 Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall. I really wanted to say something about this because it's such an important event, such a momentous event and such a misunderstood, I think, event. And in many ways, looking back over the last 30 years, there's tragedy all over those 30 years. But at the end of the day, it is a momentous, celebratory, positive thing. And one of the things I think that I regret, not that I regret, that I think was unfortunate is that Iron Man didn't see it. Because imagine not only Iron Man's, you know, just joy in seeing communism collapse, completely collapse. By 1989, when the war comes down, communism is finished. To see her prediction come true. To see that world liberated from at least this form of collectivism, this monstrosity. So it's sad that Rand did not have the opportunity to actually experience this and actually see it happen. I think she was the number one voice, anti-communist voice in the 20th century. Nobody understood communism, nobody understood its roots, its sources, what it represented better than she did and nobody argued for it against it. Over and over and over again, as vehemently as she did. Anyway, it only happened seven to eight years after she died. She died in 1982. So she could have lived another seven years to see it. And of course it could have happened earlier. And this is part of what is misunderstood about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I mean, a lot of people think that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a consequence of Ronald Reagan ramping up military spending. Or any particular thing that a politician did. But the ultimate cause, the real cause of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is what Iron Man identified, is it's complete and utter bankruptcy. It's complete and utter failure. It internally fell apart. I'd say the one thing Ronald Reagan did really to help bring it about is the moral sanction he gave it. His words, not so much as deeds, but his words calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. Standing by the solidarity demonstrators, calling them on the immorality, calling the communists on the immorality of their system. But at the end of the day, the death of communism was self-inflicted. The death of communism was a consequence of the fact that communism has to fail. It is a negation of human nature. It is a negation of everything that is required for human beings to be successful. For human beings to thrive, for human beings to create wealth, for human beings to survive. So the only alternatives here are extinction that people would just die off or the death of communism itself. Either people die or communism dies. It cannot sustain itself over the long run. Indeed, according to Rand, and I agree with him, communism probably would have failed much, much earlier if two things would have happened. One, if the West had not granted it material support, starting with World War II and providing it with support against Hitler, and then all the way through detente in the 70s and giving them food and technology, American businessmen going over there to drill for oil and to help them develop their oil fields. If not for the help they got from our governments and from the West, communism would have failed much earlier. So communism was destined to die and it might have even died in the 40s or 50s if not for us keeping Stalin afloat. I mean, imagine if Hitler had taken Moscow, had destroyed the Soviet Union, had destroyed Stalin. I think the history of the last post-World War II would have been completely different. I still think Hitler would have been annihilated, would have been destroyed, but they wouldn't have been in Eastern Europe. They wouldn't have been a Soviet Union. They wouldn't have been slavery in Eastern Europe and in Russia for decades and decades and decades. The only reason North Korea still survives is because we fed them. So communism cannot sustain itself. Indeed, totalitarianism cannot sustain itself. Look at Venezuela. Totalitarianism and to a large extent, authoritarianism cannot survive. They cannot produce the goods. And in this context, there's a new book. I haven't read it yet, but it looks really good by an intellectual who I like in certain things and I don't in other. Victor Davis Hansen, who is a great military historian. And he's got a book debunking the myth that Nazi Germany was prosperous, successful, had great weapons, developed, innovated. He shows they didn't. Their weapons systems were inferior. Their production was inferior. In every aspect, Nazi Germany was inferior to the UK and to the United States. Now, I don't know if he says why, but I can tell you why the mind doesn't function under force. As a consequence, totalitarianism will always lead to poverty. Totalitarianism will always lead to products that are worthless. Totalitarianism will always lead to defeat. It's just a question of time. And if you let it happen. So this is why, I'll take these couple of questions in a minute. This is why I'm not worried about China as a threat to the United States as China becomes more