The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Ivan Ilyin's 'On Resistance to Evil by Force' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Pt. 11

Episode Date: June 20, 2026

65 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 continue 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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I appreciate all of you. Head on over to P.cignon Show.com. You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Eileen. Dr. Johnson, what's happening today? I'll tell you what's happening today. For some reason, there's a helicopter with some big thing hanging from it.

It looks like a big drill bit, but I don't think that's what it is. Maybe it's what it is. For the last two days, I've been flying around, driving me crazy. I don't know what it's doing. I live close to railroad tracks. I don't know if there's a connection. But you start getting paranoid when it's like day three. And he's still wandering around up there.

But it looks like a big drill bit. And I saw him knocking down some trees before. Maybe that's what he's doing. I don't know. He went right over the house a couple of times. I was doing a lawn yesterday. He went right over the house. And I don't know.

I don't know. It's, I hope he's having a good time up there. I have nothing to say about it anymore. I'm not one of these paranoid guys, but it does get you a little worried. after three days, two and a half days. Could always wander out there and see if there's anybody you could ask.

Well, I live very close. I love the train tracks. I don't mind them at all. But their sole purpose is to feed the power station that's not very far away. It's massive. It's massive. So I get the impression that this area is very, very highly patrolled. You know, this is a high security area, so to speak.

for that reason. So I don't know if that has any relevance, but I think the thing's a drill bit. And I think he's chopping down trees. But he's only done that a little bit. Out of the three days he's been there, I've seen him doing once. I don't know.

All right. Well, you know, as long as a helicopter's not black, I think you should be okay. I can't tell what color. Oh, here it comes. I can't tell what color it is. I think it's dark blue and white. All righty.

We went the other direction. Let's jump back in. Hell is going on here. After a week off, let's jump back into this. I think people have missed us. We're solid. Evil enters a soul much more

easily by stealth than by violence and destruction. It is often more expedient for its adorned mask than to immediately reveal its own disgusting nature. Therefore, criminals, wishing to overcome good, not only rape and kill but also praise evil, vilify good, lies, slander, flatter, propagandize, and agitate. Then, having acquired authority, they command and forbid, excluding coerce with threats, they tempt, sexually intoxicating the eye, ear, and mind, pandering to man's evil instincts and inflaming them to a state of passionate fervor. They awaken in souls the feeling of resentment, envy, hostility, vindictiveness, hatred, and malice,

put people in burdensome, humiliating, unbearable living conditions. They bribe, honor, and try to undermine in the soul the feeling of self-worth, respect, and trust of people to each other, accustomed to evil by simple repetition, shameless example, imperceptible infection, suggestion, undermining of the will, instilling vicious mental mechanisms and strive to cover all with obvious success, impunity, the din of an intoxicated feast. Yeah, he's a very good writer. But understand, this is Berlin, 1925.

We know what Berlin was in 1925. You know the condition of Berlin in 1925. I mean, it's not just a Soviet Union. it's not just Tolstoy. It's also what he's seeing around him. Berlin, you know, it's not just, you know, the state and the economy had collapsed, public morals had collapsed. And it was, you know, a Jewish movement, pornography, and open, you know, prostitution, all this, had a welcome home in Berlin, I'm sure other cities too.

you should see, hear how they praise this in the academy. It makes you nauseous. But people wonder why Hitler was so popular. And whenever these guys got into trouble, where'd they go, the USSR, as if to prove his point. And remember that. So it's not just all these. And also remember that in the right after the revolution, probably around now, maybe a couple years earlier, you had Alexander Colanty

creating the sexual revolution in the USSR. I mentioned her before. She was purged eventually, thank God. And the family had fallen up, you know, easy divorce, abortion, the so-called community of wives, which every revolutionary movement, from the radical Protestants in Northern Europe to then, has that as one of their, well, community of wives just means, I can screw anyone I want.

And it was doing so much damage to the economy. People weren't showing up to work. There was so much contempt and anger and chaos that they had to stop it. In other words, that was too radical for Lenin and Trotsky. So, and she eventually lost her job and is just kind of a curiosity now. but she is always considered one of the first early feminists and someone who young women should aspire to be. That's a exact quote.

So he's referring to many things here. And he was living in 1925, Berlin. He was witness to a lot of things. Stuff we take for granted. But then it was just an outrageous imposition. And we know who stopped it, at least for a while. Vicious violence and murder, of course, thicken the disgusting atmosphere of this villainous procession,

and is the main manifestation of evil and its most destructive consequence. This is precisely the qualitative perversion and architectonic decay of the living spirit. Violence itself, for all its outward brutality, carries its poison not so much to the body as to the spirit, murder itself, for all its tragic irreversibility, is intended not so much for those killed as for those remaining alive. Both instill fear and intensify the effective temptation. They shake the will, awaken passions, and distort reason. It's very important to note that a later, well, I guess it was happening now, but when the Soviet Union was finally established, you know, you did have peasant uprisings, but not like it was under Lenin. The concept was to have these arrests being random.

