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Sept. 12, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:35
FALLOUT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep662
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Coming up yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of 9-11.
I'll discuss the roots of 9-11 and also the legacy all these years later.
I'll explore the irony of how the powers given to the U.S. government to fight Islamic terrorism have now been turned against conservatives and Republicans.
And I'll show how Trump's enduring popularity is making the left extremely nervous about 2024.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of 9-11, and I was tempted to do a segment on this yesterday, but I thought, let me see what people say about 9-11 all these 22 years later.
Let me see what the memory of 9-11 is like now and respond to that.
So we'll start with Joe Biden.
And Joe Biden said, I was there.
It was like looking through the gates of hell, except he wasn't there.
He wasn't in New York.
He was in Washington, DC.
He in fact, apparently gave a speech on that day in DC.
So this is very typical Biden.
He turns out that he claims to be at all these important historical events.
And he was there at the civil rights movement.
He was alongside Martin Luther King, except he wasn't.
So this is a guy who sort of imaginatively visits places and events and gives first-hand accounts that he is no position to really give.
In fact...
You know, this is Biden, and people are now accustomed to this, and this is what we have as the leader of our country.
Now, when 9-11 happened, it occurred as a complete...
Shock. And it was a shock not simply because it was an unprecedented attack, something like this hadn't happened before, even Pearl Harbor, which was obviously a massive attack by the Japanese, but that was not on the American mainland.
That was off the shores of Hawaii.
So it was unprecedented in that sense, but I think it was unprecedented in a bigger sense, and that is that After the end of the Cold War, America went into a kind of lull.
And you remember people talking about the fact that it's the end of history.
I mean, think of what a startling and broad claim that is.
Sort of like all wars are now over.
The ideological struggle over the best type of government is now over.
Liberal democracy has won the day.
This was, of course, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, but many other people echoed similar sentiments.
And what this meant is that the arrival of a kind of new ideology on the scene, and in this case, of course, Islamic radicalism, which wasn't new in the sense that it was invented at 9-11, it was actually cooked up.
80 or 60 years before the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ascent of the Khomeini regime in 1979.
So Islamic radicalism had been cooking for a while.
It then took a hold of a major state, Iran.
You had powerful radical movements in other places, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, and so on.
And so, all of this was brewing, but we didn't really pay attention to it.
Part of it was we were focused on the Soviet threat.
But even after the Soviet threat, there was a kind of atmosphere of Clintonian negligence.
And this negligence is very culpable.
And I think one of the remarkable things is how little Clinton, Bill Clinton here, not Hillary...
Was held to account for it.
Because think about it. The radical Muslims were sort of rehearsing 9-11.
And by rehearsing here, I mean launching attacks as if to test the resolve of the Clinton administration.
You might remember Khobar Towers, I believe 1995.
The attack on the two U.S. embassies.
The attack on the USS Cole.
I mean, a massive attack.
They blew a giant hole in the hull of a U.S. ship.
And yet, no response from Clinton.
Nothing. And so the Islamic radicals were like, wow, this is the perfect kind of opponent.
This is like a guy who's bigger than you, but you walk up to him and like punch him in the stomach and he doesn't do anything.
And then you punch him in the back and he doesn't do anything.
So you go, wow, why don't I aim a shot at his head?
Because clearly this guy's useless.
He's kind of large but inert.
And I think all of this led to 9-11.
Now, after 9-11, the US crippled Al-Qaeda by striking out at Al-Qaeda facilities.
Also, the US scattered the Taliban.
But look, what happens is two things.
One is the Taliban just waited it out.
They hung out in the mountains for 20 years.
I mean, these are very hardened people.
And now they're back. They're running Afghanistan.
Who's in charge? The Taliban.
And Al-Qaeda, I think, is not quite what it used to be, but Al-Qaeda now morphs.
You get new groups coming up.
You have ISIS, for example, and then you have to contend with ISIS. ISIS displaces Al-Qaeda.
Now, ISIS itself suffered some blows under Trump, but again, I'm sure ISIS is now trying to make a comeback under Biden.
Islamic radicalism is not gone.
It comes, by the way, both in the Shia and Sunni strains of Islam.
And so you think about groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, they are Sunni.
You think about the Iranian mullahs, they are Shia.
And so you shouldn't think of Islamic radicalism as coming out of one or the other.
