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Speaker 2: Thank you.

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Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show

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and it's been a while. Mister Fieldhouse is back. How

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are you doing, sir?

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Speaker 2: Like you said it's doctor Admiral. Yeah, sleet Lord of Appalachia.

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Speaker 1: Oh man, So someone sent me this article, and considering

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how much World War two has the discussion of World

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War two has re entered the zeitgeist thanks to people

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like Thomas seven seven seven and Daryl Cooper and a

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lot of others, obviously Papuchanan people like that, I thought

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this article by Anthony Beevor who Anthony bevar even though

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he I considered him to be a left libertarian ish,

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but he did write a really good book on the

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Spanish Civil War, and he's written a couple of good

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history books, and he gets the facts right as far

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as I can tell. He wrote an article for Foreign

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Affairs saying entitled We're still fighting World War Two the

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un subtitled the Unsettled Legacy of the conflict that shaped

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today's politics. So, yeah, are you you know, what's your

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take on the fact that World War Two is so

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so much more discussed now? Is it just time to

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is it time to shatter myths?

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Speaker 2: I think in a lot of ways, is the fact

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that you know that's sort of like the uh, the

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metaphysical paradigm, for lack of a better word, how the

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last few generations have defined the world and we've seen things,

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whether explicitly or not. So we're in a situation where

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it's now possible to you know, even examine those you know, presuppositions,

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those perspectives and why we have those perspectives, which is

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why people like you know, Thomas and Daryl are very

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much doing and a lot of the I think the

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reaction in mainstream media is it's almost like the establishment

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sees itself as you know, the hosts the body politic,

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which they're not, but they see themselves as that, and

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they see any person engaged in any kind of I

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would say what they call revisionist history, which I wouldn't

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even say that we were doing that, but it seems

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anything that attacks the narrative, even when it's doing so

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by stating facts that everybody knew in the past, is

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it looks at us as a virus, and it's it's

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almost like we're seeing a host, you know, trying to

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kill off what it sees as an infection. And that's

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part of why I think World War Two is suddenly

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back in the zeitgeist with the establishment.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, the problem is even even when Pap Buchanan wrote

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his book there's just way too much velocity of information now.

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So you know, Papu Cannon can write his book and

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he can get on c Span two to talk about it.

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But the fact is is that now you somebody, you know,

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an idiot like me, can go viral and get a

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million people looking at what I'm what I'm saying, and

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two million people what I'm say saying, and you know,

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just call myself an idiot, but you know what I'm saying,

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you could very well be true. And it could it

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could go right up against the established narrative. Yet, yeah,

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if it catches on and people people agree with the

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message and even look into a little bit, it's really

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hard that for that host to be able to hold

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off or prevent that virus from entering.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and part of this is I think has gotten

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so weird and even we can see the last I

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don't know was it thirteen years since you can and

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put his book out about Churchill and Hitler is these

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are not controversial facts at the time, right, I Mean,

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they weren't things that every person khe but some of

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the general World War two knowledge would know the majority

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of those things, just like a lot of the things

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we did in the past, or historians talked about the

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past concerning the Third Reich, or you know, Italy during

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World War Two. You know, things that we would say

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challenge the narrative today were pretty mainstream, right, historians had

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a fairly balanced understanding. They may not present it as

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a balanced manner, but they had a fairly balanced understanding

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until very recently. The weirdest thing I think we're seeing

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right now that gets back to the whole, Like the

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host attacking what it sees as an infection is basic,

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uncontroversial facts are now Just stating those things is now

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seen as a partisan political, you know issue, even when

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you know, historical knowledge was never seen that way and

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these are not very often controversial facts, if that makes sense.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just looking. It came out in twenty eight,

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seventeen years ago, and social media was I mean Twitter

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was at its infancy. I think I had just made

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my first Twitter account in two thousand and eight. Facebook

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was something very few people were on, so information wasn't

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being blasted out there like like it is today. Son,

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I think really is a sign of the times and

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a sign of what technology can do.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Like one of the best examples, and I'll shut up,

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is we were talking one time offline about the old

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time Life books that came out in the late eighties

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early nineties about World War Two, and yeah, these were

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you know, produced by Time Life Books. So these were

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table call, you know, coffee table books that weren't what

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we'd call serious history, but they were you know, documenteds history,

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and they were very willing to present you know, the

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side of the Third Reich, of the Axis and in

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the Soviets and other actors. They're you know, in honest detail.

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And it's weird that today a book like that would

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be seen as explicit Nazi propaganda when it was just

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doing history. And again, me and you were not that old.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the you know those time Life books you

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I have one on Stalinograd and it presents it, i

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mean down the middle, like what happened there really isn't

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a lot of you know, a lot of narrative there.

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So yeah, all right, anyway, let me start reading this

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article because I think he does a pretty good job

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of getting into what you just get an idea what

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he sees, and I think a lot of people will

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have a lot see some of their thought in it

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as well, so bevore starts. History is seldom tidy, eras

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overlap and unfinished business from one period lingers into the next.

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World War two was a war like no other in

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the magnitude of its effects on the lives of people

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in the fates of nations. It was a combination of

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many conflicts, including ethnic and national hatreds, that followed the

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collapse of four empires and the redrawing of borders at

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the Paris Peace Conference after World War One. A number

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of historians have argued that World War two was a

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phase of one long war, lasting from nineteen fourteen to

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nineteen forty five, or even until the collapse of the

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Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one, a global civil war,

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first between capitalism and communism, then between democracy and dictatorship,

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what Nulzi called the European Civil War. World War two

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certainly brought the strands of world history together with its

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global region, its acceleration at the end of colonialism across Africa,

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Asia and the Middle East. Yet despite sharing this international

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experience and entering the same order built in its wake,

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every country involved created and clung to its own narrative

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of the Great conflict. Yeah, I think him pointing out

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how colonialism basically became something that needed to be fought against,

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you know, and you would see in the next several

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decades even Rhodesia, Rhodesia had to go and Africa, Africa,

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the way Africa was conducting itself needed to be changed.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And it presents a very interesting picture to us

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of how the Western Allies began self attacking post World

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War Two.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Even the matter of when the war began is

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still debated. In the American telling, it started in earnest

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when the United States entered the conflict after Japan attack

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Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one, and the

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German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States

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a few days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin meanwhile, insists

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that the war began in June nineteen forty one, when

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Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, ignoring the joint Soviet a

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Nazi invasion of Poland in September nineteen thirty nine, which

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marks the start of the war for most Europeans, yet

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some trace its origin back further. Still, for China, it

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began in nineteen thirty seven with the Sino Japanese War,

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or even earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in

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nineteen thirty one. Many on the left in Spain are

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convinced that it began in nineteen thirty six with General

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Francisco's Francisco Franco's overthrow of the Republic, launching the Spanish

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Civil War. These clashing worldviews remain a source attention and

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instability in global politics. Putin cherry picks from Russian history,

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combining homage to Soviet sacrifice in the Great Pagatriotic War

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as World War two is known in Russia with the

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reactionary ideas of exiled Czarist white Russians after their defeat

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by the Communist Reds in the Russian Civil War of

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nineteen seventeen to twenty two. The latter include religious justifications

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for Russian supremacy over the entire Eurasian land mass from

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vladivaus Stock to Dublin, as Putin's ideologue Alexander Dugan has

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put it, and a deeply rooted hatred of liberal Western Europe.

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Such ideas have also begun to circulate within the within

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US President Donald Trump's orbit.

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Speaker 2: I would stop right there and point out that he's

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doing with Daryl points out that the American left doesn't

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have international enemies, they have domestic enemies and international groups

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that remind them of their enemies. And you know, quating

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the American right with Russia right there, you know it's

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explicit on this wart. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: He also says Putin's ideolog Alexander Dugan, and there's a

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lot of debate over just exactly how much influence Dugan

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has over Putin.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I've interacted a little bit with Dugan, and I

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promise you that Putin is aware of him and has

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interacted with his ideas and interacted with him. That's not

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the same thing as saying that Dugan is in charge

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of his foreign policy.

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Speaker 1: Putin has rehabilitated the World War Two area Soviet leader

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Joseph Stalin, who, as a Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei

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Sakaroff has said, was directly responsible for even more millions

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of deaths than Hitler. The Russian president goes so far

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as to insist that the Soviet Union could have won

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the war against Nazi Germany on its own, when even

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Stalin and other Soviet leaders privately acknowledged that the Soviet

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Union would not have survived without America aid. They also

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knew that the US British strategic bombing campaign against German

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cities forced the bulk of the German Lafwaffe back home

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from the Eastern Front, thus giving the Soviets air supremacy.

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Above all, Putin refuses to acknowledge the horrors of the

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Stalinist error as many Solmes, as Mary Solmes, the daughter

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of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recounts it to me

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at dinner in two thousand and three. Church Will asked

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Stalin during an informal meeting in October nineteen forty four,

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with the Soviet leader regretted most in his life. Stalin

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took a moment to reflect before he quietly answered, the

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killing of the Kulaks, the land owning peasants. This campaign

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peaked with the Hola Domor in nineteen thirty two to

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nineteen thirty three, in which Stalin deliberately inflicted famine on Ukraine,

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killing more than three million people and instilling a hatred

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of Moscow among many survivors and their descendants.

