Simon Sebag Montefiore: History Is Not Over
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From the free press, this is honestly live in New York City. Thank you.
Hell yeah! I'm Barry Weiss, and I am thrilled to be here with you tonight. Did you guys know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with a lot of naked dwarves? Did you know that Catherine the Great, long smeared as a nymphomaniac, was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod's genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and honestly, I don't remember any of it. But not my guest tonight, not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pagers that you cannot put down. Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great, to name a few, are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature. Most of his books are biographies of people, but Jerusalem is a biography of a city.
A city, as he writes, that is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice, in heaven and on earth. The book takes you through Jerusalem's 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, many of them in China, which we're going to learn about. And it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel, with Trump, I think, 72 hours into being president again, I could not think of a better person to talk to than Sebag. So, Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome to Honestly.
Thank you so much. It's... It's great to be here and great to see you.
It's great to see you too.
We last saw each other on election day.
Exactly. So we saw each other the afternoon of the election.
And we called it right.
We did call it right. But neither of us had the cojones to go on Twitter and say we think Trump's going to win. But we both acknowledged to each other privately that we thought Trump was going to win. And I think the feeling that both of us felt that day was a kind of nauseous anticipation and a sense that something big was coming. And I don't think either of us felt like the big thing was Trump, but something maybe beyond him on the horizon. Can you maybe take us back to that conversation and take us to like how you felt on the eve of his election and how you're feeling today and what you think it portends?
I think that the significance of it was a crisis of confidence in the Western liberal democracies in themselves, and a crisis partly caused by an incredibly complex world crisis, many new powers rising, but also a crisis within the societies of the Western liberal democracies, which had been models of confidence in themselves since 1945. In 1945, the victory of liberal democracies, the defeat of a totalitarian challenge sold the idea of Western capitalist democracy around the world And even new countries that were in fact dictatorships felt they had to look like democracies. They all had presidencies and legislatures and everything. They were just copying America because America was the model of victory. And for systems to win...
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