15/12/2016 Newsnight

He says history is being written today by every citizen of Syria.

But what kind of gruesome history is it?

At last, there is peace in eastern Aleppo, or what's left of it.

But the Syrian war is far from over, unless politics can intervene.

In the meantime, rebels are being evacuated to another enclave,

which could be the scene of the next battle.

And as people leave Aleppo, we'll talk to this doctor

who's on his way back the region to help the injured.

Also tonight: The new geopolitical weapon - hacking.

I believe the leak was a large part of why Hillary had real problems

with him enyams and why she did not hit her targets in the states trump

won. Could it have been the difference? Absolutely.

Well, we have to be very careful of this 1930s comparison.

The fact is, it's the only history that's taught in our schools.

One of the reasons everyone's mentioning it

is because it's the only history anyone knows anymore.

Where does history tell us we may be heading?

When the world looks back on the last 17 days of horror that

eastern Aleppo has just endured, it will undoubtedly wonder how

the brutality of medieval warfare could have imposed itself

Why did the two mechanisms of world authority -

the United Nations and the United States - both fail?

And how could the battle have gone on so long once one side

These are interesting questions, but today, at least,

there are more hopeful images from Aleppo than we've

Let's have a look at four scenes that tell the story of today.

First, the Syrian flag being raised over eastern Aleppo.

Let's not forget, this is the day that Assad hailed

what he called Aleppo's liberation as an historic event.

Second, the buses on their way to evacuate civilians,

rebels and their families from the remaining rebel-held

Meanwhile, overhead, Putin is watching.

This is footage of the buses today from the Russian Defence Ministry.

And finally, civilians waiting to move back into East Aleppo.

The children are chanting in praise of Assad -

a useful reminder that not all Syrians are anti-Government.

It was not a day for joy, but it was one of relief.

Now the professional journalists have had difficulty in getting

access to Eastern Aleppo, but the shelling there has been

vividly reported thanks to smartphones and social media.

And if that's been true of the attack on Aleppo,

The skies are clear, the birds chirping and people are leaving

besieged Aleppo and I'm hoping that I will be doing the same thing.

Dr Zaher Sahloul is from the Syrian American Medical Society

and is part of a medical convoy heading to the country this weekend

to help build a hospital to treat those injured

How much contact have you had today with the people there in terms of

how the evacuation has been going? I was fixated on my cellphone looking

at the reports and texts coming from my colleagues inside Aleppo. These

are the doctors and nurses I spent my last medical commission with

right before the siege. And they were updating me about the

evacuation process and I had a sigh of relief that it happened without

hiccups this time. Relatively smooth. When you get back there,

there will be a generation of children deeply scarred by what

they've been through. Every child I've seen in Aleppo, even before

these last few months, was scarred. They have been under siege, they

have shortage of food, medicine, there is no schooling, there is

bombing and every one of them will have trauma deep in planted in their

psyche for the rest of their lives. And physically disabled as well?

Yes, and this is a problem Syria has to live with in the long term. We

saw the child motionless in the ambulance. How quickly do you think

those kids will recover? It will take a generation or more for them

to recover. Syria does not have the capacity to deal with the cycle --

psychological impact of the crisis. We also have a large number of

people injured because the amputations and spinal cord injuries

in Syria. It will take a look of effort and let's not forget that we

have 50% of the refugees outside Syria who are children. -- a lot of

effort. Do you ever reflect on how the human race could do better in

solving these disputes? Iowa to reflect on the fact that the

president of Syria was trained to be a doctor and he is overseeing the

destruction of many cities in his country, displacement of Hop

population, the injury of one and a half million people. -- his

population. The day that Nero burned Rome, the emperor, that was a

historic day. It is a historic day when you have a president trained to

be a physician overseeing the killing of 350 hospitals and the

killing of doctors and nurses in Syria. I was at school with him and

nobody expected him to be that brutal always was. Have you met with

him since? Yes. I asked him about introducing democracy in Syria and

he said they are not ready for democracy, Syrians. You never, ever

see a clue as to what horror can be inflicted by him from the kid you

knew at school? No. Many of us believe he is a war criminal and any

person who believes in the stability of Syria, they don't perceive him as

being part of the picture of the future of Syria. Do you think it

took too long for the point of surrender to be reached in eastern

Aleppo? Definitely. It was over weeks ago. They couldn't win from

that position. And of course there was a lot of suffering in the last

days as they held out. Definitely. Everybody knew this was happening.