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Speaker 2: I would ask, real quick, does anybody think that Stalin

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really said that, Churchill.

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Speaker 1: No, I don't believe that at all.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. I could absolutely believe that Stalin thought that, But

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would he say that to an ally that he still

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saw as a competitor. I refuse to believe that.

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Speaker 1: I don't think he would say that to his closest confidence. Yeah,

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He's just not the kind of person who admits to

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something like that. He would default to something much less substantial.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and especially because to the larger point that the

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author brings up the role of, you know, the great

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mythos of the Second World War and how it impacts

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different country By saying that, Stalin is essentially saying that,

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you know, his mythoss Are is just made up. So

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I don't think he did that.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. He's also in bringing up the hol of Domoor

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and using this as an example. He's also it looks

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like you can use well, why did certain Ukrainians side with,

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you know, with the Reich.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, certain ethnic Russians and you know Tatters and you

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know people who are half Mongol who joined, you know,

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as hass auxiliaries. You know, the Nazis were surprisingly diverse.

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Speaker 1: World War two also produced an often uneasy balance between

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Europe and the United States. Hitler's hegemonic ambitions forced the

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United Kingdom to adopt its self appointed role of world

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policemen and turn to Americans for aid. The British were

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genuinely part of their The British were genuinely proud of

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their part in the ultimate Allied victory, but they tried

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to hide the sting of their declining global influence by

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spouting the cliche that the United Kingdom had managed to

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punch above its weight in the war and by clinging

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to their special relationship with the United States. Churchill was

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dismayed by the prospect that US troops might simply go

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home after The threat from Moscow ensured that Washington in

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oh Sorry, Churchill was dismayed by the prospect that US

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troops might simply go home after the war and the

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Pacific ended in nineteen forty five. Although American attitudes continue

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to fluctuate between seeking an active global role and retreating

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into isolationism, the threat from Moscow ensured that Washington would

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remain deeply engaged in Europe until the collapse of the

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Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one. Today, the first major

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continental war in Europe since World War Two is in

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its fourth year, driven in part by Putin's selective reading

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of Russian history, while deadly conflicts in the Middle East

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and elsewhere threatened to spread further. The Trump administration, meanwhile,

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appears to be casting aside the United States global leadership

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in the cuton fuse tantrum. Eighty years ago, the end

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of World War II paved the way for a new

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international order based on respect for national sovereignty and borders,

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But now a steep bill for American ambivalence European complacency

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in Russian reventionism may finally becoming doe.

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Speaker 2: I'm going to be brutally honest. When we conquered Europe

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de facto and occupied the whole western half, we really

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weren't doing that because of respect for their borders, their

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national identity.

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Speaker 1: No, that was it was an occupation.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and we can after that, we can discuss whether

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or not it was just or effective or should have happened,

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and that's a much longer discussion. But let's not pretend

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we did it out of absolutest morals, you know, reasons.

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Speaker 1: And this is one of the things that Bivre does

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and just my reading of his Spanish Civil War book,

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getting the idea that he's more of like a left libertarian.

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He basically blames the whole Ukraine conflict on Putin's selective

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reading of Russian history while invoking the United States global

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leadership in a confused tantrum. Because it's the United States

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global leadership quote unquote is what provokes what happened. You know,

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what happened in Ukraine, as I've said, as I've said

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clearly if I was president, if I was president of Russia,

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I would have invaded in twenty fifteen.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, my to put my cards on the table, I'm

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hard neutral in this war. I don't support either Russia

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or the Ukrainians, and I happen to know some very

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good people from both camps, as cliche as that is.

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And my concern, more than anything is is the American

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need to involve itself in things that doesn't understand and

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then try to micromanage things it does not understand. Is

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what caused this? And in saying doing that, I'm not

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justifying what Putin did, you know, but I'm explaining that

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this didn't have to happen. And because of you know,

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politicians in the United States who didn't know what they

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were doing. Primarily, you know, people in the Biden administration

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who put a senile, dying man in office so they

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could get what they want, started a war which killed

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lots of Ukraine, And if you actually care about them,

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you should you be opposed to the actions that caused.

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Speaker 1: That, especially the politics behind it. All Right, more than

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a number the sheer cruelty of World War two was scarred,

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was scared into the memories of several is scared. I'm sorry.

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The sharer cruelty of World War two was seared into

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the memories of several generations. It was the first modern

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conflict in which far more civilians were killed than combatants.

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This could have been made possible only by an ideologically

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fueled dehumanization of the enemy. Nationalism started to a fever pitch,

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and racism promoted as virtue on one side, and Lenin

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s class warfare that endorsed exterminating all opposition on the other.

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How's that not so, what's what's better racism or classism?

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Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I know this is rhetorical, but we all

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automatically know what the default establishment answer is.

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Speaker 1: Telling and tellingly. After the war, Soviet diplomats fought to

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prevent class warfare, which would have included the Soviet Union's

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mass killing of aristocrats, bourgeoisi, and land owning peasants from

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being mentioned in the United States nineteen forty eight Genocide Convention.

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In all, some eighty five million people died in World

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War II, a figure that includes those who perished from

327
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famine disease. Nazi Germany killed around six million Jews, among

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other people in the Holocaust, no comment. Almost a fifth

329
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of the Polish population. Also, nearly six million people was lost.

330
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The Chinese lost well over twenty million, more of whom

331
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perished from famine and disease than from fighting on the battlefield.

332
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Estimates of Soviet deaths range from twenty four to twenty

333
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six million, many of them needlessly. Stalin was aware in

334
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nineteen forty five that the total exceeded twenty million, but

335
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he owed up to just a third of that loss

336
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as he tried to conceal the extent of the horror

337
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he had unleashed on his people. The international relations scholar

338
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David Reynold has noted that Stalin settled for seven and

339
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a half million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic

340
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but not criminally homicidal.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, just real quick digress. One of the points that

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I always bring up and discussing the impact of the

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Second World War in terms of casualties, was it thirty eight,

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nineteen thirty eight, or excuse me, nineteen forty The United

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States and Soviet Union had roughly parody and population. Soviet

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Union sort of apples and oranges because of their expansion

347
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to Poland and whatnot. Who was considered a citizen who

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was not, So it's an approximation, but they had roughly

349
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the same population in nineteen forty, and Soviet Union endured

350
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something like twenty to thirty times as many casualties as

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the United States. And the best way to understand this,

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and I've heard multiple historians bring that up, is imagine,

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in one month, you absorb as many casualties as the

354
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United States did in the entirety of World War Two,

355
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and then the month after that, after that, and you

356
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go on for twenty plus months. And that's what the

357
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Soviet Union did. And again, I'm not pro Communists in

358
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any sense of the word. I'm not ethnic Russian, so

359
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I have a lot less concern for them. But as

360
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an American, the average American is simply incapable of understanding

361
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the amount of human suffering and sacrifice that the Soviet

362
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Union Soviet people put into this conflict.

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Speaker 1: World War two brought the strands of world history together.

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It is not enough to remember the dead, many of

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whom were deliberately rendered nameless by their killers. For those

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who survived, the prisoners of war and the civilians imprisoning camps,

367
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the conflict changed changed life in calculable ways. Those resigned

368
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to their lots were often early victims. The most likely

369
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survivors were those with a burning determination to return to

370
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their families it's all on to their beliefs, or to

371
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bear witness to unspeakable crimes. Many often captured soldier did

372
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not make it home. Those from the Soviet Red Army

373
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who had been forcibly recruited by the German military were

374
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rounded up well in German uniform in France and handed

375
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over to Soviet officers, who executed suspected leaders in the

376
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woods before transporting the rest back to the Soviet Union.

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Speaker 2: What a negative way to say they sorry? What a

378
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negative way to say they left the Red Army and

379
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joined who they saw as their allies.

380
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Speaker 1: Exactly there the soldiers were sentenced to slave labor in

381
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the Frozen North. Just days after Germany's surrender, British forces

382
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in Austria ordered the more than twenty thousand anti communists

383
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Yugoslav nationals in the area under their jurisdiction to be

384
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handed over to Communists Yugoslav authorities, who shot and then

385
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buried them in mass graves. British forces also handed over

386
00:23:49,599 --> 00:23:53,359
to Soviet authorities Cossacks who were Soviet citizens but had

387
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fought for Germany. The British government almost certainly knew that

388
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a harsh sentence awaited these soldier, but feared that letting

389
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them go would mean the Soviet authorities would hold on

390
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to British prisoners of war that the Red Army had

391
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liberated in Poland and Eastern Germany. The Red Army also

392
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rounded up six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers in northern China

393
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and Manchuria. All of them were sent to labor camps

394
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in Siberia and worked to death. For decades after the war,

395
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its memory lived on in those who had experienced at

396
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first ten Yeah, the post war.

