Media Revives Russia Hysteria for 2024 Election. Is Self-Immolation Always Regarded as Immoral? PLUS: Germany: Still the Most Extremist Country in Europe
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Russiagate 2.0 (6:49)
How Do We Regard Self-Immolation (31:42)
German Authoritarianism on Display (50:38)
Ending (1:16:24)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, in case you didn't get enough of Russiagate hysteria during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump's alleged collusion with the Kremlin was the dominant storyline of the Clinton campaign's attack, And in case you still didn't get enough of it during the entire first Trump presidential term, when talk of peepee tapes and dossiers and Russian blackmail and Robert Mueller was the leading story in the United States for years.
And in case you still weren't satiated by the tsunami of Russian talk leading up to the 2020 election when Democrats and their allies in the CIA and corporate media actually succeeded in getting reporting about Joe Biden censored by Big Tech by falsely labeling it Russian disinformation, don't worry.
There's a lot more coming as we head into the 2024 election.
Earlier this week, the grand dame of Washington media, NBC News and MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell, who is also long the wife of former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, announced that the 51 former intelligence officials who warned of, quote, Russian disinformation in the lead up to the 2020 election, now feel, quote, vindicated in her words, despite the fact that the claim they made That the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation is every bit as much of a lie now as it was then.
Somehow they feel vindicated.
That is because major media outlets are explicitly preparing to label everything they dislike in the selection year, from criticisms of Joe Biden, to questioning the war in Ukraine, and everything in between as, quote, Russian disinformation.
With apologies to one of the world's greatest animals, these media operatives are like a dog who finds a toy they love and then refuses to release it from its mouth no matter what.
Since 2016, they have been attempting to regain control of American discourse and politics by calling everyone a Kremlin agent and all dissent Russian disinformation, and amazingly enough, Despite how tired and stale it is, they are clearly preparing for this to be their primary tactic to prop up Joe Biden and ensure that he is re-elected and that the glorious war in Ukraine continues eternally.
They unveiled it this week and we will show you all of that.
On Sunday, a 25-year-old member of the United States Air Force, Aaron Bushnell, went to the Israeli embassy in Washington and set himself on fire while chanting pro-Palestinian slogans such as Free Palestine.
In recordings and postings he left, before doing so, Bushnell made very clear that he was engaging in this as an act of protest against U.S.
support for Israel's destruction of Gaza.
All of this led to a rather predictable form of discourse with Israel supporters clearly understanding the danger to their cause of a U.S.
service member sacrificing his own life in protest of U.S.
support for Israel, insisting that the mayor was just mentally ill and that nothing about his act should be admired or celebrated, in fact, should be scorned and hated.
But is it really possible to separate one's views of this act of self-immolation from one's view of the underlying cause in whose name it was done?
One might think from this discourse that anyone who engages in setting themselves on fire for a cause is always disparaged as mentally ill.
But that is simply not true.
The U.S.
has a long history of venerating such acts and expressing admiration for people who do this, provided the cause is right.
So is there anyone condemning this self-immolation now because they believe that the act is inherently immoral?
Or is it just cover for their opposition to the underlying cause that he cited of stopping Israel's destruction of Gaza?
It's really worth taking a look at.
Finally, Germany's history in the 20th century is rather shameful and horrific, to put that mildly.
There are few people who will say this more loudly or eagerly.
than Germans themselves.
Not only do they engage in extreme self-denunciation of their history and self-flagellation as a people, but they also insist that they are now going to do everything possible to compensate for what they regard as their shameful past.
Yet, so often this embarrassment about their own history results not in what you might think it should, humility or moderation or restraint, but instead in its opposite.
Some of the most unhinged extremism on the planet emanates from German officials.
Indeed, one could easily make the case that Germany is...
Despite all this history, or more accurately because of it, still the most extremist nation in all of Europe.
We will examine how and why.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
United States political and media culture have been completely dominated for the last eight years by one single story.
Namely, an attempt to breed fear and hysteria and hatred toward the Russians.
This is something very familiar in American political history.
For decades, Americans were conditioned to view Moscow and the Kremlin As these avatars of all things evil, as these grave threats, and somehow even when Russia completely changed the ideology of its country when it ceased being a communist empire in the late 1980s with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union into multiple states,
Even when it essentially joined the world of capitalism, with the United States helping to elect the Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who followed Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, even with all of that, these tactics have never really changed.
Every time there's some kind of a failure in American political life, or a failure on the part of the elite class, or some grievance, or some social ill, American elites instinctively instead of accepting blame for themselves have this scapegoat in Moscow that they encourage everybody to blame instead of blaming them.
And as a result it has led to this utter obsession.
With Russia, if you're a critic of the Democratic Party or bipartisan wars in Washington or question Joe Biden in any way or any of his policies, you will automatically be declared to be a paid agent of the Kremlin, as I just was right before I went on the air by a regular MSNBC contributor who said to me, how much are you paid by the Kremlin?
They mean this earnestly.
It's a brain worm that they are consumed by and they just can't, they genuinely believe it.
It's not only a tactic.
They have talked themselves into the fact that everywhere they look there's like a Russian lurking under the bed controlling everything that they dislike about the world.
And this was the main theme of the 2016 election.
It was the primary attack line for the first term of the Trump presidency.
And it was the tactic used over and over to discredit any reporting that was derogatory about Joe Biden leading into the 2020 election as well, up to the point where they actually got major reporting on the Biden family's business activities in Ukraine and China and elsewhere censored.
By Twitter and then by Facebook by falsely getting the CIA to label this Russian disinformation when in fact all of these documents were real.
So if you've had enough of that, sorry, you're going to have to live through another election cycle where the corporate media is throwing around these same concepts, these same terms, accusing everything of being blamed on Russia.
And the reason I know that is because they're already doing it.
They're already saying it.
Hear from NBC.
Just this week is an article headlined Russia's 2024 election interference has already begun.
They're not saying it's coming.
They're saying it's already begun, which is another way of saying that their tactic of protecting Joe Biden by accusing everyone of being a Kremlin agent and every critical word about Joe Biden being Russian disinformation, that's what has already begun.
Quote, Moscow is spreading disinformation about Joe Biden and other Democrats to lessen U.S.
military aid to Ukraine and U.S.
support for NATO, former officials and cyber experts say.
Quote, U.S.
officials and experts are most concerned.
I'm sorry, who's most concerned?
Oh, don't worry.
It's U.S.
officials and experts.
The people have an incredibly long and storied history of telling the truth, of being incredibly reliable in everything they say.