It actually comes out of both.
And Iran is very much with us.
In fact, Iran is, I think, the sort of central hub, if you will, of Islamic radicalism, because it's the one place where the Islamic radicals are in control of a major state.
Now, the Taliban is in control of a state, but it's not a major state.
It's Afghanistan. And Iran is not only important in itself, but it's linked now to Russia.
It's linked to China.
So, this kind of new axis of evil is moving all over the world.
It's moving in Venezuela. The Chinese, the Iranians, the Russians are all in Venezuela.
It's trying to create, if you will, a rival axis to the United States.
And so, as we look back on 9-11, we were negligent in allowing it to happen.
We allowed it to happen and we dealt with some of the immediate effects of it.
But the longer-term effects of Islamic radicalism are, regrettably, still with us to this day.
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I want to talk about a different legacy of 9-11.
And as Debbie and I were thinking about it, we thought this can be summarized in the single word, fallout.
And fallout literally means something that comes out of something else, even though it was not anticipated at the time.
So think, for example, of you launch a nuclear attack, and the nuclear attack is on, let's just say, The center of American missiles in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
But the nuclear radiation goes all over Colorado.
You kill a lot of people in restaurants and so on.
That's the fallout. That was not the intended target.
That's not even what the enemy wanted to happen necessarily.
But it's the collateral damage.
It is something that does happen, and it is harmful, and it came directly out of the attack itself.
Now, when we think about 9-11...
The fallout I have in mind has to do with our response to 9-11.
Our response to 9-11 was, in a sense, we've got to stop this kind of thing from happening.
Remember all the never-agains.
And never again, of course, is a phrase that's borrowed from the Holocaust.
We should never allow something like this to happen again.
But now when you think about it, let's think about what you mean by that.
Because never again means not only that when crimes are committed...
And when international acts of terror are launched, we want to get the people who did them.
Never again means we have to prevent it from happening before it happens.
And that means we've got to start spying on a lot of people who haven't necessarily committed any crimes at all.
In fact, we don't know if they have or if they haven't.
We're just going to look at them and try to sift from that surveillance.
This guy's a risk and that guy's a risk.
And now we go to deeper surveillance and we start looking at their bank records and so on.
And so this establishment of a sort of surveillance state...
I'm even going to call it to some degree a police state.
But it was a police state with a limited target.
And who were the targets?
Potential terrorists.
And presumably, they were potential terrorists from abroad.
Initially, when we talked about getting wiretapping...
Giving free reign for the government, the U.S. government, to wiretap.
It was like, well, they're going to be wiretapping calls between, like, Iran and the United States, where some Iranian national is trying to get in through the border or trying to come in through the immigration system.
And this guy's then going to go, what, sign up for flight lessons or try to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.
So we were like, yeah, I mean, this guy should be surveilled and this guy should be followed.
And we don't really care if his privacy is being violated.
He could be a potential terrorist.
And so what I'm getting at is that many people, me included, but this was a drumbeat led by the neocons.
Let's create the kind of regime here in the United States of surveillance, of wiretapping, of following people.
And I would add, this morphed into something even worse, and that is entrapment.
So entrapment is, I mean, in the classic meaning of entrapment, you've got a policeman, and I'm not suggesting that the policeman is just out there to randomly grab people on the street and say, okay, there was a crime committed, let's just get that guy.
No, it's not like that.
The policeman thinks it is a particular guy.
This guy is a gang member.
He was present in the general vicinity when it happened.
I think it's him.
I don't really know that it's him, but so what?
Here's the point. I'm pretty sure he did it, but I don't really have the proof.
So, what if I lure him into giving me evidence?
What if I entrap him in some way?
What if I plant the drugs?
What if I plant the evidence?
Or what if I interview him on a different subject but get him to say something incriminating in a different context that, once recorded, Can be played before a jury which will think it relates to this particular crime.
So there are various forms of entrapment.
And all of this got going after 9-11.
This was in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, but it kept going.
And then later, these very tools were turned back.
I think beginning in the Obama years against new targets.
The transition was moving from foreign terrorism to domestic terrorism.
