Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies

00:00:00.000 | Most people, most of the time, are polite,

00:00:04.800 | cooperative, and kind, until they're not.

00:00:09.800 | - The following is a conversation with Rick Spence,

00:00:16.420 | a historian specializing in the history

00:00:19.160 | of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies,

00:00:22.800 | conspiracies, the occult, and military history.

00:00:27.640 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it,

00:00:30.560 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:00:33.400 | And now, dear friends, here's Rick Spence.

00:00:37.000 | You have written and lectured about serial killers,

00:00:41.440 | secret societies, cults, and intelligence agencies,

00:00:45.560 | so we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics.

00:00:49.040 | But let's begin with intelligence agencies.

00:00:51.360 | Which has been the most powerful

00:00:53.560 | intelligence agency in history?

00:00:55.680 | - The most powerful intelligence agency in history.

00:01:00.520 | I mean, it's an interesting question.

00:01:02.480 | I'd say probably in terms of historical longevity

00:01:07.480 | and consistency of performance,

00:01:11.760 | that the Russian intelligence services,

00:01:15.640 | notice I didn't say the KGB specifically,

00:01:17.760 | but the Russian intelligence services,

00:01:19.440 | going back to the czarist period,

00:01:21.680 | are consistently pretty good.

00:01:25.440 | Not infallible. None of them are.

00:01:27.600 | Of course, there's a common Western way

00:01:32.160 | of looking at anything Russian.

00:01:34.560 | Very often, I think it's still the case,

00:01:36.520 | Russians are viewed in one of two ways.

00:01:38.640 | Either they are bumbling idiots,

00:01:41.800 | or they are diabolically clever.

00:01:44.160 | No sort of middle ground.

00:01:46.040 | And you can find both of those examples in this.

00:01:48.440 | So what I mean by that is that if you're looking

00:01:51.200 | at the modern SVR or FSB,

00:01:54.960 | which are just two different organizations

00:01:57.280 | that used to be part of the one big KGB,

00:01:59.600 | or the KGB or its predecessors, the Cheka,

00:02:02.440 | you're really going back to the late 19th century

00:02:07.040 | and the Imperial Russian Intelligence Security Service,

00:02:12.040 | generally known as the Okrana or Okranka.

00:02:17.000 | It's really the Department of Police,

00:02:19.040 | the special corps of gendarmes.

00:02:22.360 | Their primary job was protecting the imperial regime

00:02:25.400 | and protecting it against imperial,

00:02:27.960 | or rather interior enemies,

00:02:30.680 | revolutionaries for the most part.

00:02:32.520 | And they got very, very good at that.

00:02:34.360 | By co-opting people within those movements,

00:02:38.280 | infiltrating and recruiting informers,

00:02:40.960 | agent provocateurs.

00:02:42.520 | In fact, they excelled at the agent provocateur.

00:02:45.760 | Person you place inside an organization

00:02:48.480 | and it costs trouble.

00:02:50.120 | Usually maneuver them into a position of leadership

00:02:53.880 | and they provoke actions that can then allow you

00:02:58.120 | to crack down on them.

00:02:59.160 | That is, many sort of lure or bring the target organization

00:03:03.880 | into any legal or open status

00:03:06.480 | that it can be more effectively suppressed.

00:03:08.640 | They were very good at that.

00:03:10.920 | So good that by the early 20th century

00:03:14.360 | in the years preceding the Russian Revolution in 1917,

00:03:17.360 | they had effectively infiltrated every radical party,

00:03:20.920 | Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, great and small,

00:03:25.920 | and placed people in positions of influence and leadership.

00:03:29.960 | To the point that arguably, that is you can debate this,

00:03:36.600 | but I think in the whole,

00:03:37.600 | they could largely dictate what those parties did.

00:03:42.280 | Nothing was discussed at any central committee meeting

00:03:46.240 | of any revolutionary group

00:03:47.960 | that the Okrana wasn't immediately aware of.

00:03:51.440 | And they often had people in positions

00:03:53.160 | to influence what those decisions were.

00:03:56.080 | Of course, that raises an interesting question

00:03:59.320 | is that if they were that good

00:04:00.560 | and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled

00:04:02.880 | most of the opposition,

00:04:03.960 | then how did the regime get overthrown by revolutionaries?

00:04:08.960 | The answer to that is that it wasn't overthrown

00:04:11.480 | by revolutionaries.

00:04:13.400 | It was overthrown by politicians.

00:04:16.040 | That would then take us into a detour into Russian history,

00:04:20.600 | but I'll just leave it with this.

00:04:21.800 | If you look at 1917 and you look closely,

00:04:25.000 | this is one of the things I would always tell my students

00:04:27.840 | is that there are two Russian revolutions in 1917.

00:04:30.840 | There's the first one in March or February,

00:04:33.000 | depending on your calendar,

00:04:34.600 | that overthrows Nicholas II.

00:04:37.160 | Revolutionaries are really not involved with that.

00:04:40.000 | Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen.

00:04:41.600 | Trotsky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen.

00:04:43.680 | They have nothing to do with that.

00:04:45.600 | That has to do effectively with a political conspiracy

00:04:48.160 | within the Russian parliament, the Duma,

00:04:51.000 | to unseat an emperor they thought was bungling the war

00:04:55.480 | and was essentially a loser to begin with.

00:04:58.240 | And it was a coup d'etat, a parliamentary coup d'etat.

00:05:01.440 | The temporary or provisional government

00:05:06.000 | that that revolution put in power

00:05:09.480 | was the one overthrown by Lenin eight months later.

00:05:14.640 | And that government was essentially one dominated

00:05:17.200 | by moderate socialists.

00:05:19.760 | It was a government that very quickly

00:05:21.040 | sort of turned to the left.

00:05:22.520 | The guy we associate with that is Alexander Kerensky.

00:05:27.040 | Alexander Kerensky was a Russian socialist, a politician.

00:05:31.160 | He was the quasi dictator of that regime.

00:05:34.200 | He's the person, not the czar, who's overthrown by Lenin.

00:05:38.560 | So the revolutionaries,

00:05:43.280 | they did not prove to be the fatal threat

00:05:45.440 | to the czarist regime.

00:05:46.680 | It was the czarist political system itself that did that.

00:05:50.840 | What then transpired was that the Okrana and its method

00:05:55.440 | and many of its agents then immediately segued over

00:05:58.600 | into the new Soviet security service.

00:06:00.920 | So one of the first things that Lenin did

00:06:02.760 | in December of 1917, within a month of seizing power,

00:06:06.240 | since the hold on power was tenuous at best,

00:06:12.280 | was that, well, you're gonna need some kind of organization

00:06:14.600 | to infiltrate and suppress those pesky

00:06:16.680 | counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists

00:06:19.000 | and all of the other enemies that we have.

00:06:21.440 | And so the extraordinary commission

00:06:24.000 | to combat counter-revolution and sabotage,

00:06:26.640 | the Cheka, was formed.

00:06:28.560 | You put a veteran Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky,

00:06:33.000 | at the head of that,

00:06:35.480 | someone you could politically rely upon,

00:06:37.520 | but Dzerzhinsky built his organization

00:06:39.200 | essentially out of the Okrana.

00:06:40.760 | I mean, there were all of these informers

00:06:43.080 | sitting around with nothing to do,

00:06:46.000 | and they were employed.

00:06:47.960 | In the early '20s, the kind of rank and file of the Cheka

00:06:53.640 | might've been 80 to 90% former imperial officials.

00:06:58.640 | Those were gradually decreased over time.

00:07:01.080 | So why would they do that?

00:07:03.240 | Well, they were professionals.

00:07:04.080 | They also needed to eat,

00:07:05.480 | and things were somewhat precarious.

00:07:07.480 | So if your job is to be an agent provocateur,

00:07:11.440 | if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations

00:07:14.600 | and lead them astray,

00:07:16.280 | you do that for whoever pays you.

00:07:17.960 | That's part of the professionalism which goes in.

00:07:22.040 | And under the Soviets,

00:07:24.640 | the Soviet intelligence services

00:07:25.880 | are also very good at that.

00:07:27.160 | They are very good at infiltrating people

00:07:29.160 | into opposing organizations.

00:07:31.680 | And I guess the one example I would give

00:07:35.760 | to demonstrate that are the Cambridge Five,

00:07:38.680 | the British traitors from Soviet standpoint heroes

00:07:43.680 | who were recruited, most notably Kim Philby,

00:07:48.100 | Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Anthony Blunt,

00:07:52.200 | and there may have been well more than five,

00:07:54.520 | but that wasn't bad out of just Cambridge.

00:07:58.220 | And then placing those people in high positions,

00:08:01.880 | the ultimate goal, of course,

00:08:03.680 | is to get your people into positions of leadership

00:08:06.400 | and influence in the opposing intelligence service.

00:08:11.040 | And so they did.

00:08:12.160 | Of course, it all fell apart,

00:08:13.320 | and they ended up in, you know,

00:08:16.520 | Philby ended up living the last part of his life

00:08:18.560 | in exile in Moscow,

00:08:19.840 | but they got their money's worth out of him.

00:08:24.400 | And you can also find this in KGB infiltration,

00:08:27.240 | the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames,

00:08:31.280 | the Hansen cases.

00:08:33.480 | Of course, we were infiltrating by we.

00:08:36.280 | I mean, the Americans in the West

00:08:37.820 | managed to infiltrate our moles as well.

00:08:40.400 | But if it came down, you know,

00:08:42.480 | someone could dispute this,

00:08:43.720 | but I would think if you were gonna come down

00:08:45.220 | to a kind of like a who had the most moles Super Bowl,

00:08:50.220 | probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.

00:08:55.720 | - So the scale of the infiltration,

00:08:59.160 | the number of people and the skill of it,

00:09:03.680 | is there a case to be made that the Okhrana

00:09:07.400 | and the Chaka orchestrated both the components

00:09:11.920 | of the Russian Revolution as you described them?

00:09:14.460 | - Well, there's an interesting question for me.

00:09:16.440 | I mean, there are all kinds of questions about this.

00:09:18.640 | I mean, one of the questions is whether or not

00:09:20.140 | Lenin was an Okhrana agent.

00:09:22.520 | Okay, I've just said heresy.

00:09:24.320 | Some people will,

00:09:26.560 | I'll do that quite often because I am a heretic

00:09:29.480 | and proud of it.

00:09:31.900 | - Great.

00:09:32.740 | - Why would you possibly say

00:09:35.560 | that Lenin could have been an Okhrana agent?

00:09:37.480 | Well, let's look what he managed to do.

00:09:39.440 | So you had, coming into the 20th century,

00:09:44.120 | nominally a single Marxist movement,

00:09:51.440 | the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

00:09:56.160 | And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks,

00:09:59.200 | Majorityites and Minorityites,

00:10:01.880 | are merely factions of that party.

00:10:04.480 | And they always agreed that they were all Marxists

00:10:07.080 | and we all believe in dialectical materialism

00:10:11.020 | and the rise of, we're all socialists, comrade.

00:10:13.920 | The difference was the tactical means

00:10:17.820 | by which one would attain this.

00:10:20.060 | And what Lenin wanted was a militant,

00:10:24.340 | small-scale vanguard party.

00:10:26.520 | He wanted a revolution, he wanted to seize power,

00:10:29.520 | seize control of the state.

00:10:31.000 | And once you have the state,

00:10:32.200 | then you induce socialism from above.

00:10:37.200 | Whereas the majority of the people,

00:10:40.600 | the so-called Mensheviks, the Minorityites,

00:10:43.800 | who are, oddly enough, the vast majority of the party,

00:10:48.000 | that's one of the first things,

00:10:49.240 | how do you lose that argument?

00:10:51.000 | Okay, how does the minority

00:10:53.340 | get to grab the name Majorityites?

00:10:55.780 | But Lenin did that.

00:10:57.120 | So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party

00:11:03.340 | of committed revolutionaries

00:11:04.860 | that would plot and scheme and undermine

00:11:06.860 | and eventually seize control of the state

00:11:08.900 | and induce socialism from above.

00:11:10.940 | There were other Russian Marxists

00:11:13.900 | who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian

00:11:16.260 | and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist.

00:11:21.040 | And they opposed that, ineffectively, from the beginning,

00:11:25.520 | outmaneuvered every step of the way.

00:11:30.520 | The Mensheviks are a case study

00:11:33.640 | in failure of a political organization.

00:11:36.280 | That, too, will be harassing to some people,

00:11:38.020 | but look, they lost.

00:11:39.660 | Now, so what Lenin managed to do,

00:11:43.880 | starting around 1903, continuing on to this,

00:11:47.040 | is he managed to divide,

00:11:48.860 | to take what had been a single Marxist party

00:11:52.080 | and split it into angry, contending factions.

00:11:57.080 | Because he and his Bolsheviks were on one side,

00:12:01.180 | advocating a much more militant, conspiratorial policy.

00:12:05.560 | The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on the other,

00:12:09.300 | and in between were a lot of people

00:12:10.660 | who really didn't know where they stood on this.

00:12:13.820 | I mean, sometimes they kind of agreed,

00:12:15.260 | he seems to be making sense today.

00:12:17.180 | No, no, I don't think he's making sense in that day.

00:12:19.700 | But he managed to completely disunify this organization.

00:12:24.380 | Now, who could possibly have seen benefit in that?

00:12:27.940 | Del Grana.

00:12:29.980 | Now, whether or not they put him up to it,

00:12:32.020 | whether or not, in some way,

00:12:33.340 | they helped move him into a position of leadership

00:12:37.540 | or encouraged it or encouraged it through people around him,

00:12:41.660 | whether he was a witting or unwitting agent

00:12:45.260 | of the Tsarist secret police,

00:12:48.180 | he certainly accomplished exactly

00:12:49.860 | what it was that they had wanted.

00:12:52.300 | And I find that suspicious.

00:12:56.020 | It's one of those things that it's so convenient in a way

00:12:59.860 | is that I'm not necessarily sure that was an accident.

00:13:04.860 | There's also this whole question to me

00:13:09.140 | as to what was going on within the Okrana itself.

00:13:13.000 | Now, this is one of these questions

00:13:15.700 | we may come to later about how intelligence agencies

00:13:20.380 | interact or serve the governments

00:13:24.260 | to which they are theoretically subordinate.

00:13:27.100 | They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power.

00:13:32.660 | After all, their main job is to collect information.

00:13:35.260 | And that information could be about all kinds of things.

00:13:39.100 | Including people within the government structure itself.

00:13:41.900 | And they also know how to leverage that information

00:13:46.860 | in a way to get people to do what you want them to do.

00:13:49.620 | So an argument can be made, again, an argument,

00:13:55.020 | not a fact, merely an opinion,

00:13:57.380 | which is mostly what history is made out of, opinions,

00:14:00.280 | is that at some point between about 1900 and 1917,

00:14:05.780 | people within the Okrana were playing their own game.

00:14:09.500 | And that game took them in a direction

00:14:12.100 | which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor,

00:14:15.940 | specifically to Nicholas II was no longer part of that.

00:14:20.820 | To me, in a way, it seems almost during the events of 1917

00:14:27.300 | that one, you had an organization

00:14:29.340 | that was very effective when it did,

00:14:30.700 | that suddenly just becomes ineffective.

00:14:32.660 | Doesn't really disappear, these things don't go away,

00:14:36.740 | because it will reappear as the Okrana,

00:14:39.860 | basically fairly quickly.

00:14:41.720 | But it raises the question to me as to what degree

00:14:45.620 | there were people within the organization

00:14:49.300 | who allowed events to take the course they wished.

00:14:54.300 | - I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is

00:15:00.380 | within an organization like Okrana,

00:15:02.940 | or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence

00:15:05.820 | that happens.

00:15:07.060 | - Well, one of the key elements

00:15:08.060 | in any kind of intelligence organization or operation

00:15:11.740 | is compartmentalization, need to know.

00:15:15.140 | So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody,

00:15:18.900 | everybody in an executive position

00:15:20.660 | are all brought into a big corporate meeting

00:15:22.580 | and we discuss all of the secret operations

00:15:24.820 | that are going on.

00:15:25.660 | No, no, you never do that.

00:15:27.480 | Only a very limited number of people should know about that.

00:15:33.700 | If you have a person who is a case officer

00:15:36.860 | who's controlling agents,

00:15:37.700 | he's the only one that should know who those people are,

00:15:40.100 | possibly his immediate superiors,

00:15:42.820 | but in no way do you want that to be common knowledge.

00:15:45.700 | So information within the organization itself

00:15:49.860 | is compartmentalized.

00:15:52.260 | So you don't need everybody to be in on it.

00:15:56.420 | You don't even need necessarily the people

00:15:58.260 | who are nominally at the top.

00:15:59.520 | For instance, the Okrana, the real boss of the Okrana

00:16:02.340 | was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior,

00:16:06.000 | the Minister of the Interior, in fact,

00:16:07.620 | but the Minister of the Interior

00:16:09.100 | had no real effective control over this at all.

00:16:11.380 | I mean, to the point was that at one point early on,

00:16:14.260 | they actually organized the assassination of their own boss.

00:16:18.040 | They have their agents among the revolutionaries

00:16:22.020 | kill the Minister of the Interior

00:16:23.780 | because he'll just be replaced by another one.

00:16:26.940 | He's an Imperial bureaucrat.

00:16:28.820 | He's not really part of their organization.

00:16:33.540 | It's like a director of an intelligence agency

00:16:36.420 | appointed by the president.

00:16:38.620 | Maybe he's part of the organization.

00:16:41.260 | Maybe he isn't.

00:16:42.340 | Maybe he is not one of us.

00:16:44.660 | So you've got different levels,

00:16:51.180 | different compartments within it,

00:16:54.060 | and who's actually running the show?

00:16:56.220 | If anyone is, I don't know.

00:16:58.940 | That's never supposed to be apparent.

00:17:00.420 | - Well, that's a fascinating question.

00:17:02.180 | I mean, you could see this with NKVD.

00:17:05.060 | It's obviously an extremely powerful organization

00:17:09.020 | that starts to eat itself,

00:17:13.080 | where everybody's pointing fingers internally also

00:17:16.100 | as a way to gain more power.

00:17:18.700 | So the question is, in organizations like that

00:17:21.380 | that are so compartmentalized, where's the power?

00:17:24.760 | Where's the center of power?

00:17:26.220 | Because you would think, given that much power,

00:17:31.460 | some individual or a group of individuals

00:17:34.300 | will start accumulating that power.

00:17:36.300 | But it seems like that's not always a trivial thing

00:17:38.820 | because if you get too powerful,

00:17:40.540 | the snake eats that person.

00:17:43.460 | - Well, if we go back into the founder

00:17:46.520 | of Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

00:17:49.740 | Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926, keels over,

00:17:54.420 | after giving a heated speech to a party meeting.

00:17:58.760 | Now, the common view, what you usually read,

00:18:02.620 | which was key for the time, is that, you know,

00:18:05.020 | clearly Stalin had him whacked

00:18:06.580 | because anytime someone died, it was almost always it.

00:18:10.700 | And I think a lot of times he did.

00:18:12.800 | But in some cases, Stalin's probably getting blamed

00:18:16.980 | for things that he didn't actually do.

00:18:20.260 | Dzerzhinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin.

00:18:24.100 | So it's not clear why he would,

00:18:25.500 | but this was the, you know, Stalin died.

00:18:27.620 | You know, obviously he was poisoned.

00:18:29.100 | Something happened.

00:18:30.340 | It was an unnatural death.

00:18:31.900 | Somebody goes in for an operation.

00:18:34.260 | You know, it gets a little too much anesthesia.

00:18:36.460 | Stalin killed them.

00:18:37.660 | Somebody tips over in a canoe in upstate New York.

00:18:42.060 | Stalin killed them.

00:18:43.220 | There's actually a case about that.

00:18:45.740 | So that itself can be kind of useful

00:18:49.340 | where every time someone dies, they think you killed them.

00:18:53.180 | That's kind of an interesting method

00:18:55.340 | of intimidation in that regard.

00:18:57.280 | But the suspicion is nonetheless there.

00:19:00.420 | Dzerzhinsky had been, he was the grand inquisitor.

00:19:05.420 | He was seemingly firmly in control of the organization.

00:19:09.780 | Of course, maybe he wasn't.

00:19:10.860 | Maybe he was.

00:19:12.260 | My guess would be is that if Dzerzhinsky's death

00:19:14.660 | was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated

00:19:19.780 | by someone within his own organization.

00:19:22.680 | And then you look at the people who take over.

00:19:25.840 | His immediate successor is Vyacheslav Menzhinsky,

00:19:31.300 | who's really not really a secret policeman,

00:19:35.260 | more a kind of intellectual dilettante.

00:19:37.660 | But if you look behind him,

00:19:40.020 | you'll notice the fellow is Henrikh Yagoda.

00:19:42.620 | And Yagoda will really sort of manage things

00:19:47.180 | from behind the scenes until Menzhinsky dies in 1934.

00:19:52.180 | And then Yagoda will hold on

00:19:53.740 | until he's the victim of the purges,

00:19:55.340 | I think, in '37 or '38.

00:19:58.400 | Yagoda is ambitious, murderous.

00:20:04.820 | And if I was going to point the finger

00:20:08.620 | to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky whacked,

00:20:11.780 | it would be him.

00:20:13.380 | And for the purposes simply of advancement.

00:20:16.480 | - That's the, you know, the person to look out

00:20:19.720 | at any kind of corporate organization

00:20:21.360 | is your immediate subordinate,

00:20:25.080 | the person who could move into your job,

00:20:27.280 | because more than likely,

00:20:28.560 | that's exactly what they're planning to do.

00:20:31.880 | - Yeah, just one step away from the very top.

00:20:34.540 | Somebody there will probably accumulate the most power.

00:20:37.280 | You mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies

00:20:41.720 | were good at creating agent provocateurs,

00:20:45.640 | infiltrating the halls of power.

00:20:49.960 | What does it take to do that?

00:20:51.520 | - Well, there's a interesting little acronym called MICE,

00:20:56.240 | M-I-C-E, and it's generally used.

00:21:01.760 | And it's just the way in which you would acquire,

00:21:03.880 | how do you get people to work for you?

00:21:06.200 | Well, M stands for money.

00:21:08.320 | You pay them.

00:21:09.160 | People are greedy.

00:21:10.360 | They want money.

00:21:11.680 | You know, if you look at Aldrich Ames,

00:21:14.000 | he had a very, very expensive wife with expensive tastes.

00:21:18.400 | So he wanted money.

00:21:19.360 | I is for ideology.

00:21:23.200 | So during, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s,

00:21:26.880 | the Soviets were very effective in exploiting communists,

00:21:30.800 | you know, people who wanted to serve the great cause.

00:21:33.400 | Even though that's initially not really

00:21:36.720 | what they wanted to do,

00:21:38.240 | because the idea was that if you recruit agents

00:21:41.000 | from among, let's say, American communists,

00:21:43.720 | you compromise the party.

00:21:46.440 | Because exactly what your enemies are going to say

00:21:48.400 | is that all communists are Soviet spies.

00:21:51.160 | They're all traitors in some way.

00:21:52.480 | So you would really wanna keep those two things separate,

00:21:55.240 | but ideology was just so convenient.

00:21:58.880 | And those people would just work for you so well.

00:22:02.160 | They were, you could get them to do anything,

00:22:04.040 | betray their grandmother.

00:22:05.240 | They would go ahead and do that for the greater good.

00:22:08.640 | So ideology can be a motivation.

00:22:10.840 | And that can be someone who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist.

00:22:15.840 | It can also be someone who's a disgruntled communist,

00:22:19.760 | because there's no anti-communist like an ex-communist.

00:22:23.300 | Those who lose the faith can become very, very useful.

00:22:30.760 | For instance, if you look in the case

00:22:36.000 | of American intelligence,

00:22:37.680 | the people who essentially temporarily destroyed

00:22:42.280 | much of the KGB organization in the US post-World War II

00:22:47.320 | were people like Whitaker Chambers,

00:22:50.280 | Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley.

00:22:52.880 | All of those people had been communist party members.

00:22:56.240 | They had all been part of the Red Faithful.

00:22:58.240 | They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned

00:23:01.320 | and turned rat or patriot,

00:23:06.640 | whichever case you may want to put in that regard.

00:23:11.640 | - What does the C and the E stand for?

00:23:14.320 | - The C is for coercion.

00:23:16.720 | That's where you have to persuade someone to work for you.

00:23:20.680 | You have to pressure them.

00:23:21.520 | So usually you blackmail them.

00:23:23.100 | You know, that could be they have a gambling habit.

00:23:27.820 | You know, in the old days,

00:23:28.960 | it was very often because they were gay, okay?

00:23:31.880 | Gets them in a position where they can be compromised

00:23:34.600 | and you can get them to do your bidding.

00:23:35.920 | But those people usually have a certain amount of control.

00:23:38.800 | Here's an interesting example

00:23:40.640 | of how the Okrana tended to handle this.

00:23:42.720 | I think it's still largely used.

00:23:44.440 | You'd round up a bunch of revolutionaries

00:23:48.040 | on some charge or another,

00:23:51.120 | distributing revolutionary literature,

00:23:54.000 | running an illegal printing press.

00:23:55.880 | You bring a guy into the room and you say,

00:23:58.240 | "Okay, you're gonna work for us."

00:24:00.720 | He, of course, would refuse to do so.

00:24:03.520 | And they go, "Well, if you refuse,

00:24:06.000 | "we'll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while.

00:24:09.920 | "You know, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so.

00:24:12.060 | "And then we're just gonna let you go.

00:24:14.640 | "We're just gonna put you back out on the street.

00:24:17.600 | "And if you don't work for us,

00:24:19.020 | "we will spread the rumor through our agents

00:24:22.420 | "already in your organization that you are.

00:24:25.440 | "And then what will your comrades do?

00:24:27.760 | "How long are you going to live?"

00:24:29.520 | So you see, you have no choice.

00:24:31.440 | You're ours, and you're going to cooperate with us.

00:24:34.320 | And the way that that effectiveness would be ensured

00:24:39.400 | is that you have multiple agents

00:24:43.760 | within the same organization

00:24:45.440 | who don't know who each other are.

00:24:48.560 | That's very important.

00:24:50.200 | And they'll all be filing reports.

00:24:52.360 | So let's say you have three agents

00:24:55.920 | inside the central committee of the SR party,

00:25:00.520 | and there's a committee meeting,

00:25:01.920 | and you're going to look at the reports they file.

00:25:03.640 | They all better agree with each other, right?

00:25:06.480 | If one person doesn't report what the other two do,

00:25:09.000 | then perhaps they're not entirely doing their job,

00:25:11.560 | and they can be liquidated at any time.

00:25:14.960 | All you do is drop the dime on them.

00:25:16.800 | And this was done periodically.

00:25:19.900 | In fact, in some cases, you would betray your own agents

00:25:22.480 | just to completely discombobulate to the organization.

00:25:27.040 | This happened in one particular case around 1908.

00:25:31.240 | The fellow who was the head

00:25:32.080 | of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization,

00:25:35.440 | which wasn't Bolshevik,

00:25:36.480 | but the so-called socialist revolutionaries,

00:25:40.560 | they're actually the biggest revolutionary party,

00:25:42.280 | the SRs, who aren't even actually Marxists, more anarchists.

00:25:47.200 | But they went all in for the propaganda of the deed.

00:25:50.000 | They really like blowing people up and carry out a,

00:25:53.520 | and it carried out quite a campaign of terrorism.

00:25:56.960 | The fellow who was the head

00:25:58.040 | of that terrorist organization

00:25:59.600 | was a fellow by the name of Yevno Azef.

00:26:02.640 | And Yevno Azef was, guess what, an Okhrana agent.

00:26:07.640 | Everything he did, every assassination that he planned,

00:26:12.920 | he did in consultation with his control.

00:26:17.880 | So he'd kind of run out his string.

00:26:20.800 | There was increasing suspicion of him.

00:26:23.600 | He was also asking for a lot more money.

00:26:26.480 | So the Okhrana itself arranged to have him ride it out.

00:26:30.520 | And what did that do?

00:26:32.600 | Well, what do you do in your party

00:26:35.080 | when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade

00:26:38.000 | was a secret police agent?

00:26:40.120 | It's consternation and mistrust.

00:26:44.040 | Nobody in the party would ever trust

00:26:45.680 | and you couldn't tell who you were sitting around.

00:26:48.240 | I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on,

00:26:51.800 | Boris Savinkov, who was a Russian revolutionary,

00:26:54.960 | and the second in command

00:26:56.960 | within the terrorist organization.

