Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Barry Show. Tunku Verradajan is a journalist, scholar,
and sharp observer of politics, culture, and global affairs. He
has a background in law and years of experience at
places like The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. It's a
unique voice which he brings to big issues. He sat
(00:22):
down with Hillsdale College President Larry p Arne for a
thought provoking conversation and we hope you'll agree about why
some minority groups thrive, like Indian immigrants who come here
while others struggle, as well as the rich and complex
history of India and what lies ahead for where we
live the West.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Morning, Tanku, Morning, Larry, how are you? I'm terrific.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Thank you you're teaching here this week and next I
think her last and they tell me you're doing great
and thank you for that. You are born in India.
Tell about that story. Where were you born? What your
dad do? How'd you get here?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, it's a long story. I'm not sure it's of
great interest, but I'll tell it to you anyway. The
executive summary. I was born in India in nineteen sixty two,
which makes me sixty two years old. And I was
born in an Army Hospital in New Delhi. One of
(01:26):
the perks of having a grandfather who was in the
Indian Army. He was a colonel. But within months of
being born, I was whisked off to New York City
because my father, who was then a diplomat, was posted
to New York. And my young mother and young father
and I came to New York and lived in Manhattan
in nineteen sixty three. And I lived in New York
(01:47):
for the next six years. So my earliest memories of
life are actually American.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
And then you went back to India. Do you live
there long?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah? I went back to India the age of about
six or seven six actually more accurately, and lived there
for ten years. Went to a boarding school in the
desert state of Rajasthan, which is on the western border
with Pakistan. It's like a I think it was a
spartan place, think Oliver Twist, where kids are expected to
(02:21):
wear turbans, constantly hungry, constantly made the play sport, but
taught by the finest teachers that were there in d
at the time. Modeled on the British system of boarding schools,
a bit of eton in the Indian desert, and at
the age of sixteen, my father was once again transferred
(02:42):
on a diplomatic assignment to London and we left with
him and I went to school to to do what's
called the A levels the two years before college in
a school called Dulwich College in London. Who's most famou
miss alumnus is PG Woodhouse.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Oh wow, oh god? Do you like PG. Woodhouse?
Speaker 2 (03:06):
I love him. And one of the things I did
almost every day, to the annoyance of the college librarian,
was to go to the library and press my nose
against the glass case there which housed all his artifacts,
including including the typewriter that he used to type all
his wonderful books on.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, my friend Mark Stein. You probably know him too.
I did a series right now on his Mark Stein Club,
The Girl in the Boat, a Woodhouse novel i'd never
heard of before.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I haven't heard of it either.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah, it's well, he Mark makes everything interesting, and Woodhouse
is always interesting, and so it's hilarious and great.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Woodhouse is maybe the most popular popular British author in
India to this day. To this day, yes, yeah, yeah,
and the Indians constantly go to Britain and are disappointed
that people aren't like a. Bertie Wooster, and.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
One of my great teachers in life loved Woodhouse and
he used to give as an example. You have to
learn to write, he would say, for example, this sentence
from Woodhouse. He dropped an astonished piece of toast. You
have to know what's wrong with that to know that
(04:17):
it's funny. Okay. And then you stayed in England for
higher education. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I stayed there for the next twenty years, and that
included a bit of higher education. I went to Oxford
where I read law, and then I stayed on at
the college which I went to Trinity College, Oxford, and
taught law there too for five or six years as
a fellow of the college. Before becoming a journalist. At
the age of thirty, I joined the London Times as
(04:47):
a leader writer or editorial writers.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You'd say in America, and you didn't become a lawyer,
a practicing lawyer.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I did not. I sometimes when I look at my
bank balance these days, I sometimes regret having done that.
It would have been nicer to be a prosperous lawyer
than a penniless journalist. But the answer is no. I
was never attracted to the practice of the law. I
was attracted to law as a as a kind of
intellectual challenge and a subject worthy of study and thought,
(05:17):
but the practice of it never never did anything for me.
Me too, I would have made a terrible lawyer.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I think, I wonder I will tell our listeners that
I know Tongko pretty well and have a sense of
his ways and manners, and he's an interesting mixture of
insightfulness and gentlemanliness that means you don't put much past him,
and when he catches you're doing something stupid, he's usually
(05:46):
courteous about it.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
I think I would have lost my temper in court,
and I don't think the judges would have liked that.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
You taught there. You taught law, yes, and you have
said to me, you miss teaching. I'm going to do
some of it here. I'm very proud to announce to
the world you're doing it now. But you're going to
do some more, I think, and well, thank you. Yeah,
I think i'd love that. I think you're good at that.
Why journalism? What is journalism? And why do you like it?
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah? Well, I stumbled. I stumbled into journalism by accident.
I happened to meet and sit next to dinner, sit
alongside the editor of my newspaper, and we ended up
becoming friends and I got a job at the Times
of London. Why journalism. I always have liked to write.
And one of the good things about an Oxford education,
(06:43):
at least as it used to be, I don't know
what it's like these days, is that we had to
do an awful lot of writing. We had to write
an essay almost weekly, and sometimes more frequently than that.
I think we ended up writing about six essays a month,
which we then had to read aloud in tutorial to tutors.
And so this encouraged not just the art of writing well,
(07:06):
but the art of writing entertainingly. Entertainingly you had to
make sure you didn't put your teacher to sleep and
your tutorial partner to sleep. And so I loved writing.
And when I knew that I didn't ever want to
practice law, and that teaching law at Oxford was something
that it was losing a little bit of its charm
(07:26):
for me, I wanted to guard and see the big
wide world, and London was just an hour and a
half away by bus, and so I decided at one
point that I needed to leave and go to London,
make some money, do something worldly instead of teaching Roman
law to undergraduates. And so I thought journalism would be
just the right thing. Was it was a time when
(07:49):
it was a time of ferment in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
It was.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
It was the early nineties. We're on the cusp of
various changes. Britain was starting to emerge from its Sacherit
period into something less desirable, and so it was a
good time to be a journalist, I thought.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
And Silver Union fell not long before that, exactly. Yeah,
we're going to talk about these times. It is interesting.
You know, if you go back through the decades that
you've been in journalism, it's hard to find a calm time. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I think if I rack my brain, I find the
calm time. But I don't think I well journalists, journalists
don't like calm times. You want there to be something
happening out there. You want people to be miserable. I
mean that in the nice, nicest possible way. But froth
(08:51):
and ferment and turbulence are always much more interesting than
placid placid waters.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
It dare well, you've you've come into the trade at
a good time, And how did you get to the
Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Well, I was in New York as the London Times
as bureau chief, and I'd done that job for three years,
and when it was time to go back to London,
because they like to rotate their journalists out of out
of jobs. They don't want them to go native, it
was time for me to go. And by then I
had married met and married an American woman. Her name
(09:33):
is Amy, and her parents were from North Carolina, and
she did not and did not want to and actually
could not, move to London with me. So I had
to decide whether to move back to London without her,
which was obviously not an option, or to stay in
New York and find another job. And fortunately I had
I had some connections to the late and great Robert Bartley. Yeah,
(10:00):
one of the finest American journalists of all time, and
he knew me and had some sense of my paltry
abilities and was kind of enough to offer me a
job on as an editor, as an editor on the
editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and I started
there in May of two thousand.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Still there.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, Actually I actually went to him and asked him
for a job, and he didn't quite he didn't. Fortunately,
he didn't swap me away, but said come to my club,
which is a place called the Heights Casino in Brooklyn Heights,
where he lived, and we had we had a beer
and a pizza together one day for lunch, and my
wife very wisely had said to me, before you go,
(10:43):
make sure you read mister Bartley's book called Seven Fat Years.
I think that's a biblical reference. And so I made
sure I read the Seven Fat Years before meeting Bob Bartley.
And the very first question he asked me was have
you read my book? And I could truthfully say that
I had.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Quickly. In some way, we're both discoverers of discoveries of
Robert Bartley. Because back in the day when I was
a kid, we'd started something called the Claremont Institute and
we had a journalist from the Wall Street Journal show
up one day. He just entered the office, didn't have
an appointment, and there were four of us who ran
that place and a secretary. The secretary is the only
(11:27):
one who had work in office. And he said, I'm
James Ring Adams and I'd like to take you to lunch.
And we said who are you, and he said, well,
I'm a journalist so he takes us to lunch, buys
us all lunch, and the next week there was a
major editorial, the lead editorial for the editorial page, about us,
(11:56):
and he checked us out and he wrote it about something,
an article that I had written, and it just it
was just stunning. And that's how I got to know him,
and I found out he was always on a lookout
for talent. Remarkable man. I think the last event he
(12:20):
ever did before he died of cancer was on a
Hillsdale College cruise and I was very attached to him. Yeah,
I'm glad, I'm glad he hired you. Good job.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Oh he was lovely man. He was. He embodied the
best of Midwestern America, the values of honesty and open mind, curiosity, hospitality, patriotism, everything.
And he could write like a dream too.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Oh yeah, yeah. He used to always say, I think
it's probably still true. Ours is the only opinion page
that actually sells news paper.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
He was very proud of that.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
He was fond of we. We would say he needed
to print that, print that onto a T shirt and
sell it and the journal could make a lot of money.
Put it on a T shirt.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I said, I've been reading the Wall Street Journal every
day since about nineteen seventy five. Professor Jaffa, the aforementioned
great teacher of mine, loved the Wall Street Journal, and
it had a scam that if he got students to
(13:32):
sign up as student rates, he got a free thing.
So I was under pressure and I started reading it
never stopped. Let's talk about the world. What is the
job of a journalist? How would you describe that?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Well, there are various kinds of journalists. My kind is
the opinion kind. So I think the job of a
journalist who works in the opinion sphere is to look
at the world or some portion of it, and the
portions can be you know, massive, or they can be
(14:16):
microscopic slices of life, and to tell the reader, honestly
and in clear language, what is happening, why it's happening,
to whom things happening, should they be happening. It's to
describe what he sees as honestly and helpfully and as
(14:37):
helpfully as possible. I'm sorry this is a very vague
and hypothetical answer, but it's sort of what journalists of
my kind have to do. Be explainers, informers, entertainers, all
at the same time.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, it comes from a word that means today, right,
what's going on today? Yeah, to read a passage. I
read seven or eight of your articles this morning. I
read you every time you appear in the journal for
years now.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
And here's a tutorial, in my opinion, about how to
start an article. This is about a man named Tony Abbot.
It's really about China, and it's about the West. And
nobody ever heard of Tony Abbot. He's an Australian. It
starts Americans dispirited by the twenty twenty four presidential campaign.
