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Western sanctions are making Russia great · UK Column Radio

0:35
None. OK, so everything's holding.
0:39
Simon Rush. Thank you for joining me in the
0:41
trenches. Oh, it's, it's our pleasure.
0:45
I speak on behalf of Saitlanders who pay my salary and enable me
0:48
to do this. It's a pleasure to be here,
0:50
Jeremy. The pleasure's all mine, Simon,
0:53
because I love chatting to you and I'm very glad that we're
0:56
going to do this on a regular basis, so thank you for that.
1:00
Again, a pleasure. It's very conversational, it's
1:03
thoroughly enjoyable. I always look forward to it and
1:06
that's that's why I occasionally send you a slightly nasty
1:10
message every time you miss a you don't keep a promise.
1:15
The reason the reason why you do that though, is because I
1:17
haven't yet joined you for a hunt and I I really want to
1:20
change that soon, I promise. Yeah, you must, man.
1:23
The hunting is good here. I've got just above my house.
1:27
I counted recently. One herd of two.
1:31
I think I stopped counting at 211 up.
1:34
Forget but well over 200 Springbok that are just, you
1:40
know, taking the cattle's grazing.
1:42
They they have to be haunted. They need to be haunted and who
1:47
who better to come and hunt? Actually, let's let's stay on
1:51
that for a second because just recently I recorded a
1:55
conversation with my friend Farmer Angus and and his
1:58
regenerative farming style. And naturally, what comes up in
2:02
some of the comments is people don't like the idea of of
2:07
killing animals, right? And that leads to the
2:10
conversation around hunting and conservation.
2:13
And the knee jerk response is always, how can you conserve
2:17
animals if you're shooting them? Simon, please, for the love of
2:20
sanity, explain why hunting is integral.
2:24
To conservation, because if the animals are not kept in check,
2:31
they will outgrow the space and they will starve one another to
2:36
death. They'll all fight over the last
2:38
blade of grass as the herds get bigger and bigger and bigger.
2:41
And then you watch them starve to death.
2:43
And watching animals starve to death is I've I've been very up
2:49
close and personal with it. I once spent, I think it was
2:54
close to 12 weeks, call it 10 weeks for the sake of a number
2:58
on a farm during a drought when the farmer couldn't, he just
3:02
couldn't bear it anymore. He fell into a depression and he
3:06
more or less didn't come out of the house.
3:08
And I was camping among the the flocks of of mohair.
3:18
I'm trying to think of the right name, the goats that produce
3:22
mohair. Why can't I think of the blasted
3:26
name? Anyway, yes, Angora goats, 6000
3:31
of them, and watching him starve to death is one of the most
3:34
traumatic things that I've ever seen in my life.
3:36
Besides, you've got to be mentally retarded to go down
3:39
this road. I mean, it takes a special kind
3:41
of stupid to approve to approve of vivi section.
3:47
Implicitly approve of Vivi section by wearing makeup in
3:52
which they don't they, they had the nature of Vivi section is to
3:58
test at what point the animal experiences what degree of
4:02
suffering. So it's not like they, you know,
4:04
put makeup in the little mouse's eye and say, well, he didn't
4:09
seem to feel a thing or, yeah, it was slightly uncomfortable.
4:11
They leave it there for as long as it takes for the, the, the,
4:18
the, the animal to get mixomatosis and cancers.
4:22
And they do it on dogs and what have you.
4:23
So honestly, I, I just want to punch in the face that that kind
4:29
of that, that that very peculiar breed of hypocrite that approves
4:38
of vivi section but not hunting for a good purpose.
4:44
And I've never met a vegan who didn't wear makeup.
4:48
Not one. I'm talking about women.
4:49
Now you would think there would be 1 tyranny.
4:54
You would think they could find one.
4:58
Just a little bit of blush. I I just found the bass evens
5:02
out the ACP marks. The thing Simon though, is that
5:05
is that people who say these things are responding
5:08
emotionally and they don't. They clearly don't live in an
5:11
environment like we do. Yeah.
5:14
You know, the other thing to bear in mind, Jeremy, is that
5:18
hunting can be botched. It, it can be botched and it can
5:23
be traumatic, but if it's done well, it's not at all traumatic.
5:28
The animal doesn't know that it's died whereas and I can
5:32
prove this. I've had people challenge me on
5:33
this and I've said I will arrange a visit to the abattoir
5:36
now because I have the contacts I.
5:39
Did that, I did that. More people should do it.
5:42
Yes, and in in South Africa and countries with halal meat, it's
5:49
particularly bad, but it's not great anywhere in the world.
5:54
Those animals are absolutely traumatised because they can
5:57
smell that blood in the air for an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, four
6:04
hours while they stand waiting to be slaughtered in the, you
6:07
know, as they move from the what we would call a crawl through
6:12
the press gang to be slaughtered so that they know what's
6:17
happening and you can see the trauma in their eyes and they
6:20
flare their nostrils. It's absolutely terrifying.
6:24
And of course when it's halal it's much worse because halal
6:30
law doesn't permit you to. The animal has to be conscious
6:34
that it is being slaughtered. So when they stun it and then
6:39
cut its throat, they they stun it in such a way that it is only
6:45
stunned that it's not blacked out.
6:48
When animals are slaughtered halal, so they perfectly aware
6:53
that a knife and and they have to be slaughtered by knife, that
6:57
a knife is cutting its throat. As opposed to the other way
7:00
around where you you use an instrument like in that country,
7:05
that movie No Country for old Men or whatever, we're the guy
7:09
moving. Yeah, that instrument usually
7:13
would kill the animal, then its throat would be cut for it to be
7:16
bled. But in South Africa, it's the
7:20
other way around because the although our country only has a
7:24
Muslim population of about 2%, the the abattoirs and the
7:30
retailers particularly are so terrified of being branded
7:34
racists or Islamophobia is Islamophobia is that they pander
7:43
to that market. So all of our animals are
7:45
slaughtered halal with very few exceptions.
7:48
Very, very, very few exceptions. So those animals are, are well
7:52
aware that their throat is being cut open for them to die that
7:58
way. And when an animal is
8:00
slaughtered that way, it's not like the movies, it's not like
8:03
the throat is cut and you immediately keel over stone
8:07
dead. The animal is.
8:11
It takes two or three seconds for adequate blood.
8:15
Sorry. For adequate blood to drain out
8:17
of the brain for it to enter unconsciousness and die.
