The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Ivan Ilyin's 'On Resistance to Evil by Force' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Pt. 1

Episode Date: May 9, 2026

53 MinutesPG-13Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Pete and Dr. Johnson begin a reading and commentary of Ivan Ilyin's 1925 book, "On Resistance to Evil by Force."Tolstoy's "What is a Jew?"The Lies of Leftism: Ivan Ilyin, Atheism and the Death of Reason in the East and West by Dr. Matthew Raphael JohnsonDr Johnson's PatreonDr Johnson's CashApp - $Raphael71RusJournal.orgTHE ORTHODOX NATIONALISTDr. Johnson's Radio Albion PageDr. Johnson's Books on AmazonJohnson's Law in Action: Venezuela and the Foreign Policy of Mass PresumptionDr. Johnson's Pogroms ArticleThe Orthodox Nationalist: Karl Marx “On the Jewish Question” (1844)Article: Karl Marx’s Theses on the Jews and the Necessity of Free Trade: Zur Judenfrage (1844) by Matthew Raphael JohnsonPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone to our reading of On Resistance to Evil by Force by Yvonne Ilyan. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? I'm doing okay it's weird starting another book but my co-hosts aren't here they're at odds with each other these days

but this is a more difficult book than the soul who needs one and Ivan Elyn was an excellent philosopher definitely on our side and almost everything and is hated by the regime and all of a sudden hated by the regime.

Every person, every Russian writer that the regime hates becomes Putin's brain all of a sudden, and it's Ilin more recently, and hence Putin's a fascist, because that's what Elin was, which of course isn't true, nor did they even know what that term means. So a lot of this translation is my own, but I always use the machine translation as a base. For something this deep and complex machine translation is very limited. But these days, it's much better than it used to be. I remember when I first came out. That's how I had to, I knew I had to learn language.

It was worthless if it wasn't Spanish or French. So it's shorter than a Schultzian book, but it's in greater depth. So this is going to be very interesting. And this, Eileen gets cited all the time, gets read very little. And that's why he's an important figure. And he's important in Russia today. A lot of people read him there. I don't know, Putin has the time to read him, but the media certainly hates him and also doesn't read them.

So this is going to be definitely worthwhile for a lot of people. All righty. I'm ready to go if you are. Yep. The terrible and fateful events that have befallen are wonderful and unfortunate homeland are sweeping through our souls like a scorching and purifying fire. This fire is burning away all the false foundations, delusions, and prejudices upon which the ideology of the former Russian intelligentsia was built. Russia could not have been built on these foundations.

These delusions and prejudices led to its decay and destruction. In this, our religious and governmental service are being renewed, our spiritual lives are opened, our love and will are tempered. The first thing that will be reborn in us through this will be the religious and governmental wisdom of Eastern Orthodoxy and especially Russian Orthodoxy. just as a renewed icon reveals the royal faces of ancient writing lost and forgotten by us, but invisibly present and never leaving us. So in our new vision and will let the ancient wisdom and strength that guided our ancestors

and built our holy Russia shine forth. Well, there's a few points before I actually get to the topic here, is this was aimed both at the Bolivics that had taken over by now in 2025. and also Leo Tolstoy, the so-called Christian pacifist, who was mostly a phylo-Semite. He really is, his soul Christianity was his version of the sermon on the Mount. Total pacifism, total refusal of violence, including paying taxes. He died in 1910, so he never got to see Bolshevism, but he saw the beginnings of it, I suppose. So these two groups of people are really the target of this.

That Tolstoy was absolutely incorrect in his assertion that violence, even in defense, is wrong. And somehow Christ preached that as well again, this is what it leads to, the Bolshevik revolution. Now, he's also talking about a few things here. he's talking about the elite having been, we talked about this with Sultanate too, having been massanified over the years, having been badly damaged morally over the years, the intelligentsia who played with every kind of ideology in a very naive kind of a way, not realizing the true foundations of Russia, which is its royal state. And of course, you know, the Bolsheviks will be a parody of that royal state.

Now, most of the Russian church abroad, because the exile movement was huge at this point, believed that the revolution did have a providential purpose, and that it brought the Orthodox faith to people like me who otherwise would never have come across it before. It was strictly relegated to Russia and Greece and Bulgaria. And now you have, you know, for decades, thanks to this exile movement, massive numbers of converts. And so it's been given a global scope that it never had before.

