第 463 期·中文精讀
道格拉斯·默裡：普京、澤連斯基、特朗普、以色列、內塔尼亞胡、哈馬斯與加沙
Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza
評論家分析俄烏與中東兩條戰線，評述各方領導人的選擇，以及西方輿論內部的分裂與爭論。
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中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫，非官方翻譯，可能存在偏差或錯誤；表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明
2025年2月底，道格拉斯·默裡（Douglas Murray）蹲在烏克蘭東部前線的一個掩體裡，手機螢幕上播的是白宮橢圓形辦公室的直播。特朗普、萬斯、澤連斯基，三個人當著全世界的面吵翻了。
身邊一個士兵瞥了一眼螢幕，說他們被建議不要太關注政治上的來龍去脈。然後補了一句：“我有活兒要幹。”
默裡後來把這個細節寫進了《紐約郵報》的專欄。三年戰爭把前線人的注意力訓練成了一種過濾器，能改變戰壕裡的事情才值得關心，剩下都是噪音。
這場三小時的對話從那個掩體開始，一路走到加沙、德黑蘭、1929年的柏林和1979年的德黑蘭機場。默裡的新書叫《論民主與死亡邪教》（On Democracies and Death Cults），書名本身就是他的論點：這個世界上真的有一批人，愛死亡勝過愛生命，而民主國家一直不願意相信這件事。
一件軍綠色上衣，和兩個世界的錯位
那場白宮爭吵裡有個細節被反覆播放：一個記者問澤連斯基為什麼不穿西裝。
默裡的反應很直接，他說這個問題是侮辱性的，理由不在於禮節，而在於兩個世界的錯位。
當一個從戰爭世界來的人走進和平世界，和平世界裡的人至少應該有一點尊重，或者至少承認對方是從戰爭世界來的。你坐在一個政治環境裡，談論人被摧毀、被屠殺、被從窗戶扔出去，而對面的那個人，這些詞對他來說沒有一個字是比喻。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他舉了丘吉爾的例子。二戰期間丘吉爾出訪外國，穿的是軍裝式制服。這不是不修邊幅，這是一種提醒：我來自戰爭世界。
然後他做了一個假想。如果坐在那個位置上的是普京，某個記者開口問他：“大家都知道您做過不少面部醫美，據說用的是貝盧斯科尼同一位醫生，能談談嗎？”全場都會立刻意識到這個問題不合適，東道主應該出來打圓場。澤連斯基面對的是同一類問題，只是沒有人替他打圓場。
默裡還提到另一層：如果澤連斯基堅持用烏克蘭語或俄語、透過翻譯回答，他會給自己多爭取幾秒鐘的思考時間。那幾秒鐘在一場火藥味十足的對話裡是決定性的。澤連斯基是喜劇演員出身，機智、反應快、語言能力強，用母語他完全有能力把那個記者頂回去。
這些細節聽起來瑣碎，但默裡的判斷是，正是這類瑣碎的東西，反映出一個時代理解力的退化。人們抓住一個次要的、無關緊要的細節大做文章，因為它比理解一場戰爭的來龍去脈容易得多。他舉了個美國例子：奧巴馬時期白宮橢圓形辦公室的丘吉爾半身像被移走，美國右翼談了整整八年。八年時間，用一座雕像代替了對奧巴馬外交政策的實質批評。
我們總是被誘惑去做這件事。（道格拉斯·默裡）
美國右翼為什麼討厭澤連斯基
萊克斯·弗裡德曼（Lex Fridman）丟擲了一個有點粗糙但很誠實的解釋：美國政治太蠢了，蠢到可以簡化成“左派說普京壞、澤連斯基好、掛烏克蘭旗，所以右派必須反過來”。
默裡認同這個說法，還補充了心理機制。
我能理解那些覺得這事很煩的人。那麼多在簡介裡掛過黑命貴旗、驕傲旗、跨性別旗的人，突然又掛上烏克蘭旗，而其中很多人一個星期前還不知道烏克蘭在地圖哪兒。很多沒在真思考的人，本能反應就是：這些人真煩，我得噁心他們一下。但你必須從這上面升起來，說一句：一個國家的命運，不取決於我今天對網路梗的容忍度。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他用了自己的說法，叫“活線上太久的人，得想辦法從梗裡爬出來”。
關於澤連斯基在那場會面裡的失誤，默裡認為有一條是明顯的：他忘了說謝謝。三年裡他每次都說的那句話，那天沒說。萬斯就是抓住這一點撲上去的。
但弗裡德曼不認為問題這麼簡單。他的分析更細：澤連斯基身上帶著一種“理所當然”的氣場，好像烏克蘭是好人、俄羅斯是壞人是全世界都該知道的事，不需要解釋。可橢圓形辦公室裡坐著一個新來的人，你得說服他。你得讓他覺得這場戰爭值得贏，得讓他覺得跟你站在一起是他的功勞。
這些人都很複雜，都有自戀的一面，拜登、特朗普都一樣。你得想辦法穿越這層複雜性。方法之一就是喂他的自我，承認他是世界上最偉大的談判者，說“很高興能和你坐在同一張桌子前，因為我相信你是那個能帶來成功解決方案的人”。（萊克斯·弗裡德曼）
默裡承認這一層，同時堅持自己的判斷：澤連斯基當時的狀態是困惑。會面之前一週，特朗普剛說他是獨裁者，政府裡有人在暗示戰爭是烏克蘭挑起的。對一個正在打自衛戰的國家領導人來說，這種處境像《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》。
我在那件事上對他有相當的同情，因為那確實令人困惑。（道格拉斯·默裡）
對普京最狠的那幾句
弗裡德曼問得很直接：你對普京最嚴厲的批評是什麼？
默裡的回答像一份清單，一條一條擺出來。血腥的獨裁者，對政治反對派的壓制做到了極限，竊取國家資源，把自己和身邊親信餵飽。他不止在俄羅斯境內摧毀反對派，還跑到別的國家殺人。
在我出生的國家，有人在倫敦市中心被釙-210毒殺。在索爾茲伯裡那樣一座宜人的主教座堂城市，被投了一種能殺死幾萬人的神經毒劑。就算你認為他有權利管好自家的事，他也不該在第三國故意使用這種武器，這種武器的用途就是展示：我能一次帶走幾萬個英國公民。（道格拉斯·默裡）
關於選舉，默裡的回答乾脆：不是自由選舉，結果是假的。
弗裡德曼追問，有沒有可能他只是把對手都清除掉了，然後合法地贏得了選舉？
如果一個人把他所有的對手都殺了，那確實對他很有幫助。（道格拉斯·默裡）
這句話之後，弗裡德曼笑了很久，說“在這個語境裡用‘這位老兄’（chap）這個詞，簡直絕了”。
默裡接著把話題引到“澤連斯基是獨裁者”這個說法上。一個國家在全面自衛戰爭期間不舉行選舉，就被叫做獨裁者。那麼如果你真的對那個地區的自由選舉充滿熱情，至少應該注意到俄羅斯的選舉在任何有意義的意義上都不自由、不公正。
他特別強調了一句，這句話是整場對話的骨架：
這並不意味著因此就要說俄羅斯已經準備好變成西方式自由民主國家，完全不意味著這些。但至少，你得承認普京是什麼。（道格拉斯·默裡）
“現實主義”這頂帽子
弗裡德曼把米爾斯海默（John Mearsheimer）的名字擺上桌：用冷冰冰的地緣政治計算來解釋俄羅斯在喬治亞、烏克蘭的軍事行動，擴大勢力範圍，這套框架有沒有它的深度？
默裡的回應從詞本身開始。他說自己非常懷疑“現實主義者”這個標籤，因為幾乎所有人都會說自己是外交政策上的現實主義者，很少有人自稱超現實主義者。
我倒想見見他們。一個超現實主義外交政策分析師。（道格拉斯·默裡）
玩笑之後是正題。他說過去幾年發生了一件像“招魂”一樣的事：一些在烏克蘭問題上早已被徹底駁倒的人物，米爾斯海默，以色列議題上的芬克爾斯坦，重新被請回舞臺中央。這些人消失了很多年，原因是沒人願意聽他們，而且通常是有充分理由的。
他願意給出對方最強的版本：俄羅斯擁有、或者自認為擁有一個勢力範圍，這令人遺憾，但我們能做的不多。
這大概是你能給出的最好的版本了。（道格拉斯·默裡）
然後他拆這個版本。超級大國確實都這麼幹，美國用軍事力量維持全球影響力，中國用政治力量和經濟手段，香港是最明顯的例子。問題在於，這套框架允許你給一個相當貪婪的政權多少空間？這道計算題每週都在變，每年都在變。
他舉了自己的親身經歷。2008年普京入侵喬治亞之後，他去過那個國家。當時他的喬治亞朋友相信，2008年之後他們能拿到北約成員資格或者歐盟成員資格，默裡覺得這個判斷錯得離譜，現在依然這麼認為，甚至認為對歐洲和北約來說，接納喬治亞幾乎是不可取的，因為你必須非常小心，不要設一條絆線，然後引發第三次世界大戰。
這句話對烏克蘭同樣適用。從1990年代起，這個問題就懸在那裡。
但反過來，他也不接受“普京只想要烏克蘭”這個說法。波羅的海三國的國防開支佔 GDP 比例是整個北約裡最高的，立陶宛人、拉脫維亞人、愛沙尼亞人是真的害怕，不是裝給誰看的。
還有一個原因讓我覺得親自去看很重要。我清楚地記得2008年普京試圖入侵之後我在喬治亞。人們不必是最堅定的烏克蘭支持者，只要承認一件事：看起來烏克蘭並不是普京視野裡唯一的東西。（道格拉斯·默裡）
和平會是什麼樣，以及“快點停火”的陷阱
默裡對和平方案的預判很樸素：烏克蘭割讓東部領土，然後在停戰期重新武裝。
他馬上又給這個預判加了一層限制。非烏克蘭人在紐約的咖啡館裡談論“頓涅茨克當然得給普京”，說起來輕巧，可這些地區住著幾十萬不想活在普京統治下的烏克蘭公民，他們的家人在烏克蘭其他地方。
他最近採訪了一些從俄佔區逃出來的孩子。那裡的學校只有俄語教學，教的是普京版本的歷史。不願接受這一切的家庭只能躲在家裡不出門。2022和2023年，俄羅斯在佔領區辦夏令營，孩子去了就沒回來。據估計大約有兩萬名烏克蘭兒童以這種方式被帶走。
一個十幾歲的男孩跟我描述，他母親外出時，有個女人來敲門，把他的證件交給他，通知他下週去報到，加入俄羅斯軍隊。（道格拉斯·默裡）
所以當有人說“這些地區當然得交出去”的時候，默裡的態度是：在烏克蘭人眼裡，接受這件事極其、極其困難。
弗裡德曼追問，會不會有幾代人的時間都無法接受？
默裡說，他會說“永遠不會”。
關於用經濟利益換和平的思路，特朗普政府推的礦產協議是其中一個版本：美國企業進入，形成緩衝區，普京就不敢動。默裡不信這套。
2022年被入侵的地區也有美國人，他們跑得很快。香港的例子也擺在那兒，一個地區有國際金融利益，不等於獨裁政權不會用軍事或隱蔽手段接管。我不認為美國礦工能構成對普京的有效緩衝。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他提了一本被遺忘的書：諾曼·安吉爾（Norman Angell）在戰前寫的那本暢銷書，論證歐洲列強之間的戰爭在經濟上不可行，所以歐洲會進入持久的康德式和平。一戰之後那本書再版了。
我沒讀過第二版，但我猜它被大幅改寫過。（道格拉斯·默裡）
默裡在這次對話裡給出的提醒，這句最鋒利：經濟相互依存能勸住一些非常理性的行為體，但它無法覆蓋讓人走向戰爭、走向瘋狂的全部動機。
弗裡德曼在這裡給出了自己的方案：與其指望一紙安全保證，不如讓烏克蘭和儘可能多的國家建立軍事和經濟夥伴關係，中東、印度、中國、美國、歐洲。俄羅斯需要朋友，一個繁榮的世界裡，俄羅斯應該同時和東方、西方做生意。
默裡說，理想情況下確實如此，如果莫斯科的政權想要這個的話。他也承認，冷戰結束後西方對待俄羅斯的方式有失妥當，沒有給予應有的尊重。但這也無法為俄羅斯過去二十年的行為開脫。
對話裡有一段關於“快點停火”的討論，值得單獨拎出來。默裡說，急著促和會產生一個結構性偏差：你會向你能施壓的人施壓，而不會向施壓不動的人施壓。
美國可以對烏克蘭施加巨大的外交、金融、情報和軍事壓力，也可以對普京施加相當的壓力，但壓澤連斯基容易得多。所以如果有人說“今天就得和平”，最可能的結果是，你壓了那個最好壓的人，達成一個能立刻止殺、但同時獎勵侵略者、懲罰受害者的結果。極其醜陋，而且極其常見。（道格拉斯·默裡）
弗裡德曼接了一句：這也是派對上最無聊的那句真話，這裡的捷徑就是懲罰烏克蘭，而你就是不能這麼幹。
默裡說：那我們就繼續當派對上無聊的人。
10月7日：從“概念”到幾小時的空白
話題轉到加沙，默裡的語速和細節密度都變了。他寫過一本關於這件事的書，去過現場，採訪過倖存者、醫生、士兵、被綁架者的家屬。
2023年10月7日，哈馬斯發動了一次旅級規模的進攻。他們炸開隔離牆，衝向最軟的目標。納哈爾奧茲（Nahal Oz）觀察基地被迅速攻陷，然後是南部的集體農莊（kibbutz），那些住著和平主義者的、主張和巴勒斯坦鄰居共存的小社群。屠殺、強姦、縱火、綁架。
他們的運氣在於撞上了一場清晨的舞會。幾百個年輕人在沙漠裡跳舞，哈馬斯用火箭筒、卡拉什尼科夫步槍、手榴彈和錘子衝進去。
他們最深推進到以色列境內二十公里，在奧法基姆（Ofakim）和斯德洛特（Sderot）這些城鎮繼續屠殺。
現在已經知道，原計劃是真主黨從北面做同樣的事。真主黨在24小時內就加入了戰爭，從黎巴嫩南部向以色列北部發射大量火箭彈。原計劃是南北同時動手，在中部會合，把以色列攔腰絞死。
協同失敗的原因，默裡的判斷是哈馬斯不信任任何一條能通知真主黨確切時間的通訊線路，因為都會被截獲。德黑蘭的伊朗革命政府，資助、訓練、武裝哈馬斯和真主黨的那一方，是知道計劃的。
對哈馬斯來說，這次行動已經相當接近成功。他們離目標還差得遠，但他們比人們以為他們能做到的，逼近了很多。（道格拉斯·默裡）
對以色列來說，這是建國以來最嚴重的情報和軍事失敗。默裡認為原因有幾層。
第一層是“概念”（the conception）。以色列安全和軍事建制派多年來相信一個判斷：哈馬斯滿足於腐敗地治理加沙，往自己口袋裡撈錢，住在卡達當億萬富翁，像很多恐怖組織一樣，意識形態還在，但會退居次要位置。
“概念”在這一天徹底崩塌，而且塌得很徹底。（道格拉斯·默裡）
第二層是10月7日當天和之前的一系列具體失敗。已經有不少人被追責，未來還會有更多。
但最讓他難受的，是那些倖存者反覆對他說的一句話：他們告訴孩子別怕，軍隊幾分鐘就到。
很多地方，軍隊好幾個小時才到。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他不想把責任全推給軍隊，因為有些單位反應極快。杜夫德萬（Duvdevan）部隊在屠殺開始後大約一小時到九十分鐘就趕到了路口投入戰鬥。還有一些自行其是的人，違抗命令，意識到事情有多大，直接說“南邊需要我們，走”，然後打了幾個小時、幾天。
但現場的複雜性超乎想象。哈馬斯扒下死去以色列士兵的制服穿在身上，帶著以色列制式的裝備進來。
書裡寫了一位阿拉伯裔以色列穆斯林醫生，他是聯合哈扎拉（United Hatzalah）急救組織的成員。那天早上六點半他正要去醫院換班，火箭彈先來，然後是全境入侵。他收到一條警報，說附近有車出了事故，就帶上急救包出發。到了路口，他看到幾個穿著士兵制服的人，他穿著哈扎拉的背心，對方開始朝他開火。
他當時腦子裡只有一個念頭：他媽的怎麼回事？（道格拉斯·默裡）
那是偽裝成以色列士兵的哈馬斯。他們把他當人肉盾牌，防止空中打擊，最後開槍打了他，把他丟在那裡。他活下來了。
還有一個女孩，她的父親在舞會倖存者的聚會上接受了默裡的採訪。女兒在生命的最後時刻打電話給他，他安慰她說軍隊馬上就到。她的男朋友頭部中彈，躺在她腿上。他們設法上了一輛車，逃離了舞會現場，開到一個他們以為安全的社群。有人告訴他們待在原地，女兒說那是個警察，其實不是，那是穿著警察制服的哈馬斯。她被殺死了。
辛瓦爾和那個救了他命的牙醫
默裡說，哈馬斯其實很好理解，因為他們說得出自己的目標，而且他們基本按自己說的去做。
他舉了葉海亞·辛瓦爾（Yahya al-Sinwar）的例子。辛瓦爾被普遍認為是10月7日的策劃者。他在2000年代因在加沙殺害巴勒斯坦人而被關在以色列監獄，後來在換俘協議中獲釋，那次協議用一千多名巴勒斯坦囚犯換回了被綁架的以色列士兵吉拉德·沙利特（Gilad Shalit）。
在獄中，辛瓦爾和一位牙醫有過多次談話。這位牙醫發現他長了腦瘤，把他送去醫院，以色列醫生切除了腫瘤，救了他的命。這位牙醫後來把談話內容講給了《紐約時報》。
辛瓦爾在獄中說：現在你們以色列是強的，但總有一天你們會變弱，那時候我就來了。然後他就來了。（道格拉斯·默裡）
關於哈馬斯憲章，默裡提醒了一件事。憲章裡引用了那段聖訓：末日不會到來，直到石頭和樹木開口說“穆斯林啊，我背後有個猶太人，來殺了他”。
他說自己經常注意到一種手法：人們會說哈馬斯憲章不重要。這是一種障眼法，回到了之前那個話題，忘掉一切，只留下最重要的基本事實。
書裡還有一個人物，薇薇安·西爾弗（Vivian Silver）。她是和平活動家，每個週末開車把加沙兒童送到以色列醫院，處理那些加沙本地治不了的罕見疾病。她為以色列所有左翼和平組織工作過。10月7日之後一段時間，鄰居們以為她被擄到加沙去了，有人做了她的被綁架者海報，幾個和平組織呼籲哈馬斯放人。後來發現她是在家裡被活活燒死的，因為留下的 DNA 太少，很久才確認身份。
加沙周邊那些社群，恰恰是那些最想和加沙人和平共處的人。哈馬斯把地獄帶給了他們。（道格拉斯·默裡）
“比例原則”這筆賬
弗裡德曼請默裡站在批評者的立場上，把“以色列做過頭了”這個案子做到最強。
默裡的回應從10月8日說起。那天以色列還沒有做出任何回應，就有人開始說以色列必須“按比例”回應。
他承認戰爭法裡確實有比例原則，但同時指出，世界對以色列的“比例”要求，實際上是要求雙方的痛苦和死亡數量對等。他不認為有任何戰爭法規定，你殺了1200人、綁了250人，對方就可以照著做一遍。
然後他做了一個換算：以色列900萬人口。把10月7日按美國人口比例放大，相當於美國在一天之內有44000人被殺、10000名公民被綁架。
沒人能告訴我，如果這樣的暴行發生在美國，美國不會動用一切必要手段去摧毀幹這事的組織、把被綁的人救回來。（道格拉斯·默裡）
弗裡德曼在這個點上完全同意，同時補了另一面：美國確實會狠狠打回去，但美國的軍工複合體和政客也可能把這件事做成伊拉克戰爭和阿富汗戰爭，那就不只是打回去，而是做了一件對所有人都有破壞性的事，包括美國自己的財政、美國的繁榮、整個地區的穩定。伊拉克和阿富汗並沒有打敗恐怖主義，很可能還製造了更多恐怖分子。
默裡沒有迴避這個類比。他說以色列戰後宣佈的兩個目標，救回人質和摧毀哈馬斯，很多人說只能做到一個。他認為以色列在兩個方向上都走了很遠，哈馬斯沒有被完全摧毀，但被嚴重削弱，領導層幾乎全部被擊斃，第二層領導層也幾乎全沒了。
他強調自己看到的比大多數外部觀察者多。戰爭初期有一些方案沒有執行，比如直接衝進希法（Shifa）醫院大院，那地方名義上是醫院，至少也是哈馬斯的指揮總部。有一個快速突襲的計劃被擱置了，因為各方死亡人數會太高。以色列在初期確實剋制了。
然後他講加沙的特殊困難。那是一個高度建成、人口稠密的地區。
順便說一句，那些輕率地指責以色列搞種族滅絕的人，從來不提一個事實：2005年以色列撤出之後，加沙人口暴漲，幾乎翻了一倍。（道格拉斯·默裡）
真正的困難在於哈馬斯完全不按規則來，而且是把戰爭法完全反過來用。你不能把軍隊偽裝成平民，你不能把醫院當作軍事基地，你不能把學校和禮拜場所當作作戰中心。哈馬斯全都幹，而且一直這麼幹，原因很簡單：對哈馬斯來說，這套打法是買一送一。他們可以在任何地方作戰，以色列只要在任何地方還手，他們就可以說這是戰爭罪。
默裡提到哈馬斯從2005年起挖的那套地下隧道網。他在書裡引了一位哈馬斯領導人的採訪原話：隧道是給他們自己用的，存放武器、保護戰鬥人員、關押人質。
一個國家為它的公民建防空洞，一個政府為它的炸彈建防空洞。這兩者之間的差別，在我看來是天壤之別。（道格拉斯·默裡）
關於錢，默裡說得更直白。每一個已經死掉的哈馬斯領導人，死的時候都是億萬富翁，單位是十億美元。卡達的錢、美國納稅人的錢、歐洲納稅人的錢，全部變成了恐怖基礎設施。跟他一起在前線計程車兵估計，加沙每第二到第三棟房子裡都藏著武器、炸彈、火箭筒、步槍和隧道入口。
這裡他提到一個他認為的深層悲劇：2005年以色列撤出加沙，無論你對這個決定怎麼看，那本來是一個機會。加沙可以變成一個有活力的實體，一個繁榮的巴勒斯坦國。哈馬斯像之前的巴解組織一樣，選擇了摧毀以色列，而不是建設巴勒斯坦。
十八年
弗裡德曼問起加沙平民的責任。默裡說，他們選了哈馬斯。布什政府2005年之後推動加沙選舉是個很不明智的決定，但哈馬斯確實是被選上去的，然後在2007年把主要對手法塔赫從屋頂扔下去、把屍體綁在摩托車後面拖著遊街，從此完全控制加沙。
他說，談這個話題容易被指責為支援集體懲罰，但有一個事實應該被記住：哈馬斯有整整18年時間治理加沙。18年，是一個孩子從出生到完成正規教育的全部時間。
18年裡，他們本可以培養出一代對自家人、對社會、對鄰居、對世界有用的加沙年輕人。他們沒有。他們花了18年把加沙的孩子灌輸進一個死亡邪教，灌輸進一種種族滅絕式的仇恨。這對以色列人顯然最危險，但對加沙人自己顯然也是災難。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他提到2014年進過加沙計程車兵，也提到2003年以來參與過幾輪作戰計程車兵，說法一致：加沙人口的激進化程度顯著上升。他說得很平淡：普通加沙家庭裡阿拉伯語版《我的奮鬥》的數量，《錫安長老會紀要》的數量。
關於“集體懲罰”的指控，默裡的定義是：集體懲罰是無目的地向平民區投彈，是地毯式轟炸。他說以色列空軍和國防軍從10月7日以來做的不是這個，是逐屋作戰，是針對恐怖組織的戰爭。加沙被毀得很慘，沒剩幾棟樓，但這不是狂轟濫炸的結果。
他補了一個細節：沒有一個他採訪過的、被釋放的人質，遇到過任何一個表現出哪怕一丁點人道善意的加沙巴勒斯坦人。
你看10月7日的錄影，哈馬斯自己拍的，他們把年輕的猶太女性帶進加沙。那些卡車、摩托車沒有被震驚的加沙平民攔下，沒人問“你們為什麼帶著一個被割斷腳筋的以色列女孩，為什麼把她帶到這兒來”。全都是慶祝。還有人質從關押他們的民宅逃出來，立刻被遇到的居民送回去。（道格拉斯·默裡）
弗裡德曼在這裡做了一個重要的平衡。他說自己不願意把邪惡投射到整個民眾身上。慶祝有好幾種解釋：可能是深度灌輸下的仇恨，也可能是一種絕望中的自我說服，你得說服自己站在爭取自由這一邊，才能給自己一個理由，在極端惡劣的條件下用這種方式抗爭。
默裡的回答是：你不需要投射，你只需要聽他們自己的話。他引了書裡第一章的那段錄音，一個年輕人闖進以色列南部某個社群，打電話回家。
“爸，開啟 WhatsApp，我給你看。我親手殺了10個猶太人。哦，父親，你兒子親手殺了10個猶太人。”他父親在那邊問“你在哪兒，你在哪兒”，他說“我要給你看，爸，我要給你看，我親手殺了猶太人，你兒子。讓媽媽接電話”。媽媽接了，兄弟接了。（道格拉斯·默裡）
弗裡德曼承認這些電話錄音獨特地恐怖，同時指出他聽過烏克蘭士兵打給父母的電話、俄羅斯士兵打給父母的電話，性質類似，戰爭裡有一種把對方非人化的機制。
默裡的反駁是具體的：闖進一個18歲女性的家，在她家的地板上殺死她，拍下她最後的屍體，然後用她的手機、她的 Instagram 賬號發給她的所有朋友。他說，他很懷疑哪怕是最兇的俄羅斯士兵，會打電話回莫斯科說“媽，你不敢相信我有多走運，我強姦並殺死了這個18歲女孩”。這在戰爭裡都算罕見。
我認為世界上確實存在惡這種力量，它可以降臨，可以被人使用。很難找到一種非神學的方式來談這件事。但10月7日哈馬斯所做的那些事，除了用惡這個詞，沒有別的描述。（道格拉斯·默裡）
為什麼全世界的怒火都指向這一個人
談到內塔尼亞胡，弗裡德曼把問題擺得很直：很多人把“邪惡”這個詞用在哈馬斯身上很猶豫，用在內塔尼亞胡身上卻很積極。默裡的回應是，這個不對稱本身就說明了一些東西。
他先給了內塔尼亞胡最嚴厲的批評，而且這份批評來自以色列內部：10月7日發生在他的任上。1973年贖罪日戰爭之後，果爾達·梅厄（Golda Meir）承擔了政治後果，一位相當傑出的總理，一位了不起的女性，但入侵發生在她的任上，她就得接下這一筆。公平的批評者會永遠拿這件事問責內塔尼亞胡。
第二條批評是司法改革。10月7日之前的一年，以色列社會因為這件事撕裂，特拉維夫和其他城市每個週末都有示威，警察周復一週加班維持秩序，示威有時會失控，有時會暴力。默裡說他個人認為司法改革有它的道理，但司法改革屬於以色列內政的細分議題，重點在於：如果你看到一件事把你的國家撕裂到這個程度，是不是應該停一停？
有一種說法是，10月7日的動機之一，正是哈馬斯和它在卡達、伊朗的支持者看到了以色列社會的分裂。相當一部分人口每週上街，堵高速，停服務。辛瓦爾在獄中說的那句話在這裡又出現了一次：總有一天你會變弱，那時候我就動手。
也有反過來的論據：10月7日的計劃在司法改革開始之前就已經在制定。默裡承認這些角度都能成立，然後把話收回來：他採訪過以色列幾乎所有政治領導人，從右到左，“我不認為他們中任何一個人會對10月7日做出和他不同的回應”。
然後是那個更大的問題。全世界有那麼多人恨他，8到9百萬人口的國家，總理成了全球性的仇恨物件。默裡說這件事很奇怪，值得追問。
他在這裡插了一段。人們談美國過去三十年外交政策的失敗，有一種人第一時間會提保羅·沃爾福威茨（Paul Wolfowitz），而且會以那種語氣問：“沃爾福威茨？你是說小布什手下那個國防部副部長？你覺得是他主導了一切？”默裡引了馬克·斯坦（Mark Steyn）的一句玩笑：他的姓以一頭討厭的動物開頭，以一個猶太人的身份結尾。
我認為這裡有非常深的東西在起作用。（道格拉斯·默裡）
內塔尼亞胡的辯護詞是這樣的：他把捍衛猶太人唯一的家園視為自己的歷史使命，這是他一生的事業。從這個角度看，他是歷史性的領導人。他多年來警告世界注意德黑蘭毛拉的威脅，警告伊朗革命政權在伊拉克、黎巴嫩、敘利亞、葉門的擴張。10月7日之後，他把一組極其困難的挑戰撐住了，把國際壓力控制在可承受的範圍內，並且推進了他一開始宣佈的兩個戰爭目標。
