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Nov. 22, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:47
THE BANALITY OF EVIL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep713
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Coming up, I'll explore how the emerging police state gets decent people to do indecent things, a problem that philosopher Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil.
Debbie joins me. We're going to talk about January 6th video, conservative infighting, and Israel's moral superiority.
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Hey, if you haven't seen Police State, we got Thanksgiving coming up, a long weekend coming up.
Perfect time to watch the movie.
And it's very easy to watch.
It's streaming now on multiple platforms, and I'm going to tell you the platforms.
It's streaming on Epoch TV. It's streaming on Locals.
And by the way, the website on Locals is just policestate.locals.com.
You'll have the option of joining my Locals channel in an annual subscription.
You get the movie for free included.
Or you can just buy the movie and it'll be permanent streaming.
And by permanent streaming, what I mean is you can go anytime and watch it as often as you want.
You can't download the movie, but you can stream it.
Now, the movie is also streaming on Salem Now, and it's also streaming on Rumble.
How do you connect to those places?
Well, the easiest way is to go right to the website, policestatefilm.net, click on the streaming option.
You choose the streaming option.
And you can also stream to any device.
I was talking to Rudy Giuliani, I guess yesterday or the day before on his WABC show, and he's like, I like to watch it on my computer.
He goes, because I like to stop and start.
I like to go back and watch this section.
So certainly, it's useful to do it that way.
But the other thing is, if you round up the family, you've got the Thanksgiving gang in tow, well, stream it to your big screen TV. How do you do that?
On the website, there's a little question that you can click on, how do I stream to my smart TV? And the instructions there are very clear, both for Salem Now and for Rumble.
I try in the film to go beyond kind of current debates, beyond just a simple question of illustrate different ways in which the government has been weaponized and ask questions that go deeper.
And one of those questions is, how does a police state get ordinary people, decent people, to do indecent things?
Now, there's an interesting philosophical context for this, and the reason I kind of thumbnail this particular episode, The Banality of Evil, is I get the phrase from the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Hannah Arendt was covering, as a journalist, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a prominent and notorious Nazi, in Jerusalem.
He was being tried by the Israelis after the war.
Now, interestingly, even though I called him a Nazi, Hannah Arendt realized that this guy was not into Nazism.
He wasn't a major Hitler guy.
He was kind of a construction guy, a city planner, a builder, and he took a lot of pride in his work.
So, when the Nazis came to power, it wasn't that Eichmann was like, you know, we want to advance the master race.
He was like, no, we're building a new society here, and I want to be part of it.
I want to see magnificent architectural structures.
I want to see all the trains run on time.
I want everything to run very efficiently.
So the point is that Eichmann's motives were banal.
I want to be recognized for my architectural genius.
I want to be seen as a guy who got things done.
And I also want to be a team player.
I don't want to be seen as a troublemaker, someone who's causing problems for the society.
And these were the motives that caused him to do that.
And I think this is very important because when we look at institutions like the DHS, the FBI, they can't be completely made up of villains.
They're made up of some villains, and there are probably more than a few.
And not just, by the way, the guy at the top.
Villains strategically placed at key areas in the organization.
But they're also guys who kind of just want to get through the day.
They just want to get ahead.
And so if you ask the question, how do you get the FBI, for example, to go into Joe Bolanos' apartment or some...
70-year-old grandmother's apartment and start wrestling her to the ground and twist her arms when she's screaming and put handcuffs on her.
And then she resists, drag her down the floor with her head hitting the stairs, pull her out into the driveway, let her neighbors gawk at her, tip off CNN, so they come and humiliate her.
How do you do that? How do you get a decent guy to do that?
And the answer is actually pretty simple.
the police state does not identify its ultimate objective.
It doesn't tell the ordinary FBI, listen, you know what, we're after MAGA, we're here to create a one-party state, we want to silence dissent, we want to teach patriots and conservatives and Republicans a lesson. No, they go, listen, we are just going to point out and tell you who's a bad guy, but you don't need to worry about what this person did.
We'll let the court sort that out.
We're just making an arrest.
Now, we like to do it in the morning.
This is kind of how we do it.
And whether or not you really approve of the procedure, think of yourself as kind of a soldier.
