TRIGGERnometry - The Truth about Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union - Michael Malice

00:00:00.740 He had the camps, he had the secret police, all these things.

00:00:04.480 People getting put up against the wall in huge numbers.

00:00:07.420 He did not hold back in terms of, this is going to have to be, you know, an abattoir.

00:00:13.540 It was very much war, class warfare.

00:00:16.940 And when they said war, they meant war.

00:00:20.040 So Stalin introduced the idea of socialism in one country.

00:00:23.260 He went through group after group, which were threats to his power, and just killed.

00:00:27.920 The number of people he killed was just astronomical.

00:00:30.660 The example after example after example that you give.

00:00:34.680 It felt like, would there be anybody left in Russia?

00:00:39.540 Michael.

00:00:40.460 Francis.

00:00:41.540 Michael.

00:00:42.240 Francis.

00:00:43.400 Michael.

00:00:44.120 Michael Malice, welcome back.

00:00:46.400 He's laughing already.

00:00:47.780 Yeah.

00:00:48.520 It's great.

00:00:48.940 We're going to talk about the Soviet Union, but before that, how are you?

00:00:52.780 I'm doing wonderfully, thank you.

00:00:54.560 By the time this airs, I'll be doing terribly.

00:00:56.060 Yeah.

00:00:56.860 Well, we're recording this right around election time.

00:00:59.940 Yeah.

00:01:00.660 So we won't talk about that.

00:01:04.820 So we won't talk about that.

00:01:06.900 There's nothing we can say about it.

00:01:08.220 Yeah.

00:01:10.520 I'm just looking at you.

00:01:11.520 You wanted lots of banter at the top of the show.

00:01:13.560 I did.

00:01:14.060 I didn't.

00:01:14.440 When did I indicate that?

00:01:16.500 Well, you indicated it to both of us.

00:01:18.340 How?

00:01:18.840 You said, I want it to be fun.

00:01:21.100 I said banter.

00:01:21.940 I didn't say fun.

00:01:22.520 You see, really, your soul is in England, because that's what we do in England.

00:01:29.640 We have banter, but there's no fun.

00:01:31.740 Yeah, that's kind of true.

00:01:33.460 I see PMQs, and it's banter.

00:01:36.280 It's not really fun.

00:01:37.480 Yeah, exactly.

00:01:38.860 So, but it's wonderful to have you on.

00:01:41.020 You're doing very well.

00:01:41.960 Are you looking forward to this bright new dawn that is awaiting us?

00:01:44.960 By the time this goes out, the dawn has already happened.

00:01:47.600 This golden dawn.

00:01:48.680 Yeah.

00:01:48.880 America's over, depending on which side you support.

00:01:52.000 Yeah.

00:01:54.240 Right.

00:01:55.120 And I think we're at an interesting point where no matter what happens, there's going

00:02:01.120 to be a huge loss of faith in the electoral system, which is really going to be interesting

00:02:05.040 to see.

00:02:05.960 Why?

00:02:06.900 Well, because if Kamala gets in, it's like, come on, this is a joke. 1.00

00:02:10.080 This woman didn't go through the primary. 1.00

00:02:12.580 She got installed by the machine.

00:02:14.420 And if Trump wins, well, obviously, insurrectionists, all that nonsense.

00:02:18.080 Yeah.

00:02:18.560 So, it's just like, I think people are going to start giving up.

00:02:23.460 I know my voice just broke there.

00:02:25.500 Your voice gave up on you.

00:02:27.320 My voice gave up.

00:02:28.660 Yeah.

00:02:28.880 You gave up.

00:02:29.560 You gave up.

00:02:30.360 But that's a really dangerous moment, isn't it?

00:02:32.780 I mean, could that...

00:02:34.260 Yeah, Michael loves it, though.

00:02:35.460 I don't love danger.

00:02:36.120 This is wishful thinking.

00:02:37.200 This is wishful thinking.

00:02:37.960 I don't love danger at all.

00:02:38.280 He wants everyone to lose faith.

00:02:39.800 I want them to lose faith, but it's still dangerous.

00:02:42.440 I mean, when people are desperate, bad things happen.

00:02:44.940 And good things possibly happen, but it's still scary.

00:02:51.300 I'm not Barack Obama.

00:02:52.720 I missed the flight.

00:02:56.280 You mean in the men's room?

00:03:01.260 There we go.

00:03:02.220 There's banter.

00:03:03.080 There's the banter that we wanted.

00:03:04.440 There's the banter that you wanted.

00:03:05.540 How are we supposed to have a serious conversation with you, Michael?

00:03:08.260 Is it impossible?

00:03:08.820 I was on John Stossel, who is the greatest.

00:03:13.140 His producer, many years ago, was going to have me on and ask my other friend, Andrew.

00:03:19.040 He goes, can he ever be serious?

00:03:21.640 And Andrew goes, can the North Korea guy ever be serious?

00:03:24.860 Yeah, he can.

00:03:26.380 Yeah.

00:03:27.140 Yeah.

00:03:27.360 And that's an interesting jump off point.

00:03:29.480 The North Korean guy can ever be serious. 1.00

00:03:31.320 Because I read your book.

00:03:33.600 It's brilliant.

00:03:34.360 Which one?

00:03:35.000 The White Pill.

00:03:35.740 Well, no.

00:03:36.060 Dear Readers about North Korea.

00:03:37.180 That's what I'm asking.

00:03:37.600 Oh, right.

00:03:38.060 Okay, I read The White Pill.

00:03:39.720 And there are some, it's a beautiful book.

00:03:44.640 Thank you.

00:03:45.560 There are moments of real darkness within that.

00:03:49.100 And as somebody who is not au fait with Soviet history, the characters, you really bring them to life.

00:03:55.620 I mean, let's start off with Lenin.

00:03:58.120 Because how Lenin is presented on a surface level to the Lenin you describe in the book is completely different.

00:04:04.520 Well, how so?

00:04:05.060 So, with Lenin, we kind of see that, you know, he was a founder of communism.

00:04:09.180 He was this visionary.

00:04:11.240 He took, you know, he took communism and was the founding father of the Soviet Union.

00:04:17.660 Yeah.

00:04:17.760 But I didn't realize the psychopathy and the brutality of that man.

00:04:21.700 Yeah.

00:04:22.140 The thing that's always fascinating when people, there's two points I want to make here.

00:04:26.120 There's this hypothesis in the university system, like good Lenin, bad Stalin, that Lenin came in and he was kind of good cop.

00:04:34.020 And then Stalin, this is kind of the Trotskyite idea that Stalin came in and the revolution was betrayed by Stalin.

00:04:39.720 And it's really completely historical that, you know, all the roots that Stalin later developed and certainly cranked up the dial had its antecedents during the Leninist period.

00:04:50.860 We see this directly when Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were two anarchists who had been deported from the States, you know, talked to Lenin to his face and were like, look, you're arresting people for political views.

00:05:02.220 You promised free speech.

00:05:03.860 And he goes, look, that's a bourgeois concern.

00:05:06.780 You know, he had the camps, he had the secret police, all these things.

00:05:10.740 And when people talk about like, oh, you know, that wasn't real communism or, you know, it hasn't been tried.

00:05:18.020 He was willing, explicitly goes, we're not holding back.

00:05:24.200 This is our one shot to get it right.

00:05:26.480 We're not going to be like hemming and hawing.

00:05:29.180 We're not going to be, you know, mincing words.

00:05:31.700 People are getting put up against the wall in huge numbers.

00:05:35.140 And one of the people in the secret police said, like, look, better, what is it, better 10 innocent people die than one spy gets away.

00:05:42.280 When you're chopping, when you're splitting wood, chips will fly, meaning you're going to have a lot of blood.

00:05:46.880 And he explicitly and constantly talked about like blood flowing, you know, the blood of our enemies and, you know, liquidating these classes. 0.57

00:05:54.680 And they did it.

00:05:55.900 You know, just huge numbers of people were killed or deported or so on and so forth.

00:06:00.960 So you have to give him credit in a very, very, very loose sense of the word where he's like, all right, we're doing this for real.

00:06:10.700 This isn't like, oh, you know, I'm a conservative.

00:06:13.660 We're going to have a free enterprise zone or I'm going to privatize the electric company.

00:06:18.180 He's like, we're going balls to the wall as fast as we can.

00:06:21.660 And, you know, he pulled back when things weren't going as well as he wanted with the new economic policy, the net policy.

00:06:26.520 But he did not hold back in terms of this is going to have to be, you know, an abattoir.

00:06:33.680 Michael, you mentioned this idea of real communism, you know, this meme, real communism hasn't been tried.

00:06:37.900 Right. So according to Lenin, what was real communism?

00:06:42.960 What was he trying to do?

00:06:44.760 Well, the communist model, it was funny.

00:06:47.360 My friend Ben was giving a talk at Hereticon earlier this week and he goes, what can I say?

00:06:53.560 It'll really piss him off.

00:06:54.380 And he wanted to give a certain topic.

00:06:56.040 But it was, and this is going to upset a lot of people, which is why it's fun to say it.

00:06:59.660 But it was essentially a transhumanist movement.

00:07:02.360 Their vision was, we're going to fundamentally, long term, remake the nature of man and the nature of society.

00:07:10.480 They thought that human beings are almost explicit, entirely plasticine, that people are born and their subject, a function of their economic class.

00:07:19.500 And if you just get the right knobs and levers, you can create, you know, an ideal society at the end where the state will wither away.

00:07:27.280 This is kind of this almost biblical sense that when communism is done, you're not going to need a government because everyone's going to know their role and do it naturally.

00:07:35.420 But what people don't appreciate now, because when we look at the Soviet Union or Venezuela or Cuba, and there's, you know, there's that joke about what did the socialists used before they used candles, light bulbs, you know.

00:07:49.460 But the idea was, no, no, no, we're scientific.

00:07:51.640 This isn't this kind of shopkeep, you know, bourgeois, oh, you've got the little green grocer in this corner and you've got a little library that's all very quaint.

00:08:00.600 We're going to turn the entire country into a factory or a laboratory where everyone's working together.

00:08:06.840 And there we're not going to waste money on profits for some billionaire while everyone's starving.

00:08:10.760 And we're going to create this super efficient machine.

00:08:14.340 I mean, if you look at the iconography, you know, nowadays, leftism is much more environmentalist, but it was all about smokestacks and, you know, electrical wiring.

00:08:22.600 Like, we're going to create this kind of very industrialized nation state.

00:08:27.440 To what end?

00:08:28.240 To the point where, because we're producing so much, because the Industrial Revolution came out and Marx was very much a function of the Industrial Revolution, now there's so much being produced, you're not going to need to work, right?

00:08:39.220 Because we're going to be overflowing with cars and bread and everything you want, because everything's being done efficiently and scientifically.

00:08:45.560 Frederick Taylor was kind of a model for this.

00:08:47.540 He was an American thinker who basically went to factories.

00:08:50.580 He was an efficiency expert, right?

00:08:52.360 And they took that, like, what if we apply this to society at large?

00:08:56.040 So when they talk about real communism, you know, it's really this kind of thing where it's kind of redundant.

00:09:03.820 It's the sense of, like, real communism means it works.

00:09:06.860 This didn't work.

00:09:07.860 Therefore, it's not real communism.

00:09:09.180 It's like, sure, but real is what you put into practice, not what's in your head.

00:09:15.320 And if he, who didn't hesitate in any sense to impose this vision on a country, if that wasn't real, I don't know what is.

00:09:24.200 And also, what you encapsulate brilliantly in the book is what a, I mean, he was a brilliant man.

00:09:31.740 Terrible man.

00:09:32.740 Awful man. 0.99

00:09:33.800 Evil, you could even describe, but brilliant at the same time. 0.67

00:09:36.720 That was never a question.

00:09:38.020 And the thing that I talk about in my other book, The New Right, is when you're in the middle and you look at the fringes, madness and innovation are equidistant, right? 0.83

00:09:48.300 When you hear some great visionary, you don't know, this guy's a complete lunatic or, holy crap, this is what's going to be in 20, 25 years.

00:09:57.820 I'm going to use a very gauche example. 0.96

00:09:59.840 I read Cyndi Lauper's autobiography and, you know, she dressed in a very idiosyncratic way before she made it. 1.00

00:10:06.920 You know, she was working at this store called Screaming Mimi's in Manhattan, dressing in this kind of thrift store, pre-hipster finery, pre-90s hipster.

