Time of Chaos

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Melvyn Bragg: His histories have often been thought controversial, he's also famous for his bare knuckle diaries, and noted, for let us say, a certain independence of opinion. Gore Vidal, in your essays, the new collection "Virgin Islands" you refer to Plato's view of the cyclical nature of human society, the way it evolves, you go to the neopolitan scholar Vico, and you talk about society going from a theocracy to an aristocracy to a tyranny and then into a time of chaos, and you characterise our time as a time of chaos, that's the title of the essay. How do you characterise... why do you think of this as chaos, and how do you characterise the chaos in which you see us today?

Gore Vidal: Well we're sort of at the end of the American Imperium and with the end of the nation state, everybody's sick of that, and if Vico, working from Plato's Republic is right, we're about to enter a new phase or we are in it now, which is chaos, in which the future arrangements are not very clear. We had a speaker at the house of representatives in the 19th century who was so politically reactionary, that they said that if God had asked him his opinion of creation he would have voted for chaos. Well, I'm afraid I'm in his position, I like chaos, and I dread the coming centrifugal forces that will be uniting Europe, will be uniting... I don't know what they'll do with the American Empire. But you see this centrifugal thing going on, which is the wish of the banks, let us say, in regard to European Monetary Union, and then simultaneously, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, practically every country, Scotland, you see people wanting to get out from under nation states, and do their own thing, well I rather like that pluralism.

Melvyn Bragg: There's two things I'd like to say there before I talk to Alan Clarke. One is, does the cyclical nature... the cyclical nature assumes that things will go on going on, and yet you are deeply pessimistic about that happening because of the presence of the discovery of the nuclear bomb, just because we were cyclical before, are we going to continue to be cyclical? Is it going to go in this nice, nice and nasty for a lot of people, but this progression, that's one thing?

Gore Vidal: Well now we move... I'm happy you brought that up, to the Hindus. Now the Hindus are always on my mind, and they think that creation ends in conflagration, and then the cycle begins all over again. Presumably a few monkeys that have survived the great smash up, will evolve into a new human race, we don't know what's going to happen. All I know is the dream of Helmut Kohl of creating a United Europe based upon the Deutschmark which will then change its name and nature, scares me to death. To have a common currency and bank with no parliament to oversee it, with no one to control it, and the kind of world mess going on economically, I'm very frightened of what's happening with money, forget the cycles of whether the human race will survive, will the currency survive? This great shift, in order that Mr Bismarck... Mr Bismarck?? Mr Kohl will be thought of as Bismarck two.

Melvyn Bragg: But you're very much in favour of things falling apart, as you've said with chaos, and yet where... and you refer to the Soviet Union wanting to... Yugoslavia splitting up, but where that's happening, that's resulting in extremely bitter savage apparently uncontrollable wars, what's good about that?

Gore Vidal: I would much rather have some small Balkan wars...

Melvyn Bragg: Not if you're...

Gore Vidal: ... no matter how...

Melvyn Bragg: Not if you're living there you wouldn't would you?

Gore Vidal: No I wouldn't, but on the other hand if we didn't have CNN, we wouldn't know about them at all, isn't that better than having the world wars that we used to have?

Melvyn Bragg: I'd rather not have CNN and not have a war. I don't think there's a balance there.

Gore Vidal: I don't think there' s any balance in the human being. They must have their wars, that has been the nature of our species from the very beginning , territorial wars, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. Everybody wants the US to step in an be world policeman, I mean we can't even police our own country, much less go round the world trying to regulate South East Asia. Now I'm for letting every country do its own thing, if they want to have a civil war with the people next door, there are at least a thousand of them going on, but because the people are black or yellow or green or brown, we are not interested. But those blonde blue eyed Balkans, who get us into such trouble, thankyou 1914, I'm for leaving them alone.

Melvyn Bragg: Alan Clarke what do you think of this view, that we're in a time of chaos, and that's a good thing according to Gore Vidal, who likes to sort of swim in this ocean?

Alan Clarke: I think the trouble about chaos is that the next stage is a revival of authoritarianism, to reassert discipline.

Melvyn Bragg: Well that is what Vico and Plato both say.

Gore Vidal: And what I fear too, the theocratic state.

Alan Clarke: Yes you've just got to lump that, but the trouble is the chaos is not global, the chaos is confined much more to the US imperium certainly, and to the "soft" countries of the West, and the barbarians of whom there are a great many, and who are acquiring various types of weaponry almost on a par with our own are to a certain extent they're more disciplined, they're more motivated, and they're certainly more aggressive, and if we let chaos degenerate too far, we may find that it becomes as unpleasant as the little wars which Gore rightly says are covered just by CNN at the moment.

