None. OK, so everything's holding.
Simon Rush. Thank you for joining me in the
trenches. Oh, it's, it's our pleasure.
I speak on behalf of Saitlanders who pay my salary and enable me
to do this. It's a pleasure to be here,
Jeremy. The pleasure's all mine, Simon,
because I love chatting to you and I'm very glad that we're
going to do this on a regular basis, so thank you for that.
Again, a pleasure. It's very conversational, it's
thoroughly enjoyable. I always look forward to it and
that's that's why I occasionally send you a slightly nasty
message every time you miss a you don't keep a promise.
The reason the reason why you do that though, is because I
haven't yet joined you for a hunt and I I really want to
change that soon, I promise. Yeah, you must, man.
The hunting is good here. I've got just above my house.
I counted recently. One herd of two.
I think I stopped counting at 211 up.
Forget but well over 200 Springbok that are just, you
know, taking the cattle's grazing.
They they have to be haunted. They need to be haunted and who
who better to come and hunt? Actually, let's let's stay on
that for a second because just recently I recorded a
conversation with my friend Farmer Angus and and his
regenerative farming style. And naturally, what comes up in
some of the comments is people don't like the idea of of
killing animals, right? And that leads to the
conversation around hunting and conservation.
And the knee jerk response is always, how can you conserve
animals if you're shooting them? Simon, please, for the love of
sanity, explain why hunting is integral.
To conservation, because if the animals are not kept in check,
they will outgrow the space and they will starve one another to
death. They'll all fight over the last
blade of grass as the herds get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then you watch them starve to death.
And watching animals starve to death is I've I've been very up
close and personal with it. I once spent, I think it was
close to 12 weeks, call it 10 weeks for the sake of a number
on a farm during a drought when the farmer couldn't, he just
couldn't bear it anymore. He fell into a depression and he
more or less didn't come out of the house.
And I was camping among the the flocks of of mohair.
I'm trying to think of the right name, the goats that produce
mohair. Why can't I think of the blasted
name? Anyway, yes, Angora goats, 6000
of them, and watching him starve to death is one of the most
traumatic things that I've ever seen in my life.
Besides, you've got to be mentally retarded to go down
this road. I mean, it takes a special kind
of stupid to approve to approve of vivi section.
Implicitly approve of Vivi section by wearing makeup in
which they don't they, they had the nature of Vivi section is to
test at what point the animal experiences what degree of
suffering. So it's not like they, you know,
put makeup in the little mouse's eye and say, well, he didn't
seem to feel a thing or, yeah, it was slightly uncomfortable.
They leave it there for as long as it takes for the, the, the,
the, the animal to get mixomatosis and cancers.
And they do it on dogs and what have you.
So honestly, I, I just want to punch in the face that that kind
of that, that that very peculiar breed of hypocrite that approves
of vivi section but not hunting for a good purpose.
And I've never met a vegan who didn't wear makeup.
Not one. I'm talking about women.
Now you would think there would be 1 tyranny.
You would think they could find one.
Just a little bit of blush. I I just found the bass evens
out the ACP marks. The thing Simon though, is that
is that people who say these things are responding
emotionally and they don't. They clearly don't live in an
environment like we do. Yeah.
You know, the other thing to bear in mind, Jeremy, is that
hunting can be botched. It, it can be botched and it can
be traumatic, but if it's done well, it's not at all traumatic.
The animal doesn't know that it's died whereas and I can
prove this. I've had people challenge me on
this and I've said I will arrange a visit to the abattoir
now because I have the contacts I.
Did that, I did that. More people should do it.
Yes, and in in South Africa and countries with halal meat, it's
particularly bad, but it's not great anywhere in the world.
Those animals are absolutely traumatised because they can
smell that blood in the air for an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, four
hours while they stand waiting to be slaughtered in the, you
know, as they move from the what we would call a crawl through
the press gang to be slaughtered so that they know what's
happening and you can see the trauma in their eyes and they
flare their nostrils. It's absolutely terrifying.
And of course when it's halal it's much worse because halal
law doesn't permit you to. The animal has to be conscious
that it is being slaughtered. So when they stun it and then
cut its throat, they they stun it in such a way that it is only
stunned that it's not blacked out.
When animals are slaughtered halal, so they perfectly aware
that a knife and and they have to be slaughtered by knife, that
a knife is cutting its throat. As opposed to the other way
around where you you use an instrument like in that country,
that movie No Country for old Men or whatever, we're the guy
moving. Yeah, that instrument usually
would kill the animal, then its throat would be cut for it to be
bled. But in South Africa, it's the
other way around because the although our country only has a
Muslim population of about 2%, the the abattoirs and the
retailers particularly are so terrified of being branded
racists or Islamophobia is Islamophobia is that they pander
to that market. So all of our animals are
slaughtered halal with very few exceptions.
Very, very, very few exceptions. So those animals are, are well
aware that their throat is being cut open for them to die that
way. And when an animal is
slaughtered that way, it's not like the movies, it's not like
the throat is cut and you immediately keel over stone
dead. The animal is.
It takes two or three seconds for adequate blood.
Sorry. For adequate blood to drain out
of the brain for it to enter unconsciousness and die.