You're getting instructions. Go up the top of that hill and take the hill.
Don't ask, why are we taking the hill?
what's the strategic importance of the hill?
You're under orders, just do it.
And similarly here, this is our format, this is kind of what you do.
And if you do it, you're gonna be seen as a good guy, you're gonna be seen as a team player, you won't be identified as a troublemaker, no black mark against your name, 30 to $50,000 bonus at the end of the year.
You can look forward to advancing within the organization, you'll ultimately retire with a pension.
And so all the prestige of having the badge, I'm a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, here's my badge, all of that combination of government benefits and prestige, the reasons you kind of join the FBI are going to come into play.
So this is the banality of evil.
This is the way you get decent people to do indecent things.
You You operationalize what they're doing.
You hide the ultimate objective from sight.
You merely make it sound like this is the thing we do and you need to be kind of on board with the team.
This is why we hired you.
This is how you can advance in life.
And this is how you can go back at the end of the day saying to your wife and to yourself, I did a good job.
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There's a very interesting article in Newsweek.
It is based on a national survey.
And the headline of the article is, Americans don't want to fight for their country anymore.
A little bit of a startling headline, isn't it?
Because I think that one of the very powerful results of nationalism is We're good to go.
And then you go, well, look, because I believe in my country, and I believe in what it stands for, I'm willing to even make, if necessary, the ultimate sacrifice.
I'm willing to risk my life, and if I die for my country, I will consider that sort of an honor.
I will have given my life for freedom.
I will have given my life for the American way of life.
I will have given my life for my family and my friends and the things that are dear to me.
This is a startling result, a startling survey that Americans don't want to do this.
And again, it is a mark of the power of patriotism that it gets you to this level.
Because if you think about it, by and large, people aren't willing to die for a whole lot of things, right?
I mean, even things that you believe in.
Let's say you believe in the Red Cross.
Well, are you willing to die for the Red Cross?
Probably not. Let's say you believe in the United Way.
You give donations to the United Way.
Are you willing to die for the United Way?
No. Is anybody willing to die for the United Nations?
I hope not. So, even things that are important to you.
I really like my car.
Are you willing to die for your car?
No. So, by and large, there are very few things.
Maybe you say, I'm willing to die for my faith.
I'm willing to be a martyr.
I'm willing to die for my country.
That's not a long list.
It's like a list of two, maybe three things.
Your family, yes.
Your children. So it's a short list.
But it is a remarkable thing.
And I think it's a particularly interesting thing for an immigrant, for somebody like me, because you're born in one country.
And you do have a certain kind of native attachment to it, right?
That's the place you were born.
It's very similar to being born into a particular family.
You have a kind of natural attachment.
Not to say your family could have all kinds of problems, but after all, it's your family.
You don't have another family.
And similarly, when you're born into a country, like, it is my country, you know, for better or worse.
But when you move to another country, Then you sort of have to re-examine because that's a country that you've adopted by choice.
And so are you able to transfer your allegiance completely?
So you go, you know what?
I was attached to India.
Now I'm part of the United States and I am willing to risk my life for the United States, my adopted country.
I do think, by the way, that immigrants, and certainly immigrants of the old sort, and obviously I'm only talking now about legal immigrants, immigrants who come here for a reason.
They believe in what America stands for.
This is, I think, a noble thing about patriotism and about nationalism, but evidently it is dissolving.
Americans don't really feel that way anymore.
And I was telling Debbie this morning, you know, I'm going to talk about Americans don't want to fight for their country anymore.
And she was like... I kind of shook her head and she goes, you know, that's really sad.
That's really bad. That's bad news for America.
And I'm going to argue in this segment and the next that it is bad news for America, but it's not entirely bad.
And what I mean by that is that I'm actually going to side here with Americans.
What I mean by that is I'm going to supply a rational motive for why I think many Americans are like, no, I'm not going to do it.
I think that some Americans who are not doing it is not because they don't love their country.
They don't love what their country has become.
They don't love what their military is doing.
They don't want to be part of that country.
Let's just say dubious, if not outright evil enterprise.
So this is a complex subject.
And I'll begin by talking about the Newsweek article, which is pretty mundane.
The Newsweek article is almost like you had written it 20 years ago.