There's an intense psychological impact when you don't know it could be you tomorrow. You can't arrest all your enemies. That would be pretty much the whole country. But it was a psychological. The Soviets were brilliant in that matter, diabolically so. Unfortunately, the right wing was way behind on the psychological aspect of things, except for Elin, of course. He saw what was what was going on. Violence. Let's say if you get, you get, you know, your husband, you get slapped by your wife or punched by her, worse. It isn't so much that it hurt.

It's, oh my God, she hates me this much. She's willing to do that? It's a psychological element, not the physical element. And in the previous paragraph, evil entering the soul by stealth, that's how evil functions. Now, I think today it's just out in the open, they don't care. But generally speaking, it never says, you know, you know, there's a lot of fake Lenin quotes out there. And you know they're fake because you have Lenin calling himself evil or his movement evil. No one's ever going to say that about themselves.

you know, the protocols and nonsense have that in there. No one's going to say that about themselves. But, no, they are the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. They're the end of history. This is going to be an era of peace in plenty until our enemies are destroyed, of course. And, you know, revolutions of any type. create these very confused passions. But he says here, resentment, envy, hostility, vindictiveness, hatred, malice.

And it brings to power the worst men because they're the ones who don't care, the sociopath. The sociopath has a huge advantage in that there's no good and evil with him. He just doesn't care. And early Soviet Marxism was very much like that. If it's for the revolution, it's good. And they did things that the whites would never even dream of doing, not just against their enemies, but to make sure that their own organization was totally unified ideologically.

And they were willing to, you know, cut down infantry units if they were not fully on board with Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism. But, of course, it was all for the future. future, this vague future that neither Marx nor Lenin never talked about. They never said, you know, what I still, it always, it's only struck me over the last few years. What political theorists doesn't talk about what's going to happen when their ideology is imposed? That's their whole thing. No, no, it's always negative.

It's always about capitalism or feudalism or something like that. It's never about, they leave that open. Karl Marx has this famous line, he says, I remember Marx or Engels, he says, I'm not going to write recipes for the kitchens of the future. That's his line. He says, and he means that, you know, it's going to have its own personality. I think it also means that I can't tell you

that you would never support us if that were the king. Remember, the communists, I have some of their electoral speeches and what they promised the world, and one of their big promises was giving land to the peasants. Now, the problem is, the land was always in peasant hands. You didn't have a landed oligarchy in Russia.

So, and talking about killing the landlords, well, they were their own landlords. What the hell is he talking about? But why would you even talk about giving property to anybody when you don't believe in private property? The only time land was granted to the peasantry was under national socialist systems. I think of the, you know, the Chavez movement in Venezuela. My favorite military dictator Velasco in Peru. Park in South Korea. Hathes al-Assad in Syria who broke the back of the landed oligarchy.

They're the ones. They're national socialists. You know, it's not just Hitler. They were national socialists fully, almost identical. you know, they differ because they live in different countries, but they're not fascist, though. Very different ideology. You know, Maslina was a clown anyway, but they were not fat. They were national socialists, very different kind of thing.

Communists, liberals, especially at the time, 1925, Berlin, you know, I used to give the, I gave the example about, you know, the alcoholic who's forced to work in a bar. He has no choice. He can't work anywhere else. You can't be anywhere out. It's not just that he's watching everyone have a good time. It's also that they're telling him that alcoholism doesn't really exist. It's in your mind. Come on with us.

Have a great time. There is no such thing. You're too hard on yourself. You know, what level temptation? That's what it's like. I think that's what it's like, you know, sexually, financially, for people living in the U.S. today. Certainly going to campus. So these are.

You know, this is really what he means. And what was going on in Berlin in 1925 is something we can relate to as the same group of people. It was ended. And the country was turned from a third world backwater to a first world powerhouse in three years, which is extraordinary. And part of the victory was to get rid of exactly this crap. This is why it must be recognized that external violence manifests evil and strengthens its actions, but evil is not at all determined or exhausted by external violence. This is a correct understanding of the relationship between physical coercion, violence, and evil.

Yeah, of course, there's going to be violence turned to wrong uses, incorrect uses, immoral uses. That happens a lot. But that's only one way evil manifests itself, and it's only a subset of violence in terms of physical coercion. Violence is a word that has a negative, I don't think in Russian, but in English it has this immediate negative connotation. Violence is, you think, you know, something violent happened next door, you're automatically thinking something negative. but that's not the case. That's really not what the word means. It can be used for good, and it can be used in a loving way.

And I think Yulin has established that already. Chapter 8. A statement of the problem. All these preliminary studies and considerations, clearing the way and clarifying the perspective, now allow us to turn to the formulation of the main problem. The spiritual permissibility of resistance to evil by means of physical coercion and suppression.

