April 18, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:19
3656 The Cold War: Survival | Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux
As tensions continue to rise between the United States of America and Russia once again, the history of the Cold War becomes incredibly relevant to the discussion of modern day. Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux discuss their personal experiences of the Cold War tensions and fallout, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the murderous nature of communist regimes, the slander of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the scar-tissue of Russia's bloody history and much much more!For more from Bill Whittle, please check out:https://www.billwhittle.comhttps://www.youtube.com/BillWhittleChannelYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyu from Free Domain Radio.
In what is pretty much a cat-like reflex action to the demands of the marketplace, because I just put out a video today where people said, it's been a while since you've had a chat with Bill Whittle.
And I'm like, yes, much like a carrier pigeon, I'm returning back to the cave of handsomeness.
Bill Whittle, I wanted to remind everyone, you can check out Bill Whittle at BillWhittle.com.
Whittle, of course, like your grandfather used to do with wood on the back porch.
And you can go to YouTube.com forward slash Bill Whittle channel, all one word.
We'll put the links to those below.
Bill, how are you, my friend?
What's new?
I'm doing great, Stephanie.
How are you?
Good to see you.
Very well, thank you.
Russia.
Okay, so this is a little bit of a trip down old fogey lane because Bill and I are, as they say of women, of a certain age.
And of that certain age, we grew up with Russia.
I don't know.
To me, it was probably different in the States.
I didn't have a huge amount of exposure to Russia or Russian ideas when I was in England.
I left when I was...
I came to Canada and it seemed to be more vivid in Canada than it was in England, sort of this idea of Russia as the enemy.
But Russia was the enemy when it was in many ways the complete opposite of what it is now.
So it was the enemy back then.
Now it's kind of changed a lot.
And it's the enemy today.
And it is so bizarre to be in this 1984-style world, you know, where Russia's the enemy.
But we're going to ship them lots of free food.
But they're the enemy.
And now that they're a more positive force in the world, they're the enemy.
And it is such a confusing scope or view to have.
Of these kinds of geopolitical relations, I wonder if you could say to the audience, what has your experience been in the rotating door of the Russian frenemy of the left and the West for the past couple of decades?
Well, first of all, full disclosure, I'm engaged to a Russian girl, so there's that.
A Russian woman, I should say.
And I think you can clear up a lot of this confusion, Stefan, if you just use the terms Russians and Soviets.
That's what actually works really well for me.
The Russians, for quite a long time during the Cold War, were the Soviets.
That's what they were.
They were the same thing.
The Soviet Union was Russia.
Russia was the Soviet Union.
But even when I was 13 or something, I made some reference to the Russians doing this or that, and somebody corrected me.
Not the Russians, the Soviets.
And I think that's really the critical thing to remember.
The Soviets were horrible people.
The Soviets were the worst people that ever lived, you could say, arguably.
When you read about the purges and the Great Terror and all the rest of it, I mean, millions and millions of people taken out and being shot by quota.
Stalin would say, we have to execute 177,000 people in Sevastopol and just go out and shoot them.
So the Soviets were horrible.
The Russians are...
You have to make a...
You can't make a Soviet without a Russian, but I think they're quite different people.
Talking to my fiancée about when I was growing up in the Cold War, she was in the equivalent of the communist Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, called the Pioneers.
And she said she didn't believe a word of it.
Nobody believed a word of it.
But there was a pretty high price to pay for openly saying you didn't believe a word of it.
And that's a very great distinction.
And let's make sure we stick to that in the conversation because, of course, it's like there are the Nazis and then there are the Germans.
And you don't want to conflate the two for all time.
So that's exactly right.
And the Soviet regime, again, for those who don't know their history, arguably – well, certainly communism is the greatest mass-mortering political system in history, 150 million slaughtered even outside of war – The Soviet system versus the communist system under Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai and so on, in some ways, neck and neck, it doesn't really matter because nobody can count the number of bodies, but let's just say it's a couple of tens of millions too many.
And so it's really, really important to remember that it was a predatory system.
It was a viciously expansionist system.
I've sort of distinguished it from the National Socialists, who were, you know, crazy and totalitarian and all kinds of nasty, but did not have particular world ambitions.
Hitler wanted to unite the disparate Germanic horde and defend against communism, which, you know, I mean, the Germans were a little scared when communism came in Russia and...
Well, they began slaughtering a whole lot of Christians.
So the fact that communism was fighting to get into Germany as well gave them this sort of impetus for that.
But it was not a world-dominant system.
Hitler was quite considerate toward Muslims.
Hitler was fine with the British Empire.
He had no problems with the British Empire, actually didn't really want war with England at all to begin with.
But Soviets were like, we have to run the world.
It is our manifest destiny to take over the entire planet.
It was viciously expansionist.
And where it could not wage war directly, and of course there were these endless proxy wars between the West and the Soviet Union, it would then wage war ideologically.
And one of the great tragedies of the West is a lot of the ideological takeovers that were instituted in North America and in Western Europe.
Even though the Soviet Union has finally been relegated to the Ashbin of history, those mechanics, those takeovers of academia, of the media, and so on, like a zombie that doesn't know its brain has been scooped out, is still slithering its way across the landscape, undoing a lot of foundations of Western freedoms.
Well, there's a lot to cover there.
First of all, when you talk about the Nazis and the Communists, you've got these two large collectivist states.
You've got two states that are very centrally organized.
You know, the left likes to say that they're the Communists and that American conservatives are the Nazis, but American conservatives and libertarians are nothing like either one of them.
Both of them are huge states.
Both of them are absolute elimination of all the freedoms that we believe in and so on.
When you talk about, so the reason that Germany's Nazism wasn't exportable the way communism was, was Nazism essentially was racial socialism based on your race, and that's not as exportable.
You could maybe say you could make a case for Aryans being included, but basically the rest of the world is excluded because of the philosophy.
The Soviets were international socialists.
They were – instead of hating races, they hated classes.
And they had classes pretty much all over the world, so you could explore a lot more communism that way.
And I think the thing to remember when the two of these organizations were fighting – and I'll tell you why I bring this up.
The Nazis, at least the Nazis were competent.
You know, they were real...
Too damn competent sometimes.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Too damn competent.
And let me say why I say that.
The Russians beat the Germans in the biggest war in history, the Eastern Front War of World War II, by unbelievable sacrifices of manpower.
Just unbelievable.
And a thorough ass-kicking on the Germans by Old Man Winter, always a traditional ally of the Russians.
Why people continue to do this over and over throughout history?
It's okay, I'll pack some mittens.
I'm sure we'll be fine.
Here's the only reason I wanted to bring that up was because in the years leading up to the Second War, the Soviets were absolutely killing virtually anyone with any expertise.
I think they killed like So many engineers and railroad technicians that in one year alone, on one line alone, there were 69,000 accidents in the Soviet Union because if you were an engineer or if you were anybody with technical skills, probably just took you out and shot you.
And there were periods there when there was nobody on these lines.
So the Soviets, in order to justify the fact that nothing was working, had to surround themselves by By external spies.
And my favorite term, it's a horrible term, but it so well describes it.
They talked about wreckers, Stefan.
You know, that would be the people inside the Soviet Union who are destroying things on purpose.
And that's why we need the NKVD and the Cheka and all the rest of it.
Well, this decapitation of competence is a very, very common feature of totalitarianism.
I've been doing a lot of studying lately on how painfully slow and difficult it is to raise the general IQ of the species, like how much suffering and how much dead-end, evolutionarily speaking, has to go through in order to raise the IQ points by like a handful of digits.
It's brutal.
And then you can just get one totalitarian regime that in one or two generations can literally pitch people back to the Stone Age as far as intelligence goes.