8:24
So, yeah, hunting, by comparison, is nothing besides
8:28
the fact that it's good for the environment and for the herds so
8:32
that they don't suffer lingering deaths over months.
8:37
Terrible to to watch animals starve to death.
8:39
Oh, Jeremy, it's the worst thing you've ever seen.
8:42
And. All you have to do is is observe
8:45
the Kruger National Park. If if people understand what's
8:49
going on there, maybe they might consider why hunting matters.
8:56
For example, there are too many elephants in Kruger, way too
8:59
many thousands and thousands too many.
9:02
The hunting programme, well the cutting programme stopped in the
9:04
early 90s and what's happened now?
9:07
The elephants are destroying the landscape faster than the than
9:12
what the landscape can recover. So which means that trees are
9:15
starting to get lower and lower. And of course, that affects all
9:18
animal life in the park. Yeah, Jeremy, it's a product of
9:26
neoliberal self hating Westerners who are, you know,
9:32
really genetic detritus. And it is the case, you know,
9:36
Doctor, what is his name? He's a, he's a descent.
9:39
He, there's some universities in Europe that still retain the old
9:44
descent qualification, which is between PhD and Professor.
9:52
Edward Dutton. The Jolly Heretic is his channel
9:56
on YouTube and he has spoken very eloquently as a scientist
10:02
about how this is it's genetics. It's very bad genetics that have
10:07
crept into the West because we don't have to have good genetics
10:11
to survive. We, we have by and large, not
10:15
here in South Africa, but you know, nanny states that take
10:19
care of us. And so children, I'm sorry to
10:22
say this, children who genetically shouldn't breed do
10:27
breed because they don't die shortly after birth.
10:32
It's a terrible, terrible subject, but that's the way it
10:35
is. These you have these people with
10:37
these monstrously bad ideas calling the shots.
10:41
We had the most successful elephant management programme in
10:45
the whole wide world up until the early 90s and then in the
10:49
rush to become part of the global community in again the
10:52
early 90s over that sort of grey period between apartheid and at
10:59
1994 when the African National Congress won the 1st multiracial
11:05
democratic election, we were falling over ourselves to say
11:10
yes Sir, no Sir, 3 bags full Sir, to everything that that the
11:14
world asked of us. So the people who knew the least
11:18
about elephant conservation got to call the shots over the
11:23
people who knew the most in the whole world about elephant
11:25
conversation. And it was to do with the the
11:28
sale of ivory and our sales of ivory, legitimate sales of ivory
11:35
to China from cold animals that had to be called, called for the
11:40
reasons that you've just described.
11:42
The terrible destruction of the Kruger National Park, which is
11:47
just about the size of the state of Israel and was one of the the
11:51
finest national parks in the world.
11:55
Yeah, that ivory funded tensions of millions of dollars.
12:02
Just by the way, the Kruger National Park at least has a
12:05
legitimate reason to exist. Yeah, I hear you.
12:16
I love looking for Segways and I absolutely cannot find one here.
12:21
But you, you were recently in Russia and I just, I cannot find
12:24
the link. So let's just jump straight into
12:26
into your trip. You were in Russia for a very
12:29
long time. Simon, tell me a bit more about
12:32
that. OK, for some years on World
12:36
Broadcasting Network and many other interviews, but but
12:38
regularly they I tried to expose the lies of the whole Russia
12:43
narrative and eventually it was three people contacted me, a
12:49
member of parliament in Russia and two guys who are just do
12:55
gooders. You know, they they've got the
12:57
opportunity, the financial opportunity to devote lots of
13:03
time to encouraging Christian conservative Caucasians to come
13:06
to Russia. So they propose that I go
13:09
eventually found the money and I went to Moscow and I met a
13:16
absolutely unbelievable group of people called the Brotherhood of
13:20
Academists and then a brotherhood of the the top
13:24
university students in, in Russia.
13:26
And I said to them, you know, I'd love to go to Donbass.
13:30
I mean, that would be my ultimate.
13:32
So they said, well, we might have a contact.
13:34
So in the meantime, I knocked around Moscow for a bit.
13:37
Then I went up to Arkham Gelsk to experience the far North,
13:42
which was lovely. And I got back to Moscow and
13:45
they said we, you know, we've arranged that you can go to
13:50
Donbas. So I went down to Donbas and
13:55
journalists, they are so rare foreign journalists.
13:58
There's a French guy and I believe there's a British
14:00
journalist living in Donetsk. But to give you a, for instance,
14:06
and I'm not a journalist, but it just kind of, you know, things
14:09
evolved. I went to the site of a famous
14:15
battle that, you know, nothing. All the mine fields were still
14:19
intact at Nicole Skye, a monastery.
14:23
So it had only been liberated a short, short while before.
14:26
We were just a few kilometres from on the front lines.
14:30
And one of the monks said that he'd had a premonition that I
14:35
would arrive. He said he'd had it for a few
14:37
days. So that was quite, you know,
14:40
that was lovely to hear. And he said, you know, we've
14:41
only ever had three journalists, one from Brazil, presumably Pepe
14:45
Escobar, because I know he's been there all very near to
14:48
thee, one from India and one from China, 3 foreign
14:52
journalists. And so it was a great privilege
14:57
for me in synopsis to be able to go there and to see what's
15:01
cooking with my own eyes. Jeremy.
15:04
And. And every single word in the
15:09
West is a lie. Every, every word about
15:11
everything. Nothing is true at all.
15:14
The slightly snide tone in which Western journalists write as
15:18
snide or patronising or condescending, but more often
15:24
than not patronising or snide is just completely unjustified.
15:28
Russian people are the loveliest people you could ever wish to
15:32
meet in your life. All of them, all of the time.
15:34
You'll get the odd, you know, punk, but as a broad
15:39
generalisation they reserve people so they appear to be
15:45
sombre or even surly, but once you break the ice they're
15:52
terrific. One of the guys who hosted me
15:56
said to me you will reap the benefit of being a foreigner,
15:59
you will. But if you stay here long
16:02
enough, you will also start to see through it that it's not
16:06
just a foreigner thing. We, we know ourselves as kind.
16:10
Those of us who travel can't believe how unkind Westerners
16:15
are. We.
16:16
We are conscious of the fact that we are kind, generous,
16:19
helpful people and we've always been like that.
