The Best Conversation About History You’ve Ever Heard - Dominic Sandbrook

The mood music about history, which I agree in the last, let's say 15 years, has been intensely moralistic.

Is that wrong? Like, should we not be trying to learn the moral lessons from the past?

The biggest killers were utopian idealists. They were people who believed in a better world. Hitler undoubtedly, you know, it sounds weird to say it, but he's an idealist. Stalin is obviously an idealist. Mao is an idealist. They think they are going to make a better world.

We now have a slightly sanitized and a self-deluding idealistic view of human nature and of what we're capable of. They've been completely insulated from the beast in other people and in themselves. Knowledge of the beast is so important.

Relax, relax. This is not an ad. I just wanted to let you know that you can watch this video without any advertising at all. No interruptions, no pop-ups, nothing. Just go to triggerpod.co.uk or click the link below and join thousands of our supporters who watch all our interviews with exclusive bonus content ad-free. Dominic Sambro, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you for having me.

It's a great privilege.

It's an honor to be here. Oh, it's an honor for us to have you. You're of course, part of the hugely successful The Rest is History podcast with our former and future guest, Tom Holland. And history has always been a fascination of ours. Our audience love our history episodes.

It's great to have you here. The thing we wanted to talk about with you is, I think given the current political climate and everything else that's been going on, a lot of people are kind of aware of the fact that the way history has been taught

for quite some time now has produced people who see a history, our history, the history of the West, the history of much of the world really, in very one-dimensional, black and white, quite moralising terms. And what we wanted to explore with you is how that was generated and perhaps fill in some of the blanks and the gaps and contextualise and add the nuance that I think history always requires. So first of all, how do we get here?

It's a good question. I think it's not so much actually about how history is taught, but it's how we talk about history more generally. So I do a lot of talks in schools, events in schools, to sort of promote history and whatnot.

And I'm actually always struck by how enthusiastic the teachers are, how committed to history, but also how little time they have. So they have very little time. A lot of children will only do history for two hours a week,

let's say, or two 40-minute sessions. So they're not covering a huge amount of ground, first of all. But I think the actual, the mood music about history, which I agree, in the last, the mood music about history, which I agree in the last, let's say 15 years, has been intensely moralistic. I'm certainly compared with when I was growing up.

By the way, before you get into that, maybe the right question, is that wrong? Like, should we not be trying to learn the moral lessons from the past? Is it just like evil reactionaries like the three of us who are like, you know, we can't judge people by the new standards? Are we wrong to be moralistic about history?

No, I think that's a very good point and not necessarily, right? There have often been ages where people are very moralistic about history. So for example, if you went back to, lots of people watching this, if they are evil reactionaries will say, oh, we should But the Victorians were intensely moralistic about history and they really did tell it as heroes and villains. So there's always been a tendency within history I think to see it as black and white, you know, good is and bad is. And that goes back as long as people have been writing history at all.

So you know, if you read, I don't know, Roman historians let's say, my co-presenters favorite subjects Tacitus, Suetonius or something, those accounts are very moralistic. You know, you've got bad emperors and good emperors. And often there's not much nuance when you're talking about Caligula or Nero or whoever it might be.

But I think when I was doing history, so let's say the 1980s, 1990s, the general discourse I suppose was not terribly judgmental. So in other words, there was no premium placed, there was no great value placed on you saying well this person is a terrible person and I want to tear them down and I want to diminish them and this person, everyone has said this person is a great, Florence Nightingale or whoever it might be, and actually they're a terrible person.

I think there was an awareness that we're all terrible people. And so it's not actually a very interesting conversation to have. And I was quite conscious when I was doing my PhD and whatnot in the late 90s, early 2000s, I did American history. So listening to a lot of people coming from America, that there was a new mood coming in actually from America.

I think a lot of this has come from the US, which was much more moralistic, which was much more about, I mean, there's a very famous example in the early 1990s, a huge argument about Thomas Jefferson. Had he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings and therefore should Jefferson effectively be cancelled? People didn't use that terminology then, but that conversation was already happening. And that was a sort of harbinger I think of what was to come in the 2000s, then obviously even more so in the 2010s and then 2020 the kind of high point of it The Black Lives Matter kind of George Floyd statue toppling moment

And for people of a slightly older generation like me That's very disconcerting because I had grown up thinking, you know, very much history is warts and all but that doesn't mean You know you you are open about violence and cruelty and all those things that happened in the past, but you don't set yourself up as a hanging judge. And I think it's a question of tone, actually.

It's not a question of what the story is that you're telling, but it's how you tell it. So in other words, anybody who wrote about the British Empire to give you an example. Anyone who wrote about the British Empire from the moment that it was happening, knew that there was a lot of violence, right? They knew that when the Indian mutiny happened and the British re-established their authority, that there were reprisals and they fired people out of cannons and all of that kind of thing.

But for a long time when people told that story, they sort of said, well, obviously the reprisals and very terrible things happened and there was a lot of savagery and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, that's not surprising because that's how people behave in history. But I think what changed was the tone with which people described those events. So suddenly instead of saying, you know, it's very, the grim things happen in history, history

is often very dark, so be it. People, there's a lot of suddenly then a weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and this is terrible, how could this have happened? We should tear down the plaques to these people, blah, blah, blah, blah. Almost as though people were indignant and affronted and surprised that something so terrible could have happened in history. Whereas I, when I approach history, think, of course people behave selfishly, greedily, sadistically, because that's in us. We would be no different. And it's not our place. It's actually, it's not even that it's not our place. It's a bit

boring to say, oh gosh, well I'm so terribly moral and these people are so immoral and they live there and they're got so compared with me. So obviously I think that's a really foolish way to think about human nature and a slightly, it's a very egotistical and self-promoting and pompous way to talk about yourself as opposed to the people who are your predecessors.

Well I would almost say that it's a denial of human nature. What's interesting to me though is how, why you think that tendency has happened. I mean, one of the things we might blame is the fact that we've had this massive period of, I use inverted commas when I say peace, but really, if you live in the West, if you've not voluntarily enlisted to go and fight,

other than the war in Vietnam, which was many, many decades ago now, you've never really had to be confronted with the reality that if you even, I walk around London, we're sitting here in the heart of London, almost every monument is to do with war.

And yet no one in our almost essentially the three generations that anybody will know themselves, their parents and their grandparents has any experience of that really in the West at all. Is that why?

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Sorry, it's very boring for you to have a guest on the podcast who just tells you the-

No, isn't it? It's great. It's just my ego gets bigger and bigger. That's what we do. We bring experts on to make ourselves feel good. You know you'll already agree with Fred.

I mean, that is the podcast model. We don't actually do that, but it's a pleasant change from arguing with idiots.

No, but I do completely agree with you. I think what we have lost is somebody described it as a sense of the tragic. So for example, we no longer have politicians with a sense of the tragic, a sense of how close we always are to the precipice as it were. But not just actually to the precipice as in terms of you know our civilization could fall apart, a load of people would turn up in our village and kind of burn all the houses down and rape and ravage and behave really badly. But also how close we

are to the beasts within ourselves as it were. Now I think if people who had been, who lived in societies that were geared for war and where war was a fairly regular occurrence, that would not be surprising. In other words, I mean, you just think about it in terms, you don't have to go very far back in history. So, go back to, let's say, the first half of the last century. You've got two world wars, you have in Central and Eastern Europe endless little conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s.

