>> why in your opinion to american citizens such as coupe is adamant guenon choose to act in this way and trade over to the side? >> the man had a question. why do some young people renounce their country and make common cause with terrorists. ..

an extremist movement that has answers that gives them a sense of identity. so for that reason and others that's why some young people connect with the movements in the al qaeda and other sound. >> mine question is is there an increase on terrorism do you think there is a specific method to use to increase delete could decrease the possibility of the threats? >> the young man had a question

about terrorism and what can be done to mitigate this problem. there are a few things that can be done. it's worth mentioning that loan wolves although they may act alone they do not live in a vacuum they are people with whom they can serve with fellow students in this so forth and so on but some people i think to be aware of these kind of red flags there is more research that can be done to understand the radicalization process why some people are susceptible to these movements but with respect to say these red flags if somebody will the spells the position, where do they draw the line because we have a first edition of the united states tradition of free speech and there is nothing illegal about holding up the popular opinion in the extremist opinions. but that said, there can be some measures taken to try to

understand this, people who might be susceptible to those. >> what they can do until there is strong evidence that a person has the intention of carrying out terror was on but since 9/11, the fbi operates the attorney general guidelines put in place in 1976 and in essence they do not commence an investigation to it and the so-called extremist terrorist group until there is evidence of the so-called criminal predicate and the so-called criminal predicate threshold for that is below probable cause but it's to have some kind of reason why they decided to investigate the group but since 9/11, there's a guide lines that have been recalibrating and its now easier for the fbi and law enforcement agencies to get that kind of information. i was reading an article

other day the fbi actually set up an extremist side radical islam site and one young man was a victim of a sting operation. basically corresponding with operators of the web site unbeknownst to him. they are getting involved in some kind of terrorist plot. yes. >> one of your point is that the rise in technology is increasing in globalization and recruitment. so would you say that this recruitment would lead to structures making a, back -- come back and to get people on your side would you say it's going to make a comeback? >> the young lady had a question about the changing structure of terrorist organizations. as i mentioned earlier, terrorist groups are moving away from the model and into more of

an amorphous organizational structure and she was asking the increasing number would it be possible for them to kind of coalesce and once again create new organizations in the structure. that's primly unlikely. the only time something like that can really happen is on the terrorist groups operate and place where the states are not very strong like afghanistan or the so-called areas like afghanistan and pakistan where there isn't the presence in bill wall and the insurgent groups to flourish and take on the structure of your traditional hierarchical organization. because of the tremendous surveillance, increased surveillance and intrusive measures like that it would be very difficult for those traditional hierarchical organizational models to emerge.

>> thank you for coming out. if you have any more questions if you want to talk to me afterwards i would be glad to do that. thank you very much. [applause] on a recent visit to london book tv sat down with some of great britain's most acclaimed historians, professors and critics and more to talk about politics, war, history, religion and culture. for the next several weeks you can watch these interviews every sunday at 6 p.m.. we start with richard seymour, the author of the four nonfiction books including american insurgents and "unhitched" discussing his belief in communism, his resignation from the socialist workers party and his issues with the political arguments of

the late christopher hitchens. this half hour interview starts right now. >> now joining us on book tv in london is author richard seymour. mr. seymour, before we start talking about some of your books, introduce yourself to the audience. tell us about yourself. >> guest: i am a ph.d. student at the london school of economics, so that's what i spend most of my time doing degette i do some writing on the side. i write for the guardian newspaper. i've written a few books on a blog as well. >> host: what is the blog called? the tomb. it is on ideas and it is rescuing from 20th century communism if you like. that's what i spend a lot of time talking about. and it's just basically for the left wing politics. >> host: are you a communist? >> guest: i would describe myself as a socialist because i

don't want to be experienced with stalin and dictatorships that were effected in the name of communism, so i wouldn't call myself a communist. >> host: what about the marxist? >> guest: i am very much a marxist. >> host: why? >> guest: i suppose the same reason of our subjects, christopher hitchens. it is a time i considered a superior amount of time expandin wayg ci they work. i explain politics. >> host: day in your view the soviet union subvert marxism? >> guest: i wouldn't say that it subverted marxism. what i would say is that a hopeful experiment in a radical new type of a socialist democracy was crushed very quickly due to starvation, civil war and things that can often authoritarian dictatorship and would have been a sort of free-flowing set of radical ideas called marxism that became a state religion and became a

