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March 3, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:09
FOG OF WAR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep282
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I'm going to talk today about Ukraine, propaganda, and the fog of war.
A big win for Merit at Virginia's Thomas Jefferson School, and a big loss for the woke left.
Radio commentator Dennis Prager will join me.
We're going to talk about current issues, and we're also going to talk about the Ten Commandments.
And I'll continue my analysis of Francesca de Rimini in Canto V of Dante's Inferno.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
There is a thick fog of propaganda surrounding the Ukraine war, the invasion of Ukraine.
And this makes it difficult for us, as it does for the Russians, to try to figure out what actually is going on.
On the Russian side, it turns out that the Russian media, controlled by Putin, is putting out all kinds of fabrications about the Ukraine.
In fact, they are essentially portraying this war in very much the manner that Stalin portrayed the Second World War as kind of a war against fascism.
In fact, a war against European fascism.
And Stalin, from Stalin's point of view, communism was nothing more than an anti-fascist ideology.
I mean, think of how deceitful this is.
Communism and fascism came out of the same socialist root.
But nevertheless, Stalin was able to mobilize, kind of national feeling, Mother Russia.
And Putin, it's amazing how the playbook is kind of the same.
Now, if all of that seems utterly deceitful, the question we have to ask is, are we getting the same kind of propaganda?
By which I mean, we're not having what normally occurs in America and in the West in these situations, which is multiple points of view, arguments that go back and forth.
I mentioned one by John Mearsheimer, the realist scholar, a very distinguished scholar of international affairs, who makes the point that the West sort of provoked this a little bit, not provoked Putin's appetite for aggression that was there already,
but in a sense gave Ukraine the idea that it would be kind of fun and that the West would be right behind them in poking the Russian bear And, of course, the Russian bear is a lot bigger than the Ukrainian lamb, if you will. And so Putin goes, okay, I'll show you.
You know, I don't want to have some little aggressive little dog biting my heels.
And so I'm going to swat you down.
And this is what Mearsheimer predicted, I think, in 2015, six years ago.
This is going to happen if we keep puffing up the Ukraine in this way.
And this is, in fact, what happened.
So, if anything, Mearsheimer has proven right.
But this is a guy who has been almost pushed out of the public discourse.
Because why? Because, essentially, we're getting a single template.
And that's the thing that worries me the most.
When you get a single template, what is the story leaving out?
Now, here's Biden at the State of the Union.
We're going to take a tough stance.
Let's go get him!
And that kind of stuff.
But I say to myself, wait a minute.
If you're serious, if you think, That Putin is really trying to restore the Soviet Empire.
Putin is this monstrous warmonger.
Here's my question. Why is the United States buying from Russia right now 600,000 barrels of oil per day?
If you're doing that, then it doesn't matter if some bar pours out the Russian vodka.
It doesn't matter if somebody goes, you know, some campus.
I actually read this. We're not going to be reading Dostoyevsky because, you know, he was Russian.
So this kind of stupidity, this kind of idiot symbolism, when here we are transferring dollars and subsidizing the Russian economy, money that basically goes straight to Putin for his own use.
that and pretend to be serious about what's going on in the Ukraine.
Now, you know, Reagan, flashing back a couple of decades, was very much of an idealist, very much understood that this was a moral struggle with the Soviet Union, but Reagan was also always immensely pragmatic.
Reagan always understood that the world moves according to the motors of power politics.
I remember going back to the 1970s, someone had come up to Reagan and said, you know, in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, is constantly lying.
They're claiming every day that they shot down 10 Israeli jets, and they're just making this up.
And what do we do about this?
And Reagan's answer was very crafty.
Think of the wisdom of this. Reagan goes, well, you know what?
Why don't we just make an announcement that we will replace not the actual amount of Israeli jets shot down by the Palestinians, but the number they say they shot down.
So think about that. That's going to make them very, oh, we shot down 20 jets.
Oh, wait, the Israelis are going to get 20 more.
