Latest / UK Column Radio / Simon Elmer on Wokeness and the Destruction of Art — Jerm Warfare

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Simon Elmer on Wokeness and the Destruction of Art — Jerm Warfare · UK Column Radio

0:37
My name is Simon Elmer. My background is in art history.
0:40
I trained, I got a doctorate in the history of art.
0:42
None. So I'm probably one of those
0:44
terrible teachers who maybe hate art so much.
0:47
But I haven't written. I've written very little about
0:50
art and culture over the last five years because I was too
0:53
busy writing about lockdown and analysing data on infection
0:58
fatality rates and then looking at the various motivations
1:03
before the for the proxy war in the Ukraine.
1:04
And then analysing why I don't know, something like, you know,
1:10
suddenly the whole world seems to be so interested in the rites
1:13
of transvestites and all that sort of stuff.
1:16
But my background is definitely in kind of art and cultural
1:18
studies. And over the last 10 years, I
1:22
kind of permit myself to occasionally go off in a tangent
1:25
and write about something. And recently I put together this
1:30
book of articles over the last 10 years called Cultural Wars.
1:34
And it came out of, I guess, my thoughts about the increasing
1:41
and expanded role of culture and what's going on, particularly in
1:44
the West and my observations about the death of art.
1:48
Because like you, I mean, you're a political cartoonist, aren't
1:51
you? I, I sort of came to the
1:53
realization it was partly, I think because I've moved to
1:56
China, I'm living in Hong Kong. And Hong Kong doesn't really
1:59
have a living culture in my opinion, outside of its
2:02
restaurants and its food. It celebrates.
2:05
It's very the very ancient culture of, of China, but it
2:07
doesn't really have what we would call in the West a living
2:09
culture. But I think it reminded me how
2:13
much I miss contemporary art or I risk I, I miss a missing a
2:18
living culture. And I think like all of us,
2:21
we've come to wonder what's happened to art in the West.
2:24
You know, I used to live in the UK for most of my life and I
2:27
think art doesn't exist in the UK anymore.
2:30
It's been replaced by something else.
2:32
And I think now that we, I think like a lot of young people, I,
2:37
I, I had a low opinion of art growing up, even though I was
2:40
studying it as a, as a historian of art.
2:43
I thought it was, it became too obscure for people to
2:47
appreciate. It kind of retired into a very
2:49
elitist kind of audience. It very quickly became
2:53
corporated by the corporate world who kind of, you know,
2:56
paid these enormous prices for it and therefore controlled who
2:59
got selected to be an artist and who didn't, who went into the,
3:03
the, the museum sector and so on and so forth, the gallery
3:05
sector. So I didn't really have much, I,
3:08
I was very critical of the role that contemporary art practice
3:13
had in the wider culture of the West.
3:19
But now that it doesn't have any role whatsoever, in a way it
3:22
doesn't have a role as a space of art, a space of expression of
3:27
debate, of where people can meet and discuss ideas, which you did
3:32
in the UK in the 90s. Whatever you think about what
3:34
was called then, the young British artist, it definitely
3:36
created a debate every, every weekend.
3:39
You know, there were debates around what culture is, what art
3:43
was, what society was, what community was, what was going on
3:46
in the world that happened within a context that you could
3:49
called artistic. And that's all gone now.
3:51
That's completely gone. And now that it has gone, I've
3:54
suddenly realized, probably too late, the importance of art in a
3:58
culture. And now that we don't have it,
4:00
I'm trying to understand what's replaced it and why it has been
4:04
killed so completely. You're going to shoot me for
4:08
this question, Simon, What is art?
4:16
What is art? Gosh, art is the easy the easy
4:21
answer. That is, art is whatever people
4:23
say it is, isn't it? Can conceptual art's got a lot
4:30
to answer for? You know, I often go into
4:31
galleries now and I could have turned to my, my girlfriend and
4:33
sort of say conceptual art's got a lot to answer for.
4:38
I'll tell you what art is. Art is, it's kind of what I, I,
4:41
I kind of conclude in the preface to the, to this book,
4:44
which I, I wrote, I published this June and I wrote the
4:47
preface this year. So the articles go back 10
4:49
years, but I wrote now kind of reflecting on it.
4:52
I think art and community are interdependent, and when one
4:57
dies, the other dies. I think what's going on in the
5:01
world now is the destruction of community, of national
5:03
communities, of local communities, indigenous
5:05
communities. And one of the ways that's done,
5:07
I think is by destroying their art.
5:11
I don't. I think communities form around
5:13
art, even though they might not know it or think of it in that
5:15
way, but I think they do. Maybe, maybe culture is a better
5:19
word. Definitely.
5:21
I think culture in the expanded sense means much more than what
5:24
we call the arts. You know, the different types of
5:26
arts. It's about the way that people
5:27
live together, the way that they pass on their values and their
5:32
histories to the next generation, The way they
5:35
interact with each other, the way they managed to sit down to
5:38
eat together or meet together or play together or even work
5:42
together without killing each other or stabbing each other or
5:45
attacking each other. That's kind of what culture is.
5:49
It's this historical thing. And within that there's
5:52
something called art, which is not only, I think, although it's
5:58
become that way in the 20th century, a specialist practice
6:01
of professionals. You know, I happen to believe
6:03
that there's a very, very small percentage of the population who
6:06
could call themselves poets, for instance, which is a very dead
6:09
art at the moment. But all musicians or.
6:13
Yeah, all. All of it, really now.
6:14
And yet I think all of us recognize the importance of
6:17
music in our lives or poetry in our lives.
6:19
You know, in moments of great stress or of happiness, we often
6:21
turn to poetry. I think a lot of people write
6:24
poetry. They don't write very good
6:26
poetry. That probably includes myself.
6:27
I write poetry. I write more and more of it as I
6:30
get older. It doesn't matter whether it's
6:31
necessarily good. It's something in US.
6:34
And I think part of the death of art and what it's been replaced
6:38
with is about killing our cultures and our sense of what
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binds us to each other as part of something more than an
6:48
individual, as a family, as a community, as a town, as a
6:53
nation, as a civilization, all that's been under attack.
6:59
And I think that is why the death of art, which after all
7:02
has been proclaimed mostly by artists for, you know, over a
7:05
century now, it really, I think they, when they proclaimed it,
7:08
they wanted art to be superseded by something else, something
7:11
which was better, something which wasn't so elite.
7:14
Actually the opposite has happened.
7:15
Art has been replaced by something which has got nothing
7:17
to do with art. And that is of course, I think
7:19
propaganda. And a lot of my book is about
7:23
what I think is the condition and the result of the death of
7:26
art. That is, it has killed art, but
7:29
it is on the death of art that this has emerged as the dominant
7:32
culture of our Western civilisation and that is woke.
7:37
Woke is now the dominant ideology of our culture.
7:40
Woke has many, many strands. It is the official ideology of
7:45
what is now being called stake order capitalism.
7:47
And I think it only could. It can only have acquired that
7:51
space, appropriated that space by killing art and turning all
7:55
culture now into propaganda for Woke I.
7:59
Mean art is it's critical. It's a critical component of the
8:05
human condition. It's always been part of
8:10
humanity. If you go back to cave art, it
8:13
was a form of communication. It's isn't it also essentially a
8:18
form of creation, of creativity? It's the ability to create.
8:25
Yeah, I went to, I was in the South of France a few years ago
8:29
and I went to, You can't actually see The Cave.
8:31
It's the Chauvet Cave, which is in the South of France.
