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March 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:53
124 Why we forgive socialism (Part 1)

Two theories as to why socialism is considered less vile than fascism

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 8.35am on Friday, March the 3rd, 2006.
I'm back in the car, so it's farewell to vague audio quality.
I'm sorry that there was a grinding noise or a popping noise as I listened to the podcast that I did yesterday afternoon, last night.
And this had everything in the world it would seem to do with the fact that the cord was rubbing against the microphone as I paced the room in a way that I didn't notice, so sorry about that.
I will try to do my best to avoid that kind of stuff in the future.
But I just didn't have time to re-record.
We must plunge on!
So this morning I got an interesting email and it's something that has baffled me for years and I came up with an answer to it years ago but I've never written or talked about it for reasons which will become clear as we go forward in this morning's discussion.
It is, why is communism and socialism given such an easy out or let off so easily in the academic curriculum and also in the arts.
And it's a very interesting question.
As you know, relative to fascism and Nazism, communism and socialism get very Easily let off the hook as far as moral responsibility for the deaths of millions of people, although communism and socialism outstrip Nazism and fascism many times over in terms of the deaths that were caused.
And that's a very interesting phenomenon, and somebody wrote and asked me about it, and I thought that would be a good topic for this morning's podcast.
Because it is!
Why would it be the case that one form of totalitarianism is wildly reviled and another one is let off the hook with barely a mention?
Or if there is a mention, they say, oh, well, it was totalitarianism, it wasn't true communism, and so on.
And communism has been tried over the world more than fascism.
And that's an important thing to consider.
So if you said something like, well, Nazism, which was a form of National Socialism, you can really only look to Mussolini for really good fascistic impulses.
The nationalization of key industries while leaving aspects of the market in private hands.
You have the intense national.
Hitler was more racial.
Mussolini was more national.
And so you'd really have to look for Mussolini for the best examples of quote best examples of fascistic tendencies or fascistic thinking.
Hitler was very much so.
You read Hitler's platforms and they're right in line with most of the welfare schemes that we have today.
Old age pensions, child support, aid for working mothers, the welfare state.
Everything that you can imagine that would be part of a popular socialist platform was part of the Nazi party, his platform as well.
So, Nazism, which as I'm sure you know, breaks out to National Socialism, was definitely on the left.
And there used to be an old saying in Germany about Nazis versus Communists.
These Nazis and Communists throughout the 20s were continually involved in street fights and brawls and so on.
And most people were able to move very easily back and forth between the two camps.
Their common enemy, as Hitler noted a number of times, was what he called classical liberalism, which, as Murray Ruffbard has said, is classical only because it lost.
Otherwise, it would just be called freedom.
So, the free market and democratic tendencies didn't mind so much.
The free market absolutely was Hitler's major enemy, as, of course, it was the Communists' major enemy.
So they would band together, these sort of two coalitions in Germany in the 1920s, would band together to create disruptions and attack the free market institutions that hated bourgeoisie.
Hitler did not like democracy, but he recognized after the failed Putsch in 1923, he tried to take over the government in 1923, it's called the Beer Hall Putsch, And he failed, and he was thrown in jail.
And he wrote, while he was in jail, he dictated or wrote parts of Mein Kampf and was released to a hero's welcome.
And he was incredibly staunch during his trial.
Again, Hitler, I mean.
I mean, I don't think I even need to say what my feelings towards Hitler are, but one of the things that you do recognize when you read transcripts of his trial, he comes across as staunch, you know, as certain, as he's got all the power of mad certainty, and of course you have flimsy, weak-kneed, vacillating, back-and-forth, Petty bourgeoisie judges who are like, well, we disagree with your actions, but we understand your motives.
That sort of thing.
Because, I mean, the whole of Germany had been wrecked by this, the Treaty of Versailles, plus the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.
I completely destroyed the German middle class and so there was some sympathy with the idea that in Germany, things had gotten really bad in Germany, this was the idea, since we got rid of the rule of the monarchy and we put in as a form of democratic socialism of a weak-kneed kind.
