WEBVTT - The Right Wing Palestine Grifters Part 1: The Left Creates a Monster 0:00:02.520 --> 0:00:05.280 Welcome to I Could Happened Here, a podcast about a 0:00:05.320 --> 0:00:09.440 world sliding ever further into the abyss. I'm your host, 0:00:09.600 --> 0:00:14.520 Mia Wong. As the wave of atrocities committed by Israel 0:00:14.560 --> 0:00:17.120 and the Gaza strip rate is on and the moral 0:00:17.160 --> 0:00:20.520 authority of Biden and his liberal cohort crumbles day by day, 0:00:21.320 --> 0:00:24.280 a new generation of right wing media grifters have seized 0:00:24.320 --> 0:00:27.160 on Palestine as a way to boost their own reactionary brand. 0:00:28.240 --> 0:00:30.800 But these are not the standard kind of right wing 0:00:30.840 --> 0:00:33.919 grifter that we've become accustomed to on this show. They 0:00:33.920 --> 0:00:38.080 aren't Chris Ruffo, they aren't libbit of TikTok, and although 0:00:38.120 --> 0:00:41.360 they will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they aren't cut 0:00:41.520 --> 0:00:48.000 from that pre existing template. These are our monsters. These 0:00:48.000 --> 0:00:50.640 are monsters birth by the left I grew up in, 0:00:51.040 --> 0:00:54.360 by the generation of new socialist radicalized by Bernie Sanders, 0:00:54.400 --> 0:00:57.480 the serience of a war, and the election of Donald Trump. 0:00:58.920 --> 0:01:01.960 This is largely to be a set up episode to 0:01:02.080 --> 0:01:04.720 understand the background of the kinds of people who are 0:01:04.720 --> 0:01:08.399 going to come later, But I wanted to start the 0:01:08.520 --> 0:01:10.880 story with a taste of where it's going to end. 0:01:11.840 --> 0:01:14.320 Max Blumenthal is a left wing journalist with the outlet 0:01:14.440 --> 0:01:18.160 Gray Zone. He was for a very long time well 0:01:18.200 --> 0:01:21.760 regarded in anti imperialist circles. In many ways, he is 0:01:21.800 --> 0:01:25.039 the ideological predecessor to enormous portions of the modern left. 0:01:26.040 --> 0:01:29.480 In twenty twenty one, Anthony Fauci, the former head of 0:01:29.480 --> 0:01:32.880 the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden's 0:01:33.240 --> 0:01:36.240 chief health official, went on Face the Nation to face 0:01:36.280 --> 0:01:39.840 allegations and calls by Senator Ran Paul and Ted Cruz 0:01:39.920 --> 0:01:43.760 for him to step down and quote be prosecuted over 0:01:43.800 --> 0:01:46.840 the course of COVID nineteen. Yeah, after the Saint if 0:01:46.840 --> 0:01:48.920 you happen to Face the Nation, release a tweet about it. 0:01:49.400 --> 0:01:52.840 Bluementhal responded with an incredibly disturbing video. I'm going to 0:01:52.880 --> 0:01:54.520 read the tweet. I'm not going to play the video 0:01:54.600 --> 0:01:58.880 because this guy listening to him is a painful experience. 0:02:00.040 --> 0:02:04.919 Bluementhal responded, quote Nobel winning inventor of the PCR test, 0:02:05.280 --> 0:02:09.080 Carrie Molus on Anthony, quote I am the science Fauci quote, 0:02:09.120 --> 0:02:12.280 and this is from Mollas. Tony Fauci does not mind 0:02:12.320 --> 0:02:14.519 going on camera in front of the people who pay 0:02:14.520 --> 0:02:17.679 his salary and lie directly into the camera. By the way, 0:02:18.000 --> 0:02:20.679 the part where he says lie instead of lying, there 0:02:20.760 --> 0:02:24.040 is a direct quote that is him, not me. So 0:02:24.120 --> 0:02:28.280 to understand how absolutely it absolutely absurd this is we 0:02:28.320 --> 0:02:34.120 need to talk about who Carrie Burris actually is. So 0:02:34.480 --> 0:02:39.359 Max Bluemoenthal is correct that Carrie Mollis won the nineteen 0:02:39.440 --> 0:02:42.280 ninety three Nobel Prize for the invention of the PCR test, 0:02:42.360 --> 0:02:44.840 which is now one of the basic building blocks of biology. 0:02:44.880 --> 0:02:48.000 Like they let undergrads and college do this stuff, but 0:02:48.080 --> 0:02:52.600 he is also an enormous crank. Berkeley's alumni magazine wrote 0:02:52.639 --> 0:02:54.680 a profile of him when he died in twenty nineteen. 