8:35
Everyone thought that the oldest cave art was kind of lasko sort
8:38
of 16,000 years ago. Sure, they could have doubled
8:41
that. It's kind of incredible.
8:43
And the French as they do, they could have recreated what The
8:46
Cave looks like so you can actually walk around and see it
8:49
and it's incredible. And that's that's 303234
8:52
thousand years ago. So art is Co extensive with the
8:57
emergence of what we now call homo sapien of modern man, if
9:01
you like, it's part of us. It's a bit like when you get
9:06
these strange ideologies which like want to stop people
9:11
drinking alcohol or they want to stop people dancing or they want
9:14
to stop people doing all sorts of things that we've been doing
9:16
for hundreds of thousands of years or thousands of thousands
9:19
of years. These are things which are part
9:21
of us for good or bad in the human condition.
9:23
And you know, as we've talked about before in different shows,
9:26
part of what's going on at the moment, I think is moving into a
9:29
kind of a post human world in which everything that makes us
9:34
human, which is above all our relationship to each other.
9:37
Humans are very social animals, has to be destroyed when we
9:43
can't come together to talk to each other, to express each
9:49
other, to see what's the most talented or interesting or
9:53
critical or simply new people in our society call themselves.
9:57
Artists have got to tell us about the world, whether we
9:59
agree with it or not. You lose a very important part
10:02
of the public square, I think. And woke could only achieve I
10:10
guess, you know, I mentioned two things that kind of started me
10:13
thinking about this. The other one is I think we're
10:16
living at the moment. I mean, you know what it's like
10:18
every day you kind of open the newspaper or, or go online.
10:22
The there's a kind of the things that people leave at the moment
10:27
and whether they believe it because they are forced to
10:31
believe it, that is they don't implicitly or they actually do
10:35
believe. And I think there's a whole
10:36
range of people out there in the West who do believe the
10:39
precepts, the principles of woke and the dogma of woke because
10:42
woke, I think is a very much a religious movement.
10:44
I think it's a kind of a neo, a kind of a Neo Puritan movement
10:49
of reformation. You know, it comes out of
10:51
America, which is kind of a Puritan kind of place.
10:54
The, the sheer lunacy, I would say even all was insanity
10:58
because not to dismiss it as a phobia, you know, when people
11:01
say Islamophobia, they say, well, well, you know, you don't
11:03
have a rational opposition to Islam or something like that.
11:06
They just mean that you are having an irrational response to
11:08
it. So I don't want to say that
11:10
they're rational, but the basis of work as an ideology is that
11:14
you cannot debate it. If you do, you're, if you say,
11:18
well, actually, just because a man says he's a woman, he isn't
11:20
a woman, they say, well, you're endangering of the life of
11:23
people who identify as, as, as, as transvestites or, or
11:26
transsexuals. If you say that, I, I don't
11:29
actually think that COVID was a disease whose constituted A
11:32
pandemic and I'm not going to wear a mask because masks don't,
11:35
weren't built to do that. There's not at all what their
11:37
function is. They say, well, you're
11:39
endangering my life. So a lot of the principles of
11:42
woke are that you cannot debate it.
11:45
It is actually a form of insanity in the sense that the
11:49
people who defend those principles and believe in them
11:52
are beyond rational debate. And I've tried to think, you
11:55
know, I was meeting with a friend here in Hong Kong
11:57
recently and we, he was sort of saying, how's this, how's this
11:59
done in such a short period of time?
12:01
You know, we're a similar age and we will remember when
12:05
particularly, you know, we both had worked in education when
12:08
debate, rational debate without screaming and shouting and
12:12
beating people up was a kind of basis, at least in principle.
12:16
You may not think that if you'd ever looked at the Houses of
12:19
Parliament during Question Time, but at least in principle, these
12:23
were things that we defended and we recognised as the basis of a,
12:27
again in principle, a civilised society.
12:30
It's not only now that people don't do that, they don't engage
12:33
in debate, but they don't see the freedom to debate without
12:37
being arrested for hate speech or denounced as as some form of
12:43
phobia or to be attacked to be diagnosed to be what's the word
12:51
to be diagnosed with some sort of phobia for your views?
12:54
This, this is something which now is not something they do
12:58
because they don't want to or they can't because that's
13:00
actually a principle of work, not to debate with people, to
13:04
just say no, you're sick and we're going to arrest you if you
13:08
keep on talking this way. So I've been trying to
13:10
understand that, and I think to understand the death of art and
13:13
this new expanded role of culture is one of the keys to
13:17
understanding how woke has, in such a short period of time,
13:22
colonized the minds of so many people.
13:25
Not just our children, not just our youth, our university
13:27
students, but I think most of the political and professional
13:32
classes of the West. I think they'd actually believe
13:35
this stuff, which terrifies the hell out of me, as I'm sure it
13:38
does you. Yeah, I mean, and do you think
13:40
it's by design? I mean, it has to be.
13:42
I don't remember the term woke in the 90s.
13:44
I don't remember the term transgender in the 90s.
13:49
No, it's a very new term. It's a very new term.
13:51
I mean, in my book, I kind of trace it back because I'm, I'm
13:54
old enough to remember when multiculturalism kind of entered
13:59
into the discourse. And multiculturalism actually
14:02
means monoculturalism. It means it means the domination
14:06
of all cultures by, I guess, U.S. consumer culture.
14:09
I don't think you can confine it to the US now because it has
14:12
colonized old cultures. It was the opposite of what it
14:13
does, but then it was followed by things like political
14:17
correctness, which is it started off as a way, I guess it came
14:24
out of that fascination with language which we had in the 80s
14:26
and 90s and before that in the 70s came out of movements like
14:29
structuralism, and then it became a form of policing
14:31
speech. Then you had the rise of
14:33
identity politics, which kind of superseded it, sort of.
14:38
That came in in the 90s, I think.
14:40
Yeah, and feminism in parallel. Feminism as well, which has now
14:43
been turned into kind of the opposite of feminism.
14:48
You know, what is what was good about feminism has now become
14:50
everything that was bad about it.
14:52
If you like this kind of relentless tack on masculinity
14:56
and young men who've been told, I mean, I don't think there's a
14:58
man under 40 under in, in England now who hasn't been told
15:01
since he was born that he is bad, that everything about toxic
15:05
and toxic masculinity, phrases like this, You know, at the
15:08
moment in England, the, the, you know, not a day goes by without
15:11
someone being attacked, some woman being attacked.
15:13
And they're finding out that if you emasculate an entire
15:16
generation of men, you are open to attack by this vast influx of
15:21
immigrants who are coming in from places that have got very
15:24
different ideas about the relationship between men and
15:26
women that we have. So there's I think, yeah.
15:29
To go back to your point, woke is a very new term.
15:32
I mean, how old is it? Maybe 5-10 years, but it's it's
15:37
it's progenitors, identity politics, multiculturalism,
15:41
identity political correctness, and then other academic subjects
15:45
like post colonialism, which started off as a good thing, but
15:49
then it could sort of turned into things like critical race
15:51
theory, which decides that all white people are from the moment
15:54
they're born to the moment they're dead, guilty of white
15:57
privilege. Didn't that develop in the 80s?
16:00
Critical race theory or just critical theory?
16:03
Critical theory definitely became very big in the 80s.
16:06
And that, that itself, I mean, I, I kind of probably studied
16:09
something which had been called that, you know, that was the big
16:11
word. You know, we've raised a
16:13
generation of children or two generations now who've kind of
16:17
worshipped to the altar of critical theory.
16:20
But critical theory has turned into the kind of the brain
16:23
repetition of the dogma of woke. Yeah, postmodernism.
