America on the Brink of War With Venezuela

25:10So one scenario that keeps me up at night is that the bombing begins, some kind of insurrection starts to be worked out. the Maludo regime picks up on who is plotting against it, and then the bombing stops before that's had a chance to play itself out. I mean, we could just be easing the path for Maludo to purge the next set of unreliable elements inside the armed forces. Does the Maduro regime have any capability to or interest in retaliating against the United States? Because they use terrorist tactics. Presumably, some of the people who, those 8 million people who migrated here, have some kind of loyalties back home and might be activated in some way.

25:52Is that a reasonable thing or does that seem too fancy a speculation? I know people take the possibility very seriously, particularly because back during the Chavez years, there was this move by the regime to buy thousands, I think over 5 ,000 of these shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles, which have been sloshing around Venezuela for a long time, you can very easily imagine one of those being snuck under a few bags of cocaine on one of these boats that have been going north. I mean, who is to say that those aren't in the US now? That would be extremely risky for the Maduro regime. I don't think it's a strategically logical thing for them to do.

26:34And illogical as this regime is, one thing that they don't make mistakes about is on how to stay in power. This is the one thing that they know how to do and that they're serious about and good at. So I do think it's fanciful. I wouldn't entirely rule it out as a possibility. This might be something that Maduro would consider as a very last resort. What happens in Venezuela if this whole thing just sort of deflated? Because one of the things that happens a lot with Trump is there's a lot of huffing, a lot of puffing. They move a lot of boats around and then he gets bored, he gets distracted. Or there's a factional fight, as you say, there are people in this administration who want to do business with the regime.

27:15There's nothing that Trump likes more than a corrupt dictator. And Venezuela's got like one of the world heavyweight champion corrupt dictators. So it's kind of weird that this one isn't his friend when so many of the others are his friends. If it just deflates and Trump says, okay, I scared them and I've got some, would there be a feeling of relief in Venezuela? Are people sort of hoping for some kind of liberation, however expensive it is? it's a really hard question i think that should be really our base scenario that is what i think is most likely to to happen because the the risks involved in the military strike are so high i don't just they just they just are hoping to scare people i mean trump is sort of a a bully who that but who then frightens himself right right um it might be that the point is simply that the build-up itself is is meant to set off some kind of insurrection in venezuela And if that doesn't happen, maybe they'll just go on to the next thing.

28:09I mean, I suppose the sailors on the USS Gerald Ford will be annoyed to have been brought from the Mediterranean, but that could certainly happen. But I think the more interesting possibility here is that what they're looking for is regime change, but not necessarily a regime change towards a democracy, but more a regime change towards an extractive military dictatorship that wraps itself up in the Stars and Stripes. I think they would like that. It's too difficult for Maduro himself, being a Cuban asset and having spent his entire career attacking the United States, to make that pivot. I don't think Marco Rubio and other players in the Trump administration would accept that.

28:54But you can just about imagine a future where some lieutenant colonel comes up the ranks, deposes Maduro, says, you know, we are pro-American now and starts to loot the country in cahoots with the claptic ads of the North. Yeah. Well, there's one other scenario, and this is not a Venezuela-specific one. One of the things that's been very different about Trump too has been Trump is creating these military crises or seeming military crises in order to justify actions at home. I mean, I don't know that he's convinced anybody, but the reason we have mass troops in our streets bundling people off without show ID with brutal tactics is Trump says we've got a crisis at home.

29:33There are these deployments of troops to try to get us used to the idea of a militarization of policing in American cities. There's the blowing up of boats with no form of process of any kind, no form of law, no authorization by Congress. This whole deployment in the Caribbean is happening without show of Congress. There have been two large deployments in the Caribbean, I guess, in the past 40 years. One is the Grenada invasion of 1983, when the Reagan administration toppled a dictator who was building a big airstrip to receive Cuban and Russian planes on Grenada. The Reagan administration went to the trouble of getting a resolution from their neighbors.