In other words, it looks at the sort of typical motives for not wanting to join the military.
They say things like, well, they begin by pointing out that all the branches of the armed forces are falling short of their recruitment goals.
Army falls short.
Air Force falls short. Navy falls short.
So the number of active duty personnel since 1987 has fallen by 39%.
And it's certainly from a certain point of view, which is the potential dangers abroad, a problem.
They quote this guy. His name is Justin Henderson.
He's a former transport operator for the Marines.
He goes, we have...
Strike groups, aircraft carriers with a marine expeditionary unit outside of Israel right now.
We're funding two wars, but we're actually boots on the ground, drones above Gaza.
So we're involved in there.
We're not sure what's happening in Taiwan.
So he's saying we could be fighting in Ukraine.
We could be fighting in Israel, Middle East.
We could be fighting in Taiwan.
And so he goes, so this is a very tumultuous time for us because we don't know what's going to happen.
And the point being... At this critical moment, he's arguing Americans are like, we're not interested.
We don't really want to be part of it.
And when we come back, I'll discuss further the motives for this belief.
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We're discussing an article in Newsweek.
Americans don't want to fight for their country anymore.
And... And again, if this article, if I'd seen this exact article 10 years ago, and again, even under a Democratic administration, I would have been like, wow, that's bad news.
And that's not how I feel.
And so we need to explore the motives for this, and we need to figure out what to do about this.
But now I look at this kind of an article, and I sort of try to probe within myself, and I say, well, I kind of agree.
I mean, I don't really feel like I would want to be part.
Do you want to go fight in Ukraine?
I don't. Even in Israel, much as we believe in Israel, it's not our country.
And a little bit of me subscribes to the Reagan doctrine.
And what's the Reagan doctrine?
People should fight for their own freedom.
People should fight their own wars.
I'm not saying the United States cannot help, and I support helping Israel.
But I even saw an Israeli officer, one of the guys who does briefings, and this was a guy who does the briefings that Debbie listens to, and he was like, listen, we're not asking Americans to fight our war.
He goes, the IDF is going to fight.
He goes, we're going to do our fighting.
Now, of course, life becomes a little more complicated if, let's say, Iran attacks Israel.
And then if, let's say, Russia and China back Iran, then you're in a wider war, whether you want to be or not.
And then you have to look at it a little bit differently.
It's no longer Israel's war.
It's now what? Maybe not a world war, but certainly a regional war.
So the calculus tends to shift.
But again, Taiwan.
Do I want to defend Taiwan?
Yeah, I actually do.
I don't want China to take Taiwan.
I think Taiwan has been a bulwark of the West.
It's been part of the free world.
They have free elections in Taiwan.
They have civil liberties in Taiwan.
But what does the US government want to do in Taiwan?
Well, first of all, they want to fly the gay flag, the rainbow flag.
They want to introduce a lot of elements of progressive liberalism from the West into Taiwan.
They're pressuring US allies to go in that direction.
So my question to you is this.
Do you want to put your life on the line for gay rights?
I mean, I don't. So my point is, there is a sense today in which we don't approve of our government.
We don't approve of the regime.
We don't approve of its objectives.
We don't approve of the wokeification of our military.
I mean, these are guys, when you go join the ROTC program, they put you in, like, women's high heels and make you march so you can, quote, identify with women.
Do you want to do that? I don't.
So the point I'm trying to make is that when you live in a country where you're demonized for being a conservative, you're demonized for being white, you're demonized for being male, and this kind of propaganda is relentlessly conducted, by the way, not just in society, but even in the military.
They tried to root out.
The military for a long time had kind of this conservative Southern tradition.
It was country music.
And it was almost like the military was two groups of people, Southern white boys and then Blacks.
And there were sort of two side-by-side cultures.
And they got along. There was Black culture.
there was rap culture, there was sort of the African American, if you will, systems of culture and identification, and then there was the Southern culture, and the US military had this dual complexion.
But now, because of the woke ideology, the woke propaganda, they're like rooting out the sort of the Southern side of it because they believe, well, that's white supremacy, these are racists.
No, they're not racists, they're actually no more attached to their own group than blacks are attached to their group, and just because you have a cultural identification doesn't mean that has to be sort of stamped out of you.