So, yes, there was a massive decapitation of competence, which is generally higher IQ people.
And IQ, you know, certainly as adults, 60 to 80 percent genetic.
So you really are carving out a pretty significant swath through very painfully gained intelligence, genetics and so on.
So, yeah, things stopped working.
And, of course, there were all of these five-year plans that, oh, yes, don't worry.
We're just about to supersede the West in terms of productivity.
Never came to pass.
But, of course, rather than – well, you can see this happening with the left at the moment.
Rather than saying they ran a terrible candidate in a terrible way, they are externalizing the blame.
Why did Hillary lose the election?
It wasn't because she was incompetent.
It wasn't because she was out of touch.
It wasn't because she was just a bad candidate and they made a mistake by going for fame over substance.
But no, it's the Russians.
It's Donald Trump and his associations.
It's hackers.
It's anything.
And it's the same thing happened in the Soviet Union.
This inability to look in the mirror and say, maybe things aren't working as well as we thought they were.
Well, then you, of course, why are things going badly?
It's those infiltrators.
It's those infiltrators.
It's the counter-revolutionaries.
It's the spies.
And that just causes you to double down.
Then you go to the second layer of intelligence.
Then you go to the third layer of intelligence.
And who are you left with?
You know, guys who can clean a toilet and not run a country.
And you're not only eliminating intelligence and competence, you're also eliminating initiative.
There were untold number of cases where workers in the Soviet Union might, somebody in a collective farm, let's say, who really believes in the Soviet ideal in the 30s, might raise a hand and say, you know, comrades, we might be able to do a little better if we were to do things this way.
And that person was put down in a file and probably in 36, 37, were taken out and shot because...
Since they had initiative, it was possible that someday they could be a threat to the Soviet system.
So many of the people that Stalin killed were not guilty of anything other than the fact that they had suspicious connections that someday may have turned into treason or whatever.
So there was like this prophylactic murder of 10 million people.
And it's just really unbelievable.
But when you take the initiative out of a society as well...
You are also changing the flavor of that population.
You raise your hand, you get smashed.
Yeah, it's the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.
And there was such a ferocious degree of psychological torture and terror that occurred.
And I just had a chat with Mike Cernovich about the Gulag Archipelago.
And I think it's in there.
There's a scene where...
Party functionaries are sitting in an audience and some muckety-muck up high up in the Communist Party gave a speech and praised Stalin.
And everyone starts applauding.
That's, yeah.
And, you know, try this one day, you know, for craps and giggles.
Try just keep applauding for like 20 minutes.
I mean, your hands are going to turn into like bloody pounding meat puppets of agony because you just keep applauding.
And nobody wanted to be the first to stop applauding.
That's it.
How insane is that?
Oh, got to keep applauding.
I guess they do jazz hands now for the sensitive social justice warriors these days.
Jazz hands are a little easier to sustain.
You can't stop because they were terrified the first person to stop applauding would be dragged out and shot.
That is the literally trapped inside the mind of a psychopathic maniac world that even the Russian government now, Russian culture is still struggling.
You know, this is post-traumatic stress disorder that's going to continue on for some time.
That having been said, it does give them a certain amount of strength when it comes to immigrants, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
And Western Europe – Eastern Europe, sorry, as a whole.
But that is the kind of absolutely mad universe that people lived in.
And the smart just, you know, played dumb and stayed low.
Yeah, and you can advance – You can make technological advances like that under two conditions.
First of all, you have to be willing to pitch human beings into the pit in exchange for technological gains.
So we're going to lose people.
And the second thing you need is you need a Western technological example, a leader.
A great example is the Russian bomb.
So the Americans spend billions of dollars in 1944 money.
It's an incredible amount of money to do the Manhattan Project.
And we come up with two different designs of nuclear weapons.
And then the Russians, the Soviets rather, steal that technology.
And then they take their best scientists, many of whom had already been killed, you know, some of these guys just weren't there, put them in a city, and Beria basically ran the Russian A-bomb campaign, a Soviet A-bomb campaign, and Beria said, if this thing works, you're all going to get dodges, and if it doesn't, we're going to kill you all.
And so you can, in fact, whip people into a form of technological competence, but...
It's not innovation, and it's never been innovation.
That's why if they hadn't copied the American technology, stolen it rather through spies like the Rosenbergs and all the rest of these people, if they hadn't stolen it, they would have been 20 years away.
The first American nuclear submarine was the Nautilus, sailed around the world many, many times.
We've never lost a single U.S. Navy soldier to radiation in any of the 70 years now.
But the Americans had a nuclear sub, so the Soviets had to have a nuclear sub.
And their nuclear sub, you know, irradiated the entire crew on the first cruise, just basically killed them all, put more people in there, sailed it out there.
So it's this kind of clawing at the same level of prestige, but because of the technological backwardness, because you kill all your smart and innovative people, because of that, you have to be willing to shovel human beings into the furnace, In order to at least have the external look of having caught up with the West.
There's a great book about this called East Minus West Equals Zero, which is basically the argument that just about everything that the Soviets came up with had to be pillaged from the intellectual productivity of Western Europe, of North America, and so on.
And I just wanted to put a little pitch in because I listened to, just sort of by the by, reminding me of the Manhattan Project.
And you were pointing out in one of your videos that, what was it, one-sixth of all of the electricity in America was diverted to the little town where they were running the Manhattan Project.
You have some very good rebuttals to some of the arguments I've made regarding the bombing of Japan, which I really wanted.
We'll put a link to that video below.
People should check that out.
Maybe we'll talk about that another time.
But yes, the amount of energy that was poured into this.
And then, of course, it's so easy to copy something and it's so hard.
Think of sitting down, how many decades of experience and expertise it takes to write a great song and then copy-paste the MP3.
That is, of course, the big challenge.
And so much of what was considered to be a race was, I would argue, they said, well, let's get in a race so that every time you get something, we can use all of our endless network of spies to steal it from you.
And that way, you're doing all of our R&D and all we have to do is pick up your notes and photocopy them.
I'm sure the Soviet leadership would have been very, very happy if the Americans hadn't invented anything new.
But as you say, the Manhattan Project took the best nuclear scientists in the world, spent enormous sums of money.
The Soviets didn't have anything like that kind of money available.
As you say, one-sixth of the electricity in the United States was generated in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to run the centrifuges to get that electricity.
Enriched uranium for the bomb.
The only way they can maintain parity is to take a Western design and copy it.
You mentioned earlier about the people that couldn't stop applauding.
There's a very, very interesting story where the future weapon of the war was the atomic bomb and the B-29.
B-29 was so far advanced compared to any other thing flying in the sky, and two or three of them had to land in Russia just before the war ended.
They went on a bombing mission to Japan, had some kind of problem, had to land in Russia.
In the Soviet Union.
And so they copied them.
And Stalin said, I want an exact duplicate of this bomber.
So finally, they make the duplicate.
They just literally pull the panels off, manufacture them, rivet them back together.
It's a precise copy.
And somebody went in there and they looked at the rudder pedals that the pilot had on this Soviet version of the B-29.
And on the rudder pedals, it was stamped Boeing.
You know, they stamped Boeing on the rudder pedals.
And they did that because who wants to be...
Stalin said an exact copy.
So you do these kind of ridiculous things because if you don't, there's a fairly good chance you could lose your life over it.
So now you have an entire group of people, probably the brightest people in the Soviet Union, wasting time doing this kind of thing because they're so terrified all the time.
Oh, yes.
And there, of course, had to, at the same time, be a ruthless suppression of any information that could flow in from the West.