30:13They sent 1 ,900 Americans to the island and 300 Jamaican and Barbadian troops as well. Not because the Jamaicans and Barbadians were needed for the extra firepower, but to show, look, this is a collective action. in 1990 or 91, there was an invasion of Panama to depose the dictator Noriega. There was a court order from an American court saying he had been indicted for various drug smuggling offenses. And the Bush administration would say, this is not just the president acting on his own whim. He was executing a valid court order. And there's more going on in both cases, obviously, but there was some form of justification to both the United States population and to the world.

30:48And that seems entirely absent this time. And maybe that's also the point is to say, where the president is acknowledging no limits at all on his ability to use force outside the borders of the United States or inside the borders of the United States. What can I say? The scary part about that, and I think that's strange as a Venezuelan, watching the United States act like this, is that it's so reminiscent to the kind of tactics that Chavez and Meludo used to consolidate power themselves back in the day. Right. So you find an unwritten rule and you break it and you break it just to show that you can break it and to destroy the president and to demonstrate your power and your ability to just not care to your opponents.

31:34And it's an intimidation tactic. We should remember that Nicolás Maduro stayed in power in 2024 after he lost an election by a more than two to one margin by simply announcing that he had won on the basis of nothing. You know, never publishing district by district or voting center by voting center tallies as had been done in every election in Venezuela since the 1950s. Now, why do you do that? To convince people that you actually won? And no, of course, everybody knows that he didn't win. To demonstrate your power to behave in thoroughly unreasonable ways is so you intimidate people. Let's give Americans a tour of the country that Venezuela was.

32:16Because I think Americans, there's an old saying, Americans will do anything for Latin America except read about it. So I don't think Americans may have a good understanding of the long history of political stability that once prevailed in Venezuela. and the very high levels of prosperity that were the case through most of the post-war period. So tell us a little bit about Venezuela in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Well, I want to start further back than that, because beginning in 1925, from 1925 to 1975, Venezuela had the fastest rising standard of living of any country in the world. It went from being this malarial, very poor, almost entirely illiterate country to being a place where Spanish people and Italian people in the post-war period wanted to emigrate to.

33:02We got rid of our last dictatorship, well, except for the present crop, in 1958, just a few months before the Cuban Revolution came to power. Actually, they're pretty much contemporaneous, the Cuban Revolution and Venezuelan democratization. And for 40 years, from 1958 to 1998, Venezuela was a multi-party democracy. Parties alternated peacefully in power. There were actual human rights. There was actual freedom of speech. You could say what you wanted. But at the same time, for much of that period, there was this process of middle class creation where thanks to universal free education through university level, the children of peasants really and factory workers got university educations and became middle class and joined these stable, broad-based, center-left and center-right political parties.

33:54Venezuela was a country that successive American administrations pointed to as a demonstration of what was possible if you stepped off of this Cold War treadmill of leftist guerrillas and right-wing dictatorships that affected most of the region. And as I said before, we were receiving political asylum seekers from all across the region because Venezuela was a rich, stable democracy. Growing up, it never once occurred to me that we could end up where we are today. We were supposed to be the leaders, the shining beacon for other countries in Latin America that were democratizing. And indeed, we had things like government think tanks that would advise other Latin American governments on how to democratize.

34:43Venezuelan diplomats helped negotiate the end of several Central American civil wars in the 1970s and 80s because they were seen as a trusted outside partner that was democratic but not entirely beholden to the United States. So the reversal of fortunes is absolutely massive. What was the crack in the society into which Hugo Chavez was able to insert himself? Where did he come from? How and why did he succeed? Many books have been written about this, and it's a subject of much controversy, but I'll tell you my take. My take is that after the 1973 oil crisis for you, which is the oil bonanza for us in 1978, you went from this period where oil had been a useful source of foreign exchange, but a stable source of foreign exchange and the kind of predictable free money that you could build prosperity on to this much more pronounced boom and bust cycle where oil revenues were very high one year, very low the next year.

