The White Pill by Michael Malice

We are not trying to bring down the mortality rate.

The author, Michael Malice is an anarchist. Not a leftist, not a conservative, not an anarcho-capitalist or a Marxist. He is an anarchist, and a consistent one at that. In his podcast episode with Lex Fridman, along with objectivist Yaron Brook, Fridman is seen asking both of them “Why is Rand so controversial?” Brook replies, “It is because she is consistently radical.” From a layman’s perspective (that’s me!), Malice is also one such person.
The first time I came across Malice was Twitter (or X), when he’d replied to an unsuspecting troll, a Trump clip saying “Shut up, silly woman.” It was hilarious. I looked up this man on YT. Lo and behold! He had three episodes with Lex Fridman. I saw all of them and was piqued. His Michael Allig story in the Christmas episode was insightful. His analysis of Epstein was novel. In his 5th episode with Fridman, Malice was there to promote The White Pill. He and Fridman had been teasing the book in some previous episodes. After that episode, I saw the trailer for The White Pill and I was stunned. I bought the book on Amazon Kindle and read it over a month.
The book is a detailed chronological account of the Soviet Union. Starting with Ayn Rand’s testimony to the US Congress, Malice details the history of the Soviet people. From their lives to those of the elite, the food, the climate, the skeletons of the old and the broken modesties of young, Malice tells it all. The different stages of the book can be characterized by the place(s) and the leader(s) most consequential to the story. They are Lenin to Stalin, then Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev in the USSR, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. The Romanian, Hungarian, East and West German tales come a bit later but are interesting all the same.

If we lose freedom here, there is no other place to escape to. This is the last stand on the earth.

Reagan’s words above would make it seem that the West and the Soviet Union were so different. In one sense, they were. Soviet citizenry, especially Ukrainians and Russians, had to choose between murder by the hands of Nazis and starvation by virtue of the revolution. (Biden vs Trump doesn’t even come close to “lesser of two evils”, does it?) In the midst of revolution, all rights were bourgeois contrivance. No one was secure, not even the rich and powerful. The harbingers of mass terror were themselves purged later. At least there were genuine elections in the US. There was frequent change of regimes. But in some sense, the two poles weren’t so different at all. After all, they were only humans. Some with too much power, over people and/or narrtives, others with none at all. Those corrupt enough with ideology or raw authority, used that power against people. Rand’s testimony to Congress, in the beginning of the book, went nowhere. Too embroiled in their day-to-day problems, the American masses bought the Walter Durantes of the press. The plight of the Soviet people went unnoticed.
The story also comes to Germany, broken in two halves - a symbol of broken Europe. The west here is not discussed as much, but Eastern Germany more than makes up for it. Just the sheer manipulation of narrative, just decades after Nazism, is alarming to read. You’d think one can detect evil (as Lex calls it) after falling into that trap sometime before. Nope, we are all gullible and not immune to groupthink at all. We can all fall prey to the same patterns of idol worshipping evil people and stories like the White Pill are a gruesome reminder of it. The book has consistent momentum and does not hesitate in giving details where it should or leaving a piece of grisly history to people’s imagination. While I would have appreciated if he had spent even more time on the Soviet Union, the Western “outside-in” perspective is fascinating nonetheless.

Where human lives mean nothing, less than nothing.

Being an Indian, you get desensitized to the million horrors happening everyday. When you have a billion people, with thousand aspirations, your brain stops comprehending their suffering. News come, news go away. But the magnitude of this “usual” suffering is so incomprehensible, understanding of empathizing with victims of systematic mass terror seems impossible. When I was in school, our curriculum was changed. It excluded foreign history in lieu of Indian history in detail. I loved the books then, and I still do. But I would have preferred it being a more rounded experience. For me, Malice’s White Pill is a lesson I was never taught. Evil exists, and the civil people of the world have unwittingly abetted mass terror since a long time, particularly so, in the twentieth century.
In the later chapters, when the arc completes in a reality crazier than fiction, the lesson is still the same. Thinking some knight in a white armor is going to save you is futile. But knowing your own strength as an individual and keeping hope alive, is the key. Resistance, however small, is significant. The tank man in the Tiananmen Square comes to mind. He was pulled away, but the symbol of one lone human, facing down a goddamn tank, brought me shivers. The White Pill is one of the most uniquely instructive books I’ve read. I recommend you to read it, and come up with an opinion. Maybe that opinion is different than mine. But, it will teach you something, for sure.

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