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March 7, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:52
CHINA CONNECTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep284
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W and I are going to talk today about the China connection, the way in which China and Russia are kind of in this Ukraine thing together.
And moreover, China, Russia, and Iran are all in cahoots with protecting the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
I'll discuss Elon Musk's call for more oil drilling, which is actually all the more commendable because it's against his own self-interest.
The January 6th commission is blowing a lot of hot air about Trump.
I'll tell you why they've got nothing on him.
And in Dante's Inferno, I'm going to enter today the circle of the heretics.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Joe Biden recently expressed consternation and surprise at what Russia has done in the Ukrainian.
In fact, listening to him it kind of reminded me a little bit of Jimmy Carter's reaction when the Soviets first invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Carter was like, I didn't see that one coming.
And you get very much the same thing from Biden.
So I'm going to quote Biden here.
Quote, how did we get to the place where, you know, Putin decides he's going to just invade Russia?
Now, he actually means Ukraine.
So let's correct him there.
and he goes, nothing like this has happened since World War II.
So Biden is really befuddled about why Putin would do this.
And it doesn't seem to occur to him that the reason might have something to do with the befuddled one himself.
In other words, when you have a weak and senile bumbler in the White House, Putin goes, now's the time.
Time for me to move. Trump's out of there.
We got Biden. Biden's not really know, doesn't even know what's going on in his own country, let alone far away near the Baltic Sea.
So that, I think, is the at least partial answer to Biden's question.
But.
As we survey all the heated rhetoric over this war in the Ukraine, this is a fight between the authoritarian world and the free world, it occurs to me, first of all, to ask a simple question.
What feature of authoritarian regimes can we confidently say does not exist in this country?
Let's go through a few.
Censorship of unauthorized viewpoints.
Putin is cracking down on dissent, and this, of course, has been a chorus for many years.
Okay, yes, he is doing that.
Aren't we cracking down on unauthorized viewpoints in this country?
Doesn't the Biden administration work closely with digital moguls to de-platform people, silence them, ostracize them?
Alright, number two. Party-line propaganda.
Kind of the idea of a one-party state.
Yeah, we've got a one-party state in Russia.
Don't we have something approaching a one-party state in America now?
Isn't the alternative party treated like a kind of domestic enemy?
You're a domestic terrorist.
We have to go after you.
You're enemies of the state.
And the general idea is that only the views of one party are legitimate.
The media, of course, has become a vehicle of virtually state propaganda.
Pretty much, again, the same as in Russia.
Mass surveillance by the state.
That's another kind of signature feature of authoritarian regimes.
They spy on their population.
They encourage people to spy on each other, call in malefactors.
And again, we see that here.
We see mass surveillance.
We see the FBI putting up, have you seen this guy?
Have you seen that guy? Turn in your uncle.
Turn in your parents. Did you see your dad on January 6th go to Washington?
Call him in. One of the January 6th trials actually involves the rather disturbing scene of a teenage or 20-something kid who essentially turned in his own father.
And ideological indoctrination in schools, another feature of authoritarian societies.
We've got it right here at home.
And so this line has now become a little blurred.
I'm not saying it's completely erased.
I obviously would prefer to live in America than I would in Russia or any other authoritarian society.
But nevertheless, we feel our liberty is being constrained.
And we see this in all kinds of ways.
Here is a fact I've mentioned before.
A woman, a Russian singer at the Met, Netrebko, was just cancelled by the Met.
And they put out a statement that makes it sound like she may have died.
They go, it's a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera.
But she didn't die.
She's available. She's happy to sing.
The Met has cancelled her because they claim that she's pro-Putin.
Well, she may be pro-Putin in her view.
She's Russian. But more importantly, she's a singer.
Who cares? She's not exactly evangelizing for Putin.
She's singing classical music.
And so they say, well, that's okay.
You know what? We've got to teach Russia a lesson.
We need to cancel artists who are sympathetic to Russia.
But the point I'm trying to make is when you're doing that, isn't that precisely one of the features of authoritarian regimes that they use ideology as a way to suppress art?
There's an article in the New York Times that talks about how interesting it is and even kind of cool.
The article is playfully titled, Fact and Myth-Making Blend in Ukraine's Information War.
And what they're really talking about is that in the Ukraine war, the Ukrainian side is putting out disinformation.
The disinformation is being widely picked up and circulated in the West.
It's being promoted by Western intelligence agencies.
