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Oct. 18, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:47
WHOSE LAND? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep688
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Coming up, I want to focus today on the Middle East and explore just a series of fundamental questions.
Well, the first one, the root of the whole thing is, whose land is it anyway?
But also things like, how is there such a massive intelligence failure in Israel?
I have a theory about it.
What about here? How come our intelligence agencies were also clueless?
What is the role of the other Muslim countries in the region, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia?
What's the chance of a widening conflict that draws in Russia and China into a major war with the United States and Europe?
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
Guys, we are just a few days away from the opening of Police State on Monday, October 23rd.
And also 25th.
So we have typically in theaters the 7pm or the 6.30pm show in hundreds of theaters.
In some theaters, these are theaters by and large where our films have done well, earlier films.
We have more than one showing in the same theater.
So it could be a 6.30 and a 7 in two side-by-side theaters.
But in any event, if you go to policedatefilm.net, type in your zip code, boom, the theaters will come up and you can choose where you want to go.
And this is the film to see with as many people as you can round up.
It's kind of a wonderful experience to not only individually experience the film, but then talk it over with others.
Now, if you want to watch at home, no problem.
Later in the week. That's next week, Friday, October 27th.
This is the first time you can watch the film at home.
It's the virtual premiere, so it's very cool.
We have a marvelous studio in Las Vegas with a giant stage.
I mean, it looks like the Oscars.
We're going to have For Giato Blow, who wrote the closing song of the movie.
This is the song that runs with the credits at the end.
It's called Police State Survivor.
He's going to perform. Then we're going to show you the movie.
And after the full movie, we have a Q&A with Dan Bongino and me.
And this is all for the price of a movie ticket.
Basically $20. So either the theater or the virtual premiere on the 27th.
And now, today's episode, I'm going to focus on several facets of what's happening in Israel, but also connect those to things that are happening here in America.
You'll see a police state resonance run through what I'm talking about, but I'm not going to make it explicit every single time.
I don't want to feel like I'm just focusing on the movie itself, although the movie is a very good interpretive It is a kind of an angle from which you can see things happening, including things that don't seem initially to be directly related, but they are related.
Biden corruption, that's related.
The struggle in the GOP over the future of the House and who should be the leader and what should be the philosophy of leading the House, that's important because that has to do with how you block a police state.
The failure of intelligence is not just a failure of Israeli intelligence, but of our intelligence agencies.
Why is it that they didn't know anything about all this?
Well, maybe they were looking in the wrong place.
Maybe they were looking at Trump trying to find something else on this guy.
What if our existing indictments don't work?
Can we come up with something new?
And if it's not Trump, what about, can we find more ways to jam it to the January 6th protesters?
After we go after people who were in the Capitol, can we get people who didn't go inside the Capitol?
Can we loop them into a conspiracy charge?
So the intelligence agencies are obsessed with this, going after domestic police state opponents.
And therefore, they completely miss...
The really bad guys, the real terrorists, the people abroad who are doing harm, not just to people in Israel, but you can be quite sure, have a lot of ideas about how to do harm right here in the United States.
And when you consider an open southern border, well, let's just say that they have an easy path in.
Nobody's going to be... I mean, we do have watch lists and so on, but it would be so much easier just to close the border.
But the Biden regime won't hear of it.
So, let me start in Israel, and then I'll come to the United States.
And I want to begin in Israel with really the core question at the heart of this conflict, which is, basically, whose land is it?
Whose land is it?
Now, I'm going to make the case that...
Now, there are some people, of course, we know who say, well, it's Israel's land because God gave the land to Israel.
And this is not, by the way, an argument that can be just lightly dismissed.
I'm not going to focus on it, but I do want to highlight it, and I do want to say that it is very clearly stated in the very opening books of the Old Testament that this is what God, in fact, does.
But, of course, there are going to be people who are not religious who say, well, I don't know about that, Dinesh.
