4077 The Truth About The North/South Korea Peace Summit
While President Donald Trump's "fire and fury" comments sparked mainstream media proclamations about the President's volatility and irrationality - the staements have had the desired effect. North Korea's Kim Jong Un and South Korea's Moon Jae-in recently held a historic Korea Peace Summit to discuss formally ending the Korean War and denuclearizing the peninsula.Michael Malice is a writer, television commentator, the author of many books including “Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il” and the host of "YOUR WELCOME" with Michael Malice on Compound Media. Website: http://www.michaelmalice.comCompound Media: http://www.compoundmedia.comBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/michael-maliceFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/michaelmaliceTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/michaelmaliceYour 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
Hope you're doing well. We're here with a good friend, Michael Malice.
He's a writer, television commentator, the author of many books, including this apt one, Dear Reader, the Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il.
And he's the host of You're Welcome.
don't even think of putting an apostrophe in there with Michael Malice on Compound Media.
The website is michaelmalice.com and compoundmedia.com.
I guess the only one that isn't named is if he was a Bond villain.
And thanks so much for your time today.
We're going to talk all things North Korea because it seems like the element of doom has risen slightly from the But, as you all want to do, let's not get our hopes up too high.
Where do you see things sitting at the moment?
I'm always hopeful when there's any even visuals of peace.
You know, the images that you saw and we all saw at the DMZ were certainly heartening.
We're certainly the first if peace and some kind of dismantling of this regime would happen.
This is kind of what it would look like.
That said, you know what, I tell everyone, all my friends who are Trump fans, remember when Hillary Clinton tweeted out happy birthday to this future president?
We haven't had one camp closed down.
We haven't had one person freed.
We haven't had one missile taken apart.
So, yes, there's absolutely reason for optimism, and this is wonderful, but the idea that Trump should get the Peace Prize, or either the Korean leader should get the Peace Prize, let's take a deep breath, because remember what happened with Arafat in the 90s, of course.
And it's like I took my ball off the moment, and everything had changed.
It's like, we're going to nuke Gaum.
I'm going to kill my family members.
It's like, now I'm a best friend.
Everything's going to be wonderful. We're brothers.
And it's like... I think I dated someone like that in my early 20s, and it was quite a rollercoaster, let me tell you.
So what changed?
I mean, this isolationist strategy, this negotiation, Trump saying, be my friend.
I mean, like, what switch may have flipped that even gives us the possibility of optimism here?
Right. So what we know that hasn't switched is this idea that Kim Jong-il woke up, maybe, like, even just Scrooge and had been visited by the ghosts of Korea past, Korea future, and Korea present.
That would be a long night. Let me put it to you that way.
One ghost a minute, that's infinity.
Yeah. And he's like, oh, wait a minute.
What have I been doing? Genocide is wrong.
I should be friends with people.
No, we know that that didn't happen.
And we know that this, you know, dictator, you know, he recently killed his own brother.
He killed his uncle when he first stepped foot into power and to this day, you know, maintains using food as a mechanism of social control.
What we don't know is what happened behind the scenes.
And there's several possible scenarios.
First of all, what is without dispute is that President Trump made this a huge priority internationally.
far more than Obama or even President Bush did.
It was one of the first things he was talking about.
I believe the Chinese president was the first one who visited President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
They were explicitly talking about North Korea.
He was talking about President Abe, with the South Korean President Moon, and the State of the Union.
I got into it a little bit with Ann Coulter on Twitter because a lot of the State of the Union was about North Korea, where we had that refugee who had the crutch waving it from the stands.
So he clearly sees this as an opportunity for him to use his power as the President of the United States to effect change and make the world a better place.
At the same time, he has to deal behind the scenes with China and Japan and South Korea.
And the point I made, which I know you agree with completely, is if we're using some kind of backdoors diplomacy to force him to do what he doesn't want to do through machinations, which I'm perfectly fine with.
I have no problem with someone putting bold this guy.
If publicly he has to be a happy-go-lucky You know, warrior of peace and safe face, fine.
As long as he does the right thing, I don't care if he tries to pretend that he's this big humanitarian.
If people have to save face in order to save lives, that's not really that much of a juggle.
So, that seemed to be a long way of saying, what happened?
We don't know, really. Because, I mean, it seemed to just pop out of nowhere.
