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Nov. 21, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:11
THE FULL STORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep712
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Coming up, I'll put the latest January 6 revelations in a larger context, unfurling the story of the real insurrection that was successfully carried out by the Democrats and the left.
Also continue my discussion of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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With all this January 6th footage coming out, I want to talk about what we are seeing, what the significance of it is, but I also want to connect the scenes that we're seeing to the larger story of January 6th.
In other words, the official story that we have, we know is bogus.
It's a fraud. It's propaganda.
It is, even in the particles of truth that it's put out, it is surrounded by omissions, things that weren't shown.
So you got a false picture.
Even recently, Liz Cheney put out a...
Kind of little mishmash of scenes of all kinds of clashes between the cops.
And those did occur. I'm not saying they didn't.
I'm simply saying that it's very easy to do that in any large event and create a false narrative.
So it's similar to saying, for example, all right, I'm now going to prove that in India the Hindus and the Muslims are always fighting.
Now, they're not always fighting.
Most of the time India is a pretty peaceful country.
But okay, here's an image of Hindus and Muslims exchanging blows.
This is from 1948.
And here's another image from 1962.
And here's another image from 1981.
And if that's all you saw, you'd be like, oh, the Hindus and Muslims are at each other's throats.
Or even take another example.
America is a racist society.
America is not a racist society.
In fact, it's amazing how far the country has come in recent decades.
But nevertheless, you could find particular episodes of people clashing and racist slogans being shouted out.
It's a big country. It's not hard to find.
And then if you thread them all together and you make a little ensemble for like, what, 90 seconds or two minutes and put it out there...
Well, it's not that that is untrue.
It's just that it's unrepresentative.
It's misleading. It doesn't give you the full picture of the event.
So these are the lies that Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney are relentlessly committed to.
But they're lies with a very high cost, which I'm going to get into.
Now, here is Scott Adams commenting on what he's seeing.
The entire architecture of deceit is crumbling.
Feel it. What he's saying is that a narrative in order to succeed has got to have a limited amount of facts.
And when facts start coming out one after the other, facts that are indisputable, you can see with your own eyes, that contradict the narrative, the narrative begins to become shaky.
And this is, by the way, I'm going to call it to some degree the 2000 Mules effect because that's the effect that 2000 Mules had on the, quote, safest and most secure election in history narrative.
You notice, by the way, that people don't even say that anymore, right?
In other words, that was a piece of propaganda that as long as it went unquestioned, it was sustained through mere repetition, right?
But the moment people saw 2,000 mules, and the thing is, the truth of it is you don't even need 2,000 mules to defeat that narrative.
Because what do you need?
All you need is to ask this question.
If it's the safest and most secure election in history, where is the comparison of the volume of fraud in 2020 versus 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, going all the way back?
Who has done that comparison?
Show it to me, proving that the amount of fraud in 2020 was the least.
Now, not only has no one done that, not only is there no such demonstration, There has been no such attempt.
No one has even tried to do that.
So the idea that this is the safest, most secure is laughable on its face.
But nevertheless, you put it alongside 2,000 mules and it becomes risible.
It becomes absurd.
It becomes ridiculous.
And so the left realized, listen, we're going to still hold on to the fact that there wasn't enough fraud to overturn the election.
But we kind of got to drop the stupidity of this being the most secure election ever.
No one really ever says it anymore.
So that's, I suppose, progress, but it certainly is puncturing a narrative.
So now we come to the January 6th narrative, and my question is, is it really crumbling?
Let's look at some of the scenes that we are seeing that are out there now on social media.
One of them shows a guy who is evidently in handcuffs or restraints and he comes up to the cops and they take the restraints off and then they kind of fist bump him and they let him go.
So the first question is, who is that guy?
Is he, first of all, is he a normal Trump guy?
Let's just say that he's a Trumpster.
He comes in. Evidently, someone's put handcuffs on him.
He goes up to the cops and they're like, well, there are all these other guys around here.
They're not handcuffed. So why should you be?
And so it's like, listen, we're not a bad guy or we'll take off your handcuffs and you seem peaceful enough.
You don't seem you need to be restrained.
And this guy then joins the crowd.
So if that's the case, what kind of insurrection are we dealing with just on that scene alone?