16:29
Postmodernism, if you like. Yeah, that's that's another
16:31
thing where everything becomes a relative value.
16:34
One of the one of the principles I think of work is that very
16:37
postmodern idea that that the world, our perception of the
16:44
world is constructed by mass media, by culture, by dominant
16:52
narratives. What do they used to call them?
16:53
Master narratives and things like this.
16:55
And there is an element of truth in that, obviously, you know,
16:57
where there's so much debate now, every time anything happens
17:00
in the world we go. So what to extent are we seeing
17:03
it as it happened or is it happened?
17:04
What to extent is it mediated? And you know, I've got a lot of
17:07
time for that to be suspicious of the way the world is created
17:09
around us, never more so than now.
17:12
I mean, you know what we lived through the last five years.
17:15
But unfortunately, it's come, it's kind of got it to the point
17:18
where if the principles of woke using this umbrella term,
17:24
whether that's environmental fundamentalism, transgenderism,
17:29
the, the war in the proxy war in the Ukraine, all these things,
17:35
if they are contradicted by reality, someone actually finds
17:38
that CO2 is not the measure of global warming or, or climate
17:43
change. Or they find that actually, you
17:48
know what we've been told about the proxy war in Russia didn't
17:50
begin in February 2022, but actually began in 2014 and it
17:54
came out of the coup organized by blah, blah, blah.
17:56
Or we find out that actually men and men or women cannot change
18:01
sector. All these sort of basic points
18:04
or we find out that actually the UK or the West hasn't always
18:07
been nations of immigrants, but actually immigration has been
18:09
very much a post war thing and it's increased massively and
18:12
it's a direct program of, you know, replacement immigration,
18:15
which is aun policy. If you come up with all these
18:17
facts work simply says, well, these facts are racist,
18:21
transphobic, sexist, climate denialists, Putin apologists.
18:26
There's a series of pathologisations that was what I
18:30
was looking about, where anyone who doesn't agree with these
18:33
principles of woke is then simply dismissed.
18:36
And if they can persist, persist, they'll then, well,
18:40
first of all their their careers have ruined and then they are
18:44
censored and eventually if they persist even further, they get
18:47
arrested. So strangely, out of
18:51
postmodernism's, that's a very broad term, critique of the role
18:55
of ideology, if you like, in the biggest sense of the term.
19:00
In mediating our perception and experience of the world has come
19:04
a complete denial of the reality of the world.
19:07
Now there is not a doctor in England, there's not a
19:09
politician, there's not a teacher, there's not a
19:12
university lecturer, there's not a counsellor who won't agree
19:16
with all these quite obviously incorrect statements that men
19:22
contains. That men can change sex, that
19:26
masks built to stop saliva from a surgeon operating on a patient
19:31
can somehow stop particles from a airborne, an airborne virus.
19:36
All these things which are, you know, kind of the basis of our
19:38
society. To distinguish between fact and
19:41
fiction, between what has been scientifically proven, if you
19:45
like, and what has been still speculation, between what we
19:50
know to have happened in the past and what we're told about
19:53
it. These are kind of the basis of a
19:54
rational society, and work has created a culture that allows or
20:02
has required the people who kind of run our society to be able to
20:06
deny these en masse, and that's a very dangerous place to be, I
20:10
think. It's a very dangerous place
20:12
because it also manifests itself in my own work as a political
20:18
cartoonist. And I was, I was saying to you
20:23
earlier how much I hated studying art.
20:26
And I can't tell you precisely why I hated studying art, but it
20:30
just felt shallow and completely empty and rudderless.
20:34
And, and I think that feeds into what you're saying that you
20:37
know, quote UN quote, art is dead.
20:39
Long live art and political cartooning has never really been
20:45
considered art anyway. It's like the dregs.
20:47
It's the bottom of the of the hierarchy.
20:49
You know, we, we, we have an idea and we throw really badly
20:53
and try and get a message out there.
20:55
When you mentioned earlier the commodity, the how art has
20:59
become commodified, I immediately thought of Andy
21:01
Warhol and Jackson Pollock. I mean Warhol.
21:05
Warhol was probably the first art, but not the first.
21:08
But he was the artist who kind of embraced his own
21:10
commodification, didn't he? I think he, you know, he, he
21:13
understood so much about, you know, his famous statement that
21:16
everyone will be famous for 15 minutes in the future has
21:18
obviously come true for quite some time now.
21:21
And he embraced that commodification.
21:23
I think. I mean, just to go back to what
21:26
you said about political cartoons, political cartoons in
21:29
the UK, cartoonists and that whole area of political satire,
21:35
if you like, is used to have a very important path in for a
21:39
long time in the UK. You know, the I've always just
21:42
say the British, we don't do revolution and we don't do
21:44
philosophy. We leave that for the French and
21:46
the Germans, but we do do we do do political satire.
21:52
I mean, there's some great, sorry I'm interrupting, but
21:53
there's some great British satire in the 80s.
21:55
I'm thinking, what was that show with the puppets?
21:59
Yeah, a spitting image. It was fantastic.
22:03
And before that we had things like Yes Minister, which kind of
22:06
dove into the, it was a great, you know, my plus of my
22:08
political education, a lot of my political education as a young
22:11
man came from watching things like Yes Minister.
22:14
Well, after that, watching Rory Bremner used to do impressions.
22:18
He was a great political analyst as well as a kind of comedian.
22:21
The British, we don't like to listen to kind of a serious
22:24
political show too much, but we'll listen to someone taking
22:26
the Mickey out of a politician and in doing so exposing
22:29
something about the political process.
22:32
You know, I'm, I'm, I miss those a lot.
22:34
And I still remember, you know, not the 9:00 news.
22:37
It's kind of ingrained. It used to be ingrained in that
22:39
generation even. Python.
22:41
And that, and it goes by Pythons as well.
22:42
I mean, it goes back to Gilray and what's his name, Rollinson
22:46
and stuff. You know, in the, the early 19th
22:48
century, we've got a long tradition of that.
22:50
That's all gone now. What is what has happened to the
22:53
role of the artist? Because the artist hasn't got
22:54
away. There are still, there's
22:55
probably more artists than ever at the moment, but their role, I
22:59
mean, one of the things I write about in this in this preface is
23:02
what royal artists have assumed now in this new expanded,
23:09
expanded field of culture under stakeholder capitalism.
23:14
And I think part of what neoliberalism did is it's
23:21
brought the production and dissemination and publication of
23:24
art, all art and the practice of it within the purview and the
23:30
control of the private sector. Yeah.
23:32
So galleries, museums and so on and so forth.
23:34
Getting onto if, if it was to, if you're a film maker or if
23:38
you're a comedian, to get into these venues where you could
23:40
actually make a living from it, or at least, you know,
23:42
disseminate your work was completely taken over by the
23:45
private sector. That's what Neil Liberalism did
23:47
with all sorts of areas of, of public life.
23:51
And now it has complete control over it.
23:55
That doesn't mean it now only simply controls the political
23:59
statements of those artists or controls whether they share
24:03
their work or publicize their work, which is just done for a
24:06
long time, certainly in this country.
24:08
It now means that if you want to be an artist in the UK of any
24:13
kind, if you want to work in the culture industry.
24:15
I've got a number of friends who, they're not artists per SE,
24:17
they're certainly not professional artists, but they
24:20
work in galleries, they work in museums and so on and so forth.
24:23
You have to, if you're an artist, you have to adopt and
24:27
express the values of woke, the principles of woke, the dogma of
24:30
woke. If you work in the galleries,
24:33
and I think this extends into lots of industries actually, you
24:37
have to go through woke indoctrination programmes like
24:42
unconscious bias train training, white privilege.
