Bill Whittle’s What We Saw: An Empire of Terror exposes Lenin’s ideological blueprint for Stalin’s mass murders—Red Terror executions, Kolyma’s 800,000 deaths, and psychological terror like midnight arrests—while debunking myths of Soviet anti-fascism via the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Using primary sources, he dismantles Marxism-Leninism as "unhuman," contrasting it with Western democracy, and warns of modern authoritarian parallels, tying it to the Second Amendment’s role in resisting tyranny. The series’ chilling 1925 testimony details grotesque methods like "bourgeois gloves" torture, while Whittle also defends the atomic bomb’s necessity against revisionist claims. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Bill Whittle.
The reason that I came out of my writing room, which I never wanted to come out of, and started doing videos, was because I was asked to take a look at PJ TV, which was kind of the Daily Wire before there was such a thing as the Daily Wire.
And I saw Bill Whittle and I thought, this guy is great.
This guy, if he weren't telling the truth, he would be on networks.
That's how much talent he has.
He was an actual high-level professional, except that he was telling the truth.
And I said, I want to do Bill Whittle, except I want to make fun of Bill Whittle because that's what I'm here for.
So I just did funny Bill Whittle and made fun of him.
And that's the reason I did it, because I just thought he was so great that there was really a lot of talent out there.
He is a writer, director, historian, a conservative political commentator.
His combined videos have exceeded 100 million views.
You can find him on YouTube at Bill Whittle channel or on his newly redesigned website at billwidd.com.
And he has this spectacular show called What We Saw, which is now about the Soviets and the Cold War.
This is, I think, the third version of it.
Bill, I worked with you for years and never knew you had any talent whatsoever.
I didn't even know you were sentient.
And I'm just shocked at the level, the quality of this show.
What is it called?
It's called What We Saw, and then it has a subtitle.
What is the subtitle?
Hello, Clavin.
Yes, it's an Empire of Terror.
Empire of Terror, that's right.
Yes, and I'm pleased I was able to surprise you with the adequacy of the program.
Yes, it was almost good.
I have to tell you.
It's riveting.
It is riveting.
And it's something, you know, this is the thing.
People need to know this, and they forget.
I mean, it's like every generation forgets again.
And it actually is the first thing I wanted to ask you was, like, why is it that left-wing bad is invisible when right-wing bad is so immediately identifiable?
So if right-wing does something really bad, and they do, you know, the far right is awful.
But we can see it.
We say, oh yeah, that's bad.
But when the left just destroys things, everything in their wake, it's okay to wear a Shea Guevara t-shirt.
I mean, the guy was a murderer, but that's fine.
It's okay to wear a hammer sickle and all this.
What is the difference?
I think the single greatest reason for this, you've caught in your question, you know, it's pics or it didn't happen.
We have extensive photographs of the Holocaust.
We have extensive photographs of the death camps, bulldozing of bodies and all the rest of it.
There is no photographic story from what the Soviet Union did to its people.
Just finding photos of victims of the mass starvation in the Red Terror is virtually impossible.
I mean, just to find pictures of the people, you can find them, and we did find them.
And they look exactly the same as the people who were walking around in Dachau or Triplinka.
Well, they didn't spend a lot of time walking around in Triplinka and Triplinka.
They pretty much got done with you in about an hour or so.
But that same skeletal haunted, utter destruction of the human body and the spirit as well.
And we simply don't have a photo record of it.
So the people who adhere to this theory have the luxury of not being able to be confronted with pictures.
And so when I decided to do the series, the first thing that was clear to me was I was, first of all, I took it, I approached it as a trial, as if I was the prosecution.
I'm making a court case here.
I'm trying to convict this system and these people and find them guilty.
And in order to do that, I knew that I had to use their words, their language, their pictures.
It couldn't just be, oh, that conservative guy who's got a bone to pick with conservatism, has this opinion about this.
So Lenin said this.
Lenin did this on this date to this person with this picture.
