On the island

The dead were piling up

In the mission report the head of the convoy wrote

At 2 pm. On May 20th. I went to the island of Nazino with commander Tsepkov

There was a terrible scramble people crowding and fighting around the bags of flour

Dead bodies everywhere a hundred or more and

Lots of people crawling about and crying give us bread boss. It's been two days since we've been given anything to eat

They're trying to make us die of hunger and the cold

They told us that people had begun eating the dead bodies

That they were cooking human flesh

The scene on the island was dreadful appalling

On May 21st alone

The three health officers counted 70 additional dead bodies in five cases, they emphasized

The liver the heart the lungs and fleshy part of bodies had been cut off

On one of the bodies the head had been torn off along the along with the male

genital organs and part of the skin

These mutilations constitute strong evidence of cannibalistic acts in addition they suggest the existence of serious

Psychopathologies

On the same day May 21st, the deportees themselves brought us three individuals who had been caught

with blood on their hands and

holding human livers

Our examination of these three individuals did not reveal any extreme emaciation

And there's an elderly local peasant woman who reported the things we saw

People were dying everywhere they were killing each other

There was a guard named Costilla

Viniq off a young fellow. He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there. He protected her

One day he had to be away for a while

And he told one of his comrades take care of her

But with all the people

The comrade couldn't do much

People caught the girl tied her to a tree caught off her breasts her muscles everything they could eat

They were hungry

They had to eat when costia came back

She was still alive he

Tried to save her but she had lost too much blood. She

Died

That was the kind of thing that happened

When you went along the island you saw flesh wrapped in rags

Human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees

And that right there is from a book called cannibal Island by Nicolas Werth

Who's written books about communism I think his most famous is the black book of communism and

cannibal Island specifically breaks down

one of the small

individual nightmares of the Soviet gulags

But the nightmare

Was not small

And it certainly was not specific. It was a widespread and it was broad and

It was almost incomprehensible

And very little about it would be known or not for one man

Alexander

Solzhenitsyn

Who?

not only survived the gulags but

lived on to write

incredibly detailed and

Very well researched two books about the gulags. Some of them were fictionalized

Like a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

and

for the for the good of the cause, but most comprehensively in his three-volume tome The Gulag Archipelago and

This series is is a massive series and it's been cut down to an abridged version that

was actually approved by the author himself and

The abridged version has just been re-released in Europe with a foreword by a man that I think

Repopulated a to discuss that book and among other things. I'm sure a man

That I needed to give an introduction to the first time. He was on this podcast, but

now who needs no introduction whatsoever a man by the name of

Dr. Jordan B Peterson

Jordan

Thank you for coming back on

How does it rough beginning chuckle Jesus

Yeah, I

Remember when I started listening to you?

You would say something along the lines of that

you know, we are quite capable of creating hell for ourselves as human beings and

That

Clearly that situation. I don't know. I mean that's that's that's hell. Yeah, and

Close enough

Yeah, and it's it's it's created by us. It's created by us, which I think is

Obviously horrific and the Gulag Archipelago

You know you talked about that book a lot and and one of the things that on that book hits you hard, obviously

For me, there's a book called about face by by colonel. David hackworth. I'm from a different

World, I guess that you in many ways

The book that hit me hardest in my life was was that book?

about face and it's it's one of those things that

when I read it, I started putting it together as like things started to fit and I

Remember that and I was wondering I guess from my perspective at what point did you

Read the Gulag Archipelago. And at what point did you start to say?

Okay, there's something really really important here for me to try and understand

well, I read it back in the

1980s early I would say

I'd read some Solzhenitsyn before that

I read the ley de Dave day in the life of Ivan Denisovich when I was about 13 or 14 and

Then I read the Gulag Archipelago in my early 20s

when I was reading a lot of psychological material too when I started reading Jung and Freud and the great clinicians and

I was reading a fair bit about what had happened in Nazi Germany at the same time

and also Victor Frankel's met man's search for meaning and

Solzhenitsyn's book is in some ways like an elaborated extension of Frankle, Frankle

Of course described what happened to him in the Nazi concentration camps and it's a relatively short book and it's a great book

but Solzhenitsyn's book is it's it's much broader and and I would say deeper and

the thing that affected me

Most particularly was the psychological take on the on the totalitarian states, you know

I had been studying political science up to that point and

The political science scientists and the economists who I would say were

Under the sway of Marxist thinking although not nearly to the degree that they are now

were convinced that the reason that people

engaged in conflict was basically a consequence of

Argumentation over resources, you know, it's basically an economic argument and I never bought that it never made sense to me

I mean, obviously there are circumstances where that's true

But it didn't seem to be fundamentally the case like tribal warfare isn't precisely about resources

It's maybe it's about territory, or maybe it's about identity, but it never seemed to me to be

simply about resources

partly because

Well a resource is something that people value

But it isn't obvious why people value what they value and so it doesn't solve the fundamental problem

anyways when I was reading Frankel and Solzhenitsyn, I

started to more deeply understand the relationship between the individual and the

atrocity and

That's what I found. Most interesting was that

Frankel's claim and Solzhenitsyn's claim as well that it was the moral corruption of the citizenry that

allowed the totalitarian

catastrophes to occur and that that in some sense was the

responsibility of every individual in the system who looked the other way or who participated actively I mean even in the gulag camps

Themselves they were almost all run by the prisoners there wasn't enough

Administrative manpower to run the prison system without the cooperation so to speak the prisoners

So it is it is a surreal sort of hell where?