24:46
You know, I've got friends who have to go through all this and
24:48
for some of my generation that's utterly insane.
24:51
It's like they've decided that there's some sort of official,
24:54
some sort of that there is an official ideology of the United
24:58
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
25:00
And that ideology is woke. And if you don't believe it, or
25:04
at least you don't act according to its principles, which they
25:08
present as simply being, you know, respectful to people's
25:10
human rights and all that sort of stuff, it's nothing of the
25:12
kind. You will not work.
25:14
You will not get employed. And art and art, the work of
25:20
artists and art and the expanded field of culture have adopted
25:25
this role of giving a, a sort of a, a nice face to what are
25:31
actual dictates of a, a mono culture, a mono ideology, an
25:38
official ideology, which is that of work.
25:41
You, you know, I've actually stopped watching except for very
25:43
occasionally just to kind of remind myself how bad it is.
25:47
I, you know, I keep on saying, you know, my girlfriend says,
25:50
what do you want to watch tonight?
25:51
So we watch a, a British film and I'm like, not, not after
25:54
1980. You know, sometimes I'll go into
25:56
1980s. Like the other day I watched
25:58
something from the early 90s, I think it was the Kingdom of
26:01
heaven. And I was just like, oh God, I,
26:03
I can't, I can't watch all this sort of stuff.
26:06
All culture is and all art is always going to have elements
26:10
more or less of the the basic beliefs and the prejudices of
26:16
the culture of the the society out of which it comes.
26:19
Yeah, that's how what culture is.
26:20
Culture is an expression of a society.
26:23
And no matter how much individual artists think they're
26:26
separate from that or critical of it, there's always going to
26:27
be an element in it. But that's changed now.
26:30
They're not simply influenced by it, they're not even critical of
26:33
it. They are now the voice through
26:36
which power speaks to the members of a society.
26:40
And there is no artist that I know of with any kind of public
26:42
profile in the UK, whether that's a comedian or an
26:45
architect or a writer or a poet or a filmmaker or an actor or a
26:52
theatre production team or any of the others, a painter or
26:54
whatever who is not now a voice for the principles of work.
26:58
There might be individual artists who do that.
27:01
There's always going to be people who escape that.
27:03
But they will not get the shows, they will not get the backing,
27:06
they will not get the public they're of the government
27:07
grants. They won't get the public sector
27:09
sponsorships, They won't get any of that.
27:11
In other words, they'll struggle as someone who is not a
27:14
professional artist. They try to get by somehow.
27:17
But if you want to be a professional artist, you artists
27:20
I think for quite some time now, but it's really increased since
27:25
lockdown I think and this move into stakeholder capitalism.
27:28
They've really embraced their new role as the the math pieces
27:33
of power, and I think that's pretty disgraceful.
27:36
You've spoken about stakeholder capitalism a few times.
27:38
And of course, another way of expressing that same ideas,
27:42
technocracy, which is effectively running society
27:45
through science and technology. And it's a terrible, it's a
27:49
terrible prospect. I'm reminded of that quip.
27:53
But is it art? And I want to ask you the
27:57
question, but is AI art? No, AI is not all I get my I.
28:05
I very much doubt it. AI is not.
28:11
I do think I've got very limited knowledge of AI.
28:16
From what I can see, AI is not artificial intelligence.
28:20
It's very complex. Algorithms.
28:24
Algorithms which have been programmed by the the makers.
28:27
I think it's been called artificial intelligence very
28:31
much in the same way that we have 1,000,000 millions, we have
28:34
lots, dozens and dozens of websites called fact checked.
28:37
And they will go on and they will Fact Check any statement
28:40
that anyone makes or any, any, any, for instance, social media
28:47
posts which has, you know, received a million shares or, or
28:50
views or any, any, any events that happens.
28:53
And it will say, we have checked this and we have debunked the
28:56
the the truth of this. And people who subscribe to
29:00
those websites can then say, I mean, I've had it to myself a
29:03
lot, You know, I'll be having a discussion.
29:04
People say, oh, but that's been debunked.
29:07
It's like by whom? Yeah.
29:09
Yeah. What?
29:09
So it gives you creates a sense that it's.
29:11
Been discredited, OK, but yes, it's.
29:13
Been discredited and it gives them a sense of sort of somehow
29:16
that there is I mean I can understand this it gets sorry
29:19
finish my sentence. It gives them a sense that there
29:21
is some sort of objective arbiter of what is true and what
29:25
is false. And that applies to science, to
29:31
politics, to history. Now, the people in charge of
29:35
history is the media. The people in charge of politics
29:39
are the corporate backers of the the people in charge of science
29:42
are, as we saw, the pharmaceutical companies and
29:44
things like that. They are the people who create
29:48
the websites which say that something is debunked or not.
29:51
I can understand in a post. We've been living in a kind of a
29:54
postmodern world for quite a while now, haven't we?
29:56
45 years or more, 50 years. And one of the celebrated and
30:03
disseminated principles of post and autism is that there is no
30:05
one truth. That truth is a product of
30:09
discourse. Discourse is a product of
30:11
institutions who who attribute a truth value to a discourse and
30:17
therefore they're products of power.
30:18
And that leaves you in a very scary state.
30:21
You kind of pick up a newspaper and you sort of go, well, is
30:23
that true? I hear a president say
30:26
something. Is that true?
30:27
I hear a doctor say something. You know, a doctor comes up to
30:30
something when someone goes in and she says, I'm terrified
30:33
because I've been hearing all this stuff on the BBC about
30:36
anyone can, you know, anyone can have COVID and anyone can share
30:39
it. What should I do?
30:40
And the doctor says to you, well, you better inject your kid
30:42
and wear a face mask all the time and don't leave the home
30:45
for six months. Now, those doctors were lying.
30:49
And as more and more of the lies, not just of the last five
30:52
years, the Iraq war, you know, whatever you want to go back to
30:56
people for, people want to have some sort of authority that they
31:00
can trust which will say this is true, this is debunked.
31:04
And I think artificial intelligence, to go back to your
31:06
question, has been called that so that people are encouraged to
31:10
see this as some sort of objective transhuman in form of
31:16
intelligence because it is not human.
31:19
It doesn't have an ideology, it doesn't have a culture, it
31:21
doesn't have a prejudice, it doesn't have a colour, it
31:24
doesn't have a race, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
31:26
That somehow this is some sort of objective truth.
31:28
And we're definitely encouraged to see AI like that.
31:31
So I mean, the amount of time I'm on social media and someone
31:34
will say to Grok, which I presume is kind of an AI thing,
31:37
and say, is this true? And Grok will come back and sort
31:40
of give an analysis and say, well, actually this is true.
31:43
All it's doing, all Grok can do is as far as I can see, is it's
31:47
doing a Google search of the data on a particular topic.
31:54
Now, I do a lot of Google searches on data on particular
31:56
topics myself. And you know, recently I was
32:00
going back and looking up, reviewing statistics which I'd
32:04
looked up back in 2016 on the housing crisis in the UKI do it
32:08
now. And I would type in what I'd
32:10
written and Grok would the AI would say yes, this is true or
32:14
blah, blah, blah. And then I would search, search
32:16
these references and half many, many times it was, it was not
32:20
true. It was not true.
32:22
They were simply repeating what I was saying.
32:24
So if AI is not intelligence, artificial or otherwise, it
32:32
certainly can't be art. The art is about art is human or
32:41
it's nothing, and human is social or it's nothing.
