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Michael and Us

PREVIEW - Richard Seymour on Afghanistan and the British Establishment

Michael and Us

Luke Savage and Will Sloan

Tv & Film

4.6668 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2021

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

PATREON BONUS - https://www.patreon.com/posts/55643199 Just as the American media has turned on Joe Biden following the announcement of withdrawal from Afghanistan, the British media has given a rapturous reception to Tony Blair as he's waded back into the discourse. Luke talks to writer and author Richard Seymour about the British establishment’s crack-up over Afghanistan, its inability to quit Blair, the storied history of liberal justifications for war and empire, and other issues raised in his recent essay “Disaster Liberalism.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

I mean, there's been a very similar disconnect between what elite opinion is saying and what polls seem to be telling us, popular opinion, broadly speaking, is saying in the United States, there seems to have been a little bit of movement away from supporting the Biden position. Has that been observable at all in the UK?

0:18.2

It's complicated. Polls generally are quite contradictory in what they find because depending on how you phrase

0:25.7

a question, you will access a different part of someone's sort of structure of feeling about

0:31.1

an issue.

0:32.6

I think by and large, there continues to be broad support for withdrawal but if you say to

0:38.0

people should British service personnel remain until such and such a goal is

0:44.1

accomplished which is an odds with leaving on time then of course people can be

0:49.3

persuaded to say oh yeah I think you know I think we should stay stay around until

0:52.5

it's been stabilized or something like

0:54.2

that in other words I don't think there's been a real shift I just think that public opinion is

0:59.8

contradictory as on almost every other matter as for Biden the only noticeable change that I've seen

1:07.5

is that I mean you know I mean the labor opposition dare not come out and

1:12.1

attack Joe Biden because they want to use his success an example for themselves which is a

1:18.7

problem for them because Biden is outflanking them substantially to the left on a number of

1:22.7

issues to my amazement but there has been quite bizarrely a sort of ironic Biden cult emerging on parts of the left.

1:33.8

Don't ask me why, but basically, you know, in a way, a sort of contrarian way saying, well, he's our guy now kind of thing.

1:42.6

He's not. He never was. He never will be,

1:45.0

but I can see that there's an element of, what would you say, provocation about it.

1:51.3

The catalyst for one of your recent pieces of writing, which was on your Patreon, was

1:57.0

Tony Blair's intervention into all of this. An intervention which, you know, I was just rereading what Blair said.

2:04.2

And he really was playing, he's playing the hits from his days as Bush's kind of main henchmen in the War on Terror.

2:11.9

I said the world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it's so obvious the decision to withdraw from

...

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