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Jan. 3, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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¡HASTA LA VISTA! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep739
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Coming up, what brought about the downfall of Harvard President Claudine Gay?
I'll explain. I'll review an important article about how scientific publishing has become polluted by the maligned forces of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Irene Armendariz Jackson, a GOP congressional candidate in Texas, joins me.
We're going to talk about the larger implications of the border crisis.
Hey, 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.
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Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, is gone.
Bye-bye. Hasta la vista, baby.
Debbie came up with that one.
And not only that, but she says the Hasta La Vista has to have an inverted upside-down exclamation point.
Now, not surprisingly, Claudine Gay issues a statement in which we learn that she is the real victim.
Not that she's the plagiarist.
Not that she's the anti-Semite.
Not even that she made some mistakes.
Not just that she misspoke.
Not just that she lifted stuff without perhaps intending to.
None of that. Not even that kind of defense, Ruth.
Rather, and I'm just going to read a single sentence.
Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor, two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am, and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats.
And she goes on to say, inspired by racial animus.
In other words... The idea is that people are going after me because I'm black or because I'm a black woman.
Now, let's think about this.
Somebody else has also resigned, Liz McGill, the president of Penn, and she's white.
And she's not a plagiarist.
So it's a little bit disingenuous for Claudine Gay to say I was fired because Because I'm black.
Now, it would probably be more accurate for her to say, I was hired because I'm black, because I don't believe that Claudine Gay would have become the president of Harvard with her academic mediocrity.
You just have to read her work to realize that you're dealing with someone of very average ability, a kind of intellectual plotter, no originality, nothing even all that interesting.
And it's a cut and paste type of scholarship.
And you can even cut and paste more creatively because she just lifted without proper attribution, even plagiarizing the acknowledgments in one case.
So Claudine Gay was hired because she's black.
Now, in a weird way, I thought that that would make her hard to fire.
Why? Because you can't fire someone for lacking merit when you didn't hire them because of merit.
You hired them because of their skin color.
And of course, their commitment to being on the left.
This is the other key point that I think Claudine Gay thought that if I am a dedicated leftist, I am secure.
And you know what? Normally, that is the case.
Normally, because of the left's domination and control of these institutions, being on the left is sufficient.
It protects liberal politicians, leftist politicians.
It protects people in the public sphere, and it protects people in the media.
And it protects people in academia.
Now the problem for Claudine Gay was that the cases of plagiarism mounted.
There were a few, and then there were more than a few, and then there were quite a few, and then there were 40, and ultimately there were more than 50.
Now that's a big number.
And let's remember that plagiarism is the greatest academic offense.
It's the equivalent of theft.
And so how do you have an institution Police the integrity of student papers if the president is guilty of 50 plus cases of plagiarism.
It's a real problem. But still, I think even given that, if it were the plagiarism alone, Claudine Gay would still be the president of Harvard.
If it was the antisemitism alone, Claudine Gay would still be the president of Harvard.
The problem for Claudine Gay was that these two separate storms kind of hit her at the same time, and they were enough together to take her down.
Now... It's interesting that there were so many academics, including some 700 Harvard professors, who defended Claudine Gay, said she shouldn't be asked to resign, and basically said, many of them did, the ones that explained their reasoning, that plagiarism is not such a big deal.
First of all, how can that even be true?
Plagiarism is not such a big deal in academia when countless generations of students have been taught that it's a very big deal.
In fact, it is the big deal on campus.
Certainly a bigger deal than any kind of conduct type of offenses or you're late to class or you didn't conform to the student guidelines.
No, stealing other people's intellectual property is a big deal.
And so I'm beginning to wonder whether this practice, reviled as I say in principle, is actually fairly common in practice among faculty members.
Maybe it's the pressure of publishing.
Maybe what these guys are all saying is, yeah, we all do it.
One guy actually interestingly said, why are we picking on Claudine Gay?
Why don't we check to see which other professors have been plagiarizing?
And I'm thinking, yeah, I think we should do that.
Because, and again, we're not talking about I wrote a sentence that resembles a sentence somebody else wrote, you know, 30 years ago, because that can happen by chance or can happen by happenstance.
Oh, I read the sentence, I happened to memorize it, I forgot where I got it from.
No, we're talking about entire paragraphs being lifted from other people's work without proper attribution, without quotation marks, and without providing the proper citation.