16:22
It's a kind of an inbuilt Russian thing.
16:25
And that's certainly true. I've got help from sure.
16:28
You can't believe how many people just want to do something
16:31
small for you, and they do it for one another all the time.
16:35
And the food is fantastic and it's dirt cheap and I've never
16:39
seen so much variety in my life. I went into Pet Georgeka, which
16:44
is a chain of corner shops, so you get them every couple of 100
16:51
yards. I don't know how many there are
16:54
in Russia, but the millions, so to speak.
16:58
And in this tiny little corner shop, I counted 108 different
17:05
varieties of bread. Not 108 loaves, 108 varieties.
17:12
The way they stack their shelves is completely different to the
17:15
waist. You wouldn't have, for instance,
17:18
4 bottles of Bovril 8 deep next to one another.
17:23
You know, 4 rows. You would have one row of Bovril
17:28
and then all of the different things alongside it.
17:31
So it's just this bewildering array of variety. 1 of I've got
17:36
a Mercedes S500 that was South Africa's richest man's last car
17:46
before he died. Richest man in in the past.
17:50
So it's a lovely car and one of my sons was using it and he's
17:55
mad about Mercedes. And after 24 hours I've been
17:59
there, exactly 24 hours. I rang him and I said I hadn't
18:02
yet been to central Moscow. I've been outside the Three
18:06
Rings, quite far outside the The Three Rings in a place called
18:11
Yuzhny Tushner. So I hadn't seen opulence yet.
18:17
I've rang him and I said in the past 24 hours I've seen more
18:22
Gilander Waggon S series, my Bach and AMG Mercedes that I've
18:29
seen in the rest of my life put together in Frankfurt, Berlin,
18:34
Washington, New York, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, put
18:38
together. So it's a very, very wealthy
18:42
society. Everybody's doing well.
18:45
The employment opportunities just never end.
18:49
The business opportunities are endless.
18:51
I ended up putting together an enormous deal with a few 10s of
18:55
millions of dollars while I was there, but I won't go into the
18:58
details of it. But I happened to know the right
19:01
person just by absolute unbelievable coincidence.
19:06
So this deal will be worth over $100 million over time.
19:10
But that kind of opportunity is just it's, it's low hanging
19:14
fruit. The people, they like
19:17
foreigners, they treat you well. There's.
19:20
Yeah, it's, it's all going on there.
19:22
Jeremy, if I was 25 years younger, I would move there in a
19:25
heartbeat. If I didn't have sons in South
19:28
Africa, my very next move would be to apply for Russian
19:33
citizenship and and do whatever. I was quite a world famous
19:38
projects manager, you know, did a tonne of international work at
19:41
the very highest level. So I wouldn't, I don't think I
19:45
battled to get a job. But obviously the knee jerk, the
19:49
knee jerk reaction would be, but Russia's being sanctioned by the
19:54
West, so surely the people must be struggling.
19:57
No man, no Jeremy, you know I'm not telling your audience or
20:03
you. I'm recounting what I told my
20:05
beloved son. I could have said to him.
20:08
It's half as much, twice as much, whatever.
20:10
My whole life put together 6 cities put together, I said to
20:14
my whole life in every place that I've visited, all put
20:17
together not as many S class my Bach.
20:21
AMG and Gilanderwagen Mercedes, as I've seen in my whole life
20:26
altogether, there's money there. There's a hell of a lot of money
20:29
there and there's a hell of a lot of work.
20:31
Jeremy, you cannot believe the the employment is unbelievable
20:37
that you go to hotels and they're crying for people to to
20:42
come and do you know get jobs. Pleading 1 receptionist while I
20:47
was there worked. Gee, I don't want to exaggerate.
20:50
I think 3 days straight because so she would take naps, you
20:55
know, kind of 10:00 at night until 5:00 in the morning.
20:59
She'd hope and pray that she wasn't disturbed.
21:02
But there's just that there's a shortage of, of workers.
21:07
The the economy is cooking. Like you can't believe the
21:12
sanctions are meaningless, Jeremy, Absolutely meaningless.
21:15
There's the, you know, Jeremy, the the three best hamburgers
21:19
I've had in my life, I had one that was awful, absolutely
21:23
awful. But the three best hamburgers I
21:26
had I've had in my life are in Russia.
21:29
Just to illustrate the concept of quality as opposed to, you
21:34
know, there's there's good quality work being done and
21:40
there's enough money to fund it and not enough people even to do
21:45
it. And it's so, so much the case
21:47
that recently a gang of businessmen, top guys managed to
21:51
secure a meeting with Vladimir Putin, which ended up being
21:56
recorded in which they said, look, Sir, sorry to trouble you,
22:00
sorry to take up your time. But we are desperately worried.
22:03
And he said, what about? And they said, we're afraid that
22:07
you're going to relent and you're going to allow the
22:11
businesses that abandoned this country, that sanctioned this
22:14
country to come back, that you're going to have pity on
22:16
them. And we've poured a lot into
22:22
filling those niches. And he had to reassure them, no,
22:25
don't worry. We we're not going to do that.
22:28
They want the sanctions to continue.
22:30
They're desperate for the sanctions to continue because it
22:33
allows them to insulate or it's, it's a forced insulation of
22:39
their economy and they're OK, Jack.
22:42
With that and they're trading with all the countries that are
22:48
not sanctioning them, which by the way is majority of the
22:51
world. People seem to forget how small
22:54
the Western, what's the, what's the word I'm looking for?
22:58
The Western collective is it's extremely small.
23:01
Yes, yes. It has hitherto been, you know,
23:04
influential over centuries, you could even say millennia,
23:07
stretching back to the time of ancient Greece.
23:10
The West has been a, if not the dominant force, a dominant
23:14
force, But the, the, the global S, particularly the East, have
23:21
cottoned on to the recipe because they have a super
23:24
abundance of people to carry out that recipe.
23:27
They're going about it hammer and tongs, with the result that
23:31
the the relative importance of the West is declining year by
23:35
year. And now we're hearing Scott
23:37
Basent shrieking about Japan and China having to buy bonds
23:44
because the the USA simply can't offload them.
23:47
The world is turning away from the Western breast, as it were,
23:54
Breast in the sense of breast milk.
23:57
The world has has had to suckle on the Western breast like like
24:02
an infant, because from the West came all of the brilliance, the
24:06
creativity, the progress, the the great leaps forward of.