Here's the receipts.
And that took a lot of research, but it paid enormous dividends because there's no point in this series where this is my opinion.
I mean, I was looking at this like a district attorney who really, really, really, really wanted this case decided in my favor.
And I felt an obligation to, too.
I mean, you know, 100 million people worldwide, because of people say because of Marxism, but really it's because of Leninism.
I mean, this was the thing that surprised me the most.
When I originally pitched the series for An Empire of Terror, it was going to be a seven-part series, and I was going to look at each one of the heads of the secret police, Zerzhinsky, Mazhinsky, you know, Yagoda, Yezhov, and talk about what each one of these guys did.
So I thought that Lenin would take up maybe episode one and maybe into episode two.
But the story started writing itself, Drew, and the thing that was most apparent early on was that all of these pathways do not lead to Stalin.
They lead to Lenin.
Lenin wrote the manual and Stalin followed the instructions.
And it's convenient for supporters of this philosophy to say that Lenin created this utopia and then this brute Georgian ape man came in and ruined it for everybody.
But Lenin had that, there's obviously a word inhuman.
I think the best word I can think of for Lenin is unhuman.
He was simply unhuman.
He was a pure intellect with no emotional connections to anything that made people human.
And so I eventually realized that the real enemy here, the real actual enemy, was theory, was intellectualism, was theory when it came to dealing with human lives as opposed to what people actually did.
The argument, I mean, that is so important to say this because we always hear this argument, they just didn't do it right.
But they did, didn't they?
They did exactly what they meant to do.
They didn't do it the right way and they didn't do it the wrong way.
They did it the only way.
When you are going to invert human motivations, things like have children be more loyal to a distant government than they are to their own parents, the idea that you're going to work as hard for no reward as you would for your own reward.
All of these are inversions of human nature.
And the only way you can get a society to do that is to force them to.
And the way you force them to is you frighten them to death by killing significant numbers of them and making it clear to everybody else that this can happen to you on a whim.
On a whim.
That's the key to a terrorist state.
It was true to some degree in the Nazi state, but universal in the Soviet state.
The critical ingredient in a state of terror is the knowledge that even if you play by the rules, you can still disappear.
There's no safety.
It's not like, okay, I'm going to do what they tell me to do, and as long as they do those things, I'll be okay.
The randomness of it, just the sheer randomness of it, kept you in a perpetual state of terror.
One of the stories, hundreds of versions of this story, but during the Great Terror in 38 and so, people in these high-rise apartment flats in Moscow would go to bed probably around 10 or 11, but they wouldn't go to sleep because the, well, so many different names, you know, the Cheka, the KGB, the, you know, OPU, all this stuff.
They like to make their arrests at 2 or 3 in the morning when human biorhythms are at their absolute bottom and it has the greatest effect and most startling.
So citizens of all of the city of Moscow would lie awake at night until about two in the morning when they could hear these trucks, these black Marias, these armored prisoner wagons, would pull up outside their building.
And then came the excruciating part.
They would hear men downstairs and hear boots, and then they'd hear the doors to the elevator close, and then they'd hear the elevator start coming up and coming up.
And then their blood ran cold.
And they could only relax when that elevator had passed their floor.
So somewhere around 3 o'clock in the morning or so, they might be able to get to sleep, knowing that they were safe for the night.
In the morning, they'd wake up and find a family they'd known for 15, 20 years, simply gone.
And so that's it.
Is the elevator going to stop on my floor tonight?
If it does, that's very bad.
Is the knock going to come on my door?
They're asking themselves, what did I do?
You didn't have to do anything.
You're an enemy of the state because we've decided it.
You have relatives in the West.
You have a degree in language.
You made a phone call to somebody in Italy in 1921.
And when things really got to the great terror, Stalin was murdering people by quota.
He would basically say to the city of Ekaterinburg, for example, I suspect that there are 250,000 anti-Soviet agents in that city, and I want them executed.
