Western Standard - The Cory Morgan Show： The Victim Cult

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00:00:30.000 Let's get started.

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Welcome to the Cory Morgan Show. This is my regular opportunity to pick some issues,

00:01:37.560 go into them, dive into them with some interesting guests and see what kind of interpretations

00:01:42.960 are out there. I've been doing those regular columns online on our Rumble channel and YouTube

00:01:47.640 and such and of course on the westernstandardonline.com. This is where I talk to some other people

00:01:53.520 rather than just listening to my own voice going on for a while and we get some great

00:01:58.280 conversations going. To begin with, though, I always, as I always do in these shows, I have to

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00:03:11.500 with this media as well. So help us out online there, spread that word, and we can keep producing

00:03:16.400 this content for you. So today is a great and interesting subject. We're going to be talking

00:03:20.800 about identity politics and in particular, victim politics. You know, everybody's a victim these

00:03:25.960 days. They want to be a victim. They want to be treated differently. They want to be treated

00:03:29.020 specially because they were a victim of this or that, whether it's through race or circumstances

00:03:34.240 or religion or sexual orientation, or the list just goes on and on. You know, somebody actually

00:03:42.120 took the time and wrote about it. And that somebody is Mark Milkey. He's a policy analyst.

00:03:48.380 you've probably seen his name around. He's been involved in a number of groups over the year. He's

00:03:52.080 an author. He's put out a few books. One of my favorites actually was in the past. I remember

00:03:55.860 reading was Tax Me, I'm Canadian. If you want to see some of the crazy spending that was done,

00:04:00.700 he categorized and listed a whole pile of it in that book. He wrote Nation of Serfs. And now he's

00:04:06.160 written a book called The Victim Cult. And he really breaks down. I mean, it is. It's like a

00:04:10.680 cult. It's a trend, and it's a dangerous one, and it's a damaging one. And it took some courage for

00:04:17.040 somebody like him to even write on it because that's part of it. They cancel and they shut

00:04:20.240 people out from even discussing these issues. And we can't make them better if we can't talk about

00:04:25.400 them. So please hang in here. It's going to be a fascinating conversation and talking to Mark

00:04:31.480 Mielke about his latest book, The Victim Cut. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on

00:04:34.640 to join me today, Mark. Your book I found fascinating and very timely. And the first

00:04:41.120 thing that strikes me is you're having the courage to delve into that. I mean, it's sensitive matter

00:04:45.880 that a lot of people can become triggered, I guess, with or upset.

00:04:50.500 So what inspired you to dive into that realm as opposed to some of the books on taxes and

00:04:55.220 such that you did in the past?

00:04:57.320 Well, probably because I grew up in Kelowna by the West Bank First Nation.

00:05:01.780 And early on, I noticed the difference between successful First Nations and unsuccessful

00:05:05.540 First Nations.

00:05:07.140 And to put not too long a point on it, successful First Nations leaders, I found, kind of looked

00:05:13.200 forward as opposed to the past.

00:05:15.500 They didn't deny the past, and there's no point in doing that.

00:05:18.540 But the ones that have been successful, and I've done a lot of policy on First Nations over the last 25 years, and I discovered the same thing.

00:05:26.880 So very simply, you know, without being flippant about it, you can acknowledge the past and whatever wrongs happen.

00:05:35.040 What you cannot do or what you should not do is focus on the past in a way that sacrifices the future.

00:05:39.740 And ironically enough, two years ago, when I was finishing up the victim cult, I met Ellis Ross,

00:05:45.260 you probably know, now running for the BC Liberal Leadership, but became famous initially for

00:05:49.680 turning around the highs of the First Nation on the coast of British Columbia. And look, you know,

00:05:54.720 he says, look, our family history has warts as well. But if he and the rest of the highs of the

00:05:59.220 First Nation hadn't looked forward, started to do deals with natural gas companies and so on and so

00:06:03.580 forth, he said they'd still be stuck in poverty. And personally, he'd be stuck in a pretty awful

00:06:07.860 position um and so when i met ellis ross two years ago and he wrote the forward for the victim culture

00:06:13.220 agreed to write the forward uh we were just in simpatico on this that uh tragedies happen all

