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March 1, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
05:56
Dinesh on the Left's End Game: Social Control and Tyranny
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Dinesh D'Souza himself.
Dinesh, congratulations on a great video.
This is a very new thing, I think.
I mean, I'm a student of the left my whole life.
I was not fully prepared to have a Marxism based on sexuality, sexual identity, sexual preference, and race.
Marxism was always based on class.
When did the change take place and why?
Well, this is a fascinating story.
As you say, Marx cared only about the economic or class division between, you may call it the rich and the poor, or more precisely, between the working class and the capitalist class.
And Marx thought that worldwide that was the only distinction that mattered.
But interestingly, Marx had made all these predictions, including the prediction that there would be a working-class revolt in the developed countries.
In Germany, in France, in England, and so on.
And when that didn't happen, the Marxists began to scratch their heads to figure out why.
Now, they could have just concluded, you know, Marx was wrong.
Let's throw out all this Marxism stuff and start again.
But they decided, no.
They said, basically, here's the problem.
And the Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci was kind of the pioneer of this thinking.
He said, look, the problem is that the working class goes to church.
The problem is that the working class goes to school.
So they absorb, Gramsci argued, bourgeois culture, the culture that is the culture of the family, of faith, of religion, of patriotism.
So Gramsci said we have to fight them there.
We need to take over the universities.
We need to take over the institutions of culture.
We need to promote Marxist culture, and that will dissolve the sympathies of the working class for the bourgeois class.
So this is how this all got started.
Gramsci laid out the doctrine in the 1920s, and then the left in America adopted it wholesale in the 1960s.
So we've now seen a 50-year project of leftist infiltration of the institutions of culture, one that has given them, I would say, a virtual monopoly, certainly over the institutions of high culture.
So in a nutshell, if a nutshell is possible here, or if any answer is really possible, what do you think the end of the left is?
Well, I think that their end is It's social control.
It is tyranny.
It is the joys of tyranny.
I mean, if we think of what dictators have aspired to since ancient times, it's the idea of having your foot or your thumb on everybody else's neck.
Because then not only can you lift their pocketbook and keep the proceeds for yourself, But you can direct their lives in all kinds of ways.
So the Napoleonic ambition.
Now, I think the difference is that in the ancient world, tyranny was somewhat limited because the reach of these kings was limited.
They relied on the nobles to pay them all kinds of fees and so on to raise an army.
But today, with modern technology, if you can create an alliance between government and the captains of industry, you can establish a regime of control that old Napoleon would never dream of.
So, you said, you coined a phrase, maybe it's not coined for you, but it was coined for me, the joys of tyranny.
And that's very, I think that that's very insightful.
There is a gap between them and us that is unbridgeable.
You and I and every conservative I know has no joy in controlling others.
So where does this come from?
I mean, I'm asking huge questions only because I so respect your mind.
I don't even know if answers are fully available.
Maybe it's built into certain people's natures.
Where do you think it comes from?
I have zero desire.
I have a lot of bad desires.
I have a sinful nature like others.
But I have to admit, one of those sins is not a desire to control anybody.
Well, I slightly disagree, and I don't disagree about you, but I mean, I disagree that there are two kinds of people in the world, the potential tyrants and the lovers of freedom.
Let me put it a slightly different way.
If somebody were to come to me and say, hey, Dinesh, you agree that good books improve people and bad books harm people, don't you?
I would say, yes, I do agree.
And then if they were to say, let's imagine a society where you, Dinesh, have complete control over every book that people read.
You get to decide what they read, and all the bad books, in your opinion, will be destroyed forever and burned.
Would that be an attractive proposition for you?
I would have to confess immensely so.
In other words, I would think that we could rid society of all kinds of evils if I was completely in charge and I established the curriculum for the whole world.
Now, I realize this is all just a thought experiment here, but I guess what I'm trying to say, I think the desire, the tyrannical impulse is there in human nature.
Fascinating.
This is truly an important discussion.
See his video.
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