It's being then promulgated and disseminated by Western media.
And the idea is that all of this is okay because it's being done by the good guys.
In other words, so what if we're kind of making stuff up?
The Russians make up stuff too.
And once again, we come back to my point, Which is a blurred line between them and us.
We're doing what they're doing.
They put out disinformation. We put out disinformation.
Look, governments do in fact put out disinformation.
But what seems here a little bit startling is that you have Western media, which is supposed to be truthful and independent.
I mean, think about it in the Vietnam War.
If the press was simply, we're just going to put out disinformation that's favorable to our side.
No, it was critical reporting that helped bring out what was really going on on the ground.
And this is one of the reasons I distrust a lot of the information I see or hear.
It's because there's a conscious effort.
Again, on the part of the Ukrainian government, yes, but also on the part of the CIA, Western intelligence agencies, they go, yeah, you know what, this is actually, this is going to make the Ukrainians look good, this is going to make Putin look bad.
And so things that would otherwise be unacceptable, noble lies, if you will, are being tolerated.
Here is the International Cat Federation banning Russian cats.
From competition. What?
One of the features, again, of authoritarian regimes, the politicization of literally everything.
You can't even have a cat show without someone saying, that's a Russian cat!
You know, it always reminds me of the old Disney movies.
That's an aristocat!
We have no tolerance for aristocrats here.
We're proletarian cats!
And so, intolerance...
Surveillance, censorship, they do it and we don't like it when we see them doing it, so why are we doing it?
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We want to talk, Debbie and I do, about the China connection.
Now, there's a war in Ukraine.
Between Russia and Ukraine, with the West backing Ukraine, what does China have to do with it?
Well, it's kind of an old Latin phrase, which is qui bono.
Who benefits? Who benefits?
And let's look at this Ukraine war from the point of view of China.
You've got three big powers in the world.
You've got Russia, you have China, and then you have, loosely, the West.
Two of them are fighting with each other.
So the third guy is looking on and going, I like this.
You guys fight.
I'll watch. So in a very simple sense, China benefits simply by being sort of out of it and letting the other two guys weaken themselves, mutual recriminations, mutual accusations, and perhaps even at some level, lethal conflict. And the two sides wear each other down.
And of course, the third man ends up perhaps the strongest at the end.
I mean, I've been reading an article by Stephen Mosher, who was on the podcast recently.
It essentially says it's called, With U.S. Distracted by Ukraine, Xi is plotting his own invasion.
Yeah, well, it's really interesting.
The other thing he says is that Before the Olympics, they signed about 15 agreements, China and Russia, some of them including natural gas, oil, rice, wheat, Russian wheat. And so what happened is...
You know, I think Putin was like, okay, I don't really care the sanctions that are going to be imposed on me because I'm making a deal with China and I'm going to be okay financially.
I think that's what happened.
Not to mention that Putin, Putin, however you say it, agreed to delay the invasion of Ukraine until after the Olympics.
Okay. So, I think what Moshe is getting at here and what Debbie is italicizing is that this was kind of coordinated between the two of them.
The Chinese knew it was coming.
Putin was sort of protecting himself against what probably the Inevitable sanctions that he knew were going to follow by saying listen. I'll cut some deals with these guys Beforehand and and and the Chinese are like well listen. We got the Olympics. We're kind of showcasing China to the world We don't want attention to be turned away by your little expedition in the Ukraine and Putin's like okay. No problem You know what I'll reset my watch, and I'll do it after the after the Olympics are over so
So what's going on here it seems is that And, you know, there was a report about a week ago, I guess now, that foolish Biden and the foolish State Department thought, well, you know what?
Why don't we take this intelligence that we have on Russian aggression mounting at the Ukraine and tell the Chinese?
So the Chinese can perhaps block the Russians from doing it.
And it was these goofballs that had no idea that the Chinese and the Russians were...
They're like this.
They were... They're colluding over.
That by scaring China to say, look what we're doing to the Russian oligarchs.
We're going to do the same thing to yours.
That somehow that is going to make them like kind of back off.
Well, first of all, this all seems to be rather foolish.
The Chinese economy, first of all, is huge.
China is economically stronger than Russia.
So you're dealing with a more formidable economic power that now has cultivated not only a big domestic market, but a huge market across Asia.
Lots of countries in the world are dependent on Chinese trade.
They talk about the so-called China price.
It's cheapest to make stuff in China.
So the Chinese oligarchs are going to be plenty rich, even without doing business with The West.
