Dr Koontz and Rev Fisk talk about the definition of warfare, the propaganda of the Cold War, the potential use of tactical nuclear weaponry, the US's current military position, the and the permanent state of emergency that came out of WWII.
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Dr Koontz - Trinity Lutheran Church
Rev Fisk - St Paul Rockford
Music thanks to Verny
Transcript:
[Speaker 1] (0:06 - 10:53)
Dr. Koontz, why is war good? War is good when it suppresses evil. It is generally, however, not good not only because war so often promotes evil rather than suppressing it, but because of all the other evils attendant upon war, its helpers that come with it.
So war can be good in a very limited sense. Pacifism is not a good option for that reason, but it is an understandable option for people that pay attention to all the attendant evils, even in a war prosecuted for a good purpose. What is a good purpose?
A good purpose would be the defense of the innocent, the defense of one's own. If you look at the history of just war, as the Christian church has been discussing it for thousands of years, you'll find that it involves the rescue of the innocent or the helpless. Think of Abram's war that he wages in Genesis 14 to recover Lot and his family and possessions.
Those are the most obviously good instances of war where it is defensive or something that recovers what was lost unjustly. That is very rarely the sole cause for war. Because of that murkiness, you really have recourse to whether soldiers too can be saved.
Luther is going to assuage the soldier's conscience by referring to his need to follow the authorities that are authorizing the war, because the individual person cannot be sure in most cases and can have very serious doubts in many cases that the war that he has to be engaged in because he's a professional soldier or because he was conscripted or whatever is actually a good war. What is war? War is, well, famously politics by other means, but war is violence prosecuted for some kind of end generally by some sort of recognized government entity.
It can be a state in the modern world roughly the past 500 years. It could be a king. It could be a baron.
It could be lots of things. Someone that would appear to be a robber that will eventually turn into a king. All kinds of different entities, but generally have some sort of governmental function.
A clan going to war in a Gaelic country or a group of men under a headman going to war in a Germanic country in the dark ages and middle ages. So it's going to be violence prosecuted in an ongoing way for the attainment of some kind of end by a group. It's not individual violence and it's not just robbery in the sense of I'm seeking just to plunder.
In war, something political is always intended as well. You're not just trying to take something. You're also trying to affect the way that life works either for you or for your opponent or both.
That sounds pretty close to what I've been reading in the book, Warfighting, the official dogma of the Marine Corps of the USA, where if I am remembering correctly, war is defined as the imposition of will by violence on an opposing political entity. Yeah. And so it's really a battle of will, not so much like who has the greatest will wins, but more there is a disagreement about what should be and then there is violence to decide what will be.
Right. Exactly. Precisely.
Yeah. And that definition I like for its looseness. Also, you just have to keep the adjective political loose in that definition.
Absolutely. Yeah. Because you don't want to fall into some sort of trap where war is only between what we recognize today as nation states.
A better word might be public. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Whatever is going to get you to the sense that it is affecting political realities, but those are not always solely national realities. So if anyone here is a reader of Mad Christian Mondays, my newsletter that goes out every Monday, you can get more at madpxm.com.
It's free. Sign up. I have not shied away from talking about both mass formation psychosis and that as an agenda or an element of so-called fifth generation warfare.
And one of the key components of fifth generation warfare as part of warfare theory is that it is no longer a matter of nation versus nation, state versus state, but that in a fifth generation war, all people are combatants and they are combatants in a matter of information. And we've talked about this before. It's easier to convert you through fear or agreement than to come at you with guns.
And so again, fifth generation warfare being something that has really just dispersed the idea that war is about nation states. That's kind of the key idea there. And as we then are going to go backwards here in time and talk about the so-called cold war, that definitely was, at least from the history books that I got in grade school, all about nation states, all about the distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys in big countries who also have Olympic teams.
And in some ways, where the cold war was fought in the minds of the people, I think, for a lot of things. So although I also have come to believe that the fifth generation warfare has been going on quite a bit longer than we realize, and you can track the infiltration of communist ideology into the American school system and call that part of it, frankly, I think, Marcuse especially being a major name in that. But anyway, from there, if you want to respond to that, or we can just jump into cold war as a concept.
Well, I think that you have to respond to it because William Lynn's idea that you have these different generations is premised on a framework of, as so much theory is of the last 30 or 40 years, that the cold war represents a certain kind of normalcy. And if you define the cold war roughly as the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and then the creation, and if you do remember the Olympics in 1992, there were teams competing under CIS Commonwealth of Independent States, which was a sort of halfway house for post Soviet republics, including Russia and Ukraine. That time period of basically 45 to 91 is its own kind of normalcy and involves nation state conflict with the world organized into three blocks with the first world.