32:45
Human is about, as I said before, the things that bind us
32:48
and allow us to live with each other.
32:51
It's about things which machines could never understand, like our
32:54
mortality, like our love, like our desires, like our fears and
32:58
our hates, all the things that make us human.
33:02
And AI cannot make art, unfortunately nowadays, You
33:07
know, you go into a museum and you see things and or you see it
33:12
online when people sort of say, oh, this is art, it's not art.
33:15
But there's no point me saying this is and is an art.
33:18
The interesting thing and the thing that I guess a critic of
33:22
art, a critic of the history of art and of the transmutations or
33:27
the changes in art should do, is to understand why art has
33:30
changed so much. Why is it not what maybe you and
33:33
I think art is and what it's become and why it has become
33:37
that and what it's doing now. Because art definitely still
33:39
exists, but not what we, you and I understand by art.
33:43
OK, so I'll ask the question about is it art?
33:47
Because somebody sent me a song a few days ago.
33:51
A friend of mine, he says, what do you think of the song?
33:53
And I listened to it and I thought that's it's a typical
33:56
pop song and sounds good. I said, Tommy, what do you know
34:02
the singer? He said, no, no, no, none of
34:04
it's real. And it just got me thinking.
34:09
You go into an art gallery and you look at a series of
34:13
paintings up on the wall. The the exhibitors don't tell
34:17
you that this is all AI produced stuff and you walk out there.
34:21
Do you feel cheated? Yeah, I, I mean, people who've
34:26
used techniques to write pop songs for a very long time.
34:30
And before that, Tim Pan Alley or something like that.
34:33
The people who wrote, you know, the, the first, the, the, you
34:36
know, hit songs, whether that's in the 60s or the 90s or
34:40
whatever, they're probably almost definitely using a kind
34:43
of a formula. So using, using formulas or
34:46
using technology, you know, architects obviously use an
34:51
enormous amount of technology, increasing number of amount of
34:53
technology to build their buildings.
34:56
I think there's a problem. I mean, within, within, within
35:00
architecture, there's a, there's a kind of a school, if you like,
35:04
or a movement called parametricism, which is built.
35:08
If you've seen something like the, the buildings of Zaha
35:10
Hadid, you see those sort of buildings which look like, I, I
35:13
compare them to sort of Blumenges.
35:16
They're kind of amazing sort of stuff.
35:18
Parametricism is a kind of a program which will you, you put
35:22
in what you want to do. I want, what are the parameters
35:25
of how much I can, you know, expand this wall, do this and it
35:29
will calculate how you can do that.
35:30
And then it will build that building for you or it will
35:32
design the building for you. You could use the same thing in
35:35
writing a song. As I said, AI is merely a highly
35:39
sophisticated and perhaps dangerous.
35:42
I don't really know about the dangers of it.
35:44
It seems that it's got an internal motor, if you like,
35:48
which goes beyond, I guess it's capacities for learning.
35:53
I guess because it is a computer which has enormous memory bank
35:57
and could initiate. Can it initiate?
35:59
I don't know. I'm kind of the wrong person to
36:01
talk about this. I guess to go back to the point
36:03
of art, I don't think the use of technology disqualify something
36:07
of being odd. I certainly don't think that.
36:09
I think that would be kind of silly in a way.
36:11
You know, in the Renaissance, people used all sorts of
36:14
technology to build these amazing cathedrals and so on, or
36:16
even before that. So I don't think that's a
36:18
problem. But that also doesn't mean that
36:21
I think the problem perhaps is that we as viewers of art and
36:25
consumers of art and judges of it maybe are dazzled by the
36:34
sophistication of it, the Sheen of it, the gloss of it, the
36:38
spectacle of arts. You know, we've both been
36:41
travelling around China recently and the city's.
36:45
Beautiful. Well, the ancient stuff, yeah.
36:49
I mean, I love the calligraphy and stuff, but their, their,
36:51
their real contemporary art is the cityscape at night.
36:54
There's no Chinese city I've been to yet which doesn't seem
36:57
to have been built around a view of the skyline at night, which
37:01
is all lit up and stuff now. The Chinese love it.
37:06
They get out their phones and they they kind of photograph it.
37:08
It's something we know in the West as well.
37:10
We're becoming more and more like that.
37:11
Our cities have been turned into kind of images of themselves, I
37:15
think. Now, I don't think that's art.
37:17
I don't think it's culture either.
37:18
I think it's part of the spectacle in the sense, you
37:22
know, kind of formulated by Guy Dubourg in his book The Society
37:26
of the Spectacle. It's about, I mean, his
37:29
definition of the spectacle was, was an excellent one, is capital
37:32
accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.
37:35
And it's something about the dazzling, I think of, of, of, of
37:41
us, of us dazzling us so much that we don't know how to be
37:46
critical, You know, nowadays, Well, not nowadays.
37:49
A little while ago, suddenly the biggest thing was 3D cinema.
37:53
And I went into 3D cinema and put the glasses on and I found
37:55
it very, very disturbing. I didn't like it at all because
37:59
I was inside the image. I didn't, I couldn't look at it
38:05
as a frame. It's a similar thing now goes
38:09
when you go to an exhibition of Van Gogh.
38:12
Well, how would you say it? They won't have the actual
38:14
paintings. They'll they'll have they'll
38:17
have slides or videos of them moving and stuff like this.
38:20
Now you need, people need to understand if they're going to
38:24
appreciate Van Gogh, that he is a painter of the frame of that
38:27
painting and the texture of the paint and all that sort of stuff
38:30
is what makes it a work of art. Projecting it onto a wall with
38:34
these kind of swirly things. That's, that's not what makes a
38:36
Van Gogh a wonderful painter or any other painter as well.
38:39
And I think the same way, you know, the, the best paint, the
38:44
best, there's lots of them. The best, the best films are
38:48
films in which you have a space between you and the work of art.
38:54
Of course, within narrative cinema, you go into a dark
38:57
space. It's all dark.
38:58
You sit there, you take your popcorn out, or I don't anyway,
39:01
and you kind of get lost in these characters.
39:03
You identify with the characters.
39:04
The identification with characters goes back to ancient
39:06
Greece. You know, that whole point of
39:08
catharsis and so on. So it's not a new thing.
39:10
You lose yourself in it, but you retain a space of perception and
39:15
criticality which has allows you to reflect upon the work of art.
39:19
You know, one of the roles of ancient Greek tragedy was for
39:23
the members of a society, the members of ancient Greece or
39:27
something, to sit down and think about their own society, think
39:29
about their relationship to the gods, to fate, to history, to
39:32
war, all that sort of stuff. The art that we are have been
39:37
promoting I think for some time now.
39:39
The words that describe it is immersive, tear jerking,
39:45
overwhelming, heart warming. These are not critical terms.
39:48
These are terms in which you dissolve into the experience.
39:52
You become part of the experience, and I think part of
39:55
that is to remove that critical distance that we need not only
40:01
to the artwork, but to the world in which it exists.
40:04
When you are weeping, when you are in the work of art, when you
40:09
are overwhelmed by it, when you are terrified by it, when you
40:13
are, when it's appealing to your base emotions, whether that's
40:19
anger or whatever. You might have a hell of a time
40:23
and you might come out going as people do now.
40:25
Wow, that was incredible. But that is no longer art.
40:29
That's part of the spectacle and the spectacle serves to take
40:33
away our critical faculties and it takes away that space which I
40:37
really enjoy in films. I went to see a film by the
40:40
Iranian director Panani the other day, the other day in Hong
40:43
Kong. Managed, managed to find a
40:44
cinema in Hong Kong which has a decent cinema in it.
