I talk with Jeff Nyquist about the Russian dual strategy against the United States: Preach to leftists the US is too much a Roman style empire, and preach to conservatives the US has totally lost its Roman ways. We’d all have to look up to Russia who is magically two contradictory things.
Nyquist: Alex Benesch is a German researcher and he has some fascinating ideas here for “Friends and Enemies”. We’re going to talk about this whole idea of of having enemies and who’s the enemies in the world. Welcome, Alex. You’re going to really be my co-host here.
Benesch: Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me on. I’ve been I’ve been trying to reverse engineer what the Russian attack strategy has been for a long time. The old days with the czars is an era that is quoted a lot nowadays by Vladimir Putin. He did this in the German parliament in the year 2000. He was actually visiting the German parliament and he gave a speech and part of the speech was in German. And he quoted Russian aristocracy, which was, of course, very closely linked to British aristocracy. And those were German families. It’s certain parts of Germany. Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein were the British throne and the Russian throne. Back in those days, it was a competition between Roman systems. So everybody wanted to be the new Rome. The French, the British, the Germans, the Austrians, the Russians, everybody wanted to be Rome. So it was just a question of who’s doing it better, right? Or who seemed more legit. But then when communism happened, they claimed to be something completely new and they claimed to be very much anti-imperialism and that means an anti-Roman system. So that’s why communists always stressed the point that the Western system is unfixable, it’s unredeemable. You can’t supposedly modernize a system that came out of Rome. So this is Marxist logic. If people trade, if people have property or are allowed to have property, there’s always going to be many losers and this is all going to end up in pure hell according to Marxist logic. So therefore, any Western system that someone has Roman traces is unfixable. That’s what the Communists claim. And so they understood us as a Roman system, even though it’s a modernized system and it has many, many, many new elements and it’s been trial and error for 2000 years. So we tried different things. We dropped different things. It’s a long history. So what are the weak points of the Roman system? They figured they’re going to attack the weak points of the West today because it’s the same weak points as back in the Roman Empire. So the Romans had problems with civil war. That’s why the Communists want to push for civil war here. Romans had problems with the provinces. Uprisings in the provinces. Therefore, communists want to stir up uprisings everywhere. And that’s kind of the baseline attack strategy. And it’s also a provocation strategy. See, when the communists poked us so hard and they infiltrated everything, this forced the West during the Cold War to become even more Roman, and the Communists seemed to hope that it was going to be so Roman that people will rebel. Too militaristic, too many taxes, too much surveillance, too much crushing of dissidents, and so on and so forth. So by by attacking any Roman style system, the Communists, of course, gave a launching board to Western countries to be Roman. Because, you know, if if we have this 2000 plus year history and we actually managed to evolve, right, we’re not going to drop any sort of Roman system, but we have to live inside of reality. And so that was the chief complaint by the Communists that we are too ROMAN. But nowadays Russia is not only talking to left wing people. I mean, Russia is still talking to the left wing. They’re still controlling communists everywhere. They’re still claiming we are too Roman. But nowadays, Russia can use the double strategy. They can also talk to the conservatives in the West and tell them the West is not Roman enough. The West has lost its Roman ways. So it’s two separate messages that are completely contradictory. But they’re still going with this anyways. Because if you ask any sort of right wing influencer or anybody with a large audience or any activists on the street, conservatives, what is essentially their complaint?
The complaint is we have lost the Roman ways. We’re too un-Roman, too socialist. And so by using that attack strategy, Russia is is still trying to attack the weak points of the West.
Nyquist: The West now is bifurcated. It has two faces. It has the left, then it has the right. Russia now has two phases of propaganda, a left, a propaganda for the left and for the right, which, of course is a function of Russian strategy. It has always had this layering where they target propaganda to different classes and different groups, but now they’re actually presenting their own image differently to two sides of the West.
Benesch: Every chance I get I tell conservatives that Russia will never be a functioning Roman system. They can never be a functioning Roman system that works for everyone, that is self-sustainable, that is modern enough, that is productive enough. They can never do it, and they can also never be an anti-Roman system. So when they’re talking to the left and to our right wing they’re lying because they cannot and will not ever achieve what they promise. In terms of Rome, this was called Pax Romana, this idea is if you secure the empire enough, you have peace and it’s quiet. In ancient Rome, you had a hundred years of straight peace, right? So this is kind of the promise that every Roman system makes, the major promise that one day things will be safe and stable and everybody will profit from it. Everybody will benefit. This is Pax Romana and the Communists even sort of copied that idea built into this socialist ideology. They say we need a dictatorship now, but at some point in the future, when we control everything, it’s going to be nice. Then the dictatorship or certain aspects of it will wither away. And we’re all left with happiness and plenty.