(15:30):
You read this in April of last year, might find
it bracing to listen to Tony Abbot. Then a quote
from him, the Western world has never been more materially rich,
but it's rarely been more spiritually bereft. Now there's a
mountain of information in those three sentences, and it looks
(15:54):
to me like you have a gift. And I because
I read a bunch of them in a row this morning.
They're all like that. That is to say, they're engaging
from the start. They have a sense of who the
audience is. And the first thing you tell him is
why they might be interested in this.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, so that's you know, well, I think that's the
fundamental The point of fundamental importance in any piece of
writing for a newspaper is to make sure that the lead,
as we call it, and we spell it eccentricly l
E dee for reasons that I still don't quite understand,
that the lead be arresting, and also hook the reader
(16:38):
as quickly as possible, because the reader's time is precious.
You have no lean on it. The reader is free
to stop reading you at any time he wants, and
so you've got to make sure he continues to read you.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
So yeah, yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So grab him by the collar.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
This Tony Abbott article. You know, Australia is out there
in Asia and China is near, and it's about China.
You've written several articles lately that go into the question
of China. What do you make of China? What do
you think is going on?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't really have a
handle on China. I write about many things in China
as one of them. But Tony Abbott, since you've brought
him up, is a very interesting way to look at
China through his eyes. He was the Prime Minister of Australia,
unfortunately only for one term. He would have I would
(17:29):
I would have liked to have seen him be Prime
Minister for much longer. He was in the sort of
Thatcher Reagan mold, maybe even more muscular than that, and
his in his beliefs, in his conservatism, and he had
no illusions about China. He thought China was He thought
one of his predecessors, Kevin Rudd, who who took Australia
(17:52):
very close to China, was a sort of panda hugger,
as he called him. He asked me not to put
that in the piece, but I shouldn't have said it,
but he forgive me for saying it. So he had
no illusions about China, he thought. He thought of China
as a threat, but not a threat one can wish away.
(18:12):
It's a threat that is in danger of consuming the
world as we know it, supplanting our values as we
know them, and yet something that we have to learn
to live with. So he was he always felt and
this is the view that I subscribe to as well,
which is that China has to be managed in ways
(18:33):
that ensure that it doesn't endanger us, and also in
ways that ensure that we don't sacrifice any of our
fundamental values. We mustn't sell our souls in order to
be on the right side of China. But we have
to learn how to live with them. So China management.
There should be a course in all colleges called China Management.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
But yeah, that might be a course in strategy.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
An Tony Abbott would be a wonderful guest to have
at Hillsdale, I would say, he would.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
What's he doing? Now? Do you know he is? He's not.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
He's a sort of sage about. He's a sort of
world world trotting, globe trotting sage. He runs a think
tank in Australia whose name escapes me, and so he
I think he's based in Brisbane or Sydney, but travels
(19:28):
the world putting out the message of what the West
should be doing and what it shouldn't be doing.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
It's questions like manufacturing. Can we manufacture things we need
if we have to fight and things we need generally? Ah,
there's a amazing, amazing ferment in America about all that
right now?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, well, we've hollowed out manufactured. I'm not an economist.
I would like people to know that but I do
know as a citizen and as a journalist that we've
hollowed out our manufacturing to an alarming extent. There are
many things that we no longer make and possibly no
longer can make if we had to make them.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
And so.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I don't know. Is it good for a society to
be a society which has to import virtually everything that
it's people need to live. Yes. Economists argue that there's
a kind of Adam Adam Smithian equilibrium that emerges, and
everything is ultimately, you know, if you if you, if
you conduct trade in a rational way, everything ultimately comes
(20:39):
to be priced right for the consumer. But when things
go get pair shaped, and when things when conflict emerges
in the world, and and and and the exchange of
goods and services becomes difficult, when there are bottlenecks and
pandemics and you can't get things as quickly as you
need them, you have to maybe rethink some of the
conventional economic positions. You know, I would love to read
(21:03):
a smart economist who repurposes Adam Smith for the modern world.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
There's one within two hundred yards at where we sit,
Charles Steele, several of them of an ur Econ Department.
I volunteer something about all that I've said for decades now.
Winston CHURCHI was a free trader. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington,
James Madison were protectionist. Alexander Hamilton. The natural law does
(21:34):
not speak to me on this question. There are examples
on both sides. What Charles Steele will say is Smith
himself explained that you have to make vital things for
your country. You have to make sure of that. I
(21:56):
was privileged to know Milton Friedman for more than thirty years,
and it was a great thing to know him if
you weren't his student, because he was very tough with
his students. He was hilarious and mean, and you know,
great man, very great man. And we once talked for
two hours about free trade. And I said, yeah, that's
(22:19):
all this positive, right. It's like the division of labor.
If it's a good thing for somebody to make this
cup and somebody else to make this microphone, and then trade,
then globally is obviously better. He'd say, so you got
the point, and I'd say, yeah, I think we should
extend it. We should get the Soviet Union to make
(22:40):
our missiles and bombs because they're really good at it
and seem to do it cheaper than we do. And
he said, yeah, you can't do that, And I said,
that's a mouthful, isn't it. There's some qualification on the
principle of free trade by the existence of national boarders,
(23:00):
and so yeah, that's uh ok.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
He was a great man, Milton Readman. I had the
opportunity I used to be at the Hoover Institution where
he was one of the presiding deities, and I remember
interviewing him in one of the earliest weekend interviews that
we did at the Wall Street Journal back in it
would have been two thousand and six, so it was
one of the interviews I did that I'm most proud
(23:24):
of because it was a tough job. I sat down
to interview Milton, and just as we were, you know,
getting into our stride, his door swings open, and his wife,
Rose walks in, who was also an economist and a
very feisty old lady, and she then said, I'll just
(23:45):
I see your interviewing Milton. I'll just sit in the
corner and listen. But she didn't do that. She sat
in the corner and proceeded to interrupt every time, Milton
said something that she disagreed with, and so I ended
up writing an interview that said an interview with Milton
and Rose Freeman.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
I went sat beside her, well, he was giving a lecture,
and she was talking quietly under her brain. Yes, and
she would say that something like at one point he
was talking about Sumptuary taxes, taxes on luxuries, and she goes,
(24:24):
I mentioned cigarettes, and she I could barely hear her.
I was right next to him, and he goes, and
the example of cigarettes. He says, immediately, I think I
think they might have just been one mind those two.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, no, they were. I think they wrote a book
together called a Very Happy Couple or something like that.
I can't remember the name, but that that phrase captures it.
And this interview, which was which was intended as an
interview with an economist to be and to be about
economics and political economy, ended up being an interview that
was a portrait of a marriage and and a very
(24:59):
clearly that the chemistry between them intellectual was was was perfect.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah. Yeah, they were, and they were short people.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
They were.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
It's uh. I don't know if people know, but they
should read the April twenty sixth article by you and
the Wall Street Journal to show that the horse is
an incredibly important thing in human history, something I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Saddle up.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, there you go. That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
That was that was a book review. It was a
It was a book by someone called David Chaffetz who's
written this book apparently you know how the how the
horses shaped human civilization, and he makes a very convincing
and attractive case for how the horse is among the
most five or six more important, most important things in
human civilization.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Amazing. Yeah, and ends up with Genghis Khan.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, if you get the horse in the wrong hands, yes,
I'll had the wrong bottom, the wrong bottom on a horse. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
The claim one of the claims in the book that
you review is that, uh, the Silk Road might have
been called the horse road because what they what they
Chinese needed to export silk for was to get horses.
And they were apparently the Mongols were the ones who
were really good at making them and uh breeding them
(26:33):
and raising them. And then they substituted tea for silk. Yes,
and the next thing you know, you got the Boston
Tea Party. Yes. I want to talk about Europe you've
written a couple of articles about populist in Europe. Uh,
(26:56):
explain what's going on there?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Well, A lot of things are happening in Europe, and
some of them mirror the things that are happening in
this country. But just as we've had here with the
emergence of mister Trump, we've had the emergence in many,
if not most, European countries of populist parties. Given the
(27:26):
political arrangements there, they tend to be parties that emerge
rather than figures, the way mister Trump has emerged as
a figure here. I don't see him as a party person.
But in Europe you've had the emergence of populist parties, populist, nationalist, populist, conservative.
Call them what you will. The preferred phrase for the
mainstream media has been to call them far right or
(27:49):
extreme right parties, a phrase I try to avoid because,
even though they are often to the right of the
conventional conservative parties, the phrase far right or extreme right
is intended almost always to disqualify them as as participants
(28:09):
in polite society, as to typecast them somehow as disagreeable
people with whom we shouldn't have any contact. I was
recently in Berlin where I met one of the senior
leaders of the a f D, the Alternative for Germany,
Alternative for Deutschland, and she was telling me she was
(28:31):
a woman called Beatrix fun Storch. She's she should really
in another era would have been a princess. She's she's
a sign of one of the most distinguished royal houses
in Germany. And she is a senior member of the
a f D. And she was describing to me how
(28:53):
the German media an anathematizes the a f D, how
the German media shuns the AfD, how it begins by
typecasting them as Nazis, and having done so makes them
ineligible for polite society and discourse, and so shuts them
out of all debate and conversation. And this is a
(29:15):
party for which almost a quarter of the German electorate
voted in the last election. If I'm not mistaken, they
finished second in the in the vote count, behind the
Christian Democrats. Now I'm not saying that there are no
members of the AFT who are disagreeable and who are
people we wouldn't want our daughters to bring home for dinner.
(29:38):
But to say that because of the presence of a
handful of Nazis in theft or Neo Nazis called them,
want you will, the entire party somehow stigmatized and untouchable
is all too convenient for people who want to continue
to manage European politics and discourse in a particular, preordained way.
(30:00):
And so you have this situation. JD. Vance spoke out
against the Munich Security Conference that you know, it is
starting to an American to see a political system that
basically treats his outcasts, a party that represents a quarter
of the population. How can you describe something that is
representing a quarter of the population is extreme? That means
(30:23):
a quarter of your population is extreme? What does extreme
even mean? And what does mainstream mean? That There was
a long winded answer.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
But in those proportional representation systems, the most popular parties
might get a third. Yeah, so a quarter is a.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Lot, a quarter is a lot.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
And yeah, well we have some of that here too.
Views censored on social media and in the big press.
You know, I've always thought, like my affection for the
newspaper you write for, uh, which, like everybody like I
(31:03):
don't regard anything else. It's wholly reliable, but it's the
most and always thought I think Bob Bartley understood this too.
