris, Adam Carolla, Heather Heying and others your questions?

Not just that, you can get supporter-only benefits like trigonometry mugs, monthly calls with other top-sops. supporters and even a regular meal with me and Francis. You also get phenomenal behind the scenes footage of our trip to America where we met a whole host of incredible guests and gave ourselves terminal indigestion. We're also starting to do monthly giveaways for locals only. The first one will be signed copies of Andrew Doyle's new book. Plus you get access to an incredible community of like-minded people who share memes,

have fun conversations, and most importantly, you get to make new friends. You can support us with as little as $7 or about £5 a month, or give us more for the higher tier benefits. Go to trigonometry.com. Go to trigonometry.com and support the show. And people don't actually understand that, you know, at the high levels, they're still, you know, just like in the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before, There is no private property in Russia.

The oligarchs don't own the assets that they own. They can be taken away just like that if you displeased the Tsar or the president or whoever is the general secretary. But come back to grievance politics and Russian identity politics. What are you talking about, Frank? Well, I think that what happened was that many people in the Russian elite, you know, sort of resented the fact that Russia was now going to become a second-rate regional power rather than a global superpower. And they never got over the fact that there was this massive change in the status. Even though between you and me, even before the end of the

Cold War, it was evident that Russian omnipotence was more apparent than real. It was a very weak, failed state, even before that. But nevertheless, they could pretend that, that you know, it's us in the United States, we're on the world. And now, all of a sudden, you wake up one morning, and you realize that you're just a large regional power. And I think for those people, all of those people, that came as a bit of a shock, and they basically began to sort of blame the West

for the predicament they were in. You know, Russia always had this interesting culture between the Russia fires and the Western, you know, sort of people that wanted to make Russia look like the West. If you read Dostoevsky or Tolstow, you will find those elements already exist in 19th century. And I think at a certain point, that kind of animus against the West converge with this attempt to create this Russian mystique, which then meant that it provided a certain

kind of ideological understanding for them, that somehow, you know, we were robbed. and of course they were robbed, but they were robbed by themselves, and of course, by the West as well, but principally it was a domestic accomplishment, and as Constantine said, what they ended up doing was keep the state intact and then turned these oligarchs into a modern high-tech group of courtiers who are there at the pleasure of Putin or whoever happens to be in power. Well, see, this is why I have this issue with this argument about the West complicity. I have no doubt that Western corporations profited massively from the collapse of the nation. But is it, I mean, the way I look at it, someone who grew up in Russia during

that period is, is it the West's fault that Russia, the Soviet Union lost the Cold War? Because that's what we're really talking about. The resentment politics and the grievance inevitably comes from loss of status and loss of power, which is particularly an acute issue for Russians. They always have been obsessed with their role in the world. being powerful, it's literally the number one objective for people in Russia think about it. Is it our fault that we won the Cold War here in the West? Well, I mean, if the reality is that Russia lost the Cold War a long time before it did. Yes.

And that was because number one, it lost its moral authority. That was already the case in the Stalinist era, where its ideological and moral appeal began to diminish. Secondly, it lost the Cold War because it turned out in 1970s that it had reached a limit in economic terms. It couldn't really make the transition from a heavy industry-based society to one that was technologically superior. It couldn't really do that. It could no longer compete in any sense whatsoever against the West in economic terms.

Why was that, Frank? Because in order to make the transition from heavy, industry to more sophisticated technology, you need to have some kind of system of incentive. You need to have much greater freedom for people to experiment than was possible in the old Soviet regime. And the Soviet regime could build big roads and railway systems and heavy industry, because that just meant they could throw a lot of labor at it. Hundreds of thousands of people could be thrown at it without necessarily having the

the technological capacity to do this. So the Russian economy began to fault. It still looked good because where they wanted to do really well, for example, in the nuclear sector or the space technology sector, they would prioritize all their best people and all their best resources to make sure that those sectors of the economy worked.

