Why You Should Take The White Pill - Michael Malice

1. 0:00 – 2:13

   Intro

   1. MMMichael Malice0:00

      We can't imagine what it's like as Westerners to live in a country where every aspect of your life has to be run through a politically correct filter. People here complain about wokeism or they hate Trump. And we can sit here and talk about how much we hate Trump or we hate wokeism, whatever, and there's no consequences. But to live in a country where even your friends are turning and spying on you, and you have to watch what you say, and at work, everything's in this context, in every movie, every song, every TV show, every newspaper, how it encompasses and affects you, we can't wrap our heads around it. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:34

      Michael Malice, welcome to the show.

   3. MMMichael Malice0:36

      I'm so nervous.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:37

      Why?

   5. MMMichael Malice0:37

      Kidding, you idiot. (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson0:38

      Is it... is, is it because of all of the cameras and lights?

   7. MMMichael Malice0:41

      (laughs) Yeah, yes.

   8. CWChris Williamson0:42

      I'll be gentle with you. (laughs)

   9. MMMichael Malice0:43

      (laughs) I don't want gentle.

   10. CWChris Williamson0:44

       Uh, yeah, I've... I've heard that. So, uh, you were about to have an argument with me, or you'd planned to have a potential argument with me.

   11. MMMichael Malice0:51

       No, no, I had an imaginary argument.

   12. CWChris Williamson0:53

       Okay.

   13. MMMichael Malice0:53

       So, do you ever get imaginary arguments with your friends?

   14. CWChris Williamson0:56

       I fantasize about them all the time.

   15. MMMichael Malice0:58

       (laughs) Right.

   16. CWChris Williamson0:58

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   17. MMMichael Malice1:00

       So this is the imaginary argument. I've been working on this book as long as we've been friends, uh, two and a half years, as you would say. And you texted me over the weekend about Lewis Ling, right? And he's chapter two.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:14

       Mm-hmm.

   19. MMMichael Malice1:15

       And I'm like, "This f-" Can I curse?

   20. CWChris Williamson1:18

       Curse away.

   21. MMMichael Malice1:18

       "This Brit (laughs) this bloody Brit."

   22. CWChris Williamson1:21

       (laughs) That's the worst word that you could have used.

   23. MMMichael Malice1:23

       (laughs) This... Well, I could have called you an Irishman.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:24

       Yeah.

   25. MMMichael Malice1:25

       "This bloody Brit has had all this time to read this book. He's not gonna have it done for the interview. He's just gonna talk about it cursorily when he knows how much I worked on it-"

   26. CWChris Williamson1:35

       Mm-hmm.

   27. MMMichael Malice1:36

       "... and how much it meant to me, and how much I wanted to hear his perspective as an Englishman." 'Cause, um, Lady Thatcher is on the cover and she's a main figure in the book.

   28. CWChris Williamson1:44

       Mm-hmm.

   29. MMMichael Malice1:45

       And I was all prepared to come in huffing and puffing, and-

   30. CWChris Williamson1:49

       I'm afraid-
2. 2:13 – 7:20

   Do the Public Know Anything About the Cold War?

   1. CWChris Williamson2:13

      for all the everybody that's smart seems to talk about the Soviet Union and lessons that come out of communism and st- You know, lots of people, t- the Lexes and the Petersons of the world or whatever seem to draw a lot of lessons from this. I frankly didn't know much about it. Like if you'd held a gun to my head and said, "Tell me when the Berlin Wall fell," or, "Tell me who the main characters were in the decline of communism between the UK, America, and, and the Soviet Union," I wouldn't have known. Uh, so it has been a little bit like a, I don't know, like a fast-tracked education through some pretty brutal elements of history.

   2. MMMichael Malice2:55

      I didn't know it either. You know, when I sat down to write this, I didn't know any of it. Um, I didn't know why it was such a big deal that the Berlin Wall fell and what that meant. I knew in a... You know, I was born in the Soviet Union but I left when I was, like, one and a half, so obviously I don't remember it in any sense. And though, you know, we were raised in my household with kind of Soviet-inspired values, for lack of a better term, I still had no good idea of what it meant when it fell, how bad it was, what are the lessons, none of that. And I still don't have a good answer as to why the Cold War, which was the absolute primary foreign policy concern for over half a century for the West, is, like, forgotten. It, it, it... I don't, I don't know how to reconcile those two things because starting from, you know, very quickly after the end of World War II up through '91, all foreign policy, whether in Britain, German- West Germany, the US, this was the filter, this was the big concern, is this pers- "How is this person going to address the Cold War," if you're talking about a prime minister or chancellor or a president? And if you ask people who Brezhnev is, right, who r- ran the Soviet Union for close to 20 years, what percent of e- educated, well-read people - now people who are a little older than us will know - know who he is? It's, it's a tiny percentage. And so when writing this, I still don't have an understanding as to why it kind of fell on my shoulders, 'cause this isn't some hipster band that you probably haven't heard of. This was the Cold War, and yet now if you talk about it, they're like, "Oh, yeah, wasn't that on, like, Labrador Records?"

   3. CWChris Williamson4:45

      Kitschy history type thing.

   4. MMMichael Malice4:47

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:47

      Yeah.

   6. MMMichael Malice4:48

      And it's like, this is millions of people in many countries over decades suffering things that all of us listening to this, and everyone listening to this is in at least a semi-free country, would find unimaginable. Just the, just even the one aspect of the idea of knowing that whenever you're on the phone, it's tapped, how that would affect your phone calls. Knowing... Now, you know, we have that here in the sense of the NSA, but not to the extent where, like, if I'm texting you and I'm making a joke about Trump or Biden, I have to w- worry, not i-

   7. CWChris Williamson5:23

      The knock at the door.

   8. MMMichael Malice5:24

      I, I... In the middle of the night. Am I gonna get fired? Am I just gonna get sat, be sat down by, you know, the authorities and be like, "What did this email mean? How did you know Chris? Who else have you talked about these things with Chris," and have no... I can't complain to anyone 'cause if I'm complaining, I'm only gonna make it worse. We can't wrap our heads around what that kind of lifestyle is like, and this was the norm for a lot of people. Uh, and that's even the, like, the easiest part to deal with, you know (laughs) ? You just don't talk politics. But the rest of it, you know, it, it's just was so pervasive and extensive and for so long and for so many people-And, I, I don't understand how this ... You know, we, the New York Times has a 1619 project, which focuses on things which we can all agree are a, a major historic concern. You know, the slave trade, you know, is obviously a, you know, a historical abomination. Uh, so the, the subject matter at least is important, even if their spin on it, you know, i- is a certain skew. But this is something that's just not discussed. And I, I, I can't ... I don't even have a hypothesis as to ... I, no, I do have a hypothesis. The hypothesis is there's not an easy narrative, right?

   9. CWChris Williamson6:34

      Mm-hmm.

   10. MMMichael Malice6:34

       I had to find this narrative. It's not an easy story-

   11. CWChris Williamson6:37

       Okay.

   12. MMMichael Malice6:38

       ... of, you know, it's, it's, okay, they're the bad guys, but then why are we teaming up with them in World War II? And who are the good guys? Are they Reagan, but is it really Reagan and Thatcher because, you know, they weren't entirely the heroes in the eyes of the press. So, when you don't have... Like, the Vietnam War's another, or the Korean War is called The Forgotten War 'cause it was a stalemate, right? So since there's no narrative and you can't make it into Hollywood where it's like good wins over evil, they just stop talking about it. And when you stop talking about it, you're, uh, ignoring what happened to untold numbers of men, women and children who had to suffer needlessly and who are now being forgotten and I'm like, "I'm gonna do something about that."

   13. CWChris Williamson7:17

       The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides.

3. 7:20 – 12:35

   Michael’s Message of Hope

   1. CWChris Williamson7:20

   2. MMMichael Malice7:20

      Yes. Yes, yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson7:21

      Yeah.

   4. MMMichael Malice7:22

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson7:22

      Um, so, I'm gonna try and do my best to summarize what I think is the reason or the message behind the book because a good bit of it is, um, repeatedly being stamped in the face by these very, very uncomfortable, brutal situations that many people across Romania, Ukraine, but largely in the Soviet Union, Russia especially is, that they're dealing with. But it's a book that's supposed to be about good as well. Right? It's about good and evil. And it kind of does take a, a little while for m- ... It took a while for me to get to the stage where I was like, "Oh, I, I kind of understand here." It seems to me that you have an issue with cynicism, um, being used and weaponized as a reason for people to not have hope. What you have done is displayed some of the most egregious transgressions of humanity from recent history. You've-

   6. MMMichael Malice8:22

      Very recent his- ... You know, this isn't (laughs) this isn't World War I. This is-

   7. CWChris Williamson8:27

      Since World War I.

