Bolshevism and Democratic Socialism

0:00Leave it in my jacket, but in any case, I sound louder, my voice resonates more with whatever I've now installed, so I'll just leave it in place. The topic which I am supposed to discuss this morning is Bolshevism and the Democratic Left. And I suspect the reason that this topic was assigned to me by Lew Rockwell goes back to a heated discussion, or actually it was an enthusiastic discussion that I had at one time with Murray Rothbard. In fact, it turned into a correspondence of several years, and it was a point about which we did not disagree essentially, but for which we did try to provide documentation in order to explain our own perhaps prejudices in one direction or another.

0:55But it was a question of which is more dangerous, the Bolsheviks, or I suppose we called inaccurately the Menshviks, since the Menshviks in Russia before the revolution were in fact revolutionary socialists. But I think the term was generally used by Murray and myself to refer to those members of the Left, who opposed the Bolshevik in the name of some democratic principle. And we're searching for a leftist alternative to the democratic centralism and the revolutionary violence that had characterized the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in the October 1917 revolution.

1:42And one might say that there is both a reality and a myth of the left, which developed because of the Bolshevik Revolution. And I think perhaps it would be useful to discuss both the reality and the myth, and to try to understand the implications. One might say less of the reality than of the myth, which lives among us. What exactly is the reality of the Bolshevik revolution in terms of the European left? Well, we know that a split will take place, in some cases a fragmentation will occur because of the October 1917 revolution, and there will be a proliferation of non-Soviet or non-Leninist Most Lefts, some of which are successful and others of which are not.

2:39One unsuccessful example, of course, are the Spartacists, who in 1919 in Germany, following the defeat of World War I and the food shortages and the demobilization of German troops which followed the war, decide to carry out a spontaneous workers' revolution in Berlin, which will be crushed. not only by elements of the German military that are present, but also with the support of social democrats who are then in the post-war German government. And a split will take place between the parliamentary social democrats represented by people like Gustav Norske, Friedrich Ebert, and the leaders of the Spartacist uprising, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, both of whom will be killed in the unsuccessful struggle that takes place.

3:44And there are also other examples, of course, that one can cite of Marxist or even revolutionary Marxists, not just people who say, you know, Marx had an interesting analysis of historical dynamics, but people who believe that Marxism must lead to revolution, but who fail in creating their own alternative to the Soviet model of democratic centralism achieved by Lenin and Trotsky, and which is very much in place once the Russian Civil War is over by 1921. The most important one might say, well, I really don't want to confuse the picture too much by saying that there's going to be a kind of Marxist-Leninist alternatives to Stalinism, which will also develop in time.

4:37The Trotskyists, in America there's sort of almost a hothouse varieties of Marxist esoterica. The Love Stoneites and others who come along who claim Lenin was right or Trotsky was right, but somebody else is wrong. One really has to look for ecclesiological parallels to this, like people who thought that Luther was right, but this was wrong, the medieval church was good, but the Tridentine Council was wrong. I mean, it's almost like breakaway groups or people who hold revisionist views about what really in many ways sees itself as a kind of post ecclesiastical establishment, which is world communism led from Moscow.

5:30But perhaps the most important of all the groups on the left that turn their back against The Leninists and are able to establish themselves as a credible alternative are the social democrats in one form or another. These are people who will say that they favor socialist economics and, in some cases, some aspects of the Marxist view of history, but reject the violence and the dictatorship known Democratic Centralism

6:31Partito Comunista d'Italia, Partito Socialista d'Italia

7:01Communist Parties Dividing from Socialist Parties

7:31do not accept the Soviet paradigm as the one they are to follow, and they claim to be pursuing a democratic path to socialism. Now, some of them, as I said, in fact, will use Marxist rhetoric very often, and the Socialist Party of Germany remains theoretically a Marxist party down till 1959. Others do too. But their argument is that Marx is really a progressive humanist, and what he is telling us to do is to create a more just society, a more equitable distribution of goods and so forth, and nationalization of the means of production will help us to become a more fair society and so forth.

