School of War - When Terrorists Become the Heroes to Young Americans

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

In prerevolutionary Russia, it was not uncommon for children to dream of becoming terrorists when they grew up. “It was a respected profession,” says Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson, who now sees troubling parallels between modern-day America and an era in Russia when terrorism became fashionable and radicals came to see violence as an expression of moral virtue. Today, Morson joins School of War to discuss what Fyodor Dostoyevsky understood about the terrorist mind, why good people can be persuaded to support terrible acts, and what America loses when it stops teaching the history of communism in schools. 3:09 America and Revolutionary Russia 3:47 The Rise of Modern Terrorism 4:38 When Terrorism Became a Respected Profession 6:10 Why Terrorists Had So Much Power 6:22 Why Russian Liberals Failed to Oppose Terrorism 7:26 The Danger of Celebrating Political Violence 9:36 Dostoevsky’s Radical Youth 11:31 Dostoevsky’s Arrest and Mock Execution 13:15 Understanding the Psychology of Revolutionaries 14:29 How Dostoevsky Predicted Totalitarianism 17:55 Why Communism Was Worse Than the Czars 20:11 Why Liberals Must Oppose Extremism 22:02 The Psychology of Left-Wing Totalitarianism 24:53 What Young People Don’t Know About Communism 28:16 How Good People Come to Support Evil 34:06 What Left and Right-Wing Extremists Have in Common 36:17 How Do We Fight Political Extremism? This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today on School of War, we look at the rise of political violence and domestic terrorism in the United States. The great Gary Saul Morrison joins us to tell us what the Russian Revolution has. to teach us about our present increasingly dangerous moment. Let's get into it. and a little dream, which you'll never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today. Dr. Gary Saul Morson, who is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities

and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He's the author or editor of 21 books on Russian literature and associated topics. The most recent book is Wonder Confronts Certainty, Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and why their answers matter. And it's really an article in the free press from a couple of months ago about Russian writers and Russian history and what it has to tell us

about modern political violence and radicalism that caught my eye. That article was called The Terrorist Mind back in May. Gary Saul Morrison, thanks for coming on School of War. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm a great admirer.

Well, thank you. It's very, very mutual. And, you know, maybe I'll just start with a very big picture question, and then I'd like to zoom in a bit on the case of Dostoevsky as we continue to talk. But what a strange thing in a way to look at that article that you wrote for the free press. And, you know, one is looking at the headlines at the news of the day here in the 2020s in the United States of America.

And for one's thought to be, gosh, this reminds me of turn of the century Russia. Aside from the sort of special pleading fact that this is obviously your subject, why should one's mind really actually turn there? What is so compelling about the comparison? Well, there are all sorts of parallels. I mean, and, you know, to the extent that those parallels hold, there's a real danger of what's going to happen in the future. That is, you know, what happened in the totalitarian takeover

could happen here. One parallelism is we see, I don't know, with, you know, making a hero of, let's say, Luigi Mangione, celebrating, you know, the violence on October 7th, even before there was any response, you know, violence becoming sexy, you know, important, something that one cultivates.

That was very, you know, Russia was the place, oh, starting in the late 19th century, where the modern terrorist movement was born, and when violence, you know, became sexy, was celebrated. You know, it was literally thousands of Zaris officials were killed per year in the beginning of the 20th century, you know, and the crucial thing that you, I mean, I mean, one of my favorite stories deals with a provincial newspaper reporter who goes to his editor and says, you know, they've just appointed a new governor.

shall we run his biography? And the answer is no, save it for the obituary. That's really what it was like. And, you know, Russia was the place, the first place where, let's say, if you asked, I don't know, a young man or a woman, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? The answer might be terrorist. It was a respected profession. I mean, you know, dangerous, of course, but respected. I mean, the only thing I think of that was, you know, probably more respected was being a writer,

this being Russia, which loves, you know, literature. And as it happened, the leading, you know, terrorist was also a novelist who wrote novels about, guess what, terrorism, right? And, you know, I never was able to decide whether he became a terrorist to have material to write novels or, you know, vice versa. you know, both were there. It ran in the families. You know, there's a scene in one of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novels,

which is quite accurate, where two revolutionary aunts are talking to their niece who wants to go and, you know, study art. And they say, your grandfather, Anton was a terrorist.