   8. MMMichael Malice8:29

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson8:29

      Almost exclusively since World War I.

   10. MMMichael Malice8:30

       Yes. Yes.

   11. CWChris Williamson8:30

       Yeah, 1917, right?

   12. MMMichael Malice8:31

       Yes.

   13. CWChris Williamson8:32

       Yeah. So, you've tried to put out front, this is how depraved and awful and disgusting human existence can become, and yet it didn't win.

   14. MMMichael Malice8:45

       Yes.

   15. CWChris Williamson8:45

       And yet people said that it would never be defeated. And yet it happened essentially overnight from everything to nothing in the space of no time at all. Which means that when we are facing struggles in future, that degree of hope should be something that should be continued forward given that life right now is not as bad as it was then, so the delta between where we want it to be and where it is isn't as big to leap. How far am I off?

   16. MMMichael Malice9:12

       I think you said it better than (laughs) I could have. I would not change one word of that other than maybe delta 'cause people won't get that reference. Uh, and I'm being only a little glib. I, I think you articulated it perfectly. In s- in one case it was literally overnight, um, uh, when Helmut Kohl who was the chancellor or, uh, y- of West Germany, he's in Poland with Lech Wałęsa and, you know, telling this, th- it's just, this is a very, um, uh, emotional, um, book for me because y- when you see the photos of these people and their kids and, you know, there were times when the people in charge were ready to s- start shooting them and someone else was like, "We're not shooting them," and you see these children, it's just like ... You know, it's like hear these stories of like, I think it was Seth MacFarlane who had a ticket on 9/11 and he like missed his flight and he has that, I think that ticket framed in his house, like a plane ticket. It's just like, you know, it's just terrifying when you realize this wasn't hypothetical. Tiananmen Square was June 4th, 1989. So that year, 1989 when shit's hitting the fan, you know, East Germany, they're like, "We want another Tiananmen Square." And they were, put the guns in the hands of the military, they gave them the bullets. They were ready. Um, so you had Helmut Kohl in Poland with Lech Wałęsa who was the head of Solidarity and, and kind of the name figure in liberating Poland from communist rule and Lech Wałęsa says to him, "You know, I don't think the Berlin Wall is gonna be around much longer. I think it's gonna be like a matter of a, a, a, of some, a few (laughs) months." And Helmut Kohl laughs in his face. He laughs in his face. Like, Wałęsa was I believe 46, Helmut Kohl I think was 60 or something like that and he goes, "Look, you're young. You don't understand how these things work. They take a long time." It was like patting him on the head, the head of Poland. And it fell the next day, the Berlin Wall, the next day and Lech ... And Helmut Kohl (laughs) literally says ... There were so many quotes in this that I found that I was just like, I, like I kept ... If this was in a movie, it would be ridiculous writing. And Helmut (laughs) Kohl says, "I'm at the wrong party." (laughs) And gets on a plane and gets his ass out of Poland. And what else is just great with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I know we're spoiling to the good parts, is no one even bothered to call Gorbachev, right? So, you know, East Germany's heavily backed by the Soviet Union. It was kind of a Soviet satellite state. It was part of the Warsaw Pact which was basically a counterweight to NATO. All these countries agreed to have mutual defense. And Gorbachev wakes up (laughs) you know, in Moscow and there's people dancing on top of the Berlin Wall and (laughs) no one bothered to call him or let him know. And you can only imagine (laughs) what's going on in his head, you know, just seeing that. But it was the same thing that was going on in the head of people all over the world because the Berlin Wall for so long was, you know, imprisoning-... half of a city or three qua- or, you know, uh, uh, three quarters of a city in a sense. Uh, people were shot, children were killed i- in prison for trying to cross it, uh, and then, you know, they're just drunk and blasting their stereos. You know, to have this thing literally overnight go from a symbol of imprisonment, torture, oppression to the biggest party on Earth is something that I think even now it's hard for us to wrap our heads around.

4. 12:35 – 19:02

   Why is Cynicism So Prevalent in Society?

   1. MMMichael Malice12:35

   2. CWChris Williamson12:35

      Going back to the cynicism thing, why do you think it is that it's so prevalent? Because it's something that both of us, I think, rail against, both of us have a particular distaste for people that are, um, unreasonably cynical, and it's, you know, part of the reason that I ended up moving countries in an attempt to try and be around people who are less- less cynical. Wh- what is it that's so alluring about that cynical mindset?

   3. MMMichael Malice12:59

      I- I don't- I don't know what I hate more than cynicism. You know, maybe, like, you know, li- literal totalitarianism, but in terms of personality, I don't know what I hate more and what I'm more against because it- it- it's such an absurd premise that's so easily disprovable. Uh, cynicism as I understand it, not in the, you know, uh, um, you know, Greek philosophical sense, but this idea that, like, everything sucks or, you know, don't get your hopes up, it's not gonna work out, as long as you have one counter-example, the thesis is disproven. And you're telling me that like... And like if people are like, um, uh, uh, you know, "I agree that most comedians suck. I agree that most movies suck. I agree that most books suck. I agree that most podcasts suck, especially mine." None of them? Not one? There's no book that you read that you're a better person having read it? There's no movie you've seen where you're like, "Holy crap, I feel like I've- watching something from heaven"? There's no song that you've ever heard that even when you hear it for the 20th time, it shakes your soul? None? And if you're that kind of person, that's on you. That means you are somehow guarded or damaged or something within, uh, and I think there is an enormous amount of pressure, uh, and from what you and I have talked about, it's, I guess, more prevalent in British culture than America, but there is a lot of pressure of, you know, kind of just head down, go to the factory, do the work, don't hope for anything better, and it's just like you don't have to become a king or a president or a CEO to improve, right? Not everyone has to be a fitness model to be in better shape, right? If you're someone who's 400 pounds, you can get down to 250. You're still a big dude, but think how much healthier you are, your clothes, mobility, walking up the stairs, quality of life in every way. Is that such an unreasonable goal? But for a cynic, it's like, "What's the point? You're still fat." Well, the- yeah, you are, but come on, these are extremely different qualities of life. So I think it is a very non-rational, um, emotional perspective that tries to present itself as it's- as if it's realistic and cool-headed. It's like, "Oh, you're naive. You're- you're a Pollyanna," and like you pointed out, the point of this book is I'm not being hopeful in the sense of nothing bad happens. I'm not being hopeful in the sense of the bad guys aren't really that bad. The extent of the depravity i- you know, I- I was on, uh, my buddy, uh, Dave Smith, he's a very failed comedian, his podcast, and he goes, "If you read 90% of this book, you'll think it's The Black Pill."

   4. CWChris Williamson15:59

      Correct.

   5. MMMichael Malice15:59

      'Cause you're reading it and you're like-

   6. CWChris Williamson16:01

      That's what I mean. I'm like, okay, Chapter 10 and we're still not here and-

   7. MMMichael Malice16:05

      And you're- you're, like, I just, one, you know, example off the top of my head, I hope I get through it without my voice breaking 'cause I still read it and- and just- it just haunts me to my core. You know, ear- early in the 1920s, there are these children who were, like, homeless in Moscow, and they were like thieves, pickpockets, you know? You're- you're a kid living on the streets, you got to make do. So the Cheka come, the secret police round them up and they take them to the cellar of the prison and they start beating them and- and torturing them and making them "Who- who are you working with? Who are your, uh, colleagues?" Whatever the term they used, right, "in your gang?" They don't... They're kids, they don't... So they take them in the car and they drive around, they go point out who you're f-... And at that point you're like, "Him, uh, him, him, him." You know, anyone. And then they took them back and they kept beating them and you hear the other prisoners, like the adults hearing these kids- these kids screaming and these adult criminals were like, they- they were losing their minds just hearing the screams of the children as the children realized th- they were being returned to the cellar. So when you hear about the... So there's no whitewashing in this book of how bad it gets, you know, but people have this idea that, like, there's no point in fighting because, you know, it's inevitable that the bad guys are gonna win, but they haven't, you know? Like, I'm here h- if Hitler had his way, I'd be dead. If Hitler had his way, you'd be dead, right? Like, you know, Britain was standing alone against Hitler for quite a while. Uh, it, uh, or you'd be a slave. I don't know what you'd be, whatever. Point being, i- you know, this insistence that villainy always... W- why is it... You know, this is the line I had, you know, when thinking about this book. Why is it that the bad guys always get what they want? Wh- what, I can't get what I want once? And when you put it in those terms, it's like, yeah, you're right. And even if I can't, what, I'm just gonna be like, "Eh, too bad." So, uh, I- I don't think it's a coherent, um, worldview. I think it's a very emotional response coached in the mask of rationality and realism, and I don't think it's realistic at all.

   8. CWChris Williamson18:05

      ... it's able to give people, it's a much more, um, sort of pedestalized position to be in, right? If you say that everything's going to be bad, it's- it feels like a well-researched... The critic always feels like the guy that's well-researched.

