Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk talk about the advent of nation-wide communications technology, the definitions and origins of Communism and its inherent duplicity, and the diplomatic and economic actions of the US to forestall Communism in Germany.
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Dr Koontz - Trinity Lutheran Church
Rev Fisk - St Paul Rockford
Music thanks to Verny
Transcript:
[Speaker 2] (0:06 - 1:05)
Dr. Koontz, we ended our last show with some talk about the development of destructive technologies in the early, well, I shouldn't say early Cold War, I guess it was in a sense, but in the latter stages of World War II, but then we continued to test them and perfect them, if you can use that word, in the early Cold War, and such interesting things as various suppositions about demonic influence breaking into the American history via a combination of blood guilt and or tinkering with the unseen in ways we could not have imagined by men whose hubris had blinded them to see what they were doing. What I wanted to ask at the end of the show and then kind of decided to wait until this one for is like, I think that's all really interesting and and super probable from where I'm sitting.
[Speaker 1] (1:06 - 1:06) Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (1:06 - 2:41)
But what then seems to fly under the radar is the assumption that other technologies are not destructive, such as the use of the screen. Going all the way back to, I'm not even thinking now, with the Internet and all this done, I'm not thinking Neil Postman, although he certainly had some good criticism of it, but I'm thinking that you got the 1950s, everyone's in the room with their 3D glasses, yeehaw, cowabunga, we're watching the surf show. It's all great.
It's all good. And the question, what does this do to the soul? What does this do to the psyche?
Well, I had fun. So nothing. It's fine.
Okay, that's not science. That's not objective. And since you're the one being experimented on, you can't actually be the one to decide what it's doing to you.
The one who will be able to make an objective assessment of the spiritual impact of such a technology as a destructive thing in an individual life immediately is someone who's not making use of it, which frankly nobody really generally fell into that category. And so now here we all are bearing the weight of generations of that technology as if it's good, without the recognition that it is potentially destructive. And to Red Herring, maybe, what I find most fascinating is if I ever talk about this with somebody, I am immediately accused of some sort of legalism or some sort of like a radical thought, which to me only then says, huh, you can't even think about it, which...
[Speaker 1] (2:42 - 2:43)
Right, yeah.
[Speaker 2] (2:43 - 2:45)
Like you can't even consider it, you know? [Speaker 1] (2:45 - 2:46)
They can't.
[Speaker 2] (2:46 - 3:17)
That's rough. So you are truly brainwashed. And I think you could make the same argument about the automobile, you know, and I don't plan to give up my car anytime soon, but is the automobile a only positive technology?
And forget greenhouse gases and all. I'm just talking about, and the Amish kind of knew this, right? What does it do to the neighborhood?
What does it do to the community? What does it do to the family? And so technology as corrupting influence, not because men tried to make it so, I think is kind of my opening parlay.
[Speaker 1] (3:17 - 3:20)
Yeah, not because men intended it, right? That's right. [Speaker 2] (3:20 - 3:21)
Yeah.
[Speaker 1] (3:21 - 6:19)
Yeah. And I mean, if you want to think about it this way, what you need for an ongoing state of emergency or an ongoing Cold War, you know, small c, small w, is you necessarily need a large public. And if possible, and certainly once radio becomes common, you know, you have roughly two sets per household by the 1940s.
And then by the 1960s, you're going to have a sort of an equivalent figure for TVs and then go on to computers and smartphones. Now you need a national public to mobilize all of the resources, particularly the human resources and the human ascent necessary to prosecuting a war that is not hot, does not directly impact them even in places that really have nothing to do with them, like Taiwan or Ukraine for the vast majority of people living in the United States. So you, you need those technologies to perpetuate your way of being, your way of existing as a regime.
Those things are necessary and they're, they're necessary for the regime, but then they come to be natural to the person who lives under that regime. Like I, I never like when Americans make fun of North Koreans for crying profusely. I mean, not only did Americans do it when George Floyd's casket was being carted around the country in 2020, that happened too.
Okay. So we had our own, you know, Kim Il-sung moment with George Floyd, but also even if you're not talking about history on a crying, the idea that somehow your life is not deeply affected by what is obviously not natural, but is so ubiquitous as to seem natural is silly. And to look down on other people for having different ubiquitous, practically natural things just reveals your own, what in biblical terms is Pharisaism, just an utter incapacity to see your own shortcomings.
But to see them in, in everyone else. So what you're talking about with certain things that change entirely, these are all, you know, and I'm going to appeal again. I think I did it on a different podcast recently, but I'm going to appeal again for someone to unearth Alfred Ray Winkle's, both his memoirs, because he lived through both world wars.
He vehemently and publicly opposed the second one, particularly. He suffered mostly from the first one, but his 450 some page book about war that he wrote, both of which I think are just kind of sitting there in Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis.
[Speaker 2] (6:19 - 6:22)
You can't write about that stuff as a pastor. It betrays the office of the ministry.
[Speaker 1] (6:23 - 7:52)
Yeah, I know. Yeah. I've heard, I've heard of that one myself too, but I think the, because what he offers is a, is a perspective on these things of someone who lived through them.
