July 4, 2024 • 40 mins
Americans are familiar with the American Revolution, an event that sent the United States on a path to greatness. However, not all revolutions across the globe have yielded such fruit. Join Jesse Kelly and historical experts as they examine revolutions of the past, both good and bad.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Be careful what you wish for, You just might get it.
You ever heard of that before? We're about to talk
about revolutions. We're about to talk about the good one.
We're going to get to Kevin Roberts to talk about
that in a moment. But we're going to talk about
bad ones as well. There have been many of them.
People love the idea, Americans love the idea of revolution,
but should we Revolutions can be and often are, horrific,
(00:30):
barbaric things.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So, like I just said, we need to be careful
what we wish for.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Now, let's focus on the good first though, Let's focus
on the American revolution. Revolutions sound good, But why do
we like the sound of revolution as Americans? Because we
had the one that worked out. We had the one
that worked out. So when we think about American revolution,
we think about freedom, getting rid of a tyrants. Most
of them don't work out, but we won God's lottery
(00:59):
in ours worked out quite well.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Let's talk about that.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
The president of the Great Heritage Foundation, I don't know
what the heck we'd have done without Heritage over the
past several decades, Doctor Kevin Roberts joins us. Now, okay, Kevin,
could you please before we dig into the American Revolution,
tell people, because most don't know, especially because our education
system sucks. What was America like before the Revolution? The
Seven Years War? What did that have to do with anything?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well, the Seven Years War was vital because it actually
trained up the colonial militia into almost irregular army, and
that obviously had a direct military impact.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
On the revolution.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
But even more important than the military Jesse was what
the American people were like, and ultimately they were had
an emerging American identity. They had an identity that was
becoming very different from the British identity. It's a way
of saying that we're very fond of the United States
of claiming that we're a classless society. That's largely true.
(01:57):
It's particularly true in the midst seventeen hundreds in contrast
to Britain, which of course was a heavily infatuated with class.
All of that to say America was a middle class place.
You could earn a good living if you were free.
Obviously there were slaves, and the United States fixed that eventually,
But if you were a free person and you worked hard,
(02:18):
you could get ahead in every colony and every city
in every colony, and that was very different than Britain,
and so it was primed to be in a successful
revolution against the British Empire.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
The Seven Years' War also really depleted the British Empire
in many ways. Them pulling back from the wilderness, leaving
our people naked out there, didn't it?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Well, it did, And what happened was the performance of
the British army in the Seven Years War showed the
Americans that they actually couldn't depend on the British military
to defend them. This was especially true on the western
side of the colonies basic roughly speaking, the Appalachian region
from Pennsylvania all the way down to North Georgia. As
(03:03):
you know, colonists there had direct interaction not just with
the British army, but also with regional Indian tribes, most
of whom got the better of the British, along occasionally
with some of the French. So even though the British
prevailed in the Seven Years were, the experience for the colonists,
including George Washington, who cut his teeth as a young
(03:25):
military colonel in that war, as you know, was very
negative and it proved to them that not only could
the British be counted on, but a decade later, when
we decided that we would declare independence from Britain, it
actually gave colonists more confidence than you might.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Think they would have possessed otherwise, no doubt. What was
the Stamp Act?
Speaker 1 (03:45):
And why were they so mad about that whole thing?
Why can't you pay a little bit more for a stamp?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
What's the big deal?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, the Stamp Act was a really fancy tax. And
so basically, although unfortunately we've gotten accustomed to this kind
of thing in the modern United States, any sheet of
paper that you had basically had to be notarized. That's
the best way of understanding it in our modern vocabulary.
And in order to get that stamp from the colonial
(04:11):
or government official, you had to pay a few pence,
You had to pay a little bit of money. Between
paying the money, but also just the inconvenience of time.
But I would argue, even more importantly than those two things,
just the ever presence of a British government official intruding
on every aspect of your life. Collas had enough, and
(04:31):
so they started the Stampback Congress, which was a precursor
to our own Congress. The Stampback Congress not only was
important in some of the policies that it articulated, but
it also helped galvanize this really healthy rebelliousness by the
American colonists. Most importantly, Jesse, I would argue, it actually
gave Americans, these colonists, sort of cultural icons, a flag,
(04:55):
certain songs, certain poems that came out of the Stampback.
This is really because, for the first time in an
organized way, it gave Americans a sense that they really
did have their own identity that was separate from the British.
We underestimate the importance of that because it's kind of vague,
you know, it's intangible. But that sense of a shared
identity across the thirteen colonies was vital to the ultimate
(05:19):
success of the American Revolution. It wouldn't happen without the Stampback.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Speaking of success, I mean, let's fast forward through a
couple things. Obviously, the United States of America became an
incredible success after we gained our independence. As I said
in the opening, though that is not the norm, Kevin.
As you obviously know, revolutions are generally disasters. Almost every
time they're disasters. It's not hard to get people angry
about the regime and power and toss them out. It's
(05:46):
very difficult to land was something decent on the other
side of that, But we did.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Why well?
Speaker 3 (05:55):
I think that's one of the most fascinating questions, not
just in American history, but in all of world history.
And as you know, I've spent a lot of time
studying and teaching that over the last couple of decades.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Ultimately I'll focus on three or four.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
The first was or is that the United States in
the seventeen hundreds was a place that was not divided
by class. Obviously, there were a lot of enslaved people,
about twenty percent of the American population. Separate from that
huge exception, the United States was a place that was
not dictated. It wasn't divided according to socioeconomic status. This
(06:31):
is important for the outcome of the revolution because unlike
say in France a decade and a half later, where
not only did you have the overthrow of the monarchy,
you had the poorer Frenchman trying to overthrow the landed aristocracy,
and the United States you didn't have that pent up frustration,
and so ultimately, when you get on the back end
(06:52):
the successful conclusion of the American Revolution, there isn't a
desire to reorder society. In fact, there is a desire
to continue something ironically that the British taught the Americans,
which was that you wanted to have both liberty and order,
something that Washington called ordered liberty. You wanted to be
a free person, but you also understood that there were
(07:14):
certain conventions in society, there were certain customs. You had
a moral obligation to help other people be free. That
was a distinctly American idea that was utterly lacking in France,
where freedom came to be defined as your freedom to
do whatever the heck you wanted to do. In the
United States, it was much more ordered, dare I say
more virtuous. And then the last reason I think is
(07:36):
that the United States was a place because even though
it was much smaller when the American Revolution was concluded
that it is today that geographically you could move around,
you could actually experience your freedom physically geographically, and so
that really accentuated that lack of motivation that most Americans
had to upend society. Because if you didn't like your
(07:58):
life where you were for the most part, if you
were a free person, you could get up and leave,
and that actually propelled the westward expansion that continued all
the way until the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Okay, so let's switch gears as we wrap this whole
thing up here. Why are so many other revolutions? Why
can't they duplicate that? Surely at least some people at
the top or a lot of people involved in them,
that's what they want on the back end of it,
whether you're tossing off a dictator here or there. Surely
(08:31):
they want to be free and ordered and good. But
it pretty much never works out that way. Why do
they fail where we succeeded.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Well, I'm going to write a headline for you that's
politically incorrect because America is an exceptional place, and it's
exceptional meaning that we aren't superior to other people.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
By any stretch.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Every human's equal in the eyes of God, obviously, but
we have some exceptional qualities about actually wanting to have
an orderly transition of power that comes, ironically from the
political philosophy we inherited from the British. But if you
think about the other revolutions that have happened since, you
think about the French Revolution and close proximity to the
(09:15):
American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and then a lot of
revolutions in the mid twentieth century, mostly from African and
Latin American countries, throwing off the yoke of communism. Many
of those countries continue to struggle with that because they
have inherited this disease of Marxism, the institutions that the
communist for example, took over in those countries. This is
(09:39):
a really important lesson for us in the twenty first
century of the United States actually miseducated their people. They
miseducated them so that they didn't understand not just how
to be free, but they also miseducated them in understanding
that order, that sort of government power came from on high,
not just a king in the case of the Seventh hundreds,
(10:00):
been in the case of the Communists, from the poll
up bureau. But instead we understand in the United States,
sovereignty comes from the individual, it comes from nature, or
it comes from God. And that is a really underappreciated
aspect of why most other revolutions fail. We ought to
feel very blessed in the United States to have had
such a successful revolution that has persisted in its ideals
(10:23):
and well until the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, we should have doctor.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Love you guys at Heritage will break Breadstill, all right,
that's ours. I hope that put a smile on your face.