You imprison yourself and Solzhenitsyn's fundamental claim and this was true for Frankel as well and also for vaclav havel

who eventually became president of

Czechoslovakia, or at least of the Czech Republic? I don't remember which

you know, they believed that it was the individual proclivity to accept lies that

Fostered the ability of tyrants to destroy the state and then

Well, and that also led to complicitous with regards to all the absolute atrocities that were occurring in both the Nazi state in the and

In the Soviet state and I think that's true when I read like I read

Solzhenitsyn's books and a lot of the books

I read about Nazi Germany - not as a victim and not as a hero, but as a perpetrator, you know

Which I think it's really important

It's something that's really important to do when you read history is that it's easy to cast yourself as a victim

It's easy to cast yourself as the person who would have been heroic in the circumstance

But it's also unbelievably useful to understand that there's a good chance had you been in those

Situations that you wouldn't have been on the side of the good guys, you know, and that's a terrible

it's really a terrible realization, but it's

It's necessary realization

Again just going back to this idea of

what you get out of reading because people ask me how cuz I read books all the time on my podcast and

what you just said it struck me as something that's

People have told me I read that book before but I didn't really get out of it what you got out of it

And when I heard you read it I said I was saying wow

How did I need to go reread this book?

And I think one of the key things is you looked at these books as you were not the victim

But the perpetrator one thing that when I read books, I know I read a lot of books mostly about war

for me I

Always think about the the peep. I don't know we see myself as the

Person that goes and heroically storms the beaches and survives

Every you know in a war book

there's these people that get mentioned for a for up for a half a paragraph or for two sentences and

They sometimes they don't even have a name because you know

You're the battalion commander storming the beach at Normandy. You don't you you're not gonna name every single person but for some reason and

Maybe it's just my experiences of being in combat when I read about that two sentences of that guy

That that gets shot that gets killed that gets blown up. I

completely

Understand and relate to that person

like I don't just see it as me being the guy that is always winning and always doing okay and always surviving I

Feel and relate to those guys

that didn't and and part of that is just because of my friends that I lost in combat like

those guys

that they're they're people and and I think that

Key thing of of reading it and going man every single person like when you read about these girl

You're talking about millions of people that were tortured died murdered

Every one of those people key word is people every one of those people is a person

and

to your point

every single one of those

executioner's every single one of those murderers is

Also a person, you know, there's a great book called

Ordinary men. Oh, yeah. We we reviewed that on this podcast. Right, right

and so, you know

It's it's it's one of the greatest books written about what happened in the Second World War

I think on the end of on the atrocity end

because

the author does such a lovely job of while it's a strange way of putting it in this context, but you know

it's about this police battalion that was moved into Poland after the Germans went through and and occupied the country and they were there to

Establish order like police do but also to participate in the mopping up. Let's say

That was part and parcel of the war and you know, these were ordinary

policemen

middle-class guys most of whom had been educated and socialized before the Nazi

Propaganda machine really got rolling. They weren't like Hitler Youth types

Mm-hmm. They were ordinary men and they were

Brought and they had a commander who?

had made an explicit case that if they weren't able to tolerate the

Conditions in Poland that they could go home. So there was no top-down order that you had to do this or else and

Then they were you know

first of all, they started rounding up while mostly Jewish people men between 18 and 65 and then you know,

They started to participate in the entire

atrocious mess

and

they were they ended up many of them taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head and

What the author does is outline how that happens to you?

you know one step at a time and so it's a really horrifying book and it's a brilliant book because

There's no attempt to make the perpetrators

Like some creatures that aren't human like just pure Psychopaths and of course in in a situation like Nazi

Germany and and in the horrors of the communist States there was no shortage of places for Psychopaths to prevail

But that's not really the issue. The issue is

Well, how does an ordinary person?

Come to participate in a global horror. Let's say and what does that mean about being an ordinary person?

And then the next question is well, what does it mean about how you should?

Conduct your life and one of the things that I mean

I think what happened to me when I read all this material in the 80s

was that I

became

Convinced that there wasn't anything more important to do in the aftermath of what had happened in the 20th century