35:43And so that fed through to a Venezuelan economy that went into these very strong boom and bust cycles. We would take on a lot of debt when oil prices were high and then couldn't pay it when oil prices were low. And so you put this together and it meant that the mechanisms of middle-class formation that had been running from the 1920s to the 1970s broke down by the early 1980s and especially the early 1990s, the sense that Venezuelans had had for two generations that you will live better than your parents was beginning to break down. And that's when Hugo Chavez came into the scene, guns blazing, trying to take over the government by force in a bloody coup in 1992, which is how we all first heard about him.

36:27Chavez capitalized on this frustration, not of very poor people, really, but of people who had a foothold in the middle class but were losing that foothold. And those are the people that he initially talked to. When you actually, there's been some very interesting research. My friend Dorothy Kronick at UC Berkeley has done showing that the initial Chavez coalition was not mostly made up of poor people. It was made up of urban, lower middle class people who were very annoyed that they were not, no longer rising the way they had been expected. And so he tries to take power for the first time violently, then competes, and seems to have won the first time freely and fairly.

37:06And many, not just the first time. He won many elections, actually, freely. How fairly is more of a debate. It happened also that soon after he came to power in 1998, by 2003, 2004, 2005, oil prices began to go up again quite fast. And Venezuela is such an oil-dependent economy that when you had a lot of oil money sloshing around the country, he could afford a consumption boom. So that the first 10 years of the 21st century were really bonanza years in Venezuela. Same as in Russia. And he had the same kind of method as Putin. I mean, I remember when I was there in 2010, when things were still, I mean, the lights were going out, the country was falling, visibly falling apart, but there was still a sort of a sheen of prosperity.

37:57There was food everywhere that he had these call in shows where he would call you, like give people a mobile home. He would give them a dishwasher and it came as a gift of the president. It's very Trumpy. It's funny that they dislike each other so much when Trump seems to have learned so much from him. Or maybe maybe they all go to the same thug dictator school. I mean, the techniques are clearly parallel. And that's what's so hard for me to even process, David, because all through that time, I was vaguely embarrassed that Venezuela had become such a throwback. Now this country's decent, like actual serious countries don't behave this way anymore.

38:38It never for a second occurred to me that Venezuela was going to be a precursor or a forerunner. to the kinds of techniques that not just Trump, but Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen and all these, and Erdogan in Turkey, that this populist wave runs on techniques that Chavez was doing already in the 1990s. Chavez was a large character. He played the part of the manly, tough guy. And he seemed to, I mean, he went on, he gave enormously long speeches, but some people seem genuinely to have liked him. His successor, Maduro, just seems like a hack, just like a faceless... How does he hold power without this apparatus of charisma that Chavez was able to mobilize?

39:28It's important to remember the circumstances under which Chavez died in March 2013. He'd been diagnosed with cancer a couple of years earlier. He'd been offered high-tech care everywhere from Sao Paulo to Lebanon to Spain. He had his choice of the best cancer care in the world, but he chose to go to Cuba. Why? Because he trusted the Cubans, and he trusted Fidel Castro more than anyone else. And so for most of the last two years of his life, Chavez, who had forged an extraordinarily close relationship, he described it as a merger of two revolutions at one point. He at one point said that Cuba and Venezuela were two different governments, but only one revolution.

40:09So he trusted the Cubans more than anyone else. And for those last two years of his life, his connection with Venezuela was mediated through Cuban intelligence because he was physically in Havana receiving cancer care for most of that time. And lo and behold, who eventually gets picked as his chosen successor, the most reliable Cuban agent in all of the Venezuelan elite. Nicolás Maduro, he didn't go to university. He spent two years in Havana at the School of Political Cadres that the Cubans had been running on the model of the Patrick Lumumba University in Moscow. He joined the Liga Socialista, which was a specifically niche pro-Cuban political party in Venezuela when he was a teenager.

