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to thank you enough. So thank you. The pekan Yonashow
dot com, everything's there. Want to welcome everyone back to
the Pekanona show. Jaryl Cooper's back, Darryl. What's happening?
Speaker 2: Man? What's up? Brother? Always good to talk to.
Speaker 1: You, Good to talk to you. Uh, let's talk about
making a podcast, man. I've I've listened three times to
the first episode of Enemy the Germans War.
Speaker 2: It's uh, that's pretty good considering a lot of it
is quotes from a book you've probably read six times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quotes from a
book that yeah. Yeah, but the Irish Gentleman. I did
not that one I was not familiar with when Yeah,
but I mean I'm not here, you know, podcasters or
I don't know that podcasting is as popular as it is.
We're still considered like load tier entertainment or load tier education,
and you know, I don't want to stroke someone, but
that's you know, it's pretty remarkable that you could you
could pull that off, because describing war, and especially describing
a war that's never going to happen again the way
it happened, you know that we've we've gone beyond that.
I mean, I know you've talked before about diving into
you know, Jim Jones and really that getting into your
head and everything. Does that as someone who was in
the military. Is that I mean, I don't. I know,
you you've said you didn't see combat, but still you
have to look at that and talk to you know,
like if you talk to Jocko about what he experienced,
this is like a lower layer, a level of hell
that like none of us could imagine. Nobody. I don't
think anyone who was in the thick of this shit
in Kandahar or you know, in in Iraq could could
imagine this. I mean, what's that like trying to put
that together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's tough because you're trying to relate and experience that.
As you said, even our combat veterans today really can't
understand from first hand experience, you know, like I know
Marines who were part of the first Fallujah assault, and
you know, the insurgents had controlled Fallujah for a long
time by that point, and you know, these guys tell stories.
You know, you can read these stories. I've heard them
from their own mouths though too of you know, there's
a smell coming from the basement and they go down
there and there's three corpses with their you know, that
are hanging from the wall by their hands and their
legs have been chopped off and they've been rotting for
a while, and so like, you take something like that
and you say, well, that's the worst thing that is
ever going to happen to one in ten thousand people
in our modern society, right, And then you take an
entire generation of men and throw them into an environment
that becomes their daily life for years where they see
stuff like that every day, where a mangled corpses might
as well be another backpack lying on the ground or something,
you know, where that's the kind of the place you
eventually dragged yourself to so you don't go crazy. And
you know, I started this is a series about World
War Two, but you like a lot of good books
about World War two and everything. I started with the
First World War. Let's so, I mean, we'll get into
this in the next episode. The Versailles Treaty and all
of the things that kind of followed in the aftermath
of nineteen eighteen, But most of the books you're going
to read, that's the angle they take out. They start
with the First World War because you need to know
about how the Versailles Treaty embittered the Germans and all
these other kind of geopolitical and social factors that came in.
I'm really interested in the fact that you know, these
these guys who were in the trenches as you know
first lieutenants or or you know, young captains. These were
your colonels in generals in the Second World War. You know,
they're their sons will be in the Wehrmont. You know,
that's that's who these people are. And you have to
understand what they went through and understand how absolutely foreign
and in most ways, even after listening to a podcast
like mine, like when I finished it, I was like,
you know, there's a lot of gruesome stuff in there
and everything and sometimes it I tried not to be
gratuitous about it, but even then, like you you still
it's like really beyond our comprehension to understand what it's
like to be there watching your friend rot in a
corner because there's nowhere to bury him, and you know,
to wake up from a nap and you know, to
see rats nibbling on his face. I mean, this is
something that is just it's the worst nightmare you can imagine.
And just young boys who were clerks and students and
you know, school teachers and whatever were thrown into this
in a situation by the way, you know, to increase
the trauma of it all, you got to remember too,
like we have an all volunteer kind of boutique military
force now, and you know, if you get a guy
like even back then you had like the volunteers, guys
like younger guys like Hitler, who you know, they had
that gift of which is is very important for a soldier,
it's really important just in life in general. I think though,
they had that gift of being able to say to
themselves that this is what I'm doing right now, and
this is my role and who I am, like you know,
in this situation, and that's all that's going on. I'm
not distracted. I'm a soldier at war. Then I'm a
soldier at war and that's you know, And that's how
a lot of the volunteers had a mentality that was
sort of at least approaching something like that. But the
vast majority of the guys who were thrown into those trenches,
you know, they were just they were just snatched out
of their high school graduating class, you know, as they
came in or wherever they were working, and thrown in
there as conscripts into a.
Speaker 1: War that really had no build.
Speaker 2: Up, you know, like Europe was at peace and they're
just sort of going along, and then the Archduke gets killed.
In a month and a half later, you and every
single person you know are at war. Like watching people
get killed, getting killed, yourselves, all these things, and so
just the speed of the uptake you know, of these
guys into the war and then the you know, as
much as the acute traumatic experiences you know of seeing
your friend get blown up or you know, these like
those horrible things, as much as those are worth I mean,
they're definitely worth remembering and talking about, and you have
to to understand, you know, these guys really Like what
makes World War One so unique is what that there
was really like, no psychological rest in between those traumas.
I mean, it was you know, it wasn't like you
go back behind the wire into the Green Zone and
Baghdad and your base safe, and maybe you hear some
mortars every once in a while, and then you go
out on patrol and then it's dangerous. This was just
you know, an assault on the senses, an assault on
the mind twenty four to seven, when you were in
those trenches and you know, and people say, you know,
they'll they'll point out, well, they were rotated off the
front line. That's not as nice as it sounds. A
lot of times the artillery would focus on, you know,
the lines further back, because you know, if there were
if they had reconnaissance troops, or if they were, you know,
mounting some kind of an assault, their own troops were
too close to the front line. So being in the
reserve lines was not a safe place. And so to
just to live under those conditions for years, and to
do it at a time when you know, I was
watching the uh Tucker interview with Nick Fline the other
day here, yesterday, whenever it was. And one of the
things that struck me about it, and this strikes me
every time I come across it, because I've come across
it a million times now, and it never ceases to
like smack me up the head to remember that, like
his cohort, Nick's cohort, their first experience of politics was
the twenty sixteen election. Trump rallies getting mobbed by Mexican gangsters.
You know, just calls for violence by people in the
House of Representatives, people in the media, just the whole
nine yeard that was their first ever experience of politics,
so to them, like this is how politics works, Like
this is how it is, This is what's normal. You know,
this is the world they spent their young adulthood learning from.
And you know, these guys, I think the average age
of like a German soldier was twenty four twenty five,
but you know that's accounting for older officers and everything else,
like a lot of your frontline just privates. I mean,
these are eighteen nineteen twenty year old kids who, if
they survived the war, spent three four years under these conditions,
and this was like three of three or four of
the most formative years of their lives. You know, where
you're really sort of getting your first taste to the
adult world and fig rang out like all the things
you've kind of watched from a bit of a distance
as a student and kind of thought about when you
become an adult, what's it really like. Well, this is
your first taste of what it's really like, you know,
and how the world works. And yeah, you really have
to start there and understand that to have any clue
how the Second World War could have come about.
Speaker 1: Well, I never want to take anything away from you know,
the American men who went over there and fought. But
you know, we have to remember they came in really
at the end, and I'm not saying it was any
easier for them. I mean there was still the amount
of casualties in that short period of time were enormous.
But I think people tend to forget that. You know,
what was the troops were there for about a year
and a half.
Speaker 2: American troops, Yeah, and really only saw combat in nineteen eighteen.
I mean, you know, other than you know, some here
and there, but yeah, really like heavy combat that was
all after the Spring. I was just in final push basically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyone who made it through that war. On the
on the German side, most a lot of those guys
were there from nineteen fourteen and on. I mean they
were there for three or four years. And to throw
another thing into it, is, you're the United States isn't
suffering their homeland being under attack, being just torn apart
by war and you know, by poison gas. At a
certain these people are watching their homes and many of
them consider themselves to be you know, they consider themselves
to be Germans, but they also considered themselves to be
broadly more European and they're just watching there this this
small piece of land that the that the hunt backed
them into, you know, you know, millennia before you know,
and it's just being torn to shreds. And I think
that people have a t as bad as it was
for men of those men, American men coming home from
the war, and the stories they told. There were people
who were there four times as long as they were.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're part of battles the likes of which
the Americans, you know, because the other thing too is
like the Americans. And don't get me wrong, not to
get to jingoistic or whatever, but our boys represented themselves. Well.