默裡說，聽到人質訊息時他的第一反應是他們都死了，永遠見不到了，很多以色列人也是這個態度。但大多數人質回來了。哈馬斯沒有被完全摧毀，但離2023年11月的戰力已經很遠，領導層幾乎全滅，第二層也幾乎全滅。
他提到2024年9月那一序列動：以色列空軍一天之內摧毀了敘利亞空軍全部裝備，因為不想讓它落到敘利亞新政府手裡的聖戰分子手上。默裡說，這條新聞當天在 BBC 網站上排第四。真主黨領導層全滅，第二第三層全部死亡或重傷。伊朗的“勞斯萊斯”被摧毀。
這些是非常重大的軍事成就，在我看來，這是對真主黨、哈馬斯以及其他伊朗代理人試圖摧毀猶太國的正義回應。（道格拉斯·默裡）
一面鏡子
弗裡德曼把話題引向那個更深的問題：為什麼世界上有這麼多對猶太人的仇恨？
默裡的第一個答案是：這是懶惰和輕信的人最容易找到的答案。世界上為什麼會有隨機、不公、不幸？最低成本、最低解析度的解釋就是，有一小撮人在背後操縱一切。
弗裡德曼把這個衝動推到個人層面：為什麼路上堵車？為什麼妻子離開我？為什麼我沒拿到那份工作？總得有人擋著我。
默裡接著講猶太人為什麼成為那個順手的目標。人數少，在特定時期、特定領域裡成就顯著超出比例。他說這不是完整解釋。猶太人涉足銀行業有它的歷史原因，但蘇格蘭人涉足銀行業也有歷史原因，到今天沒什麼人把國際金融的問題全怪到蘇格蘭人頭上。
然後他給出他認為最有解釋力的那段。他引了瓦西里·格羅斯曼（Vasily Grossman）《生活與命運》裡的一段。格羅斯曼說，反猶主義你在哪裡都能遇到，在科學院，在孩子們院子裡玩的遊戲裡。但它告訴你的是提出指控的那個人，不是猶太人。
告訴我你指控猶太人什麼，我就告訴你你自己犯了什麼罪。（瓦西里·格羅斯曼，默裡在書中引用並試圖推廣這句話）
默裡把這句格言一條一條套上去。伊朗革命政府指控以色列是殖民政權，而伊朗革命政府在我們這一代人的時間裡一直在殖民中東。土耳其政府指控猶太國家犯下佔領罪，而土耳其從1970年代起佔領著半個塞普勒斯，塞普勒斯是歐盟成員國，土耳其是北約成員國。
支援哈馬斯的人說以色列犯下無差別殺戮。默裡的回應是：哈馬斯，10月7日你們在幹什麼？網上有一批人反覆聲稱以色列士兵會強姦巴勒斯坦人，在監獄裡、在戰場上、在醫院裡，這種說法週期性爆發。默裡說，2016年之後你們說“相信所有女性”，10月7日之後你們說相信所有女性，除了那些說自己被強姦、說看到朋友被強姦的猶太女性，然後你們轉過頭說“看，猶太人都是強姦犯”。
你一直在為強姦犯搖旗吶喊，然後去指控猶太人強姦。這套邏輯怎麼用都成立，怎麼用都管用。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他把這一層和他上一本書《西方之戰》（The War on the West）連起來。那本書講的是西方歷史被一種極不公平、極不準確的框架重新評估，美國的原罪被定為奴隸制。默裡當時提出的問題是：這套框架最要命的地方在於，它沒有出口。就算它是真的，你也沒法做什麼。你18世紀的祖先擁有過奴隸，你打算怎麼辦？沒有機制可以寬恕，也沒有機制可以被寬恕，因為你沒做那件事，也沒有活人可以接受你的道歉。
10月7日之後，他看到一個出口出現了。
我被告知，我來自一個犯下定居者殖民主義、白人至上、種族滅絕、種族清洗的社會。我被放進了一個無法脫身的道德負擔裡，我無法請求任何人的寬恕，也沒有人能寬恕我。但是，啊，這裡有一個國家，我可以在此時此地指控它犯下所有這些事，把我的能量、我的負擔全部卸到它身上，而且我可能真的能讓它結束，從而解脫自己。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他把格羅斯曼那句話改了一下：這一次，告訴我你指控猶太人什麼，我就告訴你，你被告知自己犯了什麼。
弗裡德曼在這裡提了一個觀察：反猶內容在網上的互動量極高。他形容自己像外星人觀察地球，看這些內容是危險的，還是一群噴子和流量販子在 cosplay 納粹，圖個“讓自由派破防”的樂子。
默裡說兩者都有，而且更多。禁忌被打破本身有快感，有些人在 Holocaust 教育里長大，聽膩了，膩了之後往奇怪的方向走。但這些都是細節。真正的事情是反猶主義回來了，而且有一類人正樂在其中。
他給了一個判定標準，很硬：如果你對敘利亞被殺的穆斯林毫無興趣，對蘇丹的種族滅絕毫無興趣，對葉門幾十萬人被殺毫無興趣，但10月8日你就站在街上舉著牌子攻擊以色列，對不起，你就是反猶主義者。你可能自己不知道，但那就是驅動你的東西。
他補了一句關於“兩國方案”的：有一批半聰明的人會說，問題就是以色列得給巴勒斯坦人一個國家，給了之後地區的問題、世界的問題都能解決。這個說法本身就荒謬。巴勒斯坦人在加沙或者約旦河西岸再拿一個國家，憑什麼葉門的經濟會起飛？憑什麼德黑蘭的毛拉會給女性平權？最可能的結果只是多一個由德黑蘭代理人掌控的失敗阿拉伯國家，這已經是最好的情況。連薩爾曼·魯什迪（Salman Rushdie）這樣一輩子支援巴勒斯坦事業的人都說，如果巴勒斯坦再得到一個國家，最好的情況也只是伊朗政權的又一條戰線。
“我愛死亡，勝過你們愛生命”
弗裡德曼提到伊朗：他的好朋友裡有伊朗人，他認識的每一個伊朗人都反對這個政權，受過良好教育，見多識廣，而1979年以來的政權把這些都鎖住了。這種反差讓他困惑。
默裡的新書開頭就寫了一個航班：1979年，霍梅尼從巴黎飛回德黑蘭。
我認為這是20世紀最糟糕的兩趟旅程之一。（道格拉斯·默裡）
另一趟是列寧坐火車到彼得格勒的芬蘭車站。默裡開玩笑說自己真是個搞交通的，等著看他那本“十大旅程”的書。
他說這趟航班把最激進形式的什葉派伊斯蘭帶進了德黑蘭，帶進了伊朗，是現代史上的一大悲劇。他有一位已經過世的密友，在革命前的伊朗長大，喜歡國王，她父親在國王被推翻前是一位阿亞圖拉。所有人對他都有批評，但你看到他之後來的是什麼。
從這位朋友和其他人身上，他學到兩件事。第一是保守主義的核心洞察：事情總能更糟。永遠別說已經到底了，你可能有一個關著幾百上千政治犯的國王，但你也可能有霍梅尼把所有這些人屠殺乾淨，包括那些曾經幫他上臺的共產黨人和工會成員，他們在反對國王時對他很有用，直到他不需要他們了。
第二件事更難讓西方心態接受：世上確實存在狂熱的信仰，真正的、意識形態和宗教意義上的狂熱。西方很容易忘掉這一點，因為我們很久沒見過了，我們只在自己的社會里聽到很遠的回聲，而且我們對這些回聲高度敏感。
那麼為什麼這個政權從1979年撐到現在？默裡引了索爾仁尼琴在《古拉格群島》裡的那段：當我們聽到樓梯上的腳步聲，聽到敲的是鄰居的門，知道鄰居被抓走了，我們為什麼沒有阻止？
人們沒有意識到，儘管有那些說辭，一切都變了，如果另一個人可能會殺了你。2009年伊朗綠色運動起來的時候，為什麼被鎮壓下去了？因為巴斯基民兵會朝你頭上開槍，會把你拖進監獄，就像他們對伊朗學生做的那樣，用瓶子強姦你，然後殺死你。哪怕只做一點點，也足以讓社會其餘部分記住，不要再來一次。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他說我們在電影裡知道這件事會發生，但太少人理解德黑蘭那樣的政權是以這種方式、在最大規模上、以終極的殘暴來運作的，這就是它們保持權力的方式。
然後是那段他反覆回到的對話。1979年，奧里亞娜·法拉奇（Oriana Fallaci）採訪霍梅尼，是極少數做到這一點的西方記者之一。她說，街上這些人，這場運動，你開啟的這場革命，是被仇恨驅動的，全是仇恨。
霍梅尼說：不，不，是愛。是愛。
你怎麼向一個西方人的頭腦解釋，有些人被這種自稱愛的仇恨所驅動？（道格拉斯·默裡）
他提到西班牙哲學家米格爾·德·烏納穆諾（Miguel de Unamuno）。1930年代，烏納穆諾在薩拉曼卡大學面對一群已經陷入長槍黨意識形態的年輕學生，他試圖捍衛自己一生的原則，學生們在他面前齊聲高喊：“Viva la Muerte！”死亡萬歲。
那些在佛朗哥時代的西班牙高喊死亡萬歲的年輕人，今天有他們的對應物。他們就是那些用“我們愛死亡勝過你們愛生命”來嘲諷美國人、西方人、以色列人的人。（道格拉斯·默裡）
這句話是這期播客的開場白，也是它的落點。默裡說，他之所以反覆回到它，是因為它幾乎無法被裝進現代人的腦子裡。如果你的整個存在建立在這個前提上，你就是世界的危險源。這是作惡的極好基礎。
怎麼採訪一個你可能討厭的世界領導人
談話轉向方法論。弗裡德曼說他有機會採訪幾位世界領導人，包括內塔尼亞胡，可能還有普京。他想請教默裡：怎麼採訪這種人？
默裡的回答從壓力說起。每一次這樣的採訪都有重量，因為你會收到一批人的要求：“你必須問他這個，你不能不提這個。”這非常難辦，因為對政治人物的採訪不該是仰視的，但也不能變成無休止的審問。你不是檢察官，對方也不必是回答你的罪犯。
我注意到很多人帶著一張問題清單去採訪世界領導人，然後在某個時刻對方可以直接說：我不需要這個。批評你的人沒意識到，你就是不能那麼做。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他引了羅賓·戴（Robin Day）評價傑里米·帕克斯曼（Jeremy Paxman）的一段話。羅賓·戴自己也很擅長對政客無禮，但很講究分寸。他說1990年代之後政治採訪的新路子有個問題：如果你認為對面那個人是騙子，你應該讓他自己暴露出他是騙子，別直接叫他騙子。
當面叫一個人騙子，可能讓電視機前的觀眾很爽，但它什麼也沒做，它實際上什麼也沒揭示出來。如果一個人是騙子，而且他自己暴露了，那是另一回事。（道格拉斯·默裡）
弗裡德曼補充了自己的做法。他說自己從不做指令碼化的採訪，對方團隊沒有權力決定他問什麼。有時候團隊會禮貌地暗示某個話題，他會禮貌地道謝、微笑，但那不代表他得照辦。他說這種事在世界領導人那裡反而少，在 CEO 那裡多，因為 CEO 有公關團隊。
默裡說，還有一件批評者不會想到的事：人生很長。你不需要因為網上某個蠢貨的要求就把一切都炸掉。他給了一條他認為算是超能力的東西：
識別出那些你在乎他們意見的人，只在乎他們的意見，別人的都不重要，然後守住你自己的那束光。（道格拉斯·默裡）
他提到丘吉爾1940年為張伯倫寫的悼詞。丘吉爾剛當上首相，張伯倫是他的重要政治對手，他完全可以利用這個機會說：你們看，我早就說過，張伯倫根本不知道自己在幹什麼，他把我們帶進了這攤爛攤子，你們早該聽我的。那是個好時機，可以贏一把。
丘吉爾沒有這麼做。他談的是人在世上行事有多難，以及怎樣才能做成。他整篇悼詞裡沒有提希特勒的名字。他說張伯倫的缺點是什麼？是渴望人類和平，是追求和平，而他的不幸在於，他被一個非常邪惡的人引入了歧途。
然後是那段默裡幾乎背下來的話：
人無法預見或預測事件展開的程序，這對人是幸事，否則生活將難以忍受。在一個階段，人們似乎是對的，在另一個階段，他們被證明是錯的，然後一套不同的價值尺度浮現出來。這一切的價值何在？一個人唯一的嚮導是他的良知，唯一的盾牌是他的記憶、他的正直，以及他行動的真誠。不管命運如何擺佈，只要你有這面盾牌護衛，你就始終行進在榮譽的行列中。（溫斯頓·丘吉爾，默裡引述）
前線給人的那種可怕的清晰
最後一段，弗裡德曼問默裡：你寫了這麼多陰暗的東西，人群的瘋狂、地緣政治的瘋狂、戰爭的瘋狂，當陽光穿過雲層，默裡臉上露出笑容的時候，那個笑容的來源是什麼？
默裡說，來源無窮無盡。最讓他受鼓舞的是聰明的年輕人。他前不久在基輔，被邀請去大學給學生演講，儘管他們處境艱難，跟一屋子學生講話、結束後留下來儘可能多地回答問題、聽他們講自己的生活、想做什麼，這本身就是最好的事。你會想起自己在這個年紀是什麼樣子，有多傻，會犯多少錯，有多少東西要學，會有多享受這個過程。
弗裡德曼問：你親眼看了這麼多戰爭，烏克蘭、以色列，這改變你了嗎？有沒有讓那團溫暖和光變暗？
默裡說，這個問題很難回答，他自己也不知道，每天都不同。
弗裡德曼追問：所以有時候會有一種沉重？
默裡說：當然，有時候。
問他後不後悔去了那麼多次前線？
他說不後悔。對寫作者來說，戰爭幾乎是最好的題材，因為你在極端狀態下看到生命。這很奇怪，但這是真的。死亡擺在你面前的時候，它給一切投下一種可怕的清晰。你會看到人如何愛，有時甚至笑得更多。蒙田有一篇隨筆一直在他腦子裡，叫《為什麼我們會為同一件事又哭又笑》。一切都變得更強烈，你看到人最好的部分和最壞的部分，它們挨在一起。
弗裡德曼說他也和烏克蘭前線計程車兵打過交道，平民生活裡那些客套、那些廢話全被剝掉了，某種意義上是更誠實的狀態。
默裡說是的，完全同意。他講了個故事，2022年他跟幾個烏克蘭士兵在一起，他們想抽菸，但酒店裡不許抽，他們就走到外面，默裡陪著出去，外面正落火箭彈。他跟士兵說：不覺得很奇怪嗎，對二手菸的恐懼居然壓過了這個。
弗裡德曼說，在前線，這個笑話的滋味特別好，你可以為這個笑一整天。生活的荒誕就擺在那兒，那麼誠實，那麼美。這也是為什麼很多士兵被戰爭摧毀了，卻也會想念它。
完全正確。每個人都說過，我從沒覺得自己這麼活過，我不會拿它換任何東西。（道格拉斯·默裡）
可以立刻做的幾件事
這期對話資訊密度很高，但真正能拿走的，是幾個判斷工具。
- 看一個人指控誰，比看他支援誰更能看清他。格羅斯曼那句“告訴我你指控猶太人什麼，我就告訴你你犯了什麼罪”，可以擴充套件到大多數公共指控上。伊朗指控以色列殖民，土耳其指控以色列佔領，支援哈馬斯的賬號指控以色列無差別殺戮。對照一下指控者自己的行為記錄，很多話會自動失效。
- 警惕“最低解析度的解釋”。所有問題都歸結到一小撮人身上的敘事，不管是猶太人、深層政府還是某個家族，共同點是它省掉了理解的成本。判斷標準很簡單：這個解釋能不能被證偽？它有沒有為“我可能是錯的”留位置？
- 把“明顯的事實”定期說一遍，哪怕它在派對上很無聊。默裡引的那個二戰起源辯論場景值得記住：一屋子人陷在波蘭鐵礦石的細節裡，主持人問安德魯·羅伯茨二戰為什麼開始，他回答“因為希特勒入侵了波蘭”。重要的東西是唯一會被忘掉的東西。
- 去現場，或者至少和長期住在那裡的人面對面聊。默裡說自己不後悔去前線的理由之一是，人們一定會告訴你你親眼看到的事情沒有發生，提前見過一次，能幫你扛住那一刻。反過來，只靠二手資訊形成的判斷，通常撐不過一次反駁。
- 如果你是做採訪、做內容的人，先分清“讓對方暴露”和“替自己出氣”。當面叫一個人騙子，滿足的是螢幕前的觀眾，揭示不了任何東西。真正有價值的問題，是對方沒有準備好、答完之後自己會露出破綻的那一個問題。
- 對“促和”的速度保持懷疑。急著結束一場戰爭的談判，壓力總會先落在最好壓的那一方身上。看到一份停火方案，先問一句：這份協議獎勵的是誰，懲罰的是誰。如果答案是獎勵侵略者、懲罰受害者，那它只是把戰爭延期。
- 把你在乎意見的人縮短到能數得過來的數量。默裡那句“一億個敵人不重要”，前提是你清楚自己那束光是什麼。守不住它，就會被輿論的浪頭推著走；守住了，別人怎麼說都只是背景噪音。
文稿來自 Lex Fridman 官網公開發布的官方 Transcript（含說話人與時間戳）。
Douglas Murray (00:00:00): … end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte. Long-lived death.” They have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, “We love death more than you love live.”
Lex Fridman (00:00:24): The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of the War in the West, the Madness of Crowds and his new book On Democracies and Death Cults. We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics, and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly. As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including the next episode of this podcast. We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast beautiful dark land of the internet. It’s hard to know who to trust. I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others. Some are insightful and some are delusional. The problem is it’s hard to tell which is which unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor.
Lex Fridman (00:01:34): I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and tried to pick up wisdom from each. Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives living there. Whether it’s Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia. Let’s try together to not be cogs in the machine of outrage, and instead to reach toward reason and compassion. There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire. Human civilization hangs in the balance. The 21st century is a new geopolitical puzzle, all of us are tasked with solving. Let’s not mess it up. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Douglas Murray.
Lex Fridman (00:02:38): What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from your visits there? Just looking at the big picture of your understanding of the invasion of February 24th, 2022, and the war in the three years since?
Douglas Murray (00:02:50): I mean, several things has political angles, which are forever changing. But on the human level, as you know, if you visit troops, frontline troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families. Struck by the way in which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise and much more. It’s very easy to get caught up in the to’s and fro’s of today’s news, but that to my mind is that’s the single thing that struck me most in my visits there. Is just the people I’ve met who are fighting for a cause, which at that level is unavoidable, undeniable.
Lex Fridman (00:03:45): So, the thing that struck you that’s different from the media turmoil is just the reality of war?
Douglas Murray (00:03:52): Yeah, of course. I mean, people who have either lived under Russian occupation from invading armies and then come back out into the world, having been liberated as in late 2022. Or the people now organized most recently there in recent weeks, who were just getting on with their job as soldiers whilst the world was talking about them.
Lex Fridman (00:04:19): When were you there early on in this escalated war of ’22?
Douglas Murray (00:04:25): Yes, first time was, I was with the Ukrainian Armed Forces when they retook Kherson, and I was back in recent weeks. And was there when the Trump-Zelensky blow up happened. In fact, I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it.
Lex Fridman (00:04:45): How’s the morale? How’s the way the content of the conversations you’ve heard different from the two visits separated by, I guess, two years?
Douglas Murray (00:04:58): One level, I mean, nothing has changed much. It is not a total standoff because intermittently each side gains territory from the others. I mean, there’d been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.
Lex Fridman (00:05:18): I think my experience of the soldiers, the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there’s a intense optimism about the outcomes of the war. There’s a sense that they’re going to win. And the definition of what win means was like, all the territory is going to be one back.
Douglas Murray (00:05:41): Yeah, I certainly on the front lines facing Crimea was became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even be able to get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the time, and I thought that that was an overreach.
Lex Fridman (00:05:57): And now, I think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted. The morale, the dreams, the certainty of victory has maybe faded from the forefront of their minds.
Douglas Murray (00:06:21): Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.