Like, I mean, this is something that, I mean, people who are 70 years old were born when this war started.
This has been going on forever.
This is like the length of the Soviet Empire.
Almost. This is a very big, long, intractable conflict, which has, I think in many ways, just been getting worse as the two countries have divided in terms of the directions, the freedoms, the economic productivity that's been going on.
And of course, the longer a country rests in this kind of stew of trauma, the more brutalized the population, the harder it is.
has been enormous.
There has been, of course, as you know, fits and starts of progress in the past.
There was under Bush, it went further back.
It's sort of like every time they get the PLO to shake hands with somebody in Israel, it's like, woohoo, it's all solved.
And then it kind of all falls apart.
So do you think it's as different from false starts in the past and why?
It is different.
And here's certain things that we know that are demonstrably different.
First of all, the fact that Kim Jong-un is willing to leave the country and meet on foreign soil is very, very different.
Because Kim Jong-un, and I talk about this in my book, Dear Reader, Kim Jong-un boasted, he said, why do I need to leave North Korea?
Everyone comes here. You know, the Chinese went there, Japanese went there, South Korean president went there.
President Clinton went there.
President Carter went there, you know, in the 90s to try to negotiate a deal.
So, you know, in a sense, this is like the mafia where the guy sits at the big table and everyone comes to his table, shake his hand.
He's not the one standing up.
So the fact that he's willing to leave the country is a major change.
The fact that his sister is taking prominence and his wife are taking prominence in North Korean propaganda is also a major change because this is a humanization.
So in the past, Kim Jong-il You know, it was regarded as this kind of deity figure.
It was not known that he had, you know, any kind of family or children.
He wasn't thought of in that way.
The metaphor I always use is it's like we think of Uncle Sam.
We don't think of him as having a house and kids.
He's just kind of floating around doing what's right for the nation.
So this is a big step forward in terms of not regarding him as some kind of superhuman deity.
So this is a step back for him as well.
And the fact that publicly they are dropping all sorts of demands that they've had for decades Which demands, frankly, I don't blame them for having the idea of let's get American troops off South Korean soil.
Well, I would certainly have that as a precondition for disarmament.
I know all the listeners, you know, with regards to the Second Amendment, the idea that, well, I'm just going to hand over my guns and trust the US federal government to protect me, that's not something that they would agree with.
So why would they expect Kim Jong-un, who has a much worse relationship with Washington than anyone here, why would they expect him to think any differently?
Oh, the whole disarmament plea has nothing left in the chamber.
I mean, after you look at people like Saddam Hussein, after you look at the Libyan president, after you look at what they're trying to do with Bashar al-Assad, the idea is like, disarm and everything will be fine.
Nobody believes that anymore.
In fact, it's a suicide mission to disarm internationally in the face of US aggression and manipulation.
So I think that is no longer believable.
Can I make one point, Stefan?
I was very delighted.
So when I first started working in this space, the argument out there always was, oh, the North Koreans are crazy.
We don't know what they're going to do. They're going to blow up everyone.
And now, even on the right, you know, in the 90s, the idea that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden could have goals and are kind of rational actors in their own depravity...
This would be heresy because the idea is if you're trying to understand how they think, you're saying that they're telling the truth and you're siding with them.
Now, increasingly on the right, I'm delighted to find people.
I was on Breitbart last week where people are like, wait a minute.
Why would he disarm?
Look what happened in Syria.
You know, look what – Qaddafi was not just killed.
He was sodomized to death.
Why would he do this?
So the fact that the US right wing is increasingly understanding that they're acting in accordance with their own interests and analyzing things from that perspective Is also a huge step forward in terms of fighting propaganda, because it's a lot easier to say, this person's a crazy person who's about to nuke Seoul, as opposed to, okay, this is an evil villain, and how do we manipulate him to get the result we want?
Well, I think you have had a lot to do with that in terms of pointing out repeatedly that evil is different from crazy.
People love to conflate evil with crazy.
Like, you know, whenever there's a terrorist attack in Europe or other places, they say, oh, it's a mental health issue.
And it's like, well, there are lots of people who are crazy.
They're not mowing down people in trucks or stabbing people to death in nightclubs.
But this idea that there's evil that is not insane is really, really important because if you think your opponent is crazy, it actually gives you license to be crazy.