What is the surprise is that the international community and Nato and

the United Nations did not intervene earlier. The evacuation of 250,000

people from their homes and neighbourhoods happening now, this

is what is called ethnic cleansing, forced evacuation, and this is a

tragedy we have to live with for the foreseeable future. It is obviously

a tragedy. The scary prospect is that you will get the same thing

again in the place people have moved to. How can that... I mean, what is

happening here? How is it saying to move people from one enclave to

another where they can be pummelled again? Everything happening in Syria

is that history is rewritten and the use of chemical weapons, more than

168 times, the use of siege as a tactic of war, on both sides. What

happened in Aleppo happened in the city of Homs, as well as other

cities before. Killing children, bombing hospitals. These are the new

norms in Syria. It is dangerous not only for Syrians but for refugees.

The rise of the extreme West, sorry, right. And the terrorism we are

witnessing is all what is happening in Syria. You are going back to

what? Under whose auspices do you go back and build a hospital? Under the

Syrian government? You will be in their region now. The NGOs have been

part of the solution and they are the hope Syrians are looking for.

There is a British NGO and representatives, and they are going

symbolically to build a hospital that was destroyed. This is our

statement to tell the doctors of Syria we are with them, we are

standing up with them, and this is also to say, shame on you, you did

not stop the genocide in Syria but we will do our part and we will be

the ones we're building the country after it has been destroyed. Thank

you. The news yesterday that Yahoo had,

without noticing, been robbed of data on a billion users capped

a year in which hacking has rarely The idea that the Russians might

try to steal emails in order to discredit a candidate

in an American election would have Now it's what intelligence services

think actually happened. It's a development with all sorts

of implications, not least the questions it raises

for journalists about how Newsnight's editor Ian Katz,

who was involved in covering some of the biggest leaks of recent

years, dusted off his Our digital world is frighteningly

leaky. The medical records of top athletes, the internal debates of a

presidential campaign, scarcely a month goes by without some new cache

of sensitive data being thrown into the harsh glare of public scrutiny.

And, increasingly, it is states who are putting them there. It's a new

kind of information war. One that challenges the very idea of what

pre-assy means in a digital world. And one that poses new and difficult

questions for journalists. The President earlier this week

instructed the intelligence community to conduct a full review

of the pattern of malicious cyber activity related to our presidential

election cycle. An election full of twists has saved one of its most

breathtaking till last. A President-Elect is locked in a

stand-off with the CIA over whether Russia mounted a hacking campaign to

help put him in the White House. I think it's ridiculous. WikiLeaks

today released a brand new batch of hacked e-mail. Mira served as a

close aide to Hillary Clinton and was a confidante of John Pedester

who's hacked emails were leaked daily during the last weeks of

campaign. As the emails were leaked there were a string of awkward

headlines. Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private

e-mail and has that person been drawn and quartered? I was watching

TV. There was one of my emails on TV. The next day, a Twitter storm

developed because of something I'd said. It was just like, it became a

daily humiliation. Just ever-present terrible experience. It became one

where every morning I'd have to brace myself for some new e-mail

coming out in which I'd have to apologise to somebody or mostly deal

with people ruffling through your most private thoughts and sticking

them on the internet. It was the worst experience I've ever had

professionally. Whatever the precise intention of those behind the hack,

it. Anden has little doubt about its impacted. I believe the leak was a

large part of why Hillary had real problems with Millenials, which is

why she did not hit her targets in the three states Trump won. Could it

have been the difference? Absolutely. People have to live with

that. There's nothing new about states hacking system of other

states for commercial information and security secrets. And nothing

new about getting hold of embarrassing information to

discredit them. The Russians even have a word for it. What the latest

attacks have done is bring together these two tactics to create a new

one, the data leak has been weaponised. So, the from e-mail at

first glance looks like Google security. If you go into the text

behind the e-mail, you can see it's send from a Yandex e-mail account.

