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March 4, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:19
DRILL, BABY, DRILL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep283
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Want to hit Putin and Russia where it hurts?
I'll tell you the solution, and it's called drill, baby, drill.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer thinks that the West is partly, well, largely to blame for the Ukraine crisis.
We'll explore his thesis.
I'm going to reveal how Biden is on his way to another, another foreign policy disaster, a new nuclear deal with Iran.
And finally, I'll use the example of Francesca and Dante's Inferno Canto 5 to show how sin harms most of all the sinner.
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.
♪♪ American politics, at least as it's coming from the Biden administration, is entering a new phase of what could only be called profound inanity.
Let me just quote Kamala Harris.
Let's remember, this is the vice president of the United States.
This is the woman kind of tasked with Ukraine.
I believe she's heading over there sometime very soon.
And here's her latest statement, quote, Ukraine is a country in Europe.
It exists next to another country called Russia.
Russia is a powerful country.
Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine.
So basically, that's wrong.
Now, what is this, the first grade?
I think in the first grade I learned that every time I end a sentence, I went to school.
School is where I study.
Study is good for students.
Students are the ones who attend school.
And this is what we're dealing with here.
This is a kind of free fall of American foreign policy and the thinking that attends American foreign policy.
It's not just Kamala Harris.
All the way through you have pundits, you have social media types and you listen to the kind of symbolic rubbish that they're talking about that has no potential chance of affecting Putin in any meaningful way.
The New York Met, the Metropolitan Opera, has decided that Anna Netrebko, apparently one of the greatest singers in Met history, shall be banned from singing at the Met.
Well, basically because she's Russian.
That's the reason.
Oh yeah, take that, Putin!
Apparently, I read somewhere that there was a university that's decided that it's going to cancel its course on Dostoyevsky.
I mean, talk about an intellectual crime, crime and punishment, remember?
Foolishness. What does Dostoevsky have to do with this?
Is he responsible for the invasion of Ukraine?
Dostoevsky, who lived in the 19th century, was not even part of any of this?
So, the Biden administration here and the left are not serious about the Ukraine.
And what's clear proof of this is this.
The main source of Russia's power, its economic power that enables its military power, is the fact that Russia has a lot of oil.
Russia doesn't make a whole lot of stuff that people want to buy.
I mean, I guess they were the inventors of the, well, what, the Russian salad?
And if there are any Russian designers, I'm having trouble right now thinking about their names.
I don't believe there are Russian automobiles that are in demand all around the world.
So, Russia is basically a big, you know, Canada.
But it's a big Canada with nuclear weapons, and it's a big Canada that has money because it comes because it has oil.
And the price of oil, of course, thanks to Biden, has been pushing upward.
That's obviously good for Putin.
600,000 barrels of Russian oil per day.
So this is a giant fund of cash.
You can do the math.
It's a billion dollars in that range that we're forking over to the Russians.
We're actually funding, in a way, the Ukraine war.
And so... You want to put the squeeze on Putin?
Well, don't make irresponsible suggestions like Lindsey Graham.
Hey, is there a Brutus around there somewhere in Russia?
Is there a General Stauffenberg, the guy who plotted the military plot on Hitler's life?
Is there someone like that who can take this guy?
Instead of making this kind of idle suggestion, we have a simple solution.
Stop buying Russian oil.
And that's something we happen to be...
Some people can't do it.
Why? Because they need oil.
Their economies function on oil.
Our economy functions on oil.
But we have oil. And we have a lot of natural gas.
And we're blocking ourselves from drilling it.
Think about the stupidity of that.
By the way, the Europeans also import a whole bunch of oil.
This is why they wanted to do the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
But the only reason the Europeans are buying this oil, you may say, well, Europe doesn't have any oil.
Europe does have oil. Europe, like America, has blocked its own oil production.
Why? Because of the climate, you see.
Because of the rising oceans, the coughing penguins, the fact that the temperature of the Earth has gone up, what, one degree in the past 100 years?
So, we are captive to a certain kind of woke madness.
And it's having real consequences.
It's disabling our foreign policy.
It's preventing us from doing the sensible, effective thing against Putin.
And it is, worst of all, bankrolling Putin's war and is in that sense indirectly responsible for a huge toll in Ukrainian lives.
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There's a certain grim realism about war which you can't avert your eyes from.
There it is. There are the buildings falling down.
There are the bombs going off.
There's the blood on the street.
Most recently, the Russians strike at a nuclear reactor.
Fortunately, this isn't producing nuclear fallout or nuclear contamination.