It blessed me. We are so blessed. But as we mentioned,
there are a lot of them that they didn't go well,
pretty much all of most of us, ninety nine percent
of them. I made up that number, but it's a lot.
(10:52):
Let's talk about some that didn't go well next. All right,
so that was the American Revolution. That was the good one.
(11:13):
But as I've explained, most of them aren't good. We
have a really fluffy, shiny view of revolution here in
America because ours turned out well.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
The most revolutions.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Are ugly feminist, ugly. Speaking of which, joining me now,
my friend Jack Pasilvic, I should use other titles, but
I'm going to be forced to call him author Jack
Pasilbic today because he did write. He wrote this great book, Unhuman.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
You should really read it.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
But Jack, before we get to your book, let's talk
about one of the subjects in that book, the French Revolution.
Now I am an American, therefore I don't care about
the French, but this is a really really revealing event
in human history.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Tell us about it.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Well.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
Unfortunately, for all of us Jesse, even though we are
not French, we are still living through the effects of
the French Revolution and its consequences, because, of course, the
French Revolution is the predicate revolution that then kicks off
the Russian Revolution, which leads to the Spanish Revolution, which
leads to the Chinese Communist Revolution and so many more
(12:22):
around the world.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The French Revolution, when.
Speaker 5 (12:25):
It's kicked off early on, it actually starts out so
so quietly because it's all about bringing together parliament at
the time, they call it the Estates General, and the
king decides. King Louis says, we're gonna put together the
parliament because we need to raise some taxes. And I've
decided that I've given the parliament this authority.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
I don't have this authority anymore.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
So we're gonna call the Estates General back in and
we're gonna raise taxes.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Well, the Estates General.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
Opens up and they says, you know, we need to
do more than raised taxes. We need we need some
equality around here, and we need some we need some
equal protections and equal rights and equal justice, and we
need inclusion.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
That's what we need.
Speaker 5 (13:02):
And you're starting to get the sense of this, and
they decide that they want to do more than just
raised taxes. They say, you know what, we need to
right some of the wrongs in French society. In fact,
one of those big wrongs in French society. Why do
we even have these things like kings and leaders and
rich people and successful people and priests and religion, and
why don't we instead put the most brutal, disgusting, ruthless,
(13:27):
ugly And I'm not just talking about the feminists, but
also these these trollish little creatures like Maximilian robes Pierre,
put them in charge and have them start executing everyone
who stands in our way, up to and including the
king and the Queen of France itself. This is constituted
and what we call the reign of Terror, which doesn't
(13:49):
end for an entire year of heads piling up in
the center of Paris until rose Pier orders and even
carries out the execution of a cloister of nuns from
coping Yon, where he pulls them down and says, you
must swear allegiance to the cult of reason and how
dare you stand up for God and stand.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Up for your beliefs?
Speaker 5 (14:12):
He starts executing nuns in the center of Paris. This
is how bad these things get. And finally Robespierre is
executed himself with people say, okay, I think this is
going a little bit too far. And all of that,
of course leads to something we call the rise of
Emperor Nepoldian who comes in.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
But that, of course is another story.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Jack, can you explain why the people themselves in the beginning?
Why would they sign on for such a thing? Because
it was, you know, unfairly popular, popular popular enough that
it got going. Why would the people sign on for
something so evil?
Speaker 5 (14:53):
So Jesse And here's the funny part about this, and
a lot of people don't even understand this, is that
even the king signed on to this because the king,
the King said, you know, I don't want to seem intolerant.
I don't want to seem like I'm politically incorrect. I
don't want to seem like I'm not listening to the
grievances of the people.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
So of course the king goes along with it, and
the King says.
Speaker 5 (15:16):
Well, yeah, we've got to Listen, we've got these are
some great ideas that these guys have about all the
things that we can do to make France better. We're
just gonna you know, it's really just about inclusion. It's
really about diversity. It's really about equity and equality fraternity
of course what they refer to it at the time.
And oh, letting the political prisoners go from the best deal.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, sure, we're going to do all of that. We're
going to do all these things.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
Don't don't lock these people up, No, actually treat them
in good faith and give them power. Don't summarily round
them up and execute them.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
We're going to go along with all of it.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
And it's the same type of behavior you see from
the House Republicans today that you see from so many
elected Republicans that say, guys, guys, guys, let's just work together.
Let's find a compromise. Look, they want to execute everyone,
so we're gonna find them in a compromise.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
It's really nice.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
We're gonna only gonna let them execute half of the
people and the other half are going to go to jail.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
See you see, it's it's much better this way.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
And Jesse, it's this idea of and I see it
on the right today and you can see it on
and now at the time would have been the monarchists
back then or the traditionalists the unshenned regime in France.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
It's it's are you addicted to rules?
Speaker 5 (16:28):
And are are you addicted to principles and you don't
care anything about power? Versus people who have no principles whatsoever,
and yet are addicted to power. Like we say follow
the money in politics a lot or and investigations, what
these guys do is they follow the power, and the
power will flow to the most brutal, the most repressive,
(16:52):
the most ruthless members of the revolutionaries.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
And this, of course was the Jacobin Club.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
So if you have no principles, just like the response
we're seeing to the Supreme Court right now, then they
view that as a free license to go and kill
whoever they want. And when I say they're going mask off,
is it's.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Not mask off. They're always liked this.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
They've been like this for two hundred fifty years, and
for some reason people on our side don't seem to
get it.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Why don't we get it, Jack? Is it that we
don't want to get it? Or are we just cowards.
I think it's a little both. I do think it's
a little both.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
And I also think that there's a bit of a
martyrdom fetish.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I think that exists on the right. I think it
comes from.
Speaker 5 (17:36):
This idea that you know, if I'm going to go
to be, you know, to be shot in the head
or executed for my beliefs, then that will show that
I'm the better person, and that will show that I
am actually the more principled person. As you're an out principle,
your enemies, well, guess what, boys and girls, they don't
care about your principles. And I hope that your principles
(17:57):
matter a lot while your children are being in the
street in front of.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
You, like was done with the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
I hope that your principles matter a lot to you
when your wife is being ravaged in front of you,
like happened in Spain, when the nuns and priests are
being killed and raped on the altars. I hope that
your principles work out really well. But don't worry, because
we are more principled than them. And it's this terrifying
and this is where the cowardist part comes in, because
(18:24):
they claim it's martyred, and they claim, and the first
layer of that is the martyrdom fetish, but the second
layer is ultimately cowardice. The second layer is cowardice because
if I claim I want to be a martyr, then
that means, oh, I don't have to do anything. I
don't actually have to do any work. I don't actually
have to go around and text message my friends or
who cares about the fact that the local library is
(18:48):
putting queer and LGBT and DEI and anti racist baby
everywhere in their town? Because guess what, the leftists don't
think about this. The leftists look at your library and
they say, oh, this is a place where I can
push my beliefs, So they will take over your library.
And this is every library in America. And you can
see the table when you first walk in. That's what
(19:09):
you'll see. Then the leftist says, oh, I can go
and take over the parks department by the parks department,
because I want my gay pride and my trans and
my dragged parades, and now I'm going to be hosting
those in the local playground.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
And because everybody else around.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
Them is going to say, O, I don't want to
rock the boat or I don't want to stand up
and do anything about this. You don't fight back, and
eventually those people will win and run rough shot over
you because they are short circuiting this issue that exists
in Western civilization, this idea that we should treat everyone fairly,
treat everyone fairly.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Well, here's what I say, Jesse.