It is clear that the problem cannot be posed until the real objective quantities hidden behind it are established and defined. How can one discuss evil without identifying and revealing its true nature? What can one say about coercion if one confuses it with violence and fails to see its spiritual function,

its motives, or purpose? Is it permissible to invoke the nature of goodness, assuming its essence is generally known, and failing to notice that it is being simplified and distorted in the discourse, what could possibly result from this except an untenable question and an untenable answer? Here it comes. Here he comes. He's off in a distance, but he's coming. Anyway, yeah, he does make a distinction, though.

He's allowing violence to be vaguely negative. Physical coercion, this was brutal to translate. I did, the machine couldn't do it. Physical coercion and violence. You know, physical coercion can be done with love. But until you have these things defined, until you have the, and it's not easy to do, that's why it's taken so long to get here.

You can't talk about resisting evil by force until you know what resisting means, until you know what evil means, until you know what force means. And so much my career is that you can't assume that people know that. They always import whatever they want into those questions. You know, either knee-jerk reactions or just, you know, fallacious understandings or arguments, I should say. So here he's gone the other side. He said, okay, violence is negative. He's going to allow that to happen.

But spiritual, but coercion, different story. So he makes that linguistic distinction very similar. Yes, there is loving violence. He doesn't like using that phrase. So instead, he uses coercion. And you do it, you have. have to do it out of love, not out of anger, even if you have a good reason to be angry. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie with Jamie Fox.

No, I can't think of the name. I'm so terrible at this. His wife and child were murdered and he went on a killing spree. Anyway, that's the concept. And he started killing innocent people. And that's the issue. It has to be tightly controlled. You can't let your emotions get away with you. And it's extremely, you know, that's tough to do.

That's where discipline comes in. That's where the spiritual world comes in. And you can't convince yourself that you did it for a good reason, when you didn't do it for a good reason. It's very easy to do that. I'm doing it for your own good. You know, something like that. But it is, that doesn't mean that coercion can't be used for your own good.

If someone doesn't understand anything but violence, what else you're going to do? And that's where Tolstoy fails completely. In order to correctly formulate a problem and correctly solve it, not only a definiteness of objective vision is needed. A tense effort of attention is also necessary to retain that given set of conditions, outside of which the problem itself falls apart or is removed. Every problem has meaning only in the context of given quantities and their correct empirical perception. Outside of this, it falls and becomes meaningless, and then the one who

nevertheless continues to resolve it in this form finds himself in the ridiculous position of a person who supposedly labors over imaginary quantities and then enthusiastically proclaims the absolute truth. It makes sense to examine the problem of the admissibility of resistance to evil through physical coercion and suppression only if the following conditions are present. Okay. Let's start, and I'll probably say something after each. These are kind of long, but there's a few of them, and let's start. I'll say something after each number.

Okay. First, genuine evil must be present. It cannot be its semblance, not its shadow, not a phantom, not external disaster. not external disasters, not error, not weakness, or a disease of an unfortunate sufferer. There must be an evil will pouring itself out in external action. Before the court of legal consciousness, this will be a will directed against the law, and since spirituality constitutes the essence of law and the existence of the living spirit as the purpose of law, then this will be an anti-spiritual will, in source, in direction,

and purpose and in means. Before the face of a moral consciousness, this will be a will directed against the living unity of people, and since love is the essence of this unity and love is a very unifying force, then this will be an antisocial will, in source, in direction, in purpose, and in means. When a malicious will is expressed in external action, the question of resisting evil through violence oppression arises.

Clearly, this question must be immediately resolved wherever internal compulsion proves powerless. An evil will emerges as an internally possessed external force, that is, where it manifests itself as spiritually blind malice, fierce, aggressive, godless, shameless, spiritually corrupting and stopping at no means. Where, consequently, the composition of moods and actions is actually present for which the mercy of the gospel has determined the least punishment is drowning with a millstone around the neck. You want me to keep going? Yeah, until we get to the second one.

Okay. It is clear that the interpretation of the present evil is an illness, a delusion, a weakness, an accidental fall, and the like does not resolve, but removes problem posed, and then calls for persuasive non-resistance turn out to be a non-answer to the question, but a hidden evasion of the question. You know, this is an example of a certain type of analytic philosophy, which I was subject to in the Nebraska philosophy department, but we understand why that's the case.

It's like talking about using the word racism, which has no meaning. You have to set out exactly and precisely what you mean, which, of course, the regime will never do. Not that anyone cares about the word anymore anyway. Same thing for anti-semitism or any of these terms. And you know that I did the translating here when I have all these words in brackets. And this one gave me a headache. Well, they all give me a headache.