0:02:54.840 --> 0:02:59.440 They described him like this quote. He'd become a vociferous 0:02:59.440 --> 0:03:03.440 critic of widely accepted scientific theories, ridiculing the notion that 0:03:03.560 --> 0:03:08.239 CFCs caused the ozone hole, that humans caused climate change, 0:03:08.480 --> 0:03:13.920 and that HIV caused aids now Okay, climate change denihilism, 0:03:13.919 --> 0:03:17.440 I think is something we all understand. The ozone layer 0:03:17.520 --> 0:03:19.880 stuff is extremely funny. This interviews from the nineties. So 0:03:19.880 --> 0:03:21.840 in the nineties we were using these things called CFC's, 0:03:21.880 --> 0:03:24.000 which is a class of chemical that we used in 0:03:24.080 --> 0:03:28.880 like hairspray and refrigerators and using them tore a hole 0:03:28.960 --> 0:03:32.040 in the ozone layer. So the world, for maybe the 0:03:32.120 --> 0:03:35.960 last time, actually performed a collective action, stopped using them, 0:03:36.000 --> 0:03:40.920 and the hole fixed itself. So okay, obviously, carry mollis 0:03:41.120 --> 0:03:45.480 unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong. But the last part, 0:03:45.600 --> 0:03:49.320 the part where carry Mullus claims that HIV does not 0:03:49.480 --> 0:03:52.360 cause AIDS, we need to talk about a bit more 0:03:52.640 --> 0:03:56.480 because it is absolutely monstrous and it is going to 0:03:56.520 --> 0:03:59.040 give mollos a body cout. Even Kissinger would not in 0:03:59.080 --> 0:04:02.320 respect to. So okay, we need to talk about what 0:04:02.600 --> 0:04:06.480 HIV AIDS actually is. So I'm just gonna go to 0:04:06.480 --> 0:04:10.640 the CDC for this one. HIV human and aminio deficiency 0:04:10.720 --> 0:04:13.320 virus is a virus that attacks the body's immune system. 0:04:13.760 --> 0:04:16.200 If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS 0:04:16.279 --> 0:04:21.000 acquired amino deficiency syndrome. There is no effective cure. Once 0:04:21.040 --> 0:04:24.080 people get HIV, they have it for life, but with 0:04:24.160 --> 0:04:28.200 proper medical care, HIV can be controlled. People with HIV 0:04:28.320 --> 0:04:31.599 who get effective HIV treatment can live long, healthy lives 0:04:31.640 --> 0:04:35.800 and protective partners. And this is something that queer people 0:04:35.880 --> 0:04:39.600 fought and died for. If you have HIV. There are 0:04:39.640 --> 0:04:41.560 simple and easy tests for it. Now you can get 0:04:41.600 --> 0:04:44.800 treatment and you can live a normal life. On the 0:04:44.800 --> 0:04:48.479 other hand, if HIV isn't treated, you can get acquired 0:04:48.520 --> 0:04:52.359 ammino deficiency syndrome AIDS, and that can and will kill you. 0:04:53.200 --> 0:04:57.520 It is what killed so so many, almost an entire 0:04:57.640 --> 0:05:01.520 generation of queer people killed the for decades and decades 0:05:01.560 --> 0:05:05.320 and decades, and it's still killing them now. Carrie Mullis, 0:05:05.440 --> 0:05:07.719 the guy who Max bluemitthal is tweeting a video of 0:05:07.800 --> 0:05:11.679 to go after Anthony Fauci doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS. 0:05:12.000 --> 0:05:14.839 He thinks that AIDS is caused by malnutrition in poverty, 0:05:15.279 --> 0:05:17.280 and he is going to spend the rest of his 0:05:17.360 --> 0:05:21.400 life telling anyone in everyone he can, getting mainstream press coverage, 0:05:21.640 --> 0:05:25.160 telling people that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He is the 0:05:25.200 --> 0:05:29.040 Andrew Wakefield of HIV AIDS denihilism. Lots of people believe him, 0:05:29.080 --> 0:05:32.560 including for example, the Foo fighters Dave Gruel. They believe 0:05:32.600 --> 0:05:35.120 him because he is apparently a reputable source. The man 0:05:35.240 --> 0:05:39.000 has a Nobel prize. But unfortunately, as we've already seen 0:05:39.000 --> 0:05:42.279 from his climate denial and his CFC denial, he is 0:05:42.279 --> 0:05:47.000 spreading unbelievably dangerous lies, and this specific lie that HIV 0:05:47.120 --> 0:05:51.000 doesn't cause AIDS fucking kills people. Here's from that Berkeley 0:05:51.080 --> 0:05:53.600 article again. I don't like the way they're phrasing it. 0:05:53.600 --> 0:05:57.480 It's the you know, it's Berkeley, right like, so some 0:05:57.480 --> 0:06:01.719 stuff going to some stuff's going to be racists. His 0:06:01.880 --> 0:06:04.840 views on AIDS don't just look bad, they may have 0:06:04.839 --> 0:06:08.240 had deadly consequences. By the late nineteen nineties, South