It's a place to go where you won't read the
same thing you read everywhere else. And uh and that
the only the only you know, you could achieve that
effect by reading everything else and just writing something different,
(31:24):
which is not what you do. He thought, Go look
at the phenomenon and describe it as it is, and
don't worry what anybody else is saying about it. And
that your your articles on You've got one on Nigel
Farage in here and and you know marine Marine Leapin
(31:46):
has now been marine Lapin is the She the most
popular politician in France.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
She might be well, I don't know where she why
I thinks stand now, but she is. You know, she
gave Macron a run for his money. So she was
one of the presidential She was one of two presidential
candidates in the runoffs. So that makes her, if not
the most popular politician, then an undeniably significant one.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
And she's been convicted of a crime. And the crime
is she used staff provided for the European Union when
she was a member of the European Parliament for non
European Union tasks, and she's excluded from politics, so whatever
percentage of the vote she got, they don't have her
(32:39):
to vote for anymore.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Now I'm not familiar with all the details of the
Marine the pen case. I've been I've been in Hillsdale,
busy teaching. But what what does it does strike me
as being all too convenient for the French political elites
and the French quote unquote mainstream to find this lovely,
(33:01):
wonderful technicality on which to disqualify the one politician that
poses a threat to the status quo. You may you
may find Marine le penn not to your taste, you
may find her unsavory, but ultimately you have to let
the French people decide whether or not they want her
(33:22):
to be president, not get rid of her based on
some kind of all too convenient technicality, which seems to
have been the case.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
I watched both the Vance speeches, the one on artificial
intelligence and the one on security in Europe, and in
both speeches they showed the audience a lot. And my
perception was in the first speech, where he said we
have to embrace AI as a major opportunity and protect
(33:56):
the workers while we do it, they seem stiff to me,
not friendly. The second one, there were open restiveness in
the crowd and he started out he said, you got
(34:16):
to spend five percent your GDP on defense, and he
said that for about three or four minutes, and then
he turned to suppressing speech and excluding political parties, and
there was in the room was there were gas and
people putting their head in their hands, and a very
(34:39):
strong reaction after. And so that makes me think, if
you put that together with this these people you've interviewed,
is Europe becoming illiberal?
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Well, European politics is all has been the exclusive preserve
of of sort of preordained political elites who've managed over
the years to sort of domesticate the system and domesticate
the horse, as it were, of politics, and make sure
(35:16):
that it rides in one direction. It doesn't rear its legs,
it doesn't gallop, It just runs at a reliable trot
in a reliable direction. But we've now reached the stage
where there where the horse, as it were, Let's let's
say the horse are the people of the countries that
they govern. The horse has decided that it doesn't want
(35:40):
to just trot, and it doesn't want to just go
in a preordained direction. It wants to explore fresh passaures,
It wants it likes to look at the grass over there.
It doesn't want to eat the grass in that on
the left. It wants to eat the grass on the right.
And so they're having trouble managing the horse. And so
I think we're in a situation where European politics is
(36:01):
being remade. The elites are used losing their grip on
the reins, and so as a result there and I'm
running out of horse vocabulary, but you know, whatever it
is you use to hit the horse to calm it
down there the crop, they're having to use the crop
a little more than they did in the past because
(36:22):
the horse is starting to disobey them. And so, yes,
this illiberalism that we see into in the form of
the disqualification of Mislapen or the shinning of the a FD,
or the disqualification of the presidential candidate in Romania, which
is what sparked mister Vance's talk, is the equivalent of
(36:43):
of the elite the rider using the crop and the
horse doesn't like it. So I think I think we
need to I think we're watching European politics being remade
as we speak. You see it in You see it
in the Netherlands with builders. You see it in some
form in Britain with Nigel Farage's prominence. Although Britain is
(37:09):
an altogether different picture now because they got them the horses,
were got its yayas out by by by winning Brexit.
If Britain was still in Europe, we might see we
might have seen the emergence of a more populist party
there which would be pushing for the same aims that
(37:31):
Brexit achieved. But Brexit, in a way happened. It ended
up effectively killing off the Democratic Party the Conservative Party,
and because the Conservative Party, having delivered Brexit, was unsure
of what to do with it, and they were unprepared
(37:52):
for victory, and their heart didn't seem to be in
concluding a deal with Europe that would have, you know,
brought and what it had voted for. But to return
to your original question, where we're seeing a remaking of
politics in Europe that will throw up surprises. I think
(38:13):
we're going to see the emergence of new leaders who
say uncomfortable things, things that we're not used to hearing,
a bit like mister Trump here who's saying things that
Americans are not used to hearing. And it's a question
of getting attuning your ear to new sounds and your
heart to new to new disturbances.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Decision pending. I wonder if you think it means in
American politics there's a fair amount of dysfunction. Yes, can't
The government has enormous resources, state, federal, and local, more
than ever, and it can't build the bridges, keep the
(39:01):
military up to date, secure the streets. And in Europe
they're light years from being able to defend themselves. And
mister trumpets confronting them with that problem, and one wonders,
what are they going to do? So there's this dysfunction
(39:23):
that seems to have spread everywhere, and meanwhile China seems
very strong and growing. Does that mean that there's been
some disproof of the Western liberal forms?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Well, I'm I'm not sure about that, but I know
that you know, messs trump advance in insisting to Europe
that they fulfill their spending obligations under the NATO Treaty,
and sometimes even to exceed those obligations, have I think
(40:04):
helped or caused the European mind to concentrate on the
task you know, you've seen some the Germans, for instance,
beginning to realize that they need to do something about
defense spending, and so, you know, they even went to
the extent of remaking lifting the brake on spending to
(40:27):
allow going into debt for defense spending. It was one
of the things. I don't know whether they finally pulled
it off, but they are taking every legal measure and
constitutional measure possible to increase spending so that they can
meet their native obligations. Because the incoming Chancellor, or the
(40:47):
presumptive incoming Chancellor, mister Mutz, I think understands, however obtuse
he may be, and I do think he is obtuse,
understands that the days of free riding on the United
States are probably over and that the Germans, if they
wish to defend themselves. And it's not entirely clear always
that the Germans wish to defend themselves because they've been
(41:09):
caught in this kind of cozy condition for a generation
no longer where they where their defense needs have been
taken care of by by Mama America, and have been
able to spend their own largess on on building what
(41:30):
is a very comfortable welfare state. But I think they're
now realizing that all this, this their way of life
and their way of spending is threatened. But you have examples,
the polls already meet the obligations. But I think I
think Europeans in general will have arrived at the time
of reckoning. I think they know that they either defend
(41:52):
themselves with their own money or they leave themselves vulnerable
to attack from I guess Russia is a country that
we feel is the greatest threat to them. But yeah,
it's all part of the remaking of European politics.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Immigration place into this in big ways. What do you
make of that? Why is it acute issue? And what
do you think will happen.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
In Europe or worldwide?
Speaker 3 (42:26):
It's kind of worldwide.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, I think immigration is a is a big problem.
I think it's a bigger problem in Europe than it
is in the United States. I think the US does
have its clearly does have its problem with illegal immigration.
But it's a bigger country than any European country. It
has bigger it has much better absorptive capacities. Demographically, it
(42:54):
has more place in which to put people. In other words,
and many of the immigrants who are coming to America
from the biggest liability of many of the immigrants coming
to America from the southern countries Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, etc.
Are that they are poor, unskilled, speak a different language,
(43:20):
but for the most part, culturally they're Christian, so they
are ultimately assimilable in this society. Once they learn English,
once they acquire skills, once they learn how to do things,
pay taxes, not commit crime, and live life in something
resembling the American way, they are ultimately assimilable. Yes, in
(43:42):
their midst become various bad guys like the trend. They
are Agua from Venezuela and various criminal syndicates. But for
the most part, these are just desperate poor people who
are coming for a better life, coming the wrong way.
They shouldn't be breaking the law and coming to this country.
But we know why they're coming. In Europe, yes, a
lot of the motivations to move from Morocco or Syria
(44:05):
or Afghanistan to Europe are similar. They're poor people caught
in the crossfire of tensions and wars who want to
live comfortable, safe lives in Europe. But the difference between
an Afghan and a Moroccan and Assyrian on the one hand,
and a Mexican on the other. Is that these first
people that I mentioned are much more difficult to assimilate
(44:29):
because they come with a culture, that is that has
historically been at luggerheads with the Judeo Christian culture of Europe.
And so in order, it isn't just a question of
teaching the Syrian French, or teaching the Afghan German, or
teaching the Moroccan, Italian or Spanish. It's a question of
(44:49):
teaching them how to live in societies that are tolerant,
that are based on Judeo Christian values, that are based
on certain levels of respect for women, for the community,
for public spaces, for ways of eating and dressing and
speaking and reading and thinking. And so it's much harder
to assimilate these, I think often essentially unassimilable people, and
(45:14):
so you have to manage them. And it's the management
of them that's so difficult, especially when in these countries
there is a progressive predisposition to regard their cultures, the
cultures of these incoming people as being of equal value
to the culture of the host country. It's all very
nice to say, so it's all very nice to say, Oh,
(45:36):
all countries are wonderful and that's all live together, But
it doesn't work out that way in real life, and
some cultures are not of equal value to others. And
we have to you know, we've lost sight of the
belief that our culture and it must seem strange to
see in Indian refer to Western culture as our culture.
But I've been an assimilated citizen of the West.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
You've written a column lately about the success of immigrants
from India to America. Yes, explained that.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Well, they have been remarkably successful. You know, they're just
one point five percent of the population, that's about five
million people, and you know they've ascended to positions of power,
particularly is business CEOs, doctors, business school deans, lawyers, and
(46:29):
the most impact impactful and eye catching presence of Indian
Americans of late meaning politics. Yeah, you know, we had
two Indian Americans run for a compete for the candidates
to the Republican candidacy for president. You have vivig Ramaswami
and Nikki Haley. You had the Democratic candidate who ran
(46:53):
against mister Trump, Kamala Harris as the daughter of an
Indian mother, I know she positioned herself publicly as an
African American, but she was. She's the child of an
Indian mother, and she was raised almost exclusively by that
Indian mother, and was, in fact, had in fact had
(47:14):
quite an Indian upbringing until it became politically expedient for
her to rebrand herself. And who can blame her there?
And I think the advantages of the melting part exactly.
But so yes, you know, Indian Americans have been remarkably successful.