Part of that is just because you know, they went
in there with a lot of naive courage, because all right,
we're here to save the day. And you know, both
sides of the war, like their troops are all just
you know, they've been there for years. They're worn down,
they're tired, you know, all this. The Americans just barge
in and you'd have the Allies talk about how the
Americans like they just they just run into the gunfire
like we did in nineteen fourteen, you know. And so
they acquitted themselves very well. But yeah, I mean it
was you know, like they didn't participate in something like
the Battle of the Somme, where the British lost six
or not debt not killed, but took sixty thousand casualties
on the first freaking day, dude, Like and then and
then the battle went on for like months and months
after that, and we didn't participate in anything like that,
like you said, though, I mean we we lost you know,
over one hundred thousand soldiers killed, a lot more wounded
really in the space of a few months, which, when
you consider our last u our last experience with with
real war.
Speaker 1: Is still.
Speaker 2: To this day, the deadliest conflict in American history, the
Civil War, that was six seven hundred thousand guys. You know,
I know the number moves around a little bit now
with new research, but six or seven hundred thousand killed
in four years. You know, we lost one hundred somewhere
thousand guys killed in a few months here, you know,
and we got our first taste of like what that
really is like. But yeah, the guys who were in there,
you know, there's just there's a lot of the stuff
that the yeah that we are, our American guys just
did not have to think about. I mean, just take
you know, one of the things that really was a
I guess I want to say a driver, because I
think there was just a lot of dishonesty and duplicitousness
involved with the Treaty of Versailles, but sort of the
a lot of the the arguments that were made to
justify the punitive terms that were imposed on Germany after
the war, where they would point out like, you know,
look at what look at these atrocities they committed, you know,
here they they they imposed a collective punishment regime on
this village or that town or whatever. And some of
that obviously there's a huge amount of exaggeration. There was
a lot of propaganda, you know, especially in the early
days in Belgium. But I mean, these things did happen,
and you know, and it's and it's not because the
Allies were sort of more righteous in their conduct of warfare.
It's that the Allies never stepped foot on German soil.
You know, the war was being fought in France and Belgium,
and so in the initial push when the Russians came
into East Prussia and you know, before the Germans sant
Ludendorf and Hindenburg to the east to go kind of
get things in order. The Russians pushed into east. There
were a lot of atrocities there. It's just because you know,
think about how strange it is not only for the
people undergoing it, but for the occupier too. You know,
the German lines had French and Belgian people on both
sides of them. You know, there were French towns behind
you and French soldiers in front of you, and so
to control a situation like that, it's very complicated, you know,
And you know, I know, of course, like you know,
we associate just the total destruction of large cities and
stuff with the bombing runs of the Second World War,
but there was, you know, there was more than people
think in the First World War two, Like there was
a lot of just infrastructure destruction, obviously landscape destruction. I mean,
to this day, there's still an ongoing program every year
in France. It's an industrial scale program where they're still
going out and digging up old unexploded munitions from the
First World War and every year a few people still
killed by them to this day. And you know, it's just,
you know, you took an individual, and you threw them
into a conflict that was so titanic and so mechanical
in the way that it you know, that it that
that that it operated. And so you know, like World
War One was mass warfare in a way that no
other war in history has been, you know. And and
so you took an individual and threw them into this
situation where, for all of these different reasons, an individual
life had almost no value. You know, Like you go
to the Iraq War, and if somebody you know, like
Jocko were to go down wounded or killed and be
taken out of the war, that's the problem for us,
like the Americans, the Sealed Team, that they'd really have
to like figure out how to like work around that
and replace that leadership and that experience and all that
kind of thing. Over here, you take just a you know,
a superhero warrior, Ernst Younger or something, and he if
he's killed, it doesn't affect anything, you know, It's just
this you're talking about mass numbers and losing the value
of individual life to an extreme degree.
Speaker 1: I think one of the one of the points you
made towards the end of the episode that can't be
ignored was you talked about the Spanish flu showing up. Now,
whether that came out of Kansas or not, you know,
well we can argue, we can argue another day, but yeah,
that took a toll. When you read about the Spanish flu,
you you see just how much damage that did. But
then you segue that into Bolshevism, you know, you this
rising tide that it almost seems like something I noticed
in like with a lot of the Gwatt guys. A
lot of the GWAT guys who came out of g Watt,
they who realized just how bullshit that whole thing was
a lot of them became libertarians. A lot of them
became commis, I mean became like, well, i'll say commis,
but they started talking about communism, they supported Bernie Sanders,
they went in another direction. And it almost seems like
the reason this tide was growing not only because of
the Bolshevik influence and how they took over in Russia
and everything, but because when you recognize that something, if
you think something isn't working, you want a very human tendency,
especially for people who just saw everything that they did
would be okay, the only way we're going to defeat
what caused this is to absolutely destroy everything. And I
think maybe you agree with me. A lot of them
just looked at Bolshevism as a way to absolutely kill
everything that came before them, and caused them to be
there and caused the destruction and the horror that they
saw and then their families saw at home.
Speaker 2: It's definitely a huge part of it. I mean, you know,
you had the elites before and after the war, even
for years after the war. You'd have a lot of
the elites in say Germany, just to take one example,
who they blamed the French and the Russians for the war,
you know, and the British kind of came into it
and they should have stayed out in the American ship.
But it's like the French wanted Alsace Lorraine back, you know,
the Russians had been spoiling for a fight over the Balkans.
You know, for all these kind of things. Okay, fine,
you talk to the you talk to the French.
Speaker 1: It's all the.
Speaker 2: Kaiser's fault, you know, it's that German military and blah
blah blah blah blah. It got to a point though,
for just millions and millions of the people in Europe,
especially the guys in the trenches that they were just
they didn't want to hear that shit anymore. They're like, no,
I don't want to hear how it was those elites
and not our elites. All of you did this to
all of us, you know, you people up there, your system,
your way of doing things resulted in this, and it
just totally delegitimized. I mean even in the even in
the victorious countries, you know, you had where you would expect,
like winning a war of that significance in scale would
reinforce the legitimacy of the ruling regime, like in one
sense maybe some of the institutions and stuff. Sure, but
it also ushered in a time where you know, the
people were much more assertive about, you know, having their
say and the government and all these kind of things
because they just weren't going to accept the same ratification
of hierarchy that they had always been accustomed to after that,
you know, and it's especially amplified when you think about
the fact a lot of these guys had It's a
different thing when you know, you're in the trenches for
a few years and you've got a captain who's there
because you know, his dad's a prince or because whatever,
you know, because there was the officer ranks much more
class differentiated than they are now. And you watch this
guy and maybe you know that guy might be a coward,
and you just watch this guy who you're supposed to
step off the sidewalk for when he passes you back home.
You watched him piss his pants every time like a
shell struck for you know, four years what you and
your guys had to bail him out or like keep
him from his own mistakes. And so it just broke
down that hierarchy that it always existed, and that opened
the door for something like like Bolshevism, you know where
it's especially when you consider like after the war, you know,
the Bolsheviks were the only ones who were really talking
in a way that at least that most people were hearing,
that were really talking in a way that seemed to
speak to the true like insanity of the situation, like
that this has to go period, like we're not interested
in reforming this thing or like whatever did this to us,
like it absolutely just has to be swept away. And
you didn't have you know, mass right wing movements yet
put together or even just whatever liberal movements or something
that were really speaking to these people and on a
level that that that that that I guess honored the
the the the level of emotion that they had given
their experiences, you know, in the Bolsheviks were and they
held sway for a while. I mean really it took
several years before right wing movements and you know across
Europe were really able to kind of gather and coalesce
and and start opposing it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess we would say the first real right
wing movement, let's come up against it was the White
Army and you know, the Black Hundreds, and they're the
cities have already. You know, in Russia, if you don't
have the cities, you're done. You're it's over. You can
have all the towns you want, but if you don't
have the cities, you know, you're basically going to try
to probably get as far away as you can from
the east and h and hide. And I mean I
think that almost mirrors what we have now. Is if
we don't have if you don't have political power, if
you people don't have political power in the cities, you're
pretty much screwed and you're going to have to figure
out a way to get that back. And you know,
we're in a different time now, and you know, the
bulsh Ticks were able to hold onto power for a
very long time because just that they solidified the centers,
the centers of commerce.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, it's so interesting when one of
the things I mentioned in the episode, and it's one
of those things that anybody who's basically familiar with the
history of the period that you know, but then when
you actually stop for five seconds and think about what
it means, is like really hits you. It's just the
fact that over the course of maybe eighteen months, every
government from the Rhine to Siberia evaporated. You know, you
have all these you read diaries from like guy like
like Klemperer's diary and the Munich Revolution, and he talks
in an almost like comical way sometimes about how like
people would be talking on the streets or or you know,
at the university where he was teaching it, they'd be like,
where's the government, Like who is the government? They don't know,
and there would be rumors that, oh, they had left
for Leipzig or you know, and they're still they're still
in charge. And you know, nobody better try to you know,
assert themselves as an alternative whatever, but nobody knows that
that's even true, and there's just nobody's in charge, dude, like,
and so so when you have a situation like that,
you really open a door for you know what, what
first happened in Russia and almost happened in Eastern and
Central Europe, which is just the most ruthless you know,
band of people who are not going to wait around
for you to finish your argument are the ones who
are gonna are going to end up on top, you know.