Now, this is weird for people because these have taken on solely material significances. But first world was what was otherwise called the free world, that is the world led by America. The second world, a term people don't use anymore, was the Soviet world or the communist aligned world led, of course, by the Soviet Union.
And the third world were what were called the non aligned states, like India. And that way of thinking is if nation states were normal, I think you're right to say, that was never exactly how this worked. Because even before the Second World War, in things that we've mentioned, you had, for example, pretty fervent and in certain immigrant communities, particularly successful communist and anarchist agitation in the United States in the 20s and 30s.
So the idea that somehow the strains and the stresses exhibited both between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also as dangers, domestic dangers about which we'll speak more in a couple weeks, that those were somehow absent before 1945. And then these are all standalone and no one is attacking you on a psychological level. During the Cold War, I think is absurd.
It runs contrary. Also, generally, I think, and you know more about this than I do. Generally, I think also to people's psychological experiences of the Cold War, it wasn't an experience purely of nation state conflict, which could then be safely corralled into when the hockey teams play each other in the Olympics.
It was also a sense that perhaps returning of nuclear destruction. It was also a sense that the world was extremely fragile, because it could be assaulted almost at any moment. Something that during the Second World War really is only true for Americans on the West Coast is now true for all Americans during the Cold War.
So the idea that somehow this assault on the individual psyche was not a part of warfare prior to whatever time is, I don't think sustainable, because it seems to have always been a part of warfare when it was possible. Propaganda plays a huge part in it. What seems to be new is the ability of the enemy to target your population with you not being able to necessarily even know that that's happening, right?
So you find posters about how the Nazis are apes and we need to go kill them, but you didn't really have a way for the Nazis to stream radio into your house here in America without the U.S. being able to do anything about it. And that's what shifted here. And this is where, so you run this all the way through the Trump election and Russian interference, and yeah, they're probably interfering, but in what way?
And maybe not the way everyone thinks they are. And implying we're not. [Speaker 2] (10:53 - 10:53)
Yeah, right, right.
[Speaker 1] (10:54 - 27:24)
Even CCP has their police force set up in New York City and all this stuff going on. That is a new thing. And I think fifth generation warfare is trying to get at that concept.
But yeah, to see the overlap and that psychological control would be the only way you would get a group of people to exercise their political force into violence for the sake of a will or a direction or something like that. And yeah, memories of the Cold War. I mean, it was a scary time.
Although at the same time, the 80s, it was morning in America too, right? So cable was getting going and there were a lot of good shows on. And those shows were about tear- drinking realities, like how we should love down syndrome people and have disarmament agreements with Russia.
If only we would do it, then they would do it too. And the only way to win is all to play, which is, it was at War Games, the movie, I think, Matthew Broderick. So there was a lot of propaganda targeting American thought to shove toward peace, which I don't know if I have a problem with that.
It was kind of a weird thing as I think back on it. If we really were in a situation where we had these global enemies, this kind of rose glasses, pie in the sky, kumbaya approach to everything. Well, it worked.
I mean, then the wall fell down, right? And so it all kind of rolled together into this beautiful Americana, Captain America was right after all thing. And then the internet took off and you had a financial market collapse in the late 90s based upon internet stuff and that rolled forward into the housing bubble.
So I don't know, it merges together as memories will do. But I definitely remember the scorpion singing wind of change and this great moment that, oh, at last we're safe. We're safe.
The wall fell down. It won't be like it was. And in some part, that dream, that ideology, that religion, whatever it is, I mean, that stuck with me up until 2020 as an assumption.
And 2020 was very much a part of like, oh, wait, that was a good lie. That was a good lie. So, yeah.
The reason that we're talking about Cold War this week and next and likely into a third week to cover the domestic front is I think precisely because it's not perhaps normal in the States is normal or must occur in the way that it occurred in the 20th century. But because the way that life functions under it, where it did function under it is the basis for the way that life functions for us now. And that recognizing that you were being propagandized by various entities, usually in the United States being ostensibly nonprofits from both Hollywood production companies to the ad council, that that was happening in the 1980s.
And that was happening in the 1950s. The recognition of that is one of the, I think, most important distinctions that we want to draw, which is that Cold War, let's say, lowercase c, lowercase w is the natural state of our state at this point. Hot war is not.
And the distinction is simple on its face, which is that open violence, what we started out by defining as war, just strictly speaking, no adjectives attached, that war is not actually being prosecuted by one of those states upon the other state. So you're not in a state of war with the Soviet Union. You're not in a state of war with the People's Republic of China.
That doesn't mean that you're not in a Cold War. And it's this category of Cold War that is really kind of novel, but will, I think, help explain for people what is actually going on amongst us. Because what I'm maintaining is that the Cold War, capital C, capital W, sure, with the Soviet Union, yes, that ended.