Nyquist: Actually, in the Roman Empire, there was never any real peace, except in the sense that Rome itself did not experience war for several hundred years. Rome was sacked by the Gauls, in the year 300 and something B.C. And then they were sacked by the Germans in, what was it, 411 or 409 A.D. So you have this period of 700 years where Rome does not experience war. I mean Hannibal came to the gates of Rome, but he never besieged it or attacked it. So you have 700 years where Rome itself is very safe, the very safe city of of which became a city of almost a million people. So, yeah, they’re promising you this kind of golden, the eternal city you’re going to live in.
Benesch: The Russias are basically play acting. They put on these costumes whenever Vladimir Putin gets reelected, they play a certain type of music in a certain type of palace and it’s close to where the czars celebrated and they’re evoking the church which they control through their intelligence agencies.
Nyquist: And yet their national anthem is still the same one as the Soviet Union had in terms of the music and the symbology in the iconography.
Benesch: It’s a cargo cult, it’s costumes, it’s, you know, play acting. But they can never deliver on the promise of being a stable Roman style empire, because the thievery is everywhere. And there’s not enough productivity.
Nyquist: Let me suggest a reason why they can never be the Roman Empire. Last night I read Plato’s Socratic dialog. Socrates is is interviewing Gorgias, who is this great orator who says that the ultimate art is the art of persuasion, of oratory. That he can basically persuade people to do anything, that he can discuss any subject.
And so Socrates asked him, well, can you persuade people to do things that are wrong? And Gorgias says: Well, I’m manipulating people according to their opinion. It’s just matches people’s opinions. And Socrates says: Well, you’re just pandering so you can have power. A guy named Polis says it makes you powerful. Being able to control people, being able to manipulate them. And Socrates says it’s just pandering. And what this pandering does is it damages your soul. Lying and pandering is self damaging. And he says that it’s better to be treated unjustly than it is to commit an injustice because you damage your soul.
This is sort of the essence of this of this particular dialog. And I think that what has happened with the people that run Russia is they have incredibly damaged souls. It creates in the people that are governing a radical stupidity. Now, this is Eric Berglund, the German American philosopher. And I think that’s that’s affecting us here in the West, too.
But I think in in Russia and China it’s reached the end stage of the disease. Sometimes I watch the Russians and I say they’re lying. But what they’re lying about doesn’t even make sense. It’s as if they’re lying just to keep in practice, even when it doesn’t matter.
Benesch: The moment the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, you know, they did try some storytelling. Imperialism is about storytelling, but the overt story was fairly lame, you know, protecting against the Nazis, which according to Russian thinking, is all white people. Fighting against what I call the windmills of Zion; pandering to the conspiracy crowd. Let’s not forget that the Soviets pushed traditional conspiracy material in the Muslim world.
There was kind of this overt storytelling, that NATO was coming too close to Russia. So this basically means NATO is too Roman. How dare they be Roman. But underneath that thin veneer was a different kind of storytelling from the Putin regime. Which is: We’re being Roman here. This is what a Roman style empire does.
We’re having a war on the periphery, on our current borders. We’re getting a new province. This is what every Roman system has ever done, right? So this was kind of the underlying narrative, and I think this is what was then enhanced by additional Russian propaganda. And there are many variations of it. One variation is that this Western Roman system is too multicultural and whatnot. Even though Rome didn’t care what you looked like, you know, as long as you submitted to the Roman system, you could have partial autonomy. And they did really not care what you looked like. This is sort of the argument; that the Western Roman system is bad, but the Russian Roman system is really, really good. So the U.S. was trying to control Ukraine. So therefore the Russians invaded. The other variation is something that we saw a lot in Europe but also in the United States. The argument is that, by being Roman, Russia is not too different from the Western system. That was used especially before the invasion of Ukraine. This is how Russia got a lot of appeasement from the West by claiming to be in the Roman tradition. Why can’t we be friends, right? Because by being Roman, the Russians claimed to be different from China. And you don’t want us to be too close to China, do you? So give us appeasement! This is also a current version of it. Don’t be too harsh on us Russians. Don’t be too harsh with the sanctions. When we get a deal over Ukraine, don’t make the deal too expensive for Russia, because then Russia would have this traditional Roman problem of falling apart, having civil war. Like with the Prigoschin coup attempt, which was very strange.
This reinforces the idea that Russia has Roman problems, meaning if they fall apart and have civil war, that would be way too bad. And so, yeah, their nuclear weapons might go rogue or the Chinese might take over. Many people think the entire Roman Empire went downhill, but it was just part of it. So the eastern part survived and lived on for much longer. And so the fallen western Roman Empire sort of splashed into Europe and turned into this European empires.