00:10:14.980 And women would, like, make fun of her. 1.00

00:10:16.520 And she thought to herself, your daughter's going to be dressed like this in five years. 0.99

00:10:19.420 And she was correct, right?

00:10:20.720 So a lot of times what seems crazy today will be reality and not only the norm but popularized soon after that. 0.98

00:10:30.780 And the reason the Germans wanted to get Lenin back into Russia during World War I because the idea was, all right, this is completely bat crap. 0.64

00:10:42.220 This can never happen in real life. 0.99

00:10:43.940 He's a loon.

00:10:45.000 But the guy's charismatic. 0.92

00:10:46.540 He knows how to make trouble.

00:10:47.760 Let's throw him in there and kind of, you know, put a monkey wrench into the gears.

00:10:53.260 And when he sees power, everyone's like, well, hold on a minute.

00:10:57.380 So people realize before this, today the word socialism is synonymous with having government control.

00:11:03.940 That wasn't what socialism meant before 1917.

00:11:07.040 There were different strands of socialism because it meant the idea of everyone working together for the betterment of society.

00:11:12.680 So anarchists were considered socialists and corporatists and so on and so forth.

00:11:16.360 And once that hit and we have the first real self-identified socialist country, a lot of the left were like, all right, we got to see if this works.

00:11:27.420 This is our one shot to make it happen.

00:11:29.620 Yeah, there's some kind of broken eggs, wink, wink, which means murdered children and people.

00:11:34.660 But this is still our one shot to put into practice.

00:11:38.040 So we got to give them every opportunity they have.

00:11:41.080 It was what I think was Eugene Lyons called the guinea pig theory of revolution.

00:11:45.300 Like, sure, you know, I have the quote in the book.

00:11:47.720 Sure, these Russians squeal and make noise. 1.00

00:11:49.860 But what are we up here?

00:11:51.080 We can't worry about the animals.

00:11:52.360 This is our chance to, you know, kind of experiment on them and find out, you know, what makes the entire world tick.

00:11:57.800 And you've seen experiment and we've touched on Lenin's brutality, but I think it's really important for people who may not be au fait with this historical character.

00:12:08.900 Let's really delve into the brutality aspect of it because it's really important.

00:12:14.580 What did he do to his own people that meant to my eyes that he's a monster?

00:12:19.780 Well, I think so what's interesting is all the things that or most of the things that the Bolsheviks and their allies hated about the czar, they took and implemented later and again escalated to an extreme degree.

00:12:34.340 It kind of so he had under the czar, you had internal passports.

00:12:38.220 Right. So you couldn't travel from, you know, one place to another without the permission of the state.

00:12:43.100 This the Bolsheviks later implemented. 0.53

00:12:44.680 They had the concentration camps, but the amount of people in the camps that the czar had were quite small, relatively.

00:12:52.820 These were for political radicals and also like they had books, you know, they could write letters.

00:12:57.400 It's jail, but it's not what we think of as this kind of intense prison system.

00:13:03.580 He, you know, basically they would take entire populations.

00:13:06.660 And one of the big things about Marxism, and this is what conservatives, you know, kind of harp on and quite understandably, is their absolute hatred of faith and religion.

00:13:16.220 So they really wanted to make sure anyone who had any kind of religious background bent the knee and repudiated their faith.

00:13:23.280 And you can imagine how difficult it is to maintain this sense of faith when your entire country is against you, when the costs are extremely high and you don't see any glimmers of hope.

00:13:37.100 And they were right.

00:13:38.160 So there was a group of religious people.

00:13:40.580 They basically put them on an island and they wouldn't take like Bolshevik money.

00:13:43.780 And they said, all right, well, if you don't take this money, you're not going to eat.

00:13:46.780 And they all starved to death.

00:13:48.300 They would put people, you know, the Soviet Union is, or what became the Soviet Union wasn't exactly Tahiti in terms of climate.

00:13:56.820 So they had no problem putting people above the Arctic Circle with no clothes and being like, all right, you're going to stay here and you're going to work for us.

00:14:03.520 And if this doesn't break you, that's perfectly fine.

00:14:06.540 So the German Auschwitz model, Arbach-Machfrei, was apparently a sarcastic reference to the Soviet vision of if you work hard enough, you're going to kind of divest your evil history and become a productive member of society.

00:14:21.120 You could pay off your debt that you, if maybe your parents were wealthy landowners or bourgeois or something like that.

00:14:27.040 You are punished for the sins of your ancestors.

00:14:30.780 Most people would associate those camps with Stalin.

00:14:33.120 But what you're saying is they were implemented under the Tsar and then really expanded under Lenin.

00:14:38.080 Yeah, under the Tsar was the Ketorga system.

00:14:40.060 But Lenin just really made it much more.

00:14:43.160 And Stalin, you know, took it to the nth degree.

00:14:46.200 And because what was really interesting in the book is you're hearing about the way he's treating political dissidents.

00:14:54.760 You're hearing about the way he's treating people he perceives as his enemies.

00:14:58.720 And then in the left, the journalists, some of the intellectuals in America and in my country, like the UK, you know, heroes of the left, like Malcolm Muggeridge extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union and Lenin in particular.

00:15:15.280 It's really fascinating.

00:15:17.140 Yeah, so before Lenin, you had something called the Fabian Society, which was the precursor to the Labour Party.

00:15:26.580 And they were heavily involved with the London School of Economics.

00:15:29.080 That was a whole little scene.

00:15:30.720 And this sounds like a joke, but the Fabian's original logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

00:15:36.360 And when they thought that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise, meaning slow and steady wins the race, because they wanted socialist control.

00:15:46.000 But their vision is, all right, we're going to do it in a democratic way, gradually, you know, piece by piece.

00:15:51.340 We're going to take over the entire country and have everything run by the state.

00:15:55.580 Right. So then, so they were, and the Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were two Fabians who really had a complete love affair with the Soviet Union.

00:16:06.040 But the thing that's really kind of fascinating that people, I think, don't appreciate is they thought these Westerners who were extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union, there were two types.

00:16:15.400 There were those who knew the truth, and they're like, all right, we need to kind of downplay this, because we got to give these people every chance to make it work.

00:16:24.600 So we don't want to be criticizing them too much and undermining this very fragile thing that they're building.

00:16:30.440 But even worse were the ones who had never stepped foot, like east of Paris, who knew perfectly well what's going on there, because they read the right books and newspapers.

00:16:41.760 And maybe if you read a book, you'd understand this glorious experiment that's happening, you know, over in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Leningrad.

00:16:49.160 So it's this arrogance of the intelligentsia, and Lenin very much played into it. 0.94

00:16:54.940 I mean, the term useful idiots applies to these people, that was a Soviet concept, because the idea was they weren't that big a deal in the West, but the Soviets were like, oh, you guys are great, you're basically our ambassadors. 0.93

00:17:09.180 It made them feel important, and they were the ones you would go to for that pull quote that journalists needed then as they do now. 0.97

00:17:14.820 Right, there's a lot of that going on, and there was.

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00:18:57.440 How honest was Lenin about the stuff that he intended to do, like, before he actually came to power?

00:19:04.440 Did he say, we're going to kill all our class enemies?

00:19:07.600 Did he say, we're going to have this, all of the things that they went on to do? 0.96

00:19:12.800 Did they talk about, you know, taking the farms away from the Kulaks, the wealthy peasants? 1.00

00:19:18.540 Did they promise to do all the stuff they ended up doing, or did they have just very kind of flowery slogans that sounded really appealing to people?

00:19:26.240 Oh, it wasn't flowery.

00:19:27.500 It was sorty.

00:19:28.600 You know, the slogans were very much, because this is the workers' revolution, right?

00:19:33.640 So it was for the workers.

00:19:34.720 So it was very much a philosophy of strength and muscle.

00:19:38.440 It wasn't flowers at all.

00:19:39.820 You know, it's not this kind of hippie thing from the 60s.

00:19:42.180 It's this idea that we're the strong ones.

00:19:44.340 We're the ones who are literally building these buildings, building these factories off the sweat of our brow. 0.91

00:19:49.640 And this fat, lazy capitalist is sitting in his house, smoking cigars, lighting them with currency, while we're starving and hungry. 0.95

00:19:57.260 You know, and we're going to, it's a revolution. 0.99

00:19:59.540 You don't have a revolution with flowers.

00:20:00.840 So, and it was very much war, class warfare.

00:20:06.420 And when they said war, they meant war.

00:20:08.920 They didn't mean, you know, like, oh, we're going to play Monopoly and I win and whatever.

00:20:12.880 It's like these people have to be liquidated.

00:20:14.780 They have to be driven out of society.

00:20:16.740 And in terms of the farms, it wasn't like, oh, we're going to get the farms from the Kulaks. 0.91

00:20:20.620 We're getting the farms from everybody.

00:20:22.280 Everything is taken from everybody for the sake of the greater good.

00:20:26.780 When they were first starting out, like, we're basically rebuilding society from the ground up.

00:20:30.840 And the idea was if something was old, it was probably bad, right?

00:20:34.080 Like so, and unscientific.

00:20:36.100 So let's have communal lunchrooms. 0.95

00:20:39.220 So everyone eats together.

00:20:40.620 Let's have communal bathrooms. 1.00

00:20:42.440 So that people don't, this whole concept of privacy is something that they fought against.

00:20:47.480 Because whatever's bourgeois was bad.

00:20:49.760 If grandma liked it, we're against it, right?

00:20:51.920 So this, and even the concept of a family, it's like, wait a minute.

00:20:55.740 If we're about fairness and equality, maybe you're a great dad.

00:21:00.200 Francis, you're a terrible dad.

00:21:02.100 It's not fair to his kid that your son has a good upbringing and his daughter doesn't.

00:21:08.400 So let's raise all the kids together in these big kindergartens.

00:21:12.260 And the line even was like, listen, if you want to visit your kid, you'll have every chance if you want to.

00:21:17.580 Now, they didn't go as far as that in the beginning.

00:21:19.660 But that certainly was the vision.

00:21:21.260 And in East Germany later on, up until even the 80s, if someone was, it's difficult to even discuss,

00:21:29.820 if someone was regarded as politically incorrect or politically desirable,

00:21:33.840 and the line for that is very, very low.

00:21:36.440 This isn't someone who's like secretly a spy.

00:21:38.400 It's just someone who just, someone who bureaucrat regards a problem.

00:21:41.720 They took the kids and gave them to be raised by good communists. 0.62

00:21:46.000 And many of these kids and parents never saw each other again,

00:21:48.940 or even more disturbingly, or not more disturbingly, but disturbingly,

00:21:52.460 after the Germany reunification, some of them did get reunited.

00:21:57.040 But that kid you got taken away from when they were four, and now they're 20,

00:22:01.000 you're looking at a stranger.

00:22:02.360 You're never going to have that relationship if you raise them.

00:22:05.120 So this, when you talk about putting the common good before the private good,

00:22:11.540 every family is a conspiracy, because you're always going to choose your family over society at large.

00:22:18.460 It's a very human, basic thing.

00:22:20.220 But there's a problem for them, because that's unequal.

00:22:22.980 So you really have to break up this kind of family and these family ties.

00:22:27.660 The very famous example, and you mentioned it in your book, Constance, as well,

00:22:32.520 is Pavlik Morozov. Like, Americans can't even wrap their heads that this was real.

00:22:37.060 But it was this kid who turned in his dad to the cops,

00:22:41.100 because was he hoarding grain or selling sweaters? I remember what it was.

00:22:44.540 The kid got killed by his family. There's statues of him.

00:22:48.020 And, you know, he's this basically kind of Paul Bunyan mythical figure.

00:22:51.500 And the message to children taught in schools is,

00:22:54.260 if you see your parents doing something wrong, turn them in.

00:22:57.200 Even if it costs your life, that's the right thing to do.

00:23:00.120 Now you know some of these kids came home, and if their parents were like,

00:23:04.320 you probably shouldn't do that, that parent has to wonder,

00:23:07.200 wait a minute, if I tell my son you shouldn't do that,

00:23:09.320 is he going to tell his teacher that I told him that? Now I'm in trouble.