When you hear from corporate media that U.S.
officials and experts are saying something, there's one thing you know, you can take it to the bank, it's filled with integrity and truth.
And what they're saying now is the following, quote, U.S.
officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a, quote, deepfake audio or video.
Using artificial intelligence tools or through a quote hack and leak such as the politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016.
Now just look at what they did there.
First of all, they're saying one of the dangers is that we could have a deepfake audio or video.
So if, for example, there appears a video or an audio of Joe Biden talking to Hunter Biden about a bribe or some other scheme, you're already primed to dismiss it as a deepfake by artificial intelligence perpetrated on you by Russian military intelligence operatives.
But then there's a second category that they're warning about, which is a hack and leak, such as the politically damaging theft of internal DNC emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016.
Now, there's kind of a slight difference between these two categories.
For example, a fake audio or video would actually be fabricated.
But the emails that came from the DNC and John Podesta's email inbox were completely authentic and genuine.
They shed a lot of light on what Hillary Clinton and the DNC were.
In other words, one is false and one is true.
And what they want to do is prime you to anticipate that anything you hear that's derogatory about Joe Biden, you just immediately put it into the category of things that you should ignore because they come from Russia.
And therefore are things that you should disregard, even if they're true.
What actually happened in the history of the U.S.
media, and there was just somebody from the New York Times who got fired for his role in publishing the heretical column during Black Lives Matter by U.S.
Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican of Arkansas, who called on the U.S.
government to use military force to crush the protest movement, to quell it on the grounds that it was violent.
And the two senior New York Times editors who were responsible for publishing that in the New York Times, even though it was a U.S. senator who wrote it, got fired.
And one of them recently read an article in The Atlantic this week, in fact, saying that his experience at the New York Times was that during the run-up to the 2020 election, U.S. media outlets were completely unwilling to publish anything that might reflect negatively in any way on Joe Biden because they were so desperate to ensure that U.S. media outlets were completely unwilling to publish anything that might reflect negatively in any And that was exactly my experience as well.
I quit The Intercept in October of 2020, right before the election because of it.
And any person who's honest will admit that...
That the media was kind of willing to be critical of Hillary Clinton in 2016 primarily because they just assumed she was going to win.
Everybody thought she was going to win.
And so nobody thought it mattered.
And then when Trump won and Hillary lost, media outlets had a complete meltdown.
They completely transformed themselves.
They said, we can never do this again.
We can never report negatively again on someone running against Donald Trump, even if it's our job as journalists to do that.
We have to prioritize our role as activists, as Democratic Party partisan activists, because there's nothing, not even our journalistic duties, more important than ensuring that Donald Trump loses the election.
And that's what journalism did in 2020.
It completely renounced whatever residual notion of journalistic duty there was.
And in 2024, it's going to be even worse.
They've convinced themselves that Donald Trump is worse.
This is like the more dictatorial version of him.
He might do things like try and imprison his political opponents.
Can you imagine living in a country where that's done?
Or politicizing intelligence.
God, what must that be like?
So they're saying Donald Trump is so evil he might try and prosecute his political opponents.
Or he might try and politicize intelligence.
And therefore we have to do everything possible to protect Joe Biden, including making sure that any negative reporting is immediately dismissed as coming from the Kremlin.
Quote, NBC goes on, the type of pro-Russia online propaganda campaigns that thrived on Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2016 US presidential election is now routine on every major social media platform.
Though it's rare for individual accounts to go as viral now as they once did.
Moscow and its proxies have long sought to exploit divisions in American society, but experts and former officials said... Wait, who said?
Oh, okay, so you know what's coming is true because experts and former officials said it, That quote, Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the country's deepening political polarization, and sharp cuts in disinformation and election integrity teams at X and other platforms provide fertile ground to spread confusion, division and chaos.
And what they mean by confusion, division and chaos is anything that challenges their political views.
That it's urgent that the war in Ukraine continue, that the U.S.
should fund it, that Donald Trump must lose, that Joe Biden must win.
Anything that contravenes that, they will regard automatically as Russian disinformation or things that are coming from Russia and its proxies.
So that was NBC News.
Here is the Washington Post reading, as always, from the exact same script.
From February 26, Russia looms over yet another Trump presidential campaign.
Quote, new praise of Moscow and a refusal to condemn Putin underscore the former president's persistent admiration of the country.
I mean, honestly, I'm exhausted reading that.
Just the words in that sequence have been so overused.
They spent all of 2016 accusing Trump of loving Vladimir Putin.
And he went on to crush Hillary Clinton.
They spent all the first presidential term Accusing Trump of the same thing and then in the 2020 election.
And Trump, despite facing some of the worst conditions a elected incumbent president can face, including financial decline as a result of the COVID lockdowns and the like, came very close to winning that election.
So the fact that they think this is going to work again, or work for the first time, like Americans are going to go to the polls based on who loves Putin or who doesn't, When polls show not only Trump leading in all the key swing states, but even now Trump leading even if he's convicted of a crime.
There's been recent polling data saying even if he's convicted of a crime, we would still vote for Trump.
The fact that they're so desperate and out of ideas that this is all they can do is actually pathetic.
But as we've seen, it can have real-world and very dangerous effects, such as continuing to pump up American fixations on Russia.
Here's the Washington Post.
There is definitely someone fascinated with Russia, but I don't think it's Trump.
Quote, lavish praise on Putin and refused to stand up to the Russian president on a range of issues from interfering in the 2016 presidential election to invading Ukraine almost exactly two years ago.
Now, let's just remember two things.
When Ukraine, when Russia annexed Ukraine, they did that in 2014 when Barack Obama was the president.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, they did that when Joe Biden was the president.
There were no invasions during Trump's presidency by Russia, no attempts to seize more territory.
This all happened under a Democratic president, two Democratic presidents, not Donald Trump.
On top of which, as we've been through many times before, it was Barack Obama who refused to send lethal arms to Ukraine and Trump did that.
So all of this is fiction, on top of being paranoid.
Quote, Trump's reluctance to forcefully confront Russia and his regular adulation of Putin have long raised the question, with Trump, why do, quote, all roads lead to Putin?
As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, memorably asked in 2019 during a contentious cabinet room meeting.
These are news articles saying, as Nancy Pelosi memorably asked, What does Russia have on Trump?
Now, they unleashed Robert Mueller and his team of A-list prosecutors with unlimited subpoena power and unlimited resources for 18 months.
And not only did they find no evidence of any kind to support this insane, deranged, demented, paranoid conspiracy theory that the Russians have blackmail power over Trump, Mueller barely mentioned it in the report because it was something he didn't even think was worth dignifying.
