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The Monocle Daily
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and why European leaders are concerned over the EU-US trade deal
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily. First broadcast on 28th July 2025 on Monocle Radio.
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It's 2am in Pyongyang, 20 o' clock in Gaza City, 1800 here in London and 1300 in Washington DC. That's the time on Monocle Radio, brought to you by. Chanel watches the UN tries to revive a two state Middle east solution. But are Israel or Palestine really all that interested? A framework of a US EU trade deal. But why do so many Europeans hate it? And ambassador operating a parallel world from his spare room. I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now. Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Patricia Cohen and Yossi Meckelberg will discuss today's big stories. And we'll speak to Phil Tinline about his new book Ghosts of which explains how a left wing hoax inspired right wing conspiracy theories. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Yossi Meckelburg, Senior consulting fellow at the Middle east and North Africa program at Chatham House. And by Patricia Cohen, New York Times Global economics correspondent. Hello to you both. Hey there, Patricia. You come to us with tales of Antwerp?
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I did, I just was actually went with a friend who grew up in Antwerp. So we did a kind of revisiting her childhood and I had never been there before, but actually Antwerp was fantastic. It's great culture, fashion, food. And I understand that we were there for the three days all year that it happened not to rain. So how great was that?
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A usual disclaimer that Patricia Cohen is not, to the best of my knowledge, trousering any bungs from the Antwerp Tourist Authority. This, this is genuine enthusiasm.
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Genuine enthusiasm.
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Genuine enthusiasm for Antwerp. But I'm. I'm not sure we've had that before on the Daily.
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A
Always something new.
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Exactly. Big hello to our many listeners in Antwerp. Yossi, you are about to go off again to various parts to promote conflict resolution, seeking peace, etc. I put it to you that you have been doing this now for some while and yet we still have fights and wars and stuff.
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Basically you're telling me that I'm complete failure.
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Exactly.
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So with this kind of low point, starting the program, let's try to elevate it somewhere. No, there is a place called the European Academy. It's in Otzenhausen, Germany. It was built after the Second World War deliberately close to the border of Germany, Luxembourg and France to promote peace, coexistent understanding. And every summer there is a summer school and around 45 young people coming from around the world. And together with a good friend of mine that I think is listening, Rob as we are running their workshops about conflict resolution, crisis management and you'll be surprised to hear we'll run a simulation in which the participants will have to resolve most of the challenges in the Middle east in around three and a half hours. How optimistic am I?
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I mean how hard can it be? But on that note, we will start in and with g. Israel has announced a daily 10 hour pause in military action in some parts of the Gaza Strip to allow for some access to some aid. Some of this aid is being dropped by air from Jordanian and Emirati aircraft. Though this is a notoriously lousy way to distribute aid, favoring as it does the swift and ruthless. Meanwhile, Israel is under ever increasing pressure to desist entirely or at least scale back its operations. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres kicking off a conference on a two state solution, described the destruction of Gaza as intolerable and said it must stop. Yossi, I suspect at this point to even ask this question is to answer it. But does Israel care what the UN thinks?
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C
No, but it starts to care about what the rest of the world is saying. And I think the repercussions of this now, do they deeply care? I mean, let's not talk about Israel, let's talk about the Israeli government. And if you'll expect empathy for this Israeli government looks somewhere else and they are more extreme and less extreme. But all of them subscribe to the same idea that by now probably they want to kick all the people of Gaza out. We heard about all this euphemism of humanitarian city, that nothing is human there and voluntary migration, nothing is voluntary about that. And that's the current government and their supporters. But I think the fact that they're allowing some humanitarian possess means that it gets them. They understand that there is a price. It's not that, you know, Netanyahu found his inner humanitarian self all of a sudden or definitely not the Benkvir and Smotrich of this world. But Netanyahu understands pressure and had there been more pressure from the United States, I would assume there would be more lorries actually coming in Gaza. As we stand again, as you said earlier, dropping from there humanitarian aid is a drop in the ocean. It's not going solve anything. It will just create people fighting for deaths and it's way too little, too late. The pressure should be roughly they need around 400, 500, probably 600 lorries every single day to feed Gaza. And if this is not common, we'll see more on this horrific picture we have seen in the last week or two.