Terrorism is the family honor, and you want to study. art? And the girl, you know, relents and joins the terrorists. This was, you know, now, of course, the number of, you know, terrorists and killers and revolutionaries was still a clear minority. Why did they have so much power? And one of the answers is that the Russian liberal movement, which was, you know, the largest

of all the political parties, the cadets, constitutional Democrats. which did not support terrorism. They were constitutional liberals, but they refused to oppose terrorism. I mean, one of their leaders is famously quoted as saying, condemn terrorism, that would be the moral death of our party.

They went along with it. You just can't, it's not, you don't, right? You don't condemn anyone to your left, only people to your right. And you know, when Lenin took over in 1917, the first one of the first things he did, that is within days, was to proclaim the cadet party outside the law, which meant anyone could do anything they like to them,

and promptly two of them who were in the hospital were murdered in their hospital beds. This didn't save the cadets at all. In fact, they were for anything, were the first victims of terrorism. So it's really dangerous when, you know, When people who commit violent acts are either celebrated or you say, well, we don't approve but, and then you approve, okay, which is very close to celebrating.

That's, you know, it doesn't, you can't, once it starts, it's very hard to control. Because anyone who tries to control it will be the object of terrorism themselves, so they have to be afraid, right? Right. The structural parallels of what you just outlined are pretty obvious between what you just outlined in the present. I suppose I take some solace in the fact that as chaotic as things sometimes are, the statistic that you alluded to, and I'm just looking at your article here, that between October 1905 and the end of 1907, some 4,500 government officials and about the same number of private individuals were killed or injured in terrorist attacks, which is a stunning, stunning number. I guess, so there's any solace to be taken. We haven't reached that point yet. Yeah, we don't have numbers like that.

But nevertheless, but you say the parallels are alarming. You know, we could talk forward through to 1917 and what happens in the nature of 20th century totalitarianism. And maybe we will hear as the conversation goes on. But I actually kind of want to go backwards in time to into the 19th century and solicit from you some understanding of how things got to where they got with this ferment of radicalism. at the turn of the century. And a figure that you've written extensively about and that sort of seems to inextricably entangled with any account of 19th century Russian radicalism

is the great novelist artist Dostoevsky, whose own experience, he has a personal experience of radicalism back in the 1840s, which leads to this stunning episode of his mock execution, essentially, which then plays into his own, famous accounts of radicalism. Tell us about Dostoevsky

and how this mixed-up, slightly unstable kid finds himself a nascent terrorist. It's an amazing story. You know, if you didn't know it was real, you would think somebody had invented, you know, this story. He, you know, became almost as soon as he started,

he wanted to become a writer, but his father sent him to a school of military engineering, where he was going to learn how to design fortresses, and he hated it, right? And, you know, there's a wonderful story about how he once designed this fortress that had only one problem. It had no doors and windows, so you would have to build it around the defenders, and they couldn't get out. And the czar supposedly saw this and said, what idiot, did design this? right. Well, he never wanted to be a military engineer. As soon as he could, he got his commission and quit the army and decided to be a writer.

And his first works were celebrated, you know, amazing. He was hardly a better debut. His first works were, you know, work was about what it feels like to be poor. Now, you know, he's a psychologist, the greatest psychologist. probably who ever lived. And what struck about poverty was not the material deprivation, but the way in which the poor person internalizes their own humiliation and looks down at themselves, right? And that becomes the theme of it. But he was drawn to various radical groups at the time, bit by bit, and, you know, he was, I won't go of all the reasons of things

that drew him to it. But in after various revolutions in Europe in 1848, the Tsar really tried to crack down on these. They infiltrated one of these groups that Dostoevsky was in.

And it was mostly a discussion group, but they were planning some fairly dangerous things. And he was arrested in April 1849, spent eight months in prison. Someone's visitor Miss Ellen told him that he was to be executed that day.

And, you know, he was, he describes this himself in many places, you know, prisoners being, it was one of his favorite themes. You know, he describes it many times, it fictionalizes it, remembers it. You know, you, the prisoner has given his last meal, you know, as if he can enjoy, you know, a last meal. Finally, Dostevsky, you know, is led out to the center. square where the executions are going to be taking place with a handful of other of the worst you know revolutionaries who are going to be executed there and you know the first group of prisoners is let out thus if he would have been in the second group three of them to be shot they were given last rights you know the guns were trained on them and the last minute an

imperial courier comes galloping up to say that the czar and his infinite mercy has commuted their sentence from death to a period in a Siberian prison and then service in the army as a private. So Dostoevsky thought that he was going to die and he this became, you know, what life feels like when you're about to die. Now all the, you know, this was, in fact, it was, in fact, it wasn't, It wasn't an accident if the courier rode up to the last minute. It was part of the punishment. This is Russia we're talking about. They know about psychological punishments, right?