And yet the most partisan Democrats continue to insist that this is not just a story, but the most important story.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, here is the Boston College history professor, Heather Cox Richardson, who has become the most popular writer on Substack.
By turning out just one article after the next that's just anti-Trump, anti-Badger, pro-DNC talking points, she makes $5 million from all the subscriptions that that earns, because feeding liberals' paranoia about Trump and Russia is by far the easiest way to get rich overnight in politics, and she has done that very well, very successfully.
And here's what she tweeted today, quote, very important article from Josh Marshall at the Talking Points Memo.
Extra points for, quote, Russian dirt safari.
The more I think about it, the more it seems the main story of the past decade has been Russian disinformation to undermine US democracy.
Just imagine how insulated in a partisan bubble you have to be.
To believe that the main story confronting the United States is Russian disinformation and Russian attempts to subvert American democracy.
But this is not a tactic.
This is what Democrats really believe.
Here is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on with former Biden spokesperson, and still Biden spokesperson, she just works at MSNBC now, Jim Psaki.
And they were talking about, you'll never guess, Russia.
And here's what Nancy Pelosi said.
This is not in 2016 or 2018 before the Mueller report came out.
This is just last week on MSNBC.
Putin is probably the richest person in the world.
of the richest person in the world forget all these ratings that people are the richest person in the world he's also the most well not the most evil stiff competition for that honor but nonetheless among the top three or four most evil people in the world what does he have on donald trump that he have to constantly world look at jen saki's face as nancy
pelosi spreads this insane conspiracy theory in 2024 that donald trump is being blackmailed by vladimir putin look at the smug knowing arrogant smirk on that face of hers Jen Psaki was one of the people who spread the CIA lie right before the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
They don't learn because they don't want to learn.
They realize that this constant paranoid Russia script helps the Democratic Party win, or they believe it will.
And so as Nancy Pelosi, look at the face already just on the screen, this smirk, this nauseating smirk as this old lady spews this completely demented conspiracy that has been debunked over and over.
Look at the Mueller Report.
Where is the evidence that Donald Trump has anything or Vladimir Putin has anything on Donald Trump, let alone has been systematically blackmailing him to serve Russia's interests?
And they put Pelosi on to say that with no evidence, these are the people who insist.
They hate disinformation.
They hate conspiracy theories.
Nobody spreads it more.
What does he have on Donald Trump that he has to constantly be catering to Putin?
Telling Putin, go into these countries.
NATO countries.
NATO was there to stop.
Russia, to keep Russia out.
They have been successful for nearly 75 years.
We will celebrate that security success.
And then we have, what's his name?
I usually have him nameless, saying he doesn't support NATO and encouraging Russia to invade NATO countries.
He who shall not be named.
I know Voldemort well, so there's another guy kind of like him.
What do you think?
We're all wondering this question.
Oh my god, that's so cutting and so effective and so mature.
They won't name Donald Trump as they spend all their time talking about him.
How incredibly clever.
Trump's comments, as always, are being distorted.
What he said was that, look, if we're going to have NATO, the Europeans need to pay their fair share.
Why do we have to pay so much more to protect Europe?
And they need to pay up.
And if they don't, we're going to pull out of NATO.
We're going to tell the Russians, we're not in NATO anymore.
You can go do what you want.
We're not going to protect Europe if they don't pay.
And so, of course, they try to turn this into some literal policy platform that Trump is encouraging Russia to go attack NATO as opposed to a hyperbolic way of saying that the Europeans have to pay their fair share.
And it isn't true that NATO was created to prevent Russia from going into Europe.
NATO was created to prevent the Soviet Union from going into Europe because the Soviet Union was a empire that was looking to expand its territory, had taken over all of Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union hasn't existed for more than 30 years.
It doesn't exist any longer.
And yet they continue to act like the Cold War is still going on, even though they were the ones when Mitt Romney said Russia was our number one geopolitical threat, who mocked Mitt Romney for being trapped in the Cold War.
That was in the 2020 debate, the 2012 debate, when President Obama mocked Romney for worrying about Russia by saying, oh, the 1980s are calling.
They want their foreign policy back.
And these people are completely trapped in the Cold War.
Where they're trying to encourage people to believe that Russia, which Obama mocked as a regional power at best, with an economy smaller than Italy's, a country we don't have to worry about and to go to war with, is now somehow not only a threat to the United States, but the greatest threat.
This is the biggest story there is what Russia is doing to the United States.
They want Americans to think, with all their struggles and all their problems, that the biggest concern they have is Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Just to show you how instinctive this is, how demented it is in Democratic Party liberal politics, here was Nancy Pelosi at the end of January on CNN when being asked about Israel and U.S.
support for Israel and the jeopardy that might put Joe Biden in with angry leftists who are mad at them for financing the war in Gaza and the protesters who are denouncing Joe Biden.
Remember what Nancy Pelosi said about them?
They're in front of my house all the time.
So I have a feeling for what feelings they have.
But we have to think about what we're doing.
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip.
This is women and children, people who don't have a place to go.
So let's address that.
But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin's message.
Mr. Putin's message.
Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see.
Same thing with Ukraine.
It's about Putin's message.
I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere.
Some, I think, are connected to Russia.
And I say that having looked at this for a long time now.
You think some of these protests are Russian plants?
These are plants.
I think some financing should be investigated.
And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.
So, just to be clear there, Nancy Pelosi is angry that there are protesters outside her house.
She's one of the most powerful politicians in the country, and so they're protesting outside her house because she and Joe Biden support and are financing the war, the Israeli war in Gaza.
Now her response to that is to say, oh, I think these people are Russian agents.
They're doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin.
They might even be paid for by the Kremlin.
And I think the FBI, I'm going to get the FBI to go investigate them.
I'm going to call the FBI and investigate these leftist protesters who are angry at the Democratic Party because they're probably doing Vladimir Putin's bidding.
Because somehow it's Vladimir Putin who cares so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it's he who wants a ceasefire and therefore anybody who is against U.S.
financing of the war in Israel must be a Kremlin agent.
Do you see how reflexively they label anyone that disagrees with them or that criticizes them as Russian agents to the point that she even calls on the FBI like it's her personal security force?
Go investigate these people, these Americans who are exercising their First Amendment right to protest.
Go investigate them.
Here is Andrea Mitchell, as I said, the grand dame of American politics and NBC and Washington, from this week.
She said, Axe American spies warned that the Hunter Biden scandal had Russian fingerprints.
They feel vindicated now.
She's referring there to the 51 ex-U.S.
intelligence agencies who fabricated a lie that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and then Natasha Bertrand at CNN turned that into, or rather at Politico at the time, turned that into a headline that said, Hunter Biden laptop story is Russian disinformation, former U.S.
spies warn.
