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June 6, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:17
NAZIS IN UKRAINE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep594
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth. Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com. Coming up, I'll show the prominence of Nazis among the Ukraine resistance. It's now out in the open. It's a big problem for the Biden regime.
I'll celebrate a Supreme Court decision that affirms the notion that union violence in pursuit of a better negotiating position is not okay.
And I'll reveal how James Comey's recent statements show that the guy, a political thug, is afraid his own brand of thuggery might be visited on him.
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The war in Ukraine and over Ukraine is a complex business in which you have a bad actor on the one side, and this is Russia.
Now, Russia is not entirely a bad actor in the sense that Russia has legitimate concerns about anti-Russian resistance on the Russian border.
Just as we would have concerns if you had, for example, a heavily armed Mexico or even Canada.
I realize it's hard to imagine a heavily armed Canada.
But a heavily armed Mexico, let's say, threatening the U.S. on the southern border.
This would make America very nervous and America would demand certain conditions to make sure that it's...
Security was protected.
Nevertheless, Putin did invade Ukraine.
That is inexcusable.
And the Ukrainians in this framework appear to be the good guys because they are fighting against a foreign country and a very big foreign country that has invaded their borders.
Now, it is a separate question about how this involves the United States.
In some senses, we should feel a kind of solidarity toward Ukraine just because they're fighting for their own autonomy.
There are troubling issues here.
Number one is the Ukraine war appears to be a kind of proxy war.
I mean, think about it. Under normal circumstances, the Russians should have overrun Ukraine in about three weeks.
But the reason that they don't and can't is because all of NATO is fighting through Ukraine against Russia.
So there's a legitimate question, what is it our business and to what degree should we commit our resources and our treasure and our taxpayer dollars in this far away conflict?
But Ukraine has nevertheless seemed relatively clean-cut.
The victims are not the victimizers.
And yet, from the beginning of the war, there were, on social media and even in some articles, the A kind of noting that there are Nazi forces, neo-Nazis, fighting in the Ukraine resistance.
And we're not talking here about the fact that there's, like, here's one guy and he happens to be a neo-Nazi and he's a kook and he happened to sign up for the Ukrainian forces.
No, we're talking about whole battalions.
We're talking about neo-Nazis having a So, in other words, we're talking about a somewhat Nazified Ukrainian resistance.
Again, I saw a number of references to this, but was sort of not able to know the magnitude of it.
But here's an interesting article just came out in the New York Times, June 5th.
Quote, Highlight thorny issues of history.
I want to go through this article in part because it represents really a breakthrough.
For the first time, you have the mainstream left openly admitting something that they themselves, the media, has tried to suppress.
Many of the so-called anti-hate groups in the United States, Jewish groups and Southern Poverty Law Center, they're always hunting for people in America and around the world who are using Nazi paraphernalia, swastikas, Nazi symbols.
They know that these symbols are all over the place in the Ukraine conflict, on the Ukrainian side, but they have been very reluctant to admit it.
They have been reluctant to denounce it or even to point it out.
Now, the New York Times article begins with the observation that the Ukrainian government and even NATO allies have been posting a bunch of memes in their social media feeds showing Ukrainian soldiers standing on tops of trucks, an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.
And then people noticed, wait a minute, these memes contain explicit and unmistakable Nazi imagery.
And so first the Ukrainian government deletes the memes, and then NATO allies delete the memes also.
So in other words, they're trying to be coy or secretive about the fact that this Nazi presence, which obviously they know about.
So, in each photograph, the Times writes, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far right.
Far right! Ha ha ha!
So we have this idea that the Nazis were far right.
This is a trope on the left that goes back to World War II. The Nazis, in fact, were on the left, but they'll never admit this.
So they love to throw in the far right label.
But let's leave that to decide for here.
The photographs and their deletions highlight the Ukrainian military's complicated relationship with Nazi imagery.
I'll say, complicated.
Well, I think that if in the United States you had regiments of the police or the military that were using Nazi paraphernalia Doing, you know, Nazi salutes, wearing Nazi hats and symbols that are identified with Hitler and Himmler.
This wouldn't be considered. The cops in America have a complicated relationship to the Nazis.
No, they would be denounced unequivocally and full-throatedly.
So when we come back more about the Nazi presence in the Ukraine and how it developed and why the West is trying to hide it.