And then he did spend years in Siberia and came back. And when he came back, he reflected a great deal on what he had been through. And one of the things he understood was the psychology of radicals and revolutionaries. And this was the period when the revolutionary movement in Russia was just beginning in the 1860s. You know, it was, historians describe it as the birth of the intelligentsia. We get the word intelligency from Russian,

but in Russia it meant something different. It didn't mean intellectuals. It didn't mean people who thought for themselves. It meant people who had signed on to a materialist, atheist, revolutionary socialist ideology. If you weren't a socialist or an anarchist at least,

you weren't a member of the intelligentsia, right? So Leo Tolstoy, who believed in God, would certainly never count to this one, right? And Dostaski wrote novels about these people, whom he was watching, and his most famous political novel, which some people think of as the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed or The Demons,

it's also, you could translate either way, deals with a real-life incident of a group of terrorists, you know, which was real terror. He based it on some real events. and in this novel it's become particularly famous because one of the terrorists outlines his plans for what they're going to do when they seize power

and it's in detail, it's a detailed description and it matches almost precisely what modern totalitarianism was to be and nobody else in the 19th century even guessed that this was conceivable you know, the number of people killed, he says 100 million, which is about what it was around the world, the total control of everyday life, the kinds of times, it's what happens in the Chinese cultural revolution, it's amazing, how did he know people ask in the 20th century? He was the only one. And, you know, I think the answer is that he himself had been with these terrorists and he knew what their psychology was like, knew what he could have. been led to do, and asked himself, what would these people do if they really got the control they sought?

They wouldn't, you know, turn into nice, sweet liberals. They would be the way he describes them in this book. And that's, you know, one of the things he's famous for is the prediction of the unique prediction. There was nobody else around the world who saw it of what totalitarianism was going to be. And this book is written in the 1870s, right? So 40 some years before the Russian Revolution, well before all the other events you're describing. Yeah, almost 50 years before, right.

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clarifications that would be offered to everything you've just said. I can offer them in a liberal frame. I can offer them in a radical frame. A liberal might say, and I have a little bit of sympathy to this, a liberal might say something like all of these

radical movements you're describing are indeed radical and go much too far and indeed taken to their extremes do lead to awful, awful things. But gosh, it's in the face of the Tsarist police state an awful thing in and of itself in thus understandable. And then, of course, a radical would just say, yeah, and Tsarist Russia had it coming, as did anyone associated with such an evil regime.

So that would be wonderful if it weren't that what followed was a thousand times worse. I mean, the number of people who were executed by the Tsars in the century before the revolution could be numbered at a couple of thousand. In Stalin's period, that was the toll on average every two days for 34 years, right? I mean, in Stalin, it goes into the tens of millions. There's no comparison. The Zara state was indeed repressive for the time. We would be called as repressive now. But what followed was incomparably worth.

You know, if you were arrested in the Zaris state, you were arrested. your family wasn't arrested, but Stalin, if you were arrested, your wife was automatically arrested, or vice versa. There were camps, you know, concentration camps, left forced labor camps,

for people who weren't accused of anything. They were simply for wives of people accused. That was it. Children would then left abandons on the street, or themselves punished because they might grow up to take revenge. This was just standard practice right there. I mean, nothing like that.

you know, ever happened under the Tsars, right? So that's one reason. You know, it gets a lot worse. You think it can't be worse. It can be a lot worse. You know, it's like, I don't know, I remember when I was a student in England, there was, you know, the kind of polite anti-Semitism you saw, you know, nobody was going to kill you, but they wouldn't let you into various clubs. They didn't want to say. And you say how evil, but it's nothing compared to what you got in the Third Reich, where they killed millions of people. Because really, you have to distinguish between levels of awfulness, right? And as ours were the most repressive state in Europe for the time. There's no comparison about that. No question about that, but it's nothing compared to what followed. And, you know, the problem with, you know, the liberal objection is that liberals don't believe in totality. They're not.

But if they don't stand up against it, it will happen. They are the ones who have to say, look, we're progressives, we're liberals, we want various reforms. We don't want concentration camps. We don't want to shoot our enemies. We don't want to make it impossible to disagree, et cetera, et cetera, right? You know, we don't want to tell them. And they have to stand up against that.