8:20So what these other, should we say, less violent socialists will do is typically turn Marx into a kind of humanistic model for economic reform. His view of inevitable revolution or violent revolution, which is there, will typically be paid down by socialist parties. One of the most important figures for this so-called revisionist Marxism is a German

9:20but you don't you don't want to push this too far and there's some good things there there's some bad things you have to you know make a prudential choice about these matters so that this is this is the Bernsteinian view that if it's very famous that you cannot treat Marx like a predestinarian history is open-ended this is a typical Bernsteinian view and social democrats you know Resonate to lines like that, and they also, which is very important, will run to join political coalitions, including the so-called bourgeois parties. And what you typically get thereafter is this distinction between the bourgeois parties and the workers' parties.

10:11There may not be, to use the late George Wallace's phrase, a dime's worth of difference between them, but the myth persists that one coalition or one party is the bourgeois party, even though they're both socialist parties, do the same things, but they represent the middle class, whereas the others represent the workers' movement and the unions. Now, the unions very often are divided. The unions in some countries will have socialist components or be predominantly socialist. In other places, they'll be Marxist. Typically in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail, the Force Ouvrière, which comes out, these are going to be thoroughly Marxist.

11:00For a long time in England, the large unions, Because the large trade unions, mass employment unions, tend to have a very strong communist component, although they continue to support the Labour Party. Sometimes they will vote communist, but they tend to have this very strong communist component. And I think in the Thatcher administration, there's a real attempt made by the government to smash them, because they're seen, I think, properly as a force that is trying to incite violent revolution. The Socialist Party becomes viewed generally as the moderates, trying to bring the trade unions into alliance with bourgeois parliamentary parties, being part of general coalitions, being committed to constitutional processes, to democratic rules.

12:00You know, go too far in sort of pushing the self-image of the socialists and the social democrats on you, but, you know, generally they're seen as the good guys who are standing up to the revolutionary violence of the communists and who, in a sense, are the first line of defense against the communists, because they had broken with the communists in 1919. They had turned their back on totalitarianism, as they would later, you know, describe themselves

12:59The Union Sacrée, the Great Coalition, the Socialists

13:29in the 1930s, the era of the Popular Front, where the great danger is seen as fascism. Not Nazism, Fascism. And what you get in the Popular Front are people screaming about Mussolini, but favoring a policy of non-resistance to Hitler. And the most traumatic event for the anti-Fascist Popular Front coalition is the takeover of Spain by the Falange, which of course never occurred. They were wiped out by Franco, who was a military dictator who took the place over. But Spain is seen as a country in which the fascists have won, and in fact the Germans are treated like a kind of secondary problem within the popular front, because the strongest passions are really directed against Mussolini and Franco within the popular front.

14:32But there is a successful attempt to rally social democrats, communists, to this front that is going to be directed against the danger, the ascending danger of fascism. In France, in the late 30s, you have a coalition under Léon Boehm, who was a socialist or a social democrat, with the communists. You know, it's a whole sort of left-center, leftist coalition that is going to be directed against the fascists. And the reality is that Boehm did absolutely nothing. He didn't really arm against the Germans. He gave some rhetorical support to the communists and the socialists in Spain, but didn't do much for them either.

15:21But the most important thing about the Popular Front is you see the social democrats making common cause with the communists, ceasing to criticize the communists. And of course, in Germany, something really important, you know, had occurred, which is It was very often ignored in this period that the German social democrats had stood up against the communists and the nazis who together destroyed the Weimar Republic. They worked hand in hand to destroy it, and the two parties which stand up against them just about to the end are the catholic center party and the social democrats. You know, and it was very much of a confrontation between the social democrats and the communists. And the social democrats were denounced by the communists as fascists.

16:10This was a common term used by Moscow. But curiously, at the same time, once the German government falls to Hitler, the Soviets are going to change the party line entirely, at least outwardly. And what you get in the thirties is the so-called popular front strategy of the Soviets, where they seek, at least in foreign affairs, a general alliance with all the parties in the left center against fascism, which is sort of very vaguely defined, so that at least in France and other places, in Italy, it doesn't mean Nazi Germany, it means Mussolini or it means Franco or some other secondary or tertiary political figure. But for a while, I say in terms of foreign policy, because there's reason to suspect that Stalin knew what he was doing in bringing Hitler to power, which he certainly cooperated in doing, and did everything he could to smash the other political parties and to get the communists in Germany, who were total instruments of the Soviet Union, to cooperate with the

17:15Nazis. And he may well have been looking for an alliance with a Nazified Germany, but at least in terms In terms of foreign affairs, the Stalinist position is the popular front, from 1934 all the way down until the Soviet-Nazi pact occurs in 1939, so it's like a five-year period, and the Social Democrats will cease to attack the communists outside of Germany, of course, where they're just rounded up and put in concentration camps, but they'll seek an alliance with the communists against the fascist danger. Well, after the Second World War, In England, the labor government after the war starts off by being almost sort of neutralists, but it becomes extremely opposed to the Soviets.

