Ep 193: Douglas Murray on War in Gaza and Modern Conservatism

Douglas Murray, journalist and author of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

Aaron MacLean: Hi, I am Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today Douglas Murray. He's a journalist and author most recently of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas, and the Future of the West. Douglas, you've been on Rogan and Bill Maher and everything else in the last few weeks, now it's time for the big time here on School of War. Thank you for joining.

Douglas Murray: It's a great pleasure to be with you and your listeners.

Aaron MacLean: It will surprise no one who's listening to us to learn that you are English.

Douglas Murray: Damn, did I give it away?

Aaron MacLean: And you had what would generally be considered to be a good education there. And yet here you are, a philosemite, a man of the right.

Douglas Murray: I don't like philosemite, by the way. I don't like it.

Aaron MacLean: Oh, you don't? Oh, you don't? I'm curious, what's your quibble with the term?

Douglas Murray: I don't like the term philosemitism because I believe it's always risking being the flip side of antisemitism. Philosemitism attributes the same things to the Jews that an antisemite might, but thinks that it's good.

Aaron MacLean: Yeah, this is the pre-October 7th the sort of Chinese treatment of Israel?

Douglas Murray: Absolutely, absolutely. No, I believe I'm a defender of Western civilization, I'm a defender of Judeo-Christian tradition and its values, and I'd like to think I'm a defender of the truth and that's what motivates me.

Aaron MacLean: Point taken. I think my question will still work, though, which is your intellectual trajectory is not the mainstream trajectory I think of probably a lot of the folks that you were in university with. What happened? We sort of started this conversation in the present, how did you end up in Israel the first time? How did you end up embracing the kinds of arguments and fights that you've embraced?

Douglas Murray: Well, several reasons. One that I've described before is that I was struck by something that happened after 9/11, which was the divide between people who believed that America had it coming and that there could be some excuse for it, and those of us who just instinctively were like, "Absolutely not, absolutely not." You can make any number of critiques of America, American foreign policy, American action, but don't you dare go down the route of saying America had it coming, as the London Review of Books infamously put it in 2001. I noticed that there was this nascent anti-Americanism in Europe, which had been there forever, but it had particularly been there since 1945 because the French, for instance, will never forgive the Americans, Canadians, British, the Allies, they'll never forgive us for liberating them. They would like to think they'd liberated themselves.

Aaron MacLean: As the vice president would say, have they even said thank you?

Douglas Murray: The truth is that they have, but they probably can never say thank you enough. But they have, but it remains a lingering thing on the French right as well as the French left. And I came to research my first book in the United States as a teenager in the 1990s and immediately fell in love with America in a very deep way. I admired this country, I admired its virtues, its attributes, the enormous opportunities it gave to people who embraced it, who wanted to be part of it. This was maybe not a natural, it wasn't unusual, but it wasn't the most natural sentiment for somebody brought up in Britain in the late 20th century to have, but it wasn't uncommon by any means. But there were leftists and rightists who disdained America and who used the post-9/11 period to really sort of blossom in their dislike and hatred.

But I always saw that the same people who were against America, they always ended up, they were always against Israel. They were always sort of flying Palestinian flags and chanting for 'River to the sea' and all that stuff. And they were always anti-British. And this line of prejudice, this line of hatred, as I have seen it for some 25 years now, goes from hating Israel most of all, for reasons that we can get into, but most of all perhaps is the epitome of the West as they see it. To hatred of Britain and Western Europe and hatred of America. But America is the big one.

So I realized fairly clearly then that these people were against everything I loved, everything I care for, everything I think is good. They were against the society that I'm very grateful, for my own country of birth, Great Britain, and America. I think the world has been immeasurably better by having Britain and then America as dominant powers. And I think the people who think that, the transatlantic alliance, have been the worst force simply among much else never contend with the fact that all of the rivals or competitors who could have taken the job would've been infinitely worse. I'd love to see the people who think that America is one of the great transgressors of human rights globally, see what they'll do when they bring their human rights complaints to the Chinese Communist Party.

So I think it's a long-winded answer to a short question, but it's a complicated question and one I've thought about, it's both complicated and simple. When somebody declares war on my society, I don't care for them.

