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Innhold levert av Liberty Fund and James Patterson. Alt podcastinnhold, inkludert episoder, grafikk og podcastbeskrivelser, lastes opp og leveres direkte av Liberty Fund and James Patterson eller deres podcastplattformpartner. Hvis du tror at noen bruker det opphavsrettsbeskyttede verket ditt uten din tillatelse, kan du følge prosessen skissert her https://no.player.fm/legal.
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Curated Questions: Conversations Celebrating the Power of Questions!
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20:50This episode dives into the significant political question posed by Ronald Reagan during the closing moments of his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter: 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' Ken Woodward explores the context of the 1980 political climate, marked by economic difficulties, high inflation, unemployment, and international issues such as the Iran hostage crisis and concerns about U.S. global standing and nuclear threats. Reagan's question, which became iconic in U.S. political discourse, was noted for its simplicity, personal relevance, emotional resonance, and strategic timing. The question invited voters to reflect on their circumstances rather than abstract policies, ultimately contributing to Reagan's landslide victory. The episode details six crucial lessons for crafting influential questions, emphasizing audience perspective, engagement, simplicity, timing, self-reflection, and a call to action. Listeners are encouraged to consider how such questions have shaped their decisions and to apply these insights in personal and professional contexts. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com . Keep questioning! Episode Notes [01:58] Setting the Stage: The 1980 Presidential Debate [04:24] Reagan's Memorable Question [06:01] Impact and Aftermath of the Debate [06:45] Analyzing the Rhetorical Question [13:06] Lessons from Reagan's Question [16:05] Modern Applications and Reflections [18:04] Conclusion and Call to Action Resources Mentioned Ronald Reagan Jimmy Carter Beauty Pill Producer Ben Ford Questions Asked Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago? Where do you feel it in your body? What emotions come to the surface? What pictures race through your mind? Would it kill you to stop chewing your food with your mouth open? What is your number seven? What comes to mind? Did you feel the knee-jerk need to answer right away when your politician asked? Did you actually do the homework to determine what factors were most important to you, then look at data vice depending on emotion? Is it any easier to see why someone in a different circumstance may answer differently than you? How did the question affect your answer when the opposing politician asked it? Did you use the same metric for the candidates or give your preferred candidate extra leeway? What famous questions continue to pop up in your world?…
The Law & Liberty Podcast
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Innhold levert av Liberty Fund and James Patterson. Alt podcastinnhold, inkludert episoder, grafikk og podcastbeskrivelser, lastes opp og leveres direkte av Liberty Fund and James Patterson eller deres podcastplattformpartner. Hvis du tror at noen bruker det opphavsrettsbeskyttede verket ditt uten din tillatelse, kan du følge prosessen skissert her https://no.player.fm/legal.
Law & Liberty’s James Patterson interviews prominent authors and thinkers. A production of Liberty Fund.
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continue reading
100 episoder
Merk alt (u)spilt...
Manage series 3548903
Innhold levert av Liberty Fund and James Patterson. Alt podcastinnhold, inkludert episoder, grafikk og podcastbeskrivelser, lastes opp og leveres direkte av Liberty Fund and James Patterson eller deres podcastplattformpartner. Hvis du tror at noen bruker det opphavsrettsbeskyttede verket ditt uten din tillatelse, kan du følge prosessen skissert her https://no.player.fm/legal.
Law & Liberty’s James Patterson interviews prominent authors and thinkers. A production of Liberty Fund.
…
continue reading
100 episoder
Alle episoder
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
A poorly worded tweet became a career-altering conflagration for Ilya Shapiro in a particularly egregious example of cancel culture. It prompted him to take a hard look at the state of legal education, which he now skewers in Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elite . He and host James Patterson discuss the book, the atrocious impact critical theory and DEI has had on our law schools, and what the future might hold.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
Anyone could be forgiven for not knowing much about Peter Viereck. The eccentric historian and poet was one of the first mid-century thinkers to robustly embrace the "conservative" label, but he fell out of favor with movement conservatives and has been largely forgotten. John Wilsey thinks that's a mistake. He joins Law & Liberty 's editor, John Grove, to talk about Viereck and his unique conservative manner of approaching the challenges of modern life. Related Links John Wilsey, " Peter Viereck's Unadjusted Conservatism ," Law & Liberty Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Winston Churchill Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited Peter Viereck, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment John Wilsey, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (pre-order) Claes Ryn, " Peter Viereck: Traditionalist Libertarian? " Law & Liberty Robert Lacey, Pragmatic Conservatism…
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Konstantin Kisin has emerged as a powerful voice opposing "wokeness" in part because he has a unique appreciation for what makes Western civilization special. He and Helen Dale discuss the current state of wokeness, his own engagement with it, and the politics of the US, UK, and Australia. Ultimately, the moment calls not just for diagnosing Western malaise, but also gratitude for all the West offers us, and optimism for its future.…
In the wake of the 2024 election, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels joins James Patterson to talk about the one issue politicians all try to avoid: the national debt. Though we have an impending debt disaster, both sides of the aisle avoid the hard choices that will eventually need to be made. Today, Daniels worries, it may be too late for a soft landing. We chose not to find solutions, and we'll start living with consequences very soon. Daniels and Patterson also touch on the state of higher education, the election, and our evolving partisan dynamics. Further Reading: Mitch Daniels, " The Day the Dollar Died ," Washington Post Mitch Daniels, " I'm Talking to You ," Law & Liberty (2022 Purdue University Commencement Remarks) Vance Ginn and Thomas Savidge, " Two Rules to Tackle America's Debt ," Law & Liberty Samuel Gregg, " David Hume and America's Debt Disaster ," Law & Liberty…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
The past five years have been tumultuous ones for elite higher education. Campuses have been rocked by plagiarism scandals, ugly and violent protests, and revelations about admissions discrimination that went on under the guise of affirmative action. Meanwhile, reformers are trying out new approaches, from civics institutes to more robust legislative oversight of public universities to brand new private institutions. How pivotal will these years turn out to be? And what strategies are most likely to revive the mission of the university? Law & Liberty senior writer James Hankins has hope for a higher-ed renaissance.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
When conservatives debate fundamentals, it does not take long for "fusionism" to come up. But it's not always clear what it is. Is it a philosophical stance or a practical coalition? Was it a historically contingent response to the Cold War or an integral part of any conservative disposition? An all-star panel joins host James Patterson to discuss and debate what fusionism really is and what the prospects are for its future. Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade consider fusionism's origins in mid-century America, its culmination in the 1980s and its current status. Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast. Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of political science and executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University. He is author of God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America, and After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, and has written for many publications. He is the editor of FUSION. Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute. Related Links: Charles C. W. Cooke, " A Roadmap—If We Want It " ( Law & Liberty ) Stephanie Slade, " Is There a Future for Fusionism? " ( Reason ) FUSION: In the Tradition of Liberty , (Samuel Goldman, Editor) Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
Human beings are flawed, finite creatures. But they are not problems to be solved, argues AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience . In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a "new humanism" that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly "touch grass." Related Links: The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen) The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj Irony and Outrage (Dannagal Goldthwaite Young) " A Long View on Artificial Intelligence " (A Law & Liberty forum on artificial intellegence led by Rachel Lomasky) " What the Smartphone Hath Wrought ," (A Law & Liberty review by Joseph Holmes of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation ) Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She lives in Washington, DC.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
As students head back to classrooms, host James Patterson welcomes education experts Frederick Hess and Michael McShane to the podcast. We are still finding the "new normal" after Covid lockdown shook our education system—and public confidence in schools. Too often, our schools are guided by ideas developed by policymakers, intellectuals, and administrators who are separated from the needs of the classroom. Ranging from cell phones in class to school choice, from gender theory to administrative bloat, the conversation points in hopeful directions, drawn in part from their recent book, Getting Education Right . Related Links: Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, Getting Education Right " Taking on the College Cartel ," Frederick Hess and Michael McShane ( Law & Liberty ) " Opening Doors for School Choice ," Frederick Hess ( Law & Liberty ) " A Unified Theory of Education ," Frederick Hess and Michael McShane ( National Affairs ) Rick Hess Straight Up (Education Week) Old School with Rick Hess (Education Next) Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues. Michael Q. McShane is an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and director of national research at EdChoice, where he studies and writes about K–12 education policy, including private and religious schools and the politics of education.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast , Helen Dale joins host James Patterson to discuss the rise of new sectarianism in the UK, political and civil unrest, and how the Australians performed in the Olympics. Helen Dale is a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty . She won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper , and read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, Kingdom of the Wicked , was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. She writes for a number of outlets, including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint , and Quillette . She lives in London, is on substack at helendale.substack.com , and on Twitter @_HelenDale Show Notes: " The New Sectarianism " (Helen Dale for Law & Liberty ) Helen Dale's Substack " The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples " (Rachel Lu for Law & Liberty )…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
In a time of partisanship and dissention, can the Constitution provide the kind of unity we seek? Yes and no, argues AEI Senior Fellow and author Yuval Levin in his new book, American Covenant . The Constitution offers a kind of unity, but a limited one, that falls short of what many hope for. He joins host James Patterson to discuss constitutional history, our present social tensions, and what's wrong with our institutions. Notes: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again Law & Liberty symposium on Levin's book "Constituting Unity", a Law & Liberty forum led by Levin.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast , host James Patterson sits down with contributing editor John O. McGinnis and AEI’s Adam White to discuss what the Supreme Court's latest rulings mean for the future of law in America. Show notes: https://lawliberty.org/forum/constitutional-government-after-chevron/ https://www.amazon.com/Originalism-Good-Constitution-John-McGinnis/dp/0674725077 Law & Liberty Supreme Court coverage: https://lawliberty.org/emancipating-the-constitution-from-non-originalist-precedent/ https://lawliberty.org/netchoice-and-the-big-tech-scare/ https://lawliberty.org/jarkesy-rejuvenates-juries/ https://lawliberty.org/murthys-maddening-modesty/ https://lawliberty.org/a-loper-bright-future-for-statutory-interpretation/ https://lawliberty.org/a-specious-form-of-judicial-restraint/ https://lawliberty.org/moores-unrealized-potential/…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
On the first episode of The Law & Liberty Podcast , host James M. Patterson sits down with Richard M. Reinsch, who was the founder of Law & Liberty and the host of our original podcast series, and is currently a Senior Writer for the magazine. Listen to Patterson and Reinsch discuss contemporary trade policy blunders and prospects, the economic resilience of blue-collar towns, and Reinsch’s new projects at the American Institute for Economic Research. Richard M. Reinsch II is Editor-in-Chief and Director of Publications at AIER. He is co-author with Peter A. Lawler of A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty . He writes regularly for National Review and Acton’s Journal of Religion & Liberty . Further reading: Richard’s writings at Law & Liberty AIER’s The Daily Economy Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch’s A Constitution in Full Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
Eliot A. Cohen joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss his new book on Shakespeare and power politics, The Hollow Crown . Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law and Liberty and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. Thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. But today, in fact, we are not left to any arbitrary leniency of a willful goddess of inspiration to get us going for this latest episode of Liberty Law Talk because our theme today is Shakespeare and politics, the stagecraft of statecraft, and even the statecraft of stagecraft when it comes to understanding the halls of power and those who would be in it. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting Fellow for the Independent Women's Forum. But importantly, for today, I am a partisan, wholly and devotedly, of all things Shakespeare. And joining me today is Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly counselor of the Department of State. His books include The Big Stick and Supreme Command. Thrice welcome, Eliot. What news on the Rialto, as we might say? Eliot Cohen: Well, Rebecca, first and foremost, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I lead a very odd life in some ways, bouncing between military matters at the moment, which is my professional expertise in one way, and then Shakespeare. It's odd, but it's nice to be back with Shakespeare because the rest of the world's pretty grim right now. Rebecca Burgess: All right. He provides us comfort and also much thought to chew on. So I thought, in this midwinter moment, when everyone is settling down in front of their fires, all sated with holiday cheer, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that all thoughtful people want, or are in need of, a good book and a good conversation. And voila, you have gifted us The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Just out recently by Basic Books. And so I thought we could use the next hour or so to talk about what Shakespeare teaches us about politics today or helps us analyze those in the halls of power. The characters within Shakespeare are always of interest, whether it's Henry V, whether it's Richard II, or whether it's Prospero. And I'm going to needle you about some you didn't put in there, including the prince from Much Ado About Nothing and that band of unserious statesmen, not statesmen yet, the princes in Love's Labour's Lost, who have to learn how to become serious statesmen. But I would love to start off by asking you: What has teaching Shakespeare and introducing Shakespeare into your syllabi at Johns Hopkins or others taught you anew about international relations, grand strategy, or politics? Eliot Cohen: Well, that's really a whole range of questions. Let me just start as a teacher. So, I'm about to become emeritus at Hopkins and shift over full-time to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I've had a 34-year career at Hopkins, which has been wonderful. The last course that I taught was for freshmen, and it was a freshman course on Shakespeare. And I have to say—it was just a wonderful way of rounding out a teaching career because what you see is how young people, who maybe have never really been exposed to this in a really serious way, they may have had an encounter with it in high school, but they're now at a stage where they can begin to appreciate it. You can see how it opens a world for them, and that's a delight. And it's, in a way, at a time when we could all use a bit of optimism—it's a source of optimism that you realize there's always going to be a new generation coming on, and they can respond to the classics very, very powerfully. So that's the Mr. Chips in me, if you will. I began ... I've always loved Shakespeare. I began thinking about teaching it after seeing Henry VIII, which is a play not often put on. There used to be some dispute about whether it was even by Shakespeare. I think most people think it is now a collaboration with another playwright named John Fletcher. And if your listeners will bear with me, I'd like to read the bit of the soliloquy that got it all started. So what's happened is Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII's chancellor, has just been deposed, and it's sudden, and it is a sudden fall from power. And here is what he says: "Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now has left me Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me." So my wife and I saw the play, and I was really struck by that soliloquy because my immediate reaction was, I know that guy. I mean, I've been in Washington now for well over three decades, and I've seen all kinds of things, and I was so taken by that, I took it ... I was meeting with a bunch of students who were all graduate students by the way, later on, and I said, "Let's talk about this." One thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of students at a professional school of international relations. And I think the thing that strikes you, as you study Shakespeare from the vantage point that I have, which includes a fair amount of government service as well, is, first, how a lot of the fundamental predicaments of political characters just don't change. He also mentioned how there are phenomena that he captures that are still very much with us. You just need to learn how to do the translation. So, if I can give just one example of that. So, one of the plays that I have always enjoyed teaching is Coriolanus, which is about the great Roman general who becomes a traitor and comes to a sticky end. But, first, he's an incredibly successful general. The problem is he has no political sense whatsoever. I've known a few generals like that, actually, in my time. Rebecca Burgess: Zero political prudence. Eliot Cohen: Right. Political prudence is not their strong suit. But there comes a point where he's just been tremendously successful in battle, and they're about to make him consul, which is the thing he really wants—it's the honor he really wants. But he has to kind of go along with the people, with the plebs. Until they ask him to show his wounds, to take off his toga and see the scars of battle, and then he detonates, and everything goes downhill from there. And I was teaching this to a group of graduate students, including about half a dozen people who'd been in very hard places and done hard things in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I said to them ... So these are people in their late twenties, early thirties, some of them. I said, "Don't feel obliged to answer this question, but has anybody ever asked to see your wounds?" And the conversation just exploded. Rebecca Burgess: I bet. Eliot Cohen: Because, yes. I mean, psychological wounds, not physical wounds. And so I think part of what Shakespeare gives us is the ability to see things that are around us, much more vividly in a way, because he's abstracting us from our current context. I could go on, but let me pause there and see where you want to take this. Rebecca Burgess: Well, in every direction, of course. But on this particular note of showing wounds, I think it is of interest, and we'll probably touch on it later. I think it's inevitable that in the rise to power, or in statesmanship, how much do you have to show the work of statesmanship to be a successful statesman? Are you supposed to make it look easy? Are you supposed to reveal your trials and tribulations? And I think there's a difference, perhaps, between Shakespeare's day and ours, between that. It seems like, today, we emphasize the personal story of the politician. But is it any different than that showing of the wounds, or showing of the interior, if you will? Eliot Cohen: Yeah, we like people to show their vulnerabilities. But, the point that Shakespeare is making with the story of Coriolanus is we've always wanted our leaders to show their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Now, we've taken it to a pathological extent. So I'm going to just give an example. So when they finally do the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, what do they do? They make a big point of having him in a wheelchair. In point of fact, FDR went to great lengths not to be photographed in a wheelchair because that was not the image he wanted to convey. To go back to Shakespeare, what you see is a lot of leaders who actually have all kinds of burdens, pathologies, and so on, and who do make considerable efforts to conceal them. Actually, Henry IV, the father of Prince Hal, who became Henry V, talks about that about how he tried to conceal himself. But the truth is, those things are always there. And I think one of the things Shakespeare shows us is, if you pay close attention, you can see what they are, which is a useful thing if you want to understand the people who are your leaders. The challenge that Shakespeare gives us, and the more I've read Shakespeare, and reflected on the more kind of diabolically cunning I think he is, he just gives you frequently little glimpses into a personality. And if you're not paying a lot of attention, you won't notice, which is kind of what the personality wanted. But what Shakespeare is going to do is say, okay, I will tell you the things you need to know, but you've got to watch carefully. And that's one of the things that Shakespeare can teach the student of politics, is the art of close observation. Rebecca Burgess: Well, so you already quoted Cardinal Wolsey's beautiful speech, it is so powerful. And it is from that point of vulnerability, a man who has realized that power is no longer in his grasp. Is this where we start to study power and those in power, from their vulnerabilities or the vulnerabilities inherent, or is it just one of many paths? Does it open up something, or are we missing something if we start from the standpoint of vulnerability? Eliot Cohen: I don't think that's where you start. This is Cardinal Wolsey at the end of his career, not at the beginning of his career. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Eliot Cohen: No, I think you look at all kinds of other things if you want to see how people actually get into the business of acquiring powers. The way I organized the book is I didn't go play-by-play. I began with one large section on how people get power, how they use power, and then, finally, how they lose it. Again, one of the things that's a bit sick about our current world, is that is where we want to start, with people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Not that you shouldn't pay attention to them, you should, but first you want to see, I think, what is it that makes them effective? What is it that makes them succeed? I mean, if you take Prince Hal, for example, who becomes Henry V ... Of whom, by the way, I have a very dark view, that is of King Henry V. Rebecca Burgess: You do. Eliot Cohen: A very dark view of this is Henry V, the Shakespearean character. The real Henry V, I couldn't care less. But you see him kind of having a glorious old time, hanging around with a bunch of lowlifes in the east cheap, in what's probably a brothel. And it's comic, and it's good fun. And here, again, you get to Shakespeare, the close observer. Actually, this is one of the ways in which Prince Hal is learning how to be a king, and that becomes clear, I think, later on in the play. But, again, you have to pay close attention if you want to see how this is going to feed into his ability to inspire people, to manipulate people, which he does a lot, and to rule. Rebecca Burgess: Right. The setting is, in fact, quite important for Shakespeare. I know you spend a little bit of time talking about how important, when you're talking to those who actually put on Shakespeare plays, they say that figuring out the staging, figuring out the costuming, sometimes is where they start from. It's not the secondary consideration, it is where they start from. For Shakespeare, the opening scene, the first scene, and the second scene of the first act, in fact, are always of prime importance. In Henry IV, it is so well done because you start in the halls of power before the king, and it's the exact same speech, the exact same dynamics that are in scene two with Prince Hal in the tavern. And so Shakespeare is telling you, here is politics high and low, here is England, for Prince Hal to figure out how to govern and rule England. He's going to have to figure out how to understand both of these on their own and how to tie them together. And I've always thought, gosh, darn it, that's so brilliant, how can we not do that, too? Eliot Cohen: Well, you're absolutely right. You always need to pay attention to how Shakespeare sets the stage initially. It's also very important, I think, to pay attention to the very end, where he'll occasionally drop this little thing on you, where, if you pay close attention, you go, aha. So at the end of Henry V, for example ... Throughout you've had the chorus, who is cheering Henry the V on and saying, "Oh, how can we possibly capture this guy's greatness in just this little theater of ours here, and touch of Harry in the night," all that stuff. And at the very end, the chorus says, "Thanks for being here. By the way, he died young, and his son was an infant, and all his conquests kind of fell apart. And we've talked about that before. See you later." It's just a couple of lines, but if you look at the end of that, of Henry V's story, you go, listen, why does Shakespeare put that in there? Why does he have to end on a two-line downer? And I think the reason is he's explaining a lot of the stuff that went before. One of the things that I talk about, I use, there's a technical term for it, it's what the Greeks called anagnorisis, where you suddenly realize the truth of your situation. That's what happened to Wolsey there, where he goes, I've been swimming on a sea of glory, and, poof, it's all gone. It happens to individuals, but it can happen to us as readers of Shakespeare and people who observe Shakespeare. I think if we read it closely enough, where you go, "Oh, oh, that's what's going on." But just to connect it to the real world of politics, that's very important too. I think one of the problems that we have when we talk about foreign policy, military affairs, and so on, is a lack of close attention to what's going on right before our eyes frequently. Governments, in particular, fall prey to this, and I've seen it firsthand, but I've also seen it in other places as well. You get caught up in government talking to itself, you get caught up in highly classified this and that, and you forget to say, "Whoa, that's right in front of me, that actually means something," and to pause and reflect on what it means. Rebecca Burgess: Right. And there's a timing aspect to that as well, right? And I wonder sometimes whether the pace of government in our daily life is just so frenetic now that we ... Unless someone is astute enough to carve out some time for themselves for reflection, the reflection doesn't happen. And the consequences of that, of course, as you just mentioned, we see all the time. But I've wondered about that, especially recently, since my own time in coming to DC, which has not been as glorious as yours, I'm still laboring in the analytic vineyard ... Eliot Cohen: It's still early yet. I'm towards the tail end, you're at the beginning. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Right, right. And we'll talk about that arc of power soon, so you can tell me the pitfalls to avoid. But I've wondered: Have we taken away the ability for our leaders, for ourselves, to have that moment of anagnorisis, of actually understanding the situation in front of us? Barring some huge kind of cataclysmic changing of the guard, which happened with Putin invading Russia, and then, of course, all the events on October 7th with Hamas and Israel. But should it really take something so profoundly catalytic for us to have these moments of, oh, the real world actually has changed from how we have been talking about it? Eliot Cohen: So, to get very serious for a moment, I just came back a week ago from eight days in Israel, where I'd led a small military and national security delegation to meet with a lot of people there high up. And they've just gone through this shattering experience. And, of course, one of the things ... I'm actually writing a piece about this for The Atlantic. One of the problems is that for the people at the very top they don't actually have time to process any of that. And the surge of emotions is such that you can't really expect them to process it. No, I think it's a very large problem. One thing I've always been struck by, and I made a bit of a study of some of the decision-making during the Second World War, it made a big difference that Churchill, when he would go to meet Roosevelt, would sail across the Atlantic, which meant that he would have three or four days where he wasn't checking emails, and he could think things through. And I think wise executives do try to carve out that time. I was, for my sins, I was a dean for a number of years at Hopkins. And one of the things that I learned, I said, I wanted to get an executive coach because the situation we were in was pretty difficult, and I wanted to get all the help I could get. She was a wonderful teacher and is now just a good friend. But that was one of the things she always emphasized, you've got to figure out a way to give yourself blocks of time where all you do is you think. And that's when I began taking really long walks every day and without headphones on, without listening to music, just long, long walks and I think it's a critical thing. And I do think that we've lost it in another way. I think a lot of senior political and military leaders don't have the time to immerse themselves in Shakespeare…I don't know, J. R. R. Tolkien, I mean something that is deep and fascinating other than what their day-to-day lives are like, and I think they suffer for it. Rebecca Burgess: So, to turn to the actual contents of your book, I love the taxonomy of power that you give, so essentially, your theme is power and the arc of power, and there's almost a little bit of a Homeric cataloging of ships in how you go about in acquiring power and exercising power and losing power. So, how does one acquire power? For Shakespeare, of course, there are three different ways, and you give us those. Eliot Cohen: So, the easiest way is inheritance. Now, of course, a lot of the plays that I use are primarily the histories, one or two of the tragedies, some of the Roman plays, but preeminently the history plays. And you might say, "Well, okay, fine, if you're living in a monarchy, of course, the crown prince inherits, but what relevance does that have to us?" Well, actually, it has a lot of relevance because if you stretch the concept of inheritance a bit, that's where it's not the case that you've... Let's take a particularly pointed case right now. If you become the president of Harvard, it's not because you've necessarily worked your way to the top in a difficult competitive environment. You've been picked and you enter into it. Now, in the past, it was the accidents of birth, I suppose, but it's not the same thing as building a business from scratch or building any kind of organization from scratch where you have acquired power, you've been selected somehow, which means that at some level for anybody in that situation, it's not something that you've acquired on your own. Rebecca Burgess: Figured out the mechanics of. Eliot Cohen: Right. And with all the learning and the scars that are associated with that, and inheritance is a fraught thing. The reason why Henry V is successful as a king, I think, is because even though he is inheriting the crown, first, the process is very difficult. He and his father have a terrible relationship. It isn't even entirely cleaned up at the end before Henry IV dies. But what Henry V has figured out is he actually has to earn this. And I think a lot of people who get picked for very high-level positions, one way or another, don't fully appreciate that. They don't fully appreciate that, actually, even though they have been selected, they still have to earn it. That's a very difficult lesson, I think, for lots of people. I then talk about how people acquire power by means, which might be somewhat underhanded, sort of maneuvering. And that's really the Henry IV case. I mean, there's a bit of crime there. He does kill his predecessor, but it's not simply a criminal seizure. It's some of the dark arts. And Washington, DC is filled with people who practice the dark arts. And the challenge there I think, is for people who often have used somewhat underhanded means to get where they are again, to establish legitimacy, and they too have to earn it. You have the third mode that I talk about is seizure, where it's basically a crime. It's what Macbeth does. He kills off his predecessor, and then... And, of course, the problem that he faces, which he recognizes, and he does it anyway, is that once you've seized power by murder, you have to keep on killing people. And there's a big difference between him and Henry IV, Henry IV maneuvers Richard II out of power. He later on has him killed, but that's a separate matter, whereas in Macbeth, it's straightforward. I mean, it's bloodshed. And there, too, people don't usually do that nowadays in organizations and bureaucracies by actually literally sticking a knife into somebody. But if you hang around any organization long enough, sooner or later, you will see somebody turning around and finding a knife that has been planted in their back frequently by somebody they didn't expect. And then people are living with the consequence of a seizure powered by a coup. And I guess the larger point for all three methods is that... Actually, people sometimes think, "Okay, once I'm in charge, things are cool." No, that's when it all begins, actually. And you always have to work at ways, people find themselves always having to work at ways to make their power legitimate and to make it effective and to be able to hold onto it. Rebecca Burgess: That's one of the really interesting contrasts, I think. Similarities in contrast, as you mentioned between Henry IV and Macbeth, is when you get to Henry IV, Part II, Henry, now King Henry, realizes that the exact same arguments he used to oust his cousin, Richard II, can be used in turn against him. And how do you prevent that? So, he made appeals to competence. He made appeals to his own ability, to justice, all of these things. But in effect, it really came down to he had a greater ability and a greater kingly sway and that was what was legitimate, trumping the blood, trumping all of these things. And suddenly, he realizes, "Oh, there are these generals lords on my borders who are also very militarily competent who are winning some of these wars for me, and now they're looking at me, and they are discontented with me. How do I stab off suddenly?" And you talk about that legitimacy question and how that also affects Prince Hal. He, as prince in waiting, as king and waiting, it turns out that is the most dangerous position and most difficult to be in because he is an automatic threat to his own father. So he can't be serious around his father. So, from the perspective of the one coming up to power, how do you guard yourself against your own father so that you can get the foothold to establish rule? Eliot Cohen: It's a very common thing. One of the points I make in the book is that Shakespeare is fascinated by the politics of courts. And again, you might think, "Well, okay, we don't live in monarchies," or, I mean, the Brits do, but we don't. And even that is a different kind of monarchy for sure than it once was. But actually, if you think about any organization, it's a court. The guy or gal at the top is the king or the queen. There may well be a crown prince who's sort of designated. By the way, that's not always the case in Macbeth, and under Scottish law, the king can pick their successors. So it's not necessarily going to go down to his son. That's one of the issues that Macbeth confronts. You have various courtiers who might think that, "I'd actually be a much better king than the current king." There's usually a court jester or two. So that phenomenon, I've seen it in universities, I've seen it in the State Department, I've seen it in the Defense Department. It's universal. People live in courts. The other thing is the shadow, just to go back to Henry IV, the shadow of illegitimacy. The good thing about inheritance is it involves a certain kind of legitimacy, whether because you're the son or daughter of the king or because there's been some sort of formal process that everybody perceives as legitimate for the selection of the next CEO. When people have acquired power in not entirely legitimate ways, I think one of the fascinating things that Shakespeare shows us is it never goes away. So in Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, when Henry V is feeling sorry for himself, he's about to manipulate his men into thinking that he's one of them, which he isn't. He tries to buy God off. He says, "So I'm going to give lots of money to the church, and I've got people singing psalms. We're going to rebury Richard II." It's one of the reasons why I think he's such a creep. He is a guy who feels he can manipulate everybody, including God. But the main point here, I think, is he knows that what his father did was illegitimate, and some of the shadow of that falls even on him. Rebecca Burgess: Right, yeah. Well, I must admit to being one of those who are swayed by the rhetoric of the chorus, and I buy in, I buy in. Eliot Cohen: So here's the fascinating thing: you're not alone. I mean, I once did a test when I was teaching this to a bunch of my very bright students, and I kind of go through the whole litany of why I think... Look, he launches an unjust war. He is quite cruel in these show trials he does of the conspirators against him. He orders the hanging of one of his best friends. He is kind of deceiving his men about what he really thinks about them. He orders the massacre of a whole bunch of French prisoners of war. Again, Shakespeare just kind of gives you a little note about that, and then it goes on to the other stuff. And then he seduces this French princess, except it's also, there's a bit of a threat of rape in it. So I say, "There are all those things. Okay, now having said that, and thinking about the Agincourt speech, 'We few, we happy few.' How many of you, if Henry the V were to walk in here right now and say, 'Follow me,' would follow him?" Everybody's hands- Rebecca Burgess: All the hands go up. Eliot Cohen: All the hands go up. I should say, "Okay, teaching is dead. I failed." Rebecca Burgess: No, you're still doing the teaching. And then you say, "All right, and now, the next day, would you have regretted it?" Eliot Cohen: That also, again, this is part of Shakespeare's genius. If we look at our own reactions to some of these characters, that could be very instructive. I mean, the same thing with Richard III. He's evil. I mean, he murders his brother, he murders these two cute little nephews in the Tower of London. And you know what? We find him kind of funny and charming, and we like the fact that he breaks the fourth wall and he confides in us and he says, "Can you believe I'm getting away with this?" And against our will we go, "Yeah, that's pretty cool, isn't it?" And- Rebecca Burgess: See, he's an absolute creep to me. And I've always been like, "How does Anne fall for his wiles? How can that be possible? How can she be so blind? She hates the guy. She marries the guy. What is this?" Eliot Cohen: Yeah, but don't you have any friends who did that? Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Yes. I mean, I recognize the pattern, but it's not one I want to recognize. But so true. But back to a little bit of Henry, and I think this gets us to your next block of considerations, which is exercising power. Once Prince Hal becomes Henry—and side note, I have to thank you so much for not titling this book “Shakespeare for Situation Rooms and Boardrooms” or something like that, it kind of takes a lot away from it. So Prince Hal becomes Henry and he has to reestablish his kingliness, his fitness to rule in front of his people on this stage, the stage of monarchy, the stage of nations, of... Well, it's the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, more or less, or the pre beginnings of it. And so he has to make certain all of his actions are seen by his courtiers and the world amplified. He is on a stage, he can't get away from that. How can he not distance himself from Falstaff? Because Falstaff, well, "Banish me and all the world," all of those things. All being said, he is still, not from a political standpoint, he's a liability for sure. He's also not a good citizen, really. And something needs to be done about that so that the youth don't take them as an example. So, how do we square those responsibilities and personalize them? Does personal responsibility take second place to political responsibilities once you are in office? Eliot Cohen: Oh, I think you put your finger on it. I think part of what you're seeing there is the dehumanizing effect of power. One of the things that Shakespeare does, this is something I think I always felt, but I feel more strongly now after immersing myself in this, is Shakespeare shows us how the exercise of power burns away a bit of your humanity. For me, the brutal thing is actually in... So first, let's begin with the Falstaff, who is humanity on some level. We love him. He's a rascal. He's funny. He has no illusions. He's probably the most beloved of Shakespeare's characters. Well, there are two moments in which we see that Henry does have to break with him. I think you're absolutely right, although Henry has also learned from him because what Henry has learned from Falstaff is this is what normal people are like. Henry is not a normal person, and in fact, people like Henry cannot be normal, and most very successful political people are not normal human beings in a variety of ways. The way Henry does it, though, is quite brutal. I mean, he- Rebecca Burgess: Yeah, " I know thee not, old man: fall to..." Eliot Cohen: "I know thee not, old man." So this is at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. Falstaff is hoping to cash in his chips, and he doesn't just say no, these are the words that every teacher dreads to hear from a former student, "I know thee not, old man." I mean, it's completely contemptuous. And then Shakespeare reminds us in Henry V in the opening scene, we are indirectly told that Falstaff has died and that the king has broken his heart. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Eliot Cohen: And you do wonder: Was the coldness in both cases necessary, or did it reflect something deeper about who Henry really is? Which is my view. But like I said, I just- Rebecca Burgess: But your view...Yes, yeah. Eliot Cohen: I just think it's- Rebecca Burgess: It is absolutely fair. I mean, I think it is all there. I just want to indulge my being rallied by the noble speeches, if you will. All right, so exercising power, I mean, so you break it down into inspiration, manipulation, and murder, so force, keeping oneself in power through these ways. But maybe why is it that everyone wants power? What is it that power has that people are willing to pay such high prices to acquire it and to have it and to hold onto it? Eliot Cohen: I'll fall back on a conversation I had in graduate school with a wonderful woman. She was a political philosopher, Judith Shklar, who was the first woman in the government department at Harvard. Who was, as a child, had been a refugee from the Second World War. And there was a group of us sitting around the table of a political philosophy class, graduate students, all of us, very ambitious. At one point, she turned to all of us and she said, "There are two reasons why you might become a political scientist: either you're in love with power, or you're afraid of it." She said, "I'm afraid of it," and looked at us. And I think it's... Ultimately, the craving for power means that there's something lacking inside you that you want to transcend or expand beyond. I think that the people I've known who are genuinely content with their lots in life don't want it and who have a sense of perspective. And that's why, I mean, we'll talk in a moment about why people leave power, but that's why the figure of Prospero and Tempest is so powerful. I mean, he knows he has to let it go if he's going to be a human being again. And it's why as people grow older, I mean, I know this, just feeling it internally, particularly if you've had a pretty happy life, which in my case I've had all kinds of satisfactions out there. You don't crave all the things that come with power and the responsibilities, the dehumanizing parts, you don't want it. I think when you still have these cravings, which haven't been internal cravings, which haven't been fulfilled in some other way, you do crave it. Rebecca Burgess: Side note because I don't want us to get too caught up in all the current relevance of Merchant of Venice, but that is one interpretation that a friend of mine and I kind of talked about with the ending of Merchant of Venice is: Why is Portia after brilliantly defeating all the legal minds of Venice, if you will, why is she content to go back to Belmont, this kind of made up fairytale place? And his response to me, and this is interesting, I'm the woman here, and he was a male professor, and he said, "Well, I think Portia realizes that the most important things are not going to happen in Venice. The most important thing is this little realm that she is able to control without having to disguise herself, all of these different types of things. But in the family life that she has created by choice, there is a refuge. Jessica, the daughter of Shylock, comes there." And I thought, "Well, that is interesting too, and it is true." But what about for those of us who, and you talk a little bit about this, of the students or of Cymbeline, the old courtier trying to keep the young princes away from the court? All they want is to experience the life of the court because hearing stories about it is not enough. So is this the tragedy of the ambitious young person who thinks, "But I need this realm and this stage of politics to meet my meaning?" Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Look, I think a noble ambition is a healthy thing. The desire to have the power to do some good with it and to have some notion of what that good is—that's an admirable thing. But I think, at the same time, it's important to know how it can be dangerous and how it's not enough simply to desire power. If you want somebody who desires power, it's Richard III. He has no idea what he wants to do with it, he just wants it. That's different from, I don't know, somebody like a Churchill who clearly wanted distinction, he wanted admiration. And if you want to get psychological, it does go back to his childhood, his relationship with his father and his mother, and all that. But in any case, with Churchill, it's clear he wanted to do something with it. And I think that's the critical thing, the critical distinction. I used to have students who you'd say, "Okay, what do you plan on doing after school? What would you like to do?" They say, "Okay, I want to make policy." To which my response was always, "Great. What policy do you want to make?" And I very rarely got a good answer to that. And at the end of that conversation, I would say, "You might want to go and have another think about why you want to... I'm not saying you shouldn't aspire to be Secretary of State. That's perfectly laudable. But why? To what end?" And I think as a teacher or as a mentor, that's the important question to ask. It's not to try to deflect people from the pursuit of power. Also, 'cause if that's in their nature, that's what they'll do no matter what you say, as Belarius finds out in Cymbeline. Rebecca Burgess: Right. So Coriolanus seems a little relevant here, too, because he seems motivated by honor and glory. Eliot Cohen: Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Rebecca Burgess: And so I think, particularly today, we have a very cynical view of power and those who approach power. And, of course, that's all imbued with truth. But on the other side of it, there's a nobler, if you will, aspiration in there, which is for honor and glory. And how do we square this, or how do we allow it? Or is it possible that there are some just motivated by that thirst? Eliot Cohen: Yeah. I mean, look, the desire for some kind of glory is a very important motivator for human behavior. For something like Coriolanus, it's success on the battlefield, for academics, it's getting to be a tenured professor at a major university. For other people, it's getting to be a CEO or maybe having a smashing podcast. But that, I think, will always be out there. The problem with Coriolanus is not only that he has zero political sense, but his desire for glory is coupled with contempt for everybody else. