C (47:57)
Yeah, it's. Look, I mean on one level it's a paranoia that was well earned, right? You know, it didn't come out of nowhere. And when I have that discussion with people, you know, they'll often say like, it's not paranoia if like they're actually out to get you. And I always tell them, yes, it is. You know, the paranoid complex is still self destructive and bad for you. Even if you do actually have reasons to be worried about things. Like, it's not a matter of like rational fear. It's a matter of projecting this onto every everything that you see. I often point out like, you know, my wife's Armenian and if you go to a family event and you start talking good about the Turks or the Azerbaijanis, you're gonna get an earful, you know, if you're lucky. But you know, they see the like the Armenian genocide as the culmination of their kind of toxic and hostile back and forth centuries long relationship. With the Turks. They don't see it as the culmination of this eternal war that mankind has waged against the Armenian people since time immemorial. And you know, on one level, like that story is what held the Jewish people together for thousands of years in exile. People without their own country who were spread out all over the world and somehow managed to maintain enough cultural continuity and self identity that when the opportunity arose they were able to come back together and go start a nation state of their own. Amazing. Just from a pure. Forget the, like, you know, the morality of it, the geopolitics. Incredible that that was able to happen. And one of the major ways that was able to happen was having this sort of, you know, somewhat just paranoid relationship with the rest of the world. And again throughout history, very often well earned paranoia, you know. But the thing is, I mean, you read about paranoid people. Like who. I did this a lot in my Jim Jones series. I read whole, you know, books, shelves of books about the paranoid complex because it's so important to what happened in Jonestown. Most people who collapse into paranoid delusion, delusions have a good reason. Like it started from something very real and traumatic that happened to them. You know, I think that it's, it's kind of, it's just a normal thing to do, you know, especially when it's so recent. I mean, you really have to like, just like, just like I try to do with like a lot of the villains in history in some of my episodes, whether it's Jim Jones or the Germans or Zionists and Palestinians, whatever. I, I always try to, in myself and in my listeners, get people to understand that these are human beings having natural human reactions, usually under the circumstances, you know, and at the very least, even if they are having an unnatural reaction or one that you can't, you just can't comprehend, understand, they've gone through things that you cannot comprehend, you know. And so when you're one generation removed from millions of your people, not being killed in war, not starving to death, you know, because the crops are failing, because there's a war on or whatever, but being rounded up and executed, you know, rounded up and killed and not by, you know, because they, they, you know, it would almost be like if, if Israel lost a war, you know, and the Arabs were everything that Netanyahu tells us they are, and they swept in and just killed millions of people, you know, in Israel and everything that would be less traumatic than what happened in Europe. Because, you know, like this is like, it's the, this is The. Germany's. The country that gave us, you know, Beethoven. I mean, this is a. Goethe, you know, this is a. This is as civilized a country as you're going to find. And still this happened. And when you have a sort of a mythology, a cultural mythology, the thing that's held you together, you have actual, like, holidays throughout the year where you commemorate all the terrible things that happened to you and how you survived them, and then something like this happens. You know, it's really. It's really no wonder. But I do think that. And so. And so when like, a sort of ordinary Jewish person, like, has this kind of response to hearing anything about World War II other than the standard narrative, because, you know, again, for. For a lot of Jewish people, and again, totally understandable. The Second World War, this global conflict, tens of millions of people dead, just the craziest thing that ever happened. What it's about, what the story is about is the Holocaust. If you ask a lot of Armenians, what's World War I about, it's about the Armenian genocide, right? And so that's totally understandable. And when you're only a generation or so removed from something that. That traumatic, it's. I mean, what do you expect? You know, I think I. I don't think I've talked about on this show, but when I was at Tucker's live event in Fort Worth, he had Roseanne Barr on as his guest, and she was telling this story not in the way at all that, like, I. Way that it hit me she's telling in a different way, almost like just sort of throwing it out there, you know, she said that when the Eichmann trial happened, she was like 4 years old, 5 years old or something like that. When the Eichmann trial happened back in the 60s, and her parents had her watching, like, all of these videos, like, bodies