Aaron MacLean: I owe whatever my views are started to crystallize as a consequence of conversations I had when I was living in your mother country around the time of the Iraq War. And I was ambivalent, I was ambivalent. I was pro-Afghanistan war and had sort of conventional American views 9/11, but I was ambivalent about the invasion of Iraq as a young person. I remember being in the college bar in your country and saying things like, "Well, but Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. We can all agree on that, can't we?" Without saying, "And therefore it seems wise that we should invade." And no, no, we could not, we could not agree at all on that. In fact, it turns out I was perhaps one of the few people in the room who seemed to believe that despite what seemed like decent evidence to me.

Douglas Murray: Well, one of the most interesting, thoughtful, reflective comments I ever heard about that period was actually from the novelist Ian McEwen, who made the observation that... I mean, he was against Iraq, and maybe we can get into that because I think the post-Iraq period is one of the things that is responsible for some of the noxious things on the right as well as the left that we've seen in the last 18 months and perhaps two decades. But I remember Ian McEwen saying that the people who were against the Iraq War, when they were marching through the streets, they should have done so in silence knowing that if they had their way, life for Iraqis would continue as hell. And I thought that was a brilliant observation because too few people actually took into account, and certainly now very few people take into account what the nature of that regime was and what Iraq would look like today if Uday and Qusay Hussein had inherited it. It's a what if, but everything looking back is.

Aaron MacLean: Some folks who I've spoken to in Israel, I suppose this mostly comes from the IDF, have framed their fight in the following way, that World War III has already begun and Israel is fighting in some early stage of it, much as the 1930s were occupied with the Japanese war in Manchuria or the Spanish Civil War and various conflicts that ultimately sort of coalesce by the forties. What's your reaction to that? Do you see a global element to this?

Douglas Murray: I don't love the framing of that because I'm intensely resistant to the view of history that seems to believe that the world is fated to always replay the 1930s and 1940s. I think that one of the reasons why, this isn't the case with some of the people you've spoken to necessarily, but I think outside of the region in the wider world, taking the wider west, particularly America you might say, there seems to be a fallback on the '30s and '40s comparison I think effectively because nobody knows any other history. And therefore in the same way that anyone who's bad has to be Hitler, anyone who's not opposing Hitler has to be Neville Chamberlain, and it's always a slide into 1939. I don't accept that, I don't like that framing just because I think it's too monotone and it's not quite fit for the purpose of what we're in at the moment.

Obviously, Israel is fighting a war against the terrorist enemy backed by Qatar and the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which seeks the annihilation of the Jewish state and the destruction of the West and sees the destruction of the Jewish state as the first thing they can achieve because the other aims are much more difficult. It's obvious to me, and it's not obvious to some people simply because some people don't realize what the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic revolutionary government say, but this is what they say and what they proxies and front-groups and sympathizers in the West also call for. The various student groups in America who've decided to decide with the death cult of Hamas in the last year and a half always call for the overthrow of America as well. They want the overthrow of the state of Israel and then get down to business with everyone else.

So there's definitely a frontline element of what Israel is fighting for sure for the rest of the West, absolutely. But I don't see it in those terms, or at least, I mean, there are similarities, but I slightly just resist them for the reasons I said.

Aaron MacLean: This is something that you've been a student and a real dedicated analyst of for years and years now, which is this linkage between the Western left or the global left, if you will, and what in the title of your book and just a moment ago you call the death cults of organizations like Hamas.

I suppose the students who attempted to set up this encampment in Yale just a day or so ago, I suppose that people like that would reject the term death cult. It's not that they would say they were embracing a death cult, far from it, it's a slur to call Hamas a death cult, this is a organization devoted to, we could do it a number of different ways, the liberation of the Palestinian people. And they may not be nice socialists themselves necessarily, we can be realists as Yale radicals, but they have our enemies. Our enemies are the modern nation state, capitalism, Israel as a particularly religious nasty version thereof. And so they share our enemies, they want freedom for the oppressed people of places like Gaza, and that's the grounds for Alliance, this death cult business is sort of right-wing propaganda. Why is it not right-wing propaganda? I mean, another way to ask the same question is why do they believe that this alliance will end well for them?