That can't be the argument that you're making in a broader secular culture.
You have to make secular arguments, and I understand that.
I'm going to be talking about the presence of the Israelis and the Hebrew people in that region from very ancient times.
Now, I agree that being in a place from very ancient times doesn't automatically make you the sole claimant to that territory.
A good example of this would be, for example, a Bedouin who arrives at an oasis.
He's first. But he doesn't get to say, alright, well, nobody else can show up here.
If anyone else comes here, I'm going to now charge them to live here or I'm going to expel them at will.
I'm going to consider all the water here to be entirely mine.
That wouldn't really make any sense.
But what is at issue here is not the right of other people to live in Israel, because that right the Israelis freely grant.
There are all kinds of Arab citizens of Israel.
There are citizens of Israel of different ethnic nationalities.
I saw it for myself when Debbie and I were in Israel last December.
So Israel is not saying that their land is only for the Jews.
But what they are saying is more limited.
And I think completely defensible, which is that the Jews have been here for a very long time.
It is quite accurate to describe this as Israel's ancestral land.
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There are many passages in the Bible which refer to God granting or giving the land to Israel.
It starts in the book of Genesis.
It continues in the Exodus.
Here's Genesis 15, 18.
And then it continues beyond Abraham.
It goes to Moses.
And of course, in the Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and takes them where?
Well, to the promised land.
Now we know from the Bible, Moses doesn't get there, but the Israelites do get there.
And so this is the sort of theological foundation.
Here's a passage from Exodus.
And I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and Now, the Israelites aren't the only people on the land, because the Bible goes on to say, to a place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
So there are other groups that are there too, and in some cases, as we know, again from Scripture, there are clashes between the Israelites and those groups.
God is, by the way, not an indifferent observer of those conflicts.
This is the biblical foundation.
But quite apart from the biblical foundation, there is now historical and archaeological evidence.
And this is evidence not of what God intended, but what was just in fact the case.
What can we find proof of?
And what we find proof of is that the Israelites The Hebrews are in the land of Israel.
In ancient times the land of Israel was divided into two.
There was a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom.
There was in a sense the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah.
Both of course comprising what we now call Israel.
And these kingdoms had different rulers at different times.
There were some times when they were kind of unified or brought together under a single conqueror.
They were sometimes conquered by outside powers, the people of Nineveh, the Babylonians, and so on.
But, the fact that they were conquered by outsiders doesn't mean that this wasn't their land.
It simply means that their land fell under someone else's control, at least for a time.
So, let's look at some dates to give us a little perspective of history.
Abraham is believed to have lived somewhere around 1900 BC, so...
Almost 2000 years before Christ, 4000 years ago.
And his son was Isaac.
Isaac's son was Jacob.
Later, of course, we have Moses.
Moses' dates are around 1400 or 1500 BC. After Moses, of course, we have the Hebrew kings.
And prophets. So, we have King Saul.
We have King David.
We have prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah.
And for many, many years, these names were not...
I wouldn't say... Well, they were considered by some people to be mythological.
But even people who were believers, religious believers, Orthodox Jews, or later, of course, Christians...
Didn't have any independent corroborating proof that there was a Saul, that there was a David, that there was a Jeremiah.
But now we do.
And I say now we do because there is, well, I mean, the city of David is...
is David's city.
That was David's palace, the Hebrew kings.
Now, there's some, again, argument about detail.
Some anthropologists think, well, the palace was built 30 years after David's rule, and it was David's successor who actually got the columns finished, and so on.
I'm not getting into the archaeological detail of it.
I'm simply making the point that these ancient palaces have been excavated.
The ruins are there now.
And you know that this was from that time, because of dating, the dating of artifacts, but you also know because of seals that refer specifically to particular individuals who were rulers, or in some cases...
There is evidence, there's stone evidence, there's evidence from seals, there's evidence from writings, and amazingly, some of this evidence has been preserved.