Cold War is the ongoing permanent state of emergency that in 2020 was obviously extended to COVID, but potentially exists in everything from the Selective Service Act to the existence of the Defense Department or the Pentagon, or lots of other things that we're going to discuss in the next couple of weeks. So yes, we're not in a hot war. Maybe we can discuss whether we're going to get into a hot war, but we're not in a hot war.
But we are, I think, permanently in a Cold War, not necessarily the Cold War, obviously, with a no longer extant Soviet Union. So let's talk about whether or not we're going to get into a hot war as opposed to this proxy war that we're in, which is hot. And we're just not officially there, although we're right on the border, it would seem.
And we got all sorts of toys over there. And we have citizens, I believe, retired military that are fighting generally for Ukraine, although I believe there are some on the other side. Before we do that, though, I may think let's go in that direction.
But I want to ask just your opinion. Because this has been the way that the alt mainstream news has been trending. Not the mainstream, but the alt mainstream, which is that Putin bit off too much.
And this is backfiring, which is sort of a newer alt mainstream media approach. It had been a little more both directions and or, you know, there was even some voice if you listen to BAP, you know, that that this was actually going to really just prove something in terms of Putin's strength. But it seems to be, and I don't know who to trust.
So I'm asking you, that Putin is is losing even within his own ranks here, some credibility. So what are your thoughts? Yeah, the loss of face within his own ranks is a little hard to track, because of the like, the severe language barrier for any English speaker, the closest that I've got to something approximating a fairly pro Russian, but but within and about Russia, fairly neutral.
Tracking of both the political events and the military events has been Russians with attitude. And they they'll release things for free. I'm not a subscriber, but they release plenty of stuff for free that helps clarify where things are and what's going on and everything.
And some of the changes, especially within the command structure of the Russian army and the relationships of various generals to the Putin administration regime, whatever you want to call it, I, the analogy that helped clarify for me what I'm going to give us as an answer to these things, is that you have a similar kind of confusion among generals and about generals, as well as about the commander in chief's capacity to wage the war that they've committed themselves to, along with difficulties mobilizing conscripts, and that would be the the North and the American Civil War. And the reason that I would use that as an analogy for the Russians is because they are vastly technologically superior to their relatively very small, numerically small, technologically inferior opponents.
And that doesn't mean that I mean, there are points in the American Civil War, like in late 1862, where the South is winning on all fronts. And what happens at that point is that media favorable to that side, and we see this happening with Ukraine, maybe about two weeks ago, as we record this, they're not they're not all quite there, because there have been there have been and remain so many enormous power outages, as a result of Russian missile strikes, that it's a little hard to maintain. But there was a point roughly two weeks ago now, in October, early October, where the media was our media was acting like this was lights out for the Russians, and they're out of here, and they're gone.
And the problem there is that winter is just coming on. And, you know, even in this globally warmed world, winter is, is, is going to come to the Eurasian steppe. And the Russians are militarily and technologically superior in numbers and capacities and experience, if you look at the wars that they fought since the fall of the Soviet Union, largely in their border areas or in their, you know, rest of provinces.
And I think eventually, they they will win apart from something that I think is the wildcard here, which is the presence of nuclear weapons, and then the use of nuclear weapons. And then as we saw also with the Nord Stream two pipeline, the attribution of attacks. So that is all completely up in the air, in the sense that the Russians are warning fervently about how the Ukrainians are trying to construct a dirty bomb.
And NATO, as well as Ukraine is insisting that Russia is going to use tactical nuclear weapons. Of course, nobody wants to do what the Americans did in the Second World War, and use them and then be honest that you use them. Because especially in a post World War Two, world order, you are dealing with the reality that certain things are seen to be off limits.
And that is part of the reason they've never been deployed in combat. That's an interesting thing. Is it Dr. Strangelove?
Is that why it's off limits? Is it because it's just gonna be bad for us too? I mean, what?
And I don't, I'm not gonna advocate nuclear bombs or anything else I'm doing. But but from a, if I put myself in a, I don't care, I'm a radical, I care more about winning position, and I have them. I don't know what would stop that guy.
Right. And I'm not sure Putin's that guy. I think, I can't think of Ukraine's actor.
What's his name? But, but, but he's an actor. He might be that guy.
Actually, I'm more worried about, about, of course, I, there's my bias, I suppose. But yeah, well, Zelensky is unlike Putin in that Putin is is a pure product of the Cold War. His tremendous fluency in German is a result of long years spent as a KGB agent in in East Germany.
