Q:
How can you say that a dictatorship like Soviet Russia has any good, when the Jews are suffering there?
A:
Let’s take an example of being let’s say in Moscow at 2 o’clock at night and being in Brooklyn 2 o’clock at night or Manhattan 2 o’clock at night. Where are you safer?
If you’re in Moscow 2 o’clock at night on the street, a policeman will stop you and say, “Show your papers, Mister.” If you don’t show your papers, you’re in trouble. You have to have your papers. Everybody in Russia has to carry papers. You can’t be such a vagrant. Here you can say, “What do you mean my papers?!”
“I’ll take you to the civilian review board,” you tell the policeman. “Asking about my papers?! Chutzpah!”
And so תשת חושך והיא לילה – You make darkness and it becomes night, בו תרמוש כל חיתו יער – in that night all the wild animals go out in the world (Tehillim 104:20). So at night all the wild animals in the world are infesting the streets of the so called civilized countries. Whereas among the dictatorships there’s law and order. There’s law and order.
Only Jews can’t live there because it’s the wrong order for us, but non-Jews, what’s wrong with it? Everybody gets a job. Everybody obeys more or less the laws.
Liberty after all is only a dream. It’s a hallucination. There’s liberty to harm themselves, that’s all. You can’t have drugs in Soviet Russia. You can’t have psychiatrists in Soviet Russia. Psychiatry is banned. Everybody is healthy because they’re working. The best refuah for all mental illnesses is work. That’s the best medicine for meshugas; working. Take all the lunatics who go to psychiatrists and put them to work, they’d all be healed. That’s why psychiatry is outlawed in Russia.
Now, I’m not an exponent of Communism. We Jews detest the communists. They’re our deadly enemies. We can’t live together with them. As soon as the communists took over Nicaragua, all Jews fled from the country; even not religious Jews.
But the dictatorships are not such bad things in themselves. Sometimes if an evil man becomes a dictator, that’s something else, but sooner or later his regime comes to an end. So Stalin and the Stalinists came to end. There are better dictators that took over and eventually the world benefits by the fact that there is a government.
When there was a king, there was law and order. The king protected the people against bandits and all kinds of wrongdoers. It was a benevolent arrangement to have a monarch. And we shouldn’t look back on monarchy and think it was a wicked thing.
And democracy is not such a good thing. You see what happened in Nazi Germany, what democracy led to. If they had the old Kaiser, if the old Kaiser was still in power, it would never have happened. He wouldn’t permit the Nazis to do what they did. Because of democracy, they voted a criminal into power, a Hitler; a low fellow who never could think of getting power when there was a Kaiser.
And so monarchy is certainly a beneficial institution. You see what happens under democracy. Today they’re teaching all the children in all the schools homosexuality. In all the public schools they’re teaching homosexuality today. And children are being ruined by the teachers. But in Russia children are not being ruined by these things. And therefore we should understand that dictators are not necessarily a negative phenomenon.
(January 1989)
