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Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show
and it's been a while. Mister Fieldhouse is back. How
are you doing, sir?
Speaker 2: Like you said it's doctor Admiral. Yeah, sleet Lord of Appalachia.
Speaker 1: Oh man, So someone sent me this article, and considering
how much World War two has the discussion of World
War two has re entered the zeitgeist thanks to people
like Thomas seven seven seven and Daryl Cooper and a
lot of others, obviously Papuchanan people like that, I thought
this article by Anthony Beevor who Anthony bevar even though
he I considered him to be a left libertarian ish,
but he did write a really good book on the
Spanish Civil War, and he's written a couple of good
history books, and he gets the facts right as far
as I can tell. He wrote an article for Foreign
Affairs saying entitled We're still fighting World War Two the
un subtitled the Unsettled Legacy of the conflict that shaped
today's politics. So, yeah, are you you know, what's your
take on the fact that World War Two is so
so much more discussed now? Is it just time to
is it time to shatter myths?
Speaker 2: I think in a lot of ways, is the fact
that you know that's sort of like the uh, the
metaphysical paradigm, for lack of a better word, how the
last few generations have defined the world and we've seen things,
whether explicitly or not. So we're in a situation where
it's now possible to you know, even examine those you know, presuppositions,
those perspectives and why we have those perspectives, which is
why people like you know, Thomas and Daryl are very
much doing and a lot of the I think the
reaction in mainstream media is it's almost like the establishment
sees itself as you know, the hosts the body politic,
which they're not, but they see themselves as that, and
they see any person engaged in any kind of I
would say what they call revisionist history, which I wouldn't
even say that we were doing that, but it seems
anything that attacks the narrative, even when it's doing so
by stating facts that everybody knew in the past, is
it looks at us as a virus, and it's it's
almost like we're seeing a host, you know, trying to
kill off what it sees as an infection. And that's
part of why I think World War Two is suddenly
back in the zeitgeist with the establishment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the problem is even even when Pap Buchanan wrote
his book there's just way too much velocity of information now.
So you know, Papu Cannon can write his book and
he can get on c Span two to talk about it.
But the fact is is that now you somebody, you know,
an idiot like me, can go viral and get a
million people looking at what I'm what I'm saying, and
two million people what I'm say saying, and you know,
just call myself an idiot, but you know what I'm saying,
you could very well be true. And it could it
could go right up against the established narrative. Yet, yeah,
if it catches on and people people agree with the
message and even look into a little bit, it's really
hard that for that host to be able to hold
off or prevent that virus from entering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and part of this is I think has gotten
so weird and even we can see the last I
don't know was it thirteen years since you can and
put his book out about Churchill and Hitler is these
are not controversial facts at the time, right, I Mean,
they weren't things that every person khe but some of
the general World War two knowledge would know the majority
of those things, just like a lot of the things
we did in the past, or historians talked about the
past concerning the Third Reich, or you know, Italy during
World War Two. You know, things that we would say
challenge the narrative today were pretty mainstream, right, historians had
a fairly balanced understanding. They may not present it as
a balanced manner, but they had a fairly balanced understanding
until very recently. The weirdest thing I think we're seeing
right now that gets back to the whole, Like the
host attacking what it sees as an infection is basic,
uncontroversial facts are now Just stating those things is now
seen as a partisan political, you know issue, even when
you know, historical knowledge was never seen that way and
these are not very often controversial facts, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just looking. It came out in twenty eight,
seventeen years ago, and social media was I mean Twitter
was at its infancy. I think I had just made
my first Twitter account in two thousand and eight. Facebook
was something very few people were on, so information wasn't
being blasted out there like like it is today. Son,
I think really is a sign of the times and
a sign of what technology can do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like one of the best examples, and I'll shut up,
is we were talking one time offline about the old
time Life books that came out in the late eighties
early nineties about World War Two, and yeah, these were
you know, produced by Time Life Books. So these were
table call, you know, coffee table books that weren't what
we'd call serious history, but they were you know, documenteds history,
and they were very willing to present you know, the
side of the Third Reich, of the Axis and in
the Soviets and other actors. They're you know, in honest detail.
And it's weird that today a book like that would
be seen as explicit Nazi propaganda when it was just
doing history. And again, me and you were not that old.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the you know those time Life books you
I have one on Stalinograd and it presents it, i
mean down the middle, like what happened there really isn't
a lot of you know, a lot of narrative there.
So yeah, all right, anyway, let me start reading this
article because I think he does a pretty good job
of getting into what you just get an idea what
he sees, and I think a lot of people will
have a lot see some of their thought in it
as well, so bevore starts. History is seldom tidy, eras
overlap and unfinished business from one period lingers into the next.