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Patricia as Yossi suggests, the United States opinion does still matter to Israel's Israel rather. And do we get the impression that President Trump is beginning to run out of patience? Speaking in the last day or today, in fact, in Scotland, he'd said we have to get the kids fed. He doesn't buy Netanyahu's line that there is no famine in Gaza. And again, it's always difficult to tell with Donald Trump whether he's just saying stuff and whether he intends to actually do anything about it. But this is a slight change in tone, perhaps?
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Well, you kind of answered your question in the way that you posed the question. Number one is I do think it's significant that Trump said today during the press conference that he does. It's not what he sees on TV and he looks like children are hungry. And that is definitely a departure in terms of it at least opens up some light between his position and Netanyahu's position. I also agree that perhaps the only one who could really exert any pressure, any meaningful pressure on Netanyahu is the United States. Now, whether Trump is willing to go that step, we don't know. You know, he's been just think of Putin, how he's gone back and forth and back and forth, criticizing, engaging, criticizing, engaging. So what this will actually mean in terms of policy. But there is a growing global outcry about this just catastrophe in Gaza.
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Yossi, I want to go back to this meeting which is occurring at the UN Both Israel and the United States have found other places to be, which is probably only to be expected. But this idea of a two state solution, is anybody in Israel or Palestine right now seriously talking about that?
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Probably not. There are very few that think that it is either viable or desirable. But to be honest, I'm not disheartened by this. Had you had the same kind of conversation here two days before September 1993, before Oslo was signed, you'd be in the same situation. People say two state solutions, Palestinian self determination, all of that. You need leadership. And the other thing, what's the alternative? We saw what happened that when doesn't we don't have a solution, a peaceful solution, so you can have a one state solution that everyone is equal there and everyone is citizenship. How many people support this you can have one state solution that either the Benville and Smotrich and all the right wing in Israel is in control of all of this or Hamas is in control. I don't think that's something that is disabled. So we need to think constructively on a two state solution because all the settlements that have been built since Oslo and you have 700,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and in the west bank, we need to think creatively. I personally believe that we should move into a confederation model of Israeli Palestinian confederation model of two state solution, but not abandoning the two state solution and the right of both people for self determination. Not that as such is the panacea of human existence because the alternative is much worse.
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Just finally on this related question, Patricia, last week we did see France recognizing Palestine. On the one hand, that's not that big a deal because most of the United nations already does, but France becomes the first G7 country to do that. Does that shift anything? Especially when it's not really all that clear what people are actually recognizing when they announce that they recognize Palestine.
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I do think it makes a difference and it was interesting I was listening today because there's clearly a similar debate going on within the British government. I mean the Labour Party I think has long talked about supporting a Palestinian state and one of the questions that came up is strategically, when does support come out that it could have the most impact? And that seems to be the question that's being discussed right now. Clearly that was not something that's going to come up today when Trump is visiting Starmer, if anything, wants to minimize any differences between the two countries. And he's not going to bring up the Middle east of all things. But I do think when you have the major democratic powers coming out and if more of them do, I do think that would have an impact.
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Well, in Slightly related news, U.S. president Donald Trump is presently visiting Scotland for a few days of cheating at golf, but has found time in between racking up spectacular victories in imaginary tournaments to conduct some business and or bewildering press conferences, largely concerned with his dislike of 1 wind farms and 2 the mayor of London. Of more substance is the framework of a trade deal between the United States and the European Union, which while it is not quite the transatlantic trade apocalypse which might have resulted from a proper trade war, still sticks a 15% tariff on most EU exports to the U.S. one analysis suggests a 0.5% dent in EU GDP. While Americans will self evidently pay 15% more for European stuff. It's not getting tremendous reviews Patricia Francois Beirut, Prime Minister of France, has called it a dark day when an alliance of free peoples brought together to affirm their common values and to defend their common interests, resigns itself to submission, which was very Churchillian of him. But why has the EU gone along with this?
