June 24, 2023 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Ladies and gentlemen, a funny thing happened to me between last week's program and tonight's live broadcast.
I turned 43 years old.
That's right.
My birthday was on Thursday, June the 22nd.
I was 24 years old when I started this radio program.
And I'll tell you what, it doesn't seem like 19 years.
Birthdays and anniversaries and holidays are a perfect reminder about how just fast and how quickly those hands of time can spin.
19 years have passed, but from the bottom of my heart, I want to tell you that I love the people I've been able to meet as a result of this work, proud of the work that we've done together and honored to be able to continue to collaborate with so many wonderful people in our listening audience and obviously our outstanding roster of guests.
I thank each of you for taking part in this journey with me.
And I want you to know that whether it be on my birthday or any day and every day, I am grateful for you.
It's an incredible honor to be able to share these special occasions with the finest people I've ever known, members of our audience.
I don't take that for granted.
I cannot overstate what a privilege it has been to work with you.
And I hope that that work can and will continue.
You have helped make my life wonderful, as have all of the friends we have made through this effort, including our top five guests specifically.
And Mark Weber is, of course, one of those, and he is with us right now.
Mark, it is great to have you on tonight.
Happy birthday, James.
It's great to be on with you again.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, my friend.
And, of course, Mark is the director of the Institute for Historical Review, ihr.org.
And I have been eagerly anticipating Mark's appearance tonight as he will be reporting on his recent participation at a conference in Estonia that addressed the future of Europe and the West.
But that was not the only stop he made on his European tour.
Mark, as this hour develops, will further share observations from his recent visits to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria.
And he'll report on conversations he had in those ports of call with writers, political figures, and activists.
So, Mark, I don't know where to begin.
How would you like to begin this?
Well, I've never, the countries you mentioned, the only one I hadn't been before was Estonia.
I hadn't been to the Baltic.
The conference was important.
And just a few weeks after that was a similar conference dedicated to the future of the West, Europe, America in Slovenia that took place.
And the conference in Tallinn was organized by the person who's the co-host of a weekly podcast that we've done since September, weekly roundup with Mark Weber.
Some listeners may already be familiar with that.
If you're not, you can find more by going on to the homepage of our website and checking it out there.
But the organizer of that conference, Frodie Midyard, gathered together an impressive array of speakers for that conference.
One of the top guests that you've had repeatedly on the political cesspool was Jared Taylor, and he was supposed to be one of the speakers at this event in Tallinn.
Unfortunately, he's been banned from what they call the Schengen zone.
That's most of the countries of Europe, including Estonia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and so forth.
But he didn't know that until he landed in Zurich and was told, nope, you can't land, you can't stay here, and he was sent on a plane back.
So one of the speakers who was supposed to speak, Jared Taylor, was not allowed, which only underscores really an important theme of the conference.
One of the important themes of that conference, it's the crisis of the West, the crisis of liberal democracy, the crisis that the United States and Europe are going through right now.
And the fact that speakers, men like Jared Taylor, are not allowed to speak in public in Europe is a sign of just how bankrupt the system has become and how hypocritical it is because it does not, although it claims to be in favor of freedom of speech and democracy, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't allow a person like Jared Taylor, who I think, as anyone who knows him can testify,
is no kind of hate monger or violent person or anything like that.
Now, the conference gathered together mostly from Northern Europe speakers.
It was a retired eminent professor from Denmark who talked about how the demographic and changes that are taking place in Europe portend very, very dark times for the future.
Every one of the speakers was supposed to look ahead to the year 2050 and project where we will be.
I mean, when we say we, meaning European peoples and peoples of European ancestry in the United States and around the world, where we will be in the year 2050, and if possible, to look at the future in the most positive way that we can, in the most hopeful way we can.
And I try to do that in my talk at the address.
But I'm going to pause now because I've already been giving you a kind of basis for that conference, which was important.
No, I appreciate you laying that groundwork.
And of course, every time you're on, the runway is always yours because you always have so much to say.
I would just add this, though.
You mentioned Jared Taylor, of course.
We actually had Jared back on the program on the broadcast for May the 27th.