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: And I think that's the perilous part. And it has a profound naivete to it as well because the people that he honors, and one of the people who he honors, who actually turns on him, and that's Aufidius, sort of his rival soldier. He says, "A lion that I would be proud to hunt." he calls him at one point. Well, actually, there are a lot of problems with Aufidius that Coriolanus is not perceptive enough to see. So, that ultimately ends up as Coriolanus' real problem. Not his desire for glory, not his sense of honor, which is an entirely appropriate thing. It's more the narrowness of his conception of honor and glory and his inability to bear with other people. Rebecca Burgess: So, is inspiration in wielding power always manipulation? Eliot Cohen: I think it usually has some element of manipulation. It usually has some element of artifice. Churchill didn't just get up and give those speeches off the top of his head. He wrote them very carefully. He edited them, he chose his words very carefully. So, there always has to be an element of calculation. And if you want, you can call it an element of manipulation as well. But again, that doesn't mean it's evil. I think it's just in the same way that I'd like to think I was a pretty good lecturer. Lecturing is performance art. And- Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: ... if you don't think of it as performance art, you're not going to be good at it. And if it is performance art, well, you better think about the performance. You got to think about- Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Eliot Cohen: ... when you're downstage, when you're not, and all that stuff. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. I'm laughing because that was my moment of anagnorisis, if you will. The first day of teaching, I thought, "Wait, no one told me. No one told me that this is a performance as well." Eliot Cohen: It is. Rebecca Burgess: "And somehow, my brain has to be clicking at a high rate of speed here as well." And I remember thinking, "Oh, that's what makes a good teacher when they can combine those elements. Not just the knowledge, but the ability to deliver it with passion, so that bringing forward of your own personal connection with the text or the subject matter so that those in your audience are alerted that it matters." Eliot Cohen: Yeah. You asked me earlier what I had learned from Shakespeare about international politics. I think one of them is the importance of theatricality and of staging of performance. I thought more and more deeply about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, particularly in the early phases of the Ukraine War, where he put his skills as an actor and as a director to wonderful use in mobilizing his own people and mobilizing international support in ways that I wouldn't have expected. So theater really does manage. And the politicians who are not particularly good are the ones who don't understand that and don't work at it really, really carefully. Rebecca Burgess: And that can be at all levels. I know you mentioned LBJ and the types of suits he wore, and Reagan did that, too, in the opposite. He had a very fine sense of fashion, but as president, in fact, he wore larger suits that were less tailored. They looked a little bit more everyman, and that was an important part of being the communicator, the great communicator. Eliot Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's true of all competent leaders, whether or not they're good people, is they are thinking about those things. Rebecca Burgess: Right before we turn to the losing power part of this, on the question of honor, again, I think you mentioned this in your book, I don't think I'm just imagining it is that difference between Hotspur and Prince Hal in terms of honor and glory. And King Henry IV thinks, or seems to think, that Hotspur would be a better heir to him. And it turns out, in fact, that would've been a disaster because Hotspur, he only has the hotness of his passion in the moment and no forethought, whereas Prince Hal kind of does, which brings in that honor's apparently not enough to- Eliot Cohen: No, it's not enough. And I would also say I'm not sure that... Henry V says that he's hungry for glory, but I think his sense of honor is different from Hotspurs. Hotspur is a more genuine human being, he's a more lovable human being. And you see that in his interaction with his wife, and that's clearly a loving match. Whereas the only thing you know about Henry V and Catherine is, it's a seduction with an element of coercion in it. But for me, though, the thing that's interesting about that story is that Henry doesn't understand his own son. And he also doesn't understand what his kingdom needs. But you can understand why he, who is a very calculating kind of guy who has gone through a lot in order to get where he is but has always been sort of calculating, wants a bit of his opposite as his successor. You say, "I wish it was Hotspur. Was kind of bold and audacious, and he's fiery, and he's spontaneous, and he's unlike me." And it's one of those cases where it's a father wishes his son was something completely different. And maybe the truth is Henry V is even more calculating than Henry IV and arguably much more successful. And maybe at some deep, deep level, Henry IV knows that and doesn't want the rivalry there. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as all the Henry plays, the history plays are, is kind of charting that course from medieval England to post-medieval England and the modern age. But losing power, since we're on that stage, what happens when people lose power? Who walks away from it, and who simply loses it? Eliot Cohen: So one of the ways in which I think people simply lose it is they deceive themselves about how they got there and about who they are. And the classic case is Richard II, who really no longer knows who he is, once he's lost the kingship. When he's confronting Henry IV at one point, he's saying, "I've got this army of angels up there are going smite you down." And then he goes, "I don't have any friends at all." And he falls apart. I mean, he's a very interesting case because he is somebody who, once he's no longer king, there's no sense of who he is. He doesn't know who he is. And he says as much, which is quite remarkable, is that speech where he says, "I've wasted time and now doth time wastes me." Rebecca Burgess: Time wastes me. Eliot Cohen: And so, he's really quite a pathetic case. Somebody else who falls prey to her own magic is Joan of Ark, who I think is a figure really worth talking about than Henry VI, who attributes her successes to magical powers and other people attribute it to magical powers. But actually, if you look closely at the accomplishments that Shakespeare shows you, they're all very human kinds of statecraft and calculation and ruses of war and so on. And so, I've got a chapter there on people who convinced themselves of their own magic. And I reference Barack Obama, who I think was intoxicated and had people around him who were intoxicated by some sense of his magical powers, which, in retrospect, were very far from being evident. But in terms of people who walk away, the two archetypes that I give are King Lear and Prospero. So King Lear wants the trappings of office but without the responsibilities. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: That's the thing that's so striking about him is he's going to divide his kingdom. He still wants to be treated as the king in every possible way, including the difference he gets from his kids, the retinue, all that. And he doesn't realize that if you give up responsibility and authority, that other stuff goes away. Prospero is really a wonderful case because Prospero, who has all these incredible magical powers, decides to relinquish them. "I'll break my staff and bury it several fathom deep and deeper than the plummet. Ever sound, I'll drown my book.", his book of magic spells. And in the book, I said, "Well, why does he do that?" I mean, he's going to go back. He's been able to do all kinds of incredible things on this island because of his magical powers. Why does he make a big deal of relinquishing them? And the reason why is, I think, he realizes that the exercise of power on that island, that magical power, but most power is a kind of rough magic, is dehumanizing. And the hint, again, is just a little thing. But Shakespeare gives it to you, is at the very beginning of the play when he's going to explain to his daughter Miranda, how they ended up on this desert island, stranded there and so forth. He says, "Okay, it's time for me to tell you how this all happened, but first, help me take off my magic robe." So, there are two things about that. One is he realizes he cannot talk to his daughter as a father talks to a daughter while still being this all powerful wizard. But he also realizes he can't take it off by himself. He has to ask her to help him take it off. And so there's, I think, a wonderful insight there. And he is a different man at the end of the play. And it's not that it's necessarily a happy ending. He's going to go away, and every third thought will be of death, but he's a human being. You see it in the way he treats the people who have been subservient to him, including even Caliban, who, at the beginning of the play, he's quite brutal towards. He's effectively saying, "Do what I tell you to do, or I'm going to torture you." And at the end, he kind of admits to the king with whom he's been reconciled and says, "Yeah, that guy's mine. I'm responsible for him." It's a very, very different tone. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. There's that whole, the shipwreck which he conjures up or the fake shipwreck. It doesn't quite happen. There's that interesting dynamic between him, who seems to be without empathy in that moment and sympathy, by the way, of watching the human drama, if you will, unfold. Which his daughter is just alive, too, and cannot distance herself from him. And she pleads with him. And so there's that, as you were saying, there's something about power that's potentially dehumanizing. You have to take that cloak off in order to remember, in a sense, why you exercise power in the first place in order to improve. Or I would say one ought to exercise power in order to improve the lives of those around one in one's state. But that's interesting. But back to Lear, I think Shakespeare gives us such a pointed commentary on that wish of Lear. "That's literal madness.", he says. Eliot Cohen: Right? Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Literal madness, now rage, rage against the winds as you're out of because there is nothing more foolish than to think that you can hold onto power but not have power. And that you're going to have a happy ending in that type of thing. Eliot Cohen: So often in Shakespeare, people deceive themselves, as in real life all the time. And that's why Prospero was such a wonderful counterpoint to him. At the end, he's not going to deceive himself, which means that he's not an entirely happy character. In the book, I draw the comparison with George Washington, who twice relinquished his power, both at the end of the revolution and then after his terms as president. And George Washington was not a happy man in either case. I mean, he had all kinds of troubles that he was facing, but he was an infinitely more human character than he might otherwise have been. And it's one of the reasons why he is such an extraordinary figure in American history and why we were so lucky to have him. Rebecca Burgess: Plutarch, which I'm, like, duty-bound to always mention Plutarch when I can, but he is arguably Shakespeare's greatest teacher. And in Plutarch, we learn, and in history, we learn that, in fact, the statesmen, the generals who have given most to their countries, often have the most unhappy endings. They're driven into exile, forgotten, banished, or killed. And there's this question of gratitude you might say, which is something that let Lear become so alive about. And gratitude from the point of, "I gave my life in public service. What have you given me? And now you're just going to take it all from me." But I also wonder about—but is there a little note of legitimacy in the people sometimes doing that? Because how else would those people leave or give it up? Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Or I think it's also sometimes you resent your benefactors, most of all. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Yeah. Eliot Cohen: But that's been no doubt. No. Look, I think that's, and Lord knows I've seen, and even to some extent, experienced cases like that where you've done an enormous amount of good. And your reward for that is going to be abuse. And I think that's why... And I'm not sure whether Shakespeare really fully conveys this, although maybe in Tempest, he does to some extent. One of the things that's really important for a powerful person to be able to do is really two things. One is first to take satisfaction in what you've accomplished, not in people's gratitude for it. That is a hard thing for people to do, because if you've been the center of... Eliot Cohen: ... for people to do, because if you've been the center of attention, you want that validation, but you're not going to get it. But the other thing is knowing how to walk off the stage. Again, it's a theatrical metaphor, isn't it? Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Eliot Cohen: It is really important to know how to walk off the stage. And there are a lot of people in the political world, in the business world, in the academic world who've never figured that out. Rebecca Burgess: There are certain presidents or former presidents of think tanks who couldn't stay in retirement and had to come back out, and then the issues that caused within, which is a separate question about founders versus rulers and governors, if you will. Eliot Cohen: Absolutely. Rebecca Burgess: But I think, also, part of it is just that desire to power is, in a way, an exercise of temporal immortality perhaps. And giving that up is the confrontation as Wolsey once again does and prosper of death. Eliot Cohen: I remember talking to one very senior official in the defense department, and we were talking about somebody else who was really clearly at the point where they should retire. And he looked at me, he said, "Eliot," he said, "You have to remember for so-and-so the next big job is death." Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Eliot Cohen: True enough. Rebecca Burgess: Well, I know we're kind of nearing the end of our time, but I wanted to go back to King Lear just for a moment because that play is just so complex. But it also seems to me that Lear, in addition to his sin of wanting to have all the trappings of power, none of the responsibility, mistakes the rule of a kingdom for the affection of a family and doesn't understand that he could force affection in a way from his daughters. But that making that the test of political succession is, in fact, one of the pitfalls, say at least of a monarchy. But it's beyond a monarchy. It's always the test of legitimacy from one's designated heir or not. Eliot Cohen: It means, I don't think he knew what the meaning of real affection is. He doesn't know it with his youngest daughter. He doesn't know it with the one nobleman who really is genuinely loyal to him, who he banishes but who sticks with him. I think, in many ways, he's a great example of somebody who has been corrupted by the exercise of absolute power in such a way that his understanding of other human beings has shrunk. And maybe that's one of the conclusions to draw: is you exercise power long enough, there's an initial period where the exercise of power can cause you to grow. After a while, the exercise of power causes you to shrink, and Lear has shrunk. And although Lear is one heck of a depressing play, the redeeming part of it is he's grown back a bit at the end. He's grown back not only in his ability to recognize who the people around him really are, the bad, but also the good, but who he is. That line where he says, "I'm a fun, foolish old man," well, that's what he is. Finally, at the end, he knows who he is, and that's not given to everybody. And self-knowledge is something that one should strive for. It's know thyself. In that sense alone, I would say Lear is an uplifting play. Rebecca Burgess: You begin your introduction in the book with a nice little anecdote about some people who see on the stage Goneril and all the rest of it. You know them, you've worked with them. I should have warned you at the beginning that I actually played Goneril once. Eliot Cohen: Oh, really? Oh, dear me. Rebecca Burgess: Yes, I did. High school, senior play. It was one of these things. I had no choice. You're given the role. And I thought, "Oh crap." And I will say, this is the fun of doing these things, of course, is we put on an excellent production, let us say. But for about two or three months afterward, there was a noticeable distancing of some people around me. Eliot Cohen: Now, was that because of them or because of you? Rebecca Burgess: Well, you know how effectively I've portrayed that role. Eliot Cohen: You're such a nice person. I can't believe it anyway. But I think there is a larger point there, which is particularly in the exercise of power, you're frequently playing a role, and after a while, you play the role, you become the role, and I think that's something that theater can teach you. And I've heard from professional actors that you play a character in a very serious way over a long season, it takes a while to deprogram yourself and to get that person out of your system. Well, for anybody who's powerful, something has to be an act. It just is. And you may become somebody who you weren't really, but I'm sure it was all about them, not about you. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. No one lost their eyes afterward. I don't have that- Eliot Cohen: I doubt you would go in for the eye gouging. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. It's a little too messy for my taste. But that lack of awareness, you've mentioned this a lot about Kloting, and I think it gets with Lear and maybe where we'll end up maybe about America today, which is those who grow up with power, those who spend a lot of time in power often forget how to wield power responsibly. And there's this lack of the effects of it almost, which you show with Kloting and how he is just cruel or just capricious in a way. And that's why, initially, I wanted to needle you a little bit about Much Ado About Nothing. You have this prince and his little coterie—they come back from a war, and they're supposed to be the statesmen, and serious, they fight wars. And instead, what do they do? They create absolute havoc by just being like, "Let's play with the lives of these lovers, these men and women." How are we supposed to square that? Or what happens? How do we not have that? How do we find the medium between frivolity, which can end in death? Thankfully, it's a comedy, it doesn't. It could have been an Othello ending there with Much Ado and the horrors of Macbeth. Eliot Cohen: That's a deeper question about how do you become a serious person? And I think the answer is you don't become a serious person through the exercise of power or through, in that case, being successful in war. You become a serious person in some other way, which is much more introspective or reflective. And that's, I think, what we're missing. We talked earlier about how people don't have time. Among other things, they don't have time to read Shakespeare. They don't have time to read the Bible, they don't have time to read Tolstoy. They don't have time to do, or they don't make time for themselves to do the things that ultimately would make them much more serious, and those things have to lie outside politics. And I think the people who do keep an even keel, it is because of the things that are outside politics. It's because of a husband or a wife or a relationship with parents or religious faith or a deep, airy addition. You can find it in many ways, but you're not going to find it in the pursuit of power. Rebecca Burgess: To bring it up to America in the twenty-first century, that question of seriousness, I could say throughout the plays, throughout your book, you mentioned the importance of rhetoric. And it seems like today, not only do we have unserious politicians, we have very poor, rhetorically skilled politicians. Eliot Cohen: Yeah, we do. Rebecca Burgess: Is this connected or do we put too much emphasis maybe today on rhetoric? Eliot Cohen: No, the problem is it's not that the opposite of good rhetoric is not no rhetoric. It's bad or misleading rhetoric. And I think in a lot of some of the tropes of our time on the right as well as on the left, you have slogans which are effective, which are rhetorically cheap. When you use the word rhetoric now, it means insincere speech. That's usually how people talk about it. What Aristotle meant by it was persuasive speech. And he thought that rhetoric was absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy because it's how you make arguments about things that are really important. I think part of the reason for it, frankly, is just the decline of high quality education. If you look at a Lincoln or Churchill, very different masters of the English language, but both of them, they knew their Shakespeare, they knew their Bible. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: And that enriched the kinds of speeches that they gave and the way that they made arguments. I think with a lot of politicians today, they don't really think it's necessary. Maybe they've been intoxicated by emails and tweets and Instagram and all that, but they don't understand the power of a well-delivered speech. Even today, even with all of our distractions. I have very ambivalent views of the Biden administration on Russia-Ukraine in particular. And one of the things that continues to baffle me is why we haven't had a series of powerful speeches about why this matters. It does matter to us enormously, and it's not hard to construct the case either. This is not esoteric. So why not? Where is it? Rebecca Burgess: It seems like we've forgotten in America, perhaps because the system works so well for so long that when you have institutions that carry forward the leadership in a way that you didn't have in monarchies, you still in fact do need the leadership of particular individuals, presidents, secretaries of state defense, others who have the microphone, if you will, to make the case. And that seems what we are absolutely leading. Eliot Cohen: I think that's absolutely right. The Cold War, you had the clarity of its beginning. You had John F. Kennedy, you had Ronald Reagan. You then had a period when the world seemed like a very benign and unthreatening place. It gets a bit darker after 9/11, and President Bush made some speeches. And then, after that, the world did not seem like a dangerous enough place, and the consensus didn't seem in peril enough for somebody to realize that they needed to get up there and make the argument. And unfortunately, the world is now a much more perilous place. This past year, I've been in Ukraine, I've been in Israel, I've been in Taiwan, so two war zones and one potential war zone. It's very serious. There are absolutely echoes of the 1930s, but we don't really have a Churchill delivering the speeches that begin to wake people up in time. Rebecca Burgess: Nor do we seem to have a common language, if you will. And I know you've done work in civic education and the importance of deep something that goes back to the Edie Hirsch of the deep civic literacy or cultural literacy that allowed a Lincoln to do what a Prince Hall did, which is everyone in America had a copy of Shakespeare, high and low, those in power, just common. Lincoln himself taught himself through Shakespeare. We seem to lack some of those texts or core texts or core images that we can pull from today, which makes a book like yours necessary on Shakespeare and politics. Though in a perfect world, everyone already would know that Shakespeare was important and relevant to politics. Given that situation, where's the hopeful road, the path that we can take forward? Eliot Cohen: Well, I think, let's go back to where I started, those bright-eyed freshmen at Johns Hopkins University. They were wide open to what Shakespeare had to teach them, and many of them were in the sciences and that were engineering, things like that. And this was not central to their worldview. And that's always, by the way, been my experience when I've had students who are not from liberal arts backgrounds or from STEM areas, I never underestimate the ability of young people to absorb fresh experiences. You just have to deliver it to them. And I think you see institutions and movements out there that are doing this, but you've got a teacher talking here. I think the solution to this is more education. Education takes place in many different ways, in many different places. People have the opportunity to shape this in their homes, in junior high, in high school. The universities are a different proposition, and I worry a lot about the universities. But the truth is, I think the essential battles are actually fought a lot earlier than that. They're fought in junior high and high school. And that's where I think people should focus. And that's why I wrote those pieces that I've written about patriotic education. Rebecca Burgess: Hearts and souls of men, right? Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: Well, like the chorus in Henry the V and like Puck in Midsummer's Night Dream, I have to draw this to a close and ask our listeners for their blessings and their patience and all those wonderful things. Right before I do that, I'd like to give you the last word. Do you have a favorite quote or speech or character in Shakespeare we didn't get to cover that you'd like to leave us with? Eliot Cohen: Yeah, I do. It's from Julius Caesar, and one of the characters that I like, and this will sound odd, is Cassius, who always gets written off as an envious conspirator, which I actually think is not true. Actually, I think Brutus has the weaker personality. Brutus is the one who's vain. Brutus is the one who doesn't want Cicero around in the plot because he wants too much attention. Well, guess what Brutus wants? And Cassius is a much more realistic guy, and there is an element of envy with Cassius. But at the end of the day, they're friends. And this is on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. There's this wonderful exchange. Brutus says, "And whether we shall meet again, I know not. Therefore, our everlasting farewell takes forever and forever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile. If not, why, then this parting was well-made." And Cassius responds, "Forever and forever farewell, Brutus. If we do meet again, we'll smile, indeed. If not is true, this parting was well-made." And it's a beautiful moment of reconciliation between two friends who had had a rupture. And the mirroring of the language, I think, captures that, and it captures an essential human dignity that, at the end of the day, they both have. And you know what? The guys who do [inaudible 01:17:10] don't have. Rebecca Burgess: It's a resonant ending, for sure. A resonant ending for this. And by the way, neither of us will exit pursued by bears. Eliot Cohen: Well, that's true. Rebecca Burgess: Well, thank you so much again, Eliot, for doing this and joining us and having this great conversation. It was a pleasure to have you with us today. Eliot Cohen: Rebecca, I enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for having me on. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. That was Eliot Cohen. I am Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us. Eliot Cohen: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
Eckart Frahm joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient Middle East and his recent book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire . Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: “When time was young and world in infancy, man did not strive proudly for sovereignty. But each one thought his petty rule was high if of his house he held the monarchy. This was the golden age. But after came the boisterous son of Chus, grandchild to Ham, that mighty hunter, who in his strong toils, both beasts and men, subjected to his spoils. The strong foundation of proud Babel laid Erech, Accad, and Culneh also made. These were his first, all stood in Shinar land. From thence, he went Assyria to command. And mighty Nineveh, he there begun, not finished till he his race had run.” Those are the opening lines from Anne Bradstreet's lengthy first of four poems on the earliest great empires called The Four Monarchies. She was no respecter for word economy. Her title runs The Assyrian being the first beginning under Nimrod, 131 years after the flood. A mouthful. Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World poet. She emigrated to Salem from England in 1630, one of a group of Puritan pilgrims, just as she arguably introduced Assyria to the New World. So today, we'll be steeped both in novelties and in the ancientness of things, also via Assyria, the world's first empire, being our main topic of conversation. And with that, welcome to a new episode of Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. Joining me today is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Previously, Frahm was a research assistant and assistant professor of Assyriology at Heidelberg. He has also worked on cuneiform tablets in the British Museum in London and in the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, among many other museums and other collections. Professor Frahm, so many welcomes. It's truly splendid to have you join us today. Eckart Frahm: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor. Rebecca Burgess: This spring you released a new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire published by Basic Books. In an instance, I think of the Amazon algorithms getting things right. I chanced upon your book because, for my own research on empire, I'd been ordering probably a library's worth of books on Persia, Greece, and Rome. Also on Egypt by German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. And thankfully or coincidentally, you begin your account of the rise and fall of Assyria with a very dramatic story of a bloody encounter between Assyria and Egypt during the reign of Esarhaddon that results in the capture of the Egyptian crown prince, much of the royal harem, and with enormous amounts of booty being taken back to Nineveh, then Assyria's capital on the Tigris River in Northeastern Iraq. Before me, cities, behind me, ruins is the inscription that encapsulates this classic imperialist behavior, rather reminds me of the Front Toward the Enemy warning on Claymore mines. But from that story, you weave a very richly textured account of Assyria as the world's first empire whose legacy in fact is the idea and form of empire, however protean you reveal that form historically to be. And it seems to me that in putting archeological artifacts, cuneiform text, and historical scholarship in conversation with Persian, Greek, Roman, and importantly biblical texts and attitudes, you set out to do at least three things with your book. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong later. The first is to brush away the cobwebs of history from the picture of who and what Assyria was. The second to create an audience for the centuries-long silent voices of Assyrians themselves, who we can now hear in their own words. I thought that was a very lovely image that you opened with of these long silent voices suddenly being able to speak again. And third, to reveal precisely that Assyrian legacy to the world of empire and the surprising modernity, if you will, of what's been called the first half test of the history and the relevance of that age to our own pandemic, great power competition age. As you weave in so much of this cultural history, I hope our conversation can touch on, not just the politics, but the deep cultural echoes that have concealed as much as revealed Assyria throughout history, from Herodotus to Shakespeare, Rossini, and Lord Byron, to perhaps the particular staging of Adolf Hitler's suicide with his wife and dog. And to Saddam's very kitschy, anonymously published 2000 romance novels inspired by Assyrian warriors and queens. And with that, the almost beginning. What is the surprising anti-imperial origin story of Assyria as you put it? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. When you hear of Assyria and you know a little bit about it, then you usually think of Assyria as this great imperial power, this militaristic, geopolitical entity, and that is what it will eventually become. But it is indeed quite remarkable that initially, Assyria is almost the opposite of an imperial state. In fact, there is no Assyria at the very beginning. Assyrian identity starts off at the little sort of town on the Tigris, some 60 miles or so south of the modern city of Mosul, the city of Ashur from which Assyria of course eventually gets its name. This is also the name of the Assyrian state god worshiped there. And it really is just a small place initially in the third millennium, largely dominated by southern powers. Remember we are here in Ancient Mesopotamia where writing, and cities, and all these things were for the first time invented in a way. But this happened primarily in the south, in Southern Iraq, in places such as Uruk, or Ur, and so on. And during much of the third millennium, the city of Ashur was probably largely dominated by those southern powers. Actually, we don't have particularly good evidence for this time. But when for the first time sources allow us to reconstruct life at Ashur, and Ashur, so to speak, really enters the stage of history. It is a small city that doesn't receive its wealth from war, but instead from trade, from long-distance trade. So this is something quite striking. While in the south, a number of city-states and territorial states seem to be engaged in almost perpetual warfare with each other, Ashur stays away from the fray. And instead, merchants from the city of Ashur engaged in long-distance trade, mostly trading tin from the East, and textiles from the South, and also made in Ashur itself by women from the city trading this for silver in Anatolia. We have a lot of evidence for that from a place named Kanesh in Central Anatolia, some 24,000 clay tablets. This is the type of document on which much of the reconstruction of Assyrian history actually rests. They are almost indestructible. Fortunately, these people didn't write on paper, papyrus, or parchment, which wouldn't have been preserved, but on clay. So we have these texts on there. And what these texts reveal about the city of Ashur is interesting that at this time, this is a city not ruled by powerful kings, but rather one which has something kind of akin to a mixed constitution in the way Polybius has described it for Ancient Rome that is, you do have a kind of dynasty of hereditary rulers. But rulers isn't even the right word. And these people weren't allowed to be called kings, and their power was very much restricted. So they were allowed to put their names on texts, temples, and things like that. But there wasn't even a palace. They didn't even live in a palace. There wasn't a royal court or anything. And they shared the little power they had with two additional institutions. One was the city assembly, kind of a popular assembly of free male citizens. So of course, Ashur too included women and slaves. Probably not that many slaves, but still there were slaves, who were not part of this. But nonetheless, I mean, an almost democratic institution that would, for instance, deal with legal matters. And there was also the institution of the so-called Limmu, as it is called in Assyria and it's often translated as Eponym. On one hand, this was the individual after whom individual years were named. And that indicates that this Limmu was in office only for one single year. He was selected by lot, probably from the leading families of Ashur, certain aristocratic dimension to it. This idea of choosing politicians througha lot has actually just saying that in the sidelines received some interest by modern political scientists who are not particularly enchanted with the quality of the political class these days, and believe that we too might profit from such a process. Anyway, they do this. So they have these eponyms in place who are in charge of the city hall, where taxes are determined, rates and measures, and things like that. So these two institutions compete with the institution of the ruler, was not called a king. So it's actually altogether a political situation that seems really remarkably modern in many regards. Rebecca Burgess: It seems more accurate then to say that Ashur was a city-state, and one that predated Greece. So perhaps Herodotus is not quite correct or needs a correction, an outside correction when he, in his account, rather binary account of Greece where everything is liberal, and free, and the barbarian other, which is very intriguing. But also on that note, I was struck by your invocation or your quote of an inscription from a stela that was erected near the Step Gate, a structure in Ashur where justice was administered, precisely about this question of justice and royal rule. So the quote is, "May justice prevail in my city. Ashur is king. Erishum is Ashur's steward. Ashur is a swamp that cannot be traversed, ground that cannot be trodden upon, canals that cannot be crossed. He who tells a lie on the Step Gate, the demon of the ruins will smash his head like a pot that breaks." It's very direct and very dramatic. But there seems to be a direct linkage of the divine royal power and justice and even nature, the physical world of nature. So you touched on this a little bit. What can be pieced together of the dominant understanding of justice in relation to the ordering of society at Ashur, and everything from the religious cult of Ashur to the lack of palaces that you mentioned? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I mean, this being a Law & Liberty podcast, it's of course absolutely right for you to ask the question about law and legal practices. And yes, you're right. There's this text that talks about law being administered at the so-called Step Gate, which is near a place where later the ziggurat, the temple tower would be located. At this time, probably it wasn't yet there, and where this popular assembly would actually come together and deal with these matters. It was not something that was solely handled by a very small group of elite members, but it was really all these free individuals, apparently. They were in charge of administering law. And it seems, based again on documents from Kanesh, as though in this location near the Step Gate, there were a number of stelæ inscribed with actual law. We haven't found those. So altogether because all these early, well, layers are very deep down. The site of Ashur haven't really been reached by archeologists. Most of this is known from this other place on Kanesh. But what we learned there is that those stelæ included laws such as, for instance, that no one, no merchant in Ashur was supposed, on punishment of death actually, to sell gold to anyone from Babylonia or from the Hurrians, who lived around the city of Ashur. So this sort of economic protectionism in place, and gold was apparently considered primarily a medium for storing wealth rather than for exchange. Exchange was actually handled through silver. So silver was the money of the ancient that he is including. The money in this earlier Assyrian history. So this is just one example of those laws inscribed on those stelæ. Now, the people of Ashur were not the first to have the written law. Written law is actually an invention from Ancient Mesopotamia, and it started not that much earlier. So these laws would be from the 13th century, perhaps BCE. The earliest written law that we actually have documented is from Southern Mesopotamia, from the reign of a king by the name of Ur-Nammu, whose law code, the Ur-Nammu Law Code is from roughly 2090 or so. And we see already with that law code, and then later with famous law codes, such as the Laws of Hammurabi, which are the most well-known laws from Ancient Mesopotamia, that these laws often have some monumental dimension. So the Hammurabi Laws, some of your listeners may know that they are primarily known from a large stele with an image of Hammurabi receiving insignias of power from the Sun God, a stele that is now in the Louvre in Paris. And there are some 300 laws inscribed on it. So what the people of Ashur have in place with this law is nothing that they invented where they came up from it first, but they too participate in this legal discourse. And this law is guaranteed in a way. This is what this inscription that you mentioned shows. It's guaranteed and execution is supervised, well, by the God Ashur. And this inscription says something else, namely that Ashur is the actual king. I mentioned that the hereditary rulers of Ashur were not allowed to use the title king. That title of king is reserved for the God Ashur. So with that, in addition to these earthly dimensions of governance in Ashur, you also have a divine dimension. There's an almost theocratic element to it. And to a certain extent, we might be able to talk about it a little later. This conception of Ashur being the actual king of Assyria remains in place. You also quoted these strange statements about him being a swamp that cannot be traversed. So in very nature, that's very unusual for Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, otherwise, the gods have anthropomorphic dimensions. They behave and look like human beings. They participate in all sorts of events, and wars, and have families. Ashur does not really. Eventually, he gets these things from other gods, but he's very malleable. He's in a way a god without qualities almost. I mean, that's actually quite convenient as Ashur undergoes some major transformations over time. The god too undergoes these transformations and becomes a more warrior-like deity. Initially, it isn't that at all. But when Ashur becomes a more belligerent state, then the God Ashur too assumes the qualities of a warrior god, and so on. Rebecca Burgess: Well, speaking of those transformations and that gravitation towards more belligerence. So there's around the 14th century BCE, which you identify as the proper birth of Assyria. You note how Assyria kind of abandons its more peaceful mercantile ways and embraces policy of military expansion. What transformations are occurring internally in Assyrian political and social institutions that are prompting this? And who are those peoples and kingdoms that Assyria is now seeking to dominate? Eckart Frahm: Yeah, the big difference really is that now in the 14th century, you suddenly actually do have a king, and I would say, of Assyria, because this is now actually becoming a territorial state. But first and foremost, there is now a king. There's an individual who bears that title, which in Assyrian, Babylonian as well is Shahu. And the first for whom this title is attested is a king by the name of Ashur-uballit, who was probably instrumental in the transformation Assyria undergoes during this time. Unfortunately, this happens in the wake of, well, a kind of dark age. Dark, primarily because we do not have too many sources. And so, it's actually somewhat difficult to establish exactly what prompts this very significant change that takes place. But we do see the outcome. And the outcome is that there is now this king. We actually have fragments of a coronation ritual from a little later, but probably already in place, at least in similar form in the 14th century. And in this coronation ritual, you still have this notion of theocracy. There still is the priest shouting to everyone during the coronation of the king, "Ashur is king. Ashur is king." Twice, actually. So there's this notion that Ashur remains king. But then, there is also now a kind of earthly counterpart. And that is, well, the king of Ashur at this point. I mean, this Ashur is king is reminiscent of medieval coronation chants such as, "Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!" Christ is victorious, he rules, he governs. But there too, of course, it's in the context of a king being put into office. And that's the case here as well. And the god through the priest then asks the king of Assyria to expand his land. So Rapesh Matka is the Assyrian. So there is a divine command to the Assyrian king in this coronation ritual to expand the territory of Assyria. So a kind of proto-imperial mission is expressed here for the first time. And that is what these kings from this period onwards actually do. Very much in contrast to the so-called Old Assyrian period about which I've talked before. They now go on campaign almost on an annual basis. And the King, sort of starting in the 14th century, expanded primarily first into the North and the East, so that cities, such as Nineveh and Arbela, which later on would become emblematic urban centers of Assyria, were included in this territory state. This is kind of the core area of Assyria. It's marked by this triangle of cities with Ashur in the south. Nineveh, opposite of the modern city of Mosul in the north. And in the east, the city of Arbela, which is modern Erbil in Eastern Iraq. But then, they also expanded to the West. So towards the Levant, especially towards a region known as the Khabur Triangle, a very fertile area and a tributary of the Euphrates River, where they sort of create a second center of power, thereby really becoming, I mean, one of the major players, political players of this time. And they also became interested in the South. They engaged in numerous wars with the Babylonians. This is another sort of light motif of Assyrian history, this preoccupation with Southern Babylonia. The Assyrians acknowledged they received a lot of their culture and their religion from there. The relationships are very much like that between Rome and Greece in this, and also in other ways. But they also want to kind of politically dominate Babylonians. The Babylonians are not too keen on that. So there's the beginning during this period of a constant set of conflicts that are very charged because of the emotional nature of the relationship between these two places. So all these things essentially happen now and remain major features of Assyrian foreign politics for centuries to come. Rebecca Burgess: And it seems like as Assyria is barreling towards empire, one of these classic problems shows up, which is suddenly you have military leaders and heroes who can take away from the authority and rule of the king. So how does Assyria, one, how do they keep their military commanders and heroes in check? And how do they keep informed about the security threats on their perimeter? What kind of storylines should we be having in mind as we're seeing the king seemingly lose some power in regards to some powerful court officials as they're on the brink of empire? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. We see that, for the first time, this conflict between the king as the absolute ruler and someone competing with him for power. Well, you see it for the first time essentially sort of in the 13th century and the 12th centuries BCE. When a viceroy, that's his official title, was implemented as the Assyrian representative of Assyrian power in this Khabur area, began to try to gain his independence. So this western part of the kingdom, I wouldn't call it an empire yet, and the eastern one. The eastern one is the core one. That's where the actual King has his residence still in the city of Ashur at this time. But during this time for the first time, you actually see how in the West, this viceroy is trying to gain more power. There are conflicts. So rush through the history now, because it's impossible to really talk about all the details here. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Eckart Frahm: What happened around 1100 or so is, and especially around 1000, is that Assyria underwent a major crisis like all the states in the Levant and in the Middle East at that time. It's often linked to the famous Sea Peoples who, well, invaded Egypt around 1177 BCE. Their arrival was probably prompted by factors such as climate change that led to further migrations. At any rate, Egypt is under pressure. Large states such as the Hittite Kingdom disappear entirely, being destroyed in the wake of attacks by marauding migrants it seems, and the details aren't entirely clear. And it takes a little while until this chaos reaches Mesopotamia, which is located further east, including Assyria, but it does reach Assyria. And so, around 1000, Assyria is really limited to its core areas. But unlike most other politics in the area, the Assyrian dynasty, most importantly so, stayed on. So there's never an interruption in the dynastic line. Actually, the dynastic line remained in place uninterrupted under the late 7th century. So for about 1000 years, which is really quite remarkable. And that means that when the dust settles... In Assyria, especially the Arameans who attacked, well, the various Assyrian cities and so on. When those Arameans begin to settle and when it seems precipitation increases again, and therefore, the agrarian output becomes again more abundant, the Assyrians are the first to profit. And it is then in the 9th century BCE under kings such as Ashurnasirpal II who moved the political capital to a new place, the city of Kalhu, its central Assyria, and his son, Shalmanesar III, that the Assyrians first regained their former territories. And then, under Shalmanesar even moved beyond. So for the first time now they really also campaigned on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. They go find Anatolia and so on. But they do not yet annex any of these places. And what happens in the wake of Shalmanesar's reign is that a number of nobles, so-called magnates, the great ones in Assyrian provincial governors, and especially military officers who have control over armies in border areas again begin to seize power at the expense of the crown. Now, many of these people at this point seem to have been eunuchs. And that, of course, is for a reason because the kings want to avoid exactly a scenario where those guys start to create dynasties of their own. And that has essentially been successful it seems. So we have not really any evidence for any of these people really sort of forming family dynasties. But we do see that for much of the first half of the 8th century, they call the shots. So there are now people, especially this general by the name of Shamshi-ilu, who is all over the place and who has inscriptions written in his own name rather than that of the king, who usually before had a kind of monopoly on this kind of memorialization. And so, we see these people really gain a lot of power. This discussion within the scholarly community and whether this really should be considered, well, a crisis or whether the agency that these people had might not also actually have contributed to Assyria in the long run actually profiting becoming, especially in economic terms, more powerful. And I think that latter point of view certainly has a certain legitimacy. But there will be a crisis eventually in the mid-8th century. Rebecca Burgess: So that crisis you note, it's curious what happens instead of Assyria collapsing in on itself. In fact, it embarks on a hundred-plus years of imperial dominance. So Assyria is now an empire. How does it remain so successful? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. If I may perhaps just say a few words on this crisis, because it is indeed very surprising that after the crisis, Assyria suddenly gained this enormous power. And because this is actually one of the new points in my book, and also perhaps resonates with our own time. I would like to just say this, between 765 and 745, Assyria undergoes a really difficult time. And I believe one reason for that is a plague. So what we see is that hardly any campaigns are undertaking anymore. The army stays at home. We have a number of sources that tell us that. And there are actually rebellions against the king. That's two mentioned in the Assyrian sources. And I believe that a major cause of all this was actually epidemics. Because important chronological texts on Assyria tell us that there were at least two bouts of, well, plague, epidemics ravaging Assyria at this time, so during this period, things really didn't look very good. And then, suddenly with the year 745 and the rise of a new king by the name of Tiglath-Pileser III, Assyria suddenly expanded massively. By the end of the reign of this King, it ruled over all of the Levant almost, has conquered significant parts of Israel, for example. It has expanded to the East. It rules over Babylonia twice as large as it was before. Tiglath-Pileser also annexed many of these places, that is, he turned them into Assyrian territory, taxed them rather than just extracting tribute. So this is, in my view, when Assyria becomes an empire. And then, of course, the question is, well, how is that possible considering that before there was this really pretty disastrous crisis? And I would say, well, what we see here is that... I mean, history is not determined by laws. I mean, you can adapt if the challenge is not too big, at least. And here I would say what Tiglath-Pileser does is he adapts, he compensates for the loss in wealth and also in labor. Lots of people probably died. By conquering new places, extracting their wealth, and then also deporting literally hundreds of thousands of people. So the Assyrians are always deporting people from other places, bringing them to new ones where they would serve as a labor force. But under Tiglath-Pileser, the numbers increased dramatically. And I think he does it in order to make up for the losses that Assyria had suffered before. I also think that probably this epidemic had also affected other places in the area which would have made it easier for Tiglath-Pileser to conquer these places. Also, it's clear that, of course, the disaster cannot have been that bad, that no troops were there at all anymore. But I think there was a real crisis, and what Tiglath-Pileser does when he kind of invents the idea of empire, creates the first empire, in my view at least. The world's first empire is that he reacts to the crisis. Rebecca Burgess: So empires are synonymous often with conquests, militaries, and armies. So I'm wondering if we can spend a little time talking about the military. Here, the Assyrian military, how they organized it, and how violent it was, or any Assyrian tactics, or behaviors actually were in their relation to their enemies on the battlefield. We have, of course, through history. And as you point out, it might be a little bit of a blackballing of Assyria in this regard. Maybe they weren't as violent as they are portrayed. At the same time though, there are some indications that they could be pretty violent. If I remember right, there may have been some indications of cannibalism, also frequent skinning of enemies, and public display of the flayed flesh. And then, of course, the boast of Sennacherib. And I know I just said that wrong about Babylon, that he had dissolved it in water and annihilated it, just reminds me of course of Rome and the sowing of salt in the fields. Yes, if you could just explain maybe a little bit about the military in this area. Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I mean, this is a question I think is important and it needs to be addressed when you talk about Assyria. So just a few words about the army. Of course, the army was an extremely important institution in Assyria in the first millennium. Without the army, it wouldn't have been possible to conquer all these different areas. Well, it included a standing army stationed in the capital under the control of the King. But of course, it would have been impossible to just go out, and with this fairly small army to do what the Assyrians eventually managed to achieve. So there were also army contingents, army units elsewhere, in the provincial capitals. Assyria at this time was organized into provinces. In the end in the 7th century, I think roughly 70 provinces or so. Each of them had a capital with the provincial governor and all those governors also had to entertain army units. So when a king would go on a campaign, he would gather up those army units as he went along. And the Assyrian vassals, that is kings or formerly independent kings, who were clients of the Assyrian kings, too, had to provide army units. The Assyrians were very open to, including in their troops, specialists from other places. For instance, the Assyrian chariotry was made up, to a significant extent after the conquest of Israel in the late 8th century, by contingents of chariots from Samaria in Israel, so the capital of Israel at that time. And there were other such foreign components of the Assyrian army. Of course, the Assyrian army went on campaign, would often act in violent ways. And the Assyrian kings described this violence with a great deal of detail. What I would say here is though that, first of course, the Assyrian kings are not the only ones. Somehow though there's a lot of focus on those Assyrian inscriptions when it comes to descriptions of islands. But for instance, when you look at inscriptions and images from Ancient Egypt from the New Kingdom, you see too how soldiers heap up large amounts of hands and penises of slaughtered enemies before Pharaoh. So Egypt is not just of nice dancing girls depicted on the walls of some tomb. You have violence being very aggressively marketed in a way in Ancient Egypt as well. And of course, violence was also simply used by everyone in the ancient world. I mean, up to today, of course, violence is something that is being implemented by most states at some point. When you compare, let's say, the behavior of the Assyrians with that of, let's say, the Romans. My feeling is that the Romans probably were actually more violent. So what's also important I think is that we might be a little bit misled by those royal inscriptions. The royal inscriptions focus very much on violence. And it is the question of why they do that. I mean, some have argued, well, deterrence. However, many of these inscriptions were not really accessible to enemies. So my feeling is more like they were set up often. I mean, in Assyrian cities, of course, they were consumed by the Assyrian elites. So one of their main purposes may have been sort of to immunize those who were expected to go to war with respect to using violence so that they wouldn't be afraid of doing so because this is of course one of the big problems. When you have an army, you must make sure that the army is somewhat willing to engage in killing. We also know, of course, that the Assyrians often preferred diplomatic solutions over violent ones. So if there was a chance to talk an enemy or a rival into submission, they would certainly go for it. When you look at the situation in Jerusalem, as it is described in the Bible, the attack by Sennacherib, whom you mentioned. Sennacherib is his name. You mentioned in 701 he attacked Jerusalem. And in the Bible, you have a story of how the chief general talks to people there, and says, "Okay, just give up. And okay, we will deport you. But we will do so peacefully and we'll settle you in some nice place where you have your own fields, and gardens, and everything will be great." And of course, this is propaganda, but that's also important to keep in mind. I mentioned the deportations. Of course, deportations are acts of violence. No one wanted to be deported. These were acts of body snatching, but these were not genocidal acts. So what is important, and this is really a big difference, let's say, from modern states such as Nazi Germany or so. Sometimes the Assyrians are compared to those, and I think that's problematic. The Assyrians had no interest in mass killing. The Assyrians wanted a labor force. They wanted people to be able to pay taxes. They also needed anyone, I mean, to be of a certain religion, or ethnicity. So they had no prejudices at all in this regard. They wanted a well-run efficient state. And for that, they needed people, on one hand of course, to be obedient. And so, deportations would make sure that, well, local loyalties would be dissolved. And they wanted these people to be able to do work, mostly in agricultural work, but also construction work, wherever they were needed most. And so, they sent them to these places. So many of the Israelites were deported after 720, the famous biblical story of the 10 lost tribes. I mean, these tribes are not lost. They actually were settled in different places inside and on the margin of the Assyrian empire, including in Media, and also in construction sites. For instance, in Khorsabad, where Dur-Sharrukin, where this king Sargon build a new capital. And that's where we find them mentioned. And occasionally we have texts, for instance, about these people from Israel on the Khabur River and Gozana, where they are part of the local community and seem to live quite nicely. So again, I want to idealize it. This is not, I mean, how things should be obviously. But I think it's important to, not to exaggerate the degree of killing and make clear that, again, it was important for the Assyrians to have actually a large population for the Assyrian kings. Rebecca Burgess: Right. That question of the propaganda of violence or of strength and the relation to the directness of publicizing a violence that they may not have actually done, at least to that extent, in practice. It made me wonder about that because, of course, as you note, you don't find any of these royal inscriptions where they admit their weaknesses. No king wants to admit their weaknesses. But then, that was an excellent point you made. And I do a lot of work around veterans and militaries in society. Well, that's one of the questions that always is, how do you enable your soldiers to be able to be effective on the field? But then, how also can you enable them to come back within society? This question of the social sanctioning of violence in particular areas. And that's a very interesting point of this also being in play there. So thank you for mentioning that. But another kind of aspect of this question of violence I wanted to ask you about. It seemed as though it was tied maybe to some of the specific Assyrian beliefs about the dead, and some of the practices in relation to the burial of the dead, and their treatment of ancestors. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I don't know if violence in particular would be linked to it, but I'm very happy to talk briefly about Assyrian beliefs about the netherworld, and perhaps about one particularly exciting case of where the burial did not occur and the consequences for Assyria, but also beyond. So in Assyria, just like in Babylonia and Mesopotamia in general, I would say, beliefs about the netherworld were quite similar to those of the Greeks and the Romans. So unlike in Egypt, the netherworld was considered a place that wasn't super attractive, where you would drink water rather than wine, and eat bread rather than cake. Of course, there was a very strong belief you needed to be there. What was very, very problematic was if you were not properly buried, and your ghost roamed around anywhere, that would be a threat to anyone left behind living. And of course, it would also be a very unhappy fate for the dead. So what the Assyrians usually did, was they buried their dead in subterranean vaults. If they had enough money to have a decent house, under their houses. So in places like the city of Ashur, many houses were found with these vaults, basements were essentially skeletons in their closets, where once a month at least the children would go down and make a small sacrifice to their parents or grandparents and ancestors. So this is how this worked. And for Assyrian kings, it worked actually quite similarly. Only that their tombs were apparently much more lavish. None were found undisturbed, but we know where those tombs were located. They were the royal tombs. I mean, were located in Ashur in the so-called Old Palace, where the Assyrian kings continued to have a kind of temporary residence even after the capital, the court had moved to other places. First at Kalhu, and later on actually Dur-Sharrukin and Nineveh. So the idea was to bury your king there once he dies. But on one occasion, in the year 705, King Sargon II – the one who actually deported those Israelites along with Tiglath-Pileser – Sargon went on a campaign to Anatolia to a land named Tabal from which he would not return because the army was defeated, the king was killed. And what's worse, the body of the king could not be retrieved. So it disappeared. Somehow it was taken away by the enemy. And that was clearly considered a really problematic issue. And you can sort of see that a whole discourse unfolds among the Assyrian elite about what this all means. If something like that happens, the idea is here then the gods must be displeased. And there's actually a text from later times in which Sennacherib seeks to establish the nature of the sin that Sargon must have committed, and so that he was killed in this rather terrifying way. It's also interesting that Sennacherib then moves away from the newly built capital that Sargon had just created in Dur-Sharrukin, and creates a new capital at Nineveh and great expense of course. So clearly, he doesn't want to be in the shadow of this king who died under these very problematic circumstances. And we see, for instance, an Assyrian scholar. We have a lot of information on these scholars, intellectuals, and so on, copy the 12th tablet of the famous Gilgamesh Epic on this occasion. And in this 12th tablet, Gilgamesh and Enkidu talk about the fate of those who die. And the text ends with people who die on the battlefield and cannot be buried. So clearly, this is in reaction to all this unhappiness about the death of Sargon. At the same time, you can see in Israel that, of course, where Sargon is remembered, I mean, he has just conquered Israel and he has been aggressively trying to bring Judah, the Southern Kingdom, under certain control as well. He is not very much beloved. And there in Isaiah, Isaiah 14, we find a kind of mocking that's related to his king. So their fun is poked at this king who was so haughty, and who climbed up the highest mountains, and was this great man, and was then though brought down, and not even buried. Buried away from his tomb as the text says. And here, I mean, what one can then sort of see is the strange ways, well, sometimes religious ideas develop. There is one line in this text, in this Isaiah text which reads something like, "How have you fallen from heaven? Oh, Day Star, son of the dawn." I mean, this statement is of course meant here as a metaphor, but later on was taken literally. Jesus says somewhere in Luke, I think Luke 10 or so that he saw Satan fall from heaven. And the fathers of the church took this up, combined this New Testament passage with the passage in Isaiah 14, and said, "Okay. In Isaiah 14, this is actually a reference, well, to Satan, to the devil." And this Day Star, son of dawn, was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, as he has fallen as light-bringer, and in the Latin version of the Bible as Lucifer. So quite literally, I mean, at least one name of the devil. So here you see how some poor certain king who happens to fall in enemy country, and his body cannot be retrieved, becomes an archetypal model for the devil in the later history of the evolution of this theological idea of absolute evil. Rebecca Burgess: The etymological transliterations, if you will, are absolutely fascinating. And there's so much. We could do a whole podcast just on the Bible, the Torah, and Assyrian history. You've mentioned a little bit of the interactions between the Assyrians, Sennacherib and his father, and both kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And I know we need to kind of move forward because there's so much to talk about with Sennacherib. I want to talk about his wife and the role of women. But just have to note that how could we not talk about this and mention that famous episode that Lord Byron later dramatized with his spectacular poem with its opening line of, "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." It was just so memorable with the destruction of Sennacherib. And it's an episode that Herodotus seems to mention in book two where he describes the defeat more in terms of field mice and once again pandemic. So it's kind of again two things that you have mentioned about these competing narratives of things that are happening. But I'm wondering if we can move towards this question of women and some of these powerful queens. Sennacherib's wife, Naqia, seems to have been extraordinarily powerful in her day. And she seems to have enjoyed ginormous influence over her husband and actually to have exerted power. And she's the only one to have left a building inscription in royal style, for instance. What does her story reveal about the role of women in the Assyrian Empire and her possible connections to the unraveling of that empire? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. So Assyria from the beginning is fundamentally a patriarchal society. So men are the ones who call the shots to a significant extent, but women have a lot of agency as well. And that was already the case in the Old Assyrian period when the city-state of Ashur engaged in this long-distance trade. All these husbands were away, of course, trading on Anatolia, and their wives were sitting at home in Ashur and were managing the household, and were managing the production of the textiles to be sold, dealing with the children, and essentially dealing with everything. So we have lots of letters written by those women, who were quite clearly literate, an important thing to keep in mind. They complain with their husbands about things not being quite right and the way they should be, and make very good suggestions of what should happen. So often enough, we were actually the ones who played an instrumental role in making all these things work. But you asked about politics. And yes, even though the Assyrian King List is an important document about this Assyrian dynasty that was in office for such a long time, it's called the King List for a reason because it only includes the names of male rulers. It is very clear that women in various periods played very significant roles. One very famous is a queen named Shammuramat, an Assyrian who was sort of active around 800. She was the mother of King Adad-nirari III, who was probably minor when he became king and went on campaign with or for his son. This is mentioned in the inscription. And later becomes the model for the famous Greek femme fatale, Semiramis, who is a sort of archetypal, oriental female despot, fascinating. I mean, licentious, all of sorts of things. In many regards, a Greek projection of course. So everything the Greeks thought was wrong in these, but also fascinating because it, of course, put into question weak narratives about male superiority. But the best evidence for this power of women actually does come, as you mentioned, from later times from the reign of Sennacherib and his son, Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon who ruled from 680 to 669 BCE. This is the time when Naqia, his mother, really seems to be an extremely important figure in many, many instances, really making the important decisions. So, she probably is instrumental in Esarhaddon actually becoming king. He is actually a younger son of Sennacherib. Naqia somehow manages to make sure that he succeeds Sennacherib. Naqia has actually received certain prophecies along with her son about Esarhaddon becoming king. And then once he is king, as you mentioned, she writes about herself building a palace for her son. We also have a number of letters written to her by members of the Assyrian elite. Some are about sort of traditional female activities such as sacrificing to gods and being engaged in the cult. But there is also a very interesting letter by a general from Babylonia—at that time, Assyria ruled over Babylonia, talking about the need to repel the Elamites, so about to take a bridge. And that letter is addressed to Naqia. It is not addressed to Esarhaddon. Why is that? Probably because Esarhaddon seems to have been in very bad health for much of his reign, and he seems also to have been depressed. So he spent days and days in the dark. And his scholars would write him and say, "This is not how well you as a king should act. After all, you are an image of the Sun God. And the Sun God comes out every morning, and you need to do this as well." But he doesn't, and he doesn't eat, he doesn't drink. So, this may be one of the reasons why Naqia is so powerful. I personally wonder, and I can't prove that, whether there might be something else. This is the time when the Assyrians have just, for the first time, really encountered, well, in somewhat major ways, the Arabs. So they have been engaged and traded with the Arabs, but also in battles against Arab tribes. And the Arabs are, well, a problem for Assyria because they are extremely flexible. Of course, they move from one place to another. Their cities, they have a number of cities, are protected by hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert. So it's very hard to get there. What is particularly striking is that, during this time, we learned this all from the Assyrian inscriptions and not from any other sources. We learned it from the Assyrian inscriptions. They are ruled by women. So, those Arabs actually have queens rather than kings. They had a few kings, but most of these rulers were actually women. And they are not just playing cultic roles. They are really there when campaigns take place. They're the ones who call the shots politically. And I can't prove it, but sometimes, well, an empire doesn't only sort of influence its