So suddenly the incentive to put out these lies diminishes.
Why? Because you've thought of a very clever way to check it.
So we need that kind of thinking and how far we are from having that kind of leadership.
I read articles now.
These are written by people who supposedly have foreign policy credentials.
Oh, the ruble is collapsing.
The ruble is down 20%.
The ruble is down 20%.
So what? We're talking about the exchange rate between the ruble and the dollar.
It doesn't mean that purchasing power inside of Russia is down 20%.
It doesn't mean that Putin is affected in any meaningful way by something like this.
It certainly doesn't follow that a 20% adjustment, devaluation of the ruble, is going to lead to the collapse of the Russian economy.
This is a country that is selling oil left and right, and the high price of oil, thank you, Mr.
Biden... We're good to go.
It's not so much trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union as it was before, but to create a kind of new axis of evil.
Essentially, you can call it the Islamo-Sino-Chinese-Russian axis to counter the power of the Western world.
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I want to talk about a really important decision that's come down in Fairfax County.
This involves Fairfax County Public Schools and the Fairfax Virginia School Board.
So a group of parents, mainly Asian Americans, sued the Fairfax School Board in district court.
It went before a guy named Judge Claude Hilton.
And the question was this.
By and large, Fairfax County Schools, which is a merit-based program for the Thomas Jefferson High School, that's the school in question here.
It's a school that emphasizes science and technology.
It is made up, it is a majority made up of Asian Americans.
In fact, almost 70%.
Whites, about 20%.
Hispanics, about 3%.
Blacks, less than 2%.
Now, this was the result of a merit-based application process in which you did grades, test scores, problem-solving essays, and response to three kind of prompts, three specific questions that they asked you.
And no one claimed that the process was discriminatory in any way.
It was merely unequal in its results.
In other words, the Asians were doing the best, the whites were doing the second best, Hispanics the third, blacks the fourth.
And so in the wake of George Floyd, and all of this, by the way, beautifully recounted in Judge Hilton's opinion, He points out that in the wake of George Floyd, there was all this activism that said, oh, we cannot have a school that has this kind of racial imbalance.
We've got to fix the balance.
Now, here's the key point.
How do you raise the level of the so-called underrepresented groups Without lowering the level of the overrepresented groups.
And which group was most overrepresented?
Well, obviously it was the Asian Americans.
And so by and large, the school board put up a scheme.
Now they disguised it.
They pretended like we're not getting rid of merit.
We're just sort of redefining merit.
And the redefinition itself is really, really cunning.
Essentially, what they did is they added what's called experience factors.
So, they kind of lowered the merit requirements and they go, listen, we need to see what the life experience of the student applicant is.
But what does life experience mean?
Well, it turns out, here's what it means.
A, attendance at the middle school deemed historically underrepresented.
Read Black and Hispanic.
This is a code. Or B, eligibility for free and reduced-price meals.
Now, that's a socioeconomic criterion, but taken with the earlier one, essentially what it means is poor Blacks and Hispanics.
And three, status as an English-language learner.
So here there's a kind of nod to the Hispanic non-English speaking community.
And for status as a special education student, in other words, if you're special ed, you're obviously given a certain kind of special consideration.
So the effect of this, very clearly, as soon as it kicked into effect, was obviously to reduce the number of Asian Americans.
And so the Asian parents went crazy and they sued.
And the judge basically said, this practice has got to stop.
Why? Because this kind of racial discrimination is not allowed in America.
You have to treat students on their merits as individuals.
If you're going to, in a sense, adopt policies that are consciously aimed at discriminating against a racial group...
Then you have to have very good reason to do this.
The court applies what is called strict scrutiny, which is we're very skeptical that this is going to fly.
And in this case, of course, it doesn't fly.
Now, interestingly, when the decision came out, Ann Coulter...
Sarah sarcastically remarks, thank God it's still legal to discriminate against white students.
So she's implying that somehow the decision is like pro-Asian American, but leaves out the whites.
