The Truth about Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union - Michael Malice

[Music] he had the camps he had the secret police all all these things people are getting put up against the wall in huge numbers he did not hold back in terms of this is going to have to be you know an abattoir it was very much War class Warfare and when they said war they meant War so Stalin introduced the idea of socialism uh in one country he went through group after Group which were threats to his power and just killed the number of people he killed was just astronomical the example after example after example

that you give it felt like would there be anybody left in Russia Michael Francis Michael Francis Michael Michael mice welcome back thanks he's laughing already yes it's great we're going to talk about the Soviet Union but before that yeah how are you I'm doing wonderfully thank you by the time this airs I'll be doing terribly yeah well we're recording this right around election time yeah uh so we won't talk about that so so we won't talk about that there's nothing we can say about it yeah I'm just looking at you you wanted lots of banter

at the top of the show I did I didn't when did when did I indicate that you well you indicated it to both of us how you said I want it to be fun I said banter I didn't say fun you see really your soul is in England because that's what we do in England we have banter but there's no fun yeah that's kind of true I see I see pmqs and it's banter it's not really fun yeah exactly so but it's wonderful to have you on you're doing very well are you looking forward to

this Bright New Dawn that is awaiting Us by the time this goes out the dawn has already happened this Golden Dawn yeah America's over who depending on which side you support yeah I right and I think it's we're at an interesting point where no matter what happens uh there's GNA be a huge loss of faith in the electoral system which is really gonna be interesting to see why well because if comma gets in it's like come on this is a joke this woman had didn't go through the primary she got installed by the machine and

if Trump wins well obviously you know insurrectionist all that nonsense yeah so it's just like I I think people are going to start um uh giving up I know my my voice just broke there your voice gave up on you as you my voice gave up yeah you gave up you gave up but that's a really dangerous moment isn't it I mean that could that yeah Michael loves it though this is Wishful think this Wishful thing everyone to lose faith I want them to lose Faith but it's still dangerous I mean when people are desperate

bad things happen and good things possibly happen but it's still scary I'm not Barack Obama I miss the fly see you mean in the men's room there we go banter ban that we wanted there's a banter that how how are we supposed to have a serious conversation with you Michael it's not possible I was on uh John stasel who is the greatest yeah uh his producer many years ago was going to have me on and ask my other friend Andrew he goes can can he ever be serious and Andrew goes can the North Korea guy

ever be serious yeah he can yeah yeah and that's an interesting jump off point the North Korean guy can ever be serious because I read your book it's brilliant which one the white pill well no the dear readers about North Korea that's what I'm asking oh right okay I read the white pill and um there are some it's it's a beautiful book Thank you there are moments of real darkness within that and as somebody who is not of with Soviet history the characters you really bring them to life I mean let's start off with Lenin

because how Lenin is presented on a surface level to the Lenin you describe in the book is completely different well how so so with Lenin we kind of see that you know he was a founder of Communism he was this Visionary he took you know he took commun he took communism and K and was a founding father of the Soviet Union but I didn't realize the psychopathy and the brutality of that man yeah the thing that's always fascinating when people there's there's two points I want to make here there's this hypothesis in University system like

good Lenin bad Stalin that Lenin came in and he was kind of good cop and then Stalin this kind of the trotskyite idea that Stalin came in and he the Revolution was betrayed by Stalin and it's really completely historical that you know all the roots that Stalin later developed and certainly cranked up the dial had its antecedence During the leninist period we see this directly when Emma Goldman and and Alexander burkman who were two anarchists who had been deported from the States you know talked to Lenin to his face and were like look you're arresting

people for political views you promis free speech and he goes look that's a bgea concern um you know he had the camps he had the secret police all all these things and what and when people talk about like oh you know that wasn't real communism or you know hasn't been tried he was willing explicitly goes we're not holding back this is our one shot to get it right we're not going to be like hemming and hawing we're not going to be you know mincing words people are getting put up against the wall in huge numbers

and uh one of the people in the secret police said like look better what is it better 10 innocent people die than one spy gets away when you're chopping when you're split splitting wood chips will fly meaning you're going to have a lot of and he explicitly and constantly talked about like blood flowing you know the blood of our enemies and you know liquidating these classes and he they did it you know just huge numbers of people uh were killed or deported or so on and so forth so you have to give him Credit in

a very very very loose sense of the word where he's like all right we're doing this for real this isn't like oh you know I'm a conservative we're going to have a free enterprise zone or I'm going to just privatize the electric company he's like we're going balls to the wall as fast as we can you know he pulled back when things weren't going as well as he wanted with the New Economic Policy the net policy but he did not hold back in terms of this is going to have to be you know an abatar

Michael you mentioned this idea of real communism you know this meme real communism hasn't been tried so according to Lenin what was real communism what what what was he trying to do well I the Communist model it was funny my friend Ben uh was giving a talk at um hereticon early this week and he goes what can I say they'll really piss him off and he wanted to give a certain topic but it was a and this is going to upset a lot of people which is why it's fun to say but it was essentially

a transhumanist movement their Vision was we're going to fundamentally long term remake the nature of man and the nature of society they thought that human beings are almost explicit entirely plasticine that people are born and they subject a function of their economic class and if you just get the right knobs and levers you can create you know an ideal Society at the end where the state will wither away this was kind of this almost biblical sense that when communism is done you're not going to need a government because everyone's going to know their role and

do it naturally but there what people don't appreciate now because when we look at the Soviet Union or Venezuela or Cuba and there's you know there's that joke about what did the Socialist used uh before they used candles light bulbs you know but the idea was no no no we're scientific this isn't this kind of shopkeep you know bouis oh you got the little green grosser in this corner and you've got a little libr that's all great quaint we're going to turn the entire country into a factory or a laboratory where everyone's working together and

there we're not going to waste money on profits for some billionaire while everyone's starving and we're going to create this super efficient machine I mean if you look at the iconography you know nowadays it leftism is much more environmentalist but it was all about smoke stacks and you know electrical wiring like we're going to create this kind of very industrialized nation state and to what end to the point where because we're producing so much because the Industrial Revolution came out and Marx was very much a function of the Industrial Revolution now there's so much being