totalitarian. The more totalitarian China becomes, the poorer it will become. The poorer its weapons systems and the inefficient its weapons systems will become, the less motivated its soldiers will be. Technologically, they will deteriorate and they will be a non threat to the United States if the United States continues to be free. We're assuming that. You have nothing to fear from totalitarian regimes unless they're suicidal. Now, you have to fear the violence, but you don't have to fear defeat if you are free. It's not an accident. The United States could turn on a dime and turn itself into a weapons producing juggernaut in World War II and crush the Germans. Indeed, as I've said before, Victor Davis Hansen is the one who pointed out that if pattern had been listened to among the generals, World War II would have ended six months, nine months earlier. Now, somebody in the chat says German tanks were far superior to Western tanks. They were not. Read Victor Davis Hansen. Again, the book is exactly on that. On were the German tanks really superior to British tanks or American tanks? Were the German aircraft superior? No, it turns out that even as British planes were being shot down, manufacture of planes in England was far superior to the manufacturing of planes in Germany. In terms of quantity and quality. And it turns out the Western tanks were indeed better than German tanks. But again, I'm not an expert on this. I refer you to the book. It's the latest book. I don't remember the name by Victor Davis Hansen. So communism and fascism to the extent that the authoritarian and they have to be are self-defeating, self-defeating. So I don't worry about totalitarians as enemies of the United States. I worry about the United States' willingness to defend itself. That's what I think is a problem. All right, let's take two questions and then a few more things about the Berlin Wall. I'm from Germany here. Is the rise of socialism, if I'm mentalism, tribalism, nationalism, far left, right parties, anti-Semitism and so on. Where there is that rise. Aminist powerless are complete back more than in the US. I'm angry and depressed, your thoughts. I, you know, I agree with you. Germany is a mess. And Germany is a mess because the lessons of the fall of the Berlin Wall were not learnt. People thought that the Berlin Wall fell and that what had won, communism had failed and what had won was the mixed economy. People thought that the Berlin Wall fell and as a famous historian and social thinker, Huntington mentions, Huntington? No, it wasn't Fukuyama, not Huntington. Fukuyama mentioned, it was the end of history because we had discovered the truth. What works is liberal democracy, mixed economy. And mixed economy had beaten communism. But this is the big mistake. And the big mistakes was, the big mistake is that it's not about politics. And it's not that liberal democracy defeated the Soviet Union. It's that the Soviet Union died. And instead of learning from that death, learning that collectivism, mysticism or anti-reason, altruism are the death of any country, ultimately. Instead of learning from that, the intellectuals in the West just settled. Oh, communism gone, okay. Well, that didn't work. But we still have altruism and we still have collectivism and we still, a skeptical about reason, particularly as applied to anything that's not science. So, Henry mentions on the chat, Ronald Reagan actually attributed the victory to faith to non-reason. So the lessons of the Berlin Wall coming down were never learnt and the opposite was adopted. The opposite was adopted. We embraced collectivism. We embraced statism. We embraced altruism. Just as much after the fall of communism as we did before. So we learned nothing from the fall of communism. We had no, we have no conception of what caused communism to be successful and to fail. And what are the philosophical roots of communism and those philosophical roots were never rejected, never rejected. And here a big blame goes to the people who defend free markets but are afraid of talking about the philosophical roots, right? Because it's the spokesman for capitalism, the spokesman for free markets who betrayed capitalism and free markets by refusing to identify. And I say refusing to identify because I think it involved evasion. The philosophical roots of capitalism and freedom and those philosophical roots are the enlightenment, are the ideas of the efficacy of reason and the sanctity of the individual. It's the idea of moral individualism, of the pursuit of happiness, the negation of collectivism and the negation of unreason, the negation of faith. And it's because our intellectuals didn't do that. That you in Germany as everywhere else are reliving all of this. We're reliving the rise of socialism. In the form of environmentalism and different forms of tribalism. We're reliving the rise of fascism with the new right wing parties in Germany and elsewhere around Europe and the rise of white supremacists in the United States or the... We're reliving all that because we never question the underlying causes. We never challenged them. And we