Yeah. Because they've now developed enough strength outside of the West.
So you're saying they're not put off at all by all this?
No. And one of the points Moshe gets when he says Xi is plotting his own invasion is he's kind of watching to see what happens in Ukraine.
And I think if he sees that A, Putin can do it, and B, the West is kind of confused, vacillating, ineffective...
I mean, here's a little tidbit from Disclosed TV. So apparently Visa and MasterCard decided we're out of Russia, right?
They thought, man, this is going to be a big strike against Russia because look, all these corporations are pulling out.
And what did the Russians do?
They just switched the Chinese credit card system, which is called UnionPay, which happens to be the second largest and fastest growing global credit card network.
So the Russians are like, well, listen, we'll just cut you out.
You don't want to do business with us? No problem.
We don't care. We turn over to China.
And so you're seeing a new world order, to use an old term, emerging here with China and Russia recognizing.
I'm not saying that ideologically they're the same.
The Chinese obviously are more hardcore on the Marxist-Leninist front.
Even though Putin's an old KGB guy, I don't think he's coming from a sort of ideological Marxist point of view.
It's interesting, too, though, because these two countries have a lot of money, and they use it wisely.
We'll talk about this in the next segment about where they're using it and why.
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We've been talking, Debbie and I, about how the New World Order is being reconfigured.
And there appears to be an emerging alliance, we can see it, between China and Russia.
And there may be a third player here that we're forgetting about, and that is the radical Islamic regimes.
And I can think specifically of two, Iran and Turkey.
Now, all of this may seem a little bit abstract, a little bit theoretical.
Like, is this alliance really materializing?
Is there someplace in the world where we can see it actually in effect?
And as it turns out, there is.
And that country is Venezuela.
Well, you know, as I've told you for many years, I've been very, very...
I'm afraid of these alliances that are happening with these with these countries with these superpower countries and Venezuela and you know for obvious reasons I think geopolitically if they have weapons and they put weapons in the hands of the Venezuelans or in Venezuela and act as their own on their own behalf We are looking at short-range missiles coming from Venezuela to our shores.
Only 1,300 miles separate Venezuela, Caracas, from Miami.
So very, very short-range missiles is all that's needed, right?
So it's worried me, and it worries me even more that we don't talk about it and that we don't have a...
I don't think we have a good grasp on what's really going on.
So, you know, a couple of years, there's been a lot of instability with the Maduro regime, and they've been trying to oust him unsuccessfully.
And of course, now that Biden is in control, that is not happening, Venezuelanos, I hate to tell you.
You are not going to be a free country.
So there was a Newsweek article a couple years ago that basically said that the United States was more concerned about China.
Of the three countries, they didn't really specify Turkey as much, but of China, Russia, Iran, they were more concerned about China.
And I really wasn't.
I was actually a little more concerned about Iran because I've heard of people I've seen Venezuelan friends of mine talking about how they saw these trucks with Farsi on them, and they thought they were missiles.
And of course, that really scared me a little bit.
Well, I think you were thinking probably more in terms of terrorism.
Yes, I was thinking more in terms of that, yes.
And in terms of Iran's got an appetite for getting a nuclear weapon.
Let's remember that the other two countries here, Russia and China, Have a substantial arsenal of weapons.
Interestingly, Russia the most and China second.
Yeah. So anyway, all three countries have sold weapons to Venezuela in the billions of dollars.
And so Venezuela owes them a lot of money.
So not only have they propped them up militarily, but they have given them money for oil refinement, They have given them money for infrastructure because if some of you recall, all of the grids in Venezuela were mossed over and so they were having all these horrible blackouts.
I know my aunt would often WhatsApp me and say, hey, you know, we don't have any Wi-Fi.
I'm having to go over here to get Wi-Fi.
Please help us.
Is there anything you can do?
I mean, it How helpless was I getting these messages from her?
But so they have supposedly tried to help them with infrastructure.
So all that to say that geopolitically, it's very smart of Russia, China, and Iran to do this, being so close to us.
Well, I also think it's fascinating how these countries, very different as they are historically, are able to get along.
In other words, there's obviously some kind of a power-sharing agreement.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Yeah. Right? Right.
But you would think that now, having Venezuela, they would be jostling, and maybe they are a little bit for who gets to, who's really calling the shots in Venezuela.
But it could very well be that they figured out a way To share the spoils, because you've got, you do have an oil rich country in Venezuela.