But it was at the expense of everything else. So basically, you could have Sputnik, you know, being the first one to go into space, But if you go into a shop in Russia, you know, you couldn't get a watch that worked, a Russian watch that work, or a lighter that actually could create flames, never and just making noise. So that was the paradox of the economy. So that came to an end in the 1970s. And it just so happened that when Reagan turned the screws in terms of the arms rivalry, that was the end of the – and they knew that. They already knew that, even when Breschen, as was alive,

that it was only a matter of time before that was the end. And the Russian Stalinists elite themselves had stopped believing in it. And the way you knew that was the case was because they began to send their children to Oxford or to Yale. They all got nice Western degrees. They weren't getting going to the University of Leningrad or Moscow. They were all going to the West. And that was the beginning of the privatization of this nomenical. So, Frank, at the core of this is the Russian leadership and the Chinese leadership,

they talk a lot nowadays about a multipolar world. You know, we don't want to live in a world that's dominated by essentially the Anglo-Sphere, basically America Plus, right? And that is what this is all about, isn't it? I think partially, you have to remember that we don't live in a unipolar world anymore because America, although it's probably the most powerful economy even now, at the moment, more powerful than China. And although it's got this incredible soft power, cultural influence all over the world,

it is no longer hegemonic in the way that it was in the past. So we are seeing the beginning of a multipolar world whereby you have greater regionalism, greater regional economic ties taking place anyway. And I think that what's happened is that Russia and to a greater extent China are trying to figure out how they could insert themselves into this new world and gain greater power. China is on the up at the moment. People don't realize it, but it's doing remarkably well in geopolitical terms. It's cleaning up in the South Pacific. For example, I don't know if you heard, but there's a place called the Solomon Island, which used to be run by the Australians and the Americans.

And the China just went in there, bribed everybody, and now they're like the dominant power there. And America wakes up and realizes, you know, much, much too late. Look what has happened. China is very active in Latin American in Africa. It's very active in Europe. Australia, I mean, when you go to Melbourne or, you know, any of these places, you'll find that it's got a massive influence there.

So we are seeing a much more fragmented world order taking place. And the really important question that is indeterminate at the moment is where does Europe fit into all this? To what extent can Europe play a significant role? Because at the moment, Europe is allowing itself to become the bagman for the United States, essentially. It's not taking any initiative. At the same time, it's criticizing the Americans for taking the initiative, but it's not doing anything that could possibly resemble the ambitions of a, or anybody who wants global power.

But do you think the problem is as well is that it feels to me, and look, you all know far more about this than I do, but it feels to me like in the West and in Europe in particular, we're more divided than ever. We seem to be at each other's throats. You know, there's political turmoil happening. We're entering a cost of living crisis all over Europe. So I guess my question to you is, Frank,

how can we possibly lead the world when we can't even lead our own countries? Well, you know, my book, one of the main points of my book is what I call the moral disarmament of the West. And I think that for me is a really crucial concept, because what that really gets at is that in the West, there is no commanding moral system of authority, no moral imagination where you're able to give your people a sense of meaning about what it means to be English, means to be French or American. And I think what has happened is that we've become detached from the past. We talked about the loss of historical sense. And what you're left with is this very narrow outlook,

which is a combination of technocratic ambition and identity politics. There are only two things that are going at the moment. And what you're really describing is probably the biggest challenge we face, because when you look at the United States, it's so polarized. People are so much at each other's throats. it is like going to two different countries so people literally don't talk to each other anymore and you get a lot of that here even in Britain

but nothing like the same intensity but that's gradually spreading all over Europe so that kind of internal division which is not mediated by a common sense that this is what we are you know sort of is a huge problem which is why I think as we're speaking we got all this unusual reaction

about the queen's death where suddenly Queen Elizabeth becomes this, you know, essentially she reminds us that history does matter, that there is such a thing as a historical legacy. And unless we take that seriously, there's nothing, there's no soul on which we can flourish as a society. And that's a real challenge for our society, like I said before, because you look at China and you look at Russia and it's far more easy from the outside. for them to be unified because they're totalitarian regimes. Whereas what you have with democracy is that you have change and you have free speech

and you have partisanship. It's far more difficult, isn't it, to be cohesive in those types of societies? Up to a point, I think you're right. But I think there's a danger of overstating the capacity of an authoritarian society like Russia or China to create this kind of homogeneous outlook. It looks like that from the outside, but there are very important internal tensions occurring there as well. And the influence of the West is quite important

among sections of Russian or Chinese society. There are regional differences. And one of my fears is not just simply what Russia is doing in Ukraine. One of my fears is what will happen if Russia implodes, the federation implodes, because... The Russian Federation is by no means as coherent and stable as it looks. A lot of the republics, you know, sort of there exists within the Russian Federation are dying to get out of that federation.