So the people in Ekaterinburg would say, they want to stay alive, right?
So they say, well, Comrade Stalin, we didn't find just 250,000.
We found 485,000.
We killed all of them.
And so this thing starts to develop this own momentum where the people doing the executing thought that they could save their own skins by being overly zealous in their mission.
And the only justice in all of this was that the people who did the killing were all murdered themselves.
Just every one of them.
And that's a small consolation for 20 million innocent lives snuffed out.
You know, one of the things you point out is that Winston Churchill, as he so often did, saw from the beginning that this was a horrible, horrible thing.
Why did he decide that it was better to ally with them against Hitler than the other way around or to take them both on?
Well, because it was German bombers over London and not Soviet bombers over London.
So many leftists will defend the communist system frequently by saying, well, they stopped the Nazis.
At least they were not only not Nazis, they fought tooth and nail against the Nazis.
But for the first year of the war, Hitler and Stalin had a non-aggression pact, which is what allowed Hitler to go into Poland.
We often talk about Hitler invading Poland.
He did invade Poland.
He took half of Poland, and Russia took the other half.
That was the deal.
They just simply annexed it.
And to say that Nazism is the opposite of communism, so if you're not a communist, you're a Nazi, is completely insane.
I think it was Jonah Goldberg who said the difference between Nazism and socialism is like the difference between Koch and Pepsi.
That they're both totalitarian regimes that are fighting for absolute control.
They're collectivist states.
One of them is based on racial differences.
The other one's based on economic differences.
But both of them are determined to exterminate the enemy and enforce the will of this single leader.
And this single leader model is Lenin.
Lenin came to absolute power as a dictator in 1917, Hitler in 1933, so do the math in terms of who was copying whose methods.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, Patton famously wanted to, General Patton famously wanted to keep marching after defeated the Nazis into Russia.
Should we have let him do that?
No.
When the war in Europe ended, the war in Japan was still going on.
When the war in Europe ended, the Iron Curtain was the dividing line between where the Soviet Red Army and the Western Allies had met.
That was basically it.
And after being invaded and taking enormous casualties, the Soviet Union had produced tens of thousands of tanks, hundreds of, millions of men under arms, tens of thousands of artillery pieces.
We had nothing like those numbers.
And Stalin was utterly convinced that when Germany was defeated and that nuisance in the Pacific was over with, then he would simply roll his army all the way to the Atlantic.
He would have absolute control over Europe, and there's nothing we could do about it.
Except for the fact that a bunch of scientists working out in the desert in New Mexico had come up with a solution that nullified Stalin's overwhelming, overwhelming advantage in conventional weapons.
Now all of a sudden, yeah, you can do that, you know, Joe.
You can roll your armies over Europe, but you and the Kremlin are going to end up radioactive dust in the stratosphere, so you might want to think twice about that.
And that's what changed the equation.
That's what led to the Cold War.
Tremendous.
Really, you can't overstate how strong the Red Army was in 1945 versus the Allies.
It was just overwhelming.
But we had the atomic bomb and we had fleets of bombers to deliver them anywhere in the world.
We had complete air superiority by that point.
We had a globe-spanning navy.
And so, Stalin, to his everlasting frustration, had to stop at the Iron Curtain, and that's where we fought the Cold War for 80 years.
But I had done a series on the Cold War previously.
I wanted to get to what drove the Soviet Union and what life under that was like.
My main objective, Drew, because as you've said, you can't walk around a college campus wearing a swastika on your t-shirt, but you can wearing a hammer and sickle.
Specific Stories of Auschwitz00:02:58
The hammer and sickle killed, this is not like a scoreboard or a contest or anything, but generally speaking, it's four to five times at least as many people.
So why is it?
Well, first, there's no pictures, but secondly, it's all theoretical.
And I was determined from the beginning to take this from the theoretical to the practical.
I had the receipts.
I wanted to show people's faces.
I wanted to tell specific stories of what happened to specific people so they could realize the brutality of this regime.
