A Geek History of Time - Episode 336 - The Antifa Is Coming From Inside the House Damian Reads an Army Pamphlet from March 1945 Part V

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Okay, so there's there, there are two possibilities going on here. One, you're bringing up a term that I have never heard before. The other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before, but it involves a language that uses pronunciation that's different from Latinate, and so you have no idea. how to say it properly. It's an intensely 80s post-apocalyptic schlock film. Oh, and schlong film.

You know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers. Oh, okay, so the resident Catholic thinking about that, we're going for low earth orbit. There is no rational here. Blame it on me after. And you know I will. They mean it is 2 o'clock at the fucking morning. Where I am.

I don't think you can get very much more homosexual panic than that. which I don't know if that's better. I mean, you guys are Catholics. You tell me. I'm just kind of excited that, like, you and producer George will have something to talk about that basically just means that I can show up and get fed. This is a geek history of

Where we connect Nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. world history teacher here in northern California and today was the first day that we were able to make use of our above ground pool this year after and I didn't even wind up getting in it but my son and one of his friends from school spent a bunch of time in it splashing around had a great time and yeah it was it was an awful lot of work We had multiple issues with parts that had busted in one way or another over the course of, you know, most of a year lying unused.

But, yeah, we finally managed to get everything together. And yeah, it all wound up being worth it in the end. So that's that's my development today. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a U.S. history teacher up here in Northern California at the high school level. Um, and I, two quick updates. Uh, number one, I don't think that you've seen all of, um, and or yet.

Am I correct? I have not. No. Okay. So I will not, uh, include any spoilers or images, but you remember the character Cyril, right? Yes, I do. Okay. Yes.

Um, I, using Cyril as an example, I turned my son into an ACAB in 45 seconds. So I was very proud of that. Um, yeah, I made some comment about how he's an abusive prick and blah, blah, blah. And I said, and, and, you know, it's the police, I think they, they, the amount of spousal assault that the police commit is somewhere like 40% higher than the general population. Yeah. And will. If I'm remembering the stats right. Yeah. And then Williams like, well, fuck them then. And I was like, all right. So, so that's one. Uh, two. I have been deleting photos because this computer has needed space for podcasts. So I've had digital photos from 2003. I think that's like four or five computers ago. And so I went back to 2003 and just the first photos I've got and started deleting photos.

And you'll have like four of the same basic thing. So pick the best. You know, that kind of thing. I went from having 20 gigs available to having, I want you to guess how many gigs I have available now. And I've not finished deleting, by the way. I'm in January of 2024. Oh, man, going all the way back to, oh, you said, 03? 03, yes.

Gee, many. From 20 gigs. Available. Available. To how many now? 200 you're very close i have 184 gigs available right now fucking hey yeah i i i i thought okay like what's whatever the number i'm going to guess is it's going to be higher than that so i was like okay i'm swinging for the fences yeah

yeah yeah you got to the warning track yeah um it's god damn insane like and the thing is like okay so digital photos are a time capsule on some level when you're doing it this way because I have to go through several of them and be like okay well which one is everybody not blinking in you know that kind of thing yeah and you know the images are you know thumbnails but you know zoom it in a little bit so I can see those and then like I'll click through several of you know the proper and stuff like that and so I see the beginning of my marriage I see the honeymoon I see the marriage itself I see the honeymoon I see and you know there's times where you've uploaded things twice not realizing it you know I see the honeymoon I see us moving into our

first house I see when relationships with some people were good I see when like just all this kind of stuff I see my kids being born I see the exhausted look that comes across our faces after the first child then it never leaves I see just all kinds of stuff like there's a lot going on there. And then eventually I come to the, you know, oh, I know what's coming next kind of phase. And but then interestingly, I also see a whole bunch of world events unfolding as well. And it was interesting getting to COVID. And I mean, you remember all the death threats I got and stuff like that. Like it was, and a lot of these things I have to save. And I save a lot of screenshots of texts because some of them may be actionable until the kids are 18 you know that kind of stuff

