AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We continue with Part 2 of our conversation with Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books, including, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024. He has just come to the United States, did a big event at the Brooklyn Public Library, interviewed by our own Nermeen Shaikh, who has known him for decades.

I want to really focus on the book. I mean, your years of antiwar activism, your writing, your involvement with the arts. First, start with the title, You Can’t Please All.

TARIQ ALI: Well, it’s our life as dissidents, Amy, you know, constantly going against mainstream opinions of politics on a global and domestic scale. And this is a plea to people who, you know, think, “Maybe we should move. The world is not looking in our direction.” And it’s a message for them and many others, saying, “You can’t please all. You have to say what you want to say. Don’t try and please anyone. Just speak the truth.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, this is a sprawling memoir, over 800 pages, but about a third of the way into the book, you have a section on your family, which talks about how you became engaged in politics in your home environment. Could you talk about that a little bit?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I was very lucky. My sort of extended family was an old feudal family, pretty conservative in politics. None of them were religious extremists in any sense, but they were conservatives. And what would have happened had my parents not turned out different, I didn’t know, because that shaped my biography considerably — is that in the late '20s and ’30s, when India was still occupied by the British, both my parents became radicals, even though they belonged to the same family. And my father joined the Communist Party in the ’30s, my mother later on. So our house was filled with two types of people: one, those related to the family, who could be chiefs of police, generals, leading politicians, etc. — usually, one had to be polite to them, though I avoided mixing in that company too much — and, secondly, trade union leaders, peasant leaders, poets, Bohemians of every sort, who were great fun and didn't patronize us, even when we were children. And that was my parents’ milieu, politically speaking. And so I grew up in that. There was no big rebellion, as far as I was concerned, against my parents, except in the sense that they were orthodox CP members, and when I came to Oxford, I became a Trotskyist, which I think irritated them, but they took it. So, it had an effect on me.

My first meeting was attending a May Day rally in 1949 when I was under 6 years of old, and the big chant at the rally was “The Chinese are going to win.” China’s revolution was on the march, and everyone was chanting, “China will win! Long live Mao Zedong!” And, of course, sitting looking at China in 2025, it’s an obsession with the United States now and the West, because this country has taken off in a huge way and is seen now as the biggest economic rival to the United States. So, one wonders whether a military solution will be attempted there. It would be totally crazy and would lead to a world war, if some crazies from here tried it. So let’s hope they don’t and they keep the competition to an economic level. But that was my first big meeting which I attended. And those chants of the people for China still echo in my ears sometimes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering also, you spent so much of your life in the U.K. and the — probably the greatest demographic change of the 20th and early 21st century is the migration of people from the Global South to the metropolises of the colonizer nations. To what degree has Indian and Pakistani migration changed or transformed the United Kingdom?

TARIQ ALI: To a considerable extent. For one thing, Juan, when I arrived in Britain to study at university in '63, the food was truly awful. It was so bad that it was impossible to eat. I had to teach myself how to cook. But one of the great contributions of migrants from all parts of the world, especially South Asia, but also the Caribbean, has been that the food culture of Britain has been totally transformed. I don't think future generations, whatever the color of their skin, will be able to live without this food and revert to what was being eaten during the war years and after.

In another sense, the British state has sought to integrate a layer of migrants by integrating, incorporating them into functions. You have a lot of — I don’t know the exact number — a lot of members of Parliament from South Asia. I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing. It’s just a fact. We’ve had a chancellor of the Exchequer, the British Treasury, who’s been from Pakistan. We’ve had a prime minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, who is from India by origin. So, from that point of view, the integration has been solid. France is the worst in that regard, in my opinion.

AMY GOODMAN: Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.