But the Russians are unlike the Jews that Tolstoy loves so much. I mean, Tolstoy actually called the Jews divine people, or sacred people, I should say. I sent you that article that he wrote on what is a Jew. And it's not even flattery. It's beyond that, calling them almost gods. Apparently having not read the Talmud, even though he cites it. there. So this is what's happening here. This is a renewal because a lot of people either were simply corrupted, especially in the elite levels. We talked about that in their Solzitin situation.

The revolutionaries were, you know, killing everyone they could, 1905 onward. They took what the stability they had for granted. And the intelligentsia, of course, was, you know, every fashion of ideology coming from the West, they adopted. The elite weren't even speaking Russian. They were speaking a really bad version of French, like Dostovsky, used to make fun of them for. And now, with these disasters, they're forced to look at themselves and realizing what's important in the world. In search of this vision, I turn with thought and love to you, white warriors, bearers of the Orthodox sword, volunteers of the Russian citizens.

The Orthodox knightly tradition lives within you. You have, through life and death, affirm the ancient and righteous spirit of service. You have upheld the banners of the Christ-loving Russian army. I dedicate these pages to you and your leaders. May your sword be your prayer, and may your prayer be your sword. I will forever retain a feeling of gratitude in my soul towards all my friends and associates who help me in this work,

and especially towards the publisher of this book. Yeah, you know, there was a strict, there was a tremendous overlap between the military groups that had fled, whether through Crimea or anywhere else, and church groups that had fled. The Orthodox Church ended up in, by now, one of three places, an exile, underground or dead. And I was just going to get worse as time goes on. So there was military organizations founded in Yugoslavia. And from there, it spread to, you know, Germany where he published this book and then Britain and even the U.S., from the West Coast, actually. There was even a large exile group going into China, nationalist China. So it spread everywhere.

So he realized that the whites did everything they could to fight back with no support from the way, no support from anyone. going into battle with limited ammunition. But the cause, knowing full well what the Bolivics were, what they were capable of love. They showed themselves right in the battlefield. They shut their own men for insubordination for anything. And the whites were not capable of that level of barbarity. Lots of, they brought a lot of foreign troops in, a lot of mercenaries.

They were capable of anything. and they realized that without resisting them by violence, things would have been much worse. And don't forget, peasants were continuously having uprisings all over the country, right up until the German invasion, which I mentioned in the Sultan-Eason part. So that warrior tradition is still there. The Cossacks were, to a great extent, destroyed underground. Some of them ended up serving the regime, I guess, and the more hard to get to parts of southern Russia and caucuses. But the Soviets, by this point, 1925, they knew that the peasantry hated them, but it didn't matter because the West were going to keep feeding them.

And that was the most important thing. The West supported the USSR continuously, contrary to mythology. and the economy of 1925 had tanked by this point. The country that was feeding the world, you know, the Russian Empire couldn't feed itself even to a tiny extent because of putting these Jews in positions of power over agriculture, like they knew anything about agriculture. We talked about that with Sultan Eastern too.

And he's well aware of all of this. and so it was a spirit of sacrifice that was something that wasn't really called on not for not since the time of troubles and not for a long time has this has this been called for so the renewal there's a lot of russians who saw this their loss and the burning of russia as renewal even if it brought but the russian spirit has become more coherent now than never was because of this as horrible as it was and um That was very common in church circles too at the time. And you were building converts all over the world. Germany and France were two huge areas. Then eventually the United States, where there's numerous Orthodox churches in every state. That wasn't the case before.

No one knew a damn thing about orthodoxy or Russia in the U.S. around this time. The press, as we know, was attacking the whites constantly, especially because they were anti-Semites, allegedly. And Tolstoy, if nothing else was there, was their God because he saw the Jews in such a sarcophantic way. But he seized the spirit of sacrifice. Eileen was not a soldier. He was a writer, a philosopher, and a very good one. And it never really created a system.