But if it's like Russia, they can't because their whole psychology, they've been brought up to oppose conservatives, people to their right, and they don't have it in them to oppose people to their left. You know, it's like you'll be condemned for not being leftist enough. It becomes psychologically impossible. Lenin counted on that, right? He called these people useful idiots because they didn't see what was going to happen to them. but they're the ones who it depends on. And when totalitarianism has been resisted, that's why. I remember when the Salazar fascist regime fell in Portugal,

there was a competition for power between the communists and the socialists. The socialists were basically what we would call left liberals, right? But they believed in democracy. And the real question was, if the socialist won, you had democracy. If the communist one, you had it like Russia. the socialist one in that case, right? And that's why Portugal is still a democracy, right? That's what you need, you know, people like that to prevent it. There aren't enough conservatives to prevent it. It really depends on, you know, the liberals. And in Russia, the liberals, and in Russia,

the liberals wouldn't do it. And they then became the first ones to be shot after, after the revolution. So I want to go into more detail on the psychology of totalitarianism, or maybe left radicalism and totalitarianism. Because I'm struck, you know, I've had, in my experience teaching, you've had much more extensive experience than I have, so you know that I've had many versions of this conversation with sort of confusion talking to young people who, as often is not, maybe this is wobbling in our dark days of, you know, popular podcast hosts like Tucker Carlson, but as often as not, find it pretty easy to recognize the evil of right-wing totalitarianism.

No confusion whatsoever about the evil of Nazism, say, and its racist division and its anti-Semitism as conceived on the right. But sometimes struggle to recognize the nature of the evil in left totalitarianism because of the rhetoric surrounding it, that it is on the side of science and love and equality and things that are good. So how can something that flies those banners, as it were, be good. And I want to read you, this is Dostoevsky, you're quoting him in your article. This is an essay that he writes later in his life. In my novel demons, I attempted to depict those

motives by which even the purest of hearts and most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offense as political murder. When violence becomes fashionable, anything, literally anything can be justified and more than likely will eventually be done. And therein lies the real horror, Dostoevsky concluded, that one can commit the foulest and most villainist act without being in the least a villain. That's right. Help us understand how this purity of heart leads to this awful violence, because I think the kind of young person or kind of radical that Dostoevsky is talking about here, while they've

not committed mass murder to my knowledge, there are plenty of student radicals from the last few years that certainly in their own minds had very pure hearts. And you're alleging, essentially, that, taken to its logical extreme, they were headed to a very dark place and perhaps are. Yes, they can be deceived by the rhetoric that says, you know, we're all for brotherhood, we're all for, you know, equality, and sign on to something where that rhetoric is simply rhetoric,

where the leaders of it know perfectly well what they're doing, okay? But not all the followers do, okay? if you really want the reason students know what's wrong with the Nazis although that by the way I'm thinking they less and less even know that yeah yeah no I was kind of optimistic

I realized even as I was saying it I was thinking gosh you sound a bit polyanish here but not the communists is that they're not taught about the communists in fact you know just in Russia alone far more people innocent people were murdered

than in Nazi Germany. I mean, it was worse for the Jews in Nazi Germany. For anybody else, it was much worse to be in the Soviet Union. And it wasn't very good for the Jews there either,

but better than Nazi Germany. You know, you know, if students would just read, I don't know, when they were collectivizing agriculture, making agriculture communist,

the peasants didn't want that. They wanted their own land. and so a campaign was set up to take all the food from a large section of Ukraine and Kazakhstan and in the course of one winter four million peasants approximately we don't know exactly

starve to death slowly and now it wasn't that there wasn't enough food they were forbidden to fish in the river and the starvation was deliberate okay that was that's what you you know if people

complain about, you know, injustice in America. Of course there is. But nothing on that scale. And good, nice people can be brought in to support people who

believe in that. You know, if you say as, you know, Hassan Piker did, as Graham Plattner did, that they're communists or they support Mao. That's what they're supporting. The murder of deliberate starvation. of tens of millions of people.

But the students don't know this because they're not taught history of communism in school. They don't know what it is. So I think if they knew, they wouldn't support it. But the leaders are depending on them not knowing. And that's the problem. You know, most of the young people

who I think do support this, support it because they don't know what it is. They don't really believe in it. Some of the lenders do. I mean, you know, the leading politicians who support it obviously know perfectly well what they're doing. But they can always count on the rhetoric of, you know,

social justice. They can count on the rhetoric of equality, although there was no equality in the Soviet Union. I mean, it was, as venting a more unequal society, than in the West. You know, there was nothing worse in the world

than being forced to labor at 40 degrees below zero with inadequate clothing and food as millions were made to do. They didn't be that, and, you know, being a wealthy Soviet bureaucrat was much greater than anything you could imagine. Another one.