Look at this. I don't know if you've seen this, honey.
It just came out. This is that the Biden administration is actually talking about, you know how they want to, that they might have to, you know, be pressured into stopping buying Russian oil.
They don't want to. They're actually subsidizing the war right now.
The Biden administration is.
But I think they feel that if, you know, public pressure mounts and we have to stop buying from Russia, why don't we buy from Venezuela instead?
Can you believe this? Okay, Venezuela, I just want to make this clear.
Russia owns Venezuela.
Right. Right.
Russia owns Venezuela.
In fact, Venezuela cannot possibly pay back the debt that they owe Russia for oil.
So if Biden is dumb enough to think that he's somehow going around Putin and, you know, making deals with Maduro, you know what?
Maduro. Well, it's kind of like, here's Putin.
He's sort of like a chess player and he's watching this global board and he's sort of hee hee hee.
And here's Biden.
He's like playing checkers. He's like, I'm going to make a move.
Exactly. What a dummy.
Oh my goodness. Right?
Oh my goodness. He's funneling money to Russia through Venezuela.
And the State Department guys think that they're making genius moves.
Let's kind of get around the Russians by going to Venezuela.
This is unbelievably dumb.
So not only does Russia own Venezuela, but so does China and so does Iran.
So... And by the way, they've talked about getting oil from Iran.
They're talking about, let's relax sanctions.
Now, what I think is going on is that the left-wingers in the Biden administration want to restore Venezuela.
They want to actually prop up the Maduro regime.
They want to prop up Iran.
And they're using this Ukraine thing as an excuse.
You look at this. So the energy sector, this is according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The energy sector in the centerpiece of Caracas' relationship with the Kremlin.
The centerpiece!
Yeah. So we're seeing, I think, on the global stage, a great unwinding.
And, you know, it seemed that the United States was losing its kind of unipolar status in the world, losing its footing.
And I think with Biden, this losing of footing has become a complete mudslide.
We've just got this messed up guy in the White House.
And as a result, we're seeing a rapid unwinding of American power.
It's going to be very hard to put all this back.
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Feel the difference. The entrepreneur, and happens to be the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has come out Foursquare in support of increased oil drilling.
And this is particularly surprising because it is, well, you'd have to say against his interest to say this.
In fact, here's his tweet.
He goes, hate to say it, hate to say it.
But we need to increase oil and gas output immediately.
And then, as if to say this is not all about him, this is really about something bigger than him, he goes, quote, extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.
Now, I think Musk here is echoing something that I and others have been saying, which is that if you want to undermine Putin, let's Generate some oil at home.
You don't have to actually go buy it from Iran or buy it from Venezuela or do stupid stuff like that.
We have it here.
We have a lot of oil. We have a lot of natural gas.
And Elon Musk is saying, let's go dig some of it out of the ground.
Musk adds, now quoting him, obviously this would negatively affect Tesla, but sustainable energy solutions simply cannot react instantaneously to make up for Russian oil and gas exports.
So part of what he seems to be saying is, listen, let's stop the importing of Russian oil and gas exports.
And if we do that, we can't expect the energy alternatives, electric and so on to completely fill the gap.
We're going to need oil and gas.
By the way, the United States is even now buying 650,000 barrels of oil per day.
We're financing in part the Russia war against Ukraine, even as we denounce it in all kinds of ways.
Russia, by the way, produces one in 10 barrels of oil in the world.
It's the third largest oil producer in the world.
Now, what I like about Elon Musk here is that here's a guy who, when the occasion demands, will rise to the defense of his country.
It's not just about his own interests.
This is a guy who actually has, he's not just a great innovator, but he's industrious and he is patriotic.
By the way, Musk is not just for oil drilling.
He also talks about the idea of Generating more nuclear power.
And he says particularly Europe.
He goes, quote, it's now extremely obvious that Europe should restart dormant nuclear power stations and increase the power output of existing ones.
And then almost as if anticipating an objection, Elon Musk says, for those who mistakenly think this is the radiation risk, Pick what you think is the worst location.
I will travel there and eat locally grown food on TV. So what he's trying to say is nuclear power is safe.
Stop. You know, it was actually this kind of paranoia and panic over nuclear power in the United States that essentially shut down the nuclear power plants.
And the United States has been deprived of having a flourishing nuclear sector for now almost half a century.
But the Europeans went for nuclear power and they've been able to do it no problem.
