TRIGGERnometry - "They're Lying About Your History" - Rafe Heydel-Mankoo

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo is a Historian and Broadcaster specialising in Royalty, British identity, the Anglosphere and immigration. He has been regularly called upon for news analysis by international media stations such as the BBC, SKY, FOX, ABC, CBS, CBC and CTV. Rafe has provided live television commentary for every major royal or ceremonial event of the past 20+ years and, in recognition of his royal commentary, received honours from the Crown in 2002 & 2012. He is a Senior Fellow at the New Culture Forum, a Fellow of the R.C.G.S. and a Trustee of the Canadian Royal Heritage Trust. He has advised various governments and NGOs. Rafe was co-editor of the critically acclaimed Burke's Peerage: World Orders of Knighthood & Merit’ & author of the best-selling ‘A London Peculiar’ - available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1742575730 Rafe’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@rafalhm Rafe on X (Twitter): https://x.com/RafHM Check out our hand-selected sponsors: Ketone IQ: Save 30% off your first subscription order & receive a free six-pack of Ketone-IQ with https://ketone.com/TRIGGERNOMETRY Mint Mobile: To get your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to https://mintmobile.com/TRIGGER Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist 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

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. The way the British people now talk about their own history, for anyone who's actually educated about history, just seems completely absurd. Why is it that it's only the British who are the bad guys?

I don't think there was ever before a case of a country. deliberately making itself poorer in order to advance a moral objective for the greater good. We've had decades of the gradual erosion of belief in nation, belief in the family, belief in our history, not only the genius of the West, but actually in the exceptionalism of the West. Nothing has done more to lift the world out of poverty than colonialism and capitalism. And that's something you can't say today, but that's the reality. So great to have you on. We always love having historians on. And with you in particular, the thing we really wanted to discuss is Francis and I both have always been interested in history and we both have a slightly outside of perspective, having lived in other countries. And so the way that British people now talk about their own history, for anyone who's actually educated about history just seems completely absurd. And we were hoping that you could go through some of these myths that we're all now being asked to believe with us and just debunk them for us. And what would you say, are the other? the things that we're being light to about the most?

Everything. I mean, unfortunately, we're in a position now where we've seen a complete capture of our educational establishment by the left. I was just reading a report just a few days ago, where in American academics, only 4% of historians are Republican voters,

if you can imagine that. I think only 1% of Harvard University now have right-leaning academic professors in the humanities. So we've seen something we've never seen before. And as a result of that, we've got, you know, one or two generations of students who have been raised with left-leaning views on history. What does that mean, Ray, for what's the left?

Because see, this is the thing I don't like that we got into the politics of it straight away, because to me, I understand history isn't an objective science. But I don't really care if there's a lot of Republicans or Democrats. I just want people teaching history, broadly speaking, as it happened and then they can have their own view on it. But we don't seem to have that. It's almost impossible to have pure objectivity in history. The best you can hope for is a balance.

And that's the point here. No one wants to have the spectrum swing either way. But when I was at university, there was about a two-one balance. There were two liberals for every conservative in history. So you knew where your historian professors stood and you could basically evaluate on your own grounds. But now there's no gauge. There's no one else to go to to get an alternative view on history.

And I think it's fundamentally important because history is one of the key elements that grounds a society and a people to place. It fosters that sense of identity and of belonging and of pride. And if you undermine that, then essentially you sever that connection between people and place. And at a time like today when you have globalization and you have the threats that we see around us, I think it's fundamentally important that people have a notion of who they are as a people. and also that they are equipped with the knowledge to be able to identify the purveyors of false history, to identify history that they can quite clearly see as either fake or biased. And I'm afraid because of our education system where children now leave school at the age of 14,

I mean, where they stop learning history at the age of 14, they simply don't have the necessary skills or knowledge to be able to identify bad history. And that's why we're saying the perpetuation of all these myths. And so it's very easy to hoodwink people about, say, the evils of Winston Churchill or Britain's role in slavery or the exclusively bad side of colonialism if people simply don't have the knowledge and skill set to be able to rationally evaluate what they're being told. So if by some miracle one of these 14-year-olds is tuned in and they're watching or listening to this, what can you give them as a kind of methodology to look at Britain, and the West more broadly and its history and go, this is how I put these things into perspective, this is how I balance things up.

What should be the core things that people should know? Well, if they are very, very scholarly, they should read the primary sources. I mean, that's the best way. If you want to have an unbiased, unvarnished approach to history, always go back and read original sources or read memoirs, read autobiographies if it comes to that about people. But read as much as you can, but also try as much as you can to search out on the internet, things like the history reclaimed website.

I know you've had Andrew Roberts on your show recently, but Nigel Bigger is on there, Nile Ferguson. Not just to exclusively read that, but read that in the context of what else you've read and what else you've been taught on the left. And I think only by viewing both sides of the argument can you hope to come somewhere near to the accurate record. Rife, so we've spoken and we've touched around the subject. of myths and whatever else. What are these myths that we are being told and that we've been asked to swallow as a population? Well, myths is a good term to use

because all societies have their foundational myths, right? So, for example, we're in London, well, I live in London, that was supposedly founded by King Ludd, after defeating the giants of Gog and Magog, and that linked us to the classical world when you had the idea of Brutus of Troy coming over. So those myths, you know, provide an important, sort of narrative and a fantasy story that gives a romance to history. What we're seeing now