24:13
Mankind, not all of it. I mean, gunpowder came out of
24:17
China for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
24:19
Not not all of it, but overwhelmingly, you know, they
24:22
are. It's that stereotype of the
24:25
exception proving the rule. You know, we can all think of
24:28
gunpowder and ink, and then we pause a little bit and we try to
24:32
pretend that we didn't pause before.
24:34
We give a third example that say, I think the the wheel came
24:37
from Sumeria, but I'm not too sure.
24:40
Generally speaking, the West has been a a a force for the the
24:45
progression of mankind. What's that?
24:48
What's that Monty Python sketch? But what did the Romans ever do
24:50
for us? Yeah, Yeah.
24:54
Did you know Jeremy that they just discovered recently It,
24:57
it's it, I want to say in the past five years, perhaps it's
25:00
10, perhaps it's 15, but it's relatively very, very recently.
25:04
Why it is that Roman cement is is still all of it, obviously,
25:10
But that which is intact is still absolutely solid.
25:15
Whereas you might cement the wall of a house.
25:20
And if a poor job is done, whatever, you know, it starts
25:24
falling off after a few years. Do you know what the reason is?
25:28
No. The Romans used salt water.
25:32
Salt water? What?
25:34
Scientists just figured it out recently.
25:36
Yeah. Salt water has this kind of
25:40
exponential effect on on cement concrete.
25:47
That actually kind of makes sense if you think about it,
25:49
because of what Seoul does over time, Yeah, it calcifies.
25:58
And often when we talk about Russia versus the West and the
26:04
sanctions, etcetera, it's always geopolitical.
26:06
But on a human level, how did you find Russia?
26:11
On a human level, there are some things that are are difficult.
26:17
One of them is the language, and that is made exponentially more
26:23
difficult by the alphabet because when you obviously it's
26:30
the same with Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
26:33
I'm not saying this is, you know, completely unique, but
26:38
there is a kind of a, I don't want to say old wives tale.
26:42
What's the urban legend? I suppose that Russian is one of
26:46
the five most difficult languages to learn.
26:49
And when you can't decipher any of it, it's very bewildering.
26:53
I know people who moved to Russia from South Africa.
26:57
They're doing very, very well, by the way, working as English
27:03
teachers in a kindergarten, but living in a really posh part of
27:06
Moscow. They say we we do beautifully.
27:09
Anyway, they were too afraid because of the language, as I
27:13
say, multiplied by the alphabet to take a a bus for something
27:18
like 3 months and they didn't catch the metro for something
27:22
like 2 years. If I remember correctly.
27:24
I was catching the bus by the second day that I was there
27:27
because I was able to fathom something really simple as far
27:31
as the bus route from my hotel to the the urban centre nearby
27:37
centre was concerned. But even I was I was very
27:44
intimidated. This that.
27:45
And you do get a sort of a village mentality and people
27:49
warn you about it, though they will say to you, look, people
27:53
from the village are rough. And I did experience that once
27:58
or twice. Some real, I'm sorry to use the
28:01
word, but real assholes just doing absolutely stupid things.
28:05
For instance, I went to an enormous amount of trouble to
28:09
book a bus ticket across the Kerch Bridge, the one that NATO
28:13
keeps on trying to destroy, and to get a window seat on the
28:18
correct side, on the right hand side so I'd be able to film.
28:22
And a guy got on the bus before me and an old man from the
28:26
village, and he simply refused to relinquish my seat.
28:31
And it became like a little bit of a scene and I had to back
28:33
down. You know, I didn't want to be
28:34
the foreigner causing trouble. And I had one very scary
28:38
incident. I caught a train from Moscow to
28:41
Alhangelsk. And I, when I got on, I said to
28:48
the conductress, I'm with Google Translate on my phone.
28:53
Look, I make videos for YouTube. I invited here by a member of
28:59
Parliament and I want to tell the truth about Russia.
29:04
Can I work in? Can I go to the eating the
29:08
dining car? You know, what are the rules
29:10
around here? Can I just go there?
29:11
Do I have to ask permission? Do I need a stamp?
29:13
Do I have to pay money? She helped me.
29:16
She rushed me down to the dining car.
29:18
She gave the manager of the dining car strict instructions
29:21
to take the best care of me and so I worked there until about
29:25
midnight time to close. The dining car happened to get
29:29
to a station. I hopped off and I walked,
29:32
getting fresh air up the the watching the platform to my back
29:38
to my berth. As I was walking up this woman
29:41
scowled at me. I thought, heavens above, what
29:43
have I done? Have to be I've.
29:47
Anyway, the mood was icy and people were looking at me one
29:52
thing and another. Eventually by the next morning,
29:56
the train manager, as it late turned out, and one of the
29:59
conductress has come past. In the meantime, the other
30:01
conductress has disappeared, who knows where she's gone.
30:05
And another conductress has yelled at me for filming out of
30:08
the the window. And the train manager eventually
30:13
gets me and he says, Mr Simon John.
30:16
I said, yeah. He said, show me your document.
30:20
And he said, look, you've been filming.
30:23
There's big trouble. The police are waiting for you
30:26
in our hungos. Now, what that means is either
30:29
the SVR, one of the successes to the KGB, or the FSB.
30:34
Because if you missed a plot and you get a ring from a train
30:38
saying we think we've got an Americansky speon, the first
30:42
thing you do is pick up the phone to the correct people, the
30:47
people who deal with foreign spies.
30:49
You don't handle the matter yourself.
30:51
So I sat there quiking my boots off to be arrested.
30:57
But in the meantime, I said to him, look, if I was an
31:00
Americansky spion, Ciai wouldn't have asked for permission.
31:05
I wouldn't have been boldly filming out of the window.
31:07
And I said, your conductors gave me permission after I asked
31:11
politely. And I told her who invited me to
31:14
Russia and I showed, you know, everything.
31:17
Now all of a sudden, I've been just kind of covert or
31:20
clandestine. Eventually, after some time, I
31:23
calmed him down, but he didn't say to me, all right, I won't
31:28
call the police. So that was a dreadfully
31:31
terrifying experience. So I've got to the the
31:33
destination. And I thought, there's no way
31:35
I'm going to do a runner and make it worse.
31:37
I'll just stand here quivering until they come and put the
31:41
manacles on me, which I did for half an hour.