Lex Fridman (00:06:24): What did you think of the blow up between Zelensky and Trump as you’re sitting there in the dugout?
Douglas Murray (00:06:31): Well, it was a very disturbing place to watch it from, perhaps anywhere would’ve been. And obviously, it was a meeting that shouldn’t have happened. It was far too early.
Lex Fridman (00:06:45): Why do you think so? There’s not enough actual pathways to peace on the table?
Douglas Murray (00:06:50): Well, I think the mineral deal, I mean, I love the fact that everyone’s now an expert in Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits, but-
Lex Fridman (00:06:57): I think as I’ve learned, and we’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, I’m learning that everybody’s an expert on geopolitics and the history of war on the internet.
Douglas Murray (00:07:05): And now mineral deposits, obviously.
Lex Fridman (00:07:07): Yes.
Douglas Murray (00:07:09): I’m really speaking of the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here. But no, from what I could see the deal that the American administration was trying to get the Ukrainian government to sign, it was too early to force. The Ukrainians were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure. And I think certainly, Zelensky actually wasn’t expecting to go until pretty much the day before, was obviously visibly tired and exhausted. Again, as you are after that amount of pressure for that long time. I mean, the thing that struck me, and I said this in my column, the New York Post from there, that the thing that struck me was I said to some of the soldiers I was with, what do you make of this? And one of them just said to me, “Well, we’re advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this,” but of course everyone has Instagram or scrolls and among dog pictures and the hot women or whatever is what happened in the Oval. But what struck me was this same guy and saying, “I’ve got a job to do.”
Lex Fridman (00:08:30): Right. And there’s a clarity and a wisdom to that. But your job is bigger than that, right? Is to understand the politics as well. And what do you think about the politics of that moment? Because that was a real opportunity to come together and make progress on peace, right? And by all accounts was not a successful step forward.
Douglas Murray (00:08:59): I don’t think by any account, it was a successful step forward. Unless to some extent it was a play, from DC to say to Putin, “Look, we doffed off Zelensky and now give us something.” That’s the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it. But I think it was just one of those extremely, I mean, just awful political moments. Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington. It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator, and people and the administration implying that Ukraine has started the war. And I think that must be for Zelensky, a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in. And I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering because it would be bewildering.
Lex Fridman (00:10:13): I think the sad thing to me also on the mundane details of that meeting and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, I think it’s true that he was also exhausted. There was a dickhead, a reporter that was asked the question about outfit in a way that, listen, Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. He’s an emotional being, for better or for worse. And there’s a dumb dickhead of a reporter-
Douglas Murray (00:10:42): Margie Taylor Green’s boyfriend. He is, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:10:46): The things you know. See, you’re a real journalist.
Douglas Murray (00:10:51): I’m all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing, but it means that you get some people in who are sort of, yeah, from a bloglanders. Nothing wrong with that, but it means that you get somebody who will do something like that. The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was that guy asked that disrespectful question, and I think it was disrespectful. I’ll very quickly say why. I think that when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect or at least concession that the other man has come from the realm of war. And that if you are sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed and decimated and defenestrated and much more to a man who’s for whom, none of that is metaphorical. I think that’s extremely hard to accept.
Douglas Murray (00:11:59): And I think that probably also at that moment, there was a sort of sense of Zelensky is being disrespected by being asked about what he’s wearing when as everyone knows, Churchill during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visit. But [inaudible 00:12:19] just that is to remind people that you are coming from the realm of war. And I think that probably in that moment, one of the things that would’ve been going through his head would be, I mean, if this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you’d hope your host stepped in and defended you.
Douglas Murray (00:12:38): Let me try this one out. I mean, if a journalist in the Oval Office, if Putin was sitting there or a putative journalist said to Putin, everyone knows you’ve had a lot of facial work done, and word is you’ve used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use. Can you comment on that? You’d say, well, that’s a disrespectful question for journalists to ask, and it’s a little bit off what needs to be gone over. And it is the same thing with Zelensky with his outfit. I think it was just petty and threw things off in a bad way.
Lex Fridman (00:13:21): Yeah, I know it was probably researched because I think Zelensky was explained this three years ago at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears, and he’s been consistent wearing the same-
Douglas Murray (00:13:31): By the way, it’s an example of the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what’s going on. I mean, my view is that since actually most people, in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything. One of the things that we always do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, every site does it. Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years. I didn’t want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama’s foreign policy. It was just an easy shorthand. I think it’s the same, we’re always tempted to that.
Lex Fridman (00:14:20): But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin, I think Putin would’ve been able to respond himself to that journalist effectively, and he would’ve done it in Russian.
Douglas Murray (00:14:33): Oh, yeah, the language thing.
Lex Fridman (00:14:35): Yeah. So I wanted to sort of lay out several just unfortunate things that happened in these situations. I think it happens in all peace negotiations, and it’s funny how history can turn in moments like this. I do think there’s a dickhead reporter combined with the fact that, with all due respect, but Zelensky’s English sometimes is not very good.
Douglas Murray (00:14:55): Yes. And apart from anything else, if had have agreed to have not done it in English, he would’ve bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:15:02): Yeah. And have the wit, the guys funny, witty, intelligent. He could do that in the native language of whether it’s Ukrainian or Russian, to be able to respond and get the interpreter. So all of that is really unfortunate, because I think in those little moments, it’s a dance, and there’s an opportunity there. The Republicans, the right-wing in the United States have a general skepticism of Zelensky, but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way. It can turn, it can change, it can evolve.
Douglas Murray (00:15:37): It’s very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it’s happened?
Lex Fridman (00:15:42): Politics in the United States is so dumb that at the very beginning it could just be reduced to… Well, the left went Putin bad, Zelensky good. Rah, rah, Ukrainian flags. Therefore, the right must go the opposite.
Douglas Murray (00:15:59): Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:15:59): Sometimes it’s literally as dumb as that. Let’s each pick a side and call the other dumb.
Douglas Murray (00:16:04): I had a line I used recently, the necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes. It is sort like that, isn’t it?
Lex Fridman (00:16:05): Yeah.
Douglas Murray (00:16:15): Because yes, I mean, I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or trans flags in their bio then put Ukrainian flags in their bio despite almost suddenly not knowing where Ukraine was. And if that happens, inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren’t really thinking is to say, “That’s really annoying. These people are really annoying, I’ll sock it to them.” But that’s where you’ve got to try to rise above that and say, “Actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn’t depend on my tolerance for memes online today.”
Lex Fridman (00:16:49): Yeah. So, I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened between Zelensky and Trump. There can been real comradery. I’ve seen the skill of that just recently having researched deeply and interacted with Narendra Modi, here’s somebody who has the skill for his country, for his situation, being able to somehow be friends with Putin and friends with Zelensky and friends with Trump, and friends with Biden and friends with Obama.
Douglas Murray (00:17:25): He was very skillful.
Lex Fridman (00:17:26): That while still being strong for his country and fundamentally a nationalist figure who’s very non globalist, not anything but pro-India, India First, Nation First. In fact, Nation First with a very specific idea what that nation represents.
Douglas Murray (00:17:52): Sure.
Lex Fridman (00:17:52): And that Zelensky could do all of those things, but have the skill of navigating the Trump room. Because every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated.
Douglas Murray (00:18:06): Yes, the obvious one, I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky’s fault, I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say, “Yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and American people and American politicians from across the aisle for your support for my country in its hour of need, but we’re deeply grateful.” And because he for once forgot to say that.
Lex Fridman (00:18:27): I think it’s not that simple. I think there’s a-
Douglas Murray (00:18:29): It’s not that simple. It’s one reason.
Lex Fridman (00:18:30): I think saying, thank you. He didn’t need to say, “Thank you.” There’s just-
Douglas Murray (00:18:33): Well, that was what Vance leapt in on.
