The White Pill

Atlanta, GA

March 1, 2023

For my parents

who got me out

and on behalf

of all the children

who never did

– Michael Malice, dedicating The White Pill

Years ago, after dinner in Toronto, some colleagues and I went to a bar. When we walked in, I was startled by what I saw. 

Murals of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels covered the walls. Swastikas adorned the ceiling. And waiters peddled drinks while dressed as storm troopers of the Waffen-SS. 

I couldn’t believe a saloon could survive promoting such a theme, and was amazed there were customers inside and no protesters out front. How could such a place exist?

Of course, it didn’t. 

But the room we entered was just as egregious. The Pravda Vodka Bar overflowed with Soviet kitsch. Pictures and portraits of hammers, sickles, Lenin, and Stalin were all over the place. The entire tavern was a monument to mass murderers, a totem to totalitarianism.

You’d think such a thematic tribute to systematic slaughter would appall potential patrons. Would “respectable” people sip cocktails in the Nazi bar we imagined above? Even as a lark?

But Pravda was packed, with most customers chuckling at (or simply ignoring) the “edgy” decor of the chic saloon.

This how it’s always been. The most deadly ideology in the history of the world has always held an odd allure to popular culture and the Leftist elite. Mao hats, Che T-shirts, and Castro beards have long been de rigueur on college campuses and among the intellectual sect. But is the ideology worthy of the idolatry?

I’m often reading several books simultaneously. When The White Pill arrived in Saturday’s mail, I put the rest of them aside. I immediately started Michael Malice’s latest book. After picking it up, I was unable to put it down.

Like my wife, Malice was born in Ukraine during its captivity within the Soviet Union. My wife escaped with her father at age ten, under the reign of Brezhnev.

Some in her family were fortunate enough to get out earlier, including an aunt who fled to France after the Russian Revolution. Most were not, and endured decades of pervasive surveillance, persistent subjugation, and suppression of the soul.

Malice came to America as a small child. He spent most of his life in New York City, yet recently moved to Austin. He’s had a successful career as a ghost writer, commentator, and perceptive observer of politics, ideologies, philosophy, and culture.

He’s one of few American citizens to have visited North Korea, and wrote an insightful “autobiography” of Kim Jong Il. Bad as things are in America, he knows they could be worse…and that they needn’t be.

The White Pill offers hope despite despair…even if it takes a while. Ours is a fallen world filled with horrible people and vile things. Yet it was also redeemed. The villains may be relentless, but that doesn’t mean their victims should relent. It instead implies the opposite. 

By reviewing the rise and fall of Soviet communism, Malice depicts the unfathomable depths to which tyranny can sink. But it can also fall. It just needs good people to give it a push.

Till the last chapter, this book reads like The Black Pill.  It’s a story of unadulterated, unrelenting evil. In mere decades (and sometimes less), communism claimed more than 25 million lives in the Soviet Union, at least 65 million in China, almost two million in Cambodia, and countless more from North Korea to Eastern Europe to Castro’s Cuba to Mengitsu’s Ethiopia to Neto’s Angola to Ho’s Vietnam.

These were political prisons, dehumanizing asylums, and cultural (and literal) torture chambers. Religion, friends, and family…as entities above and before the State…were systematically suppressed, or used as weapons against targeted inmates in these sealed societies. And there was no escape, neither physically or mentally. Captive “comrades” were strictly confined, with no place to go.

As Malice put it in a recent interview, as much as their personal liberty may be under siege, Westerners can find ways…if only for a moment…to ignore partisan politics or avoid current events. By meeting for drinks, watching distractive movies, or reading comforting books, we can forget for a while the lunacy of our leaders and whatever policies they impose. 

In the Soviet Union, death could await anyone caught engaging in (or considering) any of these leisurely luxuries. Even if Americans must endure their oppressors, they can still mock, ridicule, or laugh at them. And they can do so among family and friends, without worrying that those they love most might surrender them to the confines of a gulag or the side of a wall.

Behind the Iron Curtain, oppression was ubiquitous, like salt in the ocean or humidity in Houston. It’s everywhere, and unavoidable…almost to the point that when you’re in it long enough, it goes without notice.

As described in the novel A Gentleman in Moscow, “all the splendid modulations of the seasons and those colorful festivities that recur in the course of normal life have been replaced by a tyranny of indistinguishable days.” It’s just how things were, the way life was. The people who lived it knew no other way.

This was by design.

Suspicion was endemic, as betrayal was incentivized and “confessions” coerced. Those reluctant to rat-out friends or confess their own “crimes” were coaxed to “reconsider” when their wives were captured or their children threatened. And when they relented, the threatened punishment was often meted out anyway.