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So. So first of all, a couple of things. Number One, whether all 27 members of the EU will ultimately agree to this, agree to this framework. And also, we should add that it's not clear what the details are exactly what's included in the 15%, what's exempted. So that's a hurdle. And some of the members were certainly hoping to get lower tariffs than that and other exemptions. They also may be wanting to kind of delay because the tariffs are being challenged in the courts as to whether Trump has the legal power to do them. And there are some who think that the case is actually quite strong, arguing that he doesn't. And so perhaps are hoping to kind of draw it out until the courts maybe push in. But the other point is that it's very hard to know the counterfactual. It's not a great deal for Europe. The question is, if they had not done the deal and we had a big trade war and Europe, these two gigantic, once allies went at it and the European Union imposed a lot of tariffs, would that have a more positive economic outlook? Hard to say.
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And of course, Yossi, there are. It will doubtless have occurred to the Europeans at least, bigger things in play that is trying to keep the United States focused on its commitment to Europe's defense. Is it possible Europe or Europe's negotiators realize, okay, this is a lousy deal, but we just need to keep the big goose happy for another three and a half years and then hopefully we can do all this again with somebody relatively normal.
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But to continue your metaphor, this goose is never happy and it's basically blackmail Europe and he gets more than he will ask for more. We saw it with the spending on defense. So Europe already NATO members increased and talking about 5%, as we said here a year ago, when we talk about 5%, explain budget on defense. No, Europe is never going to do that. It's still kind of post Cold War mentality, and it happens. So then this comes and the tariffs, and I just think to myself, those are, if you look, Europe and the United States, those are countries that always enshrined the idea of free market. What happened to free market? This was when people talk about tariffs, oh, this is all the socialists and the communists, they are the one to like to limit free trade. And both the European Union and the United States were supposed to be champions of free trade. But here in the United States all of a sudden doesn't live in free market and in free trade. And we'll see how again how it's going to pan out. Again, I will surprise in the United States how expensive everything it means that consumer in the United States, at the end of the day, we're going to pay more and more about everything that came from Europe. And always when I saw it, some of the list of winner and loser and when I saw that the market is happy, I'm always concerned.
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Patricia, President Trump is probably absolutely delighted that the Europeans think it's a lousy deal because he will doubtless then think it's a good deal for him because this is the zero sum way he perceives the world. And he will spin this as a great victory for all that he would have spun Pearl harbor as a great victory if he'd been president in 1941. But is it actually a great win for Trump?
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Well, it was a very important deal between the EU and the United States. And the fact that the market went up is an indication, although as many economists said, the market is either completely crazy or completely wrong, and maybe both are true. But it was an important deal. And arguably what is as insidious in terms of the economy as the prospect of tariffs is the uncertainty and the constant back and forth in tariffs up and down. And to the degree that this at least injects some element of stability in the global economy, I think a lot of people see that as a big positive. And even some analyst I think, who otherwise might support Trump's economic policies have criticized the way that he's done it and been flip flopping and how that that's really bad for business. So on that sense, the level of certainty could be a win.
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B
Sort of elaborating a little bit on the previous question I asked you, Yossi, is this also maybe in the interests of trying to repair the transatlantic relationship more generally? And does it appear to be on a, I guess, ongoing upswing if we plot the nadir as Vice President Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February?
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Yeah, I agree this is kind of an attempt. We saw it in the NATO summit, the constant pandering to Trump or Wanz, because what they say. But I don't think this is an administration that you can, I don't know how to use the word appease, but satisfy at any point, because the minute they satisfy it on one point, they will ask the work in the idea that they will blackmail you on something else, they will ask for something else. Again, I'm refraining with the word operating like a mafia, because it's not. It might take too far, but the idea that they constantly operate worried that.
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Some actual mafiosi might get upset with you on the basis of like, you know, professional insulting.