40:57So he's been a Cuban asset literally his entire life. And the Cubans are very good at keeping power for a kind of leftist dictatorship in Latin America. They know exactly how to do it. They've exported the techniques that Cuban intelligence has been using for its entire existence to Venezuela. Cuban agents man the top post in Nicolás Maduro's intelligence shop inside the presidential palace. So, you know, you sound slightly paranoid when you describe it this way, and it is genuinely very weird. You don't usually hear about a smaller, weaker, poorer country, in effect, sort of colonizing and parasitizing a larger, richer, more powerful country.

41:44But that is what has happened. And give us a sense on the global repressiveness sweepstakes. How repressive is the Venezuelan regime, both in its Chavez iteration and now in its Maduro? Let's put it bluntly. I mean, how many people are in political prisons, do you think? How many people have been done to death? We see there are 8 million refugees, but that's not entirely the regime's doing or intended doing. So what's hard to, the difficult bit about that question is to really convey in a short answer how gradual the ratcheting has been. Because for a long time, between 2000 and 2012, Venezuela was, political scientists described it as a hybrid regime.

42:29So the same with their war elections, votes were counted openly. Chavez did keep winning those elections. There was freedom of speech at the beginning and then less and less as time went on. The space for actual free thought and free expression and political organizing narrowed very gradually over now 27 years since Chavez was first elected. So I think the true breaking point came in 2017. So Maduro came to power in 2013. in his fourth year in power, there was a large set of street protests. People maybe remember the images from the news of these university kids and their homemade shields and homemade gas masks, like juking it out with the security forces who were beating them and tear gassing them and rounding them up and throwing them in jail.

43:21That seems to have been the point at which Maduro realized that the facade of a democracy is too costly to me right now to keep up, and we're just going to go full dictatorial. So from 2017, especially after 2019 with maximum pressure and with COVID, which was an excellent pretext for farther authoritarian crackdowns, it really ended. The possibility to write freely in Venezuela at Caracas Chronicles, it became almost impossible to do it. Now, there are checkpoints all over Venezuela. If you drive from not even just one Venezuelan city to another, but even inside Caracas and the major cities, there are checkpoints where police or military or people in uniform, so you don't know who they are, will stop you.

44:06We'll go through your stuff. We'll go through your cell phone. We'll look through your WhatsApp and your email to try to find anything that could be anti-regime. And if they find it, we'll trundle you off to jail. So people I talk to in Venezuela tell me that there's this now ritual that they have to do before they go out anywhere. They have to look through their phone, make sure that there's nothing on that that's going to get them in trouble and delete it if it is there. There are dozens of military political prisoners, a few hundred civilian political prisoners. It's not a huge gulag state, I wouldn't say.

44:43But what there is is this understanding, especially since 2019, 2020, that you're not allowed to protest. You're not allowed to speak openly. People know this and people behave accordingly. The people who stayed behind knew that this is what they were signing up to. The people who left were people who were unwilling to live in those conditions. All right. So let's recapitulate as we're coming to the end of our time. this American fleet in the Caribbean Sea threatening Venezuela outcomes. So one is huff, puff, and Trump gets bored or declares victory and says, I've got something. Is there a possibility of a negotiated settlement between the United States and Maduro?

45:20Is that something that Maduro could do? I'd never say never, but it sure doesn't seem to be in the cards now. Okay. So another option is that they try to foment some kind of coup d 'etat either outside the regime from the military or within the regime. Is there any professional military or is the military completely political. Entirely political at this point. So you'd have to find someone who was a Maduro loyalist who was willing to turn against them. There's not some... But that's not as crazy as it sounds because most... Venezuela has been a kleptocratic military dictatorship for years now, right?

45:54So the people who have reached the top of the military hierarchy are people who are there largely motivated by graft and the possibility to enrich themselves. And the American calculus, Marco Rubio's calculus seems to be these guys are going to want to cut a deal because they didn't get into this to fight the United States militarily. They got into this because they wanted fancy cars and expensive homes. And we can offer. So that's not unfamiliar.