Not informing could itself be a crime because it implied you weren’t vigilant enough against “enemies of the state”. Akin to it not being sufficient today to not be racist because we must also be “anti-racist”, if you weren’t an “ally” of the party you were an enemy of the people. And you could be executed for it.

Snitching was encouraged since silence was criminal. As a recent slogan has it…if you saw something, you needed to say something. In this way, the average citizen became a state informer. To protect themselves and save their own skin, even most the devoted relative became a desperate fink. Distrust was sown by design, with compliance reaped by fear.

As Hannah Arendt put it, the Soviets atomized society by “turning your closest friend into your fiercest enemy”, making no one want to know anybody. It was easier to deny being part of a “conspiracy” if you could claim no acquaintances.

The captors could themselves be accused of complicity if they couldn’t force their accused to confess. No prisoner could ever be released. The Soviets “never arrest anyone who isn’t guilty.” And letting anyone go would be tacit admission they’d arrested an innocent, which was “impossible.”

The Soviets, as Malice put it, inverted Western bourgeoise individualism. He recounted one head of the NKVD admitting it’s better for ten innocents to be punished than one guilty person get away. After all, “When you chop wood, chips fly.”

Soviet “citizens” (i.e., captives) grew grimly accustomed to hallway footsteps, late night knocks, and recurrent disappearances. Noticing the frequency with which neighbors suddenly vanished, voices stayed low, lights kept dim, and opinions hid in the silent recesses of repressed minds. And this started from the get-go, with the revolutionary Bolsheviks and the rise of Lenin.

Before emigrating from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1926, Alisa Rosenbaum was pulled aside at her going away party. A man gave her a message to pass to the Americans. “Tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and we are all dying slowly.”

When the woman who’d rechristened herself as Ayn Rand arrived in America, she conveyed the message…in speeches, stories, novels, and plays…for the rest of her life. And she did so, as Malice quoted her, “not with wistful remorse, but with ‘complete loathing for the whole country, including the Czarist period.’”

But many Americans refused to believe her…or wanted to ensure no one else did. Upon returning from the Soviet Union in 1919, Lincoln Steffens announced that he had “seen the future, and it works.” Song of Russia screenwriter Richard Collins agreed: “We have the right to lie because we are the future – we’re the good guys.”

The means were not only justified by the ends. They were the ends.

Stalin introduced a new constitution in 1936 that ostensibly granted “freedoms” and “rights”, including those of speech, religion, and to vote. He then executed as traitors anyone who helped prepare that document. This sham constitution offered no liberty to Soviet citizens, but provided plenty of propaganda for useful idiots in the intellectual West.

There were plenty of those, tho’ several became disillusioned after they saw the “people’s paradise” with their own eyes. But not all of them.

The most notorious stooge for Stalin was New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty. In 1932, Duranty received a Pulitzer prize for reporting that not only ignored Stalin’s intentional starvation of Ukrainians, but explicitly denied a genocide was occurring. Malice tells the tale of Gareth Jones, who implicitly exposed Duranty’s lies by surreptitiously (and courageously) going to the Ukraine and reporting the man-made famine (the movie Mr. Jones recounts his efforts and repays a viewing).

This book abounds in such stories…of demonic malevolence, audacious heroism, and dignified gallantry. It gives examples of atrocities unfit for a family essay, but indispensable to the tales being told. And they should be told more often.

The White Pill tells many of them, from the ascent of the Cheka to the demise of the KGB, from the rise of the gulags to the fall of the Wall. Some of the more harrowing and moving stories come from the Soviet satellites east of the Elbe.

As the Cold War heated up, the western sections of post-war Germany had coalesced into the Federal Republic. The Soviet sphere became…with tyrannical tongue in communist cheek…the “Democratic Republic.” By the 1960s, German feet had begun to vote.

It was a landslide. Thousands fled the Communist sector, with few passing the other direction. As the tide poured from east to west, the East Germans decided they needed a dam. Around and thru the city of Berlin, under cover of darkness over two weeks, one went up.

Before most of the world understood what had happened, the Soviets had enclosed West Berlin. In the middle of East Germany, as Malice quotes historian Frederick Taylor, they’d erected “a bizarre prison in which paradoxically only those locked up inside were free.”

Over the years, almost 150 people died trying to escape into this “prison.” Conrad Schumann made one of the first successful attempts, and perhaps the most memorialized. A 19 year-old East German border guard whom West Berliners were shouting down as the wall went up, Schumann decided to leap for liberty over the rising barbed wire.

