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March 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:11
125 Why we forgive socialism (Part 2)

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

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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 3 p.m.
on Sunday, March 4, and I'm going to finish up my take on the theory of why Communism or Socialism might have got such a better rap than Fascism, both of which in my book should have got equally horrible raps.
And I'm going to use the word Socialism here to denote both Communism and Socialism.
And to not worry too much about differentiating the two, because the sort of theories are pretty much the same in their basis.
And so one of the things that I wanted to point out yesterday, or on Friday when I did a podcast, and I started with the topic but then I ended up not returning to it, was that I said that there was a saying about the communists and the fascists within Germany in the 1930s, and they were actually called Beefsteaks.
That was sort of the slang for them.
And the reason for that was that the Germans who were Nazis, the youth who were Nazis, were called the Brownshirts because their uniform was brown.
And, of course, those who were communists were into red because it's the color of communism, the color of the Soviet Union.
And so they were called beefsteaks because they were, the Nazi ones, were called beefsteaks because they were brown on the outside and red on the inside.
In other words, they could sort of go both ways.
They sort of looked like Nazis, but they were very close to communists, and so it was very well understood, the relationship between National Socialism and Socialism in the 1930s in Germany.
It's just that now we've put them at opposite ends of the political spectrum for reasons which I think are fairly clear, or at least will become so as we go forward in this.
So I remember one of the first instances that I noticed the real confusion about this issue was that when I was in the debating finals, when I was an undergraduate student, I was a debater as I'm sure you can imagine, and I was at the Canadian finals in Newfoundland and I saw a gentleman standing in line in the cafeteria to pick up some food and he had a little buttoned lapel with a picture of Marx on it, you know that
That Old Testament biblical picture of Marx with the big beard and the beady eyes.
And I just remember being kind of shocked because, of course, I have some Eastern European in my background.
My first name, Stefan, is Eastern European.
And so I'd heard some of this kind of stuff through the family.
Some of the stuff that occurred in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
And I just found it quite shocking.
And I found it just astounding that somebody would sort of openly wear a button of Marx.
And I was too young and I wasn't secure enough in my ability to debate and also in my beliefs to confront him.
I mean, I would certainly do so now.
But I just remember it being astounding, and I do remember wanting to go up and ask this fellow, well, how would you feel if I were wearing a button of Hitler?
And you would probably feel pretty astounded and horrified, and just because the victims aren't as vocal as the victims of Hitler doesn't mean that they were any less deserving of humanity or sympathy or understanding.
And so this I just found kind of surprising.
This was sort of in my early twenties, and I remember even back then Just being astounded at the difference, and also having a class entitled, The Rise of Capitalism and the Socialist Response.
And I don't think that you would ever have something like, I don't know, The Rise of Jewry and the Nazi Response, or The Rise of Freedom and the Fascist Response, unless it would be to outrightly condemn both Nazism and Fascism.
But, of course, that's not whatever happens.
What happens is you have legitimate courses on socialism, and you have strong socialist elements within Western society that are always growing.
Like, we kicked the butt out of Nazism, and we kind of got it beaten down, except for a few fringe groups.
But, man, we just can't beat socialism to save our lives.
And that's because we do have a lot of moral confusion about socialism.
Socialism is Sort of viewed as a kindly, friendly, nice way to deal with the problems of poverty and the violence and brutality that is inherent within socialism, which has been displayed over and over and over again.
Every single time you get a socialist government getting into power, a communist government getting into power, all of society turns into a complete bloodbath, and the deaths of tens of millions of people ensue, and deaths in the most horrible kind of ways we talked about on Friday.
And so we just can't uproot this fantasy about socialism from within our midst.
And I think that there's some interesting questions as to why that might be the case, or what might have been occurring, or what might be occurring.
So, you know, the other question to answer before we dip into the topic is, well, why is the question important at all?
It's always important to ask, is it important?
And I would say that, yes, it is very important.
One of the things that you will see, both probably within your own nature and within the nature of those you're having conversations with, as you begin to progress forward in an understanding of society, of violence, of pacifism, of rationality, of superstition, and religion, and state worship, and nationalism, and racism, and classism, and all this kind of stuff, is that human nature Human nature always wants to have an out.
Human nature always wants to grab onto something that avoids the absolute dictates of reason.