And so there was this feeling that, you know, Germans are a little bit a fan of rigid iron discipline and so on.
And there was this feeling in Germany that things had really gotten bad, and that the war was an example of that.
That the government blundered us into the war, and then the government blundered us to lose the war, which has, you know, wrecked our economy.
There were so many bad things going on, and I'm not saying that the Treaty of Versailles directly caused the hyperinflation.
It wasn't the case at all.
It was the excuse that the government used to print all its money and to overprint its money to pay these debts to undermine the value of the German mark while paying off these debts from the Treaty of Versailles, which were lunatic and would have taken until 1982 actually to pay off if they'd continued to do it.
But for the average uneducated person, and this is one of the other bazillion-jillion reasons why you don't want to have the government in charge of these things, Government disasters that come out of abstruse and abstract monetary policy that take two years or so to manifest themselves can always be blamed on external sources, unjustly.
And so that's another reason you don't want to give the government control of the money supply and the economy, is that they'll wreck people's economy, they'll wreck people's livelihoods, they'll wreck people's incomes, and then they'll be able to point at people and say, Ha!
You see?
And so, they pointed at the Allies, of course, they pointed at the Treaty of Versailles, and sadly, they pointed at the Jews.
So, that brings us to the topic, tying together the topic that I'd like to talk about this morning, which is why is Communism, which killed, in Russia alone, estimated 80 million people during its 70-year reign?
And nobody will ever know.
Nobody will ever know.
As Morgan Freedman, not Milton Freedman, but Morgan Freedman, said in the movie Seven, so many bodies roll away unavenged.
And it is very true that in Russia, as Solzhenitsyn has written bitterly and brilliantly and heartbreakingly in the Gulag Apokolago, That the death toll will never be known.
There are no witnesses, or few witnesses, left.
There is no documentation.
These people who died in the snows, who died in the waste, the millions upon millions upon millions of Ivan Danisoviches, just vanished as if they never were.
And as he says in the Gulag Apokolago, secrecy is our cancer.
And it is very true, and he is a brilliant analyst who did an enormous amount of work, pre-internet of course, trying to dissect what occurred during the Soviet death camps, the gulag camps, the concentration camps.
And it is unbelievably difficult reading at times, but it is incredibly instructive to recognize the scope of evil that has escaped Western consciousness.
That we view Russia as a blustery, sort of Nikita Khrushchev, shoe-thumping, kind of lunatic country where people lined up for hours to get bread and so on.
And, you know, which was a dangerous nuclear power in the Cold War and so on.
But what we don't see is the savage, murderous regime that exploded upon the land.
And it didn't happen under Stalin.
It happened under Lenin.
The death camps were set up under Lenin, the right of the state to imprison people, to give a tenor or a ten-year prison term on a whim, with no recourse and no court.
But still, of course, with a pretense of a court.
There always is the pretense of virtue, which is why, not to hammer the point too subtly, but the argument for morality will always work.
There always has to be a pretense of virtue, as Ayn Rand points out in Atlas Shrugged with Hank Reardon and this trial that he's supposed to go to defend his property, which has been arbitrarily seized.
He says, I'm not going to help you participate in this sham by pretending this is any kind of court of law.
And so one of the things that really has escaped people's consciousness is this murderous barbarity, savagery...
It was a living hell.
Generations of people were flushed into the sewer of state coercion and destroyed, and their atoms spread across the sky, never to be seen again.
The relatives didn't even know what happened.
They were seized in the middle of the night.
And nobody ever knew what was going to happen.
And, of course, they would line up for hours to try and get some word from the NKVD, the Russian secret police.
They'd never get anything.
They would send food baskets, which I'm sure were cheerfully devoured by the scum who were in the NKVD.
And it was just a living hell on earth, and it went on for many, many years.
And Ayn Rand did what she could to try and get this blind spot, just to put it as charitably as possible, more open into the Western consciousness.
And what happened in China was even more brutal in some ways, and that is something that we have even less knowledge of.