It was hidden over, well, 4,000 years or 3,000 years, and it is now, only now, in our lifetime, excitingly coming to light.
Now, the Romans conquered Jerusalem and in 70 AD they smashed the temple and they expelled the Jews.
And many of the Jews fled.
They realized that this was This was a Roman war against the Jews, a war that the Romans won.
They were the great power of the ancient world.
There are all kinds of celebratory memorials to Roman victory.
There are Roman coins that show Romans leading Egyptian captives away to Rome.
And so the Jews went into diaspora.
And so it seemed they would be.
It seems like the Jews were scattered, that they were never to return.
Normally when people become exiles like this, they don't come back.
In fact, sometimes no record of them doesn't exist into the future.
But remarkably, and this is a kind of a vindication of biblical prophecy because the Bible does predict that the Jews will return to Israel.
It's one of the few, just very precise predictions in the Bible.
And then against all odds, starting in the 19th century, Jews began to move back to the area now known as Israel.
But in 1948, through a UN declaration, this is after, by the way, World War II, the state of Israel was created as the recognized homeland of the Jews.
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I've talked about the claim of the Jews to be the original people who settled in the land known as Israel.
And I want to turn to the Palestinians and also more broadly to the Islamic world to give an idea of how they view this conflict.
Now, the Palestinian viewpoint is that Israel is the conqueror, the conqueror of Palestine, and the Palestines are and have been an occupied people.
But of course, there's kind of a hidden assumption there which needs to be brought out, and that is the assumption that the Palestinians...
Were there before, that they were Palestinians, that there was some kind of a Palestinian state or Palestinian kingdom or Palestinian country, and that the Israelis and the Jews occupied that country, took it over and colonized it.
But of course, there never was a Palestine in that sense.
In fact, the word Palestine was the Roman word for Israel.
It was the Roman word for the two kingdoms of Judah and then Israel.
That whole region, the region now called Israel, the Romans called Palestine.
And so, when the Palestinians say we're Palestinians, they're appropriating that term.
And the term itself, where did the Romans get it?
Well, they got it from the word Philistine.
The word Philistine was just sort of modified into Palestine.
And the Philistines were people who lived in that region in ancient Israel.
So the Bible talks about the Philistines.
You might remember the famous story of Samson and the Philistines.
Samson, of course, the very strong man, he's captured by the Philistines, and ultimately he pulls down the whole temple, killing himself and the Philistines, his Philistine captors with him.
Well, the Philistines were there, but the, and this is the sort of tricky claim of the Palestinians today is they say, well, we are those people.
We are the Philistines.
So, in other words, we too are indigenous to the degree that you can use that term.
We too are indigenous.
Now... If you say that, it still doesn't mean this was entirely your land.
You could be indigenous, and the Jews could be indigenous also, and you could have been living side by side.
So it's their land and it's your land.
And if that's the case, maybe your argument is that they ultimately pushed you out or pushed you to the side or made you into a second-class citizen.
That's one way to argue.
But the general way that the Palestinian case is made is not that.
It is that we were here, this was our land, and then the Jews who are imposters and aliens, they came and took our land.
Now, literally everybody, and I suspect this is true by and large of educated people in the Muslim world as well, they know that's not true.
They can see for themselves the same archaeological evidence, which by the way, millions of tourists come and see every year in Israel.
They know the Jews were there too.
And yet this is a truth that they have to publicly deny.
And not only publicly deny, they make international organizations deny it as well.
International organizations act like, listen, we're not going to say this is Jewish land.
We're not going to say it was Jewish land.
We're not going to say the Jews were here first.
All we're willing to say is that this is disputed territory and it needs to be settled by negotiation.
So this is basically the kind of So,
they maintain a certain We're not going to take sides.
We're simply wishing the two parties well.
And so it has been, think about it, if this kind of tiptoeing strategy was effective, it would have worked by now.