Because after all, if the cops are there to prevent the insurrection, this guy is an insurrectionist, then you would think at the very least he should be in handcuffs, if not led away.
But no, the cops don't seem flustered.
They seem to let him go.
Now, a second possibility is that he's not a Trumpster and that he is a Fed.
And he goes up to those guys and he goes, I'm a fed, you know, I've been planted with a Trump hat in the crowd.
That alone is, again, interesting on its face because it means that you've got people causing trouble who are disguised as Trumpsters, but they're actually Capitol Police officers or they are from one or other police agency of the government.
So whichever interpretation you're inclined to, you've got a very interesting situation.
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It's really eye-opening for people to see...
For many people for the first time, these January 6th videos.
Now, it's not that the videos have not been available.
Sometimes these very videos have been played in court.
But when a video is played in court, it's often under a protective order.
It's not there for public consumption.
You literally would have to be in the courtroom like Julie Kelly and then see the video.
So for Julie, it's not new.
But as Julie knows, most people are not in the courtroom.
They haven't seen these videos, and so the videos are really eye-opening.
Let's remember, by the way, it's easy to forget...
Fox News had these videos.
They suppressed them.
Tucker showed, like, what, one or two?
And then the moment he wanted to show more, it's like, no, the order came down.
You can't do it. Maybe this was actually part of the falling out between Tucker and Fox.
I don't know. But think of it.
This is a conservative network that had this publicly vital information that shut it down.
Right there, you should realize that you're dealing, well, let's just say with kind of a fox in the henhouse, or to put it differently, you're dealing with an unreliable network that has its own agenda, and the truth, or even fair and balanced, is certainly not part of it.
All right. Now...
The videos, as you look at them, and it's in the detail that you begin to realize that not only is the overall narrative that we got from the January 6th committee a lie, but there are numerous false testimonies that have been given by Capitol Hill officers.
Here's Officer Aquilino Gonel, and this is what he said under oath.
I was bleeding from both hands, had a maimed foot, hit on the head, sprayed with pepper and bear spray, beaten, punched, pushed, pulled, and assaulted.
Well, as it turns out, there is a video of Aquilino Gornell.
It's 2.09 minutes long.
I'm looking at it.
Here's the guy walking.
He is not bleeding from both hands.
He does not have a maimed foot.
If he was hit on the head, there is no indication of any kind of injury.
He looks perfectly normal.
He's walking around.
He's perfectly in possession of his faculties.
He's also got complete mobility of his body.
Nothing would appear amiss.
In fact, he's there with other officers and he looks like any one of them.
It's very obvious that these statements that this guy gave under oath are either wildly exaggerated or utterly false.
This did not even happen to him.
And so the kind of shameless lying that has gone into feeding this narrative is now being cracked open like piece by piece by piece.
It's kind of amusing, but one of the other Capitol Hill officers, this guy named Harry Dunn, I just published a book.
And this must be like one of the worst books to come out.
Its timing could not be worse.
Why? Because even though he puts out all this propaganda, it's being blown away with dozens of videos that are all over social media.
So it's kind of funny because there's a...
National Public Radio, otherwise known as National Propaganda Radio, did a sort of adoring interview with this Harry, with this Dunn character.
And here are a couple of things from the interview because now you can almost look at it and chuckle because he was asked, I started by asking him if he ever imagined when he became a police officer that he'd have to defend the Capitol from an armed insurrection!
So again, the presumption that there was an armed insurrection.
Let's remember, by the way, nobody brought arms into the Capitol.
So right there, you've got, even from NPR, a flat-out lie.
Second of all, it's not an insurrection.
But the obvious reason that these guys, even if they took over the building, even if they took over the Capitol, what would they do with that?
Would they now be in control of the U.S. government?
Obviously not. Would they start appointing ambassadors?
Obviously not. Would they make laws?
Obviously not. No, they would then be surrounded and there'd be bullhorns and they'd be asked to leave the building and they would.
So, from the beginning, this was nothing more than a protest.
All right. And then we have Don going on to talk about the fact that he is fighting people left and right.
And he goes, when I got home, I wanted to get out of the clothes I was covered in, the suit and the grime and the residual pepper spray.