And one of the things that he describes about the world prior to the first world war is how extremely quiet and small it was small on a day to day level, large. When you considered places that you didn't see on a TV and didn't hear about on a radio and got news of maybe never, but possibly once a month in the newspaper, the world was both much larger and in that way, sort of more exciting, but it was also a lot smaller because life was much more determined by everyday relationships. Once that opens up by means of transportation technology, you know, very fast trains, automobiles, everything, but especially via communications technology, you now have people who are wondering what's going to happen to a, a fictional radio character broadcasting out of New York and they live in Helena, Montana and they're writing into the Amos and Andy show and, and wondering what's going to happen to Amos and Andy. So once you have national publics, you really then can have national ongoing emergencies because you have the communications technology to perpetuate those things.
[Speaker 2] (7:53 - 8:17)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So let's come back to that. Right. Because I think the, the permanent crisis is, is really our, our meat and potatoes through these two episodes.
But so just circling around again to the, the impact of technologies that are designed to influence the way you think.
[Speaker 1] (8:18 - 8:18)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (8:18 - 11:42)
Right. So, so by definition, the, the talking picture is supposed to go into your brain and change it. The book does this too.
The book writing is designed to go into your eyes and then, and then change you. What I really want us to, to wrestle with, and I don't know who has the real capacity to do this. But what I, what I think we haven't wrestled with, and now I'm talking to you, LCMS, and I'm talking to the American Christian reality.
We haven't even considered what a psychological soul change, that kind of medium shift in the way we learn how to think will, can have, even though we've seen how bad it's gotten, how fast it's gotten. Now, I mean, you have, you have errors in ancient Israel, where in a single generation they fall apart. So it's not like you need this technology to become apostasy, right?
It can happen either way. That being said, you know, images that you listen to isn't so far away from what an idol, like the, the, you know, Janice and jobbers would have killed for a TV set, man, set that thing up in front of Pharaoh and tell him, look, we got the gods, you know? And he would have been like, wow.
Right. So, so, but aside from that, again, that these things change the way we think, we won't even admit that. And that's the problem.
We have to, if we're going to use them, we have to at least realize what we're losing in the transaction away from being developed as a reading, writing culture and society. And as a people of the book, not to quote Islam, but, but as a people of the book, officially as to what we are biblically, we are about this scripture, not about this image that to, to give up our capacity to grow as thinkers from writing is to take a step further away from the fundamental reality of our, our religion. And then is it any wonder that no one reads their Bible now?
And to me, the answer is no, it's no wonder at all. There's no surprise, no shock. We trained ourselves to not be able to do so.
And this is all without even getting close to the other possibility, which is that there's in fact, spiritual demonic stuff going on in the, in the, in the interchange, you know, that, that the way that the circuits are working is, is maybe not what white magic, which we just assume it is. Of course it's, it's, it's neutral, right? And I don't even think you have to go there.
I think, I think it's worth asking that question, but you can't ask that question until you learn to think again. And we've given up the possibility of learning to think because we would rather stream entertainment as our development of brain from age, golly, where was I? And I just saw this like eight or nine month old in the shopping cart with the phone.
And, and, and it's just like, oh, the poor kid. In fact, yeah, it was set up. He wasn't even touching it.
It was just set up and just beaming in his face. And he's just watching. And it was like these little, you mentioned Teletubbies last episode, these little things that are supposed to be cute.
But if you get a little objective on them, you're like, that's the most terrifying looking thing I ever saw. What on earth does this kid think reality is now? God, no wonder he's screaming at night.
He's got colic. My, my backside, he's got colic. Anyway, your thoughts.
[Speaker 1] (11:44 - 16:32)
I think that entertainment is the, is the consumer side of the state of affairs that we entered into nationally, certainly after the second world war. But I, but I think also before where we are there in order to, to consume and some technologies are different than others. It's maybe easier to turn off the radio than it is to stop scrolling.
But the reality is the same. You're still taking things in. I mean, the, the difference between FDR and his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, whom we talked about several weeks ago now is Hoover made a lot of radio addresses in the very early part of the depression to a national radio audience.
And no one really remembers that because the thing that he was notably bad at was sounding intimate and warm and confident, which FDR was outstanding at doing. So what changes in that transaction is that the American people now become sort of the paternal concern of the president as they hear FDR saying, you know, here's, here's how banking works. And this is why I'm going to have a bank holiday and, and so on and so forth.
And Hoover couldn't master that and was, and it was trying to appeal to a certain rational faculty of understanding that perhaps people never had, but certainly that they could not exercise in the form that they were receiving that information, which was as a kind of voice ringing in their head that was disembodied, which in a different time would have been thought of as a divine voice. So I think that what we're dealing with is what, what you're talking about is sort of like the, it's sort of like the consumer end of the pipeline. The producer end of the pipeline has to do with understanding what these realities are and then utilizing them effectively, which I think is precisely what both sides of the cold war do with their own populaces.
And in some ways that consumer end of it is even more tightly controlled now than it was during the cold war because of the different media that we use. So you can find print media from the cold war in the United States that openly supports communism or distance from Truman's decision to desegregate the military or, or whatever it may have been. And those things were openly stated and openly discussed because quote, we're a free country.