Tolstoy tried to, but there was too many contradictions in it. I don't know how anyone can seriously be a pure pacifist. I don't know how that even, if that's possible. And again, not everything Tolstoy said was incorrect. I mean, you know, I've been reading him for a long time. He's one of the first writers to make red pill arguments about the relations between the sexes in Anna Karinina. I have a paper on that, too, by the way. So I've been writing on this man for a long time, and there's a lot to be said.

and that was just his dedication, I suppose. And the dedication was to the spirit of sacrifice and what good can be brought out of this violence and this disaster of the Bolshevik takeover. Introduction. Humanity grows wiser through suffering. Ignorance leads it to trials and torments, but through torment, the soul is purified and gains insight.

The clear-sighted gaze is given the source of wisdom. The first condition for becoming wise is honesty with oneself and with the subject before the face of God. Well, this is what the judgment is. The judgment is where your conscience is laid bare. No excuses. None of the typical excuses you could make. You can convince people of things. No, it's laid completely bare.

And maybe something like this, a trauma like this, can force people to think clearly for the very first time. suffering is necessary for any good thing. I wouldn't be doing any. I couldn't be, you know, people are trying to avoid suffering are making a huge mistake. It's terrible while it's happening. But when it's over, you realize that you loved every minute of the struggle. And it makes you hard.

It makes you tough. And I certainly have been through my share. And I understand exactly what he's talking about. This in this case, it's a national calamity. And, you know, the Tolstoy idea was, it seemed so absurd to him. And yet his movement was growing, even in Western Europe, in the U.S., he had communities all over the place, even after his death. Gandhi singing his praises. And it's utter nonsense because it led to, at least in part, to this.

Tulsaoy was not a Christian. he rejected most of the of the Bible he was as communicated by the church I think it was a big mistake because it gave him more notoriety than it would have he can't deny the excellence of its fiction though I tend to like books

like the Cossacks by him War and Peace was too fragmentary for me I loved Anna Karinana and I think he really pointed to the precisely and this is a Tolstoyne now pointed to exactly the decay of the nobility that Elylin is talking about that needed to be wiped away. You know, that one of the toughest jobs of the Russian monarch was to control his own house, was to control his own, you know, the courtiers around him.

Alexander III did a great job, but you had to be made of iron to do that. And it was very hard for a normal guy to do it. and Nicholas II, of course, sacrificed himself. He said so. He said I'm sacrificing myself for the sake of Russia. He didn't abdicate the throne, but he was forced out. And that's why he was canonized and remains very popular saint, even among people who have, like me, who have no Russian blood in them whatsoever.

Can a person striving for moral perfection resist evil with force? Can a person who believes in God, who accepts his human, universe and his place in it, not resist evil with his sword? This is a twofold question that now requires a new formulation and a new solution, now especially for the first time. It is groundless and fruitless to resolve the question of evil without having the experience of genuine evil, and our generation has been given the experience of evil with particular force for the first time, as never before. As a result of a long gestating process, evil has now succeeded, and freeing itself from all internal dualities and external obstacles, revealing its face,

spreading its wings, articulating its goals, gathering its forces, recognizing its paths and means. Moreover, it has openly legitimized itself, formulated its dogmas and canons. It celebrates its no longer hidden nature and revealed its spiritual essence to the world. one of the main doctrines of or political doctrines of the Russian churches that the monarch was as St. Paul talks about, the restrainer. When the last Roman emperor, Christian Roman emperor is removed, there is no restraint on evil. And we see this with everything from the Spanish flu to the nonstop violence. No one had ever seen anything like this with the Bolsheviks. I don't have seen anything like this in World War I.

I mean, the mass slaughter that the West was trying to cover up. And Tolstoy, you know, lived a very charmed life. He was a landowner. He was a member of the elite. He had a almost a very naive view of human nature. He didn't believe in private property, but was a landowner. You know, crazy things like that. And he hadn't seen evil before.

Tostoy lived in a fairly good time in Russian history. It was only in the last couple decades of his life that he became that, that he took this position of pure pacifism. And his works on it, I think, are extremely simplistic. And of course, as this book goes on, we'll see him make distinctions between physical force, compulsion, coercion, morally, and nationally. And these are very different things that Tostoy never deals with. Why physical violence gets privileged above all other forms of violence, he doesn't understand.

You know, mental violence, I think it's, well, it's not violence. Mental coercion has far-lasting effects in physical violence. For him, violence is physical by definition. But this is, he knows that humanity has stepped into a brand new phase of its existence. And all the old guardrails are gone. And he still sees the Russian diaspora a way to bring that understanding to the, to the world. And, and we can be so, you know, Solzhenitsyn was one of them, much, much, much later. And still, the ignorance of, see, the U.S. of Russia, that didn't really change until, way after World War II.