00:26:58.760 | By the way, the guy that wanted Azef's job

00:27:01.040 | so bad he could taste it.

00:27:02.400 | Well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror

00:27:07.040 | that his boss was a police agent.

00:27:09.520 | And well, he should,

00:27:10.360 | because Savinkov was a police agent too.

00:27:12.600 | See, they already had the number two

00:27:15.280 | waiting in the wings to take over.

00:27:18.480 | But he was legitimately shocked.

00:27:20.040 | He didn't really suspect that.

00:27:21.760 | So it's a way of manipulating this.

00:27:25.080 | And then finally we come to the E.

00:27:27.600 | That, I think, is the most important, ego.

00:27:31.200 | Sometimes people spy or betray

00:27:36.720 | because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive.

00:27:40.400 | The sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit.

00:27:49.240 | An example of that would be Kim Philby,

00:27:51.680 | one of the Cambridge Five.

00:27:52.880 | Now, Philby was a communist,

00:27:55.320 | and he would argue that he always saw himself

00:27:57.720 | as serving the communist cause.

00:27:59.720 | But he also made this statement,

00:28:03.640 | I think it's in the preface to his autobiography,

00:28:07.920 | and he says, "One never looks twice

00:28:09.680 | "at the offer of service in the elite force."

00:28:13.480 | And he's talking about his recruitment

00:28:16.240 | by the NKVD in the 1930s.

00:28:18.600 | And he was absolutely chuffed by that.

00:28:20.680 | The mere fact that they would want him,

00:28:23.800 | what he considered to be a first-rate organization

00:28:26.480 | would want him, satisfied his ego.

00:28:30.520 | And if I was to take a guess

00:28:33.800 | as to whether it was ideological motivation,

00:28:37.640 | whether it was the romance of communism,

00:28:40.000 | or whether it was the appeal of ego

00:28:41.680 | that was the most important in his career of treason,

00:28:44.280 | I'd go with ego.

00:28:45.320 | And I think that figures into a lot.

00:28:48.360 | People don't, someone doesn't get the promotions

00:28:51.320 | that they wanted.

00:28:54.000 | Again, if you look at something

00:28:55.040 | like Aldrich Ame's career in particular,

00:28:58.520 | you've got these kind of,

00:29:00.240 | his career in the CIA was hit or miss.

00:29:04.960 | He didn't get the postings or promotions

00:29:10.240 | that he wanted as a valuation.

00:29:11.920 | He never felt that he got credit for doing that.

00:29:14.360 | And that's the type of thing

00:29:15.200 | that tends to stick in someone's craw.

00:29:17.120 | And can lead, for egotistical reasons,

00:29:20.440 | an added incentive to betray.

00:29:24.000 | - Yeah, that there's a boost to the ego

00:29:25.800 | when you can deceive,

00:29:27.320 | sort of not play by the rules of the world,

00:29:30.960 | and just play with powerful people

00:29:34.880 | like they're your pawns.

00:29:36.800 | - You're the only one that knows this.

00:29:39.400 | You're the only one that knows

00:29:40.640 | that the person who is sitting across from you,

00:29:43.680 | to which you have sworn your loyalty,

00:29:45.880 | you are simultaneously betraying.

00:29:48.200 | What a rush that must be for some people.

00:29:51.680 | - I wonder how many people are susceptible to this.

00:29:54.800 | I would like to believe that the people have,

00:29:57.680 | a lot of people haven't the integrity

00:29:59.480 | to at least withstand the MI,

00:30:02.200 | the money and the ideology,

00:30:05.360 | the pull of that, and the ego.

00:30:08.080 | - It can also be a combination of the two.

00:30:10.240 | I mean, you can create a recipe of these things.

00:30:14.360 | Certain amount of money, ego,

00:30:18.200 | and a little push of coercion,

00:30:19.800 | that if you don't, we'll rat you out.

00:30:24.800 | You'll be exposed.

00:30:26.280 | - What are some differences to you

00:30:29.120 | as we look at the history of the 20th century

00:30:32.040 | between the Russian intelligence

00:30:33.560 | and the American intelligence, the CIA?

00:30:36.840 | - If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB,

00:30:39.440 | one of the things that you find consistent

00:30:41.280 | is that they, a single organization

00:30:45.120 | handled foreign intelligence,

00:30:47.160 | that is spying upon enemy or hostile governments,

00:30:51.560 | and also internal security.

00:30:54.720 | So that's all part of it.

00:30:56.240 | Whereas if you look at the U.S. models that evolves,

00:31:00.080 | you eventually have the FBI under Hoover

00:31:03.880 | who insists that he's going to be

00:31:05.520 | the counterintelligence force.

00:31:07.080 | Okay, if they're commie spies running around America,

00:31:09.880 | it's the FBI who's supposed to ferret them out.

00:31:13.040 | The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that.

00:31:15.560 | And the charter, the basic agreement in 1947,

00:31:20.560 | did not give the CIA any,

00:31:23.960 | it's often said they were barred from spying on Americans,

00:31:26.920 | which isn't quite true.

00:31:28.920 | You can always find a way to do that.

00:31:30.640 | What they don't have is they don't have

00:31:31.880 | any police or judicial powers.

00:31:33.800 | They can't run around in the country

00:31:36.320 | carrying guns to use on people.

00:31:38.640 | They can't arrest you.

00:31:39.840 | They can't interrogate you.

00:31:41.240 | They can't jail you.

00:31:43.280 | They have no police or judicial powers.

00:31:45.240 | Now, that means they have to get that from someone else.

00:31:49.360 | That doesn't mean that other agencies can't be brought in

00:31:52.120 | or local police officials,

00:31:54.200 | corn or whatever you need,

00:31:56.160 | you can eventually acquire.

00:31:57.200 | But they can't do that directly.

00:32:00.360 | So you've got this division between foreign intelligence

00:32:05.240 | and domestic counterintelligence,

00:32:08.600 | often split between hostile organizations.

00:32:13.600 | The relationship between the FBI and the CIA,

00:32:16.480 | I think it's fair to say is not chummy, never has been.

00:32:21.080 | There's always been a certain amount of rivalry

00:32:25.320 | and contention between the two.

00:32:28.600 | And it's not to say that something like that

00:32:30.040 | didn't exist between the domestic counterintelligence

00:32:34.720 | and foreign intelligence components of the KGB,

00:32:37.720 | but there would be less of that to a degree

00:32:39.880 | because there was a single organization.

00:32:42.120 | They're all answerable to the same people.

00:32:45.440 | So that gives you a certain greater amount,

00:32:50.880 | I think, of leeway and power

00:32:53.440 | because you're controlling both of those ends.

00:32:58.040 | I remember somebody telling me once that,

00:33:01.400 | and he was a retired KGB officer.

00:33:05.480 | There you go, retired.

00:33:07.000 | One of the things that he found amusing

00:33:09.760 | was that in his role,

00:33:11.560 | one of the things that he could be

00:33:13.200 | is that he could be anywhere at any time in any dress,

00:33:18.200 | which meant that he could be in or out of uniform

00:33:22.960 | and any place at any time.

00:33:24.800 | He was authorized to do that.

00:33:26.800 | - So more freedom, more power.

00:33:29.040 | - I think one of the things that you would often view

00:33:31.240 | is that the Russians are simply naturally meaner.

00:33:35.160 | There's less respect for human rights.

00:33:39.600 | There's a greater tendency to abuse power

00:33:45.960 | that one might have.

00:33:48.640 | I mean, frankly, they're all pretty good at that.

00:33:51.640 | They're probably, it is fair to say

00:33:53.760 | that there's probably some degree of cultural differences,

00:33:58.320 | that it not necessarily for institutional reasons,

00:34:00.920 | but cultural reasons.

00:34:02.320 | There could well be things that Americans

00:34:07.920 | might balk at doing more than you would find

00:34:11.720 | on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations.

00:34:14.640 | The other aspect of that is that Russian history

00:34:16.960 | is long and contentious and bloody.

00:34:19.960 | One of the things it certainly teaches

00:34:24.080 | is you never trust foreigners.

00:34:25.640 | Every foreign government, anywhere,

00:34:29.480 | any country on your border is a real or potential enemy.

00:34:32.920 | They will all at some point, if given the chance, invade you.

00:34:37.640 | Therefore, they must always be treated with great suspicion.

00:34:41.640 | That goes back to something that I think

00:34:44.400 | the British observed was that countries don't have friends.

00:34:48.280 | They have interests,

00:34:50.320 | and those interests can change over time.

00:34:54.400 | - Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious

00:34:56.720 | of all other nations.

00:34:58.120 | - That's your job.

00:34:59.040 | You're supposed to be suspicious.

00:35:00.400 | Your job is not to be trusting.

00:35:02.440 | Yeah, the basic job of an intelligence agency

00:35:04.680 | is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys,

00:35:07.640 | and then hide those away.

00:35:10.320 | - Are there laws, either intelligence agencies,

00:35:14.280 | that they're not willing to break?

00:35:17.240 | Is it basically lawless operation

00:35:20.760 | to where you can break any law

00:35:22.320 | as long as it accomplishes the task?

00:35:24.760 | - Well, I think John le Carre gave his pen name.

00:35:29.040 | He was talking about his early recruitment

00:35:30.640 | into British intelligence,

00:35:31.960 | and one of the things he remember being told up front

00:35:35.440 | was that if you do this, you have to be willing to lie,

00:35:38.440 | and you have to be willing to kill.

00:35:40.200 | Now, those are things that,

00:35:43.880 | in ordinary human interactions, are bad things.

00:35:48.160 | Generally, we don't like it when people lie to us.

00:35:51.360 | We expect that people will act honestly towards us,

00:35:56.360 | whether that's being a businessman you're involved with,

00:36:01.560 | your employers.

00:36:03.040 | We're often disappointed in that

00:36:04.600 | because people do lie all the time for a variety of reasons,

00:36:08.000 | but honesty is generally considered to be a bit,

00:36:11.280 | but in a realm where deception is a rule,

00:36:15.760 | dishonesty is a virtue, to be good at that.

00:36:21.440 | To be able to lie convincingly

00:36:24.760 | is good.

00:36:29.840 | It's one of the things you need to do,

00:36:32.560 | and killing also is generally frowned upon.

00:36:35.440 | You know, put people in prison for that.

00:36:39.560 | They're otherwise executed, but in certain circumstances,

00:36:42.680 | killing is one of those things

00:36:44.720 | that you need to be able to do.

00:36:46.880 | So what he felt he was being told in that case

00:36:48.800 | is that, you know, once you enter this realm,

00:36:50.600 | the same sort of moral rules

00:36:52.040 | that apply in general British society do not apply,

00:36:54.600 | and if you're squeamish about it, you won't fit in.

00:36:59.160 | You have to be able to do those things.

00:37:02.440 | - I wonder how often those intelligence agencies

00:37:06.840 | in the 20th century, and of course,

00:37:09.640 | the natural question extending it to the 21st century,

00:37:12.640 | how often they go to the assassination,

00:37:16.160 | how often they go to the kill part of that

00:37:19.040 | versus just the espionage.

00:37:21.440 | - Let's take an example from American intelligence,

00:37:24.920 | from the CIA, 1950s, 1960s, into the 1970s, MKUltra.

00:37:29.920 | That is a secret program which was involved

00:37:35.800 | with what is generally categorized as mind control,

00:37:40.000 | which really means messing with people's heads.

00:37:44.800 | And what was the goal of that?

00:37:46.480 | Well, there seemed to have been lots of goals,

00:37:48.400 | but there was an FBI memo that was,

00:37:52.960 | I recently acquired, quite legally, by the way,

00:37:55.520 | it's declassified, but it's from 1949.

00:37:59.520 | So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence,

00:38:05.200 | and it's an FBI memo because the FBI, of course,

00:38:07.640 | very curious what the CIA is up to,

00:38:09.680 | and the FBI are not part of this meeting,

00:38:11.840 | but they have someone in,

00:38:13.040 | they're sort of spying on what's going on.

00:38:15.920 | So there was a meeting which was held

00:38:18.120 | in a private apartment in New York.

00:38:21.380 | So it's not held in any kind of,

00:38:25.480 | it's essentially never really happened

00:38:28.320 | because it's in somebody's house.

00:38:29.640 | But, and there are a couple of guys there from the CIA.

00:38:32.800 | One of them is Cleve Baxter.

00:38:35.100 | Cleve Baxter is the great godfather of the lie detector.

00:38:41.260 | Pretty much everything that we know

00:38:43.240 | or think we know about lie detectors today,

00:38:44.940 | they owe to Cleve Baxter.

00:38:46.540 | He's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel,

00:38:50.260 | but, which somehow was a derivative

00:38:52.940 | of his work on lie detectors.

00:38:55.180 | So these guys are there,

00:38:56.380 | and they're giving a talk to some military

00:38:58.740 | and other personnel, and there's certain parts

00:39:01.500 | of the document which were, of course, redacted,

00:39:04.140 | but you could figure out what it is

00:39:05.620 | that they're talking about.

00:39:06.860 | And they're talking about hypnotic suggestion,

00:39:09.580 | and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do

00:39:13.420 | with hypnotic suggestion.

00:39:14.960 | And two of the things they note is that one of the things

00:39:18.000 | we could potentially do is erase memories

00:39:20.500 | from people's minds and implant false memories.

00:39:24.980 | That would be really keen to do that.

00:39:26.780 | Just imagine how that would be done.

00:39:28.580 | So here to me is the interesting point.

00:39:32.100 | They're talking about this in 1949.

00:39:34.340 | MKUltra does not come along until really 1953,

00:39:38.020 | although there are all sorts of, you know,

00:39:39.740 | Artichoke and others.

00:39:42.100 | Everything is sort of leading up to that.

00:39:43.660 | It's simply an elaboration of programs

00:39:46.220 | that were already there.

00:39:47.420 | I don't think that it ultimately matters

00:39:51.140 | whether you can implant memories or erase memories.

00:39:56.140 | To me, the important part is they thought they could,

00:40:00.980 | and they were going to try to do it.

00:40:03.780 | And that eventually is what you find out

00:40:06.660 | in the efforts made during the 1950s and '60s

00:40:11.060 | through MKUltra, MKSurge, MKNaomi,

00:40:14.620 | and all the others that came out.

00:40:17.180 | That's one of the things they're working for.

00:40:19.420 | And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived,

00:40:23.840 | there's that whole question, is that you get someone

00:40:26.060 | to put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger,

00:40:29.060 | and then I remember it later.

00:40:30.500 | Yeah, you could, interestingly enough.

00:40:35.440 | So non-direct violence, controlling people's minds,

00:40:40.020 | controlling people's minds at scale,

00:40:42.480 | and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.

00:40:44.980 | Well, one person put it that the basic argument there,

00:40:47.180 | or the basic thing you were after,

00:40:48.500 | was to understand the architecture of the human mind,

00:40:51.820 | how it worked, how it put together,

00:40:53.780 | and then how you could take those pieces apart

00:40:56.500 | and assemble them in different ways.

00:40:58.300 | So this comes, this is where hypnosis comes in,

00:41:03.600 | which is a, was, then, still is, fairly spooky thing.

00:41:07.780 | Nobody's ever explained to me exactly what it is.

00:41:10.780 | The idea was that could you,

00:41:13.300 | you think of the whole possibilities in this case,

00:41:15.440 | could you create an alternate personality

00:41:18.060 | and use that alternate personality in an agent role,

00:41:26.440 | but then be able to turn it on and off,

00:41:29.580 | so subsequently the person,

00:41:31.580 | which that personality inhabited,

00:41:34.420 | was captured and interrogated, tortured,

00:41:39.160 | had their fingernails torn out,

00:41:40.660 | they would have no memory of it.

00:41:43.000 | They couldn't give any kind of secret away

00:41:44.680 | because it was embedded in some part of their brain

00:41:47.480 | where there was a completely different person.

00:41:50.160 | I mean, you can just imagine the possibilities

00:41:55.080 | that you can dream up.

00:41:55.920 | And again, it's not, I think,

00:41:57.880 | the question is to whether that is possible

00:42:01.880 | or whether it was done.

00:42:04.140 | Well, I suspect that both of those are true,

00:42:05.760 | but that you would try to do it.

00:42:07.920 | Then imagine the mischief that comes out of that.

00:42:10.960 | And one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint

00:42:13.680 | about MK, Ultra, and the rest

00:42:15.160 | is that you were having medical experiments,

00:42:18.600 | essentially, being carried out on people

00:42:20.900 | without their knowledge and against their will,

00:42:23.040 | which is, you know, a no-no.

00:42:25.880 | Yeah, the fact that you're willing to do medical experiments

00:42:28.480 | says something about what you're willing to do.

00:42:31.840 | And I'm sure that same spirit, innovative spirit,

00:42:35.980 | persists to this day.

00:42:39.980 | And maybe less so, I hope, less so in the United States,

00:42:46.000 | but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world.

00:42:50.880 | - Well, one thing that was learned,

00:42:52.800 | and the reason why most MK, Ultra,

00:42:54.920 | and similar records were destroyed

00:42:56.760 | on order in the early '70s,

00:43:00.080 | around the time the CIA became

00:43:02.360 | under a certain amount of scrutiny.

00:43:04.080 | Now, the mid '70s were not a good time for the agency

00:43:06.480 | because you had the church committee

00:43:07.840 | breathing down their neck.

00:43:09.360 | You had all of these assassins, you know.

00:43:11.080 | People were asking lots of questions.

00:43:12.800 | And so you need to dump this stuff

00:43:16.440 | because there's all kinds of,

00:43:17.640 | because you were committing crimes against American citizens.

00:43:22.080 | So let's eradicate it.

00:43:24.240 | And the important lesson to be learned

00:43:25.920 | is that never do this type of thing again,

00:43:28.880 | where at least in any way

00:43:30.560 | in which the agency's direct fingerprints are placed on it.

00:43:34.400 | You can pay people.

00:43:37.920 | You can subsidize research.

00:43:41.080 | You can set up venture capital firms.

00:43:44.000 | You got plenty of money.

00:43:45.800 | And you can funnel that money into the hands of people

00:43:48.460 | who will carry out this research privately.

00:43:51.760 | So if something goes wrong, you have perfect deniability.

00:43:55.880 | - On the topic of mice,

00:43:58.640 | on the topic of money, ideology, coercion, and ego,

00:44:01.640 | let me ask you about a conspiracy theory.

00:44:04.880 | So there is a conspiracy theory

00:44:07.200 | that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein

00:44:11.320 | at a high level, if we can just talk about that.

00:44:15.520 | Is that something that's at all even possible?

00:44:18.680 | That you have, basically, this would be for coercion.

00:44:22.280 | You get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous

00:44:26.920 | and then you collect evidence on them

00:44:28.680 | so that you can then have leverage on them.

00:44:30.840 | - Well, let's look at what Epstein was doing.

00:44:34.080 | He was a, well, he was a businessman

00:44:38.000 | who then also developed a very lucrative sideline

00:44:41.400 | in being a high-level procurer,

00:44:43.580 | basically in supplying young girls.

00:44:47.440 | And he also filmed much of that activity.

00:44:52.440 | I think his partner in this, Ghislaine,

00:45:01.860 | and I'm hoping I'm pronouncing her name correctly.

00:45:03.680 | - I think it's Ghislaine.

00:45:04.680 | - Ghislaine, well, I've heard it both ways,

00:45:06.680 | Ghislaine or Ghislaine, whichever it may be.

00:45:08.880 | I think her argument at one point was that,

00:45:10.480 | well, we did this to protect ourselves,

00:45:13.560 | but this type of thing has been done before.

00:45:15.720 | There's nothing new about this,

00:45:17.400 | getting influential people in compromising situations

00:45:20.440 | and filming them.

00:45:21.820 | I could give you another historical example of that.

00:45:26.840 | In late 1920, actually early 1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin,

00:45:31.840 | there was a very prominent sort of would-be psychic

00:45:37.480 | and occultist by the name of Erich Jan Hannesen.

00:45:40.520 | He had a private yacht, I think it was called the Seven Sins,

00:45:45.400 | and he hosted parties.

00:45:46.640 | He also had a whole club called the Palace of the Occult,

00:45:49.560 | which hosted parties where things went on,

00:45:52.200 | and there were cameras everywhere.

00:45:54.960 | He filmed important people.

00:45:57.600 | Guys like the brown shirt chief of Berlin

00:46:01.800 | in various states of undress and sexual Congress.

00:46:07.040 | And he did that for the purposes of blackmail.

00:46:11.840 | So in Epstein's case, he is a procurer of young girls

00:46:16.840 | to wealthy men, largely,

00:46:22.480 | and many of those events were recorded.

00:46:28.800 | Now, even if it wasn't his intention

00:46:33.280 | to use them for blackmail,

00:46:34.560 | think of what someone else could do

00:46:36.560 | because people know about this.

00:46:40.120 | So you can raise a question, is this not,

00:46:42.120 | Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert,

00:46:46.200 | but through his greedy perversion,

00:46:49.800 | he's now collecting information that could be useful.

00:46:52.480 | Who could that be useful to?

00:46:54.280 | Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew?

00:46:57.820 | Think of all the people who were there,

00:47:00.760 | and there were important people

00:47:04.280 | who went to Lolita Island.

00:47:07.560 | So if it isn't Epstein directly,

00:47:09.640 | he might have been being,

00:47:10.880 | I'm not trying to let him off the hook

00:47:12.880 | because I have anything for him.

00:47:14.600 | He was either running his own blackmail business

00:47:17.040 | or someone was using him as a front for that.

00:47:19.800 | I mean, I think we're kidding ourselves

00:47:21.520 | if we try to pretend that's not what was going on.

00:47:24.400 | - So you think even American intelligence agencies

00:47:27.400 | would be willing to swoop in

00:47:31.600 | and take advantage of a situation like that?

00:47:33.720 | - Well, you know.

00:47:36.040 | - Just in case.

00:47:36.860 | - American politicians could ultimately

00:47:38.760 | end up in a position to oversee things

00:47:40.820 | like intelligence budgets.

00:47:42.400 | One of them might even become director.

00:47:46.320 | You never know.

00:47:47.140 | You can never tell what some crazy president might do.

00:47:50.840 | It could be very,

00:47:52.380 | one of the guys who understood the part was J. Edgar Hoover.

00:47:55.480 | J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time

00:47:56.880 | collecting dossiers and politicians.

00:47:59.080 | How do you think he'd remain director of the FBI

00:48:02.200 | as long as he did?

00:48:04.320 | Because he systematically collected dirt on people.

00:48:09.320 | So there is a history of this type of thing.

00:48:15.840 | And again, you could argue that's partly for his protection

00:48:18.080 | to keep his job,

00:48:19.160 | to protect the sanctity and security of the bureau.

00:48:24.160 | You can find a million different ways to justify that.

00:48:28.520 | - It's really dark.

00:48:31.280 | - Well, there is that side to human nature.

00:48:35.920 | Let's put it that way.

00:48:37.240 | - Whether it's the CIA or the Krona,

00:48:39.320 | maybe that's what the president of the United States

00:48:42.600 | sees when they show up to office

00:48:44.320 | is all the stuff they have on him or her.

00:48:48.520 | And say that there's a internal mechanism of power

00:48:53.360 | that you don't wanna mess with.

00:48:54.960 | And so you will listen.

00:48:56.680 | Whether that internal mechanism of power

00:48:58.480 | is the military industrial complex or whatever,

00:49:00.560 | the bureaucracy of government.

00:49:02.840 | - Kind of actually the deep state.

00:49:04.280 | - The deep state.

00:49:05.120 | - The entrenched bureaucratic.

00:49:06.680 | Well, it's been said, and I think it's generally true,

00:49:09.640 | that bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures.

00:49:13.040 | It basically exists to perpetuate itself and to grow.

00:49:16.640 | I mean, nobody wants to go out of business.

00:49:19.480 | And of course, then you get all of these things

00:49:21.920 | like Pizzagate and accusations of one form or another.

00:49:26.840 | But here's an interesting thing to consider.

00:49:29.080 | Okay, and I want to argue that I'm not saying

00:49:31.120 | that Pizzagate in any way was real or QAnon had anything,

00:49:33.800 | but where do they get these ideas from?

00:49:36.040 | So let's ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist?

00:49:40.880 | Yeah.

00:49:43.680 | Do organized pedophile organizations exist?

00:49:49.560 | Yeah, they share information, pictures,

00:49:53.520 | they're out there on the dark web.

00:49:55.700 | They cooperate.

00:49:58.560 | So does child trafficking exist?

00:50:02.700 | Yeah, it does.

00:50:05.480 | So in other words, whether or not specific conspiracy

00:50:11.640 | theories about this or that group

00:50:13.960 | of organized pedophile cultists is real,

00:50:17.800 | all the ingredients for that to be real are there.

00:50:22.160 | Pedophiles exist, organized pedophilia exists,

00:50:27.040 | child and human trafficking exists.

00:50:30.220 | At some point, at some time,

00:50:34.400 | someone will put all of those together.

00:50:37.560 | In fact, certainly, they already have.

00:50:40.700 | - We'll jump around a little bit,

00:50:43.080 | but because your work is so fascinating

00:50:46.220 | and it covers so many topics.

00:50:47.960 | So let's, if we jump into the present

00:50:50.960 | with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group.

00:50:54.920 | - Bilderbergers.

00:50:56.720 | - So the elites, as I think you've referred to them.

00:51:00.080 | So this gathering of the elites.

00:51:01.920 | Can you just talk about them?

00:51:04.440 | What is this?

00:51:05.960 | - Well, first thing I have to point out

00:51:08.120 | is that Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization.

00:51:12.040 | It's where the Bohemian Club meets.

00:51:15.960 | It's that 2,700 acre old growth redwoods

00:51:20.800 | near north of San Francisco.

00:51:24.440 | The Bohemian Club began, I think we're back to the 1870s.

00:51:29.440 | Its initial members were mostly journalists.

00:51:33.020 | In fact, supposedly the name itself comes from,

00:51:36.680 | it was a term for an itinerant journalist

00:51:38.880 | who moved from paper to paper, it was called the Bohemian.

00:51:41.560 | And although I think there may be other reasons

00:51:47.520 | why that particular term was chosen as well,

00:51:50.160 | but I think the original five members,

00:51:52.200 | there were like three journalists,

00:51:54.460 | there was a merchant and there was a vintner guy

00:51:57.320 | who owned a vineyard, it's California, how surprising.

00:52:00.680 | None of them terribly wealthy,

00:52:02.480 | but they formed an exclusive men's club.

00:52:05.440 | Was and still is.

00:52:06.920 | Nothing terribly unusual about that at the time.

00:52:10.000 | But it became fashionable, and as it became fashionable,

00:52:12.840 | more wealthy people wanted to become part of it.

00:52:15.520 | And the thing about getting rich guys to join your club

00:52:18.600 | is what do rich guys have?

00:52:19.600 | Money.

00:52:20.440 | And of course, it's one of those rich guys

00:52:21.900 | that bought "Bohemian Grove"

00:52:24.000 | where now you build your old boy's summer camp,

00:52:28.160 | which is what it is.

00:52:29.420 | They got cabins with goofy names.

00:52:31.760 | They go there, they perform skits,

00:52:34.600 | they dress up in costumes.

00:52:37.440 | True, some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifices,

00:52:40.500 | but it's just a skit.

00:52:42.720 | What's really going on there?

00:52:44.040 | So on the one hand, you can argue,

00:52:45.560 | look, it's a rich guys club.

00:52:49.040 | They like to get out there.

00:52:50.920 | The whole motto of the place

00:52:52.220 | is weaving spiders come not here.

00:52:54.840 | So we're never gonna talk about business.

00:52:57.160 | We just wanna get out into the woods, put on some robes,

00:53:01.440 | burn a couple of effigies in front of the owl,

00:53:04.060 | have a good time, probably get drunk a lot.

00:53:06.620 | - What's with the robes?

00:53:07.740 | Why do they do weird, creepy shit?

00:53:10.100 | Why do they put on a mask and the robe

00:53:12.180 | and do the plays and the owl and the sacrificing,

00:53:17.180 | I don't know, whatever.

00:53:19.540 | - Why do you have a giant owl?

00:53:21.220 | I mean, why do you do that?

00:53:23.340 | - Well, what is that in human nature?

00:53:24.540 | 'Cause I don't think rich people

00:53:25.940 | are different than not rich people.

00:53:28.900 | What is it about wealth and power

00:53:31.380 | that brings that out of people?

00:53:33.700 | - Well, part of it is the ritual aspect of it.

