[00:00:14] Speaker A: Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast.
I'm so grateful some good friends enabled me to present them to you.
If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet House us to help preserve tibetan culture.
Tibet House is the Dalai Lama's cultural center in America.
All best wishes. Have a great day.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: This is episode 334, enlightening democracy here and now, part one.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Okay, good afternoon, everyone.
Here we are on March 11.
Actually, March 11 is the birthday of my younger brother, who I've lost touch with over some years, very fragmented, our little nuclear family. Three brothers.
Anyway, welcome all of you, my brothers, all my brothers and sisters.
Since Dala Lama says we should have.
We're all members of the one 8 billion person family, all brothers and sisters.
Okay. Since that's what he says, then you're my brothers and sisters. Those of you who are here, and I'm very happy to talk to you yesterday, four days ago, on Thursday, jolting Joe Biden. And I hope many of you saw that wonderful State of the Union address that he gave.
I really thought it was like in the spirit of FDR, in the spirit of Lincoln, actually.
And he's dealing with some, but in a way it was Lincoln before the civil war when they actually had come to overt blows and 600,000 people, which sort of equivalent to 6 million maybe today, considering the size of the populations, had just been killed on both sides by these idiots who want to fight against the idea that all humans are equal and that therefore democracy is a better way.
And having opposition out in the open and nonviolent and in form of dialogue and also not enslaving people and not abusing them and killing them and harming them, which is what that civil war was about, of course, the people in the south trying to keep their slaves and the people in the north repenting of having had slaves, mostly had slaves too in the north.
A lot of them, the Brits had already a few decades earlier had tried to stop slavery in England, although they still traded. I think there are some renegade captains still traded in them at that time. And they were probably among those who brought the middle passage, what they call the middle passage, bringing them across the ocean from Africa and of course the muslim traders and people who sold them as slaves and one tribe selling another.
So it was a general human, it's been human problem of abusing and trying to put people below them and then treat them as lesser humans. And democracy is a brilliant idea was tried in Greece. It existed also in indian republics before the empires there during Buddha's time it existed, and then it existed in the budhist community among them as a micro community, a countercultural community within other societies. And then in Tibet it existed in the theory of the dharma, where all human beings are equal and all human beings are also related to animals. And animals, humans were animals in previous lives, animals will be humans in future lives, and lives are beginningless. And therefore everybody's been sort of everything.
So that equality idea is there in original Buddha's teaching and it is there in the mendicant community. And it was there in a few cases of communities that actually became vulnerable to hierarchical, militarized communities in history, which is why people don't know about them.
They just think Buddhism was a hypocritical religion that pretends to being more than it actually is on the ground like all the other ones. Of course, Buddhism has been imperfect, of course, but originally it was all there. And therefore current Dalai lamas are really forceful about democracy and he convinced the king of the Bhutan to do the same.
So it's all complicated, but we are anyway right now in a planetary moment. Now also, this is, remember in the context you will remember from. I presume some of you have listened to my vimalakirti teachings. You might have read the Vimalakirti Sutra.
And you know that therefore in either tantric mysticism of Kalachakra or even in original buddhist exoteric teachings like in the Vimalakirti, this world here is a Buddha land. This is Muni's Buddha land. So the Buddha power is around us. It's all here. And it's not supposed to be a Nazi land and a place of killing and a place of really serious domination by evil people. Evil defined as people who want to subjugate other humans and not to mention animals and so on to their own domination and exploitation.
And that is not the Buddha way actually, nor is it the modern democratic way.
And then also of course, the planet as the battleground for the patriarchy of the last 4000 years where women's voices are crushed and therefore men fight all the time. And the sort of doggy dog and the human life is not really made into human life where you restrain your doggy dog type energies and emotions.
That's not a Buddha land. And this is shaky Muni's Buddha land. And it's been a long, slow fool revolution for 2500 years from the axial age until now on the whole planet, to bring beings into human beings, into a place where enlightenment education can be pursued universally with different cultures and religions and great ancient founders and wonderful environments and so forth. And also everybody having the benefit of the best environments because of our technology.
So in other words, we can grow food in remote places and ship it to places which is not so good for growing food. We can communicate and know what's going on everywhere.
We can decontaminate ourselves from racial prejudice, sexist prejudice and religious prejudice and realize of our commonality as humans and be all equal before the law in societies and make those societies essentially nonviolent with a sort of, maybe a little bit of a police force of a United nations genuine one, not one made by ex colonial powers who still keep control over everybody with their vetoes and things, but a real one which may have 3000 nations in it. That may be quite complicated. It may have centers in Asian, it has to have in every continent some kind of center, not just in New York city.
And we can have a planet of peace, but the planet.
The ongoing thing of having the occasional horrible war and the domination and then trying to have peace in some small sectors no longer will work because the greed of those countries where the oligarchs rise and can no longer be controlled.
Their greed is destroying the actual environment of the planet, extracting from the earth, polluting the earth and extracting from the earth its resources, polluting it and destroying its productivity. This can no longer go on. But they are not controllable. They have not been controlled by. Even democracies are not fully controlling them, but they have controlled them in certain contexts. And we know how to do it. We know social systems, the EU, the US, Japan, India mostly, and hopefully will continue to.
So we know that these democracies can work and especially freedom of speech. Freedom of information, accurate information, not misinterpreting freedom of speech, meaning everybody can lie in every way to brainwash other people. That's not freedom of speech. That's freedom of lie and helpful, beneficial speech. Freedom of beneficial speech and reason is what determines what is beneficial.
And then judges have to be reasonable judges like our present SCOTUS, the super crooks of the United States.
They are not being reasoning, they are turning reasoning on its head on the basis of arrogance. And they just say anything that sounds legalistic. And then people don't really, people know it's irrational what they say, but they kind of don't really want to tackle the fact that we have a bunch of corrupt people, not all of them, but a majority of corrupt people that are making reasoning not popular, not being the safeguards of talk. So that was four days ago. We were very thrilled by very strong jolting Joe, I call him. I borrowed the name from DiMaggio, the nickname Jolting Joe Biden, because he's younger than me, actually, but he is elderly and people think he has no strength.