   9. MMMichael Malice18:17

      Yeah, right.

   10. CWChris Williamson18:18

       Right? As opposed to the person that's hopeful, because the person that's hopeful that things don't happen have... And maybe this is actually reflected in terms of our, uh, neurochemistry. Andrew Huberman taught me about this thing where if you tell someone that a movie is going to be really, really good, their dopamine release, even if it's as good as they expect it to be, is less. And if the movie is less good than they expected it to be, then they lose even more.

   11. MMMichael Malice18:42

       Sure.

   12. CWChris Williamson18:42

       So, what you're doing is, by being the cynic, you're saving yourself from ever being the person that over-promises. So, maybe reality does deliver the world better than you'd hoped. "Well, brilliant, that's a, that's a bonus for you," and, "Oh, well, you know, I'm just trying to keep everybody's feet on the ground." That seems like a noble cause, right? So,

5. 19:02 – 24:39

   Why Ayn Rand’s Speech is Important

   1. CWChris Williamson19:02

      you named each of the different chapter- most of the chapters up until toward the end, after this famous Ayn Rand speech, a p- passage from a speech that she gave. Why- what's so special to you about that particular speech?

   2. MMMichael Malice19:17

      Um, so there's a, there's, um, in Prague, there's a, a museum of communism, and I visited one there when I was in Prague several years ago. And I remember the captions on the different exhibits were worded in a very kind of idiosyncratic way. 'Cause in a Western museum, um, you would have it be kind of scholarly, you know, even the Holocaust museum, it's gonna be kind of, uh-

   3. CWChris Williamson19:42

      This is what it is.

   4. MMMichael Malice19:43

      Yeah, yeah, very kind of emotionless, matter-of-fact. And I remember that in this museum of communism, 'cause, you know, the, the Czechs were under the f- the boot of the Soviet Union for many decades. It's like, "According to, you know, this ideology, we would all have food, but in reali- and thanks to their demented re-" and it, this demented reality, "we're all starving," and there was one caption where they talk about how, you know how like, on the side of a pack of cigarettes, it says, you know, "Smoking this will, will be dangerous to your health." Well, in the same way, living in a communist country would be dangerous to your health. So, it's, it, it was very much like this kind of F you, and I sent my, my protege Trey was in Prague recently, I go, "Can you..." uh, 'cause I'm like, I, I don't, "Can you get- take me photos of the captions?" And he, and he went through and took- sent them all. And this was, you know, over this past summer, and it r- that... It was really a gut punch, and this is after the book was largely done, 'cause that was the first moment when I realized to what extent it encompasses every aspect of the people living in these countries' lives. You know, i- i- think a- we can't imagine what it's like as Westerners to live in a country where every aspect of your life has to be run through a politically correct filter. Now, people here complain about wokeism or they hate Trump, but you can go to this sports game, you can watch some shoot 'em up movie, you know, Jerry Bruckheimer movie or something stupid. You can watch How I Met Your Mother. There's nothing political about it. It's just... But s- and we can sit here and talk about how much we hate Trump or we hate wokeism, whatever, and there's no consequences. But to live in a country where even your friends are, they are turning and spying on you and you have to watch what you say, and at work, everything's in this context. In every movie, every song, every TV show, every newspaper, how it encompasses and affects you, i- i- it's, we can't wrap our heads around it. And, you know, so Rand was testifying in 1947 in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and she was the only, um, person testifying, the only witness who had lived in the Sov- in what became the Soviet Union. And the congresspeople were pushing back at her, 'cause they're, 'cause they were just like, 'cause what she was saying to them was fantastical to them, because they were of this idea that like, "You know, we have it one way. You know, the Russians have it a different way. But people are all pretty much the same all around the world." Which is true, y- you know, to, in, i- to that extent. And this congressman from Pennsylvania goes like, "Don't they, like, have picnics and visit their mother-in-law?" And, and you could sense the exasperation in her voice, and she says the quote which is on the back cover of the book where she goes, "Look, it's almost impossible to convey to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship." She's like, "I can give you a little, a lot of details. I can never completely convince you because you're free." And she breaks down, like, "Just try to imagine you're in constant terror from morning till night, and at night you're waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you live in a country where human life means nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. Where you don't know who's gonna do what to you when, 'cause there's no rights or law of any kind." And this sense, uh, which I grew up with to some extent. It was kinda passively fed into me.

   5. CWChris Williamson22:57

      You've told me about, uh, what's that concern that you have? You sometimes worry about giving people pieces of information 'cause how can it be used against you?

   6. MMMichael Malice23:04

      Yeah. Yeah, you run the filter in your head. Like, the sense of never being entirely safe is something that I don't think Americans, thank God, can wrap their heads around. 'Cause they think, I think, i- insofar emotionally, y- you can kind of get to the point where, you know, you go to school and they're teaching you lies, and the newspapers are full of lies, and the m- the movies are full of propaganda. So we kind of get to that. But in the sense of like, there's nowhere else to go? We can't really appreciate what that's like. So that kind of was the theme, you know, trying my best. And again, I also can't... I've been to North Korea, but it's one thing to... Beautiful country, wouldn't wanna live there. It's, uh, it's one thing to visit, 'cause I knew I could get my ass out, right? It's another thing to be like, "This is the entirety of my reality, from the day I'm born till the day I'm gonna die, and there's no alternative to this." And, you know, just how pervasive that is, I don't think any of us know what that's like to have a life that is effectively without choice.... our entire lives.

   7. CWChris Williamson24:15

      It's the difference between being homeless or going camping.

   8. MMMichael Malice24:18

      Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, even with homelessness, it's, what if you're homeless and everyone else is homeless? That, I mean, that's the difference, 'cause when you're homeless you ha- you, you used to have a home, you could still have a shelter, you know, there's ways to change your environment. But yeah, I, I think that's a good way of putting it.

   9. CWChris Williamson24:38

      Given

6. 24:39 – 32:12

   The Inability to Foresee Consequences of Communism

   1. CWChris Williamson24:39

      the atrocities that occurred throughout all of the 1900s under communism, how the fuck did people not foresee the issues that were going to occur?

   2. MMMichael Malice24:52

      Um, well-

   3. CWChris Williamson24:55

      Is it only obvious in retrospect?

   4. MMMichael Malice24:57

      I, I, I think... That's a great question, how did they not foresee it? I think a lot of people did foresee it. Um, Mikhail Bakunin, who was Marx's big rival, uh, he had an essay from 1867, which is in The Anarchist Handbook, and he just dissects Marxism. And you read it and you're like, "This guy not only predicted the Soviet Union, he predicted the problems of the Soviet Union."

   5. CWChris Williamson25:19

      Prophetic.

   6. MMMichael Malice25:19

      Pro- very prophetic. And in the quote, that, if I could sum it up in one sentence, it's his quote where he says, uh, "If the people are being beaten by a stick, they're not much more mollified if it's called the people stick." So when you have the, and even if you, the argument was this is gonna be temporary, right?

   7. CWChris Williamson25:40

      (laughs)

   8. MMMichael Malice25:40

      We're going to have this kind of oppressive dictatorship of the proletariat, we're gonna purge these evil elements from our society, and once that's done and everyone's working for the sake of everybody else, um, and the parasites are kinda destroyed, you know, everyone's gonna, you're not gonna be w- you, like, my hard work is not gonna be going towards, you know, Carnegie and having an eighth mansion for him, it's gonna be going towards the people, I'm gonna work less. Um, i- there is a kind of coherence to it.

   9. CWChris Williamson26:09

      In the course of time, these methods will be abolished when they've become unnecessary.

   10. MMMichael Malice26:14

       Yeah. Yeah, and you know, Emma Goldman, who's on the cover, she sat down with Lenin and she's like, you know, 'cause the socialist argument was under capitalism you're free to starve, right? But under socialism the individual would be allowed to flourish. So she sits down with him and she goes, "People are getting locked up for their political views, there's no free speech, like, this is not what we're about." And Lenin goes, "This is like a, like a bourgeois privilege. Like, we're in, we're in a time of revolution, once this kind of civil, Russian Civil War is settled, then we're gonna be reintroducing freedoms." And it was a complete lie. Once the Russian Civil War, as, as she saw personally, was stopped, then they just doubled down even more and even Lenin's erstwhile colleagues from other, like the anarchists, the, uh, the Mensheviks, they were all locked up. A- and when Lenin adopted their views, the Menshevik views, and the Mensheviks started pointing out, he goes, "If you point this out, that is being counterrevolutionary, you're gonna go to jail." So even pointing out the hypocrisy became a felony. Um, so, you know, yeah, very quickly it became clear what this means in practice. And God bless her and her partner in crime, literal crime, Alexandra Berkman, they fled the Soviet Union, um, very early on. They went to the West. They said, "Guys, this is a complete nightmare. These are, people are not helping the workers." They're like, "We're for violence. Uh, we're not like pansies here. I tried to kill Frick. We're for bloody revolution, we're for stealing food if you're starving, th- you're not, but, but this is not what we're about. They're, they're oppressing the, the sa- exact people we're supposedly for."