And he is fairly old, and remembers these things and thinks in ways that came to be native to the Cold War. We'll talk about the American incarnation of that next week. But just in a nutshell, that there is a, there is a native caution built into Cold Warriors on both the American and the Soviet sides, by virtue of the sense that this could be completely destructive.
That's why you have this category of tactical nuclear weapons that you're not, you're not deploying these things strategically, that is, as a kind of ultimate game changer, you would theoretically deploy them with relatively small loads in order to achieve certain, you know, immediate battlefield objectives. That's, that's why you would use them. I, I do not think that that is really not that it's not in the cards, but that it is probably a card they would be extremely reluctant to play on the Russian side, because it would play into the hands of their enemies so easily.
Yeah, right within the realms of information warfare. Right. And it is, it is not, I think, at all militarily necessary.
They've, they've already captured large swaths of the Russian speaking portion of Ukraine without using anything resembling nuclear weaponry, it really would not be necessary to do so. So there is very small advantage in deploying tactical nukes for the Russians. There is very great propaganda advantage in deploying tactical nuclear weapons, perhaps even as a false flag on the part of Ukraine.
That's, I mean, I'm not saying they're going to do it. I don't know enough about Zelensky to know that I'm saying, they're the only ones who if you think about this a couple moves ahead, like you're playing chess, could benefit in any way, right? From the deployment of nuclear weapons, when you can't win, you use the radical solution, right?
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
I want to come back to this. But I want to bring another hot war possibility in because there's a little island called Taiwan. And Xi Jinping just threw a coup, which is crazy.
Like you're in charge of everything. And you have a coup on the guy who like supports you, but used to be in charge. And that shocked the world a little bit for a moment and a half.
So they're running drills. China, CCP is running drills in the Strait of Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi, blah, blah, blah.
That's old news. But there continues to be this, I think it was today I saw, US, Japan, South Korea, saying North Korea don't pursue nuclear weapons. So that's also sitting right there.
So another side of the Asian continent with some similar potential hot war things, that China's policy is Taiwan is ours, and we will have it. It's only a matter of time. Is that any more or less in the cards right now?
Or is that just sort of a distraction while we change our computership model of economy? Well, I mean, it is true that we are on-shoring things that before COVID were almost exclusively sourced from Taiwan, or mainland China. I think that one thing that a permanent state of cold war induces in us is the sense that everything is our job, at least potentially.
So logically, the distinction between committing troops and weaponry and everything to Ukraine, that's really the same thing as committing troops and weaponry and everything to Taiwan. So the difficulty here is that if Cold War originally existed as a way of projecting American power, in distinction to Soviet power, for reasons that were both ideological and, let's say, purely political in the sense of realpolitik, then what you're dealing with now is the same responsibility, you know, lying on America to potentially police anything that could come up as a kind of injustice, or especially as a power move by somebody that is a threat to us, in a diplomatic or geopolitical sense. And that's, that's really Russia and China. Yeah, there's no one else who even approaches that.
So I think, unfortunately, the logical response on the basis of current advocacy of Ukraine in the presence of Ukrainian flags on, you know, outside the homes, some of the homes in my neighborhood, is there's really no difference between that and Taiwan, even though objectively, a historic pre-Cold War American response to these things was it is not our business.
[Speaker 2] (27:24 - 27:24) Yeah.
[Speaker 1] (27:25 - 35:27)
Whether the Chinese control Taiwan, or the Russians control Ukraine. So, but that's, it's almost impossible to say that within any kind of electable or even broadcast worthy American environment to say that something is not our business. Well, isolationism is bad for everybody, don't you know that?
Yeah, isolationism. Right. Yeah.
Isolationism is going to be consistently brought up. We've referenced on the show before the overwhelming percentage of Americans that didn't want to enter either world war. But it's not only that people's minds generally change quickly, when war begins, but also that their amnesia becomes severe after the war is over.
So for, okay, for example, almost nobody remembers that there was a Mexican war, maybe the Mexicans do, right. But most Americans don't remember that there was a Mexican war. And they certainly won't know how wildly unpopular it was, even among the troops who were prosecuting that war.
I mean, Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in that war thought it was a total fraud. We should not have been there.
We were just bullying the Mexicans because we could militarily in order to get more space and stuff. And so what's going to happen is that not only do wars get forgotten, but also that the reasons that people don't want to be in them also become forgotten, particularly when they are successful. The exception to this that you can see in American memory from the Cold War is the Vietnam War, which is not remembered as successful, even if in many tactical ways, it was highly successful.
We just didn't have the will to prosecute it in a way to resolve the problem permanently, right? So I think what we're looking at is I am afraid that not only the body politic, but our leadership, such as it is of both parties, has no capacity to beforehand realize what it will mean for us to be committed to Ukraine, let alone also to Taiwan. And that we wouldn't really be able to learn that until after those wars were over.