And that's this It's one of the main lessons that
not just soldier everybody kind of took from the war
itself actually, but also you know, definitely the Bolshevik Revolution
is that you know, at the end of the day,
like we like, force really does trump everything else. Like, yeah,
we Germans feel like we, you know, we're backed into
this corner by French and German Russian aggression and all
these kind of things, and that we never wanted this war.
And they have a good argument for that. But they
you know, they they really felt that way. But it
didn't matter. They lost. They they they got beaten in
the war and that's the end of the story. Now
they're responsible for it, they're the bad guys, and they're
paying for it. And so that's like, that's one. But
then the Bolshevik Revolutionary you had this little band of
nerds from like Swiss coffee shops and you know, just
people from Manhattan, like Brooklyn, like coming back, and they
overthrew this centuries old dynasty that you know, it seemed
like if any you know, if any dynasty in Europe
was the sort of you know, the representative of the
old regime, it was that, and it collapsed like nothing,
you know, just evaporated. And people really took the lesson
that if we want to create a new world, you know,
maybe it'll be ugly, maybe it'll be tough or whatever,
but when it's over, we'll have that new world and
it'll be better for everybody. You just have to do
whatever you must do to make it happen. And that's
the lesson that because if you don't, somebody else will,
you know, And that's just the lesson that they took.
Speaker 1: So a couple of the individuals that you concentrated on
in there, I guess the first we'll talk about is
Ernest Younger who I have a Alexander Adams Lino cut
right up there looking up on the wall of him
in uniform, and I mean it we know anyone who
knows about the life of Younger, And I mean really,
I mean it's hard not to call him a renaissance
man considering what the things he like, the all the
things he wrote, the things he could do. But I mean,
what a fucking badass dude.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know the thing is, you know,
I just because I mentioned him in the episode, and
I mentioned him earlier here, like I'll talk about somebody
like Jocko. Jocko is like in our modern you know,
American world, like you're going to struggle to find a
harder more like just just a guy who is more
of a soldier down to his core than that dude. Right,
He's one of those people who, you know, a lot
of us we're sort of like, you know, we get
out of high school and we have to figure out
what we want to major in or what job we
want to do, and we're kind of just you know,
just thrown along in our lives. And then sometime in
like our maybe early twenties, if we're lucky. Maybe later
if we're not, we sort of like almost kind of
wake up a little bit and be like, oh, I
have to start actually like becoming something. I need to
actually like figure out where this whole thing is going,
and like start working towards that. He's just one of
those dudes who graduated from high school and he's like,
I want to be a commando. That's what I want
to be. And ever since then and even before then,
he spent his time learning and training about leadership and combat.
That's just who he is, right, So he's a very
very like he's a person who can bring his focus
down to a single point in a really admirable way.
But take somebody like Younger and put a into a
situation of where where uh, just the daily grind of
being in the war is so stressful and so depressing
and just so overwhelming for even a strong psychology, and
to still have that same mentality to literally the last
moment of the war, I mean, where he is surrounded
and he and his men start shooting and he manages
to crawl away, he gets shot up, somebody picks him,
one of his guys picks him up, starts dragging him away.
He gets shot, another guy picks him. I mean, this
is like he was fighting to the very very end
with the same intensity that he had in that first rush,
you know, through through Flanders, and it's what it's it's
what sets him apart from like just so many other
people and really like in a way that you only
could have that only could have been replicated in World
War One. I mean, maybe maybe you have like some
old like Green Beret guys from Vietnam and stuff who
were spending all their time behind you know, enemy lines,
and they were just they were in the war and
that was that. You know that you had some of that,
But man, you had guys like Younger. The thing is
like he's a brilliant writer. So we all know about
Ernest Younger, and yeah, he was remarkable. I don't want
to pretend that everybody in the trenches was like him.
But if you do go through like the volunteers, there's books.
There's there's a book. It's only an okay book. I
think it's it's by George MOSSI. Maybe we kind of
goes through his brutalization thesis, but he has this chapter
on the volunteers in the war and just their psychology
and how different they were. And you know, among those guys,
and even among a lot of the conscripts, I mean,
you had people who shifted their mentality into that war
mode and they were able to live there and actually
preserve their sanity in conditions that you know, again would
wreck the sanity of even strong minded people. You in
a lot of ways, like our soldiers today are almost
like combat athletes, you know, like it's like it's just
they go into acute confrontations for a short period of time,
you know, they overwhelm the enemy with technology and skill
and training and all those kind of things, and then
they then they go back to you know, playing call
of duty back at base or something for a little while.
These guys, you know, Ernst Junger was not that dude,
he was he was just a guy, just like all
these du like these guy like Hitler, just a guy.
But you take guys who are just a guy in
their normal lives and you throw them into a situation
like that, and you find out what's what you know
and it's not always who you think either. I mean,
this is a not really an exactly comparable situation, but
when I was in the Navy, Back in two thousand
and four, I was part of We had this just
really terrible bus crash where we were on our way
out as a crew together and the bus there were
two buses, and the one that was in front just
took a semi completely head on and it was just
total chaos, and you know, people lost limbs, people die,
just horrible And one of the things that always remember
from that is that the people who kept their head
and we're going around helping and the people who were
just in a corner, like completely paralyzed were not the
people you'd necessarily expect, you know, and and you you know,
really comes out in situations like that, and especially if
it's something that you know, you have to not just
be able to kind of steal yourself for a for
an acute situation, but you have to have like the
sort of the just the mental strength and the continuity
of that strength to get you through something that uh,
you know, just just goes on and on and on.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess the other guy that you have to
concentrate on is Adolf Hitler. And I think obviously people
like you and I who read books and you know,
watch movies about this stuff know that a messenger in
World War One was not a was not a safe job.
I think the mean, it's not the greatest movie, but
I'm able to watch movies and dismiss, you know, the
propaganda that's in them. But nineteen seventeen was a movie
that just showed exactly how dangerous a the life of
a messenger was, the job of a messenger was, and
for him to be able to, I mean pull off
some heroic shit while he's doing that, I mean, stuff
that is not in a messenger's you know, job, job description,
you know it just yeah, it's just wild to know
that what he did, how he did it, and also
to see that attitude that he had while doing it,
where I mean, this is a this isn't only a job,
but I mean this is where I want to be,
This is where I belong, and I can't believe people aren't.
He had that kind of attitude of why aren't people
as serious about this as I am?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he took the attitude afterward, maybe with with
some justice that if they had been that serious then
the war might have gone differently, you know, but yet
to talk about the messenger thing real quick? You see
this so annoying. Like even in you know, like mainstream
scholarly biographies of Hitler, they'll talk about it in a
way because every single thing that they say about him
has to be said with a sort of cynicism or
kind of reading into it some kind of you know, negative,
negative connotation that they'll present it as if being oh,
he was just a messenger. You know, he slept back
at regimental headquarters, like you know, he wasn't like now.
And you know, i'd say, first of all, during one
of the most intense parts of the war, when the
Germans were on their initial salt through Flanders, he was
right at the tip of the spear on that assault,
so he saw that combat. He was made a messenger.
But what a messenger basically did?
Speaker 1: I mean?