So, yeah, hunting, by comparison, is nothing besides
the fact that it's good for the environment and for the herds so
that they don't suffer lingering deaths over months.
Terrible to to watch animals starve to death.
Oh, Jeremy, it's the worst thing you've ever seen.
And. All you have to do is is observe
the Kruger National Park. If if people understand what's
going on there, maybe they might consider why hunting matters.
For example, there are too many elephants in Kruger, way too
many thousands and thousands too many.
The hunting programme, well the cutting programme stopped in the
early 90s and what's happened now?
The elephants are destroying the landscape faster than the than
what the landscape can recover. So which means that trees are
starting to get lower and lower. And of course, that affects all
animal life in the park. Yeah, Jeremy, it's a product of
neoliberal self hating Westerners who are, you know,
really genetic detritus. And it is the case, you know,
Doctor, what is his name? He's a, he's a descent.
He, there's some universities in Europe that still retain the old
descent qualification, which is between PhD and Professor.
Edward Dutton. The Jolly Heretic is his channel
on YouTube and he has spoken very eloquently as a scientist
about how this is it's genetics. It's very bad genetics that have
crept into the West because we don't have to have good genetics
to survive. We, we have by and large, not
here in South Africa, but you know, nanny states that take
care of us. And so children, I'm sorry to
say this, children who genetically shouldn't breed do
breed because they don't die shortly after birth.
It's a terrible, terrible subject, but that's the way it
is. These you have these people with
these monstrously bad ideas calling the shots.
We had the most successful elephant management programme in
the whole wide world up until the early 90s and then in the
rush to become part of the global community in again the
early 90s over that sort of grey period between apartheid and at
1994 when the African National Congress won the 1st multiracial
democratic election, we were falling over ourselves to say
yes Sir, no Sir, 3 bags full Sir, to everything that that the
world asked of us. So the people who knew the least
about elephant conservation got to call the shots over the
people who knew the most in the whole world about elephant
conversation. And it was to do with the the
sale of ivory and our sales of ivory, legitimate sales of ivory
to China from cold animals that had to be called, called for the
reasons that you've just described.
The terrible destruction of the Kruger National Park, which is
just about the size of the state of Israel and was one of the the
finest national parks in the world.
Yeah, that ivory funded tensions of millions of dollars.
Just by the way, the Kruger National Park at least has a
legitimate reason to exist. Yeah, I hear you.
I love looking for Segways and I absolutely cannot find one here.
But you, you were recently in Russia and I just, I cannot find
the link. So let's just jump straight into
into your trip. You were in Russia for a very
long time. Simon, tell me a bit more about
that. OK, for some years on World
Broadcasting Network and many other interviews, but but
regularly they I tried to expose the lies of the whole Russia
narrative and eventually it was three people contacted me, a
member of parliament in Russia and two guys who are just do
gooders. You know, they they've got the
opportunity, the financial opportunity to devote lots of
time to encouraging Christian conservative Caucasians to come
to Russia. So they propose that I go
eventually found the money and I went to Moscow and I met a
absolutely unbelievable group of people called the Brotherhood of
Academists and then a brotherhood of the the top
university students in, in Russia.
And I said to them, you know, I'd love to go to Donbass.
I mean, that would be my ultimate.
So they said, well, we might have a contact.
So in the meantime, I knocked around Moscow for a bit.
Then I went up to Arkham Gelsk to experience the far North,
which was lovely. And I got back to Moscow and
they said we, you know, we've arranged that you can go to
Donbas. So I went down to Donbas and
journalists, they are so rare foreign journalists.
There's a French guy and I believe there's a British
journalist living in Donetsk. But to give you a, for instance,
and I'm not a journalist, but it just kind of, you know, things
evolved. I went to the site of a famous
battle that, you know, nothing. All the mine fields were still
intact at Nicole Skye, a monastery.
So it had only been liberated a short, short while before.
We were just a few kilometres from on the front lines.
And one of the monks said that he'd had a premonition that I
would arrive. He said he'd had it for a few
days. So that was quite, you know,
that was lovely to hear. And he said, you know, we've
only ever had three journalists, one from Brazil, presumably Pepe
Escobar, because I know he's been there all very near to
thee, one from India and one from China, 3 foreign
journalists. And so it was a great privilege
for me in synopsis to be able to go there and to see what's
cooking with my own eyes. Jeremy.
And. And every single word in the
West is a lie. Every, every word about
everything. Nothing is true at all.
The slightly snide tone in which Western journalists write as
snide or patronising or condescending, but more often
than not patronising or snide is just completely unjustified.
Russian people are the loveliest people you could ever wish to
meet in your life. All of them, all of the time.
You'll get the odd, you know, punk, but as a broad
generalisation they reserve people so they appear to be
sombre or even surly, but once you break the ice they're
terrific. One of the guys who hosted me
said to me you will reap the benefit of being a foreigner,
you will. But if you stay here long
enough, you will also start to see through it that it's not
just a foreigner thing. We, we know ourselves as kind.
Those of us who travel can't believe how unkind Westerners
are. We.
We are conscious of the fact that we are kind, generous,
helpful people and we've always been like that.
It's a kind of an inbuilt Russian thing.