It's and they've done so as I think I may
(47:34):
have pointed out in the journal piece, without any of
the advantages that come with special pleading or affirmative action
or reserved places in college. In fact, you know, until
the Supreme Court ruling on the affirmative action case, it
was probably a disadvantage to be an Indian applicant to
an Ivy League school, the same way it was a
(47:55):
disadvantage to be a Chinese applicant. So so yes, I
think it's and you know, and they they've they've assimilated
better than others. They've maintained the core of their own culture,
but they've also learned that in order to be successful
in America, you have to play by America's rules, speak
(48:17):
America's language, not necessarily eat America's food. I still applaud
them for eating Indian food at home, but I think
they've been and they've been pilloried by the left. Who's
who've coined this phrase, and they use it as a
(48:37):
term of abuse. They call people, they call people from
ethnic minorities who succeed in this country sneeringly model minorities,
as if somehow being a model minorities like being some
kind of teacher's pet. And so you're just this suck
up that that does things by the book and is success,
and you're successful and you can hold down a job
(48:59):
and you don't get divorce, and your children go to university,
and this somehow makes you this undesirable thing called a
model minority. And somehow, if you're a minority, you have
to be someone who's in trouble and who's needy, and
who's discriminated against and stopped by the police.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
And then if you are, then I can get a
lot of power by claiming to help you out.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
But what about so these Muslims who have come to
Europe are hard to assimilate, and the Indians who've come
to America who aren't as numerous, but still have been
easier to assimilate. It's something about Indian culture there that
makes that so well.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
I think, Yeah, Indian culture is very different from Middle
Eastern culture. It's very different from and the Indians who
come to this country are in the majority Hindus. But
I would wager that even Indian Muslims have assimilated well
(50:00):
in this country. So there's something about the Indian Yeah.
I think Indian culture in a way transcends religion. You know,
Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus have a lot more in
common than Indian Muslims have with Syrian Muslims. I think
the Syrian Muslim and the Indian Muslim have the fact
that they're both adherence to the Islamic faith in common,
(50:23):
but beyond that, they have very little in common. They
may fast during the month of Ramadan, but that's part
of the Islamic tradition. But they have other things. You know,
they treat women differently. We're talking about the educated class
of Indian muslim not all the way down the line,
but the same is true also for the Hindus. We're
talking about educated Hindus. So the Indian muslim Is who
(50:49):
emigrates to this country is likely to have been to
an Indian university where he's had a kind of education
that isn't isn't religiously exclume usively religious. Where he studied science,
and where he studied literature, and where he studied the
constitution has some sense of things beyond religion. But I
(51:13):
think it's important. One of the things that it's it's
it's most important to stress is of course that you
know in Indian immigrants to this country often come armed
with the English language. They may speak it with an
accent that is sometimes hard to understand, that sometimes requires subtitles,
(51:33):
but they can read it perfectly well, and they can
write it reasonably well and ultimately get to speak it
with an American accent long enough. And so I think
they're just much more easily as symbable because they're in
the main there's nothing in their cultural package, in their
cultural baggage that leads them to resist America. They're not
(51:57):
inherent resistors the way that a moroccan An immigrant to
Germany would be an inherent resister. He'd worry about his
daughter going to school he'd worry about his wife going
to the market by herself. He'd worry about the way
people dress, and whether you know, he'd worry about all
the fundamental things that German citizens do that would would
(52:19):
require him to assimilate to norms that are inimical or
hostile to his own norms. Indian immigrants in the United
States don't have those problems in the main.
Speaker 3 (52:31):
And India itself. I'm an expert on India. I've been
there once for ten days, which means I spent one
second there for every Indian Indian probably. But I know
something about Western Churchill, and I think there was a
place where he was right in a place where he
(52:51):
was wrong. And it's rare for me to say that
Churchill was wrong about something. I think there is in India.
Churchill thought that there could be in India, but he
thought in his day that there was not one. That
it would break into a thousand pieces of British left.
It broke into three. So I think he was wrong
(53:13):
about that. But tell a quick story. So we're having dinner.
One night. When I was over there, I hung out
with education people. They offered me an award, and I
always wanted to go to India. So I thought, here's
an excuse, and so we got into it.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
Never turned out an award.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah, yeah, I'm older than you are. You get more
as you get older. But we're sitting around dinner, and
of course everybody is terribly courteous. India's charming place, very
different too. But my host ass in a very charming way,
said Winston Churchill starved to death three and a half
(53:57):
million people in Bengal in the Second World War. And
she said it sort of kindly and not really to
confront me. And I have to know about that. I
actually had a debate with a lady who wrote the
book that claimed claims that a lady named Murkergie and
she's just wrong about every basic fact and it was
(54:18):
so I said, well, you know that's not true. And
so we talked about it for twenty minutes, and everybody
was very polite and impressed that, you know, it turned
out and true. And then I said, uh, I said, uh,
I picked up in the last couple of days. Many
of you like mister Mody and many of you don't
MODI it is the current ruler of Indie. And they
(54:41):
nod their head, and I said how did he get
that job? And they he was elected. And I said,
and those of you who'd like to get him out,
how will you get him out? And they they said,
I said, Britain have anything to do with that being
(55:04):
the way here in India And they go my host.
I had a host and a hostess, a married couple.
And the host is named Dhlip the corp. Really great
guy and he's educated at Baliol College in law. And
he says, and he said, yes, he said, we have
(55:25):
said that. You know. In other words, the British weren't
all bad. And I think in the nineteen thirties it
was Lord Halifax and Stanley Baldwin who drove the first
big step toward Indian independence. And they eventually got that
(55:52):
what nineteen thirty four, nineteen forty eight, twenty four years
fourteen years later, not very long. And they may have
been right about that, but Churchill was partly right because
there were about a million people killed and when the
British left in the Civil War. So anyway, and India
(56:14):
is important, I'd like to ask you about that. It
seems to be India's the most populous country. It's governed
through elections. They have freedom of speech, and they're young,
and they're going to be the most populous country for
a long time. Are they important and how should we
regard them?
Speaker 2 (56:36):
India is a big deal. I just wanted to say
a couple of things about Churchill before I talk, and
if you'll permit me, I agree with you. I think
people are misread the Bengal famine. I think Andrew Roberts
and his biography addresses puts that cannard to rest. So
any of your viewers who want to know about the
truth about the Bengal famine should read Andrew Roberts's biography
(56:58):
of Churchill and the other The other thing that's said
about Churchill, which is that he said that Indians were
beastly people with a beastly religion. That's never actually been
accurately attributed to Churchill. It was Leo Amri who said
or claimed the Churchill had said it, and we have
no way of fact checking that right. And there's every
(57:19):
every reason to believe that Churchill didn't say it. I mean,
he may have said something that was less than flattering,
but we don't know and can't know whether he used
those precise words. But those words are often thrown into
our thrown at our faces. But as as far as
India's concerned, India's a big deal. And the more we
(57:39):
worry about China, the bigger, the bigger deal India becomes.
For the ways, but particularly for the United States, which
can't take on China alone, can't and shouldn't, and and
it will need reliable ally who have skin in the game.
(58:02):
And no one has more skin in the game against
China than India does. It's it's it's India's northern neighbor.
It has Indian territory under its control that it's taken illegally,
and it's a constant source of threatened angst and danger
to the Indian people, to the Indian economy, to India's
territorial integrity. So for as long as Hi Jinping lives,
(58:25):
America and India will have common cause. And certainly I agree.
I think Britain, the British colonial experience in India is
a complex thing. But one reason why India is a
successful place today and Indians are successful exporters of themselves
(58:52):
is that they are intellectually and linguistically equipped with tools
that were left in India by the British Empire, a
tradition of Western education, the English language, a way of
kind of rational thought, the Westminster model of democracy, the
(59:14):
rule of law, the adoption of the common law system.
Everyone talks about the railways, but these are all the
railways of the mind and the railways of politics. And
so they left, Yes they did. They extract vast amounts
of riches from India and to the benefit of the
mother country back in Northern Europe. Sure, but it's not
(59:37):
as if they gave the Indians and India nothing in return.
And most significantly of all was their shaping of India
as a kind of unitary political entity, which it had
never been before. And so I think, you know, you
can detect that the colonial experience was a mixed one,
in other words, not uniformly bad, by the fact that
(01:00:00):
Britain and India today have very amicable relations. I think
it's probably the best example of any post colonial relationship
that I can think of in the world between a
former imperial power and a decolonized state. India and Britain have.
(01:00:21):
Maybe Brazil and Portugal are comparable, but the Portuguese left
Brazil under different circumstances and much longer ago than the
British left India, and so I think I think India
needs to be paid attention to. India also needs though
and I disagree with you slightly, India we need also
(01:00:42):
to continue to insist that India live up to its
own highest standards. I think we often sometimes and sometimes
do glibly say that India's just like us, it's an ally,
it has the same value as Western democracy, et cetera,
et cetera. But what we've seen in the last ten
years fifteen years has been a maintenance of the form
(01:01:04):
the forms of democracy, the forms of election, the forms
of speech, the forms of litigation, but an erosion of
the substance. So when you say this free speech, yes,
on paper, there is, but there have been there have
been increasing instances of intolerance, of shutting down of expression
and speech that wouldn't pass muster with the First Amendment
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
And so.
Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
I think we need we need to while we celebrate
India and celebrated for the values that it shares with us,
we need also to ensure that India remains true to
those values. That's my view.
Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
It's a very partisan now, right, I mean, mister Modi
has remade Indian politics, but then had some setback in
the most recent election, and so the.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
Yeah, he he lost a vote chair. He now governs
in a coalition where previously his party ruled on its own.
He's backtracked on a few things. He's much less Thatcher
right in his economic policy than he had promised to
be in twenty fourteen when he first came to bar.
He's much more of a crony capitalist than I would
(01:02:09):
like him to be. But he's still a capitalist.
Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
Have you interviewed him.
Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
I have not. He doesn't. He doesn't give time to
journalists readily.
Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
If you get a chance, I hope you'll do it,
because it'll be very good for me to read it.
Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
It would, it would, it would be exciting. I'd love
to do that. But he's reluctant. He's a reluctant interview E.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Well, he's something else. Yeah. I think there's a job
for you there to explain India, because I believe very
much that it's important and friendly.
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
I think a point that I highlighted in my Pulliam
lecture last night, though, that's something that worries me and
should worry the Hillsdale family. Little ismon is the increasing
hostility towards Christians in India. It's something we need to
focus on and I think it's it's part of the
growing uh consequences of Hindu assertive Hindu nationalism. So Christians,
(01:03:10):
I think the Christians in India need need to need
our help.
Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Good well, uh, you're a as I said at the beginning,
a gentleman and a splendid journalist and help us to
understand the world. And I am grateful to you very
much for teaching here and for being on this podcast.
Thank you, Doc Tron, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
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(01:03:52):
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(01:04:17):
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(01:04:39):
we take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the
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Hope at eight seven seven seven one seven PTSD and
(01:05:05):
a combat veteran will answer the phone to provide free counseling.