World War two was a war like no other in
the magnitude of its effects on the lives of people
in the fates of nations. It was a combination of
many conflicts, including ethnic and national hatreds, that followed the
collapse of four empires and the redrawing of borders at
the Paris Peace Conference after World War One. A number
of historians have argued that World War two was a
phase of one long war, lasting from nineteen fourteen to
nineteen forty five, or even until the collapse of the
Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one, a global civil war,
first between capitalism and communism, then between democracy and dictatorship,
what Nulzi called the European Civil War. World War two
certainly brought the strands of world history together with its
global region, its acceleration at the end of colonialism across Africa,
Asia and the Middle East. Yet despite sharing this international
experience and entering the same order built in its wake,
every country involved created and clung to its own narrative
of the Great conflict. Yeah, I think him pointing out
how colonialism basically became something that needed to be fought against,
you know, and you would see in the next several
decades even Rhodesia, Rhodesia had to go and Africa, Africa,
the way Africa was conducting itself needed to be changed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it presents a very interesting picture to us
of how the Western Allies began self attacking post World
War Two.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Even the matter of when the war began is
still debated. In the American telling, it started in earnest
when the United States entered the conflict after Japan attack
Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one, and the
German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States
a few days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin meanwhile, insists
that the war began in June nineteen forty one, when
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, ignoring the joint Soviet a
Nazi invasion of Poland in September nineteen thirty nine, which
marks the start of the war for most Europeans, yet
some trace its origin back further. Still, for China, it
began in nineteen thirty seven with the Sino Japanese War,
or even earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in
nineteen thirty one. Many on the left in Spain are
convinced that it began in nineteen thirty six with General
Francisco's Francisco Franco's overthrow of the Republic, launching the Spanish
Civil War. These clashing worldviews remain a source attention and
instability in global politics. Putin cherry picks from Russian history,
combining homage to Soviet sacrifice in the Great Pagatriotic War
as World War two is known in Russia with the
reactionary ideas of exiled Czarist white Russians after their defeat
by the Communist Reds in the Russian Civil War of
nineteen seventeen to twenty two. The latter include religious justifications
for Russian supremacy over the entire Eurasian land mass from
vladivaus Stock to Dublin, as Putin's ideologue Alexander Dugan has
put it, and a deeply rooted hatred of liberal Western Europe.
Such ideas have also begun to circulate within the within
US President Donald Trump's orbit.
Speaker 2: I would stop right there and point out that he's
doing with Daryl points out that the American left doesn't
have international enemies, they have domestic enemies and international groups
that remind them of their enemies. And you know, quating
the American right with Russia right there, you know it's
explicit on this wart. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also says Putin's ideolog Alexander Dugan, and there's a
lot of debate over just exactly how much influence Dugan
has over Putin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've interacted a little bit with Dugan, and I
promise you that Putin is aware of him and has
interacted with his ideas and interacted with him. That's not
the same thing as saying that Dugan is in charge
of his foreign policy.
Speaker 1: Putin has rehabilitated the World War Two area Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin, who, as a Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei
Sakaroff has said, was directly responsible for even more millions
of deaths than Hitler. The Russian president goes so far
as to insist that the Soviet Union could have won
the war against Nazi Germany on its own, when even
Stalin and other Soviet leaders privately acknowledged that the Soviet
Union would not have survived without America aid. They also
knew that the US British strategic bombing campaign against German
cities forced the bulk of the German Lafwaffe back home
from the Eastern Front, thus giving the Soviets air supremacy.
Above all, Putin refuses to acknowledge the horrors of the
Stalinist error as many Solmes, as Mary Solmes, the daughter
of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recounts it to me
at dinner in two thousand and three. Church Will asked
Stalin during an informal meeting in October nineteen forty four,
with the Soviet leader regretted most in his life. Stalin
took a moment to reflect before he quietly answered, the
killing of the Kulaks, the land owning peasants. This campaign
peaked with the Hola Domor in nineteen thirty two to
nineteen thirty three, in which Stalin deliberately inflicted famine on Ukraine,
killing more than three million people and instilling a hatred
of Moscow among many survivors and their descendants.
Speaker 2: I would ask, real quick, does anybody think that Stalin
really said that, Churchill.
Speaker 1: No, I don't believe that at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I could absolutely believe that Stalin thought that, But
would he say that to an ally that he still
saw as a competitor. I refuse to believe that.
Speaker 1: I don't think he would say that to his closest confidence. Yeah,
He's just not the kind of person who admits to
something like that. He would default to something much less substantial.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and especially because to the larger point that the
author brings up the role of, you know, the great
mythos of the Second World War and how it impacts
different country By saying that, Stalin is essentially saying that,
you know, his mythoss Are is just made up. So
I don't think he did that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He's also in bringing up the hol of Domoor
and using this as an example. He's also it looks
like you can use well, why did certain Ukrainians side with,
you know, with the Reich.
Speaker 2: Yeah, certain ethnic Russians and you know Tatters and you
know people who are half Mongol who joined, you know,
as hass auxiliaries. You know, the Nazis were surprisingly diverse.
Speaker 1: World War two also produced an often uneasy balance between
Europe and the United States. Hitler's hegemonic ambitions forced the
United Kingdom to adopt its self appointed role of world
policemen and turn to Americans for aid. The British were
genuinely part of their The British were genuinely proud of
their part in the ultimate Allied victory, but they tried
to hide the sting of their declining global influence by
spouting the cliche that the United Kingdom had managed to
punch above its weight in the war and by clinging
to their special relationship with the United States. Churchill was
dismayed by the prospect that US troops might simply go
home after The threat from Moscow ensured that Washington in
oh Sorry, Churchill was dismayed by the prospect that US
troops might simply go home after the war and the
Pacific ended in nineteen forty five. Although American attitudes continue
to fluctuate between seeking an active global role and retreating
into isolationism, the threat from Moscow ensured that Washington would
remain deeply engaged in Europe until the collapse of the
Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one. Today, the first major
continental war in Europe since World War Two is in
its fourth year, driven in part by Putin's selective reading
of Russian history, while deadly conflicts in the Middle East
and elsewhere threatened to spread further. The Trump administration, meanwhile,
appears to be casting aside the United States global leadership
in the cuton fuse tantrum. Eighty years ago, the end
of World War II paved the way for a new
international order based on respect for national sovereignty and borders,
But now a steep bill for American ambivalence European complacency
in Russian reventionism may finally becoming doe.