31:43
And then I thought, stuff this, if the the putting KGB doesn't
31:47
even have the courtesy to be on time, well then I'm buggering
31:50
off. So I went to the hotel and by
31:52
the next morning I realised that they'd obviously seen sense.
31:55
But somewhere in between me being taken to the dining car
31:59
and as I say, the next morning, well, midnight, you know, 3
32:03
hours later, somebody had said to that conductors, how dare you
32:07
allow this man to film our Birch forests, our state secret Birch
32:12
forest. So there are some things about
32:14
Russia that it can be a bit tricky, but I promise you it's
32:17
99%. What's wrong with What was wrong
32:20
with filming outside out the window?
32:23
It's a it's a country in a time of war.
32:28
They've been assassination plots on Vladimir Putin.
32:31
We're learning this now. The leaks are coming out.
32:34
And those are people working for a state entity, you know,
32:38
Russian railways. You'll probably find that
32:40
somebody just got a fright because there are so few
32:43
foreigners there. Jeremy, I, I was given a tour of
32:46
a the most magnificent museum I've seen in my life in Crimea.
32:51
We do the tour. I make buddies with the, with
32:54
the tour guide. And he, he speaks the most
33:00
terrific English. So I said to him, how many
33:02
people do you get a year? You know that you speak so well.
33:06
He said no, I learned at school, so how many people do you get a
33:09
year? He said, I haven't, you're the
33:10
first since sanctions in 2014. So there is a level of I was, I
33:19
was at a border post as well, interrogated hugely at the
33:23
border post between southern Russia and Crimea.
33:28
There was a woman from the the Russian Ministry of Foreign
33:31
Affairs had come to to pick me up, to show me around.
33:33
A friend had asked a friend a favour, blah, blah, blah, So big
33:36
thing haven't had tourists for years.
33:40
And I said to her, jeez, this is taking.
33:43
She said, what are you worried about?
33:44
She said this is all a charade. And she said, Simon, it's a
33:47
pantomime. She said they haven't had any
33:49
foreigners pass through here for years and years and years.
33:52
So they need to be able to tell their bosses that damn good job
33:56
of interrogating you. That's all it is.
33:59
So there's this neurosis almost. And And so yeah, they just took
34:04
it a bit far. They thought that I was doing
34:06
research for the CIA by filming 100 billion Birch trees, and I'm
34:10
not exaggerating. Over 1000 kilometres you will
34:13
see 100 billion Birch trees. What's funny also is that in
34:19
Hollywood, Russians are always portrayed as spies and KGB
34:23
etcetera, etcetera, and S Africans are always portrayed as
34:26
mercenaries. So, so you could have been, you
34:32
could have been portrayed as that.
34:35
Could have been, Yeah. I think it was just, you know,
34:38
provincial people working for a state entity, you know, level of
34:43
hysteria. Look, make no mistake, the first
34:46
meeting I held in Crimea, I had two translators.
34:49
So I had translators when I was in Donbass and Crimea.
34:53
I beg your pardon? Sorry.
34:53
The first meeting I held in Donbass, it's with this bigwig
34:58
politician, Mr Andrew Kramer, hanging over a nice guy, and I
35:04
had two translators with me and it was him and two other people.
35:07
So he introduces himself and the other two people, and the third
35:12
guy he introduces, as you know, for the party or whatever, head
35:18
of PR. OK, fine, jolly good.
35:21
We hold the meeting, buzz off. A couple of days later, I'm
35:24
having dinner with the translator and the one of the
35:27
two translators, lovely lady called Lilia, and she'd taken
35:33
time off work to help me. She, she's the head of foreign
35:36
affairs for the Donetsk People's Republic in the president's
35:40
office. Really nice girl.
35:44
I said, yeah, that the PR guy. She said, what PR guy?
35:46
I said the PR. Come on, man.
35:48
Lilia, you were at the meeting. We panted quite a lot.
35:52
You know, I would give her a bit of a hard time and she'd give it
35:54
back. I said, come on, Lilia, you were
35:56
at the blooming meeting. PR guy, the guy with the ginger
35:59
hair, You looked like an Irishman.
36:01
She said PR and she kind of patted me, patronising me.
36:07
She said that wasn't PR, that was the FSB, that was just
36:11
Simon. Honestly, grow up.
36:13
So they do keep a damn close eye on you.
36:15
Make no mistake, they are taking no chances whatsoever.
36:20
But who cares? I don't care.
36:21
They can watch me 24 hours a day.
36:23
I've got no intention of doing them any harm.
36:26
On the contrary, I'm now working on them out of the corner of my
36:29
eye, staring at it, a documentary called Layman's
36:37
Guide to the Russia Ukraine War, and it spells out that this is a
36:42
NATO artefact. It's a confection of NATO and
36:47
all of the evidence is there to be seen.
36:49
It's there's no such thing as the Russians just invaded
36:54
Ukraine. It was a whole series of events
36:57
that were instigated and agitated by NATO to provoke this
37:02
war and I'm sad to say for eschatological reasons.
37:07
And when people hear that, they just sort of glaze over, oh,
37:09
heavens above here, Simon now telling us that this is, you
37:14
know, that it's satanic. But I will make the arguments in
37:18
the documentary. And it's a very compelling
37:20
argument. This is a deliberate
37:23
paedophiliac satanic death cult cabal attempt to instigate World
37:30
War Three. But leave aside the reason for a
37:33
second. Let's say we don't know what is
37:36
the reason. What we do know for sure is that
37:39
this thing was started by NATO. End of story.
37:45
But sadly, in the West, that message hasn't permeated yet, in
37:48
spite of all of the evidence. And I think it's because the
37:50
Westerners are damn cowards. Cowards that that not one single
37:56
Westerner has visited the whole of Crimea, as attested by the
38:01
the woman at the border gate, that this la di da top lady of
38:05
the Department of Foreign Affairs and by the translator at
38:09
this spectacular museum and by the monks at the monastery and,
38:14
and, and, and the list goes on. I was interviewed on television
38:18
in Donbass and they said they've never had one interview of a
38:23
foreigner, a single one. So how, how is it possible that
38:29
any journalist in the West could possibly know what they're
38:31
talking about? And to which the answer may be
38:33
somebody may, the response may be, yeah, but then you should go
38:36
to Ukraine. I'd love to accept Gonzalo Lira
38:41
was tortured to death and then murdered by the Ukrainian
38:45
authorities because he wouldn't write what they wanted him to
38:49
write. And I don't want to be put on
38:51
the mirror of its website, among the cast of characters that the
38:55
Ukrainian government is encouraging freelance assassins
38:59
all around the world to murder. I remember you sent me a voice
39:08
note from Donetsk and you were telling me how hairy it was
39:16
because you could hear the sounds of of war.