yeah yeah so i have to kind of go through all of that and and still like i managed to delete quite a bit but it's also cool because like i get to see you know my relationship with my current partner i get to see you know just all all kinds of stuff but i also see the death of my latin program i also see you know the aborted attempt at a drama program i see like the tremendous amount of masking that we had to do for several years yeah um just all kinds of so it was it was really quite fascinating i really liked it so like how are you doing man oh i'm fine i'm fine um that's that's a lot to oh it put me into some weird head spaces i'm not going to lie yeah yeah and i don't drink so um probably for the best yeah but but you know i i i am an historian i

am able to both process that I'm having an emotional reaction and recognize the value in seeing a thing. And I've been through enough therapy that I know how to process these things. So I'm doing all right. Found some cool photos of us. Oh, cool. Yeah. And things like that.

Found some photos of Dr. Stem when he came over and did cool show with us. So, you know, found photos of Julia interviewing Jess Safaris, you know, and all kinds of good stuff. those it's been fun it's been fun so very cool all right so all the fun aside time to get to why we're here um when last we spoke i was reading from a 1945 march of 1945 pamphlet that the department of defense well department of war at the time at the time put out to uh people going into basic training uh called fascism um and uh i'd gotten to the section where they talked about war and peace And so I'm going to start there again just to kind of reset it because of people, you know, maybe they're listening to this on a Thursday right before the next one drops. And the last one they listened to was last Friday.

Yeah. It's been a while. Yeah. So let us take three fundamental concepts, war and peace, race and the purpose of the state and see how the two systems stack up. since the Soviet Union is associated in most minds with communism and is the only working example, references frequently made to Soviet practice in comparison with the characteristic fascist practice. So, you know, let's look at two polar opposites here because back in 1945, the army was

letting people know that communism was a bulwark against fascism because the army is a bunch of liberal pussy cucks. so war and peace we have seen how by its economic and political structure fascism means war fascism whether in Germany or Japan or Italy has never been secretive about its glorification of war and its aim of world conquest with the conquest of Ethiopia Austria, Czechoslovakia, Manchuria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, fascism came close to achieving its goal. this was one time when fascism meant to make good its promise so you'll remember from the last episode that fascists usually lie about their aims until they get the power right yes so i found this an interesting highlight now i'm going to focus on the first few but you'll get the ideas we go along with the others so annotating wise uh we'll start with the ethiopia because that's the one

that they listed first Ethiopia was invaded by Italy in 1935 and remember france and the UK both did very little at all to stop it because they thought that they could still level Italy against Germany over the Austrian issues in the mid-1930s, the Anschlauss. Right. Pierre Laval,

you remember him from last time. Yes. The Frenchman. He helped broker the Franco-Italian agreement that told Italy that they had a free hand to expand in Africa so long as they helped out in Europe. Because England and France,

are empires that carved the shit out of Africa by this point. Oh yeah so now go ahead. Oh just you know for anybody not on on board or you know who is less

familiar than the two of us you know as history teachers by this time the French and the English and Germany and still the Belgians Portugal and Spain.

Portugal and Spain, various portions of Africa had been carved up. You know, the phrase like a Thanksgiving turkey, I don't feel quite goes far enough. Yeah. There were literally only two places that were as yet untouched by European colonialism.

Yeah. It would be, yeah. The whole continent had been, or nearly the whole continent, had been claimed by one European power or another. Yeah. And had been squabbled over and fought over. So, yeah, to the Europeans making these decisions, this was allowing Italy to conduct business as usual. Yes.

To join the club. Yeah, yeah, essentially. And Italy comes Like hey, what do you guys have left? Well, well, there's not much around here. Have you tried some Ethiopia? Yeah. That's like kind of, you know.