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I'm talking about the Nazi or neo-Nazi presence in the Ukraine army and the Ukraine resistance.
And this is something that Vladimir Putin has pointed out and denounced.
He has basically talked about a Nazified Ukraine.
He says Ukraine needs to be de-Nazified.
Let's remember that Russia fought a bitter battle against the Nazis.
Now, in fairness, it should be pointed out that the Soviet Union first signed a treaty with the Nazis, the so-called Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
And then that treaty was repudiated by Hitler, who then invaded Russia.
But the Soviet Union then became the deadly enemy.
Russia became the deadly enemy of the Nazis.
Now, what makes all of this really interesting is that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is Jewish.
So you've got a Jewish president of a country that has open and flagrant and really Nazis who aren't trying to hide the fact that they're Nazis in the Ukrainian forces.
And these are guys who...
These are guys who wear the skill and crossbones, sometimes called the death's head.
And this, by the way, was a symbol made notorious, this is the New York Times writing, by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II. The Times also points out that the Anti-Defamation League considers this totenkop for death's head a common hate symbol.
But they don't want to say it's a hate symbol in Ukraine.
Why? The reason really is given here, and that is that the West is worried that if it got out, widely got out, this would support what Putin is saying.
It would reinforce, you could say, Russian propaganda.
And so it's Western propaganda to hide the Nazi presence in the Ukraine.
There's another guy. This is a Ukrainian state emergency services agency guy.
He posted on Instagram a photograph.
There's an emergency worker.
He's wearing this black sun symbol.
It's known as the Sonnenrad.
Well, this was a symbol that appeared in the castle of Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi general.
And the director of the hated SS. And this Black Sun is now popular among neo-Nazis.
But again, these photos have been removed, not again because they don't reflect reality, but precisely because they do.
Now here is a guy named Ihor Kolakovsky, a Ukrainian historian.
He says these symbols should not be taken to be Nazi symbols at all.
He says that they have a completely different, a non-Nazi meaning in the Ukrainian context.
I'm quoting him here. The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth.
So what he's saying is that you can have Nazi symbols, but they're not Nazi symbols if the context is removed.
In other words, what he's saying is we aren't really Nazis.
Obviously, we aren't Germans.
We're Ukrainians.
But... The question becomes, don't you believe in this Nordic doctrine of racial superiority?
And the answer is yes.
Don't you believe that other people on the earth are inferior and should be eliminated?
And the answer is yes.
Now, interestingly, Nazi superiority, the Ukrainian Nazi superiority, is directed at the idea that the Russians are an inferior people who are trying to take over Ukraine.
And some of this actually goes back, interestingly enough, to World War II. Let's remember that the Soviet Union had gulags or concentration camps.
And they had concentration camps before the Nazis did.
And they had them all over the Soviet Union.
And while the Nazis had concentration camps for Jews, now they later included war captives and so on, and some other Germans as well, nevertheless, the Soviet camps were basically for the Russian people.
And hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, just read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which I'll also talk about a little later.
In this podcast, Solzhenitsyn documents the way in which these camps stretched all over the country, not just in the Ural Mountains or in Siberia, but all over the place.
Well, apparently when the Nazis first invaded Ukraine, this was their entry point into Russia, many people in the Ukraine welcomed the Nazis as liberators.
And it's sort of understandable.
They were liberators compared to Soviet tyranny.
This is something, by the way, that the West never learned from World War II, that Stalin was just as much of a tyrant as Hitler.
And so the West did a lot in World War II. We chose to ally with Stalin against Hitler.
But nevertheless, Stalin was an oppressor of the same genre as Hitler.
Well, apparently many Ukrainians took the side of the Nazis.
And this is kind of where the neo-Nazi movement in Ukraine began.
Now, What I find surprising is that here, 70 years later, after World War II, it's still going.
You still have the Azov Battalion.
You have a number of other groups in Ukraine that represent these neo-Nazi organizations.
One is called Svoboda Patriot of Ukraine, the Social Nationalist Assembly, and you have Nazi commanders in Ukraine's parliament.
Their units are in critical parts of the military.
Basically, neo-Nazi street gangs have evolved into, quote, the best fighters in the country.
This is quoting an article in Politico.
So this is the dirty secret of the Ukraine war.