46:25We got a few of those.

46:29okay so so that's so one so scenario one is they back down or there's maybe a form of a deal but probably not maybe just a backing down scenario two is the united states hopes for a coup by someone whom maduro trusts who turns on him i'm failing all of that we look like we're in for a barrage of air and naval strikes against targets that don't seem very connected to the way power is held in Venezuela. Well, no, I mean, it is possible that the Americans really decide to attack the military's infrastructure and go after all the bases and the naval bases and blow up the places where these military officers live.

47:05So I'm not discounting that at all. That's a very live possibility. And the point seems to be that the threat of that is meant to induce them to revolt. Yeah. But if they do do that, does that break the, I mean, the guys at the checkpoints, Do they stop coming to work or are they still there just because there's been some wreckage of the officers' base housing? I mean, we're into the twilight zone here. There's no good way to answer that question until you see it in action. What does seem to be true is that a lot of the spoils from this kleptocracy are highly concentrated in the pockets of maybe 30 or 35 generals.

47:44So not a lot of it seems to filter down to colonels and captains and those junior officers. And in Latin America, everybody knows in Latin America, every successful revolt begins with the frustration of junior officers. Marco Rubio definitely understands this, right? So there is this sense that it's not an entirely crazy possibility. It's just nothing like this has ever worked on the basis of just an air bombardment. Let me ask you a couple of questions about the domestic U.S. politics of this, as you see it from all the way off in Tokyo. There was a time when Chavez was kind of a hero to the global left.

48:19The kind of people who today like Hamas and Gaza used to like Chavez. And once the kind of demonstrations that you see on behalf of Hamas and Gaza, you might have seen on behalf, not as big, but you might have seen something, if not in the United States, and certainly in Europe and other places in Latin America. Is that over? Is the Chavez romance finished? Oh, man. Those guys all whistled away from the crime scene and tried to scrub it from their CVs because it's just a straight up embarrassment. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people in England and North America got caught up in that. But you wouldn't see big protests in Mexico City on behalf of Maduro.

48:56Oh, no. I mean, Maduro is an attack line. Venezuela has become an attack line in political ads around Latin America. Don't vote for that guy. He's a Maduro. Don't vote for them. They'll turn us into a Venezuela. You have to remember that it's not just the U.S. where these large number of migrants and Venezuelan migrants, penniless, often in bad health and needing a lot of assistance, ended up. Venezuelan migrant flows destabilized pretty much the entire region. Colombia took 3 million people? Peru, Chile, Argentina, all of Central America, Mexico. Latin Americans are not under any illusion that the Meludo regime is anything other than what it is.

49:40As we're having this conversation, realize if we were sitting around in the Trump situation room, who at that table would think in these what happens next? And Rubio, I think, would, is capable of that. Who else? I don't think the issue is so much in Latin America. I think the issue is more China-Taiwan, really, in a way. It's your asserting spheres of influence view of power globally. And how does Beijing look at that? On what basis do you oppose a move on Taiwan after you've done something like this? Well, I think that does seem to be one of the big themes of this administration, is the idea that the United States is supposed to be something more.

50:23They just don't buy it. As far as Trump's concerned, the Chinese basically have the right idea to everything. They have the right idea to how to manage an economy. They have a right idea how to manage foreign relations. They have the right idea about how rich your leader should be. The Russians are even better on how rich your leader should be. And he likes their taste in interior decoration. So it's just we're making the United States more like dictatorships around the world. And although Although the United States has, let's be blunt about this, often practiced in reality, spheres of influence in Latin America, since World War II, since the 1930s, there's always been some project to bring other stakeholders along, other Latin American countries, other partners to use some infrastructure to get permission from domestic people in the United States to get some kind of structure of international permission.

