Konstantin Kisin: "Îi faci pe toți oamenii egali făcându-i pe toți egal de săraci" | NTD Romania

Today I sit down with Konstantin Kissin, a UK-based satirist, political commentator, and co-host of the Trigonometry podcast. They're not calling you racist because they care about race or racism or eliminating racism. They're calling you racist because it works. It's a tool to shut people up. Born in Moscow during the Soviet era, Kissin is the author of the new book, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. The problem isn't evil, malicious people running around who want to make things worse. The problem is people who buy into ideology, that gives them permission to do terrible things in the name of the greater good. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Konstantin Kissin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me back. Well, Konstantin, I had such a good time reading your book, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. In fact, in many ways, I felt a deep kinship here, although technically I was born in Canada. Polish was my first language, and I certainly came to know a lot of the kinds of habits in the family that you describe in the book. For example, this idea, which frankly drove me crazy as a kid, that anything that is talked about in the family stays in the family. So why don't we actually start there? Why would it be the case that in a family, and growing up in the Soviet Union? Well, if you grew up in the Soviet Union towards the end of it, as I did, it was a strange time because the Soviet Union was no longer nearly as powerful as it was either externally or internally. But at the same time, many of the habits continued. And so even in the mid-'80s, the late-'80s that I lived through, there was a climate of fear about speaking your because only 40 or 50 years ago, people would have been put in a camp or executed for speaking their mind. So you don't wash that away overnight. It takes generations for people to overcome that. And even in the early-'80s, my grandfather, as you know, I talk about in the book, he made some comments on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that were considered anti-Soviet, and he was immediately made unemployable. He was ostracized by friends, many of whom, like in today's climate, many of whom agreed with him privately, but refused to back somebody who spoke out against a controversial thing in public. And so even at that point, it was still the case that my parents, when I was a kid going to school, they would say, well, look, all of this dissident stuff that we talk about around the kitchen table, you can't be saying that out there because your dad will be in trouble, or your mom will be in trouble, or the family will be in trouble. And there were examples all around us. So growing up like that, it definitely made me aware of how precious it is, what we have here in the West, which is, until recently, at least, the opportunity to speak your mind without fear. It's a hugely valuable thing that I think we underestimate massively, because we've always had it, or we feel we've always had it, and we take it for granted far too much. And it's really interesting. It takes a while for someone that comes from an authoritarian or totalitarian society, once they arrive in a free society, to realize that things work a little bit differently. And this was indeed the case with my parents, because all those internal rules just de facto stayed in place until perhaps many decades later, where it became a little less of an issue. This idea of not appreciating what you have, this is something that really comes out when you read an immigrant's love letter. Explain to me why you think it's like this, that in quite probably the freest society that has ever existed, at least in recorded history, many people feel that it's terrible. I think it's a symptom of our success, Jan. We have created the most free, open society where you can come and make something of yourself. And I'm going to add tolerant, frankly, right? Well, as you know, I make the point in the book and in interviews that I've done, we live in one of the most open, tolerant, progressive societies, in the right sense of that word, in the history of the human species. And I think it's because we've created that, that so many, particularly younger people, they don't even know that a different world either existed somewhere in the past or exists in a different geographical location. Many of them haven't seen other countries, other societies. They don't understand that the problems that we have, in quotation marks, pale into insignificance when you contrast them with other countries. Just one example in Russia at the moment with what's happening with the war in Ukraine, the people who were protesting against this in Russia, initially they went out on small protests, a few hundred people, all arrested immediately. Then they started going out with a single protest, single man, single woman protest, with placards saying, I'm for peace. And they would get arrested. Then they would satirically go out with no placard and just their hands in the air, and they would get arrested. And to the point where I was just in the former Soviet Union for my sister's wedding, and we met some of my family who who live in Russia now, and they were telling us how this guy whose name is the Russian, his name in Russian translates to for peace, because he comes from one of the Muslim areas of Russia, and Zamir is a name that is common there. And he was stopped and arrested at the airport because he had a placard saying, my name is Zamir, I'm here to be picked up by somebody. That is the level of paranoia and state oppression that many, many people around the world live in right now. But if you've grown up in New York or Los Angeles or London or whatever, you have absolutely no conception that that even exists. And so that contrast isn't there, that comparison isn't there. And so, of course, by comparison with the imagined utopia of progress that we all now suddenly bought into, then