00:06:18.260 the time uh israel victimization in history now but uh you you better find a way away from that

00:06:24.180 and look forward and figure out how you're going to succeed so that was really inspiration for the

00:06:28.180 book uh first nations that succeed in canada and look forward and those who um want to use the past

00:06:33.860 almost as a weapon against the present. Yeah, Chief Louie out of a Soyuz very similarly was

00:06:39.620 very much always on quit being hung up on the past and let's look forward because we have to

00:06:43.860 improve things right now. Exactly. And what I appreciated too, so I mean right now we're

00:06:49.460 seeing it predominantly in people in a position of minority or even an identity where they've

00:06:54.500 turned themselves into a minority. You pointed out some examples where it was people in the majority

00:06:58.900 who were using victimhood though as a means to a political ends. I mean it shows that

00:07:02.580 this trend or this tactic can be harmful. And you went into great depth, for example,

00:07:07.620 as Adolf Hitler played a victim of all people. Right. Of all people. I mean, nothing in the

00:07:13.200 victim cult downplays actual tragedies or gain actual victimization in history or now, right?

00:07:17.980 There's over 7 billion of us on the planet. Even accidentally, the tragedies happen, you know,

00:07:23.180 you know, cars smashed into each other and that sort of thing. There's no shortage of real

00:07:26.960 tragedies in history or now. But yeah, the most unbelievable part when you when you look at sort

00:07:31.920 and maybe it's just a human thing, we tend to want to blame others rather than first look at maybe

00:07:37.780 I've contributed to this bad outcome in some way. And so Adolf Hitler, as you mentioned,

00:07:41.880 mentioned in the Germans are a good example. I mean, look, my last name is German origin, 0.93

00:07:46.400 obviously, but I don't have any sympathy for what happened between really 1800 and 1945.

00:07:52.260 A lot of people are familiar with, for example, how Adolf Hitler used the Versailles Treaty and

00:07:56.960 the claim that Germans were victimized by this post-World War I treaty imposed on them.

00:08:01.920 and adolf hitler certainly used that to uh to disrupt germany and gain power what people

00:08:07.680 probably don't know and it's a good historical example is that germans actually were victimized

00:08:13.120 if you go back to the late 18th century france was occupying part of germany and as happens in

00:08:18.800 all wars there were some pretty vicious things that went on towards the germans from the french

00:08:23.360 now once the germans kicked out the french in the early 1800s the germans went on some search for you

00:08:27.920 you know, what it means to be a pure German. How do we make Germany great again? Literally,

00:08:31.880 that was the language. And they lapsed into, you know, kind of cultural purity. And to use the

00:08:37.640 language of the present, you know, who's indigenous German and who's not? Like, it was crazy stuff. 0.99

00:08:42.480 And long before the Germans became enamored with the very harmful notion of race purity, 0.86

00:08:48.500 they got into this notion of cultural purity, because they were trying to assert their identity,

00:08:52.640 right? They have been oppressed, they have been victimized by the French. But they made a couple

00:08:56.660 fundamental errors to think that if you get some sort of pure German culture, pure indigenous

00:09:02.180 culture, that's what it was, that somehow that would save them from, I don't know, future

00:09:06.020 victimization. It wouldn't. It just made them narrow-minded. And so they began to be afraid

00:09:10.340 of everyone, not just Jews in history, which they were, but English, liberals, anybody who wasn't,

00:09:18.100 you know, say Protestant German of that era. And so the Germans had this notion of victimization 0.84

00:09:22.260 early on and adolf hitler picks it up literally a century later and we know what happened um i mean 0.86

00:09:27.700 that the subtitle of the victim cult is you know how how this can wreck civilizations well it wrecked

00:09:33.220 german civilization and turned the land of germany which had been bach and beethoven into the land 0.54

00:09:37.780 known for dachau and of course uh you know german nazis almost destroyed english civilization um so

00:09:43.700 that's kind of the subtext of the book that even when you're actually victimized as a person as a

00:09:48.580 society, as a nation, even you've got to be really, really careful because if you get stuck there,

00:09:53.860 watch out. Yeah. And you really go into how being victimized, even if it's genuine and legitimate,