And Musk thinks they need to turn up the volume, do more of it.
And these are ways, practical ways.
This is how entrepreneurs think there.
It's not just about issuing stern statements.
We stand with Ukraine.
Hashtag Ukraine.
No, if you actually want to undermine Putin, take away some of his coins.
Do it by importing less of his oil and natural gas.
Start doing more oil and natural gas.
Start doing more nuclear power here in the West.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sent the markets into an uproar.
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Who's afraid of the January 6th commission?
Not me. The more I look at these guys, the more I realize it's, you know, send in the clowns.
It's cartoon time.
Now, true, you've got these sort of blustering figures on social media and on TV. Adam Kinzinger puts on his sternid.
Liz Cheney, who looks like some kind of a nanny.
And they look like, you know, we're coming to get you.
We're coming to get Trump.
We're going to start with Trump.
And get him for what?
What are you going to get Trump on?
Well, it produces big report.
Yes, we're going to be turning it over to the DOJ. They'll make their own decision.
But, you know, we think serious crimes have been committed.
And, of course, the media jumps in.
Serious crimes. Serious crimes.
Yeah, Trump's in real trouble now.
And so then I look a little more closely to see, you know, is there any smoke here, let alone fire?
And it turns out they're just blowing smoke.
So here's an article...
Here's an article from the New York Times, okay?
And I want to focus on one word which gives the whole game away.
Here's the headline. Breaking news!
Breaking news! First of all, you'd think it'd be breaking news while this is on the front page of the Times.
In a court filing, the Jan 6 panel said there was evidence to conclude that Donald Trump, and here comes the big word, may have committed crimes to stay in office.
Okay. Now, what is the meaning of the word may?
Let me suggest that it's the exact same meaning as the word may not.
Let me give you an example.
Djokovic may compete in the French Open.
That means he may or he may not.
It's one or the other.
China may invade Taiwan.
That means China will invade Taiwan unless it won't.
So, May here is giving you no information at all, and it gives you the clear indication that all they're suggesting is a possibility.
Trump might have committed crimes to stay in office.
Dinesh might have committed crimes in order to have his podcast.
Alright. He actually didn't, but he might have.
It's possible. It's not logically impossible that I have.
Alright, here we go.
Let's continue with another...
Here's another headline.
Hi. In a legal filing, I know, honey, you're always worried the FBI will show up at our door.
The January 6th commission, Dinesh, please show up on Wednesday to testify.
I'm like, yes, I will.
Please have a big screen TV present so I can play mule videos prior to my testimony or include it in my opening statement.
Here's New York Times again. In a legal filing, the Jan 6th panel...
Laid out a narrative.
Laid out a narrative is the kind of somber term for spun a yarn.
Laid out a narrative aimed at showing that Donald Trump knew the 2020 election was not stolen.
Now, first of all, on the face of it, this is absolutely stupid.
Because if there's one thing that Donald Trump does know, it's that the January 2020 election was stolen.
He's been saying that nonstop pretty much every time he opens his mouth.
Since Election Day.
So the idea that he somehow knew it wasn't stolen, it flies in the face of obvious reality.
So it's clear that these January 6th guys have got absolutely nothing on Trump.
And the Times even admits it, because as you delve into the article, right there it goes, I'm not quoting...
Quote, they say, the January 6th laid out its argument for a potential criminal case.
Next sentence. Building such a case would be very difficult for prosecutors, experts say.
So, in other words, the Times goes to a bunch of lawyers, is there anything here?
They go, nah, nothing here.
Building such a case is very difficult, experts say.
Experts say. So there's no there, there.
That's the whole point of what I'm getting at here.
And I think the January 6th guys sort of know this.
The harassment, the media narrative, that is what they're after.
So the point I'm trying to get at is constantly threatening that they will bring a criminal case.
There might be a case. We're looking at it.
We're reviewing it. We're trying to get more paper.
All of this is a kind of menace.
That is itself the punishment.
The case itself is there's nothing to it.
But you can cause anxiety in someone simply by threatening to show up.
We might have something on you.
The IRS is looking into your tax returns and so on.
And that very fact is going to make your, you know, Adam's apple run up and down your throat because...
There is a little bit of trepidation, even if there's no merit to it.
But as far as I can see, they've got nothing on Trump.
Trump actually has nothing to fear.
And I think from his actions and from what Debbie and I and our family saw of Trump recently, he's not exactly worried.
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You might remember, surely you do remember, the Boston Marathon bomber.