And therefore they're like, the opposition is promoting that.
But he is really strong. He really was great. And then on the 10th, on Sunday, I went, yesterday, I had to go into the city and back to speak at the demonstration protest near the UN. Basically in front of the UN, they have a special Ralph bunch park or something between 46 and 47th all the way from First Avenue to Second Avenue to First Avenue. And it's kind of a nice park there and a blocked cross street.
And the Tibetans since 1960s have been stronger in 70s, when there are more numbers of Tibetans in America have been protesting there. The invasion of Tibet by the Chinese, where the Chinese have pulled a Putin's Ukraine number on the Tibetans, but in different circumstances, where population differential of 6 million to 600,000, the China Tibet population instead of just 140,000,000 to 46 million, which is the russian current Russian. Actually, Russia is really only 111,000,000. Actually, the 30 million are refedation republics who are just dominated by the White Russians, who consider themselves the real Russians, the ethnic Russians. So they're only 111 actually ethnic Russians. And they're much smaller than the former Zarist empire and then soviet empire. And now Putin trying to. The KGB trying to make it a big empire.
So I always go when I can and I give a speech not to give up hope that the 20th century, and apparently now this first part of 21st century involves the colonial empires releasing their grip over many, many people they think of as lesser people. British, French, Portuguese, spanish, Germans, were really not into it that much. Biggest european population, but not that much into it. But then they went nuts with the Nazis. Then you have Russians.
And these empires have been very destructive for hundreds of years for many people throughout the planet, and they are unraveling. The 20th century was their unraveling, and there's still a bit of unraveling to go.
And the latest one to big one to unravel is the russian one.
And they are fighting it desperately.
And then they are setting a bad example for the Chinese, who were never fully colonialized, and they had their own empire, but they were, in a way, but not by the Europeans. Or put it this way, they were colonialized by the Manchurians, and then the British just did business with the Manchurians. But the Russians, fake thing about the Chinese, fake thing about centuries of humiliation from the westerners is actually false. The ones who were dominated by the westerners are the southeast Asian and the Indians. But the foreigners never fully occupied China. They did business on the French, Hong Kong, Canton, Guangzhong, and Opium war, you know, smuggling opium into China, because their empire by the Manchus was weakened by their gentlemanly refusal to do warfare with modern technology.
So the Chinese are uncertain whether they're going to go for democracy. They tried to go for democracy up to the end of the mentor empire, and then because of japanese invasion and nationalist like, warlord behavior, and then communist empire, then they're sort of in the middle, influenced by Russia to be a communist empire. It was kind of confusing.
It's very confused. The planet is very today anyway. But those are the background of what I want to say or talk about today. So the first, I'm sorry, I'm very digressive. And also, this is different from. I'm not sort of just delivering a message, because I think you all in my sort of close supporters around the world, small number that we are, I think you are very aware of all of these things. And I'm putting a question to you. What can we do?
How can we align ourselves with this battle for democracy?
And when you think of how dire it is, we at least can be aware. That's all. So I want to share with you some things.
And what I say to the Tibetans on Sunday, basically, is don't give up hope in the only partial international law nations under international law system, which is still dominated by ex colonial powers, the Russian, the american, british, French and Chinese.
And these are empires that renowned for hundreds of years.
And the American is kind of this weird, ambivalent one. People talk about our empire, people in America, because we do have some freedom of speech. They talk about it like Chomsky, for example. He's been saying how evil we are for decades. They're sitting in MIT in a comfortable tenured chair and now retired and saying how we're the awful empire and Russia's better and all that often.
And I think that's funny, because he couldn't get away with that in the Soviet Union, and he couldn't get away with it. Maybe he could have very little hearing during the decade of Yeltsin and Gorbachev, from the advent of the KGB through Putin, but he couldn't do that. Now look at the killing their opposition.
So we have this ambivalence in a way. We support the British. We're a little bit sort of pseudo british empire. We have those who would like to be british empire.
And then we still american empire.
But we also want to rebel against all empires. And we led the planet's rebellion against all the empires. Our bodhisattvas, like Jefferson and Washington and Madison and Franklin and these people who were incarnated bodhisattvas for sure, all humans are equal, all men are equal. But they meant by that men and women human are equal.
And the pursuit of happiness for a population instead of just work for the bosses, that was unique. So anyway, we're now, however, we're under threat again, like we were in the civil war, very serious one, backed up by Russian KGB, very strong and chinese who want to behave like Russians and then sort of fitted into their sort of chinese empire idea and make it worldwide. We remain the son of heaven, center of the universe. Zhongwa, their word for China, means a central country.
So that's their ancient imperialism thing. And meanwhile, we're on the brink of the people in the world standing up and saying, we don't want any kinks, we don't want any bosses, because bosses realize that the people they're bossing don't like them and don't like being suppressed by them. So they feel resentful to them. So bosses become scared. When they become dictators or presidents for life, or kings or queens or whatever they are, they become really bad, mostly kings. And then therefore they want to make war with the neighboring boss. And so that keeps the resentments of the populations that they dominate and they extract and exploit, and that keeps them thinking there's an enemy over there and they better conquer them. And then the bosses remain strong as long as they can keep some sort of wartime footing and some sort of fear going in the culture.
And the people on the planet have information because of technology, and they travel everywhere and they're intermixed. And every city has every kind of temple and religion. Religions overcome some kind of prejudices, but they then become religious fanatics.