00:10:00.420 doesn't necessarily mean you have to have poorer outcomes later. You went into the example of

00:10:05.140 Asian North Americans, for example, who were treated terribly in the early part of last century,

00:10:10.420 but they've moved beyond that. And as far as a culture or an ethnic group, they're very

00:10:15.300 successful in north america right now right um for those you know unfamiliar with it or may be

00:10:20.260 familiar i mean the first probably asian um you know immigrants to to canada in the united states

00:10:25.940 really came around 1850 on the west coast in particular california and and shortly after

00:10:31.140 that time to british columbia and what i did in the victim call is i looked at this cohort because

00:10:36.020 they were victimized they were discriminated against uh they were not allowed to vote they

00:10:40.420 often they were they were discriminated against by labor unions by politicians and the rest of them

00:10:44.340 But some interesting things happened over time. They fought back. I would never say just accept

00:10:49.660 your victimization. They fought back in politics and the courts. Sometimes they won, sometimes they

00:10:54.820 didn't. There are great stories of San Francisco and Chicago and New York merchants fighting back

00:10:59.300 in the courts and sometimes winning against discriminatory local ordinances that basically

00:11:04.980 tried to outlaw their businesses. And they won sometimes. But the interesting thing is they also

00:11:11.100 took a very proud position in the best sense of that word. They refused to be permanent victims.

00:11:17.580 For example, they also fought back consciously, unconsciously. There was a real emphasis on

00:11:22.700 entrepreneurship and education. To give you an example, in 1910 in the United States,

00:11:27.820 they found some terrific statistics where they showed attendance at high schools and universities.

00:11:33.660 In 1910, white Americans were attending high school, graduating from college at rates higher

00:11:38.780 than chinese and japanese americans by 1920 1930 it's actually chinese and japanese origin kids

00:11:45.740 in the united states who are graduating from high school and college are much higher than white

00:11:50.940 americans now what does this do well this sets the groundwork for the future success

00:11:55.740 but the irony or the the yeah the the oddity of this is this is happening at a time in american

00:12:01.820 history and canadian history that is the most discriminatory period against those of asian

00:12:06.940 origin. And yet they refuse to permanently see themselves as victims. I should say, by the way,

00:12:12.140 I don't dismiss, again, the tragedies of history or just kind of take a get-over-it approach in

00:12:16.560 the victim cult. Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were put into internment camps, as

00:12:20.840 almost everybody knows. They deserve compensation for their private property. They only received 1.00

00:12:25.380 partial compensation after the war. But there's a big difference between, say, that, where you've

00:12:30.420 been victimized five years ago or 20 years ago, and looking back maybe 100 years or 1,000 years.

00:12:36.280 you know because there is some I mean we're conservatives we believe in private property

00:12:40.360 there is something to compensation for what when governments do something wrong to you

00:12:44.260 but it's an art not a science and you can't you know extrapolate back a thousand years

00:12:49.460 and say your tribe hit my tribe therefore that's the reason I am the way I am today

00:12:54.760 that's stretching it to put it mildly yeah one of your statements from the book was everyone's

00:13:00.300 ancestor was a victim if we go far enough back everybody could find something but we there's

00:13:04.640 no sense hanging up on it. I mean, we can acknowledge it without using it as a crutch

00:13:08.520 or an excuse for not doing well today. Another denominator you spoke on in there was strong

00:13:13.960 family units. I mean, people, cultures, groups that tended to prosper, that tended to be stable,

00:13:19.680 did well, tended to have united families. And that's been touched upon in a number of other

00:13:25.400 books. But it's one of those things, how could you change that trend? Because broken families

00:13:29.500 are actually starting to become endemic in every culture right now.

00:13:33.260 Yeah, and that's a tough one.

00:13:34.860 In one sense, I don't have a Tony Robbins one, two, three approach to how to solve these

00:13:38.700 problems.

00:13:39.200 I think that would be flippant.

00:13:40.720 What I try and do in the victim cult, though, is I try and what I try and do is disprove

00:13:44.340 some of the commonly held assumptions for why outcomes for certain groups are the way

00:13:48.120 they are.