That was right after he had been bounced from the airport there in Europe.
And he gave us a full testimony of his travels and how they were so abbreviated.
And he made mention of all of the stops that he was going to be making in Europe.
It wasn't just going to be Frodie Midjord's Skanza Forum there in Estonia, but he was going to make several different stops, as did you, and as did Roger Devlin, who's going to be our guest in the second hour as we continue this two-week mini-series where we're talking to people who either attended or addressed several different gatherings throughout the world over the course of the summer.
They've really bloomed.
We'll talk about that proliferation with Roger.
But that was really going to be, Mark, a true constellation there in Estonia.
All of the stars, literally and figuratively, were going to be in array there with you, Roger, and Jared.
That was a star-studded lineup, to be sure.
Obviously, Jared didn't make it, but you both did.
And if we could move forward to this, well, actually, we have a minute left.
Why don't you wrap up this segment with any thoughts that you have in mind?
And then we're going to talk specifically about the contents of your speech, which is posted for anyone who is interested, and you should all be interested, at our website, thepoliticalscessbool.org tonight.
Oh, thank you.
And the speech is, of course, also posted on our site and the site of the organizer of the conference.
Yeah, I mean, basically, no one, as I said in my talk, no one needs to be reminded about just how disheartening, how gloomy the trends of the last 10, 20, 30 years have been for Europe and the United States.
But I guess, so, so, and the speakers tried to put, sort of look to the head in a way, because it is very gloomy.
There's very little light shining through the clouds of our world right now.
The trends are not good.
They're not inspiring.
But the big point I made, and I think it's important everybody keep in mind, is this will not go on indefinitely.
And I laid out all sorts of reasons why this will not continue.
Not just merely because times change, but because the premises on which America and Europe are operating are false.
They're not workable.
They're striving for a utopia that will not be reached.
It cannot be reached.
It's a little bit like expecting communism to work.
It's based on false premises, and it will fail.
And that, we should prepare for that.
That's what we should look forward to for the time.
And with that teaser in mind, ladies and gentlemen, we will come back with Mark Weber, who's going to provide us with a ray of hope here on TPC.
Stay tuned.
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host and creator of the dissident mama podcast, Rebecca Dillingham, author of A Walk in the Park, My Charlottesville Story, Identity Ditches, Patrick Martin, and yours truly, Michael Hill, founder and president of the League of the South, as well as several other authors.
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Why does the left lie constantly?
Because they get spiritual power from lying.
The lies come from Satan, the father of lies.
John 8, 44.
Here's how the political lying process works.
Satan provides the beast with a lie.
Then the more they use the lie, the more spiritual power they get.
Look, the media is a lie multiplier, and this multiplication gives more evil spiritual power to the beast.
And that can overwhelm and even deceive the body of Christ, especially when the body is being disobedient to the head.
The churches today are incorporated, so they're subordinate to human government.
They obey the beast and do nothing to restore our national relationship with God.
And the government shall be on his shoulders, Isaiah 9, 6.
That verse is not for the present-day church.
Rather, it is for the end time church, the body of the line of Judah.
A message from Christ Kingdom Ministries.
So, as I said a moment ago, ladies and gentlemen, we're in the middle of a two-week miniseries where we're talking with the guest attendees and or speakers, gentlemen who addressed these conferences that we have been highlighting and showcasing,
and And I think I'm fascinated by this.
Mark Weber made a multi-national tour of Europe, as did Roger Devlin.
They both were in Estonia together.
That was the first stop on Mark's speaking tour.
But that was not the only stop, and then they separated and went to other places.
So we're going to be getting the download on all of that.
But I would make mention of the fact, and Mark did just earlier, that if you go to ihr.org, that is the website for the Institute for Historical Review.
Obviously, Mark is the director of that wonderful and venerable organization.
There you will find his weekly roundup, the weekly roundup with Mark Weber.
This is a current event show that he does with Frodie Midyard.
I actually gave a speech last fall for Countercurrents in Atlanta, and I said that we were talking about the history of this program.
I said, one of the reasons I started this show was to be able to interview people like Mark Weber, people like Mark Weber, whose ability to offer insightful analysis of any given situation.