the West does seem, you know, all the usual isms and phobias and whatever, because we're not comparing it with reality, we're comparing it with things that we imagine. Is this imagined thing that is imagined in this current cultural moment actually something that we should be striving for? I think it's a very good question, and it kind of puts me in a difficult position, because on the one hand, I do think the way I would say it is, I do think if it were possible, it would be desirable to achieve. My concern is that it's not possible. You know, we know that, you know, we talk about eliminating things from our society, like racism or sexism or whatever. We can't even eliminate murder from society. We can't eliminate rape from society. We can't eliminate so many problems, because we're not perfect. We're human. We're fallible. We, you know, human beings have, you know, mental health issues that can't always be resolved. Human beings, some of them are just psychopathic. We can't get to a point where we've got zero problems in society unless, and this is perhaps where we will be, what we'll be talking about, unless you're willing to use extreme authoritarianism to achieve it. So, for example, we could say, well, we do want to eliminate murder, so why don't we take all males between the ages of 16 and 40 and lock them down in a prison? We'd eliminate 95% of the murder, right? That's the level of tyranny it takes to be eliminating things to the very, very, very end, to create utopia. And the pursuit of that is why I think we're starting to see a willingness to use authoritarianism, a willingness to shut down comedy that questions the narrative, a willingness to shut down media conversations, a willingness to destroy and smear politicians who attempt to challenge some of these things. Because we're embracing a level of totalitarianism, culturally, that is necessary to pursue the utopia that we're talking about. That's fascinating. So another part of the reason why I asked this question is, I'm not entirely clear, and certainly some people that both of us know believe this to be the case, that it is clear what this final outcome is really supposed to be, right? It's rainbows and unicorns. It's the dream that we were all sold in the Soviet Union, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. Everybody's equal. Life is fair. We all want life to be fair, don't we? That's what we imagine. And it's the pursuit, unfortunately, of equity, which is what we're really talking about. That's where you have to use an awful lot of force. Because the truth is, we didn't evolve for life to be fair. We're a competitive species. We evolved to have hierarchy. The moment you walk into a room, you instantly know who is in charge. This is how our brains evolved. We're not capable of living in a flat society. We want hierarchy. We want structure. We want these things, and we can't live without them. And so they attempt to pretend that we are ants in an anthill, who are all genetically related and therefore can work towards the common good, completely sacrificing their own ambitions. Human beings ain't that. We just ain't. And it's interesting because at the beginning of your book, in one of the first two chapters, you kind of describe, I'll say this in quotes, how great a society the Soviet Union had created. Healthcare for all. You give a series of examples. Education for all. Childcare. Free childcare. You get paid to go to university, to college. You get paid, Jan. Think about that in today's climate, where young people are racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition fees. Incredible. Universal healthcare. Guaranteed job. Wealth inequality, very, very low compared to what we have. Incredible society in many ways. And then the other piece, of course, is that you're always equalizing across the bottom, so to speak, right? That's the effect. You make everyone equal by making everybody equally poor. That's what you do. That's how you do it. And that's why you need the tyranny, because people don't want to be equally poor. People who work hard and who are talented and who contribute more want to feel rewarded for that. They don't want to feel like in the Soviet Union, most people didn't work hard, because why would you? If you're operating an organization where it doesn't matter whether you work hard or you're the laziest person in the world, you get treated the same. You have the same salary. You have the same opportunities for promotion, et cetera. Why would you work hard? Why would you create? That's why you need the whip. You need the whip to get people to do stuff, because the incentive of their own life, their own desire to better themselves is suppressed by the state. And so you have to make them. So this is the point, is the pursuit of equality in this way, equality in inverted commas, is predicated on authoritarianism. You cannot do it without that. You can't make people equal without the authoritarianism. They don't want to be equal. We think we do. We claim we do. We don't want to be equal. We want to be rewarded on the basis of our merits and talents. That's everybody wants. So your current level of understanding in these totalitarian societies that we've seen, socialist societies that we've seen, like Nazi Germany, like the Soviet Union, like North Korea, like communist China, is it more that with this type of a vision, this sort of society will naturally result with these kinds of ideas? Or is it that there's just some very cynical folks that are just taking advantage of it to seize the wealth for themselves and seize control, which is more important? It's always both, because the structure at the top will always be a few corrupt people who capitalize on the system. But the ideology that underpins that at the mass level is much more what we've just talked about. But of course, it's going to be run by a few old men who take advantage of that system. That's how it is. That's how it always will be. To some extent, I think that's probably true in a democratic society as well. It's just the