You're, after all, not fighting for the Confederacy, even if you have a Confederate flag, by the way, in your bunker.
You're fighting for the country.
And the military at one time understood all this, but now they try to demonize these people and drive them out.
So the question becomes, why should those guys do it?
What is their motive for entering an institution that degrades them, disrespects them, reviles them, and does so publicly as well as institutionally?
I say that there's no purpose at all.
So you know what? Let the transgender platoon go fight for gay rights in Taiwan.
It's their fight. It's not my fight.
I'm out. And so when I look at these numbers, and of course, I haven't even really gotten into the article.
We really don't need to. The article is the usual kind of humbug about Oh, yes, it's difficult to reach young people because we need to speak in the language of technology and blah, blah, blah.
We need to offer better packages of pay.
Look, all of that may be a minor factor.
I think the reason our military is having a problem is we have a crisis of conscience about what the military is for, fundamental disagreements about how the military is being deployed.
And so ultimately, at one point, the military was an extension of the country.
The country is good.
The country has good objectives.
The military is serving those objectives.
Now you have to say that the country is ancestrally good.
It was built on good principles.
It's being run by a junta.
We don't even know who's running the country, quite frankly.
It's really not Biden. So you've got a gang running the country.
They're the ones really giving orders to the military.
The military is conducting ruthless propaganda campaigns against people like us.
And so if we don't want to join the military, it's not only understandable, We're good to go.
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Debbie and I normally do a Friday roundup, but we're doing kind of a Wednesday roundup because, of course, we're going into Thanksgiving.
And so no podcast through the weekend, and then I'll be back on normal podcast on Monday.
This is a Thanksgiving where it looks like we're just going to be the two of us.
We're going to go eat, guess what?
Indian food. Can you believe it?
We're having Indian food.
I've actually been a little bit into Indian food.
Oh, you want Indian food all the time.
I can stop you.
Look, we're PhD weight loss here.
You know, you can't. Yeah, Debbie's like, you know, she's like, when you go have Indian food, Debbie, you need to just eat the Indian food and don't take any of it home.
Because I'm always tempted to like, because we sometimes will bring home the dal, you then put it in the eggs.
So Indian food sort of extends like three days.
Yes, but especially the carbs, you know, like the naan.
You'll have naan for three consecutive days or you'll...
And a lot of the Indian food is made with oil that is seed oil, which is very bad, and that's one of the no-nos of PhD weight loss.
So in order for us to live that PhD weight loss lifestyle, we cannot eat Indian food.
It's interesting, we've kind of reached a stage where, of course, and for years and years, we did the traditional turkey with stuffing and so on.
Is it that we just turkeyed out or what is it?
I don't cook turkey.
Well, you cook turkey bacon. Turkey bacon, yeah, but that's not the same thing.
I've never actually made a full out turkey dinner thing.
I've never done that. Right.
So I'm not about to start.
Yeah. Yeah, and we don't have family this Thanksgiving.
They're all kind of on the other side.
Well, and Danielle and Brandon will be with her in-laws at the ranch.
So it's just going to be Thanksgiving with Debbie and me.
All right, let's talk about this January 6th footage that is now with House Speaker Mike Johnson releasing the footage.
And some people are saying, well, it's not that this footage is totally new.
In fact, if you've been closely following the January 6th trials, some of this footage has come out in trial exhibits and things.
But guess what? Because not everybody's going to go inside a courtroom to watch this stuff.
And a lot of it is under protective order.
So it can come out in a trial, but it's not available to the public.
So the public... It's seeing many of these things for the first time.
And the effect is pretty electric, pretty liberating, because I think it's kind of what we already know or suspect.
It's a little bit like the effect of 2,000 mules, right?
People sort of know that there's massive fraud.
It's like, uh-oh, now we see.
So now we see that while there was sporadic violence, and by the way, Liz Cheney puts out You know, just your typical recycle, the same seven scenes that she's cobbled together that we've all seen a hundred times.
And the point is, when you have a large event, we're not denying the truth of that.
There was sporadic violence. Well, we've seen that ad nauseum.
It's kind of like saying, America's a racist society.