I'm not saying I'm sure exactly why, but if you know somebody who's in a bad relationship and you say, well, maybe it's not for you, then they're going to say, well, but he does this nice thing, or that nice thing, or he's a great guy in this way, or a great guy in that way.
People don't want to Get all of their fantasies and illusions, especially the destructive ones, they don't want to get them chased down.
Which is good because if they did then Christina would need another occupation.
But it's certainly very true when it comes to state power and coercion that it is very hard, and I found this very hard within myself, so I'm not saying that it should be easy for everyone, But it's very hard to corner the fantasy that violence can work and be productive anywhere.
To finally nail that fantasy down and eliminate it from your system is so, so, so, so, so important.
You can't have A theory of morality or a theory of reality that allows for fantastical or contradictory or nonsensical or illusory elements.
You've really got to try and chase down all of your illusions and eliminate them because that's the path to maturity and to wisdom and to compassion and to actually having an effect in a very positive way on the world.
And so the reason why I think it's very important to answer this question Why is socialism considered good and fascism is considered bad?
Because if any aspect of state coercion or of coercion in general is considered good in any way, then violence is good.
Then brutality is good.
Then pulling out guns, chasing people down the street, shooting them in the neck or shooting them in the leg is good.
And if that's the case, then there's no such thing as morality.
There's no such thing as right and wrong.
Everything is relative.
Everything is subjective.
We don't worship anything to do with morality.
We simply subject ourselves or subjugate ourselves and lick the boots of those in power and call it good.
And that's not particularly a world I want to live in.
It's not a view that I would ever subscribe to.
And so I think that we need to find, wherever people have a soft spot towards violence, or control, or coercion, or brutality, or suppression, or any of those things, we have to find where people have a soft spot towards these things, and we have to tell them repeatedly and emphatically that it's just not so.
That violence never works.
Except in self-defense on occasion.
So, I think it's a very important question to answer.
If socialism is allowed to have any kind of positive moral hue, any kind of, it's about niceness, or it's about helping people, or it's about taking care of the poor, or the sick, or the old, if any of that is allowed, morality vanishes, objectivity vanishes, rationality vanishes, humanity vanishes into a cloud of blood which we cover up and call virtue.
So, I think it's very important to answer this question.
You can see this in religion.
So people say, well, yes, organized religion is bad.
And by that they mean that a personal religion, like I worship my typewriter, can be good.
They also say, well, you know, okay, Muslim is bad and Catholicism has got a bad history.
But you know what's a really great religion?
It's Buddhism.
It's so nice and sweet and kind.
And the Dalai Lama's got these big glasses and a big smile and all this kind of stuff.
So they always try to find some place Where irrationality can be good, so that they never actually have to face the fact that irrationality always leads to destruction.
That irrationality makes people miserable.
That irrationality is what people always use when they're bullying children, and when the state is bullying its citizens, and when people are being tossed into charnel pits of slaughter that socialistic and fascistic societies represent, or any totalitarian societies.
So I think it's very important To chase down any of these kinds of irrationality, the destruction that comes from irrationality and collectivism must always be exposed.
And also, it kind of helps to really make sense of the Second World War, and of large parts of the 20th century in general.
It makes those events, those terrible disastrous events, that much more comprehensible.
And that's kind of what we want.
We want the world to make sense.
And it really does.
When you look at it without any sort of historical blinders, I think it does.
And it also helps explain the cycle of violence.
So, if for instance there is, and we'll talk about this logically, right?
If there is a relationship between Judaism and Communism, or some dominant ideology in Communism, but let's just say Judaism for now, if there is a relationship between Judaism and Communism in its origins according to specific people who were Jewish, and of course large numbers of people who were non-Jewish, all long dead, And if there was a lack of criticism on the part of intellectuals, a lot of whom are Jewish, of communism as it began, then it helps to explain the cycle of violence.
Therefore, if you get a group that has some tangential responsibility for the creation and dissemination and lack of criticism towards one of the most brutal ideologies in history, then you get a cycle of violence.
So you start with The growth of communism in the West, and of course it was never supposed to take root in Russia, it was only supposed to take root in an industrial country, the only unfortunate problem being that the industrial countries treated their workers better than any other societies ever have throughout history, if you have any doubts about that.
Talk to a serf.
In fact, I think it was Dostoyevsky's father who treated his serf so brutally and was such a raging alcoholic that he was actually murdered by his own serfs.
His own slaves murdered him by forcing him to drink vodka until he died.