There are some people who have said that Claudine Gay has been picked upon because she's obviously a person of considerable distinction.
Hey, she went to Phillips Exeter.
She went to Princeton. She has Harvard credentials.
She has Stanford credentials.
And I go, whoa, all that this proves is how bad and how extensive...
Affirmative action has now become on the campus.
Because in every institution, you're given a, quote, leg up.
They look the other way.
If you're black, it's sort of you can get away with anything.
And think about it. Affirmative action clearly doesn't work.
Because if it worked, the catch-up would only be at one point.
You go to Phillips Exeter.
They give you a break because you're black.
So if affirmative action works, you won't need another break to go to Princeton, and another break to go to Harvard, and another break to get a faculty appointment, and another break to get a promotion.
In other words, at some point, you would be on a level playing field.
At some point, you would go, okay, I've taken advantage of my break, and now I can compete effectively with everyone else.
The amazing thing is Claudine Gay never reached that point in her entire career.
And here's Mark Lamont Hill, a black activist and professor.
The next president of Harvard University must be a black woman.
Identity politics all over again.
And so I reply, I go, not just any black woman.
She must be short and one-legged.
And in the process of transitioning to be a man, academic credentials entirely optional.
This is DEI. And what I'm getting at is that when you depart from merit, when you start appointing people based upon these other criteria, this is what you get.
You get not only the downfall of Claudine Gaye, But the downfall of Harvard itself, an academic institution that ceases to be primarily an academic institution, it becomes really something else.
And think of all these black women who have been advanced in this way.
Think of Kamala Harris.
Is she a respected individual?
No. Why?
Because it's obvious that she's a joke.
It's obvious that she was selected because she's a black woman.
Same with Claudine Gay. So what happens is that the affirmative action here degrades these people.
It degrades them because you can't take them seriously.
You can't judge them by the same standards as anyone else.
This is the corruption of DEI. And in this sense, Claudine Gay is a victim.
Claudine Gay is a victim in the sense that had she been told from a young age, you need to study hard, you need to produce your own work.
No one's saying that Claudine Gay is not an intelligent individual.
What we're saying is that Claudine Gay decided to throw her lot in with this DEI enterprise where she advances based on ideology, she advances based on skin color, and now we have this result.
Let's just hope that this is not just the end of Claudine Gay.
But the end, I think you might be expecting to say of Harvard, but no, I'm not saying that.
the end of the whole DEI toxic culture that has now poisonously had such a bad effect throughout American academia.
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I want to talk about an article in the Cambridge University Press article An article called Critical Social Justice Subverts Scientific Publishing.
The article is written by a prominent chemist.
Her name is Anna Krylov.
She grew up in the USSR in Russia, in fact, in Soviet Russia.
And she saw the abuses of science in the Soviet Union.
And now she is a prominent professor of chemistry.
And in this article, she's talking about how DEI... Diversity, equity, and inclusion has polluted scientific publishing.
And she's focusing, of course, on publishing in chemistry.
And she says it has distorted it, corrupted it in some very specific ways.
And I want to mention what these ways are.
First, she says censorship.
Censorship is now crept into scientific publishing.
Scientific documents are censored.
They're censored because of so-called offensive content.
Sometimes it's the topic, like if you're talking about the differences between men and women, that's considered offensive.
Sometimes it is, she says, everyday English words and phrases.
They're trying to have scientists, think about this, not use words like webmaster because of the word master, dark times, nursing mother, even the word the poor.
One publisher says he won't publish valid scientific research that may be harmful to groups or populations.
So if you're making an observation, let's just say a particular disease is more prevalent among one group, but somehow it could be taken that the group is being portrayed in a bad light.
Okay, we're not going to publish that research.
Wow. And there are even calls to block harmful research at the funding stage.
Don't even do the research.
Let's prevent people from getting money to do those researches in the first place.
Very astonishing. So, censorship.
Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry, amazingly, puts out some guidelines that say that what is offensive, what they're going to try to restrict, isn't offensive by some objective standard.
Quote, it is the perception of the recipient that determines offense, regardless of author intent.
If you write about a group and they take offense, it is by definition offensive.
Wow. Wow.
The second way in which the DEI is corrupting scientific publishing they are trying to get rid of specified names, people, prominent scientists And both take their names off of buildings, off of observatories, but also disconnect their names from the actual things they discovered.