So now the one group that you can target, it's okay to discriminate, are the whites.
But no, if you actually read the decision, it's not that.
What the decision clearly says is that you cannot target and disadvantage in this way any group.
In other words, students are...
Individuals. They're applying as individuals.
They're competing against each other.
And what you need, you can have the kind of application standards you want, but you cannot devise them to do this kind of racial balancing.
We want to increase the number of this group, reduce the number of that group.
Basically, Judge Hilton goes, that's not allowed under the Constitution.
He's affirming the colorblind ideal.
He doesn't say that explicitly, but that's what he's after.
And so it's a very good sign, this victory, which, by the way, protects Asian American students.
It protects white students. By the way, it protects capable Hispanic and black students as well.
Why? Because any system based upon merit is going to benefit the meritorious.
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A January 6th protester, I'm very sorry to say, has taken his own life.
And I am furious about it, and I'm going to give you the details.
The guy's name is Matthew Perna, P-E-R-N-A. And you might think, well, this was a guy who somehow was involved in violent fracases with the police.
Not at all. Matthew Perna entered the Capitol through an open door.
He didn't break, touch, or steal anything.
He didn't harm anyone.
He stayed inside the velvet rope.
He took pictures.
Now for this, the Biden DOJ, Merrick Garland, has gone after this guy as if he is a member of ISIS. They had charges against him, the usual nonsense, parading in a public building.
And they claimed that he engaged in witness tampering.
And witness tampering, in this case, is nothing more than deleting posts from social media.
Witness tampering. And otherwise disorderly conduct.
Basically a big nothing.
But when you're dealing with the relentless arm of these prosecutors, and apparently just when the guy was like already breaking down under the stress of confinement, of charges, the DOJ goes, we're going to put more charges on you.
And these charges are nothing more than re-descriptions of what he already did.
I experienced this a little bit in my own case.
It's nothing more than, oh, Dinesh, yeah, you exceeded the campaign finance law.
Yeah, but you put your check in the mail, so that's mail fraud.
You took your money out of your bank account, so that's bank fraud.
That's three charges right there.
So this is the mechanism that they use to break your spirit.
And in this case, alas, they did.
And I want to read now from the statement put out by his family, because it's absolutely heartbreaking.
Matthew Lawrence Perna died on February 25, 2022, of a broken heart.
His community, which he loved, his country, and the justice system killed his spirit and his zest for life.
And then the line that really got me...
They say God never gives anyone more than they can handle.
That statement is not biblical, nor is it true.
Rest easy, Matt.
You are finally free. I mean, this is heartbreaking stuff.
And my point is, you know what?
It's not God who gave Matthew Perna an unbearable burden.
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You'll feel the difference. Guys, I am absolutely delighted to welcome to the podcast, well, the legend Dennis Prager.
I've enjoyed being on his show.
I've even guest-hosted his show over the years, but I'm thrilled to have him on mine.
Dennis is, of course, the radio commentator on Salem Media.
He's lectured all over the world.
He conducts symphony orchestras.
He's a best-selling author.
He's co-founder of Prager University, and he has a new book just out, The Rational Passover Haggadah.
I got that right, I think.
Dennis, welcome. Delighted to have you on the podcast.
I want to talk about your book, but I thought I'd start by asking for your take on...
You know, on our side of the aisle you've got a sort of isolationist camp.
It's none of our business.
We should stay out of there.
Of course, you've got the old neoconservative view that the United States needs to stand up.
This is a new version of the Cold War.
Russia is kind of beating the old Soviet drum in a new form.
How do you think about this Ukraine conflict?
I think of the world and I think about everything.
For some this is a joy and for others it's annoying.
I think of everything in moral terms, but I also think of everything in rational terms.
So morally we're seeing about as pure an act of evil as imaginable.
Ukraine did not threaten Russia, neither do Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Or Moldova.
I mean, these are not exactly threats to Russia, which is one-ninth of the world's land surface.