397
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say, for decades after it

398
00:24:30,880 --> 00:24:33,799
lived on It's like, yeah, but it didn't even end

399
00:24:33,920 --> 00:24:36,759
for you know, a decade plus. The last German POWs

400
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didn't lead till nineteen fifty six. The any person knows

401
00:24:40,640 --> 00:24:42,759
who I am in real life, my real life namesake,

402
00:24:43,240 --> 00:24:45,519
my uncle. You know, it was a pow until like

403
00:24:45,599 --> 00:24:48,440
nineteen fifty in the Soviet Union. You know, Germany didn't

404
00:24:48,440 --> 00:24:50,000
have an army at this point, It didn't even have

405
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a unified country or a government that was you know,

406
00:24:52,920 --> 00:24:56,440
accepted by outside countries at that point. But somehow the

407
00:24:56,559 --> 00:24:58,880
prisoners still stayed there for a decade plus, and of

408
00:24:59,240 --> 00:25:02,119
foreign countries we say this, You know, these tragic things

409
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lived on for decades afterwards. You want to say, look, man,

410
00:25:04,920 --> 00:25:08,160
it's like this didn't even end for a decade plus afterwards.

411
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Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a book called an Eye for an Eye

412
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which talks about Germans who were sent to a prison

413
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basically afterwards that was manned quote unquote manned by a

414
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woman of a certain background who proceeded a torture of

415
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them all to death.

416
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Speaker 2: Yeah.

417
00:25:31,160 --> 00:25:34,519
Speaker 1: Yeah, this the war didn't The war didn't end for

418
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a long while after. I mean, and ideologically has it.

419
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Speaker 2: Ended ideologically know or at least they're trying to keep

420
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it from ending. And to his earlier point, he says,

421
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you know, lots of historians see the First World War

422
00:25:48,720 --> 00:25:51,680
and Second World War is just one larger conflict. And

423
00:25:52,039 --> 00:25:54,880
you know, lots of people saw the occupation and division

424
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of Germany post World War Two as part of that war.

425
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So again for my family who were in German, you know,

426
00:26:00,400 --> 00:26:03,240
when the wall came down was an eighty nine ninety

427
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to a lot of them, they saw is you know

428
00:26:05,079 --> 00:26:08,480
that damn war that started in nineteen fourteen, where their

429
00:26:08,559 --> 00:26:11,240
uncles marched off the war. Finally that damn thing was ending.

430
00:26:11,720 --> 00:26:14,880
It didn't, but you know, that was the respective they had.

431
00:26:15,240 --> 00:26:17,000
And as you said, you know a lot of people

432
00:26:18,319 --> 00:26:20,960
they're you know, fighting tooth and nail to keep us

433
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from giving up that worldview.

434
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Speaker 1: Yeah. One thing that Americans, many Americans do not have

435
00:26:28,440 --> 00:26:33,240
is a long view of history. They still they still

436
00:26:33,279 --> 00:26:39,599
want to They still cry about the those crazy Iranian

437
00:26:39,720 --> 00:26:43,559
students who stormed the embassy in nineteen seventy nine, not

438
00:26:43,680 --> 00:26:45,839
knowing that that was three decades in the making.

439
00:26:46,240 --> 00:26:50,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that was brought up where was a two

440
00:26:50,519 --> 00:26:53,839
thousand and eight by Ron Paul brought it up and

441
00:26:54,440 --> 00:26:56,599
John McCain said, that's ancient history. It's like, you know,

442
00:26:56,640 --> 00:26:59,119
somehow the fifties are ancient history, but the forties are not.

443
00:27:00,440 --> 00:27:05,599
Speaker 1: You know, the post war order was shaped by generations

444
00:27:05,640 --> 00:27:08,200
whose aim was to prevent such a tragedy from ever

445
00:27:08,240 --> 00:27:11,440
occurring again. But for those who did not experience the

446
00:27:11,480 --> 00:27:14,039
conflict and look back from today, the casualty kind of

447
00:27:14,039 --> 00:27:17,480
World War two made maybe just a figure. It is

448
00:27:17,519 --> 00:27:20,359
difficult to truly absorb the reality of tens of millions

449
00:27:20,400 --> 00:27:23,799
of deaths. Losing this direct connection to the past means

450
00:27:23,839 --> 00:27:27,119
losing the shared resolve that for eighty years has produced

451
00:27:27,119 --> 00:27:31,079
an unbroken, if highly imperfect, great power piece.

452
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Speaker 2: And that right there is the central part of his argument,

453
00:27:34,640 --> 00:27:38,680
you know, the buried statement. It's not just that people

454
00:27:38,680 --> 00:27:41,839
could die. More importantly, people will give up on supporting

455
00:27:42,000 --> 00:27:43,440
the project that he's part of.

456
00:27:44,880 --> 00:27:50,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've said before is he's a good historian.

457
00:27:50,960 --> 00:27:55,160
He will give you the facts, but there's something, there's

458
00:27:55,200 --> 00:27:58,799
always something behind it. So there the problem is for

459
00:27:58,880 --> 00:28:01,440
a long time, for a something like the Spanish Civil War,

460
00:28:02,000 --> 00:28:05,240
the facts were so distorted and only coming from like

461
00:28:05,319 --> 00:28:09,160
the hard left, Yeah, that you didn't know what was happening.

462
00:28:09,160 --> 00:28:11,279
And it wasn't until people like pain and be war

463
00:28:11,440 --> 00:28:15,920
started writing, and more archives were opened that you know,

464
00:28:16,119 --> 00:28:17,920
we got the truth behind what was happening.

465
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Speaker 2: Because I'm doing a lot of research for one of

466
00:28:20,559 --> 00:28:24,440
our friends dealing with interwar Germany. One of the things

467
00:28:24,480 --> 00:28:28,160
you see in one of the big issues in American

468
00:28:28,279 --> 00:28:32,480
scholarship is because of you know, Americans who actually have

469
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:35,880
the combination of fluency in reading and writing the German

470
00:28:35,960 --> 00:28:38,359
language as well as you know, some military and political

471
00:28:38,400 --> 00:28:41,000
understanding to be able to you know, turn this into

472
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something more than you know, modern day leftist cry baby

473
00:28:44,279 --> 00:28:48,039
history is. It's weird as so much of the actual

474
00:28:48,119 --> 00:28:50,680
good history that you can work with on the subject

475
00:28:50,799 --> 00:28:53,839
in the inter war World War two came out in

476
00:28:53,440 --> 00:28:57,319
the fifties until about nineteen sixty, and even some of

477
00:28:57,319 --> 00:28:58,920
the newer stuff a lot of the newer stuff on

478
00:28:58,920 --> 00:29:00,920
that area that's pretty good. You go back and you

479
00:29:00,960 --> 00:29:03,759
look through their sources and basically they're citing the earlier stuff.

480
00:29:04,279 --> 00:29:09,599
So it's a it's a weird issue where it's it's

481
00:29:09,640 --> 00:29:12,160
like America gave up the desire to actually do the

482
00:29:12,200 --> 00:29:14,240
work of real history, if that makes sense.

483
00:29:16,839 --> 00:29:21,799
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, real history makes people. Once people start understanding

484
00:29:21,839 --> 00:29:25,319
what really happened and the the myths and the fairy

485
00:29:25,359 --> 00:29:31,160
tales melts away. Then people start looking at their not

486
00:29:31,200 --> 00:29:36,799
only their government, but just the whole, the spirit behind it,

487
00:29:36,920 --> 00:29:39,599
and question it and they can't have that.

488
00:29:40,160 --> 00:29:42,440
Speaker 2: Yeah.

489
00:29:42,519 --> 00:29:45,559
Speaker 1: The fights that didn't end the war left the world

490
00:29:45,559 --> 00:29:49,400
and entirely changed place. In the combatant nations, few lives

491
00:29:49,400 --> 00:29:52,799
were left untouched. Many women whose fiances were killed in

492
00:29:52,920 --> 00:29:56,599
action never married or had children. Others found that returning

493
00:29:56,640 --> 00:29:58,880
men could not cope with the reality that women had

494
00:29:58,920 --> 00:30:02,920
taken over the of everything, making the men feel redundant.

495
00:30:03,279 --> 00:30:06,920
The backlash was strongest in continental Europe. In Germany, men

496
00:30:06,920 --> 00:30:09,440
who had been imprisoned during the war heard for the

497
00:30:09,480 --> 00:30:12,279
first time of the mass rapes committed mainly by the

498
00:30:12,319 --> 00:30:15,519
Red Army. They felt humiliated that they had not been

499
00:30:15,559 --> 00:30:18,400
there to defend their women, nor could they handle learning

500
00:30:18,440 --> 00:30:20,880
that the women had dealt with the trauma and the

501
00:30:20,920 --> 00:30:23,640
only way possible by talking to each other about it.