And then he goes on to say he grabbed some bourbon, he got in the shower, blah, blah, blah.
And look, it is all contrived.
This is like pure fiction.
So, if you...
I mean, first of all, his clothes were covered in suit.
I just wish we could see, again, an image of those clothes.
I bet you they were not covered in suit.
So, even at this level of granular detail, we have exaggeration, prevarication, outright falsehood.
But it's not often that you get the falsehoods on video, so you can do side-by-side frames.
This is what the guy said. There he is.
Look, he's perfectly fine.
So... You've got to remember here when you're thinking about these police officers that...
And no, here's the image.
You're looking at the police officers.
They're standing around. They look friendly, bored, a little apathetic.
Nothing much happening here.
And then let's remember that the left has told us now for almost three years that this event was so brutally traumatic that multiple officers committed suicide after the event because they were just so traumatized by it.
That makes no sense.
It is in fact refuted by the video that you see in front of your very eyes.
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I'm continuing my discussion Mike Johnson, like Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson before him, is trying to use selective video to whitewash January 6th.
But we remember what happened.
Donald Trump sent a violent mob to the Capitol in an attempt to undermine our democracy.
Now, what's really going on here?
The quote selective videos that are being released are in fact the images of January 6th that we haven't seen We've seen a lot of violent images of January 6th because the left to January 6th committee the media have been Trumpeting if I can use that term those images for three years, so it's not like we haven't seen that side We just haven't seen the other side, and that's why these people are freaking out This is why Adam Kinzinger is freaking out Liz Cheney is
freaking out the freaking out because the full rounded story is emerging They can't say that these are selective videos because they've been giving us selective videos all along So these are the videos that we haven't seen that kind of fill out the picture so Was there violence in January 6th?
Yeah, we've seen it. Was there also non-violence on January 6th?
Yeah, we're starting to see that too.
Were there cops who were letting people inside the building?
Yeah, we're starting to see that.
Were there cops who are fist bumping protesters and letting them through, removing their handcuffs?
We've seen that. Are there cops escorting people around?
We're seeing that. We're good to go.
And the reason that they're unnerved is that their narrative, which was based on the partial truth, is now being seen in a larger context.
and the full context gives a different picture, a revised picture, and in fact a revised motive, which I'm going to come to in a moment.
The disturbing footage is the footage of the cops beating people, often by initiating violence.
So a lot of times when you see there's violence, you haven't seen what got that started.
How did the violence begin?
Did the crowd just get violent, start hammering on the cops?
Or were the cops picking on nonviolent protesters, beating them, and then out of outrage, and in some cases defending a woman over here or a kid over there, some guy then begins to block the police shield, and then of course he is apprehended.
Oh, he's a violent insurrectionist.
I'm not defending taking on the cops.
I don't think you should take on the cops.
But I also think that there is a context for these things, and we need to know what that is.
If the police initiate the firing of flashbangs into the crowd, if the police begin raining batons on people, I don't know if you've seen the brutal beating of Victoria White just horrifying, this woman cowering and almost begging for her life, and people are telling the cops, don't do that, you'll kill her.
And so the viciousness, the sadism of these cops, and you can see it on video, this is what is bringing this whole narrative, I think, into a much wider focus for people.
And then you also have to think about the people who took their lives.
And I won't name all of them, but here are a few.
We know about Matthew Perna.
He's featured in Police State, an interview with his aunt Jerry Perna, George Mecham, Mark Onst, Chris Stanton. I mean, I saw the video and and very interestingly in one of the videos that's now come out, you can see Matt Perna.
He's walking in, and his recognized beard, he's draped in a reddish, I don't know if it was an American flag.
Completely calm and peaceful.
Not causing any trouble.
He's just walking in.
We now know from police state he was in for about 20 minutes.
Caused no trouble.
The most he did was shout, USA, USA, USA. So who's going to take the responsibility for these dead people?
You can say, well, they committed suicide.
But why did they commit suicide?
Because the DOJ destroyed their life.
The DOJ treated these guys as if these are enemies of the state.
They should be locked up for years and years and years.
In Matt Pernas' case, of course, you know, we're going to put it on terrorism.
What did this kid do that warrants the tag of terrorist?
Nothing. If this guy was on the left doing exactly the same thing, it would be nothing.