But so the main thing here is that you have to understand what evil is. Can't be just something that's against your interests, something you don't like, something that upset you, something that triggers you. It has to be genuine evil, defined here as something that destroys the living unity of the nation. Something that divides the people as a whole. Nationalism and this unity revolves around humility. You know, we have to learn to listen to others. We can't, you know, we're not all, we all can't be in charge. we all do our part

whether we get our picture in the paper or not we all do our part and we we have to have humility or else nothing the whole thing falls apart and then again I mean he could have made his point in like two sentences but when he gets agitated

he just strings out these adjectives But evil in this case, or the most extreme version, is something that is blind. He says blind malice, fears, aggressive violence. When we use violence or coercion, whatever you want to call it, we cannot be blind. We have to know precisely why we're doing it. We have to be able to defend it rationally, not just to ourselves, but anyone who notices this. and what Tolstoy, you know, I read him, you know, many years ago, I really refreshed myself for this segment or this book,

and he doesn't really get into the question of what do you do with people that refuse to listen, that don't understand, you know, persuasion. And I'm always reminded of the defund the police movement. that the regime really tried to put out there. They're so obsessed with supporting crime for the sake of the chaos it causes. And having psychologists go to the Cripps headquarters and talk to them. That's what they said. And they had an even agenda in that they wanted to destroy the society.

Tolstoy, I don't think he wanted that. I think, you know, but to the Beetal story, you have to believe that everyone is rational, like he is. I think he was wrong. He was a rational man. He was very intelligent. But because he's like that and his friends are like that. It doesn't mean that everyone is like that. He was a little sheltered in that regard.

He did have quite a life. But you have no choice but to believe that every human being, unless they're, you know, demented, you know, retarded or something like that, you have to believe that every living man is, is rational. And if they're not, that you can then talk to them, persuade them, and bring the reason out of them. And that is, I mean, to understate the problem, it is an extremely naive point of view. He doesn't have an answer for this. And now, I wrote the sentence.

The sentence here, I'm right, the Transident, it's clear that the interpretation of the present evil as an illness, delusion, a weakness, an accidental fall. Does that result? Well, that could have been written yesterday. You hear the defense lawyer say it all the time. He was mentally ill. He was beaten up as a child. He made a mistake. And he says, that's totally missing the point.

and so, you know, it's really extraordinary how contemporary his writing is, and it makes him very relatable. Unfortunately, with Tolstoy, I can't relate to him, because I wasn't a Russian landowner. But, you know, and the way that Tolstoy writes, he really claims he is the final interpreter. This is what Christianity is. He speaks like a synod would speak. There's tremendous, tremendous arrogance. I think the church excommunicating it was a bad idea. It just brought more attention to him, like a stricent effect.

Obviously, he was out of the church at that point. He was a Judaizer at that point. No kidding. You know, he was excommunicated. I think that, well, the church was very popular and trusted. And so if he's kicked out, an excommunication actually meant something back then. You know, you had no standing in society after that. But he didn't worry about it because he owned land and he was more or less self-sufficient.

But it's pretty incredible. But, you know, I have no doubt that at the time, most people in fact were rational. It was a far healthier society than what we have today. Today we have a society where rational people are the exception, not the rule. So now what do we do? you know and and that's why he could he could be writing this if he wrote this if he was alive and wrote this yesterday he wouldn't have any you know it's it's very contemporary and it's extraordinary for that reason second as long as evil is not perceived by anyone as long as no one has seen the external

act and has not discern the malice hidden behind it then no one has either the basis nor the reason to pose and resolve the problem of external resistance. This is precisely why many people, burdened in advance by the presumptuous necessity of an answer, turn away from evil and prefer not to see it, either by evading the information or benevolently interpreting it in the best sense, or hiding behind the impossibility and the impermissibility of judging one's neighbor, or refirming the faith that malice is not inherent in people at all. He frees himself from its burdens, dulls its severity, and torment, and deprives himself of the right to participate in its discussion.

And as a result, all his judgments on this issue turn out to be either incompetent, like the judgments of a man born blind about additional colors, or scholastic, like the judgments of a reasoner about untried imaginary circumstances. Well, let me say something here. It's one thing to catch someone in the act and take violent action. You know, no one denies that. There's a reason that the law gives lesser sentences to a man who shot while having sex with his wife. Every once in a while, that happens.

The sentences are not as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as long as it would be for murder. And sometimes the jury doesn't see it as murder at all. You can't hear it, you know, secondhand, third hand, fourth hand. So judging one's neighbor. I love that. We can't judge each other. The point here is, I said a common cop out.