Douglas Murray: Well, I mean first of all by not thinking about it in any serious way. It's interested me for a quarter of a century the way in which some people in the West can use any act of terrorism against the West, whether it's 9/11 or the invasion of Israel on the 7th October as what a late friend of mine described as a megaphone for their own prejudices. If Osama bin Laden brings down the Twin Towers, we will interpret it as being an anti-capitalist movement. Or if Hamas invades Israel, we will see it as an anti-colonialist movement. It tells you only about the person who suffers from this delusion, it tells you nothing about the person who carried out the act of war and terrorism.

I describe Hamas and Hezbollah as death cults because that's how they describe themselves. They literally worship death, they glorify death, they love death. Hassan Nasrallah, the now late leader of Hezbollah, who's, you might say, got what he wanted, said many times in his adult lifetime that the Israeli and Western love of life is our greatest weakness and that it's a weakness because, as opposed to our love of life, they, Hezbollah, the jihadist movements worship death, they love death. It's what the leadership of Hamas has said for decades, same thing. You can go back right to the founders of Hamas, they also the same thing, "We love death more than you love life."

And if you look at the actions of Hamas on the 7th of October, actions which they broadcast, gleefully filmed themselves with GoPros and cameras and iPhones and much more, if you look at their own video of their actions, you can see this in real time. The terrorists on 7th were literally worshiping, glorifying in death. There's a phone call that I cite at the beginning of the book, which your listeners are probably aware of but many people in the wider world are not, of a young Hamas terrorist from Gaza phoning his family on the 7th from one of the kibbutz, one of the communities in the south that they'd invaded and saying to his father, "Father, father, your son has killed 10 Jews. Father, with his own hand, your son has killed 10 Jews. Get mother on the phone, turn onto WhatsApp video, I can show you." If you look at the videos of Hamas, for instance, trying to take the head of a young man who's lying prostate on the floor in front of them and trying to take off his head with a shovel, all the time they're screaming with elation, "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar."

I describe them as the death cult because that's what they are, and that's what they describe themselves. If Hamas presented itself as a social justice movement and hid its actions and didn't say what they wanted, I think some of the misunderstanding in the West, much of the West would be, as it were, easier to understand. It's just that they do say it and they do do it all.

And as ever, I'm slightly amazed that the people who have been brought up on a cheap reading of Edward Said's Orientalism do not realize the extraordinary oddity of them in the West imposing their interpretation of Hamas onto Hamas when it doesn't fit Hamas, when they literally will not listen to the words that they say or don't believe the words they say or say, "They may say that they worship death, and they may act to kill as many people as possible in peaceful communities and a dance party, they may say that and they may do that, but I, I at Yale, at the age of 19, have a much better understanding of what they really mean and what their aims really are, which is simply the liberation of people or an anti-colonialist struggle or struggle against white supremacy," or any of the other things that people have tried to fit onto Hamas in the last 18 months.

It's a very, very interesting corner, which obviously I go into in the book in some depth, to not just ask the question of why this mishearing, misinterpretation has been happening in America in particular, but why it's happening.

Aaron MacLean: Yeah. Not to violate your point about over-reliance on World War II analogies, which I take, but when Stalin and Hitler engaged in their period of cooperation, at least they had the decency to be deeply cynical about it. Whereas Yale kids, it's idealistic, it's heartfelt.

Douglas Murray: Well, as I say in the book, I mean, even from that period, I mean, I say that throughout history, there have been death cults, there have been movements, religious movements and secular movements that have also fought this war against people who love life in the name of death. A pertinent one that is on my mind often, which I'm about to break my own rule, but it's a sidebar of the catastrophe of the 20th century perhaps, but when Franco was rising to power in Spain in the '30s, the great Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote the Tragic Sense of Life famously in Spanish history, famously finds himself at the university. He's been teaching a lecturing to students, and because he's against Francoism, because he's against the incipient military dictatorship that's coming, the fascism that's coming, the students end up chanting to the professor, "Viva la Muerte, Viva la Muerte, long live death, long lived death." Unamuno leaves stating this is a necrophilic cry, but he loses, they win.

But many people, as I try to put across in the book, in some examples people won't be familiar with maybe, many people have done, continue to do terribly wicked things in the name of social justice or wrapped up in social justice. There's this case I go into in the book, which I just think is very telling of what happened in the 1950s, '60s and '70s German left, the left that actually believed that if they had one aim, and they weren't wrong in this and this isn't a bad aim to start from, is don't be Nazis, some members of the German left end up being the leaders of the hijacking of the plane that ends up being diverted to Entebbe.