00:53:36.560 | And that clearly is a ritual.

00:53:39.700 | Rituals are pretty simple.

00:53:41.060 | Rituals are just a series of actions performed

00:53:43.980 | in a precise sequence to produce an effect.

00:53:49.460 | That describes a lot of things.

00:53:50.820 | It describes plays, symphonies,

00:53:54.260 | every movie you've ever seen.

00:53:56.100 | A movie is a ritual.

00:53:58.180 | It is a series of actions carried out

00:54:00.700 | in a precise sequence to produce an effect

00:54:03.500 | with an added soundtrack to cue you

00:54:05.260 | to what emotions you're supposed to be feeling.

00:54:06.900 | - It's a great idea.

00:54:07.860 | So the rich people should just go to a movie

00:54:09.820 | or maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert.

00:54:11.380 | Like, why do you have to put--

00:54:12.780 | - Well--

00:54:13.940 | - Why the owl thing?

00:54:14.940 | - Part of it is to create this kind of sense,

00:54:17.940 | I suppose, of group solidarity.

00:54:20.300 | You know, you're all going to appear.

00:54:23.020 | Also, a way of sort of transcending yourself in a way.

00:54:28.020 | You know, when you put on the robe,

00:54:29.860 | it's like putting on a uniform.

00:54:32.340 | You are in some way a different or more important person.

00:54:37.300 | It's a ritual.

00:54:38.500 | Okay, the key ritual at Bohemian Grove

00:54:41.300 | is a thing called the cremation of care.

00:54:43.780 | And cremation, and that's what it's supposed to be.

00:54:46.340 | We're gonna put all of our, you know,

00:54:47.460 | we're rich, important people.

00:54:48.740 | We have to make all of these critical decisions.

00:54:50.700 | Life is so hard.

00:54:52.220 | So we're gonna go out here in the woods

00:54:53.900 | and we're gonna kick back

00:54:55.700 | and we're all gonna gather around the lake

00:54:57.580 | and then we're gonna carry, you know,

00:54:59.900 | it's wicker, it's not a real person.

00:55:02.740 | And how would you know?

00:55:07.140 | And then we're gonna, and we're gonna,

00:55:08.100 | and this is the cremation of our care.

00:55:09.700 | But it's a ritual which is meant to produce

00:55:12.220 | a sense of solidarity and relief

00:55:14.420 | among those people who are there.

00:55:16.460 | The question comes down with the rituals

00:55:19.380 | is how seriously do you take them?

00:55:21.460 | How important is this to the people who carry them out?

00:55:25.300 | And the interesting answer to that

00:55:27.980 | is that for some people it's, you know,

00:55:29.700 | for some people it's just boring.

00:55:32.020 | I mean, there are probably people standing around the aisle

00:55:34.100 | who think this is ridiculous

00:55:35.540 | and can't wait for it to get over with.

00:55:37.260 | There are other people who are kind of excited about it

00:55:39.140 | and get caught up into it.

00:55:40.940 | But other people can take it very seriously.

00:55:44.140 | It's all a matter of the intention that you have

00:55:47.820 | about what the ritual means.

00:55:51.620 | And I don't mean to suggest by that

00:55:55.060 | that there's anything necessarily sinister

00:55:59.300 | about what's going on.

00:56:00.540 | But it is clearly a ritual carried out

00:56:04.060 | for some kind of group reinforcing purpose.

00:56:07.980 | And you're absolutely right.

00:56:08.980 | You don't have to do it that way.

00:56:11.540 | That's not an, I mean, I've gone to summer camps

00:56:13.500 | and we never carried out mock sacrifices

00:56:15.980 | in front of an owl.

00:56:17.540 | All right, you know, we did all those other things.

00:56:20.220 | We didn't even have any robes either.

00:56:21.660 | So it goes beyond merely a rich guy's summer camp,

00:56:26.660 | although that's an aspect of it.

00:56:28.860 | But it also, I think, often obscures it.

00:56:32.420 | Focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club

00:56:37.300 | ignores that the club is around all the time.

00:56:40.020 | That's what's at the center of this.

00:56:42.100 | It is the club and its members.

00:56:45.060 | So despite all the talk about,

00:56:47.980 | no, no weaving spiders coming around here,

00:56:50.300 | one of the other features of the summer meeting

00:56:52.660 | are things called lakeside talks.

00:56:54.820 | And this, often people are invited to go there.

00:56:57.780 | And one of the people who was invited,

00:56:59.900 | I think around 1968, was Richard Nixon,

00:57:03.300 | who was making his political comeback.

00:57:05.820 | And he was invited to give a talk

00:57:08.220 | where very important people are listening.

00:57:12.180 | And Nixon, in his memoirs, realized what was going on.

00:57:15.380 | He was being auditioned as to whether or not

00:57:17.740 | he was going to be right.

00:57:18.660 | He recognized that that was really the beginning

00:57:21.180 | of his second presidential campaign.

00:57:23.180 | He was being vetted.

00:57:24.780 | So one of the main theories,

00:57:31.180 | call it a conspiracy theory or not,

00:57:33.100 | about the Bohemian Club and the gatherings

00:57:35.460 | is that people of wealth and influence gather together.

00:57:39.620 | And whether or not it's part of the agenda or not,

00:57:44.300 | inevitably you're going to talk about things of interest.

00:57:47.620 | But to me, the mere fact that you invite people in,

00:57:49.980 | political leaders, to give lakeside talks

00:57:52.060 | means that there are weaving spiders which are going on.

00:57:55.380 | And it is a perfect private venue

00:57:59.620 | to vet people for political office.

00:58:04.180 | I mean, yeah, where else are you going to do it

00:58:05.940 | if you're interested in vetting,

00:58:07.580 | if you're interested in powerful people selecting?

00:58:10.620 | - Well, see, here's the question.

00:58:11.820 | Are these guys actually picking who's going to be president?

00:58:14.580 | Is that the decision which is being made?

00:58:16.540 | Or are they just deciding what horses they're going to back?

00:58:21.140 | - Right.

00:58:22.060 | - I think the latter is the simpler version of it,

00:58:24.340 | but it doesn't mean it's the other way around.

00:58:25.940 | But these are the kinds of, you know,

00:58:28.740 | I mean, Nixon was, you know,

00:58:30.180 | there was the whole 1960 thing.

00:58:33.500 | So he's the new Nixon, remember this?

00:58:37.180 | And this is where the new Nixon

00:58:39.660 | apparently made a good impression on the right people

00:58:42.580 | because he did indeed get the Republican nomination

00:58:46.380 | and he did indeed become president.

00:58:49.820 | - Well, there could also be a much more

00:58:52.140 | innocent explanation of really it's powerful people

00:58:55.860 | getting together and having conversations

00:58:57.460 | and through that conversation,

00:58:58.820 | influencing each other's view of the world.

00:59:01.380 | And just having a legitimate discussion of policies.

00:59:05.940 | - But why wouldn't they?

00:59:07.620 | I mean, why would you assume

00:59:08.460 | that people are not going to do that?

00:59:09.940 | - It's the owl thing with the robes, like what?

00:59:13.740 | - Why the owl and why the robes?

00:59:16.260 | - Which is why it becomes really compelling

00:59:19.260 | when guys like Alex Jones,

00:59:21.260 | forgive me, but I've not watched his documentary,

00:59:25.060 | I probably should at some point,

00:59:26.340 | about the Bohemian Grove,

00:59:28.380 | where he claims that there's a Satanist human sacrifice

00:59:33.380 | of I think children.

00:59:37.780 | And I think that's quite a popular conspiracy theory

00:59:43.420 | or it has lost popularity.

00:59:45.140 | It kind of like transformed itself

00:59:47.060 | into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories.

00:59:51.220 | But I mean, can you speak to that conspiracy?

00:59:54.500 | - Let's put it this way,

00:59:55.340 | the general public rich people are inherently suspicious.

00:59:57.860 | - Yeah.

00:59:58.700 | - Let's put it that way.

00:59:59.980 | First of all, they've got all that money

01:00:03.100 | and exactly how did one obtain it?

01:00:06.940 | And I do not of necessity adhere to the view

01:00:11.380 | that behind every great fortune, there is a great crime,

01:00:14.060 | but there often are.

01:00:15.300 | There are ways in which it's acquired.

01:00:18.100 | But I think it's,

01:00:19.180 | one of the things I think that can happen

01:00:24.340 | is particularly when people acquire a huge amount of money.

01:00:27.380 | And I won't name any names,

01:00:32.180 | but let's say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere

01:00:35.020 | who coming from no particular background of wealth

01:00:37.580 | suddenly find themselves with $600 billion.

01:00:39.880 | Well, this is the question you would have to ask yourself,

01:00:44.580 | why me?

01:00:45.580 | Because you're one of the rare tiny group of human beings

01:00:49.740 | who will ever have that kind of wealth in your hands.

01:00:53.820 | Even if you are a convinced atheist,

01:00:56.460 | I think at some point you have to begin to suspect

01:00:59.260 | that the cosmic muffin, providence, whatever it is,

01:01:02.180 | put this money in your hands to do what?

01:01:04.920 | Achieve great things.

01:01:06.780 | Just think of all the stuff.

01:01:08.200 | So you're gonna start a foundation

01:01:09.680 | and you're gonna start backing all the things that you like.

01:01:12.680 | This is, I think there's an element of ego

01:01:15.500 | that comes in with it as well.

01:01:18.920 | And again, it may not be so much what the rich person

01:01:23.920 | with a huge amount of money at their disposal

01:01:27.440 | and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it

01:01:33.720 | can be influenced by others.

01:01:38.340 | It's always that question as to

01:01:41.880 | who's actually manipulating these events.

01:01:47.360 | What's going on in that regard?

01:01:49.040 | And in some way they can be a very useful sucker.

01:01:51.520 | Find somebody with a lot of money

01:01:53.000 | and get them to finance the things

01:01:56.960 | that you want them to do.

01:01:58.320 | The Bohemian Club is, I don't think in and of itself,

01:02:03.800 | inherently evil or sinister,

01:02:06.560 | but it means that there are lots of different people in it

01:02:09.080 | who have different agendas.

01:02:10.400 | It goes back to what I said about how somebody feels

01:02:12.620 | about the cremation of care ritual.

01:02:15.520 | This is either just a waste of time,

01:02:17.400 | it's just some sort of silly thing that we're doing,

01:02:19.680 | or it is something of great importance,

01:02:24.100 | perhaps even mystical or religious importance,

01:02:30.060 | because that's ostensibly what it's pretending to be.

01:02:35.120 | It's always this question as to what degree

01:02:36.640 | you begin to play and the play becomes serious.

01:02:40.120 | That tends to happen a lot.

01:02:43.200 | - You've studied a lot of cults and occultism.

01:02:47.960 | What do you think is the power of that mystical experience?

01:02:52.480 | - Well, what is broadly referred to,

01:02:54.760 | we'll get into, what's occultism?

01:02:56.440 | What's the occult?

01:02:57.280 | The occult is the hidden, is all it really means,

01:02:59.600 | specifically hidden from sight.

01:03:01.200 | And the basis of it is the idea that what is hidden?

01:03:08.560 | Well, what is hidden from us is most of the world,

01:03:11.860 | most of reality.

01:03:13.040 | So the basic concept within occultism,

01:03:15.960 | the basic concept within most religions,

01:03:17.880 | which are approved forms of occultism,

01:03:21.080 | is that the world, the physical world that we are aware of,

01:03:25.360 | is only a very small part of a much larger reality.

01:03:30.360 | And that what the methods and practices of occultism

01:03:40.000 | arguably do is to allow someone to either enter

01:03:44.420 | into this larger reality or to access that larger reality

01:03:48.840 | for purposes to be exploited here.

01:03:53.420 | The most interesting statement about,

01:03:54.960 | and a key element of this becomes the thing called magic.

01:03:58.240 | Now we all know magic, you know,

01:03:59.580 | it's a guy standing on stage performing a trick.

01:04:01.980 | But the interesting thing about a stage magician

01:04:07.060 | is that a stage magician is,

01:04:09.140 | we know when we're watching this, that it's a trick.

01:04:14.060 | Yet we can't really figure out, if he does it well,

01:04:19.060 | how that trick is being accomplished

01:04:21.020 | because it seems to defy physical laws.

01:04:25.380 | And that's what's fascinating about it.

01:04:28.020 | So even though you know it's a trick,

01:04:29.660 | if you can't figure it out,

01:04:30.860 | it has this kind of power of fascination,

01:04:33.600 | but it's mimicking something.

01:04:36.100 | Stage magic is mimicking real magic.

01:04:40.700 | So it's real magic.

01:04:43.700 | Well, let's go back to Alistair Crowley

01:04:45.380 | 'cause you know, he always has to come.

01:04:46.980 | We knew he was gonna come up at some point in this,

01:04:49.620 | earlier than that, 'cause he always does.

01:04:51.500 | - All roads lead to Alistair.

01:04:52.780 | - All roads lead to Alistair Crowley.

01:04:55.420 | Alistair Crowley, and I've said this enough

01:04:57.100 | so I should be able to get it right,

01:04:58.140 | but I'm paraphrasing here.

01:04:59.340 | He goes, magic, which of course he spelled with a K to L

01:05:03.540 | or CK, is the art and science

01:05:08.540 | of causing change to occur in conformity with will.

01:05:13.620 | So in a way that's sort of mind over matter,

01:05:17.440 | but it's the idea that one can, through will,

01:05:22.380 | through intention,

01:05:24.220 | bend reality to make something happen.

01:05:32.700 | Somebody once put it this way, it's tipping the luck plane.

01:05:36.260 | And so, you know, you've got some kind of a level plane.

01:05:38.660 | What you're trying to do is just tip it just a little bit

01:05:40.620 | so the marble rolls over one side or another.

01:05:45.620 | Now that presupposes a lot of things,

01:05:47.780 | that is there a luck plane?

01:05:49.060 | I don't know, but you know, it's a good sort of idea to have

01:05:52.620 | but, and here again, don't become overly bothered

01:05:59.280 | trying to figure out whether you actually can bend reality.

01:06:04.280 | Become bothered by the fact that there are people

01:06:07.840 | who believe that they can

01:06:09.680 | and will go to great efforts to do so,

01:06:13.440 | and will often believe they have succeeded.

01:06:17.080 | So it's this effort to make things occur

01:06:24.160 | in a particular way, maybe just to sort of nudge reality

01:06:29.120 | in one little way or another.

01:06:31.320 | And that's where things like rituals come in.

01:06:33.700 | Rituals are a way of focusing will and attention.

01:06:37.240 | We're all there, we're all thinking about the same thing.

01:06:40.180 | And you have to imagine just how, you know,

01:06:43.960 | the pervasiveness of what could be called

01:06:46.360 | that kind of magical thinking

01:06:48.240 | that we'd have is everywhere.

01:06:50.180 | So let me give you an example.

01:06:51.800 | You ever attended a high school football pep rally?

01:06:55.180 | Think of what's going on there.

01:06:59.240 | Okay, your team is going to battle the other team.

01:07:03.560 | You've now assembled everyone in the gymnasium.

01:07:06.840 | You've got people who are dancing around

01:07:08.800 | in animal totem costumes.

01:07:11.440 | And what are you chanting?

01:07:13.000 | Everyone is supposed to chant that, you know,

01:07:15.200 | that the other team dies,

01:07:16.760 | okay, that you will be horribly defeated

01:07:18.280 | and that our team will be victorious.

01:07:20.140 | That is a magic ritual.

01:07:23.500 | The idea is it becomes into this idea

01:07:26.680 | that's very popularly about visualizing things,

01:07:29.880 | visualizing, manifesting, I love this term.

01:07:32.720 | You need to manifest your success.

01:07:34.440 | Well, that's just magic.

01:07:36.720 | That is trying to cause change in conformity with will.

01:07:41.720 | So these things can happen

01:07:45.520 | without you being even consciously aware of what's going on

01:07:50.520 | and you don't need to be

01:07:53.840 | because if you're all a part of the mob,

01:07:57.440 | which is there in the gymnasium

01:08:00.000 | and you get into this and you get worked up,

01:08:02.560 | an occultist would argue what you're doing

01:08:06.080 | is you're creating a huge amount of energy.

01:08:08.560 | All of these people are putting energy into something

01:08:10.720 | and that energy goes somewhere.

01:08:13.280 | And maybe you can, maybe, just maybe, you actually can

01:08:17.920 | slightly increase the chances of your team's victory.

01:08:22.720 | Of course, your opponents are having their own ritual

01:08:25.440 | at the same time, so whoever has the bigger mojo

01:08:28.120 | will apparently win on the team.

01:08:29.760 | - So that's a, I would say, trivial example of that,

01:08:34.200 | but a clear one.

01:08:36.440 | I do believe that there's incredible power

01:08:38.960 | in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality.

01:08:43.160 | I think that's probably one of the things

01:08:44.560 | that made human civilization what it is.

01:08:47.600 | Groups of people being able to believe a thing

01:08:52.600 | and bring that belief into reality.

01:08:54.440 | - Yes, that's, you're exactly right.

01:08:55.920 | Bring to conceive of something

01:08:58.360 | and then through intention, will,

01:09:04.120 | to manifest that into this realm.

01:09:07.920 | - And of course, that power of the collective mind

01:09:12.920 | can be leveraged by charismatic leaders

01:09:15.920 | to do all kinds of stuff,

01:09:17.240 | where you get cults that do, you know,

01:09:21.280 | horrible things or anything.

01:09:24.360 | - There might be a cult that does good things.

01:09:25.800 | I don't know, it depends.

01:09:27.400 | - We usually don't call them cults.

01:09:28.220 | - We don't call those cults.

01:09:29.160 | - Exactly, 100%.

01:09:31.720 | - Without endorsing this entirely,

01:09:33.560 | an interesting, you know, one of the questions,

01:09:35.080 | what's the difference between a cult and a religion?

01:09:37.520 | And it has been said that in the case of a cult,

01:09:44.160 | there's always someone at the top

01:09:48.480 | who knows what's going on, generally,

01:09:51.160 | who knows it's a scam.

01:09:52.460 | In a religion, that person is dead.

01:09:56.720 | So, see, I've just managed to insult every single religion.

01:10:01.720 | And, but it's an interesting way of thinking about it

01:10:05.960 | because I think there is some degree

01:10:08.480 | of accuracy in that statement.

01:10:11.080 | - Do you think, actually,

01:10:12.040 | the interesting psychological question is,

01:10:14.680 | in cults, do you think the person at the top

01:10:17.380 | always knows that it's a scam?

01:10:20.560 | Do you think there's something about the human mind

01:10:22.160 | where you gradually begin to believe--

01:10:24.400 | - Begin to believe your own bullshit?

01:10:25.800 | - Yeah.

01:10:26.640 | - Yes, that's--

01:10:27.460 | - That seems to be--

01:10:28.300 | - That, again, is part of magic, I think,

01:10:29.400 | is believing your own bullshit.

01:10:31.000 | It doesn't necessarily mean

01:10:33.520 | that the head of the cult realized,

01:10:35.840 | but there's someone, maybe the second,

01:10:38.680 | you know, I always sort of look in the lieutenants.

01:10:41.080 | Someone probably has an idea about what's going on.

01:10:49.800 | The other thing that seems to be a kind of dead giveaway

01:10:53.440 | for what we would call a cult

01:10:54.600 | is what's called excessive reverence for the leader.

01:10:58.600 | People just believe everything these people say.

01:11:02.680 | I'll give you an example.

01:11:05.000 | The first time I ever encountered anything like that

01:11:07.320 | was in Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s.

01:11:12.040 | I was going to grad school,

01:11:13.560 | and there was a particular cult locally,

01:11:17.800 | which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun.

01:11:19.960 | And it was the same, so there was some guy who was,

01:11:24.440 | you know, among the other things,

01:11:27.360 | followers were convinced to hand over all their money

01:11:31.080 | and personal belongings to him.

01:11:34.200 | I believe he used part of that money to buy a yacht with.

01:11:37.040 | Anyway, a lot of it went to him.

01:11:41.000 | And then, of course, working for free

01:11:43.480 | upon different cult-owned business enterprises,

01:11:46.400 | of which there are several,

01:11:48.440 | and there was a person I knew

01:11:49.800 | who became a devoted follower of this,

01:11:52.000 | and it was, all I could think of at one point

01:11:56.880 | was ask them, "What the hell is the matter with you?

01:11:59.880 | "I mean, have you lost your mind?

01:12:03.200 | "Why would you, what is it that this person

01:12:06.280 | "can possibly be providing that you essentially

01:12:09.520 | "are going to become a slave to them?"

01:12:11.120 | Which is what they were doing.

01:12:12.780 | And I actually give that credit in a way

01:12:15.600 | of sort of sparking my whole interest

01:12:18.000 | in things like secret societies.

01:12:20.960 | And here again, as a disclaimer,

01:12:22.880 | I am not now, nor have I ever been,

01:12:24.880 | the member of any fraternal organization,

01:12:26.880 | secret society, or cult that I know of.

01:12:29.100 | And that's what interests me about them.

01:12:35.180 | Because I'm just always trying to figure out

01:12:38.280 | why people do these things.

01:12:39.960 | Like I said, why the robes and the owl?

01:12:42.780 | Why? - Yeah.

01:12:44.320 | - Why do you do that?

01:12:46.080 | And it's trying to figure it out.

01:12:49.000 | I mean, I couldn't even hack the Boy Scouts, okay?

01:12:51.280 | That was too much of there.

01:12:52.360 | Because to me, you join an organization,

01:12:54.400 | and the first thing that comes along

01:12:55.560 | is there's somebody, there are rules,

01:12:57.000 | and someone is telling you what to do, okay?

01:12:59.440 | I don't like people telling me what to do.

01:13:01.720 | Spent much of my life trying to avoid that

01:13:03.280 | as much as possible.

01:13:05.040 | And join a cult, there's gonna be someone

01:13:07.280 | telling you what to do.

01:13:08.480 | Join the Bohemian Club, and there's gonna be someone

01:13:13.000 | telling you what to do.

01:13:15.080 | And obviously, a lot of people

01:13:16.720 | really get something out of that.

01:13:20.480 | It becomes, in some ways, it's sort of necessary

01:13:23.220 | for them to function.

01:13:24.920 | But I do not understand it, and my study of it

01:13:28.240 | is a personal error to try to understand

01:13:31.240 | why people do that.

01:13:32.960 | - And there's so many reasons.

01:13:34.680 | Primary of which, I would say, is the desire

01:13:39.400 | in the human heart to belong.

01:13:42.000 | - Yes. - Right.

01:13:44.080 | - And the dark forms that it takes

01:13:47.280 | throughout human history, recent human histories,

01:13:50.320 | something I'd love to talk to you a bit about.

01:13:52.640 | If we can go back to the beginning of the 20th century,

01:13:57.000 | on the German side, you've described

01:13:59.520 | how secret societies like the Thule Society

01:14:02.240 | lay the foundation for Nazi ideology.

01:14:04.740 | Can you, through that lens, from that perspective,

01:14:07.740 | describe the rise of the Nazi Party?

01:14:10.880 | - Well, I guess we could start with

01:14:12.120 | what on Earth is the Thule Society?

01:14:14.980 | So the Thule Society was a small German occult society.

01:14:21.400 | That is, they studied metaphysics,

01:14:27.120 | another fancy word for occultism,

01:14:29.580 | that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918.

01:14:36.040 | The key figure behind it was a German esotericist

01:14:41.040 | by the name of Rudolf von Zebotendorf, okay?

01:14:50.840 | Not his real name.

01:14:52.040 | His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer.

01:14:54.120 | He was adopted by a German nobleman

01:14:57.240 | and got the name von Zebotendorf,

01:15:00.040 | and I like to say that name.

01:15:02.400 | So I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters

01:15:06.480 | who show up and do things,

01:15:07.780 | and trying to figure out who these people are.

01:15:11.240 | So we're working up in the years

01:15:12.400 | sort of prior to the First World War.

01:15:14.200 | So a decade or so prior to World War I,

01:15:17.240 | he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire.

01:15:19.540 | Turkey, there was none in the Ottoman Empire,

01:15:25.800 | which was a fairly tumultuous place,

01:15:29.240 | because in 1908 and 1909,

01:15:31.640 | there was the Young Turk Revolution,

01:15:34.200 | and you had a kind of military coup,

01:15:38.160 | which effectively overthrew the Ottoman sultan

01:15:43.160 | and installed a military junta,

01:15:46.920 | which would go on during the First World War

01:15:49.000 | to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian genocide.

01:15:53.480 | Eventually, he created a genocidal military regime,

01:15:57.000 | which would lead the country into disastrous First World War

01:16:00.560 | which would destroy the Ottoman Empire,

01:16:03.280 | out of which modern Turkey emerges, yada, yada, yada.

01:16:06.120 | - And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here,

01:16:08.160 | which is that you refer to the intelligence agencies

01:16:11.640 | as being exceptionally successful,

01:16:13.880 | and here in the case of the Young Turks

01:16:16.160 | being also very successful in doing the genocide,

01:16:22.840 | meaning they've achieved the greatest impact,

01:16:27.720 | even though the impact on the scale of good to evil

01:16:31.940 | tends towards evil.

01:16:33.160 | - It's one of those things that often comes out

01:16:34.800 | of revolutionary situations.

01:16:36.480 | Revolutions always seek to make things better, don't they?

01:16:40.520 | We're going to take a bad old regime,

01:16:42.440 | you know, the sultan does, you know,

01:16:44.960 | and the sultan was bad, I think it's fairly stated.

01:16:50.560 | Abdul Hamid II was not a, wasn't called a red sultan

01:16:55.240 | because of his favorite color type of thing.

01:16:57.400 | And the idea is that they were going to improve,

01:17:02.960 | they were now going to, you know,

01:17:05.320 | the Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire,

01:17:08.120 | they were going to try to equalize

01:17:10.080 | and bring in the different groups,

01:17:12.920 | and none of that happened, it became worse.

01:17:16.520 | Okay, in the same way that you could argue

01:17:19.400 | that the goal of Russian revolutionaries

01:17:21.360 | was to get rid of the bad, old, incompetent,

01:17:23.540 | medieval czarist regime

01:17:25.040 | and to bring in a new, great, shining future,

01:17:28.080 | and it became even more authoritarian.

01:17:34.040 | And the crimes of the imperial Russian regime

01:17:36.520 | pale in significance of what would follow,

01:17:38.520 | in the same way that the crimes of Abdul Hamid pale

01:17:41.680 | to when you get to the Young Turks.

01:17:44.360 | But that wasn't necessarily the intention.

01:17:48.000 | But, von Zappotendorf was a German businessman

01:17:51.560 | who's working in this period,

01:17:53.240 | and the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire

01:17:55.200 | in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue.

01:18:00.200 | You know, all kinds of interesting things about it.

01:18:03.280 | The Young Turk Revolution is essentially a military coup,

01:18:07.160 | but it is plotted in Masonic lodges.

01:18:12.160 | Okay, I know, technically Masonic lodges

01:18:14.440 | are never supposed to be involved in politics,

01:18:16.440 | but they are.

01:18:18.800 | Or, you know, the lodge meeting breaks up

01:18:22.040 | and then you plot the revolution.

01:18:23.600 | So, same group of people, but it's not technically.

01:18:26.480 | But yes, and there's the Macedonia Risorsa Lodge

01:18:30.760 | in Thessaloniki was ground zero

01:18:33.800 | for plotting this military coup

01:18:39.440 | that was supposed to improve the empire.

01:18:41.480 | Zappotendorf is, in one way or another,

01:18:44.400 | mixed up in all of this,

01:18:45.600 | or at least he's an observer of it.

01:18:47.200 | Plus, he's initiated into the Masonic lodges.

01:18:51.440 | And interestingly enough,

01:18:54.640 | the fellow who initiates him

01:18:56.160 | into one of these Eastern lodges

01:18:58.400 | is a Jewish merchant by the name of Ter-Moudi,

01:19:01.040 | and who's also a Kabbalist.

01:19:06.400 | So, Zappotendorf is very, very interested in the occult.

01:19:11.040 | He's initiated into Eastern Masonic lodges

01:19:13.600 | in a period when those same lodges

01:19:15.120 | are being used as a center for political intrigue.

01:19:20.120 | He also apparently is involved in gun running,

01:19:26.000 | which in revolutionary periods is, you know,

01:19:28.240 | there's a lot of money to be made off of that.

01:19:30.560 | So, he's connected to various dark businesses

01:19:36.520 | in a tumultuous time,

01:19:39.000 | with connections to politicized Freemasonry and the occult.