Yeah, it is. Well, I can't judge. Well, isn't that convenient? So you don't have to go through the mental struggle of understanding what's going on and doing something about it. You just give that slogan and walk away and let everyone else deal with it. Go ahead. Whether or not atrocities should be physically suppressed, only one who has seen real evil,

who has perceived and experienced it, who has received and carried within himself its diabolical burns, who has not turned away, but has immersed his gaze in the image of Satan, who has allowed the image of evil to be truly and faithfully reflected within himself and endured it without becoming infected, who has perceived evil but not accepted it. For one who has accepted evil has become infected by it, to a certain extent has become it, and thereby transformed from a resisting subject into a subject that must be resisted. It is for him to resolve the question of methods of resistance. One who has not accepted evil has truly known it, but has not become it.

He possesses it in his spiritual experience, sees it. its nature, understands its path and laws, and is therefore able to correctly pose and resolve the problem of resistance, having experienced rejected and gained wisdom, he has thereby acquired the power of vision and the right to judge. This is a very profound point. I firmly believe I'm one of these people. I have faced true evil. And it changes you forever. But people who are sheltered. People who don't, you know, people don't have a lot of problems. They're in no position to judge what others do.

My favorite example here is university professors sitting in their very comfortable offices, condemning someone like General Pinot Sheem. Well, what was he facing? He was facing extreme violence in the streets. a psycho dictator which led the legislature to ask him to take over, even though he only got 39% of the vote or something like that.

You haven't seen that. You haven't seen that face up, right right in your face. You haven't had to deal with it. So you're in no position to say what it was like to be in a position to do something about it. you know, you've never been in a situation where there's riots every day and the society is collapsing around you. This is you can't go into it.

This is your home. How dare you judge someone like that who was successful? All these guys in Latin America. I have a book out on the subject. Um, on the, I remember the name even dictators of, uh, military leaders of Latin America, um, where I defend them. I defend them in very similar ways. these are, you know, academics who have not seen this.

They have not seen what these men have seen. In Indonesia, for example, before the coup of Suharto, the savior of Asia, one of the generals who took part in that coup had his little girl blown up by a communist bomb. It was meant for him, of course. See, they haven't, they don't know what that's like. Of course he's going to take, you know, they're sheltered people. intellectually soft people. And what he's saying here is how dare they judge what someone like that is going to do,

especially when it's successful and popular, as it was in most cases, the military and, you know, it's very patriotic and usually coming from the lower classes and all that. They create, you know, land reform and stuff that the communists would never, ever have given. So that's very, very, this is a very powerful point. someone who's sheltered, someone who doesn't know what evil is, has not seen it in his mind, he really shouldn't be talking about it. Third, the presence of genuine love for good in the questioning and decisive soul is needed.

The problem of resistance to evil is not an abstract, but a practical problem. Its formulation, discussion, and solution presupposed that a person not only perceives, contemplates and studies the actions of people, but evaluates them, connecting them with a living, accepting, and rejecting attitude chooses, prefers, and connects them, connects his well-being, his joy, his life, and his destiny with what he himself is chosen and preferred. Here it is not enough to experience and perceive. One must love and enter into a living identity. It is not enough to think. One must sincerely and genuinely feel. It is not enough to speak. One must rejoice or be indignant. If a person who does,

does not know if a person who understands the difference between good and evil cannot even perceive the problem of resisting evil, then someone who knows this difference but remains indifferent to it may perceive this problem, but will be unable to resolve it. For it is revealed only to someone who grasp it with the primary central sense of their soul, who understands it because they cannot help but understand it and cannot help but grasp it, because the question of goods victory over evil is a question of their personal existence. Right. So there's two elements now.

One and two. It's not just that you have evil in front of your face that permits that kind of action. Again, I think he's speaking more politically, but it applies to anyone. And I use the military coups as an example, especially in Latin America, the 60s and 70s. they see the evil, they see what the communists are, back in the drug dealers,

killing innocent people all the time, constant violence. The economy collapsing, okay, he sees it in his face, he sees it right, right there. This is his home, but he also has to love it. He has to be a patriot. He has to love his nation. He has to love the good and know what the good is. It's not just a matter of reacting to evil. That's why the second part is very important.

A third part is very important. It's extremely significant. He has to know evil. He also has to know the good. And both of those things he had to have experienced. It is of immense significance that those two things have to work together. True resistance to evil is not limited to condemn. it or exhausting itself with its rejection? No, it confronts a person with the question of life and death,

demanding an answer as to whether it is worth living in the presence of victorious evil, and if so, how exactly they will live to prevent its victory. If the triumph of blasphemy and embittered contempt doesn't stifle a person and extinguish the light in their eyes, it means their soul lacks the foundation for a true understanding and resolution of the problem of resisting evil. For this problem is formulated, us. What should one do who truly loves the elements of spirit and love, yet witnesses its desecration, perversion, and extinction? Are the unloving competence to judge the tragedy of the lover? Does it make sense to interrogate the indifferent as to what they would do if they witnessed a destruction of that

to which they are indifferent? This is why, when the spiritual nihilist and the lazy relativists pose the problem of resisting evil through physical coercion and suppression, they obliterate it by their very formulation and offer it a non-solution. Relativism, the ultimate cop-out. I don't believe that they're actually full relativists out there. There's no way. They get angry just like everybody else. They may even use violence like everybody else.