Africa 0:06:08.360 --> 0:06:12.359 was in the midst of a catastrophic AIDS epidemic. President 0:06:12.360 --> 0:06:16.280 Thumbo mcbecky, under the spell of AIDS de nihilist including Mullis, 0:06:16.400 --> 0:06:19.840 declared that AIDS was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many 0:06:19.880 --> 0:06:23.159 South Africans were denied access to treatment. A two thousand 0:06:23.160 --> 0:06:25.599 and eight study published in the Journal of Acquired Immuno 0:06:25.640 --> 0:06:30.000 Deficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, thirty five thousand 0:06:30.000 --> 0:06:33.120 babies were born with HIV and three hundred and thirty 0:06:33.240 --> 0:06:39.159 thousand South Africans died of AIDS unnecessarily. This is monstrous. 0:06:40.160 --> 0:06:43.920 And here is Max Blumenthal, who was up until very 0:06:43.920 --> 0:06:47.880 recently at the very least nominally a left wing journalist, 0:06:48.480 --> 0:06:51.640 tweeting a video of this fucking guy to attack Anthony 0:06:51.640 --> 0:06:53.839 Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right wing anti 0:06:53.880 --> 0:06:58.080 lockdown rules. Now, I especially want to do this because 0:06:58.120 --> 0:07:01.800 if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it is very 0:07:01.920 --> 0:07:03.920 very easy to do from the left. You can attack 0:07:04.000 --> 0:07:08.200 him for his response to the original HIV AIDS pandemic, 0:07:08.640 --> 0:07:11.880 and you know, lots of queer people have done this. Instead, 0:07:12.000 --> 0:07:15.240 Max Bluemandal is tweeting a guy is tweeting a video 0:07:15.480 --> 0:07:20.320 from an unbelievable right wing crank who were responsible for 0:07:20.360 --> 0:07:23.720 the death of three hundred and thirty thousand people. So 0:07:23.760 --> 0:07:25.560 the question we're going to be answering for the next 0:07:25.560 --> 0:07:29.960 three episodes is how did we get here and what 0:07:30.080 --> 0:07:34.400 is happening now? And to do this, we need to 0:07:34.440 --> 0:07:38.000 talk about the rise of American Marxist Leninism. I'm going 0:07:38.040 --> 0:07:40.800 to try to present the ideology as sympathetically as possible, 0:07:40.840 --> 0:07:43.920 because it's important to understand how people came to believe 0:07:43.920 --> 0:07:48.560 in these things, because part of the horror and tragedy 0:07:48.600 --> 0:07:51.000 here is that not all of these people are the 0:07:51.040 --> 0:07:54.080 grifters and shills and right wing fanatics that the ideology 0:07:54.160 --> 0:07:56.960 spawned and who were now having to deal with people 0:07:56.960 --> 0:08:01.000 who are on info Wars agreeing with Alex Jones. Most 0:08:01.040 --> 0:08:03.360 of them were people like us, people who saw the 0:08:03.400 --> 0:08:05.520 horrors of this world and wanted to make it better. 0:08:07.680 --> 0:08:11.360 A lot of the writing about this is clinical and antiseptic, 0:08:12.160 --> 0:08:16.120 largely coming from either academic journals or very very angry liberals. 0:08:16.640 --> 0:08:21.440 And I can't be clinical about this. I can't cover 0:08:21.520 --> 0:08:24.400 this neutraally. And I can't do that because some of 0:08:24.400 --> 0:08:26.920 these people were my friends. There were people I loved 0:08:26.960 --> 0:08:29.120 and respected and cared about, and they're people who have 0:08:29.200 --> 0:08:31.840 now lost, and so I owe it to them to 0:08:31.880 --> 0:08:47.480 be fair about this. So what is the modern generation 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:50.599 of Marxist Leninism. You could start with the history of 0:08:50.640 --> 0:08:54.360 the Bolsheviks and Stalin's consolidation of power and the development 0:08:54.400 --> 0:08:56.800 of Marxist Leninism as an ideology, and you could trace 0:08:56.800 --> 0:08:59.440 it through the twentieth century, and you could trace, you know, 0:08:59.480 --> 0:09:02.120 the ways which it is and isn't the ideology that 0:09:02.240 --> 0:09:06.400 Lenin had originally been developing. But that really is the 0:09:06.400 --> 0:09:09.360 wrong place to start here if you want to understand 0:09:09.440 --> 0:09:12.120 how this ideology came to be and why so many 0:09:12.160 --> 0:09:15.000 people came to follow it. The right place to start 0:09:15.559 --> 0:09:18.920 