01:19:44.000 | Now, in the course of the First World War,

01:19:51.800 | he returns to Germany.

01:19:54.960 | He just shows up.

01:19:56.800 | And it would be my operative suspicion,

01:20:04.480 | or theory, that Zappotendorf was working for someone.

01:20:09.480 | I don't think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord.

01:20:12.800 | Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire

01:20:14.920 | and return to that place?

01:20:16.240 | Who's behind him?

01:20:19.560 | Well, maybe no one, but maybe someone,

01:20:25.280 | because he does seem to have money at his disposal.

01:20:28.120 | And he comes into Munich,

01:20:29.200 | and he basically takes over

01:20:30.400 | this small sort of occult study group.

01:20:32.520 | Now, the interesting thing is that the Thule Society

01:20:35.480 | is really just a branch of another existing,

01:20:41.360 | what's called an Areosophist Order,

01:20:45.480 | a thing called the German Order, or the Germanen Orden,

01:20:50.240 | which is centered in Berlin.

01:20:51.920 | But for some reason, he doesn't want his group

01:20:56.520 | to be connected by name with the Germanen Orden,

01:21:00.560 | so Thule Society, Thule in this case

01:21:03.200 | is a reference to supposedly

01:21:05.760 | a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race.

01:21:10.760 | Okay, apparently they were all snow people

01:21:13.440 | who wandered out of the snow at some point.

01:21:15.920 | It's kind of like a frozen Atlantis.

01:21:18.120 | So I mentioned these people, the Areosophists,

01:21:22.640 | who, which is, you have to practice saying that.

01:21:25.040 | So what are they?

01:21:26.440 | Well, they're a kind of racist,

01:21:30.240 | Germanic offshoot of theosophy.

01:21:33.280 | And I know I'm explaining one thing to explain something,

01:21:38.520 | but there's no other way to do this.

01:21:39.880 | So theosophy was 19th century,

01:21:43.040 | very popular and widely modeled occult belief

01:21:46.000 | that was founded by a Russian woman

01:21:47.320 | by the name of Helena Blavatsky.

01:21:49.160 | She was a medium psychic.

01:21:54.000 | She supposedly got channelings

01:21:55.520 | from the ascended masters.

01:21:57.560 | The basic story there,

01:21:58.720 | they're all of the ascended masters,

01:22:00.240 | which are mystical beings

01:22:01.480 | that may or may not have once been human.

01:22:03.640 | They live inside the Himalayas

01:22:05.480 | or they float among them on a cloud

01:22:08.200 | and they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity.

01:22:13.200 | What Blavatsky did was to take Western esotericism

01:22:18.200 | and blend it with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism,

01:22:21.560 | which became very, very sexy in the West, still is.

01:22:25.080 | Buddhism attracts a lot of people because,

01:22:26.600 | well, it's Buddhism.

01:22:28.080 | It's different, see?

01:22:29.240 | So the Mahatmas, the ascended masters

01:22:33.920 | were sending her messages,

01:22:35.120 | despite the fact that she was later proven

01:22:36.920 | pretty much to be a fraud

01:22:38.080 | and writing the letters herself.

01:22:40.240 | Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine

01:22:43.680 | and it's been widely modified and copied since then.

01:22:46.520 | So an idea in theosophy

01:22:49.920 | was that human spiritual evolution

01:22:52.600 | was tied to physical evolution.

01:22:55.480 | So in the case of Blavatsky,

01:22:59.680 | Blavatsky never said that Aryans, white people,

01:23:03.560 | anything out this were superior.

01:23:05.640 | She talked about the different root races,

01:23:09.240 | but it's just her version of it.

01:23:11.840 | It's just total gobbledygook

01:23:13.200 | that seems to include everyone.

01:23:15.280 | I'd defy you to make much sense out of it.

01:23:17.400 | But in the early 20th century,

01:23:20.800 | there were different sort of,

01:23:22.800 | one of the things that became fashionable,

01:23:26.400 | not terribly popular.

01:23:27.800 | These are small movements with the idea that,

01:23:30.000 | well, Germany is a new upcoming country.

01:23:34.480 | And part of this, I think,

01:23:36.160 | was really trying to define who the Germans were.

01:23:40.040 | Because remember, the German Empire,

01:23:45.880 | Germany as a political state

01:23:47.200 | doesn't come into existence until 1871.

01:23:49.960 | Prior to that, Germany was a geographic expression,

01:23:53.200 | a vaguen, which described a large area in Central Europe

01:23:57.920 | where a lot of people who wore leather shorts

01:24:01.640 | or something like that,

01:24:05.920 | and spoke similar German dialects were nominally Germans,

01:24:09.800 | but they might be Prussians or Bavarians or,

01:24:12.920 | they came in all sorts of varieties and religion.

01:24:16.600 | There was no German identity.

01:24:19.880 | But something very similar happened in Italy

01:24:21.320 | in the same period.

01:24:22.280 | I mean, you know, there weren't Italians.

01:24:24.720 | There were Sardinians and there were Romans

01:24:26.720 | and there were Sicilians.

01:24:29.040 | Umbrians spoke, again, dialects of a similar language,

01:24:33.240 | but had never lived, you know,

01:24:34.800 | not since the Roman Empire under a single state

01:24:37.560 | and really didn't think of themselves as the same.

01:24:40.040 | So you have to create this artificial thing.

01:24:43.440 | You have to create Germans.

01:24:45.040 | There's now a Germany with an emperor.

01:24:48.400 | And so we're all gonna be Germans.

01:24:50.440 | Well, exactly what is that?

01:24:54.200 | Much of it is an artificial creation.

01:25:00.320 | You know, you have to decide upon

01:25:01.320 | some sort of standard dialect.

01:25:03.640 | Okay, we'll decide what that is.

01:25:06.320 | You know, often dialect that only a few people

01:25:08.560 | actually speech, and then they will be drilled

01:25:10.440 | into children's heads through state schooling programs.

01:25:13.200 | So I think this is the kind of milieu that it comes out of.

01:25:17.280 | People were trying to figure out

01:25:18.440 | what on earth Germans actually were

01:25:21.080 | and the need for some sort of common identity.

01:25:24.720 | And, you know, that leads to everything

01:25:28.240 | like Wagnerian opera.

01:25:30.440 | Richard Wagner wanted to create a German mythical music.

01:25:34.240 | So he went back and strip-mined old German myths

01:25:37.160 | and cobbled them together into a lot of people

01:25:39.360 | standing on stage singing.

01:25:41.320 | And that was his purpose.

01:25:42.680 | He was a nationalist.

01:25:44.120 | He was, in many ways, a kind of racialist nationalist.

01:25:46.840 | And this was his idea of trying to create

01:25:49.320 | out of bits and pieces of the past

01:25:52.920 | a newfangled form of German identity.

01:25:55.560 | So on the more mystical end of this,

01:26:00.200 | you had the ideas that, well,

01:26:01.400 | Germany must have been created for some special purpose

01:26:03.800 | because the Germans must be very special people.

01:26:06.600 | And we must have some sort of particular destiny.

01:26:09.480 | And then out of this, you know,

01:26:10.840 | the direction this is heading,

01:26:12.040 | well, we're all part of some sort of master race

01:26:15.520 | with some sort of ties

01:26:17.160 | to some sort of great civilization in the past.

01:26:20.520 | Call it Thule, call it whatever you want to be.

01:26:23.480 | They basically just invent things

01:26:26.360 | and try to attach those to the past.

01:26:30.800 | And so Ariosophy was the Arianized version of Theosophy.

01:26:35.800 | And what this did was to take the idea

01:26:40.640 | that spiritual and physical evolution

01:26:43.240 | had led to the most advanced form of human beings,

01:26:46.920 | which were the Arians.

01:26:48.200 | And the most advanced group of them

01:26:50.320 | were, of course, the Germans.

01:26:52.160 | And this attracted appeal.

01:26:56.600 | Keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement.

01:26:59.240 | This was very much a fringe movement.

01:27:00.680 | Most people weren't aware of it

01:27:02.120 | and weren't particularly interested in it.

01:27:04.400 | But it had an appeal for those

01:27:05.920 | who already had a kind of esoteric bent

01:27:08.360 | in some form or another.

01:27:10.800 | And this is where things like the German Order

01:27:14.840 | and their other groups,

01:27:16.560 | it was only one of many, sort of grew out of.

01:27:18.840 | And what it was that the Thule Society as a branch,

01:27:25.200 | the Thule Gesellschaft was supposed to do

01:27:29.640 | was to study this.

01:27:32.520 | It was an esoteric study group.

01:27:35.360 | And so people would get together

01:27:36.760 | and they'd talk about things,

01:27:38.200 | probably make more stuff up

01:27:40.120 | and all sort of work around this idea

01:27:43.040 | of German Arians as the most advanced type of human beings

01:27:48.040 | and all the wonderful things that the future would hold.

01:27:52.440 | And the fact that this was in the midst of a war

01:27:54.720 | in which Germany was again,

01:27:56.720 | fighting as they saw it for its existence,

01:28:01.520 | heightened those kinds of tensions as well.

01:28:06.680 | So my suspicion again,

01:28:11.680 | is that Siboltendorf in terms of who was behind him,

01:28:16.200 | that he was essentially called back to Germany

01:28:18.520 | to work either for the Prussian political police

01:28:22.560 | or for some aspect of German intelligence or security

01:28:27.000 | to try to mobilize occultism or esotericism

01:28:32.000 | for the war effort.

01:28:35.160 | Because again, this is 1918.

01:28:37.440 | The war, it's gone on way too long.

01:28:40.880 | Within a few months, Germany will collapse

01:28:42.760 | and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion

01:28:46.800 | of the population.

01:28:48.040 | - So this is almost like to help the war effort

01:28:51.640 | with a kind of propaganda,

01:28:53.240 | a narrative that can strengthen the will

01:28:57.040 | of the German people.

01:28:57.880 | - It will strengthen the will of some people.

01:28:59.500 | - Some people.

01:29:00.340 | - You have to try to appeal to different aspects of this.

01:29:04.620 | But the mystical aspect is one of those things

01:29:07.200 | that can be, can have a very powerful influence.

01:29:10.480 | And the idea is that if we can come up with some kind

01:29:13.280 | of mystical nationalism, maybe that's one to put it,

01:29:18.280 | a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited

01:29:24.040 | for the workers.

01:29:24.860 | At this point, you're kind of grasping at straws.

01:29:27.520 | And this is a whole period when the Germans

01:29:29.880 | are marshaling the last of their forces

01:29:31.980 | to launch a series of offensives on the Western Front,

01:29:35.920 | the peace offensive, which will initially be successful,

01:29:38.840 | but will ultimately fail and lead to a collapse in morale.

01:29:43.120 | But among the leadership of Germany,

01:29:45.560 | it was a recognition, it was that national morale

01:29:48.040 | was flagging.

01:29:48.880 | And one of the other things that was kind of raising

01:29:55.020 | its head was what had happened nearby a year,

01:29:58.240 | well, the Russian Revolution,

01:30:00.080 | which had now brought the idea,

01:30:02.660 | which brought another solution to all of this,

01:30:05.020 | the idea of revolutionary Marxism.

01:30:07.120 | Here, we need to remind ourselves

01:30:09.900 | as to where Marxism comes from, not Russia, Germany.

01:30:12.940 | Where was the largest Marxist party?

01:30:16.340 | In Germany.

01:30:17.900 | - And Marx probably expected the revolution

01:30:21.620 | to begin in Germany.

01:30:23.020 | - Where else?

01:30:24.220 | - I mean, it's the Soviet Union is not very industrialized.

01:30:26.700 | Germany is, and so that's where it would probably--

01:30:29.540 | - Russia, 5% of the population is industrial workers.

01:30:32.380 | In Germany, 40% of the population is industrial.

01:30:35.180 | So if any place was like made for Marxism, it was Germany.

01:30:39.540 | I think that's why it caught on in East Germany so well,

01:30:41.860 | 'cause it had kind of come home.

01:30:43.460 | And it was a local belief.

01:30:48.620 | It wasn't something imported by the Russians.

01:30:51.140 | It was a German invention.

01:30:54.980 | So the Thule Society, one of the things you can see in this

01:30:59.980 | is the Thule Society was particularly involved

01:31:02.700 | in sort of anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation.

01:31:07.700 | They saw themselves, the Bolsheviks saw them

01:31:12.740 | as this whole movement, it was a counter to this.

01:31:15.180 | It was a kind of counter Marxist movement.

01:31:19.900 | - Can we sort of try to break that apart in a nuanced way?

01:31:23.820 | So it was a nationalist movement.

01:31:28.780 | The occult was part of the picture, occult racial theories.

01:31:32.100 | So there's a racial component, like the Aryan race.

01:31:37.100 | So it's not just the nation of Germany.

01:31:39.560 | And you take that and contrast it with Marxism.

01:31:42.500 | Did they also formulate that in racial terms?

01:31:45.820 | Did they formulate that in national versus global terms?

01:31:50.220 | Like how did they see this?

01:31:51.880 | - Marxism formulates everything by class, okay?

01:31:54.780 | People are categorized by class.

01:31:56.340 | You're either part of the proletariat

01:31:57.740 | or you're part of the bourgeoisie or just, you know,

01:31:59.940 | you're either part of the proletariat

01:32:01.260 | or just some sort of scum, really.

01:32:03.260 | Needs to be swept into the dustbin of history.

01:32:05.500 | Only workers count.

01:32:06.780 | And that was what would take someone who was a nationalist,

01:32:13.140 | would sort of drive them crazy because their ideas,

01:32:17.520 | we're trying to create a German people, you know?

01:32:19.580 | We're trying to create a common German identity.

01:32:22.240 | But what the Marxists are doing

01:32:23.500 | is they're dividing Germans against each other by class.

01:32:26.520 | German workers hate the German bourgeoisie.

01:32:29.420 | German proletariat is opposed to German capitalists.

01:32:33.540 | We're all, you know,

01:32:34.480 | we're all trying to fight this war together.

01:32:36.680 | So that was why Marxism in the form,

01:32:43.780 | particularly in the form of Bolshevism

01:32:45.240 | was seen as unpatriotic.

01:32:47.160 | And of course, it was opposed to the war as a whole.

01:32:49.760 | You know, the idea that parroting Lenin

01:32:52.400 | was that the war was an imperialist war.

01:32:54.840 | And the only thing that was good

01:32:57.000 | that was going to come out of it

01:32:58.080 | is that the imperialist war,

01:32:59.940 | through all of the crises it was creating,

01:33:03.680 | would eventually lead to a class war.

01:33:05.640 | And that would be good

01:33:06.560 | because that would reconcile all of these things.

01:33:08.920 | But think of this, the two very different versions of this.

01:33:11.880 | The Bolshevist version, or let's just call it

01:33:16.120 | the Marxist version of Germany,

01:33:18.320 | it was going to be a class society

01:33:20.320 | in which we're going to have to have

01:33:21.500 | some kind of civil upheaval,

01:33:23.000 | which will have Germans fighting Germans.

01:33:25.060 | Whereas the kind of mystical nationalism,

01:33:31.760 | the almost kind of religious nationalism

01:33:34.040 | that Sybiltendorf from the Thule Society

01:33:36.160 | had hitched his wagon to,

01:33:37.800 | held that Germans are all part of a single racial family.

01:33:42.860 | And that's what must be the most important thing.

01:33:47.860 | And that these can be different ways

01:33:49.460 | of trying to influence people.

01:33:52.060 | It comes down to a matter of political influence.

01:33:55.320 | So in a sense, I think that what Sybiltendorf

01:33:59.900 | from the Thule Society was trying to do,

01:34:01.780 | at least within Munich,

01:34:03.100 | was to use this idea of mystical nationalism

01:34:06.700 | as a potential rallying point

01:34:08.820 | for some part of the population

01:34:10.420 | to oppose these other forces,

01:34:12.480 | to keep people fighting.

01:34:15.620 | The war is lost, though, by the,

01:34:18.940 | in November, you know, the Kaiser abdicates.

01:34:21.780 | And essentially, the socialists do take over in Germany.

01:34:24.580 | That's, things come very, very close

01:34:29.180 | to following the Russian model.

01:34:32.460 | And you even get the Russian version

01:34:37.180 | or take on the Bolsheviks,

01:34:38.540 | which are the Spartacists,

01:34:39.780 | who try and fail to seize power early on.

01:34:44.340 | But you do essentially end up with a socialist Germany.

01:34:47.080 | And that then leaves, in the aftermath of the war,

01:34:53.040 | the Thule Society is sort of the odd man out,

01:34:57.280 | although they're still very closely connected to the army.

01:35:00.560 | And here's one of the things that I find interesting.

01:35:02.160 | When you get into 1919,

01:35:03.800 | who is it that's paying Sybiltendorf's bills?

01:35:06.560 | It's the army.

01:35:09.680 | The one thing the German army is absolutely determined to do

01:35:14.400 | is to preserve its social position and power.

01:35:19.160 | And they're perfectly willing to dump the Kaiser to do that.

01:35:24.160 | That's sort of this deal which is made.

01:35:28.340 | In November of 1918, Kaiser's abdication,

01:35:31.920 | the proclamation of a German republic,

01:35:33.880 | which, you know, you just had this guy declare it.

01:35:38.360 | It wasn't really planned.

01:35:39.660 | There's the Ebert-Groener Pact.

01:35:44.480 | Groener is the chief of staff,

01:35:47.360 | general staff at this point.

01:35:48.960 | Friedrich Ebert is the chief socialist politician,

01:35:55.200 | basically, and they make an agreement.

01:35:57.100 | And the agreement, basically,

01:35:59.400 | is that the army will support Ebert's government

01:36:03.320 | if Ebert supports the army,

01:36:07.960 | and particularly, that means the continuation

01:36:10.280 | of the officer corps and the general staff

01:36:13.440 | in one form or another.

01:36:14.620 | So a deal is made.

01:36:17.080 | And that, of course, is what will eventually help defeat

01:36:19.720 | the Spartacist uprising.

01:36:21.400 | - Now, was the army doing the similar kinds of things

01:36:23.420 | that we've talked about with the intelligence agencies,

01:36:26.920 | this kind of same kind of trying to control

01:36:30.120 | the direction of political power?

01:36:32.680 | - The German intelligence landscape

01:36:34.360 | in the First World War, is it,

01:36:36.640 | is obscure in many ways.

01:36:38.480 | There are lots of things that are going on.

01:36:40.880 | You've got,

01:36:41.720 | Germany has a military intelligence service

01:36:45.880 | called Abteilung, or Section 3B.

01:36:48.960 | That's just plain military intelligence.

01:36:51.320 | You know, they're constantly trying

01:36:52.800 | to collect military information before the war

01:36:55.600 | about the weaponry and plans of the enemies,

01:36:57.680 | and then about what the operational plans

01:37:00.280 | were during the war.

01:37:01.440 | It doesn't really go much beyond that, though.

01:37:05.880 | The German foreign office

01:37:08.080 | runs a kind of political intelligence service.

01:37:14.100 | And that's the one which is much more involved

01:37:19.980 | in things like subsidizing subversion in Russia,

01:37:23.620 | which is one of the things that the Germans sign on to

01:37:27.880 | fairly early.

01:37:30.060 | Little diversion here, in 1915,

01:37:34.440 | there is a Russian revolutionary

01:37:36.800 | who's lived much of his life in Germany,

01:37:38.800 | who goes by the code name of Parvus,

01:37:44.720 | and he essentially comes to the Germans

01:37:47.880 | in Constantinople, interestingly enough, in Turkey.

01:37:50.920 | He's hanging around there

01:37:51.960 | the same time as the Botendorf is there,

01:37:53.760 | which I find curious.

01:37:55.720 | So Parvus, or Alexander Hellpand,

01:37:59.880 | to give his actual name,

01:38:02.120 | comes in and he goes, "Look,

01:38:03.680 | "there's a lot of revolutionaries in Russia,

01:38:05.040 | "and there's a lot of mistrust with the regime.

01:38:06.960 | "We think that the war will increase the contradictions

01:38:10.080 | "in Russian society,

01:38:11.600 | "and if you give me a lot of marks,

01:38:15.200 | "I can finance this revolutionary activity,

01:38:18.280 | "and through subversion, I can take Russia out of the war."

01:38:22.560 | Well, the Germans are facing a two-front war.

01:38:24.200 | That sounds great.

01:38:25.640 | We'll use money in order to...

01:38:28.560 | But notice what they're doing.

01:38:30.420 | The German general staff,

01:38:33.260 | a very conservative organization,

01:38:35.600 | not a bunch of revolutionaries,

01:38:37.400 | are going to finance revolution in an opposing country.

01:38:42.400 | They are going to finance revolutionary subversion

01:38:46.040 | to take Russia out of the war,

01:38:48.360 | which basically works.

01:38:53.180 | So that gives you another idea

01:38:56.840 | as to what the German military is willing to do.

01:38:59.880 | They're not revolutionaries,

01:39:01.800 | but they'll pay revolutionaries to subvert another regime.

01:39:06.660 | Now you've got the problem

01:39:08.120 | is that the revolutionary regime

01:39:11.240 | that your money helped bring to power

01:39:13.880 | is now threatening to extend into your country.

01:39:18.880 | So the whole question for the army

01:39:22.120 | and for others in Germany in 1919

01:39:25.000 | is how to keep Germany from going Bolshevik,

01:39:29.920 | from, in a sense, being hoist by your own petard.

01:39:33.160 | So the Thule Society,

01:39:35.440 | I don't think is a huge part of this program,

01:39:37.700 | but it is a part of it.

01:39:39.000 | And it's all an effort to try to keep control.

01:39:42.040 | And that's why the army is financing them.

01:39:44.640 | That's even why the army at some point

01:39:46.320 | then supplies them with its own propagandists.

01:39:50.200 | So the Thule Society begins to create,

01:39:52.680 | under Subotindor's leadership,

01:39:54.500 | what he called the Rings of Thule.

01:39:57.160 | And these are satellite organizations

01:40:01.880 | that aren't the society as though,

01:40:05.400 | but they're kind of controlled and inspired by it.

01:40:08.300 | And one of those is a thing called the German Workers' Party.

01:40:12.400 | And the German Workers' Party, again, is local.

01:40:17.520 | It's not large.

01:40:18.600 | It's not terribly influential.

01:40:20.280 | But what does it aspire to be?

01:40:22.280 | It aspires to be a party

01:40:24.520 | that will bring German workers away

01:40:28.160 | from the seductive influence of the Bolsheviks

01:40:32.800 | and into a more patriotic position, a patriotic.

01:40:38.000 | And the way that I describe this

01:40:39.760 | is that it's not an anti-communist organization.

01:40:43.320 | It's a counter-communist organization.

01:40:46.420 | So you don't create something which completely opposes it.

01:40:50.580 | You create something which mimics it,

01:40:53.360 | which is ultimately what the German Workers' Party

01:40:55.960 | will become is the National Socialist German Workers' Party,

01:41:00.960 | known as that term, socialist.

01:41:03.160 | And that is, in my view,

01:41:07.600 | what Nazism is from the beginning.

01:41:10.440 | It is a counter-communist movement.

01:41:13.120 | - And by the way, for people who don't know,

01:41:14.880 | the National Socialist German Workers' Party

01:41:19.160 | is also known as the Nazi Party.

01:41:22.760 | So how did this evolution happen

01:41:25.240 | from those, that complicated little interplay?

01:41:28.560 | We should also say that a guy named Adolf Hitler

01:41:31.560 | is in the army at this time.

01:41:33.200 | - Yes.

01:41:34.040 | Well, here's the way to come into this,

01:41:37.640 | 'cause remember I said the army was going to supply

01:41:39.400 | its own propagandists to help the German Workers' Party

01:41:42.120 | and the Thule Society do their work.

01:41:43.920 | And the propagandists they supply them with

01:41:46.120 | is a man who the army trains,

01:41:51.120 | sends to classes,

01:41:53.480 | to learn the art of public speaking and propaganda.

01:41:56.960 | And that fellow is Corporal Adolf Hitler.

01:42:00.720 | - So how does Adolf Hitler connect

01:42:04.040 | with the German Workers' Party?

01:42:06.400 | - Well, he'd been in the army during the war,

01:42:08.280 | the only regular job that he'd ever had.

01:42:10.400 | Kind of liked it.

01:42:12.680 | So you often get the view is that,

01:42:13.880 | well, at the end of the war,

01:42:14.720 | he joined millions of other German soldiers

01:42:17.080 | who didn't have jobs.

01:42:17.920 | No, no, he stays in the army.

01:42:19.320 | He stays in the army until 1921.

01:42:22.080 | He's on the army payroll at the very time

01:42:25.600 | in which he is held to set this up.

01:42:28.040 | What appears to have happened is this,

01:42:31.240 | Subbotnendorff had organized the Thule Society.

01:42:34.440 | That didn't had, you know,

01:42:35.760 | that had tried to oppose.

01:42:38.360 | There's actually a brief period of time

01:42:40.360 | in which the communists actually take over Munich.

01:42:43.960 | The Bavarian Soviet Republic,

01:42:47.880 | which doesn't last very long.

01:42:49.960 | And eventually the army and volunteers put this down.

01:42:54.600 | While that's going on, by the way,

01:42:55.960 | Hitler is actually sitting in the barracks in Munich,

01:43:00.600 | wearing a red armband,

01:43:02.840 | because he is technically part of the soldiers

01:43:05.360 | who have gone over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic.

01:43:08.080 | He seems to have had flexible interests in this case.

01:43:13.200 | So once order is restored, so to speak,

01:43:17.080 | the army comes in and decide that,

01:43:19.760 | well, one of the things we need,

01:43:20.840 | we need to have people who can lecture soldiers

01:43:23.960 | on patriotic topics.

01:43:26.600 | And so there is a particular captain

01:43:30.400 | by the name of Karl Mayer, who sort of spots Hitler.

01:43:34.160 | He later describes him as like a stray dog

01:43:36.760 | looking for a master.

01:43:37.960 | Hitler has a knack for public speaking.

01:43:40.520 | Other soldiers will listen to him.

01:43:42.200 | Yeah, some people can do that.

01:43:44.640 | Some people can't.

01:43:46.640 | Mayer decides that he's a good candidate

01:43:50.280 | for further training.

01:43:51.280 | And so, yes, they bring him in.

01:43:52.680 | They turned him into what's called a Weimann,

01:43:55.680 | a kind of liaison man.

01:43:58.960 | He's an army propagandist.

01:44:01.840 | And then you've got this little outfit

01:44:07.360 | called the German Workers' Party.

01:44:09.440 | And essentially what happens is that Hitler is sent in

01:44:14.040 | to take over leadership of that, which is what happens.

01:44:16.800 | He shows up, he attends a meeting.

01:44:19.120 | There are like 50 people there.

01:44:21.000 | By the way, the topic of the first meeting he's at

01:44:24.920 | is how and why capitalism should be abolished, okay,

01:44:28.960 | which is not what you might well expect.

01:44:31.600 | And because remember, the German Workers' Party

01:44:35.200 | is trying to cast itself as a counter-Bolshevism.

01:44:40.040 | So it's not saying that capitalism is great,

01:44:42.600 | which is important.

01:44:43.440 | Now, capitalism is evil.

01:44:44.280 | We agree upon that.

01:44:45.120 | We just agree it has to be destroyed

01:44:47.120 | from a nationalist point of view

01:44:49.640 | as opposed from some sort of strange

01:44:51.920 | internationalist point of view.

01:44:53.480 | So Hitler is essentially, as I see it,

01:44:56.720 | sent in by the army as their trained man

01:44:59.840 | to assume leadership within this small party

01:45:03.160 | and to use it for the army's patriotic propaganda campaign.

01:45:09.880 | And is his season doing so, even to the name change,

01:45:13.640 | to the National Socialist or German Workers' Party?

01:45:16.720 | I mean, really, what sounds more red than that?

01:45:19.720 | - So the interesting thing here is

01:45:24.440 | from where did anti-Semitism seep into this whole thing?

01:45:28.960 | It seems like the way they try to formulate counter-Marxism

01:45:33.040 | is by saying the problem with capitalism

01:45:35.960 | and the problem with Marxism is that

01:45:39.920 | it's really Judeo-capitalism and "Judeo-Bolshevism."

01:45:44.920 | From where did that ideology seep in?

01:45:47.920 | - Well, that's a huge topic.

01:45:51.680 | Where does anti-Semitism come from?