But it shows you Putin.
Putin's a guy who knows what he wants.
He doesn't care about who he has to pulverize in order to get it.
He's willing to pay the cost.
And this is not a guy who cares about his worldwide reputation, or here's a guy who you can somehow dissuade.
We're gonna take him off of Twitter.
We're gonna close down all the Russian accounts on Twitter.
None of this is really going to matter.
This is the guy who wants the Ukraine.
Now, the real question is, is why?
What's in it for Putin?
Why is it so important for this big grizzly bear Russia to crush this little puppy dog, let's say, called the Ukraine?
Well, The political scientist John Mearsheimer has a theory about this, and I want to go into this theory in a little bit of depth.
And you'll notice that in doing it, I'm doing something that is really not common in our debate today.
We don't have really much of a debate at all over foreign policy.
I remember from the Reagan years, and Debbie will remember too, competing theories about trying to understand the Soviet Union, And a kind of vigorous debate, left and right, but also debate within the right about what type of sort of anti-communism, what strategies are most effective.
We're getting very little of this.
What we get is a sort of party line from the kind of neoliberal left.
We get a few exaggerated assertions, oh, Putin is the new Hitler, things like that.
But in terms of actual understanding of Ukraine and Putin, his motives, what he's after...
Very little of that. Well, this is where John Mearsheimer comes in, and this is one of the leading students of the region and one of the leading thinkers of the so-called realist school.
So the realist school is based on the idea that, look, with a lot of countries, there are some countries with which ideology is paramount.
And so, for example, you might have China, where they're teaching Marxism, Leninism in the schools, and ideology is important to them.
And also not to mention a justification for their centralized control.
But there are other countries like Russia, which are kind of gangster regimes.
Now, Russia in the old Soviet days was an ideological state.
But under Putin, it's not.
It's basically we're a big country.
We've lost a lot of our power.
We're trying to get it back.
And we don't like pesky little dogs, if you will, barking at us in our grizzly bear's lair.
That's basically the realist view.
Now... What Mearsheimer says is that Russia could live with a democratic Ukraine.
They could care less whether Ukraine is democratic or not.
What they do care about is whether Ukraine is hostile to Russia or not.
That's what they care about. And according to Mearsheimer, the West has now for 25 years been feeding the Ukraine with what you can call dangerous illusions.
So what's the dangerous illusion?
The dangerous illusion that kind of settled itself into sort of liberal, neoliberal elite circles after the end of the Cold War was this.
We don't need to think of the world in terms of real politic anymore.
This is not a case of power politics being played out the way it did in the 18th or the 19th century.
That was then, but this is now.
We're now above all that.
We're integrating the whole world into a kind of neoliberal order.
It's going to be based upon democratic societies.
It's going to be based upon trade.
It's going to be based upon this idea that we are all inhabitants of the same interconnected planet It's basically kind of your World Economic Forum pablum.
And the idea is that it's one thing to go to Davos and ski, and at the end of the day, to mouth these kinds of slogans.
It's a whole other thing to go to a little country, which is sitting right next to a really big and dangerous country that is nervously looking over its shoulder, and tell Ukraine, hey, Ukraine, listen, you may be a little dog, but you know, you see that grizzly bear over there?
Go bite him! You know, go bite him.
Go snap at his ankles.
Don't worry. You're part of the West, you see?
You're part of this new democratic neoliberal order.
You're the future. Putin's the past.
So go get him. Go get him.
We're behind you. And then Ukraine goes, okay, let's go get him.
Let's go get him. And then the grizzly bear turns around.
Whop! You know, and then suddenly the little dog turns around and goes, okay, where are all my friends?
Where are all my allies? I thought all these people were going to come rescue me.
Turns out, No one's going to come rescue you.
No one is going to send troops.
Nobody wants to fight on your behalf.
You're on your own, pal.
So this is Mearsheimer's point.
It is grossly irresponsible to go to a little country sitting on the edge of a big country.
I mean, you can kind of understand this by flipping it around.
Imagine, let's say right now, if China were to say, listen, we're going to make it our policy to cultivate very close ties with Mexico and Canada so that we can basically egg them on to confront the United States.
Think of how we would feel.
Think how we would respond.
We would be, in that sense, the grizzly.
We'd be like, wait a minute, Canada?
Really? The Canadians? Well, who's putting them up to it?
The Canadians themselves are not capable of this.
Oh, it's the Chinese. Really?
So, the point is that big powers and strong powers get really nervous when, in their very backyard, they're being provoked by external forces.