TARIQ ALI: And we have Sadiq Khan, who is the mayor of London, of course. So, from that point of view, a political point of view, that we integrate, that doesn’t mean that all these people who are given or elected to these jobs are good, but they are effectively integrated. And so, it gives — you know, for the dogmatists of identity politics, it’s a blow. It’s like when Obama was elected here, and everyone had hopes that something would change, and he is the first president who passed into law the right of the United States president to order the execution of a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, if such a person is considered a menace to society — i.e., giving the president powers to have a list. I mean, Trump could use that — let’s hope he doesn’t — and say, “Well, you know, this isn’t even my policy. This is a policy put in by a liberal Black U.S. president.” And, you know, this is a situation which has to be dealt with politically, not necessarily by ethnicity. And it’s happening all over Europe in one way or the other.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the establishment of Pakistan — you talked about India, but Pakistan — and what happened in World War II, and what happened after, with your family, right through to now? As we speak, President Trump is about to meet today, and I think tomorrow, with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, at the White House.

TARIQ ALI: When the movement for independence from Britain grew — it grew and grew and grew — there were two different varieties. One was, of course, a secular movement. But then, within this secular movement, some of its Muslim members said that under majoritarian rule, the very large majority of Muslims who live in India could be crushed. And there was a big debate about it. Not all Muslims agreed. But a party grew up, the Muslim League, which said, “We need a separate Muslim state.”

My grandfather, Sikandar Hayat Khan, had been the elected prime minister of the Punjab, a crucial key state both for wheat and creating the Indian Army and sustaining it, very important state for the British during the Second World War. He died, tragically, in 1942. He was completely opposed to the partitioning of the Punjab. He said Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs must continue to live together. And had he been alive, who knows what would have happened? But he died, and the leadership that followed basically got Pakistan, courtesy of the British. The British was — I always say it was a “thank you” to the Muslim League by the British for backing us during the war, our most critical years, whereas the Congress Party opposed the war. Their leaders were locked up. They resigned from all the government posts they held. But that also gave them a lot of popularity.

And had the Congress backed the Second World War, I don’t think there would have been a partition in the form in which it took place in 1947. And Mahatma Gandhi was convinced that the Japanese would take India, totally convinced, and that he would have to be negotiating Indian independence not with Churchill, but with Hirohito. And that pushed him. The one big mistake the old fox made was — I mean, everyone thought that that might happen. And so, India and Pakistan became two states.

And very soon, it’s ironic that the two institutions created by the British, the army and the civil service, ran Pakistan, because its own politicians were pretty weak. And then a military coup took place, and they tried to tamper with democracy. Finally, an uprising in '68 defeated the military dictatorship. And East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, rose in rebellion, wanting many, many things. The whole country was in rebellion. The elections gave the East Pakistani party of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman a huge majority. The army refused to accept that. Civil war ensued. India intervened in Pakistan and broke up into two portions. And since then, with a few exceptions, like the Bhutto years, it's essentially the army that has been running the country, and that is now obvious.

In India, Amy, the, you know, democratic rights and democracy prevailed. India was too large for any military dictatorship. And we then had a big revulsion against the ruling party’s corruption, inability to do very much. And Modi, not totally unlike Trump in some ways, came to power on a very sectarian program, backing Hindu nationalism, attacking all minorities, the Muslims in particular, saying that Muslims who had lived in India for several hundred years and converted during the Mughals should convert back, putting incredible pressures on them. So, what many people in India say is that, though democratically elected, India is effectively an autocracy. And it is run in a very dictatorial fashion. So, in fact, Trump and —

AMY GOODMAN: Fiercely anti-Muslim.

TARIQ ALI: Sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: Fiercely anti-Muslim.