They're all looking somewhere else. Well, they're not Russian ethnically for a start. They're not Christian very often, et cetera, et cetera, which is one of the things that started to happen in the 90s, which is why you end up with Putin, because the country's collapsing, Chechnya wants to separate. It's just the beginning. and they are like, we need to find a strong man leader who's going to crack down and hold the country together.

So what do you think is going to happen with the war in Ukraine and with Russia? Well, in the book, I argue that this is a typical frontier war. And a frontier war usually means that there are these inbuilt, long, historically rooted sources of tension. And the way that I look at it is for that reason I think this war is not going to end anytime soon because although there is no doubt will be peace treaties

and you know sort of they will decide to have ceasefires and everything else that's not going to happen because this is a war that Ukraine cannot win and Russia cannot afford to lose I think Ukraine can be a major

moral victory. It's already done that. to some extent. It can hold on to all the territory that Russia try to take away from it. But at the end of the day, Ukraine is Ukraine and it's not in a, hasn't got the power and the strength, even with Western support to inflict such a blow on Russia, that would completely sort of mean that that is really the end. So the way that I see that is that the conflict is going to continue for some time to come. And what we, you know, there's nothing we can do about here and there because it depends upon the people on the ground. All that we can do is hope that somehow a certain breeding space can be created for

Ukraine to recharge its battery because it's losing a lot of people. It's losing a lot of its resources and hopefully sort of as the global order, you know, reorganizes itself, it might be a little bit more difficult to start a new war and that's what I'm really hoping for and I think the key thing is ensuring that everything is done possible to make sure that Ukraine's independence and its capacity to be a sovereign nation is upheld and protected. I think that's the key objective. At the same time, I think that we've got to be wary of the possibility of Russia disintegrating and the corrosive and explosive consequences that will have in the cocaine.

and all the different, you know, the Asian parts of the Federation, which could be, could unleash a dynamic that will, you know, kind of in white, Iran and bringing Turkey. And God knows what's going to happen at that point. So we've touched on this. And there's going to be a lot of people who are very interested in this, who've never had this, I've never even contemplated this thought, and I'm one of them. Why might Russia implode? And what are the countries who want to break free of Russia? Well, I think that just about every non-Russian republic would rather

sort of move away at a distance. And even Armenia, which often acts as a Russian proxy state, even Armenia doesn't, hasn't got a love affair with Moscow by any means. So the way that I see it is that the Russian Federation is held together by essentially coercive authoritarian means rather than through any kind of consensus. And there are very few mechanisms for consensus to be achieved, all done by negotiations

and bullying. It's like that kind of combination. And what's happened in the most recent period is that Turkey and Iran, for very different reasons are using its influence to try to seduce and attract people to move in their direction. Pretty much in the way that we had a comparable situation in Kosovo and elsewhere where you have different Islamic powers trying to sort of gain a degree of influence, if not hagemony, in that part of the world. So, yeah, I've got this very bad feeling that if you have something like the boss,

Balkan War, you know, Mark II, but this time within the Russian Federation, the consequence of that will be much more drastic, dramatic than what happened in the old Yugoslavia. And what might those consequences be geopolitically, Frank? Well, I think that the way that I, I mean, one of the things I worry about is that I will put Iran in a much stronger position, because Iran's already been made an honest honorary member of this club that China and Russia inhabits. So this kind of a new triangle relationship that's been established. I don't think that would be a very good result if Iran strengthens its kind of position

and stabilizes its self-precessity at that time. Within Iran, things are going awry. I think that Turkey is very interesting in this respect because Turkey is on a role at the moment because it's needed by NATO. NATO really realize on Turkey as this intermediary. But at the same time, Turkey's got very clear, distinct interest, which fundamentally contradict that of Europe and European powers. So that's what I meant earlier on where we talked about a situation not unlike before

