This quick little BBC interview from 1998 is like, a total mind fuck.
I need to learn who Alan Clarke is but he’s a British guy and he’s in this interview talking about “barbarians” in countries like “Persia” making “weapons of mass destruction”
He’s like, why are we not invading and handling Saddam Hussein?!
GV is says it all. He covers:
We never should’ve gotten into the Civil War, WWI, WW2
We cannot and should not be “world police” prophetically taking the oppositional stance to an oncoming war’s rhetoric that he anticipates specifically
That the Clinton Sex Scandal was pay back for trying to do universal health care (interesting! Never heard this but GV is always right)
That the American empire is collapsing even as people won’t acknowledge it’s existence
He anticipates massive currency instability
And again the whole thing is he’s being interviewed after releasing The Smithsonian Institution which is about time traveling to try and prevent the USA getting in WW2 which is GV’s obsession because of his beloved Jimmy Trimble was killed in the Pacific.
He’s sitting there in 1998 getting interviewed alongside a man who’s spewing propaganda that supports the oncoming invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, and he’s arguing for peace.
He’s arguing for peace in the 1860s, and against wars started last week, a decade after his death.
He says with heaving sadness he figures humans must be by nature territorial and warring, that it’s unintelligible (age of chaos) that it’s all going to burn and rise again because the way we are only leads to destruction, and he’s sitting here getting interviewed about his "What if I Could Go Back in Time and Stop WW2?" fantasy book next to a guy doing complex war propaganda and he’s still trying to argue for peace now and in the future.
GV was anguished.
He was so good.
I seriously cry almost every time I listen to him or read him in any form, fiction, essay, interview.
He’s a lost prophet.
I love him so much.
I’ll come back and edit and add quotes and pics I guess.
Okay wow yeah, Alan Clarke
Here's the basics
Melvyn Bragg discusses politics and morality with Gore Vidal and Alan Clarke.
GV in 1998
I just noticed this Wikipedia page was for "Alan Clark" but the BBC episode says "Alan Clarke" and so does the BBC episode. So I made sure the Wikipedia page was for the author of the book The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922-1997 and it is.
Clark v Clarke
Why's that happened?