Lex Fridman (00:18:36): He’s just picking a thing to leap on. There’s a whole energy. You have to acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Biden buddy buddy with the left for the last four years. There’s ways to fix that. Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that. And you basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is showing… There’s many ways of doing that. But one of them is saying, feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world’s greatest negotiators, right? “I’m glad we’re able to come to the table and negotiate together, because I believe you are the great negotiator/mediator that can actually bring a successful resolution to…” As opposed to have an energy of, it should be obvious to everybody that Ukrainian are the good guys and Russia is the bad guys.
Lex Fridman (00:19:38): There’s this whole energy of entitlement that he brought. He forgot that there’s a new guy. You got to convince the new guy that this global mission, that this nation is on this war that is in many ways, the West versus the East. That there’s ideals, there’s whole histories here that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince them, right?
Douglas Murray (00:20:06): Yeah. No, sure. And they obviously failed on that occasion. But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator. I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the president’s comments on that saying that the big picture of Putin just saying, “This is a dictator.” And I think the people can be live enough to be able to recognize that you can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn’t mean you have to fall for Putin. And again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don’t have that capability.
Lex Fridman (00:20:54): Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin?
Douglas Murray (00:20:59): He’s a dictator who’s very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition. He’s kleptomaniac of his country’s resources, has enriched himself as much as he could, as he has with the cronies around him. He’s not just acted to destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth and killed people on our soil. As it happens, weapons of mass destruction, the use of polonium in the Center of London, not good. The use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming Cathedral City like Salisbury. Not good. If the sort of apologists of Putin would say, “Well, he’s just a sort of tough man who’s looking after his house business,” he say. Well, I don’t think even if you think he has the right to do that, he should be doing it in third countries deliberately using weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British citizens. Yeah. I mean, that’s just for starters.
Lex Fridman (00:22:19): Do you think he’s actually popularly elected?
Douglas Murray (00:22:22): No.
Lex Fridman (00:22:24): Do you think the results of the elections are fraudulent?
Douglas Murray (00:22:28): Yes. I mean-
Lex Fridman (00:22:31): Do you think it’s possible that it’s just that the opposition has been eliminated and he’s legitimately popularly elected?
Douglas Murray (00:22:38): It definitely helps the chap if he’s killed all of his opponents.
Lex Fridman (00:22:42): Something about using the term chap in that context is just marvelous.
Douglas Murray (00:22:53): This is another, the sort of slightly Alice in Wonderland things recently about Zelensky as people are saying, “Well, he’s a dictator because he hasn’t held elections during a total war of self-defense.” And it’s like, “Well, if you are really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you’d at least notice that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense.” But this doesn’t mean that you have to say that therefore, they should have Western style elections and freedom, that Russia is ready to go and become a western liberal democracy. It doesn’t mean any of that at all. At least note that this is what Putin is.
Lex Fridman (00:23:36): What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in ’22?
Douglas Murray (00:23:40): Well, it’s what he’s said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman (00:23:47): Do you think there is empire building components to that motivation?
Douglas Murray (00:23:52): I would trust most of my friends in East and Central Europe who certainly do think that. There’s a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on defense. And it’s because they’re very worried. I don’t think they’re faking it. I don’t think they’re faking it for me or for anyone else. I think the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.
Lex Fridman (00:24:24): Do you think there’s a possibility that the war continues indefinitely, even if there’s a ceasefire in the peace reached, the war will resume, he will seek expansion even beyond Ukraine?
Douglas Murray (00:24:38): Yes. And the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it’ll be a temporary pause. And whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the opportunity to advance again. Yes. Again, one of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine. That that’s all he wants, and that he has no history of rhetoric or actions that suggest anything else. And again, it’s one of the reasons why it’s useful traveling to places and seeing things your own eyes. Because I very much remember being in the country of Georgia after Putin tried to invade in 2008. Again, people don’t have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause. Just to recognize that it doesn’t seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin’s vision.
Lex Fridman (00:25:41): Do you see value and maybe depth and power to the realist perspective of all this? Somebody like John Mearsheimer’s formulation of all this, that in these invasions of Georgia, of Ukraine, it’s using military power to expand the sphere of influence in the region in a cold calculation of geopolitics.
Douglas Murray (00:26:06): It’s interesting. One of the fascinating things about the last few years is that there’s been an act of sort of necromancy of certain figures were totally, totally debunked in the area of Ukraine, Mearsheimer, and in the case of Israel people like Finkelstein. And it’s been interesting because these are people that one hadn’t heard of for some years because they were not listened to, usually, for good reason. By the way, first of all, I’m very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because most people to some extent will say that they are a realist in foreign policy. Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.
Lex Fridman (00:26:53): I would like to meet them.
Douglas Murray (00:26:54): A surrealist foreign policy analyst.
Lex Fridman (00:26:57): We did mention Alice in Wonderland, so.
Douglas Murray (00:26:59): Yeah. I mean, maybe we should introduce the term, but… I mean, if you want to say, if you want to look gimlet-eyed, eyed out across the world, you’re a realist. I think the steel man of their argument would be Russia has or believes it has a sphere of influence. And is regrettable, but there’s very little we can do about that. That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.
Lex Fridman (00:27:30): Well, to expand on that steel man, isn’t this how superpowers operate in the dark realist/surrealist way? Meaning the United States uses military power to have a sphere of influence over the whole globe, really. China appears to be willing to use military power to expand its sphere of influence.
Douglas Murray (00:27:55): And political power, yeah, more importantly, in the case of China.
Lex Fridman (00:27:57): Political power.
Douglas Murray (00:27:59): Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas. Hong Kong being the obvious one.
Lex Fridman (00:28:05): Behind that, isn’t there always a kinetic threat?
Douglas Murray (00:28:09): Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, you disappear some booksellers and students are protesting, of course. But to go back to this, yeah, of course. Okay. The countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence. I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a fairly rapacious regime. I mean, it’s not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kiev in the first weeks of the war in ’22, he would’ve gone straight on to other places.
Douglas Murray (00:28:58): And maybe he would’ve done, maybe he would’ve taken his time, maybe he wouldn’t have done. And this is a very fine calculation that changes every week, let alone every year. My friends in Georgia I thought were wildly off the mark when they were believing that after 2008 they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. And I thought that was completely unlikely. And I still think it’s unlikely and almost suddenly undesirable for Europe and for NATO, because you’ve got to be very careful. And obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been since the ’90s, are you going to set up a trip wire to start World War 3? And that’s not a small thing to consider.
Lex Fridman (00:29:44): So what do you think the peace deal might look like, and what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months?
Douglas Murray (00:29:56): I just thought it would be regrettably the Ukrainian ceding territory in the east, and then making sure they rearm during whatever peace period comes afterwards.
Lex Fridman (00:30:14): And probably, all four territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson.
Douglas Murray (00:30:22): You couldn’t lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on. And I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about the Ukrainian ceding territory is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin’s rule, and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine and much more. And I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian occupied areas, and it’s brutal for the Ukrainian to be growing up in that territory. So, when people say, “Well, obviously Donetsk has to be given to Putin.” I think that is not as easier a thing if you are in Ukraine as it is if you’re sitting in New York say.
Douglas Murray (00:31:26): There is a school of thought that obviously President Trump to some extent was floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done, a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else, you get a buffer zone of American businesses and investment. And therefore American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to invade. I don’t follow that idea because not least there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast…
Douglas Murray (00:32:00): … in the regions that were invaded in ’22 and they left fast. And we know from Hong Kong and other places, just because there are international financial interests in the region does not mean that a dictatorship will not, either militarily or covertly, take over. I don’t see American miners as being an effective buffer zone against Putin.
Lex Fridman (00:32:24): By the way, what did you learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children from those regions?
Douglas Murray (00:32:32): Well, it’s heartbreaking because the only schooling is Russian schooling. Obviously, teaching the Russian language, Putin’s view of history and, effectively, indoctrination. And people can quibble with that term but it’s Putinesque indoctrination schools and any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and not go out. And I spoke to children and parents who’d had [inaudible 00:33:08], for instance, the Russians set up in ’22 and ’23 summer camps for the children of some of the areas that have been occupied and the children went off to the camps and then they didn’t come back, they were just stolen. It’s thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion, that’s not a small thing. It’s not got very much attention but, yes, children who would hide whenever the Russian troops came to the door.
Douglas Murray (00:33:38): One teenage boy who described to me how, when his mother was out, a woman came around the house, knocked on the door and gave him his papers and said that he had to attend the next week to sign up for the Russian army. This is not good and that’s obviously what life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine. I just have it in mind when people say things like, “Well, obviously, these regions have to be handed over.” It’s very, very hard, if you’re a Ukrainian, to concede to that.
Lex Fridman (00:34:20): Yeah. And even if they are, as part of the negotiation, to hand it over, I think it’ll probably be generations or never that that could be accepted by Ukrainian people.
Douglas Murray (00:34:30): Absolutely, and I would have thought never.
Lex Fridman (00:34:33): What do we know about this kidnapping of children? The stories of the thousands of children that the Russian forces kidnapped?
Douglas Murray (00:34:43): Some of them were in orphanages in Eastern Ukraine, not all by any means, but some were. And it’s a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families, many the Russians said, “Well, look at these Ukrainians, they don’t even look after their children, therefore, we will look after them.” And recently, when I was there looking into this story because it’s a very interesting question as to why it hasn’t had more attention. One thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls some 12 years ago now in Northern Nigeria and the appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram completely gained the world’s attention. And I was very interested into why the Ukrainian children who’d been taken by the Russians have not gained similar attention, there’s a slight similarity with the war in Israel which I’m sure we’ll come on to.
Douglas Murray (00:35:37): And I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages and the Ukrainians knew, this is my estimation of the terrain, is that the Ukrainians knew that, if they made a great deal about this more than they did, that the children would effectively be the most effective bargaining chip. And I do think there’s considerable truth in that because, if you look at, for instance, the way in which pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the kidnapped Israelis, you’ll see that it’s a pretty effective tactic for any totalitarian regime or terrorist group to operate in a way that means that the population of the country you’re attacking pressure their government to do something in terms of concession, it’s a very effective tool. And I think that story was partly played down, not just outside of Ukraine, but also within Ukraine partly for that reason.
Lex Fridman (00:36:45): As a truth seeker, as a journalist, how do you operate in that world where, at least to me, it’s obvious that there’s just a flood of propaganda on both sides? Now, of course, when you go there and directly experience it and talk to people but those people are still also swimming in the propaganda. So, unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it’s hard to know. I speak to people on the Russian side and they’re clearly, first of all, hilariously enough, they almost always say that there’s no propaganda in Russia.
Douglas Murray (00:37:22): Of course.
Lex Fridman (00:37:22): Which makes me realize you can be completely lied to, maybe I am in the United States as well, and just be unaware. Maybe earth is run by aliens, maybe the earth is flat so I don’t know.
Douglas Murray (00:37:38): Maybe you’ve taken mushrooms.
Lex Fridman (00:37:40): I have before this and I finally see the truth and it’s you that are deluded, Douglas. Okay, but back to our round earth discussion, round earth shills that we are, how do you know what is true?
Douglas Murray (00:37:55): You can tell it when the bare facts become not true, you can tell it when somebody is willing to claim that everything caused the invasion of 2022 except for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
Lex Fridman (00:38:16): Yeah, there’s a hilarious thing that happens and I think you’ve actually speak about this that people are generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected leader.
Douglas Murray (00:38:27): Always, always.
Lex Fridman (00:38:28): So, the interesting thing that happens is these wise sages that do the narratives of NATO started the war which there is some interesting geopolitical depth and truth to that.
Douglas Murray (00:38:28): Sure.
Lex Fridman (00:38:41): That NATO expansion created a complicated geopolitical context, whatever.
Douglas Murray (00:38:45): Sure.
Lex Fridman (00:38:46): But they forget to say other parts of that story.
Douglas Murray (00:38:50): Well, yes, of course. And of course, to some extent, it’s rather … The most irritating type of question asker at any event is the person who says, ” I was disappointed that, in your 30-minute talk, you didn’t address X.” And I tend to say, “Looking forward to coming to your next talk where, in 30 minutes, you’ll cover everything that could possibly be covered.” There’s always stuff that’s going to be left on the sides, there’s always going to be stuff that’s left unaddressed, there’s always going to be other angles, there’s always going to be somebody else who has this interesting perspective and you can’t cover it. Nevertheless, if you cover everything other than the central things, then it’s suspicious. Many years ago at a debate in London, there was a debate about the origins of World War II and Pat Buchanan talking of necromancy was one of the speakers and Andrew Roberts, the historian, was one of the people on the other side. And at one point, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining in Poland in the mid … Something like this.
Douglas Murray (00:40:02): And the moderator, I remember, it was just a melee, and the moderator turns to Andrew Roberts and says, “Andrew Roberts, why did World War II begin?” and he says, “World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland.” And it was a magnificent moment because everything had been a marsh, they were just so lost in all the intricate and clever and interesting things that you can talk about about the origins of a war that you forget to mention the thing that’s most important. And certainly, my experience as a journalist and writer is one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people are certain to tell you that what you’ve seen with your own eyes didn’t happen or hasn’t happened and it helps to steal you for that moment.
Lex Fridman (00:40:58): Yeah. It’s a gradual thing that happens where the obvious thing starts being taken for granted and people stop saying it because it’s the boring thing to say at a party. And then, all of a sudden, over time, you just almost start questioning whether the obvious thing is even true. I don’t know how that happens in human psychology but it does.
Douglas Murray (00:41:20): Yeah, I think it does. I’ve observed it in a lot of different places which is the important thing is the only thing you do forget, everything else is what you remember. And some of us are, for some reason, wired in a way where we try not to forget the important thing.
Lex Fridman (00:41:34): Remember the obvious thing, yeah.
Douglas Murray (00:41:35): Yes. And as you say, not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what is true because what a douchebag you’d be if you were that guy.
Lex Fridman (00:41:44): Nobody likes captain obvious at a party, okay. Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator, a successful negotiator that brings a stable peace to Ukraine?
Douglas Murray (00:41:58): It’s possible, we’ll have to see. I think it’s just too early and complicated to tell. That he wants to bring a peace seems to me to be obvious, he stated it a lot of times. Whether he can, we’re just going to have to see. It’s extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the peace still. And I would suggest that the one, not the most difficult, but one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe. It doesn’t matter because we in the West, some of the countries in the West have said it before that we’d secure their peace and we haven’t. And so, what other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured, I can’t see.
Lex Fridman (00:43:02): I think there’s not going to be ever a guarantee that you can trust. I think the way you have a guarantee, implicit guarantee is by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible. So, you have partnerships with the Middle East, you have partnerships with India, perhaps even with China, with the United States, with many nations in Europe.
Douglas Murray (00:43:27): All of which still suggests that, if there’s enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion.
Lex Fridman (00:43:38): There would be financial pressure, yeah. Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West. I think a world that’s flourishing would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East.
Douglas Murray (00:44:00): Thought it would be ideal. It would be ideal if the regime in Moscow wanted it but that’s that not … Again, you get into the thing of people accused of Russophobia but the … I do believe that, after the fall of the wall, Russia was ill-treated by the West, not treated with some of the courtesy that it required, I do think that. And at the same time, that doesn’t justify the actions of Russia in the last 20 years.
Lex Fridman (00:44:38): Right. But let’s descend from the surrealist to the realist, it’s very possible for Russia to be on the verge of military invasion of these nations and that being wrong while also not doing it because they’re afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China.
Douglas Murray (00:44:59): It’s possible. But the alliance they formed with this rogue alliance with China to a considerable extent, North Korea, not useful and Iran is something they seem to find bearable. It’s not a very good alliance in most people’s analysis but it’s an alliance.
Lex Fridman (00:45:23): It’s bearable but I don’t think, maybe you disagree with this, I don’t think the Russian people or even Putin wants to be isolated from the West. I think it wants to be friends with the West and with the East and with everybody, he just also wants Ukraine. And there’s … How does the Rolling Stones song go?
Douglas Murray (00:45:47): Which one?
Lex Fridman (00:45:50): Not the satisfaction one.
Douglas Murray (00:45:52): Sympathy with the Devil?
Lex Fridman (00:45:54): That’s the one. You got me on that one. No, there’s interests, whether it’s expanding the sphere of influence, that’s one thing on the table but that can be put aside if you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations. And if Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations, then that prevents Russia from invading.
Douglas Murray (00:46:17): I think the premise is one that I’ve seen before. There was a famous … What was his name? Norman Angell. He wrote this book which was a fantastic bestseller in his day where he believed that Europe would be in a period of endless Kantian peace because the prospect of European powers going to war was so economically unviable. The book was reissued after World War I and I never got the second edition but I assume it was significantly rewritten.
Lex Fridman (00:46:53): That’s a very cynical take that just because the book is wrong-
Douglas Murray (00:46:56): I’m not saying that the book is wrong, I’m saying that the idea that cooperation on an economic and other levels is any significant preventative device to madness breaking out is not something I see. It could deter some people, it could deter some very, very rational economically driven actors but it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war and to invade and to go mad.
Lex Fridman (00:47:31): Okay. Well, I would argue that, in the 21st century, one of the reasons we have much fewer wars is because of the much more-
Douglas Murray (00:47:39): Bomb.
Lex Fridman (00:47:39): Well, so there’s a few tools here on the geopolitical stage. One of them is that we’re just much more interconnected economically, globally interconnected and that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace. There’s a lot of money to be made from peace, there’s also a lot of money to be made from war. There’s a lot of interest, attention and I’m just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using. The alternative is, what, military force? That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one but, unfortunately, it has its downsides also. And after three years of war and the hundreds of thousands dead, you have to start wondering what are the options on the table.
Douglas Murray (00:48:28): I agree. I’m obviously for economic cooperation but my only caveat is not to think that that is something which is of ultimate interest or even at the top of the list of interests of despots, tyrants, extremists who want something else.
Lex Fridman (00:48:55): Yeah, but can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin?
Douglas Murray (00:49:00): No.
Lex Fridman (00:49:02): A lot of the ideas I hear about peace is Putin bad, victory must be achieved, NATO membership required. But what do you have to do? You have to come to the table to end the killing is one and, two, have different ideas of how to have a non-zero chance of peace.
Douglas Murray (00:49:31): Go on.
Lex Fridman (00:49:31): So, the options are … It seems to me the only option, not the only option, but the likeliest option is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There’s, of course, there other radical options. There’s Russia joining NATO or something like this or there’s flirting with World War III essentially, giving nukes to Ukraine or something like this. There’s crazy stuff or a totally new military alliance with France and Britain and Germany and European nations and Ukraine or some weird network of military power that threatens Russia in some way or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India, China and Ukraine, something like this, just some really out there ideas. And I think that’s how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.
Douglas Murray (00:50:33): No, it could be. I hope your idea is right, I think it’s about what’s certainly the most peaceful way for this to be resolved. My only caveat, as I say, is and also never forget to factor in that people want different things in this world and some people don’t dream as you dream.