nature of structures, the nature of hierarchy. People will, at the top, attempt to collect the resources and power and influence in order to better their own life. It's inevitable. You're not going to get rid of that entirely either, I think. Something very important in your book is this idea that this ideology seeks equality. But you make the case pretty strongly, I think you believe this, that the project is actually to subvert the West, to shake it at its foundations, to break apart the threads that bind society together. I'm inclined to believe this too. I would quibble with the word project. I haven't decided whether I think it's sort of organized or whether it's more organic. There are definitely hostile forces that accelerate processes that are already happening. But whether it's all entirely deliberate, I question. I think it may be more a product of several technological revolutions that have changed the way society is organized, whether that's the sexual revolution or the internet revolution in recent times. They've created new ways of behaving that are detrimental to our society. The sexual revolution is obviously really important and great in many ways, but one of the things it does is it affects the family unit. The multi-generational impact of that is not good. But wait, sexual revolution in terms of women's empowerment or sexual revolution as in free-for-all sex? Both. If you think about women's empowerment, women going into the workplace, it changed the dynamics around the upbringing of children, and it also changed the value of men and women in terms of the dating sphere. So one of the reasons you're seeing fewer intact families now is that that change, while it was necessary in some ways and very healthy, certainly from a women's rights point of view, it also had an impact on how the family was organized and how children are brought up and raised. So you've ended up going, in the space of only a few decades, from a situation where most people were born into a family with two parents to a situation where those rates are plummeting. And we know the impact on children of being brought up without a parent. So that technological change, and I know there's a lot of conservatives that think it was the war on poverty and incentivizing single parents, and I don't know whether that's true or not. I'm just saying I think the technological side is probably very big. And then, of course, you come to more recently the technological change in terms of social media and how that helps people propagate certain ideas that make them feel good without necessarily being accurate. Well, what I was mentioning before was that there's this sort of stark, women's empowerment very clearly, to me, isn't the same thing as saying that sexual activity is perfectly normal and fine any which way you want it, as opposed to, say, within some kind of family structure, which is how it has been since time immemorial as the accepted norm. So it's that part that, to me, strikes me as something that fundamentally attacks the family unit. Yeah, I think that's part of it, but I think it's not just that. I also think just the change to the family structure. I think I hear what you're saying, but I think that is only a part of it. Now, I know that from a sort of more conservative, socially conservative perspective, that is the bit that you hone on, but I think more of the impact comes from the changing relationship between men and women. Very interesting. Well, so it's interesting that you might take issue with the word project because the whole title of your book is obviously an ode to Yuri Bezmenov. I'm sure you're on record saying that somewhere. No, no. You're one of the few people that's worked it out. Yuri Bezmenov outlined a very clear project. It was the Soviet Union's project to subvert America. He explained how he was going to do it. So tell me why you picked this. I do think that the foreign powers that dislike what we have in the West are obviously keen to destabilize the way that we do business. That's what they want. As I say in the book repeatedly, I don't believe that the West has anything to fear from communist China, from Vladimir Putin's Russia, from Islamist terrorism, from whatever threat you want to name. I don't believe the West has anything to fear as long as we have confidence in ourselves and that we're willing to defend ourselves and stand up for what we believe. Then we have nothing to fear. My concern is that there is a culture internally within the West, whatever, you know, Russia is doing with the troll farms or whatever, internally in the West there's a culture that has emerged from something that happened on university and college campuses decades ago that means we are not willing to maintain our immune system when we haven't been for some time. And that's why I wrote An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. I hope it's a sort of antibody injection in my small way into the body of Western civilization. We gotta learn to understand we have threats and they're external, but the only way that a civilization collapses is when it is internal. You can have the biggest threat outside if you're strong internally you're going to be fine. In fact, look at America during the Cold War. America was booming because it had something to position itself against and it had to think about what are our values, why are we in the standoff, what makes us different, what is it that we have that people there don't have, why is it that we want to be here in this moment. America and your leaders, you had to think about this, you had to chisel it out, you had to define, well we are a people who believe in freedom above all, whereas in many other parts of the world people don't have that and they don't necessarily even think that they want that. This is who we are. So I think it's really about understanding that this is coming from the inside. I think other powers may want to accelerate it, they may want to help the destabilization along, but I think it's we ourselves who are doing this to ourselves.