are new myths being created. So you have Sadiq Khan saying that London was built by immigrants, right? The complete nonsense given the fact that immigrants only started to arrive here in the post-war period, apart from the Irish, but the Irish are part of the British Isles. You had, you know, Rishi Sunak producing a 50-pence coin saying diversity-built Britain. Again, completely factually inaccurate to state that. You've got now BBC history, BBC, for example, putting out this book horrible histories that claims that black sub-Saharan Africans have been present in Britain for a millennia. You have the Guardian claiming that Roman emperors were black. These are the myths that we're being told that Nelson was in favour of slavery on the basis of one single letter,

which has now proved to have been edited after his death. And of course, you know, you have the war and the attack on essentially every single hero that symbolises, in my view, the great maverick spirit of the British. So, you know, be it Nelson, be it Drake, be it Churchill. These are the myths. The myths that we have in our society today are targeted merely at, really at undermining, I think, the foundations for Britain's pride in itself in its accomplishments and its achievements and in the heroism of its figures. But we also have to acknowledge, for instance, everyone can take a drink. My mother's Venezuelan. And the way that people in South America look at Francis Drake isn't particularly favorable. So there's two signs, if we're being fair.

With Drake, there certainly is, but there's the idea that there are no redeeming qualities. You know, you can call it generational chauvinism, the idea that we're going to judge everyone in the past by today's standards. Now, some people come out better of that. Drake is not one of the most enlightened figures, even by his own time. But there's certainly a lot to admire. about the man, especially when you consider him within the context of his time. And also as well, the thing that I find particularly frustrating, Rafe, is Venezuelan mother, and we talk about colonialism, and it seems to be the British are the only ones who did this. They were the only ones who participated in the slave trade.

And you look at the Spanish, what the Spanish did in South America, which is brutal, awful, and horrific. And I studied it, and I was taught it because of my family and whatever else. and then you look at the trans-Saharan slave trade, you know, the Ottoman Empire. Why is it that it's only the British who are the bad guys? Yeah, well, that's why we know that this actually isn't about colonialism. This isn't about slavery. If it was, we would have exactly the points that you're being made

by the activists who are so keen to undermine Britain's role in history. And I think that's why what we're seeing here is a much larger attack on Britain and America as well. Because, of course, slavery is universal. right? And slavery is millennia, thousands of years old, as is slavery. And of course, if you look around the world, I think the British Empire, of course, is far from perfect, you know, and I always had to sort of make one of those qualifying statements, much like when you have Microsoft saying, I acknowledge that I'm standing on the land of the Iroquois. I have to say, I acknowledge that the British Empire did bad things, right? No one is denying that. But we all know that because we hear that every single day. So we don't need to go on about that. But the fact is no empire in history has been as benign. as the British Empire. What's remarkable is that Britain was able to maintain its empire with the most minimal military presence in those countries. And it did that through various means, and it allies with Indian princes in India, for example. But if you just compare it to what the Spanish did, what the Portuguese did, certainly what the Belgians and the Germans

did, the British Empire comes off hugely well. And you just have to contrast, for example, what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed, you know, because the Soviet Union was an empire, or Poland and Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria, fed as fast as they could, you know, to the West, trying to get into the EU, trying to get into NATO and so forth. Contrast that with the British Empire. When the British Empire voluntarily gave independence to its colonies, they decided to come back together again

in voluntary association in the shape of the Commonwealth. That's not something you do when you are under the yoke of an evil empire. And people like, you know, Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan, Nehru, first leader of India. They didn't want to overthrow the imperial yoga. They didn't want to get rid of the institutions and the structures that the British Empire had brought into those countries.

They simply wanted to run them themselves. But they respected the inheritance that they had. And wherever you go in the world, and whatever region of the world you go to, those countries that were former British colonies are the ones that are most likely to be wealthy, stable and democratic. And that's a great asset.

And in fact, it's the legacy of the British Empire that has enabled many of these colonies to become global players, you know, the English language, the common law, these infrastructure of the civil service, of the military, of the police, you know, the hospitals that were built there by the British. There are so many good things that were done by colonialism. I often say that colonialism and capitalism, for all of their ills, nothing has done more to lift the world out of poverty than colonialism and capitalism. Now, that's something you can't say today, but that's the reality. And why can't you say it? Why can't we have this very sane, sensible, rational discussion where we go, look, as you've pointed out yourself, they're good and they're bad.

There are positives and there are negatives. And that is how life works. Because I think we need to understand that we are now living in a post-revolutionary society. This is what I keep trying to explain to people. The revolution has already happened. we are now the underground resistance. That's why we're able to have these conversations only on places like YouTube and so forth, right?

We have become the new revolutionaries, if I can put it that way. You don't need to fly red flags from rooftops to have a revolution and have mobs in the streets. We've had this long march through the institutions. The buildings still stand there, but the people who inhabit them are cuckoos in the nest who bear no comparison or connection to the generations who built those institutions.

And so we have this inverted or subverted ideology now which views any any presence of Britain around the world as being necessarily evil because it advances what I would regard as a you know a Marxist agenda. I call woke American Marxism and Britain has succumbed to this American woke mind virus, which is I think is a virus transmitted by the English language, which is why it's more present in the Anglosphere and in Scandinavia, which of course are they're all bilingual there and in the Netherlands. But that's why we can't have this discussion. But I think it's also important to, you know, I want to expand a bit more on this whole role of the British Empire globally. I mean, you know, what slavery was also universal. What was unique to Britain and Western Europe was the evangelical Christian movement that engulfed the British Empire. And the British Empire spent the second half of its history atoning for the sins of the first half.

and it expended a sum equivalent to 2% of GDP on the West Africa Squadron, which was the Royal Navy Force trying to enforce an end to the global slave trade on the Atlantic. Now, I don't think there was ever before a case of a country deliberately making itself poorer in order to advance a moral objective for the greater good. And I think that's something that everybody in Britain

should be hugely and supremely proud of. So just finally, because if you say the word, I remember, so my grandfather, he was a doctor and when he retired, he became a historian. And I remember my grandfather, Venezuelan grandfather, teaching me about William Wilberforce. And we went to a place at one of his houses that he lived in Wimbledon because there was a blue plaque. And my grandfather wrote a book about the blue plaques. And he explained to me all about William Wilberforce, what he did, why he wanted to achieve, what he wanted to achieve to abolish slavery.