Speaker 2: In a lot of ways, it's not that a messenger
is a dangerous job too. In a lot of ways,
it was one of the most dangerous jobs and one
of the most difficult, just because you were alone most
of the time. Maybe you were with one other person,
but very often you were alone, and you look around
and you'd see this pockmark landscape, and every one of
those shell holes out there might have a few enemy
soldiers in there like standing reconnaissance, and you got to
pick your way through it to find your way to
the line, and you're by yourself. You know, That's one
aspect of it. But then also during like the really
heavy artillery bombardments, frontline soldiers got out of the they
would get out of the trenches and they'd go into
their dugouts, these deep dugouts to protect themselves from the shelling,
and they would stay down there until it was all
over with. That's how, you know, it makes no sense
unless you know that. How you know, an assault like
the German assault in nineteen eighteen, one of them, you know,
they fired two million artillery shells in four and a
half hours along like a forty mile front. You know,
they just completely saturated it, and you're like, how does
a flea survive that? Well, this is how they spread
themselves out and they go into these real deep dug out. Well,
during those things that one of the first things that
would often happen as a result of those artillery bombardments
is all the telephone lines would get cut because they
didn't really have like reliable radio communication yet.
Speaker 1: If they moved.
Speaker 2: Forward or if they were doing something they were literally
had guys with spools running out miles and connecting telephone lines. Well,
those things would all just get annihilated as soon as
the bombardment started. And you still have to be able
to communicate. And so while everybody else is out of
the trench, down in their dugouts, waiting out the artillery bombardment,
the messengers are out there running back and forth going
finding you know, people incredibly dangerous, you know, And so,
you know, one of the things I always like to
do when I make any of these episodes, and I
almost wish I had emphasized this a little more.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: I did emphasize it, but I wish I almost would
have done a little bit more. Maybe I'll figure out
a way to to do the same thing in the
next episode, is to just try to understand, like the
mentality of a person who does a certain thing, you know,
Like in my Jonestown series, I talked about like, you know,
this very kind of thing that's not one of the
big crazy things they did or whatever, but it really
gives you some insight into like what these people's mentality
was where when they first moved from Indianapolis out to
this really conservative town in northern California because it used
to be like cowboy towns up there and stuff. They
go in there and it is all pro Vietnam War,
you know, anti civil rights, conservative, hardcore conservative town. And
like two weeks in the Jonestown people who just moved
to town do this demonstration down main Street against the
Vietnam War, and like just it's just sort of like
gives you just a view into their mentality. It's very confrontational.
Just let you know something about them. Well, I like
to do that all the time. And when you think
about like Hitler the time that he came back, it
happened twice. But the second time he comes walking back
from his message rounds with two maybe three, there's some
like differing report two or three French soldiers and their
weapons that he's carrying, and they're prisoners of his and
he's marching them back. Now, if you're out doing your
rounds right, and you happen to see because obviously he
got the drop on them, he saw them first. You
see three French soldiers, all of them armed, all of
them you know, carrying their weapons, and you would be
you would be actually you could easily justify to yourself
just leaving that situation alone. Just I'm just gonna work
my around because i have a message to deliver, you know,
that's my mission here and this is not. And so
I'm gonna work my way around this confrontation, and you know,
sort of take a wide route. But for a guy
who says no, fuck no, like I'm not doing that,
Like these are the enemy and my mission really is
to win the war, and so I'm going to go
take these prisoners because I got to drop on them.
And so to rush these guys and yet multiple armed
soldiers from the other side to put their hands up,
handy their weapons and then march back as prisoners with you.
I mean, that's just a certain kind of person. You know,
there are a lot of super courageous, badass dudes in
World War One who would not have done that. You know.
It's just it really does take a certain kind of
human being, and it's the you know, it's indicative of
traits that we'll see in Hitler as this story continues
to develop. You know, where he's just he was not,
to say the least, he was not a man who
for half measures. You know, if he's going to do
something he's gonna do it, and he's going to be
fully committed.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this. The at the end of
the war, they time to go home. And I've heard
people say, like, you know, the people the soldiers who
came home from World War Two, because they had a
two months to decompress and they were on a ship
for a while, as compared to like those coming back
from Vietnam, we were just stepping off of a plane.
That the obvious PTS the PTSD wasn't obvious. They had
a time to really, they had a time to decompressed
before they were sent back into society. That didn't happen here.
They just, I mean a lot of them, I assume,
walked home because I mean, what what what else is
there to do? Your army, you've been you've been absolutely devastated,
and not only that, you may have been there for
two three four years in the worst conditions possible that
any human being has seen up until this point. And
we'll never see again, you know. I mean, even if
we have a nuclear war, it's not going to be
like it's not gonna be like that. It'll be hopefully
it's over in a second. And these men who just
saw the worst possible thing. Come back to a society
that is in chaos. I mean, there's no Germany doesn't
really have a government and society. In the streets are
people they don't know who are seeking to take over
their country by force. It's like, how do you even
begin to imagine what they were going through? And what
the mentality of someone who just saw that for even
if they only saw it for two years, they walk
home and they walk into this. I mean that it's
something that we can't even fathom. And we, you know,
we like to think that we can look back and
we can judge these men. I mean, what what do.
Speaker 2: You we have? We have no standing. We have no
standing whatsoever to judge these guys, you know, because yeah,
you know, imagine you're you're at war. You go home,
like after this, this, this ordeal has come to an end, uh,
and not in your favor. You get home and you
find your mother, your father, your little sister on the
brink of starving to death. People who are like you know,
I mean German civilians and troops on the front. By
the end of the war, they were eating cats and dogs.
They were just they were, you know, wandering through fields
looking for any edible route they could dig up. There
was no food, and so you come home and you
find your family in that state and you want to
look around and say, well what do we do about this? Well,
there's no government, so you know, don't look don't look
over there, there's nobody to look to. And then it's
as you said, you look around. This is really going
to be the you know, one of the big themes
in parts of the of the next episode. I was
going to include it more in this one, but it
just kind of got out of hand. Is that, Yeah,
you come home, and it's not just that there are
revolutions kicking off and that cities are popping up and
declaring themselves independent or regions are doing that. It's not
just that, it's that, as you said, like a lot
of these people, these aren't my fellow soldiers who are
leading these revolutions, Like these are people who stayed behind,
you know, maybe people who had rear echelon jobs, or
you know, they were sailors. You know, it's obviously the
keel Uprising that kind of kicked it off. There's a
lot of sailors who've been sitting in port with nothing
to do, and you don't want to leave sailors sitting
around with nothing to do except for complain and talk
to themselves, you know, for four years, because you'll have trouble.
I say that as a Navy guy. And yeah, you
come home and it's not only the rear Echelan people
and the people who you know just didn't fight very often.
It's people from who recently come over here, from like
Poland and other places, and you have these things kicking
off where, you know, one of the things that I
can't remember if I was talking to, but somebody who is.
He's not like us. He's sort of much more normally conservative,
you know. I was talking to him about the the
article that Churchill wrote in nineteen twenty Zionism Versus Bolshevism,
where if you go through and read that thing, and it's, dude,
it's like a Daily Stormer article. I mean it's like
literally they are responsible for every revolution and civil disruption
since the French Revolution. Like they just go, you know,
just as hardcore as you can go. You get banned
on Twitter in the era of Elon for like writing
what Churchill wrote in that thing, right, okay, but like
so now the war's over. Russia's way over there. We're
on our little island. We just kicked ass. We've got
our navy in act and all that. And yeah, communism
sucks and it's awful and evil, but it's really like
a geopolitical problem. It's not a social problem in your
own country. You know, they didn't have anything like that. Well,
if you take that mentality that Churchill had when he
wrote that article, and you just take it out of
that safe, victorious, you know, environment, and you put it
over in central and eastern Europe where millions of people
are being killed right over there, you know, where after
the war, you know, you have like one of the
actually one of the interesting things about like Hitler's anti Semitism,
and he sort of alludes to this and talks about
it in mind comf although I think like he maybe
like you get the impression right, because he talks about
how in Vienna before the war, when he was there,
that was like his first confrontation with like like real
like ostudent. You know. He if he said, if you know,
if we had if we had Jews and Lens, they
were just assimilated German Jews. I didn't know they were
Jewish or anything. They're just Germans whatever. Well, here he's
got like real Jews. Then he's confronted with them, and
he sees them and he talks about in mind comf
how like that's when his anti Semitism really started to
sort of percolate and he started to read and come
to these ideas. And that's probably true. But an interesting
thing is that all the people who knew him back then,
and the people who knew him in the trenches, they
all said he never talked about it, like it almost
as if it was this thing that like was interesting
and he was following it and he's learning more about it,
and maybe these feelings and ideas are starting to, you know,
become more fully formed in his mind, but he's really
still in like the lurking four chan phase of the
whole thing, you know. But then the war ends and
these people watch as Berlin, Munich, the city he was
in at the time, you know, all these cities in Germany,
people wear in red armbands and declaring for the Soviet Union,
you know, declaring Soviet republics in different parts of Germany,
and they're breaking away, and all of them are led
by Jews and doesn't mean all of the supporters and
all the people in the streets were That was a
different story. But even still, it's like and then Bela
Kun in Hungary there's a revolution, him and his whole
government are Jewish. Revolution in Austria communist revolution there, the
whole government is Jewish. And of course, like you know,
as Churchill says in that nineteen twenty article, you know, well,
I mean he actually Churchill actually says in that article
that Germany like was attempted, a bunch of radical Jews
attempted to take over Germany after the war, you know,
and that they did take over Russia. And so if
you take that mentality and then transfer it over to
central or Eastern Europe where where they're watching all of
this happen like out their window, where this is their country,
that they know that if these people win, then we're
going to be facing what's going on in Russia right
now with just you know, yeah, we'll get into that
next series. Your listeners know, well what was going on
by this point. What you get is Adolf Hitler. That's
what you get. You take Churchill's mentality, put it in
this much more real, much more pressurized situation where the
threat is an actual threat, and what you get is
somebody like Hitler, like that's that's really what it is,
you know, And these people were trying to deal with
a threat and a situation that I mean, it's it's
hard to comprehend the consequences where you lose. You don't
just lose a war, you don't just lose your country.