And even that, it was bad. They just took, you know, leftist arguments and took at face value. Remember the Soviets said they accepted it. except later on when it came to the Jews. But otherwise, you know, Eileen was, they tried to relegate him to nothing. And with people like Jolzenitsyn and Dostoevsky and Gogol, they were too important to shut up entirely. So they had to totally remake them.

And which is what the regime does with those people who it can't ignore. Ilin had tried to ignore as long as possible. But as he becomes more and more popular in Russia today, that the regime couldn't ignore him. And now it's gone all out under attack on him, which is why it's important that we deal with him here in his, I guess, I think his most famous book. Human history has never seen,

or at least cannot remember, anything equal to this. For the first time, such genuine evil has been given to the human spirit with great frankness, and it is understandable that in light of this new reality, many problems of spiritual culture and philosophy, especially those directly related to the ideas of good and evil are imbued with new content, acquire new significance, are illuminated in a new way and require a substantive reexamination. Above all, the moral and practical, religious and metaphysical question of resistance to evil

and the true necessary and worthy paths of this resistance must be discussed. Yeah, atheism now was becoming, it had been fashionable for a while, but because of the Soviet victory, this was a wave of the future, according to Western intellectuals. This was the gradual de-Christianization of the Western world. This was a brand new time in which he now has said three times, and I think you should say it at least three times. And so, but to rebuild something is the next ten. task and so much of his writing was dedicated to that. You know, he moved around a lot. Ilin did because they did try to get rid of him a couple of times.

He understood evil because he had experienced it as at every white soldier in that war. Of course, at this time, those that escaped were all still alive. And this was no time for bickering or fighting, although it didn't happen. and it was the diaspora that was to begin rebuilding. It was almost like a sort of a government in exile, not entirely, but it was sort of a government in exile. There was always monarchist groups all over the place. And they weren't that clear prior to the revolution, though, this revolution has forced them to realize what they had lost. Because you don't know what you have until it's gone.

And the Russians simply took this for granted. And sometimes it's left to people. like me, Sarah from Rose, people who had no Russian blood to understand the greatness of what they had. Russians take it for granted. And this is one of Sarah from Rose's big statements. They simply was day-to-date for them. It wasn't anything special. But the violently extreme violence of the Bolsheviks, I don't think our vocabulary really can match it.

That it was ordinary for them to torture and to slaughter. without trial or with show trials. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, they were identical in this regard. They were identical ideologically. And this was something, yeah, the French Revolution was violent. The glorious revolution was violent, all that, but nothing, nothing like this. This was the first totalitarian experiment. It lasted far too long, and you can't have totalitarianism without the total breakdown of society.

You can't have the total breakdown of society without the total destruction of its leadership. All communist governments do that, starting from year zero. You know, like the Vietnamese tried to do, the Cambodians tried to do, like Mao tried to do.

It's so, you know, a revolution is a total upending of everything. Not just politics or economics, everything, social life, family life, everything. So it was totalitarian by definition. And that word, I don't think, was even coined at this point, but it will slowly, they talk about it, but not using that term. We used it retroactively, but it was starting to be built in a way that, you know, and this was

at a time of the experimentation of the Soviet state, the sexual revolution was going on there, which almost destroyed it, even from their point of view almost destroyed it. They had to stop it. The economy had collapsed. And they were, they were, and, they were, and, you know, and they were, yet there were still, money was pouring in from Western countries and Western investments were pouring in to rebuild the society. So everything that Marx believed about how the bourgeoisie and the communists were going to interact was put on his head. And to this day, very few people know that.

And I think Ilin knew it at the time. But it just makes a mockery of Tolstoy's point of view. Again, it's sort of like not believing in free will. I don't know how anyone can consistently not believe in free will. Because even in the process of not believing in it, you're not certain where those thoughts are coming from. It's all determined. Truth doesn't matter. So I don't know how you could ever consistently believe that.