You know, if you're really unlucky and you're living in what's now Eastern Poland or Belarus or Western Ukraine, you know, the borders are changing every few years, endless pogroms, ethnic cleansing, all of this kind of thing. I mean, those are people who really do have a sense of the tragic because they know that things can change with dizzying speed and in a couple of years, the people who you've relied on all your life who are your neighbors may turn on you and try to kill you. And I think what's clearly happened is that we now have a slightly sanitized and a self-deluding

idealistic view of human nature and of what we're capable of. And a great example of this in the period that I've written about is the way that people thought about war and war crimes. So for example in the Falklands War in the 1980s. So the Falklands War by the standards of wars is a really really clean war. It's been fought over islands where only a tiny population live. The two groups of people who are fighting of the islands, the Argentines and the British, most of them have never been to

the islands before. So it doesn't feel personal for them. They're almost fighting, it's as though they're fighting, kind of, they've agreed neutral territory and they're fighting on this neutral territory. There are no war crimes against civilians because the civilian population is so small. So actually it's a sort of, in inverted commas, a fair fight. But after that war happened about, let's say, eight or nine years later when servicemen started to

write their memoirs, they would describe things like, for example, cutting off ears of enemy soldiers who had been killed as souvenirs. I mean it sounds, lots of people watching this will be like, wow, that's pretty horrific, right? That you would take a trophy or posing for photos with dead bodies. Those kinds of things.

Is that a war crime?

I mean people I guess can make up their own mind about that but here's the thing. When that was first reported, oh whoa oh what terrible behavior, how could we have behaved so badly, this is unbelievable we have to have investigations and then furious arguments, other people say no that didn't happen at all. But actually, if you read any account of previous wars, anybody who'd fought in previous wars would say, I mean, as grim as this is, this is pretty standard stuff. You know, Canadian soldiers at the day were notorious for, I mean, notorious is a very

loaded word.

They were well known for taking ears, taking trophies, for being really kind of, you know, they were pretty hardcore. Now because it's World War II, it's the good war, we don't make a great fuss about it. But these things happen in wars and people who had fought in previous wars were unsurprised by the reports coming from the Falklands. They were like, come on, this is what happens.

You train young men to fight, you know, to do the most savage thing possible, to kill another young men. And that line is always gonna be a little bit more gray and a bit slippery than we would like. Let's not, you know, be pearl clutching about this.

But I think what that reaction suggests, and of course the reaction to what's happened since and stories coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever, is that probably we have, we like our conflict now, very sanitized. You know, we like it kind of…

Robbie Reilly With drones.

Ian Marlow Yeah, right, exactly. We like it at a distance. We like to shy away from the kind of the hand to hand, the physical nature of it, I guess. And that goes back to your point about we have been incredibly fortunate to grow up in an age of peace. And a lot of people now have lived and died in this country or in the West more generally. They've had the dream. They've been completely insulated from the beast and other people and in themselves.

So they've kind of lost sight of that, I suppose. I love the fact that you use the phrase warts and all, which is famously Oliver Cromwell. When a painter asked how he should have his portrait painted, he famously said, paint me warts and all. And actually, he's a fascinating figure because on the one hand with Cromwell, you talk to my Irish family for example, and you can't hear anything but, you know, expletive-laden

invective from them, rightly so. And on the other hand, father of democracy in this country, etc, etc. But what's really interesting is how we can't seem to accept that people like Cornwall, great figures of history, have this duality to them.

Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think Churchill is a good example of this as well, right? That people will say, oh yes, Churchill, I know you say he saved democracy from Nazism, but on the other hand, he said some very cool things about Indians. You know, people are complicated. And I think anybody who thinks at all seriously about human nature or about even the characters that you meet in great literature or something, you don't even have to think about the people

that you know. You know that people are capable of tremendous things, but also terrible things. I mean, Cromwell, I think, is the most fascinating character in all English and British history. He's much more complicated than people think. He's actually much more fun-loving than people think, by the way, he didn't ban Christmas. It's not Cromwell who bans it.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. But yeah, Cromwell can be a very savage character. You know, when he's commanding at some of his later battles, people describe him kind of laughing as though he's drunk. You know, he's seized with this kind of martial spirit in the sense that actually we might find very unsettling now that he's doing God's work and his opponents are God's enemies and therefore they will be, you know, he will sigh through

them as though through chaff or whatever. So that side of Cromwell, lots of people might find very unsettling. And yet on the other hand, he's somebody who wrestles with his conscience, wrestles with what he thinks is God's plan, feels himself unworthy. You know, one of the reasons in the 1650s after he basically, he's got effectively supreme power and he wrestles with this issue about whether he should take the crown or not.

It's, you know, would that be too arrogant? Is that what God wants for me? Am I good enough? All of that kind of thing. And most dictators don't think like that. Most dictators can't wait to get their hands on the ground. So I think Krummel's a fascinating character.

And he's a really good example of somebody who, you know, there's a statue of him just down the road from us, outside the Palace of Westminster. Because as you say, he is seen as one of the, you know, the people in the Victorian period and the late Victorian period saw him as one of the great heroes of democracy in this country. Would I like to see, I've got an Irish wife, would I like to see Cromwell's statue taken down? Absolutely not.

Because I think as with all statues, it's a testament to a particular time period that in which it was put up. But also because I think it's good that people know about big complicated figures like that and they appreciate precisely your point about Warts and all. I think that's true of Churchill, it's true of Cromwell, it's true of almost all of what we would think of as great characters in history.

They're always more complicated.

Absolutely, and in particular let's look at the British Empire because as someone who has a South American background, I actually find it infuriating when people talk about the British Empire and they're like, this is the most evil empire that's ever lived. I'm like, compared to what? The Belgians in Congo? The Spanish Empire? The Portuguese?

It smacks not only of ignorance, it smacks of a certain type of arrogance as well that the British are, you know, not only did we have the greatest empire but we were also the most evil. I'm like, really?

It's a tremendous self-absorption and actually it's something that we share actually with our American cousins. You know, they love to, no coup can happen anywhere in the world, but the CIA's fingerprints on all over it, according to kind of, you know, very ultra liberal kind of American commentators. You know, indigenous people or people in foreign countries never have any agency.

It's always got to be the evil American puppet masters who have done it. And as you say, with the British Empire, there's a narcissism about some of the commentary about it, which is kind of, we have to be the most evil, everything must be our fault. Conflicts in the 21st century because we drew the boundaries in the wrong places, all of this kind of thing. Now, on empires more generally, my view on empires is actually very simple. Empire is the natural unit of human organization.

There are others of course, and we live in an age now where lots of people watching this will think of the nation state as the most sort of obvious and natural model, but no model is really natural. But empires for most people who've lived and died, lived and died in empires of one kind or another. You know, China effectively now is an empire. The United States is obviously a empire not merely continental empire across its North America, but

internationally

Having an empire is in itself. I think not illegitimate. It's the way that most people have been ruled It's the way that the Romans or the Persians or whoever the Ottomans organized their societies. One group dominating another, again, is not unnatural. It's the norm in human history. I think what makes the British Empire quite really interesting and really unusual is that right from the beginning, it has the seeds of its own dissolution in it.

Because it's one of the things that it exports is the idea of, you know, the rule of law, liberal democracy, all of those kinds of things. So from the beginning, the British Empire is kind of an internal argument. There are always people, lots of people in Britain who don't like the idea of colonization and of dominance and so on. There are always ferocious arguments about it. And some of the British Empire's most well-known celebrated critics, Gandhi, a great example,

these are people who are profoundly shaped by British institutions, British traditions, by the British idea of fairness and freedom and all of those kinds of things, the kind of rhetoric of liberty, if you like. That's not to say, of course, there's elements of hypocrisy and greed and all of these things in the British Empire, as there are in all human phenomena, all human institutions. But I mean, to go back to your point about, you know, the Belgians, Portuguese, the Spanish,

and so on. If you had, it's a bit like the philosopher kind of John Rawls' famous sort of conceit which is if you could choose, if you had to make a blind choice and you didn't know how rich you were going to be, you didn't know what you were going to look like but where would you choose to kind of start again. And you had to choose an empire, a European colonial empire in which to do it. I think the British Empire would be a pretty good place to choose.