Wow. So the classic example would be William Shockley, who was a racist, a racist in the sense that he believed that whites are smarter than blacks, inherently, biologically, but he is also the inventor of the transistor.
He won the Nobel Prize.
So... Are they saying just, okay, let's not name this building after William Shockley because he was a noted racist?
Or are they saying, let's even pretend he didn't invent the transistor?
That would be taking things one step even further.
But it's not just a guy like Shockley.
It says others who have no record of unsavory behaviors or beliefs are also among the canceled.
There's a very prominent statistician named Ronald Fisher, one of the sort of fathers of modern statistics.
This guy is reviled not because he was a racist, but because they claim his methods are used by racists to show differences of IQ or differences of ability between different groups.
So he's on the cancellation list.
James Webb. James Webb was the director of NASA. In fact, he's the guy who was the head of NASA when they put a man on the moon.
And he led NASA through really its glory days.
But it turns out that during that time, NASA also discriminated against gay people.
Apparently, I don't know if it was more difficult to be hired or if they felt that it made you a security risk.
In any event, This was nothing to do with Webb.
It was the policy of NASA. But because Webb was the head of NASA, Webb is now seen as a homophobe, and so they want to have a Webb telescope and things that are named and related to Webb somehow removed.
In fact, the Royal Astronomical Society says that authors that submit scientific papers that talk about the Webb telescope should call it the JWST, meaning uses initials, you can't use his name.
It's now the JWST telescope, not the Webb telescope.
And then in the article, it goes on to say that now editorial boards for scientific journals are appointed based upon race, based upon gender.
So affirmative action in scientific publishing.
And finally, there is an acceptance for work that is substandard because it produces the ideologically correct conclusion.
Let's say, for example, you have a study that shows that women are discriminated against in the workplace because they earn less than men.
Now, normally to make that study work, you've got to show that a woman and a man were applying for the same job.
They had the same levels of education, preparation, credentials, and yet the man got the job.
If you don't do that, the study is of no value because it's not controlling for what I sometimes call confounding variables.
Confounding variables means there are other factors that would explain this discrepancy, and it's not necessarily due to discrimination.
You would think that this would be like a basic requirement of publishing, a basic requirement of trying to make your point through any kind of study of this sort, but no.
What's happening is that in scientific publishing, you've got a lowering of standards.
Why? Because as long as you reach the ideologically correct conclusion, the politically correct answer, that is sufficient.
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Guys, I've got a guest on today to talk about the border.
It's Irene Armendariz Jackson.
She's a lifelong El Paso resident.
She's a Republican candidate for Congress to represent Texas' 16th congressional district.
Her husband is a Border Patrol agent.
You can follow her on X, at Team Irene 16, or her website, IreneArmendarizJackson.com.
Irene, great to have you.
Thanks for joining me.
I kind of want to get to the heart of this border crisis because I know for me and probably many others, we see on social media these Big trains of people seemingly heading toward the border, getting through the border.
And I guess I say to myself, I thought we had immigration laws that established a clear process for how you can become a citizen or how you can come through as a refugee.
There are various categories.
How is it that we have these people who are just showing up and somehow ending up in the United States?
Assuming that someone knows nothing about all this, how would you explain the nature of this border crisis?
Well, first of all, thank you so much for giving me this opportunity and Happy New Year.
And what I tell people is this has been a problem from the beginning.
I grew up with a binational relationship in Ciudad Juarez, which is only a river away We attended church.
We were good Baptists, so we went to every activity.
And my Spanish is like a Mexican.
So I understand the illegal immigration, even from before all of this happened.
I saw the other side of it.
I saw the people that were fleeing civil war in San Salvador, and they ended up on the border.
They ended up being deported, and the church would step up.
So... There's no question that there is a need for asylum in our free country of the United States.
But what's happening right now is that it's a free-for-all.
We have no border.
We have no border patrol at the river.
We used to have at least one border patrol at least every other mile.
Now we have stretches of 13, 15 miles with no border patrol.
I jokingly say I'm so old, I remember when people would run away from Border Patrol instead of running to them.
And so what this administration has done is basically just said, come, come all, come all, and we're going to let you in.
And when you are living in dire poverty...
With no opportunity for progress.
And I'm talking about even the country that's right next to us, where my parents came from, legally, Mexico.