TARIQ ALI: Fiercely anti-Muslim, refusing to accept any compromise deal on Kashmir. Kashmir is the province which has a Muslim majority of about 85 to 90%, but the Indians never let go of it. That remains a bone of contention. But after the way Israel has dealt with Gaza, Modi wouldn’t, you know, hesitate to use similar force, which has been used against Kashmir, barely reported. Mass graves have been discovered. Mass rapes of women, the Indian Army was authorized — the Supreme Court turned down a petition that Indian military and the Indian Army soldiers should be tried for rape. They have special rights, and one of their rights is rape.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tariq, I wanted to ask you about another part of your new memoir. There’s a section of the book, a chapter titled “Back to the USSR.” You were in the Soviet Union several times in the late ’80s. And who did you meet? And you were also opposed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And while you opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, you had different views about some of the Russian Federation wars in Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Moldova. Could you talk about that, as well?

TARIQ ALI: Yeah, it so happened that because of some of the books I wrote, I was invited to give talks in the Soviet Union. And I remember going to Tashkent in 1985 and gave a speech at a conference organized by the U.N., in which I was very critical of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and said they should come out, they should never have gone in, and their entry has made Afghanistan a crucible of the Cold War, and the Americans are bound to come in sooner or later. I did say all this at the time.

And I then was waiting for the response of the Soviet delegation, thinking they would try and slaughter me. Instead, the Soviet delegates at the conference rushed up to me, hugged me, shook hands, and the leader of the delegation, Yevgeny Primakov, who later became foreign minister and, for a while, prime minister, said to me, “Almost the very words you said were spoken by our new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, at a special meeting of leading party cadres. He said Afghanistan was a huge error. We should never have gone in. We have to get out as soon as possible.” I couldn’t believe my ears that this was actually going on, but it was going on.

And so, I was invited many times for other things, to speak, to interview, to talk to people. I didn’t meet Gorbachev, but I met most of his leading supporters, you know, and dissidents like Boris Kagarlitsky, who’s still in prison in Russia. So, I was very inspired, because the discussions were so free, Juan. Pravda, Izvestia papers, we used to joke about as being totally, you know, authoritarian. Big debates taking place, people writing in from all over the country supporting the reforms, old women workers saying, “We work in this women’s factory in Belarus, and this is how we are treated.” And that transformed the mood completely.

I was completely opposed to the war against Chechnya. I thought it was totally out of order. It was backed by the West, actually, by the United States and Britain. And I was not in favor of holding Chechnya back by force. I’ve always been in the favor — in favor of the rights of national self-determination. So that didn’t make me unhappy. But when that then is used by the world’s largest and most powerful country to further divide and threaten Russia, because Russia doesn’t fit into NATO from — they wanted to be part of NATO. Not allowed to be. So, that’s a story I tell in this book. The story I haven’t told is all my trips to the United States, because the book would have then become almost double its size. But I’m writing a special book on, you know, the United States in the ’60s, ’70s, now, etc.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Vietnam, but, before that, the Bandung Conference And you were part of the Bandung Media, I assume, named in honor of this conference, about to celebrate the, what, 70th anniversary of the nonaligned, anti-colonialist meeting in Indonesia. Can you talk about the significance of that, and what you see happening 70 years later?

TARIQ ALI: Well, we were amazed. Darcus Howe, who was an Afro-Caribbean activist and journalist, and myself were called in by Channel 4’s new commissioning editor, a Parsi from India, Farrukh Dhondy, who said, “All our multicultural coverage is awful. It’s terrible. We need a change. A, why should we have a separate program for Afro-Caribbeans and a separate program for South Asian? Let’s merge the two.” So they asked me to come up with a name, and I said, “Well, look, Bandung. Let’s mark Bandung and the nonaligned conference. We’ll call the program The Bandung File. And we will not just film and talk about the lives of these minorities in Britain, but go back to the origin.” So we made lots of films about the Caribbean itself to show people what life there was like, India, Pakistan, got a number of scoops in the process.