I'm going to pick one incident from here, here, here, make a kind of montage and show you and go, Oh, America's racist.
You're like, what about the millions of positive interactions people have?
You cannot generalize about a society based upon these recycled horror stories, some of them years and years old, that you're cobbling together.
So I think this is really what's going on.
And the left is really freaking out.
No, honey, they're really not.
Well, no, no, they are. They are.
But let me tell you, so I watch a lot of clips on, you know, the Hill and Some of the CNN clips and MSNBC clips.
And they're totally going, oh, you know, this is not going to be good for Republicans.
This is going to show...
Oh, yeah, I've seen this. This is going to remind people of Trump and of what he did and this and that and the other.
And so I don't know necessarily that they're freaking out.
I think they're just totally down.
No, I think they're living in denial.
They think that their narrative has completely settled in in the American conscience.
And if it had, then people don't want to be reminded because it immediately creates the jitters.
But I think the ordinary American doesn't care about January 6th, per se, at least not two years later.
They saw it three years later.
They saw what happened when it did.
They probably think, yeah, there was some bad stuff that went on.
Those guys should not have gone into the Capitol.
But at the same time, they also know a lot of those guys They were peaceful. Of course, there's a powerful section, I think, on January 6th in the movie, which puts a new coloration on the whole event.
I mean, the power of what Police Day does with January 6th is it restructures the motive of it, which I think is really important.
The videos by themselves are valuable.
Exactly. So you see that narrative, and then you see the video, and you're like- You know what?
It was actually orchestrated.
They actually were letting people in.
It wasn't like everyone just ran their way in.
They didn't fight their way in.
No, people were being let in.
They were very cordial with the officers.
The officers were cordial with them.
So something went terribly, horribly wrong after that.
Well, I don't know if you saw the video where the guy walks in and the officer leans over and the guy's in handcuffs and they unhandcuff him, right?
He appears to flash a sort of a badge and then once they unhandcuff him, he fist bumps the officer.
So let's just think about this for a minute because it seems to me there are two possibilities.
One is the guy's not an insurrectionist.
He's a normal Trumpster.
He's a fan, fan, fan. Absolutely.
So one possibility is that he's an undercover cop, and he's like, I'm an undercover cop.
They're like, oh, okay, we'll unhandcuff you.
But the other is that he isn't an undercover cop.
He is a Trumpster, and they know it's no big deal.
So they're like, okay, well, nobody else is handcuffed.
I see. So they're like, let's undo your handcuffs.
I think it's more the other.
I think it's more the other. You think it's more likely to be the first?
I think it's like, I'm an informant.
Take the cuffs off right now.
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And the topic we wanted to talk about in this segment is the perils of conservative infighting.
Now, just to provide a little bit of background here, Debbie and I have been tracking the ways in which societies pivot and fall into the socialist camp.
And we know that when that happens, it's really hard to get them out.
Venezuela kind of went socialist in the early 2000s, shortly after the Hugo Chavez takeover, and it's like never recovered.
We don't know how to get that country back.
Other countries went socialist, Eastern Europe, for 50 and 60 years.
Of course, in the Soviet Union, it was more like 70 years.
And sometimes this happens initially through a democratic loss.
The right is defeated.
And the point that you make, which is a point you're worried about in this country, is it is the division of the right.
That allows the left to pull it off.
So talk about how that happened in Venezuela, and then let's relate it to, because I mean, this is a risk in Argentina.
This is a risk all around the world, that you actually have a conservative majority of all the conservatives were united, but they start sniping at each other, and we can't deny that's happening now in this country.
Yeah. Well, you know, last Friday I had Joseph Humeyer, and we talked about Hezbollah and Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere.
But one thing that he actually said about this phenomenon is that no leftist regime in all of Latin America has ever succeeded without the help of the right.
And by right, I don't mean conservatives because, you know, we can argue about what they stand for and all those things, but the right wing.
They self-destruct.
They're too opinionated about this person or that person.
No, you're not conservative enough.
No, you're not right-wing enough.
You're not free market enough.
You're not this. You're not that.
I don't like the way you behave.
I think you're too out there.
The conservatives expel the libertarians.
The libertarians kick out the conservatives and go out and form their own party.