   11. CWChris Williamson27:49

       (laughs)

   12. MMMichael Malice27:49

       And the Western intellectuals, who love having other people do the dirty work, were like, "Oh, you don't get it," or like, "Ah, it's fine." So that kind of, to me, was very disturbing and this is something that happens to this day when you have these eyewitnesses, you know, speak their truth and testify as to what they saw, and you have someone who went to Harvard be like, "Ah, you don't get it. Read a book." (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson28:15

       Talking about anarchists, especially in the US, what was the story of Lewis Ling?

   14. MMMichael Malice28:19

       Oh, God. The Lewis Ling story. I love him, he's such a badass. Um, Lewis Ling was one of seven men, there was a, um, a, in, or, um, I forget the year, in the late 1800s there was a rally in Ha- Haymarket Square in Chicago, um, this is when they were f- after the Civil War had ended, they thought there was gonna be a third American revolution. You had the first one, which overthrew aristocracy and monarchy, the second one, which overthrew slavery, and now you're gonna have one which is gonna overthrow the capitalists and we're gonna have, you know, a revolution here in America and have things like the eight-hour day and, you know, abolish profit and all that other stuff that, that they liked. And there was, um, a, um, a ra- a meeting, public meeting, there were some speeches. Very... It was peaceful. Not mostly peaceful, it was entirely peaceful. The mayor came, he's like, "All right, no problem here," he leaves. Someone throws a bomb, we still don't know to this day who threw that bomb or for what purpose. A lot of cops were killed, a lot of the cops started shooting, a lot of people were killed. Uh, they arrested seven people and they put them on tr- various anarchists, some of whom weren't even there, um, some who had spoken there and, and advocated peace, and they put them on trial as basically, like, "You preach this ideology," and they charged them with murder, uh, even though there was not even an allegation that they had thrown the bomb or encouraged it or were like, "Yeah, more..." You know? Lewis Ling, they searched his house and they found bombs at his house, and his attorney said, "Well, uh, my client has the right to have bombs in his house." And which became this kinda meme, before memes were a thing, where it's like, uh, uh, he's ascribed to have said, "I couldn't have thrown that bomb, I was at home making bombs." (laughs) And they imprison him and someone s- we still don't know how, snuck a blasting capsule into his jail, and rather than be hanged, he detonated his jaw. Uh, he was, if you look at photos of Lewis Ling, it's, it's like a time traveler 'cause he looks like Channing Tatum or something. He, he looks like... he came out at Abercrombie ad. I think Abercrombie's not doing, like, the studs anymore, but whatever. Like, when Abercrombie was a thing. And he blows off his jaw, it's hanging and with his blood, he writes on the wall, "Hooray for anarchy." (laughs) Uh, and he dies the next day. He's like, "They're not gonna get to me." So he was... You know, people, uh, ignorantly romanticize Che Guevara. Uh, but he was the first really, this, like, young spirit of violent defiance and I mean violent in every sense of the word. Um, and he really was a, you know... People, uh, the- the cop who arrested him, uh, wrote a book about it and he even, he talked about how people came to visit him in jail 'cause they were so impressed by his, like, magnificent physique and what a stud he was. So he really was a- a- a total badass. Uh, you know, he, he... Certainly not a good guy, but certainly, uh, in terms of literature, this kind of, uh, very, um, s- a specific archetypical figure.

   15. CWChris Williamson31:10

       What happened to the other six?

   16. MMMichael Malice31:11

       Oh, they were hanged. Uh, one... Uh, no, no, no, no.

   17. CWChris Williamson31:13

       Y- didn't one apologize?

   18. MMMichael Malice31:14

       Uh, no, no. Uh, no. Sorry. They were told, "If you write for clemency, uh, the governor will l- lessen the charges." And some of them were like, "I'm not, I didn't do anything. I didn't kill, I didn't kill anyone. I'm not for murder. I'm not asking for clemency." And they're like, "All right." And, in fact, one of them, as he went to the gallows, turns and says, "Can I address the crowd and say a few words?" And they just killed him right then and there. So they be- and there's this, they got pardoned, uh, posthumously. Uh, there's a monument to their, to them in a cemetery near Chicago. Emma Goldman was repatriated to be buried there as well. The dates on her tombstone are wrong, which is funny. And the quote, August Spie's quote is worded several different ways, but one of them, they're all effectively, technically the same meaning. Uh, "Someday the voices, someday our voic- someday our voices will speak louder than those you strangle today." Uh, and it's true.

   19. CWChris Williamson32:11

       How would you describe

7. 32:12 – 39:53

   Political Philosophy at the Start of the 20th Century

   1. CWChris Williamson32:12

      the, uh, vibe of political philosophy at the start of the 20th century? Because everything kind of comes out of this, right? We're talking about anarchism, uh, s- around that sort of a time. We're about to have the First World War, we're about to have the inception of the Soviet Union, we're about to have this sort of onset of communism and then downstream from that everything else happening. What was unique about that period in terms of political philosophy history that enabled this, uh, mix of ingredients to start cooking?

   2. MMMichael Malice32:44

      I think a big part of it was the rise of the intellectual, because you had the Industrial Revolution happening kind of in that window and as a result of this, there was a lot more money going around and there was a lot more opportunity for people to make their living just being intellectuals. Uh, and intellectuals had a much higher, um, status in that society, they became an emerging class. Um, so, and also you had these enormous fortunes being generated as a result of industrialization becoming a thing. Uh, farmers, you know, were kind of on the down and instead you had people building factories and these giant kind of conglomerates that were changing the face of the world. Uh, and you had reactions to this, you know, progressivism of course being one of them in America. Um, you know, this kind of classical liberalism was falling by the wayside because the argument was, not unreasonably I think, you had these enormous amounts of immigrants coming to the States, uh, from Europe and Eastern Europe and from Ireland and, and Italy, and they're living in these horrifying conditions. They don't have sanitation, uh, you know, the c- the people are getting injured at work and there's no hope for them. Uh, children are dying young 'cause there's no birth control and you have s- a woman who's got no husband and 13 kids, like, what's she gonna do? She has to prostitute herself, right? Um, so, you know, when you have these horrifying conditions, at the same time you have the rise of the kind of, you know, monopolist class, a lot of people were like, "All right, something's not adding up here. Uh, so, like, we got to figure out how to square this circle." And there were, you know, different approaches to what that would look like. On the one hand you had... So, uh, what people don't appreciate now is socialism at the time was really this kind of blanket term about that society has to be managed somehow for the greater good. It didn't mean the government runs everything necessarily. That is kind of the, the, the strain that went out. But anarchists consider themselves socialists even though they're opposed to government entirely. Um, so they were kind of... You know, you had in Britain you had the Fabian Society coming up, you had, you know, uh, uh, the Webbs, um, and the Bolsheviks were the ones who won. And I think what ended up happening, and I don't think this is particularly ambiguous, is all these different branches of intellectual leftism were like, "All right, we've got a shot here. This is the one country where they're trying it, we have to make it work and give it a shot to see if it does work." And Eugene Lyons, you know, who was a former communist, I, I guess I discuss him more in the book, journalist said, "Yeah, you, you guys were looking at the Russians like guinea pigs and you were perfectly happy to have them just be ground into nothing because this was your noble experiment and they were the ones paying the price, but you were the ones kind of reaping the benefits."

   3. CWChris Williamson35:25

      Yeah, that's so interesting, the fact that even if it wasn't particularly your brand of socialism, your brand of progressivism that you wanted, even if they weren't getting it right and the costs that were being, uh, the, the toll was huge, if at the end of it you could have pointed at it and said, "Well, that was a victory that went well," that would justify your movement going forward.

   4. MMMichael Malice35:48

      Right. And in, in all fairness, as different times, uh, moved on, there were plenty of socialists and leftists who were like, "All right, I'm out."

   5. CWChris Williamson35:59

      Too much.

   6. MMMichael Malice35:59

      Uh, yeah. When, when Hitler and Stalin signed the Ribbentrop Pact and, uh, you know, treaty of non-aggression and they basically started becoming buddies, you know, overnight many of these communist front, um, organizations in the West-... changed their names from advocating for, like, being against fascism to being for peace, right? And they're, "Oh, no, no, we gotta stay out of the World War II," but there were lots of progressives, hardcore progressives, who were like, "You're shaking..." Like, they were like, "You're shaking hands with Hitler? Okay, that's a wrap. Like, this is not ambiguous, this is completely what we're against. I'm outta here." So, they still remained, you know, hardcore democratic socialists or whatever, progressives, uh, depending on the individual, but in terms of having a love affair for the Soviet Union, that was a big one for them to swallow. And also, just other things, like the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring, Afghanistan. These were big, big problems for lots of leftists, but not so much for people like The New York Times.