And so the sheer brutality of that, the one-sidedness of this, I mean, remember, part of what justice is, is a sense of equal treatment.
And so when somebody is singled out and treated in this brutal way, and that doesn't happen to anybody else, there's a natural human revulsion to that.
And that's what I feel about this.
And now I want to turn to Maybe the biggest part of this story, which is not something anyone is really talking about, but that is who had the motive.
In January 6th to generate the outcome that in fact occurred.
And this is something that is revealed in police state, I think, in a very powerful way.
It's bigger than these videos themselves.
Why? Because it gives a context for them.
It explains the videos.
It explains the double standard.
It explains the real insurrection which was mounted, as it turns out, not by the right, but by the left.
A successful insurrection that to this day has not been named quite as such.
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The whole motive of January 6th, according to the left and the Democrats and the January 6th committee, was to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
Now, if that is true, then it does supply a motive for why the Trumpsters would have barged into the Capitol.
They didn't want Joe Biden certified, and so they were mounting this action.
You can debate whether it's an insurrection or not, but nevertheless, they're trying to stop the certification.
Now, right away, we have to pause and ask, What was the official proceeding going on at the time that the Capitol was breached?
Was it certification? Was, in fact, the final round in which certification was being discussed by the members of Congress present in the building?
As a factual matter, no.
That was not what was going on.
That was not the nature of the official proceeding.
The official proceeding was actually quite different.
What was it? Well, the official proceeding was, in fact, the questioning of the 2020 election.
The official proceeding going on was the challenges to the election result in the swing states.
And there was a line of Republicans, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, many others...
And they had a plan to challenge Georgia, to challenge Arizona, to challenge Wisconsin, one by one to challenge these results.
Now, this is very important because these challenges are...
Challenges that are going on in the official body of government and they create a parliamentary record that then provides the basis to go to the Supreme Court and say that the 2020 election is riddled with fraud.
It's an election whose outcome remains in doubt.
It is an election that cannot be allowed to stand.
In order to go to the Supreme Court, you need standing.
And standing is a kind of legal authority to say that here is the basis on which this election is being questioned.
If you don't have standing, if you don't have that legitimate legislative record, then you can't go before the Supreme Court because then they go, well, you have no standing to bring this case.
So, we're talking a little bit of legalese here, but very important legalese.
In other words, I think it was in the mind of these Republican senators that we question the results, we examine the truth about what happened, we create a record, and that then becomes the basis for challenging the outcome in the proper venue, whether the proper venue is the Congress or the Supreme Court, either way.
And that Questioning of the election is the process that came to an abrupt halt.
That was the process ended by January 6th.
So now think about it this way.
Why did the Trumpsters have a motive to stop that?
Did the Trumpsters not want the questioning of the election to continue?
They did. So they had no motive to stop that process.
But now ask yourself, did somebody else have a motive?
And the answer, of course, is yes.
Nancy Pelosi had a motive.
Chuck Schumer had a motive.
The Democrats had a motive.
The media had a motive.
Now, why is this important?
Well, it's important because it shows who had...
It answers the question that is sometimes known as qui bono.
Qui bono is who benefits.
Who benefits from what happened on January 6th?
It has been a bonanza for the left.
After January 6, number one, the whole questioning of the election was set aside.
Biden and Harris were immediately certified, basically late that night, early in the next morning, and that was it.
Moreover, on top of that, the rhetoric of insurrection justified or provided a pretext for the digital platforms to create censorship apparatuses.
You could no longer question the election, you'd be banned from social media because now you're a potential insurrectionist, and so a shutdown not only of the official questioning of the election, but any discussion of the topic following that.
Wow. So, now we turn to the questions, all of the unanswered questions of January 6th, which I think can be answered much more clearly.
Why is it that the Capitol Police, which had all this...
The Capitol Police were never informed about the intelligence concerns about reaching the Capitol.
The FBI knew about it.
Other intelligence agencies knew about it.
Nobody told the Capitol Police.
Now we know why. Why didn't House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secure the Capitol Hill complex?
Why did she deny the request by President Trump to call up the National Guard?
Now we know why. Why were there FBI and other police agencies, Capitol Hill police included, having provocateurs in the crowd egging people to go into the Capitol?