We are, by sending all our troops and resources and money to Ukraine, we are, we're not directly helping Nazis, we're not sending the money to the Nazis, but we can't deny that we are helping Nazis in Ukraine along with the others.
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There's an important new development involving the FBI in the Biden bribery racket case.
So the House Oversight Committee is looking at the evidence provided by a whistleblower.
This is a whistleblower from within the FBI who says he has definitive proof That the Biden family was getting bribes and large bribes.
We're talking about something in the range of $5 million from a foreign entity.
We don't know if it's China or if it's some other country, but we're talking here about bribery in exchange for public access, for political access to Vice President Biden, a very serious offense.
And evidently, this FBI whistleblower is extremely credible.
Now, the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer, has gone to the FBI and said, we need to have this document that discusses the evidence provided by the whistleblower and what the FBI has done or not done to follow up with this lead.
And the FBI says, in effect, that they won't provide the document because it's part of an ongoing investigation.
And also because to provide the document is to risk revealing the name of this whistleblower whose life would be in danger.
Now let's think about this for a minute.
First of all, why would the guy's life be in danger?
I think we're good to go.
Of the idea that the FBI is saying, we can't reveal this person's name because we can't protect him.
Not only does it reveal that the FBI is useless, that they can't protect a valuable source providing information about corruption at the highest levels of government, but then they go on to say, we think that the person's life would be in danger.
And again, my question is, danger from whom?
Danger from some Biden ally?
What is George Soros going to dispatch?
A hit squad? Is somebody else going to threaten or target this guy?
Is it Biden himself?
Does Biden know how to get these kinds of things done without his own hands getting dirty?
All of this is extremely weird and extremely troubling.
Unfortunately, Comer is not backing off.
He's going to have a vote shortly to hold FBI Director Wray in contempt of Congress.
And tomorrow I'm going to go into this in more detail.
I'm going to explain how this all works.
Because some people go, well, what is that going to do?
How is that going to work?
Nothing ever comes of any of this.
Well, I'm going to show what it can and can't do.
What does contempt of Congress even mean?
In what way does this hold anyone accountable?
And what are the options available to the House?
Remember, the House is a legislative, not an executive branch.
Thank you. Let me turn for today to an interesting comment from James Comey, who was recently interviewed by Jen Psaki.
And the interview is very interesting because Comey expresses very openly that he is pushing for Biden over Trump.
He's very scared that Trump might come back into office, and he says that a Trump second term would be far more dangerous even than the first one.
Now, why is that?
Let me quote from Comey.
Think about what four years of a retribution presidency might look like.
He could order the investigation and prosecution of individuals who he sees as enemies.
Now, I resist the temptation here to go into an extensive guffaw because this is exactly what Comey has been doing nonstop.
And I mean going all the way back to 2016 and, in fact, even before.
Because even before Trump was elected, the Hillary campaign was conspiring and working closely with the FBI, and by the way, also with the media, to plant false accusations on Trump and on the Trump campaign, and Comey was a knowing and active part of that.
Remember, Comey is the guy who essentially tried to set up General Michael Flynn.
And that is, he pretended to be investigating Flynn.
There was nothing to investigate Flynn about.
But the idea was that if we can interview Flynn, we get him to make a bunch of statements.
We interview him for hours and hours.
We find two statements that contradict each other.
Oh, Flynn lied! And then we go after him for lying.
So this is really the corrupt machinations of a corrupt FBI director.
And what the FBI director, the former FBI director, is afraid now is that he might be held to account.
That Trump might actually say, not just political revenge, but let's go and take a look at what were all these things were done in hiding by this corrupt triangle of crooks.
The police agencies of government, the Democrats, the media, all working hand-in-hand with each other, and Comey's afraid that the same kind of thuggery that he visited upon Trump for more than four years might finally be visited on him.
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I want to talk about a Supreme Court ruling.
It's an 8-to-1 ruling, so very interesting.
This is a ruling that basically draws in two of the three liberals.
Only Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson It's a dissenter in this ruling, and it's a ruling that goes against unions.
Now, this is an important ruling because unions rarely get slapped down by the Supreme Court.
Unions enjoy a certain type of, I won't say immunity, but certainly protection in the law.
Some of this goes back to the laws that were passed in the aftermath or during the New Deal and immediately following the New Deal.