Now, you couldn't avoid interacting with the West because you wanted to show off your athletes, you wanted to show off your engineers, you wanted to have everyone dominate everyone else, but the chances of defections or absent defections, the chance of bringing back information about what the West was actually like, you know, it's hard to remember, of course, back before the internet, it was hard to get information from outside your country if your government, it's the North Korea situation now, they don't know what the hell's going on in the outside world, other than there seem to be a lot more lights.
But they were very strong and very well able to keep information fairly ruthlessly suppressed, with the exception that, of course, and this is a level of courage that I still find stunning for the dissidents in the Soviet Union, they copied the Gulag Archipelago, and this is a level of courage that I still find stunning for the dissidents in the Soviet Union, they copied the Gulag Archipelago, they copied even Atlas Shrugged, and other, because, of course, Ayn Rand was a Russian Jew who hated communism and fled to the West to inform us of the dangers of communism, Ayn Rand was a Russian
But they copied these things, and we have stories of Solzhenitsyn, who would write on toilet paper because he wasn't allowed pen and paper when he was in his incarceration.
And this is another thing, too, that he would bury his work every single night for fear that he would be picked up by the secret police.
And he actually only ended up getting to a minimum security jail because he pretended to be a nuclear physicist.
Now, what kind of insane system is it that you can pretend for a couple of years to be a nuclear physicist?
And nobody knows.
Nobody's any the wiser.
Or if they are, they just cover it up.
Well, that's a system that's all about form rather than content.
It's all about appearance rather than reality.
And this goes all the way down to the villages that they would create, right, called the Potemkin villages.
So they would get these prisoners and they would fatten them up and then they would put them in these villages and then they'd invite this endless procession of Western journalists to come and go, ooh, wow, they're doing fantastic.
Look, I poke this prisoner with a stick and I get belly ripples going back and round orbiting his stomach.
And they just created this show.
And the Western intellectuals and the Walter Durante of the New York Times got a Pulitzer.
That's the guy.
Yeah.
I mean, they were just completely taken in because they wanted it to be true.
They wanted centralized power and socialism and communism and central planning.
They desperately wanted it to work because that's what the FDR was currently building up under the Great Depression and so on.
They wanted it to work, and it's been so hard to get any kind of truth.
Even now it's hard to get truth.
I mean I did this whole presentation on McCarthyism and how far the Soviets had infiltrated the American government, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.
They were using the State Department as part of their arm for expanding international totalitarianism through communism.
It's very, very hard to get the truth.
And I sort of feel this urgency to get the truth out because now that they're a hell of a lot nicer than they used to be, they're being resurrected as this Franken enemy once more.
Yeah.
And as somebody who's engaged to a Russian who left there, you know, six months ago, this is a very, very painful thing for me to say as an American, but in many ways, they're freer than we are here.
They're more capitalist than we are here.
When my wife found out how much of our income was spent on taxes and I showed her a list of 100 different taxes that American American taxpayers get to pay.
She simply couldn't believe it.
Her response was, if they're taking half of your money, where's your health care?
Why are the roads so bad?
Moscow is spotlessly clean.
I saw a video of Moscow taken just a couple months ago.
For guys like us, it's kind of what we're talking about, it is unrecognizable.
It looks like Tomorrowland.
It's absolutely unrecognizable.
That is very distressing to somebody like me to hear cases where people can do things and have the ability to do things in Russia that we just can't do here because of regulations and all the rest of it.
Oh, I mean, when you get out of the propaganda and start looking at the numbers, there's arguments that, of course, America is continuing to slide down in the Economic Freedom Index and so on.
You know, maybe Trump can do something about that with regards to taxes and somewhat of the deregulation scenario.
But, oh, yes, I mean, it's the old tragedy.
Hey, look, we defeated socialism.
We defeated communism.
And we have become the very monster that we were fighting.
we have become the very monster that we were fighting.
That's right.
That's right.
And, you know, there's a couple other things that I remembered which I sort of wanted to share with you.
And, you know, there's a couple other things that I remembered, which I sort of wanted to share with you, and maybe you can remember some of these things.
And maybe you can remember some of these things.
So in 1972, this is the height of the Cold War, there was the Summit Series of hockey.
So in 1972, this is the height of the Cold War, there was the Summit Series of Hockey.
And I came to Canada in 1977.
We flew over on Freddie Laker because we couldn't afford a direct flight.
We flew over on Freddie Laker and then took a bus from New York.
And I remember this was in November, riding through.
Started off with rain, ended up with a little snow It was the worst winter Canada I ever had, which was the greatest thing for me.
Because, of course, when you grow up in England, all you are is desperate to see snow.
Snow is the coolest thing ever.
Oh, it's the coolest thing ever.
Because you're going to be cold anyway.
You might as well be cold and have fun.
And it's actually less cold in England when there's the occasional snow, because it's not that clammy, breathe it in and ice your spine from the inside kind of cold.
So for me, the fact that it was just like...
And, of course, I was 11, so I was looking up at all these giant...
You know how they...
Well, they plow all of the parking lots, and you end up with these unbelievably huge mountains.
And back then, it was a massive snowfall.
I loved it.
I'm like, this is the coolest country ever.
And then summer came along, and I'm like, wow, actual summer!
You know, in England, summer comes, I think, on a Wednesday, every second here.
But here, you actually get real heat and real cold.
I like it.
It's a very bipolar kind of country, but the...
You know, if you love the winter sports, you love the summer sports, this is definitely the place to be, and I'm sort of that way inclined.
But I remember, this was about five years after this Summit series where there was a Soviet-Canadian hockey game, and I remember old-timers, like, telling me these stories, you know, like, everybody, the whole country stopped.
They put televisions in the schools.
Classes were suspended.
Like the entire country ground to a halt to view this ice hockey battle.
Hey, a Cold War.
This ice hockey battle between the Soviets and the Canadians.
And everybody was desperate for Canada to win.
And everybody was so thrilled and excited and considered it a true vindication of democratic capitalism when Canada beat the Soviets.
And you know what, Bill?
I've got to tell you.
I'm listening to these stories over and over again about how excited everyone was that the puck went this way rather than this way.
And I remember thinking, we're doomed.
We are so doomed as a society because if it comes down to a hockey game, we've lost already.
Is there no moral argument you can make?
Is there no foundational human rights argument?
Or we're in possession of free will and a soul and we're not economic products of our deterministic class system?
Have we lost everything so much to defend that it comes down to...
The puck went in the net.
That's it.
Freedom.
We're rules.
And it's like, that's a terrible, terrible way to decide the future of civilization is a hockey game.
And I just remember thinking, if it came down to a hockey game, what the hell is wrong with the West?
I'll take the opposite position on this one.
The reason that the direction that the puck went, left or right, Was because that was a way you could compete.
And the other way you could compete would be to have 25,000 nuclear weapons going one way or the other.
So basically what that's saying is that things like that assume such an enormous importance because it was one of the very few ways where the West and the Soviets intersected.
And it was a way where you could compete against these two ideologies.
Space race was another one.
But beyond that, The competition is going to involve Soviet tanks coming through the folding gap and then nuclear response on our part.
That was it.
So you had to play these little tiny things where your entire philosophy on one hand and the other hand is boiled down to who wins a chess match.
Remember Bobby Fischer and Kasparov.
I remember the Olympic win and so on, but when the Soviets would beat Americans, I was young obviously, I said, how can this be possible, you know?
And they won in basketball.
And the refs overturned a couple decisions.
It was a completely bad thing.
In any event, somebody said to me, that's because the Americans are amateurs and the people playing for the Soviet team in the Olympics are their professionals because they don't have professionals.
They're the best players in the country.
That gives me a little bit of comfort anyway.
