Transcripts For CSPAN2 C-SPAN2 Weekend 20120825 : vimarsana.

[applause] good morning, everybody. this is an opportunity for me and for charlotte to be back in speaking again understand the stage. we had a wonderful time when we were here last year. last year i was speaking about intelligence, basically about the way particular the british intelligence services had to change in order for the changing threat of our security. this year i have rather a different hat on. i m worried to hats really. my hat is a former intelligence officer and my hat is a thriller writer, which i now am. the fact that both those hats that my head as you might say comes about from the fact that my books are actually based on things that happened to me, things i knew about during my career as an intelligence publisher and my characters are based broadly on people i ve met or heard about during that time and all my plots a thing comes straight out of my time at my size. so i am approaching the sub active radicalism today through these two points of view. radicals as a security threat and radicals as characters for novelists. it s a bit like a question from the university examination paper on the know, the payer and contrast. [laughter] i m sure that during this week, different lectures have been defining radicalism in very different ways. but what i am most interested in sf i say the security security intelligence asked back msn novelists really as well on my personality. i am interested in the points where radicalism turns into extremism. it is true that in a stable, modern democracies such as we ve had been on both sides of the atlantic, radical thinkers who talk about change or rate did not change are not regarded as threats to our security, i might go insane totalitarian countries, where you re not really about to pretend in any way. you re certainly not about to speak. you re not allowed to write. you re hardly about to think about dissent. and if you think about the soviet union during the cold war and eastern european countries, you can see an example of that. no dissent is tolerated. in the same were recently really had in libya and the return of gadhafi where you are not allowed to dissent. in zimbabwe as well, i would say another totalitarian state. and even maybe one can sigh and russia. i don t know if you ve been reading about the group of young women who sang a song and make a drill and and were immediately kept in prison and are awaiting a try which seems to be inevitably going to end prison sentence. so that is totalitarianism in its day. in a democracy, security services like my, mi5 only get concerned that involved when radicals turn into extremists. in other words, when they start to take some kind of action, particularly violent destructive action to bring about the changes that they re thinking about, talking about. and in taking this action, they threaten the security of the state. so that is what interests intelligence. and those are the kinds of people to also interest novelists, the people who do extreme and extraordinary things. those are the most interest are yours to people who write novels. fiction writing is only really interested in is used, the causes if you like to this stance but they eliminate the characters and expand the actions that they take. i think nowadays, most people would agree that the job of a novelist is not to judge people, not to take sides in any way, but to observe them and analyze what they do, why they do it commit to take this piece is, if you like, and put them together again and interesting, readable, exciting sort of ways. so i want to talk about some radical extremists that i ve dealt with and sometimes manage in the course of my career and how i can sound other novelists have presented in fiction. so that s my job for the morning. i ve chosen three types of radical extremists you might say to talk about. and the first one is five. particularly those spies who are motivated by some sort of ideology. these are the people who take radical action to undermine, destroyed or changed their own countries by working covertly for a foreign power. i think there s so much more interesting than those who merely sell secrets in it for the money. they re not radical a set of. they re just selfish. my second category that i m going to talk about is what you might call radical protesters, people who have some sort of personal grievance against the society they live in and to use violent against those whom they think are to blame for the things they are in agreement about. and thirdly i will talk about terror, both religious extremists who seem to regard particularly society only so it can be replaced by something else and political, people who use terrorism to receive a political end, whether it independence or whatever it might be. so those are going to be my three categories. before you get on with them, i just wanted to give resolve to the earliest writers of ascension. as i say nowadays, most fiction writers are much more interested in characters van and issues. fiction is not seen nowadays as it is the cause of proselytizing or pushing across your ideas for a new form of society. it is spinning tales for interest, stimulation for a good reason. that s the appraiser used in connection with the book that i was criticized for something that was a good read. but i do believe for a good read, whatever kind of ridiculous it s got to be a good read. so fiction is not really something we cannot proselytize. spinning tales enters stimulation. but we shouldn t forget that the novels actually began dashti began as a way of expressing radical and political ideas. if you go back to the beginning of the novel in the early 18th century to come up against daniel do so, it was widely thought and he wrote was all heard about the story of a man who was marooned on a desert island. and the story itself, the story of this man on a desert island to fund a colleague caught the imagination really a generation and this remained a favorite even to this day. but it wasn t just storytelling. daniel do so was using his story to express his own radical ideas, thomistic ideas they were about individual morality and how it shapes society. and they were shaping what turned out to be a pretty pleasant society. i m not a sealskin jonathan swift who wrote gulliver s travels. he had a very different, less up to mystic view of individuals he had a very different pessimistic view. and the main subject of a lover s travel is travels into several remote, and if you remember the lover s travels at all you