dogma. it's been replicated not just in the regimes around the world, but in various parties around the world. there is a party i used to be long until monday. adis a post/rocky organization. it is heterodox in some ways but essentially was defined by its critical attitude towards the u.s.s.r. on the stalin regime. maintaining a revolutionary socialist politics. again, one of my subjects, christopher hitchens, remember the forerunner of the international socialist before it became the socialist workers party. so i stood in the same political tradition as him which is one of the reasons i decided to write about him. >> host: you've written christopher hitchens and your book is called "unhitched: the

trial of christopher hitchens." of what do you accuse him? >> guest: there's a few things. first i think in the last ten years of his life when he achieved the greatest accolades, the greatest celebrity and probably the most money, he was the least convincing as intellectual polemicist, as you know, some would be the was known as a political writer. for example, i think that in his riding on religion, he took and the central point of view which is to say that religion is fairly monolithic. you can reduce them to make concrete coherent set of ideas, and they are not subside to become susceptible to interpretation and the way that people implement them. saddam as it happens, and many of these interpretations of religion were based on just straightforward error or

misrepresentation. that's what i find looking through theological scholarship. but i think the problem with it is that the secondary to belie the political agenda because christopher hitchens back to the war in iraq. he said that he was in favor of the war because a would free the people of iraq from the terrible and oppressive regime. so far, so good. the problem is that after the war has ended, nonstop chaos and bloodshed. and he has to explain this. he said is because of the islamofacists, because all of the religious groups have been tearing the country apart since the occupation began and it's not because the occupation itself and the way that it introduced the secretary in politics into the state. he generalized from that to explain lebanon, israel, palestine. where i come from, he explained the complex religion.

and the irony is i have never heard anyone refer to the ira or the sort of gangs as religious death squads until he did. because we never understood it in those terms. and it felt to me as somebody that came from there that this was a position from someone saying these backwards sort of colonial places that they're funny that cord ideas are killing each other because of the funny backward ideas. it's actually more complicated than that. and it is ironic that it took tony blair in the debate to point this out. i find myself perhaps for the first time. >> host: so when it comes to christopher hitchens were you and admire our prior to that? >> guest: absolutely. even a lot of what he wrote afterwards i thought was a lot worth reading. the problem i guess i have is

that he sees this have to be as unpredictable as he had been. i almost knew what he was going to say every week especially if it was about war or religion i knew what he was going to say pity if he chose the subject he was going to say that he kurds were an example of what iraq could have been, the liberation could have been if it were not for the religious and he was going to talk about religion and talk about the effect that it had on democracy and so on and so forth. so, he lost a bit of his edge, a bit of his originality which i always thought existed in the fact he was somebody that was quite unique in american politics who wound up the american establishment but somebody that unapologetically argued for the socialist politics and it got to where hardly anyone does that. >> host: so richard seymour was there a solution or a non-solution to iraq? >> guest: yeah. i think they should have been

allowed to have their telling moment. the moment in the square in egypt where millions of people were united in an ecstatic moment and faced down a fairly well entrenched dictatorship and this wasn't a dictatorship that was weakened and isolated by years of sanctions. tony blair went on television and said he is a pretty good guy he had a degree of authority. nonetheless i'm convinced had the united states rather than invading the state apparatus is and creating chaos and unemployment. i think they would find a way to

ask and we have seen that in to nisha and we have seen attempts in yemen nd algeria and elsewhere and probably bahrain. so i think that the arab spring shows the way forward. >> host: richard seymour, did the situation in syria -- where if anything would you like to see the international community getting involved? test coverage is one of those i'd like to unpack, where is it, who does it consist of? countries are not united in and of themselves never mind with one another. there are great divisions what to do about syria. personally i think one of the great problems with syria is the degree of intervention that's already taken place. there are countries that are intervening, supply, really radical squads with arms in a