So now we can go beyond all of that. We can have shambhala, which was predicted in the Kalachakra, the wheel of the time machine tradition, and we can have new Jerusalem, we can have the return of the know. But they can interpret their religions in a way to think that the golden age is back and they can relax. They only have to change the theology slightly to say that their God or Buddha or who's not a God but is teacher of God, their gods, their Buddha or the secular nature is such that we don't have to be scared of each other. And we can be of one family, brother and sister, and we can realize that we can develop the education to enable people to internalize, not through indoctrination, but through understanding their interconnection with everybody else. And that's what we're looking at, that's what we're fighting for. And then in the meantime, the planet herself, the Bodhisattva goddess planet herself, is fed up with us polluting her and extracting and exploiting her and not caring for her. She's very generous to support us if we will keep her in balance, which we can do. We don't have to also accept the death of billions of us to do it. We can fit 8 billion here, probably ten, if we learn to share, and we learn to live intelligently with renewable energy system, with a healthy food system and medical system, which we are capable of having. We are smart.
Okay?
So that's a really wonderful context, but also very dramatic. Now, the last crisis that we face, which really we have to cope with this year, if we lose democracy in the US this year, if it's taken over by KGB employees, the Trumpites, who are actually treasonous traitors, who are not working for America, and over 150 of them are in the government, and they tried to overthrow it when they lost power in 1920, when the democratic force came back strongly.
And the other confused, brainwashed people, the core of them are not the 70 million who voted, but about 30 million, the ones who really want to go back to Nazi kind of domination and conquest, 30, 40 million, they're not the 70, but they manage to confuse with the misinformation and the robots and the conspiracy theories and misuse of media, misinterpretation of First Amendment and bad judgments, like Citizens United.
And they are coddled, of course, by oligarchs who like Nazi systems, because they could thrive during Nazi systems like Orban. They also take over economically. Once they take over politically, they take over economically, like Putin and all his oligarchs, Oban, now Orban and Hungary, and they're a bunch of many oligarchs there. And any other country where they do that, their clique becomes economic oligarchs, as well as political police state dictators.
And that's what they want here, and they want us to do that, because then there would be a transnational Nazi plan to keep the people, everybody's people, down, and they would use each other's, their own people, to support the other one. And they would have fake wars between them, of course, they'd appear to have conflicts with each other, which would then enable them to tell they're russian people and they're american people, they're european people, that the other people are your enemies.
Okay, the war is happening now, and it's a war on earth by the corporations, by the petropath petroleum psychopath. Petroleum sociopath that I've been talking with you about for some time. They want to go back on this whole renewable thing even though it's cheaper and it's more feasible. They claim it can't be because they don't monopolize all the extracted wealth from everybody. I mean, those private capital things, they go in, they buy up trailer parks, they don't let off the poor people, they squeeze the poorest people even more because they're never enough for them.
So it isn't that they only after the middle class, they have to every there. And they sort of act like, well, it's like von Ribbonchrop and the german nobles and the Krup and these industrial magnates. They supported Hitler to go after the socialists and the workers and the unions, and they thought that's all it would be. Meanwhile, Hitler destroyed the whole country by attacking every other.
So. And that's what our people will do. They'll pretend to attack each other, but that will be pretense.
But they fold us into that to some extent in the cold war, some of them.
And then when the cold war ended, they had no more excuse to do that. But then they really, actually, the cold war didn't really end because KGB didn't really give up their Soviet Union and the Russian Federation was not really independent republics. That's what I want to talk about, and I want to invite one colleague, but not in person, because, Andy, I don't know if he would agree, but there's a ukrainian guy named Dylan Kombalik. C o M B E l l I c k that I recommend to all of you. You can find his writing on medium, mostly about Ukraine, but English is good.
He doesn't live in Ukraine because I think he's scared of russian special ops people killing him.
I don't know where he is exactly, and I don't think he wants people to know. But he used to work for the Stark treaty thing, so he's really good about Russia. He knows how the whole thing is.
Of course, a little annoyed with them because of being ukrainian, and they've been terrible to the Ukrainians for centuries.
But he really perceives this war in the most accurate way, way more so than any foreign policy experts, any of them.
Any of the so called experts. He really sees it really well, and you can find it on medium and mainly reporting on that. But I have a lot of things that I've learned from him in addition to learning the other one, of course, that, you know, that I always recommend is Heather Cox Richardson, who writes on Substac, also free, although there's a paid level, but basically free, and does american history and talks about and puts the american thing in terms of our history, civil war and everything. Really fantastic. So I've learned a lot. I've woken up once I retired, cut out of my ivory tower, Sanskrit and ancient Tibet, ancient India and ancient Tibet, Buddha lands, mandalas and so on. I learned a lot about history and american history and things from these folks and this terrible war that we're in. So my first sort of point now. Okay, so now I'm ready to talk on the crisis. So to the Tibetans, I said, don't lose hope, because the Ukrainians are carrying the banner of fighting for freedom and they're going against the cynical, oligarchic Nazi approach, which is that dictators are more efficient in modern technological terms and dictators are what we want, which is a totally false projection from a militaristic social system to a world peace social system that doesn't fit.
Because dictator becomes totally scared. Of course, he scares everybody else in the society. Usually he, sometimes she, but usually he scares everybody else. But then he himself becomes totally scared of his own bodyguards and ever circles and circles of power under him, but he becomes scared of them. They also scared of him. So then they lie to him. So then he doesn't know what really is going on and then starts doing all insane things and destroys everything. So it's actually the least efficient, most destructive method of human governance in any time, actually. Really?
As my son instructed me, it took Hitler only 13 years to flatten the great country of Germany, completely flatten it by attacking everybody else and being something so out of control that they all punished all and getting Germans to follow him. And then everybody did a mind practically exterminating the Germans.
So I told them, don't be discouraged. The Dalai Lama is the one who understands the world, and he understands that it is kindness that everyone needs, and it is intelligence that everyone needs, and dialogue and resolving conflicts with speech, freedom of speech and democracy to make sure that differences are aired within a society. And majorities will rule, but they will not destroy minorities. They will rule with loyal opposition minority, who will then compete again to shift rule. If majorities become corrupt or get over, et cetera. That's the process, messy process of democracy that is more efficient and effective. When you have a planet filled with human individuals who want the best for themselves and their families and who realize that they can only have the best if others have the best, it doesn't mean that everyone will be exactly the same. There will be people who will have greater abilities, they will have greater knowledge, they will gain greater wealth, but if they do it properly, they will use that wealth to share and they will not become extreme in that way. And where they then become frightened that everybody's after them and we can live like that.