01:45:54.040 | Well, let's start with that term itself,

01:45:56.360 | a term which I have really grown increasingly to dislike

01:46:01.360 | because it doesn't actually say what it means.

01:46:05.880 | Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism.

01:46:09.160 | That's all it is.

01:46:11.180 | I'm not sure whether there has ever existed a person

01:46:15.040 | who hated Jews, Arabs, and Maltese equally.

01:46:18.880 | Okay, that's kind of hard to imagine.

01:46:21.000 | I don't know, but that's technically what that would mean

01:46:23.360 | because let's face it, most Semites are Arabs.

01:46:27.680 | So if you're an anti-Semite,

01:46:29.720 | then you don't seem to distinguish Jews from Arabs.

01:46:33.720 | Makes no sense.

01:46:34.700 | The origin of the term is invented by, guess what?

01:46:39.320 | An anti-Semite, a guy in the 1870s,

01:46:43.880 | a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr,

01:46:46.560 | who is, wouldn't you know it, part Jewish himself,

01:46:50.600 | and who decides that you really need a better term

01:46:56.280 | than Judenhas, Jew-hate, which was the term,

01:47:00.200 | 'cause that just sounds so inelegant.

01:47:03.440 | Doesn't it?

01:47:05.000 | Okay, what do you wanna call yourself,

01:47:06.640 | a Jew-hater or an anti-Semite?

01:47:09.920 | See, anti-Semitism, it's got that ism part at the end of it,

01:47:13.680 | which means it's a system of belief.

01:47:16.040 | Anything that has an ism

01:47:17.760 | must somehow be scientific and important.

01:47:20.240 | It's all part of the 19th century obsession

01:47:22.240 | with trying to bring science

01:47:25.280 | into something one way or the other.

01:47:26.480 | So we're gonna get rid of Jew-hate

01:47:28.280 | and we're gonna turn it into anti-Semitism.

01:47:30.840 | And we're only gonna be talking about Jews,

01:47:32.640 | but we'll never actually say that.

01:47:34.680 | And somehow, the invention of a Jew-hater

01:47:39.680 | to disguise the fact that he's a Jew-hater,

01:47:42.240 | even though he's partly Jewish,

01:47:44.000 | by inventing the term anti-Semitism worked

01:47:46.120 | because everybody has bought it and repeated it ever since.

01:47:49.120 | So I don't know, maybe just because anti-Jewism

01:47:55.160 | would just be, is it too direct in some way?

01:47:59.360 | Do we have difficulty confronting, actually,

01:48:01.480 | what it is that we're talking about?

01:48:03.120 | - I do wish terms were a little bit more direct

01:48:05.320 | and self-explanatory, yeah.

01:48:06.800 | Jew-hate is a better term.

01:48:09.280 | - Well, the question then comes,

01:48:10.200 | what exactly do you hate about Jews?

01:48:12.960 | And a lot of this has to do with,

01:48:17.480 | if you go back part of the 19th century,

01:48:20.660 | if Jews were hated, they were hated for religious reasons.

01:48:24.360 | In Christian Europe, they were hated

01:48:25.440 | because they weren't Christians.

01:48:27.960 | And they existed as the only kind of significant

01:48:32.560 | religious minority, but other than that,

01:48:35.360 | they tended to live separately.

01:48:37.760 | They had little economic influence.

01:48:40.660 | Jews tended to live in shtetls in the East,

01:48:44.600 | ghettos elsewhere, and they were,

01:48:46.600 | some were involved in banking and business,

01:48:48.400 | but they sort of remained segregated from much of society.

01:48:53.400 | That changes when you get to the 19th century,

01:48:57.680 | and with what's called Jewish emancipation.

01:49:00.520 | And that means that between about 1800 and 1850,

01:49:04.320 | most European countries dropped the various

01:49:07.480 | legal or social restrictions against Jews.

01:49:10.000 | They are assimilated into the general society.

01:49:12.520 | So ideally, you stop being a German Jew,

01:49:17.280 | and you become a Jewish German.

01:49:19.720 | Those are two very different, important concepts.

01:49:24.600 | And what that does, of course,

01:49:26.320 | is that it opens up the professions,

01:49:30.700 | business world elsewhere.

01:49:32.000 | So Jews move, who had been largely

01:49:36.640 | within those realms to begin with,

01:49:38.240 | they already had a good deal of experience

01:49:40.800 | in banking and business, and they move into those areas

01:49:43.520 | and professions and become quite visible.

01:49:45.560 | And that's what then creates anti-Semitism.

01:49:53.740 | Because in some way, that is seen as part

01:49:57.500 | of the changes that have taken place.

01:50:02.500 | And there are a lot of things going on here.

01:50:06.660 | Part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching

01:50:08.660 | social and economic changes that took place

01:50:10.820 | with industrialization.

01:50:12.240 | So one of the things to keep in mind

01:50:15.620 | is that in the process of industrialization,

01:50:18.400 | just like today, whole classes of people

01:50:21.380 | were made extinct economically, craftsmen, for instance.

01:50:26.220 | So when factories came along and began

01:50:28.580 | to produce things with machines,

01:50:30.680 | all the craftspeople who had made those things previously

01:50:33.820 | are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in factories.

01:50:40.100 | So there are winners and losers in industrialization.

01:50:46.020 | And what people saw in Germany and elsewhere

01:50:50.520 | is that among this new sort of rising capitalist elite,

01:50:54.540 | among these new professions, among the bureaucrats

01:50:57.780 | that are coming out of these burgeoning states,

01:51:00.100 | there were visibly a fair number of Jews.

01:51:04.100 | So in some way, the rise of Jews in the minds

01:51:09.060 | of many people were connected to all

01:51:11.180 | of the other bad things that were going on.

01:51:13.540 | You know, the world was changing in a way we don't like.

01:51:16.480 | And seemingly, the Jews are prospering

01:51:19.700 | while I am not.

01:51:21.700 | And that was true in Germany and elsewhere.

01:51:25.540 | Jews became highly visible in the professions.

01:51:28.100 | They became very visible in banking.

01:51:30.140 | They became visible in legal profession.

01:51:32.780 | They became visible in the medical profession.

01:51:35.260 | And those are people that a lot of people

01:51:36.980 | would come in contact with, bankers, lawyers, and doctors.

01:51:41.620 | They were not the majority there,

01:51:43.460 | but vastly overrepresented

01:51:48.660 | in terms of the general population,

01:51:50.460 | and especially within the cities.

01:51:54.400 | So in that sense, the roots of antisemitism to me

01:51:59.260 | is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere,

01:52:01.380 | and not just in Germany by any means,

01:52:03.260 | France, Britain, everywhere else,

01:52:05.380 | became identified with the bad changes

01:52:08.460 | that were taking place.

01:52:10.840 | And, but you also found that Jews

01:52:16.140 | were not only prominent among capitalists,

01:52:18.780 | they were also prominent in the socialist movement as well.

01:52:23.740 | So one of the things you could look around,

01:52:25.260 | we return to Germany in 1919

01:52:27.540 | in the aftermath of World War I,

01:52:29.700 | and you look around in Bavaria or elsewhere,

01:52:32.220 | you tend to find that there are a lot of Jews

01:52:35.300 | in visible positions on the German left.

01:52:38.900 | Rosa Luxemburg is but one example of that.

01:52:44.460 | Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia.

01:52:48.020 | When the Soviets send a representative

01:52:50.060 | to Germany in this period, it's Karl Radek, a Jew.

01:52:54.300 | So it wasn't difficult to exploit that,

01:52:58.860 | to argue that just as the ranks of capitalism

01:53:03.860 | was full of Jews, the ranks of Bolshevism

01:53:08.980 | or of the revolutionary left were full of Jews,

01:53:11.780 | because you could easily go around

01:53:13.660 | and distinguish a great many of them.

01:53:16.460 | They don't have to be the majority,

01:53:17.660 | they just have to be numerous, prominent,

01:53:21.540 | and visible, which they were.

01:53:24.440 | So this provided you a,

01:53:27.840 | in the case of the propaganda of the German army,

01:53:31.580 | the type of stuff that Hitler was spewed out,

01:53:33.660 | they could put all the anti-capitalist rhetoric

01:53:36.060 | in there if they wanted to.

01:53:36.900 | The army was never gonna overthrow capitalism,

01:53:39.060 | and the capitalists knew they weren't gonna do it.

01:53:41.300 | So go ahead, talk shit about us, we don't really care.

01:53:45.740 | That's not gonna, because we know that the army

01:53:47.480 | would prevent that from happening.

01:53:49.180 | The way to then undermine the real enemy,

01:53:54.660 | it was a scene, the revolutionary left,

01:53:57.660 | was to point out the Jewish influence there.

01:54:01.700 | I mean, look at Russia.

01:54:02.620 | Well, Lenin's not, but Trotsky, there he is.

01:54:04.780 | Look, there's a Jew, there's one.

01:54:07.180 | Radek is a Jew.

01:54:08.420 | It wasn't hard to find him in that regard.

01:54:10.780 | - You gave a lecture on the protocols

01:54:15.460 | of the elders of Zion.

01:54:17.780 | It's why they consider it to be the most influential work

01:54:20.040 | of anti-Semitism ever, perhaps.

01:54:23.080 | Can you describe this text?

01:54:24.720 | - Well, the protocols of the alerted elders of Zion

01:54:30.700 | is probably one of the most troublesome

01:54:36.340 | and destructive works of literature that has ever emerged.

01:54:39.800 | And yet, its origins remain obscure.

01:54:47.560 | So you get a whole variety of stories

01:54:50.140 | about where it came from.

01:54:51.720 | So the one story that is often is that it was the work

01:54:56.140 | of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police,

01:54:58.460 | and in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905

01:55:05.260 | in Paris, and there's a whole description

01:55:10.140 | of Pyotr Raczkowski, who was the supposedly the chief

01:55:15.140 | of the Okhrana at the time, was the man behind it.

01:55:19.420 | Another fellow by the name of Matvei Golovinsky

01:55:22.060 | was the drafter of it.

01:55:23.300 | And that they had this document written

01:55:28.300 | by a French political writer from some decades back

01:55:34.100 | called "Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,"

01:55:38.620 | which they were then adapting.

01:55:42.220 | Usually, it's argued that they plagiarized it

01:55:45.700 | into the protocols, and none of that is really true.

01:55:49.820 | I mean, the first part about it is that at the time

01:55:53.700 | this supposedly took place, Raczkowski wasn't working

01:55:55.740 | for the Okhrana, he'd been fired, and he wasn't in Paris.

01:55:59.380 | And the whole situation which is described

01:56:01.900 | couldn't have taken place because the people

01:56:03.940 | who did it weren't there.

01:56:05.420 | It's a story.

01:56:06.780 | But it provides a kind of explanation for it.

01:56:11.300 | So the protocols emerge, so you always have to go back.

01:56:15.700 | This is one of the things that I have found

01:56:19.900 | always useful in research, is go back to the beginning.

01:56:26.280 | Find the first place this is mentioned,

01:56:30.480 | or the first version, or the first iteration.

01:56:33.860 | Where does it start?

01:56:35.420 | So you go back to St. Petersburg, Russia, around 1903.

01:56:41.900 | There is a small right-wing anti-Semitic newspaper

01:56:46.620 | published there called Znamya, Banner.

01:56:49.120 | And it publishes in a kind of serial form

01:56:54.620 | a work it doesn't credit with any original author.

01:57:00.340 | And this is the first version of the protocols

01:57:04.900 | of the learned elders of Zion.

01:57:06.820 | But what it's actually describing

01:57:08.580 | is a Judeo-Masonic plot to rule the world.

01:57:14.740 | Those two terms are always combined together.

01:57:17.820 | And in fact, in the earlier version,

01:57:19.380 | there's far more mentions of Freemasons than there are Jews.

01:57:26.740 | And the publisher of Znamya is closely connected

01:57:31.740 | to a thing called the Union of Russian People,

01:57:35.580 | the Union of Russian Men, which ostensibly existed

01:57:40.160 | to defend the empire against subversion,

01:57:42.980 | and particularly against what it thought

01:57:45.860 | was Jewish subversion, when they also argued

01:57:48.260 | that the prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements

01:57:50.620 | somehow proved that this was, in some way,

01:57:52.460 | a Jewish revolution.

01:57:53.820 | But again, this is not a mainstream newspaper.

01:57:56.380 | It's not appealing to a mainstream population.

01:57:58.620 | Very few people saw it.

01:58:00.300 | But this is where it appears.

01:58:01.900 | Now, keep in mind, that's two or three years

01:58:05.380 | before it's usually said to have been written.

01:58:08.380 | Or the other version is that there's this crazy priest

01:58:10.720 | by the name of Sergei Niles, and he wrote it,

01:58:13.300 | or actually appended it as an appendix to his work in 1905.

01:58:18.300 | Now, it was around before that.

01:58:20.980 | So Niles didn't create it, it wasn't drafted in Paris

01:58:24.580 | in 1904, 1905.

01:58:27.140 | It was serialized in an obscure,

01:58:29.980 | right-wing Russian newspaper, 1903.

01:58:34.540 | - And by the way, we should say that these are 24 protocols.

01:58:39.540 | - Well, it varies.

01:58:42.420 | - It varies, that are, I guess, supposed to be meeting notes

01:58:47.420 | about the supposed cabal where the Jews and Freemasons

01:58:54.380 | are planning together a world domination.

01:58:57.420 | But it's like meeting notes, right?

01:58:59.660 | - Protocol, which are, Russian term,

01:59:02.300 | basically for notes of a meeting.

01:59:03.980 | - Yeah.

01:59:05.660 | - Well, it's notes of a meeting.

01:59:07.180 | These are the goofiest things I've ever seen.

01:59:09.700 | Because what you've got here, it's not notes.

01:59:12.500 | No one takes notes from a meeting that way.

01:59:15.620 | What you've got is like the exposition

01:59:17.940 | of a Bond villain, right?

01:59:20.260 | It's all of this, boy, oh, then we're gonna do this.

01:59:22.660 | And the last thing you wanna do is lay out your,

01:59:25.100 | if you've got a plan for world domination,

01:59:26.820 | my suggestion would be don't write it down.

01:59:29.780 | So it's not notes of a meeting.

01:59:34.940 | It's, again, it's another sort of narrative

01:59:38.140 | or story that's being told.

01:59:40.380 | It bears no resemblance to the dialogue in hell

01:59:45.140 | between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

01:59:48.340 | But what it is, the best thing,

01:59:50.140 | it's not particularly readable in some ways.

01:59:52.900 | There was an Italian writer by the name of Cesare Michalis

01:59:57.140 | who wrote a book, translated in English,

02:00:01.700 | called The Non-Existent Manuscript.

02:00:03.700 | And what it is is that he takes the different versions,

02:00:08.500 | starting with the 1902, 1903 versions,

02:00:11.580 | and looks through the other ones,

02:00:12.780 | and he tries to, in the process,

02:00:14.620 | to reconstruct what he thinks the original might have been.

02:00:20.020 | But the other thing he does, which was fascinating to me,

02:00:22.980 | is that he takes this whole sort of initial text,

02:00:27.020 | and in bold type, he indicates the paragraphs,

02:00:31.180 | but more often sentences or phrases

02:00:33.980 | that appear to be identical from the Jolie work.

02:00:37.460 | And they're just scattered throughout it.

02:00:41.740 | There's no particular rhyme or reason to it.

02:00:45.620 | You don't plagiarize that way.

02:00:48.140 | I mean, who does that?

02:00:49.580 | It's a sentence here, a sentence there,

02:00:52.820 | which has led to a peculiar theory of mine,

02:00:57.620 | which, of course, I will have to expound upon,

02:01:00.060 | which is that I think that the original author

02:01:02.100 | of the Protocols was the same Maurice Jolie.

02:01:05.340 | I think what someone stumbled across

02:01:09.860 | was a work which he wrote and never published,

02:01:15.820 | and which he just drew.

02:01:17.860 | It's exactly what someone would do

02:01:19.620 | working from your own kind of material.

02:01:24.300 | Because I've written things,

02:01:26.020 | and then taken what I've written,

02:01:27.500 | and then sort of repackaged that into something else.

02:01:31.460 | - Sentence here, sentence there.

02:01:32.580 | - Yeah, and the same sort of thing comes out.

02:01:34.340 | Only sort of bits and pieces of it remain.

02:01:37.300 | So why would Jolie have done that?

02:01:39.060 | Jolie was, we're talking about a man

02:01:41.860 | whose career basically spanned the 1850s to 1870s.

02:01:46.860 | He's an obscure figure.

02:01:49.940 | I'm not even totally sure he existed.

02:01:54.700 | I mean, but it's one of those things,

02:01:57.060 | you go looking for him.

02:01:58.580 | - I love that you're a scholar of people

02:02:00.400 | that just kind of emerge out of the darkness.

02:02:02.940 | - They just come from nowhere.

02:02:05.340 | - And there's the Ocrana there also.

02:02:07.140 | And we should also say this was,

02:02:08.180 | I guess the original would be written,

02:02:09.700 | I mean, what's the language of the original, Russian?

02:02:12.540 | - Russian.

02:02:13.380 | But my hunch is that that's adopted from a French version.

02:02:17.180 | First of all, they're constantly harping on Freemasons,

02:02:19.220 | which wasn't nearly as a big idea there.

02:02:21.940 | If you go back to France in the 1890s,

02:02:25.180 | there's some big scandals.

02:02:26.420 | Well, there's the Dreyfus scandal,

02:02:27.900 | well, we got that, all right,

02:02:29.260 | where you've got a Jewish officer

02:02:30.900 | on trial for being a traitor, all right.

02:02:33.180 | So that was, so you bring in the whole Jewish element,

02:02:36.100 | Jews is disloyal, Dreyfus case, 1894.

02:02:39.520 | Earlier, you had the Panama scandal,

02:02:43.540 | which was this huge investment scandal

02:02:46.060 | when the Panama Canal Company in Paris collapsed.

02:02:48.700 | And again, many of the major players in that work,

02:02:51.140 | Jewish financiers.

02:02:53.300 | And then you've got the Taxel hoax.

02:02:57.380 | So the Taxel hoax was the work of this guy,

02:03:02.060 | his real name was, I think, Jogan Paget.

02:03:05.560 | He was kind of a French journalist.

02:03:08.160 | He started out writing porn.

02:03:11.380 | So, I mean, he wrote things like "Sex Lives of the Popes"

02:03:14.780 | and "The Erotic Bible" and various things of that kind.

02:03:17.800 | He was a Catholic, broke with the Catholic Church,

02:03:20.460 | wrote bad stuff about the Popes,

02:03:22.420 | and apparently became a Freemason for a while,

02:03:27.860 | and then supposedly recanted his evil ways,

02:03:30.580 | went back to the church,

02:03:32.500 | and then under the name Leo Taxel

02:03:34.420 | began writing these whole series of articles,

02:03:37.080 | basically arguing that there was

02:03:38.880 | a Masonic-Satanic conspiracy,

02:03:42.840 | run, by the way, by an American, Albert Pike.

02:03:46.340 | And this also included child sacrifice.

02:03:50.960 | It's got "Pizzagate" as well,

02:03:53.500 | by a high priestess, Diana Vaughn.

02:03:56.240 | And so there's like child sacrifice,

02:03:59.560 | weird, roby, bohemian grove stuff,

02:04:03.200 | and the Freemasons are devil worshipers,

02:04:05.640 | going back to the Knights Templars,

02:04:07.440 | and so there's a thing called "The Devil in the 19th Century"

02:04:09.600 | and "The Secrets of Freemasonry."

02:04:11.880 | And this became a bestseller in France.

02:04:14.740 | So France is just obsessed

02:04:17.520 | with all of these kinds of conspiracies.

02:04:19.800 | So evil Satanic Freemasons,

02:04:22.140 | evil Jewish financiers, Dreyfus,

02:04:25.720 | this is the brew where all of this comes.

02:04:28.760 | So I wanna figure out how Freemasons

02:04:30.360 | and Jews get connected together.

02:04:32.320 | France is the place where this happens.

02:04:36.320 | Now, Taxel, or Jogon Paget,

02:04:39.580 | eventually pulls another interesting thing in this.

02:04:42.040 | Around 1897, critics argue that he's making this stuff up

02:04:46.960 | and demand that he present Diana Vaughn,

02:04:49.560 | supposed Satanic high priestess, toddler killer.

02:04:52.660 | And he says, "Oh, we're gonna have a press conference.

02:04:55.320 | She'll appear and say all of this stuff

02:04:58.000 | as she returns to the church and possibly becomes a nun."

02:05:01.680 | And so people show up,

02:05:03.580 | high figures in the Catholic church shows up,

02:05:05.720 | and he does, no Diana Vaughn,

02:05:07.400 | and Jogon Paget goes, "It's all a hoax.

02:05:09.880 | I made it up.

02:05:10.760 | You're all a bunch of idiots for believing it."

02:05:13.320 | Okay, you, members of the church especially,

02:05:15.920 | just what gullible morons you are.

02:05:18.800 | And that's it.

02:05:20.560 | He confesses it.

02:05:21.380 | To this day, however, you will find people

02:05:23.220 | who will insist that it's actually true

02:05:25.640 | because they desperately want it to be true.

02:05:29.440 | But this is, I think, the milieu that,

02:05:33.520 | I like that word, apparently, that this comes out of,

02:05:36.760 | and this is this whole kind of unhealthy mix.

02:05:41.600 | So France, to me, is the only place

02:05:45.200 | that in the decade preceding it

02:05:46.680 | that something like this would be concocted.

02:05:49.600 | So it was either created

02:05:51.600 | by some sort of unknown person there,

02:05:54.460 | but I still think that even though he dies in like 1879,

02:05:58.920 | that in Maurice Joly's troubled career,

02:06:03.920 | he went from being an opponent of French emperor,

02:06:10.920 | Napoleon III, which is what the whole dialogues

02:06:14.560 | was written against.

02:06:15.740 | And then he was, for a time, a close political ally

02:06:25.000 | of a French politician by the name of Adolphe Cremieux.

02:06:29.180 | So Adolphe Cremieux, what's he got going for him?

02:06:32.880 | Well, he was kind of a radical politician.

02:06:34.960 | He was an opponent of Napoleon III.

02:06:37.920 | He was a Freemason.

02:06:39.840 | Oh, and he was Jewish.

02:06:41.600 | In fact, at one point, I think he was actually the head

02:06:45.280 | both of the Scottish right in France,

02:06:51.360 | and an important figure in the Alliance Israelite,

02:06:56.360 | okay, the Jewish organization in France.

02:06:59.320 | So he was publicly, very prominently Jewish and Masonic.

02:07:03.800 | So someone else who would have linked them together.

02:07:06.920 | Joly, as he did with virtually everyone,

02:07:09.440 | this was a guy whose life largely consisted

02:07:11.600 | of dual threats and fistfights.

02:07:14.000 | So he gets angry at Cremieux

02:07:19.840 | and it's exactly the type of thing that he might write

02:07:24.840 | to vent his spleen about it.

02:07:29.360 | But he died, probably a suicide.

02:07:33.320 | That's kind of difficult to tell.

02:07:35.000 | In obscurity, his son seems to have inherited

02:07:41.520 | most of his literary works.

02:07:47.080 | And his son then became a journalist

02:07:51.520 | to work for newspapers in France in the 1890s,

02:07:54.800 | but was also associated with some people

02:07:57.320 | on the fringes of the Okhrana

02:07:59.440 | or the Russian press in France.

02:08:04.180 | So one of the little things that had happened by this time

02:08:08.680 | is that France and Russia had become allies,

02:08:12.440 | even though their political systems

02:08:13.920 | are completely incompatible.

02:08:16.520 | And so the Russians were using money

02:08:20.040 | to subsidize French newspapers

02:08:23.000 | that were championing the alliance between the two.

02:08:26.820 | Russian meddling.

02:08:28.080 | Okay, no, they're just paying

02:08:30.440 | to have the right kind of newspapers come out.

02:08:32.520 | So there's this whole connection

02:08:33.840 | between the kind of Russian journalistic world

02:08:37.280 | and the French journalistic world

02:08:39.080 | and all of these scandals which are going on

02:08:43.160 | and Jolie's son, and then 10 years down the road,

02:08:47.960 | this thing pops up in a newspaper in St. Petersburg.

02:08:51.920 | That's where I think the origins lay.

02:08:56.920 | - Why do you think it took off?

02:09:00.760 | Why do you think it grabbed

02:09:03.640 | a large number of people's imaginations?

02:09:06.360 | And even after it was shown to be

02:09:09.200 | not actually what it's supposed to be,

02:09:12.440 | people still believe it's real?

02:09:14.480 | - Well, it doesn't take off immediately.

02:09:16.560 | Okay, it never receives any kind of wide,

02:09:18.640 | I mean, nobody much reads the first edition of it.

02:09:21.920 | When it's re-edited, it keeps getting,

02:09:24.840 | there are something like 18 or 19 different versions

02:09:28.280 | as it goes through.

02:09:29.120 | I mean, it gets, you know,

02:09:29.960 | people leave this protocol out or leave another one.

02:09:34.320 | As time goes on, there's more and more emphasis on Jews

02:09:37.120 | and less and less on Freemasons.

02:09:39.280 | So it's sort of, and the whole thing could have begun

02:09:42.640 | as an anti-Masonic tract.

02:09:46.720 | I mean, you could leave Jews out of it entirely

02:09:48.360 | and just turn it into a Masonic plot to rule the world.

02:09:51.080 | But let's just throw them in as well,

02:09:52.880 | since the two things are already being combined elsewhere.

02:09:55.980 | It doesn't become a big deal

02:09:59.760 | until really after the First World War,

02:10:02.680 | because the initial versions of it are all in Russian.

02:10:05.720 | And yeah, let's face it.

02:10:07.760 | While that's widely read in Russia,

02:10:09.400 | it's not much read anywhere else.

02:10:11.880 | It's a different alphabet.

02:10:12.920 | Nobody can even see what it means.

02:10:15.440 | So it has no particular influence outside of Russia,

02:10:18.520 | but then you get to 1919

02:10:20.440 | and you get all these different versions of it.

02:10:23.520 | So suddenly you get two English versions in the US,

02:10:27.000 | another English version in Britain,

02:10:28.800 | a German edition, a French edition, a Dutch edition.

02:10:32.560 | Everybody is coming up with these things.

02:10:35.000 | So it's not until in the immediate aftermath

02:10:38.020 | of the First World War that this metastasizes

02:10:41.720 | and it begins to show up

02:10:42.680 | in all of these different foreign editions.

02:10:46.820 | And I think that it just has to do with the changes

02:10:52.040 | that have taken place during the war.

02:10:54.880 | One of the things that people began looking for was that,

02:10:58.680 | why was there a war?

02:10:59.920 | And we just had this whole disastrous war

02:11:01.840 | and the world has been turned upside down.

02:11:04.940 | So there has to be some kind of explanation for that.

02:11:08.180 | I don't know.

02:11:09.000 | And one of the things this offered to see,

02:11:10.580 | there's this evil plan.

02:11:11.940 | There's this evil plan that has been put into motion

02:11:14.900 | and this could possibly explain what's taking place.

02:11:18.240 | The reason why the protocols were, I think,

02:11:23.700 | widely bought then and why they still are in many ways

02:11:28.420 | is the same reason that the tax hole hoax

02:11:30.820 | I was talking about was.

02:11:32.060 | Because it told a story that people wanted to believe.

02:11:35.840 | So in France in the 1890s,

02:11:39.900 | there was widespread suspicion of Freemasons.

02:11:43.980 | It was seen as a somewhat sinister secretive organization,

02:11:48.980 | certainly secretive.

02:11:50.540 | And there was also the same sort of generalized prejudices

02:11:58.020 | about Jews, clannish, distinct, too much influence,

02:12:03.020 | all of the things that went on.

02:12:05.300 | So it was sort of easy to combine those two things together.

02:12:09.500 | And even though Taxel admits it was a hoax,

02:12:14.340 | there were those who argued that this is just too,

02:12:17.440 | it's too accurate.

02:12:18.460 | It describes things too completely to be a hoax.

02:12:21.240 | And then you get the same arguments.

02:12:24.740 | In fact, I've heard the same arguments with the protocol.

02:12:28.180 | I don't even buy this as an example of plagiarism

02:12:31.460 | because you can't actually prove

02:12:32.540 | what's being plagiarized in any sense.

02:12:35.140 | To me, the protocols are a prime example

02:12:39.800 | of what I call a turd on a plate.

02:12:42.940 | These things crop up.

02:12:45.900 | I have to explain that now.