So you can just imagine The kind of lives that these people had.
Or you can talk to a serf in the Middle Ages, or you can talk to a slave in the South or in Africa.
There's lots of terrible things that have occurred to the sort of, quote, workers in history.
And capitalism was the first system to, the free market, classical liberalism, was the first system to raise them out of this endless penury that they'd been locked into in a lightless dungeon of poverty and predictability all throughout history.
And so unfortunately, although Marx confidently and openly predicted that the only way that communism was ever going to occur was as an inevitable growth or an inevitable result of the expansion of capitalism, it actually took root, the very first communist revolution was in Mexico.
Which, of course, is one of the reasons why Trotsky fled there before Stalin's assassin, Ice, picked him to death in 1936.
I think it was 1908 or something like that.
The first communist revolution was in Mexico, and then the next one was in 1917 in Russia, and heavily funded by and brought about by the German government, as I mentioned in the last podcast, to get Russia out of the war, in the First World War.
So, if it's true that a certain group in society is associated, rightly or wrongly, with the growth of communism, And then that group, among many others, is targeted as a result of that, or as a result of that perception.
It helps us to understand the cycle of violence.
Of course, it doesn't justify anything in regards to the cycle of violence, but it does help us to understand it.
And it also helps us to understand just why it's so important to rail against false and hideous ideologies, because if you don't, then you really do risk the result of them being considered moral, Which completely undermines people's ability to fight against them.
Whatever we perceive as virtuous, we cannot fundamentally oppose in our hearts.
So I think it is important to answer this question of why socialism is considered to be moral.
As you probably have understood by now, I'm interested in examining the question, to what degree did Judaism contribute to the rise of communism?
And I think it's important to explain, before I start into the logical possibilities, that it doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
And I know I don't say that very often, and I certainly don't say it lightly, but it really doesn't matter whether Judaism is associated with the origins of communism or not.
What does matter is, did people believe that?
And that's as important in some ways as whether it was true or not.
Certainly in the realm of propaganda, and in whipping people into a hysteria, and whipping people into war-like capacity for destruction and genocide and bottomless pits of murder and destruction, it's important to understand what propaganda means.
It's not important to understand whether it's true.
I mean, it is to some degree, but when you're talking about the effects in history, it's more important to focus on propaganda than truth, because propaganda is what caused people to act in a particular way.
So if the German population in general perceived that the rise of communism within Russia was a Jewish phenomenon, or a Jewish-inspired, or to a large degree, Jewish-led and defended phenomenon, And if they then further perceived that this Jewish philosophy or this Jewish ruling class or elite was systematically slaughtering tens of millions of Christians,
then we can't understand the rise of Hitler, we can't understand the rise of genocide within Germany, or genocidal tendencies or facts within Germany, if we can't understand the German perception in the 1920s.
Germany and Russia have had a very close relationship throughout history.
In many Russian novels you'll come across German characters, and I can't tell you exactly why, but there have been.
So the Germans were perfectly aware what was going on, for the large part, within Russia.
And so it may have not been too difficult for German propagandists to make the case that Germany was now threatened by a highly expansionistic communist dictatorial system whose leaders were believed to be Jewish, or largely Jewish, and whose sole goal at times seemed to be the wholesale slaughter of millions of Christians.
And so if you understand that Germany was sort of looking to the east and seeing this black cloud of genocide against Christians arising in Russia and was entirely aware that the Russian leadership continually talked about the need for a world revolution.
They were not interested in countries because it was an international revolution that was being aimed for, then the Germans are going to be very afraid of this revolution rolling across their borders and engaging in wholesale genocide of all of the local Christians.
So that's their sort of perception.
And then they look to the West, and what do they see?
They saw all of these Western intellectuals Slavishly licking the boots of Stalin and of Lenin and talking about how wonderful and beautiful and inevitable and fantastic and amazing and heavenly and fabulous the Russian communist system was.
And they also knew that Western capitalism, through its corruption, through the state power that arose in the First World War and post-First World War period, the power of the right to print money, the power of the right to set inflation, all of the expansions of state power that occurred in the West,
And they're all then sucked into the hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s, middle class is completely wiped out, you have the mad stock market boom of the late 1920s culminating in 1929, and then you enter into a decade-long depression, which seemed to be the end.
It seemed to be the end of classical liberalism, the end of the free market, the end of capitalism.