But I guarantee you that if you went down the road where we are, or in central, London, or even if you went to some of these hallowed institutions, these universities, and you ask the kids, who's William Wilberforce, I doubt they would be able to tell you who he is. Well, I know that for a fact, because I've encountered these students, and I've spoken in university settings, and what I tried to do is, you know, I tried simply to present facts when I give a public speech or a debate, because I think too often people get polarized with too much opinion on hot air, and I always think the best way to win an argument is to simply present the cold facts, which hopefully you can't debate.

But what I found very frustrating is nowadays. I mean, I did a debate at a university recently where I hadn't been for seven years. And in the space of that seven years, I could see a noticeable decline in the tolerance and attention spans of the students I was speaking to. And literally, you know, we hear about jaw-dropping moments. So I literally saw people's jaws dropping open

when I told them that, you know, there were more Africans held in bondage in average, than were ever transported over the Atlantic. They simply couldn't comprehend that. When I explained to them that no Europeans enslaved Africans, Africans were enslaved by other Africans. Europeans simply moored their ships off of the coast of West Africa and went to the slave markets on the coast.

That's where they came from. You know, if they explained to them that the Islamic slave trade carried on for centuries before the arrival of the British and the French, and it carried on well into the 20th century, with the British and French trying to expunge it, And the biggest opponents, one of the biggest opponents of the end to slavery, were Africans themselves, who were the British, had to try to force to abolish slavery. And indeed, the existence of slavery today, you know,

where the International Labour Organization says that seven in every 1,000 Africans today is a slave. That's 10 million people. CNN reported that hundreds of slaves are sold every week in Libya. And the kids simply couldn't accept this. And it's because of the fact that they're being taught. a very, very narrow and biased view of history. And I would have much more time for these academics who are spouting this nonsense about Britain and the slave trade

if they were equally vocal about what I've just said. If they were actually protesting outside, you know, high commissions and embassies around the world, you know, Cameroon has 800,000 slaves, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique. And yet they're silent about that. And you would have thought that the lives and the plight of people alive today is far more important than worrying about historic slavery,

which happened eight generations ago. Raif, one of the questions I want to ask you because you're talking about something, obviously, we've heard lots of people say, which is that there's been a takeover of the institutions. And I guess the question is, why is there an appetite for that particular message? Because as a historian, I'm sure you appreciate

that certain ideas come about for, there are reasons that certain ideas take over. It's not just, you couldn't just take over an institution and spread a completely alien ideology that would instantly be accepted. There must be something about the current moment, whether it's technology, whether it's our prosperity, whether it's a lack of threat, whatever it is that's causing people to be receptive to the message of self-hatred or whatever, however you might describe it. Well, it certainly is all of those things, but I actually think that there has been a long march, which has been decades in the, making and the whole idea behind the Long March for the institutions was essentially a realization that Western Europe and America weren't civilizations that were going to overnight become radically left-wing.

You know, you had Antonio Gramsie, of course, who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and he realized that the economic model of communism wasn't going to be a success in the West. They were expecting the communist revolution to happen in industrialized. countries that happen in feudal states like China and Russia, and there was a sudden realization that there needed to be another way to do this. And that was to very gradually and slightly and slowly push that sort of over the window, to change the reality and the perception of reality very gradually over time. You know, in 1968, you had Ruder Deutsche coined this phrase, the long march through the institutions. And he did that deliberately because at the same time

in America, you had the new left, which were radical extremist leftists who wanted to have an immediate revolution. They wanted terrorist activities and so forth to try to create this this Nirvana, this leftist Valhalla. And he understood that if you were going to achieve that, you needed to do so on a very gradual process, almost imperceptibly. And I think that's why we suddenly come to this position. You know, I call it American Marxism because, of course, it was a creation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcosa and others who came to America, after the Second World War and laid the foundations for this to take over the the cultural and intellectual means of production if I can put it that way So in essence to take over the institutions of museums galleries and so forth but also of the of academia

And so I think you've seen this pendulum swinging so slightly over over the years that now everything is ripe for this for what we're seeing the plan being put into action You know in 1984 there was a chap called Besbenoff if you know you know you know you who must know, or Yuri Besmanoff, who came over and talked about the four stages of taking over a society, demoralization, destabilization, and creating a crisis, and then normalizing the new ideology. Well, we've had this demoralization has been going on for a huge amount of time. He said that it takes one generation, 25 years, to demoralize the youth of the country, in essence, to bombard them as so much untruth that they become, it becomes impossible for them to actually discern truth from, from fiction. So you could take them to the gulags in the Soviet Union, and despite seeing the clear evidence of their own eyes, they wouldn't believe it. So I think the reason for the situation that we're in today is because we've had decades of the gradual erosion of