And it's the same thing for violence. There's nothing wrong with violence and force. I certainly don't think there is. But it has to be under certain circumstances. In the Soviet case, it was under any circumstances. and they destroyed each other as well. All revolutions lead to civil war. In the Soviet case, it was contained,

but with all these purges, you know, Lenin purges as well, Trotsky did his head of the Red Army. Purged a lot of people he didn't consider ideologically viable, or reliable, I should say. And this is one of the reasons that the whites lost. They simply were incapable. They didn't have this mentality.

or the evil that was hidden had become completely revealed because when the Bolsheviks were talking to groups of workers prior to the revolution, they didn't say they were going to do this. They lied through their teeth. How can a group of people who doesn't believe in private property say that we're going to give land to the farmers? They never said anything about collectivization. They knew they were going to do it.

That's the only thing that makes any sense under socialism. They can't say it. We've got to burn down your treasures. They're not going to say that either. So they had to hide it. But now, as Arr was gone, Russia's best were either killed in the war or driven underground or in exile. And therefore, now they have the freedom to do whatever they want. And we know who ran that.

We know the Jews were a huge part of it. And this somehow was revenge for the so-called pogroms, which we know barely existed in the way that the Jews say that they did. So, you know, every paragraph here, he's saying a tremendous amount that is not fully understood today, but I think his audience understood it at the time. This question must be posed and resolved philosophically as one requiring mature spiritual experience, a thoughtful formulation and an impartial solution. To do this, one must first renounce premature and hasty conclusions about one's personality, one's past actions, and one's future paths. The researcher must not preface their investigation with daunting possibilities or prospects.

They must not rush to judge their past or allow others' judgments to penetrate the depths of their heart. Whatever the final solution, it cannot be practically uniform or identical for everyone. The naivete of an all-equalizing, abstract morality has long been recognized in philosophy, and demanding that everyone always should resist evil with force or that. that no one ever resist evil with force is meaningless. Only an unafraid free spirit can approach the problem honestly, sincerely, and perseveringly, thinking through and discussing everything without cowardly hiding or simplifying,

without seducing oneself with affected virtue or being carried away by violent gestures. The entire question is profound, subtle, and complex. Any simplification here is harmful and fraught, with false conclusions and theories. Any ambiguity is dangerous both theoretically and practically. Any cowardice distorts the formulation of the question and any partiality distorts to formulation of the answer.

What he's doing here is he is attacking enlightenment-level ideology that treats people as interchangeable individuals, like Thomas Hobbes, like Locke, like Rousseau. they tend to think that everyone thinks like them. Capitalism and socialism have that in common, that they view human beings not as people, but as abstractions, you know, market segments or something like that.

And this abstraction, well, people don't live abstractly. It just so happens I did my doctoral dissertation on this, because this was a huge issue with Michael Oakeshot. many years ago at the London School of Economics and Political Science, that when you try to make, you know, ideology, ideology makes sound nice on paper, but people don't live on paper either. So how do you make it work in a society that already has a way of life? There's only one way, that's violence. But it's camps. It's total regimentation. It's the total surveillance state. There's no other way to do it. And Marxism is the ultimate in all of these. You know, using, using words like everyone should, everyone has, the words like all in every are so dangerous. You know, we're talking about every single human being or just groups as abstractions. What are we talking about here?

It rejects any kind of complexity. It allows ignorant people to have answers to every question. It makes them sound intelligent, but they really don't know anything. Having ideology is very different from having principles. Principles are very difficult. Ideology is very easy. You know, and all the Enlightenment ideologies tend to have a very simplistic structure that treat all human beings more or less the same. They're equally, they have the equal amount of potential, equally smart, equally dumb, and there's other things on the outside that keep that from happening. Keep them from being equal. Therefore, those other things have to be destroyed.

but they're inherently revolutionary. And capitalism was the same way. The concept that, you know, the old British Whig idea that all countries, all other people in the third world have an Englishman just waiting to be let out, which the regime still has to this day, that they all, you know, long for English parliamentarism and capitalism and so-called free markets. always this highly leveling reductionist, you know, almost a very naive point of view. And Tulsaul and had it and it makes them sound ridiculous when you think about it at any great extent. And that's why so much my argumentation usually is, what do you mean? What, what, you know, how are you defining these terms? We don't, we're not talking, we're not using these words in the same way.