Exactly. They go. They splinter off.
and once you splinter off like that, you can never, ever get a majority. Ever. And that is exactly what happened in Venezuela. Unfortunately, there was a lot of corruption in Venezuela. I'm going to admit that. But the right-wing party, which at the time was COPE, they They just disintegrated.
They self-destructed.
They splintered off into a lot of little parties, and they couldn't keep it together.
They could not keep it together.
So what happened? That gave way to Hugo Chavez, Mr.
I'm not going to do business as usual coming in.
And he ran as kind of a centrist.
He ran as somebody who would fix corruption.
And then, of course, once he got in, he pivoted far left.
The other thing about this division is you can always pick off or buy off elements of the opposition because you offer them a deal.
And then they realize it's more in their interest to cozy up the regime than it is to become part of a conservative alliance that doesn't really value them anyway.
Well, and that is definitely a phenomenon in Venezuela that happened and in all of Latin America.
But I will say this, given the Iranian and Chinese and Russian influence down there, all the money that they're pouring in, they are making sure that the left stays safe.
So coupled with that, I think it's very, very, very difficult to get out of that.
Let's talk about in this country, because, of course, there have been Republican primaries before.
Obviously, there have been some ideological schisms between, even in the Reagan days, between the sort of Reaganite kind of hardcore, and also people who were seen as more moderate, more squishy, more unreliable.
Even in Reagan's cabinet, we would distinguish between those sort of two types of people.
But there was an understanding that even though you make these distinctions, they are in the Republican camp.
I don't remember having the idea of a rhino, meaning someone who's a Republican, quote, in name only.
By the way, I don't think anyone is a Republican in name only.
By and large, if somebody is a Republican who's kind of on the weak-kneed side, they've still chosen in a culture where it is more favorable for them to be a Democrat.
They would get more accolades.
They probably would get more money.
They still want to be Republicans, and that has to count for something.
This is why I think it's very important to work with the RINO, so-called.
Obviously stiffen their spine.
Look, for sure, if we don't work with the Ridos, if we don't work with MAGA, we are going to splinter off.
And that is going to be nothing but detrimental to this country.
And a gift to the other side.
A gift to the other side, 100%.
They're going to keep winning elections.
Whether they cheat or don't cheat, doesn't matter.
We're going to give it to them on a silver platter.
So this then creates an important piece of advice that we want to dispense to all the campaigns and that is make a distinction between policy arguments on the right and strafing your political enemies on the left because a lot of times I think we Republicans don't make a distinction They will use the same rhetoric that they would use for Hillary Clinton Barack Obama and Biden, you know against Vivek Raj Swamy.
Exactly.
Or even against Nikki Haley.
And my point is no.
In the great divide of this country, all the Republicans, even Chris Christie, is going to be better than someone on the far left.
I have to kind of catch myself a little bit.
No, you're right. You are right.
That is the gift that keeps on giving to these Democrats.
So if we are going to be so righteous that, oh no, I'm not going to vote for Trump, no matter what, no matter what, he's horrible, blah, blah, blah.
He's not really a Christian, blah, blah, blah.
Well, you know what? He may not be a Christian, but he has done more for Christians than any other president.
And conversely, we've got to lay it out.
For whatever reason, let's just say in some hypothetical universe where Trump has to drop out, we've got to look at the other candidates and see who's the best.
Exactly. I mean, in other words, this is the case where in politics you pick the best guy on your team to unify the team and take on the other team.
There's no other way to look at it.
There isn't. And there is no other way to win.
To win. We're good to go.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H. One of the most striking phenomena in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7 that we see in the West and here in America is a certain type of venom toward Israel and toward the Jews.
And the question is, how do we make sense of this?
Like, what's really going on?
Is this anti-Israel?
Is it anti-Zionism?
Is it anti-Semitism?
Are people against the Jews for being Jewish?
This is a complicated subject because, of course, there are many secular Jews in Israel.
Zionism, which began in the 19th century, was originally kind of a quasi-socialist secular movement.
Later on, it took on a religious connotation.
So you and I have been talking about the motives of this venom.
Yeah. And you were quoting to me a moment ago, let's focus on it, a journalist who is clearly anti-Israel and who has her own theory.