And communism ends up being fake. And it's where then the new dictator arises under the excuse that not everybody else is a communist. So therefore the dictator becomes a new king, basically new emperor. And we've seen how destructive that is.
Okay, so I told them that and they liked that. But they like it best when I speak in Tibetan in short sentences they don't like when I read. Although next year I promised them that I would have my speech because my Tibetan has become quite rusty.
But I speak it really fluently without accent and they love hearing that. And so I promised to have it translated into Tibetan. So I'm going to get someone to help me. I can translate much of it, but I would need help to make it more colloquial and read it to them in Tibetan. And the elder people will like that. And the young ones will be inspired by that to learn their own Tibetan, which they should do. There's now maybe 1000 Tibetans in the queens. They are AOC voters, by the way, which is very sweet, I think.
So United States of North America. But, okay, so now we're beginning with a series of propositions I want to put forward and I'll try not to digress too much. And I don't want to go on too long because I want you to be. This is in terms of questions to you. I think we should make a kind of informal, unorganized think tank between ourselves and we should come up with ideas and maybe we should create maybe a signal group or, I don't know, somebody can advise me, who knows better, the Internet where we can talk about things and people can give other ideas. I don't pretend to know everything and whatever. And I'm just doing my own study and I have plenty of time because I'm retired, but I don't have that much time because I'm trying to save tibetan culture all the time and Tibet. So I don't have that much time. Anyway, first thing we have to understand that in this crisis year, the United States of North America, as we should realize, is what it know. Mexicans don't like us calling the United States of America. They actually don't like it because they're another set of United States of America. And even the Canadians are united provinces of America within the commonwealth, but they're still a kind of United States. So they don't mind if we say the Mexicans don't mind if we say United States of North America, but I don't know, maybe the Canadians will. But we should think about that anyway.
USA, let's just call it. So the USA has been infiltrated by a new group.
We can call them the Russianazis. The Russianazis.
Or we could maybe call them the Z Nazis, since Putin is making z his thing. The Z Nazis.
But they are Nazis. And what we think of whenever people go Nazis, when russian. Limbaugh called the feminists feminine Nazis, that's what he know. He didn't mean they were Germans, right? Or national socialists. He meant they were. Know what you think about from the evil guys in the movies, holocaust movies.
There's even Nazis in Israel, there are Nazis in the muslim countries.
Have to realize that. So what we mean by Nazis are people who think they're higher than other people and who think that the lower people should be subjugated or killed by them if they're not going to be subjugated.
And even they think there are people who are impure, who are lesser beings who should be exterminated. It gets like that. They think that.
And that's really intolerable on this planet. Toleration is this wonderful. Doesn't mean we wouldn't even love. I mean, we have to love Putin.
We have to love. I was semi entransced by Putin because I was so annoyed with W. Bush at the beginning of this century. My stupidity. My wife told me from the first minute, don't do that. And so did Halema. But I still thought, well, at least he does martial arts. He rides horses and he goes fishing. He's not just like a party boy, like w.
Invading Iraq, useless under pretense of lies and doing maybe false flag thing in 911, his backers. Anyway, I don't know if he knew. I don't think he even knew what was going on.
But anyway, that's my mistake. But I do love these and I love them. All of them. We have to love them. We have to love Hitler. He's in hell somewhere. Some kind of hell, some Nazi hell, he's there from killing so many people.
He and Mao are like screaming together there at Stalin. They're all there Berea.
But we love them. We don't want them to do that. They made their world like that themselves.
And by crunching down, by disassociating themselves from other living beings so dramatically as to kill them, so many. And so it's numbers and we love them. But loving them doesn't mean surrendering to them, and it also means preventing them from getting them making more hells for themselves by destroying more people. We don't do it by hating them.
We do it by forcefully trying to prevent them from doing bad things, doing evil, and not being foolish and being intelligent about.
But our own country is invert. I mean, if those who, I presume many of you are Americans, if you are Europeans, you are EU. So in a way, you're in our country. Anywhere where there's a democracy is our country.
Remember, we're one human family beyond nationalism. We're into familyism, okay? We're into universalism. We're into one common human family. And once we get there, I think we'll take it more easy on the animals. And we won't do industrial farm killing. Slaughter some places, maybe they'll have to eat meat.
But ideally we can all give the planet a break and revert to plant food and excuse the cows and the people in the huge numbers of them anyway, billions and billions of them, chickens and cows and feet and make some beautiful other kind of beyond meat meat.
So point one, we are infiltrated by these people.
The christian nationalists are like that. They want to be christian Nazis and use all the Pentagon and onward christian soldiers and conquer everybody and make America indisputably the new empire, the global empire. They want the russian Nazis, the Z Nazis, the russian Nazis, they want to do that. And they studied us and they saw our civil war and they saw our race prejudice issues and they realized that's what they would work on.
But now we have to admit that we are infiltrated by them. So we should realize, Jeff Jordan, Ted Cruz, the 147 people who tried to prevent Biden from taking office, knowing full well the election was not stolen and fraudulent, but trying to pretend that it was, having prepared it ahead of time and even tried by riot to prevent the actual office shoal activity proceedings to institute it under the constitution, they should be deprived of the office. They are not allowed, they should be banned from office.
And they can be replaced. It's not a party thing. They can be replaced. By Republicans who didn't do that in the House and Senate, but they should be removed. And any judge who has gone against the Constitution, which they have done on the Supreme Court, three or four of them, should be removed because they made false reasoning that was rejected by right wing lawyers. Michael Lutig. We should create a special panel. People like Michael Lutig are both left and right people to judge whether they've been reasonable about our constitution.
