Paul Conti

Like people will tend to think, oh, evil's not very bright or not very intelligent.

That's a way to let evil propagate, right?

Evil can be effective and attractive and very compelling, but evil nonetheless.

And I just think there's a fearless willingness there.

to look at that and to describe it that I see primarily I've studied in Russian culture.

Well, I think unspoken animosities are very, very, very dangerous.

I mean, right, it was a Cold War.

There was fighting through proxies, right?

The superpowers were fighting surrogate wars through proxies, which, of course, in and of itself causes immense suffering.

But it becomes the opposite of an exchange of ideas or an exchange of thought.

You know what I mean?

Khrushchev, right?

Not believing that the kitchen could look like it did at the World's Fair, right?

And some of the misconceptions here of what things were like in Russia, right?

It was a thought that those other people are not actually people, right?

There's an enemy society of evil people.

which then paints with a broad brush in a way that makes it too easy for the war to go from being cold to boiling over into utter destruction.

And I wrote, it was really a true story that when I was in, it was still the Soviet Union, but it was right around the time of the Soviet Union coming to an end.

And

And I had gone on a trip for students from England.