And with all of the Western intellectuals talking about how great Russia was, with the entire Russian continent now under the grip of a Soviet-style Russian communist dictatorship, with genocide occurring in the East and slavish adulation of those genocidal murderers in the West, I think that Germany really did feel caught.
That's sort of my understanding from conversations that I've had over the years and research that I've done for my last novel.
Germany really did feel caught, and so this is why Germany really felt that it wanted sort of living room, and it wanted what it called Lebensraum, which is the expansion of a buffer state, or the creation of buffer states between itself and Soviet Russia.
And it really felt it was a kill-or-be-killed situation with regards to Soviet Russia.
And the German population, to some degree, I mean obviously not every German, but not an inconsequential number either, felt or believed that this communist dictatorship was associated with Judaism.
Now, to me there are four logical possibilities to this.
There may be more, obviously I'm no oracle or comprehensive fountain of truth, but these are sort of the four possibilities that I see if we're looking at this question of why is communism given a better rap than fascism.
So, in the question of relationship between Judaism and Communism, there are four possibilities.
One, there's no relationship whatsoever between Judaism and Communism, and nobody ever believed it, and this is just... I had a dream, or somebody slipped me a pill, and I went on a journey, and I just made up all this stuff, and that's fine, that's certainly a possibility.
Then, of course, we're going to have to look elsewhere for the explanation, or any possible explanation, as to why Communism is viewed as something better than Fascism.
Fine, let me know.
I'll be happy to talk about being corrected and happy to be corrected in future podcasts.
So if I'm completely incorrect, nobody ever believed in this relationship and this relationship never existed, by all means let me know.
Now, the second is that there is no relationship whatsoever between Judaism and the foundation of communism or early communist leadership and so on.
But people believed that there was, or that they believe that there is.
Now, then we start to get into an interesting examination of cause and effect in history.
So let's just say that there was no relationship whatsoever between Judaism and Communism, but people seized upon this, that the Germans seized upon this to fan and flame and awaken the latent anti-Semitism within the German population, and of course it's not only within the German population.
They grabbed onto this and they said, ah, communism is a Jewish phenomenon and let's all get together and hate the Jews and blah blah blah blah blah.
And that's certainly possible.
I can't claim with any shred of certainty that I know for a fact whether there's any relationship between Judaism and communism.
And so it's certainly possible that it was all simply propaganda.
Now, if that's the case, then another interesting question arises.
Thus, when you look at another piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, namely, the denial of the existence of the Holocaust.
David Ervening, I think, had a book about it, and Ernst Zündel up here in Canada.
So, a bunch of crazy white supremacists slash Nazis slash whoever.
I believe that there's no such thing as the Holocaust, that it was all made up by Ben-Gurion to help the UN ratify the State of Israel in 1948 and so on.
And it's all made up and faked and all that.
So these crazies are roundly exposed, denounced, disproven within the popular media.
I mean, long before I became a philosopher, I knew about the existence of something like Holocaust denial and how bad and crazy it was.
So, when a certain slight is brought against a particular group, that group generally tends to fight back with all the resources at its disposal, and rightly so.
I mean, if somebody says that you're a bad guy when you're not a bad guy, then you should do everything in your power to restore your reputation.
Reputation is very important.
So, where an unjust accusation is hurled at a group like the Jews, then they fight back, and rightly so.
But you know about it!
Until I started doing research into this, and this is sort of based on some family history, but once I started doing research into it, I came across this question, and it seemed to me such a large and important question to be asked and to be answered, that I was amazed, astounded, blown away by the fact that I had never ever heard about this as a question or as an issue.
It explained so much, it made sense of so much, not whether it was true or not, but that it was believed, and what might have motivated the Germans to this horrible, raging anti-Semitism and the genocide of the Holocaust, or I actually sort of hate to call it THE Holocaust, because It wasn't like there was only one, right?
A Holocaust.
The Armenians and the Kulaks and all of the other genocides that occurred in the 20th century.
I don't want to give the word the to one of them, but let's just say the Holocaust.
What is it that could have caused this to occur?
Why did the Germans just wake up one day, as is sort of mentioned in history?
Well, there was economics and there was this and there was that, inflation and the depression and so on.
Well, yeah, okay, so Austria went through exactly the same thing and was the birthplace of Hitler and also didn't become a crazy sort of mad, genocidal, murdering country.