And again, there were many of us who would have supported it to the degree that we would have said, listen, there's not much of a difference, let's say, between an Iranian plotting an attack in Iran or in Tehran And let's say an Iranian-American who's been radicalized at NYU or Berkeley who wants to carry out a terror attack for the same reason and in the same way, well, that guy may be a U.S. citizen, but he's a domestic terrorist.
He's someone who is doing the same thing domestically.
So what happened is, what I'm getting at is that the police state moved from the Muslims to supposedly domestic terrorists using all the same tools of surveillance and entrapment, and then it was conveniently moved by Obama and Obama's successors, including the people in the Biden regime, the Republicans and conservatives. So you see here how the legacy of 9-11 in a very bitterly ironic way has turned on some of the very people
who are the enthusiastic supporters of the surveillance state established in the aftermath of 9-11.
And here, there were a few people, Ron Paul, one of them, who warned against this.
They go, listen, these powers can be turned against U.S. citizens.
And now they have.
And this is the subject of my new film, Police Date.
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Debbie and I talk pretty much daily about the ongoing impeachment trial in the Texas Senate of Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Now, we know Ken Paxton.
Ken Paxton is a friend of ours.
He's been a guest on the podcast.
He's worked with Debbie on some political projects.
This is even before I knew Debbie.
Debbie's been pretty enmeshed in Texas politics for quite a while.
At least going back to what, honey, 2008 or maybe 2008 or 2009.
And this is when Debbie, it first dawned on her that she was looking at Obama and she goes, basically, I see a version of Hugo Chavez.
I need to get involved. The terrors of Venezuela are now being visited on the United States.
And so Debbie became involved nationally, but she also became involved very much locally.
All right, so Ken Paxton has enemies.
He's got a lot of enemies, and some of them are Republicans.
Now, they tend to be Republicans of the moderate.
I wouldn't say necessarily rhinos, because it's not that they're Republicans just in name, but they're establishment Republicans.
And there are a lot of those guys in Texas, and there are some of them that decided that it's time to get rid of Ken Paxton.
Now, they didn't just decide that because they thought, well, look...
You know, Ken Paxton's a bad guy.
We don't like him. Let's get rid of him.
But let's remember that there were other Republicans who ran against Ken Paxton.
So there are powerful people in Texas.
One of them is a member of the Bush family, George P. And there were others who ran against Ken Paxton.
So you've got a peculiar dynamic in the situation where your rivals Who have been defeated in the primary and then you, Ken Paxton, go on to win, they all have a sort of an interest.
Now, I'm not saying that they're all actively conspiring and certainly not to the same degree, but they wouldn't mind seeing Ken Paxton out of the running in the same way that some of the rivals of Trump wouldn't mind seeing Trump out of the running because it clears the pathway for them.
I've been watching, I've been following the trial hour by hour or anything, but I've been watching the cross-examination of, I think, four or five witnesses now by Tony Busby, by the way, a very good attorney who's representing Paxton.
And a lot of things are emerging out of this that are making things, at least in my mind, pretty clear.
Number one, Ken Paxton was indiscreet.
He was wrong. He did have an affair.
And Debbie and I were talking about this in the car on the way to the podcast that this is probably going to hurt Paxton politically because a lot of his supporters were diehard evangelicals.
They're supporters who saw him as a family man, who saw him as somebody who was one of them, And so this is clearly, to some degree, a sordid business.
Now, initially, I didn't know whether he had the affair or anything, but I saw Tony Busby in one of these clips saying, it's not the worst thing in the world.
I mean, someone who's had an affair hasn't necessarily committed a crime, have they?
And so I take that to mean when your own lawyer is saying things like that, well, there was an affair.
So that's something that Ken Paxton has to deal with, not just by the way with his wife and family, but he has to deal with it politically because there are consequences when your supporters are firmly in, or a number of them, in the evangelical camp.
But... Having said that, goes on, I find out that virtually everything else that is being alleged against Ken Paxton is extremely suspect and dubious.
And so, for example, I find out, number one, that George P. Bush apparently has reapplied for his law license.
Very interesting, coincidental phenomenon.
Here, Ken Paxton is undergoing a trial that, if he's removed, would vacate the position of Attorney General.
George P. Bush was one of the contenders for it last time.
He's now applied for his license, presumably to say, hey, I'm eligible.
I'm here. I can do the job.
So this suggests, if you will, that there are hidden hands behind all this that are pushing the process.