Speaker 2: I'm going to be brutally honest. When we conquered Europe
de facto and occupied the whole western half, we really
weren't doing that because of respect for their borders, their
national identity.
Speaker 1: No, that was it was an occupation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we can after that, we can discuss whether
or not it was just or effective or should have happened,
and that's a much longer discussion. But let's not pretend
we did it out of absolutest morals, you know, reasons.
Speaker 1: And this is one of the things that Bivre does
and just my reading of his Spanish Civil War book,
getting the idea that he's more of like a left libertarian.
He basically blames the whole Ukraine conflict on Putin's selective
reading of Russian history while invoking the United States global
leadership in a confused tantrum. Because it's the United States
global leadership quote unquote is what provokes what happened. You know,
what happened in Ukraine, as I've said, as I've said
clearly if I was president, if I was president of Russia,
I would have invaded in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my to put my cards on the table, I'm
hard neutral in this war. I don't support either Russia
or the Ukrainians, and I happen to know some very
good people from both camps, as cliche as that is.
And my concern, more than anything is is the American
need to involve itself in things that doesn't understand and
then try to micromanage things it does not understand. Is
what caused this? And in saying doing that, I'm not
justifying what Putin did, you know, but I'm explaining that
this didn't have to happen. And because of you know,
politicians in the United States who didn't know what they
were doing. Primarily, you know, people in the Biden administration
who put a senile, dying man in office so they
could get what they want, started a war which killed
lots of Ukraine, And if you actually care about them,
you should you be opposed to the actions that caused.
Speaker 1: That, especially the politics behind it. All Right, more than
a number the sheer cruelty of World War two was scarred,
was scared into the memories of several is scared. I'm sorry.
The sharer cruelty of World War two was seared into
the memories of several generations. It was the first modern
conflict in which far more civilians were killed than combatants.
This could have been made possible only by an ideologically
fueled dehumanization of the enemy. Nationalism started to a fever pitch,
and racism promoted as virtue on one side, and Lenin
s class warfare that endorsed exterminating all opposition on the other.
How's that not so, what's what's better racism or classism?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I know this is rhetorical, but we all
automatically know what the default establishment answer is.
Speaker 1: Telling and tellingly. After the war, Soviet diplomats fought to
prevent class warfare, which would have included the Soviet Union's
mass killing of aristocrats, bourgeoisi, and land owning peasants from
being mentioned in the United States nineteen forty eight Genocide Convention.
In all, some eighty five million people died in World
War II, a figure that includes those who perished from
famine disease. Nazi Germany killed around six million Jews, among
other people in the Holocaust, no comment. Almost a fifth
of the Polish population. Also, nearly six million people was lost.
The Chinese lost well over twenty million, more of whom
perished from famine and disease than from fighting on the battlefield.
Estimates of Soviet deaths range from twenty four to twenty
six million, many of them needlessly. Stalin was aware in
nineteen forty five that the total exceeded twenty million, but
he owed up to just a third of that loss
as he tried to conceal the extent of the horror
he had unleashed on his people. The international relations scholar
David Reynold has noted that Stalin settled for seven and
a half million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic
but not criminally homicidal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just real quick digress. One of the points that
I always bring up and discussing the impact of the
Second World War in terms of casualties, was it thirty eight,
nineteen thirty eight, or excuse me, nineteen forty The United
States and Soviet Union had roughly parody and population. Soviet
Union sort of apples and oranges because of their expansion
to Poland and whatnot. Who was considered a citizen who
was not, So it's an approximation, but they had roughly
the same population in nineteen forty, and Soviet Union endured
something like twenty to thirty times as many casualties as
the United States. And the best way to understand this,
and I've heard multiple historians bring that up, is imagine,
in one month, you absorb as many casualties as the
United States did in the entirety of World War Two,
and then the month after that, after that, and you
go on for twenty plus months. And that's what the
Soviet Union did. And again, I'm not pro Communists in
any sense of the word. I'm not ethnic Russian, so
I have a lot less concern for them. But as
an American, the average American is simply incapable of understanding
the amount of human suffering and sacrifice that the Soviet
Union Soviet people put into this conflict.
Speaker 1: World War two brought the strands of world history together.
It is not enough to remember the dead, many of
whom were deliberately rendered nameless by their killers. For those
who survived, the prisoners of war and the civilians imprisoning camps,
the conflict changed changed life in calculable ways. Those resigned
to their lots were often early victims. The most likely
survivors were those with a burning determination to return to
their families it's all on to their beliefs, or to
bear witness to unspeakable crimes. Many often captured soldier did
not make it home. Those from the Soviet Red Army
who had been forcibly recruited by the German military were
rounded up well in German uniform in France and handed
over to Soviet officers, who executed suspected leaders in the
woods before transporting the rest back to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: What a negative way to say they sorry? What a
negative way to say they left the Red Army and
joined who they saw as their allies.