In a country with a serious media, Mark would anchor his own Sunday Current Affairs show on national television.
But short of that, we're thankful to have his talents here on TPC.
But the speech I gave, and this is the point I'm making by bringing that up, the speech that I gave last fall in Atlanta was forward-thinking and very hopeful.
And that was what struck me so much.
I think Mark had one of the most striking titles for a speech that I've seen in a long, long time.
And the title of his speech was, As Bad as Things Are, They Won't Continue This Way.
And I loved how Mark started this speech.
And again, we have that up at our website.
It's up at Mark's website and elsewhere.
Mark, you said, I don't think there's a single person in this room who needs to be told how bad our situation really is.
Before you pivoted into the title of the speech, As Bad as Things Are, They Won't Continue This Way.
So in this age that we currently find ourselves slogging through, how can we look forward with hope and enthusiasm?
Because truth has a way of poking its head up no matter what.
And societies, governments, systems that are based on false premises about life, about human beings, and about history, they won't last.
They're going to fail.
And one of the most striking things to me, and another point I made too during that talk and so forth, is the very high quality, increasingly, of younger people that are coming on board.
This is a very gratifying aspect of all of this.
I've been in this for quite a long time, even longer than you have, James.
And when you might say we started this, it was a lot lonelier battle than it is today.
There are now many, many more people.
And I'm impressed by how many, especially young people, get it.
They understand the whole thing.
The whole thing has fallen into place in a way that was very difficult for me and for many others to come to.
At the same time, we are in a society in which more and more people, whether they're political, non-political, left, right, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, they can see things are not going well.
This isn't some assessment that's made by some tiny minority.
This is borne out by public opinion polls that show people are not happy with the direction things are going in in Europe and in the United States.
But it's not reflected politically because a dissident view, a resistance to the trends that we're having, are just stamped down with a harshness that's just astonishing.
And the banning of Jared Taylor is just one expression of the effort by the system to shut up voices that it doesn't want to hear, even though the public is so unhappy in the system.
I made the parallel between the last decades of the old Soviet Union.
I said the last leader of the Soviet Union who really believed in communism, really believed that if we just push on, the day will come in which this glorious communist future will be around was probably, it was Nikita Khrushchev, and he was thrown out in 1964.
After that, they still said the same slogans, they still had the same promises, but people just stopped believing, increasingly stopped believing those promises because they could look around and see the contrast between the lives that they lived and what was their daily, what everybody could see on the one hand and the promises on the other.
And we're going through a similar thing in America and Western Europe today.
Everyone is very aware that our cities are more ugly, they're more disordered, things don't work as well as they used to.
Our politicians keep putting out the same sort of slogans, but people increasingly just don't believe it.
Now, that's happening all, and one of the striking things, and it's very important these kinds of conferences take place, because just as the same ideology is in place in the United States and Western Europe, so also are the trends and the problems are very similar.
It's just astonishing to see all over Europe the same kind of ubiquitous across the board propaganda to uphold the system.
I mean, Pride Month and welcome refugees, the usual kind of slogans are everywhere, and they're obligatory all over Europe, just as they are here in the United States.
And just as, and so the whole Western world, and I mean by that, European world and countries or peoples that have European background, they're facing the same kinds of intimidation, the same kind of oppression, and the same kind of problems across the board.
Now, having said that, the feeling in Eastern Europe is very different than it is in Western Europe.
Western Europe has had far more years of American-style Hollywoodization, propaganda, softening up that Eastern Europe has not had.
And Eastern Europeans are far more devoted to maintaining their own national ethnic identity in a way that Western Europeans and Americans are not.
So in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and so forth, in Eastern Europe, there's a much stronger and more healthy sort of national identity and a national spirit than there is in the United States and in Western Europe, where it's been replaced by a huge, enormous emphasis on individual liberty, how I'm feeling.
I want my rights.
And that rights were across the emphasis on the here and now and the me, me, me, me.
But in Eastern Europe, that's not as strong.
Having said that, though, the same propaganda that we've all been subjected to and are subjected to in the United States and Europe, you can find it in Eastern Europe as well.