produced you're not going to need to work right because we're going to be overflowing with cars and bread and everything you want because everything's being done efficiently and scientifically Frederick Taylor was kind of a model for this he was an American uh thinker who basically went to factories was an efficiency expert right and they took that like what if we apply this to Society at large so when they talk about real communism you know it's really this kind of thing where it's it's it's um kind of redundant it's the sense of like real communism means

it works this didn't work therefore it's not real communism it's like sure but real is what you put into practice not what's in your head and if he who didn't hesitate in any sense to impose this Vision on a country if that wasn't real I don't know what is and also what you encapsulate brilliantly in the book is what a I mean he was a brilliant man terrible man awful man evil you could even describe but brilliant at the same time that was never a question and the thing that I I talk about my other

book that you write is when you're in the middle uh and you look at the fringes uh Madness and Innovation are equidistant right when you hear some great Visionary you don't know this guy's a complete lunatic or holy crap this is what's going to be in 20 25 years I'm going to use a very G example uh I read Cindy loper's autobiography and you know she dressed in a very OS syncratic way before she made it you know she was working at this store called screaming mimes in Manhattan dressing in this kind of thrift store

pre hipster finery pre like '90s hipster and women would like make fun of her and she thought to herself your daughter's going to be dressing like this in five years and she was correct right so a lot of times what seems crazy today will be reality and and and not only the norm but popularized soon after that and the the reason the Germans wanted to get Lenin back into the Soviet into Russia excuse me obviously not the Soviet Union uh during World War I because the idea was all right this is completely bat crap this

can never happen in real life he's a loon but the guy's charismatic he knows how to make trouble let's throw him in there and and kind of you know put a monkey wrench into the gears and when he sees power everyone's like well hold on a minute so people don't realize that before this today the word socialism is synonymous with having government control that wasn't what socialism meant before 1917 there were different strands of socialism because it meant the idea of everyone working together for the betterment of society so anarchists were considered socialists and corpor

and so on and so forth once that hit and we have the first real self-identified socialist country a lot of the left were like all right we gotta see if this works this is our one shot to make it happen yeah there's some kind of broken eggs wink wink which means murdered children and people but this is still our one shot to put into practice so we got to give them every opportunity uh they have it was what I think was Eugene lions called the guinea pig theory of Revolution like sure you know I have

the quote in the book sure these Russians squeal and make noise but what are we up here we don't can't worry about the animals this is our chance to you know kind of experiment on them and and find out you know what makes the entire world tick and you've saying experiment and we've touched on Lenin's brutality but I think it's really important for people who may not be ofay with this historical character let's really delve into the brutality aspect of it because it's really important what did he do to his own people that meant to

my eyes that he's a monster well I think his the so what's interesting is all the things that or most of the things that the Bolsheviks and their allies hated about the Z they took and implemented later and and again escalated to an extreme degree it kind of so he had under the Zar you had internal passports right so you couldn't travel from you know one place to another without the permission of the state this the Bolsheviks later implemented they they had the um concentration camps but the amount of people in the camps that the

Zar had were quite small relatively these were for political radicals and also like they had books you know they could write letters it's jail but it's not we think of as this kind of in intense uh prison system he you know basically they would take entire populations and one of the big things about Marxism and this is what conservatives you know kind of harp on and quite understandably is their absolute uh um hatred of faith and religion so they really wanted to make sure anyone who had any kind of religious background uh bent the knee

and repudiate their faith and you can imagine how difficult it is to maintain this sense of of of faith when your entire country is against you when the costs are extremely high and you don't see any glimmers of Hope and and they were right so there was a group of of of of religious people they basically put them on an island and they wouldn't take like bolik money and they said all right well if you don't take this money you're not going to eat they all starve to death uh they would put people you know

the Soviet Union is or what became the Soviet Union wasn't exactly um um uh uh um Tahiti in terms of climate so they had no problem putting people above the Arctic circle with no clothes and being like all right you're going to stay here and you're going to work for us and and if this if this doesn't break you that's that's perfectly fine so the German aitz model arbak MAF fry was apparently a sarcastic reference to the Soviet vision of if you work hard enough you're going to kind of divest your evil history and become

a productive member of society you could pay off your debt that youve may for your parents were wealthy land owners or bis or something like you are punished for the sins of of your ancestors most people would associate those camps with Stalin though but what you're saying is they they were implemented under the Zar and then really expanded under lennin yeah under the Zar was of the korga system but it was Lenin just really made it much more and Stalin you know took it to the nth degree mhm and because what was really interesting in

the when in the book is you're hearing about the way he's treating political dissidents you're hearing about the way he's treating people he perceives as his enemies and then in the left the journalists some of the intellectuals in America and in my country like the UK you know Heroes of the left like Malcolm mugridge extoling the virtues of the Soviet Union and Lenin in particular it's it's really fascinating yeah the so before Lenin you had uh something called the Fabian Society which was the precursor to the labor party and they were heavily involved with the

London School of economics that was a whole little scene and this sounds like a joke but the fabian's original logo was a wolf and sheep's clothing and when they thought that was too on the nose they changed it to a tortoise meaning slow and steady wins the race because they wanted socialist control and but their vision is all right we're going to do it in a democratic way gradually you know piece by piece we're going to take over the entire country and have everything run by the state um so then so they were uh and

the Sydney and betus Webb were two fabians who really had a complete love affair uh with the Soviet Union but but the thing that that's really kind of fascinating that people I think don't appreciate is they thought these westerners who were extolling the virtue of the Soviet Union they were two types there were those who knew the truth and they're like all right we need to kind of downplay this because we got to give these people every chance to make it work so we don't want to be criticizing them too much and undermining this very

fragile thing that they're building but the even worse were the ones who had never stepped foot like east of Paris who knew perfectly well what's going on there because they read the right books and newspapers and maybe if you read a book you'd understand this glorious experiment that's happening you know over in Moscow so and St Petersburg Leningrad so it it was a it's this arrogance of the int intelligencia and Lenin very much played into it I mean the term useful idiots applies to these people that that was a Soviet concept because the idea was

they weren't that big a deal in the west but the Soviets were like oh you guys are great you basically are ambassadors it made them feel important and they were the ones you would go to for that pull quote that journalists needed then as they do now right there's a lot of that going on and there was we live in an age where everything about us is online our names addresses even Social Security numbers now we think we know you the trigonometry audience pretty well and I'll have as it a guess the idea of that