I mean it's definitely not the Belgian Congo, right? It's not, you know, you're not in Mexico in the 1520s kind of ravaged by smallpox with Cortez and the conquistadors rampaging around what becomes Mexico City. So yeah, I think the British Empire, it's clearly not the most evil empire in history. It's not dedicated to extermination or to violence in the way that the Third Reich is or whatever. So those comparisons that you see quite a lot nowadays,

especially online, just strike me as utterly bonkers.

Will Barron Well, they are. And one of the things that also bothers me about this, and you mentioned Central America, for example, there is this sort of idea that everyone's living peacefully and singing Kumbaya and holding hands, and then these evil Europeans arrived and started being violent.

Like, that's not entirely my reading of the Aztec Empire, exactly. Right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, that's not entirely my reading of the Aztec Empire, exactly.

Right.

Do you know what I mean? You know, the more I read about the Native Americans in North America, I suddenly figure out they're not really, they weren't really, you know, they weren't really that peaceful or loving or…

No, no, no. There are very simplistic ways of talking about this. So even the distinction between indigenous people and European colonizers is wrong because often, so to give the example of the Aztecs, the Aztecs had come from somewhere else. They were armed migrants or you might call them colonizers themselves. They come from probably from what's now roughly what's now Colorado. They'd come south, they'd

subjugated people around them, they ran this empire, you know, they did sacrifice people to the gods, they did all these kinds of things.

In huge numbers.

They were no strangers, exactly, they were no strangers to violence. Now that's not to say they're terrible villains and the Europeans are great saints. They're both complicated societies capable of all the extremes of human nature. I think that's my approach. It's not to say, you know, because I've written about the Aztecs in a book for children.

It's not to say-

You probably have to sanitize that a fair bit,

I'd imagine.

Actually, no, no, not at all. Because kids love the violence.

Yeah, they do.

When I taught the Aztecs at school,

the kids loved it. Of course, why would that be worrying? That's normal. Kids, if you're standing in front of 40 10-year-olds and you've got 40 minutes, if you're not careful, they will be very bored very quickly. And the best way to keep them interested is to, every few moments, every few minutes, punctuate it with somebody having his heart ripped out or Henry VIII having an enema or any of these kinds of details. These kind of grim, gory

details are sticking kids mind.

They love it.

They love it. Of course they love it because people are fascinated. Right. In many ways, kids are human beings that they're most unseasoned. Well, in not many ways, that very obviously, they're most raw and unseasoned, right? And kids are fascinated.

Why do kids love gladiators? They're not really interested in Roman baths or in Roman law codes. What they like is the Colosseum and basically people, you know, gouging each other's eyes out and whatnot. Because kids, like all of us, they're kind of voyeurs when they look at history and they love the extremes. I think that's completely normal and natural and, you know, I'm not saying we should completely pander to it and sink into the

kind of pornography of violence when we talk about history, but it's self-eluding I think to pretend that that's not why people are often interested in history in the first place. You know when I fell in love with history when I was very small it was knights, battles, kings and queens, executions, all of these kinds of things. If you had said to me, no actually, little Dominic, age seven or something, it's much better for you to learn about the suffragettes

and the struggle for equal rights and all of these things. How many people are really going to be that enthusiastic about history? That's not to completely dismiss those subjects and say don't do them later on, but what gets you into history is narrative conflict.

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So I interrupted you when you were saying you wrote the book about Aztecs for kids. Yeah. Oh, yes, you did. Yeah. So I felt with that that you have two sort of complicated societies. You have a conquest that actually is, again, very nuanced and very complicated, because it's actually not the Spanish just conquering Mexico. The Spanish have loads of, they actually have,

there are far more, the great battles, there are far more indigenous Mesoamerican soldiers on the Spanish side than there are Spaniards, right? There are internal struggles, there's internal dissension, this is a clash of empires, a clash of colonizers if you like. So to see it really simplistically is, these guys are the good guys, these guys are the bad guys.

Now that's obviously how people initially told the story when it was told from the European perspective. Now the trend is to completely do it the other way and to say that everything about the Spanish or other European colonizers is terrible and they're greedy and they don't really care of their Christianity as just a pretext for their sort of ruthless mercenary ambitions. I think that's just as simplistic as the old stories, where it was the kind of Aztec

slavering covered in blood and the Spanish kind of noble Christian warriors.

They're both really sort of silly ways to talk about history, I would say. And I always remember when I was in Venezuela being pinned against the wall by my uncle's friend who told me in great detail about how Francis Drake was a pirata, a pirate. And I was like, well, I'm kind of seven years old, mate. I don't really understand what you want me to do with this information. But it was a very powerful lesson for me because it made me understand,

oh, the way that I see Sir Francis Drake and I was taught in school, to a Latin American, he was a pirate, a plunderer, a thief on a mass scale.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly. I think it's fascinating. These lessons are really good, actually. So you mentioned Cromwell.

Yeah.

If I was Irish, I undoubtedly would have a very dim view of Oliver Cromwell. I'm not, so I don't. It's not that complicated. People always, you know, looking at historical characters, you always have to be conscious of where you're standing, right? Where I'm standing, where you're standing will always be different places. Just because, you know, not because of any differences between us, but nobody can be

exactly where you are, coming to it with the baggage that you have. And I think actually, instead of, you know, these people get into really frenzied and fierce arguments, which to my mind are actually unnecessary. It's completely reasonable that people have different views about characters in the past. And the idea that one view must dominate, that it becomes intolerable for anybody to

say, well, actually, I quite like Winston Churchill. I mean, that one view must dominate, that it becomes intolerable for anybody to say, well,

actually, I quite like Winston Churchill. I mean, that's obviously ridiculous. You know, Winston Churchill, sure, I understand. I completely get that if you're an Indian historian, you're going to look at different aspects of Churchill's life and career that will jump out to you. And, you know, you may regard him as objectionable.

That's fine. I don't need to persuade you of silence, you say your own thing. But I think it's completely reasonable that people in Britain see Churchill as the incarnation of the Bulldog spirit, as the symbol of patriotism, as the symbol of winning the Second World War, all of those kinds of things. Why wouldn't we? I mean it'd be weird if we didn't.

And it's also as well acknowledging the fact that when you're dealing with these seismic figures who changed history in such a profound way, they're going to change history in ways that you perceive to be good but also other people will perceive to be bad. Yeah

yeah of course. And to take that on a little bit, it's mad to think that other, to reward people in history purely because they agree with you. In other words, to celebrate only the people who mirror your own prejudices and preconceptions, right? So in other words, to look back at the 18th century and to say, well, so and so is obviously

a good person because they believed in equality like me. But this person who appears to be very interesting and civilized and what not is actually a terrible person because they invested in the slave trade or whatever it might be. We can be horrified by the slave trade and think that slavery is wrong and all those kinds of things. But you've got to grant people in the past their own agency, their own space, their own... their difference, I guess, and

sort of... and respect their difference. I guess respect the fact that they... their moral world, their mental world, the baggage they're carrying with them is completely different from ours. And of course, what I always say, especially when I'm in schools actually, and this always makes the children kind of go, oh, is to say, you're not the end. Like, there will be people who come after you who will say, you were bonkers and immoral

and wrong, and why couldn't you see that eating meat is morally wrong or getting on an airplane is, you know, whatever, all these kinds of things that the kids will take for granted, right?