502
00:30:24,079 --> 00:30:27,079
And France and other occupied countries, men who returned from

503
00:30:27,079 --> 00:30:30,359
prison camps and forced labor in Germany wondered how women

504
00:30:30,400 --> 00:30:32,640
without any means the support had managed to survive, and

505
00:30:32,680 --> 00:30:35,400
began to suspect them of relationships with enemy soldiers or

506
00:30:35,440 --> 00:30:39,599
black market tiers. Not surprisingly, these responses produced a socially

507
00:30:39,640 --> 00:30:45,559
reactionary period that lasted through the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. Again,

508
00:30:45,640 --> 00:30:47,240
what's he saying? What's he saying here?

509
00:30:47,920 --> 00:30:50,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right. Somehow the problem was the men were

510
00:30:50,680 --> 00:30:52,799
away and the women got by. It's again, I want

511
00:30:52,799 --> 00:30:55,440
to remind everybody, nineteen fifty six is when the last

512
00:30:55,440 --> 00:30:58,920
POWs left the Soviet Union. So it said the forties

513
00:30:58,920 --> 00:31:01,799
and fifties were really real, and you want to say, look, shithead,

514
00:31:02,039 --> 00:31:04,799
they weren't even back in the forties. You know. Let's

515
00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:07,200
you know, cause and effect is a little bit off

516
00:31:07,240 --> 00:31:13,400
in what he's talking about there. So yeah, it's this

517
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:15,480
is a good example of not just biased but really

518
00:31:15,519 --> 00:31:17,640
bad history and some very basic facts here.

519
00:31:19,279 --> 00:31:22,839
Speaker 1: Intense political conflict persisted even after the end of hostilities,

520
00:31:22,960 --> 00:31:25,160
and August nineteen forty five, well after the fighting in

521
00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:28,119
the European Theater had ended, the Soviet Union began to

522
00:31:28,160 --> 00:31:31,359
release ordinary Italian soldiers that had captured in the latter

523
00:31:31,400 --> 00:31:35,079
part of the Access Powers campaign to take Stalingrad. These

524
00:31:35,079 --> 00:31:38,799
soldiers were sent home with that without their officers. However,

525
00:31:39,119 --> 00:31:41,559
because the leader of the Italian Communist party had appealed

526
00:31:41,559 --> 00:31:44,200
to Moscow to delay the return of high ranking prisoners

527
00:31:44,240 --> 00:31:46,920
who might publicly condemn the Soviet Union and hurt the

528
00:31:46,920 --> 00:31:51,680
party's chances in upcoming elections. Communist groups gathered at railway

529
00:31:51,680 --> 00:31:54,799
stations in Italy to welcome the returning soldiers, who they

530
00:31:54,880 --> 00:31:57,680
expected to be more sympathetic to their cause. They were

531
00:31:57,680 --> 00:32:00,240
appalled to see the soldiers that scrawled the world the

532
00:32:00,240 --> 00:32:04,279
words abaso communist, so down with Communism on the train cars,

533
00:32:04,279 --> 00:32:07,279
and fights broke out at the stations. The communist press

534
00:32:07,359 --> 00:32:11,359
labeled the retornees who criticized the Soviet Union in any

535
00:32:11,400 --> 00:32:12,799
way as fascists.

536
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:16,319
Speaker 2: Keep in mind that if these were Italians fighting on

537
00:32:16,400 --> 00:32:18,799
the East and Front at that point, most of them

538
00:32:18,920 --> 00:32:22,440
would have been volunteers. After the creation of the Italian

539
00:32:22,480 --> 00:32:26,200
Social Republic and the removal of Mussolani as the Prime

540
00:32:26,240 --> 00:32:28,480
Minister of Italy by the crown. So these were people

541
00:32:28,519 --> 00:32:33,359
who voluntarily chose to continue fighting after that point. Yeah,

542
00:32:34,119 --> 00:32:37,200
So to say, hey, they were shocked at they're anti communists, like,

543
00:32:37,319 --> 00:32:39,880
no shit, that's why they were there, and being put

544
00:32:39,920 --> 00:32:43,720
in prison by communists for several years, you know, kind

545
00:32:43,720 --> 00:32:46,079
of reinforces their preconceived notions.

546
00:32:47,400 --> 00:32:49,680
Speaker 1: The sheer cruelty of the war was seared into the

547
00:32:49,720 --> 00:32:54,759
memories of generations. Borders were obliterated or redrawn during and

548
00:32:54,799 --> 00:32:57,640
after the war. Many people who had been displaced no

549
00:32:57,720 --> 00:33:03,880
longer knew their nationalities, arch populations, sometimes entire cities were uprooted, evacuated,

550
00:33:03,960 --> 00:33:07,319
or killed by paramilitaries, secret service and troops.

551
00:33:07,920 --> 00:33:11,319
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty the ethnic Germans of East Prussia and

552
00:33:11,359 --> 00:33:16,640
the rest of Eastern Europe were forcibly moved, you know west.

553
00:33:16,720 --> 00:33:19,480
If they weren't killed, they were very well aware of

554
00:33:19,519 --> 00:33:23,799
their ethnicity. So his cause and effect and his attempt

555
00:33:23,880 --> 00:33:28,160
to portray you know, you know, post two thousand ethnic

556
00:33:28,200 --> 00:33:31,960
ambiguity onto this is you know, his bias does not

557
00:33:32,079 --> 00:33:34,960
exactly is not borne out by the facts.

558
00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:39,920
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty nine, Poles from what suddenly became Western

559
00:33:40,079 --> 00:33:45,599
Ukraine had been dumped in the deserted city spaces of

560
00:33:45,680 --> 00:33:49,519
Kazakhstan or Siberia and left to starve. The Polish city

561
00:33:49,519 --> 00:33:53,079
of LeVaux was occupied twice by the Soviets and once

562
00:33:53,119 --> 00:33:55,759
by the Nazis, who sent its Jews to death camps.

563
00:33:56,680 --> 00:34:00,480
After the war, Lauoa was given a new Ukrainian name Levov.

564
00:34:01,240 --> 00:34:05,279
At the Yalta Conference in February nineteen forty five, where British,

565
00:34:05,359 --> 00:34:08,159
Soviet and US leaders met to discuss the organization of

566
00:34:08,239 --> 00:34:11,440
post war Europe, Stalin forced the Allied powers to accept

567
00:34:11,440 --> 00:34:13,360
that the whole of Poland was to be shifted to

568
00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:18,639
the west, receiving former German provinces on the western side,

569
00:34:18,639 --> 00:34:21,960
while the Soviet Union absorbed Polish provinces to the east.

570
00:34:22,679 --> 00:34:25,159
To complete the execution of this plan, the Red Army

571
00:34:25,199 --> 00:34:28,719
carried out the largest systematic forced removal of a population

572
00:34:28,800 --> 00:34:32,599
in modern times, transplanting more than thirteen million Germans, Poles

573
00:34:32,679 --> 00:34:33,679
and Ukrainians.

574
00:34:35,440 --> 00:34:38,800
Speaker 2: Darryl has a good episode on this topic called The

575
00:34:38,800 --> 00:34:40,239
Anti Humans.

576
00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:48,199
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, getting emotional just thinking about that one.

577
00:34:48,800 --> 00:34:51,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can talk about that one offline.

578
00:34:52,320 --> 00:34:57,840
Speaker 1: Yeah. As a discussion at Yalta continued, at the Potsdam

579
00:34:57,880 --> 00:35:01,559
conference in August nineteen forty five, Stalin's desire to expand

580
00:35:01,599 --> 00:35:05,599
Soviet territory became clear. He showed interest in assuming control

581
00:35:05,639 --> 00:35:09,239
of former Italian colonies in Africa and suggested the removal

582
00:35:09,280 --> 00:35:12,880
of Franco and Spain. Quote, it must be very pleasant

583
00:35:13,480 --> 00:35:15,760
for you to be in Berlin now after all your

584
00:35:15,760 --> 00:35:19,199
country has suffered, Avrol Harriman, the US ambassador to the

585
00:35:19,239 --> 00:35:22,480
Soviet Union, remarked to Stalin during a break in the talks.

586
00:35:22,960 --> 00:35:27,239
Stalin I the ambassador, without changing his expression, Sir Alexander

587
00:35:27,320 --> 00:35:29,480
went all the way to Paris. He replied. The line

588
00:35:29,559 --> 00:35:32,519
was hardly a joke. The year before, the Soviet leadership

589
00:35:32,920 --> 00:35:35,599
had ordered plans to be drawn for invasion of France

590
00:35:35,639 --> 00:35:38,199
and Italy and a seizure of the straits between Denmark

591
00:35:38,239 --> 00:35:42,679
and Norway. In nineteen forty five, Soviet and General Serghi

592
00:35:42,719 --> 00:35:48,639
Schtempko told Sergo Baria, whose father had been been a

593
00:35:48,760 --> 00:35:53,599
feared a feared secret police chief. During the Stalin era,

594
00:35:54,159 --> 00:35:57,280
it was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe

595
00:35:57,280 --> 00:36:00,000
fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be parallel

596
00:36:00,280 --> 00:36:05,400
by their colonial problems. This Soviet leader's thoughts created an

597
00:36:05,440 --> 00:36:08,719
opening only on learning that the United States was close

598
00:36:08,719 --> 00:36:11,679
to building the atom bomb, where the plans abandoned. Even

599
00:36:11,679 --> 00:36:15,360
in Moscow's appetite for expansion was not. World War II,

600
00:36:15,519 --> 00:36:18,159
of course, was also the dawn of the nuclear age.