is America. It's with a generation of young people who 0:09:18.960 --> 0:09:20.480 grew up in the wake of the two thousand and 0:09:20.480 --> 0:09:23.280 eight financial collapse and the ruthless suppression of occupy by 0:09:23.280 --> 0:09:26.840 the Obama administration. It's a generation of people who grew 0:09:26.880 --> 0:09:29.440 up on the Internet who began to learn about the 0:09:29.480 --> 0:09:32.080 lies we've been fed our entire lives about the world 0:09:32.160 --> 0:09:35.800 and America's role in it. They learned the lies we'd 0:09:35.840 --> 0:09:39.600 been told about the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, 0:09:39.679 --> 0:09:43.880 about Allende and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about 0:09:43.880 --> 0:09:47.600 American imperialism in Lebanon and Haiti and Guatemala and Honduras 0:09:47.640 --> 0:09:51.359 and Iran, about Patrice Lamumba and the DRC, About Sukarno 0:09:51.480 --> 0:09:55.720 and Suharto in the Killing Fields, about Thomas Sankara, about Saikuavara, 0:09:55.800 --> 0:09:58.319 about the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a 0:09:58.400 --> 0:10:01.559 thousand crimes of the American m Empire crime as we 0:10:01.600 --> 0:10:06.000 could spend an entire episode just listing by name. They 0:10:06.080 --> 0:10:09.040 learned in a tremendously short amount of time that the 0:10:09.080 --> 0:10:12.679 American Empire was born of genocide, It was built by slavery, 0:10:12.840 --> 0:10:15.600 and he is sustained by replicating those genocides across the 0:10:15.640 --> 0:10:18.760 world and at home. That the governments they were taught 0:10:18.760 --> 0:10:21.520 from birth to love and respect, slaughtered children in the 0:10:21.559 --> 0:10:24.280 streets with health fire and missiles, and then had the 0:10:24.360 --> 0:10:27.400 unmitigated gall to turn around and proclaim itself the leaders 0:10:27.440 --> 0:10:29.760 of the free world and the upholder of the rules 0:10:29.760 --> 0:10:34.880 based international order. And so they started learning about how 0:10:34.880 --> 0:10:38.880 our capitalist economy really functions. They started reading Marx and 0:10:38.880 --> 0:10:41.360 then they started reading Angles, and it led to other 0:10:41.440 --> 0:10:44.880 Marxists into the great international enemies of American imperialism from 0:10:44.880 --> 0:10:49.320 the last century ho Chi Minh Castro to Lenin, to 0:10:49.400 --> 0:10:52.880 struggles against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals like Phenonen 0:10:53.000 --> 0:10:56.720 and militants like Asada Shakur. It led them to believe, 0:10:56.920 --> 0:11:01.080 to really believe in the struggle against capital and racism 0:11:01.120 --> 0:11:05.559 and imperialism, and that led them to Stalin and Mao, 0:11:05.960 --> 0:11:08.959 and eventually it would lead them down a darker path, 0:11:09.760 --> 0:11:14.000 a path where anything and everything could be justified if 0:11:14.040 --> 0:11:17.800 it meant defeating the American Empire, a path that told 0:11:17.840 --> 0:11:19.760 them it was their duty to back every state in 0:11:19.800 --> 0:11:22.240 the world who could even conceivably check the advance of 0:11:22.280 --> 0:11:27.920 American power. It led them to modern geopolitics, to the 0:11:27.920 --> 0:11:31.120 belief that modern China and Vietnam or socialist states still 0:11:31.200 --> 0:11:35.520 resisting American imperialism. It would lead them eventually to backing 0:11:35.559 --> 0:11:38.800 the very Russian oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR. 0:11:39.559 --> 0:11:41.160 And it would lead some of them into the very 0:11:41.160 --> 0:11:44.280 heart of darkness itself, to an alliance with anyone and 0:11:44.320 --> 0:11:47.839 everyone who opposed liberal interventionism. It would lead in the 0:11:47.880 --> 0:11:51.120 seeking alliance with the arch right wing anti communist Donald Trump. 