But the issue is that those things will certainly be permitted as long as control over them isn't very necessary because most people are only listening to a certain number of radio networks and watching a small number of broadcast TV channels. So the fact that someone somewhere thinks that Truman is wrong about these segregated military doesn't, doesn't functionally matter that much generally speaking. So permission of dissent is not in this case like an ideological feature of the system because you'll notice that it gets quashed in many places.
We'll talk about McCarthyism next week, but quashing of dissent is necessary wherever the, the means of controlling consumer opinion become too open to things that are inconvenient for the regime. I, I don't therefore think of, you know, Facebook, you know, censoring people or someone getting, you know, Trump getting banned from Twitter. I don't really think that's that strange.
I think it's just a regime reaction to something that they've always done, which is to keep dangerously dissenting opinion away from channels of wide distribution. That's all. So if you can, you know, if you going all the way back to the days of the Ron Paul newsletter, if you can, if you could just keep dissent down to, you know, mimeograph newsletters sent to a preset mailing list, you're fine, but you do need to control opinion.
And that has been going on for a very, very long time. I mean, my, this is, we're talking at this point, I mean, the 1930s are when my grandparents are born with one exception. So this is, this is going back a very long time, almost beyond anyone's living memory that you would have had a state of affairs in which wide distribution of readily available media reporting and opinion would have been absent from people's lives.
[Speaker 2] (16:32 - 16:33)
Right. Right.
[Speaker 1] (16:33 - 16:33) Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (16:33 - 18:10)
And I'm not necessarily advocating that we entirely unplug from the matrix. Although I kind of am, I'm kind of advocating that you unplug and then go back in knowing what you're doing as opposed to living in it. And what we've been doing is we've been living in it.
And, and I'm not even talking about what they're saying for me. So much of this has to do with how you think, what you think as a process, as a cognitive discipline, and we, we just, I don't think we can, we can reckon with how weak we have become intellectually. And with regard to our willpower, even you who are listening out there, you geniuses, you write these, you know, 30 post storms in, in discord with all the, everything.
And you've researched it more than anyone else. Like you would be a monster if you'd unplug, but until you unplug, you just remain sort of a monster in handcuffs. And that's to me, that continues to be something that I struggle to find a way to say, because as a pastor, the last thing I want is for everyone to think they have to be like me or make all the decisions that I make.
And yet when you, when you look at how ubiquitous this non-normal has become, how much like a zombie apocalypse it in fact is, it, it's hard to to keep my mouth shut, at least on the matter, perhaps the way it was for McCarthy when he believed there were communists around, we'll leave that for next time, but we can start that conversation with just asking for a definition of communism.
[Speaker 1] (18:12 - 20:32)
Communism is very generically the idea that goods, especially material goods need to be had in common for a just society to exist. I say very generically because there have been Christian permutations of that idea over time, over the centuries, there have also been stringently economic permutations of that, which is classical Marxism. There are now more often in the West, sort of ethno racial versions of that gender versions of that that do not have to do with Marxism as an economic theory precisely, but rather it's sort of a pattern of thought.
But the, the premise of justice would be on the basis of racialized redistribution or sexualized redistribution of goods. The payment, for example, of, you know, the U S women's soccer team, the exact same thing as the men, even though they're vastly less popular and attract vastly less ad revenue. The, that, that idea is going to be instantiated in the 20th century generally as a Marxist reality, or more accurately as a Marxist Leninist reality.
That hyphen Lenin is simply the indicating the way in which power needs to be exercised, which is something that in this body of ideas, body of theory, Lenin is the one who, as the head of an actual communist state, the Soviet union learns how to exercise power. Whereas Marx, of course does not because he's a, he's an exile and is, is really mostly, basically mostly a sort of aberrant classical economist and not, not someone who actually holds power of, of much of any, much of any kind. So that's, that's communism.
It's growth over the course of the 20th century, I think is probably the best place to start to understand what it is that, that we're looking at and what it is that we are doing in response to it.
[Speaker 2] (20:33 - 20:51)
Right. Right. And maybe instead of the word growth evolution, which you've already hinted at, that what it was as a germ, as a seed is not quite what it is.
Although the most malevolent results of the presuppositions are still there. Right. [Speaker 1] (20:52 - 26:43)
Yeah. Yeah. And every once in a while you'll get an actual, let's say orthodox Marxist in Western politics.
They used to be all over, you know, social democratic and labor parties in Europe, for example, they used to be all over the far left wing of the democratic party in the United States, particularly in the Northeast and California and stuff. And those, those people are, are mostly gone. Democratic socialists of America used to be this international workers of the world used to be this.
Those folks are mostly gone where it's an economic theory and there's no particular hatred of whites or hatred of men or, or that, that is to say that something like racial or sexual communism rather than Marxist communism is what prevails in the United States. Whereas what prevailed in not to say that it's divorced from other things like atheism and hatred of religion, but what prevailed in the Soviet union and in large parts of Europe after the second world war is, is orthodox Marxism. Not so much, certainly not in the 1940s and fifties, anything connected to a, a sense of racial grievance or, or anything like that, or, or a destruction of the family even.