40:47
And it wasn't a completely successful film, but for 2 1/2
40:50
hours or whatever it is, I got to think about that film.
40:53
And those spaces of thought are very, very important.
40:57
And the spectacle in the broader sense of the term, are about
41:03
erasing those spaces to take away that space of thinking,
41:08
debate and expression and replace it with the very emotive
41:12
values of the spectacle. I I laughed now when you
41:17
struggled with the pronunciation of Vanguard.
41:19
So a couple of years ago, I think 2023, my wife and I were
41:23
in Amsterdam and we had the great privilege of going on a
41:26
private tour of, of his museum and the the guide.
41:32
I specifically asked the guide, how do you pronounce his name?
41:36
And she said, that's fun. Yeah, fun.
41:39
But nobody can say that other than the Dutch, really.
41:42
If I say that people, people right now who I'm talking about,
41:45
yes, Americans say Van Gogh. Van Gogh, yes, because they
41:50
can't do the sun. And so that's what that's
41:52
precisely what the guide told her.
41:53
She said she she says Van Gogh or Van Gogh, depending on who
41:58
her audience or who she's taking around the, the the museum.
42:01
Because if she says Van Gogh, she says she's had it before
42:04
where Americans say to her, who are you talking about?
42:08
I love his artwork. And you are absolutely dead
42:12
right that you, you can't be immersed in it.
42:15
You have to stand back and look at it because of the the way he
42:18
framed it and all that kind of stuff.
42:19
And that's also largely because he wasn't a very good artist to
42:23
be, if we're being very honest about ourselves.
42:25
He's one of my favourite artists.
42:27
Yeah, yeah. You don't think?
42:28
I don't think he's one of the greatest.
42:29
He's certainly not as great as everyone says.
42:31
He's very, he's very important. Interesting, I think.
42:34
Yeah. Yes, and his story is probably
42:36
what makes him. But I mean, I was also, I don't
42:39
know if you've been to Versailles and had a look at
42:41
some of that art. It is spectacular, absolutely
42:45
exquisite. And then today you have a banana
42:48
peel stuck on a wall. This is going to be a critique
42:53
of contemporary art. Yeah, I, I guess let's maybe
42:58
talk about, let's maybe talk about woke a little bit about
43:02
what it's trying to do 100. Percent agreed, Yes.
43:05
Yeah, because I think, I think the, you know, we're not, we're
43:13
not merely talking about, I don't think we're merely talking
43:15
about changes in art which have now become, you know, someone
43:20
could come in and say, oh, you're a couple of elitists.
43:23
You know, why shouldn't people go and look at Van Gogh being
43:27
projected on a, on a, on a museum wall or something like
43:30
that? Or why should we go and see,
43:32
have a movie where we come out and we feel, you know,
43:34
exhilarated because we actually feel that we've been inside it.
43:37
I don't think what I'm trying to talk about is not just that
43:40
because what we're being what's what is replacing art is not
43:45
simply worse art, if you like, or more popular art or less
43:50
highbrow art or less critical art for which there is there is
43:53
a role for all that sort of stuff.
43:55
Perhaps we're being presented with something which is trying
43:59
to, I think, dismantle a civilization.
44:03
One of the things I write about in in in the preface to this is
44:08
I ask the question, why is it now that art has finally been
44:12
killed? Art as we understand it as
44:14
having a critical function, a space of relative freedom
44:19
because obviously the culture industry, it's not necessarily
44:22
about freedom. You know, we talked about some
44:24
of the problems in it, but relative freedom in which people
44:26
can come together and think and speak and debate and express
44:30
themselves or be or see other people express themselves about
44:33
the issues of the day. We've lacked that space for
44:36
quite some time now. Why has it happened now?
44:39
The bigger picture, I think is that European civilization,
44:45
which goes back around about 1000 years, if you think about
44:49
the actual birth of Europe as a, as a, as a policy, if you like,
44:53
as a, as a civilization, which was an ancient Rome, which is,
44:56
you know, but you, you can go, you can take Europe back as far
44:58
as you want. That I think is now, well, it's
45:02
undeniably under attack. I think one of the principles of
45:06
my understanding of this is what I said before, that the
45:08
community and art go together. They exist.
45:12
They're interdependent of when one goes, the other goes.
45:16
I think part of the destruction of Europe and the replacement of
45:23
its people by this policy of replacement immigration is you
45:29
to do that, you have to get rid of the culture of Europe as
45:32
well. You know, the UK seems to be the
45:35
most advanced. I don't know, Germany's pretty
45:37
bad as well. But the UK at the moment seems
45:39
to have taken a series of very large steps into the erasure of
45:43
anything which you could call British culture, you know,
45:46
England. I don't know how much you know
45:48
about this. I imagine you know a lot,
45:49
Jeremy, but in England, it must be the only country in the world
45:52
where you are arrested for flying your own flag by your own
45:57
police forces and then you're called, then you are denounced
46:01
by the people who've come to the country to live there because
46:05
you need to integrate. Of course, that's the that's the
46:07
lie. You're then denounced as a
46:08
racist for flying your own flag. And then your arrest will be
46:12
disseminated on all the media platforms and all the news
46:15
programs and debated in Parliament and people will
46:18
actually say now that if you fly the English flag in England as
46:23
an English person, you are far right.
46:27
Now that's just one example. There's numerous examples our
46:33
the equivalent of our Orwell's kind of foreplace.
46:36
It's called Prevent UK. It started off as a an anti
46:40
terrorist surveillance government programme which
46:46
essentially was set up after 7-7, the bombings in in London
46:51
in 7-7 to monitor the threat of Islamic terrorism in the UK.
46:57
It's actually become quite the opposite of that.
46:58
It is now defined in its literature and this is the, this
47:03
is the, these are the principles by which our security services
47:07
and our peace are operating. That forms of terrorism now
47:12
include cultural nationalism. So any celebration of the
47:18
national culture of England or Britain in general is now
47:22
considered a form of terrorism. I know this sounds to your
47:25
listeners. They'll think I'm completely mad
47:27
if they get my book. They can look up the website in
47:29
which it says it. Any opposition to any of the the
47:34
policies by which we're threatened, whether that's mass
47:37
immigration or the rise of Sharia courts or a simple
47:41
dislike of women walking around wearing burqas, these are all
47:44
considered now forms of terrorism.
47:46
So there is a, there's many, many other examples there.
47:50
I go into the wall and I'll be listening to them all.
47:51
But there is a erasure of British culture.
47:55
It's hard to say British culture because we're a strange country.
47:58
We've been divided for so long between Wales, Scotland and
48:01
Northern Ireland and so on and so forth.
48:02
But if I can use this umbrella term, British culture that is
48:06
being systematically erased, and I don't mean simply diversified,
48:12
but to be British now is being illegalized.
48:19
It's being illegalized and assume it's going to be
48:21
criminalized as well. You can actually be arrested for
48:23
flying an English flag. You can be.
48:26
I mean, just this week I saw, you know, we are still a
48:28
Christian culture. If we're not a religious,
48:31
necessarily a very religious society, we definitely a
48:34
Protestant religious culture. Some St. preacher who had a
48:38
quote from the Bible saying God so loved his son that he
48:41
sacrificed him to save mankind, and he was told by the police
48:44
that this could be interpreted as a form of hate speech.
48:48
Yeah, this is this is a new thing.
48:50
We've had hate speech for a long time.