18:14Ernest Bevin, who was the Foreign Minister under the Labor Party, was much more strongly anti-Soviet than the American government.

18:52The Social Democrats have run to embrace the communists as coalition partners all over Europe. They will never speak against them. The Premier of France made a speech about a year and a half ago The French have a sort of strange system of, we have to sort of, it's called apparencement, the National Front on the right saying they're not really fascists, they're nice guys, that person would probably be torn limb from limb by the media, the journalists, as you try to leave, by members of the Communist Party, but talking about the most despicable and continuing denial of the holocaust, I mean, they're not really fascists, they're nice guys, that person would probably be torn limb from limb by the media, the journalists, as you try to leave, by members of the Communist Party, The socialist government of France denies Soviet crimes, you know, openly, because it needs the communists in its coalition.

20:24And if you take a look at the German social democrats, or whatever they are, which have pretty much destroyed German democracy now and put people in jail for disagreeing with the government and so forth, what you see is an alliance with the East German Communist Party, no problem, against the so-called bourgeois parties, which are on economic matters usually The Ulevar Coalition has the socialists, the communists, they all cooperate. Now, looking at this, can one speak about a consistent social democratic opposition to the communists? I think what you can speak of is not a consistent opposition, but rather an opposition that goes on for long periods of time before it gets reversed.

21:19What I would argue is that there is always a family resemblance between the social democrats and the communists, which it is not nice to talk about, but is obviously there. And the question is, exactly what is it based on? Well, first, I'm going to use a term I think, an expression which was originally presented, I think, by the late James Burnham. There is the Gestalt of the left. There's a leftist pattern of thought. And it is natural that the social democrats support the communists, just as it is natural that the Iron Guard in Romania lands up on the side of Adolf Hitler in the Second World War.

22:07You don't have to be... Mussolini made it a little problematic, but the Iron Guard you're not surprised about. Or some of these tougher, more militant right-wing nationalist groups and so forth. So one should not be surprised that social democrats land up fawning on communists from time to time. Or that they generally perceive the right as being more of their enemy than other people who are associated with the left. I think everything being equal, this is a predictable situation. Now I have a former student of mine, with whom his PhD I once directed, who is a violently anti-communist social democrat, who would probably be by now sputtering with rage.

22:52He'd probably take his bottle of water and smash my head with it or something, because he thinks the real heroes against the commies are the social democrats. They're the good guys. They're the ones like Bevin and others who fought against the communists. And, you know, in a certain case it's true. I mean, at various times it was the social democrats, the Truman democrats, and sort of looking at their American equivalents today, the neoconservatives, who, you know, have been the strong anti-communists, who have borne the brunt of the fighting against at least the propagandistic front, although they have volunteered to fight in the army, but they make a lot of noise against the communists, and they denounce the communists. But there is this leftist gestalt which I think remains there and has to be looked at, and part of it is a belief that the human race can be amalgamated, reconstructed, and re-socialized by public administration.

23:50And if you believe all those things, you're going to simply look at the communist, or you may look at the communist at the end, as people who share your goals, or your teleology, but are a bit in a hurry. Number two, I think since the 1930s, the ideology of the left, or at least the enemy of the left, has been fascism. What unites them is anti-fascism. Now, the question is, what is fascism? That's a very good question, because by now I don't have no idea what they mean by it, except people who disagree with them, right?

24:37But there's something called fascism, which is the demonic force in the universe, because it's a Manichean view, which not the right, the left has. Fascism is their enemy, and fascism is that which does not correspond to their view of where we should be historically, or what we are marching toward. And I think that the hatred of this generic fascism, which is less and less, or becomes more and more uncoupled from what happened in the 1930s. It has nothing to do with corporatism or Italian nationalism or German racial theory. It just means not being in sync with where these people want to go. This makes you a fascist. But anti-fascism since the 1930s has been, one might say, an integral component of the leftist ideology, whether communist or social democratic.