There's no opportunities, so of course they're going to come.
They're going to sell every piece of valuable possession that they have, and they come to the United States.
Sometimes they borrow land to put up as collateral in banks.
That's what's happening in Guatemala with these loans to pay their passage over here being disguised as mortgages.
And so people are just seeing this opportunity of no border and coming in.
And so whether it's their need is, my concern, and what the concern of Americans should be, especially this administration and Congress, should be for the safety of Americans, which we definitely do not have.
We have men roaming the streets everywhere here in El Paso.
It has become the panhandling capital of the United States, things that you never saw before.
Five, six years ago, they are now here at every block.
We see people that have no business being here.
Yesterday, as a matter of fact, I went to the police station downtown to help my mom do something, and there was illegals coming in asking for help because their possessions had been stolen at all these shelters.
So now what do we have?
Now we have police officers that should be protecting American citizens in El Paso tending to the needs of all these illegals.
And so... What you see in the news of thousands and thousands of people running, it is true.
People need to understand in America that what is being shown on TV is what we see every day.
Every day. Every day.
A couple of weeks ago, we had another fatality on the border.
It's called the border highway.
Ironically, it's named Cesar Chavez, who was against illegal immigration.
And people are running across that border because those are the gotaways.
Those are the ones that are trying to come in without being detected.
And one of the men got hit again.
The first fatality was a 12-year-old little girl.
But now what happens is my heart goes out to them.
But now the person, the American citizen that hit them and killed them is going to have to live with that for the rest of their lives.
So unless we have a secure border and we stop the thousands of people coming in, we are endangering American citizens.
We saw this in Israel. We saw this in Israel.
The people that were hit the hardest were the people that were right on the border.
And that's what we are. And they don't even have to jump the border.
They're probably already here.
Not probably. They are here.
And they're just waiting for their orders in order to rise up against American citizens.
So if you don't understand, we have immigration laws.
Millions, probably even billions of people have followed the process, including my parents.
And these people have said, we're not going to do it.
It's our opportunity.
What President Biden has done is he has changed the procedures.
He hasn't changed law because he doesn't have that power, but he has changed the procedures of the way immigration law enforcement is applying the law.
Let's look at that more carefully.
You mentioned that there are lots of poor people, lots of people who are facing various types of hardships.
My understanding of the refugee laws and the asylum laws was that it is not sufficient to be poor because more than half the world is poor.
Absolutely. I remember, for example, there were allowances for people from communist countries to come to America.
You're being deprived of basic human rights and freedoms.
But there are lots of countries that have poverty but don't have that level of tyranny.
Doesn't it make sense if you're applying for refugee or asylum status for you to do that from your own country and not be allowed into the United States until that status is granted?
Isn't one of the sort of strategies of the Biden administration to say, we'll give you a court date at some date in the future, but in the meantime, feel free to roam through America, and sometimes in a manner that whether or not you show up for your court date, We're not going to be able to find you, nor are we really planning to try.
Absolutely. And so one of the things that happens here on the border is that we have very cheap labor.
Now, my dad was a drywall construction worker.
So many times he had to leave El Paso in order to provide for his family.
This is a legal citizen would have to leave because the illegals would come and underfit the jobs.
So now we have also...
Republicans that say, you know, they take the jobs that nobody wants, which is a lie.
And I experienced it in my own life.
So this is nothing new.
Again, this is nothing new.
Legal immigration has been here from the beginning.
But the problem is, is the amount, the overwhelming of the system.
They're very strategic.
I will hand it to the Democrats.
They are consistent and persistent.
And when they want something, they keep their eye on that ball.
I think their goal is to change, and Obama spoke of it when he was running, is to change the demographics of the United States.
And so when they allow all these people to come in and overwhelm the system, then you have exactly what you just said.
You have people roaming the streets because they're not able to work, and we don't want them to get permission to work.
We have a lot of people that are processing their status legally that would be an asset to our country.
And I know that there's a lot of business people that are saying, you know, Americans don't want to work. Let them in. Let us make sure that we have the employees that we need. Then why don't we process those that have followed our laws, expedite them and allow the ones that have those skills and for those jobs that we are in dire need to allow them to come in. But absolutely for no reason. And I don't care, Dinesh, if you're my brother, my cousin, if you're going to come into
the United States illegally, you should be deported. And one thing that I respect enormously from President Trump is that he has already stated that when he becomes president again, there will be mass deportations. I strongly support that.