   7. CWChris Williamson36:55

      The Espionage Act, was... Is that the same thing that's still in now? Is that the same basis in America, for deporting people that have been, uh, uh, accused of being, uh, foreign agents and stuff like that? The one that was... I think it was 1916-

   8. MMMichael Malice37:09

      Yeah, yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson37:10

      ... 1917. Is that the same... f-

   10. MMMichael Malice37:13

       No, I don't- I don't- I'm not sure that it is. So, what you're referring to is, after Leon Czolgosz kill- Czolgosz killed, uh, President McKinley in 1901 and Teddy Roosevelt came in, and Teddy Roosevelt said, you know, "Anarchisms are the worst people ever," their- it's- they're worse- it's worse than slavery and- and so on and so forth, and they basically passed a law saying if you're an anarchist or have certain other ideologies, you can be deported, and they- there was something called The Red Arc where they rounded up a bunch of, uh, anarchists and radicals, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and sent them, uh, "Get your ass back to Russia," which, "'if you love it so much." Um, I don't know how, if that is still... I'm sure it's probably still legally enforced 'cause laws don't ever get repealed, but I don't know if that's the basis for, uh, um, if- if it's being used in contemporary terms.

   11. CWChris Williamson37:56

       Yeah, you said in 1916, keeping us out of the war was a winning slogan. By 1917, it was a crime.

   12. MMMichael Malice38:01

       Yeah, so Woodrow Wilson very famously campaigned on, "He kept us out of war," right? And Woodrow Wilson was the f- was only the s- the second, uh, um, Democrat to be elected president after war- after the Civil War. McKinley was, uh, not McKinley, excuse me, Grover Cleveland was elected into two non-consecutive terms because the Republican Party just basically ran the table. Uh, and since, uh, F, uh, Taft and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 split the Republican vote, Wilson snuck in, but it was not at all clear that he was going to get reelected because the Republicans regrouped. They had Charles Evans Hughes, who was a former governor of New York, um, and Supreme Court Justice as- as the nominee, and it's like, "All right, it's- it's um, th- we- we got this in the bag." You know what I mean? And it was, I think it was like 3,000, 2,000 votes in California decided that election, uh, and it went for Wilson and- and he got reelected, but, you know, this was the big argument, "He kept us out of war." And then a few months later, it's like, "Well, you know, we gotta go to fight war in Europe," which was complete violation of the Monroe Doctrine and what America had stood for since its inception. Um, and very heavily, you know, Wilson introduced, just like Lenin was saying through Goldman, you know, free speech is kind of this bourgeois contrivance, you can't have it under times of war, he's saying the same thing. So, people who were advocating against the draft, uh, people who were advocating things like that were imprisoned, including Eugene V. Debs, who was the Socialist candidate for president. He locked him up, and it came upon Warren Harding, who was inaugurated in 1921 to, you know, I- I don't know if he pardoned him or gave him clemency to get him out of jail. So, they were imprisoning a lot... They were, you know, reading the mail. It was very much a, uh, totalitarian vision, and the expla- excuse was, you know, "We have to do this 'cause otherwise there's gonna be German spies, we have to fight the kaiser," so on and so forth, "Make the world safe for democracy." But these were just complete, brazen violation of all sorts of constitutional principles that, uh, are regarded nowadays as sacrosanct.

8. 39:53 – 52:40

   Fundamental Philosophy of the Soviet Union

   1. MMMichael Malice39:53

   2. CWChris Williamson39:53

      What are the principles that the Soviet Union was founded on, then? It's like 1917-y time. What- what was the fundamental philosophy or principles that it was created upon?

   3. MMMichael Malice40:03

      Well, there- there's the de facto and du jour, right? So, there's what they said it was, and then there's what it was in reality. So, Lenin campaigned on this concept of all power to the Soviets. So, the idea is you have these localized worker councils, and the workers, you know, now that they're liberated from the shackles of capitalist opp- uh, control, they're gonna sit down, figure out how to run the factory better for themselves, everyone's gonna share in the wealth, everyone's gonna put in their two cents, from each according to his ability. So, you're stronger than I am, so you're gonna do the heavy lifting. Maybe I'm better w- with my little hands with screws. You know, everyone's gonna work together, it's gonna work out just phenomenally great. So, you- you have this kind of sense of localized control. Um, but very quickly, it became, you know, Lenin, what Lenin wanted, um, and Trotsky, his kind of sidekick. And you had pla- places like The New York Times saying explicitly, "Oh, Lenin's not a dictator. He's just getting his way 'cause he's smarter than everybody." You know, so like, the- the most pro-Lenin propaganda that even Lenin kind of would maybe shy away from saying with a straight face in the Soviet Union, 'cause he did have some semblance of humility, uh, in the West it was just like, "This guy's come to kind of save the world, uh, um, from the bad guys and- and we- we owe him whatever we can to make sure it works."

   4. CWChris Williamson41:14

      You said that Lenin was widely regarded as a lunatic.

   5. MMMichael Malice41:17

      Yes.

   6. CWChris Williamson41:17

      Why?

   7. MMMichael Malice41:18

      Well, before 19... Uh, this idea that, "Okay, we're gonna come in. We're gonna overthrow capitalism. We're gonna..." 'Cause, you know, the Marxist idea is much more radical than what the Soviet Union even tried to implement, 'cause it- the Soviet Union was in theory. It's like putting- putting your ideas to practice, right? So, this kind of concept of, you know, everything is gonna be done through the state and we're gonna change the very nature of man, that human being is infinitely plasticine. You know, early on they were talking about like, "Okay, what if kids are raised communally," right?

   8. CWChris Williamson41:50

      That was wild. That absolutely took... What was the thing about, um, uh, code on marriage, the family and guardianship? It was seen as bourgeois to prefer your own children over others.

   9. MMMichael Malice42:00

      Right, 'cause it- 'cause if- there... So, what they did correctly or logically is, you take s- the idea of equality and then you just extrapolate it everywhere you go, and it's just like, it leads to conseq... So, here's an ide- so, like, let me give you a counter- a counter-example that I w- what was in my North Korea book, Dear Reader. When conservatives say, "The family's the basic unit of society," right? So-... they do that in North Korea, meaning if you commit a crime, Christopher, like the Williamson family's on trial because it's-

   10. CWChris Williamson42:29

       And that's eight generations of-

   11. MMMichael Malice42:30

       Well, three.

   12. CWChris Williamson42:30

       Yeah.

   13. MMMichael Malice42:30

       But it's, it's a unit. Unit means one. It's not divisible.

   14. CWChris Williamson42:33

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MMMichael Malice42:33

       So if the family's the unit and someone commits a crime, the family goes on trial, so they are putting that into practice. Now, that's not what conservatives mean, of course, but when you're talking about equality and you mean it thoroughly, it's just like, "Why should one child be advantaged by having loving, wealthy parent..." Like, and we have an aspect of that here, which I don't know they're a- they're all entirely crazy. The argument is, "Why should I, who's the heir to like the Kardashian fortune as a kid, have all these advantages? I'm never gonna have to work a day in my life. You're born to a mother addicted to heroin in some, you know, gutter. You... We're not gonna start off with the same opportunities. That's not fair." And I think there's something to that. But if they take it the extreme of, "Well, why should one f- kid have more love or a better parent than another? We're just gonna take the kids and raise them all together by professionals. The government teachers are gonna raise them. They're gonna be trained in this." Not like... Look, m- every mom and dad's winging it. That's not fair to those kids. We need to have professionals and experts raising them. And don't worry, the mom after work can go visit her kid if she chooses. This was the, the, the model for their whole country, and some of it, they had enormous pushback and some of it they implemented, but the whole point is, this is a new scientific society. "You guys are old fuddy-duddies. You're doing things just 'cause your grandma did a certain way. We're starting from scratch and we're rebuilding it nice and clean along scientific principles." None of this emotionalism, this kind of bourgeois sentimental, like, "Oh, I love my kid." No, no, no, no, no, no. This kid doesn't belong to you. This kid belongs to everyone. So i- it's, it doesn't... It, it's really-

   16. CWChris Williamson44:12

       (coughs)

   17. MMMichael Malice44:12

       ... once you put it into practice, uh, you know, and North Korea's another example, like in construction, like the women have to do the construction also 'cause men and women are equal. So they're putting it into practice and it's just like, "Okay, good luck with that."

   18. CWChris Williamson44:25

       Is this a warning for what happens if you take scientism or rationality too far?