48:52
If anyone in the UK informs the police that they feel anxious or
48:59
threatened, simply anxious by anything that you or I say in
49:03
public or online, the police will come to us or can come to
49:10
us. They can knock on our door or
49:12
they can come up to us in the street and without telling us
49:15
what exactly it is that we've said or who can make the
49:18
complaint, can arrest us or threaten us.
49:21
At least with arrest, they'll usually give us a warning that
49:24
if we desist from speaking like this or we remove a post or
49:27
whatever, a social media post, that they will arrest us on the
49:31
grounds that is hate speech. What has gone beyond that very
49:34
recently. Now if you watch what's going on
49:35
in the UK, there's a new use of what is called public order
49:40
arrests. If someone marches along a
49:45
street. You know, there's a lot of
49:47
marches in England's, the UK in particular, England in
49:51
particular has has marches every week.
49:53
If in the middle of a a pro Palestinian protest, for
49:58
instance, against what's going on in Gaza, what's been going on
50:02
in Gaza for a long time, if an Englishman walks through with a
50:06
Union Jack, he will be arrested on the grounds that it could
50:10
have called a public disorder. Now on the grounds of that you
50:12
might think, well there might be some justification for that, but
50:15
it's gone way beyond that. Now if someone gets up with a
50:19
British flag or God forbid an English flag in a public space
50:22
in the UK, they will be told that it's a threat to public
50:25
order and therefore they will be threatened.
50:27
You have to remove it or you'll be arrested.
50:29
One of the more dangerous mutations of that, I'm sorry,
50:32
I'm slightly going off culture, but I'm going to come back to
50:34
it, is that the more violent the reaction to this display of
50:38
anything that you might call cultural nationalism or British
50:41
identity or English identity. So if someone suddenly attacks
50:44
me and says that you're a right wing racist and fascist.
50:48
And these are words which are thrown around very commonly by
50:51
woke for displaying an English flag or a British flag that is
50:55
now used by the police as justification for arresting you
50:58
because you're clearly creating a public disorder.
51:01
So the more intolerant and aggressive and violent the
51:06
protesters against my rights to freedom of expression as
51:10
protected by the Human Rights Law 19/19/98 and the European,
51:16
what is it, Commission on the Human Rights, the more violent
51:19
they threaten me or actually attack me, the more proof theory
51:23
is that I am therefore guilty of creating a public disorder.
51:28
So your listeners, Yeah, I basically this is I guess in
51:30
South Africa. I don't know, it's a pretty
51:31
crazy place itself. This may sound like insanity.
51:34
This in a way is what I'm trying to understand.
51:36
How is it that the culture industry of the UK, which after
51:41
all is people not only by artists by, but by gallery
51:45
owners, curators, the huge network of people who make the
51:48
culture industry out of art. How is it that they have not
51:52
only not opposed this, but have actually accommodated to have
51:56
turned these spaces of thought and debate and expression into
52:00
places in which this clear insanity, which goes against
52:03
everything that you could call European civilization or British
52:06
culture already, or the history and so on?
52:08
How has these these places become vehicles for the
52:11
dissemination of a dogma and an ideology that is work that goes
52:17
against everything that we understand, not just you and I,
52:21
not just our generation, but it goes back for, I would say, 1000
52:25
years of European civilization. The reason that they're doing
52:28
that is because once you've eradicated these values, these
52:32
principles, these understandings of how we live together, that
52:35
I've got a right. I mean, I would agree with
52:37
someone getting up and flying a flag, but they shouldn't be
52:40
arrested for doing so. If they shout out something
52:42
which I find offensive, I might go off to them if once and say I
52:46
disagree with you and This is why.
52:47
But that all that's gone now. Now it's simply a rest that is a
52:51
police state and I would say it's a fascist state.
52:54
It's probably the wrong word because woke is a fascist
52:56
ideology. He shows a lot of fascism.
52:59
It doesn't debate, it relieves in censorship and it believes in
53:02
violence as well. How's that happened?
53:04
No, I think the reason it's happened.
53:06
I know that we discussed how it's happened.
53:08
The reason it's happened is I think because the end game, the
53:14
immediate end game over the next 2050 by 2050, by 2070 at the
53:20
very latest, is the replacement of the European people in the
53:29
European continent, in the EU, if you like, and including the
53:34
UK. Not the absolute replacement of
53:37
those people, but the, because the people become conquered way
53:42
before they become a minority in their own country.
53:44
You can see that for instance, in, in Palestine or, or Israel,
53:49
even though the Israelis there have been a, a minority up until
53:52
fairly recent, I think it's still kind of a balance.
53:54
They've run the country for a very long time before that.
53:57
And I think what's happening to the happening across Europe, not
54:00
just in the UK, though we're definitely at the forefront of
54:02
it now, is that the, the civil service of, of the UK and I
54:07
think across Europe, the educational sector, the
54:11
political sector, the cultural sector, definitely the, the kind
54:18
of the professional class, the administrative class who run the
54:20
country is being entirely replaced or has been entirely
54:23
replaced by acolytes in the Church of woke.
54:27
This extremely intolerant ideology which wants to
54:33
basically change UK and make it no longer a British society.
54:37
So that's the role I think the art is playing at the moment.
54:40
We can only. Do bland, by the way.
54:42
Yeah, sorry. It is the clicky.
54:43
It is. It is that it is a form of
54:46
what's it's a unique form of colonialism, colonialism in the
54:50
past, the great years of colonialism, if you like a lot
54:54
of it instigated by the British Empire, of course.
54:57
Well, as you go into a country, you take over its control.
55:01
And you know, in the case of India, the, the, the Raj as it
55:04
was called, it wasn't a billion people then, but it was about
55:08
500 million, wasn't it? It was still an enormous
55:10
population. It was run by about 5000 civil
55:12
servants, but they didn't replace the population.
55:15
What's going on now in Europe and to an extent in the US, in
55:20
Australasia as well, in Australia and New Zealand, is
55:22
the nature populations are being replaced by people from deeply
55:28
incompatible cultures and backgrounds and ideas about how
55:31
we live together, cultural backgrounds, ideological
55:33
backgrounds, religious backgrounds and so on and so
55:35
forth. And I think we can only do that
55:37
if we can. I can see it's being done if you
55:40
take away the cultural infrastructure, if you like, by
55:45
which a British people are bound together.
55:48
There's a belief, which is one of the principles of woke, that
55:52
as soon as someone comes into a country, they become a
55:56
nationality of that country. I find it very amusing.
55:59
You know, I've got friends here in China who lived here for
56:02
about 18 years. Both their children are born and
56:04
grew up here. They both speak Mandarin.
56:07
But if anyone called them Chinese, they think they were
56:09
mad. But in, but in the UK, everyone
56:13
who enters the UK, as soon as they get their citizenship or
56:15
even before that, before that, they suddenly become British.
56:19
Now, I think the the basis of that, again, this is a lunacy.
56:23
It's not racism to say otherwise.
56:24
It's it's, you know, cultures are essentially national in
56:31
their origins and beyond that they're regional in their
56:34
expressions, multicultural and was about the erasure of those
56:38
national boundaries, I think. And that was seen as a good
56:41
thing. But the idea that as soon as
56:45
someone steps into a country, no matter where they come from,
56:48
they therefore become British or whatever, they can have
56:52
citizenship. That's very different work kind
56:54
of collapses the difference between citizenship and a
56:56
nationality that I think is a very that's a fundamental
57:02
precept or principle of replacement immigration.
57:07
One of I happen to think, you know, European civilization is
57:11
possibly it's one of the greatest civilizations there's
57:13
ever been. The modern world doesn't exist
57:16
without it. Yes, it has lots of faults.