02:12:47.300 | - Yeah, please.

02:12:48.140 | - But I have to.

02:12:49.340 | What is a turd on a plate?

02:12:50.400 | Well, a turd on a plate is a turd on a plate.

02:12:53.600 | Suppose you come in and there's a plate sitting on the table

02:12:56.620 | and there's a turd on it.

02:12:58.140 | Now, the first thing you're gonna want is,

02:12:59.980 | is that a turd?

02:13:01.420 | Is it a human turd?

02:13:02.860 | Where did it come from?

02:13:04.540 | Why would someone poop on a plate?

02:13:06.720 | There are all these questions that come to mind.

02:13:08.900 | It makes no sense.

02:13:10.240 | But that's what you come, it's just there.

02:13:14.080 | I don't know where it came from.

02:13:18.300 | I don't know why, but there's a turd on a plate

02:13:21.340 | and that's what the protocol is, that they're just there.

02:13:24.580 | - But the reality is, just like with a turd on a plate,

02:13:27.400 | you take a picture of that in modern day

02:13:29.000 | and it becomes a meme, becomes viral,

02:13:30.920 | and becomes a joke on all social media

02:13:32.800 | and now it's viewed by tens of millions of people

02:13:34.840 | or whatever, it becomes popular.

02:13:36.760 | So wherever the turd came from,

02:13:39.660 | it did captivate the imagination.

02:13:43.560 | - Yeah.

02:13:44.400 | - It did speak to something.

02:13:45.240 | - But it seemed to provide an explanation.

02:13:48.240 | Can you just speak to Jew hatred?

02:13:51.980 | Is it just an accident of history?

02:13:56.440 | Why was it the Jews versus the Freemasons?

02:13:59.360 | Is it the collective mind searching

02:14:04.360 | for a small group to blame for the pains of civilization

02:14:10.440 | and then Jews just happened to be the thing

02:14:12.920 | that was selected at that moment in history?

02:14:15.680 | - It goes all the way back to the Greeks.

02:14:20.240 | Let's blame them.

02:14:22.320 | So one of the first occasions you find the idea

02:14:28.920 | that Jews are a distinct, mean-spirited, nasty people,

02:14:34.480 | goes back to a Greco-Egyptian historian named Manetho.

02:14:43.800 | This is around, I think, 300 BC, early.

02:14:48.800 | Can't even rope the Romans into this one.

02:14:54.840 | So Manetho is trying to write a history

02:14:59.040 | of the dynasties of Egypt.

02:15:00.680 | I think his history of dynasties of Egypt

02:15:02.720 | still is one of the basic works in this,

02:15:04.960 | but he tells this whole story,

02:15:07.000 | which essentially describes the kind of first blood libels

02:15:10.800 | that the Jews to celebrate their various religious holidays

02:15:15.800 | would capture Greeks and fatten them up in the basement

02:15:19.360 | and then slaughter them and eat them

02:15:20.600 | or drain their blood or do something.

02:15:22.120 | Yeah, it's just the sort of earlier version of that kind.

02:15:25.080 | Also, I think it repeats the sort of Egyptian version

02:15:30.600 | of the exodus out of Egypt,

02:15:33.440 | which is quite different than the biblical version.

02:15:38.560 | In this case, they stole all the stuff

02:15:42.720 | out of the Egyptians' houses and ran off into the desert.

02:15:45.520 | The Jews stole all the stuff and ran off.

02:15:47.120 | Yeah, Hebrews.

02:15:47.960 | Hebrews robbed the Egyptians.

02:15:50.120 | They were taken in.

02:15:51.800 | We took them in and sheltered them, gave them jobs,

02:15:55.760 | and then they stole all the jewelry and ran away.

02:15:59.960 | We didn't even chase them.

02:16:01.400 | We were glad to see them gone.

02:16:03.560 | So, it's a different narrative on that story.

02:16:08.360 | But it essentially portrays the Jews as being hostile.

02:16:13.720 | You know, they don't like other people.

02:16:15.720 | They're contemptuous of other people's religions,

02:16:21.820 | the rest of it.

02:16:22.660 | And see, the Greeks tended to think of themselves

02:16:25.180 | as being extremely cosmopolitan.

02:16:27.460 | Now, the Greeks ran across people worshiping other gods.

02:16:30.640 | They go, "Oh, those are just our gods

02:16:32.000 | "and they're different names."

02:16:33.560 | Everything was sort of adjusted into their landscape.

02:16:36.480 | So, you end up with that kind of hostility,

02:16:42.120 | which was there at the time.

02:16:44.080 | And that was probably influenced also

02:16:47.760 | by some of these earlier rebellions

02:16:50.920 | that had taken place in Egypt.

02:16:53.880 | During the Roman period,

02:16:55.080 | you not only have the Judean rebellion in 70 AD,

02:17:00.320 | but you have a couple of other uprisings in North Africa,

02:17:03.280 | and they're very bloody affairs.

02:17:07.040 | And in some cases,

02:17:08.320 | Jews begin massacring other people around them.

02:17:11.280 | They start killing the Greeks.

02:17:12.280 | The Greeks start killing them.

02:17:14.560 | So, there was a fair amount of, from that period on,

02:17:17.360 | a certain amount of bad blood,

02:17:19.240 | of mutual contempt between Greeks or between Hellenes,

02:17:22.240 | between the people who became Hellenized,

02:17:24.600 | as the Romans would be, and the Jews.

02:17:29.560 | And the Romans also seems to have developed

02:17:32.960 | much of that idea.

02:17:34.080 | They consider Judea as being a horrible place

02:17:37.640 | to have to govern, inhabited by a stubborn, obnoxious people,

02:17:42.640 | not well-liked.

02:17:47.520 | So, that's really where you see

02:17:51.220 | the earliest version of that.

02:17:57.400 | And the reasons for it would be

02:17:59.400 | complicated.

02:18:03.120 | What you could say is that going back to Manetho

02:18:05.560 | and to the Roman period,

02:18:07.240 | Jews, Judeans frequently experienced difficulties,

02:18:13.200 | conflicts with other people living around them.

02:18:17.000 | And part of that probably had to do with the diaspora,

02:18:21.640 | which was the movement.

02:18:22.760 | Well, you know, you get the idea.

02:18:23.840 | The Romans came and they kicked everybody out,

02:18:25.320 | which they didn't.

02:18:26.160 | Jews had been leaving Judea,

02:18:27.880 | since it was a poor, limited area,

02:18:29.760 | and moving into areas like North Africa,

02:18:31.760 | Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France.

02:18:34.360 | They moved widely around the Roman Empire.

02:18:36.960 | So, that sense of both distinctness and hostility

02:18:41.960 | existed since ancient times.

02:18:46.320 | So, it wasn't just the attitude of the church towards Jews

02:18:52.640 | was mixed by, well, one of the ideas, of course,

02:18:57.440 | is that at the end of time,

02:19:00.040 | just before the second coming,

02:19:02.040 | one of the signs,

02:19:03.200 | how are we gonna know that Jesus is going to return

02:19:06.280 | and the world is going to end?

02:19:07.400 | Well, the Jews will all convert.

02:19:09.000 | There will be a mass conversion.

02:19:12.520 | They'll sort of see the light.

02:19:14.120 | Now, so there have to be Jews around to do that,

02:19:17.240 | or we won't, you know, it's like a canary in a coal mine.

02:19:19.320 | You have to have them there to tip it off.

02:19:21.720 | So, that was one of the arguments as to why,

02:19:24.240 | within the church,

02:19:25.080 | as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted,

02:19:28.100 | beyond the fact that it's just kind of bad policy

02:19:32.040 | to forcibly convert people

02:19:33.480 | because you don't know whether it's sincere.

02:19:36.800 | But they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact,

02:19:41.800 | which will then redeem itself at the end of time.

02:19:51.680 | It's not something which is encouraged.

02:19:54.080 | It predates Christianity.

02:19:56.140 | And then Christianity, of course, in its own way,

02:20:01.840 | just sort of plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn't it?

02:20:06.840 | I mean, I hesitate to use that term,

02:20:10.780 | but that's what you do.

02:20:11.920 | It's just like, well, we're the Jews now.

02:20:14.240 | Okay, you used to have a unique relationship with God,

02:20:16.520 | but now it's been passed over to us.

02:20:18.320 | And so, thanks for the Bible.

02:20:23.320 | I can remember that.

02:20:25.480 | And my mom's side,

02:20:26.680 | I was periodically exposed to Sunday school.

02:20:29.300 | And pretty much, the Old Testament was always presented

02:20:33.800 | as if somehow it was the history of like,

02:20:38.440 | for lack of a better term, Europeans in some way.

02:20:42.360 | It was sort of a Christian history.

02:20:44.080 | It was all the prequel to that.

02:20:46.120 | And there'd be some sort of,

02:20:48.180 | first, the term Hebrew was always used, never Jews.

02:20:51.040 | So, the ancient Hebrews,

02:20:52.520 | and somehow the Hebrews just sort of became the Christians.

02:20:55.920 | And I don't know, the Jews just got,

02:20:57.840 | they didn't get a memo or something.

02:20:59.840 | - So, it's basically like Christianity,

02:21:01.560 | the prequel is the Old Testament.

02:21:05.080 | - Well, they just sort of take over.

02:21:06.800 | Okay, we have the special dispensation now.

02:21:09.140 | Thank you very much.

02:21:10.240 | You're an artifact.

02:21:12.540 | - So, it's interesting.

02:21:14.760 | So, this whole narrative that I would say

02:21:18.400 | is kind of like a viral meme,

02:21:20.680 | started, as you described, in 300 BC.

02:21:26.000 | It just carried on in various forms and morphed itself

02:21:31.000 | and arrived after the Industrial Revolution

02:21:33.320 | into a new form to the 19th and 20th century,

02:21:38.320 | and then somehow captivated everybody's imagination.

02:21:41.680 | - I think that modern antisemitism

02:21:43.720 | is very much a creation of the modern world

02:21:48.040 | and the Industrial Revolution.

02:21:49.680 | It's largely a creation of Jewish emancipation.

02:21:53.300 | It's the nasty flip side of that, okay?

02:21:58.180 | All of the restrictions are thrown off,

02:22:02.040 | but now also you become the focus of much more attention

02:22:06.400 | than what you had before.

02:22:09.600 | - You know, prior to that, you had the kind of ghettoization,

02:22:14.600 | which worked both ways.

02:22:17.440 | I mean, there were rabbis who praised the ghettos

02:22:21.760 | as a protection of Jews against the outside world,

02:22:25.600 | because inside, we can live our life as we wish,

02:22:30.560 | and we're unmolested.

02:22:32.560 | Whereas, if we were, the great fear is that

02:22:38.320 | if we were sort of absorbed into this larger world,

02:22:41.640 | we'll lose our identity.

02:22:43.360 | That sort of question comes up in the 18th century

02:22:46.600 | in things like the Haskalah Movement in Germany,

02:22:50.400 | 'cause the German Jews were always

02:22:51.840 | at the sort of cutting edge of assimilation and modernity.

02:22:55.440 | Moses Mendelssohn was an example of that,

02:22:57.680 | arguing that, you know, we just need to become Germans.

02:23:01.360 | So, you know, as much as possible,

02:23:04.720 | the synagogue should look like Lutheran churches,

02:23:08.280 | everything, things should be given in good German,

02:23:14.560 | and that's the way, we need to become Jewish Germans.

02:23:17.400 | We don't want to become a kind of group of people

02:23:20.080 | who are apart in that way,

02:23:22.520 | and that has created great tensions ever since.

02:23:27.520 | You know, one of the essential points, it seems to me,

02:23:31.480 | in anti-Semitism, anti-Jewism,

02:23:34.920 | is that all the Jews are in it together.

02:23:36.600 | Isn't that one of the things?

02:23:37.440 | Okay, they're always talking about

02:23:38.640 | as if they're a collective, Jews this, Jews that,

02:23:41.520 | as if it's a single, undifferentiated mass of people

02:23:44.680 | who all move and speak in the same way.

02:23:47.660 | From my personal experience, not being Jewish,

02:23:53.560 | it's incredibly diverse.

02:23:59.240 | In many ways, really, one of the things

02:24:01.200 | that anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity

02:24:04.520 | or a singularity of Jewish identity that never existed.

02:24:09.520 | Just like you said, in one hand, there's a good story.

02:24:13.960 | In the other hand is the truth,

02:24:16.080 | and oftentimes, the good story wins out,

02:24:18.480 | and there's something about the idea

02:24:20.600 | that there's a cabal of people, whatever they are.

02:24:23.120 | In this case, our discussion is Jews seeking

02:24:27.240 | world domination, controlling everybody.

02:24:29.800 | It's somehow a compelling story.

02:24:32.200 | It gives us a direction of a people's to fight,

02:24:35.520 | of a people's to hate, on which we project our pain,

02:24:39.160 | 'cause life is difficult.

02:24:41.140 | Life, for many, for most, is full of suffering,

02:24:44.280 | and so we channel that suffering

02:24:45.660 | into hatred towards the other.

02:24:48.720 | Maybe if we can just zoom out,

02:24:50.880 | what do you, from this particular discussion,

02:24:53.720 | learn about human nature that we pick the other

02:24:59.040 | in this kind of way, and we divide each other up in groups,

02:25:04.040 | and then construct stories,

02:25:07.400 | and like constructing those stories,

02:25:09.520 | and they become really viral and sexy to us,

02:25:13.680 | and then we channel the hatred.

02:25:16.360 | We use those stories to channel our hatred

02:25:18.020 | towards the other.

02:25:18.960 | - Well, yeah, Jews aren't the only recipient of that.

02:25:23.480 | I mean, any time you hear people talking about Jews,

02:25:26.800 | this or that, white people, this or that,

02:25:29.000 | black people, this or that, Asians, this or that,

02:25:31.480 | where they're an undifferentiated mass,

02:25:34.800 | who apparently all share something in common,

02:25:37.160 | well, then nobody's really thinking.

02:25:40.720 | And the other thing you'll find is that

02:25:43.440 | people who will express those views when pressed

02:25:45.480 | will argue that, oh, well, this, you know,

02:25:47.120 | if they actually know anybody from those groups,

02:25:49.180 | those are okay.

02:25:50.200 | You know, it's like Nazis.

02:25:52.720 | Oh, they go, oh, this isn't okay, Jew.

02:25:54.640 | They're all right.

02:25:55.680 | They will always be constantly making exceptions,

02:25:58.320 | in one form.

02:25:59.400 | What they actually meant, an actual human being,

02:26:02.160 | and they seem to be fairly normal,

02:26:03.960 | well, they were okay.

02:26:05.480 | So what it was that they hated

02:26:07.000 | weren't actual people for the most part.

02:26:09.160 | It was just this kind of gollywog vision

02:26:13.200 | that they had of them.

02:26:15.200 | You're not even talking about real people.

02:26:17.300 | I don't know.

02:26:20.800 | What does that tell you about human nature?

02:26:22.500 | Well, okay, in 70-odd years,

02:26:26.160 | what have I learned about my fellow creatures?

02:26:28.700 | One, I don't actually understand them any better

02:26:34.820 | than I ever did.

02:26:35.660 | In fact, less so, okay.

02:26:37.600 | I would say this.

02:26:38.600 | When I was 17, I thought that I had the world

02:26:40.760 | much more figured out than I do now.

02:26:42.960 | Completely deluded, but you know,

02:26:46.240 | it seemed to make much more sense

02:26:47.600 | than I could categorize things.

02:26:49.160 | Basic take upon human beings,

02:26:51.840 | most people, most of the time are polite,

02:26:56.600 | cooperative, and kind until they're not.

02:27:01.600 | And the exact tipping point and moment

02:27:09.200 | in which they go from one to the other is unpredictable.

02:27:13.500 | God, that's brilliantly put.

02:27:16.720 | Speaking of the tipping point,

02:27:18.660 | you gave a series of lectures on murderers,

02:27:22.060 | crimes in the 20th century.

02:27:23.900 | One of the crimes that you described

02:27:26.620 | is the Manson family murders.

02:27:29.220 | And that combines a lot of the elements

02:27:31.180 | of what we've been talking about

02:27:32.500 | and a lot of the elements of the human nature

02:27:34.980 | that you just described.

02:27:37.020 | So can you just tell the story at a high level

02:27:39.660 | as you understand it?

02:27:41.060 | The Manson family.

02:27:41.900 | Well, you begin with Charles Manson,

02:27:43.180 | who's the key element in this.

02:27:44.380 | And Charles Manson, for most of his life,

02:27:47.380 | up until the time that he's around 33,

02:27:50.620 | is an unexceptional petty criminal.

02:27:52.900 | In and out of prison,

02:27:55.460 | reform school from an early age,

02:27:58.740 | not really associated with violent crimes.

02:28:01.520 | He did stuff like steal cars, write bad checks,

02:28:06.520 | became an unsuccessful pimp and drug dealer.

02:28:09.180 | So around 1967, he gets out of his latest stint

02:28:13.600 | in federal lockup in Terminal Island,

02:28:16.460 | near Los Angeles, California.

02:28:18.380 | By that time, he's learned how to play the guitar,

02:28:22.500 | has ambitions to become a musician,

02:28:25.100 | and also has proclaimed himself a Scientologist.

02:28:29.480 | Not that he ever seems to have practiced,

02:28:31.780 | but that's what he would claim that he was.

02:28:34.340 | Kind of self-educated himself in prison to a certain degree.

02:28:38.380 | And so when he gets out of prison in '67,

02:28:42.620 | he was a model prisoner.

02:28:45.820 | He behaved himself and seemed,

02:28:49.940 | you can sort of imagine his life

02:28:51.380 | as going in a completely different direction.

02:28:54.500 | And here again, I'm gonna say something

02:28:57.260 | kind of good about Charles Manson,

02:28:58.980 | which is that he actually was a decent singer.

02:29:02.100 | If you really sort of listen to some of the stuff he did,

02:29:05.220 | he's not a great singer, but he could have,

02:29:09.980 | other people got recording contracts

02:29:12.200 | with less talent than he had,

02:29:13.620 | and he could play guitar.

02:29:15.220 | The Beach Boys actually do record

02:29:18.180 | one of his songs without him.

02:29:20.460 | - How would you evaluate Hitler's painting

02:29:23.060 | on compared to Charles Manson's?

02:29:24.740 | - Well, you're supposed to say it's terrible.

02:29:26.500 | - Okay. - Okay.

02:29:27.580 | It looks average to me.

02:29:28.740 | - Yeah, it's landscape.

02:29:29.700 | - I mean, if you didn't know it was Hitler,

02:29:32.340 | would it, would it, would it, would you,

02:29:35.780 | I don't know what people will say about it.

02:29:38.740 | - I'm sorry for the distraction.

02:29:39.580 | - It's just, you know, it's just, it's an average painter.

02:29:42.580 | That's what it was.

02:29:43.500 | It's nothing like crazy genocidal maniac paintings.

02:29:46.580 | You don't have really have those.

02:29:48.500 | So Manson, he could have done that.

02:29:50.660 | He probably could have, you know,

02:29:52.460 | he made certain inroads into the music industry,

02:29:55.460 | and if he hadn't been such a weirdo,

02:29:56.860 | he might've gotten further with it,

02:29:59.220 | but his life could have taken a different turn.

02:30:01.460 | So this is one of the questions I have.

02:30:02.940 | Where did a guy who becomes,

02:30:05.020 | who's an unexceptional career petty criminal,

02:30:07.740 | suddenly emerge into some sort of criminal mastermind,

02:30:12.060 | a Svengali, who can bend all of these people to his will

02:30:15.980 | and get them to go out and commit murder?

02:30:18.020 | That's a, that's a real shift that you have.

02:30:21.780 | So the first thing it kind of could tell you

02:30:25.740 | that something odd is going on,

02:30:27.220 | is he gets out of prison in L.A. County,

02:30:30.800 | and he's supposed to, you know, he's on parole.

02:30:36.140 | You know, parolees are supposed to have a job,

02:30:38.420 | not supposed to leave the jurisdiction of their parole.

02:30:40.980 | He heads straight for the Bay Area,

02:30:42.660 | violates parole right off the bat.

02:30:44.480 | Two weeks later, he drifts into the parole office

02:30:49.580 | in the Bay Area, whereupon he should have been arrested

02:30:52.660 | and sent back to Terminal Island,

02:30:55.020 | but instead they just assign him a parole.

02:30:56.820 | I don't know, maybe things were easier then in some way.

02:30:59.100 | So he gets assigned a parole officer, Michael Smith.

02:31:01.960 | Michael Smith is initially handling a number of parolees,

02:31:06.660 | but after a while, once he takes on Manson,

02:31:08.660 | he only has one parolee he's supervising,

02:31:11.700 | Charlie Manson, which is odd.

02:31:14.540 | Then you also find out that Michael Smith,

02:31:17.460 | in addition to being a parole officer,

02:31:19.500 | is a graduate student at the University of California,

02:31:23.280 | studying group dynamics,

02:31:25.980 | especially the influence of drugs on gangs and groups.

02:31:30.980 | And he's also connected to the Hayat Ashbery Free Clinic,

02:31:34.300 | which is a place where the influence of,

02:31:37.020 | 'cause Hayat Ashbery had lots of drugs and lots of groups.

02:31:40.460 | So, you know, Charlie Manson never gets a regular job,

02:31:45.880 | hangs around with young girls,

02:31:50.460 | ex-cons, engages in criminal activity,

02:31:56.180 | is repeatedly arrested, but nothing ever sticks

02:31:58.580 | for the, you know, next couple of years.

02:32:02.240 | So who gets that type of thing?

02:32:06.020 | Who gets a get-out-of-jail-free card?

02:32:08.440 | Informants.

02:32:11.260 | So here is what, again, this is speculation,

02:32:17.580 | but Manson, at some point after he got out of prison,

02:32:23.700 | is getting this treatment because he is recruited

02:32:26.260 | as a confidential informant.

02:32:28.140 | - For who?

02:32:29.460 | - For who?

02:32:30.300 | That's the interesting question.

02:32:35.060 | So, probably not for any local police departments.

02:32:39.140 | My best suspicion is probably

02:32:41.180 | the Federal Bureau of Narcotics,

02:32:43.540 | precursor to the DEA.

02:32:45.540 | You know, federal parolee, federal parole officer,

02:32:52.380 | cum graduate student in drugs and group dynamics,

02:32:55.460 | and eventually, with permission, he goes back down to LA.

02:32:59.500 | And what is he part of when he's there?

02:33:01.460 | Well, he's on the fringes of the music industry.

02:33:04.820 | Not so much, you know,

02:33:05.660 | these, those are the Wilsons and elsewhere,

02:33:09.180 | which also brings him to the fringes of the film industry.

02:33:11.780 | So one of the things, if you're sort of looking

02:33:13.660 | in terms of Hollywood music industry elites

02:33:17.420 | in the flow of, oh, and he's also dealing in drugs,

02:33:20.280 | and girls.

02:33:22.020 | So an early version of Jeffrey Epstein.

02:33:26.300 | - Yeah.

02:33:29.660 | - Manson attracted lots of underage runaways,

02:33:33.020 | and trained them, used them,

02:33:37.660 | also associating with biker gangs

02:33:39.980 | who produced the drugs, et cetera.

02:33:41.900 | So that's part of what he's,

02:33:43.660 | he's an informant in the movement of drugs,

02:33:46.980 | basically within the film music industries.

02:33:49.820 | And he's given pretty much a kind of free reign

02:33:51.780 | at that point.

02:33:52.620 | What then happens in August of 1969

02:33:56.900 | is that there are these murders, you know,

02:33:59.020 | first Sharon Tate and her friends in Cielo Drive.

02:34:02.900 | I think everybody has probably pretty much heard

02:34:06.620 | that story before.

02:34:07.780 | And of course the question is, why Cielo Drive?

02:34:10.980 | Why Sharon Tate, Frikoski, and the rest of them

02:34:13.260 | that he has them?

02:34:14.100 | Manson was familiar with the place.

02:34:15.740 | He had been there before.

02:34:17.100 | Members of the family had been there before.

02:34:19.640 | So he knew where it was.

02:34:22.220 | It wasn't an easy place to find.

02:34:24.860 | I mean, the way that that house,

02:34:26.220 | the house, the original house is no longer there,

02:34:28.460 | but the same sort of property in a house is built there.

02:34:31.300 | And if you didn't know where it was,

02:34:33.900 | it's not some place,

02:34:35.300 | let's just go for a drive in the Hollywood Hills

02:34:37.300 | and murder people in a house.

02:34:38.940 | Well, that isn't the one that you would come across.

02:34:41.500 | There are lots of connections there.

02:34:44.460 | Wojtek Frikoski, who was one of the people killed

02:34:46.940 | at the Cielo Drive house was involved in drug dealing.

02:34:50.100 | That's a possible connection between the two.

02:34:52.260 | Probably a fairly likely one.

02:34:54.660 | Probably not unfortunate Sharon Tate at all.

02:34:58.700 | She was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.

02:35:02.700 | Her husband might've been, you never know.

02:35:04.920 | And then the next night after the slaughter there,

02:35:11.140 | which by the way, Manson is not at.

02:35:13.060 | So this is one of the interesting things about is

02:35:14.740 | Charles Manson doesn't kill any of these people.

02:35:17.340 | His crime is supposedly ordering the killings to be done.

02:35:24.160 | He supposedly thought that the killings

02:35:28.260 | at the Tate house were sloppy.

02:35:29.760 | And he was gonna give everybody a crash course

02:35:32.980 | in how you apparently commit seemingly random murders.

02:35:35.820 | So the next night he takes a group of people

02:35:37.660 | over to the LaBianca's house in a different section of LA.

02:35:41.140 | And you've got Lena and Rosemary, LaBianca,

02:35:45.460 | guy's a grocer.

02:35:47.300 | His wife runs a dress shop, upper middle class.

02:35:51.980 | And they're bound to gagged and hacked to death.

02:35:54.860 | And as at the Tate residence,

02:35:58.380 | various things like piggy are written,

02:36:00.620 | various messages in blood,

02:36:02.060 | things that are supposed to look like cat's paws,

02:36:04.560 | because one of the groups trying to be framed for this

02:36:07.400 | was the idea was the Black Panthers.

02:36:09.200 | So the general story that comes out in the subsequent trial

02:36:14.200 | is that this was all a part of something

02:36:15.640 | called Helter Skelter,

02:36:17.240 | which Manson supposedly was an idea

02:36:19.820 | that that sounds like a Beatles song.

02:36:21.560 | That's where he got it from.

02:36:23.200 | He thought the Beatles were talking to him

02:36:24.840 | through their music

02:36:26.160 | and that there was going to be an apocalyptic race war.

02:36:30.160 | And this was all part of a plan to set this off.

02:36:34.360 | So this is why the Black Panthers

02:36:37.000 | were trying to be implicated in this.

02:36:40.040 | Although how it was supposed to do that

02:36:43.460 | is never really explained.

02:36:44.900 | Here is what I think was really happening.

02:36:50.560 | What really happened and how I think it fits together.

02:36:53.260 | Before Sharon Tate and her friends

02:36:56.760 | or the LaBiancas were killed,

02:36:58.460 | there was a murder by members of the family

02:37:02.880 | of some of the same people involved in the later killings

02:37:05.700 | of a musician drug manufacturer

02:37:08.440 | by the name of Gary Hinman.

02:37:09.800 | So Manson again was involved in the drug trade

02:37:14.240 | and Hinman made them.

02:37:17.640 | He was a cook basically.

02:37:20.520 | And he brewed them up in his basement,

02:37:22.800 | sold the drugs to Manson who sold them to biker gangs

02:37:26.620 | like the Straight Satans,

02:37:28.520 | which was one of the groups that he used

02:37:30.120 | and they distributed them elsewhere.

02:37:31.920 | Well, one day the Straight Satans show up

02:37:35.960 | and complain that the last batch of meth

02:37:39.320 | or whatever it was that they got from Manson

02:37:43.560 | had made some of their brothers very, very ill.

02:37:46.200 | And they were quite unhappy about that.

02:37:48.880 | And they wanted their $2,000 back.

02:37:50.980 | Manson had gotten those drugs from Gary Hinman.

02:37:55.900 | So he is unhappy and he sends Bobby Bose away

02:38:01.120 | and a couple of the girls over to Hinman's place

02:38:03.720 | to get the money from him.

02:38:05.120 | As the story is later related, I think by Susan Atkins,

02:38:09.960 | Hinman denied that there was anything wrong with his drugs

02:38:14.280 | and refused to pay up,

02:38:15.880 | which led to a interrogation torture session

02:38:19.220 | in which he was killed.