And then the program — excuse me. And then the program used to be approached by people, and it got very well known. And, for instance, I remember in Britain, there had been an investigation of the murder of a Black kid in custody, beaten to death by the police. Big anger in Islington in London. And we got rung up by the organizers, saying, “Today is the report of the inquiry and the discussion on it. Could Bandung film it?” So I said, “Yeah.” So we went in, and the security people said, ”BBC.” So no one replied. “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” So we were let in, set up our cameras. The police chief comes in and says, “I thought no television was allowed. We had agreed to that.” So, we had a very feisty researcher, Vasudha Joshi from India. And she said, “Well” — he said, “Who are you people anyway?” And she said, ”Bandung File from Channel 4.” He said, “Oh my god!” and walked out. He actually — we filmed all this. And then he said he’s not coming back until the cameras are cleared. So, Vasudha stood up and said, “Look, this is very anti-democratic. Why don’t you let the audience decide?” So, the police chief backed down. He said, “OK.” So she put it — she said, “All those in favor of letting Bandung File film,” and the entire audience of several hundred people raised their hands. And we shot it as was and put it out the next day as for live.

And the new guy who was taking over Channel 4, Michael Grade, not at all political, saw this program and said, “My god! This is great television! I mean, we should have the — why are we putting this out on the weekends, when no one’s at home?” So he gave us a primetime slot in the week, and our viewing figures jumped up. And we were — Amy, I have to say this, that in that early period of Channel 4 in Britain, we were never censored once. We were told by the head of the television. He called me and said, “If you’re going to do something naughty, warn us in advance so our lawyers can make sure everything’s kosher.” I said, “OK.” Once or twice, I didn’t inform them, but, by and large, relations were very good. The program lasted four years, and then they ended it. It was never replaced. But the interesting thing was that lots of conservative newspapers and their TV critics said, “Why is this program being taken off the air? It was like a breath of fresh air for us.” And so, we had a lot of support.

AMY GOODMAN: From the Bandung Conference, if you can explain its significance in 1955 in Bandung, in Indonesia, the meaning of this anti-colonial gathering, right through to today, what we see with BRICS, for example, the growing movement of non-Western countries taking on what’s happening?

TARIQ ALI: The Bandung Conference took place a decade or so after decolonization. India was a free country. China had made its own revolution. Lots of African countries had got their freedom or were on the verge of getting it. Leaders of the caliber of Nkrumah were emerging in Africa as African leaders, not just leaders of their own countries. So it was the high point, really, of the decolonization. And so, they met, the nonaligned world, saying, “We don’t want to be allied to any bloc. We have to fend our own interests.” And that’s why it became such an important symbol.

Of course, looking back, they could have done a lot more. But, you know, I mean, they did — they established a global presence that later went on to create a Non-Aligned Movement, formally called such, led by Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt and Tito of Yugoslavia, three leaders, who said, “We are nonaligned.” And they said — Nehru said, “I know the Americans will say it’s anti-American, but, actually, we don’t want our worlds to be in hock to either bloc.” And that had a big impact, too, because it happened during the Cold War, and it offered a sort of third way, which was then taken up by movements like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, etc., etc.

And that goes on. I mean, the last wave of it we saw was in South America with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Fidel, of course, you know, still alive in Cuba, with Evo Morales coming to power in Bolivia. That was part of it. And they often talked. I mean, I had many meetings with Chávez, and he would ask me what you’re asking me: What was the Bandung Conference all about? Because they identified with this notion. And the BRICS are doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: BRICS being Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

TARIQ ALI: Which is quite astonishing, Amy, that they have decided to club together. Of course, where it will end, we don’t know. But the U.S. is — from its own point of view, is not in a collegial mood, as we can see at what happened in Paris with the AI conference and Trump basically saying that he’s going to pocket Greenland and take Canada. I was in Canada, and I said, “Well, you Canadians are surprised. Don’t be, because he’s, you know, wanting to take over Gaza and turn it into a real estate bonanza. Three Arab countries have been attacked, bombed, destroyed, Afghanistan occupied. So, if he takes Canada over, why is it so different?” And one of my friends said, “Well, the problem is there will be no resistance in Canada.”