Number two... Some of the people in Ken Paxton's office go to the FBI and report these possible violations of law.
And so the question becomes, what were those violations?
What did they know about that Ken Paxton did?
And it turns out they knew nothing.
All they did was they produced allegations.
He received gifts.
Well, what were those gifts?
Who gave them to him and for what purpose?
I don't know. I just thought that this is a potential violation.
Or that he's running the office in an organized crime manner, says one guy.
I don't know.
I'm not speaking specifically.
I just heard from one guy and a second guy that there was something that was going on.
Well, isn't it true that you yourself applied for a job in that office shortly after you made this complaint?
Well, yes, it is true.
Well... If you thought that organized crime was being carried out of that office and you consider yourself a decent and straight-laced guy, why would you apply for a job that involves participating in these organized crimes?
And so it goes on like this, case after case, and what you realize is that this is a political hit through and through.
It's a political hit that is somewhat camouflaged because some of the people doing the hit are Republicans.
Now, it's being egged on by the Democrats.
It's really clear that the Republicans against Paxton are working with people like the Attorney General in, not the Attorney General, but the prosecuting attorney in Travis County.
Travis County includes Austin.
This is perhaps the most liberal part of Texas.
Needless to say that the prosecutor there is a Democrat.
So, what you have is Democrats are gleefully participating in all this.
It's a wonderful opportunity for them to get rid of a nuisance of a powerful attorney general who is actually conservative and carries out conservative policies and is running the office in a conservative manner.
It looks to me like this is something very underhanded that is going on against Paxton.
Not that Paxton is entirely in the right, but in terms of criminality.
It doesn't look like he has done anything, I repeat, anything to justify his removal from office.
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Feel the difference. There is an interesting article on NBC News and the reason I read places like NBC News and Slate and these left-wing sites is to get the temperature of not just what the left is saying but how they're feeling.
The article is about aggregating recent polls that put Trump against Biden.
So they're not looking at polls for Trump winning the nomination.
In fact, I think the left has sort of resigned to the fact that Trump is decisively ahead and all this hullabaloo and all these indictments have not shaken the confidence of Republicans in Trump.
So that's, for the left, that's bad news enough because they were, nothing would please them more than to have Trump's own side, the Republicans, undo him.
Because then the left will go, well, we didn't really do it.
You guys decided you didn't like this guy.
You didn't think he could win. You chose a better candidate from your point of view.
So in no way does the left then become responsible for trying to torpedo the democratic process.
They're sort of off the hook for going after their chief political opponent.
By the way, I saw Vladimir Putin on TV. He was interviewed by Australian TV. And he goes, you know, this Trump arrest and all these indictments, he goes, I think this is great.
He goes, but let's think about it.
Let's see why.
He says, I think it's great because it shows the hypocrisy of the United States.
The United States has been lecturing the rest of the world for decades.
Oh, Putin, you're going after your political opponents.
And here they are doing the same thing or worse.
And so, Putin's point is, let's put an end to the sort of internal rottenness and hypocrisy of this U.S. regime once and for all.
Now, you can say, well, Putin's one to talk.
He does the same thing.
And I grant that that is the case, but this is my point.
And it's sort of Putin's point, too.
Putin's point is that you have always claimed to be different than the rest of us.
You have always claimed to be better than us.
You have always claimed to be living by a set of higher principles than the rest of the world.
Well, guess what?
You aren't.
And I think on this point, Putin is completely right.
So here's the left and they, but they're not too worried about the foreign policy predicament because their main goal, their obsessive goal is to get Trump, to keep Trump from the Oval Office, to keep Trump in part from engaging in what some on the left are calling a retribution presidency.
In other words, Trump coming back would not be the same.
Trump 47 wouldn't be the same as Trump 45.
This would be Trump with a vengeance.
This would be sort of the Terminator is back and now things are going to get really bad for the left.
No more Mr. Nice Guy, if you want to put it that way.
So here are these polls.
And CNN polls.
Sometimes when Rasmussen does a poll, the left goes, well, that's Rasmussen.
They're kind of pro-Trump.
We can't really trust their numbers.
Well, here's a CNN poll.
It shows Trump leading Biden, 47 to 46.
Wall Street Journal survey tied at 46.
New York Times Siena poll shows a tie at 43 with the rest undecided.