way that isn't helping the revolutionary process. it's helping the right wing so i think they should keep out of it to the on the other hand, i think that if the revolution is on the ground in syria and wishes to purchase weapons if they wish to forge agreements with other people on the side of the country, they are perfectly entitled to do that. i just think that nothing should be done that comes from above as if to say, you know, we sort of superman are going to come in and save the day because that almost never works. >> host: do you think that iraq, baghdad could have had a square moment? do you think that saddam hussein and hosni mubarak are the same person? in essence? >> guest: no. i think that it was in many ways a lot worse. but not just a lot worse. i think that by the time 2002, 2003, it was a lot weaker in

many respects. partly this has got to do with how well these regimes are able to maintain a broad social basis. the mubarak regime eventually fell the same way. the social basis narrowed and kept progressively until a smaller delete so that the numbers of people felt excluded from the regime and they couldn't be contained within net. saddam hussein didn't have much of a social basis. what he had is terror and they were being depleted. he lost his international respect. previously he had the support of countries including the united states and france and so on. he lost all of that. he lost any agreement with saudi arabia said he was isolated. on top of that, he had a number of uprisings, which proved that the regime wasn't universally popular. and of course northern iraq to basically become a kurdish

state. so, i think the regime is vastly week than it appeared to be. and the fact that when there was a threat of war they were talking about going to release all of these political prisoners or we are going to have a vote on something but the point was that they felt we needed to make these gestures. i think it is a week regime and it would have crumbled under a few minutes. you can never second-guess these things but one thing i would always say is given what happened in iraq as a result of the invasion with the excess deaths that resulted and the chaos and the ethnic cleansing no matter bad a dictatorship you can always make it worse. >> host: richard seymour, in "unhitched," is what of christopher hitchens guilty of in the end? >> guest: okay, i think there

are a number of things. he lost his critical age and ability to maintain a critical distance from the establishment from the government. he became. i'm not saying it is in a completely discriminatory because there were some things that he was going to preside boesh four but when he founded the bush administration was a force for liberation in the middle east and was going to be like the republicans in the spanish civil war, i think that he lapsed into a delusional state and partly it had to do with his relationship with paul wolfowitz who persuaded him. we are not just a bunch of real politics. we are going after the democratic generation reasons. to an extent i think that he believed that and it had to do with his historical perspective. he had come to the conclusion after 2000, 2001 and that capitalism and such no longer faced in any logical enemy. there was no social force or

moving class capable of challenging and a serious way and as such it is the only force left. it was a force of creative destruction but nonetheless was a revolutionary process. and so he felt good. and most of the bottle spreading cabalism from a liberal capitalism would be a step up and therefore america and american power was on the right side of history. for him to support it was to supports the progressive force so for that reason he thought not only the americans couldn't lose in iraq and afghanistan, but that it couldn't -- if america really dedicated itself it couldn't go a ride. the problem is in this respect i didn't think that he was even able to get it right in hindsight. he never recanted. he certainly saw things had gone badly wrong but he never reexamining his basic

assumptions which led him to say let's have a war. >> host: do you think about writing while he was still alive? >> guest: i did not think about writing it. much of it was written part of it is based on an essay that i wrote in 2005 which i e-mail to him because we were having a bit of correspondence. he was being very likable and charming. i sent him this which was very damning of him and he eventually yielded and vaguely insulted me but it was a very amusing conversation. but it was included in another collection of the critics for each he drafted the response to that included others. so, on top of that, but it

became clear that the 22 had come out and that was his memoir, there were aspects of his life and his writing that he had chosen to gloss over and some of us are interested in figuring out what was true and what wasn't delayed they contacted me about six months before he suddenly passed away and said, you know, you've been writing about him for a long time we are looking for someone to do a book would you like to do it? yes. who else is going to do it. so why did. and i started immediately contacting his old friends, comrades, people used to know and just got more of a sense of who he was as a person and what sort of life he had and what sort of things he sort of excluded from the purview.