In fact, it was taken over in the Anschluss in 1938 by Germany and was not happy about it.
So, if an anti-semitic charge is made against the Jewish culture, or any culture, and is demonstrably ridiculous, then that charge tends to get refuted, and refuted openly.
In fact, I think that it is to the benefit of certain communities to be attacked and to openly and roundly refute whatever that attack is, because it makes the next attack that much less believable.
So more power to them.
I think that's fantastic.
Good for them.
They should do it.
But I never heard of this one.
And that raises my suspicions a little bit about what's been going on.
Just a little bit, not much.
Because again, it's so hard for me to figure out exactly what has been going on.
But if A motivation for an entire world war, if the motivation for an entire evil genocide perpetrated upon European Jewry and of course lots of other people who got caught up in the in the nets, if the motivation for that has never ever I've been brought to the light of day, and I know a fair amount about history.
I mean, I get a master's degree in history, I've read it for many, many years, but until I began digging into certain sources, I just had no idea.
And that, to me, is kind of important.
The fact that it's not there is important.
We know this as libertarians, that when we say something as obvious as the state is violence, taxation is theft, People's eyes, they do that sort of Roger Rabbit boing straight out, and they just either reject it openly or can't comprehend it.
But it's such an obvious thought that the fact that it's never spoken about in the entire 14-odd years of compulsory state education, that the basic moral nature of the state is not mentioned, and it's not the most complicated idea in the world.
Does the government have a police force?
Do they throw you in jail?
If you don't obey the laws, then the government is forced.
The fact that such an obvious idea is never mentioned is important.
It's part of what we call propaganda for very obvious ideas or challenges or responses to never be mentioned is important.
Now, there's the third possibility.
is that there is a relationship between Judaism and Communism but no one has ever figured that out.
Or no one, I don't know, except like three guys have ever figured that out and therefore it's just not talked about because nobody's thought of it.
Well, I don't think that's the case, because in the research that I've done about the crazy German nationalists and the propaganda that was going on in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, early to mid 1930s, this connection was made by, let's just call them crazy, lying, nationalist Nazis.
That's fine.
But this connection was made, and it was considered to be a pretty important connection.
And of course, when you are a propagandist, You don't just make stuff up out of thin air.
You don't say that we're the best group ever because twelve leprechauns stood in a row, did a jig, and told me so.
Because people are just going to say, OK, maybe we'll up the meds and we'll talk later.
What people want to do when they're a propagandist is they want to hook in to something that people kind of believe already, or kind of have a theory about already, and then expand it.
This doesn't mean that what the propagandist is saying is true, but it has to have resonance with the population as a whole.
And Germany faced an enormous threat from the expansion of Russia, as it has in the past.
And may again, who knows?
But Germany faced an enormous threat.
And Germany knew about the genocides against the Christians.
They also knew that Western intellectuals were denying that such genocides were actually existing.
And, of course, it's sad and bitterly funny to me that to be called a Holocaust denier is about the worst thing that can ever occur to you as a moral human being, and it is stone evil to deny the existence of a genocide.
So it would seem to me kind of important to have a look at the history of the intellectuals in the 1920s and the 1930s to find out just who was denying the existence of the Russian Holocaust against the Kulaks and the bourgeoisie and so on, because that was a very common phenomenon, but that's not something that's part of our history either.
Because we have this whole thing where socialism is not really bad, but fascism is really bad.
So that's another possibility.
There is a relationship between Judaism and communism, but no one ever believed that there was.
And therefore it may be possible that It's not really talked about to throw people off the scent.
I don't think this one's too likely because if nobody ever believed there was a relationship then it would never even be a topic.
It would never have come up as part of the propaganda in Germany.
It would never have statistics gathered about it which you can find in not disreputable sources and so on.
So I don't consider that too likely.
Now the fourth possibility is that there is a relationship between Judaism and Communism And people do know about it, but they're afraid to talk about it because that would be viewed as anti-semitic.
And again, whether that sort of feels true or doesn't, it doesn't really matter.
I think it's an interesting possibility.
I certainly know that I feel probably more nervous talking about this topic than I have about any other topic that I have talked about to date.
And I've talked about some pretty intense topics.
This one is a very scary area to talk about for me.
And maybe it is for you, too.
Maybe you have the heart of a lion, and I have the heart of a mouse, and I'm afraid of talking about this topic for no reason.