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, on BRICS, President Trump, as soon as he came to power after the inauguration, he sanctioned Spain, because he mistakenly said it was the “S” in BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China. He thought it was Spain, the “S.” It’s South Africa.

TARIQ ALI: This is like — reminds me a bit of the late President Reagan turning up in one Central American country and thinking he was in another. Politics is going to be like that in the United States, well, at least 'til the midterms, but we don't know. And I think people have to fight it, not just talk about it. The opposition — we really need, Amy, all over the West, opposition, real opposition parties. You know, stand up, fight back. I mean, Gaza cost the Democrats the election, most likely. And in Britain, we’ve had more independent MPs elected than ever before, since the Second World War. Again, main issue, Gaza. So, on that level, times are changing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tariq, I wanted to ask you — in addition to all of your histories and political analysis, you’ve also delved quite a bit into novels, theater and film. I think particularly of Redemption, your book about Trotskyists trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the “Islam Quintet.” What have you been able to do with fiction that you haven’t been able to do with nonfiction writing?

TARIQ ALI: You know, I had no intention of writing fiction. But then, with the Gulf War beginning, and people, interesting, intelligent people, saying foolish things about the Muslims, I got interested in Islamic history. And I thought, “Why not go to Spain, where the Arab culture was dominant for 600 to 700 years, and study it for a bit?” And I thought I’d come back and write an essay or a short book. And I went to Spain, and I was entranced by the architecture. And I said, “I can’t just do a dry-as-dust history. This has to be put into fiction.” And I wrote it, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree. And a lot of Spanish people said to me — it won prizes in Spain. And they said, “This is a history we had, we didn’t know. So, thank you for bringing.” And it still is on course lists in Spain. And the book did very well.

And Edward Said then rang me up and said, “It’s great. And don’t stop now. Tell the whole bloody story.” I remember Edward’s words very clearly. So, I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He said, “The entire clash between Islamic civilization and Western barbarism, tell it.” So I then did the story of the Crusades with Saladin. I did the Ottoman Empire story with The Stone Woman. Then I got a phone call from Italians saying, “You got anything against us? Why haven’t you done Sicily under the Arab?” So I then went and spent months in Sicily and did The Sultan of Palermo, and lastly, finished up with the Night of the Golden Butterfly, which is partially about modern Pakistan and partially about a big Muslim uprising in China in the 19th century, the Yunnan uprising, where Muslims ruled in unity with other opponents of the Manchus, and which I had no idea of 'til I found by accident in a book a letter in which the sultan of Yunnan had written to Queen Victoria, saying, “The Manchus are going to kill us. Please give us asylum in India.” And so, some of the refugees, after the rebellion was crushed, came to Calcutta, other Indian towns. So I invented a story linking South Asia with that particular uprising. And to touch wood, I'm very pleased the books have done relatively well. Edward was pleased.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq, I wanted to continue on this question of the arts and the power of the arts and how revolutionary they are. I mean, very interestingly, this past weekend, Trump, in the middle of all of his executive orders, fired something like 16 members of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Now, compared to everything else, some might have not thought this was particularly important — and said he would make himself chairman of the board. But when you look at the history of that place — the next day, I was at the Whitney in the last days of the Alvin Ailey exhibit, and you see Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes. Alvin Ailey won one of the Kennedy performing arts honors. I’m wondering if the honors will be revoked over these years. But why it is so significant that he did that, that he understood the power of the arts, and probably that they have, for so many years, artists, rejected him? It’s very hard for him to find musicians who will allow him to use their music, for example, at his rallies.