39:20
The first night I was there. Do you want me to tell you the
39:22
story? Please.
39:25
I arrived there and it was a long day.
39:27
We went to the wrong border post.
39:28
The guy who was chaperoning me made a mistake in an innocent
39:34
mistake, so we had to drive a hang of a long way around by the
39:37
end. By the time I got to the hotel,
39:39
it was warm. I was absolutely cupboard,
39:42
couldn't get enough fresh air into my room, so I went and sat
39:45
on the steps of the hotel. This is how the hand of the Lord
39:48
works if you're a believer. So I'm sitting on the steps of
39:52
the hotel with as little clothing on as possible, so a
39:55
pair of of flip flops, pair of shorts and a thin T-shirt,
40:00
trying to just cool down after the terrible day.
40:05
And the next thing I see, out of the corner of my eye, at about
40:08
45°, at about maybe 150 metres from ME3 streaks comes streaking
40:19
past. And I was, I was direction
40:25
bewildered, so I thought that they're air defences.
40:33
The next thing, 3 almighty explosions a couple of blocks
40:38
down from where I was facing. It turned out the next day that
40:44
they were Storm Shadow missiles. There were sixteen of these
40:48
fantastic explosions, that there were Storm Shadow missiles and
40:52
that I had, that I had my directions wrong and they were
40:56
coming from the West. I was facing east and I was
41:03
perfectly calm. For whatever reason, if I'm not
41:06
claiming to be a hero, I would still be playing rugby if I was
41:10
that brave, perfectly calm. The next morning at 5:30 I'd
41:17
just woken up and I was lying in bed contemplating whether to get
41:21
up and brush my teeth or to lie in a bit longer and three drones
41:27
came past the hotel. Jeremy are nearly I was I was
41:31
literally in in the sense of fright and not in the sense of
41:36
of 100,000 year old pieces of wood.
41:39
I was literally petrified. I was so afraid that I was too
41:44
afraid to jump out of bed and and take cover in the corner or
41:51
in the toilet, you know, so that the two walls between me and the
41:56
the threat or a wall between me and the window.
42:01
Anyway, that was the Tuesday morning.
42:04
So Monday night, Tuesday morning, over the Wednesday and
42:07
the Thursday, I heard about another, I don't know, forty of
42:11
these drones and I somehow got used to it.
42:16
So I was quite, you know, feeling quite comfortable.
42:19
On the Thursday night we had supper at a pub, a British style
42:25
pub called the Golden Lion I believe, and I was, a group of
42:32
four of us was sitting on the veranda was two journalists,
42:34
myself and my host. And the next thing a swarm of
42:40
drones came in. They were some way off, if I was
42:43
to estimate, like 800 metres maybe.
42:48
We started hearing these things and at about 6:00, between 600
42:51
and 400 metres away, coming directly towards, I don't say
42:55
directly to me, although I was told by Russia's top war
43:00
journalist that this was all for my benefit.
43:04
We needn't get into that now. But he said, I promise you I
43:06
know what I'm talking about. This was about you.
43:09
Nevertheless, here come these these drones towards the Golden
43:15
Lion. It could have been actually a
43:17
building in front a building behind whatever, but there was a
43:19
huge open space to to my right the direction of the the drones
43:26
and you could fathom quite nicely where they where they
43:32
were. And the next thing they start
43:33
getting hit by the air defences. I counted something like 30 five
43:38
hits in this process. I was eating, by the way,
43:41
Jeremy, the best meat you'll eat in your life is in Russia.
43:45
Believe me. Don't believe me?
43:46
I only eat meat. I eat meat five times a day.
43:49
It serves me very well. I know a piece of meat.
43:54
I was eating one of the best steaks I've ever tasted.
43:58
And so I just carried on. For some reason, I was perfectly
44:01
calm. I felt like the hand of the Lord
44:03
was over me and I had nothing to fear.
44:06
And my host and these other two journalists absolutely did their
44:10
nuts because I refused to run and take cover with the rest of
44:18
the restaurant page patrons. You know, everybody was running
44:22
for dear life because it was very clear that the drones were
44:25
coming very much into towards us.
44:29
Maybe not us precisely, maybe be a building behind in front bed,
44:33
but it was apparent that this is a potential threat and a huge
44:38
one of that many, many, many drones.
44:41
But I felt like the like I was safe and I carried on eating.
44:44
Eventually they they really gave me a bit of a tongue lashing and
44:47
I was forced to go in and hide in the corner with with
44:51
everybody else. And you won't believe it when I
44:53
came back that bloody cleared my stake away because we'd taken
44:56
too long to get back. I was furious.
45:00
Do you think there's a future for Donbass?
45:04
Yeah. Jeremy, the Russians are
45:06
building something marvellous. the IT, it has to be seen to be
45:11
believed. A little birdie told me that you
45:15
and some very, very high level journalists may visit Russia.
45:23
I tell you what, I had a grin on my face when I heard that news.
45:27
I thought, this is it, boy, he's going to see something
45:31
absolutely marvellous. Jeremy it is so heartening to
45:33
see, to see how well they're doing, how they're rebuilding.
45:39
I went to the Azov stall battle, one of those most traumatic
45:42
things of my life. You know, the Azov stall plant
45:45
battle of March, April of 2022. But it's been left exactly
45:50
intact. And it's scary beyond scary.
45:53
But the the rest of Murray Upal looks like a new pin.
45:58
It's absolutely splendid. Just to to illustrate the point.
46:03
Yes, there's a future as great future.
46:04
They're growing, they're rebuilding everything.
46:07
The roads are as flat as a pancake, as a.
46:11
Russian as a as a Russian region, not as a Ukrainian
46:14
region though. No, nobody wants to be
46:16
Ukrainian, Jeremy. You know, they, they say that
46:19
the elections are rigged, but when you speak to people, they
46:22
tell everybody says the same thing.
46:25
The reason those election results were in the 90% is
46:28
because of this war. We were here, we saw who started
46:32
it. If it wasn't for the war, it
46:35
would be about 70 to 80% pro Russia.