There's no gulag apicalago for communist China, or for Cambodia, or for Korea, or Vietnam, or any of the other slaughterhouses that communism turns
entire cultures into entire civilizations get turned into sadistic and psychotic murderers it is an unbelievable virus of evil this idea that communism socialism it's is working its way through our body politic and our lives and and souls as well today so it is something that we need to be pretty clear about that's the war between say germany and russia which started nineteen forty one
Operation Barbarossa, if memory serves me right, that this war was a war between two socialistic ideologies.
The Russian one, which was based on class to some degree, and then the German one, which was based on race to some degree.
But it's a war of two collectivisms.
The way in which they whip up hatred differs, but the content is the same, and of course they absolutely are unbelievably hypocritical in their execution.
So to say, well, the difference was one was based on race and one was based on class is interesting to note from an ideological standpoint.
In other words, how did they whip up hatred against the enemies that they wanted to get the people all foaming at the mouth to go and kill?
They had slightly different enemies at times.
But the methodology and the structure and the power structures were all identical.
So it really was a Tweedledum and Tweedledee kind of situation.
And sort of watching two sumo wrestlers wrestle when you have no idea who's who.
And they're all merging into each other.
This was the case, except that over a hundred million people died, were murdered, were slaughtered, and were killed in not just, you know, lined up and shot, which is evil enough, but dragged off to labor camps and forced to serve those who were killing them.
And forced to pull the gold teeth from those who had died.
And forced to strip the boots and fight over the boots from those who had died.
And forced to watch their friends become ill and give up and die.
And you could do a thousand hours of podcasts and deal only with the miseries of one camp for one There's no language enough from now to the end of time to encompass the suffering that occurred.
It would be hard to encompass the suffering even of one individual.
But it's something that's very hard for us to imagine.
And on a scale of evil, it is something that these two totalitarian systems, sort of two sides of the same coin, or the same system with different labels, They've been widely separated, right?
So there's been an enormous amount of intellectual effort put into putting fascism on the right and communism on the left and socialism in the middle, and socialism is something that is considered to be something which has valid value.
You see, and somebody quoted this in the letter that Murray Rothbard was talking about, you see all these kids in university with their Che Guevara t-shirts and so on, and where the hell are all the Herman Goering t-shirts?
That's sort of very important.
Now there are a number of reasons for me, why there is this blind spot.
And given the size of the blind spot, you can imagine that the reasons are somewhat controversial, so I'm going to take as delicate an approach to these as I can.
And the first one is not that controversial, it's simply obvious, which is that we didn't fight Russia, but Russia was an ally in World War II.
Although it could be said that until the non-aggression pact was signed between Russia and Germany, In 1938 or 1939, I think it was, Hitler had no chance to invade Poland and Czechoslovakia and France and so on because Germany can't fight a two-front war.
It's right in the middle of Europe and there's one thing that's always going to tear it apart and it's one thing that it felt I mean, it was absolutely desperate to get out of the two-front situation in World War I, so desperate that it funded and sent Lenin back through Finland to start the revolution, so that Lenin would take Russia out of the war.
And that's how desperate it was to get Russia out of the war in the First World War.
It's sort of important to understand just how conscious Germany is of the threat from Russia.
I mean, Germany and Russia have had sort of long and occasionally intertwined histories.
When you read Russian writers like Tegenev and Dostoevsky, You will see German characters popping up quite a bit.
There was quite a German merchant class in Russia.
Historically, they've had some fairly close relationships.
I have no idea why, but it does seem to be the case.
And they have been at each other's throats a number of times, and in Germany they are very aware of the Slavic threat, of the threat from the East, of the shadow from the East.
And so they are pretty conscious of what's going on in Russia and what threat might manifest itself from Russia, in the same way that America, of course, was focused on the Russian threat during the Cold War, however imaginary that might have been.
So, the fact that Russia was an ally was something that the power elite in the West needed to get people to stomach, to swallow, to understand.
I mean, if you stood in front of millions of Westerners who had lost millions of family members to a brutal war and it had their lives destroyed and their children Bomb to ashes, and so on.