And as I relate in the book, these people started off believing, "Let's not be Nazis." They end up hijacking a plane and separating out the Jews from the non-Jews on the plane in order to kill the Jews. And there was a Holocaust survivor on the flight who had a tattoo on his arm that he shows to one of the German leftists who's hijacked the plane, and he says something along the lines of, "I had hoped that the German people had changed." And the hijacker in question who was a revolutionary leftist says, he's dumbfounded by this claim, "What are you talking about? I'm not a fascist, I'm an idealist."

Aaron MacLean: Yeah, "I'm murdering you for entirely different reasons."

Douglas Murray: Totally different reasons. "Why would you draw any comparison between Mengele doing a sporting mission in Auschwitz and me doing it for totally different reasons on a plane in Uganda?" I give it as an example because it seems so relevant to me of what is happening in our era where in the name of all of these anti-impression movements, liberationist movements that they've tried to impose on Hamas and Hezbollah's aims, they end up supporting genocidists, would be genocidists. And just time and again, they reveal nothing about Israel, nothing about the Jewish state and everything about themselves.

Aaron MacLean: Well, it's a good illustration of the fact that as an ethical principle, "Don't be a Nazi," is necessary but not sufficient.

Douglas Murray: Exactly, exactly.

Aaron MacLean: You could start with it, but there's going to need to be more.

Douglas Murray: There's going to need to be more, and that's something I wish more people realize realized.

Aaron MacLean: Let me ask, your example points to something important, which is the shape-shifting, malleable quality of antisemitism itself and the striking fact that a Hitler and a Stalin, a left and a right, a German radical and a Hamas terrorist all kind of end up in quite comparable places when it comes to Jews or to Israel. You cite in the book, you won me over with this, not that I wasn't already an admirer of your work, but you cite on a number of occasions Vasily Grossman, who deserves more attention, I think.

Douglas Murray: By the way, I'm very proud to say, I just heard yesterday that apparently on Amazon where you can of course buy this book, as in all places where books are sold, one of the books that people are buying along with it or after it, after my book are works by Vasily Grossman, I feel a quiet but deep pride in that because-

Aaron MacLean: You didn't tell them that it's like 1000 pages long, Life and Fate. I don't think you mentioned that in your book.

Douglas Murray: I kept that bit quiet, but I'm enormously moved if I've done anything to help bring his work to a wider focus because it took a long time for his work to get out of Russia and a long time for it to get into English. And yes, his work is absolutely vital. One of the great writers of the 20th century or of any time.

Aaron MacLean: We should probably do a whole episode on him at some point here on the show, but you point to a passage in Life and Fate where he gives an outline of antisemitism, and he's a man who knows of what he speaks as a journalist in Stalin's Russia, his mother's killed of course by the Nazis, and this is chronicled in a fictional, but only slightly fictional form in the novel. Talk a bit about Grossman's view of antisemitism, and feel free to say things about Grossman, I think the world needs to know.

Douglas Murray: Well, Grossman's a great hero of mine because he felt the compulsion to see and chronicle his time in all his horror and glory. He covered the Battle of Stalingrad. He was also the first journalist into Treblinka, and I actually the epigraph of On Democracies and Death Cults is from Grossman's account of his entry into Treblinka where he pieced together what had happened from whether the Germans have tried to cover it over to some extent, ineptly, where he says, "You might ask what's the purpose of all this? Why remember all this?" And he says that the writer's duty is to recount these things and these civilian's duty is to learn them.

Life and Fate is really Grossman's greatest attempt to write a modern War and Peace. And you might say that quite a lot of people had tried to follow in the footsteps of Tolstoy, but Grossman is one of the few that actually does. And one thing that blew me away when I read Life and Fate, which a late Persian friend of mine described to me years ago before I read it as one of the two absolutely essential novels of the 20th century, the other being The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, she had a very high literary bar. But in the middle of Life and Fate, this vast Tolstoy-like account of the era, he did something I just was floored by, which is at the midnight of the 20th century, he takes three or four pages out of the narrative to look into the question of antisemitism.

And to my mind, he says almost everything that needs to be said because the subject of antisemitism is both fascinating and endless, limitless. And yet he encapsulates it. And one of the many things he says, which I just was so struck by is he describes, as we know and as America civil society has demonstrated, and British civil society has demonstrated in the last 18 months, we know he says that antisemitism can be found in the academy of sciences and in the games children play in the schoolyard.