Millions and millions of you were gonna be enslaved and killed,
you know that, that's what the stakes were for these people.
And when you're in when you're facing something like that
and you don't have a government, and you don't have
an intact army or police force or anything like that,
you start to come to some pretty radical conclusions about
the things that have to be done to preserve your
own life, your family, your country, and and these people,
these are the cit to serve ccumstances, these people were
working with, you know. It's just it's it's really like,
you couldn't you really couldn't even imagine like a scenario
in the modern world that would put people in a
similar situation, you know, where things have fallen apart to
that degree, and you're facing a threat of this severity
like on your horizon, you know, and so it's just
intensely pressurized, and you know, and I often tell people like, look,
you know, you can there's a there's a lot of
sort of uh explanations, historical explanations for the Jewish leadership
of all these revolutionary movements that even Ben Shapiro wouldn't
have a problem with. Like you can, there's there's a
bunch of social factors, a bunch of things going on
that you can say, well, this is why all of
these things happened, and you could teach it in the
university class good good professors sometimes do. But for the
people who are in that situation, who just went through
this this insane war, who are now coming back and finding,
you know, there's artillery being fired outside their window on
their streets, and people being shot and killed on their doorstep,
and this is what they come home to. And then
they look around and all they know is that all
of these movements that are kicking all this off are
all led by Jews and declaring for the Soviet Union,
which everybody, including Churchill knows is a Jewish you know,
takeover of Russia. They're going to come to the obvious conclusion,
and they're going to respond to that in a predictable way.
And you know, the way I often put it to
people who are skeptical about that is, like, you just
imagine America. We lose a major war, like a real war,
to the point that it breaks our society down economically
and politically and socially, so that the government completely collapses
and everything like that, and all of a sudden, different
regions of the country start breaking away and declaring themselves
communist republics, and all of them are led by ethnic Chinese.
It's just not something you'd be able to ignore. You
you have to take that into account and and sort
of draw again, just completely rational conclusions from it, you know,
forgetting like whether the responses to that information, you know,
we're rational or not or whatever. But like we'll talk
about that later in the series. But to see that
and to understand it the way that they did completely natural.
You know, you do almost have to be a crazy
person or completely blind to not have that response, you know.
Speaker 1: So Ernst Noltzy describes nineteen fourteen through nineteen forty five
as a European civil war. It's accurate, but were what
was the war. You know, that's always the question is
what was the war? Were were Brits so angry at
Germans that they just they had to give Poland a guarantee?
Were it? I think it's when you understand everything you
just said, and like, like the Churchill article is what
takes you to three minutes? Is that a three minute
read to a four minute read? Anyone? Anyone could read it?
And you know, he basically argues Zionism, it is better
to push Jews to Zionism than it is to Bolshevism
because Bolshevism is going to basically destroy Europe. And when
you look at this European civil war, you know, you
have to come to the conclusion. And I guess that
is one of the reasons why Germany is considered the
enemy is because they came to the conclusion and a
lot of their a lot of their comrades there, you know,
came to the conclusion that this really isn't a war
amongst Europeans. It's a war of of we've been infiltrated
by this, by this power, and we this this outside power,
this this organized international jewelry, and we're going to be
torn apart unless we do something about it, and it
just unfortunately it was you know, you could talk about
the focus in Europe in England, which I'm sure that'll
be a part of the series, and everything, talk about
FDR getting involved here, talk about Russia, what what the
bulsh of, what the power that was that was underway there,
and then of course Stalin Stalin takes it a step further.
I mean, this this this European Civil War as Nulty
calls it. Yeah, it was a civil war. But you
have to wonder if it wasn't for this outside influence,
whether that war would have existed that at all, or
if it would have been as bad as it was.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, you know, certainly the discourse that preceded
it and like contributed to its outbreak would have been
would have would have been different, obviously. You know. The
thing is like, if you go to nineteen fourteen, you know,
there were powerful Jewish bankers, there were just prominent, wealthy
Jewish activists and things like that. The end of the day,
I mean, you still had kings and queens in Europe,
you had kaiser as, you had czars, and those are
the people that started the European Civil War, you know,
and now all of them thought they were getting into
a war of eighteen seventy seventy one. You know, between
the Prussians and the French, they didn't understand what they
were getting into. And once they were in it, you know,
just the same old human tendency that kept us in
Afghanistan for twenty years doing nothing, you know, kicks in
where you know, just one more year and maybe you
can change it, or the next battle and now we'll
you know, make a breakthrough, or I don't want to
be the prime minister or the president who's in office
when this all goes to shit or whatever, and so
they just keep doing it. But over the course of
those thirty years, you do start to see that become
like more a more prominent issue, and you know, you
could say maybe part of that is because of, you know,
the the response that people in interwar Europe had to
Jewish influence that brought it to the center. But you know,
you don't have this is one of the things that
again it's it's it's really hard to to to quantify
this and put this down to like, you know in
ways that are just like it like like it's not
an idea you can necessarily prove, but it's one that
proves itself to common sense that you don't just have
or it's possible, but you don't usually just have millions
and millions and millions of people in different countries, speaking
different languages coming to the same conclusion about something that's
just completely made up in a fantasy in their own
head that they you know, just in their fever dream.
There's always almost always like there's something behind it that
they're that they're playing off of, and you know, whether
it gets exaggerated or whether their response to it is
out of whatever. Like those are all separate questions, but
in terms of how they're understanding the historical events that
doesn't just happen, you know. And you know, I think also,
and this is like, you know, I tend to think
of these things a lot in terms of just broader
historical like maybe you know, I know, you had a
great series with Thomas where you guys were going through
the thought of Eric hobbs Bomb. I'm a big hobbs
Bomb guy looking at like the broader historical forces that
were bringing these various tensions in Europe to a single head,
you know, and really like in the in the industry
realized world where in a very very very short period
of time, a couple of decades in many cases, you
went from having societies that were basically traditional agricultural societies
where most people lived in the countryside and worked, you know,
in workshops or worked in agriculture, to very very quickly
just having these cities of millions and millions of working
men and families packed up in tenement houses and everybody
living hand to mouth in a way that you know,
it's not like it was back in the a few
decades back, where you're at your workshop, but nobody needs
shoes right now. Well, you know, you've got a couple
pigs at home, and you've got a garden and all
these kind of things, and you kind of, you know,
it kind of patches you over through, you know, the
down part of the cycle. It wasn't like that. It
was just you're completely at the mercy of these larger forces.
Your factory decides to fire you, or you get hurt
on the job or something. You're just your family does
have food, and that's just how it is, you know.
And to Germany's credit, actually they were one of the
pioneers and beginning like to try to do something about that,
you know, on a policy level. So you have like
these millions of people and the formation of this new
thing called the public, you know, in public opinion that
really had not been a thing before that was becoming
not only becoming a political force, but by the time
you get up to nineteen fourteen, was really becoming like
the dominant political force that kings and kaisers had to
kowtow to, but one that I mean, you know, as
we see like to this day, very mercurial, let's say,
you know, like public opinion, how the public moves. And
so you have like all of these people too who
came from a rural situation or a more traditional situation
where you know, they probably lived near extended family, they
probably grew up and died around people who knew them
their whole lives. To being in a place where you
have like your your basic sense of social identity and
individual identity is being sort of shaken down to its core,
and all of these kind of things that are that
are happening that really created like a public in all
of these developed countries that was very ready to embrace
anything that's sort of gosh, there's this do I have
that quote anyway, embrace something that would sort of re
solidify that sense of identity and cohesion and connection that
they had lost. You know. And I'm not even talking
about like the radical movements of the Inner War period.