Speaker 5 (19:44):
I think that we should treat people the way that
they treat us, and I think that we should treat
them exactly the way that they treat us. And if
the code of Hammurabi and I for an eye is
a little bit too much for people.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Then I'm sorry. You may not be cut out for
what needs to be done.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Jack.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
How did a revolution in France lead to these other
revolutions as you shoild Russia Spanish? How could one lead
to the other?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
What does that happen? So it happens because you get
the Communist Manifesto.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
It gets written a couple of decades later after the
French Revolution. It takes all these ideas up that we
are ruled by the system of evil capitalism, and we
are ruled by these horrifically evil monarchs who need to
be taken out, who need to be killed, who need
to destroyed.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
And by the way, this starts happening all across Europe.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
They start assassinating kings, they start assassinating queens.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
These are of Russia.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Sar Alexander gets killed by a hand grenade. Oh and
by the way, you would think nothing that could ever
happen here in the United States, thank goodness, would never
Oh wait, but in nineteen oh one, actually just a
couple of years after, a couple decades after the Commuist
Revolution comes out and anarcho socialist walks up to President
McKinley and shoots and kills him. And this is how
we get Teddy Roosevelt as our young because president he
(21:00):
was VP at the time. No one even gets taught
that one of these anarchosocialist assassins kills a president of
the United States during this preer. We just get told, oh,
that was just the first red scare, and that's a
bunch of these red baiting politicians like Joseph McCarthy want
to talk about the kind of stuff we really because
they killed one of our presidents. So you know, fast
warning or go back a little bit now to Europe.
(21:22):
Remember that happens so the assassination McKinley takes place even
before the Bolshevik Revolution, because you get this idea and
a lot of this is predicated on the industrial revolution,
and the elites get so much power. The elites just
lorded over people, and then you get the unhuman class.
And the unhuman class walks around and says, you see
how you're living in squalor, and you see how all
(21:44):
those people are doing better than you. Well, instead of
working with them and trying to come up with some
kind of reform and trying to, I don't know, maybe
do something to make things a little bit more fair
around here, or working on better wages for the workers, let's.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Just go kill them. Let's go kill them.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
Rap their wives, let's murder their children, rape their children.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Who cares, and we'll.
Speaker 5 (22:05):
Do so with the justification that we are on the
right side.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
And this is what Karl Marx gives them.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
And so suddenly you see this with Lenin, because Lenin
takes Marxism and adds something a little piece to it.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
What he says is, well, the workers don't seem to.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
Be doing this on their own, so we need to
institute something called the revolutionary vanguard. And the revolutionary vanguard
is Lenin going around to all the freaks, to the creatures,
the bug people, all around where he can find them
in Russia, putting together what's been called a coalition of
the fringes and saying, in order for us to fix Russia,
(22:42):
we have to go kill everyone and take all their stuff.
And he's able to do so with great effect. And
the Romanops, by the way, early on, as horrific as
it turns out for them, they do the same thing.
Where they go along. He said, well, if I just abdicate,
then all of this will go away.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
I just but I'll stay.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
Here, and you know, we can work together and we
can find a better way forward for Russia, rather than
just order the army to crush the revolutionaries outright crush
the Bolsheviks. No, Romanov doesn't order this. And by the way,
I'm not saying in any way that he deserved what
he got, because eventually what they did was they said, oh, great,
you've abdicated.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
That's wonderful. Now you're under arrest.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
Now we're going to lock up you and your wife
and your children, all Christian by the way, We're going
to cart you out to the Middle of the forest
in Siberia, and one night, late in the night, we're
gonna wake you up, and we're going to bring you
down to the basement and we're going to shoot you
and bayonet your children against the wall. That's what happens
when you go along with people. That's exactly what happened.
(23:45):
Even young little Prince Alexi is bayoneted against the wall
and then eventually shot in the head. So again, when
you're dealing with people who have no principles, dealing with
people whose highest calling is oppressive warfare, murder and violence,
then it will always end in piled Remember Jesse and
(24:06):
you read the Great book on in this as well,
that the communists.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
People say, why do the spore communism?
Speaker 5 (24:11):
How can people still spot communism even after it's killed
one hundred million people. I say, they look at a
one hundred million people as a good start. They want
to increase that number because remember those were those were fascists,
and those were anti communists, and those were people who
are against the revolution, those were right wing extremists, and
so those people are all.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
In the way.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
Remember, communism is only, always, ever, only one genocide away
from total utopia.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
That is a fact, my friend, the book is Unhumans.
You need to pick up your phone right now and
go order it. It's awesome. It really is freaking awesome book, Jack,
my brother. As always, I appreciate you very much. On
Humans available wherever books are sold.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
All right, done?
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yet, what about Mao's Revolution next? Speaking of ugly revolutions,
(25:18):
there have been many of them. I'm sure the competition
is fierce, but I have a hard time thinking of
a more horrific one than Mao's Cultural Revolution. This is
one that's not widely taught in American schools, mainly because
American schools are full of dirty Communists and they don't
want you to know about it. But it was a
horrible affair. Let's bring in the man who wrote the
(25:39):
book on it, Stephen Moser, author of the book. Wonderful book,
terrible book, but you know what I mean. The devil
in communists China? Okay, Stephen, Before we get to the
cultural revolution, can you help us understand why Mau needed one.
The Communis had had China since nineteen forty nine, they'd
been in power for what seventeen years?
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Why did he need a revolution? Why was a revolution necessary?
They had a revolution they won.
Speaker 4 (26:05):
Well. This was factional fighting within the Chinese Communist Party.
This was an effort by Chairman Mao to recover his
power and prestige that he had lost because of fifteen
years of mismanagement of the Chinese economy. Remember they took
power in nineteen forty nine, to be sure. And then
they prosecuted, persecuted, and killed the landlord so called the
(26:29):
rich peasants. They prosecuted and persecuted and tortured and killed
millions of people who were formerly with the nationalist regime,
who had been in the government of that earlier, earlier
ruler of China. They killed, tortured many, many people who
were intellectuals who opposed the Communists for various reasons. And
(26:52):
then Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian, a great leap
forward in nineteen fifty seven, forcing six million villagers into
huge people's communes that ended in a absolute disaster. Forty
five million people died in the worst famine in human
history from nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty two. It was
(27:15):
an unnecessary famine. It was a man made famine, a
mal made famine, really, you should say, because it was
made by Chairman Mao, and at that point Chairman Mao's
prestige had dropped fairly low within the ranks of the
Chinese Communist Party. In fact, he has senior premier, the
guy who had worked sold at the shoulder within for decades.
(27:36):
The Oshauchi came to him in nineteen sixty two and said,
history is going to reveal us as the worst murderers
in Chinese history. We've killed forty five million Chinese. Let
them starve to death. Mao never forgave him for that slight,
so the other Communist leaders pushed Mao back into the
(27:59):
second rank, and the Cultural Revolution was really an effort
by Mao to get back in control of all of China.
Now it purports to be something else, right, because the
Communists never tell you exactly what they're about. The ostensible
purpose for the Cultural Revolution was to destroy traditional Chinese culture,
(28:21):
to destroy any connections that Chinese people had with the West.
Anyone who had foreign relatives, anyone who could speak a
foreign language like English, anyone who was a student of
Confucius or Mensius or admired traditional Chinese culture was an enemy.