Nyquist: The Holy Roman Empire, and then it was actually Napoleon, and then it was the Council of Europe.
Benesch: The Brits tried the constitutional monarchy, you had the American Republic, and then even Napoleon. Initially he was interested in enlightenment ideas. But then France was in a civil war and there were outside threats. The only idea he then had was to mimic Emperor Augustus from Rome. And he hoped that in the future things would be nicer. So this was kind of Western Europe. The eastern Roman Empire sort of spilled into Russia. Besides the Roman Catholic Church you have the Russian Orthodox Church. And so this this marketing pitch was that they could be merged. Russia wants access to European technology, and want to sell us some gas and oil back for that. So that was a pitch for a long time. Now the argument after the Ukraine invasion is: We need to forgive the Russians because it’s a Roman system and because it’s so similar to what we are, all the alternatives would be much, much worse.
If Russia loses its Roman conservative character, that would be even worse. So accepting the Ukraine war is the lesser of evils. This is kind of the storytelling we’re being presented with. This is countered by other voices that say, well, by spending 100 billion in Ukraine, the United States could destroy much, much more Russian military capabilities.
Therefore, the United States can focus on China. It’s easy to look through this storytelling. It’s harder if you’re a conservative in the West and you think we’re going down the drain, you know, we’re losing our Roman ways and we’re going to end up in a communist dictatorship. People are motivated by fear and they’re also motivated by this positive storytelling that the Russians are presenting us with, kind of a positive vision, a utopia of a future. The left had a utopia, of course. Now they’re selling another type of utopia. They’re not being very specific about it, but it’s pro-family, against the gay agenda and so forth. Everybody will have five children and it’s all Christian nationalism.
Nowadays in Europe, the Russian influencers try to go with national Bolshevism. It sounds idiotic because it’s a blend of communist elements and right wing, sometimes even fascist elements. It sounds awfully close to National Socialism. The Nazis had an exaggerated emphasis on the ethnic attributes. The Nazis wanted to be more Roman than anybody else. So they thought the old empire fell because it wasn’t fanatic enough and it wasn’t ethnically centered enough. That was kind of the Nazi interpretation. So they tried to remedy that. They tried to avoid these mistakes of Rome by being incredibly fanatic and being incredibly focused on your ethnic attributes. Now, of course, for the Romans, this would have been an idiotic idea to care what your subjects looked like. You had provinces on conquered territory and gave provinces a semi autonomy. This was a winning strategy for Rome. The Nazis were actually dumb enough to conquer new territories such as Ukraine and treat people like crap instead of treating them nicely so they would help against Soviet Russia. Now it’s National Bolshevism.
Nobody has ever really explained what this is supposed to be and exactly how this is supposed to look like. Every existing socialist country had wrestled with the question of: “Should we incorporate some nationalist ideas?” For example, in former Soviet East Germany, they kept the old uniforms and they had some of the Prussian heritage in the propaganda. And this was just to ease people into communism. Placating people and then in the future removing these nationalist elements. So you end up with pure communism. When Germany was reunified, the left tried to figure out why they could not prevail. I have a book over there. It’s written by two people who are pretty influential now in Germany. One of them is a woman called Sahra Wagenknecht. She’s like an old school communist who is now going with national Bolshevism. She’s going to start a new party, she says. And this party could be in the 20 to 25% range, according to polling. So this might become a big deal. This woman in the 1990s was whining about losing Eastern Germany. She was debating another communist why East Germany was no longer communist. So this one communist argued, the problem was that the government hadn’t eliminated all traces of German culture.
Therefore communism didn’t have a good enough “immune system”. They called it a disease: Nationalism, conservatism. So he would have preferred radical antifascism. Communists are not so explicit in the United States, but it’s truly about destroying any trace of nationalism and tradition to the point where people won’t even have access to information about the old times. So imagine if they had actually eliminated the German language from Soviet eastern Germany. So it takes maybe two or three generations. And then the German language is done. You could burn literally every bit of literature that has any anything to do with the past pre-communism. After two or three generations, you have really eliminated anything traditional and by erasing the language. East Germans wouldn’t even have been able to understand Western radio broadcasts. It was a split right through Germany. So you could send radio signals and even television signals. Standard radio and television signals could be picked up in Soviet Eastern Germany. But if you don’t understand the German language anymore, you can’t even use that information. They couldn’t trace everything single pocket radio that could receive shortwave frequencies. They couldn’t triangulate you when you were receiving signals. They could only triangulate you when you were sending signals. So they couldn’t stop everybody from listening to these Western broadcasts. But if they eliminate the language, people can’t get access to any sort of other information.