Lex Fridman (00:51:02): I think we’ll talk about that in your new book, Death Cults, that one is an easier one for me to understand to the story that you’re describing. I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to leaders of major nations.
Douglas Murray (00:51:20): Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not, by any means, urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a millenarian madman who cannot be in any way understood.
Lex Fridman (00:51:30): I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.
Douglas Murray (00:51:35): From your lips to God’s ears.
Lex Fridman (00:51:38): Can you steer me on the case for and then against Zelenskyy as the right leader for Ukraine at this moment? Is he the right person to take it to the point of peace?
Douglas Murray (00:51:48): We’ll see. If he can, then of course he is. He deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril, for playing the international game of getting support for his country well. And sometimes the person who does that, not that there are many people like that, can be the person who also brings about a peace deal and sometimes not.
Lex Fridman (00:52:20): I think there’s a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering of the people of the land he loves to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who did the destruction and to be able to-
Douglas Murray (00:52:37): That is very hard.
Lex Fridman (00:52:38): … compromise on anything.
Douglas Murray (00:52:43): That’s possible. Again, it puts the onus on him though. It slightly presupposes that Putin doesn’t have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard, I’ve noticed this in a lot of conflicts, it’s extremely hard the way in which outsiders come in and others who haven’t seen what you’ve seen or gone through what you’ve gone through and say, “You know, it’s time to get around the negotiating table and just …” You think you didn’t see what I saw or you didn’t go through what I went through, who are you to tell me? It comes back to that thing with the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace. The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables but the visitor from the land of war has seen other things and it’s very hard for somebody who hasn’t seen it to tell the person who has that they should act differently.
Lex Fridman (00:53:45): And the sad thing about humanity is both the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are right.
Douglas Murray (00:53:55): Yes, that’s a struggle, that’s definitely a struggle. It’s like asking somebody to forgive, I’ve seen that at a lot of ends of conflicts. People say, “You know, the important thing is that we forgive and move on,” and then the other person says, “You know, your child didn’t die of shrapnel wounds.”
Lex Fridman (00:54:18): Yeah, this is … I got a lot of heat for an interview I did with Zelenskyy. By the way, people privately, the people that message me is all love and support and the people that disagree in Ukraine, soldiers. People online are ruthless, they’re misrepresenting me, they’re lying about-
Douglas Murray (00:54:34): People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying?
Lex Fridman (00:54:39): I know, yeah.
Douglas Murray (00:54:39): Good God, Lex, you’ve discovered a new phenomenon.
Lex Fridman (00:54:42): I’m a real radical intellectual.
Douglas Murray (00:54:46): Nothing misses your eye.
Lex Fridman (00:54:50): I see the truth and I’m unafraid to point it out. No, there’s a degree … This idea that you need to compromise with the person who the leader of a nation you’re at war with and, in so doing, to some degree, are forgiving their actions. Because the actual feeling you have is you want it to be fair and the definition of fair when you’ve seen that much suffering is for him and everybody around him and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die because you’ve seen towards suffering. But the other side of that is, yes, there’s children that have died but you coming to the negotiation table-
Douglas Murray (00:55:39): Will stop other children from dying. Yes, of course.
Lex Fridman (00:55:41): And so, there is … You had this way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective that it’s naive to say to come to the negotiation table and it is for a person from the land of war. But the very smart, intelligent and not naive person from the land of peace that is often right in some deep sense about the long arc of history, for them it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.
Douglas Murray (00:56:11): The one thing I would add to that though is don’t forget that it also depends on whether or not there’s a clear shot of winning.
Lex Fridman (00:56:20): Sure.
Douglas Murray (00:56:21): If there’s a clear shot of winning and that’s the most important. The most important thing in wars is not final negotiations or anything like that, it’s simply winning and losing. And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you’re near it, then having somebody else come in and saying why not stop just before victory is very hard. That’s one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we’re talking about.
Lex Fridman (00:56:50): You know what’s the other big complexity of that? Because the clear shot of winning is like a man walking through the desert seeing water. During war, it really is an illusion. So, here’s what happens. The really complicated aspect of negotiation is, in order to negotiate peace from a place of strength, you have to have victory in sight.
Douglas Murray (00:57:18): Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:57:19): And so, the temptation from that position is to not negotiate, is to keep pushing forward to achieve victory. And this, I would say, hindsight is 20/20 But this is the failure in ’22 and two occasions to achieve, to negotiate a ceasefire and peace. One in the spring because Ukraine was in a real big, I would say, position of strength having fended off the Russian forces around Kiev. That’s one. And then, as you mentioned, in the fall of ’22 with Kherson and Kharkiv, had a lot of military success, they were in a place of strength. And from that place, they’ve decided to keep going because victory was in sight but that was also an opportunity to make peace.
Douglas Murray (00:58:12): It’s perfectly possible, yes.
Lex Fridman (00:58:14): That’s the hard thing.
Douglas Murray (00:58:15): It’s very hard, it’s all hard. But again, victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars and, you’re right, they can also grind on because nobody has the capability to make a breakthrough. It’s a case … The wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they burn out after about 10 years or so for similar reasons.
Lex Fridman (00:58:44): When you’re in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won?
Douglas Murray (00:58:49): It’s a very good question. And you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or political leaders?
Lex Fridman (00:58:56): Military and political leaders. It just feels like, like I said, man in the desert seeing water. I think there’s a sense that victory is so close, there’s times in a war when you feel like victory is close.
Douglas Murray (00:59:11): No, you’re right. It’s [inaudible 00:59:13].
Lex Fridman (00:59:13): And then it just slips away.
Douglas Murray (00:59:14): Yes, it’s an interesting insight. It’s like the way in which there’s a force in nature which is that, if you amass an army, amassing it will pull you in to using it. Extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say let’s go back. Yes, you’re right, no, it’s one of many, many interesting aspects to warfare.
Lex Fridman (00:59:42): I think the sad thing about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader which I would argue that Zelenskyy really unified Ukraine in this fight in the beginning of the war. You have to be that and, like you said, after you amass the army and have military success, to be able to step back and make peace. Those two just don’t often go hand in hand because, again, as a wartime leader, especially one who has seen the suffering first hand, walking away is tough. Especially, also combined with that, just the realities of war where there is probably corruption, that there is things, once the war ends, there has to be investigations. Because the war wasn’t won, you might not turn out to be, when the history looks at it, the good guy and a leader doesn’t want to … A leader always wants to be the good guy.
Lex Fridman (01:00:49): So, there’s just all psychological complexities that are … And you look at this whole picture, in a basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish, if you want humanity to flourish, you just ask the question, okay, so what is the thing I would like to see.
Douglas Murray (01:01:09): There’s so many historical analogies you can give but just surely not rewarding Putin’s actions in any way would be a good way to deter him and other dictators from trying to grab land in the future.
Lex Fridman (01:01:34): So, yeah, but this is nuanced because it’s very probably good to be the boring person at the party that says dictatorships are bad, democracies are good, many of the ideals of the West are good.
Douglas Murray (01:01:49): Mostly the better.
Lex Fridman (01:01:50): Better? Yes.
Douglas Murray (01:01:51): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:01:53): That sounds like animal farm but, yes, two legs better. But yes, democracy is better and invading countries is bad but World War III is bad too. So, after you say something is bad, what’s the next step? Because military intervention in a lot of these conflicts-
Douglas Murray (01:02:14): It’ll be a bad deterrence.
Lex Fridman (01:02:16): Yeah, but what’s effective deterrence?
Douglas Murray (01:02:19): That we’re going to have to keep going over for a long time to come.
Lex Fridman (01:02:22): My question is how can we achieve peace in April? In May? The adults at the table all seem to tell me, “Well, it’s a process, it’s complicated,” it just feels like this is a thing that might go into the next winter and there’s still maybe initial ceasefire and then ceasefire is broken and there’s more people dying-
Douglas Murray (01:02:50): For sure.
Lex Fridman (01:02:50): … and it’s that mess. It seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying every single day.
Douglas Murray (01:02:59): Of course, we are all … Almost everybody, not everybody but almost everyone, would like the killing to stop immediately, of course.
Lex Fridman (01:03:06): No, I think that is the boring thing at the party. Yes, but they don’t say it often enough, not often … There has to be a frustration-
Douglas Murray (01:03:13): Perhaps I should say it more.
Lex Fridman (01:03:13): There has to be a frustration. I don’t understand why Putin, Zelenskyy and Trump can’t just meet in a room together without signing anything, leaders meeting and discussing and the human connection, there’s so many layers of diplomats. It’s the problem I have with the managerial class, they schedule meetings really well, they don’t get shit done and I would love it if people got shit done. So, the soldiers get shit done, they’re fighting the reality of the war and then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the scale of nations and geopolitics. But these diplomatic meetings and this-
Douglas Murray (01:03:55): No, I agree. I share your frustration about it, at the same time, I think … I share your frustration because I’ve seen it all, a lot of-
Douglas Murray (01:04:01): I share your frustration because I’ve seen it, a lot of it in my own eyes. There was a [inaudible 01:04:09] the other week and they were hit just after I left the base. You wouldn’t believe what a thermobaric bomb can do to the human body. And I share your frustration with that.
Douglas Murray (01:04:23): At the same time, one of the things that happens if you are rushing is that you do, and I’ve seen this elsewhere, you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can’t pressurize. That is one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply, America can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military pressure on Ukraine, and it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it’s much easier to pressure Zelenskyy.
Douglas Murray (01:05:11): That’s one of the many things that makes it harder is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing and accepting the horrors of war, which we can linger on, but accepting all that. If somebody says, “We’ve got to get peace today,” and the three of them around a table, the most likely thing is that it’ll be the person who you can pressure most easily, who will be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome, which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim. That’s an extremely ugly and common thing to happen.
Lex Fridman (01:05:57): Yeah, and that’s the other boring thing to say, the boring truth, that the easy shortcut here is to punish Ukraine, and you just have to not do it.
Douglas Murray (01:06:09): Let’s keep being the boring people of the party.
Lex Fridman (01:06:11): Yeah. Well, nobody’s going to invite us. All right. Let’s go from one complicated conflict to perhaps an even more complicated one. Israel and Palestine. Can you take me through what happened on October 7th as you understand it and as you outline at the beginning of the book?
Douglas Murray (01:06:43): Well, the book, On Democracies and Death Cults, is a mixture of firsthand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that’s been going on since the 7th of October, but the war that’s been going on a lot longer. Also, I suppose on what, for me, is one of the overwhelming questions which I’m sure we’ll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world.
Douglas Murray (01:07:09): Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza. Hamas broke through the security fence and attacked all the softest targets they could. They swiftly overwhelmed things, like the observation base in Nahal Oz. They ran through the communities in the south, very peaceful, peacenik [inaudible 01:07:41] free communities of the kibbutzim as they’re called, the communities, and murdered and raped and burned and kidnapped.
Douglas Murray (01:07:52): Of course, they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party, and rampaged through that with RPGs and Kalashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more, and got within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel, on places like Ofakim and Sderot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well.
Douglas Murray (01:08:25): We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north. Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again in very large numbers into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, but the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garrote Israel from the center.
Douglas Murray (01:08:52): The interesting reason why I think, it’ll be found out in the future, but why they didn’t coordinate better was Hamas didn’t trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it that wouldn’t be intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which obviously funds Hamas and Hezbollah and trains and arms knew of the plan. It was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state, but they didn’t get close to that, but they got worryingly closer than people might’ve thought they were capable of.
Douglas Murray (01:09:27): I think from the Israeli side, it was obviously one of the most, if not the most, catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state. I think there are several reasons why. One is a perception problem, what a lot of military commanders and others described to me as the conception. The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in security, military establishment was that Hamas were content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and lining their pockets and living in Qatar and becoming billionaires, but that like many other terrorist groups and cults, that they would end up becoming just corrupt and not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary. That’s the first thing was there was just a massive era of the conception in Israel.
Douglas Murray (01:10:33): And then, the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day. There already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that and their, doubtless, will be in the future as well. The single thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way, was the number of people who described to me, who survived the massacres in the south, who said that they’d said to their children, “Don’t worry, the Army will be here in minutes,” and they weren’t. In many places, it was many hours until the army got there. There are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings. Other things were very, I discovered, were very human failings. I don’t want overstress the failure of the army, because actually certain units and things got down very fast. There’s a unit, Duvdevan, who got down to the junction by within about an hour, 90 minutes of the massacres starting, and joined in the fight. And then, there were self-starters, who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just broke orders and just realized the magnitude of what was happening and said, “We’re needed in the south. Go.” And fought very hard for hours, days in some cases.
Douglas Murray (01:12:11): But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable, I mean, as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing. You can see it in hindsight, but you can’t see when you are in it. And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in, taking uniforms off dead Israelis, wearing them, coming in with Israeli-style apparatus on them.
Douglas Murray (01:12:47): There’s a Muslim doctor I quote in the book, I interviewed, who describes how he was going to his… He’s an Israeli Muslim Arab, and he’s a doctor. He was going to his shift at the hospital at 6:30 in the morning. The rockets start coming in because the rocket started first and then the full invasion. He described to me how… He’s one of the members of this group, United Hatzalah, which is a first responders group, and they get an alert and it tells them that a car has crashed nearby, and they put on their first aid kit and so on and go.
Douglas Murray (01:13:26): He got one of those alerts at one of the junctions, and realized there was a car that something had happened and there were some dead bodies. He stops and he sees these men dressed as soldiers, and he’s wearing his Hatzalah gear and they start firing at him. And he just thinks, “What the hell? What the hell is going on?” They turned out to be Hamas dressed as Israeli soldiers. They used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault. In the end, they shot him and left him, and he survived. He’s a very, very brave man.
Douglas Murray (01:14:06): So, there was a lot of confusion like that. There was a girl whose father I interviewed, she was at the Nova party. I met him at one of the reunions of the party and the weeks after, and the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. He described how in the last moments of his daughter’s life, she phoned him on her phone, like a lot of people. He reassured her that Army would get there and so on. Her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap, and she was obviously panicked. They’d managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to a community where they thought they’d be safe in the south of Israel.
Douglas Murray (01:14:50): They were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman, and he wasn’t the policeman. He was Hamas dressed as police and she died. She was shot and killed as well. So, there was a lot of confusion like that. Hopefully, the world will find out exactly what went wrong, Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe, but, I mean, it was a complete catastrophe.
Lex Fridman (01:15:23): Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened? There’s a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land, because it’s such a giant intelligence failure. It seems that there is some manipulation on the inside for political reasons or for-
Douglas Murray (01:15:41): Yes. You don’t need to go into conspiracy land. I think there are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were withholding the information. I don’t know. Again, people will find out there’s an awful lot of politics inside Israel, and it’s hard to know that at this stage. I think most people are still Israeli and not Israeli, including people who are anti-Israel, who just believe that Israeli military, and particularly intelligence dominance, is so strong that there must have been some kind of conspiracy. Otherwise, how could this have happened?
Douglas Murray (01:16:23): I don’t think you need to go into that. I mean, for instance, some of the young women at the observation base are on the record. I’ve spoken to them myself, who said that they had been warning in the weeks running up to the 7th, that they were seeing maneuvers and training by the border, which suggested that Hamas was going to do something like this. They say that they were ignored. Though you speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say the thing is that this stuff was happening all the time, so it’s very hard to know at the moment.
Lex Fridman (01:17:05): Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history and the governing ideology of this group?
Douglas Murray (01:17:15): Well, Hamas, in a way, quite easy to understand, because they say what their ambitions are, they say what their beliefs are. They’ve said it from their governing charter onwards. And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as if we’re trying to understand them, is that they tend to do what they say and act on what they believe.
Douglas Murray (01:17:37): The primary aim of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel and [inaudible 01:17:42]. They’re not an unusual group, sadly. The bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think, is that they really do mean what they say and that they really do mean what they say they want to do. I give a number of examples in the book of this, but, I mean, the most obvious is the case of Yahya Al-Sinwar, the Hamas leader who is generally regarded as having orchestrated and arranged the 7th of October.
Douglas Murray (01:18:19): We know a fair amount about him because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza, and he was released in the prisoner swap for the… He’s one of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who was released in a swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier. Yahya Al-Sinwar, in prison in Israel, talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Yahya Al-Sinwar had a brain tumor.
Douglas Murray (01:18:59): This dentist identified this and actually sent him to the hospital. The Israelis famously removed the tumor and saved Sinwar’s life. But this dentist used to speak to him in the prison not fairly regularly and has related, not at least to the New York Times, his conversations with Sinwar. Sinwar said in one of those conversations, he said, “At the moment, you, Israel, are strong, but one day, you’ll be weak, and then I’ll come.” And that’s what he did.
Lex Fridman (01:19:39): Is it a hatred of Israel, or is it a hatred of Jews? Is it on the level of nations or the level of religion?
Douglas Murray (01:19:49): Both. It’s both. I mean, it originates from a religious mindset, but it’s, of course, political as well. I mean, the Hamas Charter, of course, some people think the Hamas Charter is of no significance in… I often notice this sleight of hand that people do. Again, it goes back to what we were saying earlier, forget everything other than the most important basic things. But the Hamas Charter, among other things, quotes the Hadith that the end times will not come until all of the rocks and the trees shout out, “Oh, Muslim, there’s a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” So, Hamas is both obviously anti-Israeli, obviously, and anti-Jewish, obviously. By the way, I mean, one of the many painful stories I tell in the book is of the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked, it’s not as if there’d be a right community to attack and a wrong community to attack, but the many of the communities they attacked were communities which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.
Douglas Murray (01:21:08): There’s a woman whose name has become relatively famous since, certainly famous inside Israel, Vivian Silver, who was a peace activist, who spent every weekend driving Gazan children from the border to… If they had very rare medical needs that could not be seen attention within inside Gaza, would drive them to Israeli hospitals. She spent every weekend doing that. Worked for all of the left-wing peace organizations in Israel.
Douglas Murray (01:21:38): For a while after the 7th, her neighbors and others thought that she had been taken captive into Gaza. And actually, there was a hostage poster for her, and there were appeals by the various peacenik organizations for Hamas to hand her over. But it turned out she’d been burned alive in her home. This wasn’t discovered for quite a long time because there was so little DNA left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers.
Douglas Murray (01:22:07): So, there were a lot, just a lot of people in the Gaza envelope, as it’s called in Israel, in the area around Gaza, who would’ve been the people who wanted to live peacefully with the Gazans some day. There’s a certain, among the many, it’s not an irony, but just among the pains of the days that is so overwhelmingly, these are the people that Hamas brought hell to.
Lex Fridman (01:22:42): The response to October 7th by Israel, can you steal me on the case that Israel went too far?
Douglas Murray (01:22:48): Well, the case that started from very early on, that critics of Israel had was the claim that… I mean, I think I first heard it on about the 8th of October before Israel had done anything in response, was the claim that Israel must act proportionately in response. I have a critic of this that I’ve often expressed, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality in warfare. At the same time, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately.