And he mobilized tens of millions of Red Guards throughout
(28:43):
the country to attack these supposed enemies. But within those
tens of millions of Red Guards Jesse, he had some
special groups. And these special groups, which were run by
his wife Chiang Qing his fourth wife by the way,
Jiang Qing, were used to target his political enemies within
(29:03):
the Chinese Communist Party. And guess what. Leo Shauci, the
head of government who had criticized Mao saying, you know,
we're going to be remembered as as mass murderers because
of the people who died during the famine. He was
the first to be arrested. And they tortured and killed
Leo Shauci at Mao's order. And then the next to
(29:25):
go was Pung dav Whi. He was a general who'd
been a leading general in the Civil War in the
nineteen thirties and forties. He actually saved Mao's life a
couple of times, a general Pung Dahai did. But he
too had criticized the Great Leap Forward ten years before,
and he too was the target of these special Red
(29:46):
Guard groups which were targeting Mao's political enemies. Pungdal Wai
was a tough old bird. They tortured him for years
before they were able to kill him, but they finally did,
and then there was Premier Joe in line. Now, Joe
and Lai had purported to be loyal to Chairman Mao
during the Great Lean Forward, but he too had questioned
some of the policies, and that was enough to get
him killed by Chairman Mao. Actually not outright, this was
(30:11):
killing without shedding blood, because what happened with Joe and
Lai the longtime premiere that people will remember because he's
the one that Kissinger Henry because you're met with on
the first secret trip to China. So, Joe and Lai
had bladder cancer, and the doctors came to Chairman Mao
and said, Joe and Lai, Premier Joe has bladder cancer.
(30:34):
We need to treat it immediately. And Chairman Mao, remembering
that Joe and Lai at once what slighted him, said no,
don't treat the cancer. Let it spread. Don't tell Premiere
show that he has cancer. Let it die. The Cultural
Revolution resulted in the deaths of twenty million Chinese resulted
in the deaths of one hundred million others. It led
(30:57):
to some really terrible things like political canibalism, Now, there
had been cannibalism before in Chinese history. During the Great
Leap Forward, people were starving to death, and there were
credible reports of people eating the dead bodies of neighbors.
But in the Cultural Revolution in nineteen sixty six, sixty seven,
and sixty eight, there was political cannibalism, not caused by hunger,
(31:22):
but caused by a desire to absolutely humiliate one's enemies
in the party, Mao's enemies in the party. And so
they would not only torture and kill their political victims,
the enemies of Mao, they would actually desecrate their bodies
by cutting them open and parting out the pieces to
the other Red Guards. Political cannibalism, now mal once famously said,
(31:45):
you know, a revolution is not a dinner party. But
in the Cultural Revolution, Jesse, it almost became one.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Good brief Okay, Steve, Obviously I have a million questions
I could ask, but can you help me understand why
did struction of so much of China's history?
Speaker 2 (32:02):
China has an incredible history.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
It's hard to find a period of time in the
known history of the world where China wasn't prominent in
doing wonderful things. But you're desecrating Confucius. Help me understand why.
What was Mao's acts to grind with these things?
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Well, Mao was a committed communist. He was determined to
burn everything to the ground, to raise traditional confusion culture
to the ground, and out of that complete destruction of
the past, he was going to build paradise. You see,
it's the fantasy of every communist leader. They're going to
(32:40):
create paradise on earth. They're going to create a new
socialist man, a new socialist woman. But they have to
start from ground zero. They have to start from a
blank slate, a tabula rasa. And in order to get
that blank slate they wanted mal wanted to destroy all
of Chinese history, all of China's culture, and so he
could basically start over. What he did was he was
(33:01):
very very good at the destruction part, there's no question
about that. But he wasn't very good about building anything
back after the destruction. But at base, the cultural revolution
was not just about destroying traditional Chinese culture and creating
a new socialist man a new socialist woman. At the
heart of it was this megalomaniac, this bloodthirsty mass murder,
(33:25):
the worst mass murder in human history, wanted to get
back the reigne of power, wanted to destroy his enemies
and the party, and to a certain extent, the ten
twenty million people who died and the one hundred million
people who were persecuted, they were just collateral damage to
this factional fighting within the Chinese Communist Party. That's the
(33:48):
real tragedy of the Cultural Revolution.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
There's so many bodies, so much suffering. Stephen, I want
people to read the book obviously get a lot more
detail on this, But can you help me understand, Mao,
how could a human being look it's you can make
the argument, and I would make the argument that he's
the most evil human being.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
To ever walk the planet.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
How does one go from being a armor's son to
being the worst human being to ever walk the earth?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
How well?
Speaker 4 (34:20):
I mean, you know, we all face choices in our life,
and Mao is a very young man, decided that and
he wrote this. He wrote, there are other people and
things in the world, but they're only there from my
use and my pleasure. So from a very early age
he rejected Confucianism. He rejected the silver rule, do not
do unto others what you would not have them do
(34:40):
under you. And he adopted a totally materialistic, totally utilitarian
view of other people. There are other people and things
in the world that they're just there from my use
and from my pleasure, And so he consciously chose to
go down that path. He totally lacked compassion for other people.
If you read you know about his his his his,
(35:02):
his life, you find that he had absolutely no feeling
for anyone else. He may never have loved anyone else
in his entire life. The other odd thing about maw was,
and this is this is very interesting to me as
a cultural anthropologist. When he was a small boy, he
was actually taken out to a stone god outside the
village where he lived by his mother, and he was rebaptized.
(35:25):
He was given a new name before this stone god,
this stone monolith, and and he was called the third
Son of the Monolith. His his original name had been Mauzetongue.
Of course we all know mau Zeton, but his mother
gave him the name third Son of the Monolith, or
third Son of Stone. And he very proudly and often
referred to himself as the third Son of Stone. And
(35:47):
the man really did have a heart of stone. He
was only out for himself from the beginning, and the
result was was mass carnage, mass butchery in China, worst
mass in human history. One hundred million people died in
purges and famines. We talked about the Great Famine, of course,
(36:08):
forty five million, other twenty million in the Cultural Revolution,
other tens of millions in various purges and persecutions. And
then there are the four hundred million unborn children who
died as a result of the one child policy. Now,
the one child policy didn't begin until after Mao's death
in nineteen eighty when I was in China for the
first time, but Mao was the intellectual progenitor of the policy.
(36:32):
He was provided the intellectual foundation of the policy because
way back in nineteen fifty eight, he said, we need
a ministry of reproduction, a ministry of reproduction, because we're
a socialist country and we should be controlling the birth
of babies the same way that we're controlling the production
of steel, the production of bicycles. He said, we need
(36:54):
to be in control of reproduction. Well, twenty two years later,
in nineteen eighty, the Chinese Communist Party acted on that
suggestion and put in place the one child policy and
The other thing you have to say about the whole
killing spree that Mao launched, is this, the Communist Party
of China, as all communist parties do, has to have
(37:17):
a target, has to have an enemy. It always has
to have an enemy of the state to refocus the
righteous anger of the people against the party for its corruption,
for its murderous practices, to redirect the righteous anger of
the people away from the Communist Party and awake from
its leaders like Chairman Mao, towards another group. And it
(37:38):
was originally the landlords, the entrepreneurs, the intellectuals, but then
in nineteen eighty, for the first time in human history,
the enemy of the state, Jesse, became the unborn child.
It was the unborn child who was standing in the
way of China's greatness. It was the unborn children of
China who were standing in the way of China's progress,
China's becoming a first world now, China becoming the dominant
(38:01):
power in the world. And on this altar, which kind
of in a symbolic way, is similar to the old
altars in which the Canaanites and the Philistines and the
Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on those altars. Four hundred million
unborn children were sacrificed as enemies of the state. So
(38:21):
the total number of people who have died at the
hands of the Chinese Communist Party over the seventy five
years of its misery is five hundred million. I know
that's a number of people can't wrap their minds around.
But every one of those it was a living, breathing
human being. Every one of those had human dignity and
innate human dignity and had their life torn away from
(38:45):
them by this system and by this megalmaniac, this paranoid
killer who was running it.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Agree he is Stephen Moser go by his book, Stephen,
Thank you so much. That was quite a window into
the life of a monster. Thank you, sir. We're not
done yet. Final thoughts next revolution. It is good that you,
(39:22):
an American, look fondly on the American Revolution, because it
was wonderful. Don't, however, fall in love with the concept
of revolution itself. As we just talked about, it doesn't
always work out that way. Yes, the existing thing is terrible.
That does not in any way mean the next thing
(39:46):
will be better. Keep that in mind as the mood
and the country drifts more and more towards just burn
everything down, civil war, things like that. These are not
things we should cheer for. We should cheer for things
writing themselves. I don't know that that can happen, not
even necessarily hopeful it will.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
But revolution scary stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
All right, we'll do it again.