And that's certainly true. I've got help from sure.
You can't believe how many people just want to do something
small for you, and they do it for one another all the time.
And the food is fantastic and it's dirt cheap and I've never
seen so much variety in my life. I went into Pet Georgeka, which
is a chain of corner shops, so you get them every couple of 100
yards. I don't know how many there are
in Russia, but the millions, so to speak.
And in this tiny little corner shop, I counted 108 different
varieties of bread. Not 108 loaves, 108 varieties.
The way they stack their shelves is completely different to the
waist. You wouldn't have, for instance,
4 bottles of Bovril 8 deep next to one another.
You know, 4 rows. You would have one row of Bovril
and then all of the different things alongside it.
So it's just this bewildering array of variety. 1 of I've got
a Mercedes S500 that was South Africa's richest man's last car
before he died. Richest man in in the past.
So it's a lovely car and one of my sons was using it and he's
mad about Mercedes. And after 24 hours I've been
there, exactly 24 hours. I rang him and I said I hadn't
yet been to central Moscow. I've been outside the Three
Rings, quite far outside the The Three Rings in a place called
Yuzhny Tushner. So I hadn't seen opulence yet.
I've rang him and I said in the past 24 hours I've seen more
Gilander Waggon S series, my Bach and AMG Mercedes that I've
seen in the rest of my life put together in Frankfurt, Berlin,
Washington, New York, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, put
together. So it's a very, very wealthy
society. Everybody's doing well.
The employment opportunities just never end.
The business opportunities are endless.
I ended up putting together an enormous deal with a few 10s of
millions of dollars while I was there, but I won't go into the
details of it. But I happened to know the right
person just by absolute unbelievable coincidence.
So this deal will be worth over $100 million over time.
But that kind of opportunity is just it's, it's low hanging
fruit. The people, they like
foreigners, they treat you well. There's.
Yeah, it's, it's all going on there.
Jeremy, if I was 25 years younger, I would move there in a
heartbeat. If I didn't have sons in South
Africa, my very next move would be to apply for Russian
citizenship and and do whatever. I was quite a world famous
projects manager, you know, did a tonne of international work at
the very highest level. So I wouldn't, I don't think I
battled to get a job. But obviously the knee jerk, the
knee jerk reaction would be, but Russia's being sanctioned by the
West, so surely the people must be struggling.
No man, no Jeremy, you know I'm not telling your audience or
you. I'm recounting what I told my
beloved son. I could have said to him.
It's half as much, twice as much, whatever.
My whole life put together 6 cities put together, I said to
my whole life in every place that I've visited, all put
together not as many S class my Bach.
AMG and Gilanderwagen Mercedes, as I've seen in my whole life
altogether, there's money there. There's a hell of a lot of money
there and there's a hell of a lot of work.
Jeremy, you cannot believe the the employment is unbelievable
that you go to hotels and they're crying for people to to
come and do you know get jobs. Pleading 1 receptionist while I
was there worked. Gee, I don't want to exaggerate.
I think 3 days straight because so she would take naps, you
know, kind of 10:00 at night until 5:00 in the morning.
She'd hope and pray that she wasn't disturbed.
But there's just that there's a shortage of, of workers.
The the economy is cooking. Like you can't believe the
sanctions are meaningless, Jeremy, Absolutely meaningless.
There's the, you know, Jeremy, the the three best hamburgers
I've had in my life, I had one that was awful, absolutely
awful. But the three best hamburgers I
had I've had in my life are in Russia.
Just to illustrate the concept of quality as opposed to, you
know, there's there's good quality work being done and
there's enough money to fund it and not enough people even to do
it. And it's so, so much the case
that recently a gang of businessmen, top guys managed to
secure a meeting with Vladimir Putin, which ended up being
recorded in which they said, look, Sir, sorry to trouble you,
sorry to take up your time. But we are desperately worried.
And he said, what about? And they said, we're afraid that
you're going to relent and you're going to allow the
businesses that abandoned this country, that sanctioned this
country to come back, that you're going to have pity on
them. And we've poured a lot into
filling those niches. And he had to reassure them, no,
don't worry. We we're not going to do that.
They want the sanctions to continue.
They're desperate for the sanctions to continue because it
allows them to insulate or it's, it's a forced insulation of
their economy and they're OK, Jack.
With that and they're trading with all the countries that are
not sanctioning them, which by the way is majority of the
world. People seem to forget how small
the Western, what's the, what's the word I'm looking for?
The Western collective is it's extremely small.
Yes, yes. It has hitherto been, you know,
influential over centuries, you could even say millennia,
stretching back to the time of ancient Greece.
The West has been a, if not the dominant force, a dominant
force, But the, the, the global S, particularly the East, have
cottoned on to the recipe because they have a super
abundance of people to carry out that recipe.
They're going about it hammer and tongs, with the result that
the the relative importance of the West is declining year by
year. And now we're hearing Scott
Basent shrieking about Japan and China having to buy bonds
because the the USA simply can't offload them.
The world is turning away from the Western breast, as it were,
Breast in the sense of breast milk.
The world has has had to suckle on the Western breast like like
an infant, because from the West came all of the brilliance, the
creativity, the progress, the the great leaps forward of.