All and every. those concepts barely existed in the ancient world in the classical world it didn't exist in the gospel either all in every are very very abstract concepts we're all very different from each other and in fact I would say this is Eileen's one of his biggest Edmund Burke for that matter one of their biggest um

foundational principles is that we're not the same we're not equal and that's never going to going to change. It doesn't justify the oligarchy we live under today, of course. But there is a legitimate place for aristocracy and monarchy, not tyranny or totalitarianism or oligarchy. And, but ideology gives people the impression that they know something when in fact they don't. And it gives them very easy answers to extremely complex question. For this reason, it is necessary to abandon once and for all the formulation of the question the Count Leo Tolstoy, his associates, and his disciples so blindly and persistently pushed and

gradually promoted into philosophically inexperienced souls. Starting with a purely personal, objectively unexamined and unverified experience of both love and evil, thereby prejudging both the depth and breadth of the question itself, curtailing the freedom of their moral vision with purely personal aversions and preferences, failing to carefully analyze any of the spiritual contents under discussion, that is, violence, evil, or religiosity, remaining silent about the fundamental principles and rushing to a categorical answer, this group of moralizing publicists posed the question incorrectly and answered it incorrectly, and then, with a passion that often bordered on bitterness, defended their incorrect solution to an incorrect question as a divinely revealed

truth. Well, we know that the left, whether socialists or not, you know, it takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe their nonsense. Today, we do have experience. To be a leftist today is just to be willfully ignorant. Back then, maybe, you know, the French Revolution, I think, destroyed a lot of liberalism's earlier prejudices. The romantic movement helped correct things a little bit. The romantic movement was a very good thing when it came to. to the, you know, herder has always been my main nationalist source of information or theoretical discussion, so to speak. Even words like theory don't work. Because again, it implies that people are a mass, just a mass of undifferentiated elements rather than at least classes. They hate

the idea of complexity. And the way, you know, in Tolstoy, too, he might be able to live this way. He might be able to live this way. He might be able to to live in a very peaceful way without violence. He could do that. He had the option. He had the option. But that doesn't mean everyone can't. He just assumed that this is something that every individual strives to be.

He actually came out and said that 1,800 years of Christianity has led to him. He brought out the truth in the gospel for the very first time. And it came for this total rejection of violence and all that and total pacifism, which again, I can't imagine anyone can consistently maintain. And that goes for personal, especially personal, but national or anything else. You could have a motivated group of small, a handful of individuals, but you can't impose that on everybody.

You know, some Marxists might actually be totally motivated, but that doesn't mean the overwhelming majority of people are going to be so motivated. They're used to living in a very different way. and unless you use nonstop violence and purges and everything else, you're not going to get your way. And even then you're not going to get your way. He just can't get around that. And again, Elyne mentions one more time that he's lived a very charmed life. And he has not come across evil.

And he died before it really ever happened. He didn't live long enough to see World War I. How the scientific, you know, the domination of science survived World War I is a mystery to me. because all their discoveries was used to slaughter people didn't have the slightest impact on it. It's like how did discovery of DNA not destroy Darwinism? Everything, you know, Darwinism is very simple to a lot of people. DNA is certainly not. And it, when the system revolves around something and it is a high cost for rejecting certain things, you know, you know,

So what he's been saying so far is that these people think in abstract terms, but the world is not abstract. The world is actually concrete. And because Tolstoy didn't have experience with the unbrided evil that Ilin had, that Russia has at this point in time, that, you know, he shouldn't be taken seriously. And in no way will everyone follow that kind of a life. in fact only tiny minorities will agree with a lot of what he said but for him to say that Christianity has um he said it in a few places actually uh was only revealed in him um and the sermon on the mount was really the only thing he cared about religiously wrote a book called my my religion or an essay my religion where he lays this out in some detail but

um he takes everything in the most simplistic way Christ said turning your cheek, loving your enemies. He just assumes what love is. He assumes that this goes for every circumstance, all in every, in every word, in every sentence. And there's no reason to believe that. Church fathers didn't believe that. But none of that was actually a Christian in his mind. Christianity came, was really only, really discovered with Tolstoy in his communities, according to him.