But it's all a testament really to how well those deterrents worked.
Because they are an extremely aggressive society, and unless you really understand the Russian character, you'll never understand their actions.
And because of that, the Russians will never understand our character either.
And that's a theme I'd like to elaborate on if you've got a minute or two.
Oh, take your time.
You visited, and I mean, the only real chance I had to go to Russia when I was younger was there was a school trip.
To go to Russia back in the days, because this is in the late 70s or early 80s.
But, you know, again, growing up poor, it was like $1,400.
It's like might as well have been $14 billion.
You know, it's only so much a paper route can take you.
But if you've been and you want to talk more about the Russian character, please go ahead.
Just remember, your wife's in the room.
Yes, I haven't been.
But a lot of this I knew sort of intellectually before I got engaged.
And once I did, I began to get the emotional connection on it.
So just very quickly...
There's a lot of mirroring going on between both the Americans, let's say the West, and the Russians.
And we both expect that the other ones have the same motives as we do.
You'd think that diplomats who claim to be so smart would have figured this out by now.
But you can't really understand what the Russians did in Georgia and Ukraine and Crimea and all the rest of it.
You can't really understand it without understanding the psychological scar That having been invaded by the Nazis to the gates of Moscow, and then losing 20 million people, 20 million people to push them back out again.
Now, that alone is pretty traumatic to a national character, national memory.
But this is the second time this happened.
Napoleon did it 150 years earlier, took all the way to Moscow, burned Moscow.
So the Russian...
And the First World War was no picnic on the Russian front either.
Exactly.
So basically, the Russian sore spot, they're tender when it comes to buffer states around the West, because they've been invaded several times from the West, and they want states between them and what was formerly, you know, Western territories.
Now, because we don't know what it's like to have been invaded and have 20 million people killed, and God knows how many during Napoleon...
Because we don't have that, we have an entirely different mindset that the Russians don't understand.
They'll never understand.
They do not understand the fact that we don't want any territory.
They do not understand the fact that the West is not about taking countries.
If we wanted to take countries, we could certainly do it with this military.
They don't understand that we are not as paranoid about invasion as they are because they can't get into the fact that we've never been invaded.
We've got oceans The two biggest geographical features in the world are defending Canada and the United States, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
The War of 1812, slightly less bloodthirsty than the Napoleonic War.
Well, that was one of those cases where you miserable, bloodthirsty people Savages up in Canada came down and invaded the peaceful, gentle people of America.
On the plus side, after that, we did try and give up cannibalism as much as humanly possible, although it is challenging, because, of course, there are a fair number of chunky people in America who would go great with a barbecue sauce.
So it is a challenging transition, but we are, of course, continuing to work on it as a national agenda.
Many of us are stringier than we look, and it's going to take a lot of Worcestershire sauce for some of us.
A1 sauce, anyway.
But this is the thing, right?
We cannot emotionally connect to the Russians' need for a buffer state, their emotional need.
The practical need, the political need, taking another country, I'm not supporting that in any way.
I'm just talking about the underlying emotional psychology and the psychological tender areas.
They need a buffer because they've been invaded, and so that makes them very aggressive, especially around their borders.
Also, they realize, this is something I learned from my fiancée, They understand something that we also don't get here in the West, and that is that their country is surrounded by Western bases.
Surrounded.
There are NATO bases all throughout Europe.
There are NATO bases down into the Baltic areas.
There are NATO bases, obviously, in Alaska, just on the other side of Russia.
They are surrounded by enemy forces, and that makes them a little itchy, too.
And if it turned out that there were Soviet divisions and tactical nuclear weapons in Mexico, I don't want to say that I'm justifying in any way the things that Putin has done to independent countries.
But I am saying, if you don't understand the motivation, I don't want to say racial motivation, but the national memory of Russia, if you don't understand that, you'll never be able to work with them.
And likewise, they will not understand the fact that, no, we really genuinely don't want to take your country over.
Why would we?
We've got a great country right here.
There's a lot in there, and I would add sort of two points to that as well.
And the first, of course, is that even the revolution of 1917, it's the 100-year anniversary of arguably the most catastrophic revolution in history because of the number of domino states that fell under communism.
As a result, this was pretty much the first one to go.
And at one point, I mean, this is, you know, they say the old thing, the sun never set on the...
the british empire but there were times when the expansion of communism appeared a virtual certainty i mean there was a time when between a quarter and a third of the entire world's population was ground under the totalitarian heel of despotic communism and it had the aggression and the will and the power to to expand and arguably i mean a nuclear war sorry nuclear the The mutually assured destruction is maybe the only thing that stopped it.
And some of what McCarthy did in terms of the spying and impact using the US State Department as the leverage, as I said earlier, to get out.
So, for Russians as well, the 1917 revolution was not in many ways considered to be an organic, spontaneous revolution within Russia.
It was a geopolitical maneuver on the part of Germany to close off the Eastern Front.
Because when Americans came piling in with the Allies in France, when they joined the war in 1917, after Wilson said...
They could not conceivably fight a two-front war at that level, so they had to take out Russia from the war.
They shipped Lenin through Finland and armed him and so on.
This happens, of course, a lot with the Western powers.
Well, we're not going to invade your country.
But we're going to get someone in there who's going to be a puppet dictator, who's going to do our bidding and so on.
And so the fact that this revolution, this 70-year democytic revolution was imposed from external powers using external arms, external money from Germany and other countries was imposed upon Russia made it feel almost like communism in many ways.
It was an occupation of Russia as well in the same way that the Shah in Iran was considered to be a U.S. puppet and in other places around the world, U.S. installed puppets or whatever.
This was a German-installed puppet designed to take Russia out of the war and, of course, what happened was unbelievably brutal.
I mean if some dictatorship was imposed upon America by some space alien power or whatever and then proceeded to slaughter tens of millions of Americans, that would kind of stick like a pretty big fishbone in the craw of the national consciousness system.
That's number one.
And number two, which we can touch on as well, to your point about Russia being ringed by all of these giant military installations and NATO and so on, which was a fairly specifically anti-Russia alliance.
Well, I mean, we think of 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and what was the resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis?
What allowed there to be some face-saving?
Okay, we'll take our missiles out of Cuba.
If you take your giant-ass massive...
Continent-destroying missiles out of Turkey, which is right visible.
We can spit over the border and see those missiles.
So, again, America's like, oh no, there'll be giant missiles in Cuba, and that's very close to us.
And it's like, hello, we got Turkey, we got missiles, they're pointed right at Russia.
And this is not to make a moral equivalence between the two systems.
are massively pro-capitalist and horrendously anti or viciously anti-communist.
However, that still is a giant missile right on your doorstep pointed right at your cities.
So basically, I mean, I agree completely.
So, What we're saying is there was a pretty strong emotional justification for the worst and most brutal regime in history.
To do some of the things that it did.
We didn't like the idea of there being nuclear missiles in Cuba.
I remember people saying they're nine minute flight time away from Washington or something.
It's like, well, same for our missiles in Moscow.
But once the war was over, the Second World War was over, Stalin didn't just say, give me a little couple of buffer states.
Stalin wanted the whole world to become communist.
He was pumping so much money into revolutions that were not organic revolutions.
They weren't the people genuinely rising up.
So much money into agitation, and unfortunately, he and his successors poured a great deal of money and time and effort into the slow undermining of Western ideals.
And they've been very, very successful at that.
Very successful at that.
So these are not nice people, these Soviets, at all.
And because they're so paranoid, because they're so So absolutely wired about this thing emotionally.
I don't think they could be trusted.
They certainly needed to be contained with strength, that's for sure.