being bulldozed into pits and, you know, just people being lined up and shot and all that and saying, see? And really, like, drilling into her, like, this is what happened and this could happen again, and we need to make sure it doesn't and all that. She said she had, like, weird twitches and nightmares and stuff for years after that. And then she, you know, this was really just about, like. I think she was talking more about just the evil that's present in the world that we have to be aware of or whatever. But I listened. I was like, good Lord, man. That, like, I understand, because her parents were alive when that happened, so I get it. But still, like, that borders on child abuse, you know, and her Parents ought to have been more responsible than that. And so when ordinary, ordinary Jewish people have that response, I, I am try to be very sympathetic. I do. Like I was talking to actually a rabbi the other day, like in, in dms, moderate guy, very smart guy. I won't say his name because you know, it's in confidence, I guess. But you know, I told him that like Jewish leaders have a responsibility like those like her parents had a responsibility to not ramp up, up the paranoia and hostility with, you know, imagined or otherwise with the rest of the world but to walk that back, to like pull people back from the brink and kind of, you know, try to try to bring your people from a place of, you know, where they were in, in, you know, after v Day in 1945, where it's just like they're just waking up from the nightmare to like now you have to start to, you know, really wake up from it. And you know, again, like even talking about this is very difficult because you know, there are people out there going to hear what I'm saying and think that, think that I'm, I'm saying that Jews have nothing to worry about, that there's nothing going on. This is all projection or to the extent that it does exist, you're bringing it on yourselves, you know, by this paranoid relationship. I'm not saying any of that stuff. I'm just saying that like, just like I tell, you know, I wrote a whole post about this. I got a ton of crap from the groipers and everybody else about it. You know, it was telling people it was, it was a message to the anti Semites out there back but like just in general. And I told him like look man, like I get all the things you're going to say. I, I know it, I've heard it. All the books you're going to tell me to read, I've read them. I know about the Jewish over representation in the Bolshevik revolution. I know about what happened after the fir. I know all that stuff, I get it. But whatever you think filling up your heart with hatred so that like you're stomping around angry at home and you know, you're being snappy with your children and your wife and it's because those darn Jews are up to it again, like that is not good for anybody like you, you cannot let yourself fall into that pit, you know, and so there's these negative emotional responses that can really become like the defining aspect of your personality. It's one of the, you know, I, I do think that's One of the things that's very unique about anti Semitism in general, you know, is, you know, I mean, we've all seen this, right, where it's like, okay, so I don't think 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Not me personally, but like, you know, hypothetical person. I don't think this, that's gonna get. Okay, fine, like that we can argue about that now. Let's make that my personality. Yeah, and that just happens, you know, and so it does make it sort of a little more alarming, a little more like it takes you aback in a way more than if people have a revisionist view of other historical events, you know, because that does happen. And you know, one of the other things that, you know, I really learned doing the Jim Jones series though, is that paranoid people and the people that maybe are hostile to them, like for real, because very often it becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. They need each other, they feed off each other. They really need each other because both of them kind of come to define themselves in terms of that conflict, you know. And yeah, I just think that, you know, we should all be trying to, we should all be trying to walk back from conflicts like that, walk back from feelings toward each other like that. You know, we all have to live in this world together. Everybody's still going to be here tomorrow, whether we like it or not, and we got to live in that world, you know, and yeah, and that's so trying to humanize people in my podcast. And you know, maybe one of the reasons that I, that I do focus on people that are very difficult to humanize, you know, I mean, whether Jim Jones or, or, or the Germans during the world wars, I guess I, I mean, part of me, I just, you know, I'm from the old school Internet. I like to troll and like be transgressive and stuff. But, but really when I'm sitting alone in my office, like working hard on the podcast, I just figure that if you can humanize these people, you can do it to anybody. And so, you know, let's push the boundary out to here of I consider even these people human beings. Things that then, you know, the things that happen in the news or in your daily life, like it's a lot easier to pull that off, you know?
