The Hated and the Dead

Alex Salmond was First Minister of Scotland between 2007 and 2014, during which time he led the unsuccessful referendum campaign for Scottish independence.

Salmond was a ruthless political operator, who was difficult to pin down on the political spectrum. This made him the perfect candidate to spearhead the independence campaign, as he meant different things to different voters. This ambiguity can make it difficult for non-Scots, like me, to get to grips with the drive for independence.

The guest I have chosen to discuss Salmond is Murray Pittock. Murray is a Scottish historian, and a professor of literature at the University of Glasgow. He is also the author of a large selection of works on Scottish history, including 2022’s Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present. 

As well as Salmond, we discuss the ideological variety inside the independence movement, Scotland’s relationship to North Sea Oil, Scotland’s experience with Blairism and New Labour, and the state of the SNP in 2024. 

Islam Karimov was the 1st President of Uzbekistan from 1991 until his death in 2016. 

Terrified by the economic devastation which gripped Russia in the 1990s, Karimov decided that he would rather close the door firmly on market economics if the transition towards it risked even slightly going the same way as Uzbekistan's former masters.

And so, Uzbekistan fossilised. The state retained ownership and control of industry. New collectivised farms were established. Foreign currencies were kept out - at least officially. Was Karimov right to do this? What were the trade offs involved? Should countries in the Global South be allowed to reject modernity? These are the dilemmas at the heart of today’s episode.

My guest today is Jen Murtazashvili. Jen is the Founding Director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is also a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and lived and worked in Uzbekistan on behalf of the United States Agency for International Development during the 1990s and early 2000s, before being asked to leave by Karimov’s government. 

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and longtime leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), now the Netherlands' largest political party, following a surprise victory in the country's November election. 

Wilders has made a name for himself across Europe as the continent’s most outspoken anti-Islam politician. Marine Le Pen might be more powerful and more widely known, but her rhetoric pails in comparison to that of Wilders, who has faced charges in court on incitement against Muslims, and who has lived under permanent police protection since 2004.

When right wing populist insurgencies succeed in troubled countries- Argentina, Israel, or Italy- most people aren’t surprised. But the Netherlands? Really? The Netherlands is about as similar to the UK as you can get. Whether you’re uplifted or deflated by Wilders’ success, you can’t discount it as insignificant.

My guest today is a return guest to the podcast; he is Guus Valk. Guus is the political editor of Dutch newspaper NRC, and was also my guest for an episode we recorded in August last year, about Pim Fortuyn, a figure who shares much in common with Wilders.

Hun Sen is the longest-serving prime minister in Cambodian history, having led the country from 1998 until August this year.

Hun has a complex legacy; he has ruled with a rod of iron, showing little mercy towards his political opponents. But as my guest today says, he is also the man who has taken Cambodia from the years of Pol Pot to the ambiguous modernity of the present. The Cambodia of 2023 juxtaposes rural backwardness with newly booming urban centres populated with an emerging middle class who are increasingly detached from their country counterparts.

This mixture of authoritarianism and capitalism has become a major theme of global politics in the last ten years, one of the reasons for which is the arrival, or re-arrival, of China onto the world stage. With the world becoming less democratic, Hun Sen may resemble the future of politics for many parts of the globe.

My guest today is Sebastian Strangio. Sebastian is the Southeast Asia editor at the Diplomat, a current affairs magazine focusing on the Asia-Pacific Region. He is also the author of Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen and Beyond, and In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century, which I would highly recommend. 

Vytautas Landsbergis led the modern Lithuanian independence movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

Lithuania became the first of the fifteen Soviet Republics to declare independence from Moscow. This was a remarkably plucky move from such a small nation, but it changed the course of world history; two years later, Lithuania was an independent country, and the Soviet Union no longer existed.

Thirty years later, Lithuania is once again looking east at a Russia probably intent on swallowing up the Baltics again. Lithuania is a strong democracy, and is probably more steadfast and serious about its democracy than many other countries in the West. And there’s probably good reason for this; it knows democracy has maintenance costs, and it knows what it costs to leave democracy fall into disrepair. 

My guest today is Elisabeth Braw. Elisabeth is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on deterrence against emerging forms of aggression. She is also an Associate Fellow at the European Leadership Network, and writes for Foreign Policy and Politico Europe. She also has a book coming out in February called Goodbye Globalisation. 

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been the President of Egypt since 2014. 

Egypt perennially struggles economically and politically, with high inflation, widespread youth unemployment and military dictatorship. In fact, Egypt has been under military dictatorship for nearly seventy uninterrupted years- nearly, because after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, democratically elected Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, came to power. But he was soon deposed in a military coup in 2013. The man who took his place was Sisi, today's subject.

But as you’re about to hear, Sisi’s Egypt is far from stable, his continued leadership far from assured. He walks a constant tightrope, lurching from one crisis to another, painfully aware that among his three immediate predecessors as President, one was assassinated, another forced to resign, and the third imprisoned, later dying behind bars. 

My guest today is Amy Hawthorne. Amy is a Middle East specialist who has formally worked with the US State Department, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Project in Middle East Democracy. As well as Sisi’s leadership style and background, we discuss the 2011 Revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s dire economic situation, and Egypt’s perspective on the War in Gaza.