601
00:36:18,519 --> 00:36:20,840
Many regarded the invention of the atom bomb with horror

602
00:36:20,840 --> 00:36:23,280
and considered the US bombing of Erosima and Nagasaki to

603
00:36:23,320 --> 00:36:26,119
be a war crime. Hey, at the targeting of those

604
00:36:26,119 --> 00:36:29,159
two Japanese cities in August nineteen forty five involved a

605
00:36:29,159 --> 00:36:33,119
weighty moral choice. Before the bombings accelerated the end of

606
00:36:33,159 --> 00:36:36,400
the war, Japanese generals wanted to fight on rather than

607
00:36:36,440 --> 00:36:40,639
accept the terms if surrender issued in July by the

608
00:36:40,639 --> 00:36:44,000
Allied powers in the July nineteen forty five Potsdam Declaration.

609
00:36:45,199 --> 00:36:47,400
Speaker 2: For added contexts, and I'll make clear that I'm not

610
00:36:48,559 --> 00:36:52,760
pro Japanese empire in this one. The what do you

611
00:36:52,800 --> 00:36:56,760
call it the demand? The condition that the Japanese generals

612
00:36:56,800 --> 00:37:00,280
required that the US government would not give them was

613
00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:03,639
the requirement that the emperor could not be removed, that

614
00:37:04,039 --> 00:37:06,679
the country could not be forced to give up its monarchy,

615
00:37:07,199 --> 00:37:10,320
which they were allowed to keep their monarchy after that anyway.

616
00:37:10,440 --> 00:37:13,320
So again it's almost like they wanted to use this

617
00:37:13,400 --> 00:37:16,559
bomb and you know, saying that they were going to

618
00:37:16,599 --> 00:37:18,760
fight on because we wouldn't give them their demands that

619
00:37:18,840 --> 00:37:21,400
we gave them anyways. And I also remind people that

620
00:37:21,480 --> 00:37:24,280
the second city where the bomb was dropped, it was Nagasaki,

621
00:37:24,280 --> 00:37:28,719
which had minimal damage. Prior was the center of Christian

622
00:37:28,760 --> 00:37:33,880
life Christian community in Japan. So essentially we found the good, clean,

623
00:37:34,480 --> 00:37:36,920
undamaged city where all the Christians lived and had to

624
00:37:36,920 --> 00:37:40,159
blow that one up too because they kept fighting on

625
00:37:40,400 --> 00:37:43,719
because they didn't get what we were going to give them. Anyways,

626
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:46,960
So again I'm a little bit cynical on how this

627
00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:47,599
is portrayed.

628
00:37:50,039 --> 00:37:54,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, just just know that b War is the

629
00:37:55,079 --> 00:37:58,440
kind of person who will who will cry over Guernica,

630
00:37:59,079 --> 00:38:01,719
the bombing of where in the Spanish Civil War, but.

631
00:38:01,679 --> 00:38:03,440
Speaker 2: He's not going to cry over the destruction of the

632
00:38:03,519 --> 00:38:05,239
Roman Catholic Church in Japan.

633
00:38:06,519 --> 00:38:10,719
Speaker 1: No, they were prepared to sacrifice millions of Japanese citizens

634
00:38:10,760 --> 00:38:13,960
by forcing them to resist in Allied invasion with only

635
00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:17,960
bamboo spears and explosives strapped to their bodies. By nineteen

636
00:38:18,039 --> 00:38:20,519
forty four, some four hundred thousand civilians a month were

637
00:38:20,599 --> 00:38:24,199
dying from famine in areas of East Asia, the Pacific,

638
00:38:24,360 --> 00:38:28,639
and Southeast Asia that were occupied by Japanese forces. The

639
00:38:28,679 --> 00:38:31,760
Allies also wanted to save the American, Australian and British

640
00:38:31,760 --> 00:38:34,880
prisoners of war who were starving to death in Japanese

641
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:39,880
camps or being slaughtered by their captors. On Tokyo's orders. Thus,

642
00:38:39,960 --> 00:38:42,400
although the atomic bomb took more than two hundred thousand

643
00:38:42,480 --> 00:38:45,880
Japanese lives, that terrible weapon may have saved many more

644
00:38:46,039 --> 00:38:48,800
in an unsettling moral paradox.

645
00:38:48,800 --> 00:38:54,079
Speaker 2: Perhaps, But again, letting them keep the damned emperor, probably

646
00:38:54,119 --> 00:38:56,280
we would have ended the war sooner and saved everybody,

647
00:38:56,280 --> 00:38:58,760
to include those POWs and lots of civilians in the

648
00:38:58,760 --> 00:39:03,079
Catholic Church. So again, I'm not pro Japan, but let's

649
00:39:03,119 --> 00:39:05,079
to say I'm very skeptical in this one.

650
00:39:07,719 --> 00:39:10,239
Speaker 1: For better or worse, World War II reset the trajectory

651
00:39:10,239 --> 00:39:13,480
of global politics. The defeat of Japan eventually paved the

652
00:39:13,519 --> 00:39:15,880
way for the rise of modern China. The collapse of

653
00:39:15,880 --> 00:39:18,440
the British, Dutch, and French empires in nineteen forty one

654
00:39:18,559 --> 00:39:21,400
forty two marked the end of Imperial Europe, and the

655
00:39:21,440 --> 00:39:25,760
experience of the war spurred the movement toward European integration.

656
00:39:26,679 --> 00:39:28,920
Both the United States and the Soviet Union, meanwhile, were

657
00:39:28,960 --> 00:39:32,599
elevated to superpower status. World War two also produced the

658
00:39:32,719 --> 00:39:35,800
United Nations, whose key objectives were to safeguard the sovereignty

659
00:39:35,840 --> 00:39:39,880
of countries and to prohibit armed aggression and territorial conquest.

660
00:39:40,840 --> 00:39:44,679
The UN was very much US President Franklin Roosevelt's dream,

661
00:39:44,840 --> 00:39:47,119
and he was prepared to let Stalin have complete control

662
00:39:47,159 --> 00:39:50,719
over Poland to achieve it. Yet, in February of this year,

663
00:39:50,760 --> 00:39:54,039
the United States turned its back on the UN's founding principles,

664
00:39:54,159 --> 00:39:58,639
voting alongside Russia and refusing to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine.

665
00:40:02,360 --> 00:40:04,960
Speaker 2: I remind everybody that the only time the un IS

666
00:40:05,039 --> 00:40:09,920
actively intervened as a force in a war was the

667
00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:14,079
Korean War, and that's because the Soviet Union boycotted and

668
00:40:14,159 --> 00:40:18,559
refused to use their boycott on the Security the Security

669
00:40:18,599 --> 00:40:21,280
Council in order to prevent it from becoming an explicit

670
00:40:21,800 --> 00:40:28,880
American dominated United Nations officially war. So again, he's a

671
00:40:28,880 --> 00:40:30,960
little fast and loose with some of these facts.

672
00:40:32,360 --> 00:40:35,880
Speaker 1: I will also remind he's writing for Foreign Affairs magazine.

673
00:40:36,239 --> 00:40:38,679
Speaker 2: He is, but you would also assume that people who

674
00:40:38,760 --> 00:40:40,920
work in the field of foreign affairs would know this,

675
00:40:41,760 --> 00:40:45,119
you know, So at that point he's either intentionally lying

676
00:40:46,280 --> 00:40:48,239
or he's stupid, and he's not stupid.

677
00:40:50,440 --> 00:40:53,840
Speaker 1: World War two also led into led into the Cold War.

678
00:40:54,039 --> 00:40:56,559
Some historians say that this new conflict started in nineteen

679
00:40:56,599 --> 00:40:59,719
forty seven with the Clay Robertson Agreement, in which British

680
00:40:59,760 --> 00:41:05,079
and US authorities decided to industrialize Western Germany, provoking Stalin's paranoia.

681
00:41:05,960 --> 00:41:10,559
That year certainly saw tensions intensify. Was Stalin issuing an

682
00:41:10,639 --> 00:41:13,440
order in September for European communist parties to dig up

683
00:41:13,480 --> 00:41:16,760
their weapons in preparation for future war and setting the

684
00:41:16,760 --> 00:41:19,639
groundwork for the Soviet blockade of Berlin the next year.