I'm talking about leading up to World War One. And
this goes to how you get. I mean, Hitler is
a perfect example because you know, Younger is a little
bit different because he came from a more stable background.
But Hitler is just a perfect example of a guy
who you know, he came from what was essentially middle class.
His dad was a civil servant. The whole middle class
back then was extremely nationalistic, you know, like you go
to the schools they sent their sons to and it's
part of the curriculum. I mean, they were very very
hardcore nationalists. But then you know, he's an artist living
in Vienna and you know, living in Munich, and he's
around these working class people who are not nationalistic because
nobody's really selling them on the idea very effectively, and
who are just in a lot of ways very dissolute
and kind of a mess. And he sort of lives
in both of these worlds sort of uniquely, and so
and he ends up as a guy who you know,
he didn't hate his father or anything like that, but
his father was very upset that he didn't want to
follow in his footsteps as a civil servant, and they
had their falling out and Hitler. By the time the
war comes, it's kind of one of these guys milling
about in the cities, sort of living hand to mouth
and trying to figure out what he's a part of,
Like what is it that you know that my what's
the larger narrative that my life is? You know, is
a page in and that was millions and millions of people,
and so you know, it allowed these governments to you know,
World War One in a lot of ways is like
it World War two also, but it's just different because
of the level of technology. World War one is so
interesting to me because you know, if you go back
really like throughout most of human history, unless you're talking
about the Romans or something, and they're remarkable, exactly for
this fact, if you send your army out in the
field and it gets beat then that's it. You got conquered,
Like that's how that's what happened, you know, like through
a lot of human history because you didn't have societies
that were as efficiently constructed and that had enough control,
whether totalitarian or authoritarian or just sort of cultural social
control over their populations that would sustain a long war
where just millions of people are being killed and like
guys are being pulled off their jobs and sent to
the field and die and doing it again like they
just you didn't have a social and political system in
place that could have could have achieved something like that.
And by the time you get up to World War One,
this new political formation it's not so new anymore. But
the if you take human history as a whole, it
is you know, the nation state had reached really like
its apagey, Like it's just max level of efficiency where
you know, these countries were able to bring to bear.
I mean just they were able to gear their entire society,
their entire economy, everything toward the conduct of a war
that went on, you know, for years, with without apparent
purpose like to the that was obvious to people a
lot of the time. And that takes like a very strong,
very efficient state to do that. And so the nation
state kind of reached that apogee. And that's something again
I think that only was possible when you have this
this sort of malleable urban mass of men, you know,
who are in this in this situation where they're susceptible
to the state's propaganda pro and anti you know, but
again it makes them susceptible the Bolshevik propaganda and things
like that later too, And you know, yeah, the First
World War, I mean is you've mentioned a couple of times,
how like that's it's really not a replicable experience, and
it's that's true for so many reasons. I mean, the
battlefield technology obviously makes a trench war like that, you know,
really kind of difficult to imagine over long periods of time,
and nuclear weapons all that. But really also, you know,
we just you couldn't, you couldn't just keep pulling up
a Maria, like we almost pulled this country apart in
the nineteen sixties over Vietnam. The idea that you could just,
you know, in this day and age, or in any
perceivable time going forward, just be pulling millions of people
off their jobs and just sending them into the meat
grinder to the point where they're being killed by a
dozen or to a minute, twenty four hours a day,
three hundred and sixty five days a year, you know,
in nineteen sixteen and seventy they're just usually they just
couldn't do it. We don't have the kind of commitment
to our political institutions and the faith in our leadership
to be able to do that. And you know, all
of these things came together back then and and really
made it possible, you know, where you had all of
the you know, we were in this bridge phase where
you had the the you know, the old regimes were
mostly still in control of Europe, but they had at
their disposal these hyper efficient nation states that really like
in a lot of ways were being influenced and controlled
by forces these monarchs couldn't understand and really didn't know
about even you know, because they were so so new
and had emerged so recently. Yeah, so it Yeah, anyway,
I don't even remember what the initial prompt was on that,
but ranting.
Speaker 1: Well, one thing that you said a little while ago
was that what was happening on the streets in Germany
and Berlin and Munich were it's basically war. Basically, you
came there were literally there were gunfights, there were battles,
there was shelling. Can that happen today? Well? Here, let
me ask you this here, I mean highly unlikely. Maybe
if we do have what some people are calling a
civil war here, it'll be little pockets here, little pockets
there of urban versus suburban and ex surban or whatever.
But when I look at something like England, where we
have this new in history, it was very rare for
somebody to wake up, somebody whose family lived on an
island for a thousand years, fifteen hundred years, to wake
up and find that their government has not only declared
war upon them, but is importing a foreign army to
basically destroy them, displace them, and rape their daughters, rape
their wives, rape their mothers, kill them. And when I
think of what an England is going through right now,
I can't, you know. And Ireland is building very quickly.
I listen every podcast I can about Ireland what's going
on over there. It's not hard for me to believe
eve that in England and maybe even in Germany's future,
we're going to see something that is going to be
similar to what happened then. And you know, it's like people,
when I talk about this, I say, you know, Enoch
Powell talked about this in the sixties and he had
a very famous speech, and it seems more and more
like in order for the English to solve this problem,
you're going to see some kind of version of his
most famous speech, like actually happen, because it doesn't seem like.
I know, some of the English people I talk to say, well,
you know our parliament. Our parliament is sovereign, so if
we can get our own people elected, they can from
a sovereign spot, you know, be able to say, Okay,
we're getting rid of all these people and we're going
to have a massive reset, to which I say, there
is no political solution. There is. Your political solutions are
band aids to get you to the next spot. And
in many cases, like Charles Spidiel says, it's going to
be worse than if you handled it now. And I
see very I see England and Ireland and Europe. If
a miracle does not happen, their future can be a
modern version. It's not going to look exactly like it,
but it's going to be a modern version of that
unless they want basically Europe to cease to exist as
it has existed for you know, a thousand years or more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, I think the I really worry
about I mean, look, these countries are going to reach
a point very soon, and a lot of them are
working toward it now in the face of tremendous opposition,
again from their own rulers. But they're going to have
to reach a point where everybody knows we're going to
lose our country, like and are we going to be
willing to do the things that are necessary to keep
that from happening. And all of those things they make
us squeamish, They make us uncomfortable, you know. But the
thing is, I mean there's something look like I get
in trouble for a lot of from a lot of
my buddies on the right when I talk about America
and our history of immigration and everything, you know, and
because for obvious reasons, they don't like the phrase that
we're a nation of immigrants because of the way it's weaponized.
But I mean, if you look at our history, it's
it's obviously true. We just you know, we were populated
by wave after wave of increasingly form or in immigrants,
and that's how we populate the United States and work
people in and what that's done, like leaving aside whether
that has anything to do with immigration today or whatever.
What it has done is it's made it so that
American identity is more fluid. You know, we're kind of
used to having to renegotiate it once a generation or two.
You know, the Anglos had to sort of figure out
a compromise with the Irish and you know, in the Germans,
and then those guys had to come up with a
compromise with the Italians and the Jews or whatever. Like
we're kind of just that's part of the process in
America and we kind of take that for granted. And
it makes it so that I think a lot of
Americans really don't they don't understand how much different it
is to say that Ireland is going to be minority
Irish in a few decades. I mean, that's a totally
It's just and what kind of a I mean, if
you think about it, and this was true for somebody
like Hitler, but it should be true for everybody. Like
losing your country, like that's not something that gets reversed,
Like you know, once that happens and something else is
in control and you're a minority, and I mean that
that's not something that you roll back once it accomplishes. Oh,
we'll fix it in two hundred years or something when
things change. No, No, that's look at I mean, look
at the Middle East. It used to be Christian, now
it's not. That's what happens, you know, and these people
are facing the reality of what is really like the
worst possible thing that can happen to.
Speaker 1: A people is you.