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C
Yeah, exactly. Feel insulted or underestimated, but no, it's the way that it works. And the other thing is, of course, because it goes back to what we heard what Trump said about Gaza, but we know that in the next half an hour he might say something completely different. And this is the constant trying to find out, to focus where you do something that the United States is going be on your side. Are they going to support the war in Ukraine? So one day they stop supplying weapons and the other they decide, yes, one day he's upset with Putin, saying, think he can do business with Putin? There is no core values, there are no core ideas and worldview. And it just. We are moving. It's a kind of a moving target. So for one, I think that at certain point, Europe needs to stand up to Trump instead of saying, we have three and a half years, we need to survive that, because what happened then? France wins the election.
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Well, to aviation news, specifically, the launch of a direct air link between Pyongyang and Moscow. Yes, the citizens of an isolated and paranoid pariah state with predatory designs on its neighbour will now be able to visit North Korea. It would be delightful to believe that the route, flown by Russian airline Nordwind, has been inaugurated because nobody else wants Russian tourists. But this is wretchedly far from the case. Hotel stays by Russian citizens in France and Italy are up 19% year on year, amid a general uptick in Russians visiting Europe. And those are, of course, just the ones we know about before we get to that aspect of it. Yossi, would you fancy holiday in North Korea? I, for one, would be genuinely delighted to go, but I suspect my application for a tourist visa would not survive a Google search.
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I don't see myself doing any better. But tourism, not out of interest and curiosity? Definitely, yes. I mean, it's an interesting place for not necessarily the right reasons, but, you know, it would be interesting to go and see what we hear about North Korea as a tourist destination. Think kind of, here is the place that I'm going to relax because you're dealing with conflicts throughout the year. Let's go and relax and enjoy a week or two in North Korea. I Have my doubt. But maybe I don't know enough about North Korea.
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Patricia, would you go or have you been?
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I haven't been. I would love to go. I mean, it's such a closed society and. And so few foreigners and certainly from the west are allowed in. It would be fascinating. I have glimpsed it over the line from Seoul from. Right at the.
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From the dmz.
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Exactly, exactly. So, you know, you can kind of see a city in the distance. There was one thing in that article which I was not aware of, which said that they've actually built a beach resort there. And so that was fascinating to me because the question is, who's going to that beach resort?
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Well, it is a fair question.
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And the economy in North Korea, I mean, people don't have enough to eat. It's a very bad situation there.
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B
I mean, I was wondering, Yossi, whether it was possible that this flight was perhaps established for more political than commercial imperatives. I am reminded of a story I did for Monocle many years ago, when Iran Air launched a link from Tehran to Venezuela during the great loving of Presidents Ahmadinejad and Chavez. And I did go on that flight for a story for Monocle magazine. We went from Iran to Damascus and then single hopped to Caracas on an antique 747 with, I think not more than 20 passengers on it.
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And you know what? Sorry.
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No, I was just gonna say, I should add, there is one flight a month.
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Yeah. I don't think there's a queue round the block for this.
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C
Yeah. So do you know what happened? What? The cargo of this airplane carried a lot of weapons went. So I think I just used you, Andrew, as a decoy for possibly smuggling weapons.
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B
I didn't ask what was in the cargo hold. And there was a very grim man who sat behind us wearing sunglasses for the entire flight and did not respond to conversational gambits. But I do want to address, Yossi, the fact that Russian tourists in large numbers are still coming to Europe and all things considered, does that seem a bit weird?
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C
No, I think there is probably, as in any country, the elite still have probably enough money.
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B
Oh, sure. But would it not make a point to those people if they said this? You know, by making it impossible for them to take their nice holidays, it demonstrates to them that this does affect you as well.
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C
Yeah. You can, you know, part of the sanctions, but it's. I think it's. It's a tricky one. Do you want to sanction all Russian people? It's the way that, you know, we talked about sport for instance, and there was the debate about tennis player participating in Wimbledon. And another. Do you want to ban everyone or only those who support or part of the inner circle of Putin? Those who support the war. But then how exactly you can set the criteria. How do you exactly apply it to every single person? You ask them to sign a paper. I'm against the war in Ukraine. The alternative is to ban everyone. But I think this is problematic. If you start about every war that you're against, to ban the entire population from traveling, how do you do that?