And so what NBC says is the former president is currently polling stronger against Biden than he did at any point in 2020 when he trailed by as many as 10 points and never came within three points in the 538 average.
So even when you do an average of all the polls, Trump was never even within three points of Biden.
Why is this? Well, NBC sort of digs into the data of these polls and it basically finds out, kind of a dismaying conclusion from their point of view, that by and large, the number one constituency that has been moving away from the Democrats, minorities, Black and Latino voters.
And Biden was winning 92% of Black voters in 2020.
He's now winning 71%.
And black males in particular are moving away, or at least they're no longer as committed to the Democratic Party.
We're not sure if they're...
We don't have demonstrated proof of shifted allegiance, but we do see a change of attitude.
The same is true with Hispanics.
And so Trump is making gains in blue-collar voters, black Americans, and Hispanics.
The one group that Biden is apparently holding onto?
White college graduates.
Wow. This is the progressive liberals.
These are the people who have been indoctrinated.
These are the people, by the way, who talk about crime but never experience crime, or at least they've insulated themselves from it.
So these are not people who are directly affected by a lot of the policies that they advocate.
Oh, defund the police!
That's because I live in a gated community.
And there's nothing wrong with living in a gated community.
I do also. But I don't go around calling for other people to be deprived of police protection.
And some Democrats say, you know, it's okay.
We can live with this.
We'll reverse these trends.
One of Obama's pollsters says, you know, in 2011, Obama was behind, but then he came around and won re-election.
But this guy's name is Jim Messina.
He says, Democrats don't need to, you know, wet their beds over this.
We should stay calm.
We have this under control.
But then James Carville was on CNN, and he was asked about this, and he goes, Jim Messina says Democrats need to quit But my wife has already changed me to rubber sheets.
What he's getting at is, I'm worried.
And Carville, by the way, has a pretty good ear for the working class and for Democrats winning voters that Democrats historically haven't done that well with.
He sees that there's an erosion going on.
So... So, the left really can't believe this because they know that they've been successful to a degree already.
They have tied Trump down.
He's got all these legal depositions.
He's got to show up in court here, show up in court there.
Think about all his legal bills.
He raises money, but some of that goes toward the bills.
And even so, despite it all, here is Trump doing better than he was doing in 2020.
And so the prospect of a Trump return to the White House cannot be written off by Democrats, as Bill Kristol tweeted out today, just talking about these very same polls.
And this is a very Bill Kristol thing to say.
I am alarmed.
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You'll get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Debbie and I are very excited about an artifact in Jerusalem that is called the Pool of Siloam.
The Pool of Siloam is a giant pool.
In fact, it's the size of two Olympic swimming pools.
And it is in the part of Jerusalem that used to be the City of David.
And it's still called the City of David now because it has been discovered that this is in fact the archaeological site on which the City of David once stood.
And pilgrims in ancient times, including as it turns out the time of Jesus, would come to Jerusalem.
They'd come from all parts of Israel and they would come by walking or they would come on an animal or on a donkey.
Remember, Jesus traveled often on the back of a donkey and And when these pilgrims got to Jerusalem, they wanted to go to the temple.
But Jews can't enter the temple if they are ritually unclean, if they haven't washed.
And so, initially in Jerusalem, there were small pools where Jews could sort of go in the pool, wash.
But as the number of pilgrims swelled and became quite large in Jesus' own day...
They decided, let's build a big pool in which all the pilgrims who come to Jerusalem can wash in this pool.
And then there are some steps to the pool.
And then there is a pathway extending something like a quarter to half a mile.
And you walk, you ascend up those steps and up that pathway to the temple itself.
Now, what's remarkable about all this is that this pool was hidden.
It was not known. And then recently, it was accidentally discovered.
A pipe broke in Jerusalem.
They began to dig.
The sort of sanitation people came in, but some archaeologists were with them.
And guess what? They dig the pipe and they discover right under that, an archaeologically important location. They discover this is where the Pool of Siloam was. And they've also found the pathway leading up to the temple. Now this is tremendously sort of important and exciting stuff. And one reason is this. Jesus, without a doubt, bathed in that pool.
Because Jesus was a pilgrim.
He went to the temple. In fact, he went to the temple multiple times.
We know he was at the temple when he was as early as 12 years old.