After 40 million people had died, if you had stood in front of these people and said, well, it's kind of six in one, half a dozen of the other people.
We've got some wins here.
We got some losses.
So let's look at the wins.
Well, we kind of liberated France.
We got them out of Belgium.
Italy has sort of fallen, and Japan has fallen, although that wasn't anything to do with why we got into the war.
And we've kind of liberated Germany.
So, you know, we got a couple.
We lost a couple.
More than a couple.
We lost Czechoslovakia, of course, which was one of the main reasons we went to war to begin with.
Sadly, Poland, which is why England declared war originally in September of 1939 to protect Poland.
Sadly, we lost Poland to dictatorship.
We lost The Ukraine we lost.
Basically most, if not all, of Eastern Europe we lost.
Sorry to all of the tens of millions of people who got swallowed up into the maw of Soviet brutality and death camps.
But we did get the cheese eaters back.
So we're happy to have the French back on our side.
Sure, they collaborated a little.
Sure, they sent, you know, trainloads of Jews to Hitler.
But, you know, for the most part, we're happy to have them back.
And so let's just say that we lost a couple.
We gained one or two.
More people are enslaved now because we collaborated with the Soviet Union.
And this is all I mean, darkly funny.
This is all darkly funny.
That you would get angry with people if you were in the West, and you would have trials of people, and you would shave their heads, and you would brutalize them for collaborating with totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany.
And at the same time, if you are FDR and Churchill, you can buddy-buddy up with Stalin.
And if that's not collaboration and the selling of Eastern Europe into slavery, I don't know what is.
And of course, people in Eastern Europe remember all of this.
They had no involvement, particularly in World War I. World War I can be said to causally and directly have created World War II.
And World War II was... They were promised, and they fought, and then they were abandoned and sold to slavery for another two generations.
And they remember this stuff, and this stuff doesn't fade away from people's minds.
You don't sort of wake up and say, oh yeah, the destruction of two generations of my family, and the butchering of many of my family members.
Do you know that completely slipped my mind?
So this is the kind of long-term evil that is sown, the long-term resentments and anger that are sown, which of course aren't improved particularly by creating genocide by bombing Kosovo.
Anyway, we don't have to get into that.
That's a topic for another time.
So, the fact that the Allies had sided with Russia, they had to sell Russia as a friendly country.
Uncle Joe Stalin, he was called.
They had to sell Russia as a misguided but friendly country.
Now, in doing this, they had an enormous amount of help from the intellectuals in the 20th century, in the late 1920s and early 1930s to the mid-1930s.
There was a pilgrimage of Western intellectuals who went trooping over to Russia, proclaiming it as a paradise on Earth, as the best thing ever, as the land of milk and honey, as one guy said, I have seen the future and it works. - Yes.
And even George Bernard Shaw, old GBS, was taken in by this, which was a real shame.
I mean, he had a pretty good mind, a pretty cynical mind.
If you get a chance to read or see Arms and the Man, the chocolate cream soldier, it's wonderful in its deflation or puncturing of military vanity.
So he was a very smart man.
He was a member of the Fabian Socialists, though, which was part of the progressive movement in the West, particularly in America.
In the pre-war, pre-First World War period, and he really got sucked into that.
So he got the hell of the military, but he was completely keen that the government could do all of these wonderful things to solve social problems.
So he was one of the people who was very responsible for founding and publicizing the Fabian Society in the United States, which Worked hard to get state control of the money supply and extend government control of education and to get the income tax and the welfare state going.
So this problem of the lefties is pretty significant.
And just by the by, the record of the intellectuals in the West prior to the First World War and during the First World War is absolutely repulsive and atrocious.
It's perhaps the worst Night of the intellectual dark evil that has occurred in the West.
I mean, because they had some memory of freer times.
Now, the intellectuals are all corrupt and serving state power, but, you know, they've never known any freedom, so they'd have to work really hard to see otherwise.
Doesn't mean that they're not responsible, but it means that there's an explanation of it.
But, in the First World War, prior to the First World War and during the First World War, the amount of slavish propaganda And German-hating propaganda that the intellectuals produced, pro-war propaganda, was just unbelievable.