Be careful what you wish for, You just might get it.
You ever heard of that before? We're about to talk
about revolutions. We're about to talk about the good one.
We're going to get to Kevin Roberts to talk about
that in a moment. But we're going to talk about
bad ones as well. There have been many of them.
People love the idea, Americans love the idea of revolution,
but should we Revolutions can be and often are, horrific,
(00:30):
barbaric things.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So, like I just said, we need to be careful
what we wish for.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Now, let's focus on the good first though, Let's focus
on the American revolution. Revolutions sound good, But why do
we like the sound of revolution as Americans? Because we
had the one that worked out. We had the one
that worked out. So when we think about American revolution,
we think about freedom, getting rid of a tyrants. Most
of them don't work out, but we won God's lottery
(00:59):
in ours worked out quite well.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Let's talk about that.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
The president of the Great Heritage Foundation, I don't know
what the heck we'd have done without Heritage over the
past several decades, Doctor Kevin Roberts joins us. Now, okay, Kevin,
could you please before we dig into the American Revolution,
tell people, because most don't know, especially because our education
system sucks. What was America like before the Revolution? The
Seven Years War? What did that have to do with anything?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well, the Seven Years War was vital because it actually
trained up the colonial militia into almost irregular army, and
that obviously had a direct military impact.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
On the revolution.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
But even more important than the military Jesse was what
the American people were like, and ultimately they were had
an emerging American identity. They had an identity that was
becoming very different from the British identity. It's a way
of saying that we're very fond of the United States
of claiming that we're a classless society. That's largely true.
(01:57):
It's particularly true in the midst seventeen hundreds in contrast
to Britain, which of course was a heavily infatuated with class.
All of that to say America was a middle class place.
You could earn a good living if you were free.
Obviously there were slaves, and the United States fixed that eventually,
But if you were a free person and you worked hard,
(02:18):
you could get ahead in every colony and every city
in every colony, and that was very different than Britain,
and so it was primed to be in a successful
revolution against the British Empire.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
The Seven Years' War also really depleted the British Empire
in many ways. Them pulling back from the wilderness, leaving
our people naked out there, didn't it?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Well, it did, And what happened was the performance of
the British army in the Seven Years War showed the
Americans that they actually couldn't depend on the British military
to defend them. This was especially true on the western
side of the colonies basic roughly speaking, the Appalachian region
from Pennsylvania all the way down to North Georgia. As
(03:03):
you know, colonists there had direct interaction not just with
the British army, but also with regional Indian tribes, most
of whom got the better of the British, along occasionally
with some of the French. So even though the British
prevailed in the Seven Years were, the experience for the colonists,
including George Washington, who cut his teeth as a young
(03:25):
military colonel in that war, as you know, was very
negative and it proved to them that not only could
the British be counted on, but a decade later, when
we decided that we would declare independence from Britain, it
actually gave colonists more confidence than you might.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Think they would have possessed otherwise, no doubt. What was
the Stamp Act?
Speaker 1 (03:45):
And why were they so mad about that whole thing?
Why can't you pay a little bit more for a stamp?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
What's the big deal?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, the Stamp Act was a really fancy tax. And
so basically, although unfortunately we've gotten accustomed to this kind
of thing in the modern United States, any sheet of
paper that you had basically had to be notarized. That's
the best way of understanding it in our modern vocabulary.
And in order to get that stamp from the colonial
(04:11):
or government official, you had to pay a few pence,
You had to pay a little bit of money. Between
paying the money, but also just the inconvenience of time.
But I would argue, even more importantly than those two things,
just the ever presence of a British government official intruding
on every aspect of your life. Collas had enough, and
(04:31):
so they started the Stampback Congress, which was a precursor
to our own Congress. The Stampback Congress not only was
important in some of the policies that it articulated, but
it also helped galvanize this really healthy rebelliousness by the
American colonists. Most importantly, Jesse, I would argue, it actually
gave Americans, these colonists, sort of cultural icons, a flag,
(04:55):
certain songs, certain poems that came out of the Stampback.
This is really because, for the first time in an
organized way, it gave Americans a sense that they really
did have their own identity that was separate from the British.
We underestimate the importance of that because it's kind of vague,
you know, it's intangible. But that sense of a shared
identity across the thirteen colonies was vital to the ultimate
(05:19):
success of the American Revolution. It wouldn't happen without the Stampback.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Speaking of success, I mean, let's fast forward through a
couple things. Obviously, the United States of America became an
incredible success after we gained our independence. As I said
in the opening, though that is not the norm, Kevin.
As you obviously know, revolutions are generally disasters. Almost every
time they're disasters. It's not hard to get people angry
about the regime and power and toss them out. It's
(05:46):
very difficult to land was something decent on the other
side of that, But we did.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Why well?
Speaker 3 (05:55):
I think that's one of the most fascinating questions, not
just in American history, but in all of world history.
And as you know, I've spent a lot of time
studying and teaching that over the last couple of decades.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Ultimately I'll focus on three or four.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
The first was or is that the United States in
the seventeen hundreds was a place that was not divided
by class. Obviously, there were a lot of enslaved people,
about twenty percent of the American population. Separate from that
huge exception, the United States was a place that was
not dictated. It wasn't divided according to socioeconomic status. This
(06:31):
is important for the outcome of the revolution because unlike
say in France a decade and a half later, where
not only did you have the overthrow of the monarchy,
you had the poorer Frenchman trying to overthrow the landed aristocracy,
and the United States you didn't have that pent up frustration,
and so ultimately, when you get on the back end
(06:52):
the successful conclusion of the American Revolution, there isn't a
desire to reorder society. In fact, there is a desire
to continue something ironically that the British taught the Americans,
which was that you wanted to have both liberty and order,
something that Washington called ordered liberty. You wanted to be
a free person, but you also understood that there were
(07:14):
certain conventions in society, there were certain customs. You had
a moral obligation to help other people be free. That
was a distinctly American idea that was utterly lacking in France,
where freedom came to be defined as your freedom to
do whatever the heck you wanted to do. In the
United States, it was much more ordered, dare I say
more virtuous. And then the last reason I think is
(07:36):
that the United States was a place because even though
it was much smaller when the American Revolution was concluded
that it is today that geographically you could move around,
you could actually experience your freedom physically geographically, and so
that really accentuated that lack of motivation that most Americans
had to upend society. Because if you didn't like your
(07:58):
life where you were for the most part, if you
were a free person, you could get up and leave,
and that actually propelled the westward expansion that continued all
the way until the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Okay, so let's switch gears as we wrap this whole
thing up here. Why are so many other revolutions? Why
can't they duplicate that? Surely at least some people at
the top or a lot of people involved in them,
that's what they want on the back end of it,
whether you're tossing off a dictator here or there. Surely
(08:31):
they want to be free and ordered and good. But
it pretty much never works out that way. Why do
they fail where we succeeded.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
Well, I'm going to write a headline for you that's
politically incorrect because America is an exceptional place, and it's
exceptional meaning that we aren't superior to other people.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
By any stretch.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Every human's equal in the eyes of God, obviously, but
we have some exceptional qualities about actually wanting to have
an orderly transition of power that comes, ironically from the
political philosophy we inherited from the British. But if you
think about the other revolutions that have happened since, you
think about the French Revolution and close proximity to the
(09:15):
American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and then a lot of
revolutions in the mid twentieth century, mostly from African and
Latin American countries, throwing off the yoke of communism. Many
of those countries continue to struggle with that because they
have inherited this disease of Marxism, the institutions that the
communist for example, took over in those countries. This is
(09:39):
a really important lesson for us in the twenty first
century of the United States actually miseducated their people. They
miseducated them so that they didn't understand not just how
to be free, but they also miseducated them in understanding
that order, that sort of government power came from on high,
not just a king in the case of the Seventh hundreds,
(10:00):
been in the case of the Communists, from the poll
up bureau. But instead we understand in the United States,
sovereignty comes from the individual, it comes from nature, or
it comes from God. And that is a really underappreciated
aspect of why most other revolutions fail. We ought to
feel very blessed in the United States to have had
such a successful revolution that has persisted in its ideals
(10:23):
and well until the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, we should have doctor.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Love you guys at Heritage will break Breadstill, all right,
that's ours. I hope that put a smile on your face.