belief in nation, belief in the family, belief in our history, and belief in the, not only the genius of the West, but actually in the exceptionalism of the West. And what is the genius of the West? What makes the West exceptional in your view? Well, it's fascinating. I mean, that requires another hour-long discussion, actually, because, you know, the Western mind is actually different to the non-Western mind. The Occidental mind, you know, in many different levels. The genius of the West comes down to the fact that Westerners view the world differently. I mean, you can, you know, there's a chap called Joseph Heinrich has written a book about this, the weirdest people in the world. Weird means Western, educated, industrial, rich, and developed. And so, for example, where, you know, there's a chap called Joseph Heinrich has written a book about this. The Weirdest people in the world. Weird means Western, Westerners or weird society people can't, are very bad facial recognition, because we only use the right hemisphere for facial recognition, whereas non-Western cultures use both the left and the right. When it comes to memory, attention, spatial awareness, visual reasoning, there is a difference between both societies. Now, why is that? Well, he traces this back down to a thousand years ago to when the Western church, later to become the Catholic Church, banned cousin marriage. Because up to that point, the whole world had clans and kinship based upon these large extended families,

where your first, second, third, fourth cousins were all deemed to be equal to brothers and sisters. And because of that, those clans societies were very much based upon nepotism, upon obedience to authority, upon conformity. What happened in the West is once you ban marriage between certain degrees of consanguidity, you got the birth of the nuclear family, which doesn't exist elsewhere. So 75% of the world still has cousin marriages. About 90% of the world doesn't have the same notion of the exclusive nuclear family that we have. And once you had the nuclear family devoid of its external connections to clanship, suddenly they had, you got the birth of individuality and innovation, because the nuclear family then had to rely on contact with strangers. And the discerning feature of the West has been its levels of high social trust and its

faith in their fellow neighbors. Can you trust somebody else? Will you actually help them in a moment of need and so forth? You don't find that in non-Western cultures. This is a long way to answer your question. But I think it's... Right. Take all the time, because this is the best bit. This is so fascinating. Please carry on. And so what then happened is you had these individual nuclear families and they then had to rely on others for different types of help and services. And people then began to choose occupations of their own choice for the first time. And through that, you then had people forming contracts with other people,

but will you do this for me? And so you get the birth of contracts in Western culture, and they began to come together through guilds, in the original sort of trade unions, get together through confraternities, get together through the establishment of universities, and getting together through charter towns. Charter towns are towns that you have to apply to join,

and you take an oath saying, I will live up to my responsibilities to help. develop this. And once you have this cross-pollination between all of these different unique, uniquely Western institutions arising, you get innovation. And social trust is intrinsically linked to economic prosperity and innovation. And individualism, of course, was core to this. That was the foundation for the uniqueness of the West, because it's not found anywhere else. And it was on that basis and on those building blocks that you began to see the development of a very different, you know, type of mentality, a very different type of view in the world. And you see evidence of it today.

For example, if you look at notions of guilt, so guilt is very much a Western concept. It now expands because of industrialization. You find it in Japan and elsewhere, but it's something which when we do something bad, we feel guilty because we have let ourselves down as individuals. We haven't lived up to our own moral code. Elsewhere in the world, I mean, it's not black and white, There are gradations of this everywhere now, but it's shame that determines all of this. I have dishonored my family. Also, for example, if you ask a westerner to identify themselves, they will use achievements and attributes. So you would say, I'm Francis, I'm a stand-up comedian, I'm extroverted introverts, and I collect, you know, milk bottle top sort of, right?

You then ask someone from the, from an area of Africa, for example. they will say, well, I'm X, I'm the son of Y, I'm the husband of Z, and I'm the father of so-and-so. So again, it's family connections that identify who the person is. And the Anglosphere particularly exploded as a birthplace of notions of liberty and the Industrial Revolution and so forth, also because of the rise of Protestantism. Because Protestantism separated or removed the priest from the equation. So people then had to read the Bible themselves. They had to become literate.

And so the growth of literacy came out of Protestantism. And that's why you see the most individual countries in the world, on the ranking America and Canada are the most individualistic. Then it's Australia, then it's the UK, and then it's the Scandinavian countries, which, of course, are also Protestant. And I find this theory of Joseph Hiram is very, very compelling. And you can actually see it on a granular level.

So if you look at Italy, for example, the Western Church's ban on cousin marriage was applied very rigorously in northern Italy, but not in southern Italy. And if you want to see the difference in the cultures between North and South Italy, South Italy has a great deal of corruption. There's a reason why the Kosoanostra,

the mafia families came into an evolution there. It's fascinating to determine that even within the European context, let alone and broader globally. So anyway, I would say that is the origins and reason for Western exceptionalism. So the reason that we are so good at innovating is all of that history. And your point about Italy is interesting.

I've spent a lot of time in Italy. The south of Italy used to be very, very rich at a time when lemons were this precious commodity for seafaring, et cetera. But they never managed to convert that into industrial growth. And it is a very deprived part of Europe now because of it. That is really, really fascinating. But there's another point. Sorry, yeah, another point there also, because you were quite right.

The process of industrialization didn't hit southern Italy. But also this puts a big lie to the argument made now all the time that slavery was the source of the wealth of Britain, and that the Industrial Revolution happened because of slavery. Now, if slavery was the driving force behind industrialization, you would have had Spain and Portugal as the great powerful behemoths of the 18th and 19th centuries, instead of which they became economic backwaters,

you know, despite the fact that they had, you know, Spain had one third more slaves than Britain did. In the USA, of course, the southern states, which were the slave-owning states, didn't industrialize. It was the north of America that industrialized. You know, so, you know, again, the point here is that people are always looking for a negative reason for the exceptionalism of the West. They're looking for a negative reason for why Britain industrialized.

It couldn't have been because of Britain's genius that Britain became the first country to industrialize, that you had Watts and the great inventors and so forth. There has to be a sinister source for all of this privilege and wealth and genius that that happened. And simply there's no evidence of it at all. Similarly, there's no evidence that, you know, well, you know, and 1792 was the peak year for the sugar industry.