Nyquist: Or if they change the meaning of certain words, if they corrupt that language. It’s the idea of the Newspeak dictionary, which got smaller every year because they were actually eliminating words, and if you take away the words for things, then people can’t express certain thoughts. What was interesting about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called collapse of communism that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, is that the words like KGB and USSR were taken away. It was the same people governing the same structures, the same communist agenda, only now you weren’t allowed to say those words anymore.
Benesch: In George Orwell’s 1984 it was always about reducing the language. But communists also loved to make it more convoluted. It’s almost impossible to understand Marx. The ramblings of Karl Marx were originally in German.
We have a rather complicated grammar. And so we have “Schachtelsätze”. That means a complicated sentence consisting of many different bits and pieces. You can form complex sentences in German that actually make sense. You know, there’s rules for everything. The next bit of sentence is caused by the previous bit of the sentence or there’s an addition to the last bits. But you can also make sentences in German that are completely convoluted. They make no sense. Marx also used another trick which is coming up with these new definitions that make no sense. His favorite topic was work, because this is what people’s everyday reality was. You have to go to work. Work is horrible. That’s why he talked about work a lot. And he created six or seven different definitions of work. Work, “abstract work” etc. I think he even used “phantasmagoric form of work”. What is abstract work? What is that definition? And so you can make these complicated sentences, throw in a bunch of words, terms you haven’t clearly defined, and presto, you have just gobbledygook. And you can always claim to be correct. Young people in Germany use a tiny fraction of the words available and they use a tiny fraction of the grammar available. It’s like 1984 and they have these slang terms. So for example, anything that seems foreign to them or strange to them is called sus, which is short for suspicious and so they use these different terms and they form these really short sentences. So that is reduction. But then you go to the slightly older crowd, people who think they are educated, college people, and the language becomes convoluted. They will talk your ear off. And a lot of it doesn’t make any actual sense. So this is something that was actually considered for Eastern Germany. You destroy the language, you force everybody to speak Russian and you destroy all memory. Nowadays we’re all dependent on these machines, and many people don’t actually collect physical books. What happens if the internet is deleting your book collection?
What if you can’t access the search engine or the results are heavily censored. You’re effectively cut off from all of human history. You’re basically cut off from all knowledge except what’s allowed for you to have. So this is something that communists actually discussed back then and this is what they discussed afterwards.
Should we have eliminated any trace of Germanness? You can give this a left wing facade. You can also try to lure people in with right wing marketing. This is kind of what what Russia is is trying on all fronts.
These are sort of things they have experimented with. So a lot of the files of communist countries are not available for study. And so we don’t know how many experiments were run. If you have a communist system, it’s like a big laboratory. You specify a certain part of your communist system and country to be your laboratory. You can explore, experiment on people, and you can set out to make a ten year long experiment, 20 year experiment. And you can try different things so you can see what sticks and what doesn’t. And so Russia is armed with a type of science that is not available to anybody else.
Nyquist: That’s very true. Let me bounce something off of you, because I’ve been following this. So let me get your reaction to this as I have studied the alt right and communism. It seems Russia is attempting to form this Eurasian mass. Gorbachev said Europe from Brest to Vladivostok and then Boris Yeltsin said Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok, which included Canada. And according to Jiao Chen secret speech, China wants the Lower 48 US states to make a second China. And so it’s like Russia is in the process of creating an empire which consists of the Caucasian people. And China is going to get Asia and the Pacific in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and who knows how South America is going to be split up. So it is almost as if these ideologies, there’s a convergence coming where suddenly these narratives of far left and far right are going to converge. And it’s not going to be about Germany or France or these countries, it’s going to be about Eurasia.
This is where the kind of Aryan thing merges with the Russians. They don’t want a real concept of nationality, because if you look at Hitler, there’s a sense in which Hitler wasn’t a real nationalist. He just used it. And you look at some of the SS divisions that consisted of non-Germans, right?
They were forming the first pan European fighting force since the Roman Empire. You know, unless you go back to the Crusades. But they still even the Crusaders, there were the French crusaders and the Germans and the English in the Third Crusade. They kept their national groups together. But it’s very interesting that it almost seems like the Soviets decided they were going to learn from Hitler. They couldn’t directly take everybody away from a national society into communism. They need to create a super nation that everybody identifies with; a white super nation, with socialist politics. China was going to do the same thing in the East. Greater Han China is a myth.
China’s not really one ethnic group. They just faked that. So it’s almost like they’re imitating China in a way. So what is your reaction? Is this the project between Russia and China? Could this be it?