And we could do another whole hour on this, but to this day, I still don't understand why we didn't use nuclear weapons in Korea against military targets.
I don't understand why we did not do that.
The Russians had a couple of bombs.
We had scores and scores of them.
When we failed to stop them in Korea, That was the cue for Vietnam.
That was the cue for everything else, this proportionate response.
They invade and then we knock them back.
They invade and then we knock them back.
You've got military units in one of the most desolate places on the earth.
If you're ever going to use a nuclear weapon for anything, that's not a bad place to do it.
And I know that sounds like a nutty thing to say, but it was the beginning of this retreat from the West.
It was the beginning of this sense that, well, you know, who are we to say that we're better than someone else and so on.
And this unprovoked attack by the North Koreans and then another one by the Chinese.
And we basically said, well, we're going to respond appropriately.
What does that mean?
We didn't invade their countries.
What does that mean we're going to respond appropriately?
It means that we're not ready to go the distance to fight these people.
We're not ready to put everything on the line to fight these people.
And they got stronger and stronger and stronger because of it.
And we still see that problem today with radical Islam.
They're convinced that we will not defend ourselves.
Well, I mean, I don't know the answer to that, Bill, but I would say something like this if I were forced to regurgitate something, which is that...
The press was communist.
The press was socialist.
The press was heavily leftist.
And there was no capacity.
Whatever you decide to do as a leader is what you decide to do as a leader.
And you certainly have a bully pulpit as a president or as a chief of staff or whatever.
You have a way of getting them.
But if the press is heavily infiltrated by the left, then the press is going to re-spin everything to the point where your career is going to be over, you're going to be tied up in court forever, you may end up in jail, who knows what, right?
So the fact that you were fighting the real socialization was occurring in the culture wars in America, and it became very quickly after the Second World War, pretty much impossible to get a clear anti-communist message across to the American public because what would happen?
Well, I mean, the example of McCarthy was very instructive, you know, dragged into the Army McCarthy hearings, sued relentlessly, sued back relentlessly, wins defamation suits, it doesn't matter a damn thing, stressed, bullied, attacked.
They emptied every conceivable salvo against the man, and I would argue thus hastening his death in his 50s as the result of just endless stress and drinking and all of this kind of stuff.
So it was very, very hard to get any kind of clear...
I mean, these kinds of conversations couldn't occur, of course, back in the day.
You had to go through the press, and the press was so relentlessly on the left that I think it would have been reframed to the point where you could have ended up as a war criminal.
One of the things that's at least satisfying emotionally, even though it doesn't seem to have done much good practically, is since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have access to most of their internal records.
And at the time, the left said that the Rosenbergs were absolutely innocent.
They were just an innocent couple who had nothing to do with anything.
And this is murder, murder, murder.
And it's this red scare about nothing at all.
And Americans are paranoid.
And so it turns out the Rosenbergs were, in fact, key spies.
The same thing with Alger Hiss.
The same thing with all of these people.
There would be an accusation of Soviet involvement, communist involvement in American – I don't mean like peripherally.
I mean infiltration of the State Department, secrets being leaked to the Soviets all the time.
And every time somebody brought that up, you're right.
The left-wing press would say, oh, this is not us.
This is un-American.
Have you no decency, sir?
How dare you prosecute these people?
It just didn't happen.
Well, it turns out it did happen.
It did happen.
We know to the degree that it happened.
to be in a position now in the West where if somebody is opposing us, they have to be right.
And for the people who think on the left that there's some kind of human compassion, you know, because the left is always about, well, we need to take care of the sick and the poor and the old and the weak.
And like they have a monopoly on helping people when in general, they use these people as kind of crampons to climb up the ice wall of people's resistance to expanded state power.
They just use them as human shields for their nefarious goals for increasing political control over anything with a pulse and a hairdo.
And so...
For me, when you think of, in particular, the 1940s, 1950s, what was going on in the State Department with communist infiltration, again, since the Venona decrypts have come out in the 1990s, this is all very, very well confirmed, and you can check out the book Blacklisted by History for more on this.
It's an amazing, terrifying, exciting, like the best whodunit that's come out in many a decade.
Clearly, the Soviets were running spies in the State Department, and there were the China boys out there in China who were saying, oh, you know, this new guy, Chairman Mao, he's just a mild agrarian reformer.
This other guy, wow, Chiang Kai-shek, he's totally a bad guy.
He's a tyrant.
And they were making sure that the money was fueled, funneled into the coffers of the communists, and they were making sure that arms were not sent to Chiang Kai-shek.
And they basically put their fingers so much on the scale of the civil war that was going on in China that the communists were guaranteed to win.
This is the result of direct Soviet infiltration and other communist infiltration into the State Department using the power of the U.S. government as a giant lever to make sure that communists got into power.
Now, of course, as anybody knows who's read it, and there's a great book called Wild Swans about this, but what happened after Chairman Mao got into power is...
Truly, hell on earth.
I mean, in some ways, arguably worse than what happened in Russia, which still had some contact with the West and some remnants of the Enlightenment and so on.
I mean, good Lord.
I mean, the slaughterhouses, the murders, the starvation was absolutely astounding.
Tens of millions of people starved to death as the result of Mao saying, cities are bad.
Let's put everyone in the countryside who doesn't know how to farm.
And let's take away all the good farmland from the competent farmers and give it to idiots who are well politically connected.
And people were eating tree bark.
People were ripping open their pillows and eating the feathers inside.
They were eating the peelings of onions, you know, that thin papery skin that you get on the outside that Nancy Pelosi appears to be made of.
I mean, it is terrifying, terrifying.
And because it's ideological, because it's ideological, the degree to which they get in your head means that even surviving the physical ordeal renders you so turned inside out and upside down as a human being.
I mean, we see young kids these days going into these social justice warrior indoctrination camps, formerly known as Enlightenment Universities.
And they come out unrecognizable, like reprogrammed as former human beings and now as, you know, useful idiots for state power.
It's a thousand, thousand times worse of what goes on in the indoctrination camps, the killing fields kind of indoctrination camps in the Soviet Union.
And the fact that this is all you need to know about the left for me, the right is genuinely horrified and gets this information out as best they can.
The left suppresses it ruthlessly.
This is ideology that caused the death of 150 million people.
150 million people.
That's more than 20 holocausts.
I mean, if we talk about the Holocaust of the Jews and the gypsies and homosexuals in Nazi Germany, 20 times, and they will not talk about it.
That should be job one.
If you give a rat's ass about humanity in any way, shape, or form, job one should be figuring out how all that came about, and the left just continually bird dogs everyone in the opposite direction.
And I think that tells you all you need to know about the supposed compassion of the left.
Well, the Russians during the late 1920s and 30s launched a campaign against the Kulaks, which were peasants.
They were farmers, basically.
And a kulak, the word kulak means tight fist.
So this guy might be an excellent farmer and that means he might have an ox perhaps or maybe he hires one or two other peasants.
So these people were intentionally starved.
20, 30 million killed in the Ukraine and in parts of Russia.
You'd come into villages where nobody was there and just literally messages scrawled on the walls in blood, you know, that women were eating their children, this kind of thing.
And it's socialism.
It's collectivism that uses starvation as a weapon.
That kind of starvation doesn't happen if you leave people alone.
You have to have What you had.
In the Soviet Union, you had guys going in there.
You had the Cheka, which was a secret police, going in there and stealing all the grain from the people.
And the kulaks, this is never talked about.
The peasants rebelled against that Soviet power so much that they slaughtered almost all of their livestock in a space of about a week or something like 17 million horses or something like that killed because they weren't going to let them go to the communists.
And The problem with this whole thing is, you're right, everything is so one-sided.