Melvyn Bragg: When you say the barbarians, you mean small countries now able to afford nuclear weapons?

That's what you're talking about?

Alan Clarke: Well they're not so small. Some of them have enormous populations. I mean there are trhe standard sort of (indistinct) countries, like Persia and China and...

Gore Vidal: And one billion moslems.

Alan Clarke: ... Northern... well exactly, the moslems, and the Northern... anyone you like, North Korea. All these countries, in their different ways, are striving for one thing, at the expense of living standards of their people, and that is sophisticated weapons of mass destruction.

Melvyn Bragg: And so in that sense, given the way you put that argument, you 're coming over as very pessimistic indeed.

Alan Clarke: Well pessimism, I mean you know, the time scale is very long, if you're a historian all time scales are seen as very long, there maybe a bad patch coming, but the trouble about survival under the really apocalyptic editions is, I mean Gore said a few monkeys may survive, it tends to be always the lower forms of life, you know flys, sharks, you know, I somehow feel that, what life'll survive on this planet will not be the sophisticated intellectuals in Britain and the US, they'll be wiped out.

Melvyn Bragg: You... in your books, you give an awful lot of presence and power and authority to individuals, and your book about the history of the conseravtive party, you talk about individuals who could have, in this country, could have done something different about the start of the 2nd world war for instance. But just on that idea of individuals, do you think that given what you've said and what Gore Vidal has said, Alan Clarke, do you think that any individuals around can do anything positive about recharging, redirecting this situation? Or is ot all a mass drift towards that anyway? A sort of Marxist mass drift that we can't do anything about.

Alan Clarke: It's very hard to tell, I mean you can... it's easier to identify the individuals with hindsight when you look at the historic pattern that developed, and then you can try and isolate points where we went wrong, and so on. Clearly the most powerful individual, the one that has the most leverage is the President of the US, but it's unfair to judge them on a day to day basis.

Melvyn Bragg: But you do say in your book that... you do talk about individuals in this country, let's take the beginning of the 2nd world war, who could have prevented Britain going into the 2nd world war, something which we think might have been a very good thing. Do you think that was really possible?

Alan Clarke: Yes it was, curiously it was much more important that we shouldn't have got into the 1st world war, of which the 2nd was a kind of continuation. But the trouble about the 2nd world war was that it was a completely idiotic concept for Britain to think that it could defend Poland against the Germans. The mathematics and the balance sheet simply didn't work out. We were going to lose, and so anybody who had their head screwed on could see that and should have tried to work out a solution. The trouble was that the Nazi's and Hitler were so odious and so difficult to deal with and so unreliable that the deal didn't ever really take shape and any politician that tried to bring it about was discredited, was discredited in a domestic context.

Melvyn Bragg: But just to see how an individual can sort of affect this sort of torrent of history that goes on, do you think had Churchill's voice been defeated in 1939, we would have taken a different course which would have led... I mean Gore Vidal's new novel of alternative possibilities of American history, but our history would have been... it could have been different, or were we inevitably going to go into that war, once Hitler got cracking with his imperial march to the East.

Alan Clarke: No I think... I don't think Churchill counted for so much in 1939, although he's waiting in the wings and he's scared Chamberlain all the time about what might happen. I think if Halifax had been chosen instead of Churchill, and you must remember, the court wanted Halifax, the civil service wanted Halifax, the Tory part wanted Halifax, and the only reason Halifax stood down and let Churchill take it was because he calculated that Churchill would make such a muck of things that after a bit they'd have to send for Halifax, a huge personal miscalculation, of course. But if he had gone for it, I think we would have made peace, a very bad peace, it would just would have been a kind of auditors, you know, bankrupt deal.

Melvyn Bragg: This rather accords with your view, Gore Vidal, which you've inherited from your grandfather, who was a great influence on your life in Washington, and a great man in many, many ways himself, but you said your grandfather felt... said quote, "No foreign war was worth the life of any American" unquote, you add, when you quote that, "Neither do I ". Do you hold to that?

Gore Vidal: Yes, we started the US to get away from wicked old Europe, that we might be wicked on our own terms, toward other people, is something else again, but we wanted to stay out, apropo England in the 2nd world war, I have a very perverse British friend who blames your entry into world war 2 on Jenny Jerome. Had that mother been a better mother to Winston, you could have avoided that war, and the peace, the intolerable peace. It was to be the peace of the desert. No the 1st world war, had their been a fair vote in the US, the people would have voted 2 maybe 3 to 1 against coming in on the side of the allies. There was a lot of pro German sentiment too, in the country. So in"The Smithsonian Institution", my young character goes back into time, to try and keep Woodrow Wilson from becoming president. Had he not been president, a great anglophile, and enthralled to the banks. In 1914, when Askwith ran out of money, rather idly one day, and had to finance a war, he went to Wall Street, and he went to J. P. Morgan, and Morgan supported the pound. After about a year of this, by 1915, J. P. Morgan went to president Wilson and said "Look, I'm just one banker, I'm supporting the largest world currency there is, I can't go on much longer, we are going to have to get into this war, or show some support for England", and that really is how it happened.