Speaker 2: You lose that one little spot in the world that
is yours for you and your people to work out
your destiny together. And that's you know, I mean, you know,
I take like people talk about Japan and how they're
all you know, their their demographics are going to collapse
and you know, all their pension systems are going to
be destroyed. It's gonna be chaos. And you'll see people say, well,
they're gonna have no choice but to bring in a
bunch of immigrants. And it's like if you talk to
Japanese people, a that's not happening and be you know, like, Okay,
so maybe they'll go through one hundred years of just
economic deprivation and social chaos and all these things, but
guess what, when that hundred years is over, Japan will
still be Japanese and those people will still be there
together able to work out their destiny, you know, in
their own way, and that's uh, you know, it's a
it's a it's very difficult when you know Christian people,
and I don't just mean dedicated Christians, but anybody you
know who grows up in a Western Christian country has
even if they don't even if they've abandoned the transcendent elements,
have you know, version of the of the morality still
imbued in them. That it's very hard for people to
you know, we're very uncomfortable with the idea of being unjust,
whether that's towards somebody who we consider one of our
own or not. And we don't like being you know,
we just you know, it genuinely like afflicts our conscience
to think that we've been unjust towards somebody, and it
makes it so that, you know, you can put it
this way, actually like uh, you know, if like like
if Ireland had been rolled over and conquered, right or
England had been rolled over and conquered and now somebody
else is in charge, and then the English rise up
and you know they start fighting back. The spirit of
the English, like the war spirit that they would bring
to that fight would not be nearly as intense as
as it is when a people wakes up and realizes
that their own best impulses, that their own compassion, their
own patience, their own sense of mercy and justice, that
all of these things have been wielded against them and to,
you know, in an attempt to really destroy the them.
And when people kind of realize that there's no you know,
when the fight comes after that, there's no room for
any of those things anymore. You know, people put them
aside and they don't you know. It's yeah, it's the
saddest thing that's going on in the world right now.
And I don't just say that because I'm a European myself.
I mean I would say it if it was Japan,
you know, like if Japan or China, any other country
that's not in Europe or in the Anglo sphere, like
anywhere in the world, if their government just started against
the consistent will of their people, just importing in one
importing enough radically foreign people of a different religion, different race,
all these things that in sufficient numbers that they were
going to be a minority in their own country in
one generation. We would all say, even liberals, everybody would
say Oh, that country's clearly lost its mind. And when
those people rose up and cut their leaders fucking heads off,
everybody would say, well, that makes sense, you know. I mean,
that's like no monarch, no European monarch in history, would
have dared due to his people the things that our
rulers are doing to us. He might brutally put down
an uprising and you know, just massacre of village because
that's where the uprising came at. Whatever, like, those things
could happen. But the idea that he's just going to voluntarily,
I mean, you have like the you know, the Danes
in England and stuff, but they didn't really have much
of a choice there. Obviously, the idea he was just
going to replace his own people and deprive them of
their homeland like that, they would have they would have
cut his head off, you know, and anybody reading that
history book would have thought that those people behaved in
a perfectly rational way. And Europeans are fast reaching the
point where, well, I guess another way to put it
would be, uh, they're already at the point where if
nothing happens, then they're going to lose their continent. They're
going to lose their country and every day that goes
by the measure that are going to have to be
taken to prevent that get more and more and more
difficult to stomach. And you just hope it happens sooner
rather than later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as somebody who's both sides of my family have
been here, have been you know, American citizens for you know,
one hundred, one hundred and twenty, you know years. You know,
just it's interesting when I what I see people ask
the question, well, what is an American? And inevitably somebody
who is a heritage American whose family goes back all
you know, all the way, and you know, these are
the people that I love and I align with, will
like hold up, be like, oh look, here's a seventeen
ninety here's here, here's the Immigration Act of seventeen ninety
saying it's you know, white people. And when they do that,
and I know, I'm going to piss people off. Now,
all I see is conservatives waiving the Constitution as all
of their rights are being taken away. That's not the answer, bro.
The answer is who the fuck is going to stand
side by side with you to take you know, to
stop this this shit. You know, some of them are
not going to look like you. Some of them are
not going to be Their families are not going to
be here. As long as you stop waving pieces of paper,
stop stop thinking paper is going to solve your problems.
The problems are so existential now that you know saying oh, well,
you know seventeen nights. I mean, these are the same
people who will say the Constitution doesn't mean anything anymore,
but then they hold up a piece of paper when
they want to talk about is what is an American?
You know? And yeah, I think that people just know
who an American is. This is all they have. There's
nowhere else for them to go, and they just they
look at people who come here and use this as
useless place, as a you know, just an economic zone,
and the money exits and it gets sent somewhere else,
and they're just like, fuck, man, why did my people
come here? Why did my grandfather fight in World War two?
You know? Why did I Why did why did my
grandfather fight on the wrong side in World War two?
You know, it's like, you know, the Americans shouldn't have
had anything to do with World War two. This, this
wasn't our fight. And watching people like something you said
a couple of years ago. I think about all the
time you said when Jeffrey Epstein died in his cell
because the basically the people of the United States didn't
rise up and overthrow their government at that point is
basically proof that we're done that that no one's going
to do anything anymore, because it was the most obvious
thing in the world world what happened there. And yeah,
I mean, I'm yeah, I don't know that fighting what
fighting is going to solve this anymore. It may it
may come down to it, but is it you know,
even if you did try to, you know, this is
in I don't think people realize that this is an
existential fight. That Another thing that really upsets me is
when people like they look at oh man, do you
see all the based Lord of the Rings memes a
DHS accounts is putting out there. They're gonna they're gonna
get rid of all the immigrants They're look at they're
preparing for war. No they're not. They're just placating you.
I mean, they're just they're entertaining you. You're they're making
you feel I mean, this is to think that it
was it was the hope of a lot of people,
including myself, that we see a lot of deportations of
people who don't belong obviously don't belong here, the economic zone,
people that don't belong here. You start there, but it
was never real, you know, it was it was how
are how are we just kicking the can a little
bit down the road so we figure out a way
through this? And I don't. I mean, I have hope
that we'll our you know, our posterity will thrive, will
keep thriving. But it gets to a point where it's
just not it's gonna it's gonna be hard. It's gonna
be hard. It's you know, when you have AI, when
you have technology, when you have all this. You know,
it's like the libertarians used to be like, oh everybody,
when you say that AI will replace jobs, that you
sound like you know, the people who said, oh no,
we need to ban cars because the know the horse
and buggy, the pors and buggy people. I have people
who contact me all the time and say, is there
any way do you know anybody who's looking to hire
like a software somebody's a coder right now. And I'll
contact people I know and they'll be like, sorry, man
what he wants to do, AI does for me in
five minutes, and it does it for twenty dollars a month,
a twenty dollars a month of description. So I don't
think people realize if I thought things were getting better,
if I thought things were that Trump was going to
that we were going to have a savior in government,
I wouldn't be a part of the old Glory Club.
I wouldn't be you know, organizing with people off you know,
off the internet. And I mean, I just I don't
know how to wake people up to the fact that
thinking that the government or thinking that, you know, referring
to documents from two hundred and fifty years ago is
somehow going to change people's minds. I don't know how
to convince some otherwise at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean I think about those Heritage Americans
who are waving around the Naturalization Act as if it's
holy writ, very similarly to like they're making the exact
same mistakes that the whites made during the Russian Revolution.
Like you just you can't understand that there is an
existential fight in front of you right now, and that
you know, you don't you don't have to agree with
that guy about everything over there, the other white army.
But you can hash that out when the Reds are done,
have finished, you know, and they're just not willing to
do that. And yeah, fortunately, I think, you know, we
see a lot of those people because they're on our
side and you know, they're in our social media spheres
and stuff. But I think the American people in general
like that. It's they don't think that way. They understand that. Like,
you know, I made this point to uh uh somebody.
We were talking about race, heritage, American stuff, and I
told him, I said, look, man, if your movement, if
your idea for where this is going and how we're
going to win involves getting American Christians to think of
you as their brother because you have the same you know,
white skin, and that the duskier guy sitting next to
them in the pew at church is their enemy, then
you're not going anywhere. That is not going to happen.
And if it does, then you've you've ruined what this
country like, what what makes it, what makes our people good? Anyway,
you know, it's just a you know, you again, you
have to be able to stand with people who like you,
and this is a crisis moment, you know, like we're
in this point. You asked, like why haven't we done
anything yet? Or why haven't people risen up? Or if
they haven't by now, then when will they ever? And
it's it's the same answers in Europe. Is the people
are looking around, they're hoping there surely must be another
way out of this, right, other than the one that
we all know there must be, right, like don't make
us do that. Please, don't make us do that. And
you know the forces that are pushing it, they you know,
they want that confrontation. They want to make you do that,
and they want that confrontation. See see how it shakes out.