Just as one example, you know, everybody's heard of Auschwitz.
Every educated person knows what Auschwitz is.
And most educated people know what Treblinka is.
Probably 1.4 million people killed at Auschwitz, 850,000, 900,000 at Treblinka.
But between those two was Kolyma, which was a gulag in the far part of the Soviet Union, which killed about 800,000 people.
No one's ever heard the name before.
And they weren't gas.
They were worked to death.
That was the economic model.
We'll get three months of work out of them.
We'll send out musicians and professors and mathematicians and so on to work in gold mines at 40 degrees below zero until they are no longer capable of functioning.
And it's cheaper to replace the part than it is to repair it.
So we'll work them to death, bury them in the tundra, and get a new shipment of slaves to work to death.
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I want to veer off topic for just a minute.
Little Discussion On Revolution00:13:42
We're obviously we're talking to Bill Whittle, who's new what we saw, the Empire of Terror, is on Daily Wire Plus.
And I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I mean, this is what Bill does, and he does it really as well as anybody out there, if not better.
And again, if you weren't telling the truth, you'd be on network TV instead of having to talk to me, which I know is a sorrow and pain for you.
But, you know, I want to veer off topic for just a minute because you brought up the nuclear bomb, the atom bomb.
And you did one of the best videos I've ever seen was your 17-minute video on the atom bomb.
And it has been, as far as I can tell, scrubbed from the internet.
I cannot find that thing anywhere on the internet.
And now there are people on the right who are suddenly throwing their aprons over.
And I need to have a discussion with those people.
You do need.
But is there a reason you don't repost that thing?
I have reposted it.
I mean, it's up on Bill Whittle channel, but I've been algorithmized pretty heavily over the course of the time since we were working together.
The thing about the atomic bomb video, which is a 17-minute version of Empire of Terror, which is eight one-hour episodes, I wanted to put together an argument that was irrefutable.
When I was done, I wanted there to be not a grain of grass, a leaf of graphs standing in the battle space.
I wanted it flattened.
I wanted to anticipate what all of the counter-arguments would be and destroy those as well.
And I feel like I succeeded in both of those cases.
In fact, you were talking in your introduction about those early days at PJTV.
I had done a couple of these things called afterburners, and you came in with a video called Shut Up, which did the amazing number of like 300,000 views, which we were just like gobsmacked by.
And I said, I'll be damned if I'll let that Andrew Clavin get 300,000 views while I'm sitting here getting 60.
So we did the, it's called The True Story of the Atomic Bombs.
And all of the arguments made by the proponents of this, that Japan was trying to surrender.
Let's just, just since you brought it up, this idea that Japan's been trying to surrender for two years and is on its heels.
Well, you know, if it wanted to surrender, what it could have done is it could have surrendered.
Surrendered.
It could have surrendered.
Because when they finally did surrender, it was a radio broadcast from the emperor.
And when that broadcast came, the war ended, period.
So they could have done that at any point, at any point.
Well, they were trying to surrender.
Well, they have radio transmitters in Japan.
They could have surrendered, but they didn't.
They say we should have tested an atomic bomb out in the ocean or something.
Then they would have surrendered.
Well, we know that wouldn't have worked because we dropped an atomic bomb on one of their cities and they didn't surrender.
And three days after that, we dropped a second atomic bomb on one of their cities and they still didn't surrender.
And we were getting ready to drop the third.
Ultimately, the atomic bombs, what it really came down to, Drew, was the atomic bombs were a fig leaf that allowed the emperor to surrender and save face.
There is no resistance against this new weapon.
You know, we would have beaten them if it hadn't been for this miracle weapon that they've developed.
That's essentially what the surrender announcement of Hirohito said.
So the atomic bombs gave Hiro Hito an excuse to bring an end to the war that he knew was lost, but that he simply could not justify given their code of ethics.
Yeah, you know, it is an amazing, amazing thing.