So what, what, what's happening is that you get with the victory of the Soviet union in the second world war and immense spread of both official communist control of certain countries, but also as you had seen in the West in the 1930s, a growth in the spread of communist ideas, even in non-communist countries. So this is something that it's, it would kind of benefit the listener. If you're not familiar with any of this, you just go back and look at not just that, you know, Romania becomes communist, East Germany becomes communist, Hungary becomes communist, but go look at, you know, okay, what's, what's like the big left wing party in Italy and France and West Germany, very often in the 1940s, fifties, even much longer.
It's going to be a communist or communist linked party. And by that, we don't even mean secretively communist, which is how communists in the United States are generally going to behave as we'll talk about next week. These are, these are openly communist.
They want a Soviet style revolution. We've talked before about the very great possibility that that could have been permanent in Germany after the first world war. It's certainly a hope many in Germany have for Germany and many outside of Germany, not only in the Soviet union have for Germany after the second world war, that somehow the, the problem of Germany's size and success will be solved by making it entirely communist.
Now the, to their credit, the Western allied powers after the conclusion of, you know, victory in Europe do not ascend to that. Americans in particular have within our political spectrum, really no public place for communism. We, we have had socialists, especially in areas of heavy 19th century German settlement, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Redding, Pennsylvania, and most famously, and for the longest time, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we're all governed by officially socialist mayors.
That was called in Milwaukee, specifically sewer socialism, because it was like, you know, let's, let's have a public water utility that functions really well and a really great streets department. It was, it was, it was in European terms, it was much more like social democracy or sort of like a labor party than it was anything even really kind of remotely Marxist. So particularly because that's, that's really nowhere on Americans radar functionally, we publicly opposed communism as a way of organizing a society.
The British are a little squashier. The French are a lot squashier on that, but they do, they do go along with us. So if you're, if you want to think about the cold war as an ideological conflict, which it is to some degree, it's an ideological conflict between communism.
It's particularly Marxist Leninist communism on the one hand. And on the other hand, something that has a variety of names and no name in particular. And I think that's really telling.
So if I say Western powers, or I even say a term that now gets used as educationally Western civilization, that's not exactly, you know, America in the 1970s. I mean, we're not, we're not necessarily, you know, going to send anybody to die in particular for the Western literary canon or something. But also if I say like liberal democracies or the free world or democratic government or representative democracy, or you see, like you get all these different noun phrases that don't actually overlap in meaning particularly, but they indicate something regarding freedom as some kind of absolute human value that Marxism obviously is not promulgating because freedom has no particular place in its theory.
[Speaker 2] (26:45 - 26:55)
So for it to work, you need free speech, not to exist. And that's a, it don't always come out and say that to you. Right.
But it, it kind of is just in the, it's in the pudding.
[Speaker 1] (26:56 - 30:20)
It is. Yeah. And I think that that, that, that is something where you have to recognize that, especially if that's, if someone's political goal is some version of communism, whether it's economic or sexual or racial or whatever it is, you have to recognize that duplicity is necessary to begin with.
And this happens in the United States eventually with the student movements of the 1960s that will particularly in California proclaim themselves as free speech movements or free speech protests. Now that freedom of speech is obviously now severely curtailed for the vast majority of Americans in day-to-day life. So think about all the words that you probably grew up saying that you thought were fine, and now you can't say them or attitudes that seemed obvious 10 years ago that now you could get fired for expressing.
So this idea of political correctness, which is originally Marxist is native to Marxism, but eventually has now been imported into our societies as other versions of communism have come to be far more prevalent in our societies. And the reason that it's there is because as you say, free speech is no particular value. There's no particular value assigned to an individual.
Like he doesn't have an eternal soul or he has no particular natural rights pertaining to him that are, that should be do him or rendered to him or given to him or acknowledged. So what he is, is a member either of a good class or a bad class in Marxist theory. And therefore his interest should be either promoted or destroyed if possible, depending on his class status.
So you can see how that framework can easily be substituted for the preferred class or women or the preferred class are blacks or whatever. And then your denigrated class is going to be landowners or it's capitalists or it's going to be men or whatever. So if you have that framework going, then the question is, you know, what are you going to do with it?
And certainly in a Western country, a communist has to be dishonest to start with because he can't come out and say, you know, he can't say in like 1980, like, you know, I hate white people. He's got to, he's got to say something different. He can't be honest about what he's thinking because if he, if he's honest about what he's thinking, people are going to be able to evaluate it rationally.
So what, what's going on is that duplicity is simply absolutely necessary to the process of communism spread in a non communist environment. They, they have to do it because openness makes clear what the stakes are. And then obviously anybody who's going to be attacked within that framework is going to respond, perhaps even violently.
You get, that's why you get a Russian civil war immediately after the Russian revolution. So they have to pursue duplicity. So they, they do that in various ways.
They, they claimed a desire for free speech in Berkeley, California, the 1960s, that obviously they're not according to their opponents today. It's just the nature of the beast.
[Speaker 2] (30:21 - 32:04)
This is reminding me of a book I've mentioned before, and now I'm losing both the name and the author, but it had to do with political theory. And one of the assertions of the book is that the political formula that is used by the elite to keep its group together isn't usually, if ever actually true, it's more like a flag and it just kind of gathers people to it. And so you could say that about, you know, American liberties, you can say that about mother Russia and communism.