02:38:20.480 | And the idea was here, what are we gonna do with that?

02:38:24.480 | Well, one of the other groups

02:38:25.640 | that Hinman had sold drugs to were, guess what?

02:38:29.140 | People associated with the Black Panthers.

02:38:30.960 | So we'll leave these things up

02:38:32.840 | and we'll make them, they will do it.

02:38:35.600 | So it's Bobby Bose away who then takes Hinman's car

02:38:40.600 | and decides to drive it up the coast.

02:38:45.880 | By the way, with a bloody knife

02:38:47.520 | with Hinman's blood and hair on it

02:38:50.560 | and blood on the seats in the car.

02:38:52.480 | And then he pulls it off the road

02:38:53.880 | and decides to sleep it off and he gets busted, right?

02:38:57.000 | So find Hinman's body,

02:39:00.160 | find Bose and Hinman's car with a bloody knife with him.

02:39:04.040 | Yeah, he gets arrested.

02:39:05.280 | So Bose was very popular with some of the girls.

02:39:11.120 | There's consternation in the family

02:39:14.400 | that Bobby has been arrested.

02:39:16.220 | So how can we possibly get Bobby out of jail?

02:39:19.300 | Copycat killings.

02:39:21.460 | So if we go kill more people and we make it look the same,

02:39:25.160 | then see, Bobby couldn't possibly have done it.

02:39:27.600 | No, see, he just borrowed the car.

02:39:30.080 | I mean, okay, he stole the car,

02:39:31.400 | but the knife was already in it.

02:39:32.240 | He didn't have anything to do with this.

02:39:34.840 | So that, to me, makes the most sense out of what followed.

02:39:39.480 | - How often do people talk about that theory?

02:39:41.520 | That's an interesting theory.

02:39:43.280 | - Well, it's there.

02:39:44.440 | It's just not the one that,

02:39:46.320 | but we also wanted to go with "Helter Skelter"

02:39:48.240 | because it was, again,

02:39:49.800 | it was a story that people could understand.

02:39:52.120 | And it was sensational and it would catch on.

02:39:56.300 | Also another probable issue in that

02:39:59.080 | was that his star witness was Linda Kasabian.

02:40:02.880 | Linda Kasabian, she was present

02:40:05.800 | at both the Tate and LaBianca murders.

02:40:08.920 | She didn't participate in the killings, according to her.

02:40:12.800 | She sort of drives the car,

02:40:14.080 | but everybody else talked about what had happened.

02:40:17.520 | Well, okay, she turns state's evidence

02:40:20.760 | and gets total immunity.

02:40:22.160 | And it's largely in her testimony

02:40:25.640 | that all the rest of the case is based.

02:40:27.900 | Now, if you start throwing into the equation

02:40:31.880 | that she proclaimed her love for Bobby Beausoleil

02:40:35.320 | and that she, according to others,

02:40:38.020 | was the chief proponent of the copycat killings.

02:40:42.640 | Well, then that would get messy.

02:40:44.560 | Now, there's one guy that's at the center of this.

02:40:46.800 | It's Charles Manson.

02:40:49.040 | He ordered all of this done to ignite a race war,

02:40:53.800 | even though, how would any of that do it?

02:40:58.800 | - So that doesn't make sense,

02:41:00.320 | but he is nevertheless at the center of this

02:41:02.680 | because he's the glue of the family, right?

02:41:05.000 | - He exerts a tremendous amount

02:41:06.360 | of psychological control over them.

02:41:08.480 | - How was he able to do that, Sergeant Charles?

02:41:11.320 | 'Cause you said he was a petty criminal.

02:41:13.080 | It does seem he was pretty prolific in his petty crimes.

02:41:16.180 | Like he did a lot of them.

02:41:17.760 | - He had a lot of access to LSD.

02:41:19.800 | - Okay.

02:41:22.060 | - Okay, which he started getting at the free clinic

02:41:25.920 | in San Francisco.

02:41:29.200 | So lots of it floating around.

02:41:31.440 | Some descriptions of the family at Spahn Ranch

02:41:34.840 | is that people were basically taking acid on a daily basis,

02:41:38.640 | which, by the way, was also a potential problem

02:41:40.760 | with Linda Kasabian's testimony,

02:41:42.760 | since she also admitted to being high most of the time

02:41:45.560 | and also thinking she was a witch.

02:41:47.680 | All right, so you wanna put her, okay.

02:41:49.920 | Where do you wanna go with that?

02:41:51.320 | See, if Manson wasn't Manson,

02:41:54.560 | if he hadn't acted like such a complete,

02:41:56.840 | if he hadn't actually acted like

02:41:58.600 | the crazed hippie psycho goofball

02:42:01.720 | that Bugliosi painted him as being,

02:42:03.780 | then Kasabian's testimony wouldn't have been as strong

02:42:09.720 | because you could, I mean, the first thing against her

02:42:11.720 | is you've got an immunity

02:42:13.040 | for telling the story the prosecution wants.

02:42:17.120 | That's a little iffy.

02:42:20.080 | And we won't even bring in the witch and the drugs

02:42:22.240 | and being in love with Bobby Bosley, all right.

02:42:24.480 | So if Manson had been dressed like you,

02:42:27.320 | sitting there in a suit and tie,

02:42:29.200 | and had behaved himself and spoken normally,

02:42:32.640 | things might've, this isn't to say

02:42:34.040 | that he wasn't guilty as hell.

02:42:38.560 | So what he supposedly did was to inspire

02:42:41.400 | all of these killings.

02:42:43.920 | And I think that's probably,

02:42:50.480 | sort of beginning with the Hinman killing.

02:42:52.780 | He told them to go over there and get the money,

02:42:56.120 | one way or the other.

02:42:57.520 | I don't know whether it's clear whether he told them

02:42:59.040 | if you don't get the money, kill him, but Hinman's dead.

02:43:03.840 | And then you might also have seen the value

02:43:08.400 | in terms of having copycat killings

02:43:11.600 | as a way of throwing off any other kind of blame.

02:43:15.080 | The other story you get is that one of the people

02:43:16.840 | who had lived at the Cielo house where Sharon Tate was

02:43:19.400 | before was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher.

02:43:23.620 | Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes,

02:43:28.020 | had welched on a deal with Manson

02:43:32.160 | in terms of a record contract.

02:43:34.400 | He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal

02:43:37.280 | and Manson wanted to get revenge

02:43:39.760 | and sent them to kill everybody in the house.

02:43:42.420 | Which again, doesn't make it much of a sense.

02:43:45.640 | One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn't living there anymore.

02:43:48.540 | He probably knew where Melcher was living.

02:43:51.840 | If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him.

02:43:54.560 | It wasn't that difficult to do.

02:43:56.120 | And

02:44:01.960 | so that's, it's not revenge on Terry Melcher

02:44:06.960 | that drew him there.

02:44:08.720 | He was familiar with the house,

02:44:11.280 | so if the idea was to simply commit random killings

02:44:15.080 | that would throw,

02:44:16.620 | that would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing,

02:44:20.420 | then you might pick some place you knew of,

02:44:22.640 | you knew the place was running out,

02:44:23.960 | there would be someone there and you really didn't care.

02:44:26.680 | In the same way that the La Bianca seemed to have been.

02:44:31.000 | Manson was familiar with that

02:44:33.000 | because it supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling.

02:44:36.840 | This is little interesting things

02:44:39.960 | that the family would be taught to do.

02:44:42.200 | Creepy crawling is when you sneak

02:44:44.080 | into somebody's house at night,

02:44:45.640 | while they're there asleep or when they're not there

02:44:50.200 | and you move things around.

02:44:52.080 | So when they get up in the morning or they come home,

02:44:55.200 | they'll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house

02:44:57.880 | which will freak them out,

02:45:00.540 | which is the whole point of that.

02:45:02.920 | - But it doesn't seem like the murder

02:45:04.280 | or the creepy crawling was the,

02:45:06.320 | well, creepy crawling may it be,

02:45:07.720 | but it doesn't seem like the murder,

02:45:10.360 | like some of the other people you've covered

02:45:12.320 | like the Zodiac Killer,

02:45:13.920 | the murder is the goal.

02:45:15.300 | Maybe there's some psychopathic kind of artistry

02:45:21.440 | to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had

02:45:23.560 | and the messaging behind that,

02:45:25.200 | but it seems like with the,

02:45:27.400 | at least the way you're describing it

02:45:28.600 | with the Charles Manson family,

02:45:30.400 | the murder was just the,

02:45:31.680 | they just had a basic disregard for human life

02:45:34.920 | and the murder was a consequence

02:45:37.400 | of just operating in the drug underworld.

02:45:40.680 | - So Manson set up a kind of base,

02:45:42.560 | I think called the Spawn Movie Ranch,

02:45:44.280 | which was an old movie ranch

02:45:46.560 | out on the northwest edge of LA.

02:45:48.960 | And they just kind of camped out there.

02:45:51.560 | He used the girls, in particular Squeaky Frome,

02:45:55.800 | to get the owner or operator

02:46:00.360 | I think George Spawn to let them hang out there.

02:46:04.960 | And basically she slept with him

02:46:06.920 | and he was perfectly happy to let them hang out.

02:46:09.160 | They also had a place out in the desert that they had.

02:46:11.860 | They dealt in credit card fraud, stolen cars.

02:46:15.600 | It was kind of a chop shop that they ran out of the place.

02:46:19.120 | So he had a fairly good little criminal gig going,

02:46:25.200 | which with the protection he had probably would have,

02:46:29.200 | the one thing they couldn't cover him on was murder.

02:46:31.600 | - So you think there was, if he was an informer,

02:46:33.880 | you think there was still a connection

02:46:34.920 | between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever,

02:46:37.920 | with him throughout this until he'd come into murder?

02:46:41.140 | - The real question is, there is a book written on this

02:46:43.540 | by Tom O'Neill called "Chaos."

02:46:46.080 | I'm not necessarily saying it's the easiest thing

02:46:47.680 | to get through, there's a lot of material there.

02:46:50.120 | I don't think O'Neill necessarily knows what to make

02:46:52.360 | of some of the stuff he came up with.

02:46:53.760 | But he does a very good job of sort of demolishing

02:46:56.420 | the whole Bugliosi narrative.

02:46:59.240 | And one of the people he mentions is a name

02:47:03.400 | that I had run into elsewhere.

02:47:05.720 | And so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again.

02:47:08.040 | And the name is Reeve Whitson.

02:47:10.960 | Reeve Whitson shows up on the fringes

02:47:17.880 | even though he has no judicial function.

02:47:20.480 | He sort of hangs around Bugliosi in the prosecution.

02:47:23.560 | He's some sort of advice, he's just kind of there.

02:47:25.720 | In the same way that he was one of these guys,

02:47:29.040 | he grew his hair kind of long, wore bell-bottoms,

02:47:32.320 | hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood,

02:47:36.760 | but no one could tell you exactly what he did.

02:47:39.560 | I know what he did later, but a decade later,

02:47:44.200 | he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America.

02:47:47.080 | So Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least,

02:47:55.000 | is CIA.

02:47:56.120 | What was he

02:47:57.360 | in 1969?

02:48:02.600 | What is he doing in this?

02:48:04.300 | The other thing about it is he appears to have been

02:48:08.640 | the person who called, there's a little question

02:48:10.960 | of when the bodies at Cielo Drive are discovered.

02:48:15.120 | So the general story is that Sharon Tate's housekeeper

02:48:18.820 | shows up around 8.30 in the morning,

02:48:21.280 | finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door.

02:48:24.840 | But there was another fellow who knew,

02:48:27.120 | I think the owner of the house, he's a photographer,

02:48:30.440 | last name may be Hatami.

02:48:31.600 | He gets a call earlier in the morning

02:48:33.640 | saying that there'd been murders there.

02:48:37.440 | And the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson.

02:48:43.860 | So someone had been at the house

02:48:49.280 | before the bodies were discovered

02:48:51.240 | and they had not called the police.

02:48:54.460 | So I don't know what's going on there,

02:48:59.460 | but it's a curious kind of situation.

02:49:04.860 | And Manson, in a lot of ways,

02:49:10.100 | just kind of self-immolates himself.

02:49:13.180 | I mean, his behavior at the trial is bizarre,

02:49:15.580 | it's threatening, it's disruptive.

02:49:18.300 | He's got his girls out on the street

02:49:20.660 | carving Xs in their forehead, carrying knives.

02:49:24.020 | One of the attorneys, initially his attorney, Ron Hughes,

02:49:29.620 | becomes Van Houten's attorney.

02:49:32.900 | And he figures out that the three girls

02:49:34.460 | supposedly on Charlie's insistence are gonna confess.

02:49:39.460 | And they confess that it was all their idea

02:49:42.300 | and Charlie had nothing to do with it.

02:49:44.200 | Hughes doesn't like this because his defense for her

02:49:49.500 | is that she was under his influence

02:49:52.380 | and therefore not responsible for her own actions.

02:49:56.660 | So he was having psychic control.

02:49:58.980 | So he refuses to go along with it.

02:50:00.760 | There's a break in the trial,

02:50:01.900 | he goes camping up in the mountains with some friends,

02:50:05.140 | disappears during a rainstorm,

02:50:08.020 | and then some months later,

02:50:09.740 | his decomposed remains are found.

02:50:11.460 | Now, rumors, always the rumors, okay.

02:50:16.300 | What would history be without rumors?

02:50:19.220 | Hell, that, ah, see members of the family,

02:50:21.260 | they were pissed off at Ron Hughes

02:50:24.100 | because he messed up Charlie's idea to get him off

02:50:27.380 | and so they killed him.

02:50:28.700 | Oh, maybe they did, maybe he drowned.

02:50:31.140 | That's absolutely impossible to say.

02:50:33.240 | You got that kind of story, there's a guy named Juan Flynn,

02:50:37.020 | who was an employee at the spawn ranch, didn't like Manson,

02:50:40.860 | held Manson responsible for the murder of his boss.

02:50:43.820 | He would testify that Manson told him

02:50:46.340 | that he had ordered all the killings

02:50:48.100 | and that Manson also admitted that he had killed 35 people.

02:50:51.680 | Maybe he did.

02:50:55.260 | On the other hand, Juan Flynn didn't like him

02:50:58.820 | and he had no, other than his word,

02:51:00.540 | had no real proof of what he was saying.

02:51:02.540 | So please understand me in this case,

02:51:05.700 | is that unlike some people who argue

02:51:08.100 | that Charles Manson got a raw deal,

02:51:10.500 | I don't think that's the case.

02:51:14.900 | I think that he influenced tremendous influence

02:51:18.180 | over the people there through drugs,

02:51:22.780 | through, sex was another frequent component in it.

02:51:30.220 | He had a real whammy over a lot of these people's minds.

02:51:34.140 | I'm not sure how, that still kind of puzzles me.

02:51:37.080 | He was a scrawny guy and he wasn't physically intimidating.

02:51:41.460 | I mean, even a lot of women

02:51:43.340 | wouldn't be physically intimidated by him,

02:51:45.140 | but he nonetheless had this real psychological power

02:51:48.420 | and there were, and if you look around him,

02:51:50.220 | the male followers he had were fairly big guys.

02:51:54.360 | So he could get people to do what he wanted.

02:51:58.820 | And again, to me, the simplest explanation for this

02:52:04.060 | is that it began with the Hinman killing

02:52:06.260 | and probably on Manson's instigation,

02:52:08.780 | the others were copycat killings

02:52:10.420 | to throw off what was going on.

02:52:13.420 | That would, if I was a cop, that's what I would focus on

02:52:17.340 | 'cause that seems to make the most sense.

02:52:19.900 | - It's still, it's fascinating that he's able to have

02:52:21.940 | that much psychological control over those people

02:52:24.820 | without having a very clear ideology.

02:52:27.820 | So it's a cult.

02:52:29.220 | - Yes, the great focus on Charlie the leader,

02:52:32.260 | the excessive devotion.

02:52:35.300 | - But there's not like a, maybe,

02:52:38.340 | there's not an ideology behind that.

02:52:39.980 | Like something like Scientology or some kind of religious

02:52:42.620 | or some kind of, I don't know, utopian ideology,

02:52:47.140 | nothing like this.

02:52:48.380 | - No, I think that Manson, again,

02:52:50.380 | was essentially a criminal.

02:52:52.060 | He had a sociopathic mindset

02:52:54.780 | and he hit upon a pretty good deal.

02:52:56.540 | - Yeah, but like, how do people convince anybody

02:52:59.660 | of anything?

02:53:00.500 | With a cult, usually you have either an ideology

02:53:04.300 | or you have maybe personal religion,

02:53:06.540 | like you said, sex and drugs.

02:53:08.260 | But underneath that, can you really keep people

02:53:10.340 | with sex and drugs?

02:53:11.220 | You have to kind of convince them that you love them

02:53:14.020 | in some deep sense.

02:53:15.500 | Like there's a, like a commune of love.

02:53:18.900 | - Yeah, you have a lot of people there in the cult.

02:53:20.500 | They don't, they have some sort of what we like to call

02:53:23.180 | dysfunctional families.

02:53:25.420 | - Yeah.

02:53:26.260 | - A lot of the females in particular seem to have come from,

02:53:29.540 | you know, more or less middle-class families,

02:53:31.440 | but those are full of dysfunction.

02:53:36.100 | You know, their parents didn't love them,

02:53:38.540 | they were semi-runaways, and now they had this whole family.

02:53:43.100 | You know, a lot of the younger women had children.

02:53:48.020 | You know, some of them by Manson,

02:53:50.420 | some of them by the others.

02:53:51.820 | They sort of bonded together.

02:53:53.860 | - And again, we return to that pull towards belonging

02:53:58.700 | that gets us humans into trouble.

02:54:03.560 | So it does seem that there was a few crimes around this time.

02:54:08.560 | So the Zodiac Killer.

02:54:13.120 | - Well, California, where I'm from.

02:54:18.120 | So I remember this period vividly.

02:54:20.480 | So by the way, the Tate-LaBianca killings

02:54:23.160 | occurred on my birthday, the year I graduated

02:54:25.400 | from high school, so I remember this.

02:54:28.160 | - Happy birthday.

02:54:29.360 | - A term which has been used for that,

02:54:31.520 | there's a writer by the name of Todd Wood

02:54:33.680 | who's coined, I wish I'd come up with this,

02:54:35.640 | Killer-fornia, which is just sort of a chronicle

02:54:40.240 | of the serial killers and disappearances

02:54:43.440 | in the late '60s and '70s.

02:54:45.040 | So you've got the Zodiac, you've got other ones.

02:54:47.360 | I mean, you know, I hate to say it,

02:54:50.680 | I'm not trying to be flippant about it,

02:54:52.000 | but I mean, young female hitchhikers were disappearing

02:54:55.000 | at an alarming rate in Northern California.

02:54:58.720 | They're bodies that have never been attributed.

02:55:01.480 | Some think that they're the Zodiac's victims,

02:55:05.920 | but it was a dangerous time.

02:55:08.120 | Edmund Kemper, you know, the co-ed killer

02:55:12.320 | was another one of them.

02:55:14.240 | There were a lot of creepy psychopaths running around.

02:55:18.760 | I don't know if it was something in the water

02:55:20.400 | or what was going on, but it was a menacing in some cases.

02:55:26.400 | Hitchhiking, especially if you were alone and female,

02:55:31.400 | was not something you wanted to do

02:55:34.560 | in much of the Golden State,

02:55:35.960 | certainly not up around the Bay Area.

02:55:38.640 | So there were a lot of these strange sort of killings

02:55:40.320 | that were going on.

02:55:41.200 | The Zodiac is, it's one of those things

02:55:43.880 | where you have these people who have theories about it.

02:55:47.400 | And if you don't share their theory,

02:55:49.680 | then, you know, you're part of the problem

02:55:52.200 | in some form or another.

02:55:53.040 | So I'm not sure, for instance,

02:55:55.520 | that the Zodiac killings were all committed

02:55:56.880 | by the same person.

02:55:58.360 | I think there might've been multiple people involved.

02:56:01.000 | And, you know, the first killings are all of couples.

02:56:06.640 | It's very sort of clear that they,

02:56:08.460 | I remember in my examination of it,

02:56:10.160 | one of the things I was looking at specific,

02:56:12.360 | yeah, what else is there to say about the Zodiac killings?

02:56:16.040 | So what I was gonna look at

02:56:17.320 | is that there are all of these accusations

02:56:20.160 | that there is an occult aspect to it.

02:56:22.000 | There was some sort of ritualistic aspect.

02:56:25.800 | So I looked at different things,

02:56:26.960 | locations, victims, phases of the moon.

02:56:31.120 | That's always worth looking at.

02:56:32.680 | I didn't find much correspondence in any of those.

02:56:36.280 | In one of the killings, I think the one in Lake Berryessa,

02:56:40.560 | he does appear in this kind of weird hooded costume.

02:56:44.880 | You know, he's got his symbol,

02:56:46.200 | the sort of compass or aiming rectal, you know, circle.

02:56:52.040 | With a cross through it, it can mean a variety of things.

02:56:55.320 | He used guns and he used knives,

02:56:57.080 | but he certainly had a thing for couples,

02:56:59.520 | except in the last of the killings,

02:57:01.240 | which is of a cab driver in downtown San Francisco,

02:57:04.440 | who he shoots in full view of witnesses,

02:57:08.520 | which is completely atypical.

02:57:11.380 | And also when he was stabbing the victims,

02:57:16.080 | it doesn't seem like he was very good at it.

02:57:19.920 | - Or if the goal was to kill them,

02:57:21.800 | he wasn't very good at it 'cause some of them survived.

02:57:23.900 | - Yeah, he doesn't, he's not particularly thorough about it.

02:57:26.520 | He seems to have had much more,

02:57:28.360 | more of the violence seems to be directed

02:57:30.680 | at the females than the males.

02:57:32.400 | - So, I mean, there's a couple of questions to ask here.

02:57:35.720 | First of all, did people see his face?

02:57:38.360 | - There is a composite drawing of his face,

02:57:40.520 | which I think is based upon the Stein killing,

02:57:43.400 | the cab driver killing, where there were people who saw him

02:57:47.320 | or who claimed that they saw him.

02:57:49.800 | The other ones were all when it was fairly dark.

02:57:52.960 | - Right.

02:57:54.320 | - I'm not sure that anyone else got to look at his face.

02:57:56.760 | The one that occurred in the daylight at Berryessa,

02:57:59.120 | he was wearing a mask.

02:58:00.640 | So there's something in common initially

02:58:05.640 | in the targeting of victims, which doesn't in the last case.

02:58:08.680 | Then after that, there's just the different cases of where,

02:58:11.880 | there's a pretty good case to be made of a woman who claims,

02:58:16.720 | I think she and her small child were picked up,

02:58:20.400 | her car broke down, she got a flat tire,

02:58:22.360 | and she was picked up by this guy

02:58:24.040 | who she got a very sort of strange vibe from,

02:58:27.320 | who eventually just let her go.

02:58:28.880 | Well, you know, that might've been the Zodiac.

02:58:33.600 | It might not have been.

02:58:35.080 | - You do this kind of rigorous look saying like,

02:58:39.080 | okay, what is the actual facts that we know?

02:58:41.960 | Like reduce it to the thing that we know for sure.

02:58:45.560 | And in speaking about his motivation,

02:58:49.500 | he said that he was collecting souls.

02:58:53.920 | - Souls for the afterlife.

02:58:55.480 | - For the afterlife.

02:58:56.680 | - That's kind of a culty.

02:58:57.880 | - Yeah, I mean, that's what I believe.

02:58:59.960 | Is it the Vikings or the Romans?

02:59:01.880 | They believed this in battle.

02:59:04.320 | - You're essentially making sacrificial victims

02:59:07.000 | and they will be your ghostly servants in the afterlife.

02:59:10.560 | - Do you think he actually believed that?

02:59:12.200 | - Who knows?

02:59:13.040 | I mean, here's the question.

02:59:14.960 | Was he making that up just to be scary

02:59:19.480 | or is that what his actual,

02:59:22.240 | that's what he's saying his motivation is.

02:59:24.260 | So let's take him at face value

02:59:25.800 | rather than trying to

02:59:27.840 | wish that into the cornfield,

02:59:32.880 | that is to get rid of it.

02:59:34.360 | Let's just take it at face.

02:59:36.400 | So he's claiming that he's killing these people

02:59:38.640 | in order to acquire slave servants in the afterlife.

02:59:43.680 | He will subsequently go on to claim many more victims.

02:59:46.520 | I'm not sure, 44, eventually he will have,

02:59:49.520 | before he just kind of vanishes.

02:59:51.120 | One of the really interesting clues to me

02:59:56.200 | when I was looking at that case,

02:59:57.560 | which I didn't find anybody else

02:59:58.960 | that tended to make much of it up,

03:00:00.360 | is that it all has to do with this kind of Halloween card

03:00:04.680 | that he sends to the press in San Francisco.

03:00:08.120 | And it's talking about sort of rope by gun, by fire,

03:00:13.080 | and there's this whole sort of wheel,

03:00:16.600 | you know, sort of like the Zodiacs.

03:00:18.040 | But what's this drawn from, where he got this from,

03:00:20.680 | is from a Tim Holt Western comic book published in 1951.

03:00:25.480 | And you see the same thing on the cover.

03:00:27.680 | It's wheel of fortune,

03:00:29.520 | but with different forms of grisly death on it.

03:00:31.960 | And all of the things that he mentioned

03:00:33.720 | are shown on the cover of this.

03:00:36.220 | So whoever put together that card

03:00:41.040 | saw that comic book.

03:00:43.080 | Well, that's kind of an interesting clue.

03:00:45.040 | So does that mean he's a comic book collector?

03:00:48.040 | When would he have, I mean, that is one,

03:00:51.240 | and also before he got the idea from.

03:00:54.080 | So he's incorporating these things for me.

03:00:56.680 | Then there are, of course, his codes,

03:00:58.480 | which people have, you know,

03:00:59.840 | which aren't all that difficult to decipher,

03:01:02.560 | probably 'cause they weren't meant to be.

03:01:04.660 | The other thing that you find often

03:01:07.560 | with serial or psychopathic killers

03:01:10.320 | is they're toying with the press.

03:01:11.680 | I mean, this goes all the way back to Jack the Ripper.

03:01:14.880 | You know, they get attention.

03:01:16.960 | And then he just disappears.

03:01:20.360 | - Why do you think he was never caught?

03:01:22.440 | - I think they knew who to look for.

03:01:24.240 | There was nothing much to go on.

03:01:25.840 | I mean, there was a guy who was long a suspect,

03:01:29.600 | and then eventually he tested his DNA

03:01:32.600 | and found that it didn't match any of the things

03:01:35.600 | that they'd found.

03:01:37.680 | Again, it goes back to,

03:01:39.840 | I'm not even sure that it's one person

03:01:41.520 | who's responsible for all of them.

03:01:43.680 | - Well, so one of the interesting things

03:01:45.320 | you kind of bring up here,

03:01:47.080 | and our discussion of Manson inspires this,

03:01:51.640 | but there does seem to be a connection,

03:01:56.240 | a shared inspiration between several killers here,

03:02:00.260 | the Zodiac, the son of Sam later,

03:02:03.040 | and the monster of Florence.

03:02:05.600 | So is it possible there's some kind of,

03:02:08.200 | like an underworld that is connecting these people?

03:02:11.840 | - Well, you take the Zodiac,

03:02:14.160 | and you had his claim

03:02:16.040 | that he's collecting souls for the afterlife.

03:02:18.120 | There are other things

03:02:18.960 | that are occult-ish connected to that.

03:02:23.240 | He may have picked some of the killing sites

03:02:26.240 | due to their physical location,

03:02:29.520 | to their position in a particular place.

03:02:32.440 | If you look at the son of Sam case,

03:02:36.040 | of course, David Berkowitz will on and off claim

03:02:38.540 | that he was part of a satanic cult

03:02:41.200 | that was carrying out, again, these killings,

03:02:43.920 | mostly of couples and young women similar to the Zodiac,

03:02:51.080 | and that he had only committed some of them

03:02:54.360 | and was witnesses at others.

03:02:55.820 | And that has really created the whole idea

03:02:59.800 | that yes, there is this some kind of satanic cult

03:03:04.280 | which engages in ritual murders.

03:03:06.600 | Then if you go all the way to Florence,

03:03:09.240 | you've got murders who go on and off

03:03:11.280 | for a long period of time,

03:03:12.480 | again, focusing on couples in isolated areas,

03:03:17.120 | which Italian prosecutors ultimately tried to connect

03:03:20.480 | to some kind of satanic cult,

03:03:23.180 | although I'm not sure they ever made

03:03:24.740 | a particularly strong case for that.