never presented an alternative. So the failure is the failure of the intellectuals. The failure is the failure of our thinkers. The failure is the failure of our leaders who misidentified what happened. Who can't think in terms of philosophy. Who can't think in terms of ideas. It had to be dollars, it had to be economic. No, the Soviet Union fell because it was anti-life, anti-human being, anti-the individual and some people in that world had enough self-respect, had enough knowledge of what's required for them to live as to revolt against it. And it didn't happen as much in Russia itself as it did in the periphery. Czech Republic in East Germany where people went out to the streets in Poland and demanded their liberty, demanded their freedom. That's why it fell. It fell because there was that remnant of what's possible. And I think the more exposure people got to the West, the more they saw how richer the West was, the more they wanted that. But again, even the people in the East did not have a clear alternative, did not have a clear vision of what freedom looks like and we did not help them because we did not supply a vision like that. Those of us in the West. So again, the intellectuals failed the people in Eastern Europe. So they got mixed economies, some of them a little better, some of them a lot worse, but mixed economies. And now when the mixed economies are failing, people are going, what happened? This was supposed to be the end of history. This was supposed to have solved all our problems. So now that they see that the problems are not solved, they're looking for solutions and the only solutions available to them are the ancient solutions. The return to tribalism, the return to socialism, the return to fascism, that's all they know, that all that exists. Because when we had the opportunity, when the West had the opportunity to assert itself, to declare victory and to teach us about the causes of that victory, the West failed. They failed those of us living in the West and they failed all those who are now free for the first time in decades, living in the East. The revolution needs to happen as a philosophic revolution. It's not, it's not political. It's not about this or that idea. It's about philosophical ideas, deep ideas, important ideas, in morality, in epistemology, in political theory. And until we have those ideas, until we argue those ideas, until we articulate those ideas, until we are morally confident in those ideas, then we will keep reverting back. We will keep cycling, keep committing the same horrors that we swore would never be committed again. And that's what we're living through today. And that's, you know, that's, yeah, you're seeing it in Germany. You're seeing the rise of these tribalistic, collectivistic, altruistic ideologies in Germany because it never went away. In a sense, particularly in Germany, Immanuel Kant never went away. He's still alive and well. And he still is the dominant philosopher of the West. And as long as he is, we will get communism, we will get fascism, we will get other forms of collectivism, statism, tribalism, resurgent. Unfortunately, the United States of America is not immune to any of that. All right, somebody's asking, how do you respond to someone who says that Hong Kong protests on American conspiracy design to make Chinese government look tyrannical? This is the view of many Chinese who's being propagandized here. Well, I mean, I've been to China and I've been to Hong Kong and there's just no basis for those ideas. I mean, there's a sense in which I wish it was an American conspiracy. I wish America had it in them to have such a conspiracy, to encourage people to stand up for their rights, to stand up for their liberty. And what are the Hong Kong demonstrations about? They're about an extradition law that was clearly bad, clearly a way for the Chinese government to implement Chinese law in Hong Kong without taking it over officially, keeping the two systems one nation idea, but basically applying Chinese law because they could ask the extradition and tried people in China. And when I was in Hong Kong, not young people, a lot of people were worried about this, were afraid of this. And that's what initiated, right? Initiated the whole demonstrations. Then what are the rest of the demands of the demonstrators? Well, that somebody you look into, how the police have behaved. Somebody you look into police brutality. And in third basically, it's a question of democracy. They want to elect their own representative. Now, all of those are legitimate demands. All of those are demands that China does not accept and people are demonstrating. You don't need an American conspiracy to get any of that. Now, are some of these students supported by some institutions that might be based in America? You know, I don't know, maybe. But they're also supported by some, very few unfortunately, Chinese business people. But what are they arguing for? And none of this, none of this, is of course, exists in China. You can't do these kind of demonstrations in China, right? So no, I don't think America's propagandizing this. I don't