periphery—it can also be the other way around. So the periphery influences things in the center. And I wonder whether these encounters with this Arab gynecocracy, this rule of women, may not have encouraged at least attempts by women in Assyria to do this as well. And Naqia is not the only one. Later on, we have others. Naqia, by the way, then imposes loyalty oaths on all the people in Assyria when she fears after Esarhaddon's death. She must make sure that Esarhaddon's own success, Ashurbanipal, is really accepted as the new king. And so, it is Naqia in whose name these oaths of loyalty are to be sworn. So there's another example of really having a lot of power. Later on, during the reign of Ashurbanipal, a sister of the king is negotiating between Ashurbanipal and the then king of Babylon, a brother of Ashurbanipal who has defected. So she's sent there to negotiate. There are literary texts about this, which are quite interesting I found in Egypt. So again, a woman charged with a very important diplomatic mission. So clearly, women, especially in the 7th century BCE, did play a big role in Assyrian politics. Rebecca Burgess: That is very fascinating. I'm very glad that you brought up Ashurbanipal. For anyone paying attention living in San Francisco, his statue is in fact right in front of what was the former Main Library in San Francisco. And this brings up a really fraught but interesting and fruitful conversation. And you do spend some time with this, is shows how, in this figure, we see the combination of how beauty and learning can coexist with cruelty and sadism. And how, from our perspective today, we can look at this figure and think, "Oh, look at this wonderful Renaissance man. This king who loved learning and wanted to gather all this knowledge, he's just like us." But at the same time, he was a very cruel man. Probably would not want to be our friends. So what is the lesson, if you will, from the figure of Ashurbanipal? Eckart Frahm: I mean, I would answer with the German philosopher Waler Benjamin having famously quipped, "There's no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." There's some truth to that, I think. This is what you can really observe when you look at Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal reached the age of the height of Assyrian art. When you look at reliefs from Ashurbanipal's palaces in many way, this is remarkably beautiful. Especially these reliefs where the king hunts lions. The depiction of these lions and other animals is very naturalistic. This is extremely artful. And, of course, you mentioned it—for us, the modern sort of Assyriologist is particularly important. But in general, of great significance is the fact that he created the first universal library. So he created a library at Nineveh—some 30,000 tablets and fragments were found there in the mid-19th century, still providing kind of the basic stock of what we know about Babylonian in literature because he collected everything, not just from Assyria, but also in particular from Babylonia. So he does all these things. And yet, at the same time, when you read his inscriptions, you encounter a man who is spiteful, who is really brutal. And yes, they were all kind of brutal, of course. But you have the feeling, whereas other kings just did deserve, as a matter of course, that they occasionally would inflict violence. Ashurbanipal is an almost sadist pleasure in describing this violence in great detail. So enemies are forced to grind the bones of their fathers, and then harness to chariots. They have to draw, and things like that, so they're bound together with beards, and dogs in the city gate. You see Ashurbanipal banqueting with his queen and what seems like a very idyllic scene at first glance, drinking wine sort of in a little vineyard at Nineveh. But when you look closely, you see that the head of one of his greatest enemies, the Elamite king, probably Teumman, hanging down from a tree. So it's this ambivalence. I mean, I think Ashurbanipal is, of course, usually really presented, well, in the counts of the Assyrian history as the apogee of Assyrian power. And in some regards, that's correct. But it also is a turning point, I think, because towards the end of his reign, with his reign, Assyria was now in charge of Egypt, in charge of Babylonia, and Elam in the East was conquered. At no other time was the Assyria as extensive as it is under Ashurbanipal. But towards the end of his reign, he lost a lot of territory. And it's, again, very hard to determine the causes. I mean, the question of what brings about the fall of the Assyrian empire is one of these big questions, of course, that will never be answered in such a way that everyone will agree, I think. But I do believe that Ashurbanipal's failure of leadership on some level played a role. Ashurbanipal sort of, I think, made the mistake that he put these professions of greatness that all Assyrian kings were usually providing. So they were the greatest scholars, and warriors, et cetera. But Ashurbanipal, unlike the other kings, he put these professions to a series of public tests. So he really sort of had an arena built, and then slaughtered lions before an audience at Nineveh. And I can't imagine that this was not somewhat ridiculous. I mean, the lions were probably sedated or something. And then, he was well protected. He claimed he was this great warrior, but he also, it's clear from a number of inscriptions, that he actually did not go to war at all. He hated it. He stayed at home. There was a very convenient prophecy in which someone had seen the goddess Ishtar telling the king, "No, just stay home, eat, drink, and make merry, and the rest I will do for you." This is a tradition that's later associated with the figure of the Greek Sardanapalus kind of caricature of Ashurbanipal as an oriental despot. And in many ways it is again a caricature, but there's also some truth to it. He claims to be this great scholar, but when you look at what he actually wrote, the letters that he exchanged with some of the scholars, they explained the most basic things. And people may have noticed. They may realize, well, this guy is actually claiming all these great things, but he doesn't really do anything. And it may have led slowly but steadily to a loss of grip on the part of this king. And well, as time went by with very weak kings following him, eunuchs taking over. This was then probably one of several reasons, of course, leading to the fall of Assyria around 612 by the hands of the Babylonians and the Medes. Rebecca Burgess: That self-inflation of his own scholarship reminds me just a little bit, and it's, of course, not to the same degree at all as these accounts of Napoleon writing to Josephine and telling her all about music and schooling her in music, and his own opinions are just quite terrible. It's kind of amusing. Of course, Napoleon was a military genius and all these other things, so he did have some things to brag about, I guess you could say. So now, we're at this moment of collapse. And you mentioned that there is this big historical mystery that Assyria falls, and it's an event rather than Rome, a protracted process of decline, sudden, abrupt, and brutal. And of course, there are these notes throughout of a rhyme between Rome and Assyria. And what I thought was interesting or noticed was that Assyria kind of stood, if I'm getting it right, to Rome as, say, Rome stands to America often for us today, or even for the British Empire, is this kind of cautionary tale or morality tale of, look what happened here. Let's not do that kind of thing against the wall that we look at. But Assyria, in a sense, has a different cultural legacy. There is that legacy, but it has much more of a legacy. And I wonder if we could turn to some of those questions of the legacy. And we have Xenophon's account. He's marching through where Assyria was, and maybe not noticing some of that. And then, there are other instances throughout the culture. And I mentioned Shakespeare and Rossini at the beginning. There's the opera. In Shakespeare, it's the very hilarious little scene between the weavers, the weavers play, where King Ninny's tomb shows up in A Midsummer's Night Dream. But coming up to today, you end with a discussion about the cultural legacy of Assyria and something that happened with the war in Iraq and ISIS in 2015. And I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I would say there are probably three legacies left by Assyria. So one is the idea of empire. The Assyrian Empire came to an end between 612 and 609, but the idea of empire lives on. And there was a successor empire right away, the Babylonian Empire. And the kings of that Babylonian Empire, most famously Nebuchadnezzar II, who brought the Jews to exile. They used the imperial toolkit the Assyrians had created. So provincial organization, specific types of bureaucracy, taxation, and a mixture of direct indirect rule, the mixture of diversity in ethnic, linguistic, and religious terms, et cetera. All this is characteristic of Assyria. The way they manage the empire is not completely taken over by the Babylonians. A few things they do differently, but they take many of these things over. And when the Babylonian Empire came to an end in 539 BCE, after some 70 years or so, a larger new empire, the Persian Empire, took over. The Assyrian legacies may be even more pronounced, because what we can see when we look at the Persian or the Achaemenid Empire is that, for instance, when it comes to art, the Persians follow much more the Assyrian model than the Babylonian model. And there's an entry from Cyrus in a cylinder inscription from Babylon, the first inscription and the most important inscription he left altogether after the conquest of Babylon in 539. He singles out the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. So, Assyria really is very much of the model empire for the Persians. And then, the idea of empire, that's the medieval idea of the translatio imperii sort of an empire moving on from one iteration to the next. Of course, as this happens and as time goes by, the image of Assyria fades away a little bit but it is the very first element in this long chain, I think, and that is important. So this is one important aspect. Another one is the stories told about Assyria. I mean, particularly the stories told in the Bible. We briefly talked and we didn't really talk at length about Sennacherib at Jerusalem, which is absolutely fine. But this is a very long story told there in great detail. And for the biblical authors, Assyria really clearly also is the first empire. And it is a great problem, and they talk a great deal about it. They provide us with the names of many of the kings, and they're quite accurate in some cases—even princes and so on are mentioned. Assyria for the Bible also is, I think, important in that the idea of autocracy that empire represents is adopted and used to create a new revolutionary image of God. So rather than the king who is in charge of everything, it's suddenly God. This is a complex process of this evolution of monotheism and is not just something that comes out of the encounter of the Israelites with the Assyrians. That would be too simplistic. But I do think one important element in that story is actually this transformation of the Assyrian royal ideology into a religious idea of divine omnipotence. So this is the second important legacy. And the third is what? And that brings me perhaps to the end of your question. I mean, what you find on the ground. I mean, you rightly said that the fall of Assyria was more an event rather than a process if you compare it to Rome or so. And indeed, it was a dramatic moment. I've called it the First World War. These many wars wage between 616 and 609. It involved the Babylonians, the Medes, the Egyptians, the Chaldeans at some point, the Urartians, many others. That was really, really drastic. And it ended with the great Assyrian cities all massively destroyed, so Nineveh was gone and Ashur was. But then of course, it's also important to keep in mind that not everything was entirely gone. I mean, there were lots of shards, but they were still there. And for instance, in Ashur, where everything had started, Assyrians also continued at least for quite a long while. So for instance, we have Aramaic inscriptions from Ashur from the 2nd century AD, so some 800 years after the fall of the city, where people still talk about worshiping the god Ashur and his wife, Serua, just like these 800 years earlier. So somehow the temple of Ashur survived, the worship of Ashur continued in Ashur, and not everything was entirely gone. And we also see how as eventually Christianity takes over Northern Iraq, how Christians in this area begin to identify with the Assyrians. So there are stories, for instance, about the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, converting to Christianity from a chronological point of view or rather sort of strange assumption considering that you would from 705 to 681 BCE, but there you have it. And you have other stories about some Assyrians being involved in Christian ideas. And you have, I mean, especially then since the 19th century, a very strong sort of Neo-Assyrian identity. Assyrian Christians in that area consider themselves the descendants of the Assyrians. And you mentioned the statue of Ashurbanipal in San Francisco. This was something that was created by a member of the Assyrian community, of course. So there is some continuity in fact in place. And it is, therefore, all the more regrettable that in recent years, I mean, essentially since the 19th century, these Christian communities have really suffered a great deal from persecution and attacks by a variety of different people and are now dispersed all over the globe, essentially. There are still some people in this place near Mosul, or in the [inaudible 01:03:43], or in other areas originally part of the Assyrian kingdom. But most of these Assyrian Christians now actually live in Europe, and in the United States, or some centers like Chicago or so. And it is, of course, also extremely regrettable that, as you mentioned, ISIS, many of these Assyrian sites, such as Nineveh or the Palace of Ashurbanipal II in the city of Kalhu, were assaulted by ISIS and dynamited or destroyed in some other ways in the past year. So this, of course, was all extremely pressing to observe. Yeah, in this regard, things have not gone well certainly over the past years. Rebecca Burgess: But as you note there, in no way am I condoning such destruction, of course. But you also note that in fact it has revealed some new things. As you mentioned, there are all these layers and they go down so far. And in not wanting to disturb some, of course, with respect, you don't touch it. But by some of this destruction, there have been some new discoveries made. And I think throughout, your book is actually quite hopeful, which stands a little in contrast to many of these types of books about empire, which often are these languorous cautionary tales. But before I get to the final, final question about the hopefulness that you have found, both perhaps for Iraq today, and for perhaps Israel and Arabs. I had this one more complicated question. One of the other stories that is in the background of your book is how other empires, later empires, the French-British Empire, in fact, we owe to their imperialism much of the uncovering of the Assyrian Empire and this archeological excavation and learning, which it's a difficult question, right? How should we feel about that? Is it not a question of feeling? What is the kind of intellectual stance to think about how we rely on other expressions of power and imperialism to uncover these legacies of knowledge? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. This is a difficult question. You're right. You're absolutely right. Rebecca Burgess: You can give a short answer, and we can- Eckart Frahm: The rediscovery of those sites. I mean, rediscovery should be in quotation marks because sites like Nineveh were never entirely sort of lost. People there knew this was the Ancient City of Nineveh. It was a place where the tomb of Jonah was, for instance, located and things like that. But the rediscovery, let's say, of traces of the actual Assyrians of the cuneiform tradition, the decipherment, this was very much largely a Western project in the 19th century. And it just so happened that this was the time when Western Imperialism was at its height. It is important I think also to remember, of course, that at the time, these sites were part of the Ottoman Empire, and neither the British nor the French nor anyone else was a colonial power there. So, the British and French individuals were usually actually quite small numbers of people who did those excavations and had to negotiate with the local pastures. It was very complicated. And okay, they may have cheated them occasionally, but they were also of course on the part of the Ottoman authorities permissions given to them to excavate things. So this is the reason why so much of this stuff is now in the British Museum or in the Louvre when we talk about Assyria in particular. It is of course, however, in the long run, a problem that in many places in the Middle East, sort of thinking about Ancient Eastern history has been perceived as a Western preoccupation, and it shouldn't be. And it is, therefore, of course, extremely important that in places like Iraq or Syria, where local identities are also grounded in the ancient past. And that is, of course, in fact what some of the dictators of recent decades have started to do. I mean, Saddam in particular has done this identifying, to some extent, especially with Babylonian kings like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II, but also sort of playing with the Assyrian legacy. And here, again, the problem was of course considering Saddam's extremely problematic legacy in terms of human rights, and so on, that others might have then taken that as a reason, in fact, just not to endorse any of this. And for ISIS, of course, it was... I mean, there were all sorts of reasons to destroy these sites. I mean, they wanted to, of course, annoy Westerners. And they knew that if they killed any local people, this would not actually get them the same types of headlines as when they actually started to blow up some Assyrian bull colossi or reliefs. And they were right. Unfortunately, this is how it went. It got a lot of traction when this all happened. So yes, you're also right, though, of course, that maybe, I mean, six years ago or so, I would have been much more pessimistic. I would've thought, okay, this is the end essentially of everything there. But it's actually quite striking in what shorter period of time, for instance, in Mosul, which was completely destroyed. Things actually have been turned around, at least to a certain extent. The city is now in a better shape, much better shape again than it was after this complete destruction after liberation in 2017. And in fact, new excavations have taken place. ISIS itself, I mean, while claiming that it would destroy all this stuff because it was idolatrous, et cetera, of course, also sold things from those sites excavated and sold it on the antiquities market. But for that, they created tunnels underneath one of the mounds in Nineveh. And those tunnels have now been explored by archeologists from the University of Heidelberg. And they have uncovered, for instance, a new throne room with two thrones. One is probably that of Esarhaddon, and the other one, we don't know. Either it was that of Naqia, his mother, or it was of his successor, Ashurbanipal. Very interesting question. So exciting new stuff is indeed coming out. And that's the thing. I mean, you think things are, it's all over, and then it goes on. So another colleague of mine, Karen Radner from the University of Munich, has now started excavations at Ashur, which is under threat from a dam that's being built of inundation with all sorts of problems, of course. I mean, she has been able to pull it off along with Iraqi colleagues and so on. I, myself, have been in Baghdad last year. I mean, it hasn't been super easy, but I was able to go to the museum, work in the museum, and look at texts from Ashur that were excavated there when I was the epigrapher on this occasion in 2001 and disappeared during the chaos of the post-invasion period, 2003, et cetera. But they were retraced, and so I was able to study them again, where I tried to sort of work on those. Now, it's what I have to do the next month and get them out next year. So yes, things go on. And it could be that it goes the other way around, that there's another massive crisis. I think everything is unstable, of course, not just in Iraq, but all over the place. But there are also opportunities. And I think all of one can do, especially when you're a scholar, is use those opportunities out there. And I think what is really important is that, first, we need to make sure that local stakeholders are being involved in all these endeavors. So Iraqis themselves, of course, are extremely important, and they need to be in charge of these places and need to endorse them. And it is interesting that the destruction at Nineveh, these attacks on these bulls when you listen to the audios, the people speaking in Arabic and saying why they are doing it. These were not people from the region. These were the people somewhere from the Gulf. And I've heard from colleagues and friends from Mosul that they're very much opposed. And many people in Mosul were not happy about what was going on. So people on the ground often actually do feel like this is their stuff and they want to preserve it. And so, again, there are, I think, opportunities to enhance collaboration, to explore this world even more. I mean, there are lots of very interesting questions that remain unsolved, and I would be very curious to know more about them. Rebecca Burgess: We touched on only a tiny portion of even what you cover in your book. I mean, you have given us a legacy to think about just as Assyria gave the legacy of empire to the world to think about and explore further. Final, final question. What is the most hopeful thing or one note of hope that you uncovered in writing this book? Eckart Frahm: I don't know if hope is the right word, but I would say- Rebecca Burgess: Optimism? Eckart Frahm: If you want to take something away from it. I would say one thing that I have tried to highlight is that, it's not a good idea to essentialize culture. I mean, it's a bit an unusual book for me to write. I had to also leave my comfort zone, and think about early history of Assyria. And by my primary interest is actually sort of more in the first millennium. But what I discovered of course was then how much it changes. I mean, we talked about it a great deal. And I think it was a good idea that it is, initially, Ashur has this mixed constitutions, these democratic elements, and eventually it becomes this autocratic state. So things can change. And there's this idea Hegel and particular pointing this out that the world's spirit in order to come into itself had to leave the East where everything was autocratic, and monolithic, and flow to the happy world of the Greeks where everything was free and great. I mean, I don't want to downplay any of the despotism and so on that you can, of course, find in those regions over extended periods of time, but it doesn't have to be like that. So you can find historical precedence for very different types of societies. I mean, this is something that I think is important to keep in mind. Don't essentialize people. And then also, again, what I said when I gave you my previous answer. It looked some six years ago as though we would never be able to go back to Iraq. And now, there are quite a few very ambitious projects collaborating with Iraqi colleagues, who are actually quite open-minded about this and trying to uncover the ancient history of this place. It's always good I think if identities are not based on only one thing. So if it is Islam, that's fine. But if it's something else too, I think that's great and that's important. And so, that's what I would hope for, that multiple identities can thrive, whether in the East, in the Middle East, or elsewhere in the world. And I would also say, I mean, the Assyrian Empire of course is perhaps interesting compare also to... I mean, today you mentioned it, empire has a bad name for good reasons, I would say. And most sort of "empires" wouldn't define themselves as empires, but you still have imperial structures in place in various ways. I mean, what I would say is when America, United States... I mean, some 10, 20 years ago, my book would have received greater attention because empire was the big thing. I mean, it was endorsed for many years. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Eckart Frahm: This has, of course, changed enormously. But the United States is still, I would say, in terms of communication, internet, et cetera, it's the number one sort of empire, so to speak. Everything works through the United States. And this is something the Assyrians were very good at. Royal roads, communication networks, et cetera. You have the aggressive nature of the Assyrian Empire as you see it play out right now. For instance, with Russia's attack on Ukraine, clearly also an imperial war. And you have a certain commercial aspect. The Assyrians always, even during imperial times, encouraged trade that you find perhaps in China, which has its own sort of specific imperial tradition. So all of these different aspects of imperial power. I mean, neither of them draws on the Assyrian model. But the Assyrian model, the first empire gives us all of these already gives us sort of stuff to think about when we think about our own world. Rebecca Burgess: Right. The rhymes of history. Eckart Frahm: Right. Rebecca Burgess: If you will. Since you mentioned Hegel, of course, I have to make this analogy at the end. You have been an owl of Minerva for us, giving us so much to think about and great insight and wisdom. And thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Frahm. Eckart Frahm: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed your last comparison. Rebecca Burgess: Well, good. Well, good. Once again, that was Professor Eckart Frahm from Yale University discussing his book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. And this is Liberty Law Talk. And I'm Rebecca Burgess. Thank you for joining us. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.…