It would have produced some real agreements and settlements and a lasting peace, but it's produced none of the above.
So it's clearly not working.
But that doesn't stop them from continuing to go down this road.
There's a sort of false agnosticism about what you know to be the case.
Now, from the point of view of the wider Muslim world, the Palestinians are an inconvenience, a nuisance, and also I would say a political opportunity. So let's go through that. They're an inconvenience because the Palestinians are not something that the rest of the Muslim world really cares that much about. I mean, it's very obvious that the Egyptians who, by the way, Egypt has a It's a border with Gaza.
When we think about the West Bank and Gaza, those are territories that were won by Israel in wars.
So in the original allocation of the State of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza were not included.
But Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and they captured Gaza, the so-called Gaza Strip, from Egypt.
And so Egypt has a border with Gaza.
But guess what? Even though you have Palestinians who are leaving, who are fleeing, who have heeded the warnings of Israel, they want to go to Egypt...
Egypt has erected a barrier.
So think about this.
Other countries have borders, and other countries enforce their borders.
And even though the Egyptians are Muslims, and many Egyptians express sympathies for the Palestinians, and the Egyptians are like, the Palestinians are mistreated, and many other countries say that they're mistreated.
But somehow when it comes to taking Palestinians into their countries, the answer is nyet.
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Feel the difference. The question I want to ponder is whether there is a danger of a wider war that goes beyond Israel and Hamas.
And while none of us knows the answer to that, let's think about what are the factors that make a wider war either more or less likely.
So the Iranians have been issuing some dire warnings.
And to the degree that Iran goes, this is our fight.
We are the ones who planned and trained the Hamas fighters.
And therefore, if you attack Hamas, Israel, if you invade Gaza, we are going to then strike out at you, which of course would naturally mean Israel would strike back at Iranian targets.
Now, it doesn't automatically follow that it's World War III. In fact, it doesn't automatically follow that any other country would even directly get involved.
That could happen, but it's not by any means a necessity.
It doesn't have to happen.
Why? Because, number one, Israel is strong enough not only to be able to handle Hamas, but Israel is strong enough to handle Iran.
Iran is a big country.
It's a powerful country.
It's one of the three or four really powerful countries in the Middle East.
And these big powerful countries are big and powerful.
Well, they're powerful and important for different reasons.
Iran has a population of about, I think, 75 million people.
So it's not a small country.
It's much larger, for example, than Iraq.
And Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are the three most important players in the Middle East.
I'm not counting Israel. I'm only talking about the Muslim countries.
Saudi Arabia is important because it has the holy sites, Mecca and Medina, and it has money.
It has oil. Egypt does not have oil, but Egypt is a large country with not only a big history, but they also have a very strong and large middle class.
And Egypt is one of the big players in the Muslim world.
And Iran is jockeying to be the big player, to set the terms, to have everybody do its bidding.
And so Iran has hungrily been eyeing the Middle East and looking for ways in which it can manipulate the politics of the Middle East.
To its own benefit. I believe the reason for Iran assistance in these attacks is quite simple, and that is that Iran wants to destabilize the Abraham Accords.
They want to make sure that Israel does not make deals.
Israel has made some deals with countries like Jordan and others in the region, but of course the big deal has not yet been made and was in the process of being at least considered, and that is a deal, a pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
That is something Iran does not want to happen.
Now, let me turn to the intelligence failure in Israel and say a few words about that, because there is an inquiry underway in Israel, and I've also more than once referred to the failure of intelligence in the United States, which also needs to be investigated and explained.
I think in the case of the United States, the explanation is the police state explanation.
The intelligence agencies are busy creating a police state in this country.
They are focused on patriots and Christians and Republicans and conservatives.
No wonder they weren't watching Hamas.
I mean, they're not even watching ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
They're not watching terrorist groups that once publicly and directly visited harm on the United States, both at home, 9-11, but also abroad.
Think for example about all the ISIS attacks that have occurred all over the place, the beheadings and so on.
