The White Pill isn’t what I expected, and that’s a good thing. Considering the pithiness with which terms like “white pill” and “black pill” get tossed around, Michael Malice could have gotten away with writing a witty but surface-level book about the importance of keeping a positive mindset. Instead, he has created the most insidious Tootsie Roll Pop ever–jet black on the outside, with a tiny chunk of white at the very center. The White Pill isn’t an anodyne book on optimism, but a deeply disturbing and detailed account of the rise and fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, with a few relevant side stories to keep things fresh.
The book starts with a look at Ayn Rand’s rise to fame as a novelist and anti-communist speaker. Malice sets the stage by showing her clear and uncompromising position against communism in the face of mealy-mouthed and largely irrelevant statements given by others who had never experienced life under it. Her revulsion against communism and her clear understanding of the mental torture that life under communism becomes is explained by a series of quotes, mostly from her testimony to Congress on the subject. For instance: “Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning until night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it.” Malice intends to show you the kind of terror that totalitarianism produces, and this first chapter, focusing on Rand, is only a taste of what is to come.
Malice continues his narrative with a look at anarchists in the early twentieth century. The descriptions of the capture, possible framing, and deaths of several anarchist activists are detailed and riveting. But most interesting is perhaps the description of the adventures of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, who were deported to the USSR and saw its atrocities first-hand. Both realized that the Soviet rhetoric about freedom and equality was just that, and that there would be no relief for the workers from Lenin’s coup.
Malice then proceeds through the atrocities of Lenin and Stalin, with grisly descriptions of the state-caused famine in Ukraine and the tortures and show trials, not just of dissidents, but of the upper echelons of the Communist Party, too. The Cheka gets a deep examination. The picture Malice paints is of a massive meat grinder, in which denouncing one’s friends and family is expected and high officials are frequently shoved into this grinder because they knew too much or too little. The culture created by these forces is shown to be terrifying and degenerate. Malice also notes how this culture resulted in massive spikes in incompetence in the military and medical fields.
In order to give the reader a little rest, the book goes into several less gruesome side stories, including a full-throated denouncement of Walter Duranty’s efforts to hide Soviet atrocities from exposure to the Western public, as well as some discussion of Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, who both made efforts to expose what was going on in the USSR, at significant personal risk. There is a discussion of Upton Sinclair’s blind support of communism, as well as a story about Henry Wallace, who the US managed to avoid having as president by a hair. The book is punctuated by a variety of anecdotes that help illustrate the evils of communism with characteristically dark humor.
It is here that the first, fleeting taste of the white pill can be found. Malice tells the tale of Khrushchev’s denouncement of Stalinism’s cult of personality in frank terms. He makes it clear that these people were themselves creators and enforcers of the very culture they decided eventually to speak out against. Yet the crushing force of what they created became too much for them to handle.
After giving us a brief bit of respite, Malice goes into detail of the USSR putting down revolutions in its satellite states and into the atrocities of the Stasi. He details the rise of the Berlin Wall with a series of heart-wrenching stories of people attempting to escape to West Berlin, with varied results. However, the fall of communism was coming, and now Malice is able to start moving in a more positive direction.
The appearances of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev herald the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain. Malice handles the events with the deftness of a classical dramatist, showing their ups and downs, their fortitudes and their foibles as they dealt with the collapse of the Soviet system. Here we start to see bits of light in the darkness, and Malice skillfully uses these lights to push us through to the end. He details the nearly comic series of mistakes and misapprehensions that led to the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon after, the collapse of the Soviet Union under immense pressure of its people leaving for better prospects in the West. Boris Yeltsin makes an appearance as well, and the story of how he faced down a coup is gripping. At the very end is that final chunk of white pill, and I won’t spoil Malice’s careful treatment of it here.
If I had to criticize the book in some way, it would be for what I think is a missed opportunity to put a little more white pill into the very dark middle of the book. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s story, and the story of the Samizdata in Russia are amazing stories of perseverance and resistance against evil, and they unfortunately only get very minor appearances in the book. It would have been amazing to hear some stories of heroism from behind the Iron Curtain.
One other minor criticism I have is that the section on Henry Wallace seems to conclude that he was a useful idiot, and not really a potential iron-fisted tyrant. This conflicts somewhat from what I’ve heard Malice say, that keeping Wallace out of the Presidency was akin to dodging a bullet. The book makes him look like a mostly harmless fool who was tricked by Stalin’s Potemkin villages and would never have tried to implement the elements of Stalin’s policy that turned it into a Terror.
I also found a handful of minor but noticeable typographical errors and a few cases where a person was referenced suddenly after not being mentioned for quite a while, which forced me to flip back and hunt for them, both things another careful reading before publication might have fixed. However, these small issues do not affect the immense value of this book in any meaningful way.
A slight personal note is that I have always wondered why Malice and others recommend reading The Fountainhead before Atlas Shrugged, and I was always hesitant to ask the question to Malice directly. I read them in the reverse order. In this book, I found a passage that led me to an acceptable answer. I think Atlas Shrugged is more gripping, exciting, and interesting than The Fountainhead, but Malice quotes Rand saying that The Fountainhead is about “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” This led me to realize that The Fountainhead is a focused support of individualism and freedom of thought, which, while covered in Atlas Shrugged, is less central to that book, yet more central to a solid understanding of Rand’s philosophy.
The White Pill is a book you should read, but I implore you to set aside the time you need to read it in full. If you pick it up and stop in the middle, it will leave you with burning anger and chilling despair from seeing the absolute worst mankind has to offer, without the ray of hope that the book in its entirety seeks to bring. And if you skip to the end, you won’t be able to feel the weight that that little ray of hope has for you.