So this notion that, oh, it's because of potential NATO membership.
Do NATO nations attack Russia?
I mean, let's live on Earth.
Who has something to fear?
Poland from Russia or Russia from Poland?
On Earth, outside of academia, who has to fear from whom?
The reason that he invaded is that he wants to reconstitute the Russian Empire and or the Soviet Union.
He said that the greatest calamity of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union.
He's a former colonel in the KGB. These things are so obvious that this is when, Dinesh, I have said on my radio show for much of my 40 years, I get paid to say the obvious.
Well-paid, I might add.
Well-paid to say the obvious.
That's how I look at it.
All right, so that doesn't mean we can send in troops.
I truly do believe that this man might use nuclear weapons.
I think at this point, I did not think of this till now, I think he's a bit mad.
And apparently the isolation that he has lived in during the two years of COVID has exacerbated his mental issues.
And when you have an unstable man calling his nation to be on nuclear alert, that is scary stuff.
So we can't send in troops.
But we should be inundating them with javelins.
I mean, they should have as many anti-tank weapons as the Russians have tanks.
So, this notion, if we're, one final word, it's a long answer, forgive me.
This notion that if we're not attacked, it's none of our business, then was the Korean War wrong?
We weren't attacked by North Korea or China.
I mean, then... Then why does God give?
Forget God. I believe in God.
But forget that. Why did luck give America the greatest strength on earth?
To only be used to defend New York or San Francisco?
That's not my theory.
With regard to Putin, it looks like, as you say, he wasn't threatened.
So he had, in that sense, no reason to do this, except that maybe his reason was, look, we've got this bungling, mumbling Biden in the White House.
We've got the familiar Democrat that doesn't understand the world, doesn't understand the nature of aggression or power.
Can count on a kind of vacillating, confused response.
And so, Putin sees this as does Xi in China.
This is their time to move against Ukraine, to move against Taiwan, precisely because although we have the power, we don't at this stage and with this government know how to use it.
That's entirely accurate.
People say, well, look at all the nice things that Trump said about Putin.
The bottom line, and the only line that matters is, he didn't invade anybody under the Trump administration.
The last invasion was Crimea, and that was under Obama.
This one is under Biden.
Biden has demoralized our military, and the most important, the great villains of the West are the environmentalist fanatics.
Who made America, which was exporting oil to Europe, made America and Europe dependent on Russian oil.
Because these nuts, they are, they're all nuts.
These people say that because it's an existential threat to human existence, global warming, there is no price too high to pay.
If we have to sacrifice a whole nation, who cares?
All that matters is Fossil fuels.
That's all that matters to these people.
They're moral idiots.
And by the way, they're not real, because they're not even for nuclear power, which is carbon-free.
I mean, Dennis, this is a little bit of my worry.
I remember from one of the Churchill biographies that it was said of Hitler that when he met Chamberlain, he was struck by the fact that Chamberlain kept opening and shutting his umbrella.
And from Hitler's point of view, the umbrella symbolized British weakness.
This guy can't even take a little bit of rain.
And in effect, what Hitler said is, this is not the England of so Walter Raleigh.
So we've been putting on global parade a woke military that is concerned about climate change and declares domestic terrorism the greatest threat and puts cadets in high heels.
Isn't that what is feeding this appetite for global aggression, the belief that the normal John Wayne United States of America has changed?
And can be counted on not to effectively oppose this kind of aggression.
That's entirely right.
These people read our country.
They see the demoralization of our military.
They see the State Department in charge.
And, you know, it's the same State Department that said to, excuse me, that's the same State Department that said to President Trump, don't you dare move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The world leader said that.
Trump did what he believed was right for America.
End of issue.
That is not the case now.
What threat did the XL pipeline pose to the environment?
If anything, it was good for the environment, because otherwise oil is shipped By train.
And they have accidents.
The pipeline is far safer.
But anything that allows us to still use anything, even natural gas, the most dangerous fanatics of our time, the environmentalist fanatics about global warming, don't care.