moscow richard seymour as a self-described socialist. does democracy fit into your belief system? >> guest: yeah of course. i think any idea of socialism that is undemocratic is not socialism. and radical democracy and the democratizing practically everything i am in favor of. i would say rather than nationalizing every industry, turning over to the workers' control that is what i would favor. this is something the was once based on the real social forces happening. there were workers counselors movements, and in the early 21st century the only glimmer we have seen in argentina they started with the occupied certain factories and turned them to

co-ops these are space movements i would like to see at instead radicalized so yes democracy has a very central place. >> host: given the politics where do you see the difference between the labor party in england and the conservative party and the liberal democrats? >> guest: the difference is primarily not in the ideas that the defendant and/or do any more but more in the social basis. the party is still very much of the trade unions were not released the trade union leadership. it still gets the votes mainly from the working-class people across manly england and scotland, and it still has some sort of money hedge of the parties of the socialist international to which belongs. the conservative party is a party of business that never concealed this but in the last 20 years the have learned a

lesson which is where they would have once defended out right hard-core conservative ideas and the stature and would have been elected on that basis they can no longer do so so that is moved to the center in order to be able to get command and portability. -- plurality. so they are around the center ground at the moment. there are tendencies within the society given the crisis, given the process of austerity that would lead to the position. but i don't think it would necessarily be reflected in the two major parties. >> host: a couple years ago you came out with the meeting of david cameron. what is the thesis of that book? >> guest: essentially that he is in the wide historical forces that he represents. what i did is i took a number of key words what he had used, progress, meritocracy, and the

idea was that essentially the language that he was using was codifying the political project that was mainly continuous with new labor in terms of its support for privatization and in terms of its support for breaking up over the welfare state and in terms of downsizing the state itself being a very important part of his project but i also tried to root and analysis of the changes in the conservative ideology to edmund burke and so on and one of the interesting things mr. cameron came out with its his particular conception of progress. progress used to mean something like the idea that we move in a direction of greater quality and greater freedom. that was the idea of the conception of the political process but there's also another

meeting that is accrued to it which means the accumulation of stuff. progress means to constantly keep producing and producing pitting it as long as you are doing that, that progress and you adapt to whatever changes that imposes and to an extent i think that is what david cameron meant by progress and singing the global capitalism and increasing the content sort of innovation and change that it produces. it's not something that he invented. >> host: we are talking with richard seymour on book tv to the we are in london talking with british authors to the richard seymour as the author of four books, "unhitched" the iaot recently.

american insurgents, the history of the antiamerican imperialism, the meaning of david cameron in 2010, and richard seymour's first book is the liberal defense of murder. is it fair to say that your thesis in that book is humanitarian intervention equals colonialism? >> guest: certainly the choice of lineage of ideas and political practice is to go back to the colonial era because if you are trying to explain how it is that some people can today start by calling intervention in the name of jefferson and thomas paine and in the name of the immense peter ideas of the 18th-century evolutions and end up, you know, making calls for just bombing of the press essentially, which i think that he did a couple of times, certainly it was that a few people had died in fallujah

because too many jihadis had escaped. i started to wonder how could you sort of your night -- unite the positions and i found i had to go back to not just of the victorian period, not just to john stuart mill, who was a liberal and very much in favor of self-determination for women and working class people in england, but also colonialism abroad because you felt that those people were not yet able to govern themselves and efficiently. financially i had to go back to the origins of liberalism itself as a political ideology where you find john locke defending obviously the rights of the freeborn englishmen, the right to liberty, the right to freedom from certain oppression, the right to property being absolutely central to the purview but also defending colonialism and slavery and

saying the justification for slavery is in many ways the same for property in this case what you've done is by defeating the opposed force, you have the right to kill them. you could have done so and by spending their life they effectively zero their life to you, but as you well, also of course the reason and the political rationale for taking control of, for the saddle, the americas, is that they were not disposing of it very well at all and there was a mandate given to make the best use of the territory since taking control of this of private property and making it into private property and applying them methods of production which are straightforward is a justification for that process and as you progress through the history of liberalism you often find it t