Tankie see, Tankie do: Against Marxism, Against Excuse-ism.

so what is it that's wrong with what mr.
Peterson has to say about Marxism well it's partly that he's recycling old Cold War stuff the Cold War was over in 1989 most of us have moved on around the world mr. Peterson seems to be stuck it is true that the Cold War ended in 1989 it's also true that many of the most important and damning documents showing what communists did how they did it and why only became Declassified and available to the public after 1989 during the Cold War it was very difficult for anyone to know what lies were made up by the CIA what lies were made up by the Soviet Union what was information and what was disinformation many people who were themselves harsh critics of communism during the Cold War were astounded to discover only after the Cold War was over that as terrible as they thought communism had mean the reality was much much worse this happened partly due to archives that were Declassified in the Soviet Union and in communist China Congress China has continued to be communist piece by piece like archival evidence and just research from the inside was sort of smuggled out would published one way or another very often by people who themselves have been long-standing members of the Communist Party but had become disillusioned with it so yes the Cold War is over but the level of secrecy and disinformation means that in the year 1989 it was very difficult for anyone to know with certainty the types of things I now know let me ask you a question professor which side did the United States fight on in Cambodia and why the United States of America even under President Ronald Reagan fought on the pro-communist side supporting Pol Pot many people refer to that as a secret is not really secret but it's something very few people knew in 1989 the American bombing of Laos a communist country was likewise referred to as the secret war what exactly happened even if you're just looking at atrocities committed by the United States of America a country that did have freedom of speech and still does was very difficult to unravel finding out what happened under Mao Zedong in China during the worst periods of mass murder and mass starvation finding out what really happened under Lenin and Stalin those things have gotten easier since 1989 of course partly due to the internet but partly also due to changing political conditions so now as never before it's possible to know it's possible to learn the lessons of that history for the first time and that's why the whole world is changing and that's why the whole world is laughing and jeering at you Marxists like never before and he's stuck with one of the oldest kinds of arguments imaginable telling us that we should not be interested in Marxism in fact it's kind of immoral in his words to be interested in Marxism in view of what Stalin did in Soviet Russia well ok Stalin did terrible things in Soviet Russia however Marxism exists in every country in the face of the earth it's been going on for 150 years and a lot more than what happened in Russia under Stalin over a period of 15 or 20 years has to be taken into account if you're going to make an assessment of Marxism to use the one example that is really horrible over there as the judgment on Marxism would be about the same sense as saying Christianity should be dismissed because of the Catholic Inquisition or the destruction of the Native American population by Christians or the Holocaust against Jews gays and so forth by Christians in Germany and on and on and on I'm not gonna laugh but I'm tempted to respond to this satirically of course the Catholic Church is discredited because of what happened in the Inquisition course and of course it would be immoral for anyone anyone today to make excuses for justify or glorify those crimes carried out by the Catholic Church of course both the Catholic and Protestant churches of various European countries but notably the Anglican Church of England were engaged in genocide acam pains against native americans First Nations indigenous people whatever term you want to use and it would be deeply disturbing and indeed evil for people to say positive things in support of those atrocities in support of attempted genocide an actual genocide today now you claim that Marxism is much larger and much broader than merely what happened under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union you say it exists in countries all around the world those are precisely the people who made excuses for Joseph Stalin and who still make excuses for Joseph Stalin to this day those are the people who are very much equivalent to Nazi Holocaust deniers or to people who would still very positively assert that there was something good or right or justifiable about the crimes of genocide carried out by the Catholic Church in some cases by the Protestant church by European Christian churches in the colonization of North America and South America the so-called new world you say this as if it were preposterous for someone like me to strongly morally opposed and condemn the Christian Church for its atrocities in the past you say this as if it would be absurd for people today to hold those institutions those political organizations legally and morally accountable for the crimes they commit in the past and to regard them as stained and discredited by the crimes they commit in the past there's nothing absurd about that at all in the same way that I regard the Nazi Party as discredited by the crimes committed by the Nazis by what real-world consequences of their ideology was of course I regard Christian churches plural as discredited by the historical record of Christianity don't you and if not why not moreover there is a question in each of these instances of how clear a line can be drawn from precept to practice how clear a line can be drawn from what's preached in principle by these parties what's set down in their manifestos and what happened when those principles were put into practice the relationship between atrocities committed by Christopher Columbus and Spanish imperialism is very direct the relationship between Spanish imperialism and the papal Authority of the Catholic Church in Rome is very direct and the Pope directly made judgments on questions about the legalization of slavery which forms of slavery were legal and which were illegal questions of genocide questions of what were then human rights about whether or not indigenous people of South America would be recognized as human and his descendants of Adam on this earth and so on the political vocabulary it was very different it was much more medieval but nevertheless the Catholic Church was very directly involved ideologically and in a sense in making policy in shaping the Spanish Empire in South America the Catholic Church literally drew the border between Brazil and the rest of South America which was at