First World War, where we simply don't know who's going to line up with who under those circumstances. And I suppose the question, because I remember when the war in your Ukraine first, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, when that conflict began, there were a lot of very, I hope they'll forgive me for saying it's very naive people in the West who were like, we just need to get rid of Putin. That's what we need to do. And they thought that that would help. And I was always saying to them, you do realize you get rid of Putin. It's probably not going to be Nick Clegg that comes to power in Russia. Do you know what I mean? So either you're going to get another strong. man leader who's going to need to assert himself even more to prove himself because he's not Putin, he hasn't proven himself. Or there's the other scenario which you're alluding to, which is he's not strong enough to hold the Federation. It's really an empire, what Russia is today, the Russian Empire together. And then you get the disintegration of this country, which has an awful lot of nuclear weapons. You're right. And I think what the tragedy is, and this goes back

to the point about geopolitical illiteracy is a lot of people have a psychological interpretation of the war that Putin is just a mad person. And if you remove that kind of cancerous growth on Russian society, then it would be really cool, not realizing that you can't blame the war on this single individual. There's a whole system at play there. There's a lot of interests that are work. And if Putin is taken out, then somebody else will replace it. who might smile a little bit more than Putin does, but essentially things will pretty much remain the same. And I do think this naivety is very, very unhelpful,

this single-minded focus on an individual or a small number of individuals rather on the fact that there's a whole system, imperial system that's running that society that has got a common interest in maintaining the status quo. So that being the case then, I hear what you say about Ukraine. Ukraine should be given the supportive needs to remain independent and hopefully things calm down over time, even though they're very strong pre-existing interests

from both sides that are in conflict. What should the West do? What should we do in this country? What should the Americans do? What should Europe do in order to manage this crisis, which is, from what you're saying, it's really a global crisis. What's happening here? What should the West do? to mitigate some of the consequences of what's happening? Well, in the end, it's not in the hand of the West entirely. In the beginning of the war, I got a lot of criticism because I argued, for example, that we should basically tell Russia

to neutralize the airspace so that basically Russia couldn't control the air unilaterally and indicate that the West will have a sort of, the West will be sending in airplanes with military supplies. If not in the whole, you can at least draw lines so that, you know, west of Kiev, you would have sort of a kind of a no-go area where this could be done. I got a lot of criticism for saying that I'm just escalating the war and they will make things a little bit more difficult. Well, not a little bit more difficult.

People would have said you'll start in World War III. That's what they would say. A little bit more difficult. You see Frank is so British now. That's his definition. A little bit more difficult. The end of the world is a little bit more difficult. Yeah, I've kind of learned the English understating.

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triggered, and get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. So I was accused of being a warmonger and the point that I made was that if you basically argue that every time you help Ukraine, it kind of creates the risk. of a nuclear war, then you might as well give up. Because what you're saying, that Russia's nuclear blackmail is going to have the last word on everything. And I still think that.

But not that the war is going on for so long, what I'm really worried about is that the nature of the war has changed quite dramatically. And somehow or another, we need to kind of take a step back and find how we can limit the damage that's being created within Ukraine itself. I do worry about the consequences of this for Ukrainian society in the long run because they need a bit of breeding space and stability in order to rebuild and get their act together. So that seems to me to be the key thing. I think the West,

people in the West should be fighting for the creation of, I suppose, a lack of a better expression of red line that Russia knows that they must not cross as a way of indicating that Russia knows that if they cross the red line, there'll be an external intervention. But within that, it's going to be resolved by the Ukrainian people themselves with our support. I don't want to lecture the Ukrainians telling them what to do. No, no, no, of course. But I was asking about the West because the West is the deciding factor, I would argue, Frank, because if the West doesn't help Ukraine, Ukraine will collapse in a day. And if the West wanted for Ukraine to win, you say Ukraine can't win.