Speaker 1: Exactly there the soldiers were sentenced to slave labor in
the Frozen North. Just days after Germany's surrender, British forces
in Austria ordered the more than twenty thousand anti communists
Yugoslav nationals in the area under their jurisdiction to be
handed over to Communists Yugoslav authorities, who shot and then
buried them in mass graves. British forces also handed over
to Soviet authorities Cossacks who were Soviet citizens but had
fought for Germany. The British government almost certainly knew that
a harsh sentence awaited these soldier, but feared that letting
them go would mean the Soviet authorities would hold on
to British prisoners of war that the Red Army had
liberated in Poland and Eastern Germany. The Red Army also
rounded up six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers in northern China
and Manchuria. All of them were sent to labor camps
in Siberia and worked to death. For decades after the war,
its memory lived on in those who had experienced at
first ten Yeah, the post war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say, for decades after it
lived on It's like, yeah, but it didn't even end
for you know, a decade plus. The last German POWs
didn't lead till nineteen fifty six. The any person knows
who I am in real life, my real life namesake,
my uncle. You know, it was a pow until like
nineteen fifty in the Soviet Union. You know, Germany didn't
have an army at this point, It didn't even have
a unified country or a government that was you know,
accepted by outside countries at that point. But somehow the
prisoners still stayed there for a decade plus, and of
foreign countries we say this, You know, these tragic things
lived on for decades afterwards. You want to say, look, man,
it's like this didn't even end for a decade plus afterwards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a book called an Eye for an Eye
which talks about Germans who were sent to a prison
basically afterwards that was manned quote unquote manned by a
woman of a certain background who proceeded a torture of
them all to death.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this the war didn't The war didn't end for
a long while after. I mean, and ideologically has it.
Speaker 2: Ended ideologically know or at least they're trying to keep
it from ending. And to his earlier point, he says,
you know, lots of historians see the First World War
and Second World War is just one larger conflict. And
you know, lots of people saw the occupation and division
of Germany post World War Two as part of that war.
So again for my family who were in German, you know,
when the wall came down was an eighty nine ninety
to a lot of them, they saw is you know
that damn war that started in nineteen fourteen, where their
uncles marched off the war. Finally that damn thing was ending.
It didn't, but you know, that was the respective they had.
And as you said, you know a lot of people
they're you know, fighting tooth and nail to keep us
from giving up that worldview.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One thing that Americans, many Americans do not have
is a long view of history. They still they still
want to They still cry about the those crazy Iranian
students who stormed the embassy in nineteen seventy nine, not
knowing that that was three decades in the making.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that was brought up where was a two
thousand and eight by Ron Paul brought it up and
John McCain said, that's ancient history. It's like, you know,
somehow the fifties are ancient history, but the forties are not.
Speaker 1: You know, the post war order was shaped by generations
whose aim was to prevent such a tragedy from ever
occurring again. But for those who did not experience the
conflict and look back from today, the casualty kind of
World War two made maybe just a figure. It is
difficult to truly absorb the reality of tens of millions
of deaths. Losing this direct connection to the past means
losing the shared resolve that for eighty years has produced
an unbroken, if highly imperfect, great power piece.
Speaker 2: And that right there is the central part of his argument,
you know, the buried statement. It's not just that people
could die. More importantly, people will give up on supporting
the project that he's part of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've said before is he's a good historian.
He will give you the facts, but there's something, there's
always something behind it. So there the problem is for
a long time, for a something like the Spanish Civil War,
the facts were so distorted and only coming from like
the hard left, Yeah, that you didn't know what was happening.
And it wasn't until people like pain and be war
started writing, and more archives were opened that you know,
we got the truth behind what was happening.
Speaker 2: Because I'm doing a lot of research for one of
our friends dealing with interwar Germany. One of the things
you see in one of the big issues in American
scholarship is because of you know, Americans who actually have
the combination of fluency in reading and writing the German
language as well as you know, some military and political
understanding to be able to you know, turn this into
something more than you know, modern day leftist cry baby
history is. It's weird as so much of the actual
good history that you can work with on the subject
in the inter war World War two came out in
the fifties until about nineteen sixty, and even some of
the newer stuff a lot of the newer stuff on
that area that's pretty good. You go back and you
look through their sources and basically they're citing the earlier stuff.
So it's a it's a weird issue where it's it's
like America gave up the desire to actually do the
work of real history, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, real history makes people. Once people start understanding
what really happened and the the myths and the fairy
tales melts away. Then people start looking at their not
only their government, but just the whole, the spirit behind it,
and question it and they can't have that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The fights that didn't end the war left the world
and entirely changed place. In the combatant nations, few lives
were left untouched. Many women whose fiances were killed in
action never married or had children. Others found that returning
men could not cope with the reality that women had
taken over the of everything, making the men feel redundant.
The backlash was strongest in continental Europe. In Germany, men
who had been imprisoned during the war heard for the
first time of the mass rapes committed mainly by the
Red Army. They felt humiliated that they had not been
there to defend their women, nor could they handle learning
that the women had dealt with the trauma and the
only way possible by talking to each other about it.