And that's a very tragic thing, because if the trends continue as they have, it will mean the destruction of the ethnic heritage and identity and national heritage of Eastern Europe, just as it is already now well underway in Western Europe and, of course, here in the United States.
Well, this is it, Mark.
Will it continue?
And this goes back to your speech, which I would encourage everyone to watch.
I really enjoyed watching this, but the title, As Bad As Things Are.
Look, we're not going to trick you folks.
We're not going to tell you.
We're winning at every turn.
No, we know how bad the trajectory is and what the trends are.
But here's the thing.
I would just say this.
As bad as things are, they won't continue this way.
I think, Mark, obviously, I don't think this.
I know this.
We live in a society that is dysgenic in most ways and degenerate in virtually every way.
And a society that is built upon dysgenics and degeneracy cannot, by its very nature, endure.
It is a society that is at odds with nature itself.
It's at odds with natural law.
And so I hope I'm not oversimplifying things by putting it, by framing it that way, but I just don't see that this continues to extrapolate into perdition.
I think that at some point that will end.
It's even more drastic than that.
This push for what they call equity means inevitably lowering standards.
And I mean standards across the board of competence, ability, and skill across the boards.
We're going to see more bridges falling apart, trains derailing, planes crashing.
Things just don't work as well as they, and there have, because the push for a society of what they call equity, because everything, people are not quote equal, quote unquote, means they have to lower standards.
And that will have ever more obvious consequences, deadly consequences, harmful consequences.
You know, one of the interesting things to me in the last several years is everyone I know, political people, non-political, whatever their background, everybody comments.
Things don't work as well as they used to.
Things just don't function as well.
And that's going to be even more true in the years ahead, the more they push in this way.
And we're not allowed even to sort of question the basic premises.
They are so rooted in the trajectory of the last 50, 100 years and have been accepted by the leaders of all the major political parties in Europe and in the United States.
Republicans and Democrats have accepted this idea that we have to push for this so-called equity.
This is utopian.
This is harmful.
And the consequences of that, even more than the dysgenic ones, will be felt more and more, obviously, by people in the years ahead.
Fantastic commentary, as always, by Mark Weber.
We've got him for two more segments.
We are going to transition away from his appearance in Estonia and talk about some of the other ports of calls he visited as this hour rolls on and it's rolling by quickly.
Stay tuned.
Your daily Liberty Newswire.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio. USA News.
I'm Jerry Varmash.
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In marking the first year since the Supreme Court took away a fundamental right, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke in Charlotte on Saturday on the anniversary of the ruling that overturned Roe versus Wade.
And so the three words that came to me that I publicly spoke were how dare they?
How dare they?
An NBC News poll released on Friday showed 61% of Americans disapprove of the High Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is backing the effort to expunge both of former President Trump's impeachments.
He said Trump's behavior didn't necessarily deserve the punishment and said he'd like to take it out of historical record.
But he noted that such a resolution needs to go through the committee process first.
Canada is launching a formal investigation into the loss of the Titan submersible.
The investigation will focus on finding out what happened and why in an effort to prevent such occurrences in the future.
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So much more to cover with Mark, but time is already fleeting.
I would like, we just heard it there at the bottom of the hour news break.
I mean, of course, the entire international media is a plumb with news of the situation in Russia.
We will try to get a snapshot, maybe Mark's quick snapshot take of that before the end of the hour.
But first, we're talking about his European tour.
We have to get to your other stops, Mark, but I want to cover just a couple more things on Estonia.
We might have to speed things up just a little bit.
But as bad as things are, they won't continue this way.
I mean, certainly you look at, and you mentioned the old Soviet Union.
Whoever thought that that would fall?
And then all of a sudden it was gone.
And the Russia that we see today under Putin is certainly starkly different than the Russia of Comrade Stalin.
And then, of course, you know, going back further in history, who would have ever thought that the Muslim occupation of Spain would have ever ended?
Certainly not the Spanish who were alive at that time.
And then all of a sudden they were gone and you had Christopher Columbus, you know, blazing a trail to the new world.
So things can change, and you mentioned that.
If you look at the past century, you mentioned this in your speech.