So he went to that pool, and he walked on those steps, and he walked that path to the temple.
And as Zev Ornstein, who runs the City of David Foundation, at least he's its public spokesman, he goes,"'This is not a matter of faith.
This is a matter of fact.'" So, Jesus as an historical person, no one denies that he did these things, and if he did these things, he bathed in that pool.
So, that pool is now being recreated.
The site is being fully excavated, and it's going to be, in short order, by short order we mean months, maybe even a year, open to the public.
We can actually walk in Jesus's...
Yeah, Debbie's reminding me that when we were in Israel, Zev Ornstein and his team gave us a private tour of the archaeological expeditions underway.
We could see all these guys covered in dust, digging and so on.
And we were able to walk on that road and also put our hand in the ashes of where Jerusalem had been burned by the Romans.
And... And another thing that's worth noting is that there is a description in the Bible of Jesus restoring the sight of a man born blind at the pool of Siloam.
So, there's one of the miracles of Scripture is located at this pool.
So now, and again, think of it, for many centuries people would read the Bible and as the kind of acid of skepticism began to spread, people began to say, well, who knows if any of this even happened?
Who knows if there was a King Hezekiah?
Who knows if there was a Pontius Pilate?
Who knows if these miracles occurred?
Who knows if these locations are made up?
Well, as it turns out, it was King Hezekiah in the Old Testament, who described in the Old Testament, he built the Pool of Siloam.
It turns out that Pontius Pilate is an historical figure, and there are now monuments that have his name on it that date back to the time when he lived.
So he was a real person.
And as it turns out now, the real sight of the miracle, you can continue to believe or not believe in the miracle, but you can't continue to not believe that there was a pool, and this is the location that is being described, and Jesus was in fact there, and He did in fact make this journey to the temple.
So, all of this is extremely fascinating.
I think it is a stunning vindication.
It has political implications.
But it also has theological implications.
Well, what are the political implications?
Well, they show that ancient Israel was, in fact, the land of the Jews.
These were Jewish kings who built these things, and there was a Jewish temple.
And so, the Jews, in a sense, Were the people of Israel.
Now, later, they were scattered.
They went into the Diaspora.
They only came back in the 19th century and then continuing until the formation of the State of Israel.
So, that's the political side.
But the theological side is that these are places and events that are described in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New.
And so, what's going on with these archaeological expeditions, which Debbie and I are doing a small part to support philanthropically, Because we think it's so important for people around the world to be able to go to Jerusalem and see for themselves that these aren't fables, these aren't fairy tales, these aren't fictions, these are real things, real places, real people, real history.
It all occurred, and as Zev Ornstein says, it's not merely a matter of faith.
It can be a matter of faith if you live elsewhere, if you've never been, if you've never seen.
But for those who have seen, who have been there, it is also a matter of fact.
We honor you, Father, for all that you've done for us.
Chief Division Counsel and DOJ have approved a no-knock breach.
Beach.
We want the subject to be on display.
Doing the walk of shame, full visual impact.
Any questions? Are we becoming a police state?
The government told American citizens they couldn't go to church on Sunday.
For the first time in my life, I'm saying to myself, am I going to get a knock at the door?
Yippee! Come to the door now!
The Patriot Act and FISA were used against Donald Trump.
These individuals have commissioned the biggest propaganda play in U.S. history.
They don't go after the people that rigged the election.
They go after the people that want to find out what the hell happened.
We don't need to have a crime.
What we need is a person to look at.
And then we go find out what crime you did.
Our focus is shifting.
Our main priority as a bureau is going to be domestic terrorism.
It really paints anybody who's right of center.
If you're a pro-life, pro-family Catholic, they define you as radical.
These are anti-government.
We are afraid of a religion, afraid of a speech.
Violent extremists, and they must be dealt with.
We can do anything we want.
I'm in the opening section of Solji Knudsen's Gulag Archipelago and it's the chapter on arrest.
It's just called arrest, one word.
And the chapter is so good that it's hard for me to even improve upon Solzhenitsyn, and in some cases I don't even like to summarize because I think that some of the texture of detail that he gives is so interesting and so relevant.
So I'll be doing some kind of reading and I'll comment as appropriate, but here's Solzhenitsyn talking about the experience of arrest.