Now, the United States, I concede, is stronger than Russia.
Meersheimer, I think, knows this too.
But that applies to a straight-out confrontation, you may say, on neutral ground between the two parties.
It's kind of like, yeah, I'm an MMA fighter, you're an MMA fighter, let's get in the ring.
But what if we're not in the ring?
What if we're talking about Russia's own backyard?
What if we're talking about fighting not in the middle, but over there?
Well, it's much more difficult for us to conduct hostilities.
You know, here is Adam Kinzinger.
Let's establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Really? How? How are we going to do that?
Are we going to send thousands of bombers over there and shoot on Russian MiGs?
Shoot down Russian planes over the Ukraine.
The irresponsibility of this, the risk of starting World War III over a country we're not willing to send a single troop, a single man over there to fight for, just shows, in a sense, the kind of recklessness.
Unrealism, the illusory nature of neoliberal rhetoric.
And this, I think, is Mearsheimer's point.
Now, I don't agree with everything in Mearsheimer's analysis.
He has an article, this actually came out years ago, and predicted all this, where he says, quote, why the Ukraine crisis is the West's Now, I wouldn't say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is our fault.
It's Putin's fault. He did it.
He's responsible for it.
But Mearshaim's more subtle point is, we sort of egged him on.
We egged on the Ukrainians, and in that sense, we pushed this conflict forward.
We made it more likely. By telling the Ukraine what?
Listen, you can be part of the EU. Listen, you can be part of NATO. We're this fighting alliance where we all hang together.
We go get the Russians.
And the Ukrainians are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it, let's do it.
And now it is they, more than we, who have to face the firestorm.
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I want to give you guys at least a brief movie update.
And Debbie was like, Dinesh, movie update?
Do you know the topic of your movie?
I'm like, I know the topic of my movie.
She's like, do you know the taboo surrounding the topic of your movie?
I'm like, yes, I'm aware of this.
She's like, you're going to have to speak in riddles.
And so I'm going to speak in riddles.
Now, in doing so, by the way, I feel a little bit like some guy in, like, the old Soviet Union.
Because in the old Soviet Union, not only could you not say certain things due to censorship, but there were kind of like spies all around you.
So you couldn't even go to a restaurant and speak freely.
And in certain extreme circumstances, you know, your wife or your kid could tell on you.
So you had to speak really in riddles.
in fact, as a Russian writer who would write about kind of the difficulties of life in the Soviet era, and he had to speak in riddles.
So his entire body of work over a lifetime.
In fact, in the end, he kind of got into trouble and they sort of busted him and he died kind of a broken man.
But during his life, he was very successful because he was able to talk about things like the housing shortage and so on, but do it in this kind of indirect way.
And if the authorities ever jumped in on him, he'd say things like, well, oh, no, no, no, that guy.
Oh, no, no.
I was actually making fun of that guy.
See, everyone's laughing at that guy.
You know, so you have to play these little stupid games.
And so, unfortunately, that fruit of repression, we're now seeing in its own peculiar form in this country.
It's really very creepy, but there it is.
Well, with regard to the movie, 2,000 Meals, by the way, if you haven't gone to the website, please do.
You can watch the teaser trailer.
If you haven't, do sign up for email updates.
And again, why? So I have kind of a direct line to you.
I can give you the upshot.
Here's how you watch the movie.
It's coming out here. This is how you get it.
And no one can block that line of communication.
We've been shooting all the way through the last few months.
It's going great. And we're now moving into this sort of editing stage.
There's a kind of production stage of the movie, the sort of cinematographer's stage.
And then we go into, well, you need music, you need to close out the score, you need to arrange distribution.
The distribution here is a little tricky because theaters aren't really back to normal.
So I like and I have in the past pretty much put all the movies in the theater.
And then move them to home box office, you know, direct purchase and streaming and so on.
But in this case, I think I'll have a modified kind of release plan.
We'll probably do a high-profile premiere.
And then we'll do probably...
I want to make it easy for people to go to the theater, those who want to go.
And so we'll have a theatrical release, but limited.
And then we'll pivot immediately.
To, essentially, websites and platforms where you can go, click, pay $10 or whatever, and order the movie.
We're setting it up so the movie can't be blocked because that's going to be the left's first, you know, they don't want to debate you.
They'd rather block you. So we've got to create a movie that can't be stopped.
And I think we'll have that figured out very soon.
The date we're looking at, The early part of May.
And we're on a fast track to May.
That's actually a very accelerated pace to get a movie done, but of course we want this to come out sooner rather than later.