685
00:41:21,960 --> 00:41:23,679
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do want to point out that the reason

686
00:41:23,719 --> 00:41:27,679
the Allies finally got around to allowing the reindustrialization and

687
00:41:27,760 --> 00:41:32,239
rearmament of West Germany was because finally the issue is

688
00:41:32,280 --> 00:41:34,920
that they could have another war there. Both France and

689
00:41:35,039 --> 00:41:39,199
Britain were on the verge of having riots over having

690
00:41:39,239 --> 00:41:42,559
to reimpose the full scale draft. So it became a

691
00:41:42,599 --> 00:41:45,679
situation was they were going to allow Germany to re

692
00:41:45,679 --> 00:41:49,360
re arm they were going to allow Germany or pretty

693
00:41:49,400 --> 00:41:51,079
much and tell them they had to go and impose

694
00:41:51,199 --> 00:41:57,039
manhood conscription just because or largely because France and Great

695
00:41:57,039 --> 00:42:00,199
Britain didn't want to do that in another generation to

696
00:42:00,199 --> 00:42:03,840
fight another war, which I don't blame them, but again

697
00:42:04,239 --> 00:42:06,960
now I'm rambling, But my point there is understand the

698
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:10,440
reason that the former Allied powers were so serious about

699
00:42:10,840 --> 00:42:13,360
treating Germany as an ally is because the fact that

700
00:42:13,360 --> 00:42:17,199
they were essentially what would be the battleground of a

701
00:42:17,239 --> 00:42:19,800
Third World War, and we really would prefer that they

702
00:42:19,920 --> 00:42:21,880
go and fight that war, and that we wouldn't have

703
00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:24,679
to go and mobilize, you know, forever for a war

704
00:42:24,719 --> 00:42:25,760
that may or may not come.

705
00:42:26,800 --> 00:42:30,000
Speaker 1: But the origins lay much further back. In June nineteen

706
00:42:30,079 --> 00:42:33,880
forty one, Stalin had been traumatized by Operation barbaras So,

707
00:42:33,920 --> 00:42:36,760
the Nazi led invasion of the Soviet Union which began

708
00:42:36,840 --> 00:42:40,079
that month. He became determined to surround himself with satellite

709
00:42:40,119 --> 00:42:43,000
states across central and southern Europe so that no invader

710
00:42:43,039 --> 00:42:48,840
could take the Soviet Union by surprise. Again, you have

711
00:42:48,920 --> 00:42:54,159
to accept that Victor Suveroff is lying, and many other

712
00:42:54,320 --> 00:42:57,480
historians are lying, and that Stalin is just saying, Oh,

713
00:42:57,480 --> 00:42:59,679
we were just hanging out and all of a sudden, boom,

714
00:42:59,679 --> 00:43:00,599
we just invaded.

715
00:43:00,880 --> 00:43:04,480
Speaker 2: Yeah. In terms of Victor Suvarova, I'm not saying explicitly

716
00:43:04,519 --> 00:43:06,960
that he's correct, but I'm saying he paints a compelling

717
00:43:07,840 --> 00:43:11,519
image with all of the evidence there that is highly

718
00:43:11,559 --> 00:43:15,679
suggestive of that. But to his point of saying that

719
00:43:15,719 --> 00:43:18,960
they developed all those satellite states there and that was

720
00:43:19,119 --> 00:43:22,199
you know, Stalin's strategy. I point people out that, you know,

721
00:43:22,480 --> 00:43:26,320
Russia slash Ukraine, that part of the Slavic world sits

722
00:43:26,400 --> 00:43:29,079
on the middle of the central Eurasian plane and has

723
00:43:29,360 --> 00:43:33,800
very few natural borders. Right, So essentially, you there's two

724
00:43:33,840 --> 00:43:36,679
ways to protect the Russian heartland. One of them is

725
00:43:36,719 --> 00:43:39,840
to have a complete mobilization of your armed forces, with

726
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:41,960
or without nuclear weapons. The second thing is to go

727
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:45,920
and build you know, satellite states further out that could

728
00:43:45,960 --> 00:43:48,199
go and fight these wars instead of you. And that's

729
00:43:48,280 --> 00:43:50,519
just the reality of you know, again, you live in

730
00:43:50,519 --> 00:43:53,320
the middle of a central Eurasian plane with no natural borders.

731
00:43:53,760 --> 00:43:57,039
And at the same time, the person who's pointing out

732
00:43:57,079 --> 00:43:59,400
that this is what Stalin did in order to prevent

733
00:43:59,679 --> 00:44:03,159
another invasion of the Soviet Union is not willing to

734
00:44:03,199 --> 00:44:06,800
acknowledge that that might be what Putin morally or immrally

735
00:44:06,920 --> 00:44:11,159
is doing in his strategic analysis for modern Russia.

736
00:44:13,119 --> 00:44:16,440
Speaker 1: For centuries, Russia had been obsessed with dominating its neighbors

737
00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:22,719
to prevent encirclement. That is categorically untrue.

738
00:44:23,280 --> 00:44:25,440
Speaker 2: I think, in some ways, giving a biased way of

739
00:44:25,440 --> 00:44:28,119
saying they were doing what it was necessary to preserve

740
00:44:28,119 --> 00:44:33,000
what they see as their existential survival, which is, you know,

741
00:44:33,719 --> 00:44:34,920
sort of whether or not you're going to have a

742
00:44:34,960 --> 00:44:38,079
biased or unbiased way of saying the same thing. It's so,

743
00:44:38,119 --> 00:44:41,199
were they aggressive? Like I said, again, they're trying to

744
00:44:41,360 --> 00:44:43,800
create some kind of foreign barrier between them and who

745
00:44:43,840 --> 00:44:47,639
they see as their enemy. And is that aggressive? I mean,

746
00:44:48,159 --> 00:44:50,320
I'm not blaming them, and even though I'm not on

747
00:44:50,360 --> 00:44:53,480
their side. So let's look at the realities of how

748
00:44:53,519 --> 00:44:55,599
you would defend a land mass like Russia.

749
00:44:56,320 --> 00:44:58,519
Speaker 1: Well, especially on the European side where you have most

750
00:44:58,679 --> 00:44:59,599
or the population.

751
00:45:00,159 --> 00:45:02,599
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again I repeat this is like, there's no

752
00:45:02,719 --> 00:45:06,199
natural borders there. You know, the only thing that stops

753
00:45:06,239 --> 00:45:09,679
them things are people with guns nukes, and you know

754
00:45:09,840 --> 00:45:13,559
another group of people with guns in front of them.

755
00:45:13,719 --> 00:45:19,719
Speaker 1: Stalin's fixation was Poland. Putin has preserved this basic mentality

756
00:45:19,800 --> 00:45:22,880
only for him. The country's most vulnerable frontier is Ukraine,

757
00:45:23,360 --> 00:45:26,840
which he argues belongs to Russia. I don't think he

758
00:45:26,960 --> 00:45:29,320
argues that. I think he argues that there are parts

759
00:45:29,360 --> 00:45:33,039
of Ukraine that are Russian and that they belong as

760
00:45:33,079 --> 00:45:33,840
part of Russia.

761
00:45:34,280 --> 00:45:38,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, I'm not pro Putin, but he's behaving

762
00:45:39,039 --> 00:45:43,360
in a manner that's completely rational for somebody of you

763
00:45:43,360 --> 00:45:46,960
know is his side, you know, in his circumstances, and

764
00:45:47,599 --> 00:45:50,840
our failure, our unwillingness of our political class to technowledge

765
00:45:50,880 --> 00:45:52,519
this is what created this war.

766
00:45:53,679 --> 00:45:56,880
Speaker 1: When Putin acted on that claim with a twenty twenty

767
00:45:56,920 --> 00:46:00,320
two invasion of Ukraine, he brought back a character ristic

768
00:46:00,360 --> 00:46:02,239
of the World War two era that had largely been

769
00:46:02,320 --> 00:46:06,360
absence of global politics. Since leaders, several of them empowered

770
00:46:06,360 --> 00:46:09,920
by the totalitarian systems they controlled, shaped the course of

771
00:46:09,960 --> 00:46:13,480
that vast conflict, from Churchill to Roosevelts of Stalin, their

772
00:46:13,519 --> 00:46:18,440
machinations reactivated the idea in the popular imagination of the

773
00:46:18,480 --> 00:46:21,960
great man driving the course of history. In recent years,

774
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:27,519
political leaders have been comparatively less influent, had had comparatively

775
00:46:27,719 --> 00:46:32,360
less influenced about. The globalized economic system, for one things,

776
00:46:32,480 --> 00:46:36,079
greatly restricts their freedom of action, and constant consideration of

777
00:46:36,079 --> 00:46:38,599
how a decision will play in the media makes many

778
00:46:38,639 --> 00:46:42,440
of them more cautious than bold. For decades, it seemed

779
00:46:42,480 --> 00:46:45,400
as though the characters of leaders would never again determine

780
00:46:45,440 --> 00:46:47,320
the course of events the way they did in World

781
00:46:47,400 --> 00:46:52,679
War II, Putin's invasion has changed that, and Trump taking

782
00:46:52,719 --> 00:46:56,599
Putin as a role model has two Do we want

783
00:46:56,599 --> 00:46:57,360
to stop right there?