And for Britain, in the slave trade, sugar was the most important commodity. Now, in 1792, sugar only accounted for 3% of British capital formation. So if sugar really was this huge economic jewel in the crown, you would have had capital flowing into it from all sorts. It should have been 30%, not 3%. In fact, we know now that the contribution of sugar to the British economy was the same as barley and hops. But you never get anyone saying that beer was the fueled industrial revolution at all, do you?

So again, we have to always look at the facts here and the facts tell a very different story from the predominant narrative of our time. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car should feel like one less thing on your list, not one more. With Carvana, it is. Just go to Carvana.com and to your license plate or Vin and get a real offer down to the penny. No back and forth, no surprises, just an experience you can trust. Like your offer? Accept it.

Schedule pickup, and we'll come to you with a check in hand. Your time line, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today. Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. And, Rafe, we spend a lot of time in the U.S. nowadays, and obviously the history of particularly slavery is very, very different because they had a lot of slaves living there,

and still the people who are descended from their slaves live in their society today. I think objectively, I don't know whether you can trace it exactly, as that, but I suspect you probably can, that those communities are very deprived when you see it with your own eyes when you travel around the United States. And you also see that people's subjective feelings about that issue. People are much more sensitive about that issue there, even than they are here in Britain. What can you tell us about the United States and the colonial Americas in terms of all of these issues? It's undeniable that the chattel slavery in America was absolutely brutal and horrific and you know i would see you know obviously anybody who was around in

the 1860s would be absolutely entitled to claim reparations for the horrors the absolute horrors of slavery and much the same as in the british caribbean islands you know slavery was horrific there has to be said at the same time that black americans are the wealthiest black people in the world i mean so there is a lot of deprivation obviously but they still have the the greatest amount of wealth of any element of of of the african diaspora but the you know the call now today you know this is this whole idea of inherited inherited trauma for example you know we're talking about eight generations now we're talking about the great great great great great great great great great grandchildren and the whole issue of of of giving reparations or compensating people

for the past is I don't think it holds any water because reparations are fundamentally an issue of tort law. It's about putting the victim back into the position they would have been in had the trauma not occurred. But I don't see why you could actually say today that the lives of African Americans in Africa is actually worse than if they had never had their ancestors leave Africa. You know, in 1973, I think it was 72, you had the rumble in the jungle when Muhammad Ali went to fight in Zaire. And he was asked by one, the journalist, he said, well, what do you think of Africa. He said, I'm so glad my granddaddy got on that boat. Now, this is a black civil rights activists, right? And, you know, he could see the difference there. So yeah, life is not great for

everybody, but it's a hell of a lot better. I mean, for example, let's look at it this way, CARICOM, which is the organization in the Caribbean trying to get compensation from the British and the Americans. I think it's in the region of trillions of pounds they want in compensation for slavery. I'm sorry, but the Caribbean nations are actually middle income countries, which rank higher on the Human Development Index than Brazil or Mexico. If you look, for example, the best way to do it is to compare the Caribbean to West Africa, which is where the slaves came from. So the annual GDP per capita in Benin is $1,400 approximately.

In Barbados, it's 17,000. So we're talking about 10 times higher income. The life expectancy in Benin is 62. In Barbados, it's 79. So we're talking about 15 years more life, 10 times more money. So, you know, as horrific as slavery was, and nobody is suggesting that slavery wasn't horrific, it's impossible for me to understand why anyone can say that the lives of people living in the Caribbean, living in this country, living in America, are worse because their ancestors were enslaved.

In fact, it's just the opposite, I would say. Do you not think the idea of intergenerational trauma is true, though, because think about how much your life will be set back if you were starting in that position, the life you were able to give to your children would be obviously significantly affected by that, the life that they would be able to give to their children. You can play that movie forward. I mean, I take my own example, you know, my ancestors being deported to Siberia because they were Kulaks or whatever. Like that had a material effect on all our family. If we'd been living in the United States and just multiplying our wealth this entire time, this studio would be a lot bigger. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, but there's

no evidence for that in West Africa. That's my point. I mean, we're talking about people who are 10 times poorer and live 15 years less in West Africa. So I don't see that. I mean, look, my family were Polish in what is now Western Ukraine, but that was Poland before the war.

They were sent to the gulags in Kazakhstan and in Siberia. I had also a family in Auschwitz as well who were Polish political prisoners there. So communists and fascists, both. Now, the idea that I would try and seek compensations for that, I think it's ridiculous, even though it severely impacted my own life because, of course, my family were aristocrats and had a great lifestyle over there. But I don't understand that, you know,

this idea of inherited trauma lasting for eight generations. Yeah, I guess the thing that I suppose we're getting to is how do we process the evil things that were done by our societies in the past? What is the healthy view of that, is I think the question for our time? The healthy view is to accept it and acknowledge it fully, you know, but also to put it into context of what was going on at the time. Again, don't judge the past by today's standards. Attrocities are always atrocities, but in terms of attitudes and so forth, those must always be taken within the context of the time. But as I say, you know, the evils of slavery were horrendous for the time, but I don't think we can say that the legacy of that today is such a bad thing when you consider the wealth, of the Caribbean, the wealth of America, and the wealth of black people living in this country

compared to what it was in Africa. So, yeah, look, no one is trying to put anything under the carpet. We must always expose. But the problem is we have too much focus on the negative and not enough focus on the good things that were done. And as I say, no civilization before had, you know, as Western Europe had done, had been inspired to try to abolish an age-old custom of slavery. And in fact, you know, it was not just slavery.