Mankind, not all of it. I mean, gunpowder came out of
China for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not not all of it, but overwhelmingly, you know, they
are. It's that stereotype of the
exception proving the rule. You know, we can all think of
gunpowder and ink, and then we pause a little bit and we try to
pretend that we didn't pause before.
We give a third example that say, I think the the wheel came
from Sumeria, but I'm not too sure.
Generally speaking, the West has been a a a force for the the
progression of mankind. What's that?
What's that Monty Python sketch? But what did the Romans ever do
for us? Yeah, Yeah.
Did you know Jeremy that they just discovered recently It,
it's it, I want to say in the past five years, perhaps it's
10, perhaps it's 15, but it's relatively very, very recently.
Why it is that Roman cement is is still all of it, obviously,
But that which is intact is still absolutely solid.
Whereas you might cement the wall of a house.
And if a poor job is done, whatever, you know, it starts
falling off after a few years. Do you know what the reason is?
No. The Romans used salt water.
Salt water? What?
Scientists just figured it out recently.
Yeah. Salt water has this kind of
exponential effect on on cement concrete.
That actually kind of makes sense if you think about it,
because of what Seoul does over time, Yeah, it calcifies.
And often when we talk about Russia versus the West and the
sanctions, etcetera, it's always geopolitical.
But on a human level, how did you find Russia?
On a human level, there are some things that are are difficult.
One of them is the language, and that is made exponentially more
difficult by the alphabet because when you obviously it's
the same with Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
I'm not saying this is, you know, completely unique, but
there is a kind of a, I don't want to say old wives tale.
What's the urban legend? I suppose that Russian is one of
the five most difficult languages to learn.
And when you can't decipher any of it, it's very bewildering.
I know people who moved to Russia from South Africa.
They're doing very, very well, by the way, working as English
teachers in a kindergarten, but living in a really posh part of
Moscow. They say we we do beautifully.
Anyway, they were too afraid because of the language, as I
say, multiplied by the alphabet to take a a bus for something
like 3 months and they didn't catch the metro for something
like 2 years. If I remember correctly.
I was catching the bus by the second day that I was there
because I was able to fathom something really simple as far
as the bus route from my hotel to the the urban centre nearby
centre was concerned. But even I was I was very
intimidated. This that.
And you do get a sort of a village mentality and people
warn you about it, though they will say to you, look, people
from the village are rough. And I did experience that once
or twice. Some real, I'm sorry to use the
word, but real assholes just doing absolutely stupid things.
For instance, I went to an enormous amount of trouble to
book a bus ticket across the Kerch Bridge, the one that NATO
keeps on trying to destroy, and to get a window seat on the
correct side, on the right hand side so I'd be able to film.
And a guy got on the bus before me and an old man from the
village, and he simply refused to relinquish my seat.
And it became like a little bit of a scene and I had to back
down. You know, I didn't want to be
the foreigner causing trouble. And I had one very scary
incident. I caught a train from Moscow to
Alhangelsk. And I, when I got on, I said to
the conductress, I'm with Google Translate on my phone.
Look, I make videos for YouTube. I invited here by a member of
Parliament and I want to tell the truth about Russia.
Can I work in? Can I go to the eating the
dining car? You know, what are the rules
around here? Can I just go there?
Do I have to ask permission? Do I need a stamp?
Do I have to pay money? She helped me.
She rushed me down to the dining car.
She gave the manager of the dining car strict instructions
to take the best care of me and so I worked there until about
midnight time to close. The dining car happened to get
to a station. I hopped off and I walked,
getting fresh air up the the watching the platform to my back
to my berth. As I was walking up this woman
scowled at me. I thought, heavens above, what
have I done? Have to be I've.
Anyway, the mood was icy and people were looking at me one
thing and another. Eventually by the next morning,
the train manager, as it late turned out, and one of the
conductress has come past. In the meantime, the other
conductress has disappeared, who knows where she's gone.
And another conductress has yelled at me for filming out of
the the window. And the train manager eventually
gets me and he says, Mr Simon John.
I said, yeah. He said, show me your document.
And he said, look, you've been filming.
There's big trouble. The police are waiting for you
in our hungos. Now, what that means is either
the SVR, one of the successes to the KGB, or the FSB.
Because if you missed a plot and you get a ring from a train
saying we think we've got an Americansky speon, the first
thing you do is pick up the phone to the correct people, the
people who deal with foreign spies.
You don't handle the matter yourself.
So I sat there quiking my boots off to be arrested.
But in the meantime, I said to him, look, if I was an
Americansky spion, Ciai wouldn't have asked for permission.
I wouldn't have been boldly filming out of the window.
And I said, your conductors gave me permission after I asked
politely. And I told her who invited me to
Russia and I showed, you know, everything.
Now all of a sudden, I've been just kind of covert or
clandestine. Eventually, after some time, I
calmed him down, but he didn't say to me, all right, I won't
call the police. So that was a dreadfully
terrifying experience. So I've got to the the
destination. And I thought, there's no way
I'm going to do a runner and make it worse.
I'll just stand here quivering until they come and put the
manacles on me, which I did for half an hour.