25:33Finally, as I said before, there is a commitment, a shared commitment on the left to the reconstruction of society by public administration and the identification of public administration with with Popular Government. One might say that part of this is an objection to the free market, a desire to restrict the free market. I think by now, however, I would argue that is simply a necessary result, but not an intention. Because I don't think the left anymore really is interested in destroying what remains of of Market Capitalism

26:48But it is social reconstruction of a different kind. But this has basically been what the left has been about, you know, since the early twentieth century. It's over a hundred years by now. So that the social democrats become, I think, an extremely questionable, provide a kind of extremely questionable leadership in a crusade against the totalitarian left. It's like making the leader of a struggle against world Nazism some dissenting Nazis, right? And saying that they... I mean, you might want to let them into your coalition, but you don't want them to take it over. Because otherwise, you're going to get Goebbels running it rather than Hitler or somebody like that. I mean, you basically don't want the left to be running a struggle against communism.

27:39I mean, it's a very bad idea. But this, I think, is what has happened in the... this was what happened in the Western world. I think that as the Cold War went on, it became increasingly associated with that part of the left which had not sold out entirely to the communists. There's part of the left that did, you know, people running around, excusing the communists. Even now, I think there was this, I was a little bit shocked actually when Ralph mentioned that Jerry Hoff at Princeton had said there were fewer than 10,000 people killed by Stalin. I have a colleague who was a minister of the Church of the Brethren, a kind of social gospel Christian who was once very upset with the remark that I made if he came in to see me that I suggested that Stalin killed millions of people and he pointed out to me that President Reagan killed far more people as a result of our policy in Nicaragua.

28:38And I was trying to figure out, demographically, that didn't work. I mean, to kill everybody, you know, in Central America, you don't even get any of the figures, you know, of people killed by Stalin. So, I mean, this Holocaust denial is simply part of this sort of anti-anti-communist mentality, that the communists don't really kill people, that there, you know, there may be a few suspensions of civil liberties, but they don't mind that either, since the anti-anti-communist left is very happy to suspend civil liberties here, too. But the point that I'm driving at is that a split is going to occur within the left between those, it would be a continuing split in a sense, I mean those who support the communists for one reason or another, those who excuse them, those who like them, those who see them as an immediate model for us, and those who oppose the communists but still carry on the leftist gestalt.

29:33And my argument is the people who carry around the leftist Kristall, but oppose the communists, are the ones who win the Cold War. These are the neoconservatives, the Cold War liberals. The person I remember that Murray used to mention most often as the embodiment of Cold War liberal leftism was Sidney Hook. And I think you're sort of placing too much of an historical burden on Hook, but the illustration was perfectly good. You know, I mean, Hooke, to his dying day, thought Marx was fine. He had been misunderstood in the Soviet Union. He was a great atheist humanist, you know, whose example we should follow in the United States. And Hooke thought of himself as a socialist. But the communists were bad because they were really on the right.

30:20I mean, this is part of the anti-communist left mentality, that the communists aren't true social democrats, or the communists really aren't good to the labor unions or they do some of the things which the right does or they're really Russian autocrats. You've got a Scoop Jackson sort of argument. This is Russian autocracy. So what you're basically getting are leftist reasons to oppose the Soviet Union. It's not that these people are moving to the right. It is just that they are able to recast the Soviets in terms of a leftist demonology, You know, that they are really, there's this famous red fascist kind of image that Truman came up with, that, you know, the fascists are now the reds. So, I think what you basically have is a struggle against communism that is going to be recast as a war between right and left, in which we are the left and the communists are on the right.

31:15And I think if you look at things like the National Endowment for Democracy, various Scoop Jackson satellite organizations and so forth, this was pretty much the arguments that were made, that the Soviets were anti-Semitic, like the Nazis, the Soviets were Russian nationalists, this sort of stuff. But there were, all of which may have been perfectly true, by the way. There may have been all these things and worse. But the argument that was presented was an essentially leftist argument for opposing the Soviet Union. Now, one could say that the reason that this is being done is that these social democrats and leftist ideologues who are anti-Soviet are really having to argue with other people who are pro-Soviet and on the left.