Debbie and I were down in Florida.
We actually saw former President Trump.
And of course, one of his first questions was, guys, how's your movie?
When's your movie coming out? He's very excited.
He obviously wants to know when it's out and what's in it and what's it going to say.
And so we give him a little scoop on where we are.
Same scoop I'm giving you right now.
So... This is, in some ways, I think the most important project I've worked on.
And as you can tell, there's a lot of electricity surrounding this whole issue.
I haven't really felt it quite this much.
It even surpasses Hillary's America.
It kind of reminds me of the electricity surrounding my first movie on Obama, except this one may even be bigger than that.
So keep an eye out for it.
And if you haven't been to...
Yeah, Debbie's like, remind him of the website again, for sure.
2000meals.com. Make sure to sign up for the email list.
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It may be that Joe Biden is not satisfied with his current level of incompetence.
What I mean is that you're probably thinking, what?
I mean, this guy's already Afghanistan, people falling out of planes, now Ukraine.
I mean, isn't he the Olympian incompetent of our presidencies?
But I think Biden's sitting back and thinking to himself, no, you know, I'm close.
But what about Carter?
Wasn't he more incompetent than me?
I mean, hostage crisis.
This guy was shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
He's like, Carter's probably a little ahead of me.
I probably need to do one more big one, at least in my first year, so I can be the clear winner of the nincompoopery award.
For presidents. I think Biden's going for that.
And the reason I see this is at a time when the guy's flailing on every—by the way, not just in foreign policy.
He's flailing on the domestic front.
He's flailing on the cultural front.
And, you know, and I think here of, like, Joe Rogan's phrase, I mean, here's a guy with, like, he's getting ready for a long hike, and he's just got a battery that's really flickering.
And we're talking here, of course, about the neurons in Biden's brain.
So you've got a guy who's faltering on every front, but he's like, I got to open up a new front.
What's the new front? The Iran deal.
And apparently Biden's idea here, and the Biden administration's idea, is let's sneak this by.
Let's get this through without having to get it approved by Congress.
Now you might think, well, I've got a Democratic Congress, even though the Senate's really close.
We can break the tie with Kamala Harris.
But Biden's not confident in that.
He doesn't want to go that route.
And Republicans already know, so they've warned them.
They're like, listen, don't try to do this Iran deal without getting Senate approval.
This is a... This is a treaty with another country, another country.
There might be other countries involved in the deal, and it needs Senate ratification.
But Biden's like, no, it's not.
It doesn't need Senate ratification.
Why not? Well, according to the Biden guys, it doesn't need ratification because it's a redo of the old deal.
So even though the old deal was canceled by Trump, even though Trump imposed...
Imposed sanctions on Iran.
Biden wants to, by the way, lift those sanctions.
Biden might even be thinking of, you know, if we don't buy oil from Russia, and that's a possibility, maybe we'll go buy it from Iran.
Think about it. Instead of buying it from one bad guy, you go to another bad guy, who's, by the way, kind of in league with the other bad guy, when you have oil yourself that you could do on your own.
So, this is the level of foolishness we're dealing with.
Now, with regard to this Iran deal, a very bad deal, It's a bad deal because it pretends to stop the Iranians from moving forward with nuclear technology.
The Iranians, of course, have taken the kind of pious approach that, you Even though building a nuclear weapon would make us numero uno in the Middle East, even though we'd be a bigger cheese than places like Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, they have Mecca and Medina, but guess what?
We have a nuclear weapon. Yeah, Cairo, Egypt's a bigger country.
It's got a bigger middle class.
In many ways, it's defined the Middle East, but so what?
We have a nuclear weapon. Do they?
No. So, Iran has every incentive.
Again, back to realism, back to global power politics.
How do you get to be...
How do you get other countries in the world to respect you?
How do you get them to call you sir?
Answer, you have a nuclear weapon.
So the Iranians know this.
Everybody knows this.
And so the Iran deal, which was intended to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon, was nothing more than lifting sanctions, releasing Iranian funds that have been frozen in the United States.
So what you end up doing is subsidizing their nuclear weapons, subsidizing their ability to go ahead and build a weapon.
And not only then do they have the weapon, But they also have the respectability of, oh yeah, we're a respectable country in the world.
Look, we've got this Iran deal where everybody else is signing on the dotted line, right here's our signature.
So Biden is again taking a rogue regime, a regime that is, by the way, the kind of canker sore of the Middle East.
Much of the problems in the Middle East would go away if in some way this kind of Khomeini regime that's now been in place for 50 years were to dissolve and go away.