03:03:26.480 | But that element comes up in all three of them.

03:03:31.720 | So you can, with a little imagination,

03:03:35.760 | argue that those similarities,

03:03:38.080 | that those things should come up in each of those cases

03:03:41.480 | in different places.

03:03:43.260 | Either suggest that, oddly enough,

03:03:47.600 | psychopathic criminals all sort of thinking the same way,

03:03:50.480 | or that there is some sort of higher element

03:03:54.480 | involved in this,

03:03:56.200 | that there's some kind of common inspiration.

03:04:01.160 | And here again, you come back to something

03:04:03.260 | similar we were talking before about do pedophiles exist,

03:04:05.760 | do pedophiles, okay, so do satanic cults exist?

03:04:10.760 | Well, they do.

03:04:11.680 | Okay, there was one in my hometown.

03:04:14.440 | Apparently quite harmless, as far as I know,

03:04:18.560 | never did anything, but there are people who,

03:04:20.760 | you know, robes, here we come again,

03:04:23.080 | robes, cut the head off a chicken,

03:04:25.000 | naked woman is an altar, you know,

03:04:26.800 | you can get off on that, I suppose, if that's your thing.

03:04:30.860 | So, profess satanists exist, satanic cults exist,

03:04:35.860 | serial killers exist, ritual murders exist,

03:04:40.580 | are those things necessarily connected?

03:04:43.620 | No.

03:04:44.520 | Could they be connected?

03:04:46.580 | Yes.

03:04:47.420 | Okay, there's nothing, don't ever tell me

03:04:51.380 | that something is just too crazy for people to do,

03:04:54.140 | 'cause that's crazy talk, all right.

03:04:58.060 | You've studied secret societies,

03:04:59.980 | you gave a lot of amazing lectures on secret societies.

03:05:02.860 | It's fascinating to look at human history

03:05:06.580 | through the lens of secret societies,

03:05:08.580 | 'cause they've permeated all of human history.

03:05:11.220 | You've talked about everything from the Knights Templar

03:05:13.660 | to Illuminati to Freemasons, like we brought up,

03:05:16.420 | Freemasons lasted a long time,

03:05:18.300 | Illuminati, as you've talked about,

03:05:21.020 | in its sort of main form, lasted a short time,

03:05:24.460 | but its legend--

03:05:26.280 | - Never gone away.

03:05:27.120 | - Never gone away.

03:05:28.320 | So maybe, like, Illuminati is a really interesting one.

03:05:30.900 | Who, what was that?

03:05:33.380 | - Well, the Illuminati that we know

03:05:35.620 | started in 1776, in fact, you can pin it down to a day,

03:05:41.600 | the first of May, May Day, 1776,

03:05:45.780 | in Ingolstadt, Germany,

03:05:47.980 | founded by a professor, Adam Weishaupt.

03:05:51.340 | It wasn't initially called the Illuminati,

03:05:54.480 | 'cause that's not really the name of the organization,

03:05:57.020 | it was called the Order of Perfectibilists.

03:05:59.660 | Apparently that changed.

03:06:01.740 | Weishaupt would say things like,

03:06:03.340 | "Never let our organization be known

03:06:05.660 | "under its real name anywhere,"

03:06:08.060 | which leaves wondering what's its real name.

03:06:10.260 | So Illuminati is simply the plural of Illuminatis,

03:06:15.780 | which means one who is illuminated,

03:06:17.540 | one who has seen the light.

03:06:19.160 | So in Roman times,

03:06:22.100 | Christian converts were Illuminati,

03:06:25.940 | because they had seen the light.

03:06:27.340 | Anyone who thinks,

03:06:28.620 | and there have been organizations called Illuminati,

03:06:32.420 | the term is not trademarked, not copyrighted.

03:06:37.420 | Anybody who thinks they've seen the light

03:06:38.980 | about anything is an Illuminati.

03:06:40.820 | So it defines nothing.

03:06:42.600 | The symbol of the Order was an owl,

03:06:46.820 | which, interestingly enough, is almost identical

03:06:50.940 | to the owl, which is the emblem of the Bohemian Club.

03:06:55.700 | - Oh, boy.

03:06:56.540 | - Make of that what you will.

03:06:58.020 | I don't make that much out of it,

03:07:00.540 | because one owl looks pretty much like another owl to me,

03:07:03.820 | but compare them,

03:07:05.460 | you gotta kind of wonder about this,

03:07:08.660 | a little, just a little thing.

03:07:10.380 | Maybe there's some kind of connection there.

03:07:12.540 | So, but that supposedly has to do with the connection

03:07:15.500 | to the goddess Minerva, and the owl was sacred to her,

03:07:18.780 | and the Order was the Minerval,

03:07:22.660 | the person who was brought in.

03:07:25.840 | The number of levels changed over time,

03:07:28.840 | there was a higher level for the Order

03:07:30.480 | that people at the lower level didn't know about,

03:07:33.340 | pretty typical for this.

03:07:34.860 | But the thing about Weishaupt was that he was quite,

03:07:39.160 | he was a luminous correspondent with members

03:07:43.560 | with his Illuminati, both during the time

03:07:46.480 | that it legally existed in Bavaria, and later on.

03:07:49.240 | So Weishaupt himself lives, I think, until 1830,

03:07:54.680 | dies in Gotha, which was ruled by an Illuminati prince,

03:07:59.360 | and so, nothing ever happens to these,

03:08:01.880 | no Illuminati's ever put to death,

03:08:03.480 | or arrested, imprisoned for any period of time.

03:08:05.980 | What happens is that their plan, well, what was his plan?

03:08:11.120 | His plan was to essentially replace all existing religions

03:08:15.120 | and governments in the world with a One World Order,

03:08:19.200 | governed by the Illuminati.

03:08:22.900 | So to do this, you had to subvert

03:08:25.380 | and destroy all the existing order.

03:08:28.700 | And the purpose for this is to,

03:08:32.900 | "We wish to make men happy and free,

03:08:34.980 | "but first we must make them good."

03:08:36.960 | - Oh, right.

03:08:39.060 | - So that's what the Order is all about.

03:08:42.940 | Of course, he also said things like,

03:08:44.780 | "Oh man, is there nothing that you won't believe?"

03:08:47.420 | Okay, so myth would be used in that.

03:08:49.540 | Also thought women should be brought into it.

03:08:52.640 | He had a rather interesting view about that,

03:08:54.300 | was that we should appeal to women,

03:08:56.060 | in part because women have a chip on their shoulder,

03:08:59.580 | 'cause they're left out of things.

03:09:01.180 | So we should appeal to their vanity on that point,

03:09:04.740 | and offer that in the future,

03:09:06.400 | all things will be open and they will be emancipated.

03:09:10.060 | So we should hold out the prospect of female emancipation

03:09:13.060 | to attract them, because he argued in the short term,

03:09:16.300 | there's no better way to influence men

03:09:18.780 | than through women.

03:09:20.140 | Get women on our side by promising them emancipation,

03:09:23.020 | but he made sure we'll never actually deliver it to them,

03:09:26.700 | because the future world will be a boys' club.

03:09:29.060 | So he talks about these things fairly openly,

03:09:34.060 | and this is where you get this idea

03:09:35.540 | of some sort of a new world order,

03:09:37.580 | which is to be based upon the destruction

03:09:39.940 | of the existing order.

03:09:41.600 | So there are those who argue

03:09:46.260 | that there is a trail of dissent

03:09:48.620 | that leads from Weishaupt's Illuminati

03:09:52.140 | to the Communist Manifesto,

03:09:54.700 | and in fact, communism itself,

03:09:57.300 | that Marxism was simply a further restating of this idea.

03:10:02.940 | And you can draw some sort of connection,

03:10:05.980 | I mean, the idea never entirely goes away.

03:10:08.520 | The Bavarian government gets a hold

03:10:13.420 | of the order's inner texts.

03:10:16.060 | So the story is they're delivered to them.

03:10:18.340 | I think that Weishaupt gave them to him.

03:10:20.720 | I think he engineered the exposure of his order

03:10:24.220 | because it gave him publicity.

03:10:26.880 | By being exposed in Bavaria, you gained great renown,

03:10:31.820 | and they continued to recruit after this,

03:10:33.580 | and the Bavarian government actually bans the Illuminati

03:10:36.860 | four different times.

03:10:38.000 | Why?

03:10:41.620 | 'Cause apparently the first three times didn't work,

03:10:44.420 | so the fourth one does.

03:10:45.740 | You can notice that it's like Papel bans on Freemasonry,

03:10:49.260 | and they just go on and on and on,

03:10:50.740 | 'cause this clearly isn't working.

03:10:52.500 | - And you actually highlight the difference between,

03:10:55.620 | speaking of publicity,

03:10:56.900 | that there's a difference between

03:10:58.620 | visibility and transparency,

03:11:00.700 | that a secret society could be visible,

03:11:02.660 | it could be known about, it could be quite popular,

03:11:06.240 | but you could still have a secrecy within it.

03:11:08.400 | - You have no idea what's going on inside.

03:11:10.460 | It's like a black box.

03:11:11.780 | If I set a black box on this table,

03:11:13.220 | we can see that there is a black box.

03:11:14.860 | What's in the black box?

03:11:16.260 | A cat?

03:11:17.420 | Who knows?

03:11:18.260 | - In fact, the secrecy might be the very thing

03:11:20.020 | that makes it even more popular.

03:11:21.620 | - Adam Weishaupt, again, there's no more thing convincing

03:11:24.940 | than a concealed mystery.

03:11:26.340 | Give people a concealed mystery in their thoughts.

03:11:28.260 | So we need to make the order mysterious

03:11:30.420 | for that exact reason.

03:11:32.000 | Always hold out the possibility that knowledge,

03:11:36.540 | special knowledge that no mere mortals have

03:11:38.980 | other than you, we'll have it that way.

03:11:41.860 | So he senses a lot of things.

03:11:43.740 | The use of vanity and ego to recruit people

03:11:48.300 | to influence both men and women,

03:11:51.900 | it's quite sophisticated.

03:11:54.620 | And as you might expect from a professor of canon law

03:12:00.140 | trained by Jesuits.

03:12:01.600 | So,

03:12:04.020 | I certainly don't think that it ceased

03:12:11.940 | when it was banned in Bavaria.

03:12:13.920 | 'Cause everybody just scatters and goes elsewhere.

03:12:15.900 | Like Paris.

03:12:16.940 | And then you have the French Revolution.

03:12:21.300 | - So the idea of the Illuminati,

03:12:23.380 | to put it crudely, the branding,

03:12:26.860 | is a really powerful one.

03:12:28.160 | And so it makes sense that it can,

03:12:31.160 | there's a thread connecting it to this day.

03:12:34.900 | That a lot of organizations, a lot of secret societies

03:12:37.420 | can sort of adopt the branding.

03:12:39.780 | - Anybody can call it.

03:12:40.620 | You can go out and form a club and call it the Illuminati.

03:12:43.060 | - And if you're effective at it,

03:12:44.380 | I think it does attract,

03:12:46.020 | honey, it's the chicken or the egg.

03:12:49.380 | But powerful people tend to have gigantic egos

03:12:52.380 | and people with gigantic egos tend to like

03:12:54.620 | the exclusivity of secret societies.

03:12:57.700 | And so like there's a,

03:12:59.900 | there's a gravitational force that pulls powerful people

03:13:02.940 | to these societies.

03:13:03.900 | - Exclusive.

03:13:05.020 | Only certain.

03:13:05.860 | And you also notice something goes back to

03:13:07.660 | when we were talking about much earlier,

03:13:09.020 | when we were talking about intelligence.

03:13:10.260 | Remember mice, ego.

03:13:12.340 | - Ego, yeah.

03:13:13.180 | - As a piece of recruitment and control.

03:13:15.100 | That's a great Achilles heel in human beings.

03:13:18.060 | The exploitation of ego.

03:13:21.260 | - And of course if we go back to the conversation

03:13:23.180 | of intelligence agencies,

03:13:24.620 | it would be very efficient and beneficial

03:13:30.540 | for intelligence agencies to infiltrate

03:13:32.920 | the secret societies, right?

03:13:34.420 | 'Cause that's where the powerful people are.

03:13:36.020 | - Yeah, or the secret societies to infiltrate

03:13:37.980 | the intelligence agencies.

03:13:39.100 | - Oh boy.

03:13:39.940 | Well, I mean, that's actually in all the lectures,

03:13:44.580 | I kinda had a sense that intelligence agencies themselves

03:13:49.380 | are kind of secret societies, right?

03:13:53.100 | - Well, it comes down,

03:13:54.420 | I give you my definition of secret societies,

03:13:56.940 | what they come down to.

03:13:57.760 | One is that generally their existence isn't secret.

03:14:00.140 | It's what they do is secret.

03:14:01.940 | It's what's in the box

03:14:03.060 | as opposed to the existence of the box.

03:14:05.020 | So one of the most important criterions

03:14:07.980 | is that they are self-selecting.

03:14:12.180 | You just don't join, they pick you.

03:14:14.160 | They decide whether or not you're going to,

03:14:15.500 | they admit you and oftentimes they will sort of recruit you.

03:14:18.900 | Once you have been recruited,

03:14:22.520 | you have to pass tests and initiations.

03:14:25.940 | And you also have to swear oaths of loyalty.

03:14:31.880 | Those are always very, very critical.

03:14:36.600 | So broadly speaking,

03:14:38.500 | what entrance into an intelligence organization does,

03:14:41.300 | they decide whether you get in,

03:14:43.120 | you just don't automatically get the job.

03:14:45.140 | You have to pass tests, a lie detector test, for instance,

03:14:49.260 | field training tests, a whole variety of tests,

03:14:53.940 | and then you're sworn to secrecy.

03:14:55.960 | You never talk about what you do, ever,

03:15:00.080 | or there will be dire consequences.

03:15:05.720 | So the method is very much the same,

03:15:09.020 | and also this idea of creating a kind of insular group.

03:15:13.300 | The organization is us,

03:15:17.860 | and everyone else is outside of that.

03:15:23.380 | We are guardians of special knowledge.

03:15:26.500 | See, this is the type of thing that would generally happen

03:15:29.460 | if you questioned whatever

03:15:30.660 | any kind of intelligence agency did.

03:15:32.300 | Well, we know things that you don't.

03:15:34.220 | Why? Because we're the organization that knows things.

03:15:37.000 | We collect information.

03:15:38.440 | We know the secrets.

03:15:39.840 | We guard the secrets.

03:15:41.440 | Therefore, if we tell you, you must believe us.

03:15:45.800 | - I have this sense that there are

03:15:48.360 | very powerful secret societies operating today,

03:15:51.640 | and we don't really know or understand them,

03:15:53.700 | and the conspiracy theories in spirit

03:15:56.760 | might have something to them,

03:15:58.400 | but are actually factually not correct.

03:16:01.560 | It's like an effective, powerful secret society

03:16:06.460 | or intelligence agency is not going to

03:16:08.820 | let you know anything that it doesn't want you to know.

03:16:13.560 | - They'll probably mislead you if you can stay close.

03:16:16.220 | So I think the question is,

03:16:19.020 | what's the most powerful or important secret society?

03:16:22.700 | Probably the one you don't know about,

03:16:24.780 | one that doesn't advertise its existence,

03:16:26.980 | the one which is never known anywhere under its real name.

03:16:31.920 | You've got things like the Bohemian Club.

03:16:36.520 | You've got the Bilderbergers,

03:16:38.720 | which is another sort of, you know, formed in the 1950s,

03:16:43.040 | largely the creation of a guy

03:16:44.720 | by the name of Josef Rettinger,

03:16:47.480 | Polish, mysterious, appears in a note where,

03:16:50.560 | a schemer for years, a man expelled from Britain,

03:16:55.760 | France, and the United States at one point or another,

03:16:59.460 | long active in the Mexican labor movement.

03:17:01.740 | All right, okay.

03:17:03.300 | Rettinger is a mysterious figure.

03:17:06.300 | In fact, his,

03:17:07.420 | I think there was even a book written about him

03:17:09.080 | called "Eminence Grise," "Grey Eminence,"

03:17:11.620 | the fellow who was,

03:17:12.460 | the front man for the Bilderbergers

03:17:14.260 | was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,

03:17:16.920 | who was at one point a Nazi,

03:17:18.500 | and then a Dutch freedom fighter.

03:17:21.100 | All right, take your pick.

03:17:23.260 | But Rettinger is the moving hand behind the whole thing,

03:17:28.260 | and I'll be damned if I can figure out who Rettinger is.

03:17:31.560 | So the idea is that, well, you get like influential people

03:17:36.040 | in media, business, politics,

03:17:39.680 | and you bring them together just to talk,

03:17:42.540 | to try to find common answers or common questions.

03:17:49.420 | It's all very much sort of Western Europe, Anglo-European.

03:17:53.320 | I mean, it's all very closely sort of connected to NATO,

03:17:56.120 | the whole concept of a kind of Atlanticist world,

03:18:00.520 | which is essentially the Anglo-American combine

03:18:05.620 | combined with Western Europe.

03:18:07.140 | But you got a bunch of these things.

03:18:10.680 | I mean, the Council on Foreign Relations

03:18:15.240 | is very similar to that,

03:18:16.840 | and the Bilderbergers, and there's an overlap

03:18:20.840 | with the Bohemian Club,

03:18:22.660 | and then you've got the Penae Circle, or Le Circle,

03:18:27.660 | which is more military,

03:18:30.280 | but also linked to the so-called secret Gladio,

03:18:35.280 | you know, the idea if the Soviets overran Western Europe,

03:18:37.900 | there would be a stay-behind organization called Gladio.

03:18:40.400 | There'd be these freedom fighters.

03:18:42.100 | So the question I have about that

03:18:44.460 | is that how many secret organizations do you need?

03:18:47.540 | I mean, why all these separate groups,

03:18:50.260 | which often seem to have the same people into them?

03:18:53.340 | - Yeah, there's a, I mean, the closer I look,

03:18:56.380 | the more I wonder the same question we asked

03:18:58.340 | about the Russian intelligence agencies

03:19:00.300 | is where is the center of power?

03:19:02.320 | It seems to be very hard to figure out.

03:19:05.140 | Does the secrecy scare you?

03:19:07.100 | - Well, I guess on one level,

03:19:09.580 | I'm comforted that there's somebody

03:19:10.980 | actually making decisions,

03:19:14.060 | as opposed to, I mean, what do you want?

03:19:16.140 | Do you want chaos,

03:19:17.540 | or do you want everything kind of rigidly controlled?

03:19:21.020 | And I don't put much stock in the idea

03:19:26.020 | that there actually is some small group

03:19:29.340 | of people running everything,

03:19:30.980 | because if they were, it would operate more efficiently.

03:19:35.180 | I do think that there are various disparate groups

03:19:39.740 | of people who think that they're running things,

03:19:43.460 | or try to, and that's what concerns me

03:19:48.460 | more than anything else.

03:19:51.180 | Well, I hate to go back to them again,

03:19:53.140 | 'cause especially bringing up,

03:19:53.980 | you go back to the Nazis,

03:19:55.100 | they had their whole idea about a new world order,

03:19:57.340 | and they only had 12 years to do it.

03:19:58.940 | Look what a mess they made.

03:20:00.220 | I mean, look at the damage,

03:20:03.000 | the physical damage that can be done

03:20:05.140 | by an idea inspiring a relatively small group of people

03:20:10.540 | controlling a nation.

03:20:13.220 | Based upon some sort of racial or ideological fantasy

03:20:18.220 | that has no real basis in reality,

03:20:21.460 | and yet guides their actions.

03:20:23.440 | It's this differentiation that I always make,

03:20:29.220 | and I would try to get across to students between,

03:20:31.420 | always be clear about what you know and what you believe.

03:20:34.900 | You don't know many things.

03:20:40.100 | You know your name, you know when you were born,

03:20:43.500 | you probably know who your father is,

03:20:46.660 | but that's not absolute unless you've had a DNA test,

03:20:50.500 | and only if you trust DNA tests.

03:20:52.840 | So you know who your mother is,

03:20:55.460 | you believe this man is your father.

03:20:57.740 | Why?

03:20:58.560 | Because your mother told you he was.

03:20:59.980 | So you believe things generally

03:21:01.540 | because someone has told you this is to be true,

03:21:04.800 | but you don't really know for sure.

03:21:09.820 | Well because we know so little,

03:21:12.220 | we tend to go by beliefs.

03:21:14.260 | So we believe in this, we believe in that.

03:21:17.220 | You know, you believe that your cult leader

03:21:20.340 | is the answer to everything.

03:21:22.340 | And it seems to be very, very easy

03:21:24.740 | to get people to believe things.

03:21:26.780 | And then what happens is that whether or not

03:21:30.880 | those beliefs have any real basis in reality,

03:21:34.300 | they begin to influence your actions.

03:21:39.060 | - So here again, regrettably in some ways

03:21:42.460 | to bring it back to the Nazis,

03:21:43.740 | what were the Nazis convinced of?

03:21:45.220 | They were convinced that Jews were basically evil aliens.

03:21:48.780 | That's what it comes down to.

03:21:49.940 | They weren't really humans.

03:21:51.220 | There's some sort of evil contamination

03:21:53.460 | which we must eradicate.

03:21:55.060 | And they set out to do that.

03:21:59.420 | - And they were sure that there's just a few problems

03:22:02.840 | that can be solved, and once you solve them,

03:22:04.740 | that you have this beautiful utopia

03:22:06.420 | where everything would be just perfect.

03:22:08.380 | It'd be great.

03:22:09.220 | And we can just get there.

03:22:10.500 | And I think it's really strong belief in a global utopia.

03:22:14.500 | It just never goes right.

03:22:17.320 | It seems like impossible to know the truth in it.

03:22:21.500 | - For some reason, not long ago,

03:22:22.860 | I was listening on YouTube to old Wobbly songs.

03:22:26.380 | The Workers of the World.

03:22:31.820 | I don't know why.

03:22:33.740 | I didn't know there was a whole album of Wobbly songs.

03:22:36.940 | But, and there was one of them called Commonwealth of Toil.

03:22:41.100 | And it's, like most of them,

03:22:42.380 | they're sort of taken from gospel songs.

03:22:45.640 | And it's talking about in the future,

03:22:48.900 | how wonderful everything will be

03:22:50.820 | in the Commonwealth of Toil that will be.

03:22:55.820 | And now these are revolutionary leftists.

03:23:01.680 | In this case, Wobblies, but nonetheless.

03:23:04.940 | It's like a prayer for communism, everything.

03:23:09.000 | Now in the future, everything will be good

03:23:11.780 | because the Earth will be shared by the toilers.

03:23:15.220 | And from each his abilities to each according to his need.

03:23:19.860 | And it's this kind of sweet little song in some way.

03:23:23.860 | But I'm just sort of imagining this.

03:23:27.060 | If I was gonna stage that,

03:23:28.460 | I'd have this choir of children singing it

03:23:30.940 | with a huge hammer and sickle behind them.

03:23:33.700 | Because that's what it's combining.

03:23:36.700 | And you can think that the sentiments

03:23:40.300 | that are expressed in that song,

03:23:41.740 | which are legitimate in some way,

03:23:45.100 | of all the horrors that that then leads to.

03:23:51.340 | - It is fascinating about humans.

03:23:55.000 | A beautiful idea on paper,

03:23:57.100 | an innocent little idea about a utopian future

03:24:00.820 | can lead to so much suffering.

03:24:03.660 | And so much destruction.

03:24:05.020 | And totally, the unintended consequences

03:24:07.140 | that you see described.

03:24:07.980 | - The law of unintended consequences.

03:24:09.980 | - And we learn from it.

03:24:11.140 | I mean, that's why history is important.

03:24:12.420 | We learn from it, hopefully.

03:24:13.820 | - Do we?

03:24:14.660 | - Slowly, or slow learners.

03:24:17.880 | - I'm unconvinced of that, but perhaps it's.

03:24:21.600 | - Speaking of unconvinced, what gives you hope?

03:24:26.260 | If human beings are still here,

03:24:29.820 | maybe expanding out into the cosmos,

03:24:33.500 | 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 years from now,

03:24:37.180 | what gives you hope about that future?

03:24:41.060 | About it even being a possible future?

03:24:42.740 | About it happening?

03:24:44.000 | - Most people are cooperative and kind most of the time.

03:24:49.000 | And that's one of those things

03:24:56.580 | that can usually be depended upon.

03:25:00.060 | And usually you'll get back to what you put into it.

03:25:03.220 | Another thing that I have like a weird fascination

03:25:09.380 | of watching are people who have meltdowns on airplanes.

03:25:13.340 | 'Cause it's just bizarre.

03:25:19.860 | - It's fascinating to watch, yeah.

03:25:21.620 | - The people who will, you know,

03:25:23.260 | there's some sort of psychotic break that occurs,

03:25:26.020 | and it's always gonna end the same way.

03:25:29.300 | The cops are gonna come on and drag you off the plane.

03:25:31.780 | Now true, and you're gonna inconvenience everybody there,

03:25:35.980 | and usually at some point they don't care about that.

03:25:38.860 | That's the one little sense of power that they have.

03:25:41.060 | So they have some sort of sense of powerlessness.

03:25:44.540 | And if their only way of power

03:25:45.980 | is just to piss off everybody else on that plane,

03:25:48.880 | they're gonna go ahead and do it,

03:25:51.500 | even though it's going to lead nowhere for them.

03:25:56.140 | - And there's similar, sometimes psychological behavior

03:25:59.180 | in traffic.

03:26:00.460 | - Oh, the road rage thing.

03:26:01.300 | - The road rage, yeah.

03:26:02.460 | It's fascinating.

03:26:03.300 | - And I bet that most, there again,

03:26:04.980 | those are all people who up to some point

03:26:06.900 | were cooperative and kind and polite.

03:26:10.220 | And then they snap.

03:26:12.320 | So those are all part of the human makeup as well.

03:26:16.640 | - But also part of the human makeup,

03:26:19.460 | difference between humans and chimps,

03:26:22.700 | is the ability to get together,

03:26:24.580 | cooperate on a mass scale over an idea,

03:26:28.380 | create things like the Roman Empire did,

03:26:30.260 | laws that prevent us and protect us

03:26:34.140 | from crazy human behavior,

03:26:37.060 | manifestations of a man's--

03:26:38.740 | - Well, human beings are just weird animals.

03:26:40.540 | It's not getting around.

03:26:41.380 | They're just completely peculiar.

03:26:43.900 | I'm not sure that we're altogether natural.

03:26:46.220 | - But I think we are altogether beautiful.

03:26:49.180 | There is something magical about humans,

03:26:50.660 | and I hope humans stay here,

03:26:52.540 | even as we get advanced robots walking around everywhere,

03:26:56.820 | more and more intelligent robots

03:26:59.460 | that claim to have consciousness,

03:27:01.020 | that claim they love you,

03:27:03.020 | that increasingly take over our world.

03:27:06.200 | I hope this magical thing that makes us human still persists.

03:27:11.200 | - Well, let us hope so.

03:27:12.740 | - Rick, you're an incredible person.

03:27:15.780 | - Well, thank you.

03:27:16.620 | - You've done so much fascinating work,

03:27:18.940 | and it's really an honor.

03:27:20.100 | - I've never had anybody ask me

03:27:21.500 | as many interesting questions as you have, so.

03:27:24.820 | - Thank you so much.

03:27:25.660 | - So many questions.

03:27:27.260 | - This was so fun.

03:27:28.120 | Thank you so much for talking today.

03:27:29.380 | - Well, thank you.

03:27:31.060 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:27:32.620 | with Rick Spence.

03:27:33.860 | To support this podcast,

03:27:34.900 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:27:37.500 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:27:39.460 | from John F. Kennedy.

03:27:41.260 | "The very word secrecy is repugnant

03:27:44.660 | "in a free and open society,

03:27:46.660 | "and we are as a people inherently

03:27:48.800 | "and historically opposed to secret societies,

03:27:51.960 | "to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

03:27:55.620 | "We decided long ago that the dangers

03:27:57.920 | "of excessive and unwarranted concealment

03:28:00.580 | "of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers

03:28:04.640 | "which are cited to justify it."

03:28:06.600 | Thank you for listening,

03:28:08.740 | and hope to see you next time.

03:28:10.780 | (upbeat music)

03:28:13.360 | (upbeat music)

03:28:15.940 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast #451

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