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aura.com trigger pod to start your free trial that's a.com trigger pod don't leave yourself vulnerable click the link in the description or scan the QR code to take control of your digital safety today how honest was Lenin about the stuff that he intended to do like before he actually came to power did he say we're going to kill all our class enemies did he say we're going to have this uh all of the things that they went on to do did they talk about you know taking the the Farms away from the the coags the

wealthy peasants did they promise to do all the stuff they ended up doing or did they have just very kind of Flowery slogans that sounded really appealing to people oh it wasn't flowery it was sorty you know the the slogans were very much because this is the workers Revolution right so it was for the workers so it was very much a philosophy of strength and muscle it wasn't flowers at all you know it's not this kind of hippie thing from the 60s it's this idea that we're the strong ones we're the ones who are literally

building these buildings building these factories off the sweat of our brow and this fat lazy capitalist is sitting in his house smoking cigars lighting them with currency while we're starving and hungry you know and we're gonna it's it's a revolution you don't have a revolution with flowers um so and it was very much War class Warfare and when they said war they meant War they didn't mean you know like oh we're going to play Monopoly and and I win and whatever it's like these people have to be liquidated they have to be driven out of

society and in terms of the Farms it wasn't like oh we're going to get the Farms from the kulacs we're getting the Farms from everybody everything is taken from everybody for the sake of the greater good uh when they were first starting out like basically rebuilding Society from the ground up and the idea was if something was old it was probably bad right like so and unscientific so let's have communal lunchrooms so everyone eats together let's have communal bathrooms so that people don't this whole concept of privacy is something that they fought against because it's

a whatever's bgea was bad if Grandma liked it we're against it right so this and even the concept of a family it's like wait a minute if we're about fairness and equality maybe you you're a great dad Francis you're a terrible Dad it's it's not fair to your his kid that your son has a good upbringing and his daughter doesn't so let's raise all the kids together in these big kindergartens and the line even was like listen if you want to visit your kid you'll have every chance if you want to now they didn't go

as far as that in the beginning but that certainly was the vision and in East East Germany later on up until even the 80s uh if someone was it's it's to even discuss if someone was regarded as Politically Incorrect or politically desirable and the line for that is very very low this isn't someone who's like secretly a spy it's is someone who just you someone a bureaucrat regard as a problem they took the kids and gave them to be raised by good Communists and many of these kids and parents never saw each other again or

even more disturb or not more disturbingly but disturbingly after the re uh Germany reunification some of them did get reunited but that kid you got taken away when they were four and now they're 20 you're looking at a stranger you're never going to have that relationship if you raise them so this when you talk about um putting the common good before the private good every family is a conspiracy because you're you're always going to choose your family over Society at large this a very human basic thing but this is a problem for them because that's

unequal so you really have to break up this kind of family and these Family Ties the very famous example and you mentioned it in um your book constant as well is pavic Marosa like Americans can't even wrap their heads that this was real but it was this kid who turned in his dad to the cops because was he hoarding grain or selling sweaters I remember was the the kid got killed by his family there's statues of him and and you know he's this basically kind of Paul bunan mythical figure and the message to Children taught

in schools is if you see your parents doing something wrong turn them in even if it costs your life that's the right thing to do now now you know some of these kids came home and if their parents are like you probably shouldn't do that that parent has to wonder wait a minute if I tell my son you shouldn't do that is he going to tell my teach his teacher that I told him that now I'm in trouble so this kind of separation between kids and parents is I think Americans are very very naive and

westerners as a whole about the nature of evil right I talk about this all the time they think someone with the crazy mustache banging desk no it's that teacher a school teacher who's very sweet and very nice and she Pats your kid on the head and Pats him on the back and says good job who also tells him if you see your mom or dad doing anything let me know and she will trip over her sensible shoes to call the cops to turn them in that is to me is the nature of evil and it's

so much more pervasive and Insidious than some crazy man with epilates and all these Metals banging your desk Michael just coming back to the the agenda of the Communists and how transparent they were about it was that a popular offering did was did the people of the Russ of Russia want that would they have voted for it in an election so they the when the Bolsheviks came in they weren't there by themselves right they didn't have the numbers so there are a few other groups that they partnered with bulla as you know in Russia means

more you had the menix who wanted things to go a little bit slower who partnered with them you had the left SRS you had the anarchists who wanted very localized control Soviet the Soviet is a workers Council this was an anarchist idea so they kind of teamed up like all right we're going to put our differences aside we're all completely against capitalism we're all completely against aristocracy and thear and you can understand why for each of those things let's get together make it the whole point of socialism the the vision is we're all in it

together we're all from each according to his ability each according to his need everyone is going to do what they can to make the society work and then everyone's going to have what they need and no one's ever going to have to go hungry again right so that was the the model and everyone's like all right this our shot this is our chance let's make it happen and as soon as Lenin had enough power he's like I think I foret the exact quote it's in the book like we've had enough talk of political discussion it's

time for action and by the end of the year uh uh I think it was 1922 anyone from any other political movement was in and of itself grounds for arrest and if not execution so explicitly so so it's like all right we've won the Russian Civil War the forces of thear were defeated the red beat the whites it's going to be read from here on out enough time for talk the party is going to be running this country and it but just to to specifically to your question about the popularity I I think people don't

people often forget context right it's not like this was like 1910s America and Lenin comes in this was zaris Russia where people were surfs where they had didn't have a pot to everyone was hungry you had his troops you know basically having no compunction about inflicting violence on the people you they see the west where the Industrial Revolution is happening people are getting more and more food or things are getting a little bit better in many regards and they have nothing and Lenin says you have nothing because those people have everything so join with me

and we're going to remake the society the future and you could very easily understand the appeal and the thing that I found interesting with Lenin is the complete lack of loyalty he had to men who served him very well he had absolutely no compunction at all once he decided that somebody was was done of killing in of killing people and that was it because that's a private Bond and his only Vision was the public Bond so again it's the correct thing to turn in your friends it's the correct thing to execute your former allies because

the only thing that matters is making Society a better place and then you look at the kind of the relationship with trosky which I found particularly fascinating so let's talk about that now what was the relationship between them and why did it end up going who was try let start with that start with try came late to the Bolshevik cause um because he thought okay it was a little bit loopy uh he actually lived in New York for quite some time uh not that long maybe a couple years his old newspaper was on St Mark's