00:13:48.700 So, for example, in the victim cult, I look at black Americans and I do some extra research,

00:13:54.400 but I also quote Thomas Sowell, the famous economist who happens to be black, incidentally,

00:13:58.840 but he grew up in the South and in Harlem and he's come across this argument and you still hear

00:14:04.680 today in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the rest of it that everything is due to racism

00:14:10.640 every outcome every every disparity between say white Americans black Americans is due to racism

00:14:15.600 no it's not as Thomas Sowell points out and I quote him in the victim cult if you look at for

00:14:21.320 example you know the notion for example that that broken apart black American families vis-a-vis you

00:14:27.960 know, other Americans, the higher preponderance of that is due to slavery or due to racism.

00:14:33.520 And Thomas Sowell says, no, black American families were pretty together until the 1950s,

00:14:38.620 until, in his view, the welfare state began to incentivize them to break apart.

00:14:42.960 And the same thing with education. He looks at a couple of Washington, D.C. schools who two of

00:14:49.180 three were black in Washington, D.C., and they regularly beat the white schools in standardized

00:14:55.260 tests. Now, this declines by the 1950s, but between the 1880s and the 1950s, before Black 0.85

00:15:02.340 Americans get their deserved civil rights enforced, Black American children are doing better in these

00:15:08.160 Washington, D.C. schools. And it's only a result of a falling educational, you know, a new education

00:15:13.980 reform that really screws up the education system that hurts Black American children in Washington,

00:15:19.880 in DC. So you can't blame what happened on racism. You can blame it on really weird educational

00:15:25.380 theories that started to appear in the 1950s. Yeah, well, we're getting into some strange times.

00:15:31.360 I remember a few years ago, there was a Toronto school celebrating having a black-only school. I

00:15:36.080 would only think that Martin Luther King must have been turning over in his grave. I mean,

00:15:39.420 with all the sacrifice you had to do for integration, and now we're moving back into

00:15:43.140 separating from each other. Right. It's really dangerous. And again, it's this notion of cultural

00:15:47.520 purity. And people today, I don't think, know their history, and they don't know the danger

00:15:51.940 of this. So in the victim cult, as we talked about a moment ago, Germans thought the best 0.93

00:15:56.300 way to recover from the harmful effects of the French occupation was to restore a true German

00:16:01.600 culture. And again, they defined it very narrowly. No Jews. If you're in northern Germany, no Roman

00:16:06.360 Catholics. They didn't like the English. They didn't like liberalism. They basically didn't

00:16:09.960 like anybody who wasn't German. But you see this notion of cultural purity in Rwanda by the majority

00:16:15.440 Hutu starting in 1960. You know, most of your viewers probably know that there was a massacre,

00:16:21.500 the genocide in 1994. Well, what predated that was 30 years of the majority population

00:16:28.300 in Rwanda, the Hutus, blaming everything on the minority Tutsis. And again, talking about 0.86

00:16:34.760 cultural purity and literally using the words indigenous. We're indigenous Hutus, you Tutsi

00:16:40.220 are not, and you are to blame for our problems. This was promulgated through state propaganda.

00:16:45.180 it in the education system. The Tutsis were made to feel inferior, that somehow they didn't belong

00:16:50.080 there, and that if they ever stepped out a line, there was pogroms almost from the beginning of

00:16:54.320 independence. And this went on for decades until basically a spark lit in 1994, and you had a

00:17:00.560 million Tutsis and others, minorities killed, murdered. So it's very dangerous to go down this

00:17:05.880 road, even in a liberal democracy of, I think the comedian Bill Maher talked about, how do we get

00:17:11.680 back to separate but equal nonsense right uh and you see that again where but you know something

00:17:16.360 being a pure anything isn't going to save you what changes uh what helps people succeed is actually

00:17:22.400 copying the best from other cultures right i mean the europeans stole arab numbers from you know

00:17:26.900 the arabs uh you know arab culture stole it from you know india um and you know if we'd all been

00:17:32.440 stuck with roman numerals i mean there's a lot of stuff we wouldn't be able to do today like 1.00

00:17:35.900 basic calculations. So cultural boring and sharing is a good thing. And people who think they should

00:17:42.140 retreat into kind of a perfectionist or pure silo, that's actually regressive. And it doesn't matter

00:17:48.240 what your excuse for that is. And it forgets shared humanity. Let me put it a different way.