I mean, if you look what the British Empire did, in India, they stopped Sootie, the burning of Hindu women on funeral pires. They stopped the infanticide of young girls. Well, they passed legislation to stop the infanticide of young girls. They allowed Hindu women to remarry. They stopped head hunting in New Zealand, tried to stop female genital mutilation in East Africa. You had, you know, human sacrifices were carrying on, you know, in the kingdom of Benin and Dahomi. There were annual sacrifices of slaves in the thousands. You know, still carries on today, unfortunately, in many countries.

in Africa, in Mozambique and Mali and elsewhere, you still get witchcraft-related human sacrifice taking place. The British were trying to abolish all of that. So, of course, there are huge stains on Britain's legacy, but there's also an immense amount of good that we should be celebrating, particularly, for example, if you're women, because women's rights around the world were hugely elevated by the presence of the British Empire in very patriarchal, very misogynistic culture, such as India and so forth. And so the reason you have so many ethnic minority women in positions of power, and you have,

around the world is in large part because of the British Empire and you know the the creation of democratic legislatures across you know one quarter of the globe is thanks to the British thanks to Britain and the British Empire great do you sometimes think that we're being gaslit as a society when it comes to our historical legacy yeah I think it's undeniable I mean the record just speaks for itself just just open a newspaper today or go online and you'll see that we are seeing a concerted effort but the point is of course None of this is based upon a genuine quest for truth or justice.

Nobody, as I said before, none of the campaigners from BLM and elsewhere care about slavery. If they did, they'd be campaigning about modern slavery. This is all about trying to undermine the West in its achievements. And so let's talk a little bit about communism. As somebody who saw communism rise in his own country, I don't understand why it has this pull. What is it about this ideology that is so attractive to young people? Why is the marketing about it so great?

You see kids wearing Che Guevara T-shirt. Shea Gavara was a rabid homophobe who executed gay people, despised them. And a racist as well. Yeah. As was Karl Marx, a huge racist. You know, you'll have Churchill being condemned as a racist. Churchill never used the N-word. He very rarely used any racial epithets, actually,

and all the millions of words we have about him, he never once used the N-word, for example. Karl Marx was using it seemingly almost every day if you read his letters to Engels and so forth. He might have been a fan of hip-hop, right? But communism, you know, it appeals to, you know, you've got to remember, youth are open to radicalisation, whether it be radical Islam, whether it be communism,

whether it just be, you know, gangs in L.A. and elsewhere, You know, people want to become part of something. And the whole notion of Marxism, which is about the oppressor and the oppress, is very appealing to youth who are naturally left wing. Remember the old adage, if you're not a liberal, at 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative, at 35, you have no brain, right? So it's that age demographic. But I think what woke is tacked into that.

That's why I call it American Marxism, actually. And, you know, James Lindsay, he's got a very good analogy for this about the genus of a cat. So he says, Marxism is the cat, the genus. But then you have a cat, but then you have tigers, lions, leopards, tabby cats, are all species of cats. In the same way, you've had traditional economic Marxism, which is about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, you know, the oppressor and the oppressed,

and that was a direct attack on capitalism and on private property. But now we have all the other Marxisms now. So we have critical race theory, which is an attack on whiteness. You have radical feminism, which is an attack on men, and importantly, on the masculine qualities that made the West so great. You have queer theory, which is an attack on heterosexuality, but more importantly, also an attack on the family. And you have what we're talking about, which is post-colonialism and decolonization, which is an attack on everything that the West achieved. And these are all linked by intersectionality.

And taken together, that is an extremely potent force for undermining and demarcation. moralizing the West. And the reason it's come into effect is, again, because of this gradual long march where everything, all of this becomes normalized now. The people who are espousing this in the 1970s were, you know, radicals underground. All of that stuff is now completely mainstream. And the people who are espousing that wouldn't even identify themselves as being radically left. They would say that they are liberal. But the fact is they are espousing views that were fundamentally, you know, extreme Marxist viewpoints, just 40, you know, 50 years ago, and people aren't even aware that they are now espousing communist ideology.

And so what happens? Because you're a historian, can you see parallels with former societies and empires where ideologies rose to the surface that were toxic to the cohesion of that society? Well, we can see a direct parallel, obviously, you know, around the world, but let me just put it this way. If you look at China and the communist Europe, you can really see what was the first thing that happened in the former Soviet bloc with the fall of communism. They restored their national flags, and they restored their national anthems, they restored their orders and decorations, they restored all of the symbols and identity of the nation which have been completely undermined by communism and they tried to rewrite your history.

That's exactly what we're seeing here as well. It's this march towards sort of a year zero. We're having our history rewritten. We are having our heroes undermined. the entire notion that there is anything to be proud of in a society. So all of these ideologies arise through an attempt to undermine what came before. That's the common value of all ideologies, that they try to undermine what came before and replace it. But, you know, artificially constructed ideologies rarely last because, of course, they don't have secure foundations. Now, it took, you know, 70 years or whatever it took for communism to finally collapse. who knows how long it will take in this country.

But I think hopefully there are enough of us now speaking out against this and trying to turn the, trying to subvert the subverted, that hopefully it won't be that long. Maybe. But the other thing that has happened and this ideology has created is demographic change. With mass immigration, the difficulty I see is that you're increasingly not one people, right? So in that situation, it's hard to see how you make your way back. Unless people do what you and I have done or your family have done, and we all through us have done, which is integrate and adopt the values of the society to which we've come, right?