But the, and I'm not saying that US intelligence has no eye on these groups at all, but I'm simply saying it's not their top priority.
Now, why do I think that? Because I'm simply quoting these intelligence agencies, they have repeatedly emphasized that the greatest threat to American citizens comes domestically.
It comes from domestic terrorism.
And you say, well, show us the domestic terrorism that's comparable, let's say, to all this ferment of international terrorism.
They're like, well, we can't show it to you.
So, Let's change the word from domestic terrorism to domestic extremism.
Let's make it looser, more elastic.
But see, what happens with bureaucracies is once the word gets out, it filters throughout the system that this is what the CIA cares about.
This is what the FBI cares about.
This is what the Department of Homeland Security cares about.
They don't really care. So if you are chasing down some foreign mosque and trying to get there, like, who cares about that?
That's peripheral. That's subsided.
That was 9-11 20 years ago.
Get with the program. We're now focused on, you know, we need to make sure we expand these January 6 cases.
The FBI is making it a huge priority.
That's basically what the Biden regime is going to reward.
So this is why the intelligence failure occurred in the United States.
It's really obvious there was a declared trial.
Shifting of the focus.
And of course, the bitter irony, and we expose this irony in police state, is we, the American people, and in fact, we, the right of center Americans, we, the guys who decided that something needed to be done after 9-11, were the ones who...
If not delivered, we at least supported the idea of expanding the intelligence powers, the surveillance powers of the U.S. government, and now look what they've done with that.
They took those powers, they waited a while, they took the Obama administration getting in there to say, you know what, we can now use these powers as weapons against the very people who gave us those powers.
And so in that sense, the police state, at least in its early construction, has a bipartisan explanation.
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I want to talk in this segment about the intelligence failure in Israel.
And I want to say at the outset that I'm not somebody who follows the Israeli apparatus of intelligence.
And so the idea that I would be able to tell you which agencies are involved, which agencies were asleep at the wheel, that's not what I'm trying to do here.
In fact, that's something that Israel needs to do.
But I want to make a broader point that It's made by a writer named Norman Samuels in the tablet.
It's called tabletmag.com.
And Norman Samuels makes the observation that when you have a big intelligence failure, let's just say we didn't see the collapse of the Soviet Union coming, which was true, by the way, of US intelligence agencies, or we didn't anticipate 9-11.
And again, it's not because there were no signs.
During the Clinton years, al-Qaeda was openly trying out the response of the United States.
So you had the Khobar Towers bombing, if you remember, in Saudi Arabia.
You had the bombing of our two embassies in Africa.
You had the attack on the USS Cole.
And the Clinton administration in all three cases did, well, either nothing or close to nothing.
So they were like, okay, let's do 9-11.
And so, it's not that there were no signs, but the point that Norman Samuels is making, when you have a big intelligence failure like that, and this falls into that category, because Israel is a small country.
And so, even though you have something like 1,300 or 1,400 people killed, when you do the math, it works out to be something like 35 or 40,000 people killed in the United States at 9-11.
So, 10 times the amount of casualties.
And so Norman Samuels, the writer, goes, that's not because some agency didn't send out a memo or it's not because they didn't deploy troops at this particular time.
It's not because they misread certain electronic signals or they didn't Bring together the electronic intelligence and the human intelligence.
There might be all of those retail explanations, which are true as far as they go, but what's the wholesale explanation?
What's the big reason? And he says the big reason very often is that your whole intelligence apparatus is based on a certain type of So,
for example, Samuels goes into the assumptions that he says were guiding Israeli intelligence, and these assumptions Turn out to be wrong.
It's not the first time the Israelis have gotten wrong.
In fact, in the 1973 war, says Samuels, Israeli intelligence had certain agreements, certain assumptions.
Number one, Israel is surrounded by enemies, but Israel is really strong and has already won two wars, the 48th War and the 67th War.