And these media outlets have never retracted that lie they helped spread, and now they're actually claiming that they're vindicated Even though the Hunter Biden laptop has always been genuine and still is.
Here from NBC News is our colleague Ken Delaney and notorious for spreading CIA talking points.
You can go Google Ken Delaney and CIA and you'll see how many stories there are about how often he has gone to great lengths to aggrandize and serve the CIA.
Also from this week, here's the article that he wrote that Andrea Mitchell was touting.
Quote, former US spies warned in 2020 that the Hunter Biden scandal had Russian fingerprints.
They feel vindicated now.
Quote, the Justice Department said this week that informant Alexander Smirnov invented a story about $5 million bribes paid to Joe and Hunter Biden is also quote, peddling new lies.
And part of that story was that he went and spoke with Russian intelligence agents.
And so now somehow, they're trying to retroactively validate a completely different claim One of the most egregious lies they told to protect Joe Biden in the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake, that it was fabricated, that it couldn't be trusted, that it was Russian disinformation.
Even though they themselves, once Joe Biden was safely elected, admitted that the laptop was in fact genuine.
So you see this kind of avalanche and they always are reading from the same script because it's a coordinated messaging and propaganda campaign in which they're engaged.
To try and prime the American public, the voting public, to believe that any stories that are coming in 2024 that in any way make Joe Biden look bad or question him or anybody who criticized Joe Biden should presumptively be assumed to be a Russian agent, even if it's not just on the question of Israel and Palestine.
If you are in any way undermining the Democratic Party's electoral interest, according to Nancy Pelosi, you should be investigated by the FBI.
As a suspect of being an army of the Kremlin.
That's how insane these people are, how demented they are, how reliant they are on conspiracy theories that are paranoid and based on no evidence.
But it is absolutely the only tactic they have.
and that's why they've repeated it in 2016 and 2020 and intend to not just repeat it but escalate it as we head toward the 2024 election last night we started the show by addressing the case of aaron bushnell who was an active duty was an active duty senior airman in the u.s um Air Force who went to the Israeli embassy in Washington on Sunday and set himself on fire.
In protest of the Israeli war in Gaza and also U.S.
support for that war.
There was a lot of requests we had in chat and by email and elsewhere for us to comment on it.
Last night I said we didn't really feel comfortable doing that because there were very few facts about him.
That had been released there wasn't much known about what he did and why and I felt more comfortable waiting until we had more facts rather than just trying to opine or feed a existing narrative and I said we'll talk about it tomorrow night if there are more facts and there are more facts I think his motive is now extremely clear and
I don't want to talk entirely or specifically about what Aaron Bushnell did as the focus because people probably have already existing views on whether this was a noble thing based on their underlying view of the cause that he invoked when he did it, namely the war in Gaza.
If you love Israel, if you think they're doing the right thing in Gaza, you're probably opposed to Aaron Bushnell.
If you believe that the Israeli war in Gaza is immoral and evil or genocidal, as the South Africans have alleged in the International Court of Justice and so of other countries, then you'll probably believe that what he did was noble.
So it kind of depends on the underlying cause, but that's the point because there was a lot of people claiming that what Aaron Bushnell did is inherently immoral or It's a sign of insanity and mental illness, only that it doesn't deserve to be praised for that reason.
And without opining on the specific case, precisely because I still think you kind of need to know a little bit more, what I do know for sure is that the act of setting yourself on fire to protest an injustice in the world is a very common form of protest.
And it's something that United States politicians and officials and journalists have often praised and celebrated.
When it served a cause that they support, namely protesting the injustice of American enemies, whether it be Russia, or China, or Iran, or all kinds of other cases.
So this idea that self-immolation is inherently insane, that it's inherently an act that ought to be denounced, has never been the way we've looked at this act previously.
It's always been looked at as an act of enormous courage and sacrifice.
Some of you might remember that right after 9-11, Bill Maher had a talk show, not the one he has now on HBO, but a different one called Politically Incorrect.
And a week or two after 9-11, he went on the air, and a lot of people at the time were claiming that the 9-11 hijackers were, quote, cowards.
And Bill Maher went on the air and said, look, what they did is reprehensible.
I condemn it.
I think it's repugnant.
But the one thing you can't say about 9-11 hijackers who deliberately drove planes into a building, knowing they were giving up their own lives for a cause in which they believe, the one thing you cannot say about them is that they're cowardly.
It takes courage to give up your own life for a cause.
And it takes courage if you're going to die suddenly, like flying an airplane to a building, and it takes even more courage to die in one of the most excruciating ways imaginable, which is dying by setting yourself on fire.
And there's no way to diminish that courage, whether you think the cause is unjust or not is, of course, a separate question.
Personally, I do have admiration for people who get to the point where they believe in a cause so much that they're willing to sacrifice their own self-interest.
Whether people like Edward Snowden, who ended up in exile in Russia, and who we thought was going to end up in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life.
Or Julian Assange, who did the same.
Or people who fight in a war because they believe in the justice of that war and risk their own life to do so.
There's no way to deny the moral courage and physical courage of that kind of an act.
And a lot of this discourse which tries to disparage self-immolation as just something only a mentally ill person would do is very inconsistent with the way we often have talked about self-immolation in the past when it was used for a cause that American elites actually support.
So first of all, just the kind of core facts from the New York Times.
"Man dies after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington," Air Force says.
"Erin Bushnell, an active duty senior airman, repeatedly shouted, 'Free Palestine' as he filmed and live-streamed his protest against Israel's deadly military actions in Gaza.
He had been taken to a hospital on Sunday with life-threatening injuries.
He went on to die.
Quote, I will no longer be complicit in genocide, a man says in the video, echoing language that opponents of Israel's military offensive in Gaza have used to describe the war.
Quote, I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest.
But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all.
Now that sounds to me like somebody who had a rational understanding of what they were doing, who set out to explain what they were doing, did so in a coherent way, a truthful way, and then went about and did it.
So it's hard to say, oh, he was mentally ill, he didn't know what he was doing, because everything he left behind suggests that he had a very clear and coherent understanding of what he did and why.
Here from the Washington Post gave a little more detail about him.
The airman who set himself on fire grew up on a religious compound and had an anarchist past.
Now, as I said, a lot of people are pretending that they hate this protest because self-immolation in and of itself is inherently wrong and bad.
And yet they've not been consistent at all when similar or identical acts were undertaken for a cause they supported.
Here, for example...
He's one of the most intellectually dishonest, whiny, petulant, and toxic people in American political life.