It seems very difficult for people to learn, begin to learn from history, from history's numerous examples, before an imminent war begins that they shouldn't let it begin. There's just a force that seems to push governments and peoples along toward war. It's a strange kind of optimism, really, that leads in that direction.
And I guess that does kind of get to something else then. One of the things that has been, again, this isn't coming from Russians with attitude. This is coming from a conglomerate of alt-right sources, meaning alt-right media, not far alt-right, blah, blah, blah.
But that one of the things we've seen out of the Russian-Ukraine conflict is that Russia isn't what we thought Russia was. Russia is definitely superior to Ukraine technologically. They definitely have everything you said earlier about the long game is in their favor.
But they're not the U.S. Navy SEALs. Or at least that's what we thought maybe they were, and they're not. Now, what I'm really beginning to wonder, though, is are we?
And how long will it take? Do we have to have a war in which we jump in the way that Russia jumped into Ukraine to find out, oh, we're not what we think we are? We've watched too many of our own movies here, right?
The Bourne effect, it wasn't real enough. And so your thoughts on that, on the paper eagle, effectively. My thoughts on the paper eagle are that, OK, let's just bracket out the stuff that people are, I think, generally aware of.
It's at the level of being Facebook memes that, you know, we're requiring our troops to get vaccinated and learn how to talk nicely to transsexuals. And the Chinese are not doing that. And look at, I mean, if anything is influence, this could easily have been sort of memed by the Russians or the Chinese.
But these military recruitment commercials from Russia, China, and then the United States, respectively, in the United States is like a one of those sort of like human Teletubby Silicon Valley cartoon things where the recruit has like two moms and is brown and is happy to be in a jobs program. You know, the Russians are like a man running and yelling and the Chinese are like a man running and yelling. And so, OK, that's just bracket that out like that.
That's that's on a level of obviousness, but not current actuality that, yes, eventually, obviously, if we're running the military as a jobs program for various like sexual deviance, we're we're sunk. Yes, obviously. And we're probably headed there.
BHoP 116 Paper Eagle 3176
I don't think that's the current state of our trigger pullers exactly, because, again, somewhat like Vietnam in a war that people are quickly forgetting, no one is claiming precisely that our troops tactically lost to the Taliban like man for man, you know, encounter for encounter. That's not the claim, for example, of the book, the Afghanistan papers. The claim there is that we were rudderless.
We were insane. We were dumping money into social reconstruction programs, trying to give people democracy and feminism and who knows what else that didn't want any of it. And that so so that much like Vietnam, we ended up in a quagmire of our own making.
But it wasn't claimed either there or really by anywhere that I have seen that the Taliban did anything except endure those 20 years. They weren't necessarily winning battle for battle, right? They were maybe getting better at certain things.
But they weren't going to win in some kind of ultimate military, purely military sense. So I think we are we are a paper eagle, but we are not a paper eagle because of obvious, like measurable lack of fitness in every kind of combat unit we might send out. I do think that that exists.
I think that that's probably increasingly creeping in, as it was, especially after Vietnam in the 1970s, when basically every branch of service was in total disarray in the United States. But I think that the more immediate issue is that we will threaten to do many things, but we will not then finally do them except through deployment of certain special forces. That is, that seems generally to be what we are comfortable doing at this point.
We will do all kinds of shady things. We will fund lots of things endlessly. But we will finally only deploy into a combat situation, select numbers of special forces.
I mean, we're doing that all over Africa as we record this. So we are trying to project force. But the idea that we're trying to project force in a country in order to stop something else from happening, that would be that would be a new paradigm, at least if that did happen, because we really haven't done that in a new way since 2003, which at this point was a little while ago.
[Speaker 2] (35:28 - 35:29)
It's quite a while ago, really. [Speaker 1] (35:29 - 46:29)
It's quite a while ago. Yeah. Yeah.
So let's come back to war as ultimately state of permanent emergency and justification for the ongoing controls, changes that the elite would like to see enforced on the population. Where we pick up really with a story that we've been telling, that we told technologically about the Second World War is with a redeployment of the technological capacities of the Third Reich into both the major victor combatants in the Second World War. So most Americans are familiar with Operation Paperclip.
There is an exact analog to it in the Soviet Union to get German scientists, particularly into space research, aircraft research, rocketry, all kinds of things. And they are shipped to various purpose-built places, often in Siberia, for those very reasons. That parallel leaves you with really two major blocks in the world.