And France and other occupied countries, men who returned from
prison camps and forced labor in Germany wondered how women
without any means the support had managed to survive, and
began to suspect them of relationships with enemy soldiers or
black market tiers. Not surprisingly, these responses produced a socially
reactionary period that lasted through the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. Again,
what's he saying? What's he saying here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right. Somehow the problem was the men were
away and the women got by. It's again, I want
to remind everybody, nineteen fifty six is when the last
POWs left the Soviet Union. So it said the forties
and fifties were really real, and you want to say, look, shithead,
they weren't even back in the forties. You know. Let's
you know, cause and effect is a little bit off
in what he's talking about there. So yeah, it's this
is a good example of not just biased but really
bad history and some very basic facts here.
Speaker 1: Intense political conflict persisted even after the end of hostilities,
and August nineteen forty five, well after the fighting in
the European Theater had ended, the Soviet Union began to
release ordinary Italian soldiers that had captured in the latter
part of the Access Powers campaign to take Stalingrad. These
soldiers were sent home with that without their officers. However,
because the leader of the Italian Communist party had appealed
to Moscow to delay the return of high ranking prisoners
who might publicly condemn the Soviet Union and hurt the
party's chances in upcoming elections. Communist groups gathered at railway
stations in Italy to welcome the returning soldiers, who they
expected to be more sympathetic to their cause. They were
appalled to see the soldiers that scrawled the world the
words abaso communist, so down with Communism on the train cars,
and fights broke out at the stations. The communist press
labeled the retornees who criticized the Soviet Union in any
way as fascists.
Speaker 2: Keep in mind that if these were Italians fighting on
the East and Front at that point, most of them
would have been volunteers. After the creation of the Italian
Social Republic and the removal of Mussolani as the Prime
Minister of Italy by the crown. So these were people
who voluntarily chose to continue fighting after that point. Yeah,
So to say, hey, they were shocked at they're anti communists, like,
no shit, that's why they were there, and being put
in prison by communists for several years, you know, kind
of reinforces their preconceived notions.
Speaker 1: The sheer cruelty of the war was seared into the
memories of generations. Borders were obliterated or redrawn during and
after the war. Many people who had been displaced no
longer knew their nationalities, arch populations, sometimes entire cities were uprooted, evacuated,
or killed by paramilitaries, secret service and troops.
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty the ethnic Germans of East Prussia and
the rest of Eastern Europe were forcibly moved, you know west.
If they weren't killed, they were very well aware of
their ethnicity. So his cause and effect and his attempt
to portray you know, you know, post two thousand ethnic
ambiguity onto this is you know, his bias does not
exactly is not borne out by the facts.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty nine, Poles from what suddenly became Western
Ukraine had been dumped in the deserted city spaces of
Kazakhstan or Siberia and left to starve. The Polish city
of LeVaux was occupied twice by the Soviets and once
by the Nazis, who sent its Jews to death camps.
After the war, Lauoa was given a new Ukrainian name Levov.
At the Yalta Conference in February nineteen forty five, where British,
Soviet and US leaders met to discuss the organization of
post war Europe, Stalin forced the Allied powers to accept
that the whole of Poland was to be shifted to
the west, receiving former German provinces on the western side,
while the Soviet Union absorbed Polish provinces to the east.
To complete the execution of this plan, the Red Army
carried out the largest systematic forced removal of a population
in modern times, transplanting more than thirteen million Germans, Poles
and Ukrainians.
Speaker 2: Darryl has a good episode on this topic called The
Anti Humans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, getting emotional just thinking about that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can talk about that one offline.
Speaker 1: Yeah. As a discussion at Yalta continued, at the Potsdam
conference in August nineteen forty five, Stalin's desire to expand
Soviet territory became clear. He showed interest in assuming control
of former Italian colonies in Africa and suggested the removal
of Franco and Spain. Quote, it must be very pleasant
for you to be in Berlin now after all your
country has suffered, Avrol Harriman, the US ambassador to the
Soviet Union, remarked to Stalin during a break in the talks.
Stalin I the ambassador, without changing his expression, Sir Alexander
went all the way to Paris. He replied. The line
was hardly a joke. The year before, the Soviet leadership
had ordered plans to be drawn for invasion of France
and Italy and a seizure of the straits between Denmark
and Norway. In nineteen forty five, Soviet and General Serghi
Schtempko told Sergo Baria, whose father had been been a
feared a feared secret police chief. During the Stalin era,
it was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe
fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be parallel
by their colonial problems. This Soviet leader's thoughts created an
opening only on learning that the United States was close
to building the atom bomb, where the plans abandoned. Even
in Moscow's appetite for expansion was not. World War II,
of course, was also the dawn of the nuclear age.
Many regarded the invention of the atom bomb with horror
and considered the US bombing of Erosima and Nagasaki to
be a war crime. Hey, at the targeting of those
two Japanese cities in August nineteen forty five involved a
weighty moral choice. Before the bombings accelerated the end of
the war, Japanese generals wanted to fight on rather than
accept the terms if surrender issued in July by the
Allied powers in the July nineteen forty five Potsdam Declaration.
Speaker 2: For added contexts, and I'll make clear that I'm not
pro Japanese empire in this one. The what do you
call it the demand? The condition that the Japanese generals
required that the US government would not give them was
the requirement that the emperor could not be removed, that
the country could not be forced to give up its monarchy,
which they were allowed to keep their monarchy after that anyway.