00:23:13.400 So this kind of separation between kids and parents is,

00:23:18.660 I think Americans are very, very naive, and Westerners as a whole, 0.99

00:23:21.700 about the nature of evil, right?

00:23:23.060 I talk about this all the time. They think someone with a crazy mustache banging desk.

00:23:27.060 No, it's that teacher, school teacher, who's very sweet and very nice,

00:23:31.200 and she pats your kid on the head and pats him on the back and says,

00:23:34.160 good job, who also tells him, if you see your mom or dad doing anything, let me know.

00:23:37.820 And she will trip over her sensible shoes to call the cops to turn them in.

00:23:42.540 That is, to me, is the nature of evil. 0.74

00:23:44.200 And it's so much more pervasive and insidious than some crazy man with epaulets

00:23:48.280 and all these medals banging a desk.

00:23:49.760 Michael, just coming back to the agenda of the communists

00:23:54.080 and how transparent they were about it,

00:23:57.300 was that a popular offering?

00:24:00.240 Did the people of Russia want that?

00:24:03.900 Would they have voted for it in an election?

00:24:06.020 So when the Bolsheviks came in, they weren't there by themselves, right? 0.68

00:24:10.500 They didn't have the numbers.

00:24:11.740 So there were a few other groups that they partnered with.

00:24:14.420 Bolshe, as you know, in Russian means more.

00:24:16.440 You had the Mensheviks, who wanted things to go a little bit slower, 0.97

00:24:18.920 who partnered with them.

00:24:20.320 You had the left SRs.

00:24:21.600 You had the anarchists who wanted very localized control.

00:24:25.320 Soviet, the Soviet is a workers' council.

00:24:27.280 This was an anarchist idea.

00:24:28.700 So they kind of teamed up like, all right, we're going to put our differences aside.

00:24:32.820 We're all completely against capitalism.

00:24:34.800 We're all completely against aristocracy and the czar.

00:24:37.240 And you can understand why for each of those things.

00:24:40.140 Let's get together and make it.

00:24:41.460 The whole point of socialism, the vision, is we're all in it together.

00:24:46.560 We're all, from each according to his ability, each according to his need.

00:24:49.220 Everyone is going to do what they can to make the society work.

00:24:52.180 And then everyone's going to have what they need.

00:24:54.000 And no one's ever going to have to go hungry again, right?

00:24:56.300 So that was the model.

00:24:58.100 And everyone's like, all right, this is our shot.

00:25:00.380 This is our chance.

00:25:01.240 Let's make it happen.

00:25:02.000 And as soon as Lenin had enough power, he's like, I think, well, I forgot the exact quote.

00:25:07.160 It's in the book.

00:25:07.640 Like, we've had enough talk of political discussion.

00:25:10.960 It's time for action.

00:25:11.940 And by the end of the year, I think it was 1922, anyone from any other political movement

00:25:19.140 was in and of itself grounds for arrest, and if not execution.

00:25:22.660 So explicitly so.

00:25:24.120 So it's like, all right, we've won the Russian civil war.

00:25:26.700 The forces of the czar were defeated.

00:25:28.040 The Reds beat the Whites. 0.88

00:25:29.420 It's going to be red from here on out.

00:25:31.220 Enough time for talk.

00:25:33.400 The party is going to be running this country.

00:25:36.400 Anyway, but just specifically to your question about the popularity, I think people often

00:25:41.940 forget context, right?

00:25:43.480 It's not like this was like 1910s America and Lenin comes in.

00:25:48.160 This was czarist Russia, where people were serfs, where they didn't have a pot to piss in.

00:25:55.500 Everyone's hungry.

00:25:56.320 You had his troops, you know, basically having no compunction about inflicting violence on

00:26:01.080 the people.

00:26:02.080 They see the West, where the industrial revolution is happening.

00:26:05.160 People are getting more and more food, or things are getting a little bit better in many

00:26:08.400 regards, and they have nothing.

00:26:10.340 And Lenin says, you have nothing because those people have everything.

00:26:14.080 So join with me, and we're going to remake the society of the future, and you could very

00:26:18.660 easily understand the appeal.

00:26:19.700 And the thing that I found interesting with Lenin is the complete lack of loyalty he had

00:26:25.840 to men who served him very well.

00:26:28.300 He had absolutely no compunction at all once he decided that somebody was done of killing

00:26:34.460 people, and that was it.

00:26:37.520 Because that's a private bond, and his only vision was the public bond.

00:26:43.180 So again, it's the correct thing to turn in your friends.

00:26:45.900 It's the correct thing to execute your former allies, because the only thing that matters

00:26:49.240 is making society a better place.

00:26:51.340 And then you look at the kind of the relationship with Trotsky, which I found particularly fascinating.

00:26:56.300 So let's talk about that now.

00:26:57.940 What was the relationship between them, and why did it end up going?

00:27:01.100 Well, who was Trotsky?

00:27:02.000 Let's start with that.

00:27:02.620 Let's start with Trotsky.

00:27:03.280 So Trotsky came late to the Bolshevik cause, because he thought, okay, it was a little bit

00:27:08.080 loopy.

00:27:09.160 He actually lived in New York for quite some time, not that long ago, maybe a couple of years.

00:27:14.140 His old newspaper was on St. Mark's Place, and the stairs that go to that newspaper are

00:27:21.020 still there.

00:27:21.560 You can see them if you ever visit, which I thought was very cool.

00:27:25.360 And he was one of those people that, you know, when things were happening in what became

00:27:30.280 the Soviet Union, he's like, holy crap, this is our big shot. 0.80

00:27:33.300 He was, in many ways, even more than Lenin, the visionary, the ideologue.

00:27:38.120 I mean, a lot of these college Marxists in academics, they would describe themselves as

00:27:43.520 Trotskyists, because the idea was, all right, like, he would have done it correctly. 1.00

00:27:48.000 He wouldn't have Stalinist brutality.

00:27:49.500 It's like, we know that's not true, by the way, because there's something called the

00:27:52.420 Kronstadt Rebellion.

00:27:53.520 So Kronstadt was this island near St. Petersburg.

00:27:56.820 There were a bunch of sailors there and military people.

00:27:59.580 They were essential to winning the Russian Civil War.

00:28:02.920 As soon as the Civil War was won, they're like, all right, we got a list of demands.

00:28:07.940 Free speech for leftists.

00:28:09.540 That was the thing.

00:28:10.260 The demands weren't even like, we want free speech for everyone.

00:28:12.400 It goes, free speech only for, like, socialists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks. 0.76

00:28:15.840 We want elections between these three.

00:28:18.320 Free the political prisoners of the left.

00:28:20.620 They didn't care about the capitalists.

00:28:21.940 They didn't care about the bourgeois.

00:28:23.920 Leftist political, all these things that Lenin promised.

00:28:26.960 And they put up a rebellion.

00:28:29.240 And Trotsky took charge of it, and they were all slaughtered.

00:28:31.800 A few of them escaped to Finland.

00:28:34.920 They said, come back.

00:28:36.560 You know, you'll have, we won't do anything to you.

00:28:40.120 The naive ones came back, were sent to camps immediately.

00:28:42.680 But this was the last rebellion of any size in what became the Soviet Union, you know,

00:28:49.300 until the late 80s, early 90s.

00:28:51.660 So when Trotsky had his chance to show his true colors, he had no hesitation about shedding

00:28:57.180 the blood.

00:28:57.780 And he was right there with Lenin, you know, from the beginning.

00:29:00.080 What was fascinating, you know, of course, and this is very much parodied by Orwell in

00:29:05.900 1984, is when Stalin came in, Trotsky was brilliant, and he knew it.

00:29:11.800 And that's a very bad thing for a politician to be, because many people around you are not

00:29:16.640 going to be brilliant, and they know it, and you're going to be rubbing them the wrong

00:29:19.660 way.

00:29:19.920 Because these people have very, very important politicians in every country, and have very

00:29:24.100 little reason to feel important, because they're not impressive personalities as a whole.

00:29:27.780 And he made them realize that they're not impressive personalities.

00:29:30.480 Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Stalin was working the party.

00:29:33.920 He wasn't a big name at all, but he was laying the groundwork.

00:29:37.640 So as he consolidated power, he got Trotsky kicked out of the party, then Trotsky kicked

00:29:42.580 out of the Soviet Union entirely.

00:29:44.400 And basically, Trotskyism, a term which was largely undefined, became synonymous with

00:29:48.920 everything that's going wrong in the Soviet Union.

00:29:50.960 So he got Trotsky kicked out of the party.

00:29:53.720 What were the accusations?

00:29:55.640 What was Trotsky's crime?

00:29:56.840 Hold on, before you go into that, because the accusations would all have been fabricated

00:30:00.820 anyway.

00:30:01.760 The interesting thing is, wasn't there also an ideological split?

00:30:04.920 Because there were those communists who believed in communism within one state, and then that

00:30:10.740 would spread elsewhere.

00:30:11.700 And there were others who believed in a world revolution that would sweep the world immediately.

00:30:16.420 Wasn't that part of the split?

00:30:17.320 Yes, there were two big kind of ideological splits.

00:30:19.860 So at a certain point, so Lenin was an ideologue and a visionary, but he wasn't completely detached

00:30:26.380 from reality, right?

00:30:27.600 So he understood, all right, this isn't going to happen overnight.

00:30:30.640 This is a process, and it's going to be a long process.

00:30:33.360 And since it's the first time we're running this experiment, excuse me, since the first

00:30:38.900 time we're running this experiment, we don't know how long this is going to take.

00:30:41.560 We're the first, we're the alpha data testing.

00:30:44.400 So at a certain point, things were going poorly for even Lenin's taste. 0.98

00:30:49.240 He goes, all right, this crap isn't working. 0.98

00:30:51.100 They pulled back. 0.99

00:30:52.360 They had something called the new economic policy, and they reintroduced an element of

00:30:56.640 market capitalism into the Soviet Union.

00:30:59.400 And as a result of this, this huge middle class almost overnight sprung up.

00:31:02.820 And these people are called net men, new economic policy net men.

00:31:06.980 And, you know, a little bit of liberty, and all of a sudden, entrepreneurship takes hold

00:31:11.440 and so on and so forth.

00:31:12.420 For a lot of Bolsheviks, this was like, hold the phone. 0.68

00:31:16.800 Like, this is exactly what we're fighting against, and you, Lenin, our guy, you're putting

00:31:21.540 this back after we defeated?

00:31:23.340 This is completely unconscionable.

00:31:24.420 And Trotsky is one of those who was just like, this is really not what we should be doing.

00:31:29.120 We should be going harder on the gas and not putting on the brake.

00:31:32.820 His other model, this is Trotsky versus Stalin, is this idea that, all right, workers of the 0.78

00:31:38.780 world unite.

00:31:39.580 You have nothing to lose but your chains.

00:31:40.740 Meaning, a working class person in Russia has more in common with a working class person

00:31:47.680 in Peru or the US or Australia than he does with like a capitalist in Russia, right?

00:31:52.680 There's inherent class antagonism.

00:31:54.880 So it is a worldwide movement for the working classes for their own liberation.

00:31:59.680 Stalin, when he kind of came in, this is like the mid-20s and so later, he understood.

00:32:06.000 He's like, all right.

00:32:07.280 Because the model was, once we have our revolution, and this was very scary for Westerners, Western 0.88

00:32:13.500 governments.

00:32:14.340 Once Lenin took power in the Soviet Union, that's the cue. 0.93

00:32:18.220 So in Germany, in Britain, in the US, there was a huge amount of fear like, holy crap, this

00:32:23.640 is going to happen here next, because the more time that went on and the more that the

00:32:28.920 Russian government under Lenin didn't collapse, the more other people are like, hold on a

00:32:32.900 minute.

00:32:33.420 Now it's our term.

00:32:34.280 This is a very kind of like what's happening here moment for Western politicians and

00:32:38.960 intellectuals.

00:32:39.380 Well, and that was the idea of the Russian revolution.

00:32:42.360 That was the point.

00:32:43.200 It was supposed to be the spark that started a world revolution.

00:32:46.200 That's how communists saw them.

00:32:47.380 The agenda was always to spread this ideology to the whole world.

00:32:52.160 It's why the symbolism of the Soviet Union, you know, even the flag, the flag didn't have

00:32:56.960 borders on it.

00:32:57.660 It was the globe and the hammer and sickle.