Place and the stairs that go to that newspaper are still there you can see them uh if you ever visit which I thought was very cool um and he was one of those people that you know when things were happening uh um in what became the Soviet un he's like holy crap this is our big shot um he was in many ways even more than Lenin the Visionary the ideologue I mean a lot of these college Marxist uh in academics they would describe themselves as trist because the idea was all right like he would have

done it correctly he wouldn't have stal brutality it's like we know that's not true by the way because there's something called the kronstad Rebellion so konat was this island uh uh near St Petersburg there were a bunch of sailors there and and military people they were essential to winning the Russian Civil War as soon as civil war was won they're like all right we got a list of Demands free speech for leftists that was that's thing the demands weren't even like we free speech for everyone goes Free Speech only for like socialists anarchists and Bolsheviks

we want elections between these three free the political prisoners of the left they didn't care about the capitalists they didn't care about the the bgea left this political all these things that Lenin promised and they put up a rebellion and trosky took charge of it and they were all slaughtered a few of them escaped to Finland they said come back you know you'll have we we we won't uh do anything to you the naive ones came back were sent to camps immediately but this was the last uh um rebellion of any size in what became

the Soviet Union you know until the late 80s early 90s so when trosky had his chance to show his true colors he had no hesitation about shedding the blood and was right there with Lenin you know from the beginning uh what was fascinating you know of course and this is very much parody by Orwell in um 1984 is when Stalin came in trosy was brilliant and he knew it and that's a very bad thing for a politician to be because many of the people around you are not going to be brilliant and they know it

and you're going to be rubbing them the wrong way because these people have very very important politicians every country and have very little reason to feel important because they're not impressive personalities as a whole and he made them realize that they're not impressive personalities meanwhile behind the scenes Stalin was working working the party he wasn't a big name at all but he was laying the groundwork so as he Consolidated power he got trosy kicked out of the party then trosky kicked out of the Soviet Union entirely and basically trism a term which was largely undefined

became synonymous with everything that's going wrong in the Soviet Union so he got Trotsky kicked out the party what how what what were the accusations what was trotsky's crime well hold on before you go into that cu the accusations would all have been fabricated anyway the interesting thing is wasn't there also an ideological split because there were those Communists who believed in communism within one state and then that would spread elsewhere and there were the others who believed in a world Revolution that that would sweep the world immediately wasn't that part of the SPL yes

there there were two big kind of ideological splits so at a certain point so lennin was an ideologue and a Visionary but he wasn't completely detached from reality right so he understood all right this isn't going to happen overnight this is a process and it's going to be a long process and since it's the first time we're running this experiment excuse me since the first time this we're running this experiment we don't know how long this is going to take we're we're the first we're the alpha beta testing so at a certain point things were

going poorly for even Lenin's taste he goes all right this crap isn't working they pulled back they had something called the New Economic Policy and they reintroduced an element of market capitalism into the Soviet Union and a result of this this huge middle class almost overnight sprung up and these people called netmen any New Economic Policy netmen and you know a little bit of Liberty and all of a sudden entrepreneurship takes hold and so on and so forth for a lot of Bolsheviks this was like what what hold the phone like this is exactly what

we're fighting against and you Lenin our guy you're putting this back after we defeated this is completely unconscionable and trosky is one of those who was just like this is really not what we should be doing we should be going harder on the gas and not putting on the break his other model this is trosy versus Stalin is this idea that all right workers of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your chains meaning a working class person in uh Russia has more in common with a working-class person in Peru or the us

or Australia than he does with like a capitalist in Russia right there's inherent class antagonism so it is a worldwide movement for working classes for their own Liberation Stalin when he kind of came in this is like the mid 20s and so later he understood he's like all right the because the model was once we have our Revolution and this was very scary for westerners Western governments once Lenin took power in the Soviet Union that's the cue so in Germany in Britain in the US there was a huge amount of fear like holy crap this

is going to happen here next because the more time that went on and the more that the Russian government under Lenin didn't collapse the more other people like hold on a minute now it's our term this is a very kind of like What's Happening Here moment for uh Western uh politicians and intellectuals and that was the idea of the Russian Revolution that was the point it was supposed to be the spark that started a World Revolution that's how communist saw them the agenda was always to spread this ideology to the whole world it's why the

symbolism of the Soviet Union you know even the flag the flag didn't have borders on it it was the globe and the hammer and sickle and and Lenin's newspaper is called iscra the spark the spark exactly that was literally his newspaper before he took power Stalin didn't see it that way right right Stalin was like all right it's not that Stalin didn't see it that way it's that by the time Stalin comes around he's like okay this didn't happen yeah so what do we do so do we pretend like it it did happen or it's

about to happen or do we kind of kind of double down in what we have so Stalin introduced the idea of socialism uh in one country now he very much still had his you know all over the world Spain is extremely important example Germany is another major example and to some extent Britain but no near extent that there the other two that I mentioned but and France there's a huge communist Mo movement in France one of the reasons France did so poorly in the war sure sure but not not to the extent that the Germans

and the Spanish certainly and much more than Britain um but that was kind of his and this was his one of his big um butting heads moments with trosky but as I talked about in the book what these political differences are are almost always a front for you know power plays and if if Stalin really wanted to work with Trotsky and have this kind of intellectual discussion which supposedly Marxism allows it's like all right now that we have the capitalists control the newspapers and Publishing everyone the lowest of the low can come up with their

ideas and we could take what brilliant ideas anyone has and create things something that's amazing under that model you would have them just hashing it out all right now we can come to the kind of uh consent of and move our way forward but of course that's not what end up happening in reality so one of the really interesting moments in the book is when you talk about the end of Lenin's life when he had the stroke I mean let's discuss that because that's not something I don't think many people have heard of and also