You cannot look at any 20-year period and find people who knew what was coming at the beginning of that period.
And of course, for the last several 20-year periods, things have not been going our way.
But that's not to say that it's always going to be that way.
Our time on earth is very finite, and we seem to think that all of history will go in the way that our current age is going.
It just doesn't work like that.
Right.
Well, one of the points I've made, and we've made, you and I have made on this show, other shows, is that the society we live in does not pay attention to those people who have been vindicated by events, whose predictions of the future have turned out to be accurate.
Instead, they denounce those people as with all sorts of the usual names.
They're bad, even though events are unfolding the way people like us saw it ahead of time.
I mean, there's consequences.
Diversity is not a strength, as Bill Clinton said in a State of the Union address.
It's a weakness.
If there's anything that the history of the Soviet Union teaches, it's the fragility of multicultural, multi-ethnic empires like the old Soviet Union and what the United States has become as well, or other ones.
People prefer to live with people of their own kind.
They want leaders who are people like themselves.
This is a very human, understandable, natural thing.
And the idea that societies and human beings can live just as autonomous individuals in a country is crazy.
Human beings are social beings.
And that means a lot in political and cultural life as well.
But anyway, the big point is that after I was done, again, there were lots of very, very, in any conference like this in Estonia and so forth, the most valuable thing to come out of it are the conversations, the friendships, the relationships that we develop out of the conversations and talks that we have apart from the formal speeches.
That's always true at any important, at any conference.
And that was very true of this one as well.
And there's no substitute, as I said, for actual people meeting and talking face to face.
And it's, again, very encouraging.
But as I went from there to Netherlands and then to Belgium and then to Austria, I had fascinating, interesting, illuminating conversations with many very intelligent people, people in government, people in writers, thinkers, scholars, and so forth.
And what's striking, of course, is just how serious the crisis is facing everybody.
Oh, we face a much worse situation than many people in the past because due to the tremendous power of propaganda that intimidates many, many people.
It's really striking how many people will say one thing in private and believe things even in their hearts, but they're afraid to say so publicly.
So people are intimidated.
Intimidated because we don't want to feel odd.
We don't want to feel weird.
We don't feel extremist, as they say.
Well, extremism in our society is defined by what movies tell us, what our educators tell us, not by what common sense dictates and what history certainly shows.
Anyway, the point is, I was really struck, though, how in Western Europe the situation is moving along.
I guess if you're a flag-waving civic nationalist, things are better than ever because Europe is more and more like the United States.
Now, from our point of view, you might say that's a catastrophe because Europe is more like the United States and European cities are more like American cities.
God help them.
Especially Western Europe.
Especially Western Europe, yes.
I mean, London is no longer an English city.
Paris is no longer a French city.
I mean, yeah, the architecture is still good.
There's still French restaurants and so forth in Paris.
But increasingly, these cities are becoming like American cities.
They're becoming third world cities.
One of the most discouraging places was Brussels.
It's the so-called capital of Europe because that's where the executive, you might say, of the European Union, the so-called European Commission, is headquartered.
And so people often use Brussels as a shorthand for the European Union.
And Brussels is, yeah, it still has a beautiful town square.
The architecture is very impressive.
There's a great deal like that.
But on the ground, it's increasingly a third world city.
And it's very discouraging.
It's very sad to see Brussels become like Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit or any other American cities.
But having said that, though, there's a great deal of people who understand and see all of that, but they're intimidated.
They're afraid.
They're afraid to speak publicly and openly about the reality that we can all see around us because they'll be either put in jail, shut up, shamed, condemned, smeared, and so forth.
And we see this all over.
But just below the surface, millions of people.
Well, this is the thing, though, Mark, too, that gives me a little bit of just, I'm sorry, just to interject.
This is one thing that actually gives me encouragement is that a lot of people will say whatever they need to say in order to get by.
And that's not necessarily anything to excuse.
But at the same time, I don't think people are that far away from coming over to us.
If someone, if a leader steps in to harness that power and that energy, and if the societal trends shift, I mean, these people are just going to fall in line very easily.
So we're not that far away.
We are, but we're not, I guess.