00:33:00.260 And Lenin's newspaper is called Iskra, the spark.

00:33:02.740 The spark, exactly.

00:33:03.480 That was literally his newspaper before he took power.

00:33:05.520 But Stalin didn't see it that way, right?

00:33:07.240 Stalin was like, all right. 0.80

00:33:08.800 It's not that Stalin didn't see it that way. 0.99

00:33:10.840 It's that by the time Stalin comes around, he's like, okay, this didn't happen.

00:33:13.220 Yeah.

00:33:13.520 So what do we do?

00:33:14.540 So do we pretend like it did happen or it's about to happen?

00:33:19.560 Or do we kind of kind of double down on what we have?

00:33:22.340 So Stalin introduced the idea of socialism in one country.

00:33:25.540 Now, he very much still had his tentacles, you know, all over the world.

00:33:29.440 Spain is an extremely important example.

00:33:32.000 Germany is another major example.

00:33:34.340 And to some extent, Britain, but nowhere near to the extent that those are the two that

00:33:37.340 I mentioned.

00:33:38.420 And France.

00:33:39.520 A huge communist movement in France.

00:33:41.560 One of the reasons France did so poorly in the war.

00:33:43.520 Sure, sure.

00:33:44.020 But not to the extent that the Germans and the Spanish, certainly, much more than Britain.

00:33:49.040 But that was kind of his, and this was his, one of his big butting heads moments with Trotsky.

00:33:55.340 But as I talk about in the book, what these political differences are, are almost always

00:34:00.860 a front for, you know, power plays.

00:34:02.860 And if Stalin really wanted to work with Trotsky and have this kind of intellectual discussion,

00:34:08.880 which supposedly Marxism allows, it's like, all right, now that we're going to have the

00:34:12.640 capitalists control the newspapers and publishing, everyone, the lowest of the low, can come up

00:34:18.020 with their ideas.

00:34:18.880 And we could take what brilliant ideas anyone has and create things, something that's amazing.

00:34:23.340 Under that model, you would have them just hashing it out.

00:34:26.160 All right, now we can come to this kind of consensus and move our way forward.

00:34:30.180 But of course, that's not what ended up happening in reality.

00:34:32.420 So one of the really interesting moments in the book is when you talk about the end of Lenin's life,

00:34:37.740 when he had the stroke.

00:34:39.680 I mean, let's discuss that, because that's not something I don't think many people have heard of.

00:34:43.920 And also Stalin's involvement in it.

00:34:45.980 There's this amazing kind of kitschy movie here that you might not know about called

00:34:52.080 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

00:34:53.280 Are you familiar with this movie?

00:34:54.260 Yes.

00:34:55.220 I'm not.

00:34:55.940 Okay.

00:34:56.700 So for those who don't know, it was really this kind of big, innovative movie,

00:35:00.260 because you had Betty Davis playing Baby Jane.

00:35:03.540 And Baby Jane was a woman who had been a child actress, like a Shirley Temple figure.

00:35:07.540 And now she's like in her 60s, whatever, she's old. 0.98

00:35:10.660 But she starts losing her mind and starts thinking she's going to relaunch her singing career.

00:35:14.820 So you have Betty Davis with little curls like Shirley Temple and putting on this makeup 1.00

00:35:20.240 and looking completely, absolutely deranged. 0.53

00:35:22.660 It was brilliantly done.

00:35:24.240 Her sister, Blanche, who was played by Joan Crawford, was in a wheelchair.

00:35:30.460 And Baby Jane was taking care of her.

00:35:33.040 And she was basically a prisoner in her own home, Blanche.

00:35:36.040 And as Jane gets crazier and crazier, it gets more and more dangerous for Blanche, 1.00

00:35:39.600 because how is she going to escape?

00:35:40.760 How is she going to get the word out?

00:35:42.200 And Jane starts torturing her more and more and more.

00:35:44.820 And there's this one very, very famous moment where Joan Crawford is sitting there

00:35:49.560 and being like, Jane, you know you wouldn't be treating me like this.

00:35:54.020 I wasn't in this wheelchair, captain's chair.

00:35:56.380 And Baby Jane's at the window.

00:35:58.080 And she looks out.

00:35:58.680 She goes, but you are, Blanche.

00:36:00.860 You are in that chair.

00:36:02.040 And you ain't never getting out of it.

00:36:03.680 And you never got out of this house either.

00:36:05.280 And she locks her in the door.

00:36:06.760 And it's this very chilling moment.

00:36:10.000 Lenin had a series of strokes.

00:36:12.260 And Stalin was his caretaker. 0.72

00:36:14.740 And that meant Stalin kept track of all the communication in and out.

00:36:18.140 He kept it kind of quiet, what state Lenin was in.

00:36:21.560 And Lenin had a will, which basically said Stalin should not be taking over this party.

00:36:28.260 He doesn't have the character. 0.86

00:36:29.260 Stalin was very much a thug. 0.89

00:36:31.380 You know, he used to be a bank robber, just hoodlum kind of figure. 0.96

00:36:34.740 Lenin was an intellectual.

00:36:35.780 And Trotsky were intellectuals.

00:36:37.540 So Lenin was like, this guy doesn't have the character.

00:36:39.940 Or there's many other problems with him.

00:36:42.040 Well, you know, Stalin made sure to suppress it.

00:36:45.080 And what Stalin introduced, he may have been the first. 0.84

00:36:48.420 But he did it certainly to an extent other people didn't.

00:36:50.860 Was, again, this is very much parodied in 1984.

00:36:53.960 Was his idea of historical revisionism in the sense of falsifying the past.

00:36:59.480 So there's this great book called The Commissar Vanishes.

00:37:02.080 Where they have side-by-side photos that the Soviets basically falsified. 0.74

00:37:09.160 So you'd have four pictures.

00:37:11.120 It'd be like Lenin, Stalin, and two other guys.

00:37:13.900 Then the next picture after one of the guys gets unpersoned.

00:37:16.460 You have Stalin, Lenin, one other guy.

00:37:18.180 And at the end, it's just Lenin, Stalin.

00:37:19.480 Now they're standing next to each other.

00:37:20.760 And we laugh.

00:37:22.080 But think about this.

00:37:22.820 For the internet, if I'm looking at the newspapers,

00:37:24.880 and all the photos I see are Lenin and Stalin hand-in-hand,

00:37:28.220 and I'm being told Stalin was Lenin's right-hand man from the beginning,

00:37:31.920 and Trotsky wasn't even there, what are you going to believe?

00:37:34.600 Of course you're going to believe that.

00:37:36.020 So I think Americans don't understand to what extent people in these totalitarian regimes,

00:37:42.640 and not at all exclusive to the Soviet Union,

00:37:45.160 are comfortably blatantly lying about the history.

00:37:48.940 To the point of just falsifying information that can,

00:37:52.560 if anyone had access to free information, would clearly be disprovable.

00:37:55.940 And absolutely, because the moment you also, you want to go and disprove it,

00:38:01.760 that's the end of you.

00:38:02.940 Yeah, oh yeah.

00:38:03.460 Oh, that's not even a question.

00:38:04.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:05.200 There's, yeah, and the Russians, I'm sure this happened when you were still there, 1.00

00:38:08.900 had something called anekdote, these little jokes.

00:38:11.620 And there was one story about Kalinin, Mikhail Kalinin,

00:38:14.780 who I think was hyped in the Soviet Union, I forget the exact title,

00:38:18.060 was talking about, oh, we're building all these great skyscrapers on Karl Marx Street.

00:38:22.420 And one of the workers like, but comrade, I go on Karl Marx Street all the time.

00:38:25.480 And there's a skyscrapers, he goes, what are you going to believe?

00:38:27.380 Your eyes are what's in the newspapers.

00:38:28.840 You'll read a newspaper once in a while.

00:38:30.680 But the joke is, you shouldn't trust your own senses.

00:38:35.040 You should be obedient to what the experts are telling you.

00:38:39.060 Michael, and was Stalin, because there's a lot of debate about Stalin,

00:38:43.580 whether he was a faithful communist,

00:38:46.900 who was just willing to enforce that ideology by whatever means necessary,

00:38:51.980 or whether he was just a tyrant dictator who just did what was necessary for his own ends.

00:38:57.820 Was he a dedicated communist?

00:39:01.540 It's very hard for me to kind of sift between those two,

00:39:06.100 or to figure out the utility of this distinction.

00:39:09.100 I don't think that he was this, he was certainly dedicated.

00:39:16.100 He was committed.

00:39:17.340 He was passionate.

00:39:18.220 We're not going to quibble about that word.

00:39:20.460 So that much we have down.

00:39:22.800 The fact that when, one of the first, I talk about in this book, the purges.

00:39:27.000 So during the late 30s, he went through group after group,

00:39:30.340 which were threats to his power,

00:39:32.080 and just killed, the number of people he killed was just astronomical.

00:39:35.240 And the first group he went after was the Society of Old Bolsheviks.

00:39:39.080 These are the people, even before Lenin,

00:39:41.200 who did their time under the Tsar,

00:39:42.960 who really were true believers where the idea of communism is like,

00:39:45.740 okay, yeah, communism is going to happen.

00:39:47.100 Okay, buddy, like, cool story, bro.

00:39:48.860 Like, he went after them.

00:39:50.200 He went after the military.

00:39:52.880 The number of people, it was like five out of six generals,

00:39:55.380 like 110 out of 112 lieutenants, just some crazy numbers,

00:40:00.140 slaughtered all them.

00:40:02.140 Then he went after the secret police, 0.99

00:40:04.120 killed a ton of them.

00:40:05.880 Then he went after the judges who put people in jail.

00:40:08.140 So he went systemically, every power center,

00:40:11.100 and the amount of people,

00:40:12.480 the amount of ministers that were killed, like 20,

00:40:14.760 the entire Belarusian Congress was arrested,

00:40:17.980 like 100 out of 102 people.

00:40:19.380 It's just crazy numbers where the only analogy would be

00:40:23.040 like if John Adams got up and said everyone in the Continental Congress

00:40:26.220 had actually been working for King George secretly,

00:40:28.300 and then you were expected to believe this.

00:40:30.140 So I don't think that can be compatible with this idea of like,

00:40:38.120 okay, this is communist ideology.

00:40:39.360 That was clearly self-serving.

00:40:42.520 And, you know, the reason we kind of know this is Khrushchev,

00:40:46.000 in I believe 56, had his so-called secret speech.

00:40:49.060 He gave this speech in the middle of the night.

00:40:50.600 No one was allowed to attend other than the party loyal,

00:40:52.980 loyal party members.

00:40:54.020 And he goes, he just went through the numbers.

00:40:57.060 He goes, this cult of personality that Stalin created

00:41:00.480 is completely antithetical to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism.

00:41:04.220 Lenin himself did have a lot of humility.

00:41:06.720 He wasn't living in a palace.

00:41:08.100 You know, he, very Spartan surroundings.

00:41:10.460 He was the true believer.

00:41:11.440 He's like, I'm going to practice what I preach.

00:41:13.220 Stalin, you know, had all these dachas and, you know, 1.00

00:41:15.140 limousines and so on and so forth.

00:41:16.600 So when Khrushchev came in, he goes,

00:41:18.560 this is not what we're about.

00:41:19.860 It's completely antithetical to the vision of an equal society.

00:41:24.660 So, by the way, for those of us from Eastern Europe,

00:41:28.900 and this applies to you certainly,

00:41:30.920 there's this great YouTube channel

00:41:32.880 where they take historical speeches and use AI,

00:41:36.720 and you can hear them,

00:41:38.480 and you could hear Khrushchev deliver the secret speech.

00:41:41.820 And it brought a tear to my eye,

00:41:43.860 because you can, you just hear him in 1956,

00:41:46.700 after 40 years, almost, of Soviet communism being like,

00:41:50.940 you were all right.

00:41:51.900 The critics were right. 1.00

00:41:52.960 Right?

00:41:53.220 It's all true.

00:41:53.800 Because up until that moment,

00:41:55.060 people were like, oh, this is,

00:41:56.140 why would he do this?

00:41:57.420 Why would he kill so many people?

00:41:58.720 This is just Western propaganda.

00:42:00.120 You undermine the Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah.

00:42:01.880 And Khrushchev's like, it's all true. 0.89

00:42:03.900 This is a complete,

00:42:05.600 he used, he was explicit.