And I think you really do need to talk to some of these folks because they get this half information.
Let's talk a little bit about what happened after the war in the Soviet Union.
I mean, I remember, you know, I remember having to hide under a desk from nuclear attack as if that was going to help.
We had lead desks, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But what happened, this system continued to oppress people.
It was not as bad under Stalin after Stalin, but it did continue to oppress people, did it not?
Well, it did.
But the thing that needs to be understood about the Soviet system is the illegitimacy, not just of the Soviet state, but the illegitimacy of the entire idea.
This idea could, this kind of government can only be enforced at the barrel of a gun.
There is no way to have the Soviet Union and a communist state without coercion.
This applies to China, it applies to Cuba, it applies to every place that this horrific philosophy has been implemented.
It is imposed upon a population by force by people who claim to be acting in the interests of the common people, but who never, ever, ever, ever had any respect or love for the common people and certainly did not desire to return to them.
As a simple example, Fidel Castro, the man of the people who just wore green coveralls and completely disdained all trippery and lived, apparently a lot of people believed he lived in a fishing hut.
That was his actual abode.
When he died, his personal bank account had $800 million in it, while his people are boiling stones to make soup.
So this is the thing about this system.
Lenin, and this is an interesting little discussion we might want to get on.
Lenin had to invert Marxism in order to have his Marxist revolution.
He had to completely rewrite Marx, and he had seven days to do it.
And he did.
He managed to convince people that this patron saint of Marxism, Lenin, was faced with a quandary which he at first couldn't solve.
He was in Switzerland when World War I was declared.
Germany was fighting a two-front war with the French and the British on the west, the Belgians, and Russia on the east.
And it was in Germany's interest to get that Eastern Front shut down so they could move those troops to the west and finally win this awful trench war.
So they had known for years that Lenin was a provocateur and an agitator.
And the Imperial High Command of Germany, which was at war with Russia, let's not forget, decided, in the expression of one of their top commanders, they were going to roll the iron dice and see what happened.
And so they agreed that they would provide transportation and a special train to get Lenin from Zurich, where he's essentially completely encircled by Germany, through enemy territory, because Russia's at war with Germany, take him all the way up to the top, and have Lenin appear in St. Petersburg in order to lead a communist revolution that would pull Russia out of the war.
And that's exactly what happened.
And it was financed by Imperial Germany.
And if Lenin had not had such, I think probably the truest thing about Lenin is that somebody, a historian, wrote he was very, very fortunate with his enemies.
If he hadn't had such incompetent, naive, vain opponents, we wouldn't know his name.
It would have been squashed early and easily.
But he got lucky in that regard and walked into a world of turmoil and basically fiatted his way into power.
Although there's not a lot of levity in this series, needless to say.
It's basically about torture and murder.
But if I recall, it was episode three called The Ramshackle Revolution.
When you learn the historical facts of the actual day of the Russian Revolution, it's a keystone cops kind of thing.
Just as a quick example, the revolution is going to begin, and the signal is going to be we're going to hoist a red lantern up to the top of a flagpole on the Peter and Paul fortress, and that will be the signal for us to go.
So they're all getting ready for it, and they're looking around, and it's getting dark, and about time for the thing, and they realize nobody brought a red lantern.
They didn't have a red lantern.
So the commander of the garrison climbs over the walls, falls down into the mud, completely mud-splattered, walks the streets of St. Petersburg, can't find a red lantern, but he does find a purple one, brings that back to the Peter and Paul fortress.
And fortunately, he was not able to attach the purple lantern because otherwise we'd be talking about the purple army in Europe and the great, purple October.
And it just goes on and on and on, Drew, on and on and on and on and on.
It was a miracle that he survived.
And a great deal of the blame lies with the Western nations, specifically Great Britain, who could have put money into keeping him.
Great Britain caught him at the border.
As he's getting ready to make his move, British intelligence knew he was there, cabled the Kerensky government, the provisional government after the Tsar had advocated, and said, we can stop this guy and hold him if you want.