Realizing he was becoming no different than guards who’d recently manned Nazi camps, Schumann decided he “did not want to kill someone for crossing the street.” So he crossed it himself.

Malice tells moving stories of a man sneaking his girlfriend and her mother-in-law under the gate at Checkpoint Charlie, and of a senior citizen “escape tunnel” that took longer to dig because it needed to be six feet high. When asked why, one of the burrowers said it was so his wife could walk to freedom. She was “done crawling.”

For a couple decades…and especially the last three years…it’s been easy to bemoan to state of society and the fate of the world. Anyone reading these entries knows I’ve succumbed as much as anyone. 

But it’s the height of hubris to think things have never been this bad. Throughout most of human history (and most places in our own time) they’ve almost always been much worse.

Bad as our creeping (and now accelerating) authoritarianism is, it still pales in comparison to the Platonic form toward which it is tending. As Christ implored us to “be perfect” while knowing we’d never get there, we must understand the nature of totalitarianism even if we aren’t there yet, and if we expect not to arrive.

And we should acknowledge that those who currently rule over us have no problem taking us there…by fear if they can, but by force if necessary. They may differ in degree (then again, they may not), but most are identical in kind to the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Maoists who imprisoned their populations to attain their positions.

No one…especially the “experts”…expected the Soviet Union to change, much less collapse. Within two decades of it doing so, western leaders had nestled themselves under the down comforter of détente. 

After successful Soviet clampdowns in Budapest and Prague, and the disastrous American war in Vietnam, we can understand why anyone could doubt that abhorrent regime would ever go away. 

The enemy was an “evil empire” we must learn to live with. And a lot of the people who held this opinion lived very well. They wanted the Soviets to go away about as much as tax accountants want the IRS (which came into existence about the same time) to disappear. 

But while houses of cards take a while to build, they come down quick. Within only seven decades, the Soviet scourge seemed an ineluctable part of the cosmic firmament. Until it wasn’t. 

The Catholic Church helped efface it from the sky. In 1978, Karol Wojtyla became the first Polish pope, taking the name John Paul II. The following year, despite Communist authorities imploring him not to come, he made a pilgrimage to his imprisoned home.

A few years earlier, the pope’s predecessor Paul VI considered a similar visit, but succumbed to Soviet demands. When told “it would be better” if he stayed away as well, John Paul wouldn’t hear of it. The visit fomented the communists’ worst fears. It pushed the pebble that started an avalanche.

That Poles saw hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens also supporting the pope, in a country where people had been trained to distrust their own instincts, let them know they weren’t alone. This was in a regime under which Priests from the pulpit were ordered to denounce their religion and deny Almighty God.

When people can be convinced they’re alone, that their ideas are those of a small minority of fringe wackos, they tend to stay silent. We’ve seen the tactic the last few years, as authorities and their mouthpieces dismissively denounced as “conspiracy theorists” anyone who dared dissent from prevailing narratives on covid, climate, or Ukraine.

And those who did speak were loudly denounced or quietly “de-platformed” to embed the belief that everyone agreed with the ruling regime. Bad as it is and co-opted as it can be, social media is itself a “white pill” because it enables a similar understanding that dissidents aren’t alone…and that, in many cases, they may be a maligned majority that’s been made to feel isolated by coercion in order to keep quiet.

The Poles didn’t have social media in 1979. But they had a pope.

Few in 1850 imagined that slavery could vanish. In most places (aside from an obvious exception), it ended peacefully, just like the Soviet Union did. But the communist collapse wasn’t inevitable, even that year. Or even that month.

Or even that day! 

A few months after Tiananmen Square…when many expected similar crack-downs east of the Oder…Lech Walesa insisted to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl that the Berlin Wall would come down. A geopolitical “realist”, Kohl smiled at the naive labor leader, and implored patience. After all, these things take time.

The wall fell the next day.

As their people began to rise, communist leaders of Soviet satellites wanted to send in the tanks. But to his eternal credit, Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t. Moreover, he refused permission to crush the protests. Despite the oppressive pillow that had been pressed to their face, this slight breeze allowed the people to breathe. Gorbachev read the writing on the wall, and knew it was time it finally came down.

These days new barriers are rising, as our enlightened “elites” lay their digital bricks. But now…the 70th anniversary of the week Stalin went to Hell…The White Pill reminds us iniquity isn’t inevitable and our rulers aren’t invincible.

To paraphrase Michael Malice, the darkness may always outnumber the stars. But it takes only a single sun to enlighten the world.

JD