And so our Iran policy should be based on long-term, I would call it, rollback.
Figure out a way that we can knock out This regime in Iran.
I'm not talking about military force.
There are lots of people in Iran who don't like the Iranian regime.
And so we're back again to this kind of old Reagan doctrine idea, which is, listen, let's find the people who in these countries want freedom.
And let's figure out ways that we can help them.
By the way, this is also a model that applies to Ukraine.
It's a model we could have used from the very beginning, which is to tell the Ukrainians that, yeah, we support them, but it is their country.
They're going to have to fight for it.
They fight. We help.
We're trying to help now, but we're trying to help at a late stage when the Russian convoy of tanks is already at their doorstep.
And with regard to Iran, we can only hope that we don't engage in foolish actions one on top of another that will ultimately result in conflict there as well.
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Feel the difference. The Chinese government evidently thinks that it's very dangerous to be Chinese and living in America today.
Why do I say this? Because the Chinese embassy in the United States has apparently issued a warning to Chinese citizens to, quote, pay close attention to their personal safety because the situation has become, quote, increasingly worrying.
You may think, what are they talking about?
What's worrying?
Well, it turns out the Chinese embassy says that there's a lot of hatred against China in the United States, and therefore Asians, Chinese in particular, but Asian Americans generally are facing, quote, malicious attacks.
And this is compromising the safety of Chinese nationals.
And they mention international students and employees of Chinese-funded institutions.
Now... Here I think I have a couple of things to say about it.
One of them is that the Chinese seem to be confusing the Communist Party and the Chinese government on the one hand with Chinese people on the other.
It's the government that we have a problem with.
It's a government that's imposing centralized control.
Now, they're imposing centralized control on the Chinese people over there.
And obviously, Chinese people over here don't have anything, in most cases, directly to do with the government.
It's one thing if they're here on some diplomatic mission or if they're a researcher in some American university and they're funneling secrets back to China and not disclosing their affiliations with China on their research grant forms.
I've talked about this on the podcast.
When that's going on, yeah, I think we'd have a problem.
Americans would have a problem with that, and rightly so.
And some of that behavior is illegal in this country.
Now, is there anti-Asian sentiment in this country?
Turns out the answer to that question is yes, there is.
But the interesting question is, where is it coming from and why?
There has been a kind of disturbing spate of anti-Asian violence, a number of cases, and many of these videos have appeared on social media.
And you've got to look a little bit closely to see, first of all, This is not some upsurge of generic, you know, American anger at the Chinese.
It's not even the kind of old culprit white supremacy.
This is, you know, an assertion of white supremacy.
No. In almost every case, not all cases, but the majority, you find that the assailants are black.
And so this is a kind of inter-ethnic problem, an inter-ethnic problem, by the way, that goes back at least to the 1980s, if not earlier.
If you've seen movies like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing or Barbershop, you get a feeling of what happens in the inner city.
And what's happening in the inner city is you've got a lot of inner city blacks, and they're there, and they've been there, and it's intergenerational poverty over there.
And then along come these Asians, and they often, they have to move into initially the poorest neighborhoods.
But you know what? In a few years, at the most, one generation, boom, their children do well in school.
They move out. They're living in the suburbs.
Now they have a nice house. Now they have two cars.
And a lot of times, the inner-city blacks are like, What the heck?
Who are these guys? How are they doing this?
They think that, well, are they getting foreign money?
Is the U.S. government helping them in some way?
So what you have is you've got these inter-ethnic tensions that are playing out on the New York subway and other places.
And then, of course, you've got systematic anti-Asian discriminatory policies.
And this is going on in American universities.
Now, it's not going on because...
It's going on really because...
The Asian Americans are overrepresented.
I talked, I think, yesterday or the day before about Thomas Jefferson School in Virginia, where Asian Americans, it's a merit system.
It's a school that emphasizes science and technology.
Asians are 70% of the student body, based on merit.
Whites, about 20%.
Hispanics, like, 3%.
Blacks, almost zero.
1.5% or lower.
And so the racial balancers on the left who are embarrassed by this result, they're embarrassed, by the way, not because the whites or the Asians are discriminating against anybody, but because they are outperforming everybody, particularly the Asians.
And so the anti-Asian sentiment here arises out of a desire to conceal the humiliation that is being inflicted on all these other groups that aren't doing as well.
It's kind of like the opposite of what's happening in the NFL, right?
Blacks are what? 12-13% of the population?
What are they, 80-90% of all basketball players and probably 70% of all football players.
