The Atrocities That Nobody Knows About

dude, the conversation that i had yesterday with frances ingano about escaping cameroon making his way to morocco and being arrested seven times trying to escape morocco and go to spain because that little piece of land that's technically europe in the north of spain yeah north of africa they would take them after they arrested them, they would hold them and then they would bring them to the fucking sahara desert and drop them off and they did that to him seven times they literally tried to kill them, they tried to drop them off in the desert, no food, no water, no nothing, no clothes they did it in the winter, they did it in the summer, in the winter it's horrific because the temperature drops to an insane level and they have no transportation, they have nowhere to go and these africans are doing this on a daily basis making this journey from whatever country they're in in africa to try to make it to europe and he did it over the course of 14 months and he outlined this 14 month journey of homelessness, living in the forest dude it was fucking crazy do you know about Eritrea which is southern Ethiopia so the only reason that came across my desk is there was an article and it said this is the only country where journalists are less free than in north korea i'm like wait, i'm getting the silver now and what they did is they took the journalists, put them in steel cages and left them in the desert bye and no one knows about this place, what's amazing about Eritrea is they took the journalists and put them in steel cages and just left them to die bye bye but the capital of Eritrea, when Mussolini took over Ethiopia, it's a perfectly preserved Italian city so there's this like fiat factory that they convert into like a museum so when you're in the capital, as Mara, you're like in the Riviera or whatever, some European city and as soon as you step out, it's hell on earth holy shit so it, but North Korea overtook them, took back the lead of worst country for journalists but it's a fascinating country that no one knows about and the oppression there is absolutely insane how many journalists have they killed? i have no idea, this wasn't recently, this was a while ago and it's the only country i think with no foreign journalists in it like the thing that drives me crazy and i know you agree is that there's so many people who like read the New York Times or the New Yorker and they think they know everything about the world because they just read the same publication everybody else does where there's so many places that are so barbaric like Turkmenistan, whatever, that it doesn't cross your desk so you don't even think it exists or it matters it's like, well i'm sure i would have heard of it it's like, no no no, it just isn't sexy enough for someone to cover and these people are basically resigned to having a nightmare existence not that necessarily we could do anything at an individual level and it's just horrible yeah, there's a lot of them the unfortunate thing is there's too many to really follow if you spent your day to day waking hours paying attention to all the atrocities that are being committed in the world you would never have time for anything else because they're constant we're just so accustomed to this life here, this first world life that any deviation from that at all just seems horrific anything that goes wrong in America seems intolerable and horrific and a human rights violation this is the shining hole of the world and someone like you who's an immigrant can speak to this better than most and someone also who has traveled to places like North Korea who understands the world better than most you can talk about this this is the theme of my next book, The White Pill which is just talking about people don't know how bad it used to be and how close we came, this country, to falling in some very very bad directions and because it's the kind of thing where if you don't talk about it you would forget just what the past was people in this country have no idea about Stalin I'm writing a lot about him or the Berlin Wall, the things that they did and you hear these stories, I'm writing right now there was this part, what Stalin would do is kill parents because they were traitors or whatever that kid who was left behind, who now lost their parents, boy or girl, whatever everyone knew if I helped that kid, my family is under suspicion why are you helping the child of these traitors? were you colluding with them in the past? because they're trying to find links so this poor kid is now a complete social outcast even family friends wouldn't even look at them even the children they were friends with wouldn't look at them and they'd fallen away in history there's so many cases like this and Americans don't have any idea what that's like they don't even understand how recent that was too yes it's not even a hundred years ago right not even a hundred years ago people were resorting to cannibalism with their own children they're cannibalizing their own children because they were starving to death thousands and thousands of people starved to death they don't even know an accurate number of how many people starved to death under Stalin Margot Hunaker who died I think in 2016 she was the head of education East Germany and she had a concentration camp there for children which ended in 89, that's not that long ago Jesus Christ rewatching shows in 89, you and I and what they would do is they would institutionalize these kids to make them into good communists no singing, no humming, you know and it'd be the kind of thing where like there was this one survivor she was suicidal because her stepdad kept raping her and if you're suicidal you got to institutionalize you, right? so they put them sometimes in solitary and the thing is the people who were guardians in this place they would sexually assault the kids with impunity and take them home what else she would do is if parents were suspicious under suspicion of the state they'd take the kids and force good communist families to raise them they would take newborns and you would never see your kids again and your kids were discouraged from trying to seek you it's the levels of depravity that would happen in these countries we are so oblivious to in America and it's like alright if I have to be the one to kind of talk about this and we should treasure, people take so much for granted here they don't know how bad it can get and audio experience on Spotify you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free Spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes you just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan experience