What really matters is that you, you have that jargon serve as a code for the inside crowd. So that you know who your allies are as you attempt to overcome and overwhelm enemies to that code. And if people will join your code, then they're in whether or not it's actually communism.
So, so this is the thing here is that communism isn't even communism. It is, it is Marxism in this sense, but how is communism any different from any kind of ancient tyrannical warfare? Other than that, they don't just kill you and cut your hands off, except sometimes they do.
But, but it's really no different than any type of other tyranny where you have an elite and a non-elite. And if it's the way for the non-elite to try to become the elite, all it does is make them the elite. And then there's the non-elite who are their enemies.
So it's a marvelous shell game of thinking. And it's a nice virtue signal if you really want to be cool with the white wine crowd, but it doesn't seem to be anything other than business as usual from ancient Assyria from where I'm sitting. And, and please correct me on that if I'm, if I'm overstepping.
[Speaker 1] (32:05 - 37:11)
So I, I think that that theory, wherever you read it, you get similar articulations and Leo Strauss of political philosophy is essentially esoteric, meaning when, when a philosopher is speaking, especially a philosopher King or a would be philosopher King, he's always speaking in sort of coded terms or coded language because the mass is, or the current regime that he's seeking to overthrow, whatever it may be, cannot handle the truths that he is disclosing to the initiated. And that is fundamentally opposed, not so much to some abstract conception of free speech as to basically all Western political traditions, which have sought to be public, to be exoteric, to be non secretive. So you're supposed to, I mean, just think, and this applies to monarchies, republics, regardless, is that you're not supposed to have enormous secretive shadowy entities controlling public life, whether it's a King who is visible or it's some sort of elected body or whatever it may be that power is visible and is exercised visibly and therefore accountably, right?
The various things to which the political power may be accountable are going to vary, obviously. I mean, Supreme court justices can only be impeached by certain agencies and not by others. You know, the coroner of your County can't impeach a Supreme court justice, but it's all exercised visibly.
The thing that you get with, with something like communism, and this is, this is something that Ray Winkle did get published on talking about after the second world war is that communism is essentially esoteric until it is already in power. And then it is obvious and brutal and tyrannical. So this, I mean, just set the cold war side for a second.
This is what I have seen happen in the United States of America, that we won the cold war in some sort of geopolitical sense, capital C, capital W cold war, but that the state of permanent emergency and therefore the expansion of institutions and the expansion of power over individual human life necessitated by those institutions and their prerogatives has created a permanent revolution in American life where political correctness of every kind, it's just kind of like the way that life operates.
And so if I want any relief from that or, or recourse to something that I remember as a freer or a better way of existing, then I don't have recourse inside my own American system because my American system is like the Russian system was once upon a time, obviously captive to forces that once wanted free speech or will even still, I mean, and this is kind of, to me, this is one of the most excruciating details is that they will still demand recognition and representation, even when they have it in vastly disproportionate ways.
So I still have to buy from black owned businesses on Amazon, even though black people are in every commercial of every kind for everything. I still, you know, is that you will still demand this sort of representation accorded to disfavored minorities, disfavored groups, even when you are obviously vastly favored. So within that system, there's a sort of, there's just a perversity where we are governed by people who pretend to be victims indefinitely.
And in that way, you have really the same dynamics just along different lines for us. It's, it's usually more religious and sexual dynamics in the, in the Western world today. In Russia, it was usually more economic dynamics, but the dynamics are the same where the class that claims to be oppressed is ruling.
They are victims permanently. You are their debtors permanently, or you are guilty permanently. And there can be no forgiveness.
That can only be your subjugation or extermination. And those dynamics are the dynamics of communism. They're not the dynamics of recognition of natural rights or life, liberty, and property or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
None of that is on the table, right? Not to speak of pre enlightenment ways of stating these things. Instead, we are also governed by the same sort of Marxist, the dynamic that the Soviet union was.
It just, it just runs along different lines because our polity is differently constituted. [Speaker 2] (37:12 - 37:22)
no, that's right. And, and the political formula of I'm oppressed has replaced the, the political formula of inalienable rights.
[Speaker 1] (37:22 - 37:23) Right.
[Speaker 2] (37:23 - 39:00)
And, and so just to give fair, fair share to the book whose name I can't remember. You know, I don't think that, that it was ever proposing that, uh, Western civilization was supposed to be run by a secret elite or a quiet elite. He was just saying that it happens anyway.
So even if your political formula is the free enterprise of all men, intellectually equals able to, to, uh, you know, hold land and vote and all this stuff that we, we kind of want to get back to if we like to go, you know, five regimes back in our American history. Um, even though we'd like to go back to that bronze age, uh, it wasn't really as good as, as we thought it was. You didn't just get a walk into the continental Congress.
You had to be somebody. And, and, and what that had to do with, um, was a lot about the in crowd, the out crowd political formula being the way of signaling that. So to see that now the political formula has changed, that, that the formula is I'm oppressed.
And so you need to submit to me, um, which is fascinating. Uh, yeah. And then how long until the, the majority who are being controlled by that minority realize that this is just, uh, a bunch of religious jargon that's being thrown around and that they, they don't have to listen to it or, or obey it in any real sense.