And basically, they protect unions by saying unions can do stuff that, by the way, other people can't do.
Think of something as simple as compulsory dues.
You go to work for a company and the union goes, hey, listen, you have to pay dues.
You're like, no, I want to opt out.
I don't want the union to protect me.
Don't negotiate for me. I'll negotiate for myself.
Oh, no. If we vote and decide to unionize the company, you have to pay dues.
Okay, I'm willing to pay dues, but I don't want any of my dues going to the Democratic Party.
In other words, you can use my dues to sustain the union and negotiate on my behalf, but you can't make political contributions that I oppose by using my money.
Again, unions do this all the time, and people seem to have very little recourse.
So unions have this kind of...
Free reign in the US political system.
And one of the dirty secrets about unions is that some of them, not all of them, but some of them engage in a certain kind of gangsterism.
If they have a strike, and let's say the company tries to hire other workers to replace union workers, it's like, okay, well, you don't want to work?
I'll get somebody else to The strikers will then block the entrance to the company, or they will beat up the so-called scab, who is replacing the striking worker.
And again, courts have sort of looked the other way.
Sometimes even the cops look the other way, as if to say that it's legitimate for unions to protect their territory and protect their negotiating position by doing this kind of vandalism or bullying or...
Or interfering with the ability of other people to freely contract with the company to go work there.
Now, we have a very interesting case that went before the Supreme Court, and this involved a company called Glacier Northwest.
And it's a trucking company, and the union wanted to go on strike.
But the union decided, before we go on strike, let's, like, let's call it screw over the company, and let's do it in this way.
The company was a trucking company that transported cement, transported the cement that is ultimately baked into concrete.
And what the union said is, we'll call the strike when all these trucks are out there on the road with carrying this cement.
Now, the company was very clear and they said, listen, if you guys want to go on strike, please complete all your delivery so that the cement is delivered where it needs to be.
Why? Because if you leave the cement on the trucks...
It's going to harden.
It's not only going to be useless as cement, but it's going to destroy the trucks because the cement will harden and essentially then is very difficult to remove.
The truck itself can suffer damage.
And the union, of course, wanted all of this to happen.
So the union said to the truckers, what you should do is when we call the strike from the moment of the strike, you just abandon the trucks.
Or you just park the truck and you take off and you let the cement harden.
Don't do anything about it.
The company is going to tell you to deliver the cement.
Don't deliver the cement.
And so 16 union drivers did this.
They were part of this, you can call it almost, I don't know what you call it, but it's a kind of a...
Let's try to impose severe hardship or financial damage on the company.
And this is really a negotiating tool.
They want the company to then go down on its knees, agree to the demands of the union, and give in.
So it's a negotiating strategy.
But the company didn't do that, and they instead sued the union.
And lower courts dismiss the lawsuit, basically saying, essentially, this is a give and take.
This is an argument back and forth.
These kinds of things happen.
And so there's no real remedy here.
But the Supreme Court says no.
And in a decision that is written by Amy Coney Barrett, again, with seven other justices signing on, including Sotomayor, including Kagan, basically what Amy Coney Barrett says is she says, look, no.
No. You do not have the right to sabotage the company's property.
In other words, the National Labor Relations Act, which is the act that protects unions, does not allow you to engage in this kind of a sabotage.
If you want to go on strike, you have a duty to minimize the damage that is caused to the company by the strike.
And by minimize the damage, I simply mean you have to deliver these products and then go on strike.
And then, of course, you can have your negotiation with management.
Now, interestingly, Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson says the opposite, and she basically goes, no, when people go on strike, they can stop work, and sure, it's going to cause some damage on companies, but all work stoppages cause production to halt, cause deliveries to be delayed, services to be canceled.
So, quote, I'm not quoting her, at the risk of stating the obvious, this means that the worker's right to strike inherently includes the right to impose economic harm on their employer." Now, of course, I think she's not distinguishing between two kinds of harm.
If I have a company, and let's just say a film company, people want to go on strike.
Obviously, I can't make films while people are on strike because my workers aren't going to show up for work.
So that's a harm caused simply by the fact that they're not working.
That, of course, is allowed.
But what is not allowed is for the workers to show up and, let's just say, burn down the facility or put cement in the tailpipes of the vehicles.