It's not fair. And the Republicans are passing on this great opportunity and they're misreading the people, especially on the border, where over 80 percent Hispanic.
And the first people that are against illegal immigration are those people that have processed their status legally, like my parents.
They are 100% against what is happening on the border.
And so the administration, again, is overwhelming the system with a specific purpose.
But that's why I don't understand why our Congress is not more aggressive I get phone calls all the time, Dinesh. What do I do?
And I get it from South Carolina, from California, all over the country.
What do we do? You get involved in the political process.
And in November, it's our turn.
Those that do not like What's happening on the border to take control and change the guard when it comes to the executive branch and the legislative branch.
Irene, that would certainly be a good goal for this year, for 2024.
Right now, as you know, we're kind of in a legislative standstill, by which I mean the Republicans narrowly control the House, the Democrats narrowly control the Senate.
So there's almost nothing in terms of congressional action that can be expected, particularly when one party has an agenda, just like you said.
My question is, why haven't the courts...
Simply taken a look at the existing law, not new laws, but the existing law, and simply said that while there is some administrative discretion in how you enforce a law, the Biden administration is carrying discretion to the point of non-enforcement, of ignoring the law, and yet it seems that courts have been reluctant to tell Biden, you can't do what you're doing.
Why is that? I think there's a lot of money being made by this border crisis, Dinesh.
I've been saying this from the beginning, and I'm not just talking about the Democrats.
There's a lot of money going through congressional hands, and we just have to follow the money.
For example, the lady that I'm running against, Veronica Escobar, How is it that she goes from being worth six years ago, less than $200,000 to now being worth over $12 million?
And this is the seat that Beto O'Rourke held for six years before he ran against Ted Cruz.
And again, it's...
You said it.
The House is narrowly controlled by the Republicans and the Senate by the Democrats.
But I would love to see the Republicans in the House attempt something.
They have brought nothing forth that tells me that as an American living on the border...
They are seeking my welfare and those that live on the border.
There's no security. Today, as a matter of fact, the Speaker of the House, who I strongly respect and I'm thankful to God for who he is, they're going again to the border.
They're going to Eagle Pass.
And my question is, what for?
We already know what the problem is.
Please just do something.
You have the power to do something and show to the American people that you are concerned and you are taking this border crisis serious.
Everybody is tired of all the congressional committees being, you know, the interviews with Mayorkas and with everybody else that is involved.
Now, Mayorkas and Blinken go to Mexico.
What comes out of it? Let's talk about amnesty, 100% against amnesty.
Now we're going to reward the people that have disregarded our laws.
And so it's just a vicious cycle.
But again, let's just follow the money and we will understand why this is still some chaos in progress.
Do you think, Irene, that the best practical step that the House could take, quite apart from these, as you say, congressional travel journeys to the border with interviews with local media and so on, is to file the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas?
Because, I mean, he's the guy in charge of this, right?
So if he's doing something outrageous, it's not enough to simply point this out on social media.
Use your legislative power and put him into the hot seat.
Isn't that what you're saying?
100%. This should have been done on day one.
On day one, when the House became under the control of the Republicans, this would have sent a resounding message to the conservatives and not just those people that vote Republican, but Democrats alike.
They're tired of everything that's going on.
They're tired of illegals having more rights than the American citizens.
Here in El Paso, we have our county hospital.
If I, as a citizen, even with insurance, go to the county hospital and they bring an illegal in, guess who's going to get preferential treatment?
The illegal. Why?
Because the federal government, with our taxes, is reimbursing all these doctors and these hospitals.
Many doctors here in El Paso have actually closed down their practice.
So now we're short doctors to serve the American citizens, because instead of fighting with the government to get reimbursed $20 for a Medicaid or Medicare patient, they're getting $150 per illegal.
So they're looking at it as a money issue.
It's not sustainable with the $20 and fighting with the government.
So now what happens? Now, again, you have these long waits for American citizens.
Now, as we come back from Ciudad Juarez, you know, a lot of people do commerce work in Ciudad Juarez.
The lines are three, four hours.
Why is that? Because many of the custom agents are helping to process illegals.
That word process, I use it very loosely because all they're doing is taking their name and their picture.
And so we don't know who really is coming in.