Alan Clarke: That's lovely! Foreshortening! I love the sequence (Gore laughs) and the argument, it's shot full of, kind of presumptions...

Gore Vidal: About going broke in 1914, because that's when the money power shifted from London to New York.

Alan Clarke: Not as soon as that, no. The curious thing was in 1914, the run up to the war, the pound increased in value on the foreign exchange, to a dangerous extent, because it was a currency of refuge. In 1939 in the run up to war, people were selling pounds as fast as they could, and exchange control had to be put in, you know, on the day that we declared war. I think that what this illustrates is that actually there was a point at which the British Empire could still have got out of that entanglement, and would have retained its prosperity, its social structure, its omnipotence really.

Gore Vidal: This is world war 2?

Alan Clarke: No this is world war 1.

Gore Vidal: World war 1 yes.

Alan Clarke: World war 1, no, no, world war 2, no. World war 2 we started off practically bust, and with the whole military balance sheet hideously against us, and if the US had not come in, I suppose in the end we'd have been worn out. I mean the Russians have played a big part in this too, don't forget.

Melvyn Bragg: But you do, you do come back to, Alan Clarke, you do come back to individuals, which is intere... I'm trying to get something going between individuals and this idea of the inevitable cyclical nature which Gore Vidal runs through on of his essays. But you say, sorry, a reviewer of your book said, "It's a well sustained critique of the guilty men whom the author believes, first threw away the Empire, and then tried to chuck the British nation state", so you think this was in the hands of a few people, who... they did that, whatever, as it were, the forces of history were, America taking over in power, and Russia growing in its own way, and Fascism growing in Germany, these few people... I'm just interested to know, do you think that they could... they did that?

Alan Clarke: Yes, I mean I think that this was a great endemic fault of the Conservative party through that period, which was that it believed that its own perpetuation in power was in the national interest, and therefore what appeared to be the national interest, on Rousseau's distinction between the free will and the real will, what appeared to be in the national interest could be subordinated to the more benign concept of perpetuating the Conservative party in power. So that meant that you actually got a lot of bad decisions that were made, and when these accumulated, the country actually got steadily weaker, and that is the history of the second half of this century.

Melvyn Bragg: Do you regret the... do you regret the decline of the Empire?

Alan Clarke: But of course I regret it.

Melvyn Bragg: And the decline of the nation state?

Alan Clarke: Of course I regret it, because I'm an old-fashioned Conservative, and I've never had to personally to consider the to weigh the balance of remaining in power, and what should be the national interest, and I'm quite clear in my mind what was.

Melvyn Bragg: Gore Vidal, what about the end of the Empire? You talk about... a lot about the end of the American Empire, what about Alan Clarke's view of the end of the British Empire, and the nation state? The damage to the nation state?

Gore Vidal: He likes it, and I'm not British so I don't know that I have much of a view of it. I see that history passed over to us the world empire, and we're the first people to have a proper global one thanks to machinery, technology, fax machines and so on, that we have one that we don't really know what to do with. It's very expensive, we're five and a half trillion dollars into debt, for armaments. We have no national health service, we have nothin... the people get nothing back for the taxes they pay, except this extraordianry swollen military budget. It's wrecked us, and we have got nothing back from it. Now we have... it's very hollow, we're a bit like Britain was. I was in front of Downing Street, September 2nd 1939, as a schoolboy, when Neville Chamberlain came out to go to the House of Commons, and say, "War is almost here", and it came the next day, and I have sort of that feeling about the US now, when I stand in front of the Whitehouse, which you can't because people are terrified somebody will blow it up. So the police ask you to move on, but I rather have the feeling that we're constantly thundering our orders. I mean picking Madeline Albright from Prague, as our Secretary of State, I mean this wet hand flapping about giving orders to the Middle East, giving orders... and nobody pays any attention, and the President otherwise engaged. I mean it's ludicrous.

Alan Clarke: Yes, I think that the trouble is the "kicking sand" the old Charles Atlas is in this isn't it? I mean if...

Gore Vidal: The 900lb weakling in our case! (chuckles)

Alan Clarke: Yes! (chuckles) It is sand kicked at him by he Serbs, he gets into a state...