   19. MMMichael Malice44:31

       Um, I don't think so because I don't think it's really rational. Because I, I think that-

   20. CWChris Williamson44:37

       Does it think that it's rational though?

   21. MMMichael Malice44:39

       It does th- But I think everything thinks it's rational, right, other than Nietzsche, right? So this... I th- The issue is thinking you're more informed than you are and, and not having this kind of agnos-

   22. CWChris Williamson44:50

       And not understanding the limits or the bounds of your own-

   23. MMMichael Malice44:52

       O- uh, uh, uh, skepticism.

   24. CWChris Williamson44:52

       ... understanding or competence. Yeah.

   25. MMMichael Malice44:53

       So this kind of love of a mother for her child isn't just like a custom or tradition. It's my understanding that when a child is born, both the parents have this biochemical reaction towards seeing these kids. We even see with like seagulls, right? If seagulls are raised without their mom, they can imprint on like a sock with a seagull face and that feeds the kid, but there is this kind of literal brain connection between the two. Uh, they did CAT scans on dogs, right? And dogs, the parts of the brain light up when they see you, uh, their owners as other m- as members of a pack. Uh, so there is that thing e- e- kind of that's happening in their head. So th- as we spoke earlier about cynicism, when you have this scientific view that emotions don't exist or don't matter or that they're like irrational, emotions are more rational than people give, uh, them credit for, and at the very basis, and apologies to Ben Shapiro, facts do in... Uh, feelings in many ways do inform facts. Uh, there is some reason s- I don't know, I can't articulate what it is, why I like this song over that song.

   26. CWChris Williamson46:07

       Even if the other song is melodically-

   27. MMMichael Malice46:10

       Yes.

   28. CWChris Williamson46:10

       ... compositionally... Yeah, feelings don't care about your facts in that regard.

   29. MMMichael Malice46:13

       Right. Right. But it's not... I don't... I'm not liking this song because some capitalist told me to or because of my... Or maybe I am, but I, I don't think that's i- entirely... It can be ascribed entirely to that.

   30. CWChris Williamson46:26

       I-
9. 52:40 – 1:00:57

   Marxism’s Goal of Global Communism

   1. CWChris Williamson52:40

      One thing that I didn't know was that the original inception of this was in the hopes of becoming the first, the tip of the spear of a worldwide movement, that the Soviet Union would be the test case. They almost saw themselves as the opportunity to prove that this could happen, and then from there they would-

   2. MMMichael Malice53:01

      They did see themselves there, yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson53:02

      Yes. Yeah.

   4. MMMichael Malice53:02

      Very explicitly.

   5. CWChris Williamson53:02

      And then they ... but what you've got, what you mentioned earlier on, that we'll get onto with regards to the press and the way that this was, um, interpreted and responded to in the US specifically, you had some people in the US that were seeing it as that experiment too. So you had a kind of collusion, like a, a philosophical collusion that was going on, uh, across the Atlantic.

   6. MMMichael Malice53:24

      Well, it wasn't just a collusion. So this was the big argument between ... you know, a lot of times in politics, uh, to this day, uh, you'll have there ... and in religion, you have the putative argument where it's like, all right, uh, you have the a- argument between the agnostics and Orthodox Christianity, is Christ co-equal with God the Father or is Christ subordinate to him? That's, you know, one of the A- that's the Arian heresy, I believe, and if you bel- ... but a lot of time it's just about power, you just have an excuse to s- you know, fight one another. So Trotsky, uh, who was, again, Lenin's right-hand man, he had the vision which is more in line with Orthodox Marxism that instead of thinking about nations, you think of classes, right? So the workers, "Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains." That's a great Marxist quote, right? So his idea is the worker, working class in Russ- in Russia have more in common with the working class, with the working class in America than they do with the bourgeoisie in Russia, right? And that, there's, that makes a lot of sense, and this is one of the reasons they were very much against the, the Great War. They're like, "Why are the workers and the poor-"... losing their lives for the sake of czars and sultans and kaisers. Like, we're the ones who pay the price for the wealthy, this is absolutely obscene, this is our opportunity to, you know, what they would call imperialist wars or capitalist wars, put a stop to it, and have the workers of the world basically unify and create this, m- maybe not literally a paradise, but certainly the next generation of humanity. You know, when Stalin came in and he saw that wasn't happening, he was like, "All right. You could have socialism in one country." But that was kind of the idea that, all right, it's gonna start here and then it's g- and this was a very real concern because Marxism predicted that capitalism would be destroyed by its own contradictions, right? And then 1929 happens. You know, this is 12 years after Lenin seizes power in, in, in what became the Soviet Union. You have the Great Depression, things are unprecedentedly bad for an unprecedented long time. There had been depressions before, but they never went on for that long or that badly. People are looking around and all the Marxists are saying with a straight face, "We predicted this and now you're seeing our predictions." And people, a lot of people were like, "All right. There's, this, these are the death throes of capitalism."

   7. CWChris Williamson55:37

      Mm-hmm.

   8. MMMichael Malice55:38

      And in that sense, FDR, you know, who is, you know, reviled by many conservatives, can be seen as the right-wing response because the alternative to FDR wasn't Calvin Coolidge. The alternative to FDR was very easily could have been a, a worker's revolution and having a communist dictatorship here in the States.

   9. CWChris Williamson55:58

      What was that quote about, uh, "The capitalists will sell us the rope and we'll tie the noose"?

   10. MMMichael Malice56:02

       Yeah. Uh, Lenin is, uh, alleged to have said, and apparently he never did, that the capitalists will sell us the, the rope with which we'll hang them.

   11. CWChris Williamson56:09

       Yes. That was it. Yeah, that's funny. And then d- do you think that it was actually true when he said that once we've reached the utopia that we're supposed to, this communist utopia, that we will be able to discard these methods?

   12. MMMichael Malice56:26

       No. Because the reason communism doesn't work isn't simply due to like human nature being bad, which doesn't even make sense, because if you are basing your philosophy on human nature, it is the basis for your philosophy. You can't say it's good or bad. It's like saying, "Well, I'm gonna build a airplane and it's gonna let people fly from their own power, but the people are bad." Well, if you're building around people who can't fly, it, the problem is in your program not in the person or you're, you know, building around. The problem is calculation. So without a market to set price, you do not know how much to produce. So, you know, a very obvious example is you don't know, have to know anything about comic books at all. But if you go to a comic book store and you see Detective Comics number 26 is $500, and Detective Comics 27 is $50,000, and Detective Comics 28 is six- you know, $6,000, something about 20, th- number 27 is special. You don't have to know it's the first appearance of Batman, but you do know, have to know is that either the supply of this issue is very low or the demand is very high, but even not knowing the facts as to why, that price is information about this is something that the market is asking for more of. But if I am setting a price, if I am, as the government saying, "Detective Comics number 27 is going to be sold at $1,000," very quickly it's gonna be a complete sold out everywhere. You're not gonna be able to find it 'cause it's way below the market. If you're gonna be able to sell, it's maybe gonna be at the black market, and that's going to be blank shel- uh, blank store shelves. On the other hand, if I say we're gonna produce X amount of copies of Detective Comics 27, then you're gonna have these massive surpluses 'cause at a certain point if you don't have the price you, don't know how much to produce. So having, without having a price mechanism, you can't have central planning work because it's not gonna have information about how much you need. Because at the same time, even if I tell you, the commissar, "Listen, my factory needs 100 more nails," I still, tha- those nails are still competing with screws and bolts, but also bread and milk and cars and CDs and computers. Every product is in competition with every other product, and a currency is what kind of adjudicates those disputes between the demands. But if you're just telling me I need 50 nails and he's telling me I need 50 pacemakers, both are a need, how do I figure out w- which is needed more? And that's what price indicates.

   13. CWChris Williamson58:49

       Is that the fundamental structural issue when it comes to communism?

   14. MMMichael Malice58:53

       Well, when it comes to central planning, yes, in my opinion.

   15. CWChris Williamson58:56

       Wh- what else, what are the other elements?

   16. MMMichael Malice58:58

       Well, I think the other element's it's very, very expensive to try to, in every sense of the word, to try to force a population to live according to your ideology. At a certain point, you need a lot of them to buy in or to have it enforce themselves because you can only pay so many police to beat so many people, and a- at a certain point, people are like, "I- I don't want to be beating people anymore."

   17. CWChris Williamson59:21

       Is there an argument to be made that in that case a capitalist system that applies status and gives prestige to people who are the most productive, uh, they are allowed to accrue that through the agreement of other people saying that, "Yes, your job title and high-rise office is something that quite rightly should, you should feel proud about." I- is there an argument to be made that capitalism is just a more nefarious way of motivating workers to do the exact same thing?