They're so unpredictable. They're so random that anything we do is going to be sane.
It is actually a way of uncorking your own crazy rather than acting in a rational context.
And let me remember very clearly, during the 2000s, the argument was, not only does Saddam have WMDs, he's about to launch them imminently.
And these two sentiments were regarded as synonymous.
And they're not synonymous whatsoever.
There are many, many countries around the world who have WMDs, other than apparently or supposedly Assad.
None of them are launching them.
And both Pakistan and India have nukes pointing at each other.
They've had for quite a while. They're not launching them.
So the idea that these two things that, oh, this person has You know, this person is crazy and he's going to attack imminently.
I think that's fallen away from the consciousness other than with, you know, people like Bill Kristol and his ilk.
Well, and of course, Americans, particularly on the right, would never accept the argument, well, you have a gun, obviously, you're going to shoot someone.
The only reason you'd have a gun is to just go and shoot someone randomly.
They would say, no, no, no, the gun is to make sure that I don't get aggressed against.
And given the US history, particularly post Second World War, It's not a crazy fear to think that you need some sort of deterrence against US imperialism.
And it's also kind of funny because North Korea has also explicitly said that they're going to attack Guam.
They said they're going to nuke us.
And enough people are like, all right, we know this is an empty threat.
And that is kind of a big deal because not that long ago, I'm sure you remember, where the idea of any country would threaten the US, immediately, we have to strike.
I mean, they said it. And now there's much of a grain of salt.
Like, you know what? Let's look at war as a last resort as opposed to our first priority.
Because, you know, not only is war horrible for the victim, it's also the costs for us are going to be enormous as well, both in terms of people lost, cost of money, and international relations.
Right. Here's another possibility.
I'll just sort of bat this around.
Let me know what you think, Mike. The US has – I don't know how to put this as nicely as possible.
Okay, I won't. The US has a long history of working with dictatorships that are absolutely brutal to their own population.
Yes. And so the idea that the US is some sort of big moral force is pretty wild to me.
I mean, they're selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to a crazy theocratic dictatorship like Saudi Arabia, where what is it?
Some guy got a thousand lashes for even remotely suggesting that women should be allowed to drive.
Now women are allowed to drive. I mean, and you get people thrown in jail for skeptical atheist blogs and I mean, just crazy, crazy stuff, complete dictatorship.
And China, of course, is brutal towards its own population in many ways.
And the US is like, yeah, we'd love to work with you.
Let's sit down and hammer out a trade deal from usual benefit.
And so I guess the argument could be floating towards Kim Jong-un is that, you know, not so explicit.
You can be evil, but don't be evil plus random.
You know, be predictable evil and the US will be more than happy to To work with you.
And so maybe this is just a different strategy that he may be getting or even explicitly be getting from other dictatorial government leaders around the world saying, no, they'll work with you.
Just, you know, maybe dial back the Guam thing a bit.
And you get to look like the good guy.
Yeah. On the public's edge.
And let me just back up what you said.
One of the jokes that's in my book is, you know, Kim Jong-il says after World War II, the U.S. imperialists, that's us, installed an evil strongman in Sigmund Rhee.
But in the North, you know, Kim Il-sung, the great leader, was, you know, voted in through a democratic process.
But South Korea was a dictatorship for quite a long time.
In the late 70s or early 80s, there was even a kind of a Tiananmen Square uprising that was put down with college students, that was put down with great brutality.
And the recent President Park, South Korea's first female president, who was recently sentenced to jail, she's their version of Hillary Clinton, Her father was a brutal dictator.
I mean, there are many crazy things.
The first lady was assassinated at one point.
The president of South Korea was assassinated another time by the head of the South Korean CIA. So it was very brutal.
And North Korea used this very effectively in their propaganda.
And they point out, look, how are you criticizing us?
When this guy is simply a puppet of the U.S. imperialists and there was a lot of truth to that.
After Afghanistan, I mean certainly we're not just going to – hey, let's have a big vote and put in whoever we want and we came in here and did a lot of war and whatever the vote results in, we're going to be fine with it.
That's not how it worked out. And I think because, as you've pointed out, is that Kim Jong-un is different from his father.
He loves the West.
He appreciates technology.