Now we know why. Why are policemen seen urging or kind of allowing people, unobstructed, to go inside the Capitol?
I mean, think about it. If you try with any public building, however minor, go to the Aerospace Museum.
And if there's a sign that says, no entry here, and there's a guard sitting there, you try to walk over there, it'll be like, hey, wait, stop.
Why are you going in there? Do you see any of that, by the way, in all the videos on January 6th?
Do you see people saying, you see bullhorns where cops go, everybody needs to evacuate the building.
Get out now. You ever heard that?
Ever saw that? Never happened.
That's the dog that didn't bark.
That's what Sherlock Holmes said.
Sometimes the dog that doesn't bark gives you a clue as to what's really going on.
And the fact that the Capitol Police, or any police, never did that tells you, in effect, they wanted those people in there.
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on the January 6 videos by reflecting back on an article published by Sundance in conservative treehouse.
This goes back to March of 2023, but it ties into what we've been talking today.
And Sundance makes the point that there is really only one way to stop challenges that are being made to an election.
Let's remember that the challenges that are being made are being made in the proper venue, namely in the House of Congress.
They are being made by people who have every right to launch the challenges.
In other words, senators representing the various states are raising a question about the legitimacy of results in those and other states.
And so you have a legal process underway that cannot be stopped.
Now, again, the senators might be right or they might be wrong.
Maybe there was enough fraud.
Maybe there wasn't. Maybe it would have tipped the 2020 election result.
Maybe it wouldn't. But all of that depends upon looking more closely at what the substantive allegations are.
And so the senators, by raising this...
In the proper venue are opening the door to that kind of inquiry.
In fact, that kind of inquiry is the legitimate next step to raising these kinds of challenges.
So, says Sundance, how do you shut that down?
How do you shut down a legitimate parliamentary process that is raising challenges as permitted legally, constitutionally?
How do you stop that? He says there's really only one way, and that is, quote, a state of emergency.
It's kind of like saying that you're debating, let's just say, a massive bill that involves taxes, a structure of the U.S. government in Congress, and somebody wants to stop that discussion from happening.
How do you do it?
There are actually very few ways to do it.
It's war. We're under attack.
The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.
We've got to adjourn right now.
We cannot continue this discussion.
It's a national emergency.
The point being, there has to be some kind of emergency that allows everybody to say, we have to quit.
We have to drop this matter.
We have to turn our attention to this larger emergency that has to be dealt with.
So, the Democrats knew from the beginning that they needed this kind of emergency.
Only under conditions of an emergency could you basically disperse the Congress, kind of stop the process that's going on, and then come back and in effect say, okay, it's already now a done deal.
In other words, the emergency is so serious, it overrides the need to go back to what you were discussing before.
Now, this may seem like I am pointing out to the evils of the Democrats in engineering this, but it needs to be said, and there are a few people who have said it, that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, also...
Also is involved in all this.
And why? Mitch McConnell had said publicly during a conference call, this is in December 31 of 2020, he told Republican senators, do not object to the election results.
He said that you can't do it.
You must not do it.
We're not going to do it.
In fact, he gave a speech on the Senate floor the afternoon of January 6th, warning of dire consequences if Republicans delay the vote.
He goes on to say, Thank you.
He downplays the issue of fraud.
He basically acts like there were some legal efforts to challenge, but they didn't go anywhere.
And then he says, quote, the voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken.
If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.
Our democracy, quote, would enter a debt spiral.
So you have a top republican kind of agreeing with the democrats that this process of questioning the election must be stopped.
And then... Conveniently, voila, providentially, you have January 6th, a breach of the Capitol.
We got to adjourn.
We got to stop the process.
Let's all retreat, get out of the building.
And then when you come back, and this is all, by the way, described in police state...
Jim Langford is like, I no longer am demanding an audit committee.
I've lost, you know, Troy Nils, the congressman from Texas, says, we lost the drive.
We lost the will.
And then he adds this poignant statement and maybe, just maybe, this is what they wanted.