It's a bright picture of the future you're painting that, mate. You know, I really realized I was in Uzbekistan recently, and they have these giant statues of Timur, they call him Timur Khan, he's called Tamerlane, but they don't like that, because that's Timur the lame,

because you're basically making fun of a disabled person at this point, right? But I if you actually look at what he did day to day, right? This is a guy that every time he had an opportunity to go and invade somewhere Mmm, right kill all the men the women whatever right come back home I know need go and hunt and kill animals to chill out This is and that was basically what you did And that was the way that these people thought.

And when I thought about that, I just went, well, this person's brain worked so differently to me and to anyone I am ever likely to meet. These are different people. They think differently. The whole worldview is different. But I guess where it leaves me, Dominic, and it comes back to what you're saying, is a

question about the truth then. Because you go, well, everyone's got their own perspective, everyone's standing in their own place. And now you've got these morons on the internet going, well, actually Winston Churchill's the greatest villain of World War II. And that just isn't true.

And that's not because they're standing in a different place, it's just because they're

wrong. Yeah

Unless they are standing in Adolf Hitler's place at which point maybe they do. Yeah, you see what I'm getting there

Yeah, I do completely. It's a really difficult one actually And it's one that's I Kind of wrestle with a little bit like is there such a thing as historical truth? Hmm, I think to some extent, you know the conversation that we've been having you'll probably be appalled by this but to some extent all of us living in the 21st century are postmodernists to the extent that we all recognize that there

can be different accounts of something that are all equally correct or all equally flawed. Equally? Yeah I think that can be. No I don't recognize that. No I think you probably do because I think you and I I think you do be. No, I don't recognize that. No, I think you probably do because I think you and I, I think you do without knowing it. In other words, that you and I, you might have a take on history, right? And I might have a slightly different take on history, a slightly different take on history.

And we would say, well, we're probably not going to agree on this, but I can see where you're coming from and where you'd say it. reasonable narrative accounts of what happened. In other words, just to give you a tiny, really petty and trivial example, if we were both writing accounts of this conversation afterwards, we might write different accounts, but they might both be right.

Okay, fine.

So, in other words, what's the true account of our conversation, even the footage that you're doing right now, depending on the camera you choose, they might say, well, actually, the camera didn't pick up that bit of nuance. That was kind of lost on, you know, right?

So it's hard.

Or the conversation that happened before we started or whatever, when you called me a dick.

Right, exactly. So it's actually hard to, it's very hard to get at what the truth, yeah. About that, that was a really exciting conversation. At the same time as saying this, in other words, we can sort of see that you can have lots of competing accounts that all have some validity. So otherwise, you would be able to write the definitive history book on the Crusades and

nobody would ever write a book on the Crusades again because that person would have published

the truth.

That will clearly never happen. There will always be lots of different books on the Crusades. People ask different questions, people see different things. It doesn't mean that the others are wrong and untrue, but you can have competing versions. But you can't then, what obviously I think most historians would say is, what you don't want to do is open the door and say, well, they're all equally valid or invalid.

That was the reason I disagreed with you. Because obviously that's not... Because if I retold this conversation as, you know, a 644 black man came, sat down, and we started talking about geography... It's not true. That's just factually incorrect.

Correct. Exactly. Exactly. So to give an example of the Crusades or the Second World War, I think we could say there are many different accounts that are often wildly different, but they're all valid and they're all valid and they're all valuable. But then there are some accounts that are not valid and valuable.

So there is a dividing line between truth and untruth, right? So in other words, the Second World War, there are lots of different books on the Second World War, seeing it from different perspectives. Some that say, I could write a book on the Second World War saying a tremendous victory for democracy and freedom, blah, blah, blah. A Polish historian could write a book on the Second World War that says, well, hold on, we ended up being conquered by Stalin. Stalin's the big winner of the Second World War, not Churchill, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you

can have different accounts that you could say, yeah, I can understand where you're coming from. That's valid. That's also's what most academic historians or scholars would say. There has to be a point where you say, hold on, you know, they didn't just sit there and talk about geography. You know, there is right and there is wrong. And this is what obviously has become more and more slippery

in the last 20 years or so. So the examples you're picking up, you know, people who are getting a lot of traction, sometimes going on shows like this or on podcasts or whatever saying, actually, you know, Hitler is the great victim of the Second World War and Churchill is the villain, all of this kind of stuff, right? I think historians clearly have a duty to say, no, you're just wrong.

There is such a thing as fact. I guess it's truth is a very loaded word. I guess accuracy is maybe a more useful word in that context. Say that's just not accurate. It's just not correct. Churchill clearly is not the villain of the Second World War. Britain did not force Hitler into war, all of these kinds of things.

So I think it's slightly more complicated than to say true, untrue. I think you can still have disagreements. You can still have competing versions. But what has happened, I think, because basically the technological change, it's a bit like the invention of the printing press in the 16th century. Technological change means that suddenly it's like the ground beneath your feet has become

unstable. You don't know what to trust. There are loads of competing versions of reality, some of which are basically completely fraudulent and founded on nothing. And, you know, historians are... I guess it's also a bit of a problem that as academic historians have slightly vacated the field, right, they don't, they're not quite as public facing as they could be. They're not talking to the public, often they're talking to each other.

That allows opportunists and charlatans and whatnot to enter the conversation, dominate the conversation instead. Once you've left that arena, and if you're not very good at speaking to the public, then it becomes very hard to fight back against it.

Donny, I want to talk to you about the evil, because a lot of people use that word, particularly to talk about events in history, whether it's the British Empire, whether it's Adolf Hitler, and Adolf Hitler, when we think about evil,

we think about Adolf Hitler and Adolf Hitler when we think about evil we think about Adolf Hitler. And you look at these people and you go, in Hitler's mind obviously what he did was horrendous evil but in his own mind he thought he was doing good. And if you look at a lot of these figures from history, they believe that they were doing some type of good whether it's the conquistadors, whether it's the Mayans who were praying to the god, why wouldn't you rip the heart out of a child? You have to appease a god, otherwise we all die. How

do we reconcile that?

Even Bridget Philipson thinks she's doing good. I think, how do you reconcile it? Do you need to reconcile it? Do you need to? I, in the sense that human beings never think they're the bad guys. You know, that scene, the famous scene from the Michelin web sketch, where they're looking at their Nazi soldiers

and they're kind of looking at their badges and saying, are we actually, are we definitely?

Are we the baddies?

Yeah, are we the baddies? The skulls? Like, really? Have you looked at our caps recently?

Our caps?

The badges on our caps.

Have you looked at them?

What? No. A bit.

They've got skulls on them.

Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?

I don't, uh...

Hands.

Are we the baddies?

There's never a moment, I think, where people, you know, willfully, genuinely cast themselves as the villains. So to take your example of the Nazis, we did an episode of the rest is history about Nazi ideology and about why they thought they were, you know, they were doing not God's work, but they were doing science's work. Actually, they thought life was racial struggle. And they believed that they were, you know,

operating in the cause of racial hygiene and that they would leave Germany a better place and the world a better place, right? That's what Nazi ideologists think, it's what they tell their soldiers. Their soldiers, even as they're carrying out what would strike us as appalling atrocities on the Eastern Front, they sort of will write in their diaries and their letters, they'll say, well, it might sound grim, but it kind of had to be done and it's better that we've done it.