And this is, of course, exactly what you would expect from people who've been raised in government schools, that they have no capacity for moral understanding or seeing the truth clearly, and they're just going to be slaves to power, because that's how they're trained from very early on.
So, again, they're completely morally responsible, but we do want to lower the incentives for these sorts of things, I think.
So that's sort of one reason that Russia is our ally, Russia is socialist, let's move Russia and Germany as far apart as possible, otherwise the war was sort of pointless, right?
The war was to get rid of one socialist empire and to create another even larger one in Eastern Europe.
So I don't think that the Western leaders felt very comfortable talking to the people who had died and murdered people and gone through all of the military sadistic hell of war.
And who had stayed home and lost their children or sent their children away to protect them from bombing and said, well, you know, thanks for the effort, but it didn't really do anything.
In fact, it was a negative net loss.
Net loss to freedom.
We thought we were fighting for freedom.
We lost a lot more than we gained.
Sorry.
Huge mistake.
Shouldn't have bothered.
And so they really couldn't say that, so they had to portray socialism in a positive light.
And they had already been helped in this, because many public intellectuals had talked about Russia as the coming great thing, as the most wonderful system in the world, as something... And of course, you know, to their uneducated and rather stupid credit, they were sitting in the middle of the Great Depression in the 1930s, which I've talked about before, and they believed all the lies that
Stalin was presenting over in Russia, and Stalin would pay for these people to come over, he would pick a village, he'd fatten it up, he'd say to everybody, you know, there are snipers in the belfries, and if you don't laugh and smile, or if you say, help me from this hell, then you're going to get shot.
And so, I mean, Solzhenitsyn writes about this at one point, the view from the other side where these people are plucked out of slave labor camps and fattened up, and they let their hair grow, and they give them decent clothes, and then they troop the Western intellectuals through, and then they shave their heads off, throw them back in the gulag, and starve them to death.
So it's awful seeing it from the other side, and very few people bother to figure that sort of stuff out, but that's one of the reasons why.
Now, the other reason, and there are many reasons, but these are sort of the two main reasons, The other reason is that there is a very large amount of propaganda that was going on in Germany throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
And I've tried to do some research on this, but unfortunately it's either in Russian, or it's in German, or it's on sort of racist, white-mongering hate sites.
So I'm not going to say that the truth of any of this has any validity.
I'm not going to say any of it is true, but I'm going to certainly accurately talk about the perceptions, because there are very many direct quotes, and I've done some studying in this for my last novel.
So there definitely was a perception that communism in Russia was a Jewish phenomenon.
It was a Jewish phenomenon.
Now, again, I have no problems with the Jews.
Jews are wonderful.
I think one of the amazing things about Jewish culture is that they show us just how great human potential is by focusing on achievement to such a great degree.
We wouldn't want the heights of human achievement to be measured by the contributions to culture, science, and the arts from the Muslim communities.
So I am enormously a degree of respect for Jewish culture in this manner.
That having been said, they're a crazy cult just like Christianity and just like Islam, so sorry, but I don't care if I like Seinfeld.
As a comedian, the fact of the matter is that the thought processes that go on in Judaism are just as brutal and restrictive and destructive to children as any other thought processes in the world that are based on crazy collectivist cult-like ideologies, whether they're religious or not.
So, that having been said, you can call me anti-semitic if you want, but the truth of the matter is that I'm just anti-collectivist and anti-irrational, and if you feel upset about this, then I think, I mean certainly by all means get mad at me, but I would certainly suggest that if you felt more comfortable with me criticizing Christianity than criticizing Judaism, then you may have a slightly inconsistent premise, that's all.
You may feel more comfortable attacking one group than another, And, of course, people feel less comfortable attacking Judaism because there's a very strong element of Jewish culture that... it's small, and I'm not saying every Jew is responsible for it, but there's a small but strong element of Jewish culture that scans people for anti-Semitic references and attacks them and attempts to destroy their careers and so on.