So they're making the rest of us look bad.
I mean, I look at these games and I go, where's the Asian Indian on the court?
I never see one. And why?
Again, it's not because Asian Indians are being discriminated against.
It's because Asian Indians don't really know how to put the ball in the basket.
So that's the problem right there.
So the Chinese, in a sense, with this communique, I don't know if they don't understand America, but if they're saying that there is some anti-Asian sentiment, it's coming from the left.
And it's really based upon the fact that the Asian Americans are, in fact, a successful group.
And in being a successful group, not only are they making the other groups, in a sense, look bad and feel bad, They're discrediting this idea that you have to be white and preferably male and heterosexual to succeed in America, that people of color are always at the bottom, they're victims of discrimination, And the Asians are saying if the discrimination is so strong, how come we're doing so well?
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I want to continue and conclude today my discussion of the very famous episode between Dante the Pilgrim and Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of the Divine Comedy.
This is the infernal circle of lust.
And because I've got a few things to say, I'm going to take a couple of segments to do it.
And we see here in this canto, just in these few lines, the kind of inexhaustible depth of Dante.
And what I mean by this is that Dante will make allusions to things and he'll just refer to them.
He'll just mention it kind of almost casually and you have to sort of dig then.
He counts on the reader to contribute.
You've got to work. But he rewards your work.
He rewards your work because when you dig and you go, who is that guy?
Why is he making this comparison?
And then you go, oh, wow, this is what he may be getting at.
And then you look back at the poem and you go, wow, Dante's already been there.
He's already thought of that.
I thought I had a blazing insight, but Dante is already three steps ahead of me.
And so it really enriches your reading in the poem.
And it goes a long way to showing that many of these guys who lived, you know, in Dante's case, we're talking about the late Thirteen The late 13th century, in other words, the high 1200s, and then the early 14th century, these were guys who had profound insight into human nature and dealt with issues extremely relevant to our own day.
Now, we're talking about the sort of adulterous Francesca and her conversation with Dante, and when we left off...
Francesca was blaming her actions on love.
She personifies love and she says in three continuous sentences, you know, love quick to kindle in the gentle heart, love that excuses no one from loving, and then love led us straight to sudden death together.
So essentially, love is responsible.
Love is to blame. Love made us do it.
And by the way, in saying this, we can kind of understand what Francesca is saying.
Why? Because even our own phrases surrounding love imply this kind of involuntary aspect, right?
I fell in love.
What does that mean? It's kind of like, I wasn't in control.
I fell in love.
It wasn't my choice. It's something that happened to me.
In a sense, love seized me from the outside.
I was sort of Caught up in it.
And you can see again how Dante's punishment in this circle, which is people are blown from side to side by tempestuous winds and gusts, tossing, as he puts it, the evil spirits like birds.
Well, this is how people feel about this topic.
The punishment in that sense doesn't just fit the crime.
It is the crime.
It matches the action itself.
Now, Dante, as I mentioned last time, is kind of drawn into all this.
He's kind of hooked, in part because the way Francesca is talking resembles his own previous love poetry.
So Dante is like, man, this is hitting kind of close to home.
She's talking the way I write.
And so Dante is moved, and he says to Francesca, in effect, tell me more.
I want to hear more about how this happened.
And then Francesca says this.
She goes, one day we read, who's we?
Francesca and Paolo. Paolo is her brother-in-law.
One day we read, to pass the time away.
So they got nothing to do.
They want to pass the time away.
Let's read. Read what?
Okay, we continue.
Of Lancelot and of how he fell in love, we were alone innocent of suspicion.
Now, Lancelot is the great knight, Lancelot.
We're talking here about the legend of King Arthur.
We're talking about the round table.
And so you've got the king, Arthur, his wife, Guinevere, and his first knight, which is Lancelot.
So here you have Paolo and Francesca in Italy.
It's very interesting. And the Arthurian legends are obviously in England, but they've spread all over Europe.
Dante knows about them.
And so here you have Paolo and Francesca, and they're reading about Lancelot.
And she goes, well, we were just reading.
We were together, but we're innocent.
No suspicion.
Time and again, our eyes were brought together by the book we read.
So they're reading, and they're exchanging glances.
Our faces flushed and paled.
To the moment of one line alone we yielded was when we read about those longed-for lips now being kissed by such a famous lover that this one, again Francesca doesn't name Paolo, this guy right here, who shall never leave my side, then kissed my mouth and trembled as he did.
So, here's what's going on.
They're reading a book, but not any book.
It turns out it's a book about an adulterous affair.