I tell you, Dinesh, to see the world in the thrall of Greta Thunberg It's to see a world gone mad.
Dennis, let's take a break.
When we come back, I want to talk about the rational Passover Haggadah and your work on the Jewish scriptures.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
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I'm back with radio commentator and symphony conductor and best-selling writer and co-founder of Prager University and now author of The Rational Passover Haggadah, Dennis Prager.
Dennis, when you said hi to Debbie as we got the podcast going, you were telling me that...
Oh, no.
Leave it to me to ruin a great partnership.
Thank you, Dennis. That's true.
One of you is very happy about it.
I know biblical Hebrew very, very well.
In fact, when I quote the pre-prophet Hebrew, it's different from pre-prophet Hebrew.
When I quote pre-prophet Hebrew biblical verses, I do it first in Hebrew and then I translate it into English.
That's how I know it. So I've written two volumes of my five-volume Rational Bible, Genesis and Exodus.
Deuteronomy is coming out later this year.
In the meantime, I have written about the oldest holiday.
The Passover Seder is the oldest holiday in the world.
We know it's been observed for 3,000 years, and it is thanks to the Seder, which was probably, though, because it seems to suggest that in the New Testament, that that was probably the Last Supper of Jesus.
So this is...
The holiday of humanity, if you will.
So I decided, since a lot of Christians are having Passover Seders now, that I would explain the ancient text that is said.
It's called the Haggadah, which means reciting.
And so, again, why do I say rational?
Because I only use reason to explain issues.
I'll give one example of it.
I have four discussion after most of the text of the Haggadah.
Here's one. If God took the Jews out of Egypt, why didn't he take them out of Europe?
And I discuss, in other words, I think I deal with every real issue that confronts thinking people of faith or anti-faith.
This book is meant for the atheist as much as for the Christian or Jew.
So that's the essence of the rational Passover Haggadah.
And even if one doesn't have to read it, obviously, at Passover at any time.
Dennis, this is fascinating.
In a way, it seems to mirror what is known as Christian apologetics, an effort to sort of give an account of Christianity in a way that's accessible to people who don't accept the authority of the Bible or who don't share Christian belief and revelation.
Let me turn to the question that you raised, which is that you asked...
God was the protector of the Jews in ancient Israel, and yet the Jews have had a calamitous 20th century.
And you said, why?
Why did God seemingly withdraw that mantle of protection?
What's the answer to that question?
I have a lot of answers.
This is something you and I can do a whole broadcast on.
But in a nutshell...
God does not promise to intervene every time there is evil.
And by the way, if God did, let's say God did, let's say every time Jews were persecuted, by the way, Jews had a calamitous 20th century, 19th century, 18th century, 17th century, so tragically.
So then one could ask, and I would ask, What, God, you don't care about the Chinese under Mao, the Russians under Stalin, the Ukrainians under Stalin, the Cambodians under Pol Pot?
I mean, and it's endless.
The Armenians, you don't care about them?
So, let's say God did intervene every time the Jews were persecuted.
This would be a very ethnocentric God.
I would have trouble with such a God, and I'm a believing Jew.
But there is no claim that God will never let Jews or anyone else not be hurt.
God gives freedom of will to the human race.
The only choice is robots.
So I ask people who ask, how does God allow evil?
Okay, let's say he didn't.
Which, by the way, would mean he wouldn't allow one murder, one rape, one beating.
He would not allow any of that.
Then we would be robots.
The Garden of Eden story says humans prefer freedom with suffering to robotic life.
That's one of my reads of the Garden of Eden story.
By the way, as regards you and Debbie, so here's the verse.
It is not good for man to be alone.
I will make him ezer kenegdo.
That's the Hebrew. Ezer is, till modern day, means help or helper.
Okay? God is, by the way, God has called an ezer.
God has called a helper. But kenegdo is the awesome statement, and it means as equal to him.
That is, even to this day, keneged in Hebrew means equal to.