I think it's very hard to find people in history who say, I know that's just evil and I'm actually a terrible person, but does Stalin think he's a bad man? I would say not. All that we know about Stalin is that, you see I don't think Stalin is an inverted commas, a monster. I think Stalin is a Marxist which is slightly different. If I can say that a monster and a Marxist on this show are two different things. So Stalin thinks,

he takes his Marxism very seriously. I think the recent scholarship on Stalin has really emphasized the extent to which he's a true believer in his own ideology. He thinks he's operating, again, not on either answers, following scientific laws that will lead to human progress and that the world will be a better place and that collectivization or purges, getting rid of enemies, all of these kinds of things, that ultimately the world will be better afterwards and he will have done tough work, you know, dirty work but it had to be done. That's what a lot of people think in history, that this was, you know, more interesting people. Of course there are always people

who are just sort of boringly greedy and venal and corrupt or whatever but somebody like Stalin I think is interesting and chilling precisely because he thinks he's on the side of right. He's on the side of morality. And if the capitalists, who are the bad people, he's the good person.

Now Hitler undoubtedly thought of himself as a good person, as somebody who would be rewarded by posterity for having done what had to be done to make Germany safer, cleaner, happier, racially pure, all of those kinds of things. It's very shocking for us to think that people could think that they were the good guys. But people in history always think they're the good guys. They're always the

heroes of their own story. It's one of the reasons I always, I've talked about this a lot, I don't fear evil people that much. One of the reasons, they do exist in my opinion. There are people who are just a- Bad people. Evil, genuinely evil. People who like torturing other people

or killing other people for the sake of it, right? But it's very difficult if you're evil to motivate millions of other people to join you. However, if you have a very persuasive story about why certain evil things need to be done for the greater good, that's when you can persuade yourself into ignoring rules, conscience,

whatever. And you can lead millions of people behind you, which is why I am always very wary of people who have this very strong sense of certainty about the fact that they are leading us in the right direction. And just this one time, we just need to ignore the rules of normal behavior just to get to, you know, we just suspend democracy for a bit.

We just, you would kill these people or we just, those are the really dangerous people in history, aren't they?

The big killers, the biggest killers were utopian idealists. Right. They were people who believed in a better world. Hitler undoubtedly, you know, it sounds weird to say it, but he's an idealist. Stalin is obviously an idealist. Mao is an idealist.

Pol Pot, when Khmer Rouge come in in Cambodia in the 1970s, year zero, empty the cities, start again on the land. They think they are going to make a better world. And you know, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. That is the classic thing, that's what the Jacobin thought in the French Revolution. It's funny because I was only, I was rereading the Handmaid's Tale the other day, you know, a Margaret Atwood's sort of feminist sort of science speculative fiction book and there's

lots of people watching this will have seen the TV adaptation. And she gave an interview about that when she said, you know, the real enemy here, it's absolutely not an anti-religious book, it's not an anti-male book, the real enemy is, and I quote, utopian idealism. Because the people who are the oppressors, who run the regime, think they are doing the right thing.

And I think all great, you know, dystopias, 1984, Brave New World, whatever. The villains, as it were, are people who think they're good people. And I completely agree with you, and this is probably because I'm a very reactionary person as well. The enemy is certainty. The enemy is people who say, I know what should be done. I know what right, where right and wrong lie.

I know I'm a good person." And that goes back to the point I was making earlier about losing the sense of the tragic. And one of the things that I think the sense of the tragic makes you aware of is your own weakness and frailty and your own, you know, I think if we're honest with ourselves, we know that we could be greedy and corrupt and violent and sadistic. Because we know from history, by the way, that lots of unexpected people have that in them. They're kind of all those people who previously had been a boring bank clerk in Hanover, but

actually suddenly for a few months in 1941 or 1942, turn out to be the most unbelievable sadistic killers and then go back and be a boring bank clerk again for the rest of their lives. You know this is…

So it's a lot about bankers now.

But I think with all of us, knowledge of the beast…

Yeah, you're right.

I'm just joking, of course.

Knowledge of the beast is so important.

But let me push back on the idea. So you talk about certainty and you know, having that knowledge that we are all flawed and broken and I agree with you yeah but look at Churchill, Churchill was pretty certain he was the one raising the alarm in the 1930s, banging the drum he had been, he had made many mistakes but he had that certainty cometh the

hour cometh the man. Yeah but but what Churchill believes in is, first of all, Churchill is very aware of his own flaws and his own frailty precisely because he's made so many mistakes. So Churchill knows that he has a terrible screw-up in him at any given moment, you know, and his mad schemes often they don't work. Churchill I think has a, it's one reason I'm always slightly baffled by the intense antipathy to Churchill, by sort of the more sort of woke element, is that I think Churchill,

of all historical characters, has a very kind of generous human sense of his own frailties, the qualities and frailties of others, how complicated life is. You know, you only have to read his memoir, My Early Life, when he's talking about serving in the Northwest frontier in India. He's talking about the men he served with, Indians as well as British. There's a kind of, there's a rhinus to it and an awareness of kind of the complexity

of human life and human nature. So sure, Churchill has things he really believes in. He really believes in the empire, he believes in Britain, he believes that Britain stands for freedom and that the Nazis are bad people and that Hitler is a threat to democracy and all of those kinds of things. But I don't think that flows from that sort of intensely moralistic, slightly self-promoting

certainty that we're talking about, which is the sense of I'm a good person, I'm a really kind and, you know, a generous person, and I'm on the side of the angels and all of that kind of thing. I think Churchill absolutely did have the sense, what I would call the sense of the tragedy. So in other words, Churchill believes that, you know, life can be pretty brutal. And because he's seen war up front, you know, he knows how tough it can be.

And I don't think he thinks, he thinks we're going to muddle through. You know, his famous catchphrase, keep buggering on, KBO. You keep, just keep going and you'll get there eventually. But Churchill doesn't think, you know, I will lead the world into a place where everybody, you know, there'll be kind of lamb gambling in the fields and everybody will be singing Kumbaya and all of that kind of thing. Churchill's not an idealist in that sense, I think. His life, he is devoted, he's devoted his life to kind of quite concrete things to Britain, to its empire, to its traditions,

its history, all of that, but not to an abstract noun. He's not trying to remake the world. And I think one of the other things, because I agree with Francis in the sense that I think quite often the people who really do make a difference in the world are people who have very strong faith in things that they believe in,

that they want to bring in, the changes they want to make, et cetera. I think the issue is quite often what you're willing to do in the service of that. And if you're willing to violate particular standards and norms and rules about not hurting other people,

not killing other people, not disenfranchising other people in order to achieve your goals. That's where I see the distinction, right? Because if you firmly believe in a particular worldview, well, that's fine as long as you're not willing to use that to hurt other people.

So I think there's a couple of things. I think one of them is seeing other people as expendable, other human beings' lives as expendable. I mean, that's obviously what Stalin would have done. So Stalin's thinking is, you know, I will make this better world. Unfortunately, these X million people will have to go first, but I mean, you know, that's a price worth paying.

I think once you're using that sort of language, you know, politicians always by definition a political leader will have to make bad choices that would involve some people getting hurt, right? Even if it's in a very small way, because they're going to lose a benefit or they're going to pay the tax or something. You're always going to make choices. If you're a sensible politician, I mean obviously if you're like Keir Starmer or somebody, you

don't like making choices at all. But most effective politicians know that there are always going to be losers. There are always going to be people whose lives are worse. And you hope that there'll be as few of those as possible. getting into the game of constantly saying, well, there's a price worth paying. And fortunately, those people had to die or whatever. I think that's very dangerous. I think the dying part is where I'm aiming my...