784
00:46:58,960 --> 00:47:01,920
Speaker 2: Oh, this, we won't go too deep because this would

785
00:47:01,960 --> 00:47:03,840
get into a huge digression of what I did in

786
00:47:04,280 --> 00:47:07,880
three four years of grad school. But long story short,

787
00:47:07,960 --> 00:47:13,920
the management sciences and leadership science which is basically overlapping,

788
00:47:14,119 --> 00:47:17,360
and we can talk that at length. But one of

789
00:47:17,400 --> 00:47:21,480
the big principles in managerial science is that the great

790
00:47:21,519 --> 00:47:25,280
man theory has to be refuted. You know, it's part

791
00:47:25,320 --> 00:47:27,840
of what you know, part of people being interchangeable or

792
00:47:27,880 --> 00:47:32,840
fungible units. So again, managerialism, that thing that dominates the

793
00:47:32,840 --> 00:47:35,159
West right there, accepts as a core tenet that there

794
00:47:35,199 --> 00:47:37,760
are no great men except for when it's you know,

795
00:47:38,199 --> 00:47:41,559
presenting great men or women on their side as you know,

796
00:47:41,639 --> 00:47:45,559
the epitome of a value. And I think part of

797
00:47:45,599 --> 00:47:47,440
what we're seeing right now in the breakdown of that

798
00:47:47,599 --> 00:47:51,119
order is like, you know, human nature is real. History

799
00:47:51,119 --> 00:47:53,360
comes back with the vengeance, and one of the things

800
00:47:53,400 --> 00:47:56,000
we're having to deal with is, as Thomas has said,

801
00:47:56,000 --> 00:47:57,679
there are people who are great men in the sense

802
00:47:57,679 --> 00:47:59,719
they are actually able to, you know, shape the course

803
00:47:59,719 --> 00:48:03,920
of his history within limits, and you know, managerialism is

804
00:48:03,920 --> 00:48:07,119
the refutation of that. So when that proves to be

805
00:48:07,159 --> 00:48:09,360
a real thing, it's you know, it's like we've sort

806
00:48:09,360 --> 00:48:10,719
of killed their god.

807
00:48:12,000 --> 00:48:18,840
Speaker 1: And Putin is probably the the avatar for that right now.

808
00:48:19,679 --> 00:48:21,599
Speaker 2: Yeah, whether we want them to be or not. And

809
00:48:21,599 --> 00:48:23,840
then you know, some people like Lee Kwan yu and

810
00:48:23,880 --> 00:48:27,199
Singapore were examples of that, you know, so you know,

811
00:48:27,280 --> 00:48:31,280
it seems to be a universal aspect of human nature.

812
00:48:31,400 --> 00:48:35,719
But again, managerialism, it rejects that as a core principle.

813
00:48:35,760 --> 00:48:38,639
So their metaphysics are being challenged. It's not just the

814
00:48:38,679 --> 00:48:41,079
morality or the politics, is that really the way they

815
00:48:41,079 --> 00:48:42,440
see the universe has changed.

816
00:48:43,760 --> 00:48:47,119
Speaker 1: Today, as Russia prepares to celebrate Victory Day on May ninth,

817
00:48:47,480 --> 00:48:50,159
Putin has determined to milk the story of his country's

818
00:48:50,199 --> 00:48:53,639
great patriotic war for all it's worth. He may well

819
00:48:53,719 --> 00:48:57,760
revert the name of the city of Vogelgrad to Stalingrad.

820
00:48:57,920 --> 00:48:59,920
It was changed in nineteen sixty one as part of

821
00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:04,679
Soviet leader in Nikita Khrushchev's de Stalinization campaign so highlight

822
00:49:04,719 --> 00:49:07,559
the Red Army's eventual victory over the Axis invaders in

823
00:49:07,599 --> 00:49:10,840
the Battle of Stalingrad in nineteen forty three, the great

824
00:49:10,880 --> 00:49:15,199
psychological turning point of the war. He may also sharpen

825
00:49:15,239 --> 00:49:18,320
the worst of his historical distortions, attempting to justify as

826
00:49:18,360 --> 00:49:21,960
continue war in Ukraine by claiming that the Ukrainians are Nazis,

827
00:49:22,239 --> 00:49:25,639
contradicting his own insistence before the invasion that Ukrainians were

828
00:49:25,679 --> 00:49:30,679
no different from Russians. That's not it's not true at all. Yeah,

829
00:49:30,719 --> 00:49:32,039
I mean, that's just not what.

830
00:49:33,960 --> 00:49:37,000
Speaker 2: It's a gross distortion of the realities of World War two.

831
00:49:38,199 --> 00:49:40,079
And part of the realities of World War two is

832
00:49:40,920 --> 00:49:44,360
you had two giant forces between Germany and the Soviet Union,

833
00:49:44,639 --> 00:49:48,760
Soviet Union being communist, you know, Germany being the Third

834
00:49:48,760 --> 00:49:52,159
Reich being national socialists, and despite the fact they didn't

835
00:49:52,159 --> 00:49:56,159
support ideological fascism, you know, certain ideological fascist groups were

836
00:49:56,159 --> 00:49:58,800
associated in aligned with them. But if you're stuck in

837
00:49:58,840 --> 00:50:01,719
between these two giant horses that are going to crush you,

838
00:50:01,719 --> 00:50:04,320
you can either be a victim or you can participate

839
00:50:04,360 --> 00:50:06,880
in one side that you see as being in your interest.

840
00:50:07,239 --> 00:50:09,880
And there's a reason why so many people stuck in

841
00:50:09,920 --> 00:50:11,880
the middle said, you know what, they would much rather

842
00:50:11,960 --> 00:50:15,760
support the Third Reich than the Soviet Union, and again,

843
00:50:15,840 --> 00:50:18,360
part of our worldview as Americans post World War Two,

844
00:50:19,039 --> 00:50:22,199
you know, refuses to acknowledge that, you know, maybe being

845
00:50:22,239 --> 00:50:24,400
crushed by the Soviet Union, the side that you know,

846
00:50:24,679 --> 00:50:26,920
we essentially turned against as soon as the war was over,

847
00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:29,800
that maybe being destroyed by them was not in the

848
00:50:29,840 --> 00:50:31,559
best interest of themselves in their nation.

849
00:50:33,119 --> 00:50:36,920
Speaker 1: Well, basically, what you will hear a lot of them,

850
00:50:37,039 --> 00:50:40,280
most Americans say, and you will especially get this out

851
00:50:40,320 --> 00:50:45,440
of the libertarian camp, is is that all all that

852
00:50:45,719 --> 00:50:49,400
was was well, I mean they'll use the term status

853
00:50:49,440 --> 00:50:53,719
of course, but it was too authoritarian groups fighting for power.

854
00:50:54,880 --> 00:50:58,000
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, there was no huggy kissy loving, you know,

855
00:50:58,480 --> 00:51:01,159
mutual co op in the middle into two groups, so

856
00:51:01,199 --> 00:51:02,880
you got to deal with one group or the other.

857
00:51:03,519 --> 00:51:05,559
In the reality is, most of those groups decided that

858
00:51:05,639 --> 00:51:09,239
the third Reich, rightly or wrongly, you know, was the

859
00:51:09,280 --> 00:51:13,000
more reasonable actor. And the fact that you know, repeatedly,

860
00:51:13,360 --> 00:51:16,519
so many groups made that decision, you know, that's a

861
00:51:16,559 --> 00:51:18,239
pattern that probably bears investigation.

862
00:51:19,960 --> 00:51:22,599
Speaker 1: Yeah. I hope that's one of the one of the

863
00:51:22,599 --> 00:51:26,320
things that Daryl will undertake in this series, because that's

864
00:51:26,440 --> 00:51:31,840
that's an important thing, is when you're when you're when

865
00:51:31,840 --> 00:51:34,800
you've been brought up in a paradigm, in a paradigm

866
00:51:34,800 --> 00:51:39,079
like he like he's describing here where there are no

867
00:51:39,159 --> 00:51:43,159
great men, there are you know, basically, we we found

868
00:51:43,199 --> 00:51:47,559
what works. You know, the end of history happened liberalism one.

869
00:51:48,360 --> 00:51:52,159
And to step outside of that is to is to

870
00:51:52,199 --> 00:51:57,000
move to authoritarianism. You I think that's one of the

871
00:51:57,039 --> 00:52:01,400
reasons why most Americans can not deal with the intra

872
00:52:01,480 --> 00:52:07,599
Warp period, because it wasn't black and white. It wasn't

873
00:52:07,760 --> 00:52:10,840
that you know, there was a reason there were groups

874
00:52:10,880 --> 00:52:18,440
calling themselves socialists who weren't historically socialist. Yeah, yeah, there were, Yeah.