There's a scene, I'm pretty sure it's in Bowling for Columbine, where you see nothing but B-52s, you know, when they're dropping bombs and you see explosions and stuff.
And Michael Moore is listing all the places where America's been at war, you know, since the Second World War.
And the problem with that is, Michael, is that the Russians started every one of them, the Soviets.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia, invasion of Hungary, invasion of Poland, invasion of South Korea, invasion of South Vietnam.
All of these things were launched by a Soviet aggression, responded to by Western military response, put back in this horrible bottle that they're in, and we get the blame for all of it.
The personal experience for growing up in the shadow of the Cold War is something that I kind of want to get on record.
I didn't have drills.
I know that there were drills in the States, whether because I was just floating between this, you know, the mothership and the colonies.
But I didn't have the drills.
But what I do remember very vividly was the movie The Day After.
You betcha.
That to me, I remember watching that, Bill, and I felt this...
Intense.
Nausea.
Rage.
Just rage at the idea that I live in a world.
This is long before I had any sort of political sensibilities or abstract arguments or anything like that.
I just felt a terrible sense of violation.
What the hell is wrong with the planet?
That people in another continent can push a button and vaporize everything around me for a thousand miles square.
That sense of the world is way out of control.
The powers that be don't know what the hell they're doing.
Something awful is going on.
Now, I found out later that, you know, this was a whole bunch of peaceniks and lefties and all that who created this movie to help further the course of, I guess, unilateral disarmament, I would guess.
But, you know, this is...
But at the time, I just...
I got so enraged.
I felt so angry that I lived in this world.
And this must be what people felt, of course, heading into the Second World War, men in particular, right?
You could be drafted at any time, but at least you had a pretty good chance of survival in that.
But this idea that...
Everything could just vanish.
You could all just be vaporized.
You could be studying for tests and then just be a nuclear shadow that nobody would ever identify.
That this is the world that I lived in.
And for people who've, I don't know, I remember many years later, I was on a business trip.
I went to the gym.
And after the gym, I was sitting in a hot tub and I was chatting with this young woman who was sitting there.
And we got into a conversation about fears that youth have.
And she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, Y2K. Y2K has got us really freaked out.
Yeah, I remember that.
And, you know, part of me is like, okay, I mean, I don't want to be that guy.
Kids these days, so easy, right?
But this was push-button, night and day, universal disintegration.
And, you know, the old, the living...
We'll envy the dead.
And there was another one, I can't remember what it was called, that went for like 13 or 14 years after the nuclear attack and so on.
Threads, maybe?
Threads?
Threads, yeah.
I think that was it.
And that was sort of even worse.
And it really was one of these situations where how the hell did we get here as a culture, as a society, as a planet, as a species?
How on earth did we ever get here?
And then, of course, realizing that There was no way in hell that any movie like this would ever be shown in the Soviet Union, and realizing that did not solve the problem.
In fact, it made it worse.
If you're only terrifying one side of the equation, you are weakening that side proportionately.
Yeah.
This is going to be hard for people who didn't go through the Cold War to understand because people older than us remember these days and we remember them as younger people.
But if you were born after, let's say, 1990, you will not Ever be able to understand what it was like to genuinely believe that you had no future.
Not just you.
That there wasn't going to be a future.
I remember this very, very clearly.
25,000 nuclear weapons on each side.
Hair trigger things.
What was that?
Doomsday clock.
Now it's a two minutes to midnight.
It was almost like 13 seconds.
That was on the bulletin of the atomic scientists on the magazine.
13 seconds to midnight.
One second to midnight.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
I'll really work hard on the algebra exam.
Yeah.
I did not, for most of my teenage years and into my 20s, I did not expect there to be a future.
And that was a weight that we all carried.
We weren't really aware of it all the time, but I know it was real.
And the reason I couldn't know it was real, because I remember two instances during the Cold War very clearly that made me, actually gave me a chance to inhale.
One of them was, what was, I know what the second one was, hang on a second.
Well, the second one was, when I saw the flag of the Soviet Union come down over the Kremlin and be replaced by the white, blue, and red flag of Russia, I remember thinking, oh my god.
And I remember the other one, too.
Somewhere around that time, there was an official statement made by Russia saying that we were no longer targeting American cities.
Now, that's probably nonsense.
I mean, You've got to target something.
You're not just going to launch them and have them come down.
But they basically said, we're no longer targeting American cities.
And I remember the feeling, like, we may actually survive this after all.
We may actually survive it.
And yeah, the day after scared the bejesus out of me.
It scared the bejesus out of everybody.
The people who were making that movie were part of the nuclear freeze movement.
They had a political agenda.
But with that said...
I don't think there was too much exaggeration in that story.
You know, a 50,000 warhead exchange of hydrogen weapons is not a good thing at all for anybody.
And it didn't happen.
And it came really close to happening.
Do you ever hear about the story in 1987 or something, somewhere in there?
About the Russian commander?
Yeah, he was ordered.
He was ordered to launch, wasn't he?
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
So he's running a missile...
I forget what the year was, somewhere like 1987.
And on his radar, he sees incoming American missiles.
He sees them on the radar track.
They're coming in.
And he had orders that we do not wait for them to impact because they're going to take out our missiles.
We launch on the warning.
When we see them, we launch.
And so everybody's gearing up.
They've got, what, four or five minutes, maybe six minutes to make a decision on this.
And this one individual Russian colonel or general, one man, basically said, I am not going to launch these missiles until I know that these things are real.
And obviously, as it turned out, it was a glitch.
It was a simulation glitch.
But if that had been a different individual there, Russia would have launched a retaliatory strike of what?
10,000 hydrogen weapons?
Oh, it was a mistake.
Well, you know, that kind of thing made your blood run cold.
And yet at the same time, you know, There were, in fact, extremely effective safeguards on the idea of one lunatic pushing the button.
Dr.
Strangelove is a great movie, but I don't know if you've ever seen a movie called Failsafe, which is basically Dr.
Strangelove without the humor.
It's a profoundly good movie.
One bomber doesn't get the recall.
American bomber goes out to the entry point, turns around, all the rest of them turn around.
This one has a mechanical problem with the radio, doesn't get the recall signal.
So they're looking at these identifications, and it's, yeah, this is a genuine code.
We're going to go and bomb this nuclear site.
And it turns out they do bomb this nuclear site.
And just to give you an idea of the flavor of the times, for those of you who don't remember it, basically what happened was this.
This American bomber was getting through, and it was going to hit Moscow.
And the president is talking to the Soviet premier.
It's a serious movie, not like Doctor Strangelove.
Failsafe, it's called.
And And he says, alright, I have the American ambassador on the other line.
And he covers up the phone and he says, what's going to happen?
And the military guy says, when that bomb comes off of that bomber, it's going to vaporize the entire southwestern side of the city.
And what you'll hear is a tone when the radio melts.
Okay.
So you can hear this guy.
He's got death in his voice.
You can hear him.
Just he's coming and talking on the phone.
He says, okay, well, we're all here.
I can see all kinds of anti-aircraft firing.
There's a glow in the east.
So in that movie, the president decides that he has to bomb New York or else there's going to be a nuclear exchange of, you know, cataclysmic proportions.
You grow up on a diet of this kind of thing, and it'll ruin your very best Saturday.
And I've heard stories of this, of course, from the Second World War, and as far as sort of imminent danger staring down the barrel of a gun, there's no comparison.
But the comparisons, I think, are useful to make, because a soldier in the Second World War was fighting a unified battle against an identified evil in protection of a homeland that would survive.
And he had a chance to influence the outcome, however small.
He could do something.
Yeah, that's right.
His heroics might make the difference in a battlefield.