0:11:51.840 --> 0:11:54.920 But it didn't start that way. The co option of 0:11:54.960 --> 0:11:57.600 the ideology is a process that took almost a decade 0:11:58.080 --> 0:12:00.760 and comprised a series of debates in side the left 0:12:00.800 --> 0:12:05.040 about what capitalism, socialism, and imperialism really are and how 0:12:05.080 --> 0:12:08.440 the left should relate to nationalism in the state. We'll 0:12:08.440 --> 0:12:10.559 talk more about how these debates led to a right 0:12:10.559 --> 0:12:15.160 wing turn at episode three. But the core beliefs anti imperialism, 0:12:15.440 --> 0:12:19.320 objection to capitalism, a rejection of liberal interventionism, and some 0:12:19.360 --> 0:12:22.520 of the darker and more conspiratorial tendencies, like accusing any 0:12:22.559 --> 0:12:26.080 protest movement against the government they supported of being CIA assets, 0:12:26.679 --> 0:12:30.960 spread like wildfire. There were contradictions from the beginning, of course, 0:12:31.840 --> 0:12:34.200 how do you square your opposition to capitalism with your 0:12:34.240 --> 0:12:37.520 support for China, a country with almost one thousand billionaires. 0:12:38.360 --> 0:12:43.080 The solution was to lie. Lies about China, in particular 0:12:43.160 --> 0:12:46.600 abound it. Many Marxist Leninists believe, for reasons that are 0:12:46.600 --> 0:12:49.880 deeply unclear to me, that China has public housing that 0:12:50.040 --> 0:12:53.280 automatically guarantees every citizen a home. This is not true. 0:12:53.480 --> 0:12:56.880 This unclear to me if it's ever been true, even 0:12:56.920 --> 0:12:58.920 through this so I mean, I guess you could argue 0:12:59.240 --> 0:13:01.080 it was sort of true during the socialist period. It 0:13:01.080 --> 0:13:03.360 has not been true for a very very long time. 0:13:03.920 --> 0:13:06.800 China has a lot of homeless people. But you know, 0:13:06.960 --> 0:13:09.280 these sort of lies persist because they are what you 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:13.600 need to believe in order to believe that China is 0:13:13.640 --> 0:13:16.960 a socialist state and not a capitalist one. Another common 0:13:17.000 --> 0:13:20.040 line is that China has a fully socialized healthcare system. 0:13:20.720 --> 0:13:25.480 This is unbelievably not true. China, in fact, used to 0:13:25.520 --> 0:13:28.679 have something like a universal medical system that they operated 0:13:28.840 --> 0:13:32.600 in extreme difficulty with groups of people called the barefoot 0:13:32.640 --> 0:13:34.920 doctors who would go to rural villages that had never 0:13:34.960 --> 0:13:37.800 really received proper medical care before and attempt to treat them. 0:13:38.679 --> 0:13:40.800 This was the thing that China used to have, and 0:13:40.880 --> 0:13:43.480 then they tore it up and privatized it, and now 0:13:43.679 --> 0:13:47.920 Chinese private healthcare is absolute disaster. Calculations by the Chinese 0:13:48.000 --> 0:13:52.280 Journal Twang estimate that almost the entire Chinese economy is 0:13:52.320 --> 0:13:56.880 based on corporations not paying their required contributions to healthcare plans, 0:13:56.880 --> 0:14:00.080 and that if corporations actually paid into the healthcare plans 0:14:00.080 --> 0:14:03.640 of migro workers, the entire economies of entire provinces would 0:14:03.640 --> 0:14:07.200 immediately go under as an enormous majority of their corporations 0:14:07.240 --> 0:14:11.360 immediately went underwater. And so what we're getting a sort 0:14:11.400 --> 0:14:17.400 of picture of is people begin to believe things that 0:14:17.760 --> 0:14:20.000 need to be true in order for their ant to 0:14:20.320 --> 0:14:23.600 square their anti imperialism or their version of anti imperialism, 0:14:23.600 --> 0:14:27.360 which is opposing at all costs the United States with 0:14:27.440 --> 0:14:31.600 their anti capitalism when the two began to conflict in 0:14:31.680 --> 0:14:34.760 terms of, you know, attempting to support a very obviously 0:14:34.800 --> 0:14:40.320 capitalist economy, and this leads to some very very bizarre 0:14:40.400 --> 0:14:44.600 twists in turns. One very common thing is for socialists 0:14:44.600 --> 0:14:47.280 and socialist organizations in the US, or at least I 0:14:47.280 --> 0:14:50.480 say socialists, I made Marxist Leninists organizations to advocate for 0:14:50.520 --> 0:14:53.040 a fifteen or twenty dollars midiroom wage in China, while 0:14:53.080 --> 0:14:56.640 simultaneously celebrating three two cents an hour as the end 0:14:56.680 --> 0:15:00.320 of poverty in China. This has never actually peneted raided 0:15:00.320 --> 0:15:03.040 the minds of the new Marxist Leninists with their endless 0:15:03.080 --> 0:15:06.040 parades of flags and new countries added every day, from 0:15:06.040 --> 0:15:10.240 the genocidal austerity bongers in Ethiopia to the hardline, murderous 0:15:10.240 --> 0:15:13.880 anti communists to rule Meenmore by baton and bullet, new 0:15:13.920 --> 0:15:18.280 Marxist Leninists were able to effectively insulate themselves from reality. 