TARIQ ALI: You know, Amy, two things. Trump, of course, is a case on his own. You know, it’s very difficult for any people thinking rationally to understand why some things are done. In the case of this, I mean, I assume that his thinking didn’t extend beyond saying, “These people hate me. I’ll show them,” as is his attitude to many things, you know. So, he’s punishing the liberal enemy in this particular case, and he knows perfectly well that liberal culture in the United States does celebrate everything that the slave tradition, the slavery has brought, which is very enriched — music, for instance, the blues. All that emerged was oppositional, for lots of people. You know, one should never sort of forget that the largest political movement this country has ever seen was the Ku Klux Klan. They were the — and there, they were offended by the sight of Black people singing. There was segregation in this country. And all the great Black musicians of every sort arose. You know, the more appreciative ones loved the music but hated the presence. I think that went very deep. Trump, of course, is basically settling scores with people who look down on him, saying, “I’ll show you,” like, you know, people who reach these positions do sometimes, not always.

So, culture can play that role. It has certainly played it in the United States. And it played it in Europe during the '30s, you know, with people seeking asylum — Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, all the great German literary poets and writers — getting refuge in the United States. When the Palisades burnt in L.A. recently, I thought of the number of these German exiles who had actually got homes there in refuge and stayed there during the last war, including Thomas Mann. And so, their works are feared. I mean, Brecht wrote a poem when they were burning the books, and he said one guy, whose books they had forgotten to burn, rushed out in the streets with his own books and said, “Don't leave me out. You’re burning everything else that is decent. Here, burn my books, as well.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, continue on this, from the jotting section of your book. You have a chapter entitled “Parchment Does Burn” about Roshan Seth, who played in the Indian Prime Minister Nehru in Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Tell us that whole story.

TARIQ ALI: It’s very funny. Roshan Seth was a friend of mine and a very good and gifted — is still a gifted actor. And he fell in love with an Englishwoman, Pepita, we knew her as, who was obsessed with India. She lived in Kerala for a long time, learned the language, knew how to cook the amazing Keralan food. And Roshan tended to be a bit British in his taste. So it was a funny couple. She had become an Indian, and he had become a Brit, though they both lived in India for some time and then moved to London. They were friends. And I had no idea who Pepita was.

And once we went to dinner. Pepita was complaining about her parents. So I said, “If that’s the case, how did they take your marriage to Roshan?” And she said, “Well, you know, mother was accepting, but my father never accepted it. And my mother invited us to lunch once. It’s like the man who came to dinner, with Sidney Poitier. And my father,” she said, “sat in his armchair, the whole time Roshan was there, reading The Daily Telegraph, not even lifting his eyes, barely muttered.” And she then said, “You don’t believe it?” I said, “I believe it. But why did Roshan go if he knew?” I attacked him. I said, “Why the hell did you go to this place?” And he said, “Well, you know.” I said, “No, well, you — I don’t know.”

So, Pepita brought a letter that her father had written to her, a pretty average letter from an upper-class racist, saying, “My dear daughter, I love you so much. I’m not prejudiced against Indians, which is why you think I’m opposing your marriage. I would be equally horrified if you were marrying Blacks, Eskimos, Hottentot” – a list of 20 ethnic — “So, don’t think it’s personal or just on this. I would be…” I said, “Roshan, you went to that after reading this letter?” He said, “Well, why should I be impolite?”

Anyway, the real story is that Pepita Fairfax was a direct descendant of General Fairfax, one of Cromwell’s leading generals in the English Civil War, who could easily have moved and settled here, like many of them did after the Civil War was defeated. But General Fairfax was — they lived in his house. You know, that was the family house. And Pepita told me — Roshan said, “OK, tell him the other story, now you’ve told this one.” And so, she said she and her brother were home from school during the holidays and exploring the attic. And while exploring the attic, they touched accidentally a panel, which opened. And in it was parchment, letters written on this parchment from Oliver Cromwell to General Fairfax explaining why the king had to be executed, Charles I, because Fairfax had said, “Isn’t it going a bit far?” I mean, this is the first execution of a king, was by the English — and Cromwell explaining in a very rational way.