Um, and again, that, that brings up the specter of, of violence and war and, and blah, blah, blah. Uh, if you want to go there, we can, otherwise we can just talk about exterminating Germany. Not, not now.
I didn't, I didn't mean right now. I meant, I meant it was, it was an idea once upon a time. [Speaker 1] (39:01 - 43:57)
Yeah. It's bad enough. They're going to, they're going to be freezing this winter.
I, I think it is, it is worth discussing the nature of, of a majority that is, that is put upon is that there are dynamics that begin then to evaporate on which communist regimes of various kinds rely. There is a, there is a just sort of a basic mistake about human beings that communism makes, which is that they are rational and therefore given the correct inputs, they will be motivated in the correct ways indefinitely. Okay.
Whether you believe that they are extremely materialistic naturally. So this is Bertolt Brecht. Who was a very devout and Orthodox communist until the East German people rose up against the Soviet Union in 1954.
And then he saw them, you know, just shot in the street. And he realized, oh, I guess this isn't what I wanted, but he's got a raise. I think it's in motor garage.
Yes. That first comes here, you're eating and fussing is like that. Just bare, nasty, active.
Just think of like lips smacking and, you know, gutlets revealed as it goes down the hatch. That's, I mean, that's how gross he's trying to make it. He doesn't say S and he says, first comes just the bare act of eating, sustaining yourself on a biological level.
Then you can talk about morality or you could say that we will not, we will not rest until this company's representation is 50% female, whatever a female is. And, you know, 30% black or whatever it is that you're looking for, whatever it is that you need. And then you can go on to questions of justice and dignity and kind of classical political philosophical questions.
But first your class demands have to be met. When that's the case, you are always dealing with a situation where you're pushing on people who certainly at first may be willing to concede as French aristocrats were in 1789 or, you know, certain Russians were in 1905 and then again in 1917 climatic climactically or, or whatever, or, you know, many, many whites have white guilt despite their complete disconnection from Southern slavery. You can get people for a while to go along with something because they're unacquainted with it, or because it seems right, or because you stayed in a strident, confident way or whatever.
When those things have actual consequences for their lives, they begin to, they begin to be more restive and, and to resist more, maybe quietly, maybe eventually loudly. But I think what is naive about communism is this idea that people are simply motivated by rewards, either material rewards under a, a, a worker state or by what I think are the much smaller rewards of being thinking of yourself as a nice or a good person today, where you're not really going to benefit from whatever, you know, altruistic act you're performing toward non binary individuals, but you get to feel good about yourself.
So there are diminishing returns on those things. And then human beings have other motivations like love and fear and rage and greed and lots of other things that communism, I think, takes far too little account of. Which is why it, it always, like all anthropologically naive groups, ends up consuming itself.
It cannot maintain ideological stability like a church that's completely doctrinally adrift, and it can't maintain group solidarity except under conditions of persecution, also like many churches. But the reason that it's doing that is that it doesn't take into account in its group formation, the fact that even the people within the group might not actually believe this stuff, because this stuff is not actually that convincing to human beings. Certainly not when exposed to it for years and years and years and years.
So I think that, I mean, the thing, one of the things about which I'm hopeful under our regime is that there is a dynamic going on between incessant propaganda and human beings. That generally works over the long run to the detriment of the propaganda, because the human beings, and I'm not saying that it's going to have like the absolute best consequences, but at the very least, human beings become extremely cynical about these things over time. If nothing else.
[Speaker 2] (43:57 - 43:59)
We're stupid, but we're not that stupid.
[Speaker 1] (44:01 - 44:51)
Well, yeah, I mean, we're, we're actually not. If you want to. Yeah.
I mean, if you want to put, we're actually not like people, people are able, for instance, to observe the gap between behavior and statement or the gap between what they were promised and what they actually got. So those things will all be helpful over time. And those, those are the kinds of things that when you get openly and strictly Marxist regimes in East Germany, for example, after the Second World War, you, you're going to get simultaneously resistance to it because people realize like, this is, this is not what they, it's not going to be what they're promising or it hasn't been what they promised or whatever the case may be.
[Speaker 2] (44:51 - 44:55)
So Morgenthau, Marshall, let's cover that history. [Speaker 1] (44:56 - 49:55)
let's, let's end here. And this will get kind of back on the domestic front next time. But it's, it's helpful to realize that the America that the GIs come home to is not an America that is particularly shiningly good throughout the Second World War.
And then for a couple of years after the Second World War, our approach to post-war Germany, particularly our zone of occupation, but generally what will come to be the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany is outlined in a variety of different government documents that come to be called the Morgenthau plan after the secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, but are not really, they're not exclusively his. He signs off on a certain draft.
He commissions another draft. Our old friend, Harry Dexter, white is involved in much of this. And what the Morgenthau plan constitutes is a, an idea that, that Germany needs to be pastoralized, that it's industrial capacities, especially in the Rhineland need to be simply decommissioned, sold off, move to other countries, move to Western countries, particularly so that Germany really will be incapable of defending itself ever again, and therefore being a threat ever again.
Morgenthau believes along with many others that there is something essentially wrong with the German people as such. Morgenthau is Jewish. Harry Dexter, white is Jewish.