Benesch: This is what every intelligence agent does: You have to pretend to be helpful. You have to pretend to provide what people need. Russia and China are targeting specific groups in the West. They’re presenting themselves as coaches. We’re going to coach you to get what you want. But the coaching is not really meant to be professional about how empires work and intelligence works. It’s a very, very dumbed down, strange, garbled type of coaching. It’s as if you pay for a car and you’re getting something that has four wheels. It does have an engine, but it’s not really a car or a modern car. You buy a piece of software and it has all these flaws and there are things, functions missing. Stuff has been deleted. This is this is what every intelligence agency is very capable of doing when there is, let’s say, an event or something important. The intelligence agency will always, for public consumption or for the politicians who have access to classified information, take out important bits of the real story. They take out all the essential bits and they add some false bits. So this is kind of the baseline technique and this is done on a grand scale.
Russia and China are providing something where the important bits have been taken out and false bits have been attached to it. A rightwinger in Europe will look at the past, and say some things were much better then. Well, who is actually qualified to to judge the 1700s, 1600s, The 1500s? It takes a while to learn about these centuries and the way things were run because you didn’t have audio recordings back then. You didn’t have film recordings back then. You didn’t have that sort of bureaucracy and all the paper files as you would expect today. So reconstructing the past is a challenge. And 20 years ago I wanted to focus on modern history where we have all this well-preserved evidence. I had my problems with older history because there were no recordings, not enough paper files and so on. But the more I learned about how empires work and intelligence agencies work and how the human mind works, the easier it became for me to reconstruct the past. You know, as as good as you can, you perform that task.
So because humans are always the same empires function the same and intelligence agencies function the same. So it’s easy to tell people what they want to hear. China and Russia need to have experts to construct the narrative and present good storytelling.
And to me, it goes back to a great deception maneuver by British intelligence. So this was during the 1700s, but also in the 1800s. This was the age where modern science became a thing and empires had to change. You know, you needed industry, you needed to put people in schools and universities and so on.
You had to try new things, which was risky. But staying the same was also risky. And so you had these different European empires that competed with each other. They sometimes allied and stronger alliances tried to squash the weaker alliance, and it kept changing back and forth. But they were all Roman systems. They were in competition with each other. And the British were the best at adapting and using science and just changing aspects of imperialism. The British were creating the new modern banking system with the fractional banking, the new Bank of England and these so-called private merchant banks. My suspicion is the big private merchant banks were run by British intelligence. It’s difficult to reconstruct that. All the parts needed to work together. The Bank of England and let’s say Lloyds and Barclays and Barings and Rothschild all needed to work together so you could scale the system up, sell bonds and prevent it from imploding.
So this was a very big thing that the British pulled off, but they did not want other empires to copy it. That quickly. So newer research actually suggests that Britain was badmouthing its own system. British intelligence was badmouthing the new system and the badmouthing was presented as left wing propaganda, and it was also presented as right wing propaganda. So if you build this new system and it’s actually working, what do you tell your competitors? What do you tell your enemies? Oh, this new system is horrible. It’s going to fail so hard. It’s just going to crash and burn. So they told the communists that all this modern stuff, banking and trade, is parasitic, it’s always going to exploit people and it’s always going to be miserable and it’s going to cause all these wars. It’s a horror show. This is the enemy. You know, anything to do with trade and personal property and individual freedom is all poisoned, that is all cancer. And we have to fight all of it. This is what they told to the left. And so they told a similar story to the right wing in the mid to late 1800s. So especially on German territory, on Austrian territory. Now, of course, Germany and Austria where the competitors to Britain. And so the story was that all this modern stuff, banking industry, capitalism, trade, freedom, is is a Jewish conspiracy. It’s parasitic. So you can see the propaganda aimed at the left and the propaganda aimed at the right wing. They were kind of the same thing. In the book by Niall Ferguson, The ascent of Money, is a quote of this British guy in the parliament, Thomas Duncombe from 1828.
He was complaining about Nathan Rothschild and how his family supposedly has endless money. And they have this spying everywhere. And they want to take over Europe and all this stuff. So basically every major point you can find in the traditional conspiracy myth. This was as early as 1828. And of course, Thomas Duncombe was tied to the highest levels of the British Empire. And it seems like there was also a way to get that propaganda into France, because France needed banking, they needed industry, they needed to modernize. And then suddenly this early French socialist literature appeared seemingly out of nowhere. And these early French leftist socialists, they claimed that trade was parasitic, it was Jewish and individual property was bad. That’s all a Jewish plot. And this propaganda was designed just to destabilize France. To prevent France from competing with England, which was a great concern. So basically, the French were told that all this modern stuff is bad, the Germans were told all this modern stuff is bad, it’s such a conspiracy, and the Austrians were told the same thing.