So, the kids got naturally very excited, rushed down — it was Christmas — and told their father, “Dad, look what we’ve discovered: letters from Oliver Cromwell to our General [Fairfax], our great forebear.” And he said, “Let me look.” So he looked and nodded and handed them back to the kids. And Pepita then made the mistake — mistake — of saying, “These are the most precious documents we’ve found, and they should be immediately given to the British Library to be stored and looked after.” And this is astonishing stuff from Cromwell, and the explanation. And the father looked at her, snatched the letters away and put them on the fire. He said, “This is private property. It is never handed to the state.”

Well, that ideology is now very rampant in your country, but that’s — the letters were burnt. And she said, “Parchment burns.” So, Roshan then looked at me and said, “Well, so, he’s mad.” I said, “Well, he’s completely irrational.” So, he said, “What he said about me is nothing compared to this atrocity.” And we all had to agree.

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq, I know you’re going to have to go in a minute, but I wanted to ask you about the Bertrand Russell, the Sartre tribunal, your involvement, your going to Vietnam.

TARIQ ALI: I was very young, Amy, in my twenties. And a number of my New Left Review colleagues were involved with the Bertrand Russell war crimes tribunal and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. And the peace foundation called me in and said, “Look, Bertie” — as Russell was called — “has decided that we need a tribunal. No one else is doing anything. And Jean-Paul Sartre has agreed in France. So we are sending over inspection teams to North Vietnam, and we want you to be part of them.” I said, “OK, no problem at all.” So I went to North Vietnam on behalf of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, and I was there for six to seven weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: What was it like going into North Vietnam? Did you think you would survive?

TARIQ ALI: We had to sign —

AMY GOODMAN: Meaning did you think you’d survive the British and U.S. governments’ reaction?

TARIQ ALI: The British government hadn’t sent troops to Vietnam, so they weren’t putting up any blocks on us traveling there. But I had to sign a letter when I boarded a plane at Vientiane in Laos for the last lap of the flight to Hanoi. They said, “Would you sign this?” I said, “What is it?” They’re saying, “It’s just a letter saying that in case the plane is attacked and blown up, your family has no right to any insurance.” I said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll do that,” and signed it and boarded the plane. We landed in darkness.

AMY GOODMAN: Was this about the U.S. blowing it up?

TARIQ ALI: Yeah. So, stayed there for six months, saw all the atrocities that we watched in Gaza taking place in Vietnam decades ago, and children burnt by napalm. It was a heartrending experience. And, you know, one of the Americans who was with me, she was very good, actually. She, Carol Brightman, was producing a paper called Viet Report in the United States. And her presence was very important for the Vietnamese, as well. And that experience had a huge impact. It did transform my life and my way of thinking, and it stayed with me for — it still does. It’s very vivid memories of what I saw.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened with this tribunal, its goal — 

TARIQ ALI: The Tribunal — 

AMY GOODMAN: — and where it was held, and the role of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell?

TARIQ ALI: Yeah, well, what happened was that France refused to let it happen in France. General de Gaulle, President de Gaulle, wrote a letter to Sartre, saying, ”Cher maître, Dear master, forgive me, but the Americans are already very angry with us for being so oppositional to the war, and this would be a provocation which is unnecessary for us.” France, no. Britain under a Labour government, no. The tribunal can’t be held here. All the European countries we tried said no, ’til the Swedish government at that time, whose prime minister — or, foreign minister, Olof Palme, had actually led a march outside the U.S. Embassy, said, “Come to Sweden.”

AMY GOODMAN: Olof Palme, who would eventually be assassinated.

TARIQ ALI: Who was later assassinated. Many think it was a revenge killing for what he did during Vietnam. Who knows? So, the tribunal was held. It was given wide coverage, attacked by the mainstream media everywhere. We asked the United States to attend. A formal letter went from Bertrand Russell and Sartre to the State Department, saying, “We would like you to come and defend yourselves.” And then they obviously —

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what the principle of the tribunal was.