0:15:18.440 --> 0:15:21.040 This left them as prey for a new generation of 0:15:21.120 --> 0:15:24.360 right wing grifters would cynically exploit them for wealth and status. 0:15:24.960 --> 0:15:28.120 They also garnered the hatred of the more internationalist factions 0:15:28.120 --> 0:15:31.400 of the left, and then, as their numbers expanded, the 0:15:31.480 --> 0:15:35.320 increasing ire of liberals, who, stealing a term from anarchists, 0:15:35.360 --> 0:15:39.000 began to call the Marxist Leninist tankies. This, I suspect, 0:15:39.120 --> 0:15:42.000 if you have heard of these people, is probably the 0:15:42.080 --> 0:15:45.720 word you've heard used to describe them. So we should 0:15:45.760 --> 0:15:51.680 talk about what this word actually means. But first, unfortunately some. 0:15:51.760 --> 0:16:05.080 Ads, and we're back. 0:16:05.440 --> 0:16:08.440 To explain what a tanky is, we have to go 0:16:08.560 --> 0:16:14.680 back to, bizarrely, the nineteen fifty six Hungarian Revolution. So 0:16:15.800 --> 0:16:18.960 all right, in nineteen fifty six there was a massive 0:16:19.080 --> 0:16:23.920 uprising in Hungary. The Hungarians effectively forced their government to 0:16:23.920 --> 0:16:26.720 break with the Soviets. The Soviets respond to this by 0:16:27.440 --> 0:16:30.040 rolling a bunch of tanks across the border, claiming everyone 0:16:30.080 --> 0:16:32.960 in the revolution is the fascism, killing them all, and 0:16:33.160 --> 0:16:36.520 they were fairly successfully able to convince a large number 0:16:36.520 --> 0:16:40.880 of Communists that the Hungarian revolutions really were fascists. They 0:16:40.920 --> 0:16:43.320 were aided in this by the fact that the liberals 0:16:43.360 --> 0:16:46.360 also lied about what the Hungarian Revolution really was, and 0:16:46.400 --> 0:16:48.120 this is a lie that they continue to spread to 0:16:48.280 --> 0:16:51.920 this day. The liberal version of the revolution is that 0:16:51.920 --> 0:16:54.640 it was, you know, it was a liberal revolution by 0:16:54.640 --> 0:16:58.720 people who wanted liberal democracy against the Soviets, hotel Terrrianism, etc. 0:16:58.920 --> 0:16:59.440 Etc. Etc. 0:17:00.640 --> 0:17:04.280 And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising 0:17:04.359 --> 0:17:07.480 and what most of it was was a rebellion by 0:17:07.560 --> 0:17:12.119 the Hungarian workers' councils. So workers across their factories seized 0:17:12.119 --> 0:17:15.640 control of their factories, threw their bosses out and began 0:17:15.720 --> 0:17:19.439 to manage and democratically the different workers' councils like foreign 0:17:19.440 --> 0:17:24.560 regional federations. It is very stunningly, very very similar to 0:17:24.640 --> 0:17:27.400 the original Soviets of the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution, which 0:17:27.520 --> 0:17:31.600 in theory the USSR is supposed to be named after. 0:17:32.280 --> 0:17:36.679 But when they reappeared again, the Soviets just absolutely smashed 0:17:36.720 --> 0:17:40.280 them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned one 0:17:40.320 --> 0:17:45.280 party state. And what this actually meant was tanks rolling 0:17:45.359 --> 0:17:48.160 up to the gates of factories blasting apart the very workers' 0:17:48.160 --> 0:17:51.080 councils who are supposed to be the basis of communism. 0:17:51.760 --> 0:17:54.639 This was an attempt, in some sense, yes, to implement democracy, 0:17:54.680 --> 0:17:57.040 but it was an attempt to implement democracy in the factory, 0:17:57.280 --> 0:17:59.600 and it was attempted by the working class to seize 0:17:59.600 --> 0:18:03.520 control the means of production and manage them themselves. Now, 0:18:03.640 --> 0:18:06.600 the smashing of the Hungarian Revolution led to a split 0:18:06.680 --> 0:18:09.320 in enormous numbers of communist parties all across the world. 