All this modern stuff is so horrible. And so this is where the similarities appeared of modern left wing extremism and modern right wing extremism. The hatred of the individual and individual prosperity and, you know, individual initiative. So this is where the hatred comes from. And so when you listen to a Russian guy, Alexander Dugin for example, he is pushing exactly these buttons. He says: I don’t care if it’s fascism and communism, as long as we fight the individualism and the liberalism and trade and all these other things. I traced this in detail, in the socialist literature, the extreme rightwing literature and conspiracy literature; if you compare them, you can see that it all started with kind of a balance between just hating on every sort of trade and individualism and, and modern anti-Semitism.
So this British guy, this Thomas Duncombe, he wrote a book on the Jews in England and all that. And this book was a simultaneous attack against Jewish people, non-Jewish people, the old aristocracy and the old church. So they were all, to him, equally guilty of everything because they believed in trade and credit and banking.
He didn’t single out Jewish people, which would have been stupid anyways. But he sort of introduced modern Anti-Semitism and turned it from medieval nonsense to a fake science.
Nyquist: So what about the Abbe Barruel who wrote the manuscript about the Jewish Masonic conspiracy two decades earlier? I mean, that came from Poland’s head of secret police basically. They concocted this Jewish Masonic conspiracy idea and the Abbe spread that document. It got spread around through the Catholic Church, through the Jesuits. I believe he was a Jesuit. And that’s why when you talk to an Irish Catholic today, ultra conservative, when you talk to some certain people in in in Bavaria, in the Catholic Church or whatever, they believe that. It became entrenched, especially among Catholics. And then later we have from the Orthodox Church the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which again was a forgery made by the leading general in Paris sometime around the turn of the century between the 18 and 1900s. So do you think that this guy was influenced by that?
Was he Catholic, by the way, this Englishman you’re referring to, Duncombe, was he Catholic?
Benesch: I don’t remember that. I’m not sure. I think he was in a trusted relationship with a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. That’s what I remember.
Nyquist: You know the French have always tried to influence Ireland. Even before France knew that Ireland was Britain’s vulnerable rear area.
Benesch: You have to professionally admit that was a good deception employed by British intelligence. I mean, you built this new system of banking and bonds and trade. You built this new system and you tell the competitors that this new thing is the worst idea. Other countries were stupid enough to believe that or certain groups were stupid enough to believe that. When this Thomas Duncan was writing his stuff, he was introducing modern anti-Semitism, but he was putting the blame equally on the old church, not the new one, and the old aristocracy, not the current one, of course.
Nyquist: Oh, really?
Benesch: He didn’t want to blame the current church and the current system because that would have put him into trouble with his friends, of course, who were paying for his gambling debts and so on. And so he was laying the blame equally on Jews, non-Jews, Catholics and the older aristocracy. So this argument that he presents is basically the same as you saw with Karl Marx. So there’s always going to be losers. It’s always parasitic, it’s always exploitation, and you can’t fix it. This is what Thomas Duncombe said. And he was even involved in early socialism. The unions and that sort of thing. He was trying to influence the left.
And so then you had the French early socialists. They exagerated the anti-Semitism part. And this went on for a while. And then later socialists in general lowered or even removed the anti-Semitic aspects, but they kept all of the rest intact. So even if if you’re not talking about Jews, even if you don’t consider greed to be especially Jewish or whatever, the the way socialists view their enemies remained intact. So if you’re for trade and individualism and freedom and property, that makes you the enemy, that makes you an enabler of parasitic capitalism and imperialism.
Nyquist: In the wake of World War Two, under Churchill’s government, they formed a coalition. All the socialists were admitted into power along with everyone else. And then after the war, after Germany collapses, but before Japan surrenders, they vote Churchill out. And so then Britain has socialism that destroys the British Empire, basically. And even under Margaret Thatcher, they’re not really able to fully even repeal it.
Benesch: Europe is really, really complex. And it then you have these older intelligence networks, aristocratic networks, that go back a long time. And in recent years you saw some actual research about that. And so it’s so hard to tell who is really playing for what side and what the operation is, because when they plan an operation, they can obfuscate so much.
Nyquist: We call it the wilderness of mirrors.
Benesch: And so you get socialists over here that are you know, pro Russian, bought and paid for. But then also you get people who work for Western intelligence, but they pretend to be pro-Moscow hardcore communists. And you can get all sorts of variations of this. So to finish the earlier point, when the Socialists dropped the anti Semitism but kept all the rest intact. So if you’re not for communism you’re still the enemy, you’re still a parasite. They dropped anti-Semitism. But then it became a big thing in the rightwing circles. And so even before the Nazis, all these ideas were formed and so in the right wing circles, the anti-Semitism was pretty exaggerated, but the rest remained intact.