Right.
No, that's right.
It's astonishing how when things really drastically change, then people shift also to the new reality.
There were many, many Americans who were not in favor of American independence when the U.S. became independent.
But after it was independent, they make their way with the, they go along with the new system.
This is what happens over and over with the French Revolution, and so on and so forth.
And in the whole Soviet Union, people tried to make their own daily lives, and they sort of went along with the system because that's just assumed to be in place.
It's especially difficult for Americans because we've had, unlike Europeans, we've had the same flag, the same currency, at least nominally, the same constitution in place for more than two centuries.
It's very hard for Americans, unlike Europeans, to talk and reflect on different, radically different forms of government.
European countries have gone through vast, huge changes.
You know, a conference in Slovenia, well, up until 1989, 90, there had never been an independent country called Senia, ever.
There had never been an independent Estonia up until after the end of the First World War.
Countries like France in the last century and a half have gone through absolute monarchies.
they've gone to authoritarian states that had democratic they've had well very very different currencies different ways of doing things and And Europeans are more used to seeing and understanding that there are different ways of looking at history and life.
Whereas America, it's much different here in this country because we've had a very good run for most of the over two centuries.
The United States has been a country, and we still have the same flag.
So people still, it's more difficult for Americans, I think, to see something radically different.
You know, of course, there's some people in the South who have some memory that there was a Confederate States of America, and that's some alternative.
And European, that in spades is what Europeans are aware of.
They're aware that flags have changed, currencies have changed, constitutions have changed.
That's something that most Americans find much more difficult, I think.
But going back to the trip in Europe, one of striking things, too, is this, again, this tremendous propaganda all across Europe.
Emphasis on, oh, you have to remember the Holocaust.
Remember what your grandparents did.
They were bad, bad, bad.
You've got to make up for that.
Or you've got to welcome refugees.
We're all human beings.
Remember, we're all the same.
Everybody should be welcomed.
Or, I mean, there's just various examples of it.
But this propaganda is promoted just across the board in Europe.
And anyone who questions it, he's accused of wanting to turn back the clock to, you know what?
The bad man with the funny mustache, we don't want that.
That's over and over what Europeans are told.
And we're told in America, you turn the clock back, it means going back to slavery, means going back to bad, bad, bad.
And so that's a very intimidating thing for people.
And this fear is bolstered by tremendous propaganda in the media and by our political leaders, by the educational system, and so forth.
And that's an intimidating thing.
And it's one of the reasons why it hasn't been changed even before this, why there hasn't been a real change already.
Hours with Mark Weber go by.
They've been time.
It's really something.
He's one of our top five guests.
You don't have to listen to him long to figure out why we invite him back so often.
Got one more segment with him and one only.
So we will make as much hay with that as we can, and we'll do it in three minutes' time.
So stay tuned, everybody.
Why don't you?
Hey there, TPC family.
This is James Edwards, your host of the Political Cesspool.
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My name is Christian Knuckles.
I prophesy there will be no revival until the church leadership stops lying to the people.
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Listener tuned in live now from New York.
Mark is outstanding.
Well, those three words really say it all, and I couldn't agree more.
Always honored to have Mark, my longtime friend, on.
Mark Weber, of course, is an accomplished historian, lecturer, and current affairs analyst and author.
He was educated in both the United States and Europe and holds a master's degree in modern European history.
Mark is on very regularly, as you know, but there was one appearance not too long ago that I particularly enjoyed.
It was the broadcast for October the 22nd.
I went back earlier today to find out the exact date.
Mark was on to talk about a personal, private family vacation that he took during which he visited the nations of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Croatia.
That's a little bit different part of Europe than his current, more professional tour has taken him on, which is what we're talking about tonight.
Now, Mark, I want to talk a little bit more about some of the trends and some of the attitudes and some of the observations and takeaways you have made over the course of your recent trip to Europe.
And then if we could just mind the clock, with a couple of minutes remaining, I'd like to get a quick take on Russia.
We hadn't talked about talking about that tonight, but I think it's just so oppressing and timely that I'd love to get just a quick reaction from you about that.