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The Law & Liberty Podcast
Comedy writer Graham Linehan joins host Helen Dale to talk about cancel culture, comedy, and his new book Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy . Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Helen Dale: My name is Helen Dale, and I’m Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. With me today is Graham Linehan. Graham is the writer and creator of multiple beloved British sitcoms, most famously Father Ted and The IT Crowd. With so many star-studded successes to his name and multiple BAFTAs—including a coveted lifetime achievement award—one would assume his place in the nation’s comedy firmament would be assured. Well, it was—until it wasn’t. Graham Linehan was one of the first prominent people in the UK to raise concerns about gender identity ideology (in 2018). He did so using the only tool available to him at the time, a Twitter account with 900,000 followers. Over the next five years, Graham’s career was disassembled. Not only was he abandoned in his hour of need by people he’d worked with for decades and known for longer, but current and future projects were also cancelled, including a completed West End musical based on Father Ted. Given his literary gifts, he’s fought back with a book, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, released last month in the UK and coming to US shores soon. Tough Crowd is both a wise and amusing guide to writing funny things for television and an account of the madness that has overrun the arts and universities throughout the developed world in the last two decades. Thank you for joining us, Graham. Graham Linehan: Thank you for asking me. Helen Dale: You were—until a Comedy Unleashed show featuring you at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was also cancelled—probably the most cancelled major figure in the UK. All the 2023 Fringe did was make your cancellation into a national scandal. You talk about the wider cancellation in Tough Crowd, but for obvious reasons, you don’t discuss what happened at this year’s Fringe. What’s it like to be cancelled on this scale? Graham Linehan: Well, it’s a destabilising thing for a comedy writer because when you’re a comedy writer, you want to be an observer of human frailty and confusion and all the other comically negative things about humanity. And so when you’re in my position, I’m now no longer outside things looking in. I am at the centre of a story. I am a figure who is incredibly divisive and scandal-ridden, and it makes even thinking about comedy somewhat difficult. I mean, in terms of coming up with a new idea or a new show—for the last five years, six years, I’ve been basically firefighting trying to protect my reputation, trying to rebuild it—and you can’t really write comedy when you’re in that kind of state. You’re in a kind of constant fight or flight mode. So yeah, it’s a very destabilising and upsetting place to be, but I just have to live with it now. Helen Dale: Has there been any sense since the book came out…It’s only been out for a few weeks now, three weeks now. Has there been any sense of... Are more people starting to talk to you now, apart from the sort of obvious media and publicity around Tough Crowd being released? Graham Linehan: Well, it’s an interesting thing because when you bring out a book—and this was actually part of my plan—I did think of it as a two-stage plan. The first stage was the book, but also the interviews that followed it because there were lots of things I couldn’t put in the book because they didn’t fit thematically to each chapter or it was simply too much information. And I thought I would use the interviews to fill in the rest of it for people. But it’s an interesting thing. I get two types of interviews. The first is what I’m getting here, which is being interviewed by people who know the issue, who understand the points, who understand what’s happened to me. And the second is what you might call the more mainstream interviews on TV and national TV over here—in the national press—which is usually with people who sort of understand the issue, but really are just kind of reporting on my Wikipedia page rather than anything that’s actually true about me. So far, it’s been okay. Just before Edinburgh, I was ambushed on TalkTV by someone who simply did not understand the issue in the slightest and was responding to the portrait that’s been painted of me by others in our profession. But yesterday I had an interesting one. I appeared on Times Radio, and even though the interviewer was taking the usual tack—which is making me apologise for either things that I didn’t do or things that have been misreported—and for once, he actually gave me a chance to respond. So, I was able to put the points as clearly as I could, and I’m hoping that will just go on. Helen Dale: Well, that’s something at least. I should just note here that some of the questions in this show were provided by subscribers to Liberty Law Talk and to my Substack. I did this last time, in my previous podcast, and it was very successful—that podcast was with Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater. And so I’ve decided to do it again. Subscriber questions are of course mixed in with my questions, and you don’t necessarily know which ones are which. However, this question is from a subscriber. Do you think most other comedians in the industry who didn’t support you are scared to speak up, or do you think they’re true believers? Graham Linehan: It’s a very good question. It’s really hard to know. What I find extraordinary is that even people I was extremely close to don’t seem to understand the issue. I heard recently that Adam Buxton—who was a very close friend of mine when I lived in Norwich, and our families hung out with each other—and you would think someone so close would make a special effort to find out exactly what the issues were and to approach them in a serious way. But no, he’s platforming people who engaged in harassment against me, and he’s allowing people on this show to smear figures like Posie Parker. So I think there’s... What you might call it is a kind of protective ignorance. It’s like, I saw an interesting thing today: two people interviewed who were at a Hamas march, and were kind of pretending they didn’t know about the October 7th attacks. And I think it’s a similar thing going on here. They don’t know about this stuff, but they deliberately don’t know about it because knowing about it to the extent that they would have to do what I do and protest about it means they might lose their careers. So it’s a kind of a faux ignorance, if that makes sense. Helen Dale: It’s a very interesting take on the idea of pluralistic ignorance or preference falsification. It’s like people are participating in those willingly. Graham Linehan: Yes, I’ve never heard those terms, but I will start using them because they sound like exactly what I’m talking about. Helen Dale: Preference falsification is when everybody says that they believe a thing, but the majority of people saying it don’t actually believe it, and then there are revealed preferences—where what they actually believe tends to be shown at the ballot box. So, they vote in a different way from what they say. Graham Linehan: Yes, that’s one thing I’ve been doing for the last five or six years is trying to find a way that people can safely make their complaints or their worries known. But it’s very difficult in this world where we’re always on a... I mean, that was one of the other reasons why the theme of audiences goes through my book. I think one of the things we did that we didn’t realise we were doing was, we decided to step on a stage. The internet is a stage—and we all decided without really knowing what we were deciding to do—to play out our lives to a public-facing audience. Once these movements started to make themselves known—the gender identity movement is obviously the one I’m fighting—but there are many others out there. Everyone realised, I think simultaneously, that it’s a little bit difficult to be a political person if you’re on a stage. You can suddenly have tomatoes or rotten fruit thrown at you. And I think it’s made, and this sort of goes back to the earlier question, I think it’s made many people very, very shy. Shy in a way that’s actually harmful, shy in a way that means that they can... One of the things I put in the book is that I always thought the Holocaust, another Holocaust, would be impossible in a connected world because you wouldn’t be able to build the concentration camps, you wouldn’t be able to commit atrocities because too many eyes were on you. And instead of that, what we have is a situation where the people committing the atrocities are filming it themselves. It’s like I heard an interesting thing about CCTV cameras in crime-ridden areas. Apparently, they had a very good short-term effect. The cameras would go up, and the crime would just disappear. But then, after a few weeks, when everyone got used to them, these places would simply resume their old kind of character. And it’s just so strange. I just think that the effect of everybody having a camera, everybody being able to spy on everyone else, has been not to suppress bad behaviour, but to amplify it. And my rosy view of what the internet would bring was completely decimated. Helen Dale: A lot of Tough Crowd is devoted to Twitter, or TwitterX as it appears to be now, and how it ensnared you. And I found it a fascinating part of the book I must say. I’ve since heard you talk about—and you’ve touched on it here—how social media produces a type of digital panopticon. I’d be grateful if you could outline some of your thinking on this here. What has this done to us and how is it playing out? Graham Linehan: Well, I think the main thing it’s done is it has turned us all into Stasi operatives. I’ve been reading a lot about the Stasi recently, and I believe it was something like one in four or one in five people in East Germany were Stasi members. So that kind of speaks to a... What’s the word? People seem to be predisposed to spying on neighbours. People seem to be predisposed to being an informer, being an operative, being a kind of member of the religious police, you might say. Unfortunately, Twitter has just allowed us all to take this role to report on our neighbours and friends for thinking the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and making the wrong joke. It’s one reason why I think comedy is in a really bad place at the moment. There’s a famous quote by a comedian over here who said, “the joke that will destroy my life is already out there.” And what that means is that, let’s say this comedian enters into a contentious debate. It can be about anything, not even as contentious as Israel, Palestine, or feminism. It could be about football. Well, the enemies of that person will be able to simply do a search through that person’s timeline to find a tweet that uses a forbidden word or says a forbidden thing. And again, this forbidden thing might not have been forbidden at the time the person wrote it. It’s just forbidden now. And so what you have, again, sorry to use all these references, but there’s a quote I think by Cardinal Richelieu who said something along the lines of, "give me three letters by any man and I will find enough to condemn him." Which means that it’s the interpretation that’s the killer. What you say is one thing, but the interpretation applied to it can be used to destroy you at any time. And unfortunately, comedians are particularly susceptible to this because their whole existence, their job depends on them being able to walk a very fine line between what’s acceptable to say and what’s not acceptable to say. So again, if there’s an enemy of this particular comedian out there, he has the power now to destroy that man’s or woman’s life. So that’s what I mean by panopticon. Helen Dale: What do you think will happen to British comedy in the future, near or far? Do you see any future where there is diversity of thought allowed in the wider industry? Graham Linehan: I think so because I think in the end, people will follow the money. I believe that Disney in the States, it’s now very easy to... There are no queues, there are no long queues at Disney. That might’ve changed recently, but this was the last time I checked at Disney World because people are so disgusted by the propaganda that Disney is pumping out. And you can see as well the popularity of shows like South Park in their recent attacks on Kathleen Kennedy that have just really struck a chord. I think Cartman has the line—which he plays Kathleen Kennedy in it—and he says the line, "Put a chicken in it and make it lame." And it’s a very funny way of looking at what’s going on. There’s this concentration on things that do not make for good stories, forced diversity, again—the lack of diversity of thought. These things don’t resonate with audiences who are themselves diverse. When you get a diverse audience, they’re not looking to see diversity. They’re looking to see things that connect them to a shared humanity. And these stories have been told down through the years for centuries. And yeah, sure, some of them are out of date and some of them have creaky opinions and so on. But replacing those creaky opinions with modern-day creaky opinions, it’s no substitute. So I think that eventually people will... I think what you’ll find is that companies like Netflix, companies like Disney, they will suddenly get sick of losing money and their shareholders will take over. And I think at that time, you’ll find people actually actively seeking out comedy that is challenging and confrontational and exciting. Helen Dale: I’ve heard you comment to the effect that writing Tough Crowd made you feel like a comedian again. Do you have any comedy work or more creative work in the pipeline? And if so, how can we support those projects beyond buying the book of course? Graham Linehan: Ooh, that’s a good question. I think, no, you know what? I think buying the book is really the only thing I need at the moment, because what I need to do, what I really need is to feel a sense of safety in terms of my financial situation. It’s really hard to write comedy when you’re worried about where the money is coming from. So if the book kind of takes off, and if people realise that it’s not just me whining about being cancelled, there’s a lot of stuff in there about how to write comedy and comic observations in themselves. If that does well, then once I feel that the rubber hits the road on the sales, I’ll be able to just start thinking about the next project. But at the moment, my whole existence is spent trying to overcome the devices that are in place to stop the book from selling. For instance, WHSmith isn’t stocking it at the moment, which is the big retailer over here for the… Helen Dale: Are you in Waterstones? Graham Linehan: We are in Waterstones, and with Waterstones, it’s a shop-by-shop basis. From what I’ve been told, every shop is the subject of a power struggle with the kind of people who would be offended by the book and the kind of people who just love books and want to sell them. So it’s up to individual shops, whether they hide it in the stockroom or put it out on display. But yeah, it’s a tough one. But I have- Helen Dale: Have WHSmith even told you why they’re not stocking it? Graham Linehan: They’re even refusing to answer emails. Helen Dale: Oh, wonderful. Graham Linehan: Yeah. But we were expecting things like that. And I think also they would be very clever just to try and not have any controversy about it and keep it quietly hidden because these types of things, when they try and suppress a book, it’s a bit like, I don’t know if you remember the episode, but it was an episode of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal protested outside of a cinema, and all they did was drove people to go and see the film. And I think these activists within every organisation are beginning to get wise to that phenomenon. And quiet cancellation is the order of the day. So yeah, I’m just trying to fight that and trying to raise awareness of the book as best I can. Helen Dale: In Tough Crowd, you observe at one point that you love audiences, and this is a direct quotation for listeners. “They’re smart, they keep you on your toes. The reason so much content is so bad at the moment is because the audience is being edged out of the relationship.” I know what you mean, and I think Liberty Law Talk listeners will know as well, but what does this look like? Because I’m assuming your comedic antennae must start to twitch when it starts. Graham Linehan: Well, it kind of speaks back to what I was saying earlier. It just looks like a box ticking. When you see a cast that’s made up of one black person, one white person, one Asian person, my antennas start to go up that I’m being lied to. And I feel like for me, a show like The Wire is a much more honest and kind of meaningful attempt to get black faces and black folks’ voices on screen because it speaks to a world that’s hidden, that’s very uniform and it feels truthful in the same way Reservoir Dogs feels truthful. It’s like basically five or six white men on screen the whole time, but it feels authentic. It does not feel like these guys would be feminists or would be great kind of battlers for race relations. They’re just what they are. And I think those stories are just as valid as every other story. And I think that what you will find—and this is what I mean when I say audiences are being edged out–—is that a black audience would love Reservoir Dogs just as much as they would anything else. It’s a very funny joke. I can’t remember who said it, but he said... Oh yeah, it might be Shane Gillis, who’s an American comedian, and he was talking about slavery movies, and he was talking to his black friends and he said, “Do you guys like these movies?” And his friends were going, “No, no, we thought these were for you.” Helen Dale: That’s so true. Graham Linehan: Yeah, so it just feels like... When I cast The IT Crowd, the central comic figure in it is Moss who is played by Richard Ayoade, and I just responded to him as a human being, as a person, and it kind of gives you what you might call a natural diversity to the cast. Helen Dale: And also he’s the nerdiest nerd nerd who ever nerded. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Which gives another twist on it that’s also useful. And also, again, it’s truthful; because I was talking to the commissioner at the time who asked me to do it, and he said I find a lot of these IT guys are usually... Are often, sorry, not usually, but often Black or Asian or whatever it happens to be. So it kind of feels right. So when I see a show where they are forcing something and they are pretending that something is a, I don’t know what you would say, a kind of truth. They’re pretending that something is truthful and it’s not, that’s when I think the audience’s alarm bells go off and they don’t even know it. You can watch something and feel slightly unsatisfied by it and not really realise why. And it’s because at some level, you’re being lied to. Helen Dale: Do you have a favourite comedic period or era, and if so, why? Graham Linehan: Oh, that’s a good question. I really love the whole... I mean, feel very, if I could go back in time and be in one place, it would be on the Bilko writing team. That was Phil Silvers, Mel Brooks, and I think Sam Simon was on it. Woody Allen I think was in there. And I just think that it felt like... I mean, you look at Bilko and it was shot in the fifties and so on, and yet it’s really authentic. It’s rough. Again, it’s diverse, but truthfully so. Yeah, I just think that must’ve been a wonderful time to be around. Also, it was a time, I guess, when Jewish comedy was really being installed in the American consciousness, and I think that Jewish comedy and the voice of Jewish people became the dominant comic voice over the next 20 years. I’d love to have been at the start of that. Helen Dale: Yes. And I think a Jewish-Irish collaboration would’ve been very interesting. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Helen Dale: Following on from the Twitter issues we were discussing earlier, you talk in your book about your old Twitter persona in the form of the conflict you had with Markus Meechan, who’s better known as Count Dankula. Yes. He’s a comedian, too, hence the name. How did that incident help open your eyes to left authoritarianism? Graham Linehan: Well, that’s a good question. It was around then that I started realising that the words fascist and Nazi were being thrown about way too liberally. And I kind of fell under the spell of it and became just another node in a network passing on received wisdom that I was getting from other left-wing people. And after that, I kind of thought, well, if that wasn’t quite true, then what else is not quite true? What else have I been unthinkingly copying and pasting, copy and pasted opinions? How many of them did I have? And I did look at many other things, and I won’t go into them because when you go into them, people say you’re denying X or denying Y. But I did think, well, I do have to now look at everything with a lot more scrutiny, serious scrutiny, and I need to start thinking about these issues carefully. Because for me, in the last few years, the black-and-white version I had of politics–which was very much left as good, right as bad–has been incredibly stress-tested. And I’ve found it lacking in lots of different places. So my thing now is to try and find people who are genuine, honest, brave, and telling the truth as best they can tell it and try and lose all the previous delineations of left versus right. One thing I found absolutely inspiring was a brilliant Zoom kind of round table of black voices who were all talking about police shootings. And it was absolutely fascinating, and suddenly, it revealed to me that the one thing they pointed out was that the big problem with police shootings in America is not racism. The big problem is the fact that everyone has guns and police are terrified. I’d never thought of it along these terms before. And of course, when you hear it like that, it’s not like a right-wing view that guns are a problem. It’s a left-wing view, and yet you never heard it really expressed because the overwhelming tide was coming to the conclusion that–if a tide can come to a conclusion–that the police were irretrievably racist, or I’m not sure what the word is there, but they were just kind of institutionally racist. And seeing this round table of these black conservative voices made me realise, oh, it is a lot more complicated than that, and it’s not helpful to drill down into one particular way of looking at the problem. A more holistic approach is what’s always needed. So yeah, what I did to Mark, and I’ve apologised a few times for it now, kind of joining in with his- Helen Dale: Note to readers: Graham also apologises to Markus in the book as well. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. I didn’t realise that he was a kind of a canary in a coal mine for that kind of Stasi desire to punish and to destroy that I subsequently became a victim of. Helen Dale: Because I will make a little observation here, and it’s one that I can’t prove. So I’m just putting it out there, and it’s perhaps worth doing some more research and thinking about for both of us later. But I do think that the Count Dankula incident may have contributed to the slowness of conservatives in coming to your aid when you were being monstered. Graham Linehan: Oh, very possibly true. Helen Dale: Because what it was is you had a—and I say this as being someone on the Tory side of the benches, for what it’s worth—among the relatively small group of Tories who are also reasonably successful artists, you had a reputation as a canceller. Graham Linehan: Yeah. Helen Dale: And I think that had roots with Count Dankula. Graham Linehan: That’s absolutely fair enough and can’t... All I can do is keep moving forward and trying to figure out what’s going on. If there’s one excuse I’ll give myself is that, although I don’t want to, but one of the things you realise the longer all this goes on, is that people do go into silos and their opinions and their beliefs are framed often by who they choose to follow on Twitter. And also they don’t want to fall out with the people who they follow on Twitter. So I mean, I may look like I have strong opinions now, but I’m also influenceable. And when you’re in one of these silos, it’s very hard to break out of them. It was only, in fact—possibly one of the only positive things that have come out of all this—is that I have broken the head of the silo. I mean, I’m in a few silos now, but I like to think that they are pretty varied and questioning and sceptical, but I’m always kind of checking myself and making sure that I’m not just following along or I’m not just repeating information that I’ve heard somewhere else, that I’m looking into things and coming to my own conclusions. It’s all you can do really. Helen Dale: This question may seem like a bit from left field—it’s from a listener, but I actually think it ties into the politics point, about conservatives having a view of you as a canceller. That was nothing to do with the view that we might’ve had of you as the person who wrote Father Ted, The IT Crowd, or did all these other things, that kind of thing. And it’s another political question, another question from a listener. What is it with the Greens and gender woo? They never talk about conservation anymore. Graham Linehan: It’s so true. I don’t know. It’s very weird. The Greens have been particularly bad on all this. They have gone mad. Do you know, one of my early theories about gender is that I feel that the success of Brexit and the success of Trump slightly drove the left mad. They suddenly realised they had no power. They had no power in the real world. The real world saw what they believed in, saw what they wanted, and said, “Nope, we don’t want either of those things. We don’t want any of those things.” And what happened was they retreated to an area where they felt they did have power. And this happened to be women’s rights. Because even among right-wing people, a lot of the discussion around women’s rights is dismissed as a culture war issue. And if you can dismiss something as a culture war issue, it means that committed people like the Greens can wreak absolute havoc while everyone else just ignores it and treats it as trivial. So what we’ve had is this movement growing and growing and growing, causing untold damage to young people and their bodies and their minds and their sanity while what you might call mainstream voices simply ignored it. And so the powerlessness that these groups felt when Trump and Brexit prevailed was able to be kind of... They were able to redirect their energy into something where they felt they did have power. And now, gosh, what is more powerful than giving hospitals the advice that they shouldn’t use the word mother in maternal advice? What is more powerful than getting to destroy a fundamental word in the English language? So yeah, they just retreated into their little worlds, and they started behaving like tin-pot dictators. Helen Dale: I have to say I did have the reaction expressed somewhat differently because obviously when this first started emerging, I was still in practice. And so it was very much not on my radar because the legal profession is quite conservative, but I could see it in the distance. And it was just the sense of, this is bonkers. Surely people are going to wake up to this. This is completely mad. And if people weren’t speaking about it seriously on the tellybox or whatever it is, we would all be laughing. This would be like, and I have to say, like the Pythons were doing, which was John Cleese’s observation in your book. I thought “This is so bonkers. People are just going to start falling about the place laughing.” And they didn’t. Graham Linehan: Yes. And one of the big problems we’ve had in fighting this is that people simply don’t believe it’s true. John Cleese had to be convinced that the story of Laurel Hubbard was true, who I think now holds the New Zealand record for women’s weightlifting, took it off two indigenous New Zealand women and he’s a man. And I think that for many people, it’s a combination of things. First, not taking women’s sports seriously. I think a lot of men outsource their opinions on women’s rights to their wives. And because this is a kind of a middle-class movement, the movement, the gender movement, a lot of the women who are telling them–I’ve said this before, but I’ve heard it from a lot of people, the phrase, a lot of men, I’ve heard the phrase–“My wife says it’s not a problem.” And these are people who are in the media, in theatre, in publishing. These are well-off people. And of course, their wives don’t think it’s a problem because their wives won’t need a shelter or a rape crisis center, God willing. So they don’t see it as an issue. So I think what happened is it has just flown under the radar for a disastrous amount of time. And every time men stuck their head in and they saw one of these extraordinary outrages committed against women, they either thought, “well, it’s not true,” or “it’s not a problem because my wife is fine.” So, unfortunately, it’s still a very male-dominated world. Men dominate the media and every other area. So they’ve just been merrily fiddling away while Rome burns, and it’s just gone as far as it has because it’s never received a kind of serious attention from the people who we expect to give it serious attention, politicians, news media, it’s just not seen as an issue. Helen Dale: There’s the thing, too–where they talk about men outsourcing–middle-class men outsourcing their opinions to their wives. There is this element, and it’s something that I’ve noticed over many years, that a lot of straight women struggle with solidarity. And so it’s quite easy to set them off very nastily against each other. And that’s how you finish up in a number of areas, you notice the sort of the loudest trans enforcers, pro-trans enforcers tend to be young women. And a number of Jewish people have pointed out, in the UK at least–I don’t know about other countries–but certainly in the UK, that the plurality of people tearing down posters of Israeli hostages are also young women. That leads me to the next question I want to ask because you write about the importance of chivalry towards the end of Tough Crowd, which is something that many feminists dislike, but that most normal people see as necessary. I’m coming out of the political right, so we tend... We’re not feminists, we tend to think it’s a silly ideology, sort of in it’s fighting biology, basically. So a lot of feminists don’t like the idea of chivalry, but I think it’s actually necessary for the reasons you give in Tough Crowd. And much of that argument that you make, which I found very compelling, came from your late dad. So to what extent was your dad not only an influence on you, but also representative of the good side of Irish Catholicism? Graham Linehan: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a good question. He was just plainly good. He was so genuinely good in every area. He was driving people to the hospital. He was volunteering at Special Olympic events. He was just plainly good. And I think that many of the things we associate with these things, like chivalry and so on, just came naturally to him. We seem to have intellectualised ourselves into a position where–and I think this is another thing that kind of gave rise to the trans movement–where we fooled ourselves into thinking that women were exactly the same as men in every way. In fact, I remember saying to my son, “Well, women have a disadvantage in sport because their bodies aren’t as strong and they’re not as tall, their lung capacity is smaller, their reach is shorter.” And he was blown away. He was blown away by the concept because he had been fed this line that there was no discernible difference between men and women. And that was one of the ways I kind of sold him on the idea of chivalry. But Dad didn’t need explanations. Dad just knew it the way that human beings do know it. And unfortunately, the internet has come in and has kind of separated us from our instinctive human understanding of these issues. So yeah, just basically we disagreed on a lot of things. And as I said in the book, he once used the words “the gay agenda,” which I was so mortified by because I’d heard it thrown around a lot by homophobes and so on. But again, good would always win out with him. And when the marriage equality vote came along in Ireland, he voted, after a discussion with me, he voted in favour of it because really, in the end, he couldn’t do anything mean-spirited. I know there are arguments against marriage equality and some of them from gay people and some of them are compelling, but he would see these images that were being heavily played of gay couples getting married, and he just thought, “Yeah, how can I stand in the way of people being happy?” So yeah, he was such a good man. And also, the way he treated my mom was very... It had a big effect on the way I kind of feel about women. And he remains a model for me. Helen Dale: You’re very, very fortunate. I think, I’m not a psychologist, I’m a lawyer, but I think one of the things that has stood you in good stead through all of this–through five years and nearly six years now of nonsense and the extraordinary attacks you’ve had on you and finishing up nearly destitute and that kind of thing–I think the figure who has sustained you is actually your father. That’s how it comes to me anyway. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. He’s something to aim for, something to aim for. I wouldn’t quite like to be quite as self-sacrificing as he was. He would go to church every day and don’t think I could manage something like that. But yeah, he’s a good thing to reach for. Maybe sometimes, even if you can’t quite get there, it’s still a good thing to reach for something. Helen Dale: The question about your dad provides me with a lead into something more general, and this is where I want to, I hope, bring the two halves of both your book and this podcast together in one place. When you were writing Father Ted, Ireland’s Catholic Church was still very powerful. Listeners, I strongly recommend the lengthy section in Tough Crowd where Graham discusses the care he and his co-writer took to ensure that Father Ted didn’t rely on Irish stereotypes or mean-spirited religious mockery. The show only featured a single joke about Ireland’s clerical abuse scandals, for example. Because of that Irish Catholic history and its complexity, I’ve wanted to ask every Irish person I know this question but missed out on asking Helen Joyce in the last podcast because Maya was there as well, and we had so much else to discuss. I should say I’ve had a wide variety of answers to it from my Irish relatives and so I want to know yours. Why is Ireland so woke? Graham Linehan: There’s a few things going on there. First of all, I believe there is some kind of tax break. That means a lot of Silicon Valley companies have moved to Ireland. So Silicon Valley is basically ground zero for a lot of these ideas. The same people who are writing the code for these platforms are the people who are calling themselves non-binary and embracing this movement. Another thing that’s happened is it’s a reaction against the UK. The UK is seen as–there’s always been a bitterness–in Ireland. Sometimes, it takes quite harmless forms like the rivalry between our football teams or sports teams and so on. But other times, there’s a real resentment at what Ireland suffered at the hands of England. So when, for instance, the UK became known as TERF Island, there might’ve been a kind of backlash against that and a feeling also that Ireland also had to make up for its sins in the past against women and gay people. Unfortunately, as happens so often in history, it’s a complete overcorrection. And Ireland has gone back to putting women under the thumb, but just in a different way. So yeah, there’s a number of things going on there, but those are definitely a few aspects of it. Helen Dale: Yes, I’ve just had some very interesting responses to that question, and I do want to buttonhole Helen Joyce on a public recording at some point and ask her, why is Island so woke? One of my relatives–who still lives in County Cork–did make the point that part of the problem was that one of the voices objecting to the trans treatment of women was coming from the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church had previously–in the clerical abuse scandal–told so many lies people didn’t want to believe that they might now be telling the truth. That was one version that I’ve heard from an Irish relative. Graham Linehan: That makes sense. That makes sense, yeah. Helen Dale: But I think it’s a number of things. It’s not monocausal. Graham Linehan: Yes, yes. There’s a couple of things. There’s a kind of perfect storm of things going on. And Ireland, as well, it always has this kind of scrappy attitude to itself and to the world, and adopting something that’s so contentious and so counterintuitive, there’s a feeling, “Oh, we’re marching into the future and our little country is doing it better than anyone else,” and stuff like this. And it would be admirable most of the time, but on this, unfortunately, again, it’s just led to women being put under the thumb of a new sacred class. Helen Dale: Because that’s got real power in Ireland, the power of the... Because my memories of Ireland are all through my relatives and from when I was a child as well. And I can still remember visiting the Republic and going to Dublin and getting a very strong sense of: this is a very conservative country and priests and cops are the people who run it. And then suddenly it wasn’t. Graham Linehan: Yes, yes. Well, one of the things that people used to say about Father Ted is that someone said—this is in the book—someone said it was Ireland’s punk. And one thing that the show did do was show people you are allowed to laugh at silly people. No matter what they do, whether they’re priests, policemen, or whoever it happens to be, you’re allowed to laugh. And I think it was a bit like lancing a boil. I think a similar thing is needed with this movement, but at the moment, I have no idea how I would approach it. This is an incredibly silly movement. I think actually one of the big problems with this as a movement is that it’s so silly that it’s almost impossible to parody. It’s almost impossible to do- Helen Dale: Apart from that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Loretta. Graham Linehan: Yes. Helen Dale: That’s the only thing I can think of. That film came out in, what, 1979 or something? Graham Linehan: That’s right. Yes, absolutely. They figured that out very quickly. Then, of course, there was Rick in The Young Ones, but- Helen Dale: The Young Ones. Graham Linehan: ... as I was saying to someone recently, if you did The Young Ones now, it would be four Ricks. You wouldn’t have the dynamics that you need for a comedy because everybody would be speaking in this monotone way. But that’s simply because I’m a 55-year-old man. I am not as attuned to the personalities that are around at the moment in terms of writing a sitcom about people that young. In fact, one of the things I did want to do was graduate from writing comedy to teaching other people how to do it or to producing stuff because I do think that it’s a young man’s game. I think young people are funnier in general than older people, simply because they have a novel way of exploding certain things that have become calcified in everyone else. Helen Dale: One of the things you brought out very well in Tough Crowd—and it’s really well worth reading for anybody who’s got ideas about making it in this industry, never mind all the wokery—it’s just how much work is involved. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. Helen Dale: All the script development, all the read-throughs, and then you only get one shot with a live studio audience. If it turns to crap, you’re stuffed—that kind of thing. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s an interesting thing. The book went through a similar process in the sense that it may be easy to write something, but for it to be easy to read, there has to be a process. It has to go through a process. It was interesting writing a Tough Crowd and reading one bit, and the next paragraph doesn’t seem to flow naturally from the previous bit. You have to rethink either the previous paragraph or the next paragraph to make that flow happen. Sometimes things would—good scenes or good moments would naturally fall out of the book—because they didn’t have that flow. That’s the art of it. Everything has to flow. When people come to the end of a show, a sitcom episode that they really love, it’s almost like time hasn’t gone by. They just started laughing and the next thing it’s over. That’s what you’re aiming for, but you can’t get there unless you are really disciplined in feeling the show on an audience level. Feeling it on an audience level means that you sometimes have to disappoint the writer in you or you have to ignore the writer in you. You have to meet the audience halfway. That takes work. That takes work. It’s a question of feel. I know it’s a cliche, but you do have to kill your babies a lot of the time. Funny moments, funny scenes, they can disappear because they just don’t fit. When we had DVD extras, when there were DVDs, we only once put on a deleted scene. As soon as we put it on and it went out, I realised that was a huge mistake because part of the art of it is making people think that the show or the characters or whatever, they are just getting on with their day. That it’s not written, that it just kind of exists. It was… Helen Dale: They emerged fully formed into the world, basically. Graham Linehan: Yes, along with the story. That the story is just telling itself. When you show deleted scenes to someone, you’re reminding them this is all artificial. This is a series of decisions. They don’t care. They don’t care. One reason I think that movies about movie-making are never a success is because people don’t really want to think about that. They want to think that the stories they’re watching are real people experiencing things in the way that they naturally should be experienced. I think that one part of the art of writing, creative writing, not just comedy writing, is what you don’t show people. Because if you don’t show them the failed experiments, and you don’t show them the jokes that don’t quite fit, they just think you’re a genius. Helen Dale: It’s funny. My father was very far from being a comedian of any sort—but one of the comments he made to me when I was young and showing some talent myself as a writer—and dad used to say when I gave him a draft or something that subsequently was published in a pretty decent outlet, he just said, “People don’t want to see the man behind the curtain, Helen.” Graham Linehan: Yes. Yes, that’s it. That’s it. Especially when it turns out to be someone like me. One thing I noticed—and it took me a while to get used to this—is people don’t give a damn about the writers. They don’t even know the writers exist. The sad lot of the writer is that when you do your job particularly well, then you are writing yourself out of the relationship. It’s the reason I think Tarantino didn’t become as great a writer as I always thought he would become. For me, he’s always too present, even to the extent of putting himself in entirely inappropriate roles in his own films. Helen Dale: Yes, it’s not like Hitchcock with one tiny little scene, what is it, going into the pet shop at the beginning of The Birds or that kind of thing. Graham Linehan: In Django Unchained, he played an Australian! It’s like, oh, my God. I think to become the writer that you want to be, you have to be able to disappear from your own work. I came to terms with that as soon as I became the centre of the story. Helen Dale: Yes. This is just leading into the final question now. This is one where I have had a few go-rounds publicly with different people I’ve interviewed or spoken to. I did ask Helen and Maya this question. It emerges out of something that is flummoxing a lot of people right now. It not only takes in things like queer theory, but also the decolonization narratives that have been used to justify Hamas atrocities in Israel, which we’ve all seen. That’s the background to this. In Tough Crowd, you talk quite a bit and accurately about the extent to which these mad ideas escaped the lab of American academia and colonised vast swathes of the internet before getting their claws into the UK and European Union. I think it’s fair to say that the universities are cultures of our broken wings now. You live in one broken wing, which is the creative arts and comedy. The other broken wing is the universities. You’ve talked quite a lot in this interview and in Tough Crowd about one way we can resuscitate the arts. What do we do about the universities? Graham Linehan: Well, I think one of the most important things to be done is to simply…I think basically queer theory has to be treated like any other ideology that was found to be corrosive and dangerous to humanity. I think queer theory is an absolute busted flush. It may make sense when you’re sitting around having thought experiments in a college dormitory, but once you apply it to real life, it’s a disaster. It’s leading to incredible unhappiness and confusion. It has to be treated like a rot that just needs to be cleared out. I think that it’s fraud. The Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay experiment where they handed in all these fake papers, including Mein Kampf. They actually got a chapter of Mein Kampf and sprinkled a bit of feminist language over it, or queer theory language, and it was published by a feminist magazine, a feminist journal. There has to be some way of addressing this problem of the fake body of knowledge that has been created by fraudulent academics quoting each other. That’s what it is. Helen Dale: Because that’s all it is. I mean, the hoax that you mentioned, the Pluckrose, Lindsay, Boghossian hoax— which actually happened back in 2018 before this story became all-consuming in 2020—but they showed the extent to which entire academic journals—for which taxpayers were paying an absolute fortune, by the way, because all of these systems are all state-funded—and they were just full of nonsense. You could get nonsense published in there if you used the right nonsense words. Graham Linehan: I was talking to someone else about this today. One of the worries that I have is that we are in such a state of chaos at the moment with the Palestine-Israel thing, queer theory, etc. I saw a thing today, I don’t know whether you saw it, but a man calmly got out of traffic and walked up to a Just Stop Oil type protest and just calmly shot two people. Helen Dale: Yes, I saw that, but admittedly, in a South American country where they tend to have more violence. Graham Linehan: Sure. Helen Dale: But even so, it’s still very worrying. Graham Linehan: Yeah, the look on his face—someone pointed out you didn’t see any rage on his face. You just saw a feeling of exhaustion. I think people are becoming exhausted by the chaos. Unfortunately, when people are exhausted by chaos, they tend to look for a strong man. I’m worried that, as I often say, the strong man better be a nice person because if he’s not, then it’s a very fertile time to grow a fascist leader who will just say, “Well, I’m sick of all this stuff. We’re going to take care of it.” What we need is a popular but not undemocratic approach to cleaning up the universities, and cleaning up the various worlds that have been taken over by such concepts as queer theory and critical race theory. I’m just worried that if it goes on much longer and the chaos these disciplines are engendering in society go on, then something’s going to give. We’re going to see more of these guys, like the bloke who got out and shot those two people. I’m scared of the strong man coming along to sort all this stuff out because we might find ourselves in an even worse position than we’re in now. Helen Dale: On that somewhat sombre note, our time has come to an end. Tough Crowd is available in all the usual places except WHSmith—which Americans don’t have to worry about—in all the places you normally buy books. I have put a link to the US Amazon page in the show notes to this so Americans can purchase it without having to spend more money than they wish to by having to change it all into pounds. It’s also—there’s an audible version as well. Graham, did you read the Audible version? Graham Linehan: I did, yes. Helen Dale: You get Graham’s dulcet tones reading his book if you buy it on Audible. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been listening to Liberty Law Talk. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Graham. Graham Linehan: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.…
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