It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours on end, a breaking, ripping open, pulling from the walls, emptying things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking, dumping out, ripping apart, piling up mountains of litter on the floor, and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots.
Now, this is, by the way, also the exact experience of an FBI raid, for example, here in the United States.
This description could just be re-tagged and it would be relevant in America today.
And nothing is sacred in a search.
Wow, that's so true.
During the arrest of the locomotive engineer in Ocean, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child.
He says that the officers dumped the child's body out of the coffin and searched it.
They shake sick people out of their sick beds and they unwind bandages to search beneath them.
So what is Solzhenitsyn getting at here?
The sheer callousness, the sheer ruthlessness of the police state, the Soviet police state.
And then he immediately pivots because he knows that shattering, though this experience is for the victim, for the person being arrested, it is also shattering for families, for all the people, the friends, the people who live in that building, the people around them.
For those left behind after the arrest, he writes, there was a long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life.
So the people here are portrayed as kind of the tale of this single life.
And the attempts to go and deliver food parcels.
But from all the windows, the answer comes in barking voices.
Nobody here by that name. Never heard of him.
Yes, and in the worst days in Leningrad, it took five days of standing in crowded lines just to get to the window, just to be able to talk to someone.
And it may be only after half a year or a year that the arrested person responds at all.
And sometimes, he says, you just get a notice, quote, no right to correspondence.
And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knows this territory very well, says the translation of that statement, namely, no right to correspondence, is we've shot this guy.
In other words, he's no longer around.
Obviously, he can't correspond with you.
He doesn't exist anymore.
Solzhenitsyn writes, the kind of night arrest described is in fact a favorite because it has important advantages.
So here at Solzhenitsyn, he's not just describing arrest.
And by the way, in the United States, these FBI raids are typically first thing in the morning when people are groggy, they haven't really woken up, so there's an element of surprise.
But in Soviet Russia, there were morning arrests, midday arrests, night arrests.
In fact, there was such a variety of arrests that you could almost, you know, write a thesis about it.
And here's Solzhenitsyn now going into the different types of arrests.
So the first is the night arrest.
And he says, During the arrest and search,
it's highly improbable that a crowd of potential supporters will gather at the entrance.
So Solzhenitsyn is saying that the night arrest minimizes hassles, and this is really why they like it.
They like it that way. In addition, there's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city streets can see how many they've taken away.
You can go by night and have this guy over here, that guy over there, a third guy over there, and in the morning, no one's really the better for it.
No one really knows what happened the previous night.
Arrests which frighten the closest neighbors are no event at all to those farther away.
It is as if they had not taken place.
In fact, he describes a scene Solzhenitsyn does where a bunch of people are arrested in an apartment, and the next day you see a group of students walking by with banners, flowers, and singing, quote, gay, untroubled songs.
And then Solzhenitsyn says, but let's talk about this business of an arrest.
he says, for those who take, in other words, not the person who's taken, but the taker, the person making the arrest, whose work consists solely of arrests, for whom the horror is boringly repetitive, have a much broader understanding of how arrests operate. So, an arrest is viewed completely differently by the guy who's subject to it than by the guy who's
The guy who's subject to it, oh my gosh, my life is overturned, oh my gosh, tomorrow's not going to be the same as any of my yesterdays.
But for the guy doing it, it's like, well, I did seven arrests yesterday and eight the day before and you're only one on my list today.
So all this screaming, turning things upside down to me is normal.
It's almost like if somebody works in an emergency room in a hospital.
Yeah, blood, broken limbs, accident victims.
This is all normal because you're a professional in this kind of chaotic world and you come to take it for granted.
And then Solzhenitsyn says that arrests operate according to a large body of theory, and innocence must not lead one to ignore this.
I'm continuing with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's description of arrests.
He says that arrests are almost scientific.
They operate, he said, according to a kind of theory.
Quote, The science of arrest is an important segment of the course on general penology and has been propped up with a substantial body of social theory.
This is stuff, in other words, he's saying that people, they study, just like here. People who are in the services, whether it's the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI or even just a normal cop, you undergo training for how to do these things. And that training begins with a certain amount of academic work. People write papers, you listen to lectures, then you undergo rehearsals and practice, and then you actually get into the business of making arrests. Arrests are classified,
soldier needs and rights, according to various criteria.
Nighttime and daytime, at home, at work, during a journey, first-time arrests and repeats, individual and group arrests.