And then I thought, stuff this, if the the putting KGB doesn't
even have the courtesy to be on time, well then I'm buggering
off. So I went to the hotel and by
the next morning I realised that they'd obviously seen sense.
But somewhere in between me being taken to the dining car
and as I say, the next morning, well, midnight, you know, 3
hours later, somebody had said to that conductors, how dare you
allow this man to film our Birch forests, our state secret Birch
forest. So there are some things about
Russia that it can be a bit tricky, but I promise you it's
99%. What's wrong with What was wrong
with filming outside out the window?
It's a it's a country in a time of war.
They've been assassination plots on Vladimir Putin.
We're learning this now. The leaks are coming out.
And those are people working for a state entity, you know,
Russian railways. You'll probably find that
somebody just got a fright because there are so few
foreigners there. Jeremy, I, I was given a tour of
a the most magnificent museum I've seen in my life in Crimea.
We do the tour. I make buddies with the, with
the tour guide. And he, he speaks the most
terrific English. So I said to him, how many
people do you get a year? You know that you speak so well.
He said no, I learned at school, so how many people do you get a
year? He said, I haven't, you're the
first since sanctions in 2014. So there is a level of I was, I
was at a border post as well, interrogated hugely at the
border post between southern Russia and Crimea.
There was a woman from the the Russian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs had come to to pick me up, to show me around.
A friend had asked a friend a favour, blah, blah, blah, So big
thing haven't had tourists for years.
And I said to her, jeez, this is taking.
She said, what are you worried about?
She said this is all a charade. And she said, Simon, it's a
pantomime. She said they haven't had any
foreigners pass through here for years and years and years.
So they need to be able to tell their bosses that damn good job
of interrogating you. That's all it is.
So there's this neurosis almost. And And so yeah, they just took
it a bit far. They thought that I was doing
research for the CIA by filming 100 billion Birch trees, and I'm
not exaggerating. Over 1000 kilometres you will
see 100 billion Birch trees. What's funny also is that in
Hollywood, Russians are always portrayed as spies and KGB
etcetera, etcetera, and S Africans are always portrayed as
mercenaries. So, so you could have been, you
could have been portrayed as that.
Could have been, Yeah. I think it was just, you know,
provincial people working for a state entity, you know, level of
hysteria. Look, make no mistake, the first
meeting I held in Crimea, I had two translators.
So I had translators when I was in Donbass and Crimea.
I beg your pardon? Sorry.
The first meeting I held in Donbass, it's with this bigwig
politician, Mr Andrew Kramer, hanging over a nice guy, and I
had two translators with me and it was him and two other people.
So he introduces himself and the other two people, and the third
guy he introduces, as you know, for the party or whatever, head
of PR. OK, fine, jolly good.
We hold the meeting, buzz off. A couple of days later, I'm
having dinner with the translator and the one of the
two translators, lovely lady called Lilia, and she'd taken
time off work to help me. She, she's the head of foreign
affairs for the Donetsk People's Republic in the president's
office. Really nice girl.
I said, yeah, that the PR guy. She said, what PR guy?
I said the PR. Come on, man.
Lilia, you were at the meeting. We panted quite a lot.
You know, I would give her a bit of a hard time and she'd give it
back. I said, come on, Lilia, you were
at the blooming meeting. PR guy, the guy with the ginger
hair, You looked like an Irishman.
She said PR and she kind of patted me, patronising me.
She said that wasn't PR, that was the FSB, that was just
Simon. Honestly, grow up.
So they do keep a damn close eye on you.
Make no mistake, they are taking no chances whatsoever.
But who cares? I don't care.
They can watch me 24 hours a day.
I've got no intention of doing them any harm.
On the contrary, I'm now working on them out of the corner of my
eye, staring at it, a documentary called Layman's
Guide to the Russia Ukraine War, and it spells out that this is a
NATO artefact. It's a confection of NATO and
all of the evidence is there to be seen.
It's there's no such thing as the Russians just invaded
Ukraine. It was a whole series of events
that were instigated and agitated by NATO to provoke this
war and I'm sad to say for eschatological reasons.
And when people hear that, they just sort of glaze over, oh,
heavens above here, Simon now telling us that this is, you
know, that it's satanic. But I will make the arguments in
the documentary. And it's a very compelling
argument. This is a deliberate
paedophiliac satanic death cult cabal attempt to instigate World
War Three. But leave aside the reason for a
second. Let's say we don't know what is
the reason. What we do know for sure is that
this thing was started by NATO. End of story.
But sadly, in the West, that message hasn't permeated yet, in
spite of all of the evidence. And I think it's because the
Westerners are damn cowards. Cowards that that not one single
Westerner has visited the whole of Crimea, as attested by the
the woman at the border gate, that this la di da top lady of
the Department of Foreign Affairs and by the translator at
this spectacular museum and by the monks at the monastery and,
and, and, and the list goes on. I was interviewed on television
in Donbass and they said they've never had one interview of a
foreigner, a single one. So how, how is it possible that
any journalist in the West could possibly know what they're
talking about? And to which the answer may be
somebody may, the response may be, yeah, but then you should go
to Ukraine. I'd love to accept Gonzalo Lira
was tortured to death and then murdered by the Ukrainian
authorities because he wouldn't write what they wanted him to
write. And I don't want to be put on
the mirror of its website, among the cast of characters that the
Ukrainian government is encouraging freelance assassins
all around the world to murder. I remember you sent me a voice
note from Donetsk and you were telling me how hairy it was
because you could hear the sounds of of war.