They don't really believe it. It's just something that they say in an argument. something that justifies whatever it is they're doing. But those who refuse to act suddenly adopt relativism because then it justifies. There's an intellectual justification for their non-action. And so, but I love the concept here, the triumph of blasphemy and embittered contempt

doesn't stifle a person and extinguish the light of their eyes. It means their soul lacks the foundation for a true understanding and resolution, the problem of resisting evil. That's an incredible line. Now, in 1925, Berlin, it may be shocking to see someone like that. In 26, Pennsylvania, it's not. Most people are like this. Most people don't know what blasphemy is.

My debates on Christianity or anything like that really revolve around them not knowing what the words mean. not knowing what the true doctrine is and and and what the words imply like 90% of what I talk about is that but so they they're not upset by by by blasphemy because really don't know what's being blasphemed but he's saying more than that you know indifference yes it may be a sign of a weak-willed person it also may be a sign of someone who just doesn't want to deal with it and so They claim indifferent and relativism, so they don't have to fight. Because, you know, in certain cases, you make it hurt.

You know, taking back your neighborhood from gangs or something like that. Everyone, all these military men who took over government. You know, these guys don't want to do that. They know that it harms military readiness. They have enough, they have enough to do, and they have enough problems just being in the Army. They do not want to take over a government. They do it. because they've experienced evil and they love their nation.

You know, I've been talking about the fake prime minister of Armenia, Pasignan, who deliberately lost the war against Azerbaijan a few years ago. The fact that the military hasn't overthrown him speaks to this issue. They can't complain and absolutely do nothing meekly go along with what he's done. the entire Nagorno-Karabakh region was lost to Azerbaijan, to the Muslims. They wiped out the Christian, everything Christian in that area, but burnt down the churches, everything. And all because of him. You know, it's been, you know, that's, so that's a huge part of this as well.

Now, he's an idiot. He honestly is. He really is a dummy. you know, it's got to be exhausting to control, to be their hand, his handler because he needs everything laid out in front of him. But the army doesn't overthrow him. If there's ever a time, a legitimate military coup, it's now. 100,000 Armenians had to flee their country and move back to Armenian. That's not enough. And he did nothing. In fact, he even justified it. But they really can't complain because they are in a position. Even though he's purged, the officers and all that, they still have a conscience, don't think? At least some of them do.

There's been no attempt to get rid of this guy, all the rigged elections, everything else. If there's ever a time for a military coup, it's now. And they would be incredibly popular for doing it. They'd be heroes in Armenia and Russia. But something is stopping them. And it's very hard to tell what. It might just be the confusion. It might just be the fact that he's purged him so many times.

Might be a certain insecurity over that. But now they have an obligation here. They have an obligation. And again, they have the same thing. They love Armenia. They've seen evil in action. They do nothing. I think the same thing.

goes for Ukraine. I think the military should have overthrown that idiot years ago. That would have saved so many lives. Russia was quite willing to forgive everything and start trading with them again. There was a lot of money to be made there, but they refused. There's a lot of reasons we could speculate us to the reasons why they did nothing. We're, you know, we've, we're sworn to support the government. Well, you're sworn to protect the country. not to go along with whatever domestically and foreign enemies, domestic enemies and foreign enemies is the oath. I think all military state.

And yet they do nothing. Fourth, the presence of a volitional attitude toward the world process in the questioning and deciding soul must, but exist. Should that be must exist? Yeah, sorry about that. That's okay. The practical nature of the question, presupposes not only the presence of living unity, but also the capacity for volitional action,

and, moreover, for volitional action not only within one's own personality, but also beyond it, in relation to others, to their evil activities, and to the world process, a process in which they are organically included. This process, when perceived with love and will, appears as a great evolving struggle in which a living and healthy spirit cannot help or participate on the side of good. It cannot help but love decide and strain, promoting one and hindering another. Well, if you didn't know he was a Hegelian, you know it now. Right-wing Hegelian. Oh, by the way, I want to say something.

And I got some very, very good comments about connecting Hegel to orthodoxy. Hegel is useful. I don't go to him for spiritual advice. metaphysically and understanding the world, yes, there's many things about him that are very understanding the state. Now things develop the justification for nationalism.

Well, that's why I go to Hegel. I don't go to Hegel for ascetic advice, you know? So, and I mentioned on my own radio show before, excellent questions. I don't know who sent them to me. Or who saw them, but I don't remember anything. But that's a quick answer there because he's clearly showing his Hegelianism here.