0:18:09.720 --> 0:18:13.840 The people leave communist parties and droves. This is a 0:18:13.840 --> 0:18:17.120 big enough deal that it spawns effectively like a crisis 0:18:17.119 --> 0:18:19.840 in China, where there is a series of bast strikes 0:18:19.840 --> 0:18:23.720 and people chanting like here another Hungary, and in particular, 0:18:23.760 --> 0:18:26.760 the British Communist Party had a guy on the ground 0:18:26.840 --> 0:18:30.160 in Hungary reporting of what was happening, and his reports 0:18:30.200 --> 0:18:33.240 split the party between the people who supported the Hungarians 0:18:33.280 --> 0:18:36.480 and the people who supported the Soviets. The latter faction became 0:18:36.520 --> 0:18:39.080 known as tankies for their support of rolling tanks across 0:18:39.119 --> 0:18:42.920 the border and slaughtering in the working class. The term 0:18:43.000 --> 0:18:45.399 was revived in the twenty tens to describe the return 0:18:45.440 --> 0:18:47.840 of Marcist Leninists, so though much of its usage was 0:18:47.880 --> 0:18:52.000 about Russia and Syria rather than the original Hungarian uprising. 0:18:52.240 --> 0:18:55.480 Now it is true that all of these people do 0:18:55.720 --> 0:18:59.280 actually support or they do actually believe that the Soviets 0:18:59.280 --> 0:19:04.159 were crushing like the return of fascism, but that that 0:19:04.280 --> 0:19:07.840 actual belief, like the belief in you know, that the 0:19:07.880 --> 0:19:11.760 Soviets were right to crush the Hungarian Revolution, is effectively 0:19:11.800 --> 0:19:14.400 irrelevant now except as a sort of marker of loyalty, 0:19:14.560 --> 0:19:18.360 because you know, the USSR is gone and the Hungarian 0:19:18.400 --> 0:19:22.679 Revolution is gone too, and so what's left is a 0:19:23.359 --> 0:19:28.520 term that on the one hand does correctly, you know, 0:19:28.880 --> 0:19:32.120 it does correctly describe a part of their political tradition, 0:19:33.560 --> 0:19:36.840 but it has it has a tendency to sort of 0:19:37.160 --> 0:19:40.080 anchor these arguments in the past instead of the presence 0:19:40.119 --> 0:19:45.359 with the substance of disagreements with the Marxist Leninists actually 0:19:45.400 --> 0:19:48.360 are now marxistlenin Iss. They're also just yeah, they're called 0:19:48.480 --> 0:19:52.960 mls to Marxist Leninists absolutely hate being called tankies except 0:19:53.040 --> 0:19:57.040 under you know, the circumstances where they adopted ironically, and 0:19:57.200 --> 0:19:59.640 I'm of two minds. I have called these people's tankies 0:19:59.680 --> 0:20:02.840 a lot. But the biggest problem with calling these people 0:20:02.880 --> 0:20:06.120 tankies is that the original tankies, the people who supported 0:20:06.160 --> 0:20:10.000 the Soviets butchering the Hungarian working class, were actually communists. 0:20:10.520 --> 0:20:13.479 They were Marxistlninists who supported the USSR and believed that 0:20:13.520 --> 0:20:16.000 state ownership of the means of production was the socialist 0:20:16.040 --> 0:20:20.320 transition to communism. These modern quote unquote Marxist Leninists don't 0:20:20.320 --> 0:20:23.760 even believe that both Stalin and kruis Chef, for all 0:20:23.800 --> 0:20:26.480 the differences, would have had these people shop for supporting 0:20:26.480 --> 0:20:29.480 capitalists in their imperialist market economies. If you tried to 0:20:29.560 --> 0:20:32.680 explain to Mao that Deng Jao Ping, with his people's 0:20:32.680 --> 0:20:35.760 billionaires and a trillion dollars of American treasury bond singing 0:20:35.800 --> 0:20:39.000 it sitting in his coffers, was doing communism, he would 0:20:39.000 --> 0:20:40.879 have branded you a capitalist, wrote and sent you to 0:20:40.960 --> 0:20:43.399 your re education camp at the end of the day. 0:20:43.720 --> 0:20:48.040 Whatever else. The original tankies, the British supporters of the USSR, 0:20:48.440 --> 0:20:52.320 were communists. Their modern day equivalents don't even have that 0:20:52.400 --> 0:20:55.600 to height behind. They have been reduced to capitalists with 0:20:55.600 --> 0:20:59.200 a hammer and sickle fetish. So who are these people really? 