Francis and Michael discuss the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, and the horrors of the Gulag Gulag system. They also discuss the election of Donald Trump, and whether or not Americans are losing faith in the democratic process.
00:04:22.140The thing that's always fascinating when people, there's two points I want to make here.
00:04:26.120There's this hypothesis in the university system, like good Lenin, bad Stalin, that Lenin came in and he was kind of good cop.
00:04:34.020And then Stalin, this is kind of the Trotskyite idea that Stalin came in and the revolution was betrayed by Stalin.
00:04:39.720And 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.
00:04:50.860We 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.
00:05:26.480We're not going to be like hemming and hawing.
00:05:29.180We're not going to be, you know, mincing words.
00:05:31.700People are getting put up against the wall in huge numbers.
00:05:35.140And 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.
00:05:42.280When you're chopping, when you're splitting wood, chips will fly, meaning you're going to have a lot of blood.
00:05:46.880And he explicitly and constantly talked about like blood flowing, you know, the blood of our enemies and, you know, liquidating these classes.
00:06:54.380And he wanted to give a certain topic.
00:06:56.040But it was, and this is going to upset a lot of people, which is why it's fun to say it.
00:06:59.660But it was essentially a transhumanist movement.
00:07:02.360Their vision was, we're going to fundamentally, long term, remake the nature of man and the nature of society.
00:07:10.480They thought that human beings are almost explicit, entirely plasticine, that people are born and their subject, a function of their economic class.
00:07:19.500And 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.
00:07:27.280This 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.
00:07:35.420But 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.
00:07:49.460But the idea was, no, no, no, we're scientific.
00:07:51.640This 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.
00:08:00.600We're going to turn the entire country into a factory or a laboratory where everyone's working together.
00:08:06.840And there we're not going to waste money on profits for some billionaire while everyone's starving.
00:08:10.760And we're going to create this super efficient machine.
00:08:14.340I 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.
00:08:22.600Like, we're going to create this kind of very industrialized nation state.
00:08:28.240To 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?
00:08:39.220Because we're going to be overflowing with cars and bread and everything you want, because everything's being done efficiently and scientifically.
00:08:45.560Frederick Taylor was kind of a model for this.
00:08:47.540He was an American thinker who basically went to factories.
00:09:38.020And 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?
00:09:48.300When 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.
00:09:57.820I'm going to use a very gauche example.
00:09:59.840I read Cyndi Lauper's autobiography and, you know, she dressed in a very idiosyncratic way before she made it.
00:10:06.920You 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.
00:10:14.980And women would, like, make fun of her.
00:10:16.520And she thought to herself, your daughter's going to be dressed like this in five years.
00:10:20.720So a lot of times what seems crazy today will be reality and not only the norm but popularized soon after that.
00:10:30.780And 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.
00:10:47.760Let's throw him in there and kind of, you know, put a monkey wrench into the gears.
00:10:53.260And when he sees power, everyone's like, well, hold on a minute.
00:10:57.380So people realize before this, today the word socialism is synonymous with having government control.
00:11:03.940That wasn't what socialism meant before 1917.
00:11:07.040There were different strands of socialism because it meant the idea of everyone working together for the betterment of society.
00:11:12.680So anarchists were considered socialists and corporatists and so on and so forth.
00:11:16.360And 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.
00:11:27.420This is our one shot to make it happen.
00:11:29.620Yeah, there's some kind of broken eggs, wink, wink, which means murdered children and people.
00:11:34.660But this is still our one shot to put into practice.
00:11:38.040So we got to give them every opportunity they have.
00:11:41.080It was what I think was Eugene Lyons called the guinea pig theory of revolution.
00:11:45.300Like, sure, you know, I have the quote in the book.
00:11:47.720Sure, these Russians squeal and make noise.
00:11:52.360This is our chance to, you know, kind of experiment on them and find out, you know, what makes the entire world tick.
00:11:57.800And 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.
00:12:08.900Let's really delve into the brutality aspect of it because it's really important.
00:12:14.580What did he do to his own people that meant to my eyes that he's a monster?
00:12:19.780Well, 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.
00:12:34.340It kind of so he had under the czar, you had internal passports.
00:12:38.220Right. So you couldn't travel from, you know, one place to another without the permission of the state.
00:12:43.100This the Bolsheviks later implemented.
00:12:44.680They had the concentration camps, but the amount of people in the camps that the czar had were quite small, relatively.
00:12:52.820These were for political radicals and also like they had books, you know, they could write letters.
00:12:57.400It's jail, but it's not what we think of as this kind of intense prison system.
00:13:03.580He, you know, basically they would take entire populations.
00:13:06.660And 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.
00:13:16.220So they really wanted to make sure anyone who had any kind of religious background bent the knee and repudiated their faith.
00:13:23.280And 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.
00:13:48.300They would put people, you know, the Soviet Union is, or what became the Soviet Union wasn't exactly Tahiti in terms of climate.
00:13:56.820So 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.
00:14:03.520And if this doesn't break you, that's perfectly fine.
00:14:06.540So 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.
00:14:21.120You could pay off your debt that you, if maybe your parents were wealthy landowners or bourgeois or something like that.
00:14:27.040You are punished for the sins of your ancestors.
00:14:30.780Most people would associate those camps with Stalin.
00:14:33.120But what you're saying is they were implemented under the Tsar and then really expanded under Lenin.
00:14:38.080Yeah, under the Tsar was the Ketorga system.
00:14:40.060But Lenin just really made it much more.
00:14:43.160And Stalin, you know, took it to the nth degree.
00:14:46.200And because what was really interesting in the book is you're hearing about the way he's treating political dissidents.
00:14:54.760You're hearing about the way he's treating people he perceives as his enemies.
00:14:58.720And 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.
00:15:30.720And this sounds like a joke, but the Fabian's original logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
00:15:36.360And 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.
00:15:46.000But their vision is, all right, we're going to do it in a democratic way, gradually, you know, piece by piece.
00:15:51.340We're going to take over the entire country and have everything run by the state.
00:15:55.580Right. 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.
00:16:06.040But 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.
00:16:15.400There 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.
00:16:24.600So we don't want to be criticizing them too much and undermining this very fragile thing that they're building.
00:16:30.440But 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.
00:16:41.760And maybe if you read a book, you'd understand this glorious experiment that's happening, you know, over in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Leningrad.
00:16:49.160So it's this arrogance of the intelligentsia, and Lenin very much played into it.
00:16:54.940I 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.
00:17:09.180It 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.
00:17:14.820Right, there's a lot of that going on, and there was.
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00:18:57.440How honest was Lenin about the stuff that he intended to do, like, before he actually came to power?
00:19:04.440Did he say, we're going to kill all our class enemies?
00:19:07.600Did he say, we're going to have this, all of the things that they went on to do?
00:19:12.800Did they talk about, you know, taking the farms away from the Kulaks, the wealthy peasants?
00:19:18.540Did 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?