I mean, I think, you know it really there's another actually,
so there's another element to it too, like that really
I think maybe is even like prior to the political
and social considerations, or I guess it is sort of
a social consideration. But you know, you know, I was
thinking the other day, I was my off time, I
was rereading an old essay that I wrote about one
of the French philosopher to Loses old S on schizophrenia
and capitalism, and he kind of makes this point that
I saw somebody make talk about this on Twitter. That's
why it's fresh in my mind the other day about
how you know, capitalism is this force. These guys were
Marxist to lose in his partner guitar, you know, they
were Marxists, but they were very cynical Marxist who didn't
expect the revolution anytime soon. One of the things that
they said is that it's completely unrealistic to expect that
the working class is going to have the ability to
resist all of the libidinal temptations that are thrown at
him by capitalism. And that's just true, like you know,
like it is especially now. I mean, just think about this, dude,
like we are. I was talking to a coder about
this who's very much into the AI stuff, which is
something that's all over my head. But I was asking
him questions, and I said, how far are we away
from like VR pornography, where the woman can interact and
respond to you with like her speech and her actions
the way chatgy can talk to you like fully formed
like language models, and you can He said, well, we
can do that now, just nobody's done it yet. There's
probably people working on but we could do that. Now
you get to that point, you see already with you know,
the legalization of weed and the I mean, back during COVID,
if you lived in California at the time, like I did,
you know, your church was closed, your school was closed,
the weed and liquor stores were all still open. You
see stuff like that, and you start to realize that,
you know, in a lot of ways, like Brave New
World is a more realistic dystopia than nineteen eighty four,
at least for our world, you know. And so for
the people who want to resist this. And I know
this sounds like a slogan, like a trite slogan or something,
but dude, it has to start like with you. You have
to harden yourself against these influences and actually make yourself
like a useful adult human being, you know, because everything
in our society is trying to draw you into this
morale of you know, hedonic impulses that you know, all
of life is consumed with fulfilling and everybody around You're
going to look around, everybody around you is sort of
doing that, and it's incredibly difficult to resist on your own,
you know, and really like the only way that people
throughout history have because you know, Obviously, throughout most of history,
the mass of the population didn't have the opportunity to
just give themselves over to pleasure or something because they
were too busy farming or whatever. But the aristocracy did,
you know, the wealthy aristocracy did. And what you saw
is as long as there was like an intact cult
of honor among the aristocracy, it really was like a
religion to them. They held out against that, but once
that lost its hold on them, they gave in, you know,
to the pleasures of the moment. They became degenerate and
fell apart. And that's something that now that you know,
we have just a level of economic plenty and technology
that can provide, you know, any pleasure you can think of,
call to virtually everybody in society is something that everybody
is now in the position of. And if you look around,
I mean it's really only people who are part of
what a lot of outsiders would look at as cults,
whether it's the Amish or the Mormons or something, who
are having any success whatsoever and resisting that. And so
the lesson there is not to go start a cult
or join one, but it's to get with your people.
You need to find out who your people are. You
need to come together with them. You need to hold
each other accountable, and you need to think of that
as your primary identity because this whole big project, like
you know, I identity has to be and loyalty have
to work from the inside out, you know what I mean.
Like I have my immediate family, and I love my
extended family. But if my extended family is you know,
a hostile to my immediate family, then you know, my
loyalty to them extends so far as they nourish and
support or you know, my more immediate family, and then
my community, and all the way on out to your country.
You know, your country, the nation state of America. That's
that shape on the map we all are familiar with.
That's a that's that's not something that you're going to
find like in the Holy Bible. You know, that's a
political configuration that came together very often in chaotic circumstances
and by random chance the way things happen, and it's
probably going to change over time. Our system of government
is going to radically change over time. Like you know,
we can't imagine that we've reached the end of history,
and like this is something that has to be preserved
at all costs. When we're in a situation like this
where the ruling powers are literally, as you said, at
war with their own people, trying to destroy us, trying
to replace their own people, you know, trying to devalue
everything that's important to them and has ever been important
to their ancestors, you have to realize that you're in
a situation where those larger things that you want to
give your loyalty over to probably don't deserve them anymore,
and maybe one day they will, but in the meantime,
you need to start here and then build out, you know.
And so you need to treat that the your your
your local community, whether it's I don't just mean your neighbors,
but your people, you know, the old Glory Club. I
love what you guys are doing. I think it's I
don't know, I don't even think it's a good idea.
I really think that that path is the only idea
right now that anybody should really be thinking about. And
you have to treat that thing not like a and again,
like I don't I'm not saying you should like go
all crazy Jim Jones or something, but you know, you
have to. You have to treat it almost with a
cult like mentality and the sense that you know this,
these are my people, and I have more loyalty to
them into this structure and too, you know this this
group than I do to any of these larger projects
that are failing me right now. And when you do that,
then you have a firm base to then and kind
of work out from and try to and try to
expand larger problem try to solve larger problems.
Speaker 1: But you have to have that base.
Speaker 2: Nobody. You can't accomplish anything on your own. Somebody who's
just out there on his own with nobody holding him
accountable on a regular basis, nobody that he's afraid of disappointing.
You know that dude is inevitably he's going to reach
a period in his life where he gets overwhelmed by
the stress of that particular moment or whatever it is,
and he's going to become dissolute and fall apart. You
have to have other people around you that you know otherwise,
you know, like like having our people around us is
what sort of packs us in and keeps us from
just dissolving, you know, into nothing. And so it's the
most important thing and and it's very urgent because, as
you said, I mean, we're we're already at the point
where things that are going to be very uncomfortable for
even right wing people, you know, because we're all still
good Christians, you know, in our hearts, are going to
be very uncomfortable at times. That's already where we're at
if we're going to turn any of this around, and
every day that goes by, you know, those measures get
get more intense. So yeah, and oh, you know what,
let me make one more point. Pares sorry, just because
it has to do with just exactly this too, and
it's from personal experience. I was talking to I was
talking to Dave Smith the other day about just sort
of our experiences of being under fire, like I was
after the Tucker interview last year, and how as he's
been at various times. And one of the things that
we both just sort of spontaneously, you know, spat out,
was that believe it or not, if you've got like
loyal friends and a loyal family, then honestly, like the
New York Times and the White House Press secretary denouncing
you by name, it all is just noise, Like it
really just is this far away thing that like you
know it, it doesn't affect you if you have that
strong base. And so, you know, build your relationships with
people who are worth building them with and really pour
yourself into them. Take the initiative, you know, do the
things that are necessary, and understand that strong relationships are
not something that that just develop because you know, two
people happen to be compatible with each other or whatever else.
They take work, go out of your way for your
friends and your family and make sure that they're doing
the same for everybody else. Like, that's how you build
that loyalty that is going to stand the test when
it really matters.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not going to add to that. So
tell people where they can subscribe to the Martyr Maaide podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have a substack. It is at subscribe
dot martymade dot com. The history show, the one we've
been talking about here, is just free to everybody on iTunes, Spotify,
et cetera. The sub stack is five bucks a month
or fifty bucks a year. There's a lot of long
essays and exclusive podcasts and all that kind of stuff.
But I always tell people, you know, if five bucks
a month is a lot. Right now, I've been there before.
I know what that's like. So just shoot me an
email martyr made at gmail dot com and we'll just
get you set up because I want everybody to check
it out if they want to. And then every Friday
at eight pm Eastern five pm Pacific, me and our
good friends Scott Horton do our show Provoked Live and
we take questions and talk about sort of more immediate things.
Speaker 1: That reminded me of listening to episode one of Enemy
and you talking about in the beginning, how yeah, I
just have to stop taking you know, all these invites
to talk about current events and everything as you start
a current events podcast that you're doing. Yeah, well, so
that's true.
Speaker 2: And our our sort of understanding when we when he
brought that idea to me, was that this is kind
of this is something that I show up for an
hour and uh, we have a chat. I'm not spending
all week working on the episode or something. He does
a lot of that work in the research and setting up,
and I'm kind of there to, uh, you know, witness
Scott do his thing.
Speaker 1: But that is true.
Speaker 2: And I want to say too obviously as you know,
you already know this, but you know that I was
talking to my wife about this the other day, because
I do need to stop letting things like that distract
me so much. But you know that doesn't have anything
to do with coming on with my friends. You know,
you and the guys who have been there and been
through the ship with me and supported me and just
just been cool throughout you know that that will always
be a priority.
Speaker 1: So I appreciate that. Daryl, thank you, thanks for your time,
and get to work on part two.
Speaker 2: Yep, thanks brother.
Speaker 1: Take care. By S.