The Michael Barry Show. Tunku Verradajan is a journalist, scholar,
and sharp observer of politics, culture, and global affairs. He
has a background in law and years of experience at
places like The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. It's a
unique voice which he brings to big issues. He sat
(00:22):
down with Hillsdale College President Larry p Arne for a
thought provoking conversation and we hope you'll agree about why
some minority groups thrive, like Indian immigrants who come here
while others struggle, as well as the rich and complex
history of India and what lies ahead for where we
live the West.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Morning, Tanku, Morning, Larry, how are you? I'm terrific.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Thank you you're teaching here this week and next I
think her last and they tell me you're doing great
and thank you for that. You are born in India.
Tell about that story. Where were you born? What your
dad do? How'd you get here?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, it's a long story. I'm not sure it's of
great interest, but I'll tell it to you anyway. The
executive summary. I was born in India in nineteen sixty two,
which makes me sixty two years old. And I was
born in an Army Hospital in New Delhi. One of
(01:26):
the perks of having a grandfather who was in the
Indian Army. He was a colonel. But within months of
being born, I was whisked off to New York City
because my father, who was then a diplomat, was posted
to New York. And my young mother and young father
and I came to New York and lived in Manhattan
in nineteen sixty three. And I lived in New York
(01:47):
for the next six years. So my earliest memories of
life are actually American.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
And then you went back to India. Do you live
there long?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah? I went back to India the age of about
six or seven six actually more accurately, and lived there
for ten years. Went to a boarding school in the
desert state of Rajasthan, which is on the western border
with Pakistan. It's like a I think it was a
spartan place, think Oliver Twist, where kids are expected to
(02:21):
wear turbans, constantly hungry, constantly made the play sport, but
taught by the finest teachers that were there in d
at the time. Modeled on the British system of boarding schools,
a bit of eton in the Indian desert, and at
the age of sixteen, my father was once again transferred
(02:42):
on a diplomatic assignment to London and we left with
him and I went to school to to do what's
called the A levels the two years before college in
a school called Dulwich College in London. Who's most famou
miss alumnus is PG Woodhouse.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Oh wow, oh god? Do you like PG. Woodhouse?
Speaker 2 (03:06):
I love him. And one of the things I did
almost every day, to the annoyance of the college librarian,
was to go to the library and press my nose
against the glass case there which housed all his artifacts,
including including the typewriter that he used to type all
his wonderful books on.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, my friend Mark Stein. You probably know him too.
I did a series right now on his Mark Stein Club,
The Girl in the Boat, a Woodhouse novel i'd never
heard of before.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I haven't heard of it either.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah, it's well, he Mark makes everything interesting, and Woodhouse
is always interesting, and so it's hilarious and great.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Woodhouse is maybe the most popular popular British author in
India to this day. To this day, yes, yeah, yeah,
and the Indians constantly go to Britain and are disappointed
that people aren't like a. Bertie Wooster, and.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
One of my great teachers in life loved Woodhouse and
he used to give as an example. You have to
learn to write, he would say, for example, this sentence
from Woodhouse. He dropped an astonished piece of toast. You
have to know what's wrong with that to know that
(04:17):
it's funny. Okay. And then you stayed in England for
higher education. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I stayed there for the next twenty years, and that
included a bit of higher education. I went to Oxford
where I read law, and then I stayed on at
the college which I went to Trinity College, Oxford, and
taught law there too for five or six years as
a fellow of the college. Before becoming a journalist. At
the age of thirty, I joined the London Times as
(04:47):
a leader writer or editorial writers.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You'd say in America, and you didn't become a lawyer,
a practicing lawyer.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I did not. I sometimes when I look at my
bank balance these days, I sometimes regret having done that.
It would have been nicer to be a prosperous lawyer
than a penniless journalist. But the answer is no. I
was never attracted to the practice of the law. I
was attracted to law as a as a kind of
intellectual challenge and a subject worthy of study and thought,
(05:17):
but the practice of it never never did anything for me.
Me too, I would have made a terrible lawyer.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I think, I wonder I will tell our listeners that
I know Tongko pretty well and have a sense of
his ways and manners, and he's an interesting mixture of
insightfulness and gentlemanliness that means you don't put much past him,
and when he catches you're doing something stupid, he's usually
(05:46):
courteous about it.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
I think I would have lost my temper in court,
and I don't think the judges would have liked that.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
You taught there. You taught law, yes, and you have
said to me, you miss teaching. I'm going to do
some of it here. I'm very proud to announce to
the world you're doing it now. But you're going to
do some more, I think, and well, thank you. Yeah,
I think i'd love that. I think you're good at that.
Why journalism? What is journalism? And why do you like it?
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah? Well, I stumbled. I stumbled into journalism by accident.
I happened to meet and sit next to dinner, sit
alongside the editor of my newspaper, and we ended up
becoming friends and I got a job at the Times
of London. Why journalism. I always have liked to write.
And one of the good things about an Oxford education,
(06:43):
at least as it used to be, I don't know
what it's like these days, is that we had to
do an awful lot of writing. We had to write
an essay almost weekly, and sometimes more frequently than that.
I think we ended up writing about six essays a month,
which we then had to read aloud in tutorial to tutors.
And so this encouraged not just the art of writing well,
(07:06):
but the art of writing entertainingly. Entertainingly you had to
make sure you didn't put your teacher to sleep and
your tutorial partner to sleep. And so I loved writing.
And when I knew that I didn't ever want to
practice law, and that teaching law at Oxford was something
that it was losing a little bit of its charm
(07:26):
for me, I wanted to guard and see the big
wide world, and London was just an hour and a
half away by bus, and so I decided at one
point that I needed to leave and go to London,
make some money, do something worldly instead of teaching Roman
law to undergraduates. And so I thought journalism would be
just the right thing. Was it was a time when
(07:49):
it was a time of ferment in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
It was.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
It was the early nineties. We're on the cusp of
various changes. Britain was starting to emerge from its Sacherit
period into something less desirable, and so it was a
good time to be a journalist, I thought.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
And Silver Union fell not long before that, exactly. Yeah,
we're going to talk about these times. It is interesting.
You know, if you go back through the decades that
you've been in journalism, it's hard to find a calm time. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I think if I rack my brain, I find the
calm time. But I don't think I well journalists, journalists
don't like calm times. You want there to be something
happening out there. You want people to be miserable. I
mean that in the nice, nicest possible way. But froth
(08:51):
and ferment and turbulence are always much more interesting than
placid placid waters.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
It dare well, you've you've come into the trade at
a good time, And how did you get to the
Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Well, I was in New York as the London Times
as bureau chief, and I'd done that job for three years,
and when it was time to go back to London,
because they like to rotate their journalists out of out
of jobs. They don't want them to go native, it
was time for me to go. And by then I
had married met and married an American woman. Her name
(09:33):
is Amy, and her parents were from North Carolina, and
she did not and did not want to and actually
could not, move to London with me. So I had
to decide whether to move back to London without her,
which was obviously not an option, or to stay in
New York and find another job. And fortunately I had
I had some connections to the late and great Robert Bartley. Yeah,
(10:00):
one of the finest American journalists of all time, and
he knew me and had some sense of my paltry
abilities and was kind of enough to offer me a
job on as an editor, as an editor on the
editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and I started
there in May of two thousand.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Still there.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, Actually I actually went to him and asked him
for a job, and he didn't quite he didn't. Fortunately,
he didn't swap me away, but said come to my club,
which is a place called the Heights Casino in Brooklyn Heights,
where he lived, and we had we had a beer
and a pizza together one day for lunch, and my
wife very wisely had said to me, before you go,
(10:43):
make sure you read mister Bartley's book called Seven Fat Years.
I think that's a biblical reference. And so I made
sure I read the Seven Fat Years before meeting Bob Bartley.
And the very first question he asked me was have
you read my book? And I could truthfully say that
I had.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Quickly. In some way, we're both discoverers of discoveries of
Robert Bartley. Because back in the day when I was
a kid, we'd started something called the Claremont Institute and
we had a journalist from the Wall Street Journal show
up one day. He just entered the office, didn't have
an appointment, and there were four of us who ran
that place and a secretary. The secretary is the only
(11:27):
one who had work in office. And he said, I'm
James Ring Adams and I'd like to take you to lunch.
And we said who are you, and he said, well,
I'm a journalist so he takes us to lunch, buys
us all lunch, and the next week there was a
major editorial, the lead editorial for the editorial page, about us,
(11:56):
and he checked us out and he wrote it about something,
an article that I had written, and it just it
was just stunning. And that's how I got to know him,
and I found out he was always on a lookout
for talent. Remarkable man. I think the last event he
(12:20):
ever did before he died of cancer was on a
Hillsdale College cruise and I was very attached to him. Yeah,
I'm glad, I'm glad he hired you. Good job.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Oh he was lovely man. He was. He embodied the
best of Midwestern America, the values of honesty and open mind, curiosity, hospitality, patriotism, everything.
And he could write like a dream too.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Oh yeah, yeah. He used to always say, I think
it's probably still true. Ours is the only opinion page
that actually sells news paper.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
He was very proud of that.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
He was fond of we. We would say he needed
to print that, print that onto a T shirt and
sell it and the journal could make a lot of money.
Put it on a T shirt.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I said, I've been reading the Wall Street Journal every
day since about nineteen seventy five. Professor Jaffa, the aforementioned
great teacher of mine, loved the Wall Street Journal, and
it had a scam that if he got students to
(13:32):
sign up as student rates, he got a free thing.
So I was under pressure and I started reading it
never stopped. Let's talk about the world. What is the
job of a journalist? How would you describe that?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Well, there are various kinds of journalists. My kind is
the opinion kind. So I think the job of a
journalist who works in the opinion sphere is to look
at the world or some portion of it, and the
portions can be you know, massive, or they can be
(14:16):
microscopic slices of life, and to tell the reader, honestly
and in clear language, what is happening, why it's happening,
to whom things happening, should they be happening. It's to
describe what he sees as honestly and helpfully and as
(14:37):
helpfully as possible. I'm sorry this is a very vague
and hypothetical answer, but it's sort of what journalists of
my kind have to do. Be explainers, informers, entertainers, all
at the same time.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, it comes from a word that means today, right,
what's going on today? Yeah, to read a passage. I
read seven or eight of your articles this morning. I
read you every time you appear in the journal for
years now.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
And here's a tutorial, in my opinion, about how to
start an article. This is about a man named Tony Abbot.
It's really about China, and it's about the West. And
nobody ever heard of Tony Abbot. He's an Australian. It
starts Americans dispirited by the twenty twenty four presidential campaign.