46:41
But an extra kind of 25% or whatever it is has been sympathy
46:49
has been garnered by the fact that that we were here and now
46:52
we see what Russia's doing and we want nothing, nothing to do
46:56
with Ukraine. Yeah.
46:59
Oh, Jeremy. And the the war crimes are
47:02
unbelievable. So they've, they've lost all
47:05
interest. They want to be part of Russia.
47:07
They're Russians speaking. That part of Russia is called
47:11
Novormalorosia. And it was, it was if you take
47:17
Crimea and the South, Mikolaev and Odessa, that's called
47:23
Novorossia. That area was constituted by
47:29
Catherine the Great beginning in 1764.
47:34
That's 12 years before the United States of America was a
47:37
Republic. This is an ancient, ancient,
47:39
ancient Russian place. It's overwhelmingly Russian.
47:42
It's Russian culture. It's by an era of history that
47:45
that idiot Khrushchev decided to make up for the the the
47:50
barbarity of his crimes as a political commissar during World
47:55
War Two against his fellow Ukrainians.
47:58
He was born on the border and his wife was Ukrainian.
48:02
That he gave Crimea to Ukraine as a kind of a I'm sorry.
48:05
I know you can see right through me hundreds of thousands of you
48:08
saw me butcher with my own hands, you know, 10s of
48:14
thousands of your countrymen. He has a little Peace Prize and
48:16
nobody in the West talks about it, where it's a well known
48:19
thing, not just to me but to the history books.
48:21
I'm reading a book at the moment by a Jewish professor at
48:29
University College London or Oxford, maybe Oxford University,
48:33
who is of Portuguese heritage. And you know, this is any
48:38
serious person knows that the, the story of of that we get fed
48:43
in the West is rubbish. The people of Odessa, not that I
48:47
went there, you obviously can't go there.
48:49
And Mikolaev are desperate, desperate for the peace talks to
48:57
fail so that Russia will retake those areas so that they can be
49:02
incorporated into Russia. About 10 of the regions, on
49:07
balance, I think the regions altogether, the oblast are about
49:09
28, something like that. About ten of them are crying
49:15
like motherless children for Russia not to stop until, you
49:20
know, my house is behind the front line.
49:23
And that's overwhelming sentiment, Jeremy.
49:25
There are no two ways about it. What have you learnt about
49:30
yourself from this trip? Jeez, I tell you what, Jeremy,
49:35
you know, in the USA there's a, there's a, something in the air.
49:40
I don't care what anybody says. I'm not a particularly spiritual
49:43
person. I don't feel it in my waters.
49:46
And you know, I don't have feminine intuition, but it's
49:50
about as thick as butter. There's something in the in the
49:54
air in the USA of you can do anything.
49:59
There's a similar, not a similar.
50:02
There's a something in the air in Russia of serenity.
50:06
I'm a very highly strung person and I have been since I was
50:11
young. You know, I'm probably the best
50:14
person I know it putting on a certain kind of, you know,
50:19
thing. But there are psychologists who
50:24
have told me they would spend the rest of their lives treating
50:27
me for free if I wanted. I'm a bit of a nut case.
50:33
And I've never felt so serene in my life as in Russia.
50:38
I cannot explain it to you. It it's calming and peaceful
50:43
that there's something, there's a serenity in it.
50:47
And I know this is going to sound heretical to some people,
50:50
but those churches, I know it's a sensitive thing.
50:55
The second commandment, graven images, worshipping icons, blah,
50:59
blah, blah, blah, blah. I get it.
51:02
But you feel that same thing on steroids in and around those
51:08
churches. I cannot explain it to you.
51:11
If you're 150 yards away from the front of one of those
51:14
Russian Orthodox churches, you feel a kind of a calm, a sanity,
51:21
a the serenity that's and you feel it throughout the country.
51:24
So I've, I've learned a lot about myself because having that
51:27
almost that mirror the counterpoint to my usual kind of
51:32
frantic intensity for the first time in my whole life was
51:36
really, you know, you only know, know the size of an elephant by
51:40
the, the size of a mouse next to it and vice versa.
51:43
So that taught me that and it taught me that that I come from
51:47
from a long history of Western, a long tradition itself of
51:54
Western lies. The everything is alive.
51:57
Just been listening to that academic, the professor at
52:02
Cornell University who was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a
52:05
week or two ago and which at some point he rattles off a
52:10
whole series of Western lies with a little justification.
52:15
You know, it's a bit like the the Spanish American War.
52:21
To hell with Spain. Remember the main false, the
52:26
World War One, the Lusitania, false.
52:29
World War 2, Pearl Harbour false.
52:32
Vietnam War, the Gulf of Tonkin incident false.
52:35
He didn't mention any of these. He was mentioning other things.
52:37
Just waste and last weapons of mass destruction.
52:42
False Afghanistan. To this day I don't know what
52:45
was the reason for going into Afghanistan actually, because it
52:48
was just mealy mouthed lies. They weren't even coherent lies.
52:54
And what's being done to Russia now is based upon a lie of the
52:58
lie of the lie of the lie of the lie of the lie of the lie.
53:03
So I've learned about my about the West, that we are the most
53:10
unforgivable liars and about myself that there is a
53:15
peacefulness that I would love to experience for the rest of my
53:19
life. And I've been fantasising about
53:21
going back. I might seek funding for it.
53:26
And even if I can't get funding to do a documentary there, this
53:30
one I don't have to do there. It's a different nature.
53:34
I would like to on on very limited budget.
53:38
I mean, it's as cheap as chips. Spend a, a, a year in a cabin in
53:45
the woods in Siberia or near somewhere near the Volga, maybe
53:50
about four hours east of Moscow, just isolated, experiencing that
53:56
unbelievable winter and the peacefulness and the quiet and
53:59
the what have you. It's beyond tremendous, Jeremy.
54:03
A conversation like this runs the risk of all the usual labels
54:08
being stamped onto you like you sound like a Russian shell.
54:14
You're being paid by Russian interests because it's just all
54:17
Russia, Russia, Russia and it's amazing and it's utopia and now
54:20
suddenly you hate the West. It's important also to point out
54:23
that I don't think we're Western Africa is Africa.
54:27
So we kind of schizophrenic in the sense that we are.
54:31
We have a history of Western and other influence.
54:35
So we kind of sit on the fence with regards to that.
54:40
Yeah, do you? You're not wrong.