that time the border between the area that was going to be colonized by the Portuguese and the area that was colonized by the Spanish they made fate full decisions that had devastating impacts on indigenous people in that continent why would why would they not be responsible why would we not judge the Catholic Church but what had had done in principle in practice and why would we not describe someone as evil who today is a member of a neo-nazi party or today is a member of a catholic revivalist party or what have you someone who really claims that these things are justifiable morally right and good two world wars my capitalist Christian countries fighting each other may all qualify for the kinds of arguments mr. Peterson makes we don't make those kinds of arguments because they make no sense and mr. Peters in order to do that with Marxism what remains implicit and unstated here is the conceit that somehow Marxism does not contain principles that directly condone and call for violence and that is false that is a lie the distinctive definitive doctrines of Marxism include class war and people say this phrase so often that it starts to lose its meaning class war is violence of a most terrible kind and you really should take the time to read some examples of what class war means in practice of people going from door to door house to house in their neighborhood and murdering their so-called class enemies in their sleep of the Soviet Army going from town to town and stealing farmers horses and chickens and pigs and murdering farmers deciding which of various poverty-stricken farmers qualify as middle class as opposed to absolutely poverty-stricken even within China the Communist Party deciding which tribal groups in rural Yunnan had achieved bourgeois status and which were so so poor so backward still living in Stone Age conditions that they would be exempt from this type of class analysis following the instructions of Karl Marx the letter and the spirit of exactly what Karl Marx said about the development of society through a series of stages and that some societies are so primitive that they have no middle class have no landlords etc the violence of Marxism is not some kind of corruption or aberration that crept into Marxism it's something that's written out very clearly in Karl Marx's work like the Communist Manifesto it's something that's written down very clearly in principle in the works of all these major leaders not just Stalin call Marx Lenin Stalin Mao Zedong it's not incidental it's not accidental and it is true that you have a difficult time drawing a straight line from a text like the Gospel of Mark the New Testament quotations from Jesus about the meaning of life you have a difficult time drawing a straight line from that to atrocities committed in Nazi Germany however if you actually start to fill in the blanks you'll realize there are other figures like Martin Luther there are other stages along the way and the line starts to get stronger and stronger you start to understand how institutionally culturally even juridical illegally there were practices that grew out of Christianity and where the connection becomes stronger and clearer to how fascism and anti-semitism developed in Germany at that time again Martin Luther being a major intellectual source and a reformation of Christianity in Germany especially and the single most influential author on anti-semitism of his millennium I suppose I think it would be really phony and insincere to say that there's a single word in the American Constitution that justifies or makes inevitable atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam and they did commit atrocities the Americans also committed atrocities in South Korea in the Korean War but there is no principle you're gonna find in the US Constitution there's no principle in the Canon of capitalism that explains that so simply indirectly as Karl Marx's principle of class war Karl Marx's principle is that the progress of history can be achieved through violence and through extreme violence only of one social class rising up and destroying another that's a very clear very direct doctrine that defines Marxism as different from all forms of leftism left-wing activist and whatever you'd like to call it Marxists historically who have existed all over the world took up the position that you should not try to incrementally improve capitalism that you should not try to reform capitalism that you should not try to help the workers by giving them higher wages better benefits by having unions make deals that would improve their lives through minimum wage reforms they would not support what Bernie Sanders is now doing Marxists by definition preached the inevitable progress of history through what's called materialist dialectics a frankly crazy theory that the only way societies make progress is by exacerbating social class distinctions exacerbating inequality foment and creating an encouraging hatred between social classes until one social class rises up to tear down the other that's textbook Marxism that's Karl Marx's major contribution to the intellectual development of politics in Europe it's very clearly and very split explicitly the embrace of extreme violence Karl Marx and Friedrich angles they were the two guys who read the history of the French Revolution I'm here talking about the first French Revolution they read the history of the French Revolution and said it's not violent enough it's not extreme enough they didn't go far enough they didn't chop off enough heads of a nun for Esther crass they should have taken this further they were the ones who said it was wrong to try to take a step backwards and create a Democratic Parliament and be moderate and try to have gradual process their analysis of the French Revolution was that it need to go further faster and have more mass murder yes I'm simplifying that these are major elements and these are two men who obsessed over the details of the history of the French Revolution and their analysis of their own time in Germany France and England their analysis was that it was completely fruitless to bring it vote the types of social democratic change that really did improve life in those countries for factory workers for the poor etc they just wanted a violent revolution that's who they were and that's what their philosophy represented and the vast majority of people in the mainstream left looked at the legacy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during their lifetimes and immediately after the death and said no thanks our society has problems and we can try to solve them by making the alliterative positive change by helping people working cooperatively not by fomenting a violent revolution and trying to tear the system down and trying to vindicate dictatorship as something better than democracy when it merely clothes itself in the name the dictatorship of the proletariat [Music]