Yeah. The one of, as you said, only two, you know, still independent, non-colonized nations. Yeah. So yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. So by December of 35, it was clear that France and the UK were trying to sell out Ethiopia for European instability. It didn't work. Despite all the war atrocities that Italy committed, including

massive slaughter of civilians, gas attacks, etc., Ethiopia did not give up, and it hung in there against Italy until the Allied forces arrived in May of 1941 and came to help them. The Italians would carry on a failing guerrilla war afterwards until the official armistice between the Italians and the Allies in September of 43, and about a month after, After this pamphlet, Mussolini would have a final hangout with all of his friends. Yeah. Yeah. So now, Austria, the Austrian Nazis failed to win any seats in their elections, which they might have had a chance at doing if Austrian Nazis weren't such assholes.

Which, okay. Yeah. I need to step in here. like because because wait yeah um the the uh uh brandon lee mulligan uh has has a great quote that that i that i have carried with me in my heart for months now since i first heard it and it is that um personality predates ideology yes um you're you're not an asshole because you're a fascist you're a fascist because you're an asshole. Yes.

You were an asshole first. And so when you say if they'd have been more successful, if they weren't such assholes, like, what kind of egregiousness are we talking about? Well, to answer your question, the Austrian Nazis tried a terrorism campaign first, and it just soured everyone on them as a group instead of just like, Hey, we're a legitimate political party. Right. That, yeah, sometimes we fight in the streets.

But, like, they terrorized people instead. And that was too far for Austrians, which is funny because plenty of Austrians were totally down for the Anschlauss, like, greater Germany. Yeah. An American journalist named John Gunther said that in 1932, 80% of Austria was all for Anshlaus. But then Germany went and fucked with them. And by the end of 33, they were down to 60% against annexation.

Like, you swung them. 140% Yeah, how big of a prick do you have to be? Right? And then the Chancellor of Austria was then assassinated in July of 34 in a coup attempt,

but it was a failed coup and then four years of terrorism and then murder of nearly a thousand Austrians followed by Austrian Nazis. Now, during this time, Austria actually interned Nazis and social Democrats. I would just like to say that again because I think it bears repeating.

The Austrian government interned Nazis and social Democrats because what's life without a good horseshoe? So the fascists of Austria wanted to keep Austria Austrian at this point and Germany began boycotting them while Hitler continued to claim that he had no desire to interfere in Austria's internal affairs because the truth is just one arrow in a quiver. at this time and at this point Austria preferred Germany to Italy sure but like that's you know that that's not a ringing endorsement and Austria became a German state that would always follow Germany's lead and after this the Nazis needed more iron ore and other materials so they eventually just annexed Austria after Hitler declared their public vote fraudulent and that his troops would come to save the Austrian democracy from such corruption. He came into Austria in March of 1938 to the applause of hundreds of thousands. Quote, not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators, end quote. That's according to Hitler.

Okay, so we're not here to interfere in Austrian democracy. Right, right, right. But we're going to come in and save Austrian democracy from corruption. by home I'm like that well that's a very good question now did you know that Austria had been one of the most liberal and welcoming states to European Jews after World War I

yeah yeah I remember hearing something about that yeah this would not bode well for them at all immediately after the Anschlauss was announced they were driven through the streets of Vienna all synagogues in both Salzburg and Vienna were destroyed during Kristlnacht and as soon as May of 38 the Nuremberg laws were enforced and reinforced the Nazis immediately deported 6,000 Jews to dachau as well as 2,000 Romani men 1,000 Romani women were sent to Ravensbrook or Ravensbrook. Because of course they were on to Czechoslovakia since we're right next door right after the Anshlaus like literally two weeks after. after meeting with the Sudeten German party leader Conrad Heinlein or Henline, Hitler then turned his eye to Czechoslovakia.

Shortest version, he wanted to do as he'd done in Austria, protect Germans living in the Sudetenland. That's what he claimed. England and France, weary from the whirlwind that had been Austria and the fact that they had been completely snookered and plowed under, they were not able to leverage Italy against Germany. They were not. So they gave Italy carte blanche in Ethiopia.