The battle might make a difference in the war.
In the Cold War, it just wasn't that.
There was literally nothing you could do.
If other people's decisions went a certain way, you would simply just disappear.
And everyone, everything.
We can fight for a civilization that can survive, but the idea that not just our civilization, but civilization and in fact the giant random experiment called life as a whole of the planet might be entirely ended.
Yeah, it's a little tough to avoid a certain amount of hedonistic nihilism when you're young in that kind of environment.
You grow up with it.
You grew up with a sense that at any moment, it's not just that you might die.
That's the kind of thing that people can handle because it is a manageable fear, your own death.
It's very different to have the strong sense that everybody and everything is going to die and you just don't know when.
It's just a matter of time.
That was what I remember about being a kid during the Cold War.
There was that sense that there's no point in planning on what I'm going to do when I get out of college.
We're not going to make it until I get out of college.
And then as we got into the 90s, late 80s, I saw some signs of easing and Gorbachev, you know, was a big relief for me in a bunch of ways.
Until he was kidnapped.
And then that was a pretty – I was out visiting friends in Vancouver that weekend and I was like, okay, I guess we're going to sit by the radio for a while and see if all the old theaters are going to come back.
I was such an idiot in those days that when the Reykjavik conference was with Reagan and Gorbachev, and it looked like we had pretty much nuclear disarmament agreement on the table, but the US had to give up Star Wars.
And Reagan wouldn't do it.
He walked out without an agreement.
I remember thinking that was probably the last chance that we had.
What I didn't realize was that Reagan understood very well.
He had a very good briefing on the Soviets, and he understood that the Soviets could manufacture such a quantity of weapons that they could cause...
Even if they didn't go with nuclear weapons, they could manufacture so many things.
20 aircraft fighters for one of ours, ours are much better, but 20 to one.
Lenin said, you know, quantity has a quality all its own.
So Reagan understood that you couldn't beat the Soviets on the military field, but you could beat them on the economic field.
And if we were to go into a program that was going to cost so much money that the Soviets simply would have to put everything on the table into defense in order to stay current with us, that was a gamble that he took, and I think that was the gamble that brought them down.
I think if he'd made a deal with them, there's a chance they'd still be here today.
And the...
What I've read about with the Second World War as well was people forget just how hedonistic – it's hard to say hedonism.
You know, it's sort of like saying, well, okay, so if you have three months to live and you have a million dollars, what's your saving plan going to be?
Well, it's not going to be much.
You're going to go out and indulge every fantasy and cross everything off on your bucket list.
And this was the case for me.
Like when I was looking back on my behavior as a teenager – There was a kind of live for the day.
Like, I'd go to nightclubs, I'd dance all night, I'd drink, I'd sleep around, I'd have girlfriends.
And it was just like, well, why not?
Why not indulge my senses?
Because...
You're not going to make it anyway.
Well, the odds are not good.
And the fear...
It was constant.
I mean, again, I don't want to sort of diss the younger folk, but global warming?
Give me a fucking break.
Global warming.
Oh no, the temperature's going to be maybe a few degrees higher in 100 years.
Hey, you know what we were worried about?
The temperature being about surface of the sun any moment.
It's a little bit more intense.
You worried about the oceans going up three?
We were worried about the oceans being vaporized and us being blown into space like a puff of a candle.
And it was constant, this fear.
As you say, there's three minutes to midnight and the Soviets are doing this and there's proxy one.
It could go hot any moment.
But make sure you study for that algebra test.
I don't want to sound like I was hating math on it.
But a lot of the decisions that formed me during this time period...
We're based upon this end-time scenario, and people who believe that the end times from a theological perspective are imminent still got nothing on this as far as everything in society telling you you are about to vanish, and you won't even be remembered because there won't be any minds left with the capacity to retain.
That's right.
And I think the only thing that's happened since the end of the Cold War that even approaches that, and it doesn't come very close, but the only thing that I can remember that approaches that level of kind of just constant underground fear was when AIDS was really, really starting to run loose.
And everybody believed that anybody, any heterosexual couple, homosexual couple, anybody could get AIDS.
And if you ever slept with anybody without a condom, then it was pretty much certain that you're going to die.
And that period there of about three or four years was just, you could just feel this fear, just this fear out there among everybody.
But that I don't think was even close.
It was still actionable.
Yes, it was actionable.
In other words, you could get tested.
And if you were negative, you could be absolutely 100% certain that you at least had a pathway to never getting AIDS if it was that important to you, right?
I mean, if you have a test and you're negative and then you just realize, okay, it's condoms now from now on or whatever, you're not going to get AIDS.
Turns out that in virtually every heterosexual relationship, you weren't going to get AIDS anyway, but that's a whole different story.
It was a kind of a terror.
And when we talk about things like the fear of the AIDS virus, we talk about the fear of the Cold War, it's very difficult for us to imagine what it must be like for an entire population to go through 30 years of going to sleep at night, listening for the sound of a car to come in an apartment complex and We're good to
and closer and closer to your floor, and then it passes your floor and keeps on going, and it stops maybe two floors higher, and you breathe for the first time in 10 minutes, and every single night, somebody's going to come up that elevator, and you know it's It's not an abstract threat.
This is things that happen.
This has just happened to people.
You can accomplish a tremendous amount of control if you have absolute terror over people, but again, what you're creating is a slave state, and what you're going to get out of it are slaves, and you are not going to make anything worthwhile to In that culture,
all you're going to do is kill your best people and terrorize everybody else and leave, in the case of Russia, leave them so psychologically wounded that it's going to take hundreds of years, if at all, for them to recover to some kind of psychological parity with people who haven't had their entire history of torture and so on.
And the last thing I'll say on this, Stephan, is One of the things that's so ironic about this was the communists launched the revolution because of all the brutality of the Tsar, right?
And Nicholas II, bloody Nicholas and so on.
And what everybody who went to the gulags basically said was the Tsar's prisons were resorts compared to what the Bolsheviks did.
Resorts.
And what did they have when they first, sorry to interrupt, but when they first broke into the Tsar's prisons, what did they find, 16 political prisoners?
That's like 20 minutes entry into the gulag.
It was like a dozen or 16 political prisoners in the entire country.
In order to be executed under the czar, you had a pretty compelling evidence that you had a bomb or a gun and you were going to kill either the czar or one of his ministers.
In the days of the Great Terror, somebody could just point at you and you would just be taken out.
And you would still under the czar.
You got a defense lawyer.
You had a law.
You had trials.
Like not kangaroo courts but actual trials.
And the czar often forgave people if they basically acknowledged their – confessed and showed atonement.
Strangely enough, one person who didn't was Lenin's older brother, Lenin.
Lenin's older brother was a bomb-making revolutionary, and he was caught.
And he was told, if you recant and if you apologize, basically, then we'll give you 25 years.
But if you don't, we'll hang you.
And he wouldn't do it.
So they hung him.
And that's what changed Vladimir Lenin's life, and he became a revolutionary because of that act.
So you want to talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
I mean, the The era of the Tsars was paradise compared to what these Bolsheviks did.
They're the worst people that ever lived.
And they managed to control half of the world through fear and terror.
And I do not think that would have lasted that long in the United States.
I don't think it will come to the United States.
You mentioned in the beginning that if a group of aliens came down and started killing 10 million of us, it would make us scared.
It would make me scared, too.
We'd fight back.
We have weapons.
You know, we would fight back.
We wouldn't just take it.
And it's a different kind of character.
It's not to say the Russians aren't courageous.
The Russians in the Second War were the most courageous soldiers maybe of all time.
But there is a sense of docility that comes from an entire group of people who've had all of the initiative murdered out of them.