Since the material of history, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, and the entire spiritual culture did not fit into rational schemes and formulas, such schemes and formulas claimed universal significance and did not tolerate exceptions. Then, naturally, a selection of suitable material and the rejection of unsuitable material began, and the deficiency of the former was compensated for by artistically convincing constructions. A naive and idealic view of the human being was preached, and the black abysses of history and the soul were ignored. An incorrect demarcation of good and evil was made. Heroes were considered villains. Weak-willed, timid, and patriotically dead. Uncivil natures were extolled as virtuous. Naive ideas alternately were presented

with deliberate paradoxes. Objections were dismissed as sophisms. Those who disagreed and rebelled were declared to be vicious, corruptible, selfish, and hypocritical people. For example, Tolstoy says, the degree of denial of the doctrine of non-resistance and its misunderstanding is always proportional to a people's degree of power, wealth, and civilization. State rulers are, quote, for the most part, bribed rapists, end quote, exactly the same as highway robbers, quote, recognition of the necessity of resisting evil by violence is nothing other than people's justification

of their habitual and favored vices, revenge, greed, envy, ambition, lust for power, pride, cowardice, anger. Now, in certain cases, that's not entirely false. We could see that in certain governments, in certain circumstances. But he says this about every government that's ever existed, especially Christian ones. I think for the most part he's really targeting Russia. I think that's his main concern, because that was a Jew's main concern. But if that first comment from law and violence, the degree and denial of doctrine on resistance, misunderstanding, if that were the case, Tulsaul story wouldn't have ever mattered. No, just like Marxism was always a plaything of the rich.

And how easy that... I mean, this is one of the core principles here. How easy it is to believe this kind of thing when you have a professional army protecting you all the time. Now, Tolstoy has been in battle. He was a soldier at one point. And yet, as he got older, again, this only developed in the last few decades of his life.

You know, he, and again, he seems to think something, talk about simplicity, that, well, the more power you have, the more wealth you have, more civil I don't know what he means by civilization here exactly I couldn't find another better word for it therefore you're going to reject the the going to reject pacifism despite him being a fairly wealthy landowner and it's true quite often he sees it in in rioters that's nothing to do with the issue it's just they there that's how they get out their their anger and revenge and hatred that can't be true but he's saying this covers

all cases, especially in Russian cases. And that's simply not true. Self-defense is, of course, is not like this. And the church has laid out in great detail, and he probably knew this, where it's justified and where it's not. And that gets very, very complicated. But he had no patience for complexity. It's that simple. I always thought that about rioters. I have a, I've been interested in writers for some time, the psychology of rioting. Why would you attack cops who have nothing to do with creating the policy that you hate so much? You know, working class guys and destroying an area, making things worse than they were before. You know, you see riders on the street and say in the Western world, they all look like, you know, homeless idiots.

I guarantee you they could barely put their positions into wars properly. Yeah, it is true that a lot of them are there just to have. that is an excuse for their anti-social natures. But that's hardly the case with everybody. And that's the criticism here. And liberal ideologies of all types, anarchism, all the rest of it, is based in this idea that everyone's the same, but differences have been imposed from without.

If we destroy those things that impose differences, and everyone will be back to being the same again. and because we're all equal, and hence we're all the same. That's what ideology is based on. And to try to force that onto a group of people, having the Bolsheviks try to force that onto a group of people. They didn't really believe in equality. They said they did.

But trying to force that on, you know, abstractions onto people that already had some socialist institutions that were very successful. Like the commune, like the Artel, like the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross, like monastery. They already had things. Socialist things that were functioning, but not even one could be a monk. Not everyone could be a part of that organization. That's only for certain people. But no, they wanted a single, solitary, unitary society.

It would have to be. That would have to be the case if everyone's the same and if everyone is equal. And really, they all think like me, but they just aren't allowed to because they have too much money or something like that. There's no question that a told story was just a, a fool as he got older. And, you know, Lenin used to love him before the revolution. He used to say wonderful things about how great Lenin was. But the minute Lenin took power, he hated him again because that kind of idea was a threat to him.