He's, of course, I assume, got internet access, the only guy.
And he's traveled.
He was educated outside of North Korea and so on.
And so... It's pretty hard to miss the difference between where you visited and the country that you have.
If there's a way, and I think this is sort of the fantasy of all dictators, which is to say, if there's a way for me to get from where I am to, I don't know, Singapore, maybe Hong Kong in terms of economic growth, but without being deposed, without being slaughtered, without losing power...
That's kind of tempting.
And if there's a way to give him that yellow brick road towards some liberalization of the economy, you know, Glasnost style under Gorbachev and so on, if there's a way to give him that path...
That he can begin to liberalize without feeling, well, the next thing you do is he's going to get sodomized, as you pointed out, like Gaddafi with bayonets up his butt.
That seems like something that, okay, you get more money, you get more power, you get more prestige, you get more influence in the world stage.
There's got to be a way.
Yeah, he's evil for sure.
Unadulterated, you know, Pillsbury doughboy filled with Satan juice kind of evil.
But if there's a path to lure him with the bright lights of the shining city of more free markets, man, I mean, There's a lot to be said for that in terms of transitioning out of dictatorship.
Oh, I agree with you, but this is where the economic argument, of course, comes in, which is it's very, very hard to have economic dictatorship and not social dictatorship because once those people have access to information and they're looking at South Korea or China and they don't have food, it's a lot harder to be like, wait, why are we keeping you in power again?
And at the same time, there's so much blood on the hands of these leaders, specifically the North Korean leaders, that there are many people who are like, my father starved because of you for no reason.
And the idea that I'm just going to sit here and shake your hand, I mean, all it's going to take is one or two nuts, or even within his inner circle, you know, when these things start falling apart.
So the thing is, it becomes this torrent once they lose their hold on the gun.
It's kind of like what's that metaphor about riding a tiger, grabbing a tiger by the tail?
The problem is you don't want to let go.
That's when it gets tricky. That's the situation.
Even Gorbachev is another example.
He lost his hold on power.
He had a happy ending, but there was a coup attempt on him at a certain point.
I agree with you completely.
If there could be liberalization and they become a Singapore model, I'd be perfectly fine with that.
But once you take away the control of the population and the brutality, You're also taking away a large element of their fear.
And if they don't fear you, someone is going to get the right idea and be like, wait a minute, this guy is Ceausescu and he should be taken out and all of his forces with him.
But China's got some, I mean, I know that the Chinese economic growth is a lot of, you know, we built a bridge to nowhere, we built a shining city in a mine, just to consume resources, but they're getting, you know, north of 7% economic growth, and they have a fairly authoritarian system.
So I may be transitioning more towards that kind of stuff where you're liberalizing the free market.
But still, there's a lot of social control.
Here's the difference between North Korea and China, because that's a very, very good question.
So with China, when they liberalized, I think it was in the 70s, Mao's honor and his status in the country was diminished.
It was very much in many ways a repudiation And even though he's still regarded as the father, he's not drawn with, you know, sunlight coming out from his body and everyone looking at him in awe as was the law, you know, when he was in charge.
Kim Jong-un is a direct descendant of the great leader Kim Il-sung.
This isn't someone, you know, like Mike Pence or, you know, Pelosi from differing parties.
The whole point of his having a legal right to be the leader of North Korea is he has the Mount Paektu bloodline, that he's a direct, and only someone of the Mount Paektu bloodline can be the leader.
That's why he had to have his Yeah, even if he wanted to, I suppose, Throw Kim Il-sung under the bus.
You know, he has his hair cut specifically to look like his grandfather and to harken back to those days.
He still wears those suits just like his grandfather did.
So that would really be a tough nut for him to swallow.
Yeah, I mean, it always comes down to me, to the sort of question, this is maybe obviously not a complete analogy, but someone who's been sent to jail for 20 years on manufactured evidence and so on, and then they're set free.
And like, do they then say, well, I'm going to go and find everyone who framed me and I'm going to go and kill them?
Or it's just like, I'm free!
Let me move on with my life.
Let me go and have the kind of glories of freedom that I never anticipated to take in my life and whether or not there may be a consciousness around that.
Because that would be – I mean, I don't know what the level of vengeance is appropriate in these kinds of situations.