Joe Biden has been President of the United States since 2021. However, this episode, unlike most others in this series, isn’t biographical; rather, what my guest and I examine today, are the prospects for Joe Biden’s re-election as US President next year, almost exactly one year out from the 2024 presidential election.

On the surface of it, Joe Biden’s polling numbers aren’t appealing. 538, America’s king of polling companies, puts his approval rating at 38%. My guest today, though, holds little-to-no regard for polling as a way of forecasting election outcomes. That guest is Allan Lichtman, and in the early 1980s, he devised a comprehensive model for predicting the outcomes of presidential elections. This model, the 13 Keys to the White House, offers the reader 13 questions provoking answers of either true or false.

But here’s the thing - the true or false questions mostly pertain to the performance of the president in office rather than the two campaigns, hence the general disregard for polling. The questions relate to matters such as foreign policy, economic management, internal party unity and scandal. If you place faith in the 13 Keys model, it shows you that Biden’s poor approval rating has not yet stymied his campaign for re-election, and that a second term for the 46th President is still very much in play. 

So today, Allan and I go through the 13 Keys and assess how the President is lining up against them. 

DISCLAIMER: Allan hasn’t made his prediction for the 2024 election yet, and any assumptions made in this podcast about the way some keys might turn out in the future are all my assumptions. This is another way of saying that not all of the 13 true/false questions can be answered just yet. But some can, and they provide important insights into Joe Biden’s performance as US president thus far.

Alex Jones is an American political commentator, new media personality, and conspiracy theorist.

Conspiracy theory- which we will here define as attributing the occurrence of events or phenomena to sinister or secret organisations- infects all parts of the political spectrum and exists across the World. However, to a certain portion of the American right, conspiracy theory does not merely influence their thinking; it is their thinking. Any government programme or action is interpreted as an insidious attempt by a secret cabal of bureaucrats to enhance their own power.

Jones’ pronouncements- most notoriously his claims that the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting were paid actors- are so strange and extreme that they serve as a way of allowing people to push conspiracy theory to the far-right, and of allowing people to claim that their own views are based in truth and objectivity. Any suggestion of government conspiracy at all is now pilloried as crazy and fringe.

But where does this leave us when the Government, and the establishment media, does act dishonestly, as they do from time to time? Clearly, we cannot live in a society where the public almost by default does not trust anything the government tells it. But nor can we live in a society where the public blithely accepts everything authority figures do or say, either. We all have a responsibility to examine information critically, and this is important whether it comes from Alex Jones or Emily Maitlis, Tucker Carlson or Chris Cuomo.

My guest today is Elizabeth Williamson. Elizabeth is a features writer for the New York Times who has covered Jones extensively, especially in relation to his legal troubles surrounding the Sandy Hook School shooting. As well as taking about Jones, we discuss the importance of conspiracy theory to the American far right, the rise of fringe movements in the country since the 1990s, and how the mainstream media can begin to regain the trust it has lost.

Today’s podcast looks at one of the most important and intricate stories in recent American history; the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the run up to, and aftermath of, the 2016 Presidential Election. The episode's subject, Robert Mueller, was the FBI Director before the election, but became infamous for his role as Special Counsel to the US Department of Justice, for which he investigated alleged collusion between the campaign of Donald Trump and actors linked to the Russian state.

Mueller's role in the 2016 election and the Trump presidency symbolises a consensus around the security services and law enforcement which the US is rapidly losing- a poll from January 2023 conducted by APM Research found that 51% of Republicans believe the FBI is biased against Donald Trump, and 43% of Gen Z - those born after 1997 - believe the FBI is biased against the left. Of course, trust has to be earned, and the history of the FBI hasn’t always inspired such feeling. But just as you shouldn’t blindly trust an institution, you also shouldn’t not trust it as a default position either. If American democracy is to survive, its people have to be willing to find a medium between these two positions.

My guest today is Devlin Barrett. Devlin is a reporter at The Washington Post, whose work focuses on the FBI, the US Department of Justice, and US law enforcement. He is also the author of October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election, which focuses on the time period we discuss today.

At the heart of Australia’s security policy lies a crucial question; should Australia, a country situated thousands of kilometres away from the Asian landmass, defend itself by casting out on the Pacific Ocean and pushing militarily towards Asia? As is often said, attack is the best form of defence…

This is certainly the view taken by the signatories of AUKUS- a 2021 security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, under the terms of which Australia will contribute heavily to the United States’ fleet of nuclear submarines- with the strong implication that these submarines will be used to counter growing Chinese military influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Today's guest sees this offensive strategy and unrealistic and mistaken. Instead, he suggests that Australia should take advantage of its geographic isolation and focus on defending its own shores; assume China will come to Australia one day, and build sufficient military capacity to deter their aggression in the meantime. He is, therefore, one of Australia’s AUKUS Skeptics, the namesake for today’s episode.

That guest is Sam Roggeveen, Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Programme, and author of a new book called The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace. The Echidna Strategy is the name Sam gives to his preferred conception of Australian security.