Melvyn Bragg: There are one or two people who might not pick up this reference to Charles Atlas (laughs). Nevermind!

Alan Clarke: Anyway, well yeah, yeah well this was an old advertisement...

Melvyn Bragg: Yeah, yeah, 9 stone weakling. Body building. Natural...

Alan Clarke: ... for body building, you see, and... you can explain that Melvyn (Melvyn laughs) in a second, but the real point is, if someone kind of heavy duty, is giving trouble, they don't really like to do anything much about it, and thsi is a classic example of what's going on in Iraq, where the UN weapons inspectors have just simply packed up, really. They've reported all the breaches, they've reported the fact that Saddam Hussein is continuing to make all these weapons, and where are the B-52's? You know, the real exercise of US power has already atrophied in that it's only taking place in a very minor concept.

Melvyn Bragg: You regret the... you think that the British nation state has been damaged in its fabric, you say, and you think that is very regrettable, so you admire the power of a nation state. What do you find in that to admire? It is not a fashionable view, now, what would you say... what do you find to admire in it?

Alan Clarke: Well, I'm not bothered about fashion, the point is...

Melvyn Bragg: I wouldn't dream for a second, I would never accuse you of that.

Alan Clarke: ... is it still built into people's instincts, and yes it is, because the nation state is what should give them security, it's what gives them self esteem, it's what gives them... or what sustains them in making sacrifices. Gore Vidal would be able to estimate whether the extent... I mean the Russians should have switched... the Russians loved Stalin, they were proud of Stalin, they will tell you what a wonderful time it was under Stalin, because the whole world was frightened of them, and you can talk to any Russian about that, and they (indistinct) over that...

Melvyn Bragg: That's true, I've been there.

Alan Clarke: .. and this is a... this is something that the nation state will give to its subjects, and once it starts disintegrating into a lot of focus groups and kind of little regional assemblies, it loses the inherent strength, which is based on (indistinct), which is based on power, which is buried deep in people's psyche, and which is actually the most valuable political force that there is.

Melvyn Bragg: Do you find that in America, Gore Vidal, would you... would you take... ?

Gore Vidal: No, I don't find it, because we're so different. You're an island and more homogenous, and it was a joint venture, England incorporated and we are a continent and we didn't want a highly concentrated nation state, we didn't want a federal capital, we didn't want a standing army, and it was Abraham Lincoln who tore the thing to pieces, and in many ways he was the villain of our republic, because he decided... the civil war was not about slavery...

Melvyn Bragg: You make him the dummy in your new novel. (laughter)

Gore Vidal: Dummy! Yes he's had a concussion. No he was a... he had a mystical view of the union which nobody else had. We had regions, and each region was the size of a European country or larger. We liked this loose confederation, the articles of confederation began as in Lincoln, through this the first modern war, six hundred thousand young men were killed, it's the bloodiest thing the world had seen at that time, and out of it came a highly concentrated federal state, which was by no means the dream ever of the occupants of the state of the US.

Melvyn Bragg: In a sense it might have been old Europe striking back. But can I move onto something... ? You've said, Gore Vidal, "Politics is everything, everthing is political". You've run for congress, you've taken a great interest in politics, you're a voice in the politics of your country, and yet you've also written recently, "We're not allowed to discuss politics anymore in the USA. All we have are personalities and sex". Do you think the effect of personalities and sex is substantially getting in the way of any useful political discussion in the states? Or even here?

Gore Vidal: Well, discussion has been closed by the corporations who own the country. The only political debate of any importance is who raises what money from whom to give to whom for what. Taxes, revenues and the infrastructure as they call it. Of the state itself, we're not allowed to talk about that, because the congress is filled with people who are chosen by corporations and they represent the corporations. They are to see that the corporations pay minimal tax on their profits and so on. So there is no representaion for the people at large, and that's why half of them never vote. They've given up. They're much smarter than the media, which also belongs, indeed to the corporations, who are very disappointed in the American people, particularly over the Clinton nonsense. Well he tried to do politics in 1993, he tried to give us a National Health Service, which every civilised country has, but we're not allowed. The insurance companies together with the pharmaceuticals together with elements of the AMA, the doctors, said, "You are trespassing, you are only a lawyer that we put in the Whitehouse. What... you're going to tax us?! You're going to remove one third of our revenues? ", which go to the insurance companies for nothing. So they said, "We'll take care of that legislation. ", and they did, then they said, "We're going to take care of you, and it's not because we don't like you, Bill and Hilary, we're sending a message to any politician in the US `You try to do something for the people at large, and you will end up like the Clintons'"

Melvyn Bragg: Alan Clarke.