But if there is liberalization, might there not be just such gratitude for the breaths of freedom coming down that the idea of insurrection and blowback might diminish?
Well, you know, one of my friends when he was reading my book made a point that I didn't realize I'd made, which is North Korea is such a perfect prison, it's even a prison for the leaders.
So even the people at the very top are bound by the dictates of this dictatorship.
I agree with you that for most people, I would certainly be one of them.
Let's just free these people.
This is a one guy.
However, given that there were one to two million people who starved in North Korea during the 90s, the idea that there wouldn't be a huge percentage of the population who watched their children starve Who watched their fathers starve, who watched family members starve, and who were hungry for, you know, a couple of decades after that, that there wouldn't be enough of them that are saying, no, no, no, no.
I'm Old Testament. I'm not doing this New Testament forgiveness.
Something has to be done. Or, in another sense, Stefan, that internationally the UN wouldn't have some kind of, like Slavira Milosevic, we have to take care of this person.
Those are, I don't know how you would work around those two things.
Yeah, I mean, it's a tough question, especially if they don't have the turn-the-other-cheek Christian tradition of forgiveness and, you know, love the sin or hate the sin stuff without that mindset.
It's quite the opposite.
You know, the great leader Kim Il-sung said class enemies have to be exterminated three generations.
This is a long-standing thing in Asia with kind of like family punishment.
So it's very much...
The scale is balanced towards punishment and not towards forgiveness to the point where you're punishing innocent people.
So this is not part of their psychology or their culture.
And I saw something that really haunted me.
I think it was on Twitter.
And it was line drawings of the concentration camps and the guards.
Yes. And the amount of the simple line drawings, but the amount of horror that was poured into these like rat like guards with the sadistic faces and the broken and shattered and starved people lying on benches being beaten and attacked and assaulted.
It was like You know, gulags come to life with Solzhenitsyn's pen of record.
And that is not an argument, you understand?
I'm just sort of saying the emotions that that evoked in me around just what is going on there and how much horror has been force fed into the very bone marrow of the people.
I can certainly see the standing on the volcano perspective.
And also, you know, the way that Hayek said that in politics, the worst rise to the top.
I genuinely think that if you're going to be a prison guard in charge of a concentration camp, it's going to be selected for people who are predisposed towards sadism and predisposed to inhumanity.
I don't think an average person, no matter how much he's brainwashed, is going to feel comfortable watching children starving and beating children relentlessly.
I don't think... That really is part of the average human psyche.
It takes a special kind of person to, you know, watch amputations and rape and just think, this is great.
When's it my turn? Well, and as you point out, food as a weapon has a long history under communism, of course.
And you were talking about, and I thought your comments about the sort of social marking or the social scoring that is occurring in China had its predecessor in North Korea, where they graded people according to their fitness as proletariat role models.
And then the people who had any taint of bourgeois or capitalist or ownership, entrepreneurship, they were sent far away from the docks, far away from the sources of food, would get the food last.
And this idea that you will starve to death.
There are concentration camps in the entire open-air prison of the country and that you would make sure these people got the food the last, if at all.
And that, of course, would tend to be your most entrepreneurial And intelligent and anybody who's worked in the free market knows that you need to have empathy for your customers if you're going to serve their needs.
And it's almost like breeding out any capacity for empathy and sensitivity in the population and making sure that the most cruel get the most food.
Yeah, I mean, but at the same time, we do like the idea that it's the ones who are cynical toward the government who are the ones who were the first ones to say, I'm going to do what it takes to survive.
Whereas those who are loyal to the regime, who believed...
That the leader is going to send food, just you wait.
They were the first ones. Many refugees talk about this.
Those are the ones who starved. That family member who's like, you guys are just worrying prematurely.
This will all blow over. The dear leader has us in his hearts.
You just have to have a little bit more faith, and those are the ones who ended up first as corpses.
So it's depraved in every direction you look.
I mean, we often talk in economics in terms of market irregularities and things like that, about rent control.
But when you apply it to human beings and genocide, what comes out of it is traumatic.
And this is also the question of me being from the Soviet Union is like, Are Russians like this because the government liked them like this?
Or was the government there because the Russians were predisposed to this kind of psychology?
It's a chicken and egg situation.