Affair between whom? Well, between the first knight, which is Lancelot, and the queen.
Now, think about this for a moment.
Dante has chosen this example very carefully.
Why? Because we're talking about King Arthur and the knights of the round table.
And what is the round table but a circle of trust between the king and his knights?
And how can you have a circle of trust?
And how can you even have a round table when your chief knight, namely Lancelot, is having an affair with your wife?
So, this is going on, and evidently, Over in Florence or over in Italy, Paolo and Francesca are reading about it and kind of being turned on by it.
So you can almost say that this book is serving a, I won't call it a pornographic purpose, but it's tempting them into what happens next.
I'm continuing now.
Our Galeho, G-A-L-E-H-O-D, our Galeho was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, basically what Francesca is saying is, well, we read the book.
There was this kind of passionate scene where there was a kiss involved.
And so this guy, Paolo, does exactly the same thing to me.
Now, evidently, in the actual Arthurian legend, it was Guinevere, the queen, who tempts Lancelot.
Here, evidently, it's Paolo who kind of makes the move.
Now, we don't know if that's what happened, but that's what Francesca says happened.
Paolo kind of made the moves on me, and then, quote, that day we read no further, which I think you know exactly what that means.
But what does it mean to say our Gallagher was that book and he who wrote it?
Now, interestingly, in the actual Arthurian story of the round table, Lancelot wanted to arrange these meetings with Guinevere, but it was not easy to do.
After all, Guinevere lives in a palace.
Arthur is the king. How do you get there?
It turns out that there was kind of a go-between.
There was actually a middle knight.
This is Gallagher. And Gallagher was the guy who arranged these secret meetings.
Gallagher was, in that sense, the broker, you might say.
And what Francesca is saying is that the book...
The book is the broker of the affair that I had with this guy Paolo.
In other words, to put it differently, what she's saying earlier was love made me do it, and now what she's saying is the book made me do it.
So, you see here...
That what Francesca is doing is rationalizing.
And this is true. This is a kind of characteristic move of all the sinners in the inferno.
We will see as we get into deeper cantos in hell, the cantos of the heretics and the sodomites and the canto of the violent and the canto of the treacherous, that this...
Consistent pattern of self-justification is always present, and Francesca right here gives us kind of the model of it.
What she's basically saying is, I didn't have a choice.
And Paolo made a move on me.
The book is the one that kind of got me all worked up.
Love made me do it.
And I think what Dante's rebuttal to all this is, Dante's basically saying, no, that is the way, that would make sense if you were some kind of an animal in which you were subject to instinct and desire and you didn't have a choice in the matter.
But what's distinctive about human beings is that we have reason, we have conscience, we have will, and we have free choice.
And so you did what you did, not because it happened to you, not because love made you do it, not because the book made you do it, but because you chose to do it.
I'm continuing and concluding my discussion of Francesca and Dante in Canto V of the Divine Comedy of the Inferno.
And I want to pick it right up with the line I mentioned in the last segment, that day we read no further.
Now, it may seem like this is just a very interesting and kind of telling and a wink-wink and we know what's really going on here type of line, but it turns out that for Dante, it's a lot more than that.
The line is actually a direct reference to something that is said by Saint Augustine in his great work called The Confessions.
Now, again, this is a little bit of why, with Dante, it helps to have notes.
Because while it's possible for an extremely astute reader to read this line and go, oh, you know what?
This evokes a faint memory.
Didn't Augustine in the Confession say something kind of like this?
But most people aren't going to think like that.
But Dante does.
Dante is very aware of the biblical tradition.
He's very familiar with Augustine.
This is actually one of the most learned men in Europe.
Now, let's turn to Augustine's confessions for a moment.
Augustine was himself a dissident, a Manichean, a heretic, somebody who was very reluctant to sort of join this tribe of Christians whom he thought to be a little intellectually shallow, and he didn't think that their views made any sense.
And so the Confessions chronicles Augustine's long journey.
But over time, Augustine is able to overcome his objections.
He begins to see the truth of Christianity, but he can't sort of take the final step of sort of going for it and deciding, you know what, I'm going to become a Christian.
Later, of course, he becomes a bishop, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa.
And, of course, he's perhaps one of the handful of most influential figures in Christianity and Christendom.
But toward the end of the Confessions, Augustine has a famous scene where he's in a garden and he's walking around and he's wrestling with it, with his thoughts about, should I take the final step or shouldn't I? And he's got his little, he opens, he has a book in his hand and he opens the book and he's reading now from Paul.