And I think the corollary of that, to go back to your point about certainty, I think there's just a difference between believing something strongly and being suffocatingly certain about it. So in other words, I would say, I mean, you obviously believe something strongly, right? You have strong views. But I would, well, I would assume or I would hope that you're aware

that not everybody has those views and other views are available, right? Of course we all are. So I think it's being aware of the contingency of your position that if you were somebody else, you might believe something different and that that's kind of fine, right? I don't expect, I don't think I have a hotline to God or to the truth and that therefore everybody should fall into line with me and they're just wrong and I'm just right.

I think that's the issue, isn't it? Someone like Stalin or Hitler, they thought, well I'm just right because in both cases actually they were kind of scientific materialists to some degree. They thought the laws of nature and the world, I know them, you know, Karl Marx or whoever told me them and I'm just following those laws. So the other opinions are by definition illegitimate. They are totally wrong and the people who are promoting them are liars and basically I need to get rid

of them. Whereas in a pluralistic society, you're aware that there's lots of valid viewpoints. And let's say Churchill, Churchill doesn't like Bolshevism, doesn't like socialism, but he's perfectly happy to work with socialists in his war cabinet. Clement Attlee will get on brilliantly with them. And Churchill himself is ideologically complicated.

He's changed parties. He was once very radical. He ends up becoming much more conservative. You know, he's conscious of the complexity of a kind of pluralistic worldview. And that's what makes him ultimately, I think, a very attractive figure because I think what he's representing there is a kind of breadth that these monsters don't have.

They're narrow. That's their... There's something claustrophobic, I think, about their worldview because they exclude everything outside of it.

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And I think, look, obviously he's not... Is that true? No, no, no, no, sorry, no, I was checking myself. I was saying, I was going to say, I don't know whether he is, but the fact that it's in my head is a partly a result of education. And we think about him as the most evil man that ever lived even though Stalin killed more people, Mao killed more people,

and yet you talk to the average person and if someone says they're a communist, we just go, okay, he's communist. When someone says they're a Nazi.

Yeah.

How many conversations with Nazis are you having?

Yeah, quite a lot

mate with our fan base. Genuinely, do you know what I mean? No, I do know what you mean. I think it's a really funny thing. I often tell this story. I was backpacking in Bulgaria with some student friends in the 1990s and we were in this village and there was a bloke there, he was like selling old communist memorabilia. And we were looking through it, because we're interested in history, we were kind of looking through it. Oh look, there's a medal of Stalin, there's all this kind of thing.

And this bloke said, they have other tray. And he kind of pulled out this other tray away, put it away. Terrible. I'm not interested in that. But afterwards we were talking about it, how our reactions were different, right? The communist stuff to a Brit in the 1990s was kind of slightly comical, right? You could have a hammer and sickle t-shirt as a student and people would kind of, you know, or CCCP or whatever.

And no one's going to think anything of it really. You know, it's a bit of an affectation. You're sort of showing off a little bit, but it's, um, it's an aesthetic thing as much as anything. Obviously, you know, a swastika t-shirt walking into a studio, swastika t-shirt is pretty

punchy and you're going to get a very different kind of reaction. And I think obviously to some degree that reflects the fact that for us in Britain, Nazism was the real enemy. We're very conscious of the death toll. It seems nihilistic and horrendous and utterly beyond the pale, right? Somebody wears a swastika t-shirt, I think you pretty much say, okay, that's it. It's inconceivable to me that one of my friends could come over with a swastika t-shirt, I think you pretty much say, okay, that's it. It's inconceivable to me that one of my friends would come home with a Swastika t-shirt.

Unless they're Hindu.

Right, well, I guess that's, you're trying quite hard there.

Or a famous rapper.

Yeah, but you're wearing that hammer and sickle t-shirt in Poland or in, you know in the former occupied Eastern Europe or you're walking around with a Khmer Rouge t-shirt in Cambodia or something. I mean, that's obviously going to have a very, very difference. So it does slightly depend where you're standing.

Is that because of, there's also a perception of intentionality. There is, there's the sense, I think most people fundamentally don't understand the thing we've been talking about in this conversation, which is the Nazis were also well-intentioned. They think the Nazis were just evil, whereas the communists were well-intentioned. I think you're right. And the things that they did were kind of like, well, they were trying to do good, but then they just put these people in camps.

And also, I think the other thing as well, the difference is communists killed millions of people, Mao and Stalin, a lot of the deaths were actually through incompetence and the inability of the economic model that

they were applying to actually feed people basically. Yeah right, so that they do kill people deliberately of course they do. Stalin's purges, the Great Terror, you

know. But that doesn't compare to marching 7 million people, if you include all the different groups into arms.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you know what I mean?

Exactly. There's not this sort of, there's not quite the same industrialized, deliberate, methodical apparatus of extermination.

But the really controversial thing I wanted to ask you is when Francis said Hitler's the most evil man, blah, blah, blah.

Is he the most evil man, blah, blah, blah. He's the most evil man.

From my reading of World War II, like, I know this will be controversial. I'm not sure what the Japanese did in World War II wasn't worse than what the Germans did.

I think the death toll of, the Japanese don't have an exterminatory program in the same way that the Germans do. The Japanese, so if you imagine you had a Japanese guest, right? A sort of nationalistic Japanese guest. That guest would say to you, I can't believe I've degenerated to impersonating a Japanese

nationalistic guest.

I hope you don't do the accent because that really would take us out of the light. He would presumably say, look, we're doing what European colonializers.

Yeah, what are you?

I'll do it again. We're butchering millions of people with shovels and bayonets and...

He would say violence happens, people, but he'd say, did not Dominic say earlier in the show? Right. That violence happens and bad things happen in all empires and so on and so forth. Why are you judging us by different standards?

Yeah.

He would probably say that. No, because I think Hitler, I mean Hitler might, but Hitler has an exterminatory program which very few other empires do. That's fair. So to give you an example that you mentioned, which is the Spanish in the Americas. The Spanish, a lot of people die when the Spanish arrive. Loads of people die, and they die through disease, they die through massacres, all of

those kinds of things. But the Spanish really don't want to kill a lot of people, what they really want is workers. And they're gutted when all these people start dying in the Caribbean or whatever. So the so-called genocide that the Spanish carry out in the Caribbean, the Taino people, when they arrived, there were none of them left, right, within a couple of decades. And the Spanish were really disappointed because they'd wanted these people to be working the gold mines and whatnot for them.

They don't want to go to the Americas and kill loads of people. It's not part of their program. They want to make loads of money, and if they have to kill a few people, fair enough. As they say, that's part of the game. But they don't have a genocidal program.

The Third Reich is unusual in having a deliberate genocidal program. Even the Mongols weren't really genocidal. They were like, either surrender, we'll kill you. But if you surrender, we'll do, yeah.

Exactly, exactly. Your city is just par for the course, right? That's what they think.

So that's what makes the Nazis kind of different.

I think it makes them, yeah, it makes them really chilling and unsettling. And there is a sort of this application of the apparatus of industrial modernity to killing people. I think that's what a lot of people... It's like, you know, you think about some of the most chilling films about the Holocaust. There's the film Conspiracy, which is about the Vanzee Conference, and it's literally

just people sitting around a table like this, talking about, you know, how they're going to organize the infrastructure. Or the film, I can't remember the title now, where you never see it but you hear it, where it's set just over there, it's the camp commandant at Auschwitz, very recent film, did really well. And again, you don't see what's happening in the camp, but you see the banality and

the ordered methodical, almost sort of humdrum nature of the apparatus of killing. I think that's what we find really terrifying about the Nazis. And that's different I think from, let's say, Stalin's great terror. I mean, it's not unlike other terrors in history. There's a sort of an ad hoc nature to it. You know, there's a, it's a regime trying to purge people within it.