But I do feel that the politically correct cops have their sirens going right behind me, and I'm about to get pulled over, patted down, and probably subjected to some fairly violent and rubber-glove involving Cavity searches.
So I do feel a little bit nervous talking about it.
And I think that that's because it seems like a very dangerous topic, because some of the conclusions that hasty and judgmental and I think not particularly rational souls could jump to is either that I'm blaming the Jews for the Holocaust, or I'm justifying what because some of the conclusions that hasty and judgmental and I think not particularly rational souls could And that's not it at all.
It certainly is not it would be completely crazy in a moral to to hold those perspectives I think that it is interesting to understand what happens when a genocide occurs and So, you know, the first major genocide was the Turks and the Armenians, the turn of the century, last century.
The second major genocide, not counting the First World War, was the Russians.
And it was by far the worst, until you come around to China in the 1950s.
By far the worst genocide.
The slaughterhouse of Russia throughout the 20th century staggers the imagination.
You can never come even close to figuring out just the horror.
You could live a million years and die a thousand deaths a day and you wouldn't be Close to understanding the horror of the entire society under Communism.
80 million people murdered in the Russian system alone, at least that's an estimate, and the people who lived weren't having a great time either.
I mean, when 80 million people get murdered, it's not like everyone else is like, oof, hey, is somebody missing from the table?
I mean, they actually face the horror of surviving in a situation where people are being killed by the millions, and entire generations of people lived and died with a complete human potential, and capacity for joy, and wiped from the face of the earth completely.
So the moral horror of that is astounding, and what happens when the causes of the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union are not directly examined.
Now I'm not saying that it's entirely related to Judaism either.
Christians have had a very strong relationship to socialism throughout a good chunk of the history of the 19th and the 20th century.
So it's not just a matter of Judaism taking the rap.
Christians have been very sympathetic towards socialism as well.
The idea of a central power, which takes people's income and redistributes it for the benefit of all, which is very similar to the church, is not that foreign to Christians.
However, Christianity does not have an atheistic tradition.
Judaism, on the other hand, has a very strong atheistic tradition.
In fact, the number of Jews who are practicing religious people is in the minority, and it's by far in the minority.
And therefore it seems hard to associate Christianity as strongly with Communism as Judaism.
Because, of course, you can't be an atheist Christian, but you can certainly be an atheist Jew.
I mean, there's no particular problem with that at all.
And, in fact, the majority of people who are Jews are not religious in that sense.
Or in any sense, really.
So, if you can't sort of trace back the intellectual history of what produced the first unbelievably large-scale genocide after the Armenians in the 20th century, then you can't trace the ripple effect of that throughout the 20th century, and you can't understand the Second World War if you don't understand the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and how much that scared the lederhosen off the Germans.
And not just the Germans, of course.
Christianity also has a very strong anti-communist movement within it.
And of course, Christianity is anti-communist to some degree, because communist is atheistic.
The communist philosophy is atheistic, and therefore is a direct competitor to the survival of the Church.
It's not even like another religion.
It's like atheism.
It's like you can't have a religion within a communist society other than the mad social religion of the state.
So Christianity doesn't have as much sympathy towards communism and is quite anti-communist, even though it can be quite pro-socialist in many ways, because communism is a direct competitor in a way that another monotheistic religion like Islam would be, insofar as it's... Well, even in Islam you can be a Christian in certain parts of Islamic countries.
But you cannot be a practicing Christian in a communist dictatorship, and therefore you just don't see the kind of blankness when it comes to discussing the crimes of communism among Christians that you do among other sectors of the population.
So if you can't figure out where all of this stuff came from, then it's very hard to figure out how intelligently to oppose it.
And so I think that's very important to understand.
So finally, when we talk about this relationship, Judaism and Communism, it's in no way meant to talk about Jews as a whole.
We're talking about philosophical movements.
Now, within Judaism there's a strong atheistic component, there is a very strong communalistic component.
You look at the kibbutzes in Israel and you can see examples of communal living and the enshrinement of the principle of from each according to their ability to each according to their means.
There are very strong traditions within Judaistic philosophy of, you know, to be a mensch, to be a good man, is to take care of others in your community, to be charitable, to be helpful, to be generous, to be kind.
And, of course, that's great, as I mentioned before, when you're talking about private charity, and it's a complete nightmare when you're talking about state coercion.
