Prager on Russia: “It’s a Mess. It’s a True Mess.”
Viewpoint
Audio By Carbonatix
Published: March 24, 2022 | Date of Source Audio: March 19, 2022
Transcribed and modified for publication from the original audio program
Dr. Sebastian Gorka discusses the state of humanity and freedom with Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager: I just realized you can almost say, “In every generation, there are Russian tanks in some city.”
Dr. Sebastian Gorka: Yeah. And as Ronald Reagan taught us, the loss of liberty, the extinction of liberty, is always but one generation away, Dennis.
Prager: God, is that true? And that leads to another one of my realizations in the recent past: Liberty is not a natural yearning in the human species. It is a value. People –
Gorka: Can I interrupt you here? I mean, this is what should have been so obvious, I thought, to the neoconservatives who said that we are going to go to war to liberate people because everybody shares our love of liberty, Dennis. How asinine is that?
Prager: Well, it's naïve. Look, half of America doesn't yearn to be free. Forget abroad. Half of America, like the rest of humanity, yearns to be taken care of. And that is the opposite of free. You're not free. The more you're taken care of, the less free you are. That's definitional. And yet people are totally okay with that. You pay my childcare, you pay my kids’ lunches and breakfasts, you pay my school bill, you pay my college tuition, you pay my healthcare, and I'll still be free?
Gorka: Absolutely. It is not a universal value. Not all civilizations are the same. …
Dr. Sebastian Gorka: … With your experience in Russia, what is the thing that you think is perhaps least understood by Americans which they should understand when it comes to this nation?
Dennis Prager: It's a very hard question to answer. Russians are a very complex people. I mean, you could say that every people are complex, but I don't think they're equally complex. See, I think Russia has both a superiority and an inferiority complex. And it's a duality that's very tough to live with. It causes a certain schizophrenic behavior. On the one hand, they basically know that they can't compete in achievements with the West. I mean, it's just a fact. But it doesn't matter. I mean, people in the West are not going around thinking, gee, who hasn't succeeded like me in Denmark? I mean, people are not thinking that way. But they do. So, there is that. But there is also the sense, “we are the deepest people in the world. We know human nature. We are deep. We have Dostoevsky to save, ‘to live is to suffer,’” a famous line from Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.” So, they have both. And there's also a tremendous sense of “we were once feared and significant, and then with the demise of the Soviet Union, we became just a poor country in the Eurasian continent.”
“They went from the czars to the commissars to thugs.”
Of course, had they embraced Western freedoms, including obviously economic freedom, they could have thrived much more. But they have no experience with freedom. So, they went from the czars to the commissars to thugs. These people with these half-billion-dollar yachts. Solely because they were at the right place at the right time to make the connections to take over what the Soviet government had owned. Now a bunch of oligarchs own it. So, it's a mess. It's a true mess.