But Estonia occupies a very unique corner of Europe, far different than the places that you had visited last fall.
Estonia is essentially the northernmost nation of Europe outside of the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and of course parts of Russia.
Certainly a different geographical location from even Belgium and Austria.
Have you noticed, what are the differences in attitudes and in trends that you observed?
One thing that is very, very strong in Estonia and Eastern Europe, but particularly in Estonia.
Estonia is different than all these other countries because it used to be part of the Soviet Union.
Correct, very different.
The Soviet Union was made up 16 so-called republics.
Estonia was the smallest of those republics in population.
There's only 1.3 million people in Estonia, of whom only 900,000 are ethnic Estonians.
And the feeling in Estonia very, very strongly is protecting their national ethnic heritage.
And they fear, the great fear is Russia.
Russia's on their border.
It's a big, huge, big, big country that used to control, that was part of Russia.
It was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire.
And then it was part of the Soviet Union.
And there's very, very strong and unhappy memories of what Soviet rule meant in Estonia.
In fact, the speakers were told, don't talk about the Ukraine war, because the feeling is so strong that any feeling talking about it, they're afraid of Russia.
And there's a great deal of fear, anger, unhappiness throughout those countries.
One of the speakers talked about, again, it's a bit maybe wistful thinking, a military alliance involving Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
I mean, whatever validity or weight that may have, it reflects this kind of strong feeling, this fear of Russia.
Poland also was part of, most of Poland was part of the Russian Empire, too, and they have very, very strong feelings.
They look at the Second World War very differently than Americans and Western Europeans.
For Eastern Europeans, the Great War, World War II, is above all the war that took place on the Eastern Front.
That's something for many Americans, it's hard to understand.
Far, far more people were killed on the Eastern Front, involving the Red Army, the Germans, and others, than involved in Western Europe.
Well, I mean, look at Stalingrad alone.
A million casualties in one battle?
I mean, that's unfathomable.
Oh, yeah.
Well, these are huge battles.
Estonians, I mean, during the Second World War, there were Estonian SS divisions and Latvian SS divisions fought with other Europeans to defend their country, their homeland, and Europe against the Soviet Union.
And, of course, they have a very different attitude about Churchill and Roosevelt because from their point of view, those are the people that sold them out to Stalin.
Remember, during the Second World War, the United States officially took the view, Stalin's a good guy.
He's a great guy.
He's going to be a partner in building this new, wonderful world after the war.
It's not how people in Estonia or Poland or Latvia or Hungary or other countries in Eastern Europe look at history.
And it's sort of refreshing to see how differently that attitude is.
One of the aspects of this is that the conference in Tallinn, Estonia, the capital of Estonia, it's hard to imagine it taking place in Paris or Berlin or even London because there would be demonstrations and efforts by the authorities to shut it down.
So there's more freedom of speech in that sense in Eastern Europe, at least in many ways, than there certainly is in Western Europe.
The attitudes are different.
I mean, it's a different people, it's different nations.
I mean, it's different regions, different histories.
Different historical experiences, different historical experiences.
That's right.
Exactly.
And we're going to be talking more with Roger Devlin in the next hour, who was also at this Estonian speech.
But I went to the Scanser Forum page and that medieval city, that capital of Estonia.
Love the aesthetics, Mark.
I mean, you want to talk about beauty being able to bring you to your knees, the beauty of that place.
My goodness.
Well, Tallinn is a World Heritage Site.
It's the best preserved medieval city in the world.
There are sites in Europe, other parts of Europe, that are better preserved from the Middle Ages, but not a city.
The other places are small.
Tallinn is, it looks very medieval.
There's a big, huge stone wall or fortress kind of look around the city, these big stone towers.
It has a very solid Northern European, Swedish, Germanic kind of feel to it.
And the conference venue, the conference venue itself really fit in with that aesthetic.
Yes, it was in what they call the old town.
We stayed in the old town, which is the center of traditional Tallinn.
And one of the nice things is the weather was so comfortable.
It was a very pleasant venue.
We had a nice place out in the courtyard between speeches.
It was very good.
Tallinn is beautiful.
And the people of Estonia are, well, they're good looking.