And that was the standard in the Soviet Union. You don't actually get equality. right so you know but students don't know this and you can you know forgive them because you know it's not that they're refusing to know it's that they haven't been taught i'm struck in the story of dust de afsky's life um that you know he begins uh in his young adulthood uh as a radical um is brutally punished for it um becomes a great chronicler of uh radicalism what offers some of the psychological insights into radicalism as anyone ever has, and then ends his life something of a vociferous anti-Semite, which is a bit of a plot twist, having in his maturity, in his

middle age, not been much of one. How does that work? The basic value in Dostoevsky's fiction, what he appeals to more than anything else, is compassion and pity for anyone who suffers. And then this person winds up in endorsing, you know, awful anti-Semitism, which leads to, you know, terrible pogroms and things. How do you bring the two of them together? I've written about this. There isn't, I call it the Dostoevsky problem,

and various people have given, you know, different answers as to how he reconciled in his own mind this hatred with his love of compassion because they were there at the same time. And it's, I could, if we had time, I could tell you some of the guesses I have about how he reconcile, but the important thing is, it is possible to do that. Listen, when I was, when I taught, before I came to Northwestern, I taught for 12 years at the

University of Pennsylvania, and I had two good friends there who taught Chinese history and Chinese literature. They were not Chinese. They were Americans who had been missionaries in China in the late 1940s had been captured and put through what came to be called brainwashing, which you know, all sorts of cycle which changes the way you think. And it had worked. They had become

malists, which meant if you listen to them, they would justify mass killings, tortures, whatever, okay? And yet they were the sweetest people you know. I'll tell you how good they were. They would adopt stray orphaned children

from the ghetto. and take them home and take care of them. And yet they were supporting mass. It's like a switch went on when the topic of Mao came, but all of a sudden it was like a recording was playing. They had them both in their head. I don't know exactly how they did it, but it really is possible to be a fundamentally good person

and support really horrible things. If only everybody who supported horrible things were an evil person, things would be a lot easier. But it's not really true. You can support those things and be otherwise a quite decent person. It's very perplexing. I didn't used to think this when I was much younger, but that, it's those, you know, Chinese historian and literature couple

that really made me think about that. And I thought, you know, I never read any, never met any, but could there have been, if there were decent Maoists like this, could there have been decent Nazis? And my guess is there were. I don't know any. I find it hard to imagine, but my guess is that there would have to have been some. And how they reconciled it in their head?

I don't know. I really don't know, but it really is possible. And that's one of the really disturbing things about human nature and really understanding the triumph of evil. So you'll correct my quote here, because it's always been on my mind, but I'm going to, I realize I'm speaking to a professor of Russian literature, so my paraphrasing of it is going to go wrong,

but all of this puts me in mind of this Solzhenitsyn observation that he had been raised to think that the line between good and evil was the line between classes, unlike the fascists who were raised to believe that the line between good and evil was drawn between races, and that he realizes at some point in the gulag, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. I think I've conveyed the spirit of it.

Am I in the neighborhood of the actual word? No, you're exactly right. I'll just add that, you know, what the Nazis did by race, the Soviets had the same attitude to social class. But you're going to say social class was not your occupation. If your grandfather was a merchant, you were deserving of the punishment of being a merchant at a shot.

It was, as if it were passed on, and merchantry were passed on the blood like Jewishness. It was done in the same way. And what Solzianitsyn says, look, we have a tendency to think, we people are the good people, and those people are just evil. You know, my political party is all good,

and your political party can only be evil. And I know, increasingly I'm meeting people who actually think this way. But the line, he's saying that the line between good and evil doesn't run between racism. or social classes or political parties or any other group, it runs through your own heart. Just when you think you are most righteous,

you might be really most likely to be evil. It groans through you, and you have to not be self-righteous and actually examine yourself and say, if I saw somebody I didn't agree with thinking the way I do, what would I say and then apply it to yourself? Otherwise, you're going to wind up on the wrong side of evil in your own heart.