It blessed me. We are so blessed. But as we mentioned,
there are a lot of them that they didn't go well,
pretty much all of most of us, ninety nine percent
of them. I made up that number, but it's a lot.
(10:52):
Let's talk about some that didn't go well next. All right,
so that was the American Revolution. That was the good one.
(11:13):
But as I've explained, most of them aren't good. We
have a really fluffy, shiny view of revolution here in
America because ours turned out well.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
The most revolutions.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Are ugly feminist, ugly. Speaking of which, joining me now,
my friend Jack Pasilvic, I should use other titles, but
I'm going to be forced to call him author Jack
Pasilbic today because he did write. He wrote this great book, Unhuman.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
You should really read it.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
But Jack, before we get to your book, let's talk
about one of the subjects in that book, the French Revolution.
Now I am an American, therefore I don't care about
the French, but this is a really really revealing event
in human history.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Tell us about it.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Well.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
Unfortunately, for all of us Jesse, even though we are
not French, we are still living through the effects of
the French Revolution and its consequences, because, of course, the
French Revolution is the predicate revolution that then kicks off
the Russian Revolution, which leads to the Spanish Revolution, which
leads to the Chinese Communist Revolution and so many more
(12:22):
around the world.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The French Revolution, when.
Speaker 5 (12:25):
It's kicked off early on, it actually starts out so
so quietly because it's all about bringing together parliament at
the time, they call it the Estates General, and the
king decides. King Louis says, we're gonna put together the
parliament because we need to raise some taxes. And I've
decided that I've given the parliament this authority.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
I don't have this authority anymore.
Speaker 5 (12:44):
So we're gonna call the Estates General back in and
we're gonna raise taxes.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Well, the Estates General.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
Opens up and they says, you know, we need to
do more than raised taxes. We need we need some
equality around here, and we need some we need some
equal protections and equal rights and equal justice, and we
need inclusion.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
That's what we need.
Speaker 5 (13:02):
And you're starting to get the sense of this, and
they decide that they want to do more than just
raised taxes. They say, you know what, we need to
right some of the wrongs in French society. In fact,
one of those big wrongs in French society. Why do
we even have these things like kings and leaders and
rich people and successful people and priests and religion, and
why don't we instead put the most brutal, disgusting, ruthless,
(13:27):
ugly And I'm not just talking about the feminists, but
also these these trollish little creatures like Maximilian robes Pierre,
put them in charge and have them start executing everyone
who stands in our way, up to and including the
king and the Queen of France itself. This is constituted
and what we call the reign of Terror, which doesn't
(13:49):
end for an entire year of heads piling up in
the center of Paris until rose Pier orders and even
carries out the execution of a cloister of nuns from
coping Yon, where he pulls them down and says, you
must swear allegiance to the cult of reason and how
dare you stand up for God and stand.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Up for your beliefs?
Speaker 5 (14:12):
He starts executing nuns in the center of Paris. This
is how bad these things get. And finally Robespierre is
executed himself with people say, okay, I think this is
going a little bit too far. And all of that,
of course leads to something we call the rise of
Emperor Nepoldian who comes in.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
But that, of course is another story.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Jack, can you explain why the people themselves in the beginning?
Why would they sign on for such a thing? Because
it was, you know, unfairly popular, popular popular enough that
it got going. Why would the people sign on for
something so evil?
Speaker 5 (14:53):
So Jesse And here's the funny part about this, and
a lot of people don't even understand this, is that
even the king signed on to this because the king,
the King said, you know, I don't want to seem intolerant.
I don't want to seem like I'm politically incorrect. I
don't want to seem like I'm not listening to the
grievances of the people.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
So of course the king goes along with it, and
the King says.
Speaker 5 (15:16):
Well, yeah, we've got to Listen, we've got these are
some great ideas that these guys have about all the
things that we can do to make France better. We're
just gonna you know, it's really just about inclusion. It's
really about diversity. It's really about equity and equality fraternity
of course what they refer to it at the time.
And oh, letting the political prisoners go from the best deal.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, sure, we're going to do all of that. We're
going to do all these things.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
Don't don't lock these people up, No, actually treat them
in good faith and give them power. Don't summarily round
them up and execute them.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
We're going to go along with all of it.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
And it's the same type of behavior you see from
the House Republicans today that you see from so many
elected Republicans that say, guys, guys, guys, let's just work together.
Let's find a compromise. Look, they want to execute everyone,
so we're gonna find them in a compromise.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
It's really nice.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
We're gonna only gonna let them execute half of the
people and the other half are going to go to jail.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
See you see, it's it's much better this way.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
And Jesse, it's this idea of and I see it
on the right today and you can see it on
and now at the time would have been the monarchists
back then or the traditionalists the unshenned regime in France.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
It's it's are you addicted to rules?
Speaker 5 (16:28):
And are are you addicted to principles and you don't
care anything about power? Versus people who have no principles whatsoever,
and yet are addicted to power. Like we say follow
the money in politics a lot or and investigations, what
these guys do is they follow the power, and the
power will flow to the most brutal, the most repressive,
(16:52):
the most ruthless members of the revolutionaries.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
And this, of course was the Jacobin Club.
Speaker 5 (16:57):
So if you have no principles, just like the response
we're seeing to the Supreme Court right now, then they
view that as a free license to go and kill
whoever they want. And when I say they're going mask off,
is it's.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Not mask off. They're always liked this.
Speaker 5 (17:11):
They've been like this for two hundred fifty years, and
for some reason people on our side don't seem to
get it.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Why don't we get it, Jack? Is it that we
don't want to get it? Or are we just cowards.
I think it's a little both. I do think it's
a little both.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
And I also think that there's a bit of a
martyrdom fetish.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I think that exists on the right. I think it
comes from.
Speaker 5 (17:36):
This idea that you know, if I'm going to go
to be, you know, to be shot in the head
or executed for my beliefs, then that will show that
I'm the better person, and that will show that I
am actually the more principled person. As you're an out principle,
your enemies, well, guess what, boys and girls, they don't
care about your principles. And I hope that your principles
(17:57):
matter a lot while your children are being in the
street in front of.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
You, like was done with the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
I hope that your principles matter a lot to you
when your wife is being ravaged in front of you,
like happened in Spain, when the nuns and priests are
being killed and raped on the altars. I hope that
your principles work out really well. But don't worry, because
we are more principled than them. And it's this terrifying
and this is where the cowardist part comes in, because
(18:24):
they claim it's martyred, and they claim, and the first
layer of that is the martyrdom fetish, but the second
layer is ultimately cowardice. The second layer is cowardice because
if I claim I want to be a martyr, then
that means, oh, I don't have to do anything. I
don't actually have to do any work. I don't actually
have to go around and text message my friends or
who cares about the fact that the local library is
(18:48):
putting queer and LGBT and DEI and anti racist baby
everywhere in their town? Because guess what, the leftists don't
think about this. The leftists look at your library and
they say, oh, this is a place where I can
push my beliefs, So they will take over your library.
And this is every library in America. And you can
see the table when you first walk in. That's what
(19:09):
you'll see. Then the leftist says, oh, I can go
and take over the parks department by the parks department,
because I want my gay pride and my trans and
my dragged parades, and now I'm going to be hosting
those in the local playground.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
And because everybody else around.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
Them is going to say, O, I don't want to
rock the boat or I don't want to stand up
and do anything about this. You don't fight back, and
eventually those people will win and run rough shot over
you because they are short circuiting this issue that exists
in Western civilization, this idea that we should treat everyone fairly,
treat everyone fairly.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Well, here's what I say, Jesse.
