The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

This week’s book of the week is the last of my 2022 pre-order purchases before my no book buying policy went into effect, making this week’s book of the week Michael Malice’s latest work, The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil.

 I am a fan of Michael Malice’s writing, I love him on Twitter, I love his podcast, and I LOVED Dear Reader, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this book. The White Pill is the story of the rise and fall of communism in Russia, but it doesn’t start in Russia. Probably because the fall of communism was rooted in 19th century America. But we’ll get to that. 

 The story opens with Ayn Rand’s testimony about the dangers of communism before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Also, with an alarming story about Rand. Ayn Rand is not her name. It’s the name she took when she came to America, but her birth name is Alice Rosenbaum. NO ONE in America knew that name. Not even her American Husband. Because the paranoia engendered in Russia following the October Revolution and the overthrow of the czar ran very deep in Rand. In the early 1920’s, before coming to America in 1926, Rand had been a college student in Russia. She witnessed the insanity of early Leninism, and the intolerance that communism breeds. It was this firsthand testimony she was providing as to why America did not want communism inside its borders, and the indication that it was already here. 

 Malice then steps us back 60 years to discuss labor riots in America, how various presidents, namely McKinley, mishandled them. Although, after last week’s books, this could also have been Cleveland he was discussing. Look, I like Cleveland overall, but he grossly mis-stepped with the Pullman Car riots. That was not mentioned in this book, so moving on. 

 The riots Malice is talking about are the 1886 Haymarket Riots. And while Cleveland was president during that time, he was not called on to mobilize the army to help the governor, as he was with the Pullman Strike. As a result of the Haymarket Riots, 8 were left dead, including police. The labor leaders, who were inspired by Marxist theory, were tried for the deaths and sentenced to hang. The face of the rioters who became most infamous was German born American Louis Lingg. Lingg, as you can see, was quite good looking. It was his smoldering good looks that inspired anarchist Emma Goldman in her quest to see an end to the political caste that had overtaken America. It was Goldman’s writings that ultimately inspired our third presidential assassin, Leon Czolgosz, who killed president William McKinley. I expect I will learn more about him next month when I read the McKinley book. As far as Goldman was involved, she wasn’t. Nothing she had said, done, or written, violated any laws, and as much as certain “intellectuals” would like to make free speech illegal, back then it wasn’t even a thought. Although it did not win her any popularity contests. 

 Where Goldman really hit her political stride was in 1917 when she encouraged people not to register for the newly instituted draft, started by then President Wilson. She was sentenced to two years in prison, and when she got out, she returned to her native Russia, where she had been born in 1869. There, she was initially optimistic about the Bolshevik Revolution. However, whereas Rand was resistant to Bolshevism from the word go and left Russia as soon as she was able, Goldman was extremely hopeful. However, in less than 4 years, the blinders were pulled from her eyes. She left Russia in 1923 and wrote a book “My Disillusionment in Russia.”  

 Between Rand and Goldman, we have the foundational ideas that pushed back...HARD...against the spread of communism in the west. Not quite hard enough to prevent FDR’s nomination and subsequent four elections to the White house, and the ongoing damage his policies implemented in the United States, but enough to ensure there was a constant and vigilant push back against the encroachment.  

Now, the next several chapters were...in fact most of the rest of the book...was a retelling of the horrors of communism in Russia. From the Kangaroo courts described so aptly in The Gulag Archipelago, to the abuses in the Ukraine described in Red Famine, it is a depressing romp through one of the worlds darkest historical chapters.  

 It includes some wonderful first-hand accounts as told by Gulag survivor Elinor Lippor, author of Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. Lippor was another nail in the coffin of Soviet Socialism. Lippor, was not Russia. She was, I believe Swedish. So, when she was released from the Gulag, she was repatriated to sweden, where she immediately wrote a book about her experiences. This book was another nail in the coffin of communism in the west. Among the accounts of her experiences Lippor shares are tales of transportation, wherein the guards would allow male inmates into the womens transport car, resulting in mass rape. And when the guards broke it up, if the men weren’t done, they’d rape the young boys in the mens car. Malice outlines in great detail how destructive communism was to families and the family unit, entire generations decimated and sent to die in the camps. Millions dead. 

 And then he sheds some light on the evil ripples that spread out as part of the greater United Soviet Socialist Republic with the satellite states, including the Hungarian revolt in 1956 and Prague Spring in 1968 and how those were crushed by the USSR. The more heartbreaking and hopeful chapters are where he describes how Germany was split post WWII. Most people are aware that Germany was split into east and west, with West falling under the provinces and influence of Europe and America, and the East following under the protectorate of the USSR. Berlin, however, is less well known. Most people think Berlin was the center line and was equally split between east and west. However, Berlin is located in northeast Germany, and was fully located inside east Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, GDR. West Germany, for the record, was the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG.  

 So, when the wall went up in Berlin, it was a literal wall surrounding the parts of Berlin that fell under the control of the FGR. WEST Berlin was inside the wall. East Berlin was outside. But making it over the wall to the enclosed area guaranteed freedom. The first part of the wall was basic barbed wire that went up on August 13, 1961. The hope that starts is this iconic photo of Konrad Schumann, who had been a GDR guard on the border. Schumann was watching the wire being strung and decided no more. World War II and all the attendant horrors German had already inflicted on her fellow citizens was not even 20 years past. Schumann jumped the fence, one of only 9 guards to do the same in those first few days.