00:42:07.500 He goes, these people were tortured to give confessions.

00:42:10.400 Like, I really believe that all these people were,

00:42:12.460 all these people were guilty was crossing Stalin.

00:42:14.900 And you hear him go on and on and on.

00:42:16.860 And it's extremely moving.

00:42:18.620 Because one thing the book brings to life so brilliantly is,

00:42:24.000 I understand Stalin was ruthless.

00:42:26.580 I understand he, you know,

00:42:29.440 wiped however many people he wiped off the face of the earth.

00:42:32.860 But the example after example after example that you give,

00:42:37.120 it felt like, would there be anybody left in Russia?

00:42:42.280 Yeah.

00:42:43.000 And it's, this is the relentlessness.

00:42:47.000 Ayn Rand, you know, who left the Soviet Union in 1926,

00:42:50.420 she wrote a semi-autographical novel about her time there.

00:42:53.960 It was called We the Living.

00:42:55.160 But her working title was Airtight. 0.72

00:42:57.480 Because the idea was, and Kim Jong, Kim Il-sung,

00:43:00.840 the great leader of the founder of North Korea,

00:43:02.380 did this kind of more successfully than Stalin to this day. 0.59

00:43:05.700 The idea is we're going to make an airtight society

00:43:09.200 from which there is no escape possible.

00:43:12.460 So this is one of the reasons I went to North Korea, 0.96

00:43:15.900 is I think it's impossible for any of us on earth right now,

00:43:19.980 certainly in the West, to imagine what this was like.

00:43:22.620 Because there's certain things about politics

00:43:25.200 you and all of us don't like,

00:43:27.300 people watching this don't like.

00:43:28.660 We could turn it off. 0.98

00:43:29.620 We could read books that are kind of silly 0.87

00:43:32.140 or books that have our political point of view.

00:43:34.420 Maybe it's going to take more work.

00:43:35.640 We could watch YouTube channels, whatever, music, whatever we want.

00:43:38.260 We don't know what it's like, where it's 24-7 and everywhere.

00:43:42.600 It's impossible to wrap our heads around this.

00:43:44.520 And your compliance is required.

00:43:46.240 Yes.

00:43:46.720 For survival.

00:43:47.420 Yes.

00:43:48.300 That's why it's called a totalitarian system,

00:43:50.540 because everything is controlled.

00:43:52.260 It's everything.

00:43:53.560 And when you went to North Korea,

00:43:55.360 because I haven't read your book on North Korea,

00:43:57.140 which is a mistake I will rectify over time.

00:44:00.320 But how similar was it in terms of what you saw there

00:44:04.420 to what the Soviet Union would have been like?

00:44:06.140 Is it a modern Soviet Union, is I guess what I'm asking.

00:44:09.180 It's not modern.

00:44:10.480 Because, I mean, you laugh,

00:44:13.920 but Westerners have this idea

00:44:17.600 that when you go there, it's all lights,

00:44:20.040 like Broadway, this is beautiful,

00:44:21.820 like Disneyland paradise.

00:44:24.680 Everywhere you go, something's wrong.

00:44:27.240 So if there's elevator buttons,

00:44:28.480 one button will be wrong.

00:44:29.740 Every wall has a crack.

00:44:31.420 The smell of mildew is everywhere.

00:44:33.420 Everywhere I went, even on the plane,

00:44:34.780 there's a fly, which is like a biblical symbol of evil.

00:44:37.560 And even in their central park,

00:44:39.540 the fountain's not running,

00:44:40.900 and it's covered in mildew.

00:44:42.280 You know what I mean?

00:44:42.900 So this sense of decay is pervasive.

00:44:47.060 The books I brought back,

00:44:48.160 you can even smell it in some of the books.

00:44:50.760 So I don't know.

00:44:53.060 There's a big difference, I think, in many ways,

00:44:54.920 because North Korea is nowhere near as powerful

00:44:56.480 as the Soviet Union was.

00:44:59.220 And there's certainly...

00:44:59.980 My friend from St. Petersburg saw my picture.

00:45:04.240 He's like, this is like St. Petersburg

00:45:05.800 with Asian people.

00:45:07.320 He just blew his mind.

00:45:08.860 So I left the Soviet Union when I was two,

00:45:11.360 so I can't obviously remember that.

00:45:13.060 But I think there's a lot of parallels,

00:45:18.220 and I think the closest thing we have to it,

00:45:20.800 especially the thing that is very similar

00:45:23.660 is this complete sense of,

00:45:25.820 which was a Soviet term, political correctness.

00:45:28.620 Like, they do not want to talk politics

00:45:31.040 because you don't know if you're going to say

00:45:33.660 the right thing or the wrong thing.

00:45:34.860 I remember my mom, who's not politically activated,

00:45:40.560 she'd go, like, it wasn't complicated.

00:45:43.340 Because one day, this guy is the greatest thing

00:45:45.500 since sliced bread. 0.96

00:45:46.740 And the next day, he's been a traitor since the beginning.

00:45:49.580 And then two years later, he's amazing again.

00:45:51.640 And you don't have to have any intelligence

00:45:53.200 to be like, this doesn't make any sense.

00:45:55.000 So the thing that people don't appreciate

00:45:56.200 with these totalitarian countries,

00:45:58.000 it's not like, all right,

00:45:59.340 if I just say Stalin is wonderful, I'm fine. 0.99

00:46:02.640 No, it's that there's other people to talk about.

00:46:05.140 And if I had said three years ago,

00:46:06.940 this guy is great, well, now he's been unpersoned

00:46:10.520 and I could be given the death penalty.

00:46:11.980 Because three years ago, in front of you,

00:46:14.380 you saw me say that he was great.

00:46:16.140 So because the reality constantly changes,

00:46:18.740 you're never on secure footing.

00:46:20.300 And I think that's by design.

00:46:21.780 Michael, so your book is called The White Pill.

00:46:23.940 And your message is basically,

00:46:25.480 things have been really, really bad in the past.

00:46:27.380 And we're very lucky to have what we have.

00:46:29.360 Is that fair?

00:46:30.160 No.

00:46:30.520 No, you're looking at me going,

00:46:31.580 no, that's not the message at all.

00:46:32.680 What's the message?

00:46:33.140 I think the message is no matter the good guys won before

00:46:37.660 and no matter how dark it gets,

00:46:41.120 there is always hope.

00:46:42.840 And this hope isn't based on some kind of Pollyanna,

00:46:45.460 like, oh, good always wins in the end.

00:46:47.780 It's not true.

00:46:48.760 But here are the receipts that as dark

00:46:50.740 as what we were talking about happened,

00:46:52.420 they didn't win.

00:46:53.900 And that's something that happened in our lifetimes.

00:46:56.280 And that's something that you can understandably

00:46:58.320 not expect The New York Times to tell you.

00:46:59.820 So if these people who had far less than any of us had

00:47:03.600 and were up against people who are far more ruthless,

00:47:06.600 far more entrenched,

00:47:07.640 and far more, in many ways, intelligence,

00:47:09.800 if they could do it, we could do it.

00:47:12.400 Who can?

00:47:13.280 Not will, can.

00:47:15.160 So that all being the case,

00:47:16.700 the reason I asked you about it is,

00:47:18.760 what are, you've talked,

00:47:21.480 you and I have talked about this a lot,

00:47:22.940 which is the difficult,

00:47:23.760 and Francis too, by the way,

00:47:24.840 the difficulty of communicating this stuff.

00:47:29.820 to people who've never...

00:47:33.820 I'm about to go into the Devil Wears Proud of speech.

00:47:37.400 This stuff?

00:47:39.580 Yeah, because it's not ideas and it's not facts.

00:47:47.240 It's almost like a felt sense,

00:47:51.920 like some kind of understanding

00:47:53.360 that comes from knowing about these historical things

00:47:58.900 that changes the way you see the world.

00:48:02.520 It just does.

00:48:03.020 If you know this was real

00:48:04.740 and you experience it,

00:48:07.140 even by reading about it,

00:48:08.800 it changes the way you perceive everything.

00:48:11.100 Oh yes, for sure.

00:48:13.240 But the vast majority of people in this country

00:48:15.480 and in the UK and elsewhere

00:48:16.660 have not done that,

00:48:18.020 have not had that.

00:48:19.400 So what are the,

00:48:20.680 like, how do we,

00:48:22.520 I don't even know what I'm asking,

00:48:23.700 like what are the lessons?

00:48:24.560 How do we communicate?

00:48:25.960 So what really drives me crazy

00:48:27.720 is the, you know,

00:48:29.480 there's the Tinder versus real life,

00:48:32.020 that meme,

00:48:32.500 like what they sell it as

00:48:33.800 then what actually happens.

00:48:34.760 Right.

00:48:35.200 I'm not a conservative in any sense.

00:48:37.180 The argument for conservatism is

00:48:39.740 we're the ones

00:48:41.180 who look at the lessons of history,

00:48:43.980 that human beings aren't really that different

00:48:45.680 2,000 years ago as today,

00:48:47.320 and we apply these long learned

00:48:49.200 historical lessons

00:48:50.140 to contemporary times

00:48:51.460 and we don't try to reinvent the wheel

00:48:52.600 because it's not possible.

00:48:54.680 And conservatives in practice

00:48:57.100 think history started

00:48:59.040 a perpetual 20 years ago.

00:49:00.880 Right.

00:49:01.320 The left,

00:49:02.260 it's always the left,

00:49:03.360 the left,

00:49:04.020 as if there's one left.

00:49:05.100 The left took over the institutions

00:49:06.760 20 years ago

00:49:07.500 and we got to stop them

00:49:08.400 and then 20 years later,

00:49:09.280 oh, 20 years ago.

00:49:10.160 And they are very

00:49:13.340 intellectually curious

00:49:15.280 and I think a lot of conservative pundits

00:49:17.060 and influencers

00:49:17.620 don't talk about history enough

00:49:19.860 and it's bizarre

00:49:20.760 because I think

00:49:22.320 it behooves anyone.

00:49:24.240 And you don't have to care about politics.

00:49:25.860 History is fascinating.

00:49:27.080 It's just a fascinating field.

00:49:28.600 This is,

00:49:29.140 instead of,

00:49:30.440 this works in theory,

00:49:32.100 what happened in real life?

00:49:33.600 What happened when people try this?

00:49:35.180 It teaches about

00:49:35.960 the limits of human evil

00:49:37.340 and the human goodness.

00:49:38.960 And this happened to,

00:49:40.100 not just this,

00:49:40.820 all these stories

00:49:41.440 happened to so many people

00:49:42.680 over so much time.

00:49:43.720 It's just,

00:49:44.180 I think,

00:49:44.380 a fascinating endeavor

00:49:45.300 for anyone who's

00:49:46.440 in the slightest intellectually curious.

00:49:48.420 So I think

00:49:49.120 it's also important

00:49:50.360 for,

00:49:51.960 one of the things

00:49:52.820 that's why it's called

00:49:53.280 the white pill,

00:49:54.740 the black pill,

00:49:55.780 is this idea

00:49:56.720 that it's a wrap.

00:49:58.100 The West

00:49:58.600 or the world is over.

00:50:00.320 I really hate this

00:50:01.520 Greta Thunberg conservatism

00:50:03.080 that like,

00:50:03.840 oh,

00:50:04.000 if we lose this election,

00:50:04.880 it's over.

00:50:05.740 It's like,

00:50:06.600 tell that to the people

00:50:08.200 in Poland.

00:50:09.480 Like,

00:50:09.700 tell that to the people

00:50:10.580 in,

00:50:11.000 you know,

00:50:11.480 in Latvia

00:50:12.480 or in Ukraine

00:50:14.000 or Russia

00:50:14.440 that it's not a wrap.

00:50:16.700 And they were,

00:50:17.260 when Margaret Thatcher

00:50:18.760 went to meet Gorbachev,

00:50:21.040 you know,

00:50:21.920 towards the end

00:50:22.340 of her prime ministership,

00:50:23.740 the foreign office

00:50:24.800 basically told her,

00:50:25.540 look,

00:50:25.980 nothing's going to change

00:50:26.820 in the Soviet Union.

00:50:28.020 Like,

00:50:28.200 take whatever wins

00:50:29.200 you can get.