But the great insight he gives, the great insight he makes is that everywhere it tells you nothing about the Jews and only about the person who suffers from it. And this is such a brilliant observation. He ends up with this Titanic phrase where he describes antisemitism as a mirror to the failings of a society or an individual, and grows to the phrase, "Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I'll tell you what you're guilty of." And it is so striking. He gives the examples that are available to him in his time writing in the '50s, and of course at that point, he gives examples of the antisemitism that went on in 19th century Russia, the obvious recent example of the Nazis who accused the Jews of being racist and of seeking world domination.

So one of the things that I thought about a lot in Israel and Gaza, Lebanon, and when I made trips back to the United States and other countries in the West was, "Okay, tell me what you're accusing the Jews of, and I'll see what you are. I know I'll see what you are." And what I saw is the Grossman's rule applies everywhere. The mullahs in Tehran accuse Israel of being a colonialist power, which is of course only a description of themselves because since 1979, the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran has not only colonized the great culture and civilization of Persia, but it has also been busily colonizing Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza. So when they say the Jewish state is colonialist, this is a mirror. They're describing themselves and their own ambitions.

When President Erdoğan of Turkey says that Israel is an occupying power, he is holding up a mirror himself. It is President Erdoğan who continues to see after more than half a century the illegal occupation of the north of Cyprus. A NATO member is still illegally occupying half of an EU member state. It is Turkey that is an occupying power, and it's Turkey historically that has sought to be an occupying power, not least in the one of the longest-lasting and largest empires in history, the Ottoman Empire, which President Erdoğan would love to reconstitute.

Ask ourselves what the people in the west accuse the IDF of. And this is by no means, I always have to have the caveat, but of course, it's not the case that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, it's not the case that any criticism of the IDF is antisemitic. But if you are focusing on the one Jewish army in the world and accusing them of the most lurid things, the most lurid actions, I think that we can say, of course, this is a form of antisemitism, which again holds up a mirror only to the person who's making the allegations.

Consider, for instance, the accusation that the Israeli Defense Force deliberately kills civilians. This is said by people who are on the side of Hamas who deliberately kill civilians. Where the IDF seeks to minimize any civilian casualties, Hamas seeks to maximize them. When people accuse the IDF of being baby killers, they do so in defense of a group of a death cult that sought on October the 7th to kill babies, not as a collateral of their war aims, but as the war aim. Consider the people who have accused the IDF soldiers of going into Gaza and seeking to rape Gazan women, a claim so lurid and ridiculous that it should have fallen apart on first inspection, but the claim was being made that the IDF were rapists by people who were supporting or covering over or excusing away Hamas deliberate rape of Israeli women on the 7th of October. All of these allegations are things that Hamas seeks to do, and the allegations are being made against the IDF.

And I just add one other twist to that which I give in the book, which is I spent a long time thinking how this applies to many of the student protesters and others in America and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, because obviously something has been going on suddenly far beyond just a mere deep interest in a relatively minor war actually in the Middle East. I mean, the same people, if you take Hamas' top-most casualty figures for the last 18 months of war, which is around 50,000 people, which includes their fighters, as they call them, their terrorists, their leadership and much more, even if you were to take that figure, that's an average six months of killing in Syria every six months for the past decade. So I'm not being in any way diminishing the war in Gaza, but I'm just saying it's odd that people would fixate on this and have spent no time fixating on Yemen, Syria, or anything else.

And I was thinking about why are they doing it? What is behind it? And Grossman's rule applies again, except with a tiny twist because as I wrote in my last book, my previous book, The War on the West, about the anti-Westernism inside America and particularly the anti-Americanism within America that had been brewing on the left, I said that this attempt to instill a sense of historic guilt on young Americans and other young Westerners was bound to blow out somewhere because a generation or more had been told they were guilty by dint of actions taken not even necessarily by their own ancestors, but by people who'd lived in America before them, that a modern American born the 21st century should be deemed guilty of the crimes of slavery or colonialism or white supremacy or ethnonationalism or genocide of course.