We've seen it many times in history. It's on a much bigger scale, of course, but it doesn't have that kind of, quite have that

cold...

It's kind of like the French Revolution and what happened after it, because basically you've got a bunch of these like crazy lunatic revolutionaries and you can't really run a country like that. So you have to kill them off and then you kill off the people who killed them off and you until you really...

It's the idea of the enemy within.

Yeah.

I think the idea of the enemy within is a very, the traitor within is a really dangerous one. Once you go down that road, so it almost always happens with revolutionary regimes. They're in battle from the very beginning because they've got the old regime, they're worried they're going to come back or they've got foreign adversaries as they did in the French revolution. So I'm getting so excited talking about the French revolution that I can't even speak.

And then when you start looking at your kind of, you look in internally and you look at domestic opposition, you say, well, these people are not just critics or opponents, they're traitors. And they're a threat to our revolution, then they've got to go. And you see that again and again.

And what's really interesting and worrying at the same time is you look at our economy, which is faltering to put it mildly. People are getting poorer, people aren't going to be able to...

I'm intrigued about where you're going to go with this. Is it... are you going to ask the key question, which is basically, is Kirstein Stalin?

Yes, exactly. I don't think he's that competent, if I'm going to be honest with you, or has the courage of his convictions either. But I guess my point is, do you get concerned when you see us enter these kind of economic times where richer and poorer, rich and poor, the gap is getting ever wider, people are struggling economically, that we're going to enter more turbulent times and these are the times where utopianism, socialism, these people are bad, that's going to start to creep in as people look quite naturally

for someone to play.

Am I concerned about it? I think it will happen, but I'm not concerned about it because I think that's history. Right, that's just what happens.

That's a really sh**ty reason not to be concerned about it, no offence. My entire family is going to get wiped out, but that's history, mate. You know, don't worry about it.

That is what I think. That is what I think. What do you mean that's what you think? I think that's what I, I think that's what...

You have children, right? Yeah. So what if they all get killed? Are you not concerned about this?

Well I always say to my son, you know, the summer will be over and winter will come I'm like, of course, I'm not concerned about it. I mean, I know it's gonna happen. It'd be waste of time to lie awake worrying about it. I think People who like us, you know born in the post-war period grew up in the years of affluence Sort of came of age in the post-coold War era, end of history, you know, liberal democracy. We still, even though we intellectually maybe think, oh yeah, I know that's not the norm and I know history is much darker, but I think still instinctively we kind of think, it'd

be nice if it was like that all the time, you know, it'd be nice if it was just economic growth and everybody was happy. It would be nice, but it's never going to happen. The 21st century will see loads of wars and disasters. There'll be a lot of, you know, am I worried about people being scapegoated or whatever? I mean, I guess it's sad that it happens.

It is sad that it happens, for the avoidance of tapping it. It is sad that it happens, but it's going to happen. Like, history's not going to stop. There will be people who are tremendous villains who will come to power and there will be, you know, massacres and stuff. Because human nature is never going to change. People will always keep behaving badly and stuff will keep happening.

And there'll be migrant crises and there will be coups and there'll be migrant crises and there will be coups and there'll be a revolution somewhere and all of those things will happen. Am I concerned about it? Not really because I spent all my life reading about it, about happening in the past and I know that history is not suddenly going to stop. You know I'm not Tony Blair or Bill Clinton thinking that brilliant the world is perfect,

we're in 1999 and let's hope that nothing ever happens again.

The world was pretty good in 1999, don't you think? It really was. It was a great time. It was a great time.

I guess it kind of was, but I mean, maybe we, obviously we think that for very contingent reasons. You know, there are lots of places where it wasn't great. Yeah, we don't care about them, I'm talking about for us. Yeah, it was great for us. I think this is precisely the problem, right? This is the problem about us having a slightly starry-eyed view of humanity and how history works and what the future will bring. You know, that sort of sense that people have now where they

sort of, you know, you talk about, oh, Britain's in such a mess, the Western world tearing itself apart, we live in an age of populism and polarization, isn't that a terrible shame and blah, blah, blah, blah. And often I'm like, you know what, when we talk about how terrible everything is, most people in history would say,

well, A, those things are completely normal. I mean, that's just life. B, you've got all those things that we always had, but also you're living until you're 80 and you have central heating and you get to go on holiday all the time and you, you know,

all this kind of thing. And your children survive into adulthood.

Right.

What are you whinging about?

You know, you've got all the... I think what people are whinging about, and I don't blame them, is that things are moving in a downward direction. Right. people are winching about because objectively speaking, I completely agree with you. Life's great. If you and I did my pin thing on my Twitter is the West is brilliant.

There's a clip of me talking about why we're all lucky and we are lucky to live here. But I'd quite like my children and grandchildren to also feel lucky to live where I live.

Well, that's what people are concerned.

Of course, I understand why they're But your point is that there's nothing you can do about it. I don't necessarily think that. There'll be lots of winners. There always are. The nature of being a parent is you want your children to be among the winners and not

the losers.

Indeed.

But ultimately, the nature of being a parent is also realizing that you can't control your child's destiny. So to some degree, you do your best. But there's not much point worrying about it. I just always think, you know, a thing that always plays on my mind, I think about this a lot, is what it would have been like to have been a German in 1910. You live in a newly unified country where life really

has got a lot better in the last few decades. You live in one of the most sophisticated, civilized...

The German people were amazing. This is the thing that we all lose because of everything that happened after 1910, quite rightly. They were an amazing people, so advanced in so many different... Like reading about the... They were like... I mean, you kind of read it and go,

Hitler kind of had a bit of a point. This was like a superior race to some extent in terms of all the industrial development. I'm joking obviously but you know what I mean, they were incredible.

Right of course and so that's 1910. If someone says to you then well how do you think the future will play out? You'd be like well it'll probably be like this. Yeah it's going to be great. And actually you know what? You could not conceive of how terrible it's going to be.

So looking forward, do I worry looking forward to the future? I just think it's unknowable. And there are societies right now that seem sophisticated, safe, united, that may well, you know, in 2050 you'll be talking about it and saying, my God, who knew that Belgium would have a civil war that would last 20 years or whatever. I mean, silly example, but you just simply cannot predict what will happen.

And do I worry about it? I don't really worry because I just think that really is a waste of time.

That's a really interesting way of looking at it. Maybe as we wrap up, the one thing that's probably worth asking as well is, you've delivered a masterclass of presenting the tragic vision. Thomas Sowell talks about this kind of being the core of the more right of center, the more conservative worldview really, which is human nature is what it is. Technology changes, therefore we express human nature in different ways.

Yes, exactly. Oh, before we get to that, actually, something else I was going to ask you, which ties into this. Do you think that nuclear weapons fundamentally changed the course of human history because this peace dividend that we've had is actually because of nuclear weapons?

Yes, I do.

Is that why?

I do. I think there would have been a third world war without nuclear weapons. That makes sense. There's no question in my mind. I think there would have been a war, maybe not immediately. Well, we'd be in one now, right? I mean, Russia, Ukraine probably would have become... Yeah, could be. I think there would definitely have been a war probably over Berlin,

and maybe it would have been delayed until 1960, 61 or something like that.

But it would have come.