And immediately after the Second World War's end in Europe, which is in May of 1945, we begin to realize that we are not really friends. Now, some of this has to do with a realization that we didn't have, partly because one of our major State Department officials in the Second World War, Harry Dexter White, is actually revealed by the former communist-turned-conservative Christian, really, Whitaker Chambers, to have been one of the people that Chambers was working most diligently when he was working as a Communist Party operative within the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s. So we have actual obvious communists, particularly in the State Department, not solely there, but particularly there, that are operating in a way friendly to the Soviet Union, not only in the 30s, but also after the outbreak of the war, such that we are treating the Soviets as equals, partners in the war. It's really, therefore, only after the end of combat in Europe, and then the Soviets do invade Japanese territory.
But obviously, we bring that portion of the war to an end in the summer of 1945. Then we look around, and we look around a country like Germany, or lots of other places in the world, but particularly centered in Germany, and we think, what is this supposed to be? Because it's divided up into four occupational zones, British, American, French, and Russian.
And everything that the Russians have occupied in Central and Eastern Europe is, in 1945, not particularly communist. No one knows what it's going to be. And at that point, I mean, I guess if we had actually been on the same team the whole time, if we were working for the same objectives, or believed that man's happiness could be constituted in all of the same ways, that we would have had no problem partitioning Europe.
But in fact, there is vehement debate, both within the United States and among nations, about what the shape of Europe should be. How should it be divided up? What parties should be outlawed or not outlawed?
That is what political opinions are beyond the pale or not. And what begins to set in comes to be called a Cold War, meaning that we are at odds with the Soviets, especially as over the next four years, from 45 to 49, they bring to power, sometimes often ruthlessly, a crushing opposition, such that there are, as it were, small civil wars in many of these countries. As they do that, we're like, Oh, well, I guess this is not what we signed up for, or they are not our allies.
And so it's in 1948, that Winston Churchill is going to announce in a speech at Westminster College in Missouri, that an iron curtain is descending over Europe. And he's saying that in order to, I mean, if this makes any sense, he's saying that about his allies. I mean, he used to sit and have conferences about how to divide up the world with Joe Stalin.
And now Joe Stalin's, you know, predominance in Russia's, what would be called in a more polite time sphere of influence, is a problem. So the Cold War here is going to express the antagonism between these regimes that really anybody could have seen coming, but for the purposes of the Second World War, we were willing to overlook. So I don't know if I can tie this to the conversation about the Pentagon.
My favorite thing about the Pentagon is that it is made from a shape that is geometrically kind of useless if you want to build anything. It's one of the most unstable structures you could possibly make and yet here it is at the center of the world right now. But that's probably not where you exactly wanted to go.
Well, I mean, the way to tie it in, I mean, the Pentagon predates the iron curtain speech that Churchill makes. And its planning begins during wartime, but of course it's not carried out. There is a lot of significance to the Pentagon.
What it does is this, so we'll start with Churchill and then go into the Pentagon, is that if you say an iron curtain is descending, the question is, well, are you supposed to stop it? What are you supposed to do about that? I mean, if you're going to announce something as a geopolitical reality, Vladimir Putin is a tyrant, then that invites action from people that are paying attention to you.
If you're not going to do anything about that, then you have to wonder why. So if you're going do something without committing troops to some sort of endless ground war in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, then what you're prosecuting is going to come to be called a cold war. The best court history of this, I mean, just kind of orthodox, no revisionist takes, just a narrative of certain facts, gets you, covers many of the proxy wars in Latin America and Africa.
So if you need to brush up on your Angolan border war knowledge, this is, or South African border war knowledge or Angolan liberation knowledge, this is your book, is by John Lewis Gaddis, and it's just called The Cold War, A History. And what he identifies are, especially this prevalence of tension without resolution, but the sense that the tension has to be there because we are confronting some sort of evil in some way, akin to what we told ourselves we were doing in the Second World War, fighting the Japanese and Germans. But if you're going to do that, you can't always have a self-conscious war footing.
So what happens after the Second World War, with the building of the Pentagon, the National Security Act of 1947, the changing of the name of the department responsible for most of these things from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, the inauguration of a permanent foreign intelligence agency in the CIA, lots of matters like this, as well as the beginning of something we've talked quite a bit about, which is the beginning of the National Security Agency.
All of those things mean that because we're in a war, it's cold, but it is a war, because we're in a war, we need to be on something like permanent war footing without the commitment of American boys to potentially die on foreign soil all of the time. So what that is going to look like is that we are going to demobilize our conscripted troops from the Second World War, but we're going to keep the draft present enough that by 1950, we're drafting people again to go to Korea in that case. But we're going to keep that possibility open, and now there's going to be the Selective Service Act, and you will register if you want to receive government benefits of any kind, including at this point now, in our time, student loans, if you're a man, whatever that means for the time being.