The one positive thing I can say is I've met many refugees and they are the most vapid, banal young people you ever hope to meet, which is really wonderful because you want them to be as boring and normal as everybody else.
You don't want them to be broken, you know, shattered birds with shattered wings.
You want to know if this country is liberated.
They're going to be listening to crappy music and watching crappy television, but they'll be normal and they'll be human.
And that is, for me, the important thing to keep in mind.
Where do you think things stand, Michael, with regards – and we talked about this last time, but I wanted to circle back on this.
The big concern, of course, with American foreign policy is it starts with words and it ends with swords.
Where do you think any potential for military involvement – I mean, direct involvement seems Very hard to imagine, but you know, they always do this subterranean stuff, this funding this and helping that and giving weaponry to so and so.
Do you think that there is going to be any escalation of military involvement directly in or regarding North Korea?
No, I don't think at all.
And I think President Trump has been working very closely with China.
And China's been working very closely with North Korea and has been taking them to heel to some extent.
And that's certainly what, if that were the case, this is what that outcome would look like.
And from the beginning, Trump and Tillerson and Bannon and several others in the administration says, there's no way we're hitting these people.
It would be absolutely bonkers, the consequences.
So that was never really on the table.
Just him being garrulous certainly has had some positive effect.
The idea that this is going to be another Iraq or Afghanistan, I can't even imagine that happening.
There's an odd kind of combination, which is one of the reasons why I'm very enthusiastic about the talks that you give on this, Michael.
There's an odd power behind calling someone evil but not crazy.
And I'm sort of reminded of what happened under Reagan, where Reagan referred directly to the Soviet Union as an evil empire.
Now, with Hussein, it was like, well, he's evil and crazy.
And there is something that is powerful around changing the course of a culture.
It's a weird word to use, respect.
If you give respect to evil, to say, listen, you're evil.
But you know what you're doing.
You're evil, but you're not crazy.
And that does seem to...
I remember when Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an evil empire.
That was a very powerful moment and a very powerful clarity.
And it really bothers me the degree to which since religion as a whole has become less of a social force in the West, we've lost the ability to call evil by its proper name.
Which is, yeah, it's cunning.
Yeah, it's dangerous. And it has power, and it has goals, and it has motives, and it's not crazy.
And there's something about clearly identifying that evil that does seem to have an impact in changing the course of what is going on.
I'm reminded back to Chamberlain, even in the 1930s, with his absolute inability to see National Socialism and Hitler for what they were doing, even after being clearly told, you know, in Mein Kampf and other writings what was planned.
This inability to see and describe and accurately comprehend evil seems to give it a kind of power and longevity that a direct enunciation of the principle seems to push back against.
And I'll give you another example that's just happening today, which is you remember, well, you don't remember, but I'm sure many people are aware of Walter Durante in the New York Times covering for Stalin's genocide and the depravity that was going on.
Getting a Pulitzer. Yeah.
Which has yet to be returned. And so many people in the West were like, oh, these show trials are nothing.
You know, everything's fine. What are you talking about?
You know, this is a great social experiment, so on and so forth.
And just today, I believe it was, it was the New York Times celebrating Karl Marx's 200th birthday.
And I mean, at what point, how many bodies do you need?
To say, oh, this isn't like the flat tax versus the sales tax versus the progressive tax.
This is when you're killing millions of people.
If that's not evil, I don't know what is.
So one of the big arguments I have with my conservative friends is they think that the corporate press sometimes gets it wrong.
And they're mistaken.
And I do that. That's true. We all make mistakes.
But my view is sometimes they are doing this with full knowledge and intentionality.
And when you look at them in that respect, it takes on a whole, like you said, a whole different set of power and a whole different perspective.
I just tell you, I mean, just person to person, I mean, particularly because your history with Russia and so on, it is and remains fundamentally incomprehensible to me how communism has escaped even more opprobrium than Nazism.
I mean, the death count is higher, the penetration is deeper, the rule of the world is wider, and the amount of suffering that has been created, although the Nazis are pretty damn close second, is greater.
And yet, I remember even back in my early 20s, when I was on the debate team, I would...
I've come across people with their Che Guevara t-shirts.
I remember one of the guys I was debating with had a little pin of Karl Marx.
And even at that time, maybe it's my family history or whatever, but even at that time, Michael, I'm like, how is this?