   18. MMMichael Malice59:48

       Well, I don't think that CEOs are held in the same regard in any capitalist country as like Stalin was. You know, you know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk is like the, was, I think he's, maybe he's number two now richest person on Earth. The way people have shit on Elon Musk 25/8 on, on Twitter alone, even before he bought Twitter wa-, there was no shortage of people condemning Elon Musk or condemning Steve Jobs or condemning, uh, Bill Gates, George Soros. I, I don't think successful CEOs, um, other than, uh, what's his name who r- ran Apple for many years with the turtleneck before he died?

   19. CWChris Williamson1:00:30

       Tim Cook? Oh.What, Steve Jobs?

   20. MMMichael Malice1:00:32

       Yeah, Steve Jobs.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:00:33

       Yeah.

   22. MMMichael Malice1:00:33

       M- Steve Jobs, maybe he's on a pedestal. I'm thinking Jeff Bezos. Sorry, I got those confused. I think very few CEOs are regarded with any sort of reverence, uh, in the same way that the kind of leaders in these countries are expected to be revered. You're not hanging up a photo, even if you're a big, uh, shit poster, of Elon Musk in your house.

10. 1:00:57 – 1:08:46

    The Most Brutal Aspects of the Soviet Union

    1. MMMichael Malice1:00:57

    2. CWChris Williamson1:00:57

       Would it be right for me to characterize the two prongs, the two sort of most brutal prongs of existence in the Soviet Union, one as being the food and lack of access, so famine on one side-

    3. MMMichael Malice1:01:10

       Well, yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:01:11

       ... and then on the other side being the combination of state police and sort of state-enforced, uh, surveillance from the population on itself, that those would be, uh, th- that seems like that gets an- an awful lot of focus? Not enough food and too much brutality coming from the state, and also, uh, enj- like, caused by its own population on itself?

    5. MMMichael Malice1:01:36

       But I- I think, I think in the West, we can look at things as discrete issues, right? We can con- say it's a problem that not enough people have access to healthcare, even in places where they have the NHS, right? We can say that, um, education's an issue. They're teaching kids things that they shouldn't, and they're not teaching kids things that they should. Or we can talk about, you know, pornography with young men. Too many people are consuming pornography. It's deleterious to their health. But these are looked at, in a way, as kind of discrete issues. I think the issue with totalitarianism is you don't get to separate out these things. Like, everything feeds into another, and it's not... And it's kind of like if you remove the secret police, you still have, you know. You're at school all the time, you're learning all this stuff. You see, you're- you're still consuming the media with th- with all the issues. Um, th- the fact that your job is basically assigned to you. You know, at a certain point, being late to work became a felony, even though it was not at all reliable, the- the public transport system, uh, uh, in these countries. So I don't, I don't... I may, I think we- we're... We could both sit here until we're blue in the face, but until we've lived in these places, we are not gonna know what the worst part of it is. It's kind of like we're... It's kind of like Plato's cave.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:02:59

       Just how bad did the famine get?

    7. MMMichael Malice1:03:01

       Wh- which, which one?

    8. CWChris Williamson1:03:03

       Well, I mean, pick whichever of your favorites there was.

    9. MMMichael Malice1:03:05

       Well, there... I didn't have any favorites-

    10. CWChris Williamson1:03:07

        Right.

    11. MMMichael Malice1:03:07

        ... most certainly. But if you're talking about the Holodomor in the 19... early 1930s, you know, Stalin's war in Ukraine, um... Red Famine is a book by Anne Applebaum, which I recommend enormously, even though she's, uh, got some pretty bad TDS, uh, which doesn't at all, um, take away from her, the enormous service she's done in her research. Um, they just decided, "All right, we're going to liquidate the kulaks." And the kulaks were these kind of wealthy farmers, uh, and very qu-... And, "We're gonna kill them or deport them to God knows where with their families." But very quickly, a kulak became anyone who owns, like, a cow, and a kulak became someone in your village you don't like. You just gotta turn them in, accuse them of being a kulak, and then you're rewarded with grain for your family. So the incentives were very heavily to turn on your neighbors, um, and you weren't allowed to leave your village. Um, and they took as much grain as they could, and they sold it for export, um, and people... I mean, the levels of starvation were in the millions, and this was by design. So they came back in the middle of the night, you know, these- these activists, to search houses, and if you... They could look... This is the- the sick thing that I learned about the Holodomor, is your own body would betray you. They could take one look at you and see you're not starving. That means you're hiding food.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:04:32

        You're less gaunt than-

    13. MMMichael Malice1:04:33

        You're less gaunt. That means you're hiding food. "Where's the food? And if you don't give me the food, that means I know you're hiding it, so that means I'm entitled to burn down your house and put you out in the winter, in the Ukrainian winter, and good luck with that, because if you don't... If you're not handing it to me, you must be hiding it, and therefore you're a kulak." And what else ha- ended up happening is, in the rest of, uh, the USSR, they were told, "You don't have food 'cause the kulaks are hoarding all the grain." They were m-... Created this kind of, uh, national out group, and then there was this kind of level of hatred, which was later kind of paralleled with Hitler against the Jews, to the sense of, "These people... You're suffering because these people are- are, you know... They're getting wealthy at your expense." And there was this one very disturbing story of this young woman who made her way to the city. She got out of her village, starving, on a line, begging for food. She had, like, a crust of bread in her hand, and the storekeeper is like, "This is what you- you filthy kulaks, this is what you deserve," and God help anyone who helped her. And then she, like, died on the spot, and everyone was basically happy about it, because it's like, "We're on this line, there's no bread in the store 'cause of her and people like her."

    14. CWChris Williamson1:05:47

        I don't think that it was the same famine, but there's a story about babies that were so hungry that they cried for so long that they couldn't even cry anymore, and there was a story about a mother whose baby was crying, and then the mother just started beating the baby.

    15. MMMichael Malice1:06:03

        Yeah. Dave Smith brought up that. That was the story that got to him the most.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:06:06

        That's pretty disturbing, yeah.

    17. MMMichael Malice1:06:07

        Yeah. Like, you know, people started swarming these train stations to try to get out of wherever they were, and there was just this one scene where this mom... And she's lost, and- and when the human body is starving for that long, the mind starts degenerating and it- it, you know, it's- it's functional insanity. And she's there and the kid's crying 'cause there's no milk coming out, and she snaps, and she starts beating the crap out of her kid in front of everybody, and then she kind of reverts to normal. And...You know, that was one of those scenes where it didn't get to me that much because it's so removed from any-

    18. CWChris Williamson1:06:46

        You have no reference point.

    19. MMMichael Malice1:06:47

        ... I have no reference point for this. Like, I can, I can't, it's hard for me, for any of us, to imagine what it's like being that hungry for that long, right? Even that is, like, I, I mean, I know people who've been on the show Survivor, but they know they c- at any minute they can get to food, and, and they're only there for 30 days max. And, real- you know, they're in a tropical paradise, you know, so on and so forth. And even, so that's bad but, you know, they, like, you get used to it. Uh, but that's the closest, you know, any of us are gonna get, uh, to understanding what that's like. And, and, the, the thing that is really, um, the, I, I would think the darkest aspect is not just the hunger. It's the knowledge that this isn't changing. Like, this, there's no, "Hang on, you know, we're in war. Once this war is over, you know ..." It's like, "No, no, no. This is peacetime and you're not allowed to leave your village, and if, God help you if you find food, it's going to be taken from you." I, I, I, I can't wrap my head around it.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:07:45

        But if you don't produce enough food, then we're going to ask you to produce five times the amount of food that-

    21. MMMichael Malice1:07:49

        Right.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:07:49

        ... you didn't produce.

    23. MMMichael Malice1:07:49

        And accuse you of stealing it.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:07:51

        Yeah. Was this organized? Was the famine-

    25. MMMichael Malice1:07:54

        Oh, yes.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:07:54

        So the famine was created by the state?

    27. MMMichael Malice1:07:58

        Yes, by Stalin.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:08:00

        Why?

    29. MMMichael Malice1:08:00

        Because he wanted to break Ukraine, he wanted to break, he wanted to collectivize the countryside. And, and for a long time, the Ukraine is very famously known as the breadbasket of Europe 'cause they had these fertile lands and, and so on and so forth, and they, they were producing all the crops. And he's like, uh, and the Ukrainians obviously historically and to this day, spoiler alert, have an enormous amount of, uh, rivalry if not contempt for the Russian people and vice versa. And he's like, "All right, like, you know, Ukraine became part of the USSR," and he's like, "We have to break Ukraine and, and, you know, just have, yeah, break the f- spirits of the people and not have any semblance of resistance to our scheme." And in this, he succeeded, uh, maybe not entirely, but very heavily.

11. 1:08:46 – 1:13:07

    Who Was Walter Duranty?

    1. MMMichael Malice1:08:46

    2. CWChris Williamson1:08:46

       Who is Walter Duranty?