0:21:00.040 --> 0:21:04.120 What they've become is suicide net socialists because the suicide 0:21:04.160 --> 0:21:07.520 nets are the actual content of their politics. This is 0:21:07.560 --> 0:21:10.560 the actual content of backing states like the People's Republic 0:21:10.600 --> 0:21:13.480 of China. It is full throated support for the suicide 0:21:13.560 --> 0:21:15.880 nets to fly under the roofs of the Fox confactories 0:21:15.880 --> 0:21:19.600 at Shenzhen. The reality of their suicide net socialism is 0:21:19.600 --> 0:21:21.879 that the Chinese working class would rather kill themselves than 0:21:21.920 --> 0:21:25.760 live under it. And it was these suicide net socialists 0:21:25.760 --> 0:21:30.400 who sins spawned their bastard children, patriotic socialism and eventually 0:21:30.600 --> 0:21:36.640 Maga communism. So how do we understand what these people are? 0:21:37.760 --> 0:21:41.359 I am going to give the final word to Karl Marx, 0:21:41.440 --> 0:21:46.440 the man whose ideology in theory spawned theirs. I'm going 0:21:46.480 --> 0:21:49.280 to read from one of Marx's most famous works, the 0:21:49.320 --> 0:21:51.240 eighteenth through Mayor. I'm pretty sure I've quoted it on 0:21:51.280 --> 0:21:55.680 the show before. The tradition of all dead generations weighs 0:21:55.720 --> 0:21:58.520 like a nightmare on the minds of the living, And 0:21:58.720 --> 0:22:01.919 just as they seem to be occupy with revolutionizing themselves 0:22:01.920 --> 0:22:05.840 and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely 0:22:05.840 --> 0:22:09.800 in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up 0:22:09.840 --> 0:22:13.000 the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from 0:22:13.080 --> 0:22:16.800 them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present 0:22:16.920 --> 0:22:20.000 this new scene in world history and time honored disguise 0:22:20.080 --> 0:22:25.439 and borrowed language. Thus Luther Martin Luther put on the 0:22:25.440 --> 0:22:28.960 mask of the Apostle Paul. The French Revolution of seventeen 0:22:29.000 --> 0:22:32.320 eighty nine to nineteen fourteen draped itself alternatingly in the 0:22:32.359 --> 0:22:35.080 guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and 0:22:35.119 --> 0:22:37.840 the Revolution of nineteen forty eight knew nothing better to 0:22:37.920 --> 0:22:41.600 do than to parody. Now seventeen eighty nine, Now the 0:22:41.640 --> 0:22:46.920 revolutionary tradition of seventeen ninety three seventeen ninety five. This 0:22:47.240 --> 0:22:49.840 is precisely the trap that Marxist Leninis have walked into. 0:22:50.760 --> 0:22:54.040 Faced with mass social upheaval. They knew nothing better than 0:22:54.080 --> 0:22:57.280 the down the mask of Stalin and Mao, and it 0:22:57.359 --> 0:23:02.159 was a terrible mistake. Here is mark again. The social 0:23:02.200 --> 0:23:05.200 revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take us poetry from 0:23:05.240 --> 0:23:08.560 the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin 0:23:08.640 --> 0:23:11.680 with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about 0:23:11.720 --> 0:23:16.119 the past. The former revolutionaries required recollections of past world 0:23:16.160 --> 0:23:19.680 history in order to smother their own content. The revolution 0:23:19.800 --> 0:23:22.600 of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their 0:23:22.640 --> 0:23:26.320 dead in order to arrive at its own content. There 0:23:26.800 --> 0:23:30.120 the phrase went beyond the content. Here the content goes 0:23:30.160 --> 0:23:35.840 beyond the phrase. But we never buried our dead. The 0:23:35.880 --> 0:23:39.159 memories of dead generations still weigh like a nightmare in 0:23:39.200 --> 0:23:42.720 the minds of the living. And in the next episode 0:23:42.800 --> 0:23:46.640 we will walk face first into that nightmare and behold 0:23:46.640 --> 0:23:47.440 the abyss within. 0:23:52.400 --> 0:23:54.880 It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. 0:23:54.960 --> 0:23:57.640 For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website 0:23:57.680 --> 0:24:00.800 coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app, 0:24:00.840 --> 0:24:04.159 Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can 0:24:04.200 --> 0:24:06.920 find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at 0:24:06.920 --> 0:24:10.119 coolzonemedia dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.