But if you're a man, you still have to do that. But all of that is going to be permanent. So instead of just taking everything away, as we did honestly try to do with almost everything that we built up to prosecute the First World War, after the Second World War, it just transmutes into something else.
And that something else can then over the course of time become bigger in many cases than its equivalent was in the Second World War. So the CIA is bigger than the Office of Strategic Services. The NSA is bigger than anything that the Army Signal Corps had going in the Second World War, and on and on and on.
So what you're going to do with the building of the Pentagon is that you are symbolizing by the Pentagon's sheer existence, the fact that America will now be at war permanently. The nature of that war will vary, but America will be at war permanently, but that war will not be called war, it will be called defense. It seems like I'm kind of just thinking on how after the meat grinding reality of World War I, that a Cold War is a natural evolution of warfare.
I mean, you kind of said it yourself, but that the elites realized that we can't just throw the boys at the guns, have them run at each other forever, but we do have to deal with the perceived threat, the perceived enemy in a global theater now, in which the ability to strike is not easy, but it's not as hard as it was for Russia to strike the US in circa 200 AD. I mean, that wasn't really easy, right?
[Speaker 2] (46:29 - 46:29) That was hard.
[Speaker 1] (46:31 - 56:34)
And now it's a little easier with submarines and aircraft carrier and all this kind of stuff. And so recognizing that that's always there, I guess what I'm asking a little bit is, can you blame them? I don't like it, I don't think it's good.
I don't think it's the way that an arrangement of confederated states that are there to protect the freedoms of the population necessarily can maintain its freedoms, but it seems that having a military state is inevitably going to have a military state. But can you blame the elites of the time for thinking this is what needed to be done? Were they malicious, I guess, is what I'm asking.
Is a cell with malicious intent? I don't think they were malicious in the sense that our elites often are today. And that is a exception of, for example, Harry Dexter White, with the exception of people that were either suspected or known then, or are certainly known now to have been malicious, to have been utterly duplicitous, to have been communists.
I don't think that there was malice, exactly. I think there was a conception of what America was for that involved necessarily having to change America entirely to achieve. And the sense that that change, that transmutation, that alteration beyond recognition would be wise or good or helpful, that was their hubris.
I don't think it was their malice. So, for example, if you take the nuclear weapons testing that we were still doing, particularly in the desert Southwest and then in the various Pacific Islands, some of which we obliterated through nuclear weapons testing during the 40s, 50s, and early 1960s, that those tests were not there in order to completely change the psychic condition of American children. Now, maybe they did, and maybe they didn't.
But the idea that so much could be destroyed at once is bound to change you somehow. Technology, which is kind of our particular thing we have used to win wars, technology has not been neutral. It has often been evil.
But I don't think that it necessarily adheres in the technology or even in the geopolitical situation. It adheres in the blindness that men have. I mean, the people overseeing those tests are a combination of academics with their narrow specialties and military officers.
Academics with narrow specialties, we didn't have, really, in the United States before the 20th century. Military officers, we consciously limited throughout the 19th century, as well as to some extent, between the world wars, because the innate going back to the founding thinking was that the presence of a military officer class is always nascently tyrannical. That people who control standing arms, standing weapons of warfare, will themselves do whatever they want, finally, because the existence of the weaponry and of the capacities has its own force on a person, especially a person who can command them.
So none of these things, I think, are especially malicious. I think sometimes when people think about history, they think as if they are thoroughgoing Armenians, or not even Armenians, but something sub-Armenian, where human will somehow determines everything. And so what you would do in that idea of what humanity is, is you would try to spot, in any given historical instance, Bikini Atoll, 1954, or Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe, 1946.
You would have to spot the motivations of every single human being involved, or at least the leadership involved. And a lot of people think that's what history is. Instead, what I find most often is a pattern particular to a topic, a problem, wartime, military officers, whatever it is, that repeats apart from the ascribed or described motivations or characteristics of the people involved.
And so I don't think that we wanted to destroy the world or put ourselves in a constant state of fear, or eventually make the federal government metastasize like a cancer, or anything like that. I think we wanted to protect our own people and generally actually oppose communism, which even the CIA did rather ineffectually for a very long time. But none of that really matters.
Human intentions matter a lot less than human beings seem to believe, certainly at the time. I really like the idea that the good news is the CIA has been incompetent for a long time. So now that they're against us, they may not be so good.
Since you mentioned Bikini Atoll, and since you once shared with me a tweet thread that I did read the entire thing on the nuclear testing there and some of the personalities involved, I mean, I really got to ask, did they accidentally rip a wormhole in the sky and let an archdemon into the existence of the current state of things? And is the sacred heart of Jesus our only solution? Because that was the premise of the tweet.
That was the premise of the thread. Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. I mean, really fascinating.