This is a guy named Jokar Sarnev.
And he was tried after the bombing.
The bombing itself was in 2013.
And his trial was in 2015.
He was convicted.
He was given the debt penalty.
And then a higher court said that we needed to have a new hearing on the penalty phase, not on the conviction itself, but on the On the penalty.
And the Supreme Court has stepped in and basically said no.
The court has, 6-3, restored the death penalty for this guy, Sarnev.
Now, the Biden administration earlier, and unrelated to this case, had announced a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, or obviously in 2022.
And the moratorium, however, is still in effect.
So they're not carrying them out.
I think there's an interesting tension here.
Now, the Supreme Court basically says the death penalty is back on.
But, of course, the Supreme Court didn't say it has to be done now.
What they said was, essentially, this guy's got to go back on death row.
But I think it is unlikely that it will, in fact, be carried out anytime soon, maybe not even during this administration.
Now, if there's any case that deserves the death penalty, it's obviously this one.
Here you've got a guy who sets off a bomb A major explosive at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, kills three people, injures hundreds of them.
Major manhunt, of course, which then resulted in his apprehension.
And he's been sort of sitting in jail, in prison.
And I actually read an article several months ago that this guy was getting COVID stimulus checks from the government, like other prisoners.
And I'm thinking to myself, what?
What? What kind of insane country does this?
What kind of society is subsidizing, even under notwithstanding COVID, a guy like this?
So it's time, I think, to, you know, bid him farewell.
And that's what essentially Justice Thomas wrote the opinion.
He says, look, he had a fair trial before an impartial jury.
He has a right to that.
He got it. So let's go.
And there are many people who think that the debt penalty is there.
And they think this also more broadly about criminal penalties.
They're for deterrence. We need the debt penalty to deter people.
No. That's actually not what punishment is for.
Deterrence is a kind of side benefit of punishment.
Deterrence sends a message to other people.
But think about it. If someone does something terrible and they deserve to have a punishment, they should get the punishment.
That's the retribution of their crime.
That's justice. What effect this has on other people has nothing to do with justice.
That's a more utilitarian argument, like, listen, you know, it's going to scare other people so that they don't do it also.
That's all fine. But the primary purpose of justice is retribution.
It is to match the penalty to the offense.
It is to restore a certain kind of moral order, you might almost say, in the universe, that you've got a bad action.
In this case, a bombing that took human life.
And in doing so, this guy, Sarnev, has forfeited the right to his own life.
It's as simple as that.
So whether it deters other people or not, I think it's quite obvious that justice itself demands that the Boston Marathon bomber Receive exactly the same justice or the same due that he meted out to other people except those people were innocent and he is not.
Continuing our discussion of Dante's Inferno, the first of the books of the Divine Comedy, we're going today to enter into the circle of the heretics.
Now, last time, over several episodes, we talked about the circle of lust.
And just to remind you, Lust for Dante is part of a pattern of, well, you can say sins of the flesh.
These are sins of incontinence.
They're sins of lacking self-control.
They're sins in which, from Dante's point of view, and from a broader medieval point of view, you have desire, in a sense, ruling over reason and will instead of the other way around.
And this is captured in Francesca's love poem.
Which absolves no one from loving, and since love made me, made me do it.
And I think Dante is very wise to sort of begin early on with a sin as sort of widespread as lust.
A sin that, by the way, Augustine talks about as an almost universal sin.
Almost everybody is tempted in some way in this area.
And Augustine himself, of course, in his Confessions, utters one of the most famous lines about this in Western literature.
He has a prayer to God, which he's making almost with a...
With a certain whimsical tone, he goes, make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet.
It's kind of like he wants to arrive at virtue, but he's sort of having too much of a good time along the way.
Now, Dante goes on from the circle of lust to talk about other sins of incontinence, sins like gluttony, and in other words, the incontinence of food and drink.
And also incontinence regarding money.
And interestingly, when Dante treats incontinence regarding money, he has two groups of people in the sort of money circle, the hoarders and the wasters.
And I think what's interesting about this is that for Dante, whether you hold on to money really tight, like I won't give it up, it's kind of a way of saying that this kind of lust for money is causing me to not spend, to be overly frugal.
But Dante sees wastefulness as reflecting exactly the same attitude, which is to say all I care about is money and all I care about is my sort of extravagant lifestyle and so I'm going to invest my hopes and energies in that.