Let me just give you a little example.
about four years ago, my husband has now retired from Border Patrol, but about four years ago, there was a big fight within rebellion within the Cereso, which is the jail in Ciudad Juarez.
And they were able to capture a few people within that span, the period that there was that rebellion. So now Border Patrol requests documents from the Cereso and they got a spiral notebook with handwritten information. So when the reason I bring this up is because we're relying on third world country information that does not have the infrastructure that the United States has
in order to provide the names of those dangerous people that are coming across the border. So what they've captured less than 200, but I know for a fact that at least for every one of those that they have captured, there has to be at least five that have gone undetected because they don't have that information in these third world countries. Scary stuff and wow.
Absolutely. A lot more to talk about, but we'll have to leave it for now.
Irene, thank you very much for joining me.
By the way, we've been talking to Irene Armendariz Jackson.
You can follow her on X at TeamIrene16, the website, IreneArmandarizJackson.com.
Irene, thank you very much.
It can actually go for IreneForCongress.com.
That'll take them to that same webpage and it's easier.
IreneForCongress.com it is.
Thanks for joining me. Thank you.
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I'm going to today conclude my discussion of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and I'm doing it in a sense to bring closure to this great work.
It's not that I have comprehensively covered it.
I'm about three-quarters of the way through, and I could go for another two weeks easily on this book.
There's so much in it.
And I do urge you, if you are inclined, if you like this type of material, it is a little bit Not traumatic, but maybe heavy reading.
But it's also beautifully written.
It's riveting.
It's true.
It has implications for us.
But nevertheless, I think what I'm going to do is sort of fast forward through the last part, picking up on a few tidbits and then summarizing so we get an overall sense of what this work is about.
Now, here's Solzhenitsyn. We're good to go.
I do not expect to see it in print anywhere with my own eyes, and I have little hope that those who manage to drag their bones out of the archipelago will ever read it, and I do not at all believe that it will explain the truth of our history in time for anything to be corrected.
So this may seem like a pessimistic outlook, but I want to point out to you that almost all of this turned out to be the case.
Now, on the one hand, the Gulag did get published, so it came to the attention first of Europe and then of the world, the educated world.
But probably most people who were in the Gulag never read it.
And Solzhenitsyn is quite right that even though the book not only came out before the fall of the Soviet Union, but in a way helped to bring about the fall, The people who put the Gulag together were never held accountable.
The Gulag itself was never dismantled until the Soviet Union itself was dismantled.
The Gulag went down when communism went down.
And so it's interesting to read Solzhenitsyn forecasting his expectations for the Gulag and then measuring them against what actually came to pass.
In another section of the work, Solzhenitsyn, this is really toward the end, has a little bit of a frustrated cry where he goes, why did we put up with this?
Why did we stand for this?
Why did we allow it?
We meaning the Russian people.
And this is a question that I think can be answered in this way.
Why did you allow it is a good question while it was being put together, while the Gulag was being assembled.
Once it was fully assembled, you allowed it only because you had to.
So you didn't, quote, allow it.
It was inflicted upon you.
And so the Russian people had a chance.
They could have stopped the rise of the Bolsheviks.
But the problem was that they thought that the Tsars were terrible.
Many of them supported the Bolsheviks.
And then they got something worse.
I think a kind of an analogy would be what happened in Iran.
There was resistance to the Shah.
It was popular resistance from many sectors of society.
And what happened? They ousted the Shah, the Shah abdicated, and they got Khomeini.
They got the radical Muslims, and at least as far as I can tell, Iran has been a lot worse ever since.
The hostility to the Tsars was based upon the fact that the Tsars were themselves viewed as tyrants.
But Solzhenitsyn goes on to say, he goes, the Tsars were not tyrants in anything like the same measure as the Bolsheviks.
So there's tyranny and there is tyranny.
By the way, in the 1980s, Gene Kirkpatrick would distinguish between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
You could say the Tsars were authoritarian, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian.
So, here's Solzhenitsyn.
Seven attempts were made on the life of Alexander II. What did he do about it?
Did he ruin and banish half of Petersburg?
You know very well, such a thing could never enter his head.
Did he apply the methods of mass terror, take hostages, imprison dubious persons?
He goes, it simply wasn't possible.
Execute thousands?
No.
He goes, the number of people executed for these attempts on the life of the czar numbered exactly five.