Now, pause for a moment right here to notice that Augustine is reading from Paul.
And Francesca is sitting next to a guy named Paul.
Paolo. Paolo is actually Paul.
Very different Pauls, of course.
And when Augustine is reading from Paul...
He reads a line which basically is to the effect of, it's time to take a decision.
It's time to move on this.
There is a time to sort of resolve and go for it.
And Augustine then writes, That day I read no further.
So in other words, that day I made my decision, and Augustine goes on, nor was there need, meaning I didn't need to read any further.
Then my mind was settled.
So think of it. Here's Augustine using this exact same line, that day I read no further, in order to make a decision for God, which will ultimately result in Augustine being, of course, in heaven.
And here, what Dante is doing is using that exact same line to the inverse effect.
So here is Francesca.
That day we read no further, meaning I made my decision.
I exercised my will, exactly the same as Augustine, but in the opposite direction.
And of course, in bursts her husband in the middle of things, kills Paolo, kills Francesca.
That's why the two of them are right here in hell.
Now... What's really remarkable, and we'll close kind of with this, is the way that Dante reacts to this.
Here's Dante. And he says that when he heard this, he goes,"...in such a way that pity blurred my senses.
I swooned as though to die and fell to hell's floor as a body, dead, falls." Dante basically collapses.
Before he collapses, his eyes fill with tears.
He can't really see straight.
Think of how he is moved by what he hears.
He moved with what? Not moved with scorn.
Not moved with... Think of the tremendous wreckage that you caused to really three lives.
Your life, Paolo's life, your husband's life as a result of all this.
No, Dante is like, what a moving story.
And interestingly, critics over the centuries, it's very revealing.
You tell a lot of yourself by how you read this poem.
The poem kind of exposes you.
And if the critic goes, oh, you know, Paolo and Francesca, love conquers all.
They defeated hell.
You know, even in hell they're together.
They're happy. No, they're not happy.
Just read the canto.
They're miserable. They don't speak.
Francesca won't use Paolo's name.
He's writhing in pain.
And even Francesca says to Dante a little earlier, she says this, Dante says, tell me more.
And Francesca says, there is no greater pain than to remember in our present grief past happiness.
So Francesca's saying, I don't really want to tell you because, you know, the temptation was thrilling at the moment, but it's painful for me to tell you now because look at me, look at where we are, and look at what it did to us, and look at how it ended my life.
So I don't want to say... But she still says, and I think the meaning of this for Dante is this, that we think of sin as something that is harmful to other people.
This is very much the liberal idea that something is bad when it hurts somebody else.
But otherwise, it's just you.
You can do whatever you want, but just make sure it doesn't hurt someone else.
But Dante's point here, and we'll see this throughout the Inferno, is that sin has its primary bad effect.
On the sinner. The sinner actually suffers the most.
Other people suffer too.
And Dante is very aware of the social consequences of sin and how it affects the church and how it affects society.
But he's making here the very profound point that the sin hurts you.
I remember many years ago when I was reading Plato's Republic for the first time and then Plato's other works, one of them called the Gorgias, Socrates makes an amazing argument where he basically says in one line, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
It's better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
It's better, in other words, for someone else to do wrong to you than to you to do wrong to them.
And I've thought about this single line for 30 years.
What could Socrates possibly mean by this?
But here we get Dante clarifying this exact same point.
And I think what Dante is getting at is that when you suffer wrong, It's an external harm to you, but it's a harm only to your body.
It's a harm to your finances or it's a harm to your convenience or your hurt in some external way.
But if you do wrong, you're actually corrupting yourself.
You're actually damaging your own soul.
And that's going to have a far more lasting impact than anything that somebody else can do to you.
What they're doing to you is from the outside.
What you're doing is from the inside.
And we see here with Francesca.
So Dante swoons, you know, he's on Francesca's side.
But let's remember, this is only Canto 5.
There are 33 cantos and 34 in the Inferno and 33 more in the Paradiso, 33 more in the Purgatorio.
So Dante has a lot to learn.
And one of the lessons that he's going to have to learn throughout hell There was a sign on the gates of hell.
I mentioned part of it. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
But part of it was also, this is a place of justice.
And what that means is that the people who are in hell, they belong in hell.
And who put them in hell is God.
And because God is just, God's decisions are always right.
And so we have this kind of interesting tussle.
Dante is going through the inferno.
He's meeting these sinners. They're always giving him their side of the story.
And Dante is like, yeah, you're right.
And the lesson that Dante has to learn as he goes through the inferno is, no, you're not right.
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