But I want to hear your thoughts on it for that reason. Yeah, the guy, if I can remember his, I mean, who knows if Twitter even allows him to exist anymore. His name is like Charles Wing Wexcell.
It's a strange name. But he's some kind of Catholic, Catholic poster. And so he wants to rededicate ourselves to the sacred heart of Jesus.
There are probably worse ideas. It's just like a little bit above in our Discord chat. It's at C, the letter, Wing, the word, capital U, small e, X, and then cull, K-U-L-L, like Krull, the movie, but without the R.
So yeah, that's his Twitter handle. So yeah, they can find that. And his thinking is that the use of technology, especially of destructive technology, is not a spiritually neutral thing.
And I want to stress the word use there, that what is happening is when people are employing incredible technologies, especially with the rapidity of discovery and advances in power, explosive power, destructive power, that we experience as a result of the Second World War, that we are interacting with spiritual realities that are not under our control, and that these things are now beginning to control us. And Wing, X- Cull, or however you say that, he believes that what changed in America, the obvious social decline, the destruction of so much that was obvious, not even cherished, but simply obvious to people when those nuclear tests were going on, can be tracked to extremely destructive tests in the South Pacific in the 1950s, and that after those points, great evils have come upon us.
So that's his idea. You can see it as far-fetched if you want. I don't think that it's really finally debatable that the use of technologies that are wildly destructive and wildly beyond our capacities to contain the impact or finally the use of, as we work about dirty bombs.
I really don't think you can see the discovery of those things as some kind of boon in human history, or a good, or that these things come from protecting angels. Yeah. So he's putting things in very literal theological terms, literal psychospiritual terms, and you can disagree with or affirm his literality.
That's fine. But the idea that somehow we have done all of these things, and we as a nation, among other things, are the only ones to have unleashed nuclear total burning upon a civilian population, that those things can go on without a problem. Blood guilt is real, is kind of the shaman of that.
Yeah. Well, it's very interesting to me that Grant, whose memoirs I'm reading right now, that's why I'm referring to him, and they're extremely well-written. They're fascinating.
There are moments in the Mexican War where six Union and Confederate generals are all lieutenants in the same regiment, working together. It's kind of wild. That's like movie-esque right there.
[Speaker 2] (56:34 - 56:35) Yeah, it is movie-esque. [Speaker 1] (56:35 - 1:00:03)
All these young, later to be famous guys in the same platoon. Yeah. I mean, the guy from whom he received the surrender at Vicksburg, and the guy from whom he received the surrender at Appomattox, he fights right alongside both those guys in Mexico.
But what is interesting is that he says that the Southern Rebellion is largely a consequence of the Mexican War. He's got other reasons for that. But what he says right after that is nations like individuals are punished for their transgressions.
That basic idea does not exist in American political theology in the 20th century, really at all. No, no, no. Blowback is not even a thing for, and that's a secular concept.
Right. Yeah, blowback is a secular concept. And Ron Paul, I mean, got scorched from all sides, as is his custom, for suggesting that anything to do with September 11th could have anything to do with our conduct in the Middle East.
And so that's simply a secular observation of human behavior and the behavior of nations when they're under pressure. Grant's assertion in high style, because one of his overarching ideas is that destiny, that is God's disposing of events, matters vastly more than any human being understands or can expect, is that God's disposing upon nations that commit atrocities or commit great evils is that they will be punished for those evils. Because that's absent, it's really hard for anyone to discuss the Cold War in any way other than good guy versus bad guy, rather than nation experiencing God's blessing and judgment versus nation experiencing God's blessing and judgment.
So it's easier for me to understand, however, what has also occurred in the United States that has been in decline in various ways, compared to the Soviet Union, which collapsed politically, but suffered similar declines of, I mean, abortion rates skyrocketed, and, you know, the life expectancy plummeted and all sorts of things, that we have experienced things very similar to those just at a different pace in a different way. But that God is working out his ways among men with us as well, rather than our thinking that the Cold War or a permanent state of emergency is something that, you know, is just sort of a, you know, maybe a political evil, but a theologically neutral fact, or that a permanent state of emergency is somehow natural for nations, because we ourselves and increasingly our parents and grandparents have never known anything else. So what I'm hoping to provide as well next week is just a perspective on the Cold War that doesn't involve seeing it as a unique finite period between 1945 and 1991, when we were the good guys and the Soviets were the bad guys, and we fought it out across the, you know, across the world. And finally, the miracle on ice occurred, and the Americans won.
All right. So, well, I think I'm going to save that question for next time. If you're listening to A Brief History of Power, you know where to find us, or you wouldn't be here.
[Speaker 2] (1:00:03 - 1:00:33)
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