There is ethnic animosity here. There's really no question about it. And the conviction here is that there is something so essentially wrong with Germans that they need to be turned into a, if at all possible, sort of a pre-industrial nation with the attendant living standards of a pre-industrial nation.
What this creates immediately after the second world war in our, under our occupation government is an imminent food crisis, somewhat similar to the one that we discussed in different countries in Europe during the first world war. And right after the first world war, our old friend, Herbert Hoover is sent by president Truman to Germany to inspect the situation. And Hoover comes back with the recommendation already in 45, 46, 47, that if we don't, if we do what we say we're going to do, and if we do what in a book that Morgenthau had published, I believe in 1942.
So during the war, pretty early during our war, if we do what we say we're going to do to the Germans, it will result in two things. Immediately, it will result in mass starvation. Eventually it will result in mass death.
Those are two different things. And the death could result from malnourishment and disease. It doesn't have to directly result from the starvation immediately.
And those things will happen because we are choosing actively to starve them and to make them incapable of supporting themselves rather than support them or build them up. The thing that not only that humanitarian appeal that will change our direction to a very different plan proposed by George C. Marshall, who had been commander in chief during the Second World War and went on to a diplomatic career after the war is there's both that and the threat that if people don't have food, they will choose communism because communism appeals to them as starving poor people.
So that if we don't support people materially, they will choose communism. So it's both the external threat of the Soviet Union and the humanitarian appeal that we should not try to exterminate an entire race of people that switches us from the Morgenthau plan is our governing document to by 47, the Marshall plan, which now gets remembered as sort of an economic thing, which it was as well. But it was also a very different approach to Germans to the Marshall plan.
That's going to say that it's in the United States best interest to build up a free nation, such as West Germany, a democratic nation, rather than letting them let let the chips fall where they may. Maybe they'll turn communist. Maybe they won't.
We don't care. We just don't want them to be industrialized again. We actually turn instead to actively.
Encouraging German reindustrialization and the manufacturing capacities that really are still the hallmark of the German economy down to. I mean, as we're recording this.
[Speaker 2] (49:56 - 50:22)
Yeah. So seeing the wisdom of punitive retribution, not always achieving the ends of of what you would like for your own right. Right.
Right. Blowback, again, is a thing. The blood guilt is a thing.
And so some real wisdom there from Herbert Hoover and and Marshall in making an ally out of an enemy. Right. You had a chance.
[Speaker 1] (50:22 - 50:24)
Yeah, exactly. Which we did with the Japanese as well. [Speaker 2] (50:25 - 50:25)
Yeah. Right.
[Speaker 1] (50:25 - 50:26)
Right. Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (50:26 - 51:03)
Which is a marvel. And in fact, we would not have as good a cars here in America as a result. Because as much as Chevy and Dodge are OK, you know.
Yeah. So. I don't know.
Let's let's try to tie this in. And we got about about seven, eight minutes here still to go. We can go on in the outline.
But you kind of said you wanted to wrap up here. Keep tying this into our present predicament. I mean, we opened the show talking about technological influence on our daily lives.
[Speaker 1] (51:03 - 51:03)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (51:03 - 51:13)
Last show, we talked quite a bit about Russia, Ukraine and about the potential for a hot war and these things. So can we tie can we tie that in here?
[Speaker 1] (51:14 - 53:48)
Yeah. I mean, I think that the pose that that Morgenthau and his allies in the Roosevelt administration. And this was that this was an intra administration debate, for sure, throughout the Second World War.
But I think that the essential mistake that they're making and trying to be punitive is that they are treating international affairs as if it is a realm of absolute justice in the same way that if someone steals your wife's purse and is punished for it in your local court, that is objective and desirable and possible. That what they're seeking is to be judges over history. And that especially as the victors in a war, they are judges over history.
So there is a very cynical opinion about about history, about human affairs generally, that the victors write the history. This is not, in fact. True.
I mean, I can give you counter examples of minority reports of all kinds for many historical events, but it's it's not true in this metaphysical sense that victors don't actually determine in an absolute way what the truth is. They may assert something for hundreds of years that doesn't make it true. Only an utter cynic would say that it's absolutely true that something is the case simply because someone asserts it long enough and loudly enough.
But there is a certain confidence or to use the word again, not connected directly to technology here, a hubris about Americans during and after the Second World War that makes them able to say we are the arbiters of what is right and wrong forever. So we will. Be able to, if we need to just exterminate a nation potentially because there's just something basically wrong with them, in our opinion.
That idea is going to be when combined with the destructive technologies that we possess. I think the actual terror of the Cold War, so it comes from at least two different sides. Yes, it comes from the Soviet Union and the threat that they hold that their paratroopers are going to jump into, like, small town Colorado.
Like, in Red Dawn, that's Colorado, right? Somewhere in the West. [Speaker 2] (53:48 - 53:49)
Somewhere in the West.
[Speaker 1] (53:49 - 53:49)
Yeah.
[Speaker 2] (53:50 - 53:53)
It's not that great of a movie. Really isn't.
[Speaker 1] (53:53 - 53:54)
There you go.
[Speaker 2] (53:54 - 53:55)
It's not that good.