(15:30):
You read this in April of last year, might find
it bracing to listen to Tony Abbot. Then a quote
from him, the Western world has never been more materially rich,
but it's rarely been more spiritually bereft. Now there's a
mountain of information in those three sentences, and it looks
(15:54):
to me like you have a gift. And I because
I read a bunch of them in a row this morning.
They're all like that. That is to say, they're engaging
from the start. They have a sense of who the
audience is. And the first thing you tell him is
why they might be interested in this.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, so that's you know, well, I think that's the
fundamental The point of fundamental importance in any piece of
writing for a newspaper is to make sure that the lead,
as we call it, and we spell it eccentricly l
E dee for reasons that I still don't quite understand,
that the lead be arresting, and also hook the reader
(16:38):
as quickly as possible, because the reader's time is precious.
You have no lean on it. The reader is free
to stop reading you at any time he wants, and
so you've got to make sure he continues to read you.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
So yeah, yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So grab him by the collar.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
This Tony Abbott article. You know, Australia is out there
in Asia and China is near, and it's about China.
You've written several articles lately that go into the question
of China. What do you make of China? What do
you think is going on?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't really have a
handle on China. I write about many things in China
as one of them. But Tony Abbott, since you've brought
him up, is a very interesting way to look at
China through his eyes. He was the Prime Minister of Australia,
unfortunately only for one term. He would have I would
(17:29):
I would have liked to have seen him be Prime
Minister for much longer. He was in the sort of
Thatcher Reagan mold, maybe even more muscular than that, and
his in his beliefs, in his conservatism, and he had
no illusions about China. He thought China was He thought
one of his predecessors, Kevin Rudd, who who took Australia
(17:52):
very close to China, was a sort of panda hugger,
as he called him. He asked me not to put
that in the piece, but I shouldn't have said it,
but he forgive me for saying it. So he had
no illusions about China, he thought. He thought of China
as a threat, but not a threat one can wish away.
(18:12):
It's a threat that is in danger of consuming the
world as we know it, supplanting our values as we
know them, and yet something that we have to learn
to live with. So he was he always felt and
this is the view that I subscribe to as well,
which is that China has to be managed in ways
(18:33):
that ensure that it doesn't endanger us, and also in
ways that ensure that we don't sacrifice any of our
fundamental values. We mustn't sell our souls in order to
be on the right side of China. But we have
to learn how to live with them. So China management.
There should be a course in all colleges called China Management.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
But yeah, that might be a course in strategy.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
An Tony Abbott would be a wonderful guest to have
at Hillsdale, I would say, he would.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
What's he doing? Now? Do you know he is? He's not.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
He's a sort of sage about. He's a sort of
world world trotting, globe trotting sage. He runs a think
tank in Australia whose name escapes me, and so he
I think he's based in Brisbane or Sydney, but travels
(19:28):
the world putting out the message of what the West
should be doing and what it shouldn't be doing.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
It's questions like manufacturing. Can we manufacture things we need
if we have to fight and things we need generally? Ah,
there's a amazing, amazing ferment in America about all that
right now?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, well, we've hollowed out manufactured. I'm not an economist.
I would like people to know that but I do
know as a citizen and as a journalist that we've
hollowed out our manufacturing to an alarming extent. There are
many things that we no longer make and possibly no
longer can make if we had to make them.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
And so.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I don't know. Is it good for a society to
be a society which has to import virtually everything that
it's people need to live. Yes. Economists argue that there's
a kind of Adam Adam Smithian equilibrium that emerges, and
everything is ultimately, you know, if you if you, if
you conduct trade in a rational way, everything ultimately comes
(20:39):
to be priced right for the consumer. But when things
go get pair shaped, and when things when conflict emerges
in the world, and and and and the exchange of
goods and services becomes difficult, when there are bottlenecks and
pandemics and you can't get things as quickly as you
need them, you have to maybe rethink some of the
conventional economic positions. You know, I would love to read
(21:03):
a smart economist who repurposes Adam Smith for the modern world.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
There's one within two hundred yards at where we sit,
Charles Steele, several of them of an ur Econ Department.
I volunteer something about all that I've said for decades now.
Winston CHURCHI was a free trader. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington,
James Madison were protectionist. Alexander Hamilton. The natural law does
(21:34):
not speak to me on this question. There are examples
on both sides. What Charles Steele will say is Smith
himself explained that you have to make vital things for
your country. You have to make sure of that. I
(21:56):
was privileged to know Milton Friedman for more than thirty years,
and it was a great thing to know him if
you weren't his student, because he was very tough with
his students. He was hilarious and mean, and you know,
great man, very great man. And we once talked for
two hours about free trade. And I said, yeah, that's
(22:19):
all this positive, right. It's like the division of labor.
If it's a good thing for somebody to make this
cup and somebody else to make this microphone, and then trade,
then globally is obviously better. He'd say, so you got
the point, and I'd say, yeah, I think we should
extend it. We should get the Soviet Union to make
(22:40):
our missiles and bombs because they're really good at it
and seem to do it cheaper than we do. And
he said, yeah, you can't do that, And I said,
that's a mouthful, isn't it. There's some qualification on the
principle of free trade by the existence of national boarders,
(23:00):
and so yeah, that's uh ok.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
He was a great man, Milton Readman. I had the
opportunity I used to be at the Hoover Institution where
he was one of the presiding deities, and I remember
interviewing him in one of the earliest weekend interviews that
we did at the Wall Street Journal back in it
would have been two thousand and six, so it was
one of the interviews I did that I'm most proud
(23:24):
of because it was a tough job. I sat down
to interview Milton, and just as we were, you know,
getting into our stride, his door swings open, and his wife,
Rose walks in, who was also an economist and a
very feisty old lady, and she then said, I'll just
(23:45):
I see your interviewing Milton. I'll just sit in the
corner and listen. But she didn't do that. She sat
in the corner and proceeded to interrupt every time, Milton
said something that she disagreed with, and so I ended
up writing an interview that said an interview with Milton
and Rose Freeman.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
I went sat beside her, well, he was giving a lecture,
and she was talking quietly under her brain. Yes, and
she would say that something like at one point he
was talking about Sumptuary taxes, taxes on luxuries, and she goes,
(24:24):
I mentioned cigarettes, and she I could barely hear her.
I was right next to him, and he goes, and
the example of cigarettes. He says, immediately, I think I
think they might have just been one mind those two.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, no, they were. I think they wrote a book
together called a Very Happy Couple or something like that.
I can't remember the name, but that that phrase captures it.
And this interview, which was which was intended as an
interview with an economist to be and to be about
economics and political economy, ended up being an interview that
was a portrait of a marriage and and a very
(24:59):
clearly that the chemistry between them intellectual was was was perfect.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah. Yeah, they were, and they were short people.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
They were.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
It's uh. I don't know if people know, but they
should read the April twenty sixth article by you and
the Wall Street Journal to show that the horse is
an incredibly important thing in human history, something I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Saddle up.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Yeah, there you go. That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
That was that was a book review. It was a
It was a book by someone called David Chaffetz who's
written this book apparently you know how the how the
horses shaped human civilization, and he makes a very convincing
and attractive case for how the horse is among the
most five or six more important, most important things in
human civilization.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Amazing. Yeah, and ends up with Genghis Khan.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, if you get the horse in the wrong hands, yes,
I'll had the wrong bottom, the wrong bottom on a horse. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
The claim one of the claims in the book that
you review is that, uh, the Silk Road might have
been called the horse road because what they what they
Chinese needed to export silk for was to get horses.
And they were apparently the Mongols were the ones who
were really good at making them and uh breeding them
(26:33):
and raising them. And then they substituted tea for silk. Yes,
and the next thing you know, you got the Boston
Tea Party. Yes. I want to talk about Europe you've
written a couple of articles about populist in Europe. Uh,
(26:56):
explain what's going on there?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Well, A lot of things are happening in Europe, and
some of them mirror the things that are happening in
this country. But just as we've had here with the
emergence of mister Trump, we've had the emergence in many,
if not most, European countries of populist parties. Given the
(27:26):
political arrangements there, they tend to be parties that emerge
rather than figures, the way mister Trump has emerged as
a figure here. I don't see him as a party person.
But in Europe you've had the emergence of populist parties, populist, nationalist, populist, conservative.
Call them what you will. The preferred phrase for the
mainstream media has been to call them far right or
(27:49):
extreme right parties, a phrase I try to avoid because,
even though they are often to the right of the
conventional conservative parties, the phrase far right or extreme right
is intended almost always to disqualify them as as participants
(28:09):
in polite society, as to typecast them somehow as disagreeable
people with whom we shouldn't have any contact. I was
recently in Berlin where I met one of the senior
leaders of the a f D, the Alternative for Germany,
Alternative for Deutschland, and she was telling me she was
(28:31):
a woman called Beatrix fun Storch. She's she should really
in another era would have been a princess. She's she's
a sign of one of the most distinguished royal houses
in Germany. And she is a senior member of the
a f D. And she was describing to me how
(28:53):
the German media an anathematizes the a f D, how
the German media shuns the AfD, how it begins by
typecasting them as Nazis, and having done so makes them
ineligible for polite society and discourse, and so shuts them
out of all debate and conversation. And this is a
(29:15):
party for which almost a quarter of the German electorate
voted in the last election. If I'm not mistaken, they
finished second in the in the vote count, behind the
Christian Democrats. Now I'm not saying that there are no
members of the AFT who are disagreeable and who are
people we wouldn't want our daughters to bring home for dinner.
(29:38):
But to say that because of the presence of a
handful of Nazis in theft or Neo Nazis called them,
want you will, the entire party somehow stigmatized and untouchable
is all too convenient for people who want to continue
to manage European politics and discourse in a particular, preordained way.
(30:00):
And so you have this situation. JD. Vance spoke out
against the Munich Security Conference that you know, it is
starting to an American to see a political system that
basically treats his outcasts, a party that represents a quarter
of the population. How can you describe something that is
representing a quarter of the population is extreme? That means
(30:23):
a quarter of your population is extreme? What does extreme
even mean? And what does mainstream mean? That There was
a long winded answer.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
But in those proportional representation systems, the most popular parties
might get a third. Yeah, so a quarter is a.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Lot, a quarter is a lot.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
And yeah, well we have some of that here too.
Views censored on social media and in the big press.
You know, I've always thought, like my affection for the
newspaper you write for, uh, which, like everybody like I
(31:03):
don't regard anything else. It's wholly reliable, but it's the
most and always thought I think Bob Bartley understood this too.