The former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, the Republican of Illinois, who knew he couldn't be re-elected to Congress and so went to CNN.
He's a fanatical supporter of things like the US funding of the war in Ukraine.
He has a Ukrainian flag everywhere he goes, but he also supports The US financing of Israel.
He's a big Israel supporter as well.
And so he went on to Twitter and said, quote, suicide is not heroic.
This was when obviously everybody was discussing the Aaron Bushnell case, and he was there to disparage it.
Suicide is not heroic, he said.
And yet, many people found a tweet of his from February of 2022, right after the Russians had invaded, in which he said the following, a salute with two Ukrainian flags and two American flags.
Hero Ukrainian soldier, quote, blows himself up to destroy bridge and stop Russian invasion forces storming in from Crimea.
So there he was praising as honorable and heroic.
An act of suicide in defense of a cause that he actually supported.
Now, you might say, well that wasn't self-immolation, it was suicide.
So let's look at other examples of how self-immolation has typically been discussed.
One of the people who I immediately remembered as having engaged in self-immolation was a 25-year-old street vendor in Tunisia.
He had been college educated, but he couldn't get a job in Tunisia.
It was a corrupt society, a repressive society.
He was forced to work as a vendor, selling items on the street to support his family.
And the police came one day and tried to take all of his things that he was selling, which is the only way he could earn a living in Tunisia.
There had just been a WikiLeaks report the year before showing how all these countries in that region that the United States supported were deeply corrupt.
The New York Times editor-in-chief at the time, Bill Keller, credited WikiLeaks with helping to spark the Arab Spring.
And Arab Spring activists won the Sakharov Prize, which is named after a Russian dissident.
It's genuinely given for people who the West considers heroic.
And here's who won in 2011.
You see the headline, Arab Spring Activists Win 2011 Sakharov Prizes from Radio Free Liberty.
Quote, five Arab Spring activists have won the European Parliament's 2011 Sakharov Prize.
Quote, this year's winner symbolizes the struggle for dignity, for democracy, and for human rights.
And they are co-authors of historical change in the Arab world, Buzik said.
Not sure who Buzik is.
I presume it's somebody with the European Union.
The winners are Mohamed Bouazizi from Tunisia, whose death after he set himself on fire Triggered the chain of popular uprisings in North Africa that became known as the Arab Spring.
And this person, this 25-year-old street vendor who set himself on fire in Tunisia was widely heralded as someone engaged in an act of great heroism, of great nobility, of great consequence.
He won the Sakharov Prize after he had died for his act of self-immolation.
And here's what President Obama had to say about this in January of 2011.
On December 17th, a young vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was devastated when a police officer confiscated his carton.
This was not unique.
It's the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world.
The relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity.
Only this time, something different happened.
After local officials refused to hear his complaints, this young man, who had never been particularly active in politics, went to the headquarters of the provincial government, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire.
There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years.
In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a king, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat.
So it was in Tunisia, as that vendor's act of desperation tapped into the frustration felt throughout the country.
That is veneration for somebody who engaged in an act of self-immolation against a government that we were denouncing as tyrannical.
Now the reality was these governments that became the target of the Arab Spring, including Egypt, were dictatorships the United States, including the Obama administration, had long supported.
But Obama loved nothing more than getting up on his high horse and talking about people's quest for freedom and comparing everybody to Rosa Parks.
And so this Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire became a hero of the Western press and of President Obama.
That was the prevailing narrative.
Not that he was mentally ill, that only a crazy person would set himself on fire, that setting yourself on fire is a very stupid way to engage in protest.
They were heaping prizes on him and veneration at the highest level of Washington politics from the podium at the White House by the president.
Because in that case, that was a political cause that we wanted to write on, that we wanted to celebrate, that we wanted to expand.
And so self-immolation was something that we regarded as courageous.
The same exact thing happened when a dissident journalist in Russia set herself on fire here from Politico in October of 2020.
For Russia, a journalist's self-immolation is a wake-up call.
Irina Slavina's last message was for, quote, for my death, I ask you to blame the Russian Federation.
She was constantly held up as an anti-Putin hero because she used self-immolation not to target our ally, as this 25-year-old airman did, but to denounce one of our enemies, the Russian government.
Nobody, very few people in American political life criticized her self-immolation because it was aimed at Vladimir Putin.
Here from the New York Times, March 4th, 2016, a Tibetan monk, 18 years old, dies after self-immolation to protest Chinese rule.
The monk, Khalsang Wangdu, 18, set himself to fire on Monday, according to Free Tibet, a group based in London.
On the same day, a 16-year-old Tibetan student, Georgie Tsering, committed the same act in India while shouting, Free Tibet, the group said.
He survived and was in a hospital in New Delhi.
On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner to be the Democratic presidential candidate, helped up a black-and-white photo of Mr. Dorjee while talking in Minnesota to the President of the Tibetan National Congress, an advocacy group.
And there you see the photo of Hillary Clinton celebrating this 16-year-old boy who set himself on fire on behalf of Tibet in protest of an American enemy, namely China.
So if you self-immolate and you do so to protest China or you do so to protest Russia, or you do so in protest of tyranny in the Arab world, and Americans want to pretend that they're on the side of freedom for the Arab world.
Self-immolation gets celebrated as heroic.
There are monuments built and prizes given for it.
Here from Radio Free Liberty in January of 2019, 50 years after his self-immolation, Czech student Jan Palik remains a symbol of defiance.
He was a Czech student who engaged in self-immolation to protest the Soviet Union's repression of his country.
And here you have Radio Free Liberty talking about him as a symbol, a heroic symbol of defiance.
Not as mentally ill, not as a crazy person, not as selfish, not as somebody who should be disparaged.
Somebody who should be held up and admired.
The friend of the show and the very intrepid independent journalist Michael Tracy found this example, quote, Robert McNamara in his 1995 memoir on Norman Morrison, a Quaker anti-war activist who self-immolated 40 feet from McNamara's Pentagon window on November 2nd, 1965.
McNamara said he was deeply affected by the act, especially because his wife and kids agreed with the immolator.
I could show you a lot more.
This is, I believe, from McNamara's book, where he wrote, anti-war protests had been sporadic and limited up to this time and had not compelled attention.
Then came the afternoon of November 2nd, 1965.
At twilight that day, a young Quaker named Norman Morrison, father of three and an officer of the Stoney Run Friends meeting in Baltimore, burned himself to death within 40 feet of my Pentagon window.
He doused himself with fuel from a gallon jug, and when he set himself on fire, he was holding his one-year-old daughter in his arms, and he screamed, quote, save the child, and he flung her out of his arms.