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You end up like the United States, for instance.
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Patricia, there has been some grumbling, unsurprisingly from Ukraine about this. They say that Europe is courting a security disaster here. Given what we know about Russia's endeavour is in hybrid gray zone warfare, you could probably argue that such operatives as Russia may be sending to Europe. They're probably not actually sending with Russian passports. But again, nonetheless, is this a risk we don't have to take?
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I'm kind of with Yossi on this one where I don't think banning every Russian is going to achieve much. And I do think it's worth differentiating between a government and its citizens.
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B
There are some European countries are not making that differentiation. Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic is not issuing tourist visas.
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Well, and those are clearly more concerned about the threat from Russia than a lot of others, which you could see even in the same way defense figures. You know, Poland is spending 5% or more and it's right on the border and Spain is spending less than 2.
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And they have historical rivalries. So and so memory of relation with Russia that probably others don't necessarily.
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Right. And have been invaded, you know, were part of the either part of the Soviet Union or invaded by the Soviet Union?
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B
Well, to West Arctica now or possibly Seborga, Pulvia or Lidonia. These are just four of the countries allegedly invented by an Indian chap who has had his collar felt by police in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, who accuse him of running an undeniably inventive scam in which he offered jobs in and passports from countries which do not exist. Though it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Donald Trump may yet impose tariffs on them. Hash Farhad Jain, the suspect may also have been involved in some manner of gun running racket. Hard to say. It is all a bit of a rum do. Yossi, we asked a short while ago, would you like to visit North Korea? How keen would you be to visit West Arctica, Seborga, Pulvia or Lodonia.
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Yeah, how silly it should be actually to believe they do exist and not to Google it first before I decided to spend money on getting.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think questions can be asked of the geography departments at the primary schools of Uttar Pradesh. I looked this up earlier, Patricia. The Onion, the satirical newspaper pretty much literally did this story in 1998 with the tale of the US ambassador to Belongi in West Africa who stood accused of having made country up. Yeah, but that was satire. This is life. Do you at least grudgingly admire the endeavor?
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A
You know, I have to say I was kind of impressed by the creativity of this guy. I mean, I think if I were going to kind of make up a fake, you know, government post for myself. He was saying that he was with the British Embassy. He should have said he's the ambassador to West Arctica or wherever. And then he could have been invited to all of the embassy parties, you know, gotten on all these guest lists.
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I don't know how many embassy parties are held in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, in fairness. But yeah, you are right. There was a story a few years ago of I think some sort of cultish organization which managed to get their invented city recognized as a sister city by various other actual cities. But again, Yossi, I always. I have an amount of sympathy for people who get scammed out of their money under false pretences obviously. But sometimes you've got to kind of admire the enterprise. There was again from India a story a while ago of some people who were ripping off Russians who thought they were betting on Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket matches. But because they understood that Russians had literally no idea what an Indian Premier League cricket match looked like, they staged the matches themselves using a bunch of like farm hands in colourful outfits and broadcast them on YouTube. And Russians bet on this thinking it was the IPL.
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A
Well, you know what, I think they got value for money.
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B
Well, the punters didn't know. They all got absolutely rinsed.
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C
I mean we like people that are creative, we try to encourage people to be entrepreneurial. But there are other values like honesty, telling the truth that we value as well. And you know, these two are actually now clash in this story. Now we need to context as you say, maybe some of the geography lessons in certain parts of India are not as good as they should have. And here is the lesson. Improve geography, then you won't be conned by this kind of people. But definitely we're thinking about it. It was really kind of. There was an idea behind it and now you can get some money out of people.
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B
Does it just in closing, Patricia, prompt any profound thoughts on the nature of nationhood? Because every country does start as an idea. There were people who've had ideas for countries which are now actual countries with flags and national anthems and seats at the UN at armies that at one point would have sounded just as crazy a notion as Westarctica.