51:12So it's not just gunboat diplomacy, but we're now back to the days of gunboat diplomacy, it looks like. If you listen closely to Lindsey Graham speaking on this in recent days, he's clearly talking about the possibility of a U.S. military move against Venezuela and Colombia. Because Trump is now also annoyed at Gustavo Petro, who is a very different kind of leftist leader, properly democratically elected, loopy in his own way, but a necessary ally on any strategy having to do with Venezuela. But if you're also talking about attacking Colombia at the same time, it's very hard to imagine how you get any sort of sympathy from Brazil.

51:52And Colombia is a for real democracy and has been one since the 1990s. Alternations in power. And an American ally. Right. Historically tilts toward the center right or even the far right sometimes currently has a left of center president. He's in his last year, right? Yes. And he's probably on his way out and is going to be replaced by a right or center right candidate. And Colombia has been a very valuable and brave ally of the United States against narco-terrorists, narco-traffickers. They're not narco-terrorists. I'm sorry, the brain rot from the Trump administration, narco-traffickers at tremendous cost of life in Colombia.

52:27So we're bombing them. Yeah, no, no, no. This is where you really see the total, this is Senator Graham speaking and not necessarily the administration, but the fact that it's conceivable to speak in that way about this issue in Washington now really shows you there's no strategic anything here. Because if you're taking this seriously, you would understand that the place that has actual human and physical connectivity with the Amazon border with Brazil is a jungle. There's like one road. There are no people. You can't really operate from there. If you were wanting to stage a humanitarian operation or anything at all having to do with Venezuela, you would have to do it through Colombia, through your ally Colombia.

53:11So you are going to need that relationship to be strong. But if you get into a Twitter argument with the Colombian president and start threatening him, well. Yeah. And not that these things matter anymore, but there's also a U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement. they're bound in all kinds of regional undertakings with the United States. As you say, it's an ally. And again, that doesn't mean much anymore, but it used to once upon a time, maybe it someday will again. All right. Well, let us hope it's huffing and puffing and that there's no loss of life and nothing too stupid happens. That's always kind of a wan hope in today's Washington, but let's hope.

53:49Nothing too stupid, nothing too brutal. And let's hope that Colombia and Venezuela discover a prosperous future and Venezuela returns to democracy the right way by the actions of its own people asserting their own strength and their own ideals on their own initiative. It's such a pleasure always to talk to you. I learn so much from you every time we speak. Thank you for making time. Thank you, David.

54:23for smartphones, for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

54:53I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way.

55:33Find it wherever you listen or watch.

55:41Thanks so much to Kiko Toro for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. As mentioned at the top, my book this week is a novel, The Oppermans, by Leon Fuchbanger. Leon Fuchwanger was a German writer of the 20th century. At the end of his life, he made the choice for East Germany over West Germany. And that bad political judgment has a negative effect on a lot of his art, which often shows the impress of a dogmatic communist ideology. But the Auberman's, at least until we get to the very end where the ideology shows up, is an extraordinarily perceptive novel of the early days of the Nazi regime in Germany.

56:19The astonishing thing about the operaments is that it was written and published in the year 1933, at the very beginning of the Nazi era. It is written before the Night of the Long Knives, before the Nuremberg Laws, before Kristallnacht, before the Second World War, before industrial mass murder. It's a story of a German Jewish family, an affluent German Jewish family, who are reduced to poverty and, in some cases, suicide and exile by the oppression of the regime that had only just begun and whose unfolding Fuchtmanger very prophetically and presciently foresaw. I'm choosing this book this week because we are all seeing the rise around us of a kind of conspiratorial anti-Semitism on both the left and on the right, on one side of the Atlantic and on the other.

57:03And we're seeing campaigns of harassment and isolation and economic boycott against Jews and Israelis all over the world. It is not anything like the Third Reich, of course, but the mentalities examined by Föcklanger I think are helpful to understand the moment we are living in right now. We are seeing this great debate over anti-Semitism in American politics with the Wall Street Journal and other important conservative voices denouncing some of the extremes on the right. Not so much of a reaction yet on the left against some of the things we see from the progressive side. Let's hope that that is coming.