So if you like individualism, if you like individual property and initiative, you were the enemy. And so socialism and national socialism were pretty bad at economics because they hated economics, they hated trade and banking and individualism. So that’s why they were so bad. We all know how bad the communists were at productivity and also the National Socialists. I mean, for a while they could pretend to be productive and have a boom phase. But experts quickly realized that the national socialist economy was overpoliticized. So you got to be in charge if you knew the Nazi elite from the old days or you were put in charge if you liked someone who was powerful. So that’s not how you have an economy. That’s not not how you plan or have any sort of productivity. And so that was kind of the big, big flaw of National Socialism. So they believed their own nonsense. They got high on their own supply. There was a built in weakness.
Nyquist: Weren’t all these countries united against them and destroyed Germany?
Benesch: Yeah. You can still see the reverberations of that propaganda today. So, for example, if you have radical right wing activists, especially in the United States, if you have right wing extreme activism, they will criticize you if you don’t get yourself in trouble, if you actually build a family, if you actually build a business or you have a decent job and build things, they criticize you for that because they say you’re too much part of the system.
You’re not revolutionary enough, you’re not radical enough. And so there’s this this built in hatred for stability and things that work.
Nyquist: Exactly. Like on the left.
Benesch: Like on the left, if you’re a broke activist and you’re constantly in trouble with the law, your crowd will respect you for that.
Nyquist: It’s radically stupid and self-destructive and it’s almost like destruction or self-destruction is the whole point of the exercise.
Benesch: Exactly. And if you look at somebody like Alexander Dugin, he is sort of preaching that you as a man, you should basically be like a medieval type person. So cell phones are bad, pop culture is bad. And you’re supposed to live in a way that is so far removed from everybody else’s reality that you stand out like a sore thumb, that you look like a freak. You look like somebody from, you know, 400 years ago. And it’s supposed to be so exaggerated that most people think you’re nuts. And the only people who understand you are from your own cult because they look the same, they have the same lifestyle. It’s kind of like what the British did, you know, when they found something that worked and they trash talked the same thing towards others. I mean, do people think Vladimir Putin likes campfires and he doesn’t like technology and he doesn’t like all these things. No, he’s surrounded by technology. His empire depends on technology. He wants his airplanes to function. He needs everything to function. All these other people in the Putin regime, they love technology. They love modern stuff.
Nyquist: They’re exporting dysfunctional ideas to the West, to sabotage the West. Feminism, transgenderism, having sexual reassignment surgery for prepubescent children. You’ve got the global warming narrative, which really came out of the Soviet Union and of course, nuclear winter. Get rid of all your nuclear weapons. All of these are sabotage operations quite transparently against the West to destroy our economy, to destroy our ability to defend ourselves. And then, of course, the open border thing; we’ve got to let in the whole third world. You know, we got an open border problem here in America that Biden has done. A million Muslim refugees hit Germany. What was that, 2014, 2015? You know, So, yeah, this is this is the sort of the game as it’s played now. And of course, the problem that the Russians and the Chinese have is that they do indeed have a dictatorship that basically constricts their own economy, They’ve got these ways of controlling the population.
In the old Soviet Union, the Soviet economy was based on the restriction of consumption. Well, they have that on a light version, which in Russia is getting worse. And in China they have it, too. And they’re trying to export that to the West.
Benesch: If you ask a white person or say a white conservative person, to name the number one positive cliché about white people, what’s typical for white people? The number one cliche is engineering, right? We invent things, because especially over here in Europe, the weather was so bad, it was so cold. We had to build things. You had to invent things. This was basically how people survived.
Nyquist: So Germany invented the television. Thank you.
Benesch: You know, you make things, you just try stuff out. This is kind of like the number one positive cliche. Now, of course, you have engineers all over the world, but this is sort of the cliché, right? And so nowadays you have scientists who are also celebrities and they sometimes go overboard in their ideas and their visions and whatnot, or they’re just telling you what’s hypothetically possible. And this gets picked up by Russian propaganda, and they start whining about transhumanism. So this is something that you find everywhere in Russian propaganda aimed at the West. It’s this complaining about transhumanism, but you have to really understand what that could mean and how many aspects there are to it. Because if you drive a car and you use a computer or use the Internet, you could also say that’s transhumanism, because we’re not meant to run that fast. We’re placing ourselves inside a machine. The car, it’s an extension of our body. And we’re zooming around in this car. Using a smartphone is transhumanist. If you really look at some aspects of it, it’s just engineering. So you can preach being primitive and complain the West is all about transhumanism and it’s all bad. But really, with modern medicine, we re-engineer things, we make things, we have computers. Of course there’s always dangers attached to these things, but that’s always been the case about science and engineering. So Russian propaganda is whining about transhumanism. At the same time, Russia is investing in nanotechnology and they’re trying to steal high tech and they want to basically conquer Western Europe for the technology and for the engineering. This is what they want. They don’t want to come here to destroy modern technology . They want to come to steal it.