TARIQ ALI: The principle of the tribunal was to ascertain whether war crimes were being committed by the United States in Vietnam. And by the time we traveled the country and seen the killings, I mean, there was one church we were going to visit, or a hospital, and at the last minute, our trip was stopped. They said, “If you do this, American planes are flying low. We think they’re going to bomb the hospital.” And me, even me, I said, “I can’t believe that. A hospital marked with Red Cross markings?” They said, “Yeah.” The Vietnamese said, “Why don’t you believe it.” I said — he said, “They’ve done it before.” So, we did — they wouldn’t let us go. It was sort of an hour away. And from the village where we were staying, we saw the flames and the bombings. We went immediately after the bombing. The entire hospital had been wiped out, bodies of wounded people, children, women lying on the streets. And over the last year, watching what was happening in Gaza, the live-streamed genocide, I saw those images that I had observed in Vietnam again, and said, “It’s awful, what the Israelis are doing. But let’s not pretend it’s new. It’s happened before.”

AMY GOODMAN: Final question: You were a dear friend of Edward Said. We talked about this in the first part of our interview. Can you talk a bit more, as we wrap up, what you feel his thoughts would be today, and who he was, the significance of this figure?

TARIQ ALI: Edward was a remarkable individual. He said to me that it was only after the 1967 war that he became completely taken by Palestine, that before that, of course, he knew what had happened, but he wasn’t as involved in it as he became after the 1967 war. And then his role as a professor of literature, comparative literature at Columbia, he used to write books on literature. Beginnings is a very, very strong book in which he described all this. And once he got involved in Palestine, his position in U.S. culture was there already, and the fact that he was also then a great partisan of the Palestinian struggle gave him a position where he was invited onto television and things like that. And he was the best-known Palestinian figure that the American mainstream could just about tolerate.

I remember walking with him at Columbia once. We were making a film together. And a friend passed, you know, liberal Zionist professor. “Hi, Edward. How are you?” He said, “Fine.” And the other professor said, “How’s the West Bank doing then? Enough?” So, I said, “West Bank?” Edward said, “They call my office, because it’s very huge, 'the West Bank,' some of these people.” And we laughed a lot.

And, you know, he and Rashid Khalidi’s cousin, Walid Khalidi, basically educated me about the real history of Palestine and what had been going on there. And we discussed every — 

AMY GOODMAN: And Rashid would become the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia.

TARIQ ALI: And then Rashid became the Edward Said professor in really bad times and made a very courageous speech, himself to the students, defending the students, etc. So there is this tradition of Palestinian intellectuals being hired. And when Edward was very critical of the Oslo Accords and attacked Arafat for signing them, saying, “We could have got a better deal five years ago than we got at Oslo,” Nabil Sha’ath, one of Arafat’s advisers, said to — publicly said — “How do you comment on Edward Said saying the Oslo Accords are a total sellout?” He said, “Perhaps Edward said should restrict” —

AMY GOODMAN: This is Arafat?

TARIQ ALI: Hmm?

AMY GOODMAN: Arafat? Who did Nabil Sha’ath say this to?

TARIQ ALI: Publicly. Nabil Sha’ath said it publicly to the press. “I think Edward Said should restrict himself to speaking about Hamlet and Shakespeare and not interfere in Palestine.” Edward, of course, went mad and replied in kind. But he is a very important presence. And I think what is taking place now, that he wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet for one second. Friendships would have been broken. The old friendship cupboard would have had to be emptied, because he was very strongly a believer in Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian solidarity in that area. He himself was a Christian and came from an old Christian family. But, you know, he said, “I’m a Palestinian first.”

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with us, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, and editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books. His latest, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024. Have a safe trip back to London. Thanks so much for being with us.

TARIQ ALI: Thank you very much, Amy. It’s always a pleasure being with you and Juan.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. Thank you.