00:50:30.080 And then they also gave her

00:50:31.360 a,

00:50:31.820 like a silver hairbrush

00:50:33.560 as a present for him,

00:50:34.380 even though he's

00:50:34.760 completely bald.

00:50:36.100 And we laugh,

00:50:37.020 but it's just like,

00:50:37.840 these people,

00:50:40.040 my,

00:50:40.380 I'm going to spoil it,

00:50:41.460 a little,

00:50:41.820 but since this is history,

00:50:42.600 it doesn't matter.

00:50:44.120 Helmut Kohl,

00:50:44.880 who was the head

00:50:45.460 of West Germany,

00:50:46.600 was meeting with

00:50:47.620 Lech Walesa in Poland.

00:50:49.600 And Lech Walesa's like,

00:50:50.460 I don't think that

00:50:51.380 the Berlin Wall

00:50:53.320 is going to be around

00:50:53.860 for much longer.

00:50:55.040 Helmut Kohl laughed

00:50:55.760 in his face.

00:50:56.920 He goes,

00:50:57.220 look,

00:50:57.980 I'm a lot older than you.

00:50:59.640 Like,

00:50:59.940 I know these things

00:51:00.880 take time.

00:51:01.660 So,

00:51:02.340 and he's like,

00:51:03.040 maybe,

00:51:04.160 it fell the next day.

00:51:05.880 The next day,

00:51:07.740 and Helmut Kohl 1.00

00:51:08.580 got his German ass 1.00

00:51:09.640 on a plane. 1.00

00:51:10.240 He goes,

00:51:10.540 he said,

00:51:10.860 I'm at the wrong party

00:51:12.280 and flew back

00:51:13.120 to Germany.

00:51:14.160 So,

00:51:14.940 there's this quote

00:51:15.700 about how did you

00:51:16.240 go bankrupt?

00:51:16.940 I think it's Steinbeck

00:51:17.660 or Hemingway,

00:51:18.120 I always forget.

00:51:19.120 Gradually,

00:51:19.640 two ways,

00:51:20.220 gradually and then

00:51:20.920 suddenly.

00:51:23.020 Amazing things happen,

00:51:24.700 what seem like

00:51:25.480 overnight,

00:51:26.060 because we don't see

00:51:26.760 the parts that

00:51:27.360 built up to it.

00:51:28.600 So,

00:51:29.460 you know,

00:51:29.820 look at,

00:51:30.420 one of the things

00:51:31.480 that was very important

00:51:32.180 to me in writing

00:51:32.960 this book,

00:51:33.720 which I didn't

00:51:34.280 understand is,

00:51:34.920 what was the Berlin Wall

00:51:37.000 and why was it

00:51:38.300 such a big deal

00:51:38.980 when it fell?

00:51:40.120 And when you realize

00:51:41.120 this was a wall

00:51:42.600 that imprisoned

00:51:43.380 an entire city,

00:51:44.880 and as one historian

00:51:45.540 put it,

00:51:45.920 it was a deranged prison

00:51:46.940 where the ones

00:51:47.700 on the inside

00:51:48.380 were the ones

00:51:48.840 that were free.

00:51:50.760 And to see,

00:51:52.060 you could go on YouTube

00:51:52.860 and see the footage

00:51:54.120 of people dancing

00:51:55.720 and cheering

00:51:56.220 with champagne

00:51:56.780 atop the wall,

00:51:57.980 what that meant.

00:51:59.340 And again,

00:51:59.960 this is 89.

00:52:01.060 This isn't,

00:52:01.620 you know,

00:52:02.240 grainy World War I footage.

00:52:04.920 These are amazing moments

00:52:06.700 of freedom

00:52:07.500 that happen

00:52:08.040 in our lifetime,

00:52:08.800 and I think

00:52:10.000 it's important

00:52:10.540 for all of us

00:52:11.120 to take the wins

00:52:12.060 that we can get.

00:52:13.400 It's such a profound point

00:52:15.360 because,

00:52:16.520 in many ways,

00:52:19.020 the black pill

00:52:19.960 is,

00:52:20.600 it's giving up.

00:52:21.640 Oh, yeah.

00:52:22.140 It's a glorified way

00:52:23.140 of giving up.

00:52:24.160 It's a way to justify

00:52:25.080 being lazy 0.99

00:52:25.820 and cowardly. 1.00

00:52:28.320 I hate it 0.99

00:52:29.000 with every fiber of my being.

00:52:30.020 Yeah.

00:52:30.860 Because all you can,

00:52:32.200 yeah,

00:52:32.460 it's a way

00:52:33.560 to do all of those things.

00:52:34.920 But you can

00:52:36.320 intellectualize it

00:52:37.520 and point out things

00:52:38.840 and go,

00:52:39.600 but you know what?

00:52:40.300 I'm the smart one 1.00

00:52:41.280 and you're the idiot 1.00

00:52:42.280 for having hope. 1.00

00:52:44.280 We recently reached

00:52:45.720 a huge YouTube milestone

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00:52:49.280 Amid the celebrations,

00:52:50.340 however,

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00:52:51.600 a few cynical voices too.

00:52:53.180 Some people are asking,

00:52:54.780 how did two guys

00:52:55.840 with weird hair

00:52:56.780 and no obvious talent

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00:53:00.480 sensible,

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00:53:02.120 non-partisan conversations

00:53:03.520 on the internet?

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00:53:05.620 massive guests?

00:53:07.100 Some people

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00:53:09.320 as to ask,

00:53:10.580 who funds you?

00:53:12.360 And the time has come

00:53:13.420 to confess the truth.

00:53:15.160 For the last six years,

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00:53:25.180 You.

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00:53:27.700 That's why the show

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00:53:42.780 We're excited to announce

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00:54:00.740 Give me money! 0.57

00:54:02.220 Chalamet,

00:54:02.720 we need a bit of finesse here.

00:54:04.340 What he's trying to say

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00:55:01.960 just an honest conversation

00:55:03.140 with a fascinating person.

00:55:04.740 Plus,

00:55:05.280 I'll be able to afford

00:55:06.420 a proper haircut.

00:55:07.660 You're not going to get one,

00:55:08.660 but at least you'll be able

00:55:09.420 to afford one.

00:55:10.280 Good point.

00:55:10.980 Click the link

00:55:11.580 and join 40,000 people

00:55:13.860 like you

00:55:14.960 to make the show

00:55:15.880 you love

00:55:16.520 better again.

00:55:18.820 I'm curious,

00:55:19.580 let me ask you this

00:55:20.260 because let's get personal

00:55:21.080 for a second.

00:55:22.000 One of the things that,

00:55:23.080 okay,

00:55:24.820 I know that's funny.

00:55:26.060 One of the things

00:55:27.260 in my Russia,

00:55:28.520 is when you jab your finger

00:55:29.660 in someone's direction

00:55:30.560 and go,

00:55:30.840 let's make this personal.

00:55:33.900 I wish I had a stiletto

00:55:35.060 right now.

00:55:36.620 One of the things

00:55:37.660 that I talked about

00:55:38.800 this several times

00:55:39.560 about the Russian upbringing,

00:55:41.180 there was a show

00:55:42.020 called Russian Dolls,

00:55:43.080 which was a Russian version

00:55:44.940 from Brighton Beach.

00:55:45.620 A spitting image.

00:55:46.820 No,

00:55:47.100 it was a Russian version

00:55:47.880 of Jersey Shore

00:55:49.240 here in the States.

00:55:51.240 We have had this misunderstanding

00:55:52.980 on the show before.

00:55:54.160 Okay,

00:55:54.360 anyway,

00:55:54.680 carry on.

00:55:55.140 So,

00:55:55.440 the point is,

00:55:56.920 have we talked about this already?

00:55:58.420 This is with the girl

00:55:58.980 in the hair salon?

00:56:00.480 I don't remember.

00:56:01.160 Okay,

00:56:01.480 so the audience

00:56:01.980 doesn't remember either.

00:56:02.680 Okay,

00:56:02.860 we've memory hole.

00:56:03.560 It's Trotsky.

00:56:04.180 It's memory hole.

00:56:04.680 It never happened.

00:56:05.940 So,

00:56:06.100 this girl,

00:56:06.660 she's a young,

00:56:07.460 whatever,

00:56:07.840 college age.

00:56:08.420 She's with her mom.

00:56:09.180 They're in the beauty salon

00:56:10.060 getting the nails done

00:56:10.700 or something.

00:56:11.760 And she goes,

00:56:13.200 she'd been frustrated

00:56:14.160 not knowing a major to have.

00:56:15.700 Right?

00:56:16.260 And she took an aptitude test.

00:56:17.980 It said,

00:56:18.400 you'd be a good lawyer.

00:56:19.340 And she's like,

00:56:19.920 mom,

00:56:20.380 I've been struggling.

00:56:21.420 I have four majors.

00:56:22.440 I'm going to do pre-law.

00:56:23.700 I'm going to be a lawyer.

00:56:24.300 I'm finally decided.

00:56:25.100 First thing out of her mom's mouth,

00:56:25.920 how are you going to pay for it?

00:56:27.300 And she completely,

00:56:28.040 the girl breaks,

00:56:28.820 has a breakdown.

00:56:29.620 And if you're an American

00:56:30.320 and you're watching this,

00:56:31.040 like,

00:56:31.440 calm down.

00:56:31.860 She's like,

00:56:33.640 why is,

00:56:34.440 and it really hit close to home

00:56:36.440 because in how I was raised,

00:56:38.840 and that's what I want to ask you,

00:56:40.000 is whenever you're excited

00:56:41.520 about something

00:56:42.180 or like,

00:56:42.760 this is something,

00:56:43.400 oh,

00:56:43.500 this might lead to something,

00:56:45.320 the first thing from Russian household

00:56:47.040 is pulling the rug out.

00:56:48.160 Like,

00:56:48.520 finding a problem.

00:56:49.440 And it's just like,

00:56:50.520 everyone who's achieved anything

00:56:52.280 has had to overcome problems.

00:56:54.620 People,

00:56:55.260 what,

00:56:55.540 no one's figured out

00:56:56.200 how to pay for law school?

00:56:57.260 Like,

00:56:57.400 there's no way,

00:56:58.680 there's nothing to Google?

00:56:59.600 But it's always immediately like,

00:57:02.420 oh,

00:57:02.560 I went on this date with this chick. 1.00

00:57:04.060 Things like,

00:57:04.760 well,

00:57:05.120 what's her background?

00:57:06.160 Where does she live? 0.97

00:57:06.900 It's just like,

00:57:07.620 why is that always your first question?

00:57:11.100 Is that,

00:57:11.480 were you raised?

00:57:11.900 Well,

00:57:12.640 yes and no,

00:57:14.080 but it's funny.

00:57:15.420 We had this guy,

00:57:16.020 Mark Walsh,

00:57:16.580 on the show a while ago

00:57:18.080 who's kind of like a psychologist.

00:57:21.360 And we talked about

00:57:22.620 why Russians are the way they are. 1.00

00:57:24.840 And I kept pressing on him

00:57:25.880 and eventually just went,

00:57:27.380 Russian history.

00:57:28.700 Look at the history.

00:57:29.420 I mean,

00:57:29.920 America is a, 0.62

00:57:30.840 is a completely different situation

00:57:32.840 because it's a nation of people

00:57:34.640 who conquered a continent

00:57:35.740 and enjoyed the fruits of that.

00:57:38.600 Right?

00:57:39.660 So if you go back

00:57:40.980 only a few generations,

00:57:42.600 really,

00:57:43.180 these are winners.

00:57:45.400 These are people who won.

00:57:47.120 They came,

00:57:48.140 they conquered the,

00:57:49.760 and they built a civilization

00:57:51.340 out of nothing.

00:57:52.780 But look at the history

00:57:54.140 of Eastern Europe.

00:57:55.440 It's famine,

00:57:56.300 it's war,

00:57:57.000 it's,

00:57:58.340 all the terrible things

00:57:59.600 that can happen to humanity

00:58:00.700 have happened there.

00:58:01.840 And so,

00:58:02.420 I think that the reason

00:58:04.080 that people are like that

00:58:05.180 is that,

00:58:06.160 look at what we've just been

00:58:07.720 talking about for the last hour.