So this is all the variety of arrests.
Arrests are distinguished by the degree of surprise required, the amount of resistance expected, even though in tens of millions of cases, no resistance was expected, and in fact, there was none.
Arrests are also differentiated by the thoroughness of the required search, by instructions either to make out or not make out an inventory of confiscated property or seal a room or apartment, to arrest the wife after the husband and send the children to an orphanage, or to send the rest of the family into exile, Or send the old folks to a labor camp, too.
So all of this has occurred.
And it varies. There's no rule.
In some cases, it's like, should we get the wife also?
Yeah, sure. Get her, too.
What do we do with the kids?
Oh, leave them. Oh, give them.
The relatives will take them.
Oh, stick them in an orphanage.
What do we do with the parents?
Okay, send them to a labor camp.
Why not? Who do you think trained these people to be the subversives that they are?
So there's an element of planning, an element of regimentation, as Solzhenitsyn says, a boring element to all this.
But there's also whim. There's discretion.
It depends on the commissar.
It depends on the local boss who decides, well, today I feel like throwing the guy's family into prison.
Well, tomorrow I probably feel a little bit, like, feel bad.
Maybe. Let's leave those guys out of it.
And either way, those people's lives are affected by kind of what my mood is like that day.
No, no, says Solzhenitsyn, arrests very widely informed.
And now we get to something that Solzhenitsyn does throughout the Gulag Archipelago.
He gives examples, naming people.
And the examples are almost inevitably interesting and even surprising.
In 1926, Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, obtained through the Comintern two front row tickets to the Bolshoi Theater.
So who's the Comintern?
Well, that's the party apparatus.
That's the Communist Party regime.
So here's this young woman.
She gets two tickets to the Bolshoi Theater.
Remember, the Soviets are famous for ballet.
They've got the best theaters in the world.
Interrogator Klegel was courting her at the time, and she invited him to go with her.
They sat through the show very affectionately, and when it was over, he took her...
Straight to the Lubyanka.
What's the Lubyanka?
Well, that's the Soviet prison.
And so, think of the scene.
You have this woman. She's got these theater tickets.
Wow! She got them from the Communist Party.
Well, it turns out that they gave her the tickets because they wanted her to use the tickets.
They kind of knew who she would ask to go with her, the man who was courting her.
That guy happened to be a member of the Communist Party, in fact, involved as an interrogator.
What does he do? Take her to the theater, and after that, boy, she's already kind of in his possession.
Off he takes her to prison, and she is locked up and presumably never heard from again.
And if on a flowering June day in 1927 on Kuzanetsky Most, the plump-cheek, red-headed beauty Anna Shrypnikova, who had just bought some navy blue material for a dress, climbed into a cab with a young man about town, you can be sure it wasn't a lover's tryst at all, as the cabman understood very well and showed from his frown.
It was an arrest.
So here this woman gets into a cab, and in 1927, I'm not sure if this was an automobile or this was a horse and carriage.
Probably it was an automobile, but the cab driver was in on it.
He knows what's going on. It's an arrest.
She gets in the cab. She's got a bright new dress.
She's anticipating something that she's developing a relationship with some guy.
Oh no, the whole point of this is for her to be arrested.
In just a moment, We would turn on the Lubyanka and enter the black maw of the gates.
No, one certainly cannot say that daylight arrest, arrest during a journey, or arrest in the middle of the crowd has ever been neglected in our country.
So this is Solzhenitsyn being sarcastic.
It's like, gee, here in the Soviet Union, we do it all.
Morning arrests, noon arrests.
We catch people as they're going about town.
We catch people as they are leaving town.
We catch people while they're on vacation.
We do it all. However, it's all been, he writes, clean-cut and most surprising of all, the victims in cooperation with the security men have conducted themselves in the noblest conceivable manner so as to spare the living from witnessing the death of the condemned. This is, well, in literature we call this irony.
And that is Solzhenitsyn saying how ironic it is that the very people who are being grabbed, the very people whose lives are coming in effect to an end, they will never be heard from again.
You would think that they would shout, they would scream, they would yell, they would make a scene, they would at least try to recruit the help of people on the street, but no.
Sheep-like, meek, they go along with their tormentors, they go into oblivion, they cooperate in their own destruction.
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