57:19
All great civilizations did. Roman did.
57:21
There's all sorts of great moments in different
57:22
civilizations, whether it is great or not or one of the
57:25
greatest. It's, it's, it's, it's, it comes
57:28
out of the languages, the national cultures, the beliefs,
57:33
the values, the interactions, which has often been very
57:36
bloody. And all the things that make
57:38
European people European, which is different from African
57:41
peoples or Muslim peoples or, you know, all overall Chinese
57:45
peoples or whatever. All the, there's nothing wrong
57:47
with that. We're nothing like what we used
57:50
to be. We're shadows of our former
57:52
selves. But that's what European culture
57:54
is. If you replace the people of
57:56
Europe with people from very, very different cultural
57:59
backgrounds, that civilisation will die.
58:02
Europe isn't a security apparatus, it is not a
58:05
continent, it is not an idea. It is the people who occupy that
58:10
place. And if you want to replace those
58:12
people, you have to destroy their culture.
58:14
And I think that's what's been going on.
58:16
Just to add to something you mentioned earlier about, but the
58:20
British, I'm a result of, of the British, you know, coming to
58:25
this southern tip of Africa, and I'm not British, but my
58:29
ancestors obviously are. And I can tell you right now
58:32
that South Africa, quote UN quote, the rainbow nation is a
58:36
complete disaster. It cannot work.
58:38
It doesn't work. It's a failure.
58:40
Multiculturalism, when it's imposed, just does not work.
58:44
It creates more conflict than anything else.
58:49
Yes, I mean, yeah, I mean, multiculturalism was, it was a
58:53
product of neoliberalism, wasn't it?
58:54
It was a bunch of, it was a bunch of, it was a lot of
58:58
things, but it was most, it was first and foremost about the
59:00
movement of labour that is people and the movement of
59:05
money, finances around the world without those bubbles of money
59:09
and these people being subject to the employment laws or the
59:13
taxes or the transparency laws of individual countries.
59:16
It was about the attack on the nation state.
59:18
You know, I think a lot of what's been happening in culture
59:22
and therefore in art over the last 50 years has been about the
59:25
dismantling of the nation state, which we've talked about
59:28
elsewhere. And when you have dismantled the
59:30
nation state, people no longer have a nationality.
59:33
They're not going to have any bonds to each other, like it or
59:36
not. And the woke don't like it.
59:40
People like to be amongst their own.
59:44
It's a very natural thing. You know, I live in a place in
59:47
Hong Kong where I'm a very, very rare here.
59:50
You know, there's very few Westerners left here unless you
59:52
sort of go into central and you go to the financial district.
59:55
And they like living with each other.
59:58
And they kind of look at me like saying, what are you doing here?
1:00:00
And I wonder the same question. If they asked me, I'd say
1:00:03
because I no longer have a country, I can't live in Britain
1:00:06
anymore. It's not I, I don't feel safe
1:00:08
there. I'm worried that I'd get
1:00:10
arrested or my girlfriend would be raped by someone.
1:00:12
It's a very, very dangerous country, but more than that, I
1:00:16
don't feel any affinity with the people there anymore.
1:00:19
Maybe if I went off into the country and so on.
1:00:21
So it's no longer my country. And I think depriving people of
1:00:25
their country or their sense of belonging to their fellow man or
1:00:29
their ability to create communities.
1:00:32
And above all, I think maybe not above all, but very importantly,
1:00:36
to pass down the values they got from their parents to their
1:00:40
children. And to have a, a continuity of
1:00:44
their, of their mores, of their cultures, of their beliefs, of
1:00:47
their values. Even if their religions,
1:00:48
whatever it is that makes up a culture that all gets destroyed.
1:00:52
And that leaves us as individuals absolutely exposed
1:00:57
to the people with the power over the culture, industry, the
1:01:01
media, the, you know, the, the, our politics, our laws and so on
1:01:04
and so forth. So yes, that's that's the bigger
1:01:09
picture, if you like, of I think why starting with an observation
1:01:13
of why is there no more art anymore in the way that you and
1:01:16
I understand it, it's actually part of a far bigger movement in
1:01:22
which we are being left defenseless against the
1:01:26
apparatuses of the state and the private sector behind it, if you
1:01:31
like. At the beginning of our
1:01:33
conversation, I asked what is art?
1:01:35
But perhaps a better way to end the conversation is to ask the
1:01:39
question, What was art? What was art?
1:01:44
I came up at the end of my, I don't know if you've read the
1:01:48
preference, but I came up with that.
1:01:50
I called it the Piper and the Archer.
1:01:53
And it goes back to the, you know that.
1:01:56
Well, the way I know it is, it's it's an old legend about the
1:02:00
Pied Piper of Hamlin Place in Germany, where they have an
1:02:05
infestation of rats in the town. The Piper comes in.
1:02:07
This is just remember, remind your viewers if they don't know
1:02:09
your listeners and the piper says, it's OK, I can, I can pipe
1:02:13
and chase. The rats will follow me and I'll
1:02:15
I'll rid you of this play. And they will get together and
1:02:17
say, great, wonderful, we'll pay you 500 guilders.
1:02:21
He does. He takes the rats away.
1:02:23
And when he comes back and answers it, they go, oh, I'll
1:02:26
give you 50. And they go back on their
1:02:28
promises. So the piper looks at them and
1:02:31
says, OK, and he does his piper and he takes the children away
1:02:33
instead. It's actually a a legend myth,
1:02:37
if you like, that goes back to the Middle Ages.
1:02:41
And I think artists like to see themselves as the piper, that is
1:02:46
someone who has magical powers but who is critical and punishes
1:02:52
the state when it doesn't honour it's Allegiant, it's role.
1:02:56
It's it's, it's doesn't all it's promises to society.
1:03:01
You've registered the rats. Oh no, no, you're not going to
1:03:03
pay us. Unfortunately, I think for some
1:03:06
time now artists have that's what art was.
1:03:09
It keeps, it helps keep it keep. It's one of the checks and
1:03:12
balances on the people in power, not honouring their promises to
1:03:16
the community and the society, whether that's a town or a whole
1:03:20
country. Now they've become pipers for
1:03:24
the state. Now they lead our children into
1:03:27
the river of woke. They lead into putting on masks,
1:03:30
they lead into injecting themselves, which they against a
1:03:32
disease which they are absolutely, almost entirely
1:03:35
immune to. They leads our children into
1:03:38
telling them that they're born in the wrong body, although they
1:03:41
should mutilate themselves. Artists have become voice
1:03:44
pieces, mouthpieces of the state instead of the defenders of the
1:03:47
people against it. And I think that's a fundamental
1:03:50
change about what art was or has been for a long time to what
1:03:54
it's become now. All right, Simon, how can my
1:03:57
audience follow you? You could follow me probably
1:04:01
best on Twitter or X as it's called now I'm at at Simon Elmer
1:04:05
2022. And if you'd like to buy a copy
1:04:10
of my book, let me plug this because called Culture wars.
1:04:16
Strangely, amazon.co UK, the Amazon the the UK version of
1:04:20
Amazon will not distribute my book now, which is never done
1:04:23
with any of my other books. I'm trying to resolve at the
1:04:25
moment. You can get it on dot com the
1:04:28
the US version or if you go onto my my my Twitter account, my ex
1:04:33
account at Simon Elmer 2022. It will lead you to my website
1:04:38
and you can buy it off that. Please do.
1:04:41
Simon Elmer, thank you for joining me in the trenches.
1:04:44
OK. Thank you very much, Jeremy.
1:04:45
Good to talk to you.