    3. MMMichael Malice1:08:48

       Oh, um, Walter Duranty was, um, he did his voice for the promo commercial 'cause he was British. He was the New York Times man in Moscow. He w- he won a Pulitzer, uh, he got to interview Stalin which was an enormous accomplishment for a Westerner, um, and while this starvation wa- this war in Ukraine, uh, and it wasn't just Ukraine of course. People were starving all over the Soviet Union, but this war was localized, I wanna be clear. Um, he was writing in the New York Times how, you know, people who were saying there's hunger, it's just anti-Soviet propaganda. Uh, this is just, and the quote is, "There is no f- famine, nor is there likely to be. The Russian people are merely tightening their belts." Now, that's a very unfortunate choice of words. I'm not trying to even be humorous. You only have to tighten your belt when you don't have enough food. It's not a fashion choice, it means your pants are falling off 'cause you're losing weight, and you lose weight, uh, w- in two ways, diet and exercise, which they weren't doing, or lack of c- caloric intake. Um, and while this whole thing was happening, you know, he's repeatedly, uh, talking about how it's the people who are complaining are just the loudmouths. Everyone else is busy doing the work and putting time in the fields and, and producing so on and so forth. The Russians have tightened their belts before, um, and when Gareth Jones, who was another, who was a British journalist, figured out what was happening 'cause he got off his train a stop early and just walked through the countryside and saw for himself what was happening, the entire Western press corps either, there's differing accounts whether this was they sat down and said to do it consciously or they just did it 'cause they knew what their marching orders were, s- called him a liar and a propagandist, uh, and so on and so forth. And Duranty was the one who took charge of this whole campaign to smear him as a complete fraud. There was a second one, o- another Britishman, Malcolm Ruggeridge, whose parents were members of the Fabian Society, was a hardcore lefty. Uh, he got information as well, and then as a result of this, when he kind of leaked the news of this kind of manmade, uh, atrocity, he was basically, couldn't get work after that because whether it was 'cause he had the wrong politics or whether 'cause he exposed his colleagues as worse than fools, as in league with the devil, um, you know, he paid the price.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:11:08

       But that's the question. Walter Duranty wasn't giving an accurate account of what was happening inside the Soviet Union, you're saying?

    5. MMMichael Malice1:11:14

       As he later admitted, yeah.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:11:17

       Why? What was, what was his motivation for do, for-

    7. MMMichael Malice1:11:20

       Well, I, I, I think it's very hard to get into the heads of someone who is putting his name front and center in terms of denying genocide. I mean, I have all the quotes from him in the book where he explicitly said, "There's no need for anyone to go to these villages." For a reporter to tell people, "You don't need to go check it out for yourself" in a country which he would clearly admit is quite secretive is, to me, unconscionable. Uh, I, I, I mean, whatever the motivation was, it can't be good. Uh, the best I can think of that would make the most sense to me is status, right? He was the dean of the Moscow press corps. He was, you know, the big shot. Uh, and basically if it's revealed that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, as it was and as he admitted, it's like, well then, what good are you? So, uh, Upton Sinclair has this quote that's ascribed to him, I, I think he actually did say this one, where he said, "It's almost impossible to convince a man of something when his salary is dependent on him not being convinced of it." So, it might be as simple as that.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:12:25

       Mm. Yeah, it, I don't know. He seemed like a very, um... I, I, I couldn't work out his motivations. I couldn't work out whether it was complicity, whether he had political sympathy.... for what was going on over there, whether it was simply the associated reflected glory and status that he was getting from having this sort of access to people that no Western journalist would-

    9. MMMichael Malice1:12:48

       Yeah.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:12:48

        ... or should do. Uh, and perhaps a blend of all of them, I suppose. One of the other things that happened obviously downstream from-

    11. MMMichael Malice1:12:57

        Or maybe he w- there's also a theory that he was being blackmailed to some extent, so that could- that would make some sense, that the Russians had some intel on him and they didn't want it revealed. Who knows?

    12. CWChris Williamson1:13:05

        That's interesting.

12. 1:13:07 – 1:22:03

    Soviet Tactics to Arrest Innocent People

    1. CWChris Williamson1:13:07

       One of the other things that happens downstream from there being widespread famine, and so actually, going back to the famine for a second, if the use of the famine from Stalin was to beat and erode the Ukrainian spirit, surely they could have considered, "We might just kill them all. It might end up as having no people left in the Ukraine to conquer."

    2. MMMichael Malice1:13:36

       Well, I- I- I mean, they killed a- they sure killed a lot of them, but I think it was... I don't... That's a good question. I'm- I'm- I wonder if that was a concern.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:13:48

       I guess-

    4. MMMichael Malice1:13:49

       'Cause they were given some grain. It's not like they were given literally none, right?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:13:52

       Yes.

    6. MMMichael Malice1:13:52

       They- they took it all, but they gave some back.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:13:54

       Yes. So what happens? Downstream from a famine, next thing that happens is you have, uh, an ever-increasing paranoia within the people who are in charge of what's going on, uh, among the populous, and this... Uh, I mean, there's a story where, is it Stalin who's- who gives the- the police an- a quota for each different area.

    8. MMMichael Malice1:14:23

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:14:23

       He- "I need 10,000 criminals from this region and this region and this region and this region," which kind of like the kids from earlier on, drive around and tell us who your accomplices are, caused the law enforcement to go around. They were retrofitting the number of criminals to their quota for criminals, as opposed to catching people that were doing crime.

    10. MMMichael Malice1:14:44

        Yeah, this is something that I think, again, Westerners have a hard time wrapping their heads around, and even I have a hard time wrapping my head around. Um, Stalin would sit down, and he'd have a piece of paper and he'd be like, "All right, in Kazakhstan you need to arrest 50,000 people," or whatever the number is. "In, you know, in St Petersburg or Leningrad, you need to arrest 10,000. In Lviv, you need to arrest this many." And it was the job of the, uh, NKVD or the KGB, whatever it was at the time, to be like, "All right, this is how many people we have to find," and his last of the s- uh, secret police heads, Beria, is most known for his quote, uh, "Show me the man, I'll show you the crime." And they prided themselves on getting confessions out of people who were perfectly innocent, and the argument is, "Well, if we arrested you, you must have done something, and if you're saying that we're arresting innocent people, that in and of itself is being counterrevolutionary and criticizing the government, so that in itself is a crime." So yeah, w- and I- my understanding is these lists are still in, like the archives in the Kremlin. Like, they still have them, this isn't just, like, hearsay. Like, they have the piece of paper where he's got the names of the different places and the numbers.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:16:01

        What were some of the tools that they used to extract confessions from people?

    12. MMMichael Malice1:16:06

        Um, that was a very hard, um, section to write about, because I think people here, we think about, like, what the police will do to get a confession out of you. It's like, okay, they're gonna yell at you, they're gonna rough you up, you know, things like that. It's like, all right, I- I- you- that's what we're used to as, like, police brutality. So, at a certain point, they lowered the death penalty for children, um, to, I think it was 12 or 14.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:16:37

        12.

    14. MMMichael Malice1:16:37

        12. And this became... This was a big problem for defenders of the Soviet Union, because this wasn't like hearsay, this was public, and they're like, "What are you- what are you doing?" And one of the reasons what they were doing is, if they would arrest people, they would have a death warrant for that person's kid signed on the desk of the interrogator. So, you know, your dad, who I got to meet a few weeks ago in Austin, he's coming in, he knows he didn't do anything, "Look, I'll just talk to them, it'll be fine," and there's the death warrant for Chris, in his view, signed, like it's- it's ready to be delivered. He'll confess to anything. I mean, they- they were having Jews confessing to working for Hitler. Um, and there was another time when, you know, they brought in someone who was an old Bolshevik, and the old Bolsheviks were the people who fought the tsar, they were like the terrorists of their time, like people who have fought with Lenin, and they were hardened men, you know? The Bolshevik would arrest them, they had the katorga system which, uh, presaged the, um, the gulags and they'd send them to Siberia, you know, middle of nowhere, and these men did that time for their political views. And they brought in one of them, and they called his, I think it was his mom, uh, or his mother-in-law, and checking 'cause she's watching his kids right there, and it's like, "Oh, are your kids okay?" And they're like, "Yeah." And so they just turned to him, he's like, "Okay, I'll sign whatever you want," you know? So the- i- i- when you... Again, this is something that is hard for us to understand in the West. You know, we are all used to these movies where, like, you know, someone's brought in, Tom Cruise is tied to a chair and they're beating the crap out of him, he's like f- you know, spitting blood at them and s- and just glaring at them. You bring in s- it's like, "We have your kids." The calculus is... And- and you know they're not bluffing. It's not like, "We have them, but, like you know, we don't really want to do anything." Like, they don't care, and you know they don't care. Um, i- i- and when that happens, uh, e- I don't think any of us can understand what our thought processes would be like.

Episode duration: 2:11:00