Stalin's involvement in it there's this um amazing kind of kitsy movie here uh that you might not not might know about called what ever happened to Baby Jane are you familiar with this movie yes I'm not okay so for those who don't know it was really this kind of big Innovative movie because you had Betty Davis playing baby Jane and Baby Jane was a woman who had been a child actress like a Shirley Temple figure and now she's like in her 60s whatever she's old but she starts losing her mind and starts thinking she's going

to be launch her singing career so you have Betty Davis with this like Cur little curls like Shirley Temple and putting on this makeup and looking completely absolutely deranged just brilliantly done her sister um blanch who was played by Joan Crawford was in a wheelchair and Baby Jane was taking care of her and she was basically a prisoner in her own home blanch and as Jane gets crazyer and crazier it gets more and more dangerous or blanch because how's she going to escape how's she GNA get the word out and and Jane starts torturing her

more and more and more and there's this one very very famous moment where Joan Crawford is sitting there and being like Jane you know you wouldn't be treating like this me like this I wasn't in this wheel trapped in this chair and she's Baby Jane's at the window and she looks out she goes what you are blanch you are in that chair and you ain't never getting out of it and you never get out of his house either and he just she locks her in the door and just very like very chilling moment lennin had

a series of strokes and Stalin was his caretaker and that meant Stalin kept track of all the communication in and out he kept it kind of quiet what state lenon was in and Lenin had a will which basically said Stalin should not be taking over the party he doesn't have the character Stalin was very much a thug you know he used to be a bank robber just hoodlum kind of figure lenon was an intellectual and trosky were intellectuals so lenon was like this guy doesn't have the character or there's many other problems with him well

you know that Solin made sure to suppress it and what Stalin introduced uh he may have been the first but he did it certainly to an extent other people didn't was again this is very much parody in 1984 was his idea of historical revisionism in the sense of falsifying the past so there's this great book called The commissar vanishes where they have side by side photos that um the the Soviets basically falsified so you they had the four you'd have four pictures be like Lenin Stalin and two other guys then the next picture after one

of the guys gets unpersoned you have Stalin lenon one other guy at the end it's just lenon Stalin now they're standing next to each other and we laugh but think about this for the internet if I'm looking at the newspapers and all the photos I see were lenon and Stalin hand in hand and I'm being told Stalin was Lenin's right-and man from the beginning and trosky wasn't even there what are you going to believe of course you're going to believe that so I think Americans don't understand to what extent people in these totalitarian regimes and

not at all exclusive to the Soviet Union are comfortably blatantly lying about the history to the point of just falsifying information that can if anyone had access to free information would clearly be disprovable and absolutely because the moment you also you want to go and disprove it that's the end of you yeah oh yeah oh that's not even a question yeah yeah there's yeah the Russians I'm sure this happened when you were still there had something called anot these little jokes and there was one story about Khan uh nikel Ken who I think was had

high was high up in the Soviet un I forget his exact title was talking about oh we're building all these great skyscrapers on Carl Mark Street and one of the workers like but comrade I go on Karl Mark Street all the time there's no Skys scers goes what are you going to believe eyes or what's in the newspapers read you read a newspaper once in a while but the joke is you shouldn't trust your own senses you should be obedient to what the experts are are telling you Michael and was Stalin uh because there's a

lot of debate about Stalin whether he was a faithful communist who was just willing to enforce that ideology by whatever means necessary or whether he was just a tyrant dictator who just did what what was necessary for his own ends was he a dedicated communist I I it's very hard for me to kind of um sift between those two or to figure out the utility of this distinction I don't think that he was this he was certainly dedicated he was committed he was passionate We're Not Gonna quibble about that word so we're that much we

have down um the fact that when one of the first I talk about in this book the purges so during the late 30s he went through group after Group which were threats to his power and just killed the number of people he killed was just astronomical and the first group he went after was the Society of old bulvik these are the people even even before Lenin who did their time under thear who really were True Believers where the idea of Communism is like okay yeah communism is going to happen okay buddy like cool cool story

bro like he went after them he went after the um the military uh the number of people it was like five out of six generals like 110 out of 112 UT just some crazy numbers um slaughtered all them uh he then he went after the secret police you know killed a ton of them then he went after the judges who put people in jail so he went systemically every Power Center and the amount of people uh the amount of administers that were killed like 20s the entire um Bellar Russian Congress was arrested like 100 out

of 102 people it's just crazy numbers where the only analogy would be like if John Adams got up and said everyone in the Continental Congress had actually been working for King George secretly and you were expected to believe this so I don't think that is an can be um compatible with this idea of like okay this is communist ideology that was clearly uh self-serving and you know the reason we kind of know this is kushev in I believe 56 had his so-called secret speech he gave this speech in the middle of the night no one

was allowed to attend other than the party Loyals loyal party members and he goes he just went through the numbers he goes the this Cult of Personality that Stalin created is completely antithetical to the spirit of Marxism leninism Lenin himself did have a lot of humility he wasn't living in a palace you know he very Spartan surroundings he was the True Believer he's like I'm going to practice what I preach Stalin you had all these doches and you know limousines and so on and so forth so when kushev came in he goes this is not

what we're about it's completely antithetical to the vision of an equal uh Society so by the way for uh um those of us from Eastern Europe and this applies to you certainly there's this great uh YouTube channel where they take historical speeches and use Ai and you can hear them and you could hear kushev deliver the secret speech and it brought a tear to my eye because you can you just hear him in 1956 after 40 years almost of Soviet communism being like you were all right the critics were right right it's all true because

up until that moment people like oh this is why would he do this why would he kill so many people this is just Western propaganda you're undermine the Soviet Union blah blah blah and kusf is like it's all true this is a complet the re the he used he was explicit goes these people were tortured to give confessions like I read to believe that all these people were the only things people were guilty was crossing Stalin and you hear him go on and on and on and it's extremely moving because one thing the book brings

to life so brilliantly is I understand Stalin was ruthless I understand and he you know wiped however many people he wiped off the face of the Earth but the example after example after example that you give it it felt like would there be anybody left in Russia yeah you and and it it it's it's this is the relentlessness uh a Rand you know who left the Soviet Union in 1926 she wrote a semi- aut graphical novel about her time there was called we the living but her working title was airtight because the idea was and