Actually, Ukraine could win if the West provided what it needs to win. Whether the West wants to do that is a different conversation. But I suppose perhaps a more optimistic scenario, we talked very early on in the conversation. You mentioned that Ukraine never really had a strong national identity. There was a strong ethnic identity, but not a national identity. I'd argue we're starting to see the formation of a very strong national Ukrainian identity. So while of course they're taking losses and economies being damaged and the industrial

heartlands are also to some extent being affected by the war, this could be the beginning of the emergence of an actual country called Ukraine, which if it is given the support it needs to be part of the EU or to be some sort of NATO ally or something like that, it could be just a normal country eventually, couldn't it? Well, I have big hopes for Ukraine becoming a normal country. And you're right to suggest that as a result of this experience, there's an unusual degree of domestic solidarity within Ukraine. And there's a kind of even a certain cultural renaissance that is occurring that you can

see, which is really very nice to see. And by the way, just sorry to interrupt, there is a mending of the thing. there was always at the heart of Ukrainian society, which is Western Ukraine and Eastern Ukraine, the Russian speakers and the Ukrainian speakers. The people like to exaggerate the differences between the two. They're not as big as people like to believe. But nonetheless, that doesn't exist anymore in anything like the way that it did, right? It still exists, but as you say, not in the way that it did.

And there's been kind of coming together as a result of this common experience. So I think that all that is true. Where I slightly disagree with you is I don't think that the West can win the war for Ukraine. Because there are real limits as to what the West can do, given the fact that there are, you know, if it goes beyond a certain point, then we are talking about such an escalation that the West would find unthinkable. I mean, I think the West is not known for its courage and its bravery and its spirit of sacrifice. and I cannot see the West doing very much more.

My objective as far as the West is concerned is to make sure that its support, its economic and military support for Ukraine is not compromised in the medium term

and that kind of war-weary sentiment that's beginning to kick in many parts of Europe is to some extent contained and is not allowed to undermine the support that Ukraine is getting.

I think that's what we should be hoping for and fighting for in the current era. And the problem, as you touched on before, Frank, with Ukraine, is that obviously Ukraine can't lose because they're literally fighting for their country, they're fighting for their lives. But Putin can't lose either. He can't lose face.

Well, exactly what I write in the book, neither cycle afford to lose, which is why it seems to me that this is a war that's going to go on for a long, long, long time. At a certain point, you know, something is going to happen in the global dynamic that will essentially till the balance in such a way that the conflict has a chance of being resolved. But I don't think that's going to happen just yet because at the moment, everybody is literally positioning. And even, you know, we talk about the West helping Ukraine, but there's almost like a vulture-like approach where different European countries are looking for opportunities in this war. It's not like everybody's altruistically decided that we're just going to help Ukraine,

regardless of its consequences. People are looking for, you know, sort of their own interest. And they're asking the question, well, what's in it for us? You know, sort of, and that kind of realpolitik is never far from under the surface as at the moment. And it's also, you know, like you said, realpolitik, but, you know, there's also people making money out of this as well. Absolutely, yeah. This is very much the case, you know, sort of. of and there's been a lot of discussions about the way in which, you know, under the radar,

trade is still going on with Russia, you know, sort of under the radar, you know, people are profiteering from the arms and various resources and supplies that were, that's being sent to the Ukraine. So it is just like any other war, you know, there is a kind of surface form of patriotism, altruism, and heroism, but under the surface, the, you know, the war profiteering and the and the hustling and everything else, that still goes on. Because we're also energy dependent on Russia. Certainly, you know, not so much our country, but Germans, et cetera, et cetera. They need Russian energy.

And we've got to understand that. I mean, you have to remember that there's a danger that if things go the way they are, the German economy, German industry, is simply going to disintegrate. I mean, there's already, if you look at the German economy, me, the middle level sort of multinational factories are really being hit very, very hardly on the small factories that are employing five, six hundred people, or many of them are being, are forced to close down. So there is obviously a cost to this. I mean, the Germans did this to themselves, let's be clear. Yeah. Right.

No, I'm having very much sympathy for Germany. I'm just simply saying that they are in a predicament. Yes. And that's going to limit their flexibility and their willingness to do the right thing. Frank, let me ask you something that a lot of people will find a strange question, but I do think it is at least a valid question to ask. That's normally what I do, mate. Yeah, it's true.

Would we be here without all of this identity politics, this internal strife and division, every time an American president gets elected, either he was put there by the Russians or it was a fake election or whatever. Would we be having a war in Ukraine if the West hadn't just started obsessing about all this stuff? It's a very good question and a very difficult one to answer.