But integration is one of the greatest dilemmas we're facing, right? I mean, in the 80s and 90s, we had an immigration of 50,000 a year. We had more immigration last year than the entire decade of the 1980s combined. We've had more immigration in the last 25 years than in the last 25 years than in the last last 2,000 years. So the idea that you can integrate such large numbers of people is simply impossible because there's no incentive for them to integrate, right? Because they have their own communities. They watch satellite television. They're not even watching any content or any, they don't have any exposure to the rest of society. Now look, my family arrived here in 1940

with the Polish government when Hitler invaded France and de Gaul came over and the free French and so forth. And my family were as, you know, the gold standard. for what you would want. They spoke English. They loved Britain, had a picture of the queen in the living room, went to Ascot and Henley and did all that sort of stuff. But they still, after 60 years living here, they still never identified as British. So we'd be watching a documentary and my great uncle would say, gosh, don't the British make great documentaries? Things like this. They absolutely loved the crime, but he still never felt part of it. Now, what we've been told, of course, is that, oh, that's just the first generation, you know, second and third generations

will automatically assimilate. Now, that does happen, for example, for the Polish community and European communities who come from a similar cultural background. But what we've seen from all the latest polling, for example, is that Muslim youth are far more radicalized than their parents or their grandparents. Do we know why that is?

Well, that's a very good world. I don't know necessarily why it is. I think it's because they don't feel a natural affinity to Britain, and they have a... It's much the same way. that if you went to Canada in the 1950s, they were more English than the English. I think that there's a great thing they identify more with their homeland because that's all they hear from their parents. And so they create in their mind this ultra-orthodox version

of what they think but exists in the homeland. So, you know, one third of youth, age 16 to 24, according to a policy exchange report, believe you should be put to death if you leave the faith for, you know, apostasy. A majority believe that homosexuality should be illegal compared to percent who don't. Sixty-two percent believe that you should have restrictions on free speech. A majority believe that, you know, a picture of Muhammad should be illegal to be shown. These are far more strongly felt amongst the youth of Britain than amongst their parents and their grandparents. And I think it's impossible to expect people who live in ghettoized communities, as increasingly as the case, to feel any affinity with Britain. And why would they want to integrate when

all the messaging they get is that Britain is a terrible country. You know, when the media and the universities and our institutions are constantly denigrating Britain's achievements, why would they feel a need to integrate? And when we're elevating minority cultures over British culture, when we are constantly trying to affirm everyone's existing identity, there is no incentive, and it's no surprise, therefore, that they're going to cleave more to that sort of masculine,

well-defined identity of their fathers. What it actually talks about as well, and we touched on this, is a deep sense of alienation here. Because a lot of these kids, I imagine, although they may say they're Bangladesh, you, Pakistani, whatever else, I can pretty much guarantee that if they went to those countries, the people in those countries would say, no, you're not. You're not one of us. You're British. But then when they're in Britain, they don't feel an affinity with that country. So it makes sense in a way that you're cleave to something and you become more extreme as a result

because you feel like you don't belong anywhere. Yeah, but you don't find the same levels with Hindus. You don't find the same thing with Sikhs, for example. You don't find the same thing with Chinese who come over here. There is something about the Islamic culture which fosters this. And unfortunately, they are living in these increasingly segregated communities. And we know that Muslims are twice as likely to become extreme.

if they live in ghettoized communities. And these communities, unfortunately, are almost like petri dishes, you know, allowing the cultivation of cultural practices, which we would find abhorrent in the rest of society. And that is, I think, a huge challenge that nobody is willing to discuss, you know, honor killings, child marriages, arranged marriages, rape gangs. You know, Britain is now the world's leading country in acid attacks. These are all practices that are happening within this country which the mainstream media won't touch and won't discuss. And forget integration. We still first need to tackle these sort of sinister

and destructive corrosive elements which are increasingly present in what is becoming a fractured ethno-nationalist state where you have these silos developing, you know, from Bradford and Burnley, Birmingham, these places, there are areas of these cities which are now 90% Muslim. And the Danes had a very good approach to all of this

where they have been knocking down out of these ghettos, super ghettos as they call them, and they have a policy now where only no more than 30% of any community can be ethnic minority. The idea they're being to enforce a predominance of Danish values, Danish culture, ethnic minorities were born in Denmark,

they have to undergo 30 hours a week of Danish childcare, where they are taught Danish language, Danish values, and so forth. In school settings, no more than 30% of schools can have ethnic minorities in them. And that's the only way that you can ever hope to have some attempt at integrating, because right now, you know, it was reported in the Daily Mail that there are schools in the north of England where children think that actually Britain is predominantly Asian, because that's all they see every day around them. That's not. There's no hope to have any attempt at integration when you're...

you have that sort of dynamic and demographics. Yeah, but demographics are the greatest challenge we face. I mean, you know, Professor David Coleman, who's a leading professor of demography, Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, he said in the writing a paper in 2010 saying by 266, white British will become an ethnic minority. Now he based that upon immigration figures, which were half of what we're currently experiencing, which by my calculation means at some point in the 2050s, white British are going to become an ethnic minority. So at what point, how can you expect people to integrate into a society

when the indigenous population is itself an ethnic minority? You know, at what point does Britain stop becoming Britain? If Britain's only 30% white British, is it still Britain? Well, what we're talking about here really is the obliteration of a culture, aren't we? And if you don't have a homogenous culture, then you don't have a society. Precisely. Well, that is the long march through the institution. And it's all about using minorities, be they ethnic minorities, be they gay, be they women, be they trans, using ethnic minorities to advance the agenda in a way that the proletariat, the working classes never did because the working classes ended up being small sea conservatives, the same types who voted in the Red Wall for Boris Johnson, you know, patriots who still lean left on economics. So it is actually a real issue. And are you hopeful, Ralph, looking at the way things are unfolding?