Speaker 5 (19:44):
I think that we should treat people the way that
they treat us, and I think that we should treat
them exactly the way that they treat us. And if
the code of Hammurabi and I for an eye is
a little bit too much for people.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Then I'm sorry. You may not be cut out for
what needs to be done.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Jack.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
How did a revolution in France lead to these other
revolutions as you shoild Russia Spanish? How could one lead
to the other?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
What does that happen? So it happens because you get
the Communist Manifesto.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
It gets written a couple of decades later after the
French Revolution. It takes all these ideas up that we
are ruled by the system of evil capitalism, and we
are ruled by these horrifically evil monarchs who need to
be taken out, who need to be killed, who need
to destroyed.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
And by the way, this starts happening all across Europe.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
They start assassinating kings, they start assassinating queens.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
These are of Russia.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Sar Alexander gets killed by a hand grenade. Oh and
by the way, you would think nothing that could ever
happen here in the United States, thank goodness, would never
Oh wait, but in nineteen oh one, actually just a
couple of years after, a couple decades after the Commuist
Revolution comes out and anarcho socialist walks up to President
McKinley and shoots and kills him. And this is how
we get Teddy Roosevelt as our young because president he
(21:00):
was VP at the time. No one even gets taught
that one of these anarchosocialist assassins kills a president of
the United States during this preer. We just get told, oh,
that was just the first red scare, and that's a
bunch of these red baiting politicians like Joseph McCarthy want
to talk about the kind of stuff we really because
they killed one of our presidents. So you know, fast
warning or go back a little bit now to Europe.
(21:22):
Remember that happens so the assassination McKinley takes place even
before the Bolshevik Revolution, because you get this idea and
a lot of this is predicated on the industrial revolution,
and the elites get so much power. The elites just
lorded over people, and then you get the unhuman class.
And the unhuman class walks around and says, you see
how you're living in squalor, and you see how all
(21:44):
those people are doing better than you. Well, instead of
working with them and trying to come up with some
kind of reform and trying to, I don't know, maybe
do something to make things a little bit more fair
around here, or working on better wages for the workers, let's.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Just go kill them. Let's go kill them.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
Rap their wives, let's murder their children, rape their children.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Who cares, and we'll.
Speaker 5 (22:05):
Do so with the justification that we are on the
right side.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
And this is what Karl Marx gives them.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
And so suddenly you see this with Lenin, because Lenin
takes Marxism and adds something a little piece to it.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
What he says is, well, the workers don't seem to.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
Be doing this on their own, so we need to
institute something called the revolutionary vanguard. And the revolutionary vanguard
is Lenin going around to all the freaks, to the creatures,
the bug people, all around where he can find them
in Russia, putting together what's been called a coalition of
the fringes and saying, in order for us to fix Russia,
(22:42):
we have to go kill everyone and take all their stuff.
And he's able to do so with great effect. And
the Romanops, by the way, early on, as horrific as
it turns out for them, they do the same thing.
Where they go along. He said, well, if I just abdicate,
then all of this will go away.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
I just but I'll stay.
Speaker 5 (23:01):
Here, and you know, we can work together and we
can find a better way forward for Russia, rather than
just order the army to crush the revolutionaries outright crush
the Bolsheviks. No, Romanov doesn't order this. And by the way,
I'm not saying in any way that he deserved what
he got, because eventually what they did was they said, oh, great,
you've abdicated.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
That's wonderful. Now you're under arrest.
Speaker 5 (23:23):
Now we're going to lock up you and your wife
and your children, all Christian by the way, We're going
to cart you out to the Middle of the forest
in Siberia, and one night, late in the night, we're
gonna wake you up, and we're going to bring you
down to the basement and we're going to shoot you
and bayonet your children against the wall. That's what happens
when you go along with people. That's exactly what happened.
(23:45):
Even young little Prince Alexi is bayoneted against the wall
and then eventually shot in the head. So again, when
you're dealing with people who have no principles, dealing with
people whose highest calling is oppressive warfare, murder and violence,
then it will always end in piled Remember Jesse and
(24:06):
you read the Great book on in this as well,
that the communists.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
People say, why do the spore communism?
Speaker 5 (24:11):
How can people still spot communism even after it's killed
one hundred million people. I say, they look at a
one hundred million people as a good start. They want
to increase that number because remember those were those were fascists,
and those were anti communists, and those were people who
are against the revolution, those were right wing extremists, and
so those people are all.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
In the way.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
Remember, communism is only, always, ever, only one genocide away
from total utopia.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
That is a fact, my friend, the book is Unhumans.
You need to pick up your phone right now and
go order it. It's awesome. It really is freaking awesome book, Jack,
my brother. As always, I appreciate you very much. On
Humans available wherever books are sold.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
All right, done?
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Yet, what about Mao's Revolution next? Speaking of ugly revolutions,
(25:18):
there have been many of them. I'm sure the competition
is fierce, but I have a hard time thinking of
a more horrific one than Mao's Cultural Revolution. This is
one that's not widely taught in American schools, mainly because
American schools are full of dirty Communists and they don't
want you to know about it. But it was a
horrible affair. Let's bring in the man who wrote the
(25:39):
book on it, Stephen Moser, author of the book. Wonderful book,
terrible book, but you know what I mean. The devil
in communists China? Okay, Stephen, Before we get to the
cultural revolution, can you help us understand why Mau needed one.
The Communis had had China since nineteen forty nine, they'd
been in power for what seventeen years?
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Why did he need a revolution? Why was a revolution necessary?
They had a revolution they won.
Speaker 4 (26:05):
Well. This was factional fighting within the Chinese Communist Party.
This was an effort by Chairman Mao to recover his
power and prestige that he had lost because of fifteen
years of mismanagement of the Chinese economy. Remember they took
power in nineteen forty nine, to be sure. And then
they prosecuted, persecuted, and killed the landlord so called the
(26:29):
rich peasants. They prosecuted and persecuted and tortured and killed
millions of people who were formerly with the nationalist regime,
who had been in the government of that earlier, earlier
ruler of China. They killed, tortured many, many people who
were intellectuals who opposed the Communists for various reasons. And
(26:52):
then Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian, a great leap
forward in nineteen fifty seven, forcing six million villagers into
huge people's communes that ended in a absolute disaster. Forty
five million people died in the worst famine in human
history from nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty two. It was
(27:15):
an unnecessary famine. It was a man made famine, a
mal made famine, really, you should say, because it was
made by Chairman Mao, and at that point Chairman Mao's
prestige had dropped fairly low within the ranks of the
Chinese Communist Party. In fact, he has senior premier, the
guy who had worked sold at the shoulder within for decades.
(27:36):
The Oshauchi came to him in nineteen sixty two and said,
history is going to reveal us as the worst murderers
in Chinese history. We've killed forty five million Chinese. Let
them starve to death. Mao never forgave him for that slight,
so the other Communist leaders pushed Mao back into the
(27:59):
second rank, and the Cultural Revolution was really an effort
by Mao to get back in control of all of China.
Now it purports to be something else, right, because the
Communists never tell you exactly what they're about. The ostensible
purpose for the Cultural Revolution was to destroy traditional Chinese culture,
(28:21):
to destroy any connections that Chinese people had with the West.
Anyone who had foreign relatives, anyone who could speak a
foreign language like English, anyone who was a student of
Confucius or Mensius or admired traditional Chinese culture was an enemy.
And he mobilized tens of millions of Red Guards throughout
(28:43):
the country to attack these supposed enemies. But within those
tens of millions of Red Guards Jesse, he had some
special groups. And these special groups, which were run by
his wife Chiang Qing his fourth wife by the way,
Jiang Qing, were used to target his political enemies within
(29:03):
the Chinese Communist Party. And guess what. Leo Shauci, the
head of government who had criticized Mao saying, you know,
we're going to be remembered as as mass murderers because
of the people who died during the famine. He was
the first to be arrested. And they tortured and killed
Leo Shauci at Mao's order. And then the next to
(29:25):
go was Pung dav Whi. He was a general who'd
been a leading general in the Civil War in the
nineteen thirties and forties. He actually saved Mao's life a
couple of times, a general Pung Dahai did. But he
too had criticized the Great Leap Forward ten years before,
and he too was the target of these special Red
(29:46):
Guard groups which were targeting Mao's political enemies. Pungdal Wai
was a tough old bird. They tortured him for years
before they were able to kill him, but they finally did,
and then there was Premier Joe in line. Now, Joe
and Lai had purported to be loyal to Chairman Mao
during the Great Lean Forward, but he too had questioned
some of the policies, and that was enough to get
him killed by Chairman Mao. Actually not outright, this was
(30:11):
killing without shedding blood, because what happened with Joe and
Lai the longtime premiere that people will remember because he's
the one that Kissinger Henry because you're met with on
the first secret trip to China. So, Joe and Lai
had bladder cancer, and the doctors came to Chairman Mao
and said, Joe and Lai, Premier Joe has bladder cancer.