Nyquist: They want you Germans to work for them.
Benesch: Yeah. You think Vladimir Putin likes his hand tremor that he has? He’s getting older and he’s grown up in a communist system. So the food wasn’t that good and the medicine wasn’t that good and the air quality wasn’t that good. And the dangerous chemicals everywhere. So this is growing up in communism. So that’s why Vladimir Putin has not aged that well. We don’t know exactly how his health is, but do you really think he’s not into modern medicine, modern technology to prolong his life. And all his cronies; you really think they don’t like the idea of certain aspects of transhumanist technology to live longer? It’s the same ploy. It’s the same thing. They find something that works and they trash talk it, you know, in front of a different audience.
Nyquist: And of course, they don’t want their own people to have too much consumption. So it’s better that the Russians not aspire to own a car or have your own house separate from other houses, not live in a closet. Well, Alex, we’ve come to the end of our hour. We maybe go over a little. This is fascinating. I have a number of questions for you. Maybe next week we can continue and I can give you some more questions. So that’s an interesting overview. And then the listeners can kind of think how this integrates. You’re going back in time, you’re giving us an overview, you’re giving us an overview.
Benesch: Humans are always the same, and empires more or less function the same, intelligence agencies function the same. So these are your constants in science. You always try to establish things that are known and reliable and true, and then you can go from there and discover things that are not known yet. You go and find out something new. So it’s easy to get distracted by ideology. It’s easy to get distracted by, you know, fantasies that are presented or distortions. It’s easy to get thrown off course by emotions. But this is why reading is so important. When you collect actual books about real empires and intelligence operations. Of course, that book is not a perfect representation of reality because the author was limited or the author maybe had a bias or the publishing company put on certain limitations or whatever. But the more books you read, the more you can piece together how these empires work and the techniques they’re using. And so when you’re reading somebody’s book, you’re not in front of the author because if you talk to the author, it’s different, right?
Because there’s a human element it and certain biases to it. But if you look at the person’s published ideas, it’s less of a distraction. If you just read actual real books with no other distraction, that is so important. Because then if you find that there are certain constants, the world is not just chaos, it’s not just confusion and crazy people with crazy ideas.
There’s a real science of imperialism or running things. In public, it’s not a science that is taught. Very few people actually get taught that in a direct way. You may get taught single aspects of it. You have a military career or you have an intelligence career and you’re maybe a field agent or maybe you’re processing information. You’re trained in a specific aspect of this bigger thing, but it is a bigger science. And if you read a good book about Napoleon, or the First World War, you can actually see people from the past struggling and trying to experiment with this science of running things. And the more you read, the better you understand it yourself. And you can become sort of a player, you can play this game and you’re not just somebody else’s target, right?
Nyquist: Or you’re just not manipulated by everything that comes along.
Benesch: Yeah, because the world is a big place and and oftentimes people use historical arguments. So they say we have to do a certain thing because of what happened in the past or they claim a certain mechanism.
We have to do a certain thing because that leads to a desired effect. And this mechanism is supposedly proven by history. So there’s a lot of historical arguments that are really flawed because usually historians, they work differently than intelligence professionals. So there are similarities, but also big differences. For a historian, if he doesn’t have any files that definitively prove the existence of something, the historian assumes this thing doesn’t exist. So you’re not getting a specific file or you’re not getting files at all. So the thing doesn’t exist for the historian. An intelligence professional will look at the past and the professional will start looking for signs of intelligence networks and signs of possible intelligence operations. And the intelligence pros will try to reconstruct the past, not in a perfect way, because it’s not possible, because you’re not all knowing, but you can at least lean in a certain direction.
You can have different scenarios and apply a different probability to each scenario. You have to start thinking like an intelligence professional, because that’s very different from a normal person or a historian. And I always tell people the intelligence business is very similar to engineering. It’s not too far removed from, let’s say, engineering.
And if people can learn engineering, they learn the intelligence game at least well enough. You don’t have to become the master overnight or whatever, but at least you understand it well enough. And so people really have to acquire that intelligence lifestyle, as I call it, because you look at the world in a different way. This is something that people experience in a fake way when they get into a new ideology or new activism. So they they think they understand the world. They think they understand how it works, and they look at everything in a new way. But this is pretty much fakery. This is just ideology, you know, an intelligence person will actually look at the world in a in a different way.
Nyquist: Hmm. Well, thank you very much for that. And I’m Jeff Nyquist. This has been Alex Benesch. And do you give out a website? Give out your website.
Benesch: The website is CandorIntel dot com.
Nyquist: I like the word candor; being honest. Just telling the truth. Well thank you and thank you folks will be joining you next week.