And strangely, what's her name might stay because she's a know. Amy Comey Barrett. Interestingly, she might be okay, and the women are probably okay, but most of the guys are not. They're corporate, corrupt, or ideologically fanatic.
Around four or five of them have to be resigned. They don't have to be jailed, but they have to be resigned. And new ones appointed gradually, and the other ones should be marched out. Trump should be taken off the ballot, and anybody who's in his capturing of the Republican Party should be removed from that. And this should have been done by the Biden administration in 2021, after the insurrection, instead of just letting the courts catch some of the ones who'd actually broken and entered and killed, instead of that, only they should have started proceedings.
And the 14th Amendment, third section of meeting is not a court thing. Removing them from office doesn't send them to jail, but it just says, you broke your oath of office, you leave, then the oath of office becomes something enforceable. That's what 14th Amendment is about. And by doing what they did and publicly doing it, everybody knows that. But January 6, people found it out, and they have the evidence, all of thousands of pages, and that Congress then bans them, but that doesn't send them to jail, it just sends them home.
And then, under democratic procedures, members of the party that they weren't part of gets put on by governors and people, whoever does that, in whatever state process they have, but they can't put people who are part of the party to the lie, which is a continuing insurrection. The lie continues. The insurrection which Trump is doing, raised his millions doing it.
That would be following the US Constitution. But they're not going to do that. We know they decided not to do that. They somehow thought they would fade away, or they thought they could defeat them again at the polls. They kept muttering the slogan of will defeat them at the polls. But what they didn't realize by doing that, is that by doing that, they're letting them destroy the polls.
And the Supreme Court destroyed the Voting Rights act, the muscle of it. So then there's hundreds there's dozens or maybe 50, 60 provisions in state things blocking voting. So they block vote of blacks and Latinos and minorities and so forth.
So the polls are not the polls when you have an ongoing insurrection in the middle of it.
But I'm not really thinking, so then they didn't do it and then now it's campaign. So then there will be more strong. They actually should do it now even they really should, because what that is, is precipitating. That's preempting the insurrection that will occur.
If we get enough people to the polls to outvote them again, then they'll do another one. The guy's already said he will accept the result of the next election if he wins.
And Biden said, you can't have person do that if he wins. But he's not removing him from doing it. He's the executive who should be implementing what was legislated already. Supreme Court is lying to say the legislature has to do a new legislation. 14th amendment is their legislation.
The only thing these people who are banned can do is appeal to the Congress. And then if two thirds say that, well, we won't implement that to you, you can stay in office. They could. If two thirds would say that that's where the Congress comes in. They already legislated. That's just, they would make a vote on the appeal by, say, if you remove Johnson, who helped plan the invasion of the Congress, if you remove Jordan, who totally for it, if you move Josh Hawley, who egged them on, if you moved all those who voted not to certify the electors, if you moved all of them by what they did, that's easy.
And they would consider it. They would shout and scream that that was Nazis and fascists and things like that.
But then you replace them.
And then if you replace them, the House would still be controlled by Republicans, but they wouldn't be Trump Republicans. They wouldn't be insurrectionist Republicans because you wouldn't allow that. They would have to be Republicans who are ready to be to govern, not to just subtract the government. They would be take an oath of office and keep the oath of office. They would forget about debt ceilings.
That's against the oath of office to say, I'll bankrupt the government.
They would actually govern. They'd pass an immigration bill.
They'd have to negotiate because the margin is slim. The Senate is democratic, but it's also margin is slim. And they might be able to get rid of the filibuster, actually, though, because it's paralyzing government, that's not governing. And it was a slave owner's provision. And when that was publicly announced, I think the public would demand that it be stopped.
So that's ideal that we've got to set up here. That would be the ideal.
And that would be done by the executive based on the legislation of the amendment, 14th Amendment. And it would tell the Supreme Court to just butt out because civil suits, lawsuits in the courts were not appropriate. They're not allowed to lawsuit against the constitution and the legislature. They're not allowed to.
They only can go to the legislature about it.
Okay, so since that can happen, maybe we have to do what Biden is doing. Openly call them out for what they are, but not enforce the constitution on them out of the faith that he has in the goodness of the american heart as a whole, that they'll be voted out again. So he won't have to resort to what could be labeled strong armed tactics.
But that's what Lincoln did well after he was shot. Actually, that's what the Republicans did in 1868 and 18 say after the assassination of Lincoln. They did that because Johnson, that Johnson, not like our Johnson after Kennedy, but that Johnson after Lincoln was like a slave person.
So he allowed new Jim Crow to happen. And then how many blacks were hung after we won the civil. We're therefore treated like slaves with segregation and so forth. We can't let that kind of thing happen now. It won't be possible. And furthermore, planet won't let us do it. Because if oligarchs then take over behind a kind of trumpian american Nazi system of Trump being a dictator from day one and using the army to suppress protests, no more pussy marches. The Pentagon will stop the pussy march next time.
And if that were to happen on this planet, then the oil people couldn't be stopped. And then you're going to have major, then millions, then they will go live in their bunkers and millions and billions of people will be killed.
That's just a fact. That will happen.
So we can't let this happen. But we will have to try to go in this sort of a Biden appeasement manner, sort of pseudo appeasement, and yet trying to do it from the goodness of the hearts of people will be nice if it happened that way. And we hope it would. And we have to do. But so all we can do today is to know what's going on.
And here, one of the tibetan children had a wonderful sign on Sunday yesterday where they said no dictators. And they had a picture of Xi Jinping of course, because their Putin in Tibet is Xi is the Chinese Communist Party. That's the Russia's united party or whatever it's called, trying to take over the Ukraine. They took over Tibet long time ago and nobody helped them, not like Ukraine. They didn't know someone like Joe Biden giving them arms. They had Eisenhower trying to do a little something with some old guns, but hardly anything. Basically too scared of China. And the Brits completely betrayed them by saying it was internal matter, maybe because the Brits were still doing business in Hong Kong, hoping to do business with the Chinese. So the Brits were very profidious, as they were, as imperialists. They were, of course, huge imperialists. Right. In the past, we rebelled against them. Read Thomas Payne again. It's so wonderful to read. Really wonderful.