Now, he's talking about an organism. A nation is organic. The state is mechanistic. Organism and mechanism are opposed to each other. Now, the state has no choice but to be mechanistic. Maybe not the crown. Crown's a different story. but he can't function without a substantial government apparatus.

But there's two metaphors. One would be simply, you know, we're the white blood cells of society who can identify evil and, you know, a pathological element and try to destroy it. The other one which may be more apt, especially today, is we're the chemotherapy, let's assume that chemotherapy is the right way to go. We're the chemotherapy and we're fighting this horrible tumor that's been imposed on us in this society. Yes, it's going to be nasty. You've got to vomit a lot. It's going to be horrible. But let's just say that's the only way to do it.

And there's no choice. I think that's a better idea here for the organic nature of things. The old medieval justification for capital punishment was chopping off a say a foot or a hand that's got gangrene, that's what justifies it. It's not just a matter of fulfilling oaths and stuff like that. It's, you know, when you have a pathological element that can be chopped off, you have no choice but to chop it off,

it's going to spread to everything and everybody. The human body was always an anatomy was always a big thing in medieval understandings of, and I think it should be, and it should be for us now. And that's how that's that's the understanding here But the process when proceed with love and will in other words courage you want to approach it appears as a great evolving struggle the healthy healthy and living spirit cannot help participate on the sign of good

And he's talking about the best of our people And we all know that it's going to be extremely difficult That we've given up a lot to do this. But we both have faced evil. I'm not the end of why I saw me and you. Faced evil as well as understand the good in a very, very defensible way, very intellectual way. And therefore, we have an obligation to take action. People who don't understand what those terms mean or who look at you when you say there's organic and mechanistic, they have no idea what you're talking about.

Well, thank God they don't act. unless they're being led. But thank God they don't act because they simply don't know. And that's what he's saying here. If it is not worth asking what a relativist should do, then it is completely absurd to pose the question of what a man should do who is weak-willed. A man who consciously derives his will from participation in the external world or who restrains it from influencing the mental and spiritual life and mental and physical activity of others has neither the basis nor the right to pose and resolve the problem of resisting evil through external coercion.

For from the very beginning, he extinguishes or withdraws within himself that spiritual capacity, the will, and spiritual orientation toward the volition of others that alone can comprehend this problem. He should not pose it because it does not exist for him. He should not resolve it because it is predetermined for him in a negative sense. And all he can say truly about it is an open. admission of his incompetence and a principal decision to refrain from participating in its discussion. Again, an extremely profound point. And I think this one's relatively easy to grasp.

Relativists have no right to take action. They have a right to, and Edmund Burke actually says this in Britain many years previously, many centuries previously. They have a right not to take action because they don't know. If you don't understand even basic issues, you shouldn't be voting, that kind of thing. There's only a certain group of people who really understand what's going on. All history is made not by majorities, but by determined and fanatical minorities. I don't care where you go. These are the people who bring about these changes.

And I say fanatical, not in a negative sense. As we all know, fanatics are the only one to ever get anything done. They're willing to stay all night and talk and fight, do what's necessary. But everyone else wants to go home. I've experienced that with organizations. So is you. So of you. Fanatic is not a negative, a pejorative term in this case.

How I'm talking about it. So he's talking about a spiritual aristocracy here. That's very important. We can't expect everyone to understand this stuff. You know, we can't go, you know, talk to our neighbor and get upset that he doesn't understand that he's being ruled by the Jews. Okay, it's understandable why he wouldn't grasp that. Maybe we could bring him along, but until he grasped it and then he shouldn't really been talking about this stuff. He has a right not to act, and that's the important concept here. Finally, the problem of resisting evil.

through external coercion actually arises and is correctly posed only under the condition that internal self-compulsion proves powerless to restrain a person from committing evil. Physical force must be experienced as necessary, but beyond this, there is no point in posing the problem. It's very, very, very profound, and we know this, and sometimes this is something that experience and wisdom, there is no calculation that lets us know this. You have to try everything. You have to try to discuss things with them, take stuff away, and still, they remain adamant.

That's when physical violence then at that point is justified. In reality, there are only two possible outcomes, either complacent inaction or physical resistance. In the first case, seeing that mental compulsion is ineffective and that the crime will still occur, he either ceases to struggle entirely and steps aside or continues to use this means, which is obviously doomed to failure. In the second case, he goes beyond mental compulsion and directs or limits the villainous will through physical force. Clearly, anyone who advances a third opinion and admits or discovers the validity of self-compulsion and mental compulsion in this case does not resolve the problem, but extinguishes it. He demonstrates not the spiritual prohibition of a

practically necessary suppression, but it's practical uselessness and thereby removes the problem by evading it. I did a paper on, I did a, yeah, there's a little bit of a delay there. Sorry about that. I don't know, should we stop here or no? Well, I mean, I think that we should probably stop the reading there, but I'm sure you have something to comment on there. Yes. In fact, in fact, do. You know, this paragraph reminded me of President Buckele in El Salvador. I think I mentioned him before. He's elected facing a society that has disintegrated. It's controlled by some of the most powerful gangs in the universe. The state has failed to take concerted action. Now, in

paper I say the following but we talk to the normal sense of habeas corpus you know the Miranda rights that kind of thing that's for basically peacetime that exists when crime isn't all that bad but when it's organized when they flood the courts when the courts were helpless or terrified with most of them were shot as it were in in Columbia in the 80s they had to wear a mass If you remember that, they had to wear the ski mask. Didn't help them. Then I don't want to hear about that stuff.