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A
I mean, actually, I think the choice of names was pretty good that he picked things that could sound like names. And as you were just talking before about self determination, I'm sure that there are people in this world who would probably like to create a West Arctica. And so you may be right. It's an idea. The nation state is an idea.
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B
Freedom for Seborga Patricia Cohen and Yossi Meckelburg, thank you for joining us. Finally, on today's show, there have been more few, rather more corrosive blights on our ridiculous era than the turbocharging of conspiracy theory by social media. There is rarely any reasoning with subscribers to such nonsense and therefore little point suggesting they read the new book by our next guest. But it would be nice if they did, as it demonstrates that one of the key texts of modern conspiracy theory, the 1967 report from Iron Mountain, which explained why the government of the United States actively promotes war, was actually written as a satire of conspiratorial thinking. The story of the report and the trajectory of its influence despite the horror of its authors, is told in Ghosts of Iron Mountain, the Hoax that Duped America and its Sinister legacy. I spoke to Phil Tinline earlier and began by asking him to introduce us to what the Iron Mountain Report was.
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D
So the report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, to give it its full, grandiose title, appears to be the leaked product of a top secret government committee that's been appointed under the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to America if permanent global peace broke out. The core of it is that if peace broke out, it would be disastrous for the American economy and American society, and terrible things would have to be done to replace the beneficial effects of war, like a sophisticated form of slavery for young men and getting them to play blood games in a form of eugenics and all sorts of horrors. Actually, it's not that at all. It is made up by a bunch of satirists sitting in an office on Fifth Avenue lampooning the attitude they see behind the Vietnam War. They see on Wall street when there's a possibility of peace breaking out in 1966, they see shares dip familiar experience at the moment. And this is called a peace scare. And they think, hang on, shouldn't we be pleased the peace is breaking out? But they spot something to mock. So they confect the story of this suppressed report and then they bring in another writer and he says, well, if we're going to do this, I have actually write it. So he writes the whole thing with real footnotes, talks to J.K. galbraith of the whole works, or gets stuff from J.K. galbraith and then it's published by a publisher, perfectly reputable publisher, publisher James Baldwin, publisher Norman Mailer. But they say, right, we'll publish it as though it's real and we won't tell our sales staff that it's not real. So it goes out into the world as though it's non fiction. So it's a very sort of daring, very 60s kind of hoax.
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B
And just before we get on to the enduring and baneful effects of that hoax, we have to acknowledge that there was once another magazine called Monster.
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D
Yes, we do. So those satirists are sitting in the office of Monocle Magazine, which they created. These are guys who were at Yale Law School and they didn't really want to be lawyers. So they think, how can we get out of this, this being like the late 50s? They think, well, obviously we will invent a, what they call a leisurely quarterly satirical magazine, which means it comes out a couple of times a year and it kind of gets going and they decide to move to Manhattan and make a go of it and they publish it for a few years. It kind of works. And they also do a spin off called the Outsiders newsletter, which is a play on the Insiders newsletter, which is, which is a big deal at the time. And they make it work for a few years. By the time they do this, they're actually more into publishing books. So that's why they do what they do with Report from Iron Mountain. But they come out of that fantastic kind of satire boom of the early 60s.
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B
But like all the greatest and I think most resonant satire, what they write does have kind of a basis in even a whiff of truth. There actually is a place or was a place called Iron Mountain. Governments and associated think tanks are in the habit of doing sort of speculative reporting about what if. Why do you think, though this particular satire transcended what it was supposed to be? That is a satire and to bring us onto the point of your book was accepted as gospel by excitable conspiracy theorists.
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D
Well, I think it's because there is this pre existing vision, fearful vision that a lot of people have, particularly perhaps in America, not solely in their minds, that there is a dark cabal at the heart of power, that there is a sort of secret committee somewhere that, that organises things and means a lot of us ill will. And so if you produce a phrase or a hoax or a rumour that fits that, then it sticks on very quickly and sticks on very hard. And as you say, it is based in some truth. One of the things that Leonard Lewin wanted to satirise, to mock was the kind of super cold, as he saw it, absolutely inhuman objectivity that these think tanks pretended to be.