The first night I was there. Do you want me to tell you the
story? Please.
I arrived there and it was a long day.
We went to the wrong border post.
The guy who was chaperoning me made a mistake in an innocent
mistake, so we had to drive a hang of a long way around by the
end. By the time I got to the hotel,
it was warm. I was absolutely cupboard,
couldn't get enough fresh air into my room, so I went and sat
on the steps of the hotel. This is how the hand of the Lord
works if you're a believer. So I'm sitting on the steps of
the hotel with as little clothing on as possible, so a
pair of of flip flops, pair of shorts and a thin T-shirt,
trying to just cool down after the terrible day.
And the next thing I see, out of the corner of my eye, at about
45°, at about maybe 150 metres from ME3 streaks comes streaking
past. And I was, I was direction
bewildered, so I thought that they're air defences.
The next thing, 3 almighty explosions a couple of blocks
down from where I was facing. It turned out the next day that
they were Storm Shadow missiles. There were sixteen of these
fantastic explosions, that there were Storm Shadow missiles and
that I had, that I had my directions wrong and they were
coming from the West. I was facing east and I was
perfectly calm. For whatever reason, if I'm not
claiming to be a hero, I would still be playing rugby if I was
that brave, perfectly calm. The next morning at 5:30 I'd
just woken up and I was lying in bed contemplating whether to get
up and brush my teeth or to lie in a bit longer and three drones
came past the hotel. Jeremy are nearly I was I was
literally in in the sense of fright and not in the sense of
of 100,000 year old pieces of wood.
I was literally petrified. I was so afraid that I was too
afraid to jump out of bed and and take cover in the corner or
in the toilet, you know, so that the two walls between me and the
the threat or a wall between me and the window.
Anyway, that was the Tuesday morning.
So Monday night, Tuesday morning, over the Wednesday and
the Thursday, I heard about another, I don't know, forty of
these drones and I somehow got used to it.
So I was quite, you know, feeling quite comfortable.
On the Thursday night we had supper at a pub, a British style
pub called the Golden Lion I believe, and I was, a group of
four of us was sitting on the veranda was two journalists,
myself and my host. And the next thing a swarm of
drones came in. They were some way off, if I was
to estimate, like 800 metres maybe.
We started hearing these things and at about 6:00, between 600
and 400 metres away, coming directly towards, I don't say
directly to me, although I was told by Russia's top war
journalist that this was all for my benefit.
We needn't get into that now. But he said, I promise you I
know what I'm talking about. This was about you.
Nevertheless, here come these these drones towards the Golden
Lion. It could have been actually a
building in front a building behind whatever, but there was a
huge open space to to my right the direction of the the drones
and you could fathom quite nicely where they where they
were. And the next thing they start
getting hit by the air defences. I counted something like 30 five
hits in this process. I was eating, by the way,
Jeremy, the best meat you'll eat in your life is in Russia.
Believe me. Don't believe me?
I only eat meat. I eat meat five times a day.
It serves me very well. I know a piece of meat.
I was eating one of the best steaks I've ever tasted.
And so I just carried on. For some reason, I was perfectly
calm. I felt like the hand of the Lord
was over me and I had nothing to fear.
And my host and these other two journalists absolutely did their
nuts because I refused to run and take cover with the rest of
the restaurant page patrons. You know, everybody was running
for dear life because it was very clear that the drones were
coming very much into towards us.
Maybe not us precisely, maybe be a building behind in front bed,
but it was apparent that this is a potential threat and a huge
one of that many, many, many drones.
But I felt like the like I was safe and I carried on eating.
Eventually they they really gave me a bit of a tongue lashing and
I was forced to go in and hide in the corner with with
everybody else. And you won't believe it when I
came back that bloody cleared my stake away because we'd taken
too long to get back. I was furious.
Do you think there's a future for Donbass?
Yeah. Jeremy, the Russians are
building something marvellous. the IT, it has to be seen to be
believed. A little birdie told me that you
and some very, very high level journalists may visit Russia.
I tell you what, I had a grin on my face when I heard that news.
I thought, this is it, boy, he's going to see something
absolutely marvellous. Jeremy it is so heartening to
see, to see how well they're doing, how they're rebuilding.
I went to the Azov stall battle, one of those most traumatic
things of my life. You know, the Azov stall plant
battle of March, April of 2022. But it's been left exactly
intact. And it's scary beyond scary.
But the the rest of Murray Upal looks like a new pin.
It's absolutely splendid. Just to to illustrate the point.
Yes, there's a future as great future.
They're growing, they're rebuilding everything.
The roads are as flat as a pancake, as a.
Russian as a as a Russian region, not as a Ukrainian
region though. No, nobody wants to be
Ukrainian, Jeremy. You know, they, they say that
the elections are rigged, but when you speak to people, they
tell everybody says the same thing.