That's why militaries take over, but in this case, they didn't have to. The President Poukele declared a state of emergency, and that stuff didn't function. He wants to reach a point where he can go back to the normal way that courts operate. But that can't happen when gangs outnumber the security services. the security service. They have more money than the security service. They're better armed than the security service. I mean, it goes the same thing for gangs in America. You know, in a fair battle, they could take the police with no problem. They're so well armed and they don't have to worry about the law. But that's the problem.

They shouldn't come to some point, shouldn't have to worry about the law when it gets to extreme circumstances where the state is becoming, it's disintegrating as it was in in El Salvador. needless to say world opinion condemned him he was most his approval rating now is like 93% last I checked he destroyed the gangs he simply let the army go and the police go you know take care of this they know where everything is and where all these guys are you know they only understand force they either are in prison or they fled the country he won and when anyone wins there you know the u.s is going to condemn you them. And of course, that includes a drug war. Drug war doesn't exist because I don't remember

any war where every soldier had a lawyer. On Iwo Jima, I don't think the Japanese infantry or Marines had a lawyer there discussing whether I should get shot or not. It's a war when that stuff is put aside. If it's not put aside, the country's going to be destroyed. That's what his state of emergency basically is. And of course, it can condemnation. You have governments all over Latin America, imitating him doing something like this. And he, in the minute he did that, the country came back to life. All the people were, you know, doing all these festivals and stuff that they couldn't do before because they were terrified. All over the place.

That's why he's, you know, and the economy recovered. That's all they needed was these scumbags out of the way. MS-13 being massive in El Salvador. And, you know, he built that ginormous pretty. and because it's possible that a few innocent people were included. I don't know how they could be innocent if they're associated with the gang somehow. The regime puts out the stupidest arguments against him. And I'm very happy about that paper.

It needs to be said. And I also had to get into the question is why the regime is so pro-crime, why they really romanticize criminals. The Bukila was facing a society falling apart. He had all the ingredients that we just talked about. about here seeing evil if that wasn't evil than nothing is when they they're kidnapping people for ransom you know it was all the time of course drugs they saw you he saw evil everything else had failed and it was a patriot he loves

this country you want to go through all this unless you love your country the same thing occurred in the Philippines with my president, uh, um, Tiet, uh, who I absolutely love. Again, condemned beyond belief by the U.S. government

because he won his drug war in a couple weeks. Chinese in the opium war. They won their drug war too, invaded by the British in the name of free trade. Whenever a country wins its drug war,

destroys its criminal element, they will be condemned if not invaded. Anyway, the point being, Bukala is an excellent example of someone who fits this mode. Now, it's not like other presidents

were not, as he says, you're complacent in action. They might as well have been. Everything they did fail, miserable. It got so bad that the government even went to the MS-13 and said, please don't kill that many people. It's a Sunday. you know, and why would they respect that? How weak would the government have to be? Do I'm not doing that?

The only other option is physical resistance, in this case, a blitzkriek. It was fast. It took them totally off guard. That's the only way to win, and he did it. And, you know, how to hell could you be a pacifist in that case? the only way these guys were going to be stopped is through violence. I remember when deterrenting the Philippines said, gave addicts permission to kill their dealers, which is pretty brilliant, if he asked me.

A hundred thousand dealers turned themselves in. Turn themselves in. It doesn't take much. Once they know that the state means business, they're going to, you know, they're going to fall apart. And the same thing in El Salvador. And that's an excellent example to advocate what he's talking about here. Very, very significant, in my opinion. All right.

We'll come back and pick this up. This was a long one and this was a deep one, but this is the important part. This is where I think people are, this is a part so people are waiting for. Yes, I agree. I encourage, yeah, there's a little bit of a delay. I encourage everyone to go and to support that. Dr. Johnson's work, please go to the show notes. Please go to the descriptions on the video, donate to his work,

and, you know, show him how much you appreciate not only this one, but, you know, if you haven't given him at least a tip for 200 years together, what's wrong with you? So, yeah, we'll be back in a few days with the next episode. I appreciate your help and I appreciate this audience. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. So I'll see in a couple days.

All right, my friend. Bye-bye.