This is a bit beyond your brief. We've spent most of this conversation talking about the psychology of left-wing radicalism. Right-wing radicalism is again very much a factor amongst American young people. It was, of course, a massive factor at times on a scale on a level with left-wing radicalism.

in the 20th century, right-wing totalitarianism got its millions in two. Could you help us understand what the psychology of right-wing radicalism, say, you know, Nazis, young Nazis, what they have in common with left-wing totalitarians and what they have that's different? They're there. They're not as many as right and are influential as there are in the left, but they're there and they could grow. I mean, there's nothing stopping them from growing at any moment, right? And fundamentally, their way of thinking is very much the same. as, you know, on the left. There really isn't that much difference

except that they don't have the pure golden utopias of communist equality to appeal to, so they're in a worse position. But nationalism, you know, can be a good substitute for it. It's harder in America because people are not of the same, all the same ethnic groups. So it's harder to appeal to that than it wasn't in Germany. or in Russia.

But it's there and it can be done and when it's there, it's just as dangerous and can lead to just the same thing as it has to be watched very closely. And, you know, the moderate Republicans, conservative people have to be as vigilant about fighting that as I'm saying the liberals have to be about fighting communists.

You know, you know, people speak of a horseshoe if it goes around right and it meets. That's not always true, but in the crucial things of what they want, it is pretty close to true, not to what they appeal to, but what they're trying to set up. And it's just as dangerous.

It's just not as numerous at the moment, but give it a chance, and it will be. You've spent a great deal of time working with young people. You've seen some of this student radicalism up close. Maybe you'll share a bit about that. But I can't have this fascinating conversation with you about historical parallels and the psychological character of radicalism without asking you what your prescription is. I mean, everyone could read more Russian literature and maybe properly curated that would help.

But practically speaking, if you'll forgive me, what is to be done? Well, first of all, let me just say, you know, my students at Northwestern, I, maybe it's because of self-selecting who takes Russian literature. but I don't see any of this among my students. And I have seen a bit of it. I was the faculty advisor of one of the residential colleges. Yes, I occasionally saw, but I saw very little of it. Maybe Northwestern is not like, you know, Columbia or UCLA, but I actually saw it up front, up close, rarely.

What's my prescription? the people who understand, I don't know if it's going to work because I'm a pessimist. I'm not hopeless, but I'm a pessimist. The people who know what's wrong, the people who are, especially those who think of themselves in the center left,

it's up to them. They have to decide, and some of them are, you can see it, you know, more and more people are doing this, which encourages me, right? That, you know, you know, yes, we believe,

we're pro-choice. We believe in, you know, a bigger welfare state. But we don't believe in communism. That's something, not just further to the left, but qualitatively different. We're going to oppose it.

When they do that, there's hope. And so that's in the short term. The long term, it comes from changing the education system, making people really know what communism want, changing the education system. So that's part of what, I mean, you know,

there has never been a bloodier movement in the history of the world. And in the 20th century, it governs some 18, depending on how you counts them, countries, 40% of humanity, and people don't know about it? Why isn't it taught? It's a real question.

You know, is it not taught because I've heard people say the education establishment is it self-controlled by people on the left who don't, who are embarrassed by this? Or don't want people to know? I guess it's possible. I don't know. That sounds a little too deliberate to me, but maybe it's, there's something to it. Maybe it's just neglect, right? But whatever it is, that sort of thing needs to be changed. so that you can see social evils in perspective, okay?

Just like my example, the types of anti-Semitism. And, you know, even if you set aside the Nazis, the Soviets, you know, took whole ethnic groups, Korea, the Chechens who, you know, create now so much trouble. One day, Stalin's police appear in the town square and everybody gets up and has marched out to Central Asia and dropped in the middle of nowhere and said, live here, and half of them die right away.

Now, it's not like the Nazis and the Jews, but it's pretty bad. There's nothing, you know, that I know of in the United States, that is, you know, in the last hundred years, at least, that is anything like that. It was like that at one time with the Native Americans, I guess you could say.

That's really the parallel. But if you're talking about social, injustices in the last 75 years, there's nothing compares with that, and you can try to repair our social injustices without imagining that's as bad as it can be.

That some of your solutions could be worse. Just the way the Soviets were much worse than the Tsars, and the Zars were pretty bad. I mean, I could describe the horrors of Zorist Russia to you in a way that would make your flesh creep, but you still have to have relative proportion.

in mind. Gary Saul Morrison, his most recent book is Wonder confronts certainty Russian writers on the timeless questions and why their answers matter. He contributes from time to time

to the free press amongst other fine publications. Gary, thank you so much for coming on School of War. Oh, thank you so much for having me and asking such interesting questions.