So again it's almost like they wanted to use this
bomb and you know, saying that they were going to
fight on because we wouldn't give them their demands that
we gave them anyways. And I also remind people that
the second city where the bomb was dropped, it was Nagasaki,
which had minimal damage. Prior was the center of Christian
life Christian community in Japan. So essentially we found the good, clean,
undamaged city where all the Christians lived and had to
blow that one up too because they kept fighting on
because they didn't get what we were going to give them. Anyways,
So again I'm a little bit cynical on how this
is portrayed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, just just know that b War is the
kind of person who will who will cry over Guernica,
the bombing of where in the Spanish Civil War, but.
Speaker 2: He's not going to cry over the destruction of the
Roman Catholic Church in Japan.
Speaker 1: No, they were prepared to sacrifice millions of Japanese citizens
by forcing them to resist in Allied invasion with only
bamboo spears and explosives strapped to their bodies. By nineteen
forty four, some four hundred thousand civilians a month were
dying from famine in areas of East Asia, the Pacific,
and Southeast Asia that were occupied by Japanese forces. The
Allies also wanted to save the American, Australian and British
prisoners of war who were starving to death in Japanese
camps or being slaughtered by their captors. On Tokyo's orders. Thus,
although the atomic bomb took more than two hundred thousand
Japanese lives, that terrible weapon may have saved many more
in an unsettling moral paradox.
Speaker 2: Perhaps, But again, letting them keep the damned emperor, probably
we would have ended the war sooner and saved everybody,
to include those POWs and lots of civilians in the
Catholic Church. So again, I'm not pro Japan, but let's
to say I'm very skeptical in this one.
Speaker 1: For better or worse, World War II reset the trajectory
of global politics. The defeat of Japan eventually paved the
way for the rise of modern China. The collapse of
the British, Dutch, and French empires in nineteen forty one
forty two marked the end of Imperial Europe, and the
experience of the war spurred the movement toward European integration.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union, meanwhile, were
elevated to superpower status. World War two also produced the
United Nations, whose key objectives were to safeguard the sovereignty
of countries and to prohibit armed aggression and territorial conquest.
The UN was very much US President Franklin Roosevelt's dream,
and he was prepared to let Stalin have complete control
over Poland to achieve it. Yet, in February of this year,
the United States turned its back on the UN's founding principles,
voting alongside Russia and refusing to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Speaker 2: I remind everybody that the only time the un IS
actively intervened as a force in a war was the
Korean War, and that's because the Soviet Union boycotted and
refused to use their boycott on the Security the Security
Council in order to prevent it from becoming an explicit
American dominated United Nations officially war. So again, he's a
little fast and loose with some of these facts.
Speaker 1: I will also remind he's writing for Foreign Affairs magazine.
Speaker 2: He is, but you would also assume that people who
work in the field of foreign affairs would know this,
you know, So at that point he's either intentionally lying
or he's stupid, and he's not stupid.
Speaker 1: World War two also led into led into the Cold War.
Some historians say that this new conflict started in nineteen
forty seven with the Clay Robertson Agreement, in which British
and US authorities decided to industrialize Western Germany, provoking Stalin's paranoia.
That year certainly saw tensions intensify. Was Stalin issuing an
order in September for European communist parties to dig up
their weapons in preparation for future war and setting the
groundwork for the Soviet blockade of Berlin the next year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do want to point out that the reason
the Allies finally got around to allowing the reindustrialization and
rearmament of West Germany was because finally the issue is
that they could have another war there. Both France and
Britain were on the verge of having riots over having
to reimpose the full scale draft. So it became a
situation was they were going to allow Germany to re
re arm they were going to allow Germany or pretty
much and tell them they had to go and impose
manhood conscription just because or largely because France and Great
Britain didn't want to do that in another generation to
fight another war, which I don't blame them, but again
now I'm rambling, But my point there is understand the
reason that the former Allied powers were so serious about
treating Germany as an ally is because the fact that
they were essentially what would be the battleground of a
Third World War, and we really would prefer that they
go and fight that war, and that we wouldn't have
to go and mobilize, you know, forever for a war
that may or may not come.
Speaker 1: But the origins lay much further back. In June nineteen
forty one, Stalin had been traumatized by Operation barbaras So,
the Nazi led invasion of the Soviet Union which began
that month. He became determined to surround himself with satellite
states across central and southern Europe so that no invader
could take the Soviet Union by surprise. Again, you have
to accept that Victor Suveroff is lying, and many other
historians are lying, and that Stalin is just saying, Oh,
we were just hanging out and all of a sudden, boom,
we just invaded.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In terms of Victor Suvarova, I'm not saying explicitly
that he's correct, but I'm saying he paints a compelling
image with all of the evidence there that is highly
suggestive of that. But to his point of saying that
they developed all those satellite states there and that was
you know, Stalin's strategy. I point people out that, you know,
Russia slash Ukraine, that part of the Slavic world sits
on the middle of the central Eurasian plane and has
very few natural borders. Right, So essentially, you there's two
ways to protect the Russian heartland. One of them is
to have a complete mobilization of your armed forces, with
or without nuclear weapons. The second thing is to go
and build you know, satellite states further out that could
go and fight these wars instead of you. And that's
just the reality of you know, again, you live in
the middle of a central Eurasian plane with no natural borders.