I would say to people, like, do you know what this represents?
Do you understand what this represents?
I mean, even if you don't care about the horrifying ideology of unlimited state power, control, and brutality, can you not...
Can you not see the bodies?
I mean, they pile so high.
They're like a mountain of horror.
I mean, how is it possible to get 40% of American anthropologists or self-described Marxists?
I mean, it's astounding.
And there's the very favorite—well, not very favorite.
In 1936, Ayn Rand was shopping around her book, We the Living, having just escaped the Soviet Union and seen it firsthand.
And she was told by New York City editors that the writer just doesn't understand communism.
So I think this comes down to a function of psychology.
When you are a certain level of education, a certain level of status, you don't have to have access to facts because you have been initiated into the mysteries of life and everyone else is just babbling morons.
And you know how it is, and it's as simple as that.
The human mind is very good at dismissing facts it doesn't want to deal with and maintaining its hold in ideology.
And frankly, and I think Thomas Sowell talks about this as well, the smarter you are, the easier it is to get wrapped up within your own ideology and become a self-serving echo chamber because you're that much more confident in your own brilliance.
The writer of that New York Times article was an assistant professor of philosophy In South Korea, like one DMZ away from seeing the net effects of communism to the north.
And it's one thing to be in some ivory tower a long way from communism and its effects, but this is like right over the border.
There are giant missiles pointed directly at your brain from a guy who inherited his kingdom from a communist insurgency.
I mean, that to me is like right there.
It's right there. There are people able to hug for 30 seconds who've been separated for decades and then forced apart again.
I mean, how can you not see something...
When it's right there, even if you lack the conceptual ability to process the bodies, they're literally right there.
Well, this is the fundamentalist left.
In the same way that fossils don't dissuade someone from creationism, If you have this kind of evangelical approach to society and you have this absolute comfortable – if you're comfortable saying, I know what's best for literally everyone in a country and I'm perfectly comfortable having a government seize all property and control every aspect of a person's life, data here and there is not going to change your mind.
I mean this is a psychological position as much as it is a political one.
It's a kind of vanity, I suppose.
I mean, I've been running my show for 11 years and I've had, I don't know how many thousands of people call into the shows.
I don't tell them what to do because I can't tell people what to do.
I can give them some principles to live by.
But the idea that I would tell people what to do and how to solve these things, I don't know.
I don't know. And this fundamental humility that is required by, I think, anybody with a modicum of self-knowledge I mean, I know we share the same DNA,
but I'm not sure we share the same humanity.
Right now, I'm about to finish reading this book called Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy from 1887.
This was, I think, the third most popular novel in American history.
The premise is someone from 1887 wakes up in 2000 and is told how society has changed.
This is the first introduction of communism to American thought.
You read it now that the 2000s actually passed in real life.
It's chilling and terrifying because everything is simple.
It's all easy. There'll be so much food, so much everything, everyone's happy all the time.
And how this psychology works is, if you and I are not happy under this system, that's something that you and I are doing wrong.
Because now we're anti-social deviationists, whereas this person has created a nirvana, and we're the ones who are the problem.
As opposed to that person who is, you know, basically a neo-Stalin.
And it must be, because, I mean, communism, I think, must appeal to people with incomplete childhood issues.
It must, because to have an all-powerful authority over you that provides for you and tells you what to do and encapsulates you in safety and security and control, well, that is the world of babyhood and toddlerhood and sort of very early childhood.
And I wonder, it's just, you know, thinking off the cuff, but I wonder how much of people's thirst for, you know, whether it's resource-based economy, robot mommies, or the state that's going to take care of you forever and tell you what to do, whether people simply have a yearning for the kind of benevolent dictatorship of early childhood whether people simply have a yearning for the kind of benevolent dictatorship of early childhood that your parents are supposed to provide, and whether that is hooked into by the state that says, you never You never really have to be responsible for your own decisions.
We'll tell you what to work at.
We'll tell you what to eat. We'll tell you where to live and so on.
And people just like, I don't think it's natural to want to give up free will when you're mature.
But it seems to be so tempting for people to abandon responsibility for the sake of security, knowing, knowing as they do that they're going to end up with neither.
I think there's a lot to do with that with government schools, which is when we're taught the model of democracy, we're basically taught imagine that you're an absolute dictator and how you would envision your country being.