Number two, Egypt is the prime enemy, but we gave Egypt a whipping in 1967, so Egypt is not going to be able to attack unless they can first immobilize the Israeli Air Force.
Three, Syria is too weak to attack by itself and will only attack in conjunction with Egypt.
And so this is not going to happen.
Number four, in 1967, Israel sort of took on the combined armies of the Arab world and whipped them.
So the Arabs are going to recognize that they're just not up to Israel's standard.
And so why in 1973, just a few years later, are they going to attack again?
All those assumptions were wrong.
There was an attack.
It was initiated by Syria.
Egypt did attack. So, every single one of those premises turned out to be false.
And similarly, says David Samuel, something similar is going on here.
And assumptions that need to be reexamined.
Here's assumption number one. We, the Israelis, have the most powerful military and the best intelligence in the Middle East.
We have the best technology.
We are a financial and corporate powerhouse.
And so, no Arab country can pose any threat of any form to Israel.
Yeah, there's Hezbollah and so on, but we can handle Hezbollah through military means, through diplomatic means, but this is not something that is even close to being a nuclear threat.
We've got it under control.
We have a West Bank, we have Gaza, but we have blockades and we have checkpoints.
And not to mention of the fact that we are paying bribes to a lot of people on the other side of the fence, and they give us information in exchange for which we give those people some money, and we give them work permits, we give them some limited economic benefits.
So this is an arrangement that is destined to endure.
Yeah, Hamas is a terrorist group, but they haven't really been able to pull off any kind of big operation.
They usually send a few rockets into Israel.
We have a dome. We've got defenses that are already deployed.
We can handle this.
Again, it's a manageable threat.
Hamas is not capable by itself, especially given our intelligence of pulling off any kind of widespread kind of operation.
They certainly are not in a position to be able to kill 100, let alone 500, let alone 1,300 Israelis.
And so all of these assumptions, says David Samuels, create an unwillingness or just a sort of blindness to information that might suggest the opposite, that might suggest, you know what, there might be something big brewing.
And yeah, these guys...
Even under the gun, with their backs against the wall, do have access to planning resources.
They do have access to other countries, not just Iran, but Qatar and others that have a lot of money and a lot of oil.
And so they're not as powerless as you take them to be.
So when your intelligence operation is driven—and by the way, we can apply this same logic to big institutions in America— The health services, the media, of course, our intelligence agencies, when they develop large-scale assumptions about the world and those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then all their statements, their announcements, their predictions also turn out to be wrong.
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You need to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. I'm now in a section of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which is called the interrogation.
And of course, the interrogation is aimed at extracting evidence that can then be used against the defendant, against the person who's been arrested.
But as Solzhenitsyn goes into various forms of interrogation, he talks about really 10 or 12 techniques that are used by the interrogators.
This is the police state interrogators of the Soviet Union in order to get what they want on you, to get you to say it or to get you to blurt it out or to get you to sign or to get you to somehow assent to it so they can go see it.
The accused agrees that he, usually it's a he, but sometimes a she, did this or participated in this or thought this in the case of a thought crime.
But before Solzhenitsyn goes into these different enumerated techniques of interrogation, he talks about the standard of proof that the Soviet authorities used.
And this is very illuminating because I see in this a sort of very interesting comparison, not a direct comparison, but a comparison nonetheless, to the January 6th defendants because they are charged under standards that are often kind of tinkered with.
They're very loose.
Did this guy obstruct an official proceeding?
Well, actually, no, he couldn't have because no official proceeding was going on at the Congress had already recessed.
No, no, no. He was part of a group, and the group collectively obstructed the official proceeding, so even though he individually didn't do that, his contribution to the group's effort should be considered in sentencing him.
Notice the sleight of hand here.
It's, in a sense, a form of collective punishment.
And collective punishment, not in the sense, normally collective punishment means ten guys collectively do something and they get punished for it.