Douglas Murray (01:23:24): The proportionality that much of the rest of the world seems to think Israel should express in warfare is to have an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides. I don’t think there’s any law of war that says that if you kill 1,200 people and you kidnap another 250, that as it were the other side’s allowed to do the same back. But that’s what a lot of people think. And then when they see the death toll escalating on the Gazan side, they say Israel has acted disproportionately and has overreacted.
Douglas Murray (01:24:06): That one is tricky, because it’s my belief that, I mean, again, this is a basic thing but it has to be stated, that 9 million citizens of Israel, if you extrapolate that out to what the 7th of October would’ve meant in American terms, you’d be talking about a day on which if the attack had happened in America where 44,000 Americans were killed in one day and 10,000 American citizens taken hostage, nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred that America would not do whatever it needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who’d been taken.
Lex Fridman (01:24:53): So just on that point, I agree with you 100% America would hit hard back, and I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that. But it’s also possible that the military industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means extend far beyond hitting back and actually do a thing that’s destructive to everybody, including America financially and the flourishing of America, and the flourishing of humanity broadly, and the region and the stability and the war on terrorism, if that’s a real thing.
Lex Fridman (01:25:34): The war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not maybe succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress. It probably made more terrorists than not. So, there’s a justified feeling of hitting back and going after somebody like Bin Laden in the case of 9/11. And there’s just the actual implementation. It seems like the implementation can sometimes, intended or unintended, have consequences that are bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes. Now, this is a general statement, and now we’ll look at Israel where things are small land, everything is very compact. There’s a lot of complexities that are well-studied that we’ve talked about extensively.
Douglas Murray (01:26:26): Well, the two stated aims of the Israelis after the 7th were to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamas. Many people said that you could do one but not both. I actually think they’ve gone a long way to doing both. By no means everything, there were still hostages as we are speaking held in Gaza, including a young American. And Hamas is not completely destroyed. It’s very, very significantly degraded, but it’s not completely destroyed. But those are the two aims.
Douglas Murray (01:27:03): I believe that I’ve seen as much of the war as any outside observer. I don’t know, some exceptions maybe, so I think I can say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven’t done. There were various operations at the beginning, various plans which didn’t happen, like storming straight in and getting, for instance, as many hostages as possible out of the Shifa complex, which is called a hospital, but also at the very least, the Hamas command headquarters. There was a plan to maybe go and do that fast, but it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would be likely to happen.
Douglas Murray (01:27:58): The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning. There was a period of making sure that when they went into Gaza, they didn’t do so, in any way, blind. Gaza is a very built-up area, and population-wise is densely populated. Something, by the way, which the people who claim frivolously that Israel has been creating genocide never take account of, which is the fact that the Gaza population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. It’s almost doubled. But yes, it’s a densely populated area, and it’s an incredibly difficult place for the train of war because of one thing in particular, which is that Hamas, going back a bit to our conversation earlier, but this is a much more extreme example. I mean, Hamas really don’t play by the rules. In fact, they use the rules of war, the laws of war completely to their own advantage. It has to be reiterated. You are not meant to disguise your army as civilians. You’re not meant to use places of care, like hospitals, as bases for your military operations. You’re not meant to use schools and places of worship as operating centers of war.
Douglas Murray (01:29:25): Hamas does all of these things and has always done so, and it does so with the very obvious reason that for them, the whole thing is a two-for-one offer. You get to operate everywhere. And if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that this is a war crime, because how could they attack this group of civilians, these people who are dressed as civilians, these people merely fighting from a mosque and so on. That’s why everybody who’s been to Gaza, who’s seen the fighting, knows the same thing, which is this is just incredibly difficult, difficult warfare, of a kind that American troops have seen in the last 20 years in Fallujah and elsewhere. Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga saw when they were fighting as our frontline troops in the war against ISIS, similar house to house, but by no means with the same entrenched bases. Again, it can’t be stressed enough that Hamas has used the years since the Israel withdrawal from 2005 to build this vast underground tunnel network.
Douglas Murray (01:30:48): Again, it’s obvious, but it has to be remembered. I quote one of Hamas leaders in the book saying this in an interview. When they build their tunnels, they do so in order their tunnels are used by them, Hamas, to store their weaponry, to secure their fighters, and to hold hostages. They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of guards and civilians avoiding aerial bombardment. Every difference in the world seems to me to exist between a country which does build bomb shelters for its citizens and a government which builds bomb shelters for its bombs.
Lex Fridman (01:31:38): Can you discuss the flow of money here? How does Hamas, the leadership, use the money? You started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there? Can you just lay it all out? Because I think it’s an important part of the picture here.
Douglas Murray (01:31:56): It’s certainly corrupt. Every Hamas leader, who’s now dead, died a billionaire.
Lex Fridman (01:32:07): With a B.
Douglas Murray (01:32:08): With a B. To say that they used Gaza’s resources or the resources that came into Gaza for their own ends is to just vastly understate matters. Hamas used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to do the 7th and everything since. They militarized the whole of the Gaza. By the estimations of troops I’ve been with, every second to third house had weaponry stashed there. Bombs, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances. The network that they just embedded all these years was total.
Douglas Murray (01:33:08): One of the many, many tragedies of this is that whatever you are reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving statelet. It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It’s just that Hamas, like the PLO before them, decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian estate. And that is to the great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza to put it at its mildest.
Lex Fridman (01:33:51): So just to outline here, leadership of Hamas are stealing the money they get sent by Qatar, by everybody, so they’re putting in their pocket and then the-
Douglas Murray (01:34:00): By the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well. Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:34:03): Yeah.
Douglas Murray (01:34:03): Well, yeah, but, I mean, it’s not just about the stealing the money. It’s about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor.
Lex Fridman (01:34:12): Those two things, but the corruption is a signal. From an economic perspective, it’s just also a signal of deep moral corruption because they’re screwing over the Palestinian people.
Douglas Murray (01:34:27): Yes, the cynicism, certainly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:34:29): Okay. And then, the money they do spend on the Palestinian cause, they’re not doing that to build up Gaza. They’re doing it to strengthen the militaristic capabilities of the terrorist organization of Hamas. You have, maybe you can correct me on this, have said that the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas-
Douglas Murray (01:35:03): Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:35:03): … because they’ve elected them.
Douglas Murray (01:35:04): They elected them. The what ifs are endless, but very unwise of the George W. Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza after ’05. But Hamas were elected ,and they then, in 2007, killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Fatah. Killed them through them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through the Gaza. From that point, they had total control.
Douglas Murray (01:35:38): This is difficult because you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment if you talk about this, but it should be born in mind that Hamas had effectively 18 years to run the Gaza. And that-
Douglas Murray (01:36:00): … run the Gaza. And that’s the time that it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education. And in 18 years they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans who were productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world, and they didn’t. They spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into a genocidal hatred, which obviously was most dangerous to the Israelis, but it was obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza.
Douglas Murray (01:36:59): If you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014 when Hamas started a war again… One of a set of rounds of war since 2005. If you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014 going house to house and who were also involved in the war since 2003, they all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population.
Douglas Murray (01:37:26): The marked increase in just, I mean, the most… I mean, it’s so banal in a way to even… The numbers of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion, there are so many what ifs and other paths that Hamas could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of using their time and power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize the population, and encouraged them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel.
Douglas Murray (01:38:01): And then on October 7th, they gave it their best shot. And by the way, there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing, this sort of thing. This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since the 7th. They have been fighting a house to house war against this terrorist group. They do do aerial strikes. Gaza is very, very badly beaten up as the buildings, I mean the infrastructure that existed.
Douglas Murray (01:38:46): There aren’t many buildings standing. But this is not the result of just wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It’s been extremely concerted. It’s extremely difficult. But when people say, “Well, this must be collective punishment.” I think that the people who say that simultaneously, that’s not true. And also there is not a hostage who’s come out who… President Trump made his point recently. There is not a hostage who’s come out who I’ve spoken with, who found any Gazan Palestinian who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them.
Douglas Murray (01:39:41): If you look at the footage from the 7th, the Hamas recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on. You will notice that the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified Gazan civilians saying, “Why have you got this Israeli girl whose tendons you’ve cut and why are you bringing her here?” It’s all celebration. It’s all celebration. And it’s the same with those couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held in who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.
Lex Fridman (01:40:26): Yeah, the celebration. I do wonder what percent of the population they represent, but there’s something really dark. There’s several ways to explain the celebration. It could be that there’s a deep indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews, and there also could be a place of just deep desperation. And it’s a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you’re on the side of fighting for freedom in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out desperation out of extremely harsh conditions.
Lex Fridman (01:41:08): Because the way we’re speaking about this with a celebration, it’s very easy to project a kind of evil on the populace that I just am very hesitant to project, especially on the general populace.
Douglas Murray (01:41:23): You don’t have to project it onto them. You can just listen to their own words. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I’m sure you’ve heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of Israel and calls back home. Have you heard that?
Lex Fridman (01:41:46): Yes, I’ve heard it.
Douglas Murray (01:41:46): I quoted it in the first chapter of the book. He calls back home and he says to his father who picks up… It’s on what? I think he’s on phone, but he’s saying, “Turn on to WhatsApp because I can show you.” He says, “I’ve killed 10 Jews with my own hands. Oh, father, your son has killed 10 Jews.” And his father is saying, “Where are you? Where are you?” “I want to show you, dad. I want to show you. I’ve killed Jews with my own hands, your son. Put mother on the phone.” Mother comes on the phone, the brother comes on the phone. This is one of many, many stories from the day that suggests something, which I would say is not just indoctrination, but yes, evil.
Lex Fridman (01:42:39): First of all, those phone calls are somehow uniquely horrific. But I’ve also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and Russian soldiers to their parents and they have… Not as intense and not as horrific, but they have a similar nature to them, which there’s an aspect of war where you dehumanize the other side in order to fight that war. We have to remember that element is going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation.
Douglas Murray (01:43:20): It would be a strange type of simple sort of, I don’t know, pride in war to go into an eight-year-old woman’s house and kill her on her floor and then film her dead body, her body in its final moments and send it round to all of that woman’s friends on her phone, on her Instagram account. You may have heard different things from me, but I mean, I would be surprised if there were even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, “Mom, you won’t believe my luck. I managed to rape and kill this 18-year-old woman.” That’s quite unusual, even in warfare. And that’s one of the things about Hamas and what I describe as the death cult types, which makes them different from other people.
Lex Fridman (01:44:31): But that’s the channeling of evil, and hatred, and anger in the human spirit. But that doesn’t make that person evil.
Douglas Murray (01:44:40): No, I disagree.
Lex Fridman (01:44:42): You commit that once.
Douglas Murray (01:44:43): I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think it can descend and it can be used. It’s very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this. But everything I’ve seen, there are actions that people like Hamas committed on the 7th that cannot be described as anything other than evil. The things that happened at the Nova Party were especially appalling. I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because first of all, it’s a party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger might have been at.
Douglas Murray (01:45:24): And so everyone knows the world of a dance party in all night raving in the desert to commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to expand your consciousness and your love and all of that sort of thing.
Douglas Murray (01:45:43): The fact that people doing that at 6:30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on trucks and military vehicles and just massacring them and raping them. I mean, I give examples of the firsthand accounts of people who survived, but I mean, it’s beyond belief of almost anything else I’ve covered in war. And it’s because it seems so… I mean, an army facing another army is one thing.
Douglas Murray (01:46:28): A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing. A terrorist group facing a group of young people at a dance unarmed and doing what they did is pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere. So that stated, can you empathize with the suffering of Palestinians and Gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response?
Douglas Murray (01:47:06): Yes. What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza. I was there on the first time a couple of days early into the ground invasion when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south deeper into Gaza and to try to stop the Hamas leadership from making it south. It actually didn’t really work because they’d already got a lot of the hostages south.
Douglas Murray (01:47:48): It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged all the way… In the end, dragged all the way in any way. But, yes, and I mean watching the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and everyone was being checked for bombs, suicide vests, checked for particularly young men of military age. I mean, you look at this tide of human misery and you think, “This is terrible.” But this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who had been miss governing the place that they lived in.
Douglas Murray (01:48:29): And of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this. At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside an unspeakable anger that they had come to this point because of the fact that they had elected a terror group to run their territory. And one of the things obviously is that a lot of people like to say, and it’s true, of course, this didn’t all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true. This particular round, this particularly intense round of war started on October the 7th without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th.
Douglas Murray (01:49:18): It wasn’t like they were forced to liberate themselves or something that some of the defenders of Hamas claim. But the conflict of course goes back a lot earlier. But you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and now has become interestingly rebranded, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Douglas Murray (01:49:52): But there is one absolutely essential issue to this which cannot be forgotten, which is do the Palestinians want a state or do they want to destroy the Jewish state? And if they want to destroy the Jewish state as they’ve tried many times, it’s a disaster for them. It’s a total disaster for them.
Douglas Murray (01:50:18): If they want to create their own state, they’ve already had several very good shots to do it, one of which is Gaza post 2005. But they’ve never shown in their leadership the desire to live with a Jewish state, and that’s the catastrophe for the Palestinians.
Lex Fridman (01:50:41): Can you still mount the case of the lived experience of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices that describe the Gaza situation as an occupation, West Bank too, and in the case of Gaza, open air prison?
Douglas Murray (01:50:57): To take them in order, there’s nothing about Gaza that was an open air prison. They had ability to trade. They had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers. Egypt wasn’t so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt. Still isn’t. But at the time of the 7th, there was actually an interesting… One of the things the international community was pushing for was more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz Crossing and others to work in Israel because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.
Douglas Murray (01:51:33): And this the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted. It as being pushed on Israel [inaudible 01:51:42] did a little bit too fast for Israel’s comfort, but it happened. That completely came to an end, and that dream has gone since the 7th of October.
Lex Fridman (01:51:54): Can you clarify the dream, the normalization relationship?
Douglas Murray (01:51:56): The normalization dream.
Lex Fridman (01:51:57): Between Gaza and Israel?
Douglas Murray (01:51:59): Gone. There will be-
Lex Fridman (01:52:02): Really?
Douglas Murray (01:52:02): Yeah, no normalization. No, not after that. And one of the reasons is the number of people, again, who I’ve spoken with, who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to work in Israel, and these were their brothers and sisters and so on and so forth. One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the kibbutz, in the communities in the South was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed house to house maps of those communities.
Douglas Murray (01:52:38): I spoke with one man who, his community, they had a security officer chief and Hamas came in. They knew to go and kill him and his family first, and then which families… I’ve seen the maps myself. They came in with incredibly accurate information about these communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the brothers, by the workers, by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out. So there is nobody that will trust that ever again.
Lex Fridman (01:53:13): There’s a lot of Palestinians that have lived and flourished inside Israel. What are they saying? What are they feeling and what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still camaraderie to some degree or is it completely destroyed?
Douglas Murray (01:53:31): My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary. I mean, if you’ve worked beside somebody and then found out they sold out your family, you will never trust again. And that particularly in a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast. At the very beginning, there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis.
Douglas Murray (01:54:05): I actually think one of the few positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has by and large held. There hasn’t been an Intifada. One of the reasons why there hasn’t been more terrorist activity in the West Bank in Judea and Samaria is because the Israelis have been very careful along with the Palestinian authority to some extent, cooperating to keep that down. But there wasn’t a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening.
Douglas Murray (01:54:47): So I think that the coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular, but not as regular that could happen of Muslim Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror as it was sympathy with Hamas. I was in the middle of one such attack myself late last year and in a town called Hadera. And those things have happened, but it’s not… That particular catastrophe has not occurred.
Lex Fridman (01:55:25): Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people who spoke of evil, they refer to him as evil on the spectrum between good and evil. As a leader, where does Netanyahu fall?
Douglas Murray (01:55:39): Well, he’s certainly not evil. Interesting if people looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamas and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister. It would be sort of telling, I would say.
Lex Fridman (01:55:53): Can we just actually linger on that point? There is a point you’ve made multiple times, which is we’re more eager to criticize and maybe even over-exaggerate the criticism of democratically elected leaders.
Douglas Murray (01:56:09): Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:56:10): It’s a dark, weird other quality of discourse at parties, aforementioned parties.
Douglas Murray (01:56:19): I mean, not to be flippant for a moment. It’s a little bit like who do you show your worst sides to the people you love? My intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because if I expressed it to absolutely everybody I met at the party or a social setting, it would be hard. I mean, there’s a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who will put up with it. And something similar happens in international politics.
Douglas Murray (01:57:02): You pressure the people who will listen. I mean, one of the things you hear a lot in the last year, people ignoramuses in the governments in places like Britain will say, we need to put more pressure on the Israelis to do X. And you go, “Well, in part that’s because they will listen.” If you go, “We need to put more pressure on the Ayatollahs in Iran to persuade them that Hamas are really bad and they shouldn’t be doing this,” what the hell do you think they’re going to do? Are they even going to listen to you? They don’t give a damn. You’re talking totally different worlds. Not just a different language. It’s a different world.
Douglas Murray (01:57:46): And by the way, that happens in Israel. I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel. When the Hostage Families Forum came about, I spent a lot of time there. I got to know a lot of the families. And they’re remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them, they protest outside Netanyahu’s house. They use clacks and horns and make sure he can never sleep. They will put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands and so on.
Douglas Murray (01:58:22): I think as much sympathy as you can for these families, the plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza for a year, a day, an hour is intolerable. But there’s a reason why the families protested Netanyahu, and that’s because Sinwar didn’t care. That wouldn’t work if you said, “Understand my plight. I’m a Jewish mother and my daughter is thing.” You think Sinwar the heads of Hamas care? You think the leaders in Qatar who host them care?
Douglas Murray (01:59:08): The Qatari emir’s mother when Sinwar was killed, praised Sinwar. You couldn’t talk that language to these people, but you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel because that, first of all, he’s somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured. And secondly he’s simply the only person you can pressure. There’s no one else. Hamas doesn’t care. Hezbollah doesn’t care. Iranian revolutionary government doesn’t care.
Lex Fridman (01:59:37): Let’s just say once, again, the obvious thing that while it is possible to discuss Hamas soldiers as freedom fighters, I’m not one of the folks that can take that perspective. It’s a tough one to take.
Douglas Murray (01:59:55): I don’t see how you can call them freedom fighters.
Lex Fridman (01:59:57): So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war. There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. And if you fully load that into your brain in a real way, not using the words of good and evil, but in a very deep human sense, from that place, from that place of desperation, from your home and your family is destroyed, doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter if there’s evil all around you that caused it. It doesn’t matter. The facts are the facts. And from that place, somebody who’s fighting for you can feel like a freedom fighter.
Lex Fridman (02:00:40): I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience. But Hamas is very clearly since we’re talking about Netanyahu, Hamas is evil. Okay. Now, you can still in that context discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for this moment, and whether he goes too far, whether he’s too politically selfish in the decisions he makes, whether he’s too much a warmonger, whether he’s utilizing the war for his own political gains and is not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but more caring about his own political maintaining power.
Lex Fridman (02:01:32): That’s a perspective that I could steal, man. And that’s a perspective worth we’re discussing, and that’s a perspective of many in Israel hold. When they criticize Netanyahu. He’s increasingly less and less popular.