875
00:52:17,079 --> 00:52:20,199
Speaker 2: That in its area that I'm neck deep in doing

876
00:52:20,239 --> 00:52:23,119
research for right now. And it's it's it's such I

877
00:52:23,159 --> 00:52:26,039
would say, amazing or complex. It almost sounds like I'm,

878
00:52:26,159 --> 00:52:28,199
you know, an artist talking about the beauty of it,

879
00:52:28,239 --> 00:52:30,960
but it's it's so much more complex, and there's so

880
00:52:31,039 --> 00:52:33,639
much more to that in so many levels that it

881
00:52:33,800 --> 00:52:38,199
it's like so many details just get swept away. In

882
00:52:38,280 --> 00:52:41,079
the case of narratives, that is, the average American is

883
00:52:41,119 --> 00:52:45,199
not capable of even understanding the basics of this much less,

884
00:52:45,440 --> 00:52:48,960
you know, trying to grasp the enormity, the complexity that

885
00:52:49,679 --> 00:52:52,960
not just understand. They can't understand the level of complexity

886
00:52:53,039 --> 00:52:57,239
was there. So it's more than anything in attacking the

887
00:52:57,280 --> 00:53:02,000
post World War too liberal world order perspective. It's trying

888
00:53:02,039 --> 00:53:04,719
to get people to understand, you know, the enormity and

889
00:53:04,760 --> 00:53:07,360
complexity of those relationships.

890
00:53:08,840 --> 00:53:10,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, this sentence right here is one of the things

891
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:14,679
that just standing alone. If the sentence was standing alone,

892
00:53:14,679 --> 00:53:17,159
I would agree with. In truth, there is no one

893
00:53:17,199 --> 00:53:20,480
set of conclusions to draw from World War Two. I mean,

894
00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:22,320
I think that's obvious.

895
00:53:23,960 --> 00:53:26,840
Speaker 2: The word Yeah, the big conclusion I think is the

896
00:53:26,880 --> 00:53:29,000
way the manner in which the First World War has

897
00:53:29,119 --> 00:53:33,679
ended created all these problems. And I seem I know,

898
00:53:33,760 --> 00:53:36,599
I'm considered extreme for saying that, but you know, Churchill

899
00:53:36,639 --> 00:53:39,039
said that, so maybe we should take his word for it.

900
00:53:39,880 --> 00:53:43,159
Speaker 1: Well everyone said that back then. It was Anyone who

901
00:53:43,199 --> 00:53:46,159
was looking at the rise of the NSDAP was like, well,

902
00:53:46,519 --> 00:53:50,960
I mean, they would no one left out, you know

903
00:53:51,440 --> 00:53:55,679
verse I yeah, yeah, And.

904
00:53:55,800 --> 00:53:58,159
Speaker 2: Just like one of a million examples that because I'm

905
00:53:58,159 --> 00:54:02,400
reading a biography of Harman Earhart right now, who was

906
00:54:04,239 --> 00:54:06,119
a bunch of his torpedo boats had to be taking

907
00:54:06,119 --> 00:54:07,880
the scap of flow given over to the British at

908
00:54:07,960 --> 00:54:11,719
the end of the war, and again again the German

909
00:54:11,800 --> 00:54:14,039
navy had a lot of Communist infiltration at that point

910
00:54:14,360 --> 00:54:17,280
and the British, we know, the British, you know, supported

911
00:54:17,280 --> 00:54:19,280
the Communists there because they were the enemies in order

912
00:54:19,320 --> 00:54:23,440
to stabilize Europe or stabilized Germany. But one of the

913
00:54:23,440 --> 00:54:26,199
things the British navy told the German ships that they

914
00:54:26,239 --> 00:54:29,159
were escorting is if they see a red banner anywhere,

915
00:54:29,280 --> 00:54:32,280
they're sinking the entire ship and they're killing everybody aboard

916
00:54:32,320 --> 00:54:35,480
because they're not going to allow communists them on their shores.

917
00:54:35,559 --> 00:54:37,480
Since they had, you know, taking the boats meant they

918
00:54:37,480 --> 00:54:41,039
had to put their German sailors ashore in the UK

919
00:54:41,159 --> 00:54:43,599
until they took them back, so you know, they saw

920
00:54:43,599 --> 00:54:45,199
that as a contagent. It's like they were willing to

921
00:54:45,280 --> 00:54:47,559
kill everybody on a ship because there was a single

922
00:54:47,599 --> 00:54:55,079
Communists there, you know. So we're ignoring things that you know,

923
00:54:56,039 --> 00:54:58,400
we're black and white obvious that everybody talked about and

924
00:54:58,440 --> 00:54:59,920
that Churchill said explicitly.

925
00:55:02,360 --> 00:55:06,480
Speaker 1: The war defies generalization, is not fit into any easy categories.

926
00:55:06,559 --> 00:55:11,920
It contains countless stories of tragedy, corruption, hypocrisy, egomania, betrayal,

927
00:55:12,039 --> 00:55:16,639
impossible choices, and unbelievable sadism. But it also contains stories

928
00:55:16,639 --> 00:55:19,199
of self sacrifice and compassion in which people clung to

929
00:55:19,280 --> 00:55:23,880
a fundamental belief in humanity despite appalling conditions and overwhelming oppression.

930
00:55:25,800 --> 00:55:29,199
Their example will always be worth remembering and emulating, no

931
00:55:29,239 --> 00:55:31,840
matter how dark today's conflicts become.

932
00:55:32,800 --> 00:55:34,800
Speaker 2: I agree, they're probably not about the people that he

933
00:55:34,840 --> 00:55:36,199
wants me to agree with him about.

934
00:55:37,840 --> 00:55:40,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm assuming that this is only about a certain

935
00:55:40,960 --> 00:55:46,000
group of people that you're the allowable, the allowable groups

936
00:55:46,960 --> 00:55:49,440
you're not allowed to see. I think the one thing

937
00:55:49,480 --> 00:55:53,000
that you can say came out of the European Civil

938
00:55:53,039 --> 00:55:58,079
War nineteen fourteen to nineteen and forty five, and especially

939
00:55:58,920 --> 00:56:02,480
saw this starting with the war in our own nation

940
00:56:03,320 --> 00:56:09,599
in the nineteenth century, is the demonizing of the enemy. Yeah,

941
00:56:09,880 --> 00:56:17,679
of of just the dehumanization, the the scorched earth, the killing,

942
00:56:17,960 --> 00:56:22,400
of the killing of civilians, just to kill civilians. Yeah,

943
00:56:22,480 --> 00:56:24,480
just for the fact that you're going to kill civilians,

944
00:56:24,679 --> 00:56:27,920
which are things that the same same historians, historians like

945
00:56:28,639 --> 00:56:34,360
these people will you know, decry thet Tila for and

946
00:56:34,559 --> 00:56:36,960
you know, quote unquote barbarians of the past.

947
00:56:37,239 --> 00:56:40,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right, And I say this is somebody. I'm

948
00:56:40,360 --> 00:56:42,679
a cop veteran and I was a military officer. All

949
00:56:42,719 --> 00:56:45,000
the stuff I've done on my doctoral level writing is about,

950
00:56:45,400 --> 00:56:49,280
you know, the development of military units and insurgencies. So

951
00:56:49,400 --> 00:56:52,159
I'm not a pacifist, and I understand the reality of

952
00:56:52,239 --> 00:56:56,599
war and war is always going to be here. But

953
00:56:56,719 --> 00:57:01,199
as you said, by creating a moral binary, we've just

954
00:57:01,239 --> 00:57:04,360
created a situation in which anything could be justified against

955
00:57:04,360 --> 00:57:07,000
your enemy, and then we're shocked when some of those

956
00:57:07,039 --> 00:57:10,159
things are done by our enemy against other people. And

957
00:57:12,480 --> 00:57:16,320
I'm not arguing for anybody to have, you know, an

958
00:57:16,360 --> 00:57:19,960
inherently benevolent attitude towards human nature, but we need to

959
00:57:20,039 --> 00:57:23,760
understand the consequences of choices and how we contributed to

960
00:57:23,840 --> 00:57:26,800
those choices, or not us, but people in power.

961
00:57:27,760 --> 00:57:32,119
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, THI We'll end it right there. Thank you,

962
00:57:32,159 --> 00:57:34,400
mister field House. I always appreciate talking.

963
00:57:34,119 --> 00:57:38,480
Speaker 2: To you anytime. Like I said, I'm willing to come

964
00:57:38,519 --> 00:57:41,119
on and I tend to ramble lots of short pieces

965
00:57:41,159 --> 00:57:44,519
like these talking through are really good and appreciate it.

966
00:57:44,639 --> 00:57:48,360
Speaker 1: You're believe me, you're not a rambler. You listen to

967
00:57:48,440 --> 00:57:55,440
my show all right, take care of yourself. Thank you.