Tom Tugendhat: belief

Transcript context

…But at least as of the time we’re talking, in September 2024, their behavior is very cautious. They’re not seeking to be sent to heaven immediately. As a social scientist, I’m a little suspicious of explanations where the society and the government are so totally different, even under autocracy. Do you see what I’m saying? It still puzzles me. I do see what you’re saying. I see what you’re saying, and in normal cases, I would sympathize. The reality is, though, this is a very brutal autocracy. It does murder an awful lot of people a year, and it has successfully got most — well, not most, but it’s successfully got many people expelled from the country. There’s a huge Iranian diaspora, as you know, all over the world. There are many extremely impressive Iranians who’ve followed their own lives away from the dictatorship. I think that alignment of government and people is easier when people can travel and be exiled, and that’s what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is a vile failure of leadership and a failure of responsibility. We’re seeing a government that absolutely brutalized an entire nation. One of the things you’re also seeing is that the government has realized that it can conduct a lot of violence through proxies. We just spoke about the Houthis, but it’s also true that Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah are mere proxies, in many ways, for the Iranian state. Now, in your earlier role as security minister and other posts, you’ve had access to a lot of classified information. Of course, we wouldn’t ask you to share that with us, but could you give us a sense, how much has that changed your view of the world? Is it like you learn all those things and then you say, “Oh my God, this is how the world works, I never figured that,” or do you just make marginal adjustments based on what you’ve learned?…

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