So let's listen to her theory and then try to comment on it and try to make sense of what she's saying and also what we think.
Right. So basically, she's answering somebody when they're talking about Hitler lost, the Roman Empire collapsed, the Crusaders are gone, meaning that- Israel is divine.
Israel is divine, right?
It's protected by its divine power and the fact that they are God's chosen people.
She does not agree.
She says, perfect example- What would she name her?
Her name is Anya Parapil.
Parapil. Parapil, yeah.
Perfect example of a Western Zionist.
This woman writes for mainstream media and produced The View, yet she sees herself as history's lone victim.
She sees Jews as God's chosen people, divinely ordained to slaughter their enemies based on biblical prophecy.
Right? And then she's like, and I bet she lives a secular life.
Well, I think...
I see them as God's chosen people, but I also see that there is a little bit of jealousy there because everyone knows that the Jews are God's chosen people.
They are the apple of God's eye.
He did make a pact to protect Israel for all eternity.
He did. And I think that that is what drives this jealousy and hatred towards them.
It has to be because this has been going on for centuries.
Yeah, I have a little different view, and my view is this.
It is that putting aside the theological notion that the Jews are God's chosen people, let me just put that aside, not agree or disagree, just sort of set it aside.
The Jews are unbelievably successful as a group, just as an ethnic group.
There was a book that came out years ago called Tribes, and it was talking about the fact that the world happens to have like nine successful tribes.
The Mormons are a very successful tribe.
The overseas Chinese that live all over Asia, very successful.
The overseas Indians are a very successful tribe.
The Episcopalians are a really successful tribe.
In other words, these are the displaced Englishmen who came to America.
They have enormous power in this country, even today.
The Parsis, who are the Iranians who came to India.
And the Jews. And the Jews are kind of at the top of the list.
They're an extremely successful tribe worldwide.
Now, quite apart from that, I mean, somebody did a, I just saw this recently, somebody did a list of Jewish Nobel laureates versus Muslim Nobel laureates.
And think about it. The Jews have 12, the Jews are basically a tiny population, right?
The Muslims are 2 billion, but evidently the Muslims have like 8 Nobel prizes and the Jews have like 100.
Well, I mean, look.
Think about that. Okay, but again, they are by design.
Amazing people. And very brilliantly smart people.
Right. So you're connecting Jewish success with the fact that the Jews from the beginning were sort of, God's hand was on them.
But I'm saying that, look, one can, you know, and obviously if I'm talking to somebody, let's just say a Hindu from India, you can't use that because they won't grasp that at all.
They won't make any sense to them.
But I think we are agreeing that a lot of the motive is, I mean, look at Israel.
It's such a, As a piece of land, it's nothing.
Tiny. Right? Tiny. Size of New Jersey.
And yet, we saw the desert bloom.
They're growing all kinds of, not just artificial plants, but all kinds of medicines.
Beautiful. I always, every time they come up with some kind of...
And I do believe that the cure for cancer will come from the Jews.
From Israel. Oh, from Israel. Absolutely.
They have a lot of the best biotech firms, are top in technology.
So what you're saying is that a lot of times other people who cannot comprehend the success of the gym.
Like, wow, how is it that they're so smart and they're so successful and they have so much?
I mean, even with Hitler, his hatred of the Jews was he saw them as the ultimate capitalists.
Well, so did Hugo Chavez, actually.
He kicked out all the Jews out of Venezuela.
He expropriated all their businesses.
He was extremely anti-Semitic.
And of course, Hitler was...
Years ago, in my Dartmouth years, I was invited to Thanksgiving by a Jewish pal of mine who worked on the Dartmouth Review, and his dad kept calling me a Jew.
And so this kid, Nathan, they took me aside afterward, and he goes, don't be offended.
He goes, for my dad, that's the ultimate compliment.
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome.
No, I mean, look, you know, I told you I do my ancestry and I have like the DNA from here and there, but I was so excited when I found out I am 2% Jewish.
Hey, I'll take it.
I'll take it. We've been discussing Solzhenitsyn and the peculiar...
ideology. Now what do we really mean by this? What we mean by this is that you can rationalize a great deal of evil, in fact unlimited evil, if ideology supplies a pretext for doing it. The point Solzhenitsyn wants to make is that normal people are capable of evil but because human beings are a compound of good and
evil, we have evil impulses but we also have the capacity for good. The two forces are always checking each other.