32:07Now, that's partly true. It's an argument on the left, because there is not much of a right that's left by the end of the Cold War. There's a very small sort of free market right, which a few localists like the League of Nord, but there isn't very much left on the right. The left is all over. And even by the 70s and 80s, what you basically get is the anti-communist left having to argue with the pro-communist left. Supporting the Soviets is not a good idea, because they really are right-wingers, they do all the things the fascists did, and so forth. This is true. I mean, this, one might say, is determined by the logic of the situation. But I would say, going beyond that, it's also what the people who are anti-communists believe.

32:58That the reason, you know, we oppose the Soviets. You read Norman Padoretz's early articles. Why am I against the Soviets? They don't support Israel. They behave like the Black 100 under the Tsar. They're terrible right-wing reactionaries. This is the reason why I'm an anti-communist. But it is not the reasons that Joe McCarthy would have given, right? It's certainly not the reasons that Francisco Franco would have given. Sorry, to name at least two of the heroes, I think of Pat Buchanan's father. This was, I think, the example given by Charles Krauthammer, the most telling example that Buchanan was a Nazi, aside from the fact that he didn't favor NAFTA, was that his father admired MacArthur, Franco and McCarthy.

33:51I think that this is an important point to keep in mind that the people who sort of lead the rhetorical propagandistic war against the communists by the end of the Cold War are simply variants on the other side that has then softened on the communists. and they both, you know, find leftist reasons for taking the positions that they do. All of this sort of brings me to my final point, which is, you know, how is the sort of split between the social democrats and communists played out and I would say that in my own judgment, you know, I'm very happy to see the communists, or at least the Soviet Communists Lose, I don't think we won very much on our side.

34:49And this is because of the way the struggle turned out. And the struggle turned out that the people who broke from the communists and their descendants and their recognizable progeny are the ones who in the end land up defeating the communists in circumstances that could only help the left, and help the leftist project. For which one might say the Soviet communists, which the Soviet communists becomes more and more extraneous in terms of the Western world. And that we are still left, one might say, with the legacy of the social democratic split, the successful social democratic split from the communist, because the social democrats in splitting from the communist become the paradigm or the model of democratic resistance to the communist.

35:41And it is this model of democratic resistance to the communist that we land up sort of taking over as the only acceptable model of resistance to the communist, which at the same time points toward the direction of our own political future. And, you know, we should not be too surprised, as I would finally observe, that the victors in the struggle, you know, the victors of the struggle against communism in the Cold War have been almost entirely on the left, and the left has done very well. A point that I'll come back to in one of my later lectures is, you know, is, or at least an observation, is that the end of the Cold War looks like the end of the Second World War.

36:28Even though we have defeated the communists, we have anti-fascist purges going on all over the place. I mean, you know, we have anti-communist purges. Why are communist mass murderers in Germany not only not persecuted, but given state pensions? You know, I mean, this is interesting. I mean, can you imagine people who served in Hitler's government not being tried, but being given state jobs, you know, and sent away with bouquets of flowers? But this is exactly what we're seeing at the end of the Cold War. And I think in order to understand this, one has to understand that the left won the Cold War. Part of the left, one might say the more archaic, Asiatic part of the left, is defeated. But the side of the left that is most relevant for our fates, that side which is most relevant, turns out to win the war.

37:19And we are still living with the consequences, one might say, of the social democratic split Yes, sir. Where does Gramsci figure it in all this, and why does Sandil as a Gramsci society still exist?

37:55He's a Marxist about his theory. It's Hegelian. He believes in the reality of consciousness, that you turn around political economic conditions by changing people's consciousness. And he actually is a Italian Hegelian who joins the Communist Party and spends a good deal of his life actually in prison. He's imprisoned by the Italian fascists. They don't treat him too badly. But his ideas seem to be perfectly correct, that in order to change socioeconomic political institutions, one must be able to control the culture, the intellectual life of a society. And there has been a Gramscian, one might say, march or sprint through Western institutions that we see, So that, you know, all these forms of political correctness have now been absorbed by people and so forth.

38:55This never happened under communism, which is interesting that, you know, most people living under Soviet occupation did not believe this stuff. They were just being occupied. You know, they're being occupied by the Russians. Many of these people hated the Russians, even those who didn't hate the Russians, like the Serbs or the Czechs, ended up hating them in the end. But there was no mistaking this for democracy. But what is so successful about this Gramscian transformation of Western institutions is that people allow themselves to be controlled by the political class, by the media and so forth, and assume this is freedom.

39:41But again, it is not a Marxist scenario we're looking at, Is it correct to say that the Mensheviks were social democrats by your definition?