Douglas Murray (02:01:43): That’s wrong. Opinion polls last month when he was in Washington, it showed it was an all time high. But you were saying…
Lex Fridman (02:01:48): I make my own poll, and according to my poll, I’m the greatest. I’m the nicest and the coolest person in the world. A hundred percent of people agree.
Douglas Murray (02:01:59): Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh that much.
Lex Fridman (02:02:01): Yeah. You laughed a little too much.
Douglas Murray (02:02:04): Too long.
Lex Fridman (02:02:04): It’s more than the joke.
Douglas Murray (02:02:06): But you were saying, I mean the…
Lex Fridman (02:02:07): Okay, let’s steelman the criticism of Netanyahu. And then steelman, the case for him that he’s the right leader actually.
Douglas Murray (02:02:15): Well, the most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is that the 7th happened on his watch. After the Yom Kippur War in 1933, Golda Meir who is very distinguished prime minister of Israel, and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion by Israel’s Arab neighbors happening on her watch. And I would’ve thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu inside Israel would always hold that against him. One of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the 7th because of the judicial reforms. I think there’s a strong case for the judicial reforms in Israel, but it’s a niche Israeli governance issue, which we don’t have to get into. The point is that Netanyahu and its government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms, and it was very divisive and on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend.
Douglas Murray (02:03:34): There were protests. And the police were tired because they’d spent week after week on overtime policing these protests, which often turned raucous, not to say violent. Well, sometimes violent and you could say, “Well, if you see that something is dividing your country this much, might you stop?” There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted the 7th was that Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population.
Douglas Murray (02:04:10): Significant chunk of it every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought, “Good. Now is the time.” In other words, what I quoted Sinwar as saying earlier when he was in prison in Israel was this thing, “One day you’ll be weak, and then I’ll strike.” Maybe that is one of the things that Sinwar thought Israel was very weak. It had been divided, and therefore the time to strike.
Douglas Murray (02:04:39): There’s an argument against that which is that the 7th was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So you can look at it several ways, but you could use that. You could say, “Look, your nation was divided. Don’t push through anymore on that.” There’s lots of things like that. You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception. There were critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet who thought that he was too focused on Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah.
Douglas Murray (02:05:17): Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamas. There’s them and many other criticisms that people make of him. I’ve interviewed, I think every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much, and I have to say, I don’t think there’s any of them that wouldn’t have responded similarly to the 7th of October to the way he has.
Lex Fridman (02:05:44): Okay. So that’s inside Israel. Outside of Israel, despite what he said, he is one of the most hated people in the world. Just the raw quantity. Relative, he’s a loved by a lot of people, but there’s a lot of people that… there’s a lot of psychological effects that might explain that.
Douglas Murray (02:06:04): I mean, it’s sort of strange, if there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of 8 to 9 million people.
Lex Fridman (02:06:14): That might mean something more than hatred of the military actions and the policies of the one person.
Douglas Murray (02:06:22): I mean, there’s an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There’s a lot of wars in the world. It’s always of interest to me, and obviously some of the one things I go into on democracies and death cults is this question of why is this so galvanizing for so many people? And I think that is a very, very interesting question. Why? By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else that when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy and the last 30 years or so, it’s very interesting. There’s a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfowitz and they will say, “Well, Wolfowitz? You mean deputy undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush?”
Douglas Murray (02:07:16): You think he guided everything? Why would that be? Other than the fact that his name, as Marc Stein once said, starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish.
Lex Fridman (02:07:34): That’s a good one.
Douglas Murray (02:07:35): So I do think that there are very deep things at play.
Lex Fridman (02:07:42): That’s a good line.
Douglas Murray (02:07:44): There are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, for a lot of people is a kind of devil. And you have to say, “Well, why is that?” Now, of course, some people will say, “Well, that’s because of his terrible hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth.”
Douglas Murray (02:08:00): … hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth. The case for Netanyahu is that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people and that that’s his life’s mission. And on that basis, I think he’s been, by any measure, historic leader, he has warned the world about the threat from the mullahs in Tehran. He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. And after the 7th, he has held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep international pressure at a tolerable level to do all sorts of things, but most importantly to oversee the two war aims that he set out at the beginning.
Douglas Murray (02:09:07): I thought, let me just express this, I thought like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages, my immediate instinct was they’re all dead, they’re all going to be dead, we’ll never see them again. And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis. But although there are still hostages being held, and as I’ve always said the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back, or at least the beginning of the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back, nevertheless, because of the actions of not just Netanyahu but The Israeli government, most of the hostages have been returned, did not expect this to happen. Hamas has not been completely destroyed, but it has been very, very significantly degraded, and you end up in the definition of what a total destruction of Hamas would look like, but they are not anywhere near the capability they were in November of 2023.
Douglas Murray (02:10:21): Their leadership has almost all been killed. The second tier of leadership almost all gone, and this is a just response to what Hamas did. The moment Netanyahu’s reputation in Israel was at a low early on because of what had happened, but there’s no doubt, and as I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean General Slim had this phrase from Defeat Into Victory, Israel isn’t a victory yet in this conflict. But when in September last year, there were a set of operational successes, so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just like every day’s news was… There was one day, I remember when after the Assad regime file, when the Israeli Air Force took out the entirety of the Syrian Air Force in a day because they didn’t want it falling into the hands of the new Jihadist administration in Syria.
Douglas Murray (02:11:30): It was story number four on the BBC News website. The leadership of Hezbollah, gone, gone. The second and third tiers of Hezbollah, gone or wounded. Iran’s Rolls-Royce, destroyed. These are very, very significant military achievements and are, in my mind, a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state. Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold firm as Netanyahu has? I don’t know but I do know that any of them would’ve done something similar or would’ve tried to do something similar, because there’s no country on earth, no democracy on earth, which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.
Lex Fridman (02:12:36): To the underlying point you made of why do so many people want to call him evil, and so the implication is it’s not just a hatred of Israel, there’s an ocean of hatred for the Jews.
Douglas Murray (02:12:54): Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:12:56): Why is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?
Douglas Murray (02:13:00): I would say there’s one reason in particular, it’s a stupid and gullible person’s easy answer. Why does certain things happen in the world? What is our explanation of chance or unfairness or any number of things? Easiest, easiest, stupidest person’s explanation is there’s a small group of people doing it.
Lex Fridman (02:13:31): Let’s not say stupid because there’s something in the human mind that craves a nice clean theory of everything that explains all the problems. It’s not just stupidest-
Douglas Murray (02:13:40): Let me rephrase, lowest grade.
Lex Fridman (02:13:42): Right.
Douglas Murray (02:13:42): Lowest grade.
Lex Fridman (02:13:44): Because I have that desire too to simplify everything like-
Douglas Murray (02:13:47): Be a bit antisemitic, what?
Lex Fridman (02:13:50): We’ve all been a bit antisemitic here and there, and just get a few vodkas in me, no. To find, I mean, maybe it’s a mathematician in me, it’s like to find a simple explanation for everything.
Douglas Murray (02:14:03): Right.
Lex Fridman (02:14:04): Actually, that’s nice for historians do this.
Douglas Murray (02:14:07): Absolutely. I agree.
Lex Fridman (02:14:09): Analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed. It’s so nice to have, especially if it’s a counterintuitive explanation. It’s one of the favorite go-tos, right? Is an explanation for all the problems in the world.
Douglas Murray (02:14:21): It’s the lowest resolution analysis imaginable.
Lex Fridman (02:14:24): Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why did my wife cheating on me? Why did I lose my job? Why did I not get the job? So even on the personal level.
Douglas Murray (02:14:33): Oh, especially on the personal level. Why did I not get everything? Somebody must have held me back.
Lex Fridman (02:14:40): Yeah, and it’s just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go-to throughout history that you just always return back to the hits, I guess. And what is it special about the Jews as a group that people love to hate? Is it just because it’s small number of people?
Douglas Murray (02:14:56): I think several things.
Lex Fridman (02:14:57): Successful?
Douglas Murray (02:14:58): One is small and without by any means saying this is a general rule, but disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times. Prominent is a word I would use, prominent slightly beyond their numbers in certain places. It’s not a full explanation. I mean all sorts of historical reasons why Jews were involved in banking, but then there are lots of historical reasons why the Scottish people, my own, were involved in banking. And to this day, you don’t find many people who blame all international finance problems on the Scots. So they were just like easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me.
Lex Fridman (02:15:46): We should also mention banking, for some reason, money is a thing that people go to, but Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences and engineering mathematics and the arts and so on.
Douglas Murray (02:15:59): A sensible person would try to work out why that is and see what is replicable. A, I don’t use the word stupid again, now a different type of person.
Lex Fridman (02:16:12): I’m triggered already.
Douglas Murray (02:16:13): A different type of person would look at that and say, that must mean they took something from me, and that’s the most zero-sum game there is. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject, because it seems to me that antisemitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable temptation of the human spirit at its ugliest and cheapest. But because it’s back in our day, it bears some analysis again, and I would say two things about it. One is, as I and others have said many times in the past, one of the fascinating things about antisemitism is that it can cover everything at once. So the Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor, both for being the Rothschilds and for being Eastern European Jews escaping the pogroms. They can be hated for being religious and for being anti-religious and producing Marxism for instance, hated for religiosity and secularism. They can be hated for most recently not having a state and therefore being ruthless cosmopolitans and also hated for having a state. And that makes it something very unusual actually in the history of human bigotry and bias and ugliness. But the real thing is, one of my great heroes, Vasily Grossman, says at the center of Life and Faith, almost everything that is worth saying about antisemitism is Grossman’s genius that he could say in three to four pages what most people couldn’t say in an entire life, even after life of study. But there’s this passage in Life and Faith that I quote in my book, which is I just bowled me over when I read it some years ago when he says the interesting thing about antisemitism.
Douglas Murray (02:18:29): He says you can meet it everywhere in the academy of sciences and in the games that children play in the yard. But Grossman’s great insight is he says everywhere it tells you not about the Jews, but about the person making the claim. And the most important gift he gives in his analysis is when he says, describes it as a mirror to the person who is making the claims, culminating in this phrase I’ve been trying to make popular, which is he says, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you you’re guilty of.” It’s a searingly brilliant insight. The Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power. The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes. The Turkish government accuses the Jewish state of being guilty of occupation. Do you know Northern Cyprus? Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the 1970s. Cyprus is an EU member state and Turkey is in NATO. So you can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state like the people who accuse Jews of something almost without fail is the thing they’re guilty of. Look at the supporters of Hamas and Hamas. One of the things they say is that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing.
Douglas Murray (02:20:25): Hamas, hello? What were you doing on the 7th? If you see, they’re these crazy guys online who claim, repeatedly claim that for some reason Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet them, whether in a prison or on the battlefield or in a hospital. It just erupts occasionally. These people go around and say, “Oh, my God, the IDF are rapists.” Excuse me? You are the ones who spent the years after 2016 saying, “Believe all women,” then from the 7th of October said, believe all women except for Jewish women who say they’ve been raped or seen their friends raped, and then you say, “Aha, the Jews are rapists.”
Douglas Murray (02:21:15): You’ve been carrying water for rapists and then go and accuse the Jews of rape. It just works. Every way you do it, it works. I do think the thing of psychological projection in the case of Israel is wild. I mean, it is wild. By the way, there’s an interesting thing on this that I tried to get into in the book, which is this thing of why did so much of the world respond the way it did? I mean, we’re sitting in New York. There was not one protest against Hamas in New York after the 7th of October.
Douglas Murray (02:21:53): The Believe All Women crowd didn’t come out against Hamas’s rapes. The Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to the killing of Israeli children or anything. Nobody did it. Nobody did it. The one thing that did happen very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who’d been attacked. And as I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from him at Times Square on October the 8th, October the frigging 8th, the protests are in Times Square against Israel, justifying the attacks that were still going on. And this is something that deserves deep self-examination on behalf of people in the West who’ve seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society, I mean degraded parts but parts, bits of the universities and so on. And I think there’s an explanation for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection. When you and I last talked on camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West. And I remember saying to you there that one of the things I was talking about in that book was the deeply, deeply, wildly biased, unfair, and inaccurate estimation of the Western past, whereby America’s original sin had to be identified and the original sin is slavery. So America has an original sin.
Douglas Murray (02:23:21): Does Ghana have an original sin? No one knows. No one really will think it polite to point one out, and you go on and on with these things that I identified in The War in the West, these sins of the West. And they have in recent years been reduced to the claim that countries like the one we’re sitting in are guilty of what? Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and a couple of others you can throw in probably. One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was that one of the deep problems of setting up that system of thought, pseudo thought, non-thought, would be thought is that there’s nothing you can do about it. Even if it was true, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Douglas Murray (02:24:22): If it turned out that your ancestors in the 18th century once owned a slave, what are you going to do? There’s no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven because you didn’t do it, and there’s no one in life who could accept the apology. And I remember setting it up there in The War on the West, I set up this very, very risky, dangerous, unforgivable, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our societies. But I would say that since October the 7th, there has been an answer for a certain type of person, which is I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more.
Douglas Murray (02:25:16): I’ve been told all of these things. I have been put in an ungetoutable of situation of moral burden that can never be relieved because I can’t ask anyone’s forgiveness and nobody can forgive me, but ah, here’s a country which I can accuse of all of these things in the here and now, load my energies, my burdens onto and what’s more I might be able to end it and by doing so would relieve myself. In other words, to slight just, I quote, I tweak Grossman with the people in America elsewhere who’ve fallen into this trap, I tweak him by saying, “On this occasion, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’ve been told you’re guilty of.”
Lex Fridman (02:26:23): Yeah, it’s an interesting kind of projection. Just to observe some of the sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of engagement online. So I watch it like a curiosity, like I’m an alien observing Earth, is this dangerous to you or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters, let’s say cosplaying as Nazis. It’s just-
Douglas Murray (02:26:56): Could be both.
Lex Fridman (02:26:57): … fun to trigger the libs?
Douglas Murray (02:27:00): It could be all of this I think it is and a lot more. I mean taboos, taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. And I suppose there are some people online who have grown up knowing that since the Holocaust, antisemitism was taboo and they’ve run out of, goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit. They’ve got bored of that Holocaust smaller course. They’d say, “I’ve heard enough about that.” And maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction as a result, but I don’t think that’s the main. I think that’s a detail compared to the real thing. The real thing is that antisemitism is back and there is a certain type of person who’s loving it.
Lex Fridman (02:27:56): Is it really back? So I watch a lot-
Douglas Murray (02:27:57): Well, it never goes away. It’s just that since the 7th, I think that it’s had a great resurgence. And this isn’t to say, I assume and that doesn’t mean that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, no, it doesn’t. But as I have often said, if you don’t ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, not any interest in genocide in Sudan, killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, but on the 8th of October, you are on the street with a placard attacking Israel, I’m sorry, you’re an antisemite for sure. You may not know you are, but that’s what’s motivating you.
Lex Fridman (02:28:40): It gets a lot of engagement. I watched it.
Douglas Murray (02:28:40): It does. It does.
Lex Fridman (02:28:40): I watched it.
Douglas Murray (02:28:44): But I mean, it’s one of several things you can always see get huge engagement. I mean, if you say that there’s a massive pedophile ring run by prominent politicians, it might be total horse shit, likely to be total horse shit, but it’ll also get a hell of a lot of engagement.
Lex Fridman (02:29:02): But that’s still… so the pedophile ring like Epstein Island, that kind of stuff.
Douglas Murray (02:29:06): Yeah, all which is very interesting.
Lex Fridman (02:29:08): Yeah, it’s like great, all right, cool. Let’s get behind that conspiracy. But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews is still, that’s the greatest hits still.
Douglas Murray (02:29:20): It is. And I mean you see it with, I mean some of the people who’ve made minor celebrities of themselves, with a sort of made up version of history with a smattering of this and a little bit of that, and then the just asking questions. I’m not saying, but there are certain [inaudible 02:29:43] have helped this along. But as I said earlier, it’s just the lowest grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning. I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in the case of Israel is so extraordinary, is the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you that the problem is simply that the Israelis need to give the Palestinians and other state. And if they do, it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world and irrespective of the fact that the Palestinians agreeing given to several states, the claim that this particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous.
Douglas Murray (02:30:50): There is no reason why if the Palestinians got another state either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom. It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else. The most likely thing is you simply have another failed Arab state run by a proxy of Tehran. That’s the best case scenario.
Douglas Murray (02:31:30): And by the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause like Salman Rushdie. He said recently, he said, “I’ve always been a supporter of the Palestinian people in their course, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it simply be at best another front for the Iranian regime in Iran.” The best. So why the passion? Why the unbelievable wild passion about this? And I say some of it can be, should be argued out and so on, and some of it can be explained, but there’s definitely a realm of it, a layer of it, which is simply at that level of this excites something within me, this excites something within me.
Lex Fridman (02:32:17): Yeah, there’s something compelling to people about hating Jews.
Douglas Murray (02:32:21): Look at the prominence or semi-prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job and somehow it’s done by the Israelis or the Jews. I mean, look at this shit is going around.
Lex Fridman (02:32:38): I have to admit, there’s a part of my brain that’s pulled towards conspiracies. There’s something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for things, what’s really going on behind the scenes. Because the real world, when you don’t look into conspiracies, first of all, it’s complicated, and second of all, it’s kind of boring. It’s a bunch of incompetent people.
Douglas Murray (02:32:59): Usually opening up Pandora’s boxes. They don’t understand.
Lex Fridman (02:33:02): Yeah, it’s pushing buffoons. I’ve walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people, and the thing I learned is they’re just human beings. I’ve yet to be in a room where exceptionally brilliant psychopaths are plotting.
Douglas Murray (02:33:26): You never got that invite?
Lex Fridman (02:33:27): No. In fact, a lot of people in the positions of power, I mean, I’m just continuously disappointed that they’re not ultra… I love competence. The places where I’ve seen competence inklings of it is in low-level like soldiers, like low-level, what do you call that? People that do stuff with their hands. So builders of different kinds like engineering, like craftsmen. I’ve seen-
Douglas Murray (02:33:53): Yes, because you’ve got a very specific task that could be highly complicated, but you get to apply yourself to and to solve.
Lex Fridman (02:34:01): Yeah. Over years, you’ve mastered it. It’s passed across generations and so on, but states, craft and that kind of stuff…
Douglas Murray (02:34:09): Well, because there’s so many variables. I mean, this is one when you’re trying to lure me onto prognostications on Ukraine earlier. I was saying I’ve seen enough to know that I just don’t know, because I know the amount of things that can change all the time. Some years ago, I was talking to a former public servant in the UK when Boris Johnson was prime minister and COVID started. I mentioned to this friend, I said, “Well, it’s pretty bad luck for Boris that he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit, and then there’s a global pandemic from Wuhan and he’s got to mug up on that and then gets it really wrong.”
Douglas Murray (02:34:54): But anyway, and I was really struck by the fact that this man, man of great insight happened to disagree politically, but said to me, “But Douglas is always like this.” And he said, “Look at Tony Blair came into power in 1997 wanting to reform education in the UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East.” I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists and most conspiracy theories, not to say that there aren’t some that do actually turn out to be to have something in them. It had happens. A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true lab league.