He's an anti disorder. We had no dictators, a kid and the no dictators, who are the dictators? Putin, Urban, who Trump just has at Mar a Lago now. Xi. Xi Jinping, Kim Jong un, of course, trump himself, but he's out of power. Then you have mile just got into Argentina. He's headed that way. Maduro is strongly in Venezuela. Bolsonaro was destroying the Amazon and he was there. He's out of power, but he's still a force there. I say, Netanyahu, is that those triumphalist settlers and crazy people who don't want to follow the UN resolution that established Israel, which also established the palestinian state, they are doing everything possible to avoid a two state solution to the holy land. And they are absolutely dictators and they have people who are even extermination types like Benghir Smotrich in that extremist government that he's founded. So I count Netanyahu as that. He also created Hamas. You have to know that he created it. And he publicly said, you can look it up. He publicly said, we need Hamas to weaken PLO so we can't be pressured to make a two state agreement. So we just say they're all terrorists and they should be exterminated and controlled and apartheided and whatever we want to do with them, because they are lesser people and they are currently now those people.
Ehut Barak, who was prime minister many times, was a very war hero, was a defense minister of Israel, was a true is great israeli hero. He said on our television, public television. He said a decent israeli government. After ten seven, they are 911. Ten seven. After ten seven should have resigned. Ten eight. And a new government would take over the repair and the reparation and the retaliation against Hamas for that. And also not only Hamas, Hamas and that one brotherhood and sister, some other islamist state of ISIS. There were other people who were worse, who were with them in that.
And that would have been done by Gantz leading a government of more peace oriented people, maybe two state people who would have not done this kind of carpet bombing, which is a crime, war crime for sure, blowing up hospitals. I mean, really, those are people who just want to take over the land and they're doing a kick out the people, drive them into Egypt, into the desert for sure.
So I don't want to argue that. I'm sorry for digressing on that. But then he is that kind of dictator. Ayatollah Kameni is that kind of dictator. The Hezbollah and Hamas, I don't even know their names are like that. And then unfortunately, in all these countries, there's oligarchs who use know. There's a nice article by Heather Cox about Orban and how once Orban had his illiberal state, his anti democratic state, which he got power to do through democracy, but then he undid the democracy, he destroyed the opposition.
That's how they do it. That's what they're trying to do here through Trump. The Russians are trying to do that to our country through Trump and Orban, naturally, who loves Putin, he's over here, like egging them on.
And the oligarchs like that because then they become cronies of the dictator and then they become really rich. And that's what happened in Russia.
KGB, oligarch cronies. And that's what happened. That's who put Hitler in the oligarchs in Germany, the big industrialists.
They said, let Hitler get rid of the socialists.
They didn't realize Hitler was going to destroy the whole country, which they always do.
So those no dictators, these dictators, we should never say Israel did bad or Palestinians did bad. We should call the people by name who are doing the bad.
Israel is good. A palestinian state would be their Iran is wonderful.
The iranian culture is a beautiful, wonderful culture. They're marvelous. And they just were taken over because we stupidly supported a stupid shah and our CIA taught them to have horrible secret police and they tortured people. And we overthrew their democratic government of Mozade in the 50s or bad behavior by RCIA in the past. So we're to blame really about that. We brought that on and now they're a real pain. But the point is, dictators in general suck, and that's a battle now. Now, in between we have to pray for Elon, that he doesn't join them.
We have to pray that teal doesn't join. The recurrent teal is currently, they both are helping Ukraine. Ukraine is the absolute spearhead of our defense against this Putin led bunch of dictator movement.
And then there's Modi. We pray. He doesn't want to be like, base. Parts of his base are like that. They want to be hindu fanatic dictators. But she's now reaching out more broadly because he's an intelligent person. And I actually think some of the sheikhs in the arab states could be good. I don't think cc is good, and I don't think the Muslim Brotherhood is good as opposed to him. But there should be some way of helping Egyptians find democracy or help of themselves doing it. Arab Spring was something, and this Tunisia, I don't give up all the Arabs at all.
And then in South America, there's something like that. And then we have a few of our american oligarchs out there in Silicon Valley, on our Wall street, and some of them have big bunkers somewhere in Kauai or in New Zealand or something. They're preparing for mass extermination on the planet. They're going to survive it. And that's why they're not stopping some of their bad behavior. And they're called preppers, I found out it's an expression. They're called, they're preparing for the apocalypse. But we hope that they won't do that. And some of our oligarchs will help this. We really need them to.
Okay.
What we're just trying to do now is understand this. And finally, I know I've gone on too long of all I wanted to do, although we're not in dialogue, I'm talking. But we have to realize that one of the things is that handicaps biden is that us has not declared war on Russia.
We're just supporting Ukraine, who's at war with Russia, but Russia has declared war on us. So that gives them an unfair advantage, actually, a little bit. And then we are also reluctant to really see how powerful they are. For example, the Mullen report totally indicted Trump as colluding with the Russians and supported by the Russians and the whole Trump movement. He did. And that bad district attorney, whatever his name was, who later renounced Trump, but he was behaving badly at that time, and he buried that in the Mueller report. And then Mueller himself said, I can't indict him because I'm doing a special counsel for a Department of justice that says they don't indict sitting president. So I can indict him, but I don't exonerate him. He's the uninited co conspirator of all these insurrectionists, and he's doing it in collusion with Russia. And he did say that and he did find evidence for that, definitely.
So we have to know that that's his backing, Trump's backing. And the other thing I think we should think about, and it's very important and I'm very proud of European Union. Begin. The Swiss just sent $8 billion of the interest accrued of some russian money. And that has to do with coming around to face the fact that Putin is not the legitimate head of the russian state.