40:16They fall back once the revolution takes place on what becomes a social democratic position and they become social democrats once they lose to the Leninist in the Soviet Union. I think we're sort of using them as a kind of shorthand for all of these non-Leninist socialists. You know, I just want to ask you sort of what became of the right, probably, as the left, the two sides of the left fighting out the Cold War. What did happen to the right? Where did it go?

41:09The Christian Democrats in Germany, who are fairly conservative, and then you have Erhard, who's kind of a classical liberal, becoming the German Chancellor. In France, you have a president in the 50s who's a man of the right, then you have the Gaullist taking over. In Italy, the left has pretty much spent its forces by the late 40s. By the early 50s, there's a kind of swing back toward the Social Democrats. Christian Democrats, who were fairly conservative in the Italian by then. And as late as the 1960s, the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale d'Italia gets lots and lots of votes. It gets like, you know, 17, 18 percent of the vote.

41:55There are parties on the German right that were well to the right of the Republicaner in Germany. Now they were doing very well in the 50s and 60s. So, there is a movement, one might say, rightward, that occurs after the Second World War, though I think it has been pretty much downhill through the last quarter of the 20th century, despite this apparent restoration of conservative values under Thatcher and Reagan, which really went nowhere. Although I think Thatcher did smash these communist unions, which were dinosaurs at the time she smashed them. But the most important thing that I think, as Peter Hitchens points out in his book on the abolition of Britain, is that the cultural institutions stay entirely in the hands of the lunatic left.

42:46And not just the communist left, the lunatic left. You know, I mean the communists at least believe in bourgeois morality. The part of the left that takes over are entirely whacked out, but they're very successful. They push feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism and so forth, all of which succeed for reasons that I go into in my sequel to After Liberalism on the politics of guilt. But I think the destruction of the right is pretty much achieved by the 1980s. The Reagan Revolution was no revolution of any kind. It's a continuation of the Carter administration under a new name. The taxes did not fall very much in this period.

43:32Social Security payments went up to make up for the slight reduction in the amount of taxes that were granted by the government. And much of the rhetoric of the Reagan administration, as I've pointed out ad nauseam, is this Cold War liberal stuff. The Cold War liberals take over the government. I think the cultural institutions are so entirely taken over by the left, that no matter what happens economically, the left is going to win and the right just keeps moving leftward. What I did not know when I wrote my book on the conservative movement in which I lambasted the neocons, is that things like this were occurring all over the Western world.

44:20What about the role of the CIA and other U.S. government institutions in promoting the funding of neocons here, in Europe, in these beautiful projects in the Cold War, everywhere?

44:50I mean, this is the CIA and things like the Congress for Cultural Freedom were recipients of American anti-communist money that are almost always on the left. I mean, there are very few examples of conservative anti-communist organizations being subsidized by the CIA and other agencies that are set up to fight communism. And of course, the perfect ally is always a social democratic ally. Now originally this may not have been the ideology of the CIA, it may have been, you know, the pursuit of strategy, of Cold War or geopolitical strategy or whatever else, but I think in time, if you actually read statements by leaders of the CIA, they also move to the left. So what becomes the institution associated with fascism, Francoism, counter-re...

45:40It's basically a leftist institution, the CIA, or, you know, it is like one of the major sponsors of the non-communist left throughout the Western world.

45:57Well, yeah, I actually wanted to speak about this in one of my later talks. I don't think he's going to make much of a difference.

46:10and all this other stuff surrounds him and I've just been curious if he's just more of the same than Italy's almost the same.

46:40The problem is that the price of his victory has been to destroy what there is of an Italian right, either, you know, a nationalist right, a localist right, in the case of the Lega Nord. I mean, they've been reduced to insignificance. Well, I mean, there's various reasons which I think Luigi Marco Bassani can probably go into because he knows more about this since he was one of the legisti, but who has now resigned from the lega. But a lot of this has to do with the dynamics of these right-wing political formations and the fact that some of them have given up on positions they took, have sort of thrown away The Wall Street Journal was delighted with the outcome because you have a neoconservative of Government in Italy, you know, I mean, the kind of welfare state centrist kind of government that they like, which is not going to rock the boat very much, and those parties that were farther to the right have now been marginalized. So I think that has been the

48:19price of the British-Scone victory. What do you think of the development of left or center parties that call themselves centralists, like Bill Clinton and Connie Blair, and their schism or at least the schism of the liberal democrats. It seems like the schism of the farther left here, do you think that's going to go anywhere?