That's a Russian free mail web service. Tony is a former Pentagon

analysts who spends her time identifying new online threats. The

so-called spear fish Mel which caught out John Pedester was a scam

all e-mail users are familiar with. But it bore the digital fingerprints

of a hacking group linked to Russian intelligence. There's a brazenness

in the attacks we've seen this year that is has been surprising. The

Russians don't seem to care that this activity is being attributed to

them. There's also a meanness to it. They're willing to dump a tremendous

amount of personal and private information as part of these

attacks. These attacks have been attributed by the US Government as

something shared by the number of companies in the private sector.

Where does this leave reporters and editors who avenue always had to

think carefully about a source's motives. Five years ago I

collaborated with WikiLeaks to publish stories of thousands of

leaked US cables. Some criticised but few doubted the motivation of

the person who leaked them. Bradley, now Chelsea manning, was so

convinced she had to expose what she considered to be an abuse of power,

she was prepared to go to jail for it. But how should news

organisations behave when they're effectively handed thrives of

confidential information by foreign states with transpartent --

transparent motives. Some say we're becoming useful idiots when we

publish damaging stories a hostile Government wants us to. What's to

become of a cycling super hero? We questioned with that on Newsnight

earlier this year. We ran a series of stories based on the medical

files of top athletes, files we were pretty sure had been hack hacked by

the Russians. It felt uneasy giving Moscow just what it wanted. But the

public interests in examining if one of Britain's sporting here rows had

broken the spirit of the rules if not the rules themselves was clear.

Not all the revelations in these leaks are quite as significant.

Thanks to Russian hackers, and a little help from chief stirrer

Julian Assange, I can now make a pretty pass able risotto. As John

Pedester said, it is all about adding the stock slowly. I also know

this time, thanks to the north Korean yaps, that Tom Hanks uses the

ail ya Johnny Madrid and Scot Ruden thinks Angelina Joel ary is a minute

imalley talented spoilt brat. The question is, have we become too

willing to serve up every tasty morsel provided by the hackers?

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, some of those who've seen their own private

communications sprayed across the internet, think it is. You have a

quote from someone about somebody else. Under the veneer of

journalism, reporters were totally trafficking in gossip. That's what

they were doing. The New York Times has run a string of stories this

year based on the Pedester emails and, before that, material hacked

from the democratic national committee. I asked the paper's

editor if the thought he might be doing Vladimir Putin's bidding keeps

him up at night? Sure it does. But it would keep me up at nice worse,

or at least longer, if I had information from a hack that I knew

was accurate that voters and citizens needed to know and I'm not

publishing because maybe it came from the Russians. I can't imagine a

slipperier slope than that. At what point is my safe at home filled with

information I can't report because I'm nervous about the source. If

someone had brought you a carton of papers, actual hard paper papers and

you knew for certain those were burgled from John Pedester's home,

would you treat those the same as a caceh of emails? That's a good and

hard question I've not had to confront yet. I would go through it.

If it was really significant and important, I would publish it. It

would make me nervous. I would admit to people how we got it. But I think

the information Trumps all. There's a powerful argument it doesn't

really matter how organisations like the New York Times and the BBC hack

material because in the Wild West of the internet, there'll always be

someone willing to publish. Some argue we should just accept there's

no such thing a prove assy in our digital lives. One high profile

victim of a major hack told me he communicates about all sensitive

matters by fax or phone. Kieran Martin is the man charged with

defending Britain against cyber attack. He's about to step out of

the shadows of GCHQ to lead the new cybersecurity centre. He told me

measures were taken to protect the British election from hackers but

there is a danger the recent US experience will inspire Ore tackers.