This is sabotage.
So, Judge Amy Coney Barrett is drawing an equally obvious, in fact, a more obvious distinction between the harm caused by mere work stoppage and the harm caused by active sabotage.
So, a real victory here for common sense, a victory for a company's right to protect its own property, and a very appropriate chastising of the unions.
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Have you heard the phrase, gender affirming care?
Very interesting phrase.
Gender-affirming care, by and large, refers to somebody who wants to change their biological gender.
And the care is helping them or enabling them to transition to a different gender than they were born and do it on the basis that their new gender is being affirmed.
Now, if you think back a few decades, there were programs that were run by various groups that were aimed at gays who didn't want to be gay.
This was called conversion therapy.
And conversion therapy was, hey, if you're gay and you don't like to be gay, you don't feel like you don't want to be gay, you'd rather be straight, you'd go to these therapists and they would show you how you can, or they claim they would show you how you can transition from being gay to not being gay.
So my question is this.
What is the difference between conversion therapy and gender-affirming care?
In both cases, you've got somebody who is one way, straight or gay.
Gay wants to become straight.
In the other case, biological male wants to become female.
In both cases, you have a sort of conversion or transition involved.
In both cases, it's being done through therapeutic means.
And yet, conversion therapy was roundly denounced by the left.
Oh, this is horrible. This idea that you can take people who are gay and make them straight.
This is evil. This is downright.
Because people just are the way they are.
They're born that way, Dinesh.
Alright, well... That's the case.
If you are one way or the other, if you are gay or straight, is it not equally a fact that you are born male or female?
And is it not a fact that if you are one thing, how is it possible to convert or transition to the other?
And so interestingly, the point I'm trying to make is that conversion therapy is now reborn on the left, and they've realized that it would be really awkward to call it conversion therapy.
They don't want to say that this is a conversion from male to female or female to male.
So they've come up with a softer kind of a, and this is what the left is really clever at, they come up with a benign term, gender affirming care.
All these words are very carefully chosen.
And one particular variant of this gender affirming care is gender affirming care for minors.
Now, here's Elon Musk on the topic.
Gender-affirming care for minors is pure evil.
Elon sort of stating it as it is.
And the question is, why would he say that?
Why is it pure evil?
Well, it's pure evil because minors are not in a position to make these life-altering decisions at an age where they are not even mature enough.
In fact, think about all the things that minors require parental consent for.
Simple things. You've got to get a parent to sign off on this.
We're not going to get your ears pierced.
We're not going to do this. We're not going to do that.
Why? Because you're a minor.
And so you're not mature enough to make these kinds of decisions.
And yet, supposedly, these same minors are in a position to say, you know what?
I'd like to have my breasts taken off.
I'd rather have my penis removed and an artificial vagina replace it.
Think about it. These are what kids are supposed to be able to do.
How crazy is that?
Well, it turns out that there are people all over the world who are realizing how crazy it is and are stopping it.
Here is an article.
Norway bans child sex changes, joins Finland, Sweden, and the UK in rejecting gender ideology.
So, last week, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board says that they were revising their guidelines on so-called gender-affirming care.
They said, we no longer consider these to be, quote, evidence-based.
And under the new guidelines...
The use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, transition-related surgery is restricted to research contexts and no longer provided in clinical settings.
And as the article says, this isn't just Norway, it's Finland, it's Sweden, it's also the UK. And by and large, what's happened is that there are a lot of studies that are now coming out, one after the other, showing that the effects of these transitions are not being carefully monitored.
And in fact, they're very problematic.
I'm quoting now from the article,"...an existing body of research shows that most kids with gender dysphoria grow to be comfortable in their bodies upon undergoing puberty." And those wishing to transition suddenly post-puberty may be experiencing a social contagion.
Translation, they're doing it for fashion, not because they really need it, and not even really because they really want it.
Why? Because it is the case, and we all know this to be, The case that when you have people who are 10, 11, and 12, they're extremely awkward, even continuing into your teens.
They're not sure about your bodies.
Your body is undergoing changes.
You feel funny about it.
You have basically pockmarks on your face.
You become extremely socially self-conscious.
So it's very easy in this kind of atmosphere to think, well, maybe I'm not what I think I am.
I always thought I was a boy.
Maybe I'm a girl, or vice versa.