She survived without injury.
After Morrison's death, his wife issued a statement that basically explained why he did what he did to stop the war in Vietnam.
And McNamara said the following in his book, quote, I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone, even my family.
I knew Marge and our three children shared many of Morrison's feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues, and I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts.
So again, We have a long history of heaping praise on people who use this as a form of protest, obviously an extreme form of protest.
But we have often said that extreme injustice justifies and merits this kind of protest.
And now suddenly in the discourse, there's this effort to depict self-immolation as something only insane people do, something that ought to be disparaged and maligned.
There were calls on Twitter today for people demanding that Elon Musk remove the tweet of Cornel West, who spoke in admiration, not of the act of self-immolation even, but just for Aaron Bushnell, who is the one who engaged in self-immolation and the cause of stopping the war in Gaza.
And a lot of people, including some who I respect because they've been long involved in the campaign in favor of free speech and against online censorship.
Actually started saying Cornel West's tweet should be removed because somehow it glorifies suicide and encourages people to take their own life.
Saying it violated the rules of action and called on Elon Musk to remove it.
And obviously the reason is not because they're offended by self-immolation.
Self-immolation is celebrated if it's done for the right cause.
It's because they were concerned that this might bring consciousness to the cause of stopping the war in Gaza.
And these people are very vehement supporters of Israel and the war in Gaza.
And therefore want to disparage this act.
But that is not always how, in fact that's not usually how, self-immolation is discussed.
It's often discussed as a very noble and brave and heroic and consequential act of protest that has sparked some of the most important and beneficial events according to our political and media elites when it serves their agenda to do so.
And so I think as you hear this discourse about Aaron Bushnell and what he did I think it's very important to understand that the context is not that self-immolation is considered intrinsically wrong.
It's all based on how people view the cause that is being advanced by that very extreme, admittedly extreme, but also definitely very courageous act.
Germany, I think, is probably the single most bizarre country on the Earth.
They obviously are deeply affected in a fundamentally psychological and visceral way by knowing that it was their country and their people that started World War II, played a big part in World War I as well, perpetrated the Holocaust, considered one of the worst crimes of the last millennia, if not the worst crime, and
For whatever reason, German officials have decided that it is their duty to make amends for what was done before they were alive by their ancestors, who share the same genetic pool, I guess, and they feel therefore responsible.
And yet the The solution or the effort to try and compensate for these past historical abuses for which they feel responsible is not to offer themselves up in humility and moderation.
And to say, look, I mean, every time Germans have tried to influence the world, it's been for bad things, bad things have happened.
Maybe we'll just take a step back for a few generations.
Kind of be humble and moderate for once, kind of stay in the middle, not express very strong opinions.
They've gone in completely the other direction, nominally, where it's still the case that whatever policies they believe are righteous, they become the most extremist country in terms of advocating it and demanding it and pushing it and taking it to its most logical extremes.
One of the causes that Germany has taken up, more so than any other country arguably in Europe, is the glories of the war in Ukraine.
And it's very strange because over the past several decades German officials have been among the leaders in the continent in trying to have friendly relations with the Russians and with Moscow for reasons that make a lot of sense.
Namely that in the past when Germany and Russia have ended up in hostilities with one another, especially with war between their two countries.
Extremely terrible things have taken place.
And so the idea was for Germany, for Russians, for the world, as Germans, we should try and have very amiable relations with Russians, with the Russians, with Russia.
And for a while they were doing that.
And then came the election of Trump and Brexit, which they blamed on the Russians, and then the invasion of Ukraine.
And now it's extraordinary.
We're back to hearing German chancellors holding outdoor rallies, screaming in German about the moral imperatives of defeating Russia on the battlefield, the glories of war.
Yet again, it's time to defeat the Russians on the battlefield.
And it was the Germans who were the first to send tanks to the Ukrainians.
So German tanks are once again rolling through Europe toward Russia through Ukraine.
And we interviewed a leftist leader in Germany, Sarah Bagenknecht, who has actually become popular among a lot of the people on the populist right, in part because she hates the culture war that the left has undertaken, but also because she has become an outspoken opponent of Europe's support for the war in Ukraine.
And one of the things she talks about is, imagine the psychological trauma that Russians feel, if you know anything about history, from watching German leaders Talk about the beauty and glories and moral imperatives of defeating Russia on the battlefield and the need to send tanks and watching German tanks.
Roll through Europe eastward on the way to the Russian border through Ukraine.
Here was the German Chancellor Olaf Schlotz in May of 2022 at an outdoor rally speaking about how important it was for Germany to take the lead in helping Ukraine defeat Russia.
And I'm going to just for those who are listening by podcast, I'm going to read the English subtitles that are on the screen.
We will continue to support Ukraine with money and humanitarian aid.
But it also has to be said we will support it to be able to defend itself.
With arms deliveries, as many other countries in Europe are doing. - This is necessary now.
I respect all pacifism.
I respect all attitudes.
But it must seem cynical to a citizen of Ukraine to be told to defend himself against Putin's aggression Without weapons.
This is outdated.
This war will have consequences.
Consequences all over the world.
Already now we have to worry that there are those who will starve.
That there are countries that can be no longer afford grain for their people.
That this whole war situation will lead to a worldwide hunger crisis.
And that's why I say as a trade unionist, as a citizen of this country, and also as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, we will not leave these poor countries alone.
We will support them.
There was an outdoor rally, there were Germans there, they were throwing their fists up in the air as their German Chancellor was talking about the necessity and the nobility and the justness of war with Russia.
Probably the most The most extremist face of the neoliberal order is the German woman who leads the EU as its president, Ursula von der Leyen.
She has become a fanatical supporter of the war.
In Ukraine, also the attempt to censor the internet in the name of stopping Russian disinformation.
If you just listen to her, you see the face of fanaticism.
And she is the German face of the EU.
She is now running for re-election for another term.
And she's almost certainly certain to be re-elected.
The bureaucrats in Brussels love Ursula von der Leyen because she represents the face of Europe, but in the most extremist way possible.
Germany is the biggest and most powerful country in Europe.
It's the richest.
And so when the Germans speak, the Europeans listen.
And they've been vying with the French for the biggest say in Europe for a long time.
And the Germans definitely are, I would say, dominant when it comes both to their own country and to the EU.
Here is Ursula von der Leyen in January of 2024 at the World Economic Forum.
For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict, Or climate?
It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarization within our societies.
These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing.
Changes in our climate and our geopolitical climate.
Shifts in our demography.