They look like Finns, basically.
The Estonian language and the Finnish language are similar.
They're different, but they're similar.
And the heritage, the background is very much sort of a parallel or similar to Finland.
During the old Soviet Union, there were tremendous differences in living standards and income and educational level.
Even though the whole country was supposedly one union of Soviet socialist republics, European and Western Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania always had higher standards of living.
They were more European, more capable than, and again, it's obvious.
I mean, people make societies, not the other way around.
You just can't impose a system and it's all going to turn into people.
Anyway, Estonia wants to be, most Estonians hope that somehow the future will be, they'll be united with Europe, it'll be prosperous.
And they are willing to put up with, you might say, the Americanization because it doesn't affect them so much.
Estonia is still very much Estonian.
But there is maybe 20%, 30% of the population which is not ethnically Estonian.
And that's a concern.
That's a big word.
It's mainly Russian.
Just a quick interjection here.
And I apologize.
I never want to interrupt you.
I'm looking at my notes, and I'm one-third of the way through what I had hoped to cover with you tonight.
And every minute – no, no, no, listen.
Every minute has been outstanding.
There's not been a wasted minute.
It's just we never have enough time.
And I could have gone the full three hours with you.
Next time you have a Saturday night off.
See, here's the thing about Mark that you don't know, ladies and gentlemen.
He is leaving this interview and going directly to give a speech in California.
A local IHR.
We'll have a meeting in an hour.
This is how ambitious his schedule is.
But in any event, I wanted to make mention of, I always enjoy hearing people share observations of their travels to Europe.
I mean, we have a March Around the World series where we interview exclusively during the month of March elected officials and leaders and activists from Europe.
We have no American guests on.
I mean, what we've done last week and tonight, we're having some of our mainstay guests, you and Roger and others, that are talking about their trips to Europe from an American perspective.
But back in March, we even elected officials like Philip DeWinter and Anka Venemersch and others, former elected officials, Nick Griffin.
I mean, a lot of people.
And I wish we had more time to get into your visits to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, but we will save that for another night.
With two or three minutes remaining, and this obviously was not something that I intended to talk to you about, but it has to be at least addressed for a moment.
With two minutes remaining, it's so hard to cut through the propaganda and know what's true and what's real.
What do you make of the current news from Russia?
I've been surprised that the Russian government has tolerated this semi-independent military force for as long as it has.
This so-called Wagner group, run by this man who is a former businessman, it's been tolerated by the Russian government, but it's not really under Russian command.
And it's astonishing to me that it's been tolerated for as long as it has, because the leader of it is his own guy.
Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but that's not tolerable.
You can't have an effective military if you've got a significant number of people who have their own ideas of what should be.
It'll be suppressed, and apparently the agreement is if he flees the country, then everything will sort of return to normal.
But it's a little bit something like America increasingly does a great deal of farming out of its military or semi-military work with private contractors, BlackRock and other, and that's an ambiguous thing because they're not under the same kind of discipline.
I don't think it's going to radically change the government.
I've made the point repeatedly, no Russian government that I can imagine, no Russian leader that is even thinkable, is going to do much differently than Putin did.
They're not going to tolerate a Ukraine that is tied and a part of the West military alliance.
That's too much of a threat to the very basic security of Russia.
No Russian's going to really put up with that.
And now, it's a crisis, and there's problems in Russia, of course.
But they've had this in every war they fought.
It was true in the First World War.
In the Second World War, Stalin simply just had people shot who even deviated slightly from everything.
Putin isn't as ruthless as that.
But it will not change the basic outcome of the war.
All right.
So, I mean, because, of course, the American media is saying that this Wagner group was ready to sack Moscow, but out of the goodness of their hearts, they turned around and they didn't want to embarrass.
It's so hard to know what's going on.
But ladies and gentlemen, IHR.org.
Yeah, well, they constantly lie is what they do, but they overplay and extend.
IHR.org, IHR.org.
Support the work of Mark Weber, an all-time great.
And let's do his weekly roundup where he comments on current events like the ones we were talking about.
So much more to talk with Mark about, but time will not allow it tonight, but he'll be back soon.