The point being that as you grow a little older, the pimples go away, your body sort of settles down, you become more comfortable with your body, and you realize that what you went through is not a kind of deep existential crisis about whether you're a boy or a girl.
It's simply the thing that's called growing up.
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I've been listening on Audible to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, his great masterwork.
And I had read some sections of it when I was younger.
The book itself, the original, is massively long.
In fact, it's in three volumes.
And if you put the volumes together, it's 1,800 pages.
So you can see why my original exposure was to grays over here, to grays over there.
But now there's a marvelous kind of condensed or abridged edition that pulls the best threads from all these three volumes.
And it's an excellent book, easily available now in paperback.
By the way, if you don't know much about Solzhenitsyn by way of background, this is a guy who was, well, he's deeply Russian.
He was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, 1918.
He fought in the Red Army in World War II and with distinction, but he made some negative remarks about Stalin after the war.
And he was immediately imprisoned.
So from 1945 to 1953, he served eight years in the Gulag.
When Solzhenitsyn wrote about the labor camps, he had been in them, so he knew what they were like.
Eventually, Stalin was denounced by Khrushchev.
Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated.
And he was...
But nevertheless, he continued to be a thorn in the side of the Soviet regime because he pointed out that even though they had denounced Stalin, many of those practices, many of those labor camps continued in the Soviet Union, even under Khrushchev and subsequently.
Eventually, he was exiled from the Soviet Union.
He went to West Germany, then came to the United States, where he lived in Vermont.
In fact, he lived just down the road.
I mean, down the road, he lived just an hour or so from Dartmouth.
And at one time, a bunch of us conservatives at the Dartmouth Review wanted to go visit him, but we were a little reluctant because he was known to be kind of a hermit and very much to himself.
So we weren't even sure if we would be able to approach him or have a conversation with him.
So we never really did that.
And ultimately, once communism collapsed in 1991, 92, Solzhenitsyn decided, well, he was never really at home in America.
And this is a story for another day, but he returned to his homeland in 1994.
Now, I want to just give one memorable, for me, vignette from the...
Gulag Archipelago.
And this involves a party conference that the Communist Party was having in Moscow province.
And there was a new secretary of the district party committee who replaced a man who had been recently arrested.
At the end of the conference, this guy stands up and he says, it is time now to have a tribute to Comrade Stalin.
And so everyone of course dutifully stood up because Stalin's name and stormy applause breaks out throughout the Communist Party Convention, rising to an ovation.
I'm now going to read from Solzhenitsyn.
For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause rising to an ovation continued.
But palms started to get sore and raised arms were already aching.
And the older people were panting from exhaustion.
It was already becoming insufferably silly, even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, and this is the key point, who would dare be the first to stop?
Stop clapping. The secretary of the district party committee could have done it.
He was standing on the platform.
He was the one who had called for the ovation, but he was a newcomer.
He had taken the place of a man who had been arrested.
He was afraid.
After all, there were these secret police all over the hall who were themselves applauding and Sir Solzhenitsyn watching to see who quit first.
And so, here's Solzhenitsyn.
He goes, in that obscure hall, unknown to the leader, Stalin, the applause went on, six, seven, eight minutes.
But he says, the problem now for the crowd is that the crowd realized nobody could stop.
Who's going to be the first one to stop?
They couldn't stop until they collapsed with heart attacks.
And he goes, yeah, at the rear of the hall, which was crowded, people could cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly.
But up in the front, you had to applaud incredibly vigorously.
And then it says that after 10 minutes, there was a man who was the director of a local paper factory.
In anguish, he watched the secretary of the district party committee, but the latter dared not stop.
And so, finally, this guy, quote, assumed a business-like expression and sat down quietly in his seat.
And oh, a miracle took place to a man everyone else stopped dead and sat down.
They had been saved.
And write Solzhenitsyn, that, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were, meaning independent thinking.
And that was how they went about eliminating them.
That same night, the factory director was arrested.
They easily gave him 10 years on the pretext of something different.
But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him, don't ever be the first to stop applauding.
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I'm talking about the hidden motives for skepticism and atheism.
The chapter is Opiate of the Morally Corrupt, Why Unbelief is So Appealing.
The book we're talking about is this one, What's So Great About Christianity.