and Kim Jong uh Kim song the great leader of the founder of North Korea did this kind of more successfully than stal into this day the idea is we're going to make an airtight Society from which There Is No Escape possible um so this is the one of the reasons I went to North Korea is I think it's impossible for any of us on Earth right now certainly in the west to imagine what this was like because there are certain things about politics you and all of us don't like people watching this don't like we

could turn it off we could read books that are kind of silly or books that have our political point of view maybe it's going to take more work we could watch YouTube channels whatever music whatever you want we don't know what it's like where it's 247 and everywhere we we it's impossible to wrap our heads around this and your compliance is required yes for survival yes yes that's why it's called a totalitarian system because everything is control it's everything and when you went to North Korea cuz I haven't read your book on North Korea which

is a mistake I will Rectify over time but how similar was it in terms of what you saw there to what the Soviet Union would have been like is it a modern Soviet Union is I guess what I'm asking it's not modern because I mean you laugh but like the westerners have this idea that when you go there it's all like lights like Broadway it's this beautiful like like Disneyland Paradise there's everywhere you go something's wrong so if there's an elevator buttons one button will be wrong every wall has a crack the smell of mildew

everywhere everywhere I went even on the plane there's a fly which is like a Biblical symbol of evil and even in their Central Park the fountain's not running and it's covered in mildew you know what I mean so it this sense of Decay is pervasive uh it's the books I brought back you can even smell it in some of the books so it I I don't know there's a big difference I think in many ways because North Korea is nowhere near as powerful as the Soviet Union was um and there's certainly my friend from um

uh uh St Petersburg saw my picture he's like this is like St Petersburg with Russian with with Asian people he just blew his mind um so I I I left the Soviet Union when I was two so I can't obviously remember that but I I I think there's a lot of parallels and it's I think the closest thing we have to it uh especially this the thing that is very similar is this complete sense of which was a Soviet term political correctness like they do not want to talk politics because you don't know if you're

gonna say the right thing or the wrong thing I remember my mom who's not politically you know some politically activated she go like it wasn't complicated because one day this guy is the greatest thing since sliced bread and the next day he's been a traitor since the beginning and then two years later he's amazing again and like like you don't have to have any intelligence to be like this doesn't make any sense so the thing that people don't appreciate with these totalitarian countries it's not like all right if I just say Stalin is wonderful I'm

fine no it's that there's other people to talk about and if I had said three years ago this guy's great well now he's been unpersoned and I could be given the death penalty because three years ago in front of you you saw me say that he was great so because the reality constantly changes you're never on secure footing and I think that's by Design Michael so your book is called the white pill and your messages basically things have been really really bad in in the past and we're very lucky to have what we have is

that fair no no you're looking at me going no that's that's not the message at all I think the message is no matter the good guys won it before and no matter how dark it gets there is always hope and this hope isn't based on some kind of polyana like oh good always wins in the end it's not true but here are the receipts that as dark as what we were talking about happened they didn't win and that's something that happened in our lifetimes and that's something that you can understandably not expect the New York

Times to tell you so if these people who had far less than any of us had and were up against people who are far more ruthless far more entrenched and Far More in many ways intelligence if they could do it we could do it can not will can so that all being the case the reason I asked you about it is what are you've talked you and I have talked about this a lot which is the difficult and Francis too by the way the difficulty of communicating this stuff to people who've never um I'm about

to go into the devil where's proud of speech this stuff yeah because because it's not ideas and it's not facts it it's like uh it's almost like a felt sense like some kind of understanding that comes from knowing about these historical things that that changes the way you see the world it just does if you know this was real and you you experience it even by reading about it and and it changes the way you perceive everything oh yes for sure but the vast majority of people in this country and in the UK and elsewhere

have not done that have not had that so what are the like how do we I I don't even know what I'm asking like what are the lessons how do how do we communicate how do we really drives me crazy is the you know there's the the um Tinder versus real life that Meme like what they sell it as then what actually happens right I'm not a conservative in any sense the the argument for conservatism is we're the ones who look at the lessons of history that human beings aren't really that different 2,000 years ago

today and we apply these long learned historical lessons to contemporary times and we don't try to reinvent the wheel because it's not possible and conservatives in prac think history started a Perpetual 20 years ago right the left it's always the left the left as if there's one left the left took over the institutions 20 years ago and we got to stop them and then 20 years later oh 20 years ago and they've they are very uh intellectually in curious and I think a lot of conservative pundits and influencers don't talk about history enough and it's

bizarre because I think it behooves anyone and you don't have to care about politics history is fascinating a fascinating field this is instead of this works in theory what happened in real life what happened when people try this it teaches about the limits of human evil and the human goodness and this happened to not just this all these stories happened to so many people over so much time it's just I think a fascinating Endeavor for anyone who's in the slightest intellectually curious so I think it's also important um for I I one things I I

call the white pill the black pill is this idea that it's a wrap the west or the world is over this I I really hate this Greta dunberg conservatism that like oh if we lose this election it's over it's like it tell that to the people in Poland like tell that to the people in you know in in ltia or or in in in Ukraine or Russia that it's a it's not a rap and they were they were when Margaret Thatcher went to meet gorbachov uh um you know towards the end of her prime ministership

the the foreign office basically told her look nothing's going to change in Soviet Union like take whatever wins you can get and then they also gave her a u like a silver hairbrush as a present for him even though he's completely bald and we laugh but it's just like these people my one I'm going to spoil it a little but since this is history doesn't matter um helmet Cole who's the head of West Germany was meeting with Le wesa in in Poland and Le wesa is like I don't think that um the Berlin Wall is

going to be around for much longer helmet Cole laughed in his face he goes look I'm a lot older than you like I know these things take time so and he's like maybe it felt the next day the next day and helmet Cole got his German ass on a plane and goes he said quote I'm at the wrong party and flew back to Germany so there's this quote about how did you go bankrupt I think it's Steinbeck or Hemingway I always forget gradually in two ways gradually and then suddenly amazing things happen What seem like

