Name: The Atrocities That Nobody Knows About
Uploaded: 2021-02-11T18:46:19.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Atrocities That Nobody Knows About' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-02-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Atrocities That Nobody Knows About' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-02-11. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- One year, Prague.
- The conversation that I had yesterday
with Francis Ngannou about escaping Cameroon,
making his way to Morocco, and being arrested seven times
trying to escape Morocco and go to Spain.
- Oh, 'cause that little piece of land
that's technically Europe in the north of Spain, yeah.
- Dude. - 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,
'cause 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
for 14 months, and he outlined this 14-month journey
of homelessness, living in the forest.
Dude, it was fucking crazy.
Crazy to start. - 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, whoa, whoa, whoa, 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 it's, 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 in the desert 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, Asmara,
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 that, 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.
- Ooh!
- 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,
'cause 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
on an individual level,
and it's just horrible.
- Yeah, there's a lot of them.
And 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,
'cause they're constant.
Like we're just so accustomed to this life here,
this first world life,
that any deviation from that at all just seems horrific.
Like anything that goes wrong in America seems like intolerable
and horrific and a human rights violation.
And like, this is the shining hope of the world.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And someone like you
who's an immigrant can speak to this better than most.
You, and someone also who has traveled to places like North Korea
who understands the world better than most.
You can talk about this.
- Yeah, 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 forget, you know, 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.
It's just, and you hear these, like I was just,
I'm writing right now, there was this part,
what Stalin would do is like he'd kill parents, right?
'Cause they were traitors or whatever.
That kid who was left behind,
who now lost their parents, boy or girl, whatever,
everyone knew if I help that kid,
my family's under suspicion.
Why are you helping the child of these traitors?
Oh, were you colluding with them in the past?
'Cause 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.
No one, I mean, there's so many cases like this
and Americans don't have any idea of what that's like.
We're completely oblivious.
I have to tell you 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 were cannibalizing their own children because they were starving to death.
Thousands and thousands of people starved to death.
Like they don't even know an accurate number of how many people starved to
death under Stalin.
Margot Honecker, 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.
We were watching shows in '89, you and I, and what they would do is they would
institutionalize these kids to make them into good communists.
So no singing, no humming, you know, and it would be the kind of thing where
like there was this one survivor.
She was suicidal because her stepdad kept raping her.
While 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 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, all right, 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.
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