War in Ukraine

... 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."

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. 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.

What did you think of the blow up between Zelensky and Trump as you're sitting there in the dugout? 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.

Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin? 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.

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? 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.

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? 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.

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? 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.

Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history and the governing ideology of this group? 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.

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. It's certainly corrupt. Every Hamas leader, who's now dead, died a billionaire.

Yes. ... because they've elected them.

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? 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.

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. Yes.

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. In one of the great cultures of earth.

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. Well, there's a lot of weight on you when you do those conversations, isn't there?

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? 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-