I think that if this was a different, world. And if we had a stronger sense of purpose and a stronger sense of who we are, a greater belief in democracy, in sovereignty, essentially in Western culture and Western way of life, then I think that Western societies would be far more formidable rather than being so weak internally. And that would have made people think twice. You have to remember that there are many people in Moscow and Beijing, you know, who look at the United States in particular and they see tension and conflict and they see an army that spends more time, you know, sort of messing around trying to figure out its pronouns than, you know, sort of taking its military mission seriously.

You know, they look at America and they find that this is a post-heroic age. Yes. where courage is conspicuously absent in terms of the values of American society. And one of the points I try to make in the book is that a lot of people in Europe, you know, sort of particularly Germans, but also others, they look at the Ukrainians and they ask themselves to question, if we were invaded, you know, would our people, you know, sort of fight back the way the Ukrainians did? Would they have the capacity to withstand that level of shock and attack?

And a lot of people are saying that in their hearts of hearts, they don't think that they would. I looked at a survey of every single European country. And the survey asked the question, would you fight against a foreign invader? That was the question they asked. Do you know which was the country that had the highest response for it that they would fight?

Any idea? No. It was Finland. Yes. And that's understandable. That makes sense. They've done it before. They've done it before.

It makes perfect sense. Yeah. And then on the low end, you know, it would be like the Dutch. You know, I'm no jokes about Dutch courage or anything like that. But, yeah, it was the Dutch and the more kind of cosmopolitan, you know, kind of nations. And I think that when you kind of look at this, this goes back to my point about moral disarmament. When you morally disarm, you know, and the first time we ever used the term moral disarmament was in relation to France in the 1930s, where it just basically gave up.

you know, sort of allowed the Germans to walk into Paris, you know, kind of more or less. When you kind of morally disarm in the way that we did, then being able to militarily and physically rearm or be firm is problematic. I mean, I hope I'm wrong. Well, this is what I made this point the day the invasion happened. In my opinion, it would never have happened if we hadn't spent the last six years obsessing about stuff that didn't really matter. But I have been heartened by the West response, actually. And I suppose the question for me is, has this been the wake-up call that we needed?

Because I don't believe that Vladimir Putin is sitting in the Kremlin now going, this has gone the way I wanted, right? I think you overestimated the weakness in division of the West. I think he overestimated the reaction that he would receive, both from within Ukraine and from externally. Is it possible that this is the spark the West needed to sort of wake up and go, maybe we shouldn't make ourselves energy dependent on people who are at least adversaries. Let's put it that way, right?

This is maybe the moment we go, okay, look, globalization was great for a while, but it's not working in this current climate. We've got to have food security. We've got to have energy security. We've got to have actual security. We've got to be willing to work in the different way in this new world. And part of that means we've got to stop obsessing about stuff that doesn't matter and deal with it. Do you think that's possible?

Possible. But if he kind of rolled the film backwards, when the war broke out, Putin's assessment of the West is absolutely correct. Because if you remember, the initial reaction in the weeks leading up to the invasion and on the day of the invasion, was we don't really want to help the Ukrainians too much because the war is going to be finished in a couple of weeks. True. It's pointless. And in the book, I mention all these people, the German government basically telling the Ukrainian ambassador, I mean, not going to help you because in a couple of weeks, there's not going to be a Ukraine.

So you had this very kind of cowardly, you know, sort of extremely opportunistic reaction by the West. Not by Britain. No, Britain was, you know, Britain was the honorable exception. The two good countries in this drama at that point are Britain and Poland. And the Baltics as well. At the Baltics, yeah, yeah. And then what happens is that when people in the West see that the Ukrainians are fighting, you know, that they're not rolling over, and that contrary to their expectation,

the Russian army is making one blunderous mistake after another. Suddenly what you have is a situation where every Western leader wants to hang out in Kiev, you know, sort of, and wants to take this pictures with the Ukrainian president. And at that point, what you have is Ukraine becomes what I call a kind of a medium to which Western leaders try to gain legitimacy, you know, and look authoritative standing next to him. It's a little bit parasitic because they are being parasitic on what the Ukrainians are doing. And then when Biden sees that Russia is in big trouble, that's at that point that the West starts coming together and NATO is reinvented because NATO was a zombie organization beforehand. So NATO is reinvented as this sort of credible force. Europe begins to, in a sense, talk with greater unity than previously, not completely.