But no, here we're talking about the fact that five guys did something and the other five are punished for what the other five guys did and not what they themselves did.
So, what a way of detaching punishment from the idea of individual effort or individual responsibility.
Now, here's Solzhenitsyn.
And 1937 was just the year when the brilliant teaching of Vyshynski came into its own.
Solzhenitsyn is being sarcastic.
There's nothing brilliant, but there's something cunning, but not brilliant about this Vyshynski fellow.
And he says the rest of us only learned about this 20 years later.
It was not revealed at the time, but Vyshynski was one of the Soviet prosecutors, one of the Soviet officials.
His name was Andrei Janu Yerevich Vyshynski.
And writes Solzhenitsyn, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics of a sort that has not permitted Soviet citizens, since to them there's a yes is yes and no is no.
This is Solzhenitsyn again using his trademark irony.
He writes, Vyshynski pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles, That it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only.
So here's Bishinsky, and he says, listen, you know, normally in a criminal trial, we got to go to beyond a reasonable doubt, which means we're sure the guy did it, at least for sure, at least within the orbit of human reason.
But he goes, human reason is really fallible.
Human reason aspires to certainty but can never achieve certainty.
So there's a sense in which Pashinsky here is being a philosopher, and there are philosophers who have argued exactly this, the quest for certainty is a mirage.
But look at the way that this is being applied here.
Since we can't get certainty, we shouldn't really bother.
We shouldn't try to achieve a certain kind of impossible standard.
Let's read Solzhenitsyn.
He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take, that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute but only, so to speak, relative.
Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot, we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in the view of certain hypotheses and assumptions and so on, that in a sense we are punishing a guilty person.
And then so arose the most practical conclusion that it was useless to seek absolute evidence, for evidence is always relative, or unchallengeable witnesses, for witnesses often say different things at different times.
The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them even when there was no evidence and no witness without leaving his office, based upon just various suppositions and assumptions and, guess what, hunches.
So, and then Solzhenitsyn says in a crushing summary, So, in other words...
Here's a guy lowering the standard of proof, saying, you know, we can never be sure, so why try to get all this evidence so we completely know?
Now, we can go with less evidence, relative evidence.
There's more evidence for it than against it.
There's probable cause.
So, the idea here is that since certainty is impossible, whatever we can get is enough.
I mean, that's the conclusion he's going for.
This is a rationalization, a justification for a police state to go after just whoever it chooses to based on a lot of evidence, a little evidence, or no evidence at all.
Solzhenitsyn begins his discussion of interrogations and various types of interrogation with a definition.
He says an inquiry, he's quoting from a manual, an inquiry is distinguished from an investigation by the fact that it is carried out to determine whether there is a basis for proceeding to an investigation.
So in other words, Solzhenitsyn goes, you know, you have some guy who has fallen under suspicion.
So typically, you don't just begin an investigation, which is to say, let's go through his files, let's get his bank records, let's just start interviewing everybody who knows him, let's try to see what we can get him on.
He goes, before all that, you need to make some inquiry, some basic first step, to see if there's anything here that warrants this kind of in-depth investigation.
But he goes, he goes, oh, sacred simplicity.
The organs never heard of such a thing as an inquiry, meaning the organs of the state, of the Soviet state.
They've never done an inquiry.
They know who they want to get, and when they know who they want to get, they begin an investigation, straight to the investigation, and from the investigation to the arrest, and from the arrest to the confinement, and from the confinement to the conviction.
It's almost like this is a preordained process, except it's ordained in this case not by God, but by the Soviet state.
Solzhenitsyn. Lists of names prepared up above or an initial suspicion or a denunciation by an informer.
These are all kind of classic police state ways in which people get on this list.
Or an anonymous denunciation were all that was needed to bring about the arrest of the suspect followed by the inevitable formal charge.
So once you're arrested, don't think that they're doing some kind of investigation where they're trying to find out because if they're trying to find out, they could find out yes, but they could also find out no.