So the real translation is, I will make him a helper who is his equal.
And it's a phenomenal double thing.
Yes, you are the man's helper, but you're his equal.
Wow. Well, I guess if there's any consolation, honey, you don't get to boss me around.
We're equals. No, no, that's correct.
No, no, no. You're right.
Oh. Debbie goes, oh.
Are you trying to say something?
Now, Dennis, let's come back to what you were saying about, you know, you made a remarkable statement.
You said you do not see.
The Jewish God as an ethnocentric God.
But that is actually how many people read the Old Testament, particularly if it's taken in a certain literal way.
God is on the side of the Jews.
The Jews are supposed to be loyal to God.
The enemies of the Jews are the enemies of God.
So you get a little bit of a sketch, I think, of a God who appears to be, in that sense, tribal.
But is that a misunderstanding?
Yes, it is. It's a tremendous misunderstanding from the text itself.
That's why I have no shame in begging people to read the Rational Bible series, because I go through exactly those issues.
And look, I want to make it clear, as you would well know, nobody writes Bible commentaries to get rich, okay?
Let's put that on the table.
This is a work of love and passion and hopefully my legacy.
God, first of all, says, I did not choose you because you're better than any other people.
I chose you because you're smaller than every other people.
Here's the key about God being ethnocentric.
There is no sacred literature of any group in history that is as critical of that group as the Hebrew Bible is of Hebrews.
The Jews don't come out looking good in their own Bible.
That's not ethnocentrism.
There isn't a shred of notion of Jewish supremacy.
Not a shred. The Jews are chosen.
That doesn't mean anything.
I could choose somebody to get me the newspaper every day, to bring me a coffee.
You're chosen for a mission.
The tragedy of Jewish life of the last 2,000 years, and especially in modernity where we could do this, is that Jews do not take the mission.
They don't even know their mission.
The mission is to bring the world to the God of the Bible and to his moral demands like the Ten Commandments.
I've devoted my life to that, bringing the Ten Commandments to the world.
When I went to speak in Romania and they had a Romanian translation of my book on the Ten Commandments, Dinesh, it was the greatest little gift of my life.
So there's no ethnocentrism.
One final proof.
It wasn't only the Jews who got out of Egypt.
It says a multitude of peoples accompanied the Jews.
Dennis, this is fascinating and wonderful.
Folks, check out Dennis' work, particularly his work on the Ten Commandments and the Rational Bible, and also the latest, the Rational Passover Haggadah.
Dennis, thanks so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. It's an honor to be with you, Dinesh.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sent the markets into an uproar.
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I'm thinking these days, obviously, about Ukraine.
And, of course, my mind flashes back to Eastern Europe under the captivity of the Soviet Union.
And it's a very interesting essay by a guy named Father Irenaeus Williams.
Interesting name. And he's talking, he's recalling the last days of communism in Poland and in Eastern Europe.
And just to set the stage, he talks about how in Poland, the Jaruzelski government fell, and an electrician named Lech Walesa, who had led the uprising...
Became the first democratically elected leader in Poland.
And that was the first Soviet domino, if you will.
And pretty soon it was Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and so on.
And the Czech writer and dissident, who actually became later the prime minister, I met him once many years ago in Washington, D.C. This is Vaclav Václav Havel.
And Havel had talked about a very interesting concept, and that's what I want to talk about and introduce here.
It's the concept of the parallel society.
Basically, what Havel said is that when the regime is corrupted, what you have to do, in fact, you don't have much of an alternative, at least in the short term, is to create a parallel society that's outside the regime, that doesn't take orders from the regime, that functions, if you will, Autonomously, apart from the regime.
Now, it influences the society in general.
It has to interact in some ways with the regime, but it maintains a distinct identity.
Now, that identity can be national.
We are Czechs.
It can be ethnic.
It can be religious.
We are Christians or we are Catholics.
And think back about how the early Christians maintained exactly this kind of parallel society inside of the Roman Empire.