I'm holding up the hardback, but you can order it off Amazon or Barnes& Noble in paperback.
Kind of a good reference to have.
I wrote the book very much in the mode of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
Except Mere Christianity came out in the 1940s.
This, of course, is much more recent.
And this covers a whole bunch of topics that weren't really pertinent when Lewis wrote Mere Christianity.
Now, I've been trying to show that atheists make it sound like they're just following reason.
Oh, I don't see the evidence for God.
But I say actually their motives are more complex and not quite so, not simply a matter of following the path of reason.
Here are atheists who acknowledge that they would prefer a universe in which there is no God, no immortal soul, no afterlife.
I quoted... Yesterday, Nietzsche did this effect.
But here is H.L. Mencken, the writer.
He's talking about life after death.
He goes, He doesn't want there to be an afterlife.
Think how odd that is. You would want, you would think, life to continue in some form.
But I think Mencken is saying that, well, we don't know what form it's going to take.
And for those of us who want to live a certain kind of life, it may be not all that good.
So I prefer that there wasn't life after death.
Here is the physicist Victor Stenger in God, the Failed Hypothesis.
He goes, not only do I disbelieve in God, I don't like the Christian God.
Quote, if he does exist, I personally want nothing to do with him.
And here's the philosopher Thomas Nagel recently confessing to, quote, a fear of religion itself.
He says, quote, I want atheism to be true.
It isn't just that I don't believe in God.
I don't want there to be a God.
I don't want the universe to be like that.
So, these are very revealing admissions, not of the way things are or aren't, but of the way things ought to be according to these figures.
And this aversion to religion, this embrace of atheism is baffling because atheists will often say, we live in a forgotten planet in the middle of a vast universe, our planet is not important, we are not important.
We are noble figures venturing out into the cold night, raging against the dying of the light, there's a pointlessness to human existence.
And there's something a little bit inauthentic or sort of fake about these poses, because If there's no God, why would you rage against the universe?
Why would you take this brave stance?
Because things just are the way they are.
They couldn't be any different, so no stance at all is really called for.
Is it brave to spit in the face of a volcano, or is it brave to sort of challenge a tidal wave?
No, natural forces aren't good or evil.
Well, they just are.
So where does the heroism come in if you're just taking the world as it is?
That's my question. Now, there are other atheists who seem almost gleeful about living in a Darwinian world.
That is, to quote the poet Tennyson, red in tooth and claw.
One time, the evolutionary biologist George Williams said Darwinism, and he's kind of speaking candidly, A kind of candor that's all too rare.
But he goes, Darwinism is a really, he goes, it's true, but it's a repulsive doctrine.
He goes, think of the ethical implications of a system that assigns no higher purpose than selfish bargains and conspiracies to propagate your own genes into future generations.
Williams goes, a moral person cannot but recoil and respond to this kind of a system with a kind of discomfort, if not outright condemnation, and yet we see that Richard Dawkins and others embrace Darwinism without ambivalence and indeed with a kind of genuine enthusiasm.
Now, why, this is my question, are they drawn to a philosophy, and where in its sort of grim hallways do they find room for this evident good cheer?
Here is biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
He's talking about the meaning of life, and he says, quote, we may yearn for a higher answer, but none exists.
And you might expect him to go, how depressing, there's no higher meaning to life.
But then he says something very revealing.
This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating.
In other words, what he's saying is the bad news, there's no meaning to life, is the good news.
Doctrines that may seem to be horrifying, death is the end, there's no cosmic purpose, there's no divine justice, free will is an illusion, can from another vantage point be viewed as emancipating.
Well, emancipating from...
What? To listen to some atheists, they want to free themselves from the shackles of religion to practice virtue.
Here is Santiago Zabala in a book called The Future of Religion.
In a world where God is no longer present, man is now free to actively practice solidarity, charity, and irony.
Well, what admirable motives.
The only problem is, why do you have to get rid of religion to be this way?
You don't have to get rid of religion to be charitable in the name of human brotherhood.
In fact, as Francis of Assisi could have told this Zabala fellow, charity, human kinship are two of Christianity's more central themes.
So what I'm getting at here is that atheism is not being upfront.
It's not divulging its true motives.
And when we come back tomorrow, over the next couple of days, I'm going to explore the true motives, not quite so pretty, of skepticism and of atheism.
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