So, I mean, there is... I don't think there's much risk for me, but... and even if there were, the truth is more important than my career.
So, what I'm going to say, though, is nothing against the Jews in particular, because the statistics of the number of Jews involved in the foundation of communism within Russia, there's lots of statistics on the web.
I don't know the validity or the source of them, and so I'm not going to talk about that.
There does seem to be a preponderance of Jews in the foundation of communism and socialism.
And that is consistent with some stuff that I do understand from sort of Jewish girlfriends and Jewish friends and so on about Jewish culture, that helping others and taking care of the weak and the unprotected is very strong in the Jewish culture, which is, hey, you know, that's great!
When you're not talking about using the power of the state, I'm all for it.
Charity is wonderful.
But as soon as you start pointing guns at people, I've got to tell you, my charitable impulses evaporate just a little bit.
So there's some consistency, and there's some evidence that there is the case, that it's not based on statistics, and Stalin had three Jewish wives, and Marx was the grandson of a rabbi, or a rabbinical scholar, and Lenin was Jewish, and Trotsky was Jewish, and the heads of the NKVD were Jewish, and 50% of the high-ranking communists were Jewish, and there were only 1.8% of the population.
I don't know about the truth of any of those statistics or not.
I certainly wouldn't put myself out there and say, they're true.
I don't know.
But if you look at the propaganda that was occurring in Germany throughout the 1930s, this fear of Jews was not just based on the caricatures, right?
It wasn't just based on the sort of evil, smelly, money-lending Jew evil caricature, but was in fact based on a perception.
Again, I'm not saying whether it's true or not, but in Germany, There was a strong perception that the Jews had taken over in Russia and were killing all of the Christians.
And that is what their perception was.
Again, I'm not going to say whether it's true or not.
It would take many lifetimes of study, and I'm guessing that even then it would never be possible to determine the truth or falsehood of these things.
However, this was the perception in Germany.
And again, as I mentioned before, Germany is quite sensitive to the threats that come out of Russia.
If you sort of put that sort of fact, that sort of understanding in the minds of the Germans, that they were fully aware of... I mean, lots of Germans lived in Russia and fled Russia, and lots of Germans understood Russia and traveled to Russia, and they were perfectly aware of what was going on in Russia within Germany, as they were in a lot of countries that were... sort of lost the war and, you know, so their stories don't get to get told, right?
I'm not saying that the Nazi story is valid in any way.
I'm just talking about their perceptions.
So they felt that the Jews had taken over in Russia, or were sort of masterminding the Russian thing, and that as a result what had happened, or what happened, was the slaughter of tens of millions of Christian kulaks and bourgeoisie and so on, and slaughter of the Christian intellectual classes, and there was a very strong perception that there was a Jewish genocide occurring in Russia against Christians.
I'm not saying... Last caveat.
I'm not saying it's true.
I'm just saying that this is what the Germans perceived.
They also... I mean, they had evidence that, at least they felt they had evidence, that there was... I mean, that the slaughters were going on, that the genocides were going on, and this is one of the reasons that they didn't like the Jews.
It's not just.
It's not fair, of course, because it wasn't like the Jews in Germany were masterminding communism in Russia, even if it were the case that it was something that could have happened.
But one of the things that is important to understand is that this is their perception.
They believed that this was occurring and that Russia was openly... Now, this is sort of something that you need to understand.
It's a bit of a secret history, but it's not secret in terms of the documentation.
It's just secret in terms of the popular narrative.
Russia was very open about its desire to expand.
Russia was very much around, we are not interested in countries.
We're interested in world domination.
The communist revolution was a world revolution that was supposed to ignite the entire planet and take the entire planet and make it communist.
And they had openly stated their desire for war eastward and westward and northward and southward and I think they even wanted to burrow into the earth to take on whoever was down there.
But the internationalism, of Russia, of the Russian communist dictatorship, was very clear.
And the Internationale is one of the anthems of the communist movements, that it is supposed to be, because it's based on class and not based on nation, and classes are the same everywhere in the world, there is an international flavor and an expansionist flavor to the communist dictatorships.