It's a place to go where you won't read the
same thing you read everywhere else. And uh and that
the only the only you know, you could achieve that
effect by reading everything else and just writing something different,
(31:24):
which is not what you do. He thought, Go look
at the phenomenon and describe it as it is, and
don't worry what anybody else is saying about it. And
that your your articles on You've got one on Nigel
Farage in here and and you know marine Marine Leapin
(31:46):
has now been marine Lapin is the She the most
popular politician in France.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
She might be well, I don't know where she why
I thinks stand now, but she is. You know, she
gave Macron a run for his money. So she was
one of the presidential She was one of two presidential
candidates in the runoffs. So that makes her, if not
the most popular politician, then an undeniably significant one.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
And she's been convicted of a crime. And the crime
is she used staff provided for the European Union when
she was a member of the European Parliament for non
European Union tasks, and she's excluded from politics, so whatever
percentage of the vote she got, they don't have her
(32:39):
to vote for anymore.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Now I'm not familiar with all the details of the
Marine the pen case. I've been I've been in Hillsdale,
busy teaching. But what what does it does strike me
as being all too convenient for the French political elites
and the French quote unquote mainstream to find this lovely,
(33:01):
wonderful technicality on which to disqualify the one politician that
poses a threat to the status quo. You may you
may find Marine le penn not to your taste, you
may find her unsavory, but ultimately you have to let
the French people decide whether or not they want her
(33:22):
to be president, not get rid of her based on
some kind of all too convenient technicality, which seems to
have been the case.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
I watched both the Vance speeches, the one on artificial
intelligence and the one on security in Europe, and in
both speeches they showed the audience a lot. And my
perception was in the first speech, where he said we
have to embrace AI as a major opportunity and protect
(33:56):
the workers while we do it, they seem stiff to me,
not friendly. The second one, there were open restiveness in
the crowd and he started out he said, you got
(34:16):
to spend five percent your GDP on defense, and he
said that for about three or four minutes, and then
he turned to suppressing speech and excluding political parties, and
there was in the room was there were gas and
people putting their head in their hands, and a very
(34:39):
strong reaction after. And so that makes me think, if
you put that together with this these people you've interviewed,
is Europe becoming illiberal?
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Well, European politics is all has been the exclusive preserve
of of sort of preordained political elites who've managed over
the years to sort of domesticate the system and domesticate
the horse, as it were, of politics, and make sure
(35:16):
that it rides in one direction. It doesn't rear its legs,
it doesn't gallop, It just runs at a reliable trot
in a reliable direction. But we've now reached the stage
where there where the horse, as it were, Let's let's
say the horse are the people of the countries that
they govern. The horse has decided that it doesn't want
(35:40):
to just trot, and it doesn't want to just go
in a preordained direction. It wants to explore fresh passaures,
It wants it likes to look at the grass over there.
It doesn't want to eat the grass in that on
the left. It wants to eat the grass on the right.
And so they're having trouble managing the horse. And so
I think we're in a situation where European politics is
(36:01):
being remade. The elites are used losing their grip on
the reins, and so as a result there and I'm
running out of horse vocabulary, but you know, whatever it
is you use to hit the horse to calm it
down there the crop, they're having to use the crop
a little more than they did in the past because
(36:22):
the horse is starting to disobey them. And so, yes,
this illiberalism that we see into in the form of
the disqualification of Mislapen or the shinning of the a FD,
or the disqualification of the presidential candidate in Romania, which
is what sparked mister Vance's talk, is the equivalent of
(36:43):
of the elite the rider using the crop and the
horse doesn't like it. So I think I think we
need to I think we're watching European politics being remade
as we speak. You see it in You see it
in the Netherlands with builders. You see it in some
form in Britain with Nigel Farage's prominence. Although Britain is
(37:09):
an altogether different picture now because they got them the horses,
were got its yayas out by by by winning Brexit.
If Britain was still in Europe, we might see we
might have seen the emergence of a more populist party
there which would be pushing for the same aims that
(37:31):
Brexit achieved. But Brexit, in a way happened. It ended
up effectively killing off the Democratic Party the Conservative Party,
and because the Conservative Party, having delivered Brexit, was unsure
of what to do with it, and they were unprepared
(37:52):
for victory, and their heart didn't seem to be in
concluding a deal with Europe that would have, you know,
brought and what it had voted for. But to return
to your original question, where we're seeing a remaking of
politics in Europe that will throw up surprises. I think
(38:13):
we're going to see the emergence of new leaders who
say uncomfortable things, things that we're not used to hearing,
a bit like mister Trump here who's saying things that
Americans are not used to hearing. And it's a question
of getting attuning your ear to new sounds and your
heart to new to new disturbances.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Decision pending. I wonder if you think it means in
American politics there's a fair amount of dysfunction. Yes, can't
The government has enormous resources, state, federal, and local, more
than ever, and it can't build the bridges, keep the
(39:01):
military up to date, secure the streets. And in Europe
they're light years from being able to defend themselves. And
mister trumpets confronting them with that problem, and one wonders,
what are they going to do? So there's this dysfunction
(39:23):
that seems to have spread everywhere, and meanwhile China seems
very strong and growing. Does that mean that there's been
some disproof of the Western liberal forms?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Well, I'm I'm not sure about that, but I know
that you know, messs trump advance in insisting to Europe
that they fulfill their spending obligations under the NATO Treaty,
and sometimes even to exceed those obligations, have I think
(40:04):
helped or caused the European mind to concentrate on the
task you know, you've seen some the Germans, for instance,
beginning to realize that they need to do something about
defense spending, and so, you know, they even went to
the extent of remaking lifting the brake on spending to
(40:27):
allow going into debt for defense spending. It was one
of the things. I don't know whether they finally pulled
it off, but they are taking every legal measure and
constitutional measure possible to increase spending so that they can
meet their native obligations. Because the incoming Chancellor, or the
(40:47):
presumptive incoming Chancellor, mister Mutz, I think understands, however obtuse
he may be, and I do think he is obtuse,
understands that the days of free riding on the United
States are probably over and that the Germans, if they
wish to defend themselves. And it's not entirely clear always
that the Germans wish to defend themselves because they've been
(41:09):
caught in this kind of cozy condition for a generation
no longer where they where their defense needs have been
taken care of by by Mama America, and have been
able to spend their own largess on on building what
(41:30):
is a very comfortable welfare state. But I think they're
now realizing that all this, this their way of life
and their way of spending is threatened. But you have examples,
the polls already meet the obligations. But I think I
think Europeans in general will have arrived at the time
of reckoning. I think they know that they either defend
(41:52):
themselves with their own money or they leave themselves vulnerable
to attack from I guess Russia is a country that
we feel is the greatest threat to them. But yeah,
it's all part of the remaking of European politics.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Immigration place into this in big ways. What do you
make of that? Why is it acute issue? And what
do you think will happen.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
In Europe or worldwide?
Speaker 3 (42:26):
It's kind of worldwide.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, I think immigration is a is a big problem.
I think it's a bigger problem in Europe than it
is in the United States. I think the US does
have its clearly does have its problem with illegal immigration.
But it's a bigger country than any European country. It
has bigger it has much better absorptive capacities. Demographically, it
(42:54):
has more place in which to put people. In other words,
and many of the immigrants who are coming to America
from the biggest liability of many of the immigrants coming
to America from the southern countries Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, etc.
Are that they are poor, unskilled, speak a different language,
(43:20):
but for the most part, culturally they're Christian, so they
are ultimately assimilable in this society. Once they learn English,
once they acquire skills, once they learn how to do things,
pay taxes, not commit crime, and live life in something
resembling the American way, they are ultimately assimilable. Yes, in
(43:42):
their midst become various bad guys like the trend. They
are Agua from Venezuela and various criminal syndicates. But for
the most part, these are just desperate poor people who
are coming for a better life, coming the wrong way.
They shouldn't be breaking the law and coming to this country.
But we know why they're coming. In Europe, yes, a
lot of the motivations to move from Morocco or Syria
(44:05):
or Afghanistan to Europe are similar. They're poor people caught
in the crossfire of tensions and wars who want to
live comfortable, safe lives in Europe. But the difference between
an Afghan and a Moroccan and Assyrian on the one hand,
and a Mexican on the other. Is that these first
people that I mentioned are much more difficult to assimilate
(44:29):
because they come with a culture, that is that has
historically been at luggerheads with the Judeo Christian culture of Europe.
And so in order, it isn't just a question of
teaching the Syrian French, or teaching the Afghan German, or
teaching the Moroccan, Italian or Spanish. It's a question of
(44:49):
teaching them how to live in societies that are tolerant,
that are based on Judeo Christian values, that are based
on certain levels of respect for women, for the community,
for public spaces, for ways of eating and dressing and
speaking and reading and thinking. And so it's much harder
to assimilate these, I think often essentially unassimilable people, and
(45:14):
so you have to manage them. And it's the management
of them that's so difficult, especially when in these countries
there is a progressive predisposition to regard their cultures, the
cultures of these incoming people as being of equal value
to the culture of the host country. It's all very
nice to say, so it's all very nice to say, Oh,
(45:36):
all countries are wonderful and that's all live together, But
it doesn't work out that way in real life, and
some cultures are not of equal value to others. And
we have to you know, we've lost sight of the
belief that our culture and it must seem strange to
see in Indian refer to Western culture as our culture.
But I've been an assimilated citizen of the West.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
You've written a column lately about the success of immigrants
from India to America. Yes, explained that.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Well, they have been remarkably successful. You know, they're just
one point five percent of the population, that's about five
million people, and you know they've ascended to positions of power,
particularly is business CEOs, doctors, business school deans, lawyers, and
(46:29):
the most impact impactful and eye catching presence of Indian
Americans of late meaning politics. Yeah, you know, we had
two Indian Americans run for a compete for the candidates
to the Republican candidacy for president. You have vivig Ramaswami
and Nikki Haley. You had the Democratic candidate who ran
(46:53):
against mister Trump, Kamala Harris as the daughter of an
Indian mother, I know she positioned herself publicly as an
African American, but she was. She's the child of an
Indian mother, and she was raised almost exclusively by that
Indian mother, and was, in fact, had in fact had
(47:14):
quite an Indian upbringing until it became politically expedient for
her to rebrand herself. And who can blame her there?
And I think the advantages of the melting part exactly.
But so yes, you know, Indian Americans have been remarkably successful.