think America's capable of propagandizing this because what would they be propagandizing? What? What virtue? And what is it that the demonstrator, the demanding that is wrong? That's the real question. So, let's see. Oh, I want, so my point about the Berlin Wall is, this is a time to celebrate. It's pretty amazing that the Berlin Wall came down. It's as bad as things are today in the West or all over the world. They're far, far better than they were in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union when the wall was still up. World is in better shape. We have more opportunities to change the world and to make it better. We have more opportunities to improve the world out there than we've ever had. So it's not a time to be depressed. At the same time, we have to realize that unless we start advocating for the right ideas, unless we reject the ideas that made communism possible, we will, we're going to end up there in the end. And I mean, it's a good illustration of how weakness, failure, demise is right now on my chat, the number of crazy, insane, evil, racist trolls. But you know, that's where we are. We've got the alt-right racism in America. We've got the alt-right racism in Germany and we've got communism, socialism on the rise in both America and Germany. And that's always the pattern. That is fascism and communism, fascism and socialism go hand in hand. Each one feeds off of each other as supposedly the response to one another. But they're both equally destructive. They're both equally evil. They're both equally the same. And they bring about the same kind of destruction, the same kind of hell as the other. And unfortunately, the world is going back there unless we reject these ideas and embrace a positive. And the positive is reason, egoism, individual rights and capitalism. All right, my spiel on the building wall. Let's- I wanna help people. I wanna do good for other people. What's so bad about that? Nothing. If you do it by your own choice and if it's not your primary aim in life and if you don't regard it as a moral virtue, on those conditions, it's fine to help people if you want to. Why can't I think of it as a moral virtue? I mean, can't I take some bows for myself for doing all these good things? Because that would be cannibalism. Because that would mean that you preach altruism which means not merely kindness, but self-sacrifice. It means that you place the welfare of others above your own, that you live for others for the sake of helping them and that justifies your life. That's immoral, according to my morality. I don't understand why you have to be so harsh in your evaluation of those people. Why call it immoral? Why don't you just say, why don't you say it's a waste of time? Why pass judgment on me? Because look at the state of the world today. And you cannot be harsh enough on those who created it. And those who created it are the philosophers of altruism. It's those who preach self-sacrifice, selflessness, self-abnegation, all the anti-self theories which means anti-man. All those who demand man's sacrifice, they have succeeded and look at the results in the world. That's a theory or a way of life or a philosophic idea which is advanced by religions that we should sacrifice for others. That's right. All right, I wanna make sure I understand you, Ms. Rand. Why is it so, I'm still not quite sure why you're so harsh on those who would sacrifice for other people. Because I look at them. Just look at them. Because they don't hesitate to sacrifice whole nations. Look at Russia. Communism is based on altruism. Look at Nazi Germany. The Nazis were more explicit than even the Russians in preaching self-sacrifice and altruism and self-sacrifice for the state, for the folk, the people. Every dictatorship is based on altruism. Now, you can't fight it by mirroring saying it's a difference of opinion. It's a difference of life and death. So your view is that if we all became more comfortable, which with our natural tendencies, that is to say selfishness, there would be less horror, less war, less Hitler? There wouldn't be any. So with the more selfish we are, the more kind, the more tranquil and peaceful the world in which we live? And more benevolent toward other people if we're rationally selfish. By that I mean a selfishness which can justify once every action rationally, not the kind of win worship, as I call it, which consists of just indulging your own desires and urges of the moment. And there is no innate natural idea, you know. There isn't, huh? No. Well, I have an innate, I have a lot of innate tendencies. You think they're innate. You know what I would say? Check your premises. Check my premises? Yeah, check the basic ideas behind any feelings that you might feel at the moment and you'll see that your feeling comes from your premises, good or bad, but they'll help subconsciously, they will direct your feelings and you will think it's an innate that it isn't. How do you think the super chat? And I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com, you're on Brooke's show and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next.