He's useful as a way to destabilize the society. But once he takes over, now that kind of idea has to go. Anarchist was one of the first groups of people that Stalin, or that London put away. and because again complexity is the problem they can't handle it using words like the masses is always so angering to me

people aren't mad they could be turned into them like maybe the case in the U.S. today they could be made into masses that's also something that's done by force but Tolstoy lived a trumped life the most part and he was he was correct about agrarianism he was very good about on agrarian i used to read him about that all the

time but he read into people and even the gospel what he wanted to and he didn't have a whole lot of people saying otherwise and he had become fairly wealthy um he was a well-known writer by the time of his death and and um he just became a megalomaniacal at a time boy this is a lot of work this is a this is serious stuff um but it's uh it's deadly serious and that's why this man is so important elin that is all the power of the leader's personal gifts and all the fanatical limitations of his followers were directly were directed towards spiritually imposing their own era on others and spreading their own delusions it is natural that a teacher that legitimizes weakness, exalts ego-centrism, indulges the lack of will,

relieves the soul of social and civic duties, and, what is much more, the tragic burden of the universe, was bound to have success among people, especially those who are unintelligent, weak-willed, poorly educated, and inclined to a simplifying, naively idyllic worldview. So it happened that the teaching of Count Tolstoy and his followers attracted weak and simple minded people and giving itself a false appearance of agreement with the spirit of Christ's teachings poisoned Russian religious and political culture. It was an absolute poison, and it was promoted by Jews to a great extent. And yet it does relieve the cowards of having to fight because there's just no reason to fight. And there's nothing to fight for. It legitimizes

abulia or just this this state of inaction he really offers nothing to fight for and he doesn't believe in fighting anyway um so well that's a big relief for people who had no intention of doing it in the first place if everyone is equal and if you're poorly educated made a lot of bad decisions well it's someone else's fault um so yeah he did bring into himself um a group of people who were just anti-social and this given given that the veneer of Christianity as weak as it was was what he means by the poison here and Tolstoy is still being talked about today in this regard politically speaking he's big in anarchist circles always has been um and in his writing you know Christianity got less and less

important anarchism became more and more important um because christ wasn't god he said so over and over again uh only god's worth jews according to him And maybe you can leave a link for that article I sent you from Tolstoy. What is a Jew? Okay. Which is I had forgotten about that one. That was so awful. What is a Jew?

I've never seen that kind of talk about worshipping power. And of course, blaming the monarchist government for hating the, for hating the monarchist government for hating them for no good reason um and of course refusing to talk about their violence he's going to talk about the talmud refusing to talk about all of this just having this strictly idealic absurd and naive point of view about them and um it just made life easy intellectually easy everything was simple and so who's that going to attract and that's what he's saying here all right wind you this this last paragraph and um we'll call it an episode and start on part two. Oh yes, please.

Absolutely. Russian philosophy must uncover this nest of empirical and ideological errors that has quietly infiltrated the soul and strive to once and for all remove all this ambiguity, naivety, cowardness, and partiality.

This is its religious, scientific, and patriotic calling to help the weak see and grow stronger and the strong gain conviction and wisdom. Isn't it great not to have to deal with all of these names. Yeah. Stumble over all of these, all these places.

It's got to be, it's wonderful. But what this last paragraph here, this is still kind of goes with the introduction. You know, a lot of the causes of the revolution could be found in Russian elites who began pursuing their own interests, who took social stability for granted, didn't realize how precious of a thing it was, who didn't feel like following the strict limits of Christianity and so found in masonry and whatever else. It could be spiritual, but they could do whatever they wanted. And that that has to be completely eliminated. And for those in exile especially, a brand new, you know, far more, far better Russian has to be created, Russian of many centuries ago to help the

weak, see and grow stronger, not to accept their weakness and say their weakness to someone else's fault, but that is perfectly okay. And there's going to be a strong and weak, no matter what system you have, but the strong can't order over people. Rule is always going to exist, including Tolstoy himself. He ruled over his whole estate. I don't know if he used violence or not. He may have consistently. But, you know, there's always going to be strong. He was always going to be weak. You know, he never sold off, you never gave up his lands. And Lenin was right to mock him for that once he took over after his death.

But they took the stability and the prosperity of old Russia for granted. And came up with these things that gave the worst elements of society a justification and worse, a Christian justification. All righty. as I do at the end of every episode, please go over to the descriptions, the videos, and this will be in the show notes. This is in public domain. It is Dr. Johnson's translation.

There shouldn't be any copyright issues on this. So you will find this everywhere, and it will include all the links so that you can donate to Dr. Johnson's work. So please go ahead and do that if you haven't already, just to thank him for 200, years together. Well, what a brilliant thing that was. But as you could see, you're ready. This is a very, very different book than that. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Okay, my friend, talk to you soon.