There are all sorts of threats from state cyber attackers. Threats to

critical national systems. Threats to our economic well-being through

commercial espionage. There may be a perception now this is a successful

model for intervention in societies such as ours and our allies and

that's something we need to be prepared to deal with. He insists

we're a long way from giving up on the idea of prove assy. Stealing

information for political, financial purposes is as old as human activity

itself. The digital world gives people an opportunity to do that on

a different scale. There's plenty to do to defend ourselves. We need a

demystify ourselves. If we wrap the problem in a shroud of mystique.

People eh people sitting at computers in far away places that

cannot be contested that is an incressbly damaging attitude to

take. Perhaps one detail of the US hacking story embodied the very

human vulnerability Martin and his counterparts can do little about.

When John Pedester received his mail, an aid and staffer replied

saying it was legitimate. It was a type owe. He meant to type

illegitimate. The course of mystery perhaps changed by two missing

letters. There an extended interview on

hacking on the Newsnight YouTube channel.

It'll be our last programme tomorrow,

There's always a tendency to think the moment we're living in

but this year has surely been dizzyingly interesting.

What's the right frame to view it through?

But first, how will historians look back on it?

We like to be first with the news, so I've been speaking to three,

to get an early draft on the year that was, in its own way,

President-Elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

The year could be remembered for lots of things.

The British people have made a very clear decision

Well, Lenin said there are decades when nothing happens

It was the year that globalisation went into reverse.

And the nation state reasserted itself

After decades of walls coming down...

..it was the year of barriers going up.

A year that nationalism and naked tribalism

I also want to fight for the preservation of our own identity.

A year that traditional politics and its parties began to fall apart.

Owen, you know perfectly well what the answer is - I voted remain.

I'm very surprised and actually quite disappointed

that you should even raise this question.

The year the truth became stretched

You bragged that you've sexually assaulted women.

I don't think you understood what was said.

Whether you like him or not, and I don't,

he is clearly an incredibly talented 21st-century communicator.

People will expect that from their leaders after 2016.

For me, 2016 has been something of a blur.

Not just a sense of events overtaking us.

they've just been rather important ones.

More a sense of assumptions changing.

For many, it's disorienting and they reach out for historical parallels.

Some reassuring ones or some obvious and rather dark ones.

The most commonly cited comparator is the 1930s.

You have outsider parties or outsider movements that arrive on

the political scene saying, we're not the same as other people,

that are not working for ordinary people.

That becomes enormously seductive to people who

do feel they've been left behind or their voices are disregarded.

It wasn't just the Nazis - Italy, Spain all had their fascists too.

There was Oswald Moseley in the UK and the

left-wing populist Huey Long over in the US.

Those outsider parties have been relatively contained in Western

democracies since the end of the Second World War.

And they're here and we're very worried about them.

The '30s can also be remembered for a US-led

adding to the disintegration of international co-operation.

But I also think issues are very tricky at

the moment in terms of the breakdown of what have been very, very secure

Especially the EU, Nato, for all its faults.

And these seem to be under great pressure.

If you lose the structures of international collaboration,

such as they are, which allow people to think collectively

or to think internationally, then, it is lost.

internationalists were very, very difficult to find.

VOICE-OVER: A vast pro-Nazi gathering,

carrying on the pro-Nazi campaign of back to Germany.

But historians are never keen on glib comparisons,

By reaching for the most familiar piece of history,

We have to be very careful of this 1930s comparisons.

The fact is, it's the only history taught in our schools.

It's the only history anyone knows anymore.

There are no militarised paramilitary organisations as there

were in the 1930s, that really characterised 1930s.

There aren't Stormtroopers or Blackshirts.

This is, in many ways, the working of democracy.

The working of democracy in the sense that?

One of the great things about democracy is it reflects

And they can make changes, radical changes,

without having to turn to revolutionary violence.

One of the roles of the media has to be not to

indulge in hyperbolic Hitler-spotting.