 Schumann is famous for it because photographer Peter Leiberg was in the right place at the right time, and had experience photographing moving objects, having garnered lots of practice taking pictures of racehorses in motion. He knew by the way Schumann was pacing and watching the wire that something was up, and when Schumann made the leap, Leiberg was ready with his camera. And Schumann leapt into history.  

 And this was hopeful. That was, believe it or not, an early crack in the GDR. The first sign that not everyone that was part of the machine running things agreed with what was going on. Other signs included the Stasi agent who tried to resign. He did not get to. The Stasi forced his wife to divorce him so that he would stay in the service. That charming anecdote is included in the book. Less charming is that after reunification, Germany opened the Stasi files, and you could see who informed on you. This gave birth to an entirely new career field: those who provide the files to the person asking, provide a little context, then hold their hands and are a shoulder to cry on when the person finds out their spouse was informing on them to the Stasi every week of their marriage.  

 Something I didn’t know is that several of the concentration camps that had been emptied of holocaust survivors at the close of WWII were back in active use by 1950 as camps for dissidents against the communist takeover in east Germany. Hundreds of thousands more died in those camps AFTER they were liberated, courtesy of the communist regime. 

 If you ever find yourself in Berlin, there is a museum at the most famous wall crossing, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, that highlights all the ways people tried to make it over the wall to freedom, those who succeeded, and those who died trying. Or if you can’t afford a trip to Germany, you can read The White Pill for 23.40 for hardcover or 9.99 for the kindle edition, and Malice covers these daring escapes and attempts for you.  

 And then the collapse starts. It’s not fast. The cracks had been forming since Stalin’s death, when Nikita Kruschev took over and delivered his “Secret Speech” which basically denounced everything about Stalinism. Now, Stalin died in 1953. It would be nearly 40 years for the collapse to complete. But that denunciation of Stalinism was the start. Even before the wall went up, the foundation had cracks in it. 

And in the west, the rise of two leaders, were the final wedges that burst apart the USSR at the seams. In America, we had Ronald Reagan. In the UK, they had Margaret Thatcher. And in Russia, in the 1980’s, they had Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s rising in the Communist Party did not have a propitious start. Both his grandparents had been sent to the camps as class enemies, and since the allegation followed bloodlines, Gorbachev was himself an outcast as a kid. No one wanted to have anything to do with a class traitor. But he eventually overcame that stigma, rose through the ranks, and was made President of the USSR, which means not just Russia, but Russia and all the satellite states. In the rising, Gorbachev became quite trusted with the party, and was able to travel in the west quite extensively.  

 In traveling, he saw that everything in the west was better than he’d been led to believe by the leaders in the party. And gradually, Gorbachev began a working relationship with Thatcher and Reagan. And one by one the satellite soviet states began voting for independence, and one by one Gorbachev let them leave.  

 I would be remiss if I don’t at least mention Romania and Nicolai and Elena Ceaucescu. I have to mention them. Elena is the fourth woman on the cover of the book. Thatcher, Goodman, Rand....Ceaucescu. Good rises over evil. The Ceaucescu’s were particularly malevolent and met an all too justified end at the hands of a firing squad on December 25, 1989. Among their crimes were draining the national treasury of Romania into their personal bank accounts, using the GDP of Romania to build an enormous mansion as a “Peoples Palace” which was really their private residence. They insisted that all unborn babies were property of the state and banned abortion and birth control. And is a woman had the horrifying trauma of a miscarriage, she better be prepared to defend it as a natural occurance. That whole section was like a real-life version of the Handmaid’s Tale, with the ironic twist of this was enforced by communist/leftist policies, not the religious right they want us all to fear.  

The USSR voted itself into oblivion on December 31, 1991, after every single member state, including Russia, voted on independence. Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia and held off a coup attempt concurrent with Gorbachev, who’s last official act was to disband the USSR.  

 So, why The White Pill? White Pill is a metaphor for hopefulness and optimism. And this book was full of the horrifying history of communism. The optimism and hopefulness is that while evil will always exist, good generally rises above, well above. Communism didn’t fall because we fought back so hard. I mean, we fought back. That’s how North Korea came to be, that’s what Vietnam was about, the Cuban Missile Crises... the whole, long, horrifying, 40-year history of The Cold War, was the West fighting against communism. But where the West won was the marketplace of ideas. Gorbachev was swayed by seeing how things really were in the west. Boris Yeltsin was primed and poised to oversee the referendum that pulled Russia out of the USSR because he SAW how rich and luxurious even the poorest people in America lived compared to some of the wealthiest in Russia.  

 Truth time folks: if you were blessed enough to be born in the United States, you ARE the 1%. Compared to the rest of the planet, you are the 1%. And the leaders of the USSR came to see this, which is why it dissolved mostly peacefully in the 1980’s. All of this happened as a result of exposure to western ideals. The evil that is communism cannot survive exposure to the light.   

Which is why Michael Malice fights so hard to expose it. He was born in the Ukraine. And his dedication is to his parents, who got him out, and for all the children who never made it. The White Pill is that there are those, like Malice, who continue to fight. James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Joe Rogan, Yeongmi Park....there are a lot of people who continue to fight. The knowledge is out there. Look it up, read the books, and you too can join the fight. And be part of The White Pill, that optimism and hope that the socialist/communist ideals that have been slowly creeping through the American Dream can be blown back by the light of truth.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on April 9, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.