Well, I mean, and of course, they went from essentially a medieval slash slavery form of social organization under serfdom to a brief flowering of liberty, which often happens right before totalitarianism.
That's right.
Me, as well.
It's one of these, you get used to carrying a load, right?
I mean, let's say somebody straps a backpack with 50 pounds on it.
You know, after a while, you're like, backpack?
What backpack?
That's right.
You don't notice it until you take it off.
I remember very, very clearly, you know, there's a great line from an old John Denver song.
He was born in the winter of his 27th year.
And I remember when I first read the magazine, I was sitting on a bed in Apartment in Montreal, I was going to theatre school, and I was reading a magazine about the fall of the wall.
And the backpack fell away.
And I just wept.
Like, I just wept.
And I felt born...
In that time, I felt born in the reading of that.
I felt like my life could begin.
Now, I didn't have to be a random, in pursuit of hedonism of the moment materialist.
I could now have, in a sense, a soul.
I could have choice.
I could have free will.
Free will under the shadow of imminent dissolution, not just of you or your loved ones, but everything in the universe that exists for man.
You can't plan.
You can't be.
You can't have a future.
It's all about the, for me at least, it was about the hedonism at the moment.
That was when I came to be as I am now.
That is when I went from an animal state to a human state, if that makes any sense.
Because before, it was just avoiding the giant footfalls of imminent dissolution.
And then I finally evolved in that moment to the point where I could have a life, I could plan, I could have a future.
I didn't have to pursue the hedonism at the moment.
I could be human for the first time that I could remember after I had found out about these disasters.
I was humming Rocky Mountain High to myself this morning for the first time in 20 years, so that's really quite a coincidence, honestly.
Yeah, it turns out that if you actually think there might be an alternate future for you other than being radioactive dust in the stratosphere, You behave differently.
There's that old song.
It's really true.
It's nothing like being hanged in the morning to concentrate the mind, right?
I mean, your entire behaviors and the behaviors of your entire society will be different if you believe you're about to be condemned.
And I suspect it's not something I want to find out for myself, mind you.
But I suspect probably the greatest joy in the world is the joy of being condemned to death and then suddenly having your sentence either commuted or being pardoned.
That's the Dostoevsky moment, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
And they basically took him out to hang him, and then at the last second, they stopped or shoot him, one or the other.
But in any event, that moment is absolutely transcendental.
And I know exactly what you're talking about.
It didn't happen to me all at once, but there was that moment of, oh, God, you know what?
We...
I may live to be 30, you know?
I may even live to be older than 30.
And it's interesting to me how the history both in Eastern Europe and in Russia of subjugation under totalitarianism, you can say, well, of course, it scarred them and gave them PTSD, which I'm sure is absolutely true.
But dammit, Bill, it also seems to have given them a particular inoculation against the migrant crisis that is pretty enviable in many ways.
And even after the tragedies of communism in the 20th century, they may have significantly more longevity and There's a lot of truth to that.
You can be a lot tougher when your life has to be tough.
I think a part of it, too, is the trajectory of Russia today.
Russia's on the rebound.
I can imagine as an American what it would have been like to basically lose to the Soviets without a nuclear war or anything, just to have the country be taken over by communists and go from living in these nice places to these horrible flats.
I can just barely imagine what it would like for America to become a second or a third-rate power and a laughingstock, and our former enemies are just riding high on the hog.
And then to have somebody come along and say, no, no, no, no, no, no.
This is the United States of America.
We're the greatest people in the world, and we're going to get back on this horse, and we're going to do it again.
So that's what Putin is to the Russian people.
My fiancée said the most wonderful thing about him.
I've never heard a better description than this.
I said, well, it seems at least like Putin loves Russia.
And she said, oh, yeah, Putin loves Russia.
He just doesn't care about the Russian people.
And I thought, that's it, isn't it?
That Putin is about the idea of Russia.
He's about the image of Russia.
He's about Russian greatness.
And if he has to make everybody's lives miserable to get there, then that's what he'll do.
But he's no comparison to the Bolsheviks.
He can't touch those people.
So my final point, I'll give you the last word, but my final point was another thing that happened for me, Bill, was I began to be A little bit skeptical about some of the impugned expertise and competence within the CIA and other places that were supposed to be tracking all of this stuff in the world.
Because I remember, I remember, it was not long before the fall of Russia when reports were all over in the newspaper that the...
The CIA and other groups, oh, Russia's never been stronger.
They're solid financially.
They're doing very well.
You know, we're going to have to live with them for another 100 years at least and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
I remember thinking, okay, they're either completely compromised as an agency or an organization.
And this wasn't just true of spies in America, but spies, I mean, it wasn't like there was – Everyone except the CIA was saying that it's about to fall.
But I do remember thinking, okay, they're either completely compromised or completely incompetent.
How could they get it so wrong?
They either don't have anyone in the inside, in which case they don't really have a job.
They're just making things up.
Or they have people in the inside feeding them bad information and they don't know or care about the difference.
Or they have people on the inside feeding them good information, but it's going through a very corrupt agency before it gets out to the mainstream media.
I mean, there was just no way...
To look at the immense and huge investment in espionage and spying and all of this kind of stuff that the West had spent money on, that got it so completely and totally wrong.
I don't recall any even debate about the fragility of the Soviet economy, even though von Mises and Rand and other economists had been pointing out The unsustainability of central planning, particularly the absence of prices, means no efficient allocation and so on.
So you had a country that was founded on ridiculously inept economic principles that was rapidly destroying its own human capital physically and financial capital in terms of the massive arms race and space race and so on that was going on.
So you had economists all over the place saying, oh yeah, no, it's completely unsustainable and you have very clear evidence after Khrushchev came out with the cult of personality from Stalin and And the death camps and the gulags and so on.
And yet all of the spies were saying, oh yeah, these guys are solid as a rock.
They're going to be around forever.
And it's just like, I just remember thinking, ah, it was one of the first big sort of chips away in my faith in the expertise of experts, if that makes any sense.
It does.
The two things that just nobody saw coming was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the internet.
Nobody saw those things coming at all.
I suspect the reason nobody saw the collapse of the Soviet Union was because the CIA was so busy counting tanks and airplanes and troops and missiles and so on that they weren't able to measure the inside of the Russian heart, which by 1990, 89 or 90, was so...
Not just discouraged with communism.
They weren't just angry with communism.
They weren't even just laughing at communism.
They were just resigned.
So I'll close you on a story my fiancé told me last night.
It just made me laugh and laugh.
This is an old Russian story, and it's a story about the superiority of American culture.
They used to tell these jokes all the time.
It's probably not going to make anybody else laugh like hell.
So there's this Russian farmer, and he's a peasant, and he's somehow managed to get permission to go to America.
And America, everything American is interesting to the Russians in the 50s and 60s.
He can't get enough of it.
So this Russian farmer comes to America.
He spends a couple of months here, and he comes back to Russia, and he's chewing like this.
He sees all his friends.
He's chewing.
And they all go, oh my god, oh my god, is that chewing gum?
And he goes, no, I'm washing my socks.
Wow.
Hey, I've been a bachelor.
I think we've all been there.
Me too.
And that's it.
It's that sense of the disconnect between being told that the West was the enemy by people you no longer had any faith in and then an understanding that every single regular person in the world could not get enough of this stuff and every single one of them would move there if they could.
Oh, let's see.
My favorite, shortest joke about Soviet era, Russia, was asking a Soviet kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?
And he says, a foreigner.
Thanks, everyone, so much.
It was really great chatting with you, Bill.
I just want to remind people, go to BillWhittle.com and YouTube.com forward slash BillWhittle channel.
