Free Thinking Festival 2014: Knowing Your Enemy
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2014
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anne McElvoy chairs a discussion about conciliation in an age of uprisings recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at Sage Gateshead. Best-selling Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov joins journalist John Kampfner and conflict resolution expert Gabrielle Rifkind.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Know Your Enemy, the phrase possibly originates with Sun Tzu, credited as the author of the Art of War, |
| 0:49.0 | an extremely influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy, probably from the 5th century BC. |
| 0:54.9 | So it's said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win 100 battles without a |
| 0:59.9 | single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or you may lose. |
| 1:05.5 | If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself. |
| 1:10.8 | Knowing your enemy is very much the limit of knowledge, the last thing your enemy, you will always endanger yourself. Knowing your enemy is very much the limit of knowledge |
| 1:13.2 | as the last thing your enemy wants |
| 1:15.1 | is for you to have knowledge of him. |
| 1:17.5 | But can all of this lead us towards reconciliation? |
| 1:21.3 | Here to discuss that are Gabrielle Rifkind, |
| 1:23.7 | director of the Middle East programme at Oxford Research Group. |
| 1:26.6 | She's a group analyst and specialist in conflict resolution, |
| 1:29.3 | and the ORG is an independent think tank that's been influential |
| 1:33.3 | for many years in pioneering the idea of sustainable approaches to security |
| 1:38.3 | as an alternative to violent confrontation. |
| 1:41.3 | John Campner is a former political journalist, now director of the |
| 1:44.3 | Creative Industries Federation. He's also author of The History of the Rich. Andrei Kerkhov is a former |
| 1:50.2 | journalist, prison warden, cameraman and now a crime novelist, including the best-selling |
| 1:55.5 | death and the penguin. He's just published Ukraine Diaries, dispatches from Kiev, his journal |
... |
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