And at the same time, the person who's pointing out
that this is what Stalin did in order to prevent
another invasion of the Soviet Union is not willing to
acknowledge that that might be what Putin morally or immrally
is doing in his strategic analysis for modern Russia.
Speaker 1: For centuries, Russia had been obsessed with dominating its neighbors
to prevent encirclement. That is categorically untrue.
Speaker 2: I think, in some ways, giving a biased way of
saying they were doing what it was necessary to preserve
what they see as their existential survival, which is, you know,
sort of whether or not you're going to have a
biased or unbiased way of saying the same thing. It's so,
were they aggressive? Like I said, again, they're trying to
create some kind of foreign barrier between them and who
they see as their enemy. And is that aggressive? I mean,
I'm not blaming them, and even though I'm not on
their side. So let's look at the realities of how
you would defend a land mass like Russia.
Speaker 1: Well, especially on the European side where you have most
or the population.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again I repeat this is like, there's no
natural borders there. You know, the only thing that stops
them things are people with guns nukes, and you know
another group of people with guns in front of them.
Speaker 1: Stalin's fixation was Poland. Putin has preserved this basic mentality
only for him. The country's most vulnerable frontier is Ukraine,
which he argues belongs to Russia. I don't think he
argues that. I think he argues that there are parts
of Ukraine that are Russian and that they belong as
part of Russia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, I'm not pro Putin, but he's behaving
in a manner that's completely rational for somebody of you
know is his side, you know, in his circumstances, and
our failure, our unwillingness of our political class to technowledge
this is what created this war.
Speaker 1: When Putin acted on that claim with a twenty twenty
two invasion of Ukraine, he brought back a character ristic
of the World War two era that had largely been
absence of global politics. Since leaders, several of them empowered
by the totalitarian systems they controlled, shaped the course of
that vast conflict, from Churchill to Roosevelts of Stalin, their
machinations reactivated the idea in the popular imagination of the
great man driving the course of history. In recent years,
political leaders have been comparatively less influent, had had comparatively
less influenced about. The globalized economic system, for one things,
greatly restricts their freedom of action, and constant consideration of
how a decision will play in the media makes many
of them more cautious than bold. For decades, it seemed
as though the characters of leaders would never again determine
the course of events the way they did in World
War II, Putin's invasion has changed that, and Trump taking
Putin as a role model has two Do we want
to stop right there?
Speaker 2: Oh, this, we won't go too deep because this would
get into a huge digression of what I did in
three four years of grad school. But long story short,
the management sciences and leadership science which is basically overlapping,
and we can talk that at length. But one of
the big principles in managerial science is that the great
man theory has to be refuted. You know, it's part
of what you know, part of people being interchangeable or
fungible units. So again, managerialism, that thing that dominates the
West right there, accepts as a core tenet that there
are no great men except for when it's you know,
presenting great men or women on their side as you know,
the epitome of a value. And I think part of
what we're seeing right now in the breakdown of that
order is like, you know, human nature is real. History
comes back with the vengeance, and one of the things
we're having to deal with is, as Thomas has said,
there are people who are great men in the sense
they are actually able to, you know, shape the course
of his history within limits, and you know, managerialism is
the refutation of that. So when that proves to be
a real thing, it's you know, it's like we've sort
of killed their god.
Speaker 1: And Putin is probably the the avatar for that right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, whether we want them to be or not. And
then you know, some people like Lee Kwan yu and
Singapore were examples of that, you know, so you know,
it seems to be a universal aspect of human nature.
But again, managerialism, it rejects that as a core principle.
So their metaphysics are being challenged. It's not just the
morality or the politics, is that really the way they
see the universe has changed.
Speaker 1: Today, as Russia prepares to celebrate Victory Day on May ninth,
Putin has determined to milk the story of his country's
great patriotic war for all it's worth. He may well
revert the name of the city of Vogelgrad to Stalingrad.
It was changed in nineteen sixty one as part of
Soviet leader in Nikita Khrushchev's de Stalinization campaign so highlight
the Red Army's eventual victory over the Axis invaders in
the Battle of Stalingrad in nineteen forty three, the great
psychological turning point of the war. He may also sharpen
the worst of his historical distortions, attempting to justify as
continue war in Ukraine by claiming that the Ukrainians are Nazis,
contradicting his own insistence before the invasion that Ukrainians were
no different from Russians. That's not it's not true at all. Yeah,
I mean, that's just not what.
Speaker 2: It's a gross distortion of the realities of World War two.
And part of the realities of World War two is
you had two giant forces between Germany and the Soviet Union,
Soviet Union being communist, you know, Germany being the Third
Reich being national socialists, and despite the fact they didn't
support ideological fascism, you know, certain ideological fascist groups were
associated in aligned with them. But if you're stuck in
between these two giant horses that are going to crush you,
you can either be a victim or you can participate
in one side that you see as being in your interest.
And there's a reason why so many people stuck in
the middle said, you know what, they would much rather
support the Third Reich than the Soviet Union, and again,
part of our worldview as Americans post World War Two,
you know, refuses to acknowledge that, you know, maybe being
crushed by the Soviet Union, the side that you know,
we essentially turned against as soon as the war was over,
that maybe being destroyed by them was not in the
best interest of themselves in their nation.