The reason those election results were in the 90% is
because of this war. We were here, we saw who started
it. If it wasn't for the war, it
would be about 70 to 80% pro Russia.
But an extra kind of 25% or whatever it is has been sympathy
has been garnered by the fact that that we were here and now
we see what Russia's doing and we want nothing, nothing to do
with Ukraine. Yeah.
Oh, Jeremy. And the the war crimes are
unbelievable. So they've, they've lost all
interest. They want to be part of Russia.
They're Russians speaking. That part of Russia is called
Novormalorosia. And it was, it was if you take
Crimea and the South, Mikolaev and Odessa, that's called
Novorossia. That area was constituted by
Catherine the Great beginning in 1764.
That's 12 years before the United States of America was a
Republic. This is an ancient, ancient,
ancient Russian place. It's overwhelmingly Russian.
It's Russian culture. It's by an era of history that
that idiot Khrushchev decided to make up for the the the
barbarity of his crimes as a political commissar during World
War Two against his fellow Ukrainians.
He was born on the border and his wife was Ukrainian.
That he gave Crimea to Ukraine as a kind of a I'm sorry.
I know you can see right through me hundreds of thousands of you
saw me butcher with my own hands, you know, 10s of
thousands of your countrymen. He has a little Peace Prize and
nobody in the West talks about it, where it's a well known
thing, not just to me but to the history books.
I'm reading a book at the moment by a Jewish professor at
University College London or Oxford, maybe Oxford University,
who is of Portuguese heritage. And you know, this is any
serious person knows that the, the story of of that we get fed
in the West is rubbish. The people of Odessa, not that I
went there, you obviously can't go there.
And Mikolaev are desperate, desperate for the peace talks to
fail so that Russia will retake those areas so that they can be
incorporated into Russia. About 10 of the regions, on
balance, I think the regions altogether, the oblast are about
28, something like that. About ten of them are crying
like motherless children for Russia not to stop until, you
know, my house is behind the front line.
And that's overwhelming sentiment, Jeremy.
There are no two ways about it. What have you learnt about
yourself from this trip? Jeez, I tell you what, Jeremy,
you know, in the USA there's a, there's a, something in the air.
I don't care what anybody says. I'm not a particularly spiritual
person. I don't feel it in my waters.
And you know, I don't have feminine intuition, but it's
about as thick as butter. There's something in the in the
air in the USA of you can do anything.
There's a similar, not a similar.
There's a something in the air in Russia of serenity.
I'm a very highly strung person and I have been since I was
young. You know, I'm probably the best
person I know it putting on a certain kind of, you know,
thing. But there are psychologists who
have told me they would spend the rest of their lives treating
me for free if I wanted. I'm a bit of a nut case.
And I've never felt so serene in my life as in Russia.
I cannot explain it to you. It it's calming and peaceful
that there's something, there's a serenity in it.
And I know this is going to sound heretical to some people,
but those churches, I know it's a sensitive thing.
The second commandment, graven images, worshipping icons, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. I get it.
But you feel that same thing on steroids in and around those
churches. I cannot explain it to you.
If you're 150 yards away from the front of one of those
Russian Orthodox churches, you feel a kind of a calm, a sanity,
a the serenity that's and you feel it throughout the country.
So I've, I've learned a lot about myself because having that
almost that mirror the counterpoint to my usual kind of
frantic intensity for the first time in my whole life was
really, you know, you only know, know the size of an elephant by
the, the size of a mouse next to it and vice versa.
So that taught me that and it taught me that that I come from
from a long history of Western, a long tradition itself of
Western lies. The everything is alive.
Just been listening to that academic, the professor at
Cornell University who was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a
week or two ago and which at some point he rattles off a
whole series of Western lies with a little justification.
You know, it's a bit like the the Spanish American War.
To hell with Spain. Remember the main false, the
World War One, the Lusitania, false.
World War 2, Pearl Harbour false.
Vietnam War, the Gulf of Tonkin incident false.
He didn't mention any of these. He was mentioning other things.
Just waste and last weapons of mass destruction.
False Afghanistan. To this day I don't know what
was the reason for going into Afghanistan actually, because it
was just mealy mouthed lies. They weren't even coherent lies.
And what's being done to Russia now is based upon a lie of the
lie of the lie of the lie of the lie of the lie of the lie.
So I've learned about my about the West, that we are the most
unforgivable liars and about myself that there is a
peacefulness that I would love to experience for the rest of my
life. And I've been fantasising about
going back. I might seek funding for it.
And even if I can't get funding to do a documentary there, this
one I don't have to do there. It's a different nature.
I would like to on on very limited budget.
I mean, it's as cheap as chips. Spend a, a, a year in a cabin in
the woods in Siberia or near somewhere near the Volga, maybe
about four hours east of Moscow, just isolated, experiencing that
unbelievable winter and the peacefulness and the quiet and
the what have you. It's beyond tremendous, Jeremy.
A conversation like this runs the risk of all the usual labels
being stamped onto you like you sound like a Russian shell.
You're being paid by Russian interests because it's just all
Russia, Russia, Russia and it's amazing and it's utopia and now
suddenly you hate the West. It's important also to point out
that I don't think we're Western Africa is Africa.
So we kind of schizophrenic in the sense that we are.