Alan Clarke: I love that. I mean I simply, you know...

Melvyn Bragg: I was going to ask you...

Alan Clarke: ... I can never resist a sort of king size conspiracy theory, particularly put with such, sort of beautiful, lucid sequential argument as that!

Melvyn Bragg: But do you agree with it?

Alan Clarke: No, I mean... this is the... it depends what sort of a society you live in, but you could say that the Nazi party dominated Germany to the extent that the corporations dominate the US. Certainly the communist party, during the communist period, played exactly the same role, it made and broke people. You couldn't move without its permission. I was impossible to exercise any judgement without referring to them.

Gore Vidal: But a conspiracy is still a conspiracy.

Melvyn Bragg: But just a second, can I just come...

Alan Clarke: Sure.

Melvyn Bragg: ... but can we get back to...

Alan Clarke: I mean I don't dispute it.

Gore Vidal: Yep.

Melvyn Bragg: But it's just interesting that what Gore said actually links very much with what I said at the top of the programme, that by going for the individual, and trivialising the individual, as both of you have written and believe about Clinton, and I agree with both of you on this, by trivialising that you are thereby trivialising politics and the political process in the US. Do you think this is deliberately... do you think this is happening?

Alan Clarke: No I don't quite go for Gore's theory, being a conspiracy, I think this is simply a function of the communications machine, now, and the appetite for artificiality and image, and impermanence and ephemerality and so on, and they can't get enough of it. I think the media have a huge... the media are very willing co-conspirators with any force, they want to destroy somebody else.

Gore Vidal: Could I ... ?

Melvyn Bragg: And so sex is just being used as something to destroy somebody?

Gore Vidal: It's a diversion, but let me show exactly how that particular conspiracy worked, because I was involved in some of it, anti-conspiracy. This is how it works, if you want to kill a health bill, which profits insurance companies, the piggy bank of the corporations and the pharmaceuticals and so on, now here's how the conspiracy worked, they set out... the took ads, a half billion dollars I am told, couldn't be that much, but it was nearly that much, on TV and they were... they went like this, it showed a worried couple, and this went all over the country, that's a conspiracy to put those ads on, to raise the money, to put them on, that killed the legislation.

"Harry, does this mean we can't use kindly doctor Haskins who delivered our Buster Brown, our precious child?",

"I'm afraid, Lorraine it does",

"But Harry, that's communism!"

Then the 6th symphony would go booming in the background. Well, you do ten thousand of those ads, that's a conspiracy to put them on, that's a conspiracy to get them out, and you've got everybody finally fearful of communism from the Clintons. Now if that isn't a conspiracy I don't know what is, just raising the money...

Alan Clarke: Yes, but just a minute, I mean (laughter) that may be true but how is it that Clinton's ratings have obstinately stayed in the high 60's...

Gore Vidal: Because they...

Alan Clarke: If they thought he was a communist, I mean you know, I think he would suffer a bit, wouldnt he?

Melvyn Bragg: Gore sees the salvation of America in the... those who don't vote, because they have more sense than not to vote...

Gore Vidal: Yes!

Melvyn Bragg: I'm paraphrasing, but they've also more sense than to take the allegations against Clinton seriously.

Gore Vidal: The press is enormously upset with the American people, and they may very well kick them out, and get another people to come in, and take their place! (laughter) I mean the press is not being listened to, the hysteria...

Alan Clarke: That is by far the most agreeable aspect of the whole crisis, is that the number of times we've had people from the press come on screen and say, "Now look, he's really finished, and now just you watch".

Gore Vidal: And "By Friday he's gone"!

Alan Clarke: And "By Friday he's gone", and so on, and then he obstinately bobs up again and he's still rated at 61%.

Gore Vidal: Because the people like him.

Alan Clarke: It's a very heartening reassertion of genuine popular feeling over those who are telling them what they ought to be thinking.

Melvyn Bragg: Is the a sort of re-emergence of a good healthy paganism that you would approve of, Gore Vidal, in your country?

Gore Vidal: I would simply say that in the maelstrom of chaos I see a glitter of common sense in my fellow countrymen, but it was always there, they just have no way of expressing it politically.

Melvyn Bragg: Alan Clarke, briefly, do you see this apllying to this country?

Alan Clarke: Yes I do, I mean, I still believe that the common sense of the people, particularly their ability to pick and choose the items of news so called, because of it being stuffed at them, will, in the end, get the better of the media.

Melvyn Bragg: Well thanks very much to Alan Clarke and Gore Vidal, that's all we have time for. Next week I'll be talking to Richard Dawkins and Ian McEwan. Thanks for listening.