Do you think there is a way of turning this back? Well, with demographics, I don't know. I mean, this is the greatest challenge. You know, whenever I talk about immigration, people say, oh, well, how can you of all people be opposed to all of this? And I always say, look, there's a difference between mass immigration and immigration, right? So what we had in the 80s and 90s was 50,000 a year. And we had iconic British role models who were black or Asian, right?

You had Daly Thompson, you had Tesla standards, Linford Christie, you know, you had Freddie Mercury. Nobody saw them through the prism of race. They were all British, right? Now everything that we're seeing is through the prism of race. And that's been the most destructive aspect of what we're seeing right now in our society. And the greatest tragedy of the last 14 years

is that we've had a conservative government in place who could have reversed that long, Mars through institutions. Because, you know, Tony Blair had 13 years in which he was able to unfurl his plan for restructuring and changing the face of Britain. And remember, mass immigration started under Tony Blair. Part of the reason we know from Andrew Neither,

the former speech writer to the immigration minister, was to rub the rights nose in diversity because, of course, 80% of ethnic minorities tend to vote for the Labour Party. And so the idea of new labour was to flood the nation with a new voting demographic who would ensure that in decades to come, they would be in charge.

And if you look at London and Birmingham, and these are essentially one-party states. The great tragedy is that conservatives put the pedal to the medal, right? They just continued and accelerated all of that. And we now have a Labour government in place right now, which is simply going to continue. I don't think you're going to see any dramatic decline in immigration. And unless that is taking control of,

I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel in terms of the greater struggle of Britain. I do think that in terms of wokeery and the education system, I do think that there is a way that we can actually see. see light at the end of the tunnel because of the fact that you've got a lot of socially conservative people coming in who are going to reject a lot of the woke values which are being spouted. That's why I think there's a bit of a hope on that side. But demographics absolutely is the greatest challenge of our day. Right. And just before we wrap up, coming back to the

history side of things, one of the things I've never really understood is why historians have gone along with this. I remember I read this brilliant book. I was staying with a friend and I picked up a book off the shelf called The People's History of Britain. I don't remember the author's name, but it was a female author. And I read it, I swallowed it, inhaled it in a couple of days. It was fantastic. And I then was like, oh, I want to read more of these. So I went online and I bought a book called The People's History of America or the United

States by a guy called Howard Zinn. And I read it for about two chapters. And I wanted to throw up in the bin and I ended up putting the book in the bin because it was just this one-sided America is all evil. there was no balance, there was no attempt to present any objective view of history. But it seems to me like historians, you said it yourself, you know, history departments at universities are absolutely filled with people who think in this way. How's that happened? Because historians are supposed to be the custodians of the past, aren't you?

That's been, you know, the greatest tragedy, in my view, personally, in terms of my profession, is to see ideology, Trump, objective truth, and the scientific method in history. And the reason for it is quite clear, the left have always been better at capturing the levers of power. So in academic terms, that means the bureaucracy and the administration. So the left have been able to get themselves onto the heads of departments, chairing committees, and much as you see in the BBC, there's an element of subconscious bias in the hiring practices, but also deliberate efforts made to ensure that when, you know,

conservative historians or more objective historians retire, that they're not replaced with the like-minded people. But you've just basically seen this gradual growth in the, and it's not just in universities. It's also in secondary schools as well. We see the same thing happening, where you have 90% of teachers voting for left-wing parties. When I was at school, you had, you know,

a number of extremely right-wing teachers. Some of them will, you know, just come out, had come out of the war as well, so old war types, and those were the guys who would throw the chalk duster at you and so forth. They've all gone. And also got to remember, the publishing industry is very different now as well. You simply can't get books published by traditional mainstream university academic publishers, and historians tend to use academic publishers for many of their works, and they're simply

getting rejected. And of course, career progression. If you want to get ahead in the university foundations, you need to keep your head down, because you're not going to get those promotions, and you won't get tenure necessarily. Raff, it's been absolutely pleasure, although depressing, as conversations about the state of this country often are on our show. Thank you so much for coming on. Before we head on over to our locals where our supporters get to ask you their questions, we always end with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be.

Before Raph answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head on over to our locals. The link is in the description, where you'll... be able to see this. Do history majors have a poor understanding of history these days? If you're a conservative PR would be an absolute nightmare. Do you agree with King Charles' plan for a slim-down monarchy? Would you think it would diminish its popularity in the world like the other monarchies of Europe? Well, I would love to say culture and demographics, but we've just spoken about that.

So I would say, oh well, far be it from me to quote Tony Blair, was it, education, education, education. because we don't understand that there is no hope for any chance of saving this nation or at least restoring it to some sort of balance if we don't tackle the teaching profession. And you can change the curriculum as many times as you want to, but if you don't actually change the cadre and the type of person who's teaching, there is no hope because children learn by osmosis. So yeah, and tackling universities is fine, and there's too much focus about universities.

We need to tackle primary schools and so forth. As I say, you know, if the hair is blue, there's nothing you can do, right? You need to go for the younger generation. Aristotle said, give me a boy of seven, and I will show you the man. We need to understand that it's children who are being indoctrinated at a very young age. We need to bring in, we need to have channels for teachers to come in from other areas. So there used to be a program for troops for teachers, getting soldiers to come into the teaching profession, getting people from the corporate world.

and by that means you'll be able to introduce more balance into the teaching profession. We don't have a right-win teaching profession. We simply want balance. Rave, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to locals now where we ask Rave, your questions. What do you consider the five most significant historical events that affected the cultural development of the British Isles in the last millennia plus? This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium.

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