57:37but this moment of defamation is one that is experienced not only by Jews but by people who understand who care about Jews in their lives, care about Jews as a matter of principle and also understand that in some complicated way that it's difficult even to untangle that the fate of democratic institutions, the fate of liberal institutions is bound up with the fate of the Jews in democratic and liberal societies. In the Oppermans, the characters see one by one the transformation of former friends, former teachers, former lovers, former business partners into people who look at them as enemies of society, enemies of the state, enemies of the people.

58:15And as they try to make sense of this, they're confronted by something that I think is often true of antisemitism, which is that there's a kind of mockery about it. It is not just a serious, it is not just a grim thing. There's an intellectual sadism that underlies it, a kind of pleasure in isolating people. And one of the ways that the sadism expresses itself, and this is, I think, the theme I want to take from this remarkable novel, this prophetic novel, is the delight in turning against the victim, the accusation of the very thing that the perpetrator is doing to the victim. So in the operamans, they are again and again being accused of being isolated enemies of society by a regime that is going to reduce all of Germany to ruin.

59:00If the Oppermans had been left alone, if Germany had continued, there would have been a prosperous future for everybody. The Oppermans are accused of being the enemy of everybody. And as the society expels them, it destroys itself. And all of this is, there's this ironic distance where we, the reader, 90 years after the book is written, know how the story will come out better, not only than the characters, but better than the author himself. In our time, the way that this kind of mockery, this intellectual sadism plays out are by accusations of Jews as committers of genocide. There's an old joke that the world will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

59:35Unfortunately, that joke has sort of come true, that the idea is to take the people who are the victims of something and make them the perpetrators of it. As I say, as a kind of, because it's, do the people make this? There's something funny about it. This is not a new thing, of course, that the comparisons of Israel and the Jews to the Nazis go back to the very beginning of the state of Israel and even before. Distinguished writers like the famous historian Arnold Toynbee accused the Jews of being Nazis in the 1950s. In the fourth volume of his famous kind of cranky and crackpot history, it's a famous book in its day.

1:00:11He wrote, Toynbee wrote, on the day of judgment, the gravest crime standing against the German National Socialist account might be, not that they exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Judaism, the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble. That is, it wasn't murdering the Jews. It was this failure to correct the Jews. The Jews are somehow defective. The Holocaust was sent to make the Jews better people. Alas, once again, the Jews did not learn their lesson as they've been failing to learn it over the hundreds of years to the disappointment of their Christian and Muslim and then Marxist neighbors.

1:00:47Something was wrong with the Jews. The Holocaust should have made them better, but at last it failed. And that failure to make the Jews better is worse crime than actually murdering the Jews. I think as I listen to a lot of the dialogue today about Israel and Jews, I'm struck that for the anti-Semite, the Nazi Holocaust is not interesting as a crime. It's not interesting even as an historical event to be studied on its own terms. It's interesting to them because it is an enviable source of Jewish power. And what they want to do with this crime, with this event, is to redistribute what they see as power from the hated Jews to other claimants of that power.

1:01:27And so the Jew must be misrepresented not as the target of genocide, as happened in the 1940s, as happened again on October 7th of 2023, but as the perpetrator, an inversion of reality intended not only as an instrument of power, but as an act of deliberate intended and delighted in humiliation. Thanks so much for listening to The David Frum Show this week. I hope you will rejoin next week to view or listen on whatever platform you use. Remember, as always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you enjoy it, is to subscribe to The Atlantic, where you support my work and that of all of my Atlantic colleagues.

1:02:02You can sign up if you wish for an Atlantic alert that will let you know when I post new articles to The Atlantic. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. See you next week here on The David Frum Show.

1:02:34This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grime. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

1:03:19Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.