overnight because we don't see the parts that built up to it so you know look at uh uh one of the things that was very important to me in writing this book which I didn't understand is what was the Berlin wall and why was it such a big deal when it fell and when you realize this was a wall that imprisoned an entire city and as one historian put it it was deranged prison where the ones on the inside were the ones that were free uh and to see the you could go on YouTube and

see the footage of people dancing and cheering with SH on top of the wall what that meant and again this is ' 89 this isn't you know you know grainy World War I footage these are amazing moments of Freedom that happen in our lifetime and I think it's important for all of us to take the wins that we can get it's such a profound point because in many ways the the black pill is it's giving up oh yeah it's aied way of giving up it's a way to justify being lazy and and cowardly I I

hate it with every fiber of my being yeah because all you can yeah it's it's it's a way to do all of those things but you can intellectualize it and point out things and go but you know what I'm the smart one and you're the idiot for having hope we recently reached a huge YouTube Milestone with a million subscribers amid the celebrations however there have been a few cynical voices too some people are asking how did two guys with weird hair and no obvious Talent managed to create some of the most sensible balanced nonpartisan conversations

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Us and other overseas trips with bigger and better guests that means more phenomenal extra content for you as we get the best Minds in the world to talk about the issues that truly matter no [ __ ] no fudging just an honest conversation with a fascinating person plus I'll be able to afford a proper haircut he's not going to get one but at least you'll be able to afford one good point click the link and join 40,000 people like you to make the show you love better again I'm I'm curious let me ask you this

because let's get personal for a second one of the things that okay um I know that's funny um one of the things in my Russ CU When You jab your finger in someone's Direction you go let's make this person it wish I had a steta right now one of the things that I I talked about this several times and about the Russian upbringing there was a show called Russian dolls which was a Russian version from Bright be spitting image no it was Russian version of um Jersey Shore here in the States you probably oh we

we have had this misunderstanding on the show before okay anyway carry on so the point is that have we talk have we talked about this already this with the girl in The Hair Salon I don't remember okay so the audience doesn't remember either okay we've memory H it's trosky it's memory it never happened so this girl she's a young whatever College age she's with her mom they're in the beauty salon getting the nails done or something and she goes she'd been frustrated not knowing a major to have right and she took an aptitude test it

said you'd be a good lawyer and she's like Mom I've been struggling I four majors I'm going to do pre-law I'm going to be a lawyer and finally decided first thing out her mom's mouth how are you going to pay for it and she completely the girl breaks has a breakdown and if you're an American you're watching this like calm down like like you're you're she's like why is and but it really hit close to home because in how I was raised and that's what I want to ask you is whenever you're excited about something

or like this is something oh this might be this might lead to something the first thing from Russian household is pulling the rug out like finding a problem and it's just like everyone who's achieved anything has had to overcome problems people what no one's figured out to pay for law school like this some kind there's no there's nothing to Google like this but it's always immediately like oh I went on this date with this chick things like well what what's her background where does she live it's just like why is that always your first question

is that were you well yes or no but it's funny we had this guy Mark Walsh on the show a while ago who's kind of like psych psychologist um and we talked about why Russians are the way they are and I kept pressing on him and and eventually just went Russian history look at the history I mean America is a is a completely different situation because it's a nation of people who conquered a continent and enjoyed the fruits of that right uh so if you go back only a few Generations really the these are winners

these are people who won they came they conquered they and they built a civilization out of nothing but look at the history of Eastern Europe it's famine it's War it's all the terrible things that can happen to humanity have happened there and so I think that the reason that people are like that is that uh look at what we've just been talking about for the last hour imagine living in a society where if you say the wrong word you're going to get executed that produces a very different type of human being to one where everyone

gives you high five and cheers you on and you know all of that I've had this conversation before but I think it's chicken egg no I don't think it is but I get that with your point but the thing is you can get to that later you could have the like all right this is exciting and then like all right now let's worry about the threats and the costs why is that always the first concern because Americans and their parents and their grandparents didn't grow up in a society where every mistake was likely to be

that costly and and the mistaken or otherwise was so arbitrary and random like yes if you're conquering this continent if you go the wrong path you're going to get killed by Indians or or whatever right but these were that was a kind of survival of the fittest in an Adaptive sense right the people who were the most entrepreneurial the people that who were most industrious the people who were the most driven the people who were the most capable they were the ones that survived but that's not what happened in Russia in Russia the people who

were the most capable and the most industrious and the most intelligent they were the ones that were killed off and you were with a lot of deeply traumatized people who knew above all not ever to rise above their station not ever to question not ever to do anything that made them Stand Out whereas this is a country of people who've been trained to stand out that's why you know to us Brits Americans are like ridiculously confident and everyone thinks they're great at everything and whatever I just think um it's it's the history of these two

countries yeah I think you're right and I I it doesn't make me despise it any less oh well it's so pernicious I despise is the wrong word for me because I think that if someone is deeply traumatized by generations of terrible history you can understand and have compassion without necessarily thinking it's the right way to be yeah but I I think at a certain point I have a lot of friends in in recovery at a certain point you have to own your trauma oh yeah and you have to be like all right like this is

something a tendency I have let me kind of keep that in check I'm not there anymore yeah yeah for sure but your point about the black pillow I mean it's interesting I think that some sometimes people would might accuse me of being black black p and I'm not blackpilled but I also think there is value in saying that the path we're heading down is the wrong path and if we keep going down this path we'll end up in a bad place course and so the black pness comes in for example the UK is very different

to the US in this way we're sitting here on the eve of the election in which Americans actually have Choice sure it may not be a great choice sure sure but it's a choice in the UK that doesn't exist if if you if you think like we do then 14 years of a woke pseudo conservative government followed by a labor not even pseudo conservative government there was no choice at the last election people didn't have one right you had a choice of two parties that are basically going to implement a very similar policy um so