And so these are the various forms of incontinence that Dante treats.
But we're going to move a little swiftly because what we're doing here is we're not doing a line-by-line, canto-by-canto reading of the Inferno.
We're finding interesting signposts along the way.
And so we're going to move out of the circle of incontinence, and we're now moving into the second category of sins.
So there are three big categories of sins in the Inferno.
The sins of incontinence, which I've mentioned.
The sins of violence.
And the sins of violence, by the way, are divided into three parts.
Violence against others, violence against self, and violence against God and nature.
So we'll talk about that presently.
And then sins of fraud.
And fraud itself is divided into two categories.
You can call it loosely simple fraud and sort of deep fraud or complex fraud.
And what makes fraud complex?
Well, what makes fraud complex is fraud is especially bad when it is committed against people who are in our Special care or people with whom we have a special bond of trust.
So that's further down, in a sense, deeper into the bowels of the inferno.
But on our way to the circles of violence, which we'll talk about, there's another circle, a kind of circle that doesn't seem to fit the schema all that well, and that is the circle of the heretics.
Dante admits that he has taken his schema for the Inferno sort of from the classical tradition.
He's taken classical virtues and inverted them, and that's where he gets incontinence.
Incontinence, for example, you can see is the opposite of moderation.
And similarly, violence and fraud are sort of the polar opposites of classical virtues.
But heresy, Dante says, doesn't fit this because in classical antiquity, they weren't concerned specifically about Christian truth and Christian doctrine.
And so Dante says we have to add this in because, of course, in a Christian poem, We have a grave sin, which is the sin of heresy.
But Dante doesn't treat heresy in the normal way.
So heresy, what is heresy?
Well, the actual meaning of the word heresy is deviating from a straight path.
So the straight path is the path of, you may say, orthodoxy, which is the right way, and heresy is falling away from that right way.
So in the kind of dictionary definition, a heretic is someone who rejects The formal teaching of the church.
The church has, in Christianity, you have doctrines.
Let's say, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity, which is that God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit are three persons, but all in one God.
And they're equally three, and yet they are one.
And so, rejecting God's oneness is a heresy.
At the same time, insisting that God is one, but that the Son, God the Son, and God the Spirit are somehow lesser than the Father, that's a different type of heresy.
And in early Christianity, you had a kind of profusion of heresies, many of them condemned by the early church councils.
And one might expect that you find all those guys, you know, the Manichaeans, the Albigensians, the Pelagians, those kinds of sort of heretics from early Christianity.
You'll find them all in here, in the circle of the heretics.
But no. Dante treats the subject in such an interesting way, he comes across two prominent figures in the circle of the heretics.
One is a politician.
Named Farinata.
And the other is a poet named Cavalcanti.
And Farinata and Cavalcanti are the two kind of sinners, evil spirits that Dante converses with in the circle of the heretics.
This is, by the way, also a very famous circle.
And this is a very instructive conversation that Dante has.
But at the face of it, you might start by saying, wait a minute, probably not as a politician, a Florentine political figure, it turns out a Ghibelline, in other words, a member of the rival party to Dante.
Dante was a Guelph.
And if you recall, the Guelphs are the party of, you may say, the Pope, and the Ghibellines are the party of the empire.
So Farinat is a Ghibelline.
He's kind of a member of a rival family to Dante's.
And the question is, what on earth does a conversation about politics and poetry I mean, admittedly, these are topics of great interest to Dante.
Dante was a politician in Florence in the year 1300, where the poem is set.
Dante is also, of course, a poet.
So you can see why he would be interested in talking to, having a political conversation, having a conversation about poetry.
But why would he put these guys in the circle of the heretics?
And I think as we begin to look more closely at these conversations, we begin to see that Dante has a much subtler and deeper understanding of heresy.
For him, it's not just a matter of, here's a teaching, you reject it, you break with it, you're a heretic.
No, for him, heresy is something else altogether.
And as we begin to look at these two very different figures, and we constantly have to do the work of asking, what is it that these two very different guys, who are, by By the way, sharing the same tomb.
In the Circle of the Heretics, by the way, there are flaming tombs, tombs that are consumed by fire.
And Dante is walking through these tombs, and in fact, he doesn't even see the sinners at first because, of course, there's a glare that's produced by the fire itself.
When one of the tombs opens up, and a man sort of almost jack-in-the-box style pops out and begins a conversation with Dante, and what he says and how he says it is a topic we'll take up next time.
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