And so you had a Roman Empire that was pagan, that worshipped, if you will, the Roman gods, mainly essentially taken over from the Greek gods.
But inside of that, you had a rapidly expanding parallel society of Christians.
And that parallel society didn't really end until Constantine, the Roman Emperor, converted in 325 AD, and then the Roman Empire itself became Christian.
But before that, this notion of a parallel society.
And the reason this fellow named Williams is introducing this now is he's basically saying that we in the West, we in America, we in Europe are going through a peculiar time that we have to recognize the gravity of it.
And we have to recognize that this concept of a parallel society might be relevant to us in exactly the same way that it's been relevant to dissidents in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia and so on and Russia.
So, what does this parallel society mean?
As I say, you can understand it in religious terms.
We maintain a religious life and a religious identity that is untouched by all the corruption and just debasement, debauchery, moral inversion, what's good is bad, what's bad is good, that we see so much in our culture that's affirmed, by the way, by the Biden left.
In this country.
So we create a religiously based parallel society or we create a kind of morally and culturally and even politically based parallel society.
And I've talked about this earlier on the podcast.
Our own parallel institutions.
They have schools. We create our schools.
They have movies. We make our own movies.
They have comedians. We ordain and develop and cultivate our own comedy.
So essentially what we're doing here is we refuse to live in their America.
That's what they want us to do.
They want us ultimately to pay obeisance, to sort of bow down, to submit to their...
If you will, false gods.
And creating a parallel society represents our refusal to do that.
But it's not purely negative.
It's not just we will not do this.
It's we will not do this, and we will do this instead.
And we won't go here, but we're going to build our own road over here.
And so we're going to create our own communities and raise our children our own way and entertain ourselves in a manner and with values different than those If you will, of the ruling junta, the ruling regime, we too are in the remarkable position of having to create right here in America our own parallel society.
I'm continuing my discussion of Francesca in Canto V of Dante's Inferno.
And the interesting thing about Dante beginning in this outer circle of lust is that he is pointing to something very universal.
Now, this is kind of the beauty of Dante.
He's very particular.
He's talking about an Italian woman in Florence in the 13th century.
The poem, remember, is set in the year 1300.
And yet the theme is universal.
Dante moves between the particular and the universal beautifully.
You may say, well, what's the relationship?
What is the relationship between all this particularity, this scheming guy over here and that woman over there?
How does the particular relate to the universal?
Well, we see the universal in the particular.
That's kind of Dante's point.
He doesn't give you theoretical generalizations.
He shows you a person.
And in her, you begin to see this bigger question of what is really the sin here?
And what is the punishment?
And how does the punishment, in a sense, fit the crime?
Now, here's Francesca.
We were going line by line, and I'm not going to do every line, but I'm going to do a bunch of them, because I think a close reading illuminates this big question that Dante is addressing about sin.
So here is Francesca continuing her conversation.
Notice that she speaks to Dante.
He doesn't speak to her. She addresses him, And here we go on.
She goes, says this remarkable thing.
If we could claim as friend the king of kings, we would beseech him that he grant you peace.
Now, notice the kind of courtesy and grace with which Francesca is speaking.
You know, if we, kind of if we weren't speaking terms with God.
Now, notice here how, for Francesca, it's almost as if style is all that matters, because...
She doesn't just have like a little bit of a falling out with God, like, hey, you know, we're not talking right now, but things are going to be okay.
She's an eternal separation from God.
But she's saying to Dante, it's kind of too bad, like, we're not on better terms with God.
We would get him to grant you peace if we could talk to him, but he's not going to listen to us, is he?
And then she goes on to talk about her transgression, which from her point of view was not really a transgression at all, but in fact something imposed on her from the outside.
Let's see. This is Francesca Love.
Quick to kindle in the gentle heart, seized this one for the beauty of my body.
Who's this one? Well, that's Paolo.
That's the guy behind her.
Paolo's behind her. He's kind of twisted and buffeted in a kind of expression of agony, but he doesn't speak.