And in our technology, spiraling regional conflicts and intensified geopolitical competition and their impacts on supply chains.
The sobering reality is that we are once again competing more intensely across countries than we have in several decades.
And this makes the theme of this year's Davos meeting even more relevant.
Rebuilding trust.
This is not a time for conflicts or polarisation.
This is a time to build trust.
This is a time to drive global collaboration more than ever before.
This requires immediate and structural responses to match the size of the global challenges.
I believe it can be done.
She believes it can be done.
Now, if you feel comforted by the image of Ursula von der Leyen going to Davos and speaking to the World Economic Forum about the need to foster unity among us and to combat division,
By which she means we need to seize control of the internet and censor and silence what she regards as disinformation to seize control of the discourse so that all of us stop disagreeing with one another and we unite behind her and her agenda.
If that is comforting to you, then you are probably an authoritarian.
Because Ursula von der Leyen From Germany is, I think, one of the most threatening authoritarians on the planet.
She is behind a lot of the European efforts to censor the Internet with things like the Digital Services Act that is now being used to formally investigate Elon Musk and Axe for their crime of not centering enough, quote, anti-Israel disinformation.
She is absolutely somebody who believes strongly in the need to censor the internet, to rid us of this information, in the name of unifying all of us behind her and her worldview.
Here is Ursula von der Leyen, just a month or so before, talking about the war in Ukraine.
Quote, we have stood by Ukraine since day one of Russia's war of aggression.
With almost $85 billion in financial, humanitarian, and military support, 85 billion euros in financial, humanitarian, and military support, we will keep supporting Ukraine and military support, we will keep supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes.
And now we are opening the door to the EU to our friend and neighbor, meaning inviting Ukraine in.
Here is the video that she posted of herself with President Skolensky where she's talking about the glories of Ukraine and the need to fight and win until the end.
Music by Ben Thede
It's her laughing with President Skolensky, with Ukrainians, with delivering weapons and humanitarian aid.
We are so grateful to our righteous savior, Ursula von der Leyen, in leading us into victory of war against Russia.
Here in February of this year, so just yesterday, here's what she tweeted.
Quote, for two years, Ukrainians have been standing strong, bravely defending their country, but also the whole of Europe.
We are in Kiev to reaffirm there will be a free and sovereign Ukraine, there will be peace and prosperity, and there will be Europe.
And she posted another video of herself to accompany that declaration of victory in war.
Exactly two years ago, it felt like everything was lost and Kiev would fall within days.
But Kiev stood strong.
Your courage stood in Putin's way.
You saved your country.
You saved all of Europe.
And today, we are here, from across Europe and the world, to pay tribute to your bravery.
There will be a free and sovereign Ukraine.
There will be peace and prosperity.
And there will be Europe.
You would think if Germans would want to kind of make amends for what they did, to compensate for it, they would at least refrain from spewing all over the world war propaganda in a German voice, but you would be very wrong.
They are the leaders in this sort of anti-Russia war propaganda, just like they were in the 20th century.
They just believe that now they're doing it for a different cause.
They're just as fanatical, they're just as extremist, they're just as unyielding.
They're as self-righteous and as convinced as ever.
No doubt enters their brain.
They're there to fight until the end.
They just believe it's this time they're fighting Russia like they did throughout the 20th century, but this time for a valid motive.
Now, aside from being the leaders in the war in Ukraine and the censorship regime, which does not seem to me like a very effective way of convincing the world that they're not a threat, that they're a new Germany, that they're a different Germany seeking to repeat the mistakes of the past, they have also decided that one of the things they need to be is the most fanatical supporter of the state of Israel.
Not the most fanatical supporter of Jews, but the most fanatical supporter of the state of Israel.
In fact, they have been oftentimes very abusive toward and even threatening toward German Jews who are dissidents or Israeli Jews who visit Germany and speak out against German policy or even against their own country in Israel.
Just this week, there was a film festival in Berlin, at which a film called No Other Land, that was produced by an Israeli Jew, Yuval Abraham, and a Palestinian Muslim, there you see him on the screen, they co-produced this film, his name is Masaf Rayata, and it won an award in Berlin!
And they both gave up, and stood up and gave a speech, And Yuval Abraham, who was Jewish, stood up and explained why he believes that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, his country's treatment of Palestine and Palestinians, is unjust.
And he was widely attacked by German elites, by German media, by German political figures who are not Jewish, as being anti-Semitic.
To the point where his safety and that of his fellow filmmaker were actually in danger in Germany.
Here he tweeted this week, our film, quote, No Other Land, Unoccupied Massafariata's Brutal Expulsion, won Best Documentary in Berlinale.
Israel's Channel 11 aired this 30-second segment from my speech, insanely called it anti-Semitic, and I've been receiving death threats ever since.
I stand behind every word.
Now, here is the speech that he gave.
You can judge for yourself whether you think it's anti-Semitic.
I want to say we are we are standing in front of you now.
Me and Bassel are the same age.
I am Israeli, Bassel is Palestinian.
And in two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal.
I'm living under a civilian law and Basel is under military law.
We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights.
Basel is not having voting rights.
I'm free to move where I want in this land.
Basel is like millions of Palestinians locked in the occupied West Bank.
This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.
So that was a speech that apparently convinced German officials who aren't Jewish that they had a right to accuse an Israeli Jew of being anti-Semitic.
and And the Germans, in fact, have been completely insane since October 7th.
They, along with France, were among the countries that banned all pro-Palestinian protests, even while allowing protests in defense of Israel.
And here was the reaction in Germany to this film festival, where other filmmakers as well, who won awards, Criticize Israel's war in Gaza, which is whatever you think of that obviously free speech And yet the Times of Israel reported from today Germany to probe the Berlin Film Festival after winners assail Israel over the war in Gaza.
Government spokeswoman criticizes speakers at Berlin Hall for not mentioning Hamas's October 7th attack, following remarks that were denounced as anti-Semitic.
German officials will investigate how Berlin Film Festival winners made, quote, one-sided comments.
The German state is going to investigate how they made, quote, one-sided comments concerning Israel's war in Gaza against Hamas at the awards gala, a government spokeswoman said on Monday.
At Saturday's ceremony, several winners were accused of making anti-Semitic remarks on stage.
American filmmaker Ben Russell wearing a Palestinian scarf accused Israel of committing, quote, genocide with its bombardment of the densely populated Gaza Strip.
Palestinian filmmaker Basil Adra said the Palestinian population was being, quote, mastered by Israel to applause from the audience, quote, Quote, it is unacceptable that the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7th was not mentioned.