Perhaps then the year should be seen as one in which the elite were

overthrown. I don't think it's so much the 1930s. Perhaps the 1830s is

a better one. Then you have the Chancellor of Austria, the prince,

and a group of like-minded monks and statesmen actually deciding what was

good for Europe for 30 or 40 or 50 years, and they believed, a bit like

the EU elite today, that they were absolutely right, there was no other

way but their way, and of course gradually bubbling under was

resistance to this, so maybe the 1830s instead of the 1930s. It's

hard to make sense of 2016. The end of one kind of order but we haven't

yet seen the construction of a new one.

Two or three times you get a junction in the court -- course of

history. And we had one. In the confusion of different directions.

And that explains many of the contradictions we are seeing. Donald

Trump getting the support of Americans are -- American

Conservatives even though he's not a Conservative. He's an

interventionist. Brexit. A vote against globalisation, and yet the

Brexiteers say that we are going to become a beacon of global free

trade. We all are over the place and a complete mess.

So perhaps there are useful parallels to be drawn between the

messy upsets that come along every now and then in the form of

revolutions. Lenin definitely would have recognised this as a

revolutionary moment and he would have found a way of seizing on it.

Revolutions happen when assumptions that generations have had for very

long periods have broken down and people no longer believe in them. We

are seeing that very much in 2016. Russia, of course, had two

revolutions in 1917. One overthrew the Czar and the odd assumptions. It

was the second, months later, that saw an opportunistic Lenin grabbed

power. He promised people everything and anything. He lied unashamedly.

He identified a scapegoat that he could then blame for everything. He

used the word "Elite" a lot. He said people had heard too much from

experts. One feature of the current situation is not that events are

just unpredictable, but that you can get perverse outcomes. Democracy has

its foibles and the public can get things that perhaps they never

really intended. You can have a binary vote, very evenly matched,

but then that leads to quite an extreme outcome. Public preferences

are quite complicated things. We all want the public to have their say

but the challenge is to reduce that down to something simple while

capturing some of the nuance, and to make sure that in the process the

public does get what it really wants.

Can the outcome sometimes be very perverse? That there is a sort of...

The intended outcome of the revolution is not where the

revolution ends up? Yes! One obvious one is the French Revolution. One of

the most famous of them all, when they wanted to get rid of a king and

ended up ten years later with an Emperor! Hitler was called to become

Chancellor in 1933 and at that time he was intended to be the puppet of

right wing Conservatives, and of course within weeks, he was out of

control. So there is an unintended consequence of a major, major sort.

1830s, 1917, 19 30s. Each history has something useful to say but none

can really tell us where 2016 will lead. I don't think you've had the

revolution yet, Evan. If the revolution is coming will know about

it. It won't just be two unexpected elections. This is not 1917. This is

the year democracy actually spoke. Comeback in 100 years and I'll tell

you about 2016! Mary Kaldor is from

the London School of Economics and John Fredricks is a Talk Radio

host and joins us from Virginia. Mary, do you find yourself at all

attracted to any comparisons to the 1930s, or are you Hitler-spotting if

you look for them? There are two comparisons. This sense of

foreboding. This sense we're in a phoney war and we haven't really

felt the effects of Brexit and Donald Trump. And that something bad

is going to happen. The other is this is all about the crisis of

political representation. What is really disturbing, which ask is what

happened in the thirties, is the way the opposition a caving in. You see

the opposition on Brexit in this country, is totally accepting

Brexit. Nobody is saying, look, we may have voted for Brexit but it's

really bad for us. Everyone is caving in on immigration. We can't

actually control immigration. If the opposition goes on and agrees to

talk about control of immigration, it just feeds of right-wing

discourse. And, more alarmingly, I think, it legitimises the growth of

hate crime. I'm really nervous about where it will lead. We won't be able

to control immigration. I think it could lead to really dangerous

racism and violence in the future. That's a pessimistic view. John

Fredricks. You're not in that camp. What do you think about people who

evoke the 1930s at this point? Even, first of all, thanks for having me.