And so I'm not saying that this is true, but when Hitler began to talk about that the Jews are killing Christians, that there's a genocide, that they're going to come here and do it next, that we've got to fight, we've got to expand our living room, we've got to create a buffer between ourselves and Russia, we've got to do anything that we can to try and control this threat of genocide we've got to do anything that we can to try and control this threat of genocide that And because it's Jewish in nature, German culture won't survive, or the only parts of German culture that will survive are the Jewish elements and blah blah blah.
He absolutely did play upon a perception within the German population that Russia was murdering all these Christians and that there was a Jewish cap or Jewish top to the Russian communist system and so they viewed it as a genocide executed to some some of them not all of them of course but some of them viewed it as a genocide Perpetrated by Jews against Christians.
And this was something that was very scary to Germans.
And I'm sure that the threat was magnified.
But why did they not look to the West?
Well, one of the reasons they didn't look to the West to solve their problems, and one of the reasons why sort of capitalism and democracy was not where they looked for their solution, was they were also perfectly aware of all of the Western intellectuals from America and from Western Europe who were trooping over to Russia and saying, wow, this is the best thing ever.
So Germany really felt caught, because they felt that this combine harvester of sort of Christian-eating communism was coming to the West from the East, and at the same time, all of the Western intellectuals were trooping over to Russia saying, boy, this is the best thing ever.
Let's get this everywhere!
We should really have communism here!
And some of those intellectuals, of course, were Jewish, and so what they felt in Germany was that there was a pincer, that communism was going to go either into Germany directly or was going to get itself instituted in Europe, and then Germany would be surrounded by communist dictatorships on the East and the West, and of course, as I mentioned before, Germany is not that keen, as no country would be, on a two-front war.
So this is sort of the, again, not to say that any of this is moral or anything, this is sort of just the, I guess you could say, the praxeological approach to understanding the history of some of Germany and the thought process of some of the Germans during the middle of the 20th century.
They didn't just sort of wake up one day and say, that's it, we're going to war!
We're going to war everywhere.
We're going to kill everyone.
We're going to murder millions and we're going to focus on the Jews and capture a whole bunch of other people in the net.
They didn't just sort of wake up one day as genocidal maniacs.
It took time.
I mean it took time and it took a lot of propaganda and it took a lot of totalitarian destruction and genocide from the Russian side that they associated with a religious to religious or cultural to cultural warfare.
And it also took a lot of intellectual, slavish praise of Russia coming from the West to really isolate Germany, to make them feel that Western Europe, which is in the grip of the worst depression in the history of capitalism, though not caused by capitalism as I've mentioned before, Western Europe is in the grip of this desperate Depression, that all of the intellectuals are saying that communism is the best thing, Russia is the best thing, that's what we really need.
And, you know, the fear of revolution was imminent.
It wasn't something that was really abstract.
I mean, it was pretty imminent in the minds of many people, not just in Germany.
And so Germany felt, or the German people were susceptible to the propaganda, That communism, this largely Jewish phenomenon, is about to take over the world, and you'll get this world communist Jewish government that is going to destroy Germany and kill all the Christians, just as they have done in Russia.
And that's important to understand, and that's a history that people don't really want to talk about.
I mean, for two reasons.
One is that it's considered anti-Semitic, which, I mean, it's just, if there are facts, there are facts.
I mean, every culture has things about it which it can be criticized for.
So I don't view it that way at all.
Anti-Semitic is to sort of make blanket statements about Jews that are negative, other than the basic facts that they're collectivist and irrational, which are just the facts you would apply to any cult.
But to say that all Jews are money-hungry or greedy or cheaty, I mean, all that stuff is nonsense.
I mean, Jews are judged as everybody is judged according to individual moral characteristics.
So that would be anti-Semitic.
But simply pointing out the facts of history is not anti-Semitic.
No more saying that Hitler was an Austrian is being pro- or anti-Hitler.
It's simply just stating a fact.
So it is a history that people don't want to talk about, and I'll talk about it this afternoon, why people don't want to talk about it.
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