And I said in The War on the West, using Hannah Arendt as a crutch, not something I usually would cite, but a particularly fine essay of hers on the nature of forgiveness, I said there that the danger of what was being set up in this thought system that I described in The War in the West was that there's no way to alleviate the guilt because nobody is alive who did these things, and nobody is alive who suffered them. So you get this impossible to unlock guilt complex shoved onto western mankind.

And what we have, I think, seen since the 7th is a massive form of projection from some citizens in the west, particularly America, sort of people who shut down the main station in New York the other week again, they accuse Israel of genocide, they accuse Israel of being colonialists, they accuse Israel of being racist, they accuse Israel of being white supremacist, they accuse Israel of crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing and so on. And I just started to notice, but all these are the crimes that you've been taught you are guilty of. All of these are the crimes you've been taught erroneously most of the time that your country is guilty of historically, and even where it is guilty of it historically, you've been taught it is your responsibility, it's your fault, you are born with this guilt. So the vast projection of what we have seen, the psychologists would call it projection is astounding to me. And that's why I just have this final twist on Grossman's rule, which is tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I'll tell you what you've been taught that you are guilty of.

Aaron MacLean: You have spent much of your career beating up on the left, we have spent much of this conversation beating up on the left. Of late, and you'll know where this question is going, some of your tangles have been on the right. And I am curious what is going on with the right? I mean, my experience of it is in the United States, perhaps you can bring news of how this plays out in the UK and Europe as well. The right is newly curious about, open to flirting with, in part embracing isolationism, forms of antisemitism, some quite outright and obnoxious, others that sort of hide the ball and are a little bit more complicated in a boring way in my opinion. What's going on? What's going on with the right in the United States, Douglas?

Douglas Murray: Well, if I can perhaps presumptuously give my take on this, and I know that some Americans don't like hearing their country talked about by somebody with my accent or background.

Aaron MacLean: I think there's always a reserved spot in the American discourse for at least one person with your accent to be a kind of... I'm not sure what the noun is I want here, it's the Christopher Hitchens spot, if you will.

Douglas Murray: Well, I don't like to think of that because those are big shoes. But, well, nevertheless, what I think has been going on is Iraq and Afghanistan did end up as quagmires, as you know a well as anyone. And the quicksand of war drew America in and a generation of foreign policy experts who had called for both wars and supported both wars and overseen both wars were seen to have mucked up badly.

And I noticed as Trump was coming on the scene, one of the reasons why he was doing so well in the primaries and so on was because we didn't really want to hear more from the Bush family. We didn't really want to be offered another Bush. There was a period in the GOP where IS Jeb next, and, I mean, I AAND others were sort of, "Does this family have to keep giving us presidents? What's so great about them?" And you could say the same about the Clintons. There was a sort of, "It is Hillary's turn, and then if it's not Hillary's term, maybe we can hang on for Chelsea." And I think it was Mark Stein who mentioned around that time, "Maybe we should just wait for the Bushes and Clintons to intermarry and just start a monarchy."

But Trump was the one who seized on the understandable dissatisfaction of many people on the right and the left with the direction of American foreign policy. And one of the things that then you saw happen was that everybody of an older generation was effectively, and you might say justifiably, compromised by that period of American state building, rather failed state building, not completely failed, but significantly failed state building. And you look at the landscape now, who is there of an older generation who's not tainted by that? The GOP itself, it has been the case for years nobody wanted to hear from them. And again, it is understandable in lots of ways. But it meant that there was this vast vacuum of senior statesmen who were in any way respected or who anyone wanted to hear from.

And now I think one of the many things that's happening is the inevitable retraction that happens after a period like 2001 to 2020, 2016, wherever you want to draw it, you might say to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, an inevitable retraction and the belief that since America didn't do everything it wanted to do and wasn't as successful as it could have been in these theaters of conflict and post-conflict, that therefore really America was no good at this, and in the end that perhaps America's no good.

And what I notice is that this is among much else, there is a form of isolationism, which I understand, I don't respect it because I think that the isolationists of our time have this deep problem at the center of it, and I've said this many times to people in the Republican Party in recent years, but it's an inevitable conundrum for them, they want America to remain the world's dominant power, but they don't want to be involved in the world. This seems to me an irreconcilable problem for them, not a problem for me, it's a problem for them. And because, for instance, if the American Navy isn't going to be responsible for keeping open the world's waterways along with its allies, the Chinese would love to keep open the world's waterways and do what they like after that.