We have a history of Western and other influence.
So we kind of sit on the fence with regards to that.
Yeah, do you? You're not wrong.
But when communism fell, when those butchers of the Tsar, you
know, when it all gave and we, we were the Bolsheviks.
Yeah, we were, we were happy about that.
I mean, we kind of sided with with.
But. But you're not wrong.
I'm not. I'm not being argumentative.
No, I'm not. I don't think I'm a Russia
shill, Jeremy. I've just had, I had a
psychologist once. She got to know me very well and
I spent two years seeing her like very, very intensely to the
point of breaking the regulations of the Health
Professions Council in South Africa.
And she said to me towards the end, she said, well, I think our
time is up. You know, after two years we've,
we've gone through it all. I just want to tell you the
thing that I'm going to take away from this.
What I've learned is about a fanatical obsession with the
truth, and I'm fanatically obsessed by the truth.
And I also like the fact that the rates of rape are very low.
Call me a shill if you like that.
Murder is uncommon. Call me a shill if you like
that. I saw practically nil graffiti.
Call me a shill if you like that.
I could walk around the suburb where my hotel was very late at
night and feel perfectly safe, which I cannot do anywhere,
anywhere, anywhere in South Africa.
Nowhere at all. Call me a shill if you like,
Jeremy, I don't care. But all I say is actually, I
want to use strong language. Now you've made me it's.
I know it's not your fault. Not for one minute do I bear you
a grudge. I know that you're representing
people out there who exist. But I am right now, livid with
rage. My blood is I'm seething because
I know that they are such people.
And you know what, What makes me the most angry about them.
And this was the point that I was implying, but I perhaps
didn't express it very well when I alluded to journalists not
going to see for themselves. They won't go and take a look
for themselves. They won't have a holiday in
Crimea, which is arguably the most beautiful part of all of
that region. So I'm talking about the
entirety of the Black Sea, the northern Mediterranean.
And yet they'll say that I, who was willing to eat black bread
and herring twice a day, every day, apart from when I was taken
out to dinner as a guest, for which I never paid 1 cent once,
I was willing to eat black bread and herring to stretch my
pitiful little budget, to stay there for long enough to really
see what is the genuine truth of the matter.
They can all take a flying. Leap Yeah, I mean, I get those
labels too. I mean, as you know, I'm heading
off to China in the near future and, and I suddenly, suddenly
I'm a I'm ACCP employee or whatever.
You know, it's ridiculous, Simon, that that that people
cannot think critically and even people on supposedly our side.
Oh, Jeremy, it's it all goes back to the one thing that we
all have in common. Your sister and I don't have.
We're not both mean, so we're always split from one another.
There's always something slightly different in our
experience. But all of us, you, your sister,
whatever gender, whatever faith, whatever country, whatever,
whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever.
We all have one thing in common and that's COVID.
And we fall into two camps. Those who were told as I was,
and who initially believed it, that everybody's dying and who
walked into the shop and thought to themselves either why do I
never see anybody die or hear of anybody dying except outlier
examples. We fall into two camps.
Those who thought, Gee, it must just be me, I'm refusing to see,
so I'll comply. I'll be a good person because
actually I'm a bad person. And those people who, as you use
the correct term, thought critically and thought hang on,
the basis on which this was sold to me is the social media videos
that saturated the entire Internet of Chinese dropping
like flies everywhere. At the train station, at the bus
station, while driving their car, while operating crane,
while operating a forklift high star, while driving a truck,
plying into people while sitting at work, while in the hair
salon. Everybody dropping like flies.
How come is it that I see nobody drop dead behind me in the
queue? As simple as that.
We live in a world of the overwhelming majority of being
mentally retarded people. And you just have to take it on
the the chin, Jeremy. That's why I listen to nobody.
I never read any comments. As one great cricketer, cricket
player of South African once said, if I read the newspaper,
he was asked a question, what do you think of the chap, the
editorial about your performance of last week, the editorial that
came out yesterday. He said if I read the newspaper,
I would give up. I would be completely defeated
by the endless criticism of people who've got no idea what
they're talking about. So I don't, I don't even, I've
never read one comment of one video that I've given and I've
done now over 800 interviews over the past eight years.
Nah, Nah, they're idiots. Ignore them, Jeremy mentally.
Retarded. Yeah, I've started doing that
too. I've started reading less and
fewer and fewer and fewer comments.
I'm engaging less with those people because they just, it's
just as Jordan Peterson, I think correctly said, sociopathic
because they have this weird, what's the word sense of power
because, you know, they can remain anonymous or whatever.
So they can say whatever they like and it enough is enough.
Yeah, yeah. OK Simon, we are, but over time
I have thoroughly enjoyed chatting to you and I look
forward to our next chat. For now, how can I follow you?
We have a channel on YouTube site, London's Media.
That's that's, that's the best place to to follow.
Thank you very much for the opportunity Jeremy.
I hope I didn't get too carried away and worked up or overstay
the welcome. No, in fact, I was hoping you'd
be more worked up. It's it's more, it's more fun
when we get passionate. All right, Simon, thank you for
joining me in the trenches. It's my pleasure, Saitlanders.
Pleasure, Jeremy.