(30:34):
We need to treat it immediately. And Chairman Mao, remembering
that Joe and Lai at once what slighted him, said no,
don't treat the cancer. Let it spread. Don't tell Premiere
show that he has cancer. Let it die. The Cultural
Revolution resulted in the deaths of twenty million Chinese resulted
in the deaths of one hundred million others. It led
(30:57):
to some really terrible things like political canibalism, Now, there
had been cannibalism before in Chinese history. During the Great
Leap Forward, people were starving to death, and there were
credible reports of people eating the dead bodies of neighbors.
But in the Cultural Revolution in nineteen sixty six, sixty seven,
and sixty eight, there was political cannibalism, not caused by hunger,
(31:22):
but caused by a desire to absolutely humiliate one's enemies
in the party, Mao's enemies in the party. And so
they would not only torture and kill their political victims,
the enemies of Mao, they would actually desecrate their bodies
by cutting them open and parting out the pieces to
the other Red Guards. Political cannibalism, now mal once famously said,
(31:45):
you know, a revolution is not a dinner party. But
in the Cultural Revolution, Jesse, it almost became one.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Good brief Okay, Steve, Obviously I have a million questions
I could ask, but can you help me understand why
did struction of so much of China's history?
Speaker 2 (32:02):
China has an incredible history.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
It's hard to find a period of time in the
known history of the world where China wasn't prominent in
doing wonderful things. But you're desecrating Confucius. Help me understand why.
What was Mao's acts to grind with these things?
Speaker 4 (32:19):
Well, Mao was a committed communist. He was determined to
burn everything to the ground, to raise traditional confusion culture
to the ground, and out of that complete destruction of
the past, he was going to build paradise. You see,
it's the fantasy of every communist leader. They're going to
(32:40):
create paradise on earth. They're going to create a new
socialist man, a new socialist woman. But they have to
start from ground zero. They have to start from a
blank slate, a tabula rasa. And in order to get
that blank slate they wanted mal wanted to destroy all
of Chinese history, all of China's culture, and so he
could basically start over. What he did was he was
(33:01):
very very good at the destruction part, there's no question
about that. But he wasn't very good about building anything
back after the destruction. But at base, the cultural revolution
was not just about destroying traditional Chinese culture and creating
a new socialist man a new socialist woman. At the
heart of it was this megalomaniac, this bloodthirsty mass murder,
(33:25):
the worst mass murder in human history, wanted to get
back the reigne of power, wanted to destroy his enemies
and the party, and to a certain extent, the ten
twenty million people who died and the one hundred million
people who were persecuted, they were just collateral damage to
this factional fighting within the Chinese Communist Party. That's the
(33:48):
real tragedy of the Cultural Revolution.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
There's so many bodies, so much suffering. Stephen, I want
people to read the book obviously get a lot more
detail on this, But can you help me understand, Mao,
how could a human being look it's you can make
the argument, and I would make the argument that he's
the most evil human being.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
To ever walk the planet.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
How does one go from being a armor's son to
being the worst human being to ever walk the earth?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
How well?
Speaker 4 (34:20):
I mean, you know, we all face choices in our life,
and Mao is a very young man, decided that and
he wrote this. He wrote, there are other people and
things in the world, but they're only there from my
use and my pleasure. So from a very early age
he rejected Confucianism. He rejected the silver rule, do not
do unto others what you would not have them do
(34:40):
under you. And he adopted a totally materialistic, totally utilitarian
view of other people. There are other people and things
in the world that they're just there from my use
and from my pleasure, And so he consciously chose to
go down that path. He totally lacked compassion for other people.
If you read you know about his his his his,
(35:02):
his life, you find that he had absolutely no feeling
for anyone else. He may never have loved anyone else
in his entire life. The other odd thing about maw was,
and this is this is very interesting to me as
a cultural anthropologist. When he was a small boy, he
was actually taken out to a stone god outside the
village where he lived by his mother, and he was rebaptized.
(35:25):
He was given a new name before this stone god,
this stone monolith, and and he was called the third
Son of the Monolith. His his original name had been Mauzetongue.
Of course we all know mau Zeton, but his mother
gave him the name third Son of the Monolith, or
third Son of Stone. And he very proudly and often
referred to himself as the third Son of Stone. And
(35:47):
the man really did have a heart of stone. He
was only out for himself from the beginning, and the
result was was mass carnage, mass butchery in China, worst
mass in human history. One hundred million people died in
purges and famines. We talked about the Great Famine, of course,
(36:08):
forty five million, other twenty million in the Cultural Revolution,
other tens of millions in various purges and persecutions. And
then there are the four hundred million unborn children who
died as a result of the one child policy. Now,
the one child policy didn't begin until after Mao's death
in nineteen eighty when I was in China for the
first time, but Mao was the intellectual progenitor of the policy.
(36:32):
He was provided the intellectual foundation of the policy because
way back in nineteen fifty eight, he said, we need
a ministry of reproduction, a ministry of reproduction, because we're
a socialist country and we should be controlling the birth
of babies the same way that we're controlling the production
of steel, the production of bicycles. He said, we need
(36:54):
to be in control of reproduction. Well, twenty two years later,
in nineteen eighty, the Chinese Communist Party acted on that
suggestion and put in place the one child policy and
The other thing you have to say about the whole
killing spree that Mao launched, is this, the Communist Party
of China, as all communist parties do, has to have
(37:17):
a target, has to have an enemy. It always has
to have an enemy of the state to refocus the
righteous anger of the people against the party for its corruption,
for its murderous practices, to redirect the righteous anger of
the people away from the Communist Party and awake from
its leaders like Chairman Mao, towards another group. And it
(37:38):
was originally the landlords, the entrepreneurs, the intellectuals, but then
in nineteen eighty, for the first time in human history,
the enemy of the state, Jesse, became the unborn child.
It was the unborn child who was standing in the
way of China's greatness. It was the unborn children of
China who were standing in the way of China's progress,
China's becoming a first world now, China becoming the dominant
(38:01):
power in the world. And on this altar, which kind
of in a symbolic way, is similar to the old
altars in which the Canaanites and the Philistines and the
Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on those altars. Four hundred million
unborn children were sacrificed as enemies of the state. So
(38:21):
the total number of people who have died at the
hands of the Chinese Communist Party over the seventy five
years of its misery is five hundred million. I know
that's a number of people can't wrap their minds around.
But every one of those it was a living, breathing
human being. Every one of those had human dignity and
innate human dignity and had their life torn away from
(38:45):
them by this system and by this megalmaniac, this paranoid
killer who was running it.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Agree he is Stephen Moser go by his book, Stephen,
Thank you so much. That was quite a window into
the life of a monster. Thank you, sir. We're not
done yet. Final thoughts next revolution. It is good that you,
(39:22):
an American, look fondly on the American Revolution, because it
was wonderful. Don't, however, fall in love with the concept
of revolution itself. As we just talked about, it doesn't
always work out that way. Yes, the existing thing is terrible.
That does not in any way mean the next thing
(39:46):
will be better. Keep that in mind as the mood
and the country drifts more and more towards just burn
everything down, civil war, things like that. These are not
things we should cheer for. We should cheer for things
writing themselves. I don't know that that can happen, not
even necessarily hopeful it will.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
But revolution scary stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
All right, we'll do it again.
Host
Jesse Kelly
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