So somebody can do evil, but at some point their conscience kind of kicks in, and then they go, okay, enough, or I remember, for example, I don't know if you've seen the movie Scarface, where you got this bad guy, Al Pacino, and he becomes a kind of assassin and a stooge for one of these cartels, in effect, drug cartels.
And he's perfectly capable of killing people.
At one point, he's told to kill this guy who's connected with the UN, and And because the guy's going to testify against the cartels, he's going to reveal information.
So he's like, oh yeah, I'm up for it.
And he's ready to, he's kind of parked in a car, the guy's coming out of the UN, and suddenly he notices the guy has got his wife.
And his four-year-old daughter.
And something in him is like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I won't do it. I'm perfectly happy killing the guy.
This is part of what I do.
But this is too much.
And finally, his associate goes, listen, you don't have a choice, man.
You're here. You got to do it.
We have to do it.
But at the last minute, when he's supposed to do it, his conscience kind of snaps and he pulls out his gun and kills the other guy.
He won't do it. And then, of course, the cartels come after him and ultimately they kill him.
This is the culmination of the movie.
But I cite it only because it's a telling example of how even for really bad guys, there is a kind of outer limit.
There is the point at which you're going to say enough.
Solzhenitsyn wants to make the point that when ideology supplies a kind of rationale, a pretext, an excuse, there is no enough.
So let's just say, for example, that ideology tells you that's a member of the exploiting class.
That's a member of settler colonialism.
That's a member of white supremacy that has oppressed you for hundreds of years.
Then it's like, why stop with one guy?
Why stop with ten? Why stop with a million?
Keep going until every last person who is identified as an evil force is wiped out.
Ideology gives you the comfort of thinking, I'm doing something good because I'm doing it in the name of the working class, I'm doing it in the name of equity, and so on.
So let's look at the text.
Here's Solzhenitsyn.
He starts off by describing an incident in which people who are rounded up and condemned to death are fed to animals in a local zoo.
Now, this is atrocious.
Human beings being fed as meat to lions and other animals.
And Solzhenitsyn goes, look, I don't know how widespread this was, if this happened very often.
He says, but I'm trying to make a different point here.
And the point I'm trying to make is that normally human beings are not going to want to do this.
They're going to say, well, if this guy's condemned to die, maybe put him before a firing squad.
But the idea of dragging those guys to a zoo, putting them into a pit with a panther, it's like something's going to stop you from doing that.
But Solzhenitsyn then asks, well, why did these guys do it then?
He goes, well, they had ideology.
And what he means by ideology is they had a sort of a doctrine.
And the doctrine tells them, listen, these people that you have here are condemned to die.
They're going to die anyway.
You're going to shoot them.
So since they're going to die anyway, why don't we kind of...
We use them as fodder for the zoo.
We're a communist country.
Communist countries are, by the way, almost always poor.
Russia is very poor.
So it's like, we don't even have enough meat for the animals.
So why don't we use these guys?
It's pure utilitarianism.
It's that the humanity of these people doesn't really enter into it.
You're thinking of like, what's good for the state?
You know, these guys, as I say, are condemned to die anyway.
So as a result, it is expedient.
It serves the purposes of the ideology and of the state to go ahead in this way.
What's he getting at?
What he's getting at is that the Shakespearean evildoer is motivated by some kind of objective.
And the objective could be, you know, I want to marry Desdemona, or it could be I'm envious of Iago and I want to get rid of Iago.
And maybe if Iago...
Sorry, I'm envious of Othello and I want to get rid of Othello.
But once that objective is achieved, well, the evil is complete.
At least that project.
Now, you may start out with another project.
I'm also jealous of Casio.
But you're not going to try to wipe out all of Italy.
That was never Iago's goal.
He would never think in that way.
His idea was a certain type of cunning that could advance him in life.
And so Solzhenitsyn is saying that supplies a kind of outer limit to how evil Iago could be.
Evil indeed, but not evil unlimited.
But ideology in the communist sense and the socialist sense, in the sense of a police state, is evil unlimited.
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