In every aspect, from abortion, to taxes, to war, to housing, and then vote your way accordingly.
So we are taught at a very early age, you know, elementary school, high school, I don't know, it depends on the person, to think of that as the basis of your approach to society.
You have to envision yourself as incomplete control and then you argue with me and we argue and then we have coalitions and we vote.
But that is the basis of democracy as it's taught in school.
And I don't think it's that much of a leap to go from there To accepting someone else to be that dictator because that, again, is like, well, that's not contradicting anything.
That's how I was raised. And if the state, as we know, is forced and parents put their children into government schools, then it's very hard for those children to say, well, the government is forced and you put me in a coercive environment.
Yes. I think that bonding with the schools is, in a sense, a proxy for bonding with the parents.
And to look at your parents and say, wait, wait, this is an agency of coercion and you kind of put me into its tender care to be...
propagandized.
I mean, what are you kidding?
And it's like, well, what are the parents going to say?
Well, we had to, or the money is stolen from us anyway.
It's like, but you told me not to lie.
The whole time when I was a kid, you told me, don't use force to get what you want.
And then you put me in this environment that's funded by coercion that's telling me lies.
It's like, I think it becomes like, I'm just going to bond with the state because it's easier than questioning everything else.
And one of the things I've been very gratified to see in very recent years is, As I talk to several conservatives, I always make the point that government schools are literally prisons for children.
And a few years ago, they would laugh in my face because, you know, how can you say that?
You know, we all do it. We all send our kids to school.
But in recent years, and I don't know what was the turning point, I think as much more of the evangelism of progressivism at a younger and younger age, The stories are being reported on social media and people are like, wait a minute, you don't need to tell five-year-olds that they can become a girl tomorrow.
At that age, they don't have the capacity to understand things like that.
I've had more and more conservatives tell me, yeah, I agree with you.
I think that is very, very healthy, that realization.
It's not about reforming the government schools and having them teach conservative propaganda.
It's like, wait a minute, this is not a salvageable system.
And these children are prisoners, and they're being taught to obey from kindergarten.
Well, I agree with you with one caveat that I think you're insulting prisons because a prisoner who's in a prison, let's say that you're innocent, well, you know that you've been treated unjustly and you're not being propagandized eight hours a day.
You're just being caged.
And you know you're being caged.
You know that you're in a situation of coercion.
Whereas in the schools, all of that's covered up, right?
The source of the funding is covered up.
The control that the unions have is covered up.
The ideological control is all presented as education.
At least in the prison, they'll cage your body, but your mind is relatively free.
But you are a little bit more physically free in the schools, but your mind is more enslaved than I think any prisoners could be.
And you're given a reason why you're sent to prison, as opposed to simply because you happen to be born.
So that's another argument.
Prison is open punishment, whereas the school pretends to be educational.
So that would be my only...
Too nice on the prison thing.
But yeah, it is rough.
And it is one of these things that, you know, they're making people crazy faster than we can make them sane.
Because so many people, you know, pouring into government schools every day, little kids being indoctrinated up the yin-yang.
And it takes a certain amount of grit and steel and maybe even just base raw intelligence to pull yourself out of that pit.
And this is why it is really hard to turn I disagree with you.
I don't think it's a numbers game necessarily.
There will always be a huge percentage of the population who are incapable of critical thought.
But I think what happens is when you're spending eight hours a day in school and you're coming home in social media and self-educating and self-educating in an entertaining way through YouTube or watching your show or anyone's show, something like that, And coming to different conclusions, all it takes is, you know, it doesn't take much to realize, wait a minute, this whole system is crap, and I'm going to be an independent thinker.
And I think that's happening increasingly, thanks to the Information Society.
I really, really hope so.
And I hope we're doing a little bit to help along with that.
Really want to thank you for your time.
Just wanted to remind people, pick up the great book, Dear Reader, the Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il.
Do not listen to the audiobook, If you're trying to get to sleep, because it is some chilling stuff, man.
It's like having a popsicle inserted into your ear.
And I checked that. Actually, one ear here, a popsicle.
That's pretty much the same thing.
No, the audiobook reader is fantastic.
And you can also check out You're Welcome, Y-O-U-R. You're Welcome with Michael Malice on Compound Media.