We can stop and arrest him.
Kerensky said, no, this is not the Tsar's regime.
We're a democratic regime.
We welcome all forms of opposition.
So the British let him in, and Lenin went to work with German money to undermine that government and produce 80 years of murder.
Where is the necessary link?
I mean, one of the reasons I think that fascism, Nazism is immediately repellent is because the racism and the hatred, that iron jackboot and all this stuff.
And communism always puts itself forward as now we're going to make everything fair.
Everything's going to be nice.
There's not going to be any of these oppressive rich people.
Where is the necessary link between that philosophy and the terror?
At the end of the sixth episode, I was writing the episode and I was a little concerned that I didn't have enough first-person direct evidence.
And about four days before I had to turn that script in, I found something online at the Library of Congress.
It really was like looking for something at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I mean, really, I was just searching, searching, searching.
Found a book that was printed in 1925 about the Red Terror in 1923 by a Russian who had been there and seen everything.
And this was a gold mine to me because this guy in his book had names and photographs of the dead that occurred during this terror.
And so I decided to make the last 20 minutes of that one single block quote.
And just as a rhetorical device, since I was going to be reading from the book for 20 minutes, at the end of that episode, I just take all the lights down to red and I just start reading about what happened during the Red Terror.
So to give you an idea about the kindness of the Soviet Revolution, one of the things that the communists did with bourgeois, which could be an archduke, but could also be the daughter of a guy who's a banker maybe or a pharmacist or something like that.
They made things called bourgeois gloves, which they accomplished by taking a person, tying them up, placing their hands in a vat of boiling water for about 10 minutes.
And then after that, they pull their hands out and peel their hands off with hooks, and they would sit there and look just like gloves.
Now, that's just one example.
And would repeatedly take prisoners in temperatures that often hit 60 degrees below zero, stand them naked in the street, and then just start hosing them down with water until they became ice statues.
There were entire avenues where the only sound you could hear was the sound of bodies hanging from the lampposts swinging back and forth.
And in that one little segment, I managed to produce enough receipts to make it clear that this was a crime committed against the Russian people.
that this belief that this would lead to a utopia persisted for many, many years.
But they were never popular.
They never won an election.
The first thing they did when they came to power was cancel free and fair elections.
And they did it at the point of a gun.
And so if you can, the same thing happened in Germany.
And this is why I did the series because I'm concerned about the same thing happening here.
I would be a lot more worried about totalitarian takeover of this country already if it weren't for that pesky Second Amendment.
It's a whole nother story to send a squad of guys out to go murder some people when those people can murder you back.
But the first thing that happened in both the Nazi and the communist states and persisted through 80 years of the communist state was that anybody with the courage to speak up was immediately isolated and removed.
And so not only did you have the example of if I speak up, then I'm probably going to get the acts too, you also have the emperor's new clothes effect of where there is no criticism of the regime that you can see, and you believe that you're the only single person who's suffering under this.
And husbands and wives wouldn't even talk about this in the privacy of their own bedroom because they knew if it leaked, that would be it.
And one of the most, you know, the thing about this, Drew, is you've got this, the entire Soviet Union was roughly 80 years, but I concentrated really on Lenin, just the first 10 years of how the state was structured.
And sometimes you just run into these incredibly poignant little things that bring it home.
Virtually every family in Russia at the time had a family photograph that was taken at some point or another.
And as the terror continued, these family photographs would start to change.
People would take a pencil eraser and they'd rub out the face of somebody who'd been denounced as an agent of anti-Soviet power.
Their own families did this to protect themselves if these murderers ever came back.
They just, next thing you know, this family picture has got six people where their faces have been physically erased from the photograph because they don't want to be associated with somebody who was sent to the Gulag or more likely sent to the Lubianca to be shot in the back of the head.
You know, I was going to wait for the musical comedy version of this to come out, but I think I should recommend that people watch it directly.