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Just when Alexander Solzhenitsyn has highlighted the procession of evil deeds done by the blue caps, the people who work in the prison camps, just as he's moving toward the very end of that chapter, we have a surprise.
might expect him at this point to be doing a meditation about evil people versus good people in a sense identifying the organs of the state as evil, the citizens who are their victims as good and Solzhenitsyn interestingly does not do that. In fact he begins this section with a startling observation he goes let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose
slam its cover shut right now. Whoa isn't the book a political expose?
Most people tend to look at it that way.
And I don't think Solzhenitsyn would deny that there's a political expose element.
I think what he's trying to say is that if you think that that's all it is, and it's not something beyond or deeper, something that looks at the nature of good and evil and the precise places that those things can be located, this is what Solzhenitsyn is going to talk about.
This is one of the most interesting sections of the entire work.
Now, here's Solzhenitsyn.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it would necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
That alone, I think, could be the leading comment of an entire thesis, of an entire study.
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
This is a universal problem, says Solzhenitsyn.
The evil is present in the evildoer, but the evildoer also has good.
And similarly, the victim is good in the sense that they're innocent in this case, but that doesn't mean that there's no evil present in them.
It is. There's evil in the good person as well.
Now, confronted by the pit, This is Solzhenitsyn now continuing the point by saying, and again, this is something that people are going to resist.
He's saying that even though the Soviets are crushing the dissidents, he says it is sort of a peculiarity of society, maybe of history, that the executioners are in this position and the victims are in the other.
It could have been the reverse.
Now, again, we're so used to identifying with historical victims.
I mean, let's take the extreme example.
The Nazis are evil, and their victims were the Jews.
So the Jews must be good.
And, of course, if you say anything today that goes against this, you are an anti-Semite.
So it's a very tricky matter.
There's a whole taboo surrounding the public understanding, for example, of the Holocaust.
But Solzhenitsyn here is saying, no, there are no purely evil people.
Not even the Nazis.
Not even the Soviets.
And there are no purely good people either.
No one can truly say that...
You can say, we didn't deserve to be burned in a camp, or we didn't deserve to be locked up for our whole lives, and you don't.
That is a grave injustice being inflicted on you.
But if you were to say that in some pure sense, I am morally innocent, you can't say, I am without sin, so no one can cast the first stone.
I think Solzhenitsyn is saying that is not human nature.
And now he begins to look at a couple of very interesting examples of this.
When the interrogator Goldman gave Vera Kornieva a non-disclosure formed sign, she began to catch on to her rights.
She began to go into the case in detail, involving as it did 17 members of their religious group.
Goldman raged, but he had to let her study the file.
In order not to be bored waiting for her, he led her to a large office where a dozen employees were sitting and he left her there.
Now, this is an amazing scene.
Let's see what happens. At first, she read quietly.
She's now reading her file.
This is like the indictment, you can call it.
But then a conversation began, perhaps because others were bored, and Vera launched into a real religious sermon.
So you have all these Soviet interrogators sitting around.
They're all waiting for her to sign.
But she's read the document, and she starts to now let them have it.
She starts lecturing them.
Now, Solzhenitsyn, one would have had to know her well to appreciate this to the full.
She was a luminous person with a lively mind and a gift of eloquence, even though in freedom she had been no more than a late operator, a stable girl, and a housewife.
So here's a woman... Ordinary woman, working class, kind of a peasant, and yet she had the fire, she had the luminosity, she had the personality, and so she starts, like, giving it to the people who are encircling her, who have all the power over her.
They listened to her impressively, now and then asking questions in order to clarify something or another.
It was catching them from an unexpected side of things.
People came from other offices, and the room filled up.
Even though they were only typists, sonographers, file clerks, not interrogators, in 1946 this was still their milieu, the organs, it is impossible to reconstruct her monologue.
So she gets into it.
You can almost say the passion takes a hold of her.
More and more people, a little, a crowd gathers, but not a crowd on the street.
This is a crowd of Soviet officials.
These are the blue caps.
And they're listening to her.
It's impossible to reconstruct a monologue.
She managed to work in all sorts of things, including the question of traitors of the motherland.
She goes on to say, why were there no traitors in the 1812 war of the fatherland when there was still serfdom?
It would have been natural to have traitors then.
So she's going, even when Russia had the serfs, and the serfs, of course, were being mistreated, you would expect them to turn against Russia, but they didn't.