I think that's why America is different because you still have choice you still have opportunity and your self-sufficient you can make your own energy you can grow your own food you can build your own stuff um and that's why America has a lot more reason to be optimistic I think yeah uh I am not white pilled about the UK um I one of the things I talk about extens in this book was the rise of Thatcher in in 79 and I think many people including Brits don't realize how bad Britain was in the 70s oh

yeah uh they had the winter of discontent uh the line I have in the book is they used to say truthfully the Sun never set in the British Empire right because the it spanned the whole globe you had mandatory blackouts in the 70s you weren't allowed to work to save electricity the garbage in Lester Square was six feet high the grave diggers were on strike uh inflation was with 20% something crazy they would alternate between labor and conservatives and the policies were the same and nothing was getting done and it was a given and this

is kind of astrology for men this whole idea of like cycles of civilization that like every Empire enters decline Britain's an a manage decline like it's going it's a wrap for us we're never going to be great again we're just going to get less more more miserable and Thatcher's quote was I just can't bear to see Britain in Decline like we were the ones who stood up alone against Hitler and who like helped liberate half the world and now look at us and she gave them that sense of hope and she was and now at

a great cost I mean the idea of thater is a lot better than the reality thater and tell that to the minors and people in Scotland let's let's be fair and to the Irish but point being the claim that uh Britain will never have electricity again and it's only going to get poor and poor or stay poor was false um but it was a long you know it was the window it was a long period of manag decline point being I don't see any trajectory in the near future for Britain for things to turn around

and on top of that the difference between the that period in now is that at least under Thatcher there was a sense of uh the British people being one people oh yeah there isn't that sense anymore now now well cuz we've got the blah blah blah community and the blah blah and and now we're all different communities instead of one people well no there was the there was the idea of the the unions versus everybody else that was a thing so there was some division there and certainly Scotland Ireland versus Great Britain um there's always

division but yeah the there I there seems to be consensus in Britain among the PE this is where you know we have talked about this off air the consensus is towards more tyranny like this the people want the cage and that is something that under you know in 78 and then 79 the Tor slogan which sa and Sach came up with was just three brilliant words labor isn't working so they had the photos of the cues of people getting relief and it's just like there's an alternative there to your point there is no alternative it's

it's I mean it seems to be it's just like it's just going to get more and more dictatorial uh so it's it's I I feel as someone who identifies some an angile I definitely feel for what your country is going through and and it's it's I think it's going to get worse before it gets better but there's also the note of the white pill which is we could have communism yeah notis yeah but there is a chance there are people who can come to the four just as Thatcher did oh sure you know I'm just

saying it's going to take a minute it is going to take that's what I'm saying yeah it's going to take longer than a minute unfortunately but I agree with you and hopefully look we all hope because the way things are going is not ideal should we say it's it's just heartbreaking for me as someone who has so much affection for Britain and what the British have accomplished to see just just that footage and you everyone knows this clip of a guy with his camera on his phone in his house and this lady cop is telling

him explicitly you're being arrested for a Facebook post or whatever it was social media thing and you're watching this and it's just like like it's easier for me to wrap my heads around the rioting in 2020 all every country's had rioting you know America was started by because of riding but to to watch that and it's just like holy crap where did you take such a wrong term turn and not only that it's that when you see this footage that there isn't this National like hold whoa whoa whoa because one of the things and I

hate praising him because it's such a boomer thing to do but one of the things Martin Luther King that did that was brilliant is he's like all right we're going to force people to face the consequence of what they're preaching you're for segregation you're racism okay you're going to see men and women in suits getting attacked by dogs and shot with fire hoses is this what you want and many people who were still prejudice looked at that and goes okay this okay we're we're this is a bridge I'm not comfortable Crossing let's take a step

back and the fact that that footage went wide and other examples I think there was a guy who had a a silence a Hamas a terrorist organization was tackled by the cops uh the fact that the Union Jack is regarded as a symbol of racism and hatred in your own country my God uh I I was in Japan in April and one of the things that I I I really didn't want to because I hate anime and I hate weabo culture I'm like don't make me fall in love with you guys I completely fell in

love with Japan because it was so great to be in a country which had national pride they love Japan they love being Japanese they're proud of what they built they take pride in themselves and and and their work uh and and everything else and they're actually much poorer uh uh than westerners in many ways because of this but that that's a that they still have this sense of Pride and this is something that I think Britain how could you not I had have you guys ever talked to danula yes yes I've had danula on my

show a couple of times like the Scots the amount that this little island brought to the entire world is so disproportionate like you guys should be like just talking about Scotland know Scots this Scots of that the fact that they're not taught this Scottish pride is as a someone who's never stepped foot in Scotland is crazy to me and and and and just downright reprehensible Michael malice comes out in favor of Pride that's going to be the thumb we'll have a little a little lgbtq lgp lgp LGB no there's going to be trans and quiz

here you [ __ ] bigot yeah St being racist trans and all right on that happy net head on over to oh no wait we've got the final question we've got a final question the one we always ask which is what's the one thing we're not talking about Michael that we should be oh um that's a great question what are what are we not talking about that we should be can I think about this because I think it's a very important question I think it's important you think about it um what is the one thing

we're not talking about um what are we not talking about that oh oh uh is democracy A system that is compatible with freedom or is inherently or even in any way Freedom seeking you did a carala thing there did you notice that no extra slow like you know you you would like is democracy uh uh uh well I wanted to word it correctly instead of talking word sty that's what she does but she doesn't she doesn't get well she might be president by the time we're talking about this so you shut your mouth it's going

to air in January ohid might die you might that's fair it's true what am I wrong I think the funniest outcome we recording this before someone someone said to me there's a line that the funniest outcomes most likely the funniest outcome is Trump gets elected and she becomes president before January that's the funniest so the first female president's there for like two months wait Trump gets elected right but he's only Biden dies incapacity doesn't have to die but but she becomes president yeah well there is the other possibility which is uh there is a very

small possibility that they both get 269 votes in which case the house and and the Senate get to pick one and potentially you could have uh Joe Biden not Joe Biden you could have Donald Trump as president and Tim Walters as vice president I don't know that would be funnier I don't think that they would put Waltz as VP don't you who would they put as they probably put her right Donald Trump president his president would that be smart to put hers too and because you know he's you know there's there's plenty of people who've

got their finger on the trigger that'd be incredible yeah yes well let's hope it's happened by the time this say you want Trump to be assassinated holy crap wow we all heard it listen to this queer my God I meant her being his vice president head on over to sub why we must ask Michael your questions is there a reason you've been more quiet on the Israel Gaza conflict do you have any clear preferences for future policies okay let's talk about this okay oh God here we go [Music]