Okay? He is not. And the reason is he kills his opposition.
And he admitted in his confrontation with Pregoshin that he, Putin is the boss of Pregoshin and that he had invested russian state money in the budget of Wagner. And Wagner is a terrorist group avowedly, and therefore he runs a terrorist organization. And that terrorist organization is connected to his secret police in Russia itself that is terrorizing the Russians.
So Kremlin is captured by terrorists. It's not Russia.
This is still the war on terror.
Okay? That's the Z. Nazis are terrorists. That would be good if we think that, if we think of developing that meme, I think. But maybe you guys don't agree, but it's very arguable. And it relates to another thing that I learned from Dylan Komblic, and I think it's really cool and I haven't researched it. Well, maybe some of you will.
And that is that according to, and this came up in his mind, I guess, by something that he noticed that the general media has not noticed. I hadn't hear about it from anywhere else, which was that in Sudan just recently, maybe last week, there were four ukrainian drone attacks in Sudan against the rapid defense force. Who are those genociding people who have been killing people like mad Janjaweed or whatever they call in are, and who rebelled against the even somewhat bad general who himself stymied the civilian revolution that was in Sudan a year or so ago, and now the two of them are fighting and they're creating unlivable conditions in Sudan. Between them, fight and Wagner is huge in Sudan.
So Russia is meddling in the Sudan.
And in West Africa, Chad, Central American Republic, Niger, three or four countries there that have seceded from general, even african state, democratic states, governance and military being under civilian. And so by the Ukrainians battling Wagner in Sudan in the middle of their own stress by Russia in Ukraine.
He noticed, or Dylan, maybe he knew before, but he mentioned that Russia's, that's part of Russia's gray zone warfare is using their terrorist know. Pakistan and state is similar. They use terrorists as a state instrument. So using that option to destabilize african countries and create floods of refugees and then push those refugees at the European Union and at America because the pushing of immigration crises in democratic countries strengthens right wing Nazi type, like a Nazi party in Germany that Russia funds.
The alternative for Deutsche Fund, the Marine le pen that wants to break up European Union in France, the five star in Italy that wants to break up, in other words. So this is part of Russia's strategy against the democracies and the world to weaken them, break up their treaties and their alliances and then pick them off one by one and then return Russia into being a grand imperial power. That's what Russia is doing. And that's amazing. And then think about it.
When they went in to support Assad in Syria, they totally do. Assad was nearly gone in Syria. And then Syria would have reverted, possibly eventually to being. Certainly the kurdish part in the east was democratic already. They're immediately making it democratic, the Kurds of eastern Syria, and they had some important oil resources, so they would have been fine. Finally. The Kurds would have. Might have had their own country, and then the Sunnis are a majority there. And then the Alawites would have retreated to the Mediterranean coast and an Assad would have to retreat. And then you could have had the beginnings of possible democracy in Syria. Instead of that, they destroyed the entire country and millions of refugees went everywhere, pushed that Europe flown to the borders of Poland and Finland and by Russia precisely to strengthen right wing parties in all those countries.
Hungary strengthen.
So that's what we're dealing with. We're dealing with global gray zone warfare.
If that's correct, which I think it is. It clicked in my head. I think it's absolutely correct.
And therefore, 300 billion of russian state money can be used to rebuild Ukraine and support Ukraine and take it away. We consider the Kremlin has been captured by a terrorist group and we have to treat them as a terrorist group. And they should not be allowed to wield the veto of the victors of the world war.
They should not. Ideally, again, that's ideal. We can't implement all that. I'm not saying that. But it's a matter of thinking that way and seeing it and understanding it. That's what it is. It's not a matter of that we can implement these sort of more ideal things. Although if we win in the fall, trying to do it by us observing democratic norms against people who are not observing them, if even in spite of the fact that we're like one arm tied behind our back, if we still win, which is what Biden's faith is, and I'm loyal there, if we still do win, then we have to go back to 14th Amendment, we have to clean up the Supreme Court. I mean, we have to do things to do stronger measures to institutionalize the Constitution in such a way that some bad actors can't misrepresent it the way they have. And we have to deal with freedom of speech issues and therefore misinformation in Internet and Facebook and all this kind of thing and bots.
There's a lot of work to be done on that kind I really have to do. And we have to definitely clean out all the insurrectionists out of the sitting government that are not cleaned out by voting. If somebody manages to keep a very republican state based on the old republican loyalty, which should not be given to the terrorist backed Trump party, which is not the real republican after all, it was the republican party that wrote the 14th amendment and legislated it. So it's not the Republican Party. The Lincoln people from the republican party should be the new Republican Party. We'll have new bunch of conservatives who will be loyal opposition, so therefore they will allow governance when they lose. And they will have to adopt programs for the people in order to compete, rather than think they can stop the people from voting and then impose on them things that the people don't want, which is what they're doing now.
Okay, so I think that's really all.
And except one last piece of the vision that, again, I have to credit Dell and Kambalik, and I'll come back maybe with another one, but I don't want to go any longer on this one today.
But the next part of it is that imagine.
And here I'm going to claim a little bit iracular status slightly, because I had a vision in 1987 when I was in, during my first visit to the People's Republic of China, which I was on my way to Tibet, actually. I didn't want to go to PRC, but of course, I also love chinese people. I learned the language in Hakali and have forgotten too much, but I did. And I got to love the language, and I love the culture and the people. I do. And they were Buddhists for thousands of years. A great chan masters, awesome.
And really one beautiful people and beautiful country. And I love Xi Jinping. And I'm so disappointed. He's going in the Mao direction. He has to go in the Mao direction. I really am. I love the guy. I dreamed about him. I had conversation with him in dream. Anyway, I had a reckless thing in 1887 where the chinese dictator. I don't know if it was Xi. I know person. They were invading Siberia.