So, she's going into all kinds of stuff, and when we come back for the next segment, we'll go into this remarkable scene of a victim of the gulag lecturing her interrogators, her imprisoners, perhaps even in the end, her executioners.
We're in the middle of a tirade that a woman named Vera is delivering to the Soviet officials who have her imprisoned and want her to sign a confession.
And she says to them, and she's a member of a religious group, she goes, why are you persecuting these believers?
She goes, they represent your most precious material.
After all, she says, believers don't need to be watched, they don't steal, they don't shirk.
Do you think you can build a just society and a foundation of self-serving and envious people?
So, think of the richness of what this woman is saying.
She's saying that religious people can actually be counted on to do their duty.
They are inherently trustworthy and honest.
They don't shirk work.
They regard that as part of their religious duties.
So they are mortal citizens in many ways.
Why are you trying to crush your best citizens?
And who do you want?
Who's left?
Are you talking about cunning people, sly people, people who will say one thing but really believe another?
Those are the people you really want to encourage.
She goes on to say, everything in the country is falling apart.
Why do you spit in the hearts of your best people?
Why don't you separate church and state properly and don't touch the church?
You won't lose a thing.
And so what she's saying is she's calling for separation of church and state, but to protect the church, meaning do whatever political nonsense you want to do with the state.
Leave the church out of it.
Separate church and state in that regard.
Then she goes on to say, are you a materialist?
You don't believe in God? She goes, okay.
In that case, put your faith in education.
And in the possibility that it will, as they say, disperse religious faith.
But why arrest people?
So at this point, the interrogator gets a little flustered.
His name is Goldman. And he comes in and starts to interrupt rudely.
But a remarkable thing happens.
Says Solzhenitsyn.
Everyone shouted at him.
Oh, shut up, Goldman.
Keep quiet. Go ahead, woman.
Talk. So think about this.
Her dress is so captivating that even the evil people around her are like entranced.
Why are they entranced? Because even evil recognizes the voice of truth, recognizes the voice of good.
And so these evil people are a little bit like, keep going.
This is something we actually sort of want and perhaps even need to hear.
And Vera continued in the presence of her interrogator.
And then Solzhenitsyn says, why did the words of an insignificant prisoner touch them in this way?
He's going on to make the broader point that even evil has attached to it, or maybe even imbued within it, a certain recognition of good.
And perhaps the other way around.
Even when there is good, there is always the lure, the inclination, the temptation to evil.
Then Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that it's impossible to portray evildoers in a story for children.
And he says that even in the great world literature of the past, Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens inflates images of evildoers of the blackish shades, and it seems kind of clumsy.
And he says, these are people who supposedly know they're evil.
Iago knows that he's evil in the work called Othello.
Iago even boasts about being evil.
Same with Richard in Shakespeare's great work, Richard III. And Solzhenitsyn goes, Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.
Solzhenitsyn is identifying this to disagree with it.
He says, but no, that is not the way it is.
To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good.
And he says it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
He says, the imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evil doers stopped short at a dozen corpses because they had no ideology.
So what is Sol G. Jason getting at here?
He goes, when you don't have an ideology, you're just kind of like a bad guy.
Your motives are going to be limited.
I need to rob the bank and shoot the clerk if he comes in the way.
I need to get rid of this person because they are in my way to achieve a certain type of gold or maybe it's 10 people but it's not going to be a million people.
It's going to be restricted by the obstacles that you're facing in the ordinary trajectory of your life.
But, says Solzhenitsyn, when you introduce this new element, and what he's talking about is socialist ideology.
Ideology. That is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
Ideology allows you to keep going.
Okay, I've killed a Jew.
It's not enough. I need to kill another.
But that's not enough either because it's not just I have to get rid of the seven Jews down my street because they menace me in one way or the other.
I have to kill every Jew in Germany.
Think about that. And I don't want to stop.
I want to keep going because there are still some of them left.
So Solzhenitsyn says you need an ideology to drive that, an ideology obviously in this case that encompasses anti-Semitism.
That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own eyes and others' eyes.
Ideology allows a little part of you to say, I'm doing it for the cause.
I'm doing it for the proletariat.
I'm doing it for the people.
You're not. You're not actually doing it for the cause or the proletariat or the people, but it is somewhat comforting to think so.
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