Government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffman told reporters in Berlin on Monday, Chancellor Olaf Schlotz, quote, agrees that such a one-sided stance cannot be allowed to stand, Hoffman said.
Now, one of the officials from the German Ministry of Media and Culture was caught applauding that speech I just showed you after that film won that award.
And it created a whole bunch of controversy in Germany.
Why are they applauding this Jew who stood up, this Israeli Jew, and stood up and criticized Israel?
And this is what the official German Ministry of Media and Culture tweeted in response to this controversy.
Quote, regarding the applause at the Berlin Film Festival after Yuval Abraham's speech, Claudia Rotha's applause went to the Jewish-Israeli filmmaker and journalist Yuval Abraham, who spoke out in favor of a political solution and peaceful coexistence in the region.
From the point of view of the Minister of State for Culture, it is very worrying that Yuval Abraham says he is now receiving death threats after his appearance at the Berlin Hall in Berlin.
So in other words, the German government came out and said, look, when one of our officials applauded that film, they weren't applauding the Arab.
Don't worry about that.
They were just applauding the Jew.
Because he was the one who mentioned the need for the two-state solution and Palestinians to live side-by-side with Israelis in peace, even though that was the message of the film.
Back in November, After Germany had already banned pro-Palestinian protesters, they were also censoring, actively, critics of Israel inside Germany.
From the New York Times on November 10th, Germany's stifling of pro-Palestinian voices pits historical guilt against free speech.
Quote, the country's authorities have banned many protests in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.
Critics say such restrictions are discriminatory.
Germany sees severely restricting criticism of Israel as a necessary part of atoning for the Holocaust.
In recent weeks, Hamburg banned protests or restricted the number of Palestinian flags that could be waved.
In Berlin, officials authorized schools to bar students from wearing the Kaifa or the Palestinian flag or its colors.
The police in Berlin said they have blocked over half of the 41 scheduled Gods in Solidarity protests, sometimes on the grounds that they would, quote, emotionalize residents of Palestinian origin.
These included a children's demonstration to mourn the Palestinian children killed by Israeli strikes in the past month.
Permitted protests were banned from using slogans such as, quote, stop the war and, quote, free Palestine.
The Berlin police prohibited the protest based on, quote, an imminent danger that the gatherings would lead to incitement to hatred, anti-Semitic statements, glorification of violence, incitement to violence, and thus to intimidation and protest and violence.
The Germans have just completely suppressed all of free speech in the name of not protecting American Jews or Israeli Jews or German Jews, many of whom are often denounced in the byproduct of these censorship orders, but in the name of protecting the foreign state called Israel from criticism in its war.
How can you repent for the Holocaust through repressing dissent?
One of the catalyzers of the Nazi party and of German Nazis and burning books and shutting down dissent and silencing people to replicate that in the name of avoiding the Holocaust makes no sense whatsoever.
Here from Politico in December of 2023, the New Yorker American writer Masha Gessen wrote a New Yorker essay that we read to you last week on why it's justified to learn lessons from the Holocaust and apply them to Israel and And Gessen was basically kicked off events and canceled from speaking in Germany, even though Gessen is an American Jew.
Masha Gessen kicks the hornet's nest on Israel and the Holocaust.
Quote, in a new Q&A, the Russian-American journalist discusses why a prestigious award ceremony for them got called off.
Masha Gessen was heading to Germany to receive a prominent cultural prize when they heard that the ceremony wasn't going forward.
That's because an essay they had published in the New Yorker had apparently tripped alarms in Germany for its references to ghettos in Europe and Gaza.
The offending essay entitled In the Shadow of the Holocaust, which I have to say just won the Polk Award last week, the second highest and most prestigious award in journalism and American journalism after the Pulitzer, the Germans said that this essay was virtually illegal.
Politico describes it, quote, as a reflection on the cultural memory of the Holocaust and how Germany has enforced a singular interpretation of it.
Quote, in Gessen's view, Germany's rigid definition of anti-Semitism, however well intentioned, has had the effect of stifling valid debate, particularly about Israel, and it has implications for the current debate in the United States over which constitutes anti-Semitism and what speech or language is acceptable.
Now, as we talked about last week, the Nuremberg Trials and all, most of American Jewish intellectual writing after the World War II, after the Holocaust, about the Holocaust, was about the need to take these lessons and not interpret it as a lesson about the evils of Germans and the vulnerability of Jews, but instead about the capacity for human beings to do evil And apply it to everyone in the future who's guilty of violating its precepts, including the Israelis.
It was very common for people like Albert Einstein, the Jewish physicist, and Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish philosopher, to accuse segments in Israel, the really extremist ones, the ones who use terrorism to lead to Zionism.
They compared them all the time to a Nazi mentality, to repeating the mentality of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust wasn't supposed to be off-limits.
There wasn't supposed to be any group of people or country immune from its lessons.
But in Germany, everything they do has to go to the most extreme and fanatical level.
That's why they are the most extremist and most repressive about protecting Israel and justifying its worth.
They're the most extreme about propping up and glorifying and funding and arming the war in Ukraine and vowing to defeat Russia on the battlefield yet again, the third time in just over 100 years that they're doing that, that country.
They are without question the most extremist proponents of not just censoring criticism of Israel, but censoring whatever they regard as disinformation from the internet.
And it is just ironic that in the name of atoning for their prior extremism, Germany has yet again become the most extremist country in Europe, oftentimes believing that they're doing the opposite of what they're trying to atone for, but oftentimes in many ways replicating
What they did previously, if not rhetorically and tactically, then definitely substantively in terms of the crackdowns on basic freedoms, in terms of the glorification of war, in terms of the necessity of censorship.
All of this is very much the mindset of a self-righteous and highly self-loving people who just don't admit any doubt in their worldview, who believe in the forcible implementation of their vision and their mentality, who believe in war as a tool for advancement, and who absolutely believe in the virtues of censorship almost more than any country anywhere in the Western world.
That concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, a system update is also available in podcast form, where you can listen to every episode that is first broadcast here, 12 hours after it's broadcast here on live on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you listen and rate and review and follow the program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive After Show that's designed to take your questions, to respond to your feedback and critiques, hear your suggestions.
That After Show is available solely for members of our Locals community, and if you want to become a member of our community, Which not only gives you access to those twice a week after show but also to all the interactive features we have.
They'll let me throughout the week respond to your questions.
It's the place that we publish our transcripts every day for the shows that we do here.
It's the place we publish our original written journalism.
And most of all it is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
You can simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly there, this being Tuesday night.
We are now going to Rumble, to Locals rather, for our live interactive after show.
For those who've been watching this program here on Rumble, we are of course very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