Fewer than 300 were convicted by the courts.
And he says, if one such attempt had been made on Stalin, how many millions of lives would it have cost us?
The point being that the czars did not even remotely approach the amount of terror and evil produced by the communists.
And then Solzhenitsyn goes on to talk about...
The loyalists. And the loyalists are, in some ways, well, I don't know if you'd call them tragic figures because these are communists.
But they're communists who end up in the claws of the communist gulag.
They become victims of the gulag, even though, you could say earlier, they were apologists for it and perpetrators of it.
And their condition, I wouldn't say Solzhenitsyn feels sorry for them.
He doesn't because he knows that these are the people who built the gulag.
They created the political support for it.
I think he views with a certain degree of horrified poignancy their behavior when the gulag came after them.
And he gives a single example that I think makes the point.
Olga Silowit's husband had been arrested.
They came and carried out a search to arrest her too.
It says the search lasted four hours, and she spent hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress, which she had been the secretary of.
And instead of being worried that she's being arrested, she was worried that the minutes that she had kept of the Communist Party meetings were incomplete.
Where are the rest of my minutes?
Now, this could be just a response to a terrified situation.
But nevertheless...
Nevertheless, the interrogator had to interrupt her and say, stop looking for your minutes.
We're going to arrest you.
You might want to say goodbye to your children.
So this is the peculiar plight of the communists.
They're more concerned with their incomplete minutes rather than, hey, I better reconcile or at least say farewell to my kids.
I might never be seeing them again.
And here's another example.
A woman gets a letter from her daughter.
The woman is now in prison.
Her name is Yelizaveta Tisbetskoya.
She's in the Kazan prison.
And her daughter writes her saying, Mama, tell me, write to me, are you guilty or not?
I hope you are not guilty because then I will not join the Komsomol, which is the Youth Communist Party.
So if communism is so bad that they are putting you in prison for doing nothing, then I'm not going to join this party.
But just tell me, are you actually guilty or not?
And here's the remarkable thing.
The mother is horrified, and she says, you know, my daughter is now abandoned.
There's no one to take care of my daughter.
The only people to take care of my daughter are the communists themselves, the very people who've arrested me.
So it would be good for her to join the Youth Communist Party.
We'll actually provide her with some sort of protection.
And so here's how she replies.
She goes, um...
She can't live without the Communist Party.
How can I put her in a position to hate Soviet power?
Better that she should hate me.
And so she writes, I am guilty.
Please enter the Konsumal.
Please join the Youth Communist Party.
So think about it.
It's so interesting. The communists are sort of liars to the end.
And even here in this horrible situation, you have this mother falsely pleading guilty At least to her own daughter, in order to clear the path for her daughter to join the very forces of oppression that have put her in jail in the first place.
And finally, I want to comment just briefly on Solzhenitsyn's very remarkable thoughts.
This is toward the closing sections of the Gulag, where he talks about the fact that even in captivity, his soul is free.
And this is important always to remember, that there's a certain part of us that no amount of tyranny, no amount of captivity, no gulag can ever reach.
And Solzhenitsyn goes that that inner freedom is what enables him to keep his dignity, keep his sanity, maintain his relationship with God, keep his memory.
So he's ultimately able to produce a work like the Gulag Archipelago.
I've said from the beginning that we are not in America facing a gulag.
At least the gulag isn't here.
But one thing that has been striking to me in rereading this great work for the podcast, I'd read it once before, but it didn't have quite the same impact on me, in part because I read it as a book about a different time and a different place.
But reading it now, I read it as I see the hints of the gulag in America.
Almost everything I've talked about from the arrest, the interrogation, the frame-up, the indifference to human suffering, The ideological rationalizations and justification, all of those things are now a feature of American society.
Now, they don't affect every American.
Every American has not found himself or herself in the jaws of the gulag.
But for those who have, for those people who have experienced the American justice or you can say injustice system, Reading this book has a very different kind of feel and connotation.
So I hope you found this the kind of awe-inspiring work that I have, instructive not only historically, not instructive in terms of giving us some insight into the nature of communism, but also instructive for some of the things happening in our own society.
May we never get to this horrible place, and let's hope that we have within us the strength The tools and the ability and perhaps a little bit of God-given luck, providence, to prevent the full manifestation of a Gulag archipelago right here in America.
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