But I believe this is an inevitable, understandable reaction to the post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq period. But then there is this movement within it which is reaching back for people they can see as heroes, are simply reaching back to the Buchananite right of America that was always there, the Ron Paul right, might say the wrong Paul right rather. And they do want forebears, they do want to see a line of intellectual and moral dissent which they are a part of. I'm not using the word dissent there in a negative way, I'm not inflecting it, but they would like to see a line of transmission that justifies the position they're now in.

Now, one of the many things that is now very, very interestingly happening on part of the right, one might be exaggerating its intellectual importance or it's political influence, is the line of transmission which is now going back to the early 20th century that America should not have got involved in World War I and indeed should not have got involved in World War II. The line of this is that America could have left the communists and the fascists to thrash it out, you would've not needed to make any alliance with Stalin and the communists and the fascists could have fought themselves to a draw. And this is of course a mildly interesting intellectual game to play. There's lots to be said in criticism and much more.

But there is one extra thing which I think is also happening now, which is a desire to downplay the crimes of fascism. You can see this with a flirtation on a part of particular Catholic right in America with Francoism, a flirtation that was always there but has become a little bit more overt on the fringes of the right in recent years. And they essentially, as far as I can see, their desire to downplay, for instance, the antisemitism of Adolf Hitler and to up-play criticisms of Winston Churchill, for instance, which used to be a left-wing vice and is now also a right-wing vice, is motivated by a dislike of national socialism because they destroyed the idea of ethnonationalism for everyone. In fact, they destroyed the dream of nationalism for everyone, and that every American nationalist has been effectively on the back foot since 1945 because you can always tarred legitimately, or more often completely illegitimately, with nationalism in its 1930s and '40s German form.

I think this is one of the things that is going on. I think it could be a harmless piece of intellectual history that's being rehashed, or it could actually be something rather sinister. And I think in part it's the latter. And my belief is that people on the right should call this stuff out when it's here, even that term I use call out, I dislike it myself, but identify it, let's say, criticize it where you see it.

And that we should do it because if everything that people like me have accused the left of in recent years, we have accused them of in part because they have been so unwilling to draw boundaries on their own side. "No one to the left of me," "Solidarity with everyone on our own side," look at the joy, the rapture with which people like me have been able to use the squad against the Democratic party in recent years. I mean, there's literally nothing better for a Republican than Rashida Tlaib or AOC. These are gifts to the Republican Party. All the Republicans have to do is to say, "Look at them. Look at crazy Bernie Sanders. That's the real Democrats."

Well, if there's no expression of hygiene or no desire for a type of hygiene or distrust of hygiene on the right, the same thing will be done, and the same thing should be done by the left, by Democrats and others against the right. If there are no guardrails at all, no red lines at all, and you just gleefully lift up all the sluices and allow the sewage to just flow, then the right will be where the left has been in recent years. And I, at any rate, don't want to see that happen. And sometimes that's something which gets me criticism from people who might be ostensibly on my side, but I don't really care, I just think that's what has to be done.

Aaron MacLean: These guys on the, what you call the Buchananite or the Ron Paul right, they remind me, at least until very recently, they have a hopefulness about them now, but until very recently they remind me of the protagonists in Evelyn Waugh's novels about World War II. So if you think of Men at Arms or something like that, the protagonist is-

Douglas Murray: Wonderful book.

Aaron MacLean: It is, it is. It is your Persian friends identification of two novels, it's a short list, it's hard to do too. The protagonist, he is reflecting on his country going to war against Hitler, his Protestant country is going to go to war against a right-wing power in cooperation with left-wing totalitarianism. And so from his perspective, which I take to be more or less Waugh's perspective at the time-

Douglas Murray: It was.

Aaron MacLean: All of this is happening centuries downstream of total political catastrophe, the loss of Catholic England, what's being fought over today are just various versions of evil so where am I even to situate myself? I lost my own country a long time ago and I'm being asked to be patriotic for a political and religious program that deserves nothing from me. And until very recently it, that's the Buchananite right, and for them the catastrophe was World War II. Not so much that it was a great global tragedy, which of course it was in every way, but that in the end, the isolationist, though they won the political argument, were sort of shown to be wrong by events themselves and we fought the war, that the American role in the war was perceived, correctly in my view, as heroic, and a world order was established with an America at the center of it that was of just utterly objectionable to this political trend. And so that's why you see that the Darryl Coopers of the world works so hard to relitigate World War II.