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B
This was the Robert McNamara esque cost benefit analysis of saturation bombing, etc.
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D
Exactly. It's the stuff that Kubrick's already mocked in Dr. Strangelove. The idea that, well, if we're going to have, if nuclear war is going to break out, it's much better for 50 million Americans to be horrifically burned to death and 100 million Americans, so we need to look that in the face and be grown up about it. Lewin just thought this is just, this is just inhuman. And so that certainly was one thing that it marks and that has a basis in reality, as you say. And Iron Mountain is a real place. It's not much of a mountain really, but it's a real warren of tunnels. It used to be an iron mine and then it was a mushroom farm. And the mushroom farmer has this bright idea amid all the kind of nuclear scares of the Korean War and thinks, hang on a minute, what if I advertise this as a kind of document store and luxury bunkers for executives to flee to. So there's all these articles published just as Lewin's writing. The having the idea to write this about what it's like inside these bunkers. There's chandeliers, there's world maps, it's like something like James Bond, it's fantastic. But there was a big giveaway which is that these stories were only breaking in early 66 because that's when these bunkers were opened. But in the report it says they were, they met there in 1963. So a sharp eyed journalist could actually clock that it was a fake from the beginning and one person dead, but no one else picked up on it.
- [35:06]
B
I guess just as a closing thought, did you get anywhere in terms of figuring out to what extent satirists, and I guess you could say any artists are responsible for how their work is interpreted because the people who cooked this up would be appalled by the legacy of the Iron Mountain Report. It has been accepted as gospel truth and used to justify the actions, the rhetoric, the behavior of the people they set out kind of to make fun of.
- [35:35]
D
Well, yes, except that the people that they were criticizing were more the kind of the sort of the Pentagon, the center of power. And actually, much as they would absolutely loathe people on the far right, there are some chimes between the worldviews of the famous horseshoe, sort of. Although the people who came out with this are not on the far left. But no, I mean, they were horrified when they realized what had happened. I think. Yes, there is obviously something to be, to be raised here. I suppose what they might say is, if you actually look at the time they were doing it, there's. When we think of the 60s in America, there's a massive difference between 1966 and 1968. Things really go into the dark in 1968 once you have the Tet offensive, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the riots in Chicago, beginnings of real kind of terrorism and so on, plus all the massive blow ups over civil rights. Things have got really. I mean, things are pretty grim in 66, 67, but there is a turn and I think it was still a playfulness in the culture. The place you can see this is another magazine, not Monocle, is Esquire magazine. Because Esquire magazine has this incredible kind of irreverent, irreverent, spiky playfulness. After Kennedy's shot, they published something called Kennedy Without Tears. Right. It's like Doctor Strange live in magazine form in some ways. And they publish this report knowing full well, I think, that it was fake, without telling their readers. And yet by 68, 69, that same editor, Harold Hayes, who's so commanding two years earlier, looks like he's sort of broken. It's gone beyond satire. So I think the kindest way to say it would be that it was absolutely brilliant for its time. But then the times changed rather than sharply.
- [37:02]
B
That was Phil Tinline speaking to me earlier. Ghosts of Iron Mountain, the hoax that duped America and its sinister legacy, is available now and heartily recommended. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Patricia Cohen and Yossi Meckelberg playing us out Tom Lehrer, who has died at the age of 97. Leyrer, a Harvard mathematician by trade, enjoyed a brief but colossally influential career circa the fifth 50s and 60s as a sort of music hall comedian. He recorded just 37 of his waspish and wordy songs, but forged a style and sensibility without which American satire would have spent half a century or so. Being very different, he would have been appalled, but probably unsurprised that his assessment of the Cold War logic of mutual assured destruction was still topical.
- [37:54]
D
What a comforting fact. That is to know, O universal bereavement. An inspiring achievement. Yes, we all will go together when we go.
- [38:08]
B
Produced by Carlotta Rubello and researched by Henry King. Our sound engineer was Flynn Simons. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.