Mary just gave you the view of the globalist elitist who don't really

understand what's going on across the world. First of all, this has

nothing to do with the 1930s movement towards fascism. That was

about nationalism. This is about Severnity and jobs. This is a

workers revolution. Has nothing to do with ethnicity or race. It is not

a revolution of nationalism, it's a work lash. This is about jobs.

People in various countries, they want their countries back. They've

seen their jobs shipped all over the globe because the elite, globalist

international gangsters bangster network has scoured the earth for

cheap labour and shipped their jobs everywhere or they've let I will

leaguals come in to take their jobs. This has nothing to do with anything

accept people wanting jobs. Let me tell you something, with all the

talk about whatever Mary was saying, the elitist gobble de gook you just

heard, let me tell you something, economic prosperity and jobs is the

great equaliser. The great unifier. A pay cheque has no ideology.

Putting... John, can I come in... Very briefly. You're saying it is an

anti-globalisation thing but it's not a nationalism thing? That's

quite a subtle distinction. What's the difference between wanting your

country back, making America grate again and being a nationalist?

Because it's not about America. It's about American jobs. OK. That's

good. This is a jobs revolution. OK. Mary? I completely agree that this

was an anguished vote of those left behind by globalisation. But the

answer to that cannot be nationalism. The answer has to be in

Terre nationalism. It has to be dealing with those multinational

corporations and taxing their safe havens which is what the European

Union does. Regulating financial speculation. If we really want big

programmes of sub lick spending in a globalised world, we can only do it

through institutions like the European Union. And, so to argue

this is an answer to the problem is crazy. Look, can I suggest what this

year has been is a collapse of left/right dichotomy. What we have

now represented here in this discussion is a new dichotomy. Open

to the world. International collaboration is the solution to the

nation state being the answer to the world's problems. John, you're

basically, it's not really a right-wing or left-wing thing

anymore. I can't place Donald Trump. He's an interventionists difficult

to place. We know where he stands on the national versus globalism

spectrum. Is that fair as to where politics as moved, John? Evan,

you're right. This is a transformational president.

President-elect trump is transforming the hub can party in

America. The real bottom line to this is, I disagree with Mary on

this, Mary, what this whole movement is about across the globe, both in

the UK and France, just happened in the United States, is people want

their countries back but it's not a movement of nationalism. It's a

movement of protecting jobs. The international bankster network

scours the earth for cheap slave labour in order to cut out workers

that make a decent wage. When you get down to it, this whole argument,

everything that's happening, the reaction is to the globalist search

for cheap slave labour and they cut out the jobs of people in those

sovereign nations. So, I want to stop this. Get my jobs back. Mary, I

think of you as a liberal left-leaning person. John is

sounding so much more left-wing than you do. Almost a Marxist, this is a

capitalist not almost to drive wages down? I don't disagree with him

about globalisation. But I think globalisation has also brought huge

benefits. The problem is, we've had dramatic economic growth. But it's

only benefitted the rich. If we want, we can't go backwards on

globalisation. Globalisation is not just about multinational

corporations and free trade. It's about international communication.

It's about inter dependence. So, if we want to do anything about it, the

only way is by having a say. Taming it by international co-operation?

Yes. And, by the way, I want to add, it's rubbish to say it's not

nationalism. That stuff about making America great again, not allowing

Muslims into the United States, that is not just about jobs. That's pure

racism. I think we've lost John. At this point we need to stop anyway.

Mary, thank you. John, we might have lost the sound feed to you,

annoyingly. Your point was well made.

But before we go, we couldn't leave you without marking the 250th

They began life in the mid-1700s, when so-called "dissecting puzzles"

were handmade by cartographers to help teach children about maps,

and really took off at the turn of the last century after production

was sped up by the invention of a new mechanical saw known as -

An exhibition celebrating the puzzles opened today

at the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in London.

Anyway, here's what a Newsnight jigsaw might look like.

We got our resident hand model to solve it for us.

Hello. Still no sign of anything particularly cold on the horizon. A

mild start to the day tomorrow. Rain for Northern Ireland pushing into