00:17:54.280 It also misreads the human heart. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident,

00:18:00.360 who I quote in the victim cult, in his book, The Gulag Acropelago, said it's really tempting to

00:18:05.680 think that the problem is over there, that person over there, that if only we get rid of them or

00:18:10.300 their tribe, then all will be well. And Solzhenitsyn said, no, that's not what's happening

00:18:15.700 here. He said the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

00:18:21.540 And that's the problem is we're losing the sense of shared humanity today. So just as liberalism,

00:18:26.280 the best parts of liberalism, the Martin Luther King parts, judge people by the content of their

00:18:31.620 character, not their skin color. Just as we finally get to that in Western society,

00:18:37.340 all of a sudden you've got people who make wrong cause and effect links and want to blame some

00:18:43.180 problem not on an education system or family breakdown or geography. Instead, they want to

00:18:48.640 blame it on racism and they use as an excuse to retreat into a silo and say, if only we can have

00:18:54.420 pure culture. Pure culture doesn't give you an engineering degree. It doesn't give you an

00:18:58.240 education. It doesn't give you a career. It just has the potential to make you bitter. So that's

00:19:03.320 the danger with the pure culture argument. Yeah, well, and as I said, it's a very timely book.

00:19:09.240 Identity politics have really been dominating our actions lately. I think, you know, it's a broader

00:19:15.120 subject perhaps on how social media has actually allowed us to separate from each other and cluster

00:19:19.880 in groups rather than integrate and share those positive aspects, as you said. So just in closing,

00:19:27.520 I mean, there's just so much to unpack in that book.

00:19:29.680 Where can we find more information about yourself, your past books, and of course,

00:19:33.500 this current one, The Victim Cult?

00:19:35.100 Sure.

00:19:35.760 Go to thevictimcult.com or markmilkey.com.

00:19:38.960 Book is available in your local bookstores, chapters, Amazon, across Canada, across the

00:19:44.240 United States as well.

00:19:46.520 Great.

00:19:46.960 Well, thank you very much for coming on and unpacking a little bit of that for me.

00:19:50.220 I mean, again, it's just been a fascinating book and hopefully we can start studying

00:19:54.200 and realizing that we're just not going down a good path.

00:19:56.020 As you said, cultural purity, I mean, some people perhaps pursuing it, thinking that they're on

00:20:00.420 a road to something good, but it's really, it tends to be negative historically.

00:20:05.300 It's a destructive idea. And again, I think the best counterexample of that are Asian, 1.00

00:20:10.960 you know, those of Asian origin in Canada, in the United States, who early on, you read their

00:20:15.020 stories, they wanted to be integrated into the mainstream. They also wanted to change the 0.84

00:20:18.920 mainstream, and they did. They made America and Canada better, you know, when white Canadians 1.00

00:20:22.860 and white americans were in a pretty racist period you know uh 100 years ago uh but they

00:20:27.900 made canada and america better by their contribution but they wanted to contribute i mean one of the

00:20:31.660 stories i have in the victim cult is of a japanese union leader who's saying to the american federation

00:20:36.460 of labor let us in we want to be part of you and they're saying no stay away so again it's ironic

00:20:42.220 today that some groups leaders of some groups i don't think it's the majority of any any ethnic

00:20:47.100 group, any racial identity. But it's ironic today and tragic that some leaders of some

00:20:53.660 self-oppointed collectives think that the best way to deal with, I don't know,

00:20:59.260 even personal prejudice you may encounter today is retreating into a silo and into some sort of

00:21:04.220 fake purity. I mean, look, Japan did that for 300 years and then they had to be opened up by 0.91

00:21:10.220 the Americans or they were at a disadvantage. Cultural purity puts you at a disadvantage.

00:21:15.660 integration and sharing cultural successes and economic successes is the way, frankly,

00:21:20.540 for everyone to move forward. Well, that's great. We'll leave off on that note of something to

00:21:25.500 strive for as a community with a number of cultures contributing. Thank you, Corey. Thank you.

00:21:44.940 Thank you.

Western Standard - December 01, 2021

The Cory Morgan Show： The Victim Cult

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