Speaker 1: Well, basically, what you will hear a lot of them,
most Americans say, and you will especially get this out
of the libertarian camp, is is that all all that
was was well, I mean they'll use the term status
of course, but it was too authoritarian groups fighting for power.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, there was no huggy kissy loving, you know,
mutual co op in the middle into two groups, so
you got to deal with one group or the other.
In the reality is, most of those groups decided that
the third Reich, rightly or wrongly, you know, was the
more reasonable actor. And the fact that you know, repeatedly,
so many groups made that decision, you know, that's a
pattern that probably bears investigation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I hope that's one of the one of the
things that Daryl will undertake in this series, because that's
that's an important thing, is when you're when you're when
you've been brought up in a paradigm, in a paradigm
like he like he's describing here where there are no
great men, there are you know, basically, we we found
what works. You know, the end of history happened liberalism one.
And to step outside of that is to is to
move to authoritarianism. You I think that's one of the
reasons why most Americans can not deal with the intra
Warp period, because it wasn't black and white. It wasn't
that you know, there was a reason there were groups
calling themselves socialists who weren't historically socialist. Yeah, yeah, there were, Yeah.
Speaker 2: That in its area that I'm neck deep in doing
research for right now. And it's it's it's such I
would say, amazing or complex. It almost sounds like I'm,
you know, an artist talking about the beauty of it,
but it's it's so much more complex, and there's so
much more to that in so many levels that it
it's like so many details just get swept away. In
the case of narratives, that is, the average American is
not capable of even understanding the basics of this much less,
you know, trying to grasp the enormity, the complexity that
not just understand. They can't understand the level of complexity
was there. So it's more than anything in attacking the
post World War too liberal world order perspective. It's trying
to get people to understand, you know, the enormity and
complexity of those relationships.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this sentence right here is one of the things
that just standing alone. If the sentence was standing alone,
I would agree with. In truth, there is no one
set of conclusions to draw from World War Two. I mean,
I think that's obvious.
Speaker 2: The word Yeah, the big conclusion I think is the
way the manner in which the First World War has
ended created all these problems. And I seem I know,
I'm considered extreme for saying that, but you know, Churchill
said that, so maybe we should take his word for it.
Speaker 1: Well everyone said that back then. It was Anyone who
was looking at the rise of the NSDAP was like, well,
I mean, they would no one left out, you know
verse I yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 2: Just like one of a million examples that because I'm
reading a biography of Harman Earhart right now, who was
a bunch of his torpedo boats had to be taking
the scap of flow given over to the British at
the end of the war, and again again the German
navy had a lot of Communist infiltration at that point
and the British, we know, the British, you know, supported
the Communists there because they were the enemies in order
to stabilize Europe or stabilized Germany. But one of the
things the British navy told the German ships that they
were escorting is if they see a red banner anywhere,
they're sinking the entire ship and they're killing everybody aboard
because they're not going to allow communists them on their shores.
Since they had, you know, taking the boats meant they
had to put their German sailors ashore in the UK
until they took them back, so you know, they saw
that as a contagent. It's like they were willing to
kill everybody on a ship because there was a single
Communists there, you know. So we're ignoring things that you know,
we're black and white obvious that everybody talked about and
that Churchill said explicitly.
Speaker 1: The war defies generalization, is not fit into any easy categories.
It contains countless stories of tragedy, corruption, hypocrisy, egomania, betrayal,
impossible choices, and unbelievable sadism. But it also contains stories
of self sacrifice and compassion in which people clung to
a fundamental belief in humanity despite appalling conditions and overwhelming oppression.
Their example will always be worth remembering and emulating, no
matter how dark today's conflicts become.
Speaker 2: I agree, they're probably not about the people that he
wants me to agree with him about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm assuming that this is only about a certain
group of people that you're the allowable, the allowable groups
you're not allowed to see. I think the one thing
that you can say came out of the European Civil
War nineteen fourteen to nineteen and forty five, and especially
saw this starting with the war in our own nation
in the nineteenth century, is the demonizing of the enemy. Yeah,
of of just the dehumanization, the the scorched earth, the killing,
of the killing of civilians, just to kill civilians. Yeah,
just for the fact that you're going to kill civilians,
which are things that the same same historians, historians like
these people will you know, decry thet Tila for and
you know, quote unquote barbarians of the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right, And I say this is somebody. I'm
a cop veteran and I was a military officer. All
the stuff I've done on my doctoral level writing is about,
you know, the development of military units and insurgencies. So
I'm not a pacifist, and I understand the reality of
war and war is always going to be here. But
as you said, by creating a moral binary, we've just
created a situation in which anything could be justified against
your enemy, and then we're shocked when some of those
things are done by our enemy against other people. And
I'm not arguing for anybody to have, you know, an
inherently benevolent attitude towards human nature, but we need to
understand the consequences of choices and how we contributed to
those choices, or not us, but people in power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, THI We'll end it right there. Thank you,
mister field House. I always appreciate talking.
Speaker 2: To you anytime. Like I said, I'm willing to come
on and I tend to ramble lots of short pieces
like these talking through are really good and appreciate it.
Speaker 1: You're believe me, you're not a rambler. You listen to
my show all right, take care of yourself. Thank you.