It's and they've done so as I think I may
(47:34):
have pointed out in the journal piece, without any of
the advantages that come with special pleading or affirmative action
or reserved places in college. In fact, you know, until
the Supreme Court ruling on the affirmative action case, it
was probably a disadvantage to be an Indian applicant to
an Ivy League school, the same way it was a
(47:55):
disadvantage to be a Chinese applicant. So so yes, I
think it's and you know, and they they've they've assimilated
better than others. They've maintained the core of their own culture,
but they've also learned that in order to be successful
in America, you have to play by America's rules, speak
(48:17):
America's language, not necessarily eat America's food. I still applaud
them for eating Indian food at home, but I think
they've been and they've been pilloried by the left. Who's
who've coined this phrase, and they use it as a
(48:37):
term of abuse. They call people, they call people from
ethnic minorities who succeed in this country sneeringly model minorities,
as if somehow being a model minorities like being some
kind of teacher's pet. And so you're just this suck
up that that does things by the book and is success,
and you're successful and you can hold down a job
(48:59):
and you don't get divorce, and your children go to university,
and this somehow makes you this undesirable thing called a
model minority. And somehow, if you're a minority, you have
to be someone who's in trouble and who's needy, and
who's discriminated against and stopped by the police.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
And then if you are, then I can get a
lot of power by claiming to help you out.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
But what about so these Muslims who have come to
Europe are hard to assimilate, and the Indians who've come
to America who aren't as numerous, but still have been
easier to assimilate. It's something about Indian culture there that
makes that so well.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
I think, Yeah, Indian culture is very different from Middle
Eastern culture. It's very different from and the Indians who
come to this country are in the majority Hindus. But
I would wager that even Indian Muslims have assimilated well
(50:00):
in this country. So there's something about the Indian Yeah.
I think Indian culture in a way transcends religion. You know,
Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus have a lot more in
common than Indian Muslims have with Syrian Muslims. I think
the Syrian Muslim and the Indian Muslim have the fact
that they're both adherence to the Islamic faith in common,
(50:23):
but beyond that, they have very little in common. They
may fast during the month of Ramadan, but that's part
of the Islamic tradition. But they have other things. You know,
they treat women differently. We're talking about the educated class
of Indian muslim not all the way down the line,
but the same is true also for the Hindus. We're
talking about educated Hindus. So the Indian muslim Is who
(50:49):
emigrates to this country is likely to have been to
an Indian university where he's had a kind of education
that isn't isn't religiously exclume usively religious. Where he studied science,
and where he studied literature, and where he studied the
constitution has some sense of things beyond religion. But I
(51:13):
think it's important. One of the things that it's it's
it's most important to stress is of course that you
know in Indian immigrants to this country often come armed
with the English language. They may speak it with an
accent that is sometimes hard to understand, that sometimes requires subtitles,
(51:33):
but they can read it perfectly well, and they can
write it reasonably well and ultimately get to speak it
with an American accent long enough. And so I think
they're just much more easily as symbable because they're in
the main there's nothing in their cultural package, in their
cultural baggage that leads them to resist America. They're not
(51:57):
inherent resistors the way that a moroccan An immigrant to
Germany would be an inherent resister. He'd worry about his
daughter going to school he'd worry about his wife going
to the market by herself. He'd worry about the way
people dress, and whether you know, he'd worry about all
the fundamental things that German citizens do that would would
(52:19):
require him to assimilate to norms that are inimical or
hostile to his own norms. Indian immigrants in the United
States don't have those problems in the main.
Speaker 3 (52:31):
And India itself. I'm an expert on India. I've been
there once for ten days, which means I spent one
second there for every Indian Indian probably. But I know
something about Western Churchill, and I think there was a
place where he was right in a place where he
(52:51):
was wrong. And it's rare for me to say that
Churchill was wrong about something. I think there is in India.
Churchill thought that there could be in India, but he
thought in his day that there was not one. That
it would break into a thousand pieces of British left.
It broke into three. So I think he was wrong
(53:13):
about that. But tell a quick story. So we're having dinner.
One night. When I was over there, I hung out
with education people. They offered me an award, and I
always wanted to go to India. So I thought, here's
an excuse, and so we got into it.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
Never turned out an award.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah, yeah, I'm older than you are. You get more
as you get older. But we're sitting around dinner, and
of course everybody is terribly courteous. India's charming place, very
different too. But my host ass in a very charming way,
said Winston Churchill starved to death three and a half
(53:57):
million people in Bengal in the Second World War. And
she said it sort of kindly and not really to
confront me. And I have to know about that. I
actually had a debate with a lady who wrote the
book that claimed claims that a lady named Murkergie and
she's just wrong about every basic fact and it was
(54:18):
so I said, well, you know that's not true. And
so we talked about it for twenty minutes, and everybody
was very polite and impressed that, you know, it turned
out and true. And then I said, uh, I said, uh,
I picked up in the last couple of days. Many
of you like mister Mody and many of you don't
MODI it is the current ruler of Indie. And they
(54:41):
nod their head, and I said how did he get
that job? And they he was elected. And I said,
and those of you who'd like to get him out,
how will you get him out? And they they said,
I said, Britain have anything to do with that being
(55:04):
the way here in India And they go my host.
I had a host and a hostess, a married couple.
And the host is named Dhlip the corp. Really great
guy and he's educated at Baliol College in law. And
he says, and he said, yes, he said, we have
(55:25):
said that. You know. In other words, the British weren't
all bad. And I think in the nineteen thirties it
was Lord Halifax and Stanley Baldwin who drove the first
big step toward Indian independence. And they eventually got that
(55:52):
what nineteen thirty four, nineteen forty eight, twenty four years
fourteen years later, not very long. And they may have
been right about that, but Churchill was partly right because
there were about a million people killed and when the
British left in the Civil War. So anyway, and India
(56:14):
is important, I'd like to ask you about that. It
seems to be India's the most populous country. It's governed
through elections. They have freedom of speech, and they're young,
and they're going to be the most populous country for
a long time. Are they important and how should we
regard them?
Speaker 2 (56:36):
India is a big deal. I just wanted to say
a couple of things about Churchill before I talk, and
if you'll permit me, I agree with you. I think
people are misread the Bengal famine. I think Andrew Roberts
and his biography addresses puts that cannard to rest. So
any of your viewers who want to know about the
truth about the Bengal famine should read Andrew Roberts's biography
(56:58):
of Churchill and the other The other thing that's said
about Churchill, which is that he said that Indians were
beastly people with a beastly religion. That's never actually been
accurately attributed to Churchill. It was Leo Amri who said
or claimed the Churchill had said it, and we have
no way of fact checking that right. And there's every
(57:19):
every reason to believe that Churchill didn't say it. I mean,
he may have said something that was less than flattering,
but we don't know and can't know whether he used
those precise words. But those words are often thrown into
our thrown at our faces. But as as far as
India's concerned, India's a big deal. And the more we
(57:39):
worry about China, the bigger, the bigger deal India becomes.
For the ways, but particularly for the United States, which
can't take on China alone, can't and shouldn't, and and
it will need reliable ally who have skin in the game.
(58:02):
And no one has more skin in the game against
China than India does. It's it's it's India's northern neighbor.
It has Indian territory under its control that it's taken illegally,
and it's a constant source of threatened angst and danger
to the Indian people, to the Indian economy, to India's
territorial integrity. So for as long as Hi Jinping lives,
(58:25):
America and India will have common cause. And certainly I agree.
I think Britain, the British colonial experience in India is
a complex thing. But one reason why India is a
successful place today and Indians are successful exporters of themselves
(58:52):
is that they are intellectually and linguistically equipped with tools
that were left in India by the British Empire, a
tradition of Western education, the English language, a way of
kind of rational thought, the Westminster model of democracy, the
(59:14):
rule of law, the adoption of the common law system.
Everyone talks about the railways, but these are all the
railways of the mind and the railways of politics. And
so they left, Yes they did. They extract vast amounts
of riches from India and to the benefit of the
mother country back in Northern Europe. Sure, but it's not
(59:37):
as if they gave the Indians and India nothing in return.
And most significantly of all was their shaping of India
as a kind of unitary political entity, which it had
never been before. And so I think, you know, you
can detect that the colonial experience was a mixed one,
in other words, not uniformly bad, by the fact that
(01:00:00):
Britain and India today have very amicable relations. I think
it's probably the best example of any post colonial relationship
that I can think of in the world between a
former imperial power and a decolonized state. India and Britain have.
(01:00:21):
Maybe Brazil and Portugal are comparable, but the Portuguese left
Brazil under different circumstances and much longer ago than the
British left India, and so I think I think India
needs to be paid attention to. India also needs though
and I disagree with you slightly, India we need also
(01:00:42):
to continue to insist that India live up to its
own highest standards. I think we often sometimes and sometimes
do glibly say that India's just like us, it's an ally,
it has the same value as Western democracy, et cetera,
et cetera. But what we've seen in the last ten
years fifteen years has been a maintenance of the form
(01:01:04):
the forms of democracy, the forms of election, the forms
of speech, the forms of litigation, but an erosion of
the substance. So when you say this free speech, yes,
on paper, there is, but there have been there have
been increasing instances of intolerance, of shutting down of expression
and speech that wouldn't pass muster with the First Amendment
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
And so.
Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
I think we need we need to while we celebrate
India and celebrated for the values that it shares with us,
we need also to ensure that India remains true to
those values. That's my view.
Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
It's a very partisan now, right, I mean, mister Modi
has remade Indian politics, but then had some setback in
the most recent election, and so the.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
Yeah, he he lost a vote chair. He now governs
in a coalition where previously his party ruled on its own.
He's backtracked on a few things. He's much less Thatcher
right in his economic policy than he had promised to
be in twenty fourteen when he first came to bar.
He's much more of a crony capitalist than I would
(01:02:09):
like him to be. But he's still a capitalist.
Speaker 3 (01:02:12):
Have you interviewed him.
Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
I have not. He doesn't. He doesn't give time to
journalists readily.
Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
If you get a chance, I hope you'll do it,
because it'll be very good for me to read it.
Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
It would, it would, it would be exciting. I'd love
to do that. But he's reluctant. He's a reluctant interview E.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Well, he's something else. Yeah. I think there's a job
for you there to explain India, because I believe very
much that it's important and friendly.
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
I think a point that I highlighted in my Pulliam
lecture last night, though, that's something that worries me and
should worry the Hillsdale family. Little ismon is the increasing
hostility towards Christians in India. It's something we need to
focus on and I think it's it's part of the
growing uh consequences of Hindu assertive Hindu nationalism. So Christians,
(01:03:10):
I think the Christians in India need need to need
our help.
Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Good well, uh, you're a as I said at the beginning,
a gentleman and a splendid journalist and help us to
understand the world. And I am grateful to you very
much for teaching here and for being on this podcast.
Thank you, Doc Tron, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
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(01:03:52):
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(01:04:17):
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