Douglas Murray (02:35:40): But in general, the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is, as I say, it’s a very low grade, low resolution. Look at the world by people who clearly have never seen the wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and the number of events. I mean, I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to me, I won’t name the country, but said to me, “Can you help us out with just how to cope with the day and understand the day-to-day struggle we’re having with the cycle?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And they said, “Our experience in government is that every day, something comes up, which we have to firefight,” and that’s what we do that day. And then the next day something else comes up, which we have to fight and we’re not getting our policies done. And I just thought, for me, that rings an awful lot truer, then that country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family telling them, it’s like, “Come on.”
Lex Fridman (02:37:06): I do before I forget. When I ask you about Iran, what role do they play in this conflict? It’s fascinating how it seems like Iran is, fingerprints are everywhere in the Middle East. And it’s also fascinating that I have a lot of friends. My best friend is Iranian. It’s fascinating that the Islamic Revolution in Iran took the country from the leadership perspective backwards in such a drastic way and that they’re still in power. That confuses me because I know now it’s possible. I don’t know the people of Iran. Sorry to make the obvious statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran and a lot of them, everybody I know, they’re opposes the regime and they’re brilliant, educated, thoughtful, worldly people. And it confuses me that this is one of the, I would say, one of the greatest nations on earth.
Douglas Murray (02:38:13): In one of the great cultures of earth.
Lex Fridman (02:38:14): The cultures and the people’s Iran.
Douglas Murray (02:38:16): Yeah, I agree.
Lex Fridman (02:38:17): Then you look at that and then you look at the leadership when they’re behind most of the terror groups,
Douglas Murray (02:38:24): In the region. Certainly, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:38:26): Can you just speak to that and how is it still the same regime since 1979?
Douglas Murray (02:38:33): I know, as you know, I start On Democracies and Death Cults with the flight taking the Ayatollah Khomeini or other from Paris to Tehran.
Lex Fridman (02:38:42): The flight that you say you wish never happened.
Douglas Murray (02:38:45): I think it’s one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century.
Lex Fridman (02:38:49): What’s the other one?
Douglas Murray (02:38:51): Lenin’s train getting to Petrograd.
Lex Fridman (02:38:54): Yeah. It’s always about the transportation.
Douglas Murray (02:38:57): Yes, I know. I’m really a transport guy. No, wait until my book of 10 best journeys.
Lex Fridman (02:39:04): Yeah, across the world.
Douglas Murray (02:39:07): No, just as the train, the Finland station brought the basilis of Bolshevism into Russia. So the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran, brought the basilis of Khomeinism, the most radical form of Shi’ite Islam to Tehran and to Iran. It’s one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there. You actually, I have a lot of Persian friends and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and so on. Her father had been an ayatollah before the overthrow of the Shah, and everyone had criticisms of him, but when you saw what came…
Douglas Murray (02:40:00): … criticisms of him. But when you saw what came after him, it was among other things, what I learned from her and other friends from that region, was that, I suppose two things. One is, of course, is that it’s a sort of central conservative insight, being that things can always be worse. They can always be worse. Never say this is rock bottom, because you might have a Shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells, but you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini butchering them all, including the people who helped him get to power like the communists and the trade unionists who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful for the Ayatollah until he didn’t need them anymore.
Douglas Murray (02:40:53): But the other thing I learned from that particular friend and others was this thing that, and again, it’s very hard for the western mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as fanaticism, real fanaticism and real ideological and real religious fanaticism, and the thing that I describe leads to the death cult mindset. That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the West to forget because we haven’t seen it in a while. We get very distant echoes of it in our own societies, really, and we’re highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways.
Douglas Murray (02:41:38): But Khomeinism not only vastly set back the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979. And your question of why gets to one of the biggest questions, really, the answer to which has to be understood, which is, it’s what Solzhenitsyn says at one point in Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, “When we heard the footsteps on the staircase and the knock was on our neighbor’s door and we knew our neighbor was being taken away, why did we not stop them?”
Douglas Murray (02:42:28): And in the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, it’s the same answer as, whether it’s Hamas governing Gaza with whoever the people in Gaza are who would’ve liked to have seen them overthrown, people don’t realize that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you. And that when the Green Revolution in 2009 started in Iran, why was it put down? Why didn’t it work? The sort of Iranians who I really hope one day get their country back, why did all these smart young students and others, why after they came out, why was it put down? It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head and they’ll take you to a prison, as they did with the Iranian students, and they’ll rape you with bottles and kill you. And even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again.
Douglas Murray (02:43:49): We know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality, and that’s how they stay empower. And one other thing on that, by the way, which is, I was reminded of this the other day, thinking about this, what I’ve just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we like to think everyone thinks like us, and we’d like everyone to be like us, and we believe fictions that we’re taught in films, like everyone basically wants the same things as us, and you go, you haven’t stepped outside the walls of the city if you think that.
Douglas Murray (02:44:40): But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of why we sort of singly fail to understand that this is possible. Khomeinism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are not that far in our past. I mean, there’s a moment when Oriana Fallaci interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few western journalists to do so, she says to him, “These people in the street, this movement, this revolution you’ve begun, it’s guided by hate, it’s hate, it’s all hate.” And Khomeini says, “No, no, it’s love. It’s love.” And it’s actually a scene that appears in The Satanic Verses of Rushdie where that exact same thing happens.
Douglas Murray (02:45:48): But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but how can you explain to a western mindset that that’s something that’s going on, that there are people directed by this hate that calls itself love? And I was reminded of a book I haven’t read since I was probably a teenager or something, made a great impression on me then. Did you ever read the Tragic Sense of Life? Miguel de Unamuno, a great Spanish existentialist philosopher, died in the ’30s. Unamuno had an encounter with students at the university in the ’30s when he realized, I mean this is the early period of the Francoists, de Rivera and all those people. Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up from the eager students who have fallen into this sort of Falangist Francoist ideology already, they end up chanting in front of him as he’s trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life. They end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte,” long live death. Long live death. And he tries to explain to them, this is a necrophilic chant.
Lex Fridman (02:47:09): Yeah.
Douglas Murray (02:47:09): But those young men in free Francoist Spain shouting long live death, they have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis and others with lines like, we love death more than you love life.
Lex Fridman (02:47:32): Yeah, that’s the line you return to. That’s a really difficult line to load in, because if you base your whole existence on that notion then, well, you’re a danger to the world. That’s a good foundation for committing evil.
Lex Fridman (02:47:55): I have to ask, because you mentioned that interview, you had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7th, and I’ve been very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders, it looks like I’ll interview Vladimir Putin and others. Want to have a general question about how do you interview people like this? Maybe to put your historian hat on of how do you approach the interview of world leaders such that you can gain a deeper understanding in the hope that that adds to the compassion in the world. So I have a deep sense that understanding people you might hate helps, in the long arc of history, add compassion to the world. But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of contexts, and maybe it’s more useful to think about, from a historian perspective, of how you need to interview somebody like Hitler or Stalin or Churchill, FDR during World War II. I think about this a lot, especially if it’s a 2, 3, 4, 5 hour conversation.
Douglas Murray (02:49:19): Well, there’s a lot of weight on you when you do those conversations, isn’t there?
Lex Fridman (02:49:24): From where? So who’s watching? Is it historians 20 years from then?
Douglas Murray (02:49:30): Who knows, I mean, the whole data might be wiped. I suspect there’s a weight on you because every major world leader you interview, and you’ve done some amazing ones, but I mean, presumably you have a set of people saying, “You’ve got to ask him about this, you can’t not address this.” And that’s a very challenging one because of course, although an interview with a politician should not be supine, nor can it be endlessly interrogative, because you’re not the prosecutor, and they don’t have to be the guilty party answering to you. And I’ve noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others, who go in with a set of those things, and at some point the other party can just, ” I don’t need this.” And people criticizing you don’t realize that, you just can’t do that.
Lex Fridman (02:50:34): Yeah, I suppose why journalists behave the way they do, although I have increasingly less and less respect for the journalists, the average journalists, have more and more respect for the great journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases, because a lot of the journalists seem to be signaling to their own in group. But there is a lot of pressure on people in that situation to ask what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question? The adversarial question that the world leader, the person, is ready for, they’ve answered that question, and what you’re trying to do is I guess one, to signal that you’ve asked the question and to push them.
Douglas Murray (02:51:24): Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:51:26): Two, you’re trying to just create drama, because really what people that ask you to ask that question, they want you to embarrass that person. They hate them and they want you to make them piss their pants or something, or just start crying and run out off the room.
Douglas Murray (02:51:43): Walk out.
Lex Fridman (02:51:44): Yeah, walk out in a way that is embarrassing for them, they could be like, look at that pathetic person. And that reveals to me nothing except maybe the weakness of the interviewee that they can’t stand up to a tough question.
Douglas Murray (02:52:02): Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:52:03): But mostly I have to do a lot of thinking because you get attacked a lot if you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually have a chance to reveal who the person is.
Douglas Murray (02:52:17): There’s a very interesting line that Robin Day who was quite a distinguished interviewer, a very distinguished interviewer back in the day, said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK. Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians, but carefully, said the problem with the new approach as he saw it from the ’90s of political interviewing was, he said, “If you think the person you’re speaking to is a liar, you should get them to reveal that they’re a liar, don’t just call them a liar.”
Lex Fridman (02:52:45): Yeah, yep.
Douglas Murray (02:52:47): I think that is, again, it’s something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don’t realize, is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn’t do anything, and it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that’s something else. But yes, I mean, I hear you, obviously you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It’s also difficult because one of the things that I don’t think anyone really understands is that in the end it’s just you.
Lex Fridman (02:53:28): Yeah.
Douglas Murray (02:53:28): I’m sure that you have this about Putin, people say, “I know exactly how you can…” They could give end endless advice, at the end it’s you sitting down talking to him. It’s like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it.
Lex Fridman (02:53:48): In person it’s actually pretty difficult.
Douglas Murray (02:53:51): It’s very difficult, because you’ve got all this weird behind the scenes stuff as well. You’ve got all of the games that people play.
Lex Fridman (02:53:58): I mean, yeah, I interviewed Zelenskyy, I’m pretty fearless in general, and he was a very human and fascinating human. But there is soldiers with guns standing all around.
Douglas Murray (02:54:10): And you didn’t have anyone? No one was packing on your side.
Lex Fridman (02:54:13): I had one friend, a security person, who’s also Ukrainian, so you never know, he could turn on.
Douglas Murray (02:54:20): You have an infiltrator.
Lex Fridman (02:54:21): Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, that doesn’t have any effect. And by the way, I should mention that, because it’s hilarious to me, but process wise, with Narendra Modi and with anyone, they said it was scripted and all this kind of stuff, I would never do anything scripted, they don’t get to have a say in anything I ask, I have complete freedom. Sometimes you’ll have people on the team very politely nudge like, “Hey, can you,” and I’ll very politely say, “Thank you,” smile, but that doesn’t mean I have to fucking do it.
Douglas Murray (02:54:59): Right.
Lex Fridman (02:54:59): I can do whatever the hell I want. By the way, with world leaders it doesn’t happen, it happens more with CEOs, because they have usually PR and comms people, they’ll just be like very politely, “Hey, you know the thing about when they, the sexual assault harassment charges they’ve had, could we just, there’s no reason to really linger on that.”
Douglas Murray (02:55:25): We don’t have to do that, yeah. One of my favorite things anyone’s ever said, its only ever happened, I know a couple of cases of this happening in private. A friend of mine once years ago was debating against the, this is before the Civil War in Syria, was debating something to do with the Middle East, and one of the people on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London. The then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad seniors’ massacre of the Palestinians in Hama, where they killed like 10,000 Palestinians in a day. And my friend starts talking about the Hama massacre by Assad senior, and the big fat Syrian ambassador stands up to respond, and he says, “That is none of your business.” And my friend was like, “Oh, I thought we were going to get a denial.”
Lex Fridman (02:56:21): Let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu, because I also have the opportunity to do a three-hour interview with him at this stage. And I’ve been, if I’m just being honest, very hesitant to do it, and I just don’t know how a conversation there could help add compassion to the world. And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large number of people that will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to post about it and to accuse you of things. In some sense, I don’t want to lose the part of me that’s vulnerable to the world.
Douglas Murray (02:57:12): People have very little understanding of things if they’re willing to say that because you’re sitting down and talking with somebody you are ergo platforming them, advancing their cause, being used, being a shill, or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which I think is something you do expertly. And another thing that your critics wouldn’t realize is that life is long, and hopefully, God willing, we’re both around for a long time, and therefore you don’t blow everything up at the request of some twat online.
Douglas Murray (02:57:51): But I do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and worry about their opinion, and no one else’s, really, and you just keep your own guiding light. That’s what’s always done it for me, is that I’ve always said I wouldn’t care if I was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed. I mean, I might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me, but it doesn’t, fundamentally that’s not why…
Douglas Murray (02:58:20): I’ll send you Churchill’s great speech on the death of Chamberlain. I mean it. He says one of the most wise and brilliant things. I was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about Zelenskyy, because one of Churchill’s greatnesses was his magnanimity, and when his great political opponent, Chamberlain died in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as prime minister, he could have used the opportunity, and we might even say that some politicians in our day won’t be able to resist the opportunity, he could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right, and Chamberlain didn’t know what the hell he was doing and he’s led us into this mess, and you should have all listened to me, because that would’ve been a good time. It would’ve been a good time to say that, that would’ve been one for the win, as they say.
Douglas Murray (02:59:16): But Churchill doesn’t do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world, and how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says, he doesn’t even mention the name of Hitler, he says, “What were Neville Chamberlain’s flaws?” He says, “Desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace,” and he says, “and the curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man.” But then he has this great passage where Churchill says, beautiful resonant passage about how, he says, “It’s not given to men happily for them, for otherwise life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events.” And he says, “In one phase, men seem to have been right and in another they’re proved wrong,” and then a different scale of values emerges.
Douglas Murray (03:00:14): And he says, “What is the worth of all this?” He says, “The only guide to a man is his conscience, the only shield his memory, his rectitude, and the sincerity of his actions.” In fact, he says, ” It doesn’t matter what happens, if you have this,” finishes it he says, “However the fates may play, but if you have this shield to guard you,” he says, “you march always in the ranks of honor.” All that can guide a man is that. If you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it’s a challenge, and then you get buffeted by the tos and throes of the waves of popular opinion, and that’s dangerous. But if you keep sight and hold onto what you believe, a million billion foes don’t matter.
Lex Fridman (03:01:18): Yeah, that is the path. We were talking offline about the great biography of Churchill. Churchill himself made mistakes, then admitted the mistakes, and we can even say was proud of the mistakes. I mean-
Douglas Murray (03:01:31): He learned from them.
Lex Fridman (03:01:32): Learned from them, that’s all the best you could do. The worst you could probably do is being afraid of making mistakes.
Douglas Murray (03:01:39): That’s what T.R. famously said in the Man in the Arena Speech.
Lex Fridman (03:01:43): T.R. Yeah, the old T.R. Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but are, in the end, some of the greatest humans ever created. Norm MacDonald, Churchill, and Teddy Roosevelt.
Douglas Murray (03:02:05): Did we do Norm? I think we did him before coming on air.
Lex Fridman (03:02:06): Oh, before coming on air, yeah. Well, he’s always everywhere in the air around us, one of the great comedians.
Lex Fridman (03:02:18): All right, what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on, human civilization? You’ve been covering some of the darker aspects, The Madness of Crowds, the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars. Sometimes when the sun shines through the clouds and there’s a smile on Douglas Murray’s face, what’s the source of the smile and the warmth?
Douglas Murray (03:02:44): Endless numbers of things. Endless numbers of things. I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually, that’s just the best thing ever. I was in Kiev the other week and I was asked to speak to students at the university, and irrespective to the rather tricky situation that they are in, it’s just great to, as you know, to speak to a roomful of students about things, and then hang around afterwards and just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do, and remembering what you were like at their age and how goofy you were and how much you were going to get wrong, and how much you had to learn and how much you were going to enjoy it, and seeing the opportunities they have in front of them if things go right. Just smart young people giving enormous encouragement all the time, that’s the best thing, I mean, it’s just-
Lex Fridman (03:03:55): Yeah, you can see endless possibility in their eyes, and they’re not burdened by, let’s say, the cynicism that builds up.
Douglas Murray (03:04:08): Even the cynicism though, I mean, you can resist that. I mean, I’ve got quite a deep well spring of it, but I mean, you can’t only fall into that, because there’s so much else it doesn’t cover. It’d be like spending your life being ironic.
Lex Fridman (03:04:30): So that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly, Ukraine, Israel, has that changed you? Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?
Douglas Murray (03:04:50): That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t know. Differs day to day.
Lex Fridman (03:04:58): So sometimes there’s a heaviness there because of the things you’ve seen?
Douglas Murray (03:05:03): Sure, yeah, at times, at times, yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:05:04): Do you regret going as much as you have to the front lines?
Douglas Murray (03:05:10): No, no. One of the reasons why a war is for a writer kind of the ultimate subject is because you see life weirdly at its ultimate. Very strange, strange thing, but it is the truth. Death, when it’s in front of you, is something which gives a terrible clarity to everything, and you see how people will love and even sometimes laugh more, how they’ll… There’s an essay by Montaigne that’s always on my mind called Why We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing. Everything’s just more, and the real thing is that you see the very, very best of people and the very worst, and they’re beside each other.
Lex Fridman (03:06:25): There some… So I’ve gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine, and there is some level of all the bullshit niceties, or whatever it is, of civilian life is all stripped away. It just seems more honest somehow.
Douglas Murray (03:06:43): Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And there’s the wild clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of, I think I mentioned, I joked about this with some Ukrainian soldiers in ’22 because they wanted a cigarette, and we stepped outside, I accompanied them outside because they weren’t allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, which there were rockets falling. And I said to them, “Isn’t it strange that fear of secondhand smoke has superseded this?” But I don’t know, it’s-
Lex Fridman (03:07:33): And seeing the humor in that, when you’re on the front line, when you’re fighting in a war, the humor of that is somehow just perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that. And the absurdity of life is just right there-
Douglas Murray (03:07:33): Yes, that’s right.
Lex Fridman (03:07:48): And it’s so honest and it’s so beautiful. And that’s why a lot of soldiers are traumatized, they’re destroyed by war, but they also miss it.
Douglas Murray (03:07:56): That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely, oh my God, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (03:08:00): There’s an intimacy to the whole thing.
Douglas Murray (03:08:01): Absolutely. Well, that’s right, I mean, everyone says, I never felt more alive, yeah, and I wouldn’t do anything different.
Lex Fridman (03:08:12): Well, I hope, just like Churchill, you keep fighting the good fight and not listening to anybody, and I’ll try to learn to do the same. Douglas, I’m a huge fan, thank you for doing this.
Douglas Murray (03:08:26): It’s been a great pleasure, and right back at you.
Lex Fridman (03:08:28): Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bertrand Russell, “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Lex Fridman (03:08:52): Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
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