48:50are the leaders. They get up there, the anti-fascists are criminalizing speech. The communists control the socialists in Europe. There are two books that have appeared in French in the last two years, one by Maurice Durand, who was actually at one time a kind of left-of-center French politician, but it's on the Communist Party, showing how they dominate France. It's always the Communist Party, and they've been able to control things from behind the scenes for years. In the last few years, now they're just, you know, out there in front, and they've gotten rid of some of the less workable things like immediate nationalization of the means of production, since so much of French production is already nationalized, like the transportation and so forth. and such furthermore. but what they now typically push is anti-fascism, holocaust, sexism, multiculturalism, but it's a way of controlling society nonetheless, totally controlling it in the name of sensitivity, fighting prejudice and so forth.

49:48The other book is by a man named Eric Woelner, who's a French-Swiss writer, called OBJW plane. I'm a friend of his, is sending me his book, The socialists are just dummies. They're all dummy parties. It's the communists who are running the place. And the communists basically have total thought control, throw people in jail for this. And the socialists are basically, you know, what they would have been if they went along with Lenin. This is his argument. They're basically back in that position of total subordination to the communists. Now, in England and the United States, though, I think what you have in the United States, Now, in England and the United States, though, I think what you have are these sort of yuppie left coalitions led by Clinton, Gore, and in their most distasteful, grotesque and effeminate fashion, Tony Blair.

50:39I must tell you that I would vote for Clinton a hundred times. He's a much more appetizing figure than Blair. Blair is almost an episcene, a feminist, has married this hideous feminist wife, who by the way was voted the most popular woman in England, Sheri Blair. She tells you how decadent the English have become. But there I think you have a problem between the politically correct left, which are the Clintonites and the Blairites and so forth, and the hard-line socialists, you know, who don't like these people because they've sold out to the capitalists. Generally, you know, if you read the French newspaper Le Monde, which I don't suggest you read, it's a disgusting paper, but you always have, you know, usually it's the politically correct left they represent, multiculturalism, fighting the remnants of Vichy government, I mean, it's like, it never goes away, the Vichy government, it keeps coming back, you know, it comes back every week, you know, they're like 98 years old, they've been

51:40The Moon loves this. They get their jollies out of fighting the Vichy government. But then every now and then you have somebody writing, saying, you know, we really have forgotten the working class, and we need, as you know, nationalization, the means of this and this. So they will publish those sorts of things. And obviously, these are the representatives of the Thors of Riel, the labor union movement, who aren't happy with the direction in which the multicultural yuppie direction in which this has happened. This is true of the Communist Party in Italy has now become a yuppie, politically correct, multicultural party, but there's like old-line Marxists who apparently have just crossed over and now vote for the right. A lot of them vote for the Allianzi Nazionale, which is the right nationalist party, because the communists have not, do not serve their own, do not serve the working class. They basically serve transgendered hippies or something like that. So I mean, but there must be a lot of them, you know,

52:39One of the things I always hear, and I've never really pursued this, and maybe you know, and maybe you don't know, is a lot of the Italian economy is underground. And if that's true, then what does that mean for things like this that you're talking about?

53:09you said if it's if it's underground you said

53:39What are those resources because they need the capitalism to sustain their effort?

54:09So, there's a very large number of these sort of liberated women, self-actualizing yuppies, multi-cultural, who are going to support the communists if they run as that kind of party. But once they're able to establish control and to pretty much drive out the right, marginalize disagreement, throw people in jail in the name of sensitivity, which they do, you know, once they can achieve these things, they have a kind of Stalinist society and then introduce their economic programs. And I've heard this argued. I don't know whether it's true. I wouldn't be surprised if it were. Because obviously this Communist Party doesn't sound like the old Communist Party. I mean, it sounds like, you know, it sounds like Hillary Clinton going crazy or something, but it doesn't sound like the old Communist Party. But, you know, the totalitarian methods are the same, you know.

55:01What is the name of your book on conservative movement? Do they have it there? Yeah, he has a copy of it. The conservative movement.

55:19Okay, is there any, I don't know, have we completed the hour? Is there time rather for more questions? Anybody have any other question?