Douglas Murray: Well, I wouldn't say they worked so hard, but work.

Aaron MacLean: Work at it at least.

Douglas Murray: Work amateurishly hard.

Aaron MacLean: It's an important part of the project because they see there's an opportunity, there's an opportunity to reset the whole conversation.

Douglas Murray: Absolutely. And there's many things to be said about that, one is, even in war one said that there was not much point in voting conservative in Britain, even then he said there was not much point in voting conservative because whenever the conservatives got into power, they didn't even manage to turn the clock back even five minutes. Now, that's a really conservative point of view and points, among other things, to one of the tensions that always exists within conservatism, which is the extent to which it can ever be revolutionary or whether it can ever really set the clock back or whether you just have to keep fighting the next battle you'll lose, and then defending a status quo that is some way downstream from the status quo you wanted to defend.

I just lay it out as an observation, one of the curiosities of the people who do want to re-litigate all that sort of thing, it is both interesting and totally futile. As my late friend Clive James once said, "We are here because history happened." The question is, well, what are you going to do about it? When I've seen the extremely fractured, and I think now rather defeated, not entirely defeated, but lackluster, more lackluster than they were even a few years ago, Catholic right in America, the fringes of the Catholic right toying with things like the imposition of Catholic law in American states, you just think, "You guys are nowhere near any world in which that's going to happen."

I remember slightly taunting one of the proponents of that some years ago on stage in America with my observation that I wasn't in favor of what they're doing because, although I wasn't alive in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, I have read about it and I know what happens when the settlement about religion that we came to gets reversed. And by the way, all of those Catholic types, if they got what they wanted, they'd all be hanging from the lampposts in the US for being Catholic.

Aaron MacLean: Instantaneously, Catholicism itself is, I don't know off the top of my head-

Douglas Murray: Yes, they'd be hanged by Episcopalians as heretics.

Aaron MacLean: Yeah, yeah. It's this strange juxtaposition of the call for the revocation of liberalism by a tiny religious minority.

Douglas Murray: And what's interesting about it among many other things is that it's actually against what the popes have said. I mean, I think it was in Ratzinger when he was Pope, just before he was Pope, one of his encyclicals, I think it's Deus Caritas, have I got the right one? Anyway, he says, no, the church does not desire political power. It does not desire, let's say, over the secular laws and the governance of the country. That's 20 years ago or more. But one might be spending too much time focusing on a minority of minority. But nevertheless, it is interesting when you see where some of the energies are being expended on your own political side.

But yes, one of the things you see is this desire to trace the perfect intellectual journey, a sort of version of the Whig version of history on the right. And another is then of some people to reset it. But maybe this is too fatalistic a thing to say for conservative and conservatives would dislike it, but you never can reset it like that. And much of what is going on is what Steiner would describe as nostalgia for the absolute, a difficulty with accepting the complexity of the modern state.

Aaron MacLean: And look, I mean, I am a Catholic, but I am similarly amused by the views that you point to and have never fully understood how it's meant to practically work. Nevertheless, they come from a place, as oftentimes do sort of phenomena on the right like this, from a place of disappointment or disgust with what liberalism can't provide a society. And that does seem to me to be the actual role of a healthy conservatism in a semi-revolutionary society like the United States, to introduce into American politics or liberal politics what just pluralistic mechanisms can't. There has to be a way of regaining balance.

Douglas Murray: Yes. And what's more, so much of this is for the private realm, the acceptance that the state cannot litigate affairs of the soul. No, that's for the individual to do. Maybe this is my Platonism coming out, but many of these dreams, even if you did dream them, if you wanted to dream them, they'd be litigated within the heart of every individual, not at a state level or at a legislative level. If people want to be good Catholics, they should be good Catholics, and they should show by example what a good Catholic life looks like. If people want to be something else, they should live it. And I find it's just such an elementary error to think that the affairs of your own heart and soul must be therefore imposed on others because simply, we've been through this.

Aaron MacLean: Douglas Murray, author of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas, and the Future of the West. It's been a really, really interesting conversation and I'm grateful to you for making the time.

Douglas Murray: I'm grateful to you and your listeners. Thank you.