And then you have this apparent solidity, this solidarity in the West, which I still think is more apparent than real. But give them credit where it's due. I think at that point, people feel that on balance, supporting Ukraine at this particular moment in time, is far better choice to make than just holding. back in the way we're doing beforehand. However, I think, you know, so where Constantine you're really

are right is that because of all of what's really happened, globalization, not globalization, but globalist ideology becomes no longer credible. You have the fragmentation of regions and the

reinsertion of pride in the nation and national sovereign and recognition in the economic terms, you know, you can't rely on God or somebody in America to provide you with food and energy or even with vaccines. You've got to attend to those things yourself. And I think that has really created a much greater understanding that the nation isn't just unimportant, as it was argued earlier on. The national borders do matter and that we have to be much more self-sufficient than we were beforehand.

And that's creating an interesting sort of global dynamic where essentially we're going to have much greater emphasis on regions looking after each other and division of labor established within regional settings. And that might sort of fingers crossed, create a greater awareness of a sovereignous political outlook and also the kind of moral values that are usually associated with patriotism. and commitment to your nation. I think that would be a really positive thing. And you can see a bit of that. I was in Finland recently. And I just love the fact that there are all these young kids volunteering to join this reserve arm. Everybody's signing up. And I think that kind of attitude, if you see a bit more of that, could not be a really, really good development. Because what will happen, Frank, if we take the easy way out or the coward's way out, or however way you want to say it, and we don't give Ukraine the support that it needs,

What do you think will happen then? I think what would happen is that Russia, well, if that would have happened, then obviously Russia would begin to imagine that it can recreate the Yalta borders, and that would have all kinds of negative consequences in the Baltic states. It would have negative consequences in East Europe.

But more importantly, it would send out a signal that, you know, what really matters is your power, your might, rather than anything else. And I think that would then create a situation where wars and the militarization of the global environment would gain much greater traction than is the case at the moment. My big worry at the moment is not Russia.

I mean, Russia is Russia, and fortunately I'm not living in Riga or Italian. My big worry is the way that our societies, Britain and elsewhere, have kind of lost their way, which is why the book is really about how the West lost their way, and the way in which they simply have forgotten what they are, what they're about, and not having a robust sense of national purpose. I think that's what haunts me all the time. Yeah, me too, which is why I do hope this is the spark that we've needed to wake up from our stup. And I think some people are starting to realize we don't live in the magical rainbow, Unicorn world that we've sort of been dreaming in for the last 30 years.

And it's been a luxury and a privilege that we've had. It's been a great few decades for actually most of the world, frankly. However, in order to maintain that world, you have to be willing to stand up for it. And we haven't been. So I hope that's what happens. Frank, it's been a great conversation. I hope everybody gets the book. Here it is, the road to Ukraine.

As always, we've got one final question. Before we do our questions from our supporters on locals, What is the one thing that we're not talking about in our society that we really should be, in your opinion? Well, the one issue I feel very passionate about and resent that it's never actually discussed in its own terms is the way that we're infantilizing our society and the way that adults are encouraged to behave like children and the way that children are adultified. and that boundary between adulthood and childhood is lost. So what we have is a situation where we have a lot of biologically mature people, but who are essentially not encouraged to take themselves seriously and have that sense of moral and intellectual independence that we need.

And we need that precisely for dealing with the challenges that we've been discussing because this is very much a grown-up issue. And our children or people who behave childishly, are not going to be in a position to give a lead or to sort of fight back against all the bad and negative developments that are kicking in our world. Frank, it's been a pleasure. If people want to find you online, if they want to get the book, where's the best place to do that? Well, the book you can get on Amazon, and otherwise I got a substack, frankferredi,

subcom, and I also got a Frank Faradie website. Perfect. Frank, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, or also all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

Take care and see you soon, guys. Nowadays, we do seem more risk-averse and we seem to be less innovative. Is this due to changes in society, family, education, child-rearing, and also the loss of religious faith? You know,