[Speaker 1] (53:55 - 54:02)
You heard it here first and only one of us actually knows what he's talking about there. So listen to wisdom.
[Speaker 2] (54:03 - 54:03) Yeah.
[Speaker 1] (54:04 - 55:53)
But. It's not just that the Soviet Union could exercise some kind of terror. It's that we could also.
And that, in addition to the forms of technological godhood, we were seeking the capacity to just destroy entire cities at one go. I mean, a power that biblically is accorded only to God and used in that case very infrequently. But also that we were going to be the arbiters of whether a nation should disappear from the earth, practically speaking.
That that kind of a hubris is something to remember about a state of permanent emergency or cold war that when you're permanently on a war footing or you are designed to be a very sharp spear. You are going to indulge in hubris. And here's what hubris is.
It is what every tragic protagonist in a Greek play has before his fall. That's what causes his fall. So the idea that somehow our fall is caused by X or Y or Z factors solely, I don't think really provides a coherent explanation.
I think if you're thinking about the Cold War as one of maybe the chief exemplar of American hubris, it is the idea that we exercise some kind of shining moral authority along with our nuclear weaponry and whatever else it is that we possess or have built up in our national security apparatus for the sake of good. Because we could just as easily use all the same things with all the same people for very great evils. And in fact, at one point officially intended to do so in the case of the Morgenthau plan.
[Speaker 2] (55:53 - 56:04)
Right, right. So that shining moral authority is a belief in an inherent tendency toward virtue in ourselves.
[Speaker 1] (56:05 - 56:06)
Yes. Right.
[Speaker 2] (56:06 - 56:12)
And a belief in kind of it's not just that we could do really good things and have done really good things.
[Speaker 1] (56:13 - 56:13)
Yes.
[Speaker 2] (56:13 - 56:15)
We are wanted to do really good things. [Speaker 1] (56:15 - 56:55)
Yeah. I mean, it's a religious doctrine that is just the inversion of the Christian doctrine of concupiscence. Yes.
So concupiscence is the inclination to sin, not even that you have committed some specific sin, but that your sinful nature is thereto inclined. American concupiscence would be the illusion that we are to virtue naturally inclined. Not just that we have demonstrated or that we did it under these circumstances or that we, I mean, we did feed Europe much of it during the First World War, for example.
And then the Berlin Airlift, we haven't even mentioned in 1948.
[Speaker 2] (56:55 - 57:06)
There's a huge difference between saying we did some good stuff and we do good stuff because we're so good, because we always do good stuff and we can't ever not do good stuff. So let's go do whatever we want and then call it good stuff.
[Speaker 1] (57:06 - 57:07) That's right. That's right. [Speaker 2] (57:07 - 57:07) Yeah.
[Speaker 1] (57:07 - 57:16)
There is all the world's difference between saying that you have done something good and that, you know, that's just who you are. You just always do good stuff.
[Speaker 2] (57:16 - 58:02)
And the idea that they were teetering on an inverse holocaust, right? So here you have a group of elites that lead a populace to a holocaust, and you're going to then go and holocaust the populace for what those elites did as if somehow that were good. Right.
As if that were eye for an eye, as if the German farmer or the guy working in the factory planned it all, right? Right. And then to call that good.
And then it's not that that was being called good, but notice the tendency of vengeance involved in this, the reciprocity as inherently our decision. And that we withheld our hand from that through some wisdom is really, really good. But we teetered right on the brink of.
[Speaker 1] (58:02 - 58:03)
We teetered right on the brink.
[Speaker 2] (58:03 - 58:31)
Of an absolutely diabolical act. So and to think that we we those elements that were there in the political process are just gone because we made that one decision. Right.
That was not the atonement. Right. Right.
It didn't it didn't just fix sin right there. It was a good decision. So.
All right. Where are you planning on taking us? You mentioned McCarthy.
Are we really going to get there or do we have to finish too much stuff from this week next week to McCarthy next time?
[Speaker 1] (58:31 - 59:58)
We could begin with with George Kennan, the melancholy American abroad next week, but we will we will get to McCarthy next week. And I want to run McCarthy alongside a very much less well-known instance of the same desire to find out what communism was and what it was doing. In this case, specifically in educational institutions and what's called the John's committee.
John's being a last name, John with an S on the end in Florida. And I'm doing that because generally, I find that when we find something that is somewhat obscure, it is much less hedged around with people's preconceptions. And so we will discuss some of the McCarthy hearings after discussing some of the McCarthy hearings and put those in a historical context, a long one going back to the 1919 and 1920 hearings about communism after the First World War.
And then comparing those with the John's committee did, especially with the educational system, because I think what you'll observe is just a common pattern of communist behavior such as we discussed today. But we'll give some specific historical instances of that and see how it worked out. And also what is pretty much always associated with communism as far as life, sexual behavior, things like that, because there are commonalities you'll find throughout time that I hope will make a little bit more sense of what's going on today.
[Speaker 2] (59:59 - 1:00:05)
Yeah, if concupiscence doesn't repeat, it echoes. You're listening to a brief history of power in order to find us or you wouldn't be here.
[Speaker 1] (1:00:05 - 1:03:21)
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