00:58:09.380 Imagine living in a society

00:58:10.780 where if you say the wrong word,

00:58:12.260 you're going to get executed. 0.60

00:58:14.000 That produces a very different

00:58:15.640 type of human being

00:58:16.660 to one where

00:58:18.380 everyone gives you high five

00:58:19.820 and cheers you on

00:58:20.720 and,

00:58:21.280 you know,

00:58:21.520 all of that.

00:58:22.300 I've had this conversation before

00:58:23.540 but I think it's chicken and egg.

00:58:25.900 No,

00:58:26.300 I don't think it is.

00:58:27.740 But I get that

00:58:28.760 with your point

00:58:29.280 but the thing is

00:58:31.720 you can get to that later.

00:58:33.520 You could have the like,

00:58:34.400 all right,

00:58:34.660 this is exciting

00:58:35.240 and then like,

00:58:36.300 all right,

00:58:36.500 now let's worry about

00:58:37.180 the threats and the costs.

00:58:39.000 Why is that always

00:58:39.740 the first concern?

00:58:41.760 Because Americans

00:58:43.520 and their parents

00:58:44.840 and their grandparents

00:58:45.520 didn't grow up

00:58:46.420 in a society

00:58:47.140 where every mistake

00:58:48.920 was likely to be

00:58:49.980 that costly.

00:58:51.340 And the mistakeness

00:58:54.040 or otherwise

00:58:54.860 was so arbitrary

00:58:55.940 and random.

00:58:57.140 Like,

00:58:57.620 yes,

00:58:57.900 if you're conquering

00:58:58.800 this continent

00:58:59.480 if you go the wrong path 0.99

00:59:00.880 you're going to get killed 1.00

00:59:01.520 by Indians 1.00

00:59:02.880 or whatever,

00:59:03.780 right?

00:59:04.100 But these were,

00:59:05.200 that was a kind of survival

00:59:06.660 of the fittest

00:59:07.420 in an adaptive sense,

00:59:08.620 right?

00:59:08.880 The people who were

00:59:09.940 the most entrepreneurial,

00:59:11.640 the people who were

00:59:12.520 most industrious,

00:59:13.660 the people who were

00:59:14.260 the most driven,

00:59:14.960 the people who were

00:59:15.500 the most capable,

00:59:16.600 they were the ones

00:59:17.320 that survived.

00:59:18.200 But that's not what

00:59:18.700 happened in Russia.

00:59:19.440 In Russia,

00:59:19.780 the people who were

00:59:20.500 the most capable

00:59:21.200 and the most industrious

00:59:22.260 and the most intelligent,

00:59:23.380 they were the ones

00:59:24.080 that were killed off.

00:59:25.580 And you were left

00:59:26.240 with a lot of

00:59:26.840 deeply traumatized people

00:59:28.360 who knew,

00:59:30.260 above all,

00:59:31.300 not ever to rise

00:59:32.840 above their station,

00:59:33.820 not ever to question,

00:59:34.920 not ever to do anything

00:59:36.780 that made them stand out.

00:59:38.240 Whereas this is

00:59:38.920 a country of people

00:59:39.840 who've been trained

00:59:40.580 to stand out.

00:59:41.240 That's why,

00:59:41.920 you know,

00:59:42.160 to us Brits,

00:59:43.280 Americans are like 1.00

00:59:43.980 ridiculously confident 0.73

00:59:45.140 and everyone thinks

00:59:45.860 they're great at everything

00:59:46.900 and whatever.

00:59:47.620 I just think

00:59:48.540 it's the history

00:59:50.540 of these two countries.

00:59:51.540 Yeah,

00:59:51.720 I think you're right

00:59:52.420 and it doesn't make me

00:59:53.940 despise it any less.

00:59:55.440 Oh,

00:59:55.840 well,

00:59:56.340 it's so pernicious.

00:59:57.740 Despise is the wrong word

00:59:58.840 for me because I think

00:59:59.740 that if someone is

01:00:00.460 deeply traumatized

01:00:01.520 by generations

01:00:02.380 of terrible history,

01:00:03.400 you can understand

01:00:04.600 and have compassion

01:00:05.460 without necessarily

01:00:06.600 thinking it's the right

01:00:07.620 way to be.

01:00:08.680 Yeah,

01:00:08.800 but I think at a certain point,

01:00:10.200 I have a lot of friends

01:00:10.880 in recovery,

01:00:11.720 at a certain point,

01:00:12.420 you have to own your trauma.

01:00:13.520 Oh,

01:00:13.700 yeah.

01:00:13.860 And you have to be like,

01:00:14.700 all right,

01:00:14.980 like this is something,

01:00:15.680 a tendency I have.

01:00:16.860 Let me kind of keep that in check.

01:00:18.200 I'm not there anymore.

01:00:19.380 Yeah,

01:00:19.560 for sure.

01:00:20.380 But your point about

01:00:21.160 the black pill,

01:00:21.880 I mean,

01:00:22.060 it's interesting.

01:00:22.640 I think that sometimes

01:00:23.960 people might accuse me 0.71

01:00:25.300 of being black pill 0.68

01:00:26.260 and I'm not black pill, 0.66

01:00:27.520 but I also think

01:00:28.720 there is value in saying

01:00:30.080 that the path

01:00:31.200 we're heading down

01:00:31.960 is the wrong path

01:00:32.840 and if we keep going

01:00:33.600 down this path,

01:00:34.300 we'll end up in a bad place.

01:00:35.620 Of course.

01:00:35.900 And so the black pill

01:00:37.620 in this comes in,

01:00:39.220 for example,

01:00:39.880 the UK is very different

01:00:40.920 to the US in this way.

01:00:41.860 Oh,

01:00:42.000 yeah.

01:00:42.080 We're sitting here

01:00:42.780 on the eve of the election

01:00:44.460 in which Americans

01:00:45.840 actually have choice.

01:00:47.380 Sure.

01:00:48.280 It may not be a great choice,

01:00:49.760 but it's a choice.

01:00:51.340 In the UK,

01:00:52.060 that doesn't exist.

01:00:53.140 If you think like we do,

01:00:55.840 then 14 years

01:00:57.200 of a woke

01:00:57.840 pseudo-conservative government

01:00:59.280 followed by a Labour,

01:01:01.440 not even pseudo-conservative government,

01:01:03.920 there was no choice

01:01:04.760 at the last election.

01:01:05.600 People didn't have one,

01:01:06.680 right?

01:01:07.020 You had a choice

01:01:07.700 of two parties

01:01:08.320 that are basically

01:01:08.900 going to implement

01:01:09.640 a very similar policy.

01:01:12.200 So I think that's why

01:01:13.700 America is different

01:01:14.440 because you still have choice.

01:01:16.520 You still have opportunity

01:01:17.480 and you're self-sufficient.

01:01:18.680 You can make your own energy.

01:01:19.840 You can grow your own food.

01:01:20.840 You can build your own stuff.

01:01:23.820 And that's why America

01:01:25.220 has a lot more reason

01:01:26.380 to be optimistic,

01:01:27.240 I think.

01:01:27.400 Yeah.

01:01:28.880 I am not white-pilled

01:01:30.560 about the UK.

01:01:32.240 One of the things

01:01:32.840 I talk about extensively

01:01:34.020 in this book

01:01:34.540 was the rise of Thatcher

01:01:35.700 in 79.

01:01:37.160 And I think many people,

01:01:38.860 including Brits,

01:01:39.860 don't realize

01:01:40.500 how bad Britain was

01:01:41.380 in the 70s.

01:01:42.100 Oh, yeah.

01:01:42.680 They had the winter discontent.

01:01:45.200 The line I have in the book

01:01:46.500 is they used to say,

01:01:47.700 truthfully,

01:01:48.520 the sun never set

01:01:49.280 in the British Empire,

01:01:50.020 right?

01:01:50.220 Because it spanned

01:01:51.440 the whole globe.

01:01:51.980 You had mandatory blackouts

01:01:54.460 in the 70s.

01:01:55.820 You weren't allowed

01:01:56.520 to work to save electricity. 0.97

01:01:58.340 The garbage in Leicester Square

01:01:59.540 was six feet high.

01:02:00.860 The gravediggers

01:02:01.500 were on strike.

01:02:02.680 Inflation was 20%,

01:02:04.560 something crazy.

01:02:05.600 They would alternate

01:02:06.220 between labor and conservatives

01:02:07.300 and the policies

01:02:08.040 were the same

01:02:08.580 and nothing was getting done.

01:02:10.100 And it was a given,

01:02:11.200 and this is kind of

01:02:11.980 astrology for men,

01:02:13.520 this whole idea

01:02:14.100 of cycles of civilization

01:02:16.660 that every empire

01:02:18.180 enters a decline,

01:02:19.480 Britain's in a managed decline.

01:02:20.700 Like, it's a wrap for us.

01:02:22.500 We're never going to be

01:02:23.260 great again.

01:02:24.440 We're just going to get 0.81

01:02:25.160 more and more miserable.

01:02:26.820 And Thatcher's quote was, 0.94

01:02:28.140 I just can't bear

01:02:28.920 to see Britain in decline.

01:02:30.160 Like, we were the ones

01:02:31.040 who stood up alone

01:02:31.880 against Hitler

01:02:32.500 and who helped liberate

01:02:34.320 half the world

01:02:34.780 and now look at us.

01:02:35.720 And she gave them

01:02:36.640 that sense of hope

01:02:37.640 and she was now

01:02:39.240 at a great cost.

01:02:40.360 I mean, the idea of Thatcher

01:02:41.240 is a lot better

01:02:41.700 than the reality of Thatcher

01:02:42.540 and tell that to the miners

01:02:43.540 and people in Scotland,

01:02:44.480 let's be fair,

01:02:45.500 and to the Irish.

01:02:46.480 But point being,

01:02:47.620 the claim that

01:02:48.580 Britain will never have 0.95

01:02:50.400 electricity again

01:02:51.260 and it's only going

01:02:52.160 to get poorer and poorer

01:02:53.080 or I'll stay poor

01:02:53.880 was false.

01:02:55.920 But it was a long,

01:02:58.240 you know,

01:02:58.580 it was,

01:02:59.080 the window,

01:03:00.160 it was a long period

01:03:01.100 of managed decline.

01:03:02.160 Point being,

01:03:02.900 I don't see any trajectory

01:03:04.900 in the near future

01:03:06.540 for Britain

01:03:07.640 for things to turn around.

01:03:09.240 And on top of that,

01:03:10.460 the difference between

01:03:11.320 the Thatcher period

01:03:12.140 and now

01:03:12.640 is that at least

01:03:13.600 under Thatcher

01:03:14.240 there was a sense of

01:03:15.520 the British people

01:03:17.360 being one people.

01:03:18.760 Oh, yeah.

01:03:19.320 There isn't that sense anymore.

01:03:21.100 Now, well,

01:03:21.980 because we've got

01:03:22.600 the blah, blah, blah community

01:03:24.460 and the blah, blah, blah community

01:03:26.200 and now we're all

01:03:27.320 different communities

01:03:28.200 instead of one people.

01:03:29.260 Well, no,

01:03:29.620 there was the idea

01:03:30.640 of the unions

01:03:31.500 versus everybody else.

01:03:32.440 That was a thing.

01:03:33.120 So there was some division there

01:03:34.500 and certainly Scotland,

01:03:35.340 Ireland versus Great Britain.

01:03:37.340 There's always division,

01:03:38.580 but, yeah,

01:03:40.220 there seems to be

01:03:43.220 consensus in Britain

01:03:45.080 among the people.

01:03:45.880 This is where,

01:03:46.500 you know,

01:03:46.700 we have talked about this

01:03:47.460 off air,

01:03:48.340 the consensus is

01:03:49.300 towards more tyranny.

01:03:50.420 Like, the people want the cage.

01:03:52.360 And that is something

01:03:53.080 that under,

01:03:54.060 you know,

01:03:54.460 in 78 and then 79,

01:03:56.300 the Tory slogan,

01:03:57.480 which Saatchi and Saatchi

01:03:58.320 came up with,

01:03:58.920 was just three brilliant words,

01:04:00.040 labor isn't working.

01:04:01.200 So they had the photos

01:04:02.340 of the cues

01:04:03.200 of people getting relief

01:04:04.520 and it's just like

01:04:05.280 there's an alternative.

01:04:07.440 To your point,

01:04:08.200 there is no alternative.