Then, Cuban Missile Crisis, obviously, what holds them back is the fear of nuclear annihilation. Again, in the early 1980s, you could have had multiple world wars during the Cold War, and every time they're held back by nuclear weapons.

It's so fascinating. It's almost like human nature in that way, where the worst thing is also the best thing, because nuclear weapons probably will lead to the annihilation of all humanity at some point. It's very possible, in my opinion. But also it's why we've avoided a global war. It's so weird. But anyway, coming back to this tragic vision which you presented, I feel like the way we talk about modern things that are going on, conflict in Russia and Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, is partly because we've lost that, right?

Do you get where I'm going with this?

I do, yeah, I do. Sorry, I was distracted by the fact that I was resting my foot on your foot

and I thought it passed the table.

No, I quite enjoyed it.

And actually, there's quite a lot

that happens under the table that's triggering our interest. It's unbelievable. You don't get that on Yeah, people always go, why haven't you got enough female guests? It's because of him.

They said, I can't help you.

Women aren't into that sort of shit, as it turns out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sad. It doesn't often happen on podcasts where the host is playing footsie with your entertainer. But yeah, you learn something new every day.

We give them the special treatment. Yeah. about those wars and we're surprised by them, we're surprised what happened and we're very moralistic in the way we interpret them. And the way we talk about them, you know, genocide, like everything's a genocide now. Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? I do, I do know what you mean. The language of, we're sort of, we're horrified, we're surprised, we reach for extreme language to describe what we're seeing. Yeah. what we're seeing. Yeah, and I think maybe the war in Ukraine is a really good example of this because Putin, if he was here now, would say, and he said it himself, you know, I'm doing what Peter

the Great did. I'm doing what Catherine the Great did. I want to make Russia strong, and that's my job. And I really would like an outlet on the Black Sea. You know, I'd like Crimea. And actually, I'd really like Ukraine to be a puppet state. And that's what empires do. We want puppet states. We want puppet states.

And this is our sphere of influence. We'll do whatever the hell we want. We'll do what we want because that's what big powers do. That's exactly what he would say. He would say, look at you having a hissy fit about it. Now I think Putin's a terrible man, very committed to the defense of Ukraine. Pretending that Putin is something abnormal is a weird way of thinking about it.

I've been very, very pro-Ukraine but on the basis of exactly what you're saying, which is of course he's going to do that, that's why he can't be allowed to do it. Yeah, exactly.

Do you know what I mean?

Exactly.

It's the most obvious thing in the world.

He wants to conquer that country and it, he's not going to do it. He's not going to do it. Or is he going to do it? And I said, I wrote a column saying, I think he is going to do it because thinking about Putin, the way he sees the world, why wouldn't you do it?

Right.

He thinks the West is really divided and weak. You know, I gave the example at the time, there was a massive hullabaloo about Boris Johnson having a cake or something to do with COVID. And I was like, he looks at the West right now. Joe Biden is 3000 years old. Boris Johnson is battling with a cake or whatever. Why wouldn't you, if you're him, then you have that ruthless, cold-blooded, amoral view of human relations.

And all you care about is basically old fashioned martial imperialism. Why wouldn't you do it? And that's... So I think... So when people are... Is Putin mad? Well, he's not mad. He would say, I'm doing exactly what empire builders have done all through history.

No, I don't want his empire to succeed. I don't like it. So I think we should stop him. But I don't delude myself about like, it's an illegal war. What do you mean? Yeah, I agree with you about that. What does that even mean?

I think I agree with you completely. And I think most people who, I don't want to completely go down the road of saying might is right, but most wars that have ever been fought were, in averted commas, illegal wars,

right?

A hundred years war, a legal war. I mean, maybe Edward III would have said it was because it was a claim to the throne of France, but come on. You know, this is the point about the conservative view of human nature, I suppose, right? That people will try to do what they can to maximize their own power and their own stability and security. And we shouldn't be surprised when somebody who is not our friend tries to do that, you know, when tries to benefit his own country at the expense of others. Putin would say, you've misunderstood the game. You don't understand the rules.

I'm playing the game properly and you clowns in the West, you know, preening yourselves about your principles have misunderstood what we're all doing.

And it's also as well, like you use the word amoral. I imagine Putin would push back on that and go I'm not amoral, I am doing something very moral which is the best for my country.

Yeah he would and that's a fair point. One thing that's I think really interesting that we have lost is a sense of national interest. There's a famous interview of the story often told, somebody sitting next to the then cabinet secretary, I think it was Sir Gus O'Donnell, and they asked him, what's more important in your view for you to do as the British cabinet secretary, is it the Britain's interest or the world's interest?

And he said, I'd like to think it's the world's interest. I'm like, well, I think it should be Britain's interests. I think, again, you're misunderstanding the nature of the game you're playing. Because let me tell you, the Chinese aren't thinking, oh, I'll do what's in Britain's interest. If you're not thinking it, nobody else is. And I think we have partly as a result of the understandable revulsion of the excesses of nationalism in the first half of the 20th century, partly because we've built this kind of liberal rules-based international order and so on that so many people are very committed

to. We have actually lost sense of the fact that there is a competitive element to world affairs in which basically you know you do what you can for your team and that that means another team will lose out and that's

again that's the nature of the game. Dominic it's been great having you on we're gonna head over to Substack where our audience get to ask you their questions but before we do the last question we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

So it's something that you've actually alluded to already. So I was gutted when you brought it up because I was freeing and priding myself on having thought of this. It's actually nuclear annihilation. I think it's interesting how much, for me growing up in the early 1980s, this was a constant threat. You know, it was on TV, there were dramas about it, there were people protesting about

nuclear weapons, you know, it was wrong, you're not going to press the button, all of this kind of thing. And now, of course, we live in an age where we don't really talk about it very much at

all.

As an omnipresent fear it has vanished, yet there are more countries with nuclear capability. And to go back to the whole argument about human nature, nuclear weapons I do think probably have saved lives since the Second World War and prevented wars, but human nature being as it is, one day people will use them. And they'll use them I think out of fear, because I think that's how war starts. They will use them. And they'll use them I think out of fear because I think that's how war starts. They will use them because they're not because they are mad or because they're evil, but because they're frightened and they feel they have no alternative. And especially in a world where AI will be running a lot of these defense programs, I think once

that process starts, it will be very difficult to stop. And it's a bit like, you know, if you're a sort of existentialist philosopher or something, you think to yourself, how can people walk around knowing that they're all gonna die? Like, why are they bothering buying a sandwich from Pret a Manger and making plans for Sunday when actually their own inevitable extinction is coming? And the reason is, of course, your inevitable extinction is too big a thing to think about and it will paralyze you. And I sometimes wonder, you know, will our descendants living in their kind of irradiated

ruins say, how could they walk around saying how brilliant life is, you know, knowing that they're sitting on all this stuff, that one day probably it will go off and it'll kill everybody and destroy civilization. And the answer is, I guess, that we're mugs, you know, we're blind, we're willfully blind to the potential that this stuff has. And also there's no one inventing it, right? It's never going to go away, we're just stuck with it now.

So yeah, that's a cheery thought.

You really are an optimist. Yeah, we're all going to die in an ecologist. Enjoy. But you seem to believe that there will be people who live after that, which makes you an optimist.

Yeah, sort of mutant, half crab, half human, scuttling in the ruins.

And on that happy note,

head on over to Substack where Dominic's going to answer your questions.

Are there any keen moments in history of what if scenarios that you believe could have dramatically altered the outcome of a particular battle that you believe could have dramatically altered the outcome of a particular battle and in turn, change the course of a war.