And Francesca doesn't use his name either.
She goes, this guy right here, he was after my body.
But why? Because love kind of kindled that in him.
And then she goes on to explain and kind of excuse both of them.
Love that excuses no one from loving.
Seized me so strongly with delight in him that, as you can see, he never leaves my side.
Love led us straight to sudden death together.
Now, notice that this is, well, in English literature, we call it a personification.
Love is kind of not a feeling, but is made into kind of a person.
So, love, with a capital L, and notice the repetition, love.
Love made us do this.
Love made us do that. And so, what Francesca is really saying is that I was taken captive, right?
By this external being, love.
Almost like Cupid's arrow got me.
Got him too. And so, here we are, and that's what took us to sudden death.
And then she goes on to say a very interesting twist of phrase.
She goes, Kaina, I'll talk about that in a minute, awaits the one who quenched our lives.
Now, what's Kaina? Well, that's actually one of the deeper circles of hell.
So, what Francesca is saying is the guy who killed us, actually her husband, who caught her and Paolo kind of in the act, he belongs in the deep circle of hell.
So, let's think about this for a second.
Basically, Francesca's saying is, I'm not to blame.
Why? Because I committed a crime of passion.
Passion, love seized me.
It made me do this.
It made Paolo do this.
But as for my husband, who kind of stumbled in on us and was like, whoa, and then reacted by killing us both, it wasn't a crime of passion for him.
No, no, no. He is a treacherous guy.
He deserves everything that's coming to him.
We expect to see him not just here in hell, in the outer circles, but in one of the deepest circles of hell.
So he's going to be held accountable for his actions, but not me, and not my partner here, Paolo.
Now, we cannot at this point attach any real significance to what Francesca is saying.
Do we know whether her husband is in hell?
No. We don't hear anything more about him.
Dante never touches on the subject at all.
But I think once we know the schema of...
Of hell and of purgatory and of heaven, we have to realize that people who have done far worse things than Francesca's husband can be found, some of them can be found in hell, some of them can be found in purgatory, and others can be found in heaven.
Let's remember, it all depends on whether you repent.
And the question unanswered and unknown is, did in fact Francesca's husband repent?
Now, what's really interesting is when Dante hears this, his reaction is remarkable.
He says, I sighed, and this is what Dante says, Alas, all those sweet thoughts, and oh, how much desiring brought these two down into this agony!
So Dante is on Francesca's side here.
And it's very important to realize that in taking Francesca's side, Dante is against God.
Why? Because God put Francesca here.
And the big question throughout Inferno is, do all these sinners, some of whom are very crafty, very personable, we would say, very good at explaining themselves?
Did God make a mistake?
Was God unjust in sticking them here in hell to suffer these torments?
And the answer of the Inferno is always no.
God is always right.
These are people who are covering up their misdeeds.
But here is Dante falling for it.
Falling for it in the way that, by the way, critics over the centuries have fallen.
I literally have read essays on things like, oh, Paolo and Francesca conquered hell.
Yes, they're in hell, but they're together.
They have overcome, if you will, the fires of hell.
And this is all nonsense.
This is all completely alien to what Dante is getting at.
The reason that Paolo is writhing in a kind of torment is...
He doesn't want to be there.
Neither does Francesca, as we'll see tomorrow.
Francesca is not happy about being in here.
She's actually not happy about having Paolo by her side.
Why? Because the two of them standing there naked, it's a matter for her of disgrace, of shame, and of torment.
And what she's trying to give Dante is an account of how sort of It's so unfortunate that we've ended up here.
We've ended up like this.
And at this point, Dante is a complete sucker.
And what he says, in effect, and we'll get to this tomorrow, is he tells Francesca, tell me more.
And what does Francesca do?
Come up with an even more elaborate, and I would say diabolical explanation of what made her do it.
And we'll conclude tomorrow with how Francesca continues her remarkable rationalization in Canto V. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify, or watch on Rumble,
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