So there's a chance that you'll be confined and charged, or there's a chance that you'll be released.
But in a police state, no.
Once you're arrested, you will be charged.
You will not be released.
Your fate, in a sense, is sealed from the beginning.
The time allotted for investigation was not used to unravel the crime, but in 95 cases out of 100 to exhaust, wear down, weaken and render helpless the defendant so that he would want to end it at any cost.
So here Solzhenitsyn is getting to A technique that is by no means confined to the Soviet Union or even other police states.
We see it here in the United States.
I have seen the process go on more than once where they interview someone.
It goes on for hours and hours and hours.
We have a couple of scenes in the movie Police State where people are describing something similar.
In one case, a guy His name is Joseph Balanos.
He's in the film.
He didn't go in the Capitol in January 6th.
And eventually, he wasn't charged.
But they tried their best to break him down.
In fact, they did it so effectively that he had a stroke while he was going through the interrogation process.
And so, Solzhenitsyn, they're not...
Interrogating you to find anything out.
They're interrogating you so you will break down, you're tired, you're exhausted, you've sort of had it, and you will say anything, which is another way of saying you will say what they want you to say, and then they go sign here, or they've recorded you, and your fate is sealed.
The purpose of this is nothing more than for them to triumphantly be able to say, you even confessed.
The guy admitted it, Dinesh.
So he obviously did it.
Why else would he admit it? Now, again, this has its equivalent even here in this country.
And the way that is done is through the plea bargain.
So the plea bargain is a legal kind of bludgeoning.
Hey, listen, we have some evidence against you.
Who knows if we'll get a conviction and we might fail.
But guess what? Maybe we have a 50% chance.
It depends on the judge, depends on the jury, depends on the environment, depends what people are feeling in a vengeful mood today.
So we're going to offer you a chance to get out of this, and you're not going to be facing 10 years.
You're not going to be facing 5 years.
Plead guilty, pay a fine, and we'll give you six months.
So think about it.
That, yeah, to some degree, that would cause some guilty people to say, OK, I'll take the deal.
It's better than facing the other.
But it also causes innocent people to use exactly the same reasoning.
I don't want to risk five or 10 years of being locked up.
It'll destroy me, my family, really my whole world.
I'll never be the same.
So, I'll take the plea even though I didn't do it, even though I'm not guilty.
And so, you see here that a legal system is not necessarily an instrument of justice.
In the wrong hands and used in the wrong way, even in a democratic society like our own, it can be used to wreak tremendous injustice and do so knowingly.
I think in some cases today, all across the country, we have prosecutors who are like...
It's not that they know you didn't do it, because they're probably, if they know you didn't do it, there's gonna be a bunch of them that go, it's too much to try to put a guy we know to be guilty into prison.
I'm convinced it does happen, but it doesn't happen probably most of the time.
Most of the time it's, I don't know if he did it, but guess what?
I kind of want to move on to another case.
I want to get a conviction.
I want to put a notch in my belt.
I'm thinking of running for office.
Or this guy is an enemy of somebody who I want to appease.
So listen, I'm going to offer them a plea bargain.
I'll bring the full force of the system down on them.
In a sense, think about it. That is a, it's perhaps a more civilized way, but it's not that different than what Solzhenitsyn is describing here.
The time allotted for the investigation is not to investigate, he says.
And again, there's a little bit of black humor here.
I think if you step back, you can sort of see, you can feel a dark sense of chuckling over this kind of stuff.
Hey, we have an investigation, but we're not investigating anything.
We're using this time to browbeat the guy who's in our captivity, to break them down in all kinds of ways.
And as we continue with...
With this chapter, we'll discover the multiple imaginative ways that are used to break down the defendant.
But whether it's through legal bludgeoning in the United States by our police state, or physical bludgeoning, and that's one of the techniques in a Soviet police state, the result being aimed at is not all that different.
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