So I was so shocked because I had no such thought. I was on my way to Tibet. I was praying for, you know, mutual know, and suddenly I was in the middle of the war room and they were invading Siberia, and people were calling in help. The Russians themselves were calling in help from. I thought it was the Russians, but maybe it was the local countries there, because the vision is Eurasia and the former russian empire, a genuine Commonwealth like the british empire turned to, which is like Kazakhstan and Tzjikesan and Uzbekistan and so forth, where they opted not to be in the russian federation because they didn't trust the Russians, the KGB not to undo the independence of the know. The Ukrainians were fooled in giving up their nukes, for example, by saying Russia would never invade know. And so they gave up their nukes and let the Russians keep theirs. It was so stupid. Baker and Bush won, and they're really stupid to get the Ukrainians to not listen to the Ukraine. Bush won. That's his fault. And, oh, yeah, you guys just let the Russians have all the ukrainian bombs there that you had on your land. They really brought to Russians. You used to be russian. Aren't you really russian? He was like that. I was really stupid.
But anyway, they all become individual. I didn't have the ideas that I do now. But now I know there will be 32 countries in the former russian empire, which Russia will be a bigger one. Biggest one, around 100 million, maybe 110,000,000 or maybe 100 million because their conditions have been so bad by the terrorists who control them. Their living condition is so bad. Their population is declining dramatically. But anyway, they're about 100 million. So the biggest european country will be Moscovia or whatever, or they can call that Russia if they want.
Moscow, Petersburg, that area, about 100 million people.
And then 31 other countries. Boyatia, Kalmikia, Yakutia, Uralia. There's all kinds of other countries, Bash, Kortistan, wonderful countries. And they'll all be independent republics, but in a commonwealth. And they'll need help, of course, because they were extracted and they were impoverished by being dominated by the russian empire, and they're young, were very much killed now by this Asaline Ukrainian war, this very evil war invasion done by him.
And it will be beautiful, but China was invading, and then we have to defend them against that last empire. There could be then one more round like the ukrainian one, where the world NATO, Japan, South Korea, the North Korea, and China will be trying to do the. They're trying to dominate everybody. Maybe that's what I had as a to, but I don't want to get into that. But I will claim that a little bit Iraq, because it was truly. I've had a few things like that in my life. Occasionally I get like that and I get taken over and see something that I wasn't expecting. And we defend Lake Baikal and Buryatia and outer Mongolia in that time. We do.
We were about to. So it was just a short visit. Maybe it was just in people's minds in the commanders of those days in China, and it doesn't have to happen. Let's hope so.
Okay. But anyway, the deconstruction of the russian empire, which we don't notice as an empire. We think of it as just Russia, but it was an empire and is an empire, and we are against empires. They're not good in the 21st century. Decentralized, localized, environmentally sensitive people who live in the place where they're governing is what we need. And our western diplomats are used to this, stupidly. One who, I won't mention his name, a late person, but someone was a friend of mine, and I said that self determination has to become a human right.
It's in the UN charter. Self determination as a human right. But the human rights people go, oh, no, we can't do self determination. It's too inconvenient, because too many nations who are powerful in the UN, they have subordinated minority populations. And this relates to something else I only learned recently, this on my own research.
I never knew this, and I bet you don't. When different african countries and asian countries got out of this and that empire and applied to join UN, different minority groups in those nations. And the one that was very famous in the 50s was the Igbo people in Nigeria, which led to the know, like massacres. And the biafra people were Igbo. And they knew that dominant tribes and muslim converted tribes in the northern who were a majority in one nation, which worked as a nation in Britain under the British, but wouldn't work as a single nation because they would oppress the Igbo too much. They applied to be the Biafran nation, and then they were totally atrocitized, ethnicided, whatever, by the larger nigerian nation. And the UN said, no, we won't have this kind of self determination going on in smaller states. We want you to apply under the borders you had under colonialism. So that's how Iraq became an unstable country with Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, Arabs, Shiites, Arabs, Sunnis, and Kurds, like, really three different groups that were not naturally natural government together. But that's because that was the divide and conquer plan of the colonialists. So they had to apply to the UN to be a nation, like, in the same entities they were under the colonialists, which created tremendous instability, which then gave the western powers, sort of previously colonial powers, still ability to interfere with them in various ways, exploit them.
I didn't know that. But that's part of the problems that we have of not really coming to a proper 21st century, environmentalistic, decentralized, non imperialist, non colonialist governments governing governance, which is what we need to have international law, okay?
Not empires and leftover empires parading and pretending to be a nation state. All right, so that's the last vision. Russia becomes patwork quilt of free nations throughout Eurasia, each one focused on making their own region livable and nice for people and getting help from previous exploiters to do so. And businesses, good businesses, altruistic businesses, multi stakeholder businesses, as there still.
So I just leave you with that vision, a very colorful map of Eurasia, and no one huge, dominating person like that. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. All the best. This is my March 10 extension talk. And my flava ukrainia talk related to Bergello. The equivalent for that is Bergello, which means made Tibet triumph. The tibetan word for Tibet is bur. So bergello.
And then this will enable. Of course, finally, remember, we are sort of trying to do enlightenment studies, and this will then open up the world to educate for enlightenment under whatever cultural matrix. Because the Enlightenment spark is in every culture and as in every being, without having to switch religions or switch cultures or whatever it is, just upgrade every culture. That's all, including a tibetan culture, will be upgraded, too. Okay. All right. All the best. Gerdi and Yoduda, by the virtue of this, may I quickly become enlightened Manjushri to make everybody else equally enlightened, manjushris and Taras. Okay, all the best. Bye. Thank you.
[01:17:47] Speaker B: The Bob Thurman podcast is produced through Creative Commons. No derivatives license. Please be sure to, like, share and repost on your favorite social media platforms, and it's brought to you in part through the generous support of the Tibet House us Menla membership community and listeners like you. To learn more about the benefits of Tibet House membership, please visit our
[email protected] menla.org and Bob thurman.com.
Tashi Delek and thanks for tuning in.