So, I think that, to sort of sum it up, this is nothing against any particular Jew, nothing against any particular Christian, nothing against any particular member of particular groups, but if you want to understand the 20th century, You need to understand the cycle of violence that begins in the 19th century with the institution of state schools.
The number one cause of all of the violence within the 20th century was the institutionalization and enslavement of children in forced and coerced state schools.
As I've mentioned before, it's not more than a generation after the institution of state education that you start to get people who are perfectly primed, a generation and a half, for World War I. And it's just the slaughterhouse of the 20th century has an enormous amount to do with the indoctrination of children that occurred in the institutionalization of state schools.
Of course, Judaism, I don't believe, had anything to do with that, so that's really the fault of the Christians and of the lazy classical liberals who didn't go to the barricades intellectually to stop this.
So you can't understand the growth of violence without first looking at the public school system, and then you really can't understand it until you understand the moral or epistemological roots of communism.
And its relationship to Judaism is interesting, but whether it's true or not, I don't know.
But it is true that it was believed, and the fact that it was believed caused a cycle of violence to swing the other way.
So you have all of these communists Russia killing off all these Christians, and then people say, ah, they're Jews!
And then you have everybody storming all over Europe with anti-Semitic hatred and virulence and evil and violence.
And then, of course, the pendulum swings back the other way, and you get the creation of Israel and all the problems that that creates.
As a Jewish friend of mine said once, he said, I mean, of all the places, because he's an atheist Jew, and he said, my God, of all the places to create Israel, why would you want to put the greatest concentration of Jews in the first Jewish state right smack dab in the middle why would you want to put the greatest concentration of Jews in the first Jewish state right smack dab in the middle And I said, well, one, because they have these religious imperatives that say that's the Holy Land, which is insane to begin with.
And number two, if you are the Jewish or Israeli government, like all governments in the world, what you really thrive on is the creation of enemies external to yourself.
so that you can...
Ask for money and ask for sacrifice and throw kids into the military and you can get donations from all over the world.
And so, as he suggested, Israel should have.
He said, you know, after the Holocaust there was such sympathy towards the Jews that we could have asked for a canton of Switzerland and been given that.
And they already have 35 cantons to begin with.
They wouldn't even miss one.
So we could have all just settled down in the lovely Alps in Switzerland and had a wonderful old time and not worry about being ringed by all of these crazy Muslim states that want us all killed.
And I said, well, sure, but I mean, that would not have really helped those who want military power and those who want to create the endless and ultimate scare scenarios of instant engulfment by historical enemies.
And so I'm sure that one of the reasons was both because of the Zionist imperative of the Holy Lands being where the Jews needed to be, And, also, the political and secular motive of wanting external enemies to continually be able to gather resources from everyone around the world who's sympathetic to the cause.
That would sort of have something to do with it.
But, of course, the pendulum that begins with the public schools and then swings back to the murderers of the Soviet empire, and swing back to the genocides under the Nazis, and then, to a smaller degree, have swung back in the problems in between Israel and Palestine, that you can't sort of understand these phenomenons, these incredibly broad historical movements, unless you understand the foundations and the ideas behind them.
Because ideas, which everybody inherits and which motivates just about everyone except we few group of original thinkers, and by we I don't mean me and some other guy, I mean me and you who's listening to this, or you and I, If we don't understand these things, then the 20th century makes no sense, human nature makes no sense, and the deaths of 170 or more million people make no sense.
And so I think even though it's a scary topic to talk about, even though I could be accused of the worst things in the world, which has nothing to do with my motive, I still think that it's important to talk about.
I certainly appreciate you listening to this, and please let me know exactly, or even approximately, where I've got it horribly wrong.
Now, I'm going to count out slowly because I've had a number of complaints from people who I think are using iTunes that what's happening is I get cut off 10 seconds before the end.
Now, I mean, I know there's only about 200 hours of podcasts at the moment, so 10 seconds!
A 10-second cutout!
Is critical!
Because I really save all the end of the... What I do is I encapsulate my real point in the last 10 seconds, and then I shriek it very quickly.
In fact, it sounds almost exactly like a fax.
In fact!
If you plug it up to a fax... Anyway.
So what I'll do is I'll count out slowly, so that those who are using iTunes, or I think there was one... MP3 Pro or something like that was one other player that had a problem, you can let me know if you're getting to the end Or not.
So here's your countdown.
Close your eyes.
The operation won't take a moment.
Just breathe deeply.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
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