01:04:09.440 It's, I mean,

01:04:10.400 it seems to be,

01:04:11.940 it's just like,

01:04:12.580 it's just going to get

01:04:13.240 more and more dictatorial.

01:04:15.480 So it's,

01:04:17.200 I feel,

01:04:18.500 as someone who identifies

01:04:19.600 to some extent

01:04:20.140 as an Anglophile,

01:04:21.200 I definitely feel

01:04:22.100 for what your country

01:04:22.780 is going through

01:04:23.360 and I think it's going

01:04:25.160 to get worse

01:04:25.600 before it gets better.

01:04:27.180 But there's also

01:04:28.480 the note of the white pill,

01:04:29.660 which is,

01:04:31.660 We could have communism.

01:04:33.460 Yeah.

01:04:34.080 No,

01:04:34.480 white pills hold not optism.

01:04:36.240 Yeah, but there is a chance

01:04:37.940 there are people

01:04:38.840 who can come to the fore

01:04:39.940 just as Thatcher did.

01:04:41.460 Oh, sure.

01:04:42.100 You know,

01:04:42.420 I'm just saying

01:04:42.900 it's going to take a minute.

01:04:43.880 It is going to take.

01:04:44.540 That's all I'm saying.

01:04:45.000 Yeah, it's going to take

01:04:45.780 longer than a minute,

01:04:46.480 unfortunately.

01:04:46.960 But I agree with you

01:04:47.980 and hopefully,

01:04:49.060 look, we all hope

01:04:49.800 because the way

01:04:50.760 things are going

01:04:51.380 is not ideal,

01:04:53.180 shall we say.

01:04:53.320 It's just heartbreaking

01:04:54.460 for me as someone

01:04:56.440 who has so much affection

01:04:57.760 for Britain

01:04:59.140 and what the British

01:05:00.140 have accomplished

01:05:00.900 to see just that footage.

01:05:05.980 And everyone knows

01:05:06.660 this clip of a guy

01:05:08.120 with this camera

01:05:09.720 on his phone

01:05:10.220 in his house

01:05:10.820 and this lady cop 1.00

01:05:12.160 is telling him explicitly

01:05:13.540 you're being arrested

01:05:14.300 for a Facebook post

01:05:15.280 or whatever it was,

01:05:15.900 a social media thing.

01:05:16.860 And you're watching this

01:05:18.020 and it's just like,

01:05:19.500 it's easier for me

01:05:21.160 to wrap my heads

01:05:21.900 around the rioting

01:05:22.760 in 2020.

01:05:24.200 Every country's had rioting.

01:05:26.720 America was started

01:05:27.560 by because of rioting.

01:05:28.620 But to watch that

01:05:30.360 and it's just like, 0.98

01:05:31.740 holy crap, 0.93

01:05:32.920 where did you take 0.99

01:05:33.900 such a wrong turn?

01:05:35.860 And not only that,

01:05:37.080 it's that when you see

01:05:37.860 this footage

01:05:38.620 that there isn't

01:05:39.700 this national like,

01:05:40.760 hold on.

01:05:42.420 Because one of the things

01:05:43.480 and I hate praising him

01:05:44.460 because it's such a

01:05:44.940 boomer thing to do, 0.76

01:05:45.980 but one of the things

01:05:46.660 Martin Luther King

01:05:47.480 did that was brilliant

01:05:48.660 is he's like,

01:05:49.840 all right,

01:05:50.300 we're going to force people

01:05:51.560 to face the consequence

01:05:53.420 of what they're preaching.

01:05:54.520 You're for segregation,

01:05:55.520 you're for racism,

01:05:56.120 okay,

01:05:56.440 you're going to see

01:05:57.100 men and women in suits

01:05:58.360 getting attacked by dogs

01:06:00.260 and shot with fire hoses.

01:06:01.640 Is this what you want?

01:06:02.840 And many people

01:06:03.560 who are still prejudiced

01:06:04.280 looked at it and goes,

01:06:05.000 okay,

01:06:05.720 this is a bridge

01:06:08.140 I'm not comfortable crossing.

01:06:09.560 Let's take a step back.

01:06:10.760 And the fact that

01:06:11.540 that footage went wide

01:06:12.680 and other examples,

01:06:14.100 I think there was a guy

01:06:14.920 who had a sign

01:06:16.240 that's a Hamas, 0.63

01:06:16.940 a terrorist organization,

01:06:17.480 was tackled by the cops.

01:06:19.640 The fact that

01:06:20.540 the Union Jack

01:06:21.800 is regarded as a symbol

01:06:23.500 of racism and hatred

01:06:24.700 in your own country,

01:06:26.080 my God.

01:06:26.920 I was in Japan in April

01:06:28.560 and one of the things

01:06:30.040 that I really didn't want to

01:06:31.680 because I hate anime

01:06:33.160 and I hate weeaboo culture.

01:06:34.400 I'm like,

01:06:34.620 don't make me fall in love

01:06:35.280 with you guys.

01:06:36.320 I completely fell in love

01:06:37.320 with Japan

01:06:37.740 because it was so great

01:06:39.540 to be in a country

01:06:40.740 which had national pride.

01:06:42.660 They love Japan.

01:06:44.280 They love being Japanese.

01:06:45.460 They're proud of what they built.

01:06:46.920 They take pride in themselves

01:06:47.900 and their work

01:06:49.060 and everything else.

01:06:50.840 They're actually much poorer

01:06:52.060 than Westerners

01:06:53.660 in many ways

01:06:54.240 because of this,

01:06:54.920 but they still

01:06:56.240 have this sense of pride.

01:06:58.500 And this is something

01:07:00.100 that I think

01:07:00.860 Britain,

01:07:01.900 how could you not...

01:07:02.920 Have you guys

01:07:03.880 ever talked to Dankula?

01:07:04.960 Yes.

01:07:05.280 Yes.

01:07:05.520 I've had Dankula

01:07:06.340 on my show

01:07:06.680 a couple of times.

01:07:07.800 The Scots,

01:07:09.380 the amount

01:07:09.980 that this little island

01:07:12.060 brought to the entire world

01:07:14.120 is so disproportionate.

01:07:15.780 You guys should be

01:07:16.640 just talking about Scotland

01:07:18.560 and Scots this,

01:07:20.260 Scots that.

01:07:20.800 The fact that they're not

01:07:22.200 taught this Scottish pride

01:07:24.160 as someone who's never

01:07:25.940 stepped foot in Scotland

01:07:26.860 is crazy to me

01:07:28.400 and just downright reprehensible.

01:07:31.100 Michael Malice comes out

01:07:32.300 in favor of pride.

01:07:33.300 That's going to be the thing.

01:07:36.180 We'll have a little

01:07:37.140 LGBTQ.

01:07:39.200 LGBT.

01:07:40.440 LGBT.

01:07:41.080 LGBT.

01:07:41.760 No, no.

01:07:42.680 There's going to be

01:07:43.100 trans and queers there, 1.00

01:07:43.980 you fucking bigot. 1.00

01:07:44.840 Yeah. 1.00

01:07:45.960 Stop being racist. 0.99

01:07:46.420 Trans and queers. 1.00

01:07:47.780 Trans and queers. 1.00

01:07:48.620 Exactly.

01:07:49.320 All right.

01:07:49.800 On that happy note,

01:07:50.880 head on over to...

01:07:51.620 Oh, no.

01:07:52.500 Wait.

01:07:53.080 We've got the final question.

01:07:54.380 Oh.

01:07:54.820 We've got a final question,

01:07:55.860 the one we always ask,

01:07:56.720 which is what's the one thing

01:07:57.640 we're not talking about,

01:07:58.880 Michael,

01:07:59.140 that we should be?

01:08:01.540 Oh.

01:08:01.940 That's a great question.

01:08:04.180 What are we not talking about

01:08:06.400 that we should be?

01:08:07.240 Can I think about this?

01:08:07.980 Because I think it's a very important question.

01:08:09.100 I think it's important

01:08:09.740 you think about it, Michael.

01:08:10.680 What is the one thing

01:08:11.880 we're not talking about?

01:08:16.700 What are we not talking about?

01:08:18.320 Oh.

01:08:19.660 Oh.

01:08:22.640 Is democracy

01:08:24.840 a system

01:08:27.120 that is compatible

01:08:29.620 with freedom

01:08:30.300 or is inherently

01:08:31.580 or even in any way

01:08:32.800 freedom-seeking?

01:08:34.920 You did a Kamala thing there.

01:08:36.420 Did you notice that?

01:08:37.540 No.

01:08:37.960 Extra slow.

01:08:38.880 Like, you know,

01:08:39.380 you would like,

01:08:40.640 is democracy...

01:08:43.300 Well, I wanted to word it correctly

01:08:44.560 instead of talking the word salad.

01:08:45.720 That's what she does. 1.00

01:08:46.500 But she doesn't get to it.

01:08:49.540 Well, she might be president 0.90

01:08:50.660 by the time we're talking about this. 0.96

01:08:51.940 So you shut your mouth.

01:08:52.520 It's going to air in January? 0.99

01:08:54.080 Oh, Biden might die.

01:08:55.060 You might be right.

01:08:56.320 That's fair.

01:08:58.320 It's true.

01:08:59.020 Am I wrong?

01:08:59.560 I think the funniest outcome...

01:09:00.940 We recorded this before.

01:09:02.140 Someone said to me,

01:09:03.460 there's a line

01:09:04.000 that the funniest outcome

01:09:04.840 is most likely.

01:09:06.020 The funniest outcome

01:09:07.000 is Trump gets elected

01:09:08.480 and she becomes president

01:09:10.120 before January.

01:09:10.860 That's the funniest.

01:09:11.800 So the first female president

01:09:12.800 is there for like two months.

01:09:14.520 Wait, Trump gets elected?

01:09:15.940 Right, but he's only...

01:09:16.700 But Biden dies

01:09:17.420 and she becomes... 0.88

01:09:18.240 Incapacitated.

01:09:19.260 He doesn't have to die

01:09:19.680 but she becomes president.

01:09:20.880 Well, there is another possibility

01:09:22.300 which is

01:09:22.920 there is a very small possibility

01:09:24.860 that they both get

01:09:25.760 269 votes.

01:09:27.460 Yes, it's very unlikely.

01:09:27.740 In which case

01:09:28.520 the House and the Senate

01:09:30.180 get to pick one

01:09:31.540 and potentially

01:09:32.620 you could have

01:09:33.340 Joe Biden...

01:09:34.900 Not Joe Biden.

01:09:35.800 You could have

01:09:36.440 Donald Trump as president

01:09:37.800 and Tim Walz

01:09:38.560 as his vice president.

01:09:39.800 I don't know that they would...

01:09:40.400 That would be funnier.

01:09:41.300 I don't think that they would

01:09:42.060 put Walz as VP.

01:09:43.460 Don't you?

01:09:44.020 Who would they put as VP?

01:09:44.880 They'd probably put her, right?

01:09:46.320 Donald Trump president

01:09:47.380 and his president as Kamala Harris.

01:09:47.920 Would that be smart?

01:09:48.580 Put hers too?

01:09:49.840 Because you know

01:09:50.360 there's plenty of people

01:09:52.220 who've got their finger

01:09:52.840 on the trigger.

01:09:53.340 That would be incredible.

01:09:55.240 Yes.

01:09:56.200 Well, let's hope

01:09:57.260 it's happened by the time

01:09:58.060 this airs.

01:09:58.860 You want Trump 0.96

01:09:59.660 to be assassinated? 1.00

01:10:00.540 Holy crap. 1.00

01:10:01.520 No. 0.99

01:10:01.580 Wow, we all heard it. 0.91

01:10:04.220 Listen to this queer. 1.00

01:10:05.340 My God. 0.83

01:10:08.360 I meant her being

01:10:09.640 his vice president.

01:10:10.640 Head on over to Substack

01:10:11.600 where we must ask

01:10:12.500 Michael your questions.

01:10:15.680 Is there a reason

01:10:16.560 you've been more quiet

01:10:17.520 on the Israel-Gaza conflict?

01:10:19.220 Do you have any clear

01:10:20.120 preferences for future policies?

01:10:23.100 Okay, let's talk about this.

01:10:24.760 Okay.

01:10:25.800 Oh God, here we go.

01:10:26.600 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - January 19, 2025

The Truth about Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union - Michael Malice

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