54:42
But when communism fell, when those butchers of the Tsar, you
54:49
know, when it all gave and we, we were the Bolsheviks.
54:53
Yeah, we were, we were happy about that.
54:55
I mean, we kind of sided with with.
54:57
But. But you're not wrong.
54:58
I'm not. I'm not being argumentative.
54:59
No, I'm not. I don't think I'm a Russia
55:01
shill, Jeremy. I've just had, I had a
55:05
psychologist once. She got to know me very well and
55:11
I spent two years seeing her like very, very intensely to the
55:15
point of breaking the regulations of the Health
55:17
Professions Council in South Africa.
55:21
And she said to me towards the end, she said, well, I think our
55:25
time is up. You know, after two years we've,
55:27
we've gone through it all. I just want to tell you the
55:30
thing that I'm going to take away from this.
55:33
What I've learned is about a fanatical obsession with the
55:37
truth, and I'm fanatically obsessed by the truth.
55:42
And I also like the fact that the rates of rape are very low.
55:47
Call me a shill if you like that.
55:49
Murder is uncommon. Call me a shill if you like
55:53
that. I saw practically nil graffiti.
55:55
Call me a shill if you like that.
55:58
I could walk around the suburb where my hotel was very late at
56:05
night and feel perfectly safe, which I cannot do anywhere,
56:09
anywhere, anywhere in South Africa.
56:11
Nowhere at all. Call me a shill if you like,
56:14
Jeremy, I don't care. But all I say is actually, I
56:18
want to use strong language. Now you've made me it's.
56:20
I know it's not your fault. Not for one minute do I bear you
56:25
a grudge. I know that you're representing
56:27
people out there who exist. But I am right now, livid with
56:30
rage. My blood is I'm seething because
56:35
I know that they are such people.
56:37
And you know what, What makes me the most angry about them.
56:43
And this was the point that I was implying, but I perhaps
56:46
didn't express it very well when I alluded to journalists not
56:51
going to see for themselves. They won't go and take a look
56:57
for themselves. They won't have a holiday in
57:02
Crimea, which is arguably the most beautiful part of all of
57:08
that region. So I'm talking about the
57:10
entirety of the Black Sea, the northern Mediterranean.
57:14
And yet they'll say that I, who was willing to eat black bread
57:20
and herring twice a day, every day, apart from when I was taken
57:25
out to dinner as a guest, for which I never paid 1 cent once,
57:30
I was willing to eat black bread and herring to stretch my
57:35
pitiful little budget, to stay there for long enough to really
57:40
see what is the genuine truth of the matter.
57:43
They can all take a flying. Leap Yeah, I mean, I get those
57:49
labels too. I mean, as you know, I'm heading
57:52
off to China in the near future and, and I suddenly, suddenly
57:57
I'm a I'm ACCP employee or whatever.
58:01
You know, it's ridiculous, Simon, that that that people
58:04
cannot think critically and even people on supposedly our side.
58:12
Oh, Jeremy, it's it all goes back to the one thing that we
58:17
all have in common. Your sister and I don't have.
58:26
We're not both mean, so we're always split from one another.
58:30
There's always something slightly different in our
58:33
experience. But all of us, you, your sister,
58:37
whatever gender, whatever faith, whatever country, whatever,
58:40
whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.
58:42
We all have one thing in common and that's COVID.
58:48
And we fall into two camps. Those who were told as I was,
58:55
and who initially believed it, that everybody's dying and who
59:04
walked into the shop and thought to themselves either why do I
59:11
never see anybody die or hear of anybody dying except outlier
59:17
examples. We fall into two camps.
59:21
Those who thought, Gee, it must just be me, I'm refusing to see,
59:32
so I'll comply. I'll be a good person because
59:36
actually I'm a bad person. And those people who, as you use
59:39
the correct term, thought critically and thought hang on,
59:44
the basis on which this was sold to me is the social media videos
59:49
that saturated the entire Internet of Chinese dropping
59:54
like flies everywhere. At the train station, at the bus
59:58
station, while driving their car, while operating crane,
1:00:01
while operating a forklift high star, while driving a truck,
1:00:04
plying into people while sitting at work, while in the hair
1:00:06
salon. Everybody dropping like flies.
1:00:09
How come is it that I see nobody drop dead behind me in the
1:00:14
queue? As simple as that.
1:00:17
We live in a world of the overwhelming majority of being
1:00:22
mentally retarded people. And you just have to take it on
1:00:25
the the chin, Jeremy. That's why I listen to nobody.
1:00:28
I never read any comments. As one great cricketer, cricket
1:00:32
player of South African once said, if I read the newspaper,
1:00:37
he was asked a question, what do you think of the chap, the
1:00:40
editorial about your performance of last week, the editorial that
1:00:43
came out yesterday. He said if I read the newspaper,
1:00:46
I would give up. I would be completely defeated
1:00:49
by the endless criticism of people who've got no idea what
1:00:51
they're talking about. So I don't, I don't even, I've
1:00:54
never read one comment of one video that I've given and I've
1:00:59
done now over 800 interviews over the past eight years.
1:01:06
Nah, Nah, they're idiots. Ignore them, Jeremy mentally.
1:01:08
Retarded. Yeah, I've started doing that
1:01:10
too. I've started reading less and
1:01:13
fewer and fewer and fewer comments.
1:01:14
I'm engaging less with those people because they just, it's
1:01:19
just as Jordan Peterson, I think correctly said, sociopathic
1:01:23
because they have this weird, what's the word sense of power
1:01:31
because, you know, they can remain anonymous or whatever.
1:01:34
So they can say whatever they like and it enough is enough.
1:01:38
Yeah, yeah. OK Simon, we are, but over time
1:01:44
I have thoroughly enjoyed chatting to you and I look
1:01:46
forward to our next chat. For now, how can I follow you?
1:01:53
We have a channel on YouTube site, London's Media.
1:01:58
That's that's, that's the best place to to follow.
1:02:01
Thank you very much for the opportunity Jeremy.
1:02:04
I hope I didn't get too carried away and worked up or overstay
1:02:08
the welcome. No, in fact, I was hoping you'd
1:02:11
be more worked up. It's it's more, it's more fun
1:02:14
when we get passionate. All right, Simon, thank you for
1:02:18
joining me in the trenches. It's my pleasure, Saitlanders.
1:02:21
Pleasure, Jeremy.