Italy wasn't able to do things. This is almost like, oh, so what happens when you deal with fucking fascists and try to leverage them against each other? So they're weary from that whirlwind in Austria. They went into Munich and completely sold out Czechoslovakia in the most, okay, but now you're finished, right? Kind of way. Yeah.

I mean, could you imagine, like, somebody attacks a country and then. that country's like president is not led into the discussions with the attacker and a thoroughly neutral and completely unbiased party who just wants

the war to end like yeah yeah yeah you know I love my job I really do I complain about it because everybody does right you know

but but I do have to say being the one who studied history and still being doomed yes to repeat it gets very old yeah and it has remained old for a very very long time I remember in 2014 a conversation with friend of the show Sean where the conference conversation came up that, you know, it's funny, I don't remember Crimea being spelled S-U-D-E-T-E-N-L-A-N-D, but apparently it is. Yeah. So, yeah. In May of 38, Hitler started planning an invasion, and in September, he cooked up the excuses. He said, Hitler said, that the Czech government was a fraudulent state that was denying self-determination

of German, Slovak, Ukrainians, Pols, and Hungarians. and he wouldn't stand for such international abuse. After all, being accused of being a traitor for just wanting equality, this was September. They didn't involve any Czech officials, although there were some in the city, and no Soviets, despite their alliance with Czechoslovakia and France. The signatories of the Munich Agreement were Hitler, Chamberlain, Dalla D'Adiere, and Mussolini. It was, of course. peace for our time at the expense of Czech self-determination.

Hitler promised that he wouldn't exercise any further territorial claims on Czechoslovakia after that. By the way, that's begging the question. Yeah. I'm not going to exercise any more of my claims. I'm sorry? Wait, what other I'm on? Let's back it up. What claims do you think you had to begin with?

Never mind. I'm not going to practice. It's, you know, I'm not going to exercise my right to grab your junk. a fifth time. Hold up. Can we hold on. I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember there being a memo about, yeah.

Yeah. Britain and France then told Czechoslovakia that if they don't accept annexation by Nazi Germany, they're going to fight the Nazis alone. This meant that Hitler had bluffed his way into occupying yet another important material center. Oh, and he now had more Jews, Slavs, Romani, et cetera, to exterminate quietly at first. Yeah. You know, and if I'm remembering correctly, Czechoslovakia had been created as kind of a Frankenstate in the first place. Yeah. Checks and Slovaks. And at the end of, yeah, well, yes. And again, that southern part of what wasn't Poland. Yeah. And now Poland existed. But yeah, no. Yeah. The groups

he named had legitimate reason to be like we want our own place yeah but no one listened to whether or not that was a legitimate claim yeah well and and nobody nobody pushed back on him right you know when when he said well you know all these groups yada yada it's like okay why are you the one who should be like there's there's no there's no compelling reason like okay yeah yeah ethnic Germans in the Sudateland will table that for the moment. The rest of the fucking country is not ethnically

German. It's Czech or Slovak or you know Serbian or whatever. It wasn't Serbian, but it would have been there's Romani, there's Ukrainians and Poles and Hungarians all there because this is part of the shattering of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, right?

Yeah. Yeah, this is This is that part of that part of Europe that had been fought over by the Ottomans and the Austrians and the Poles and the everybody and everybody had settled there and everybody. Yeah. And like this is this is why it's werewolf country to to back up several episodes. But like who are you, Adolf, to be saying, well, you know, I need to step in here because of, you know, the Slovak's and the Czechs and the, and the. all of these people, okay, if you have a nationalist claim of any kind, if we grant you the idea that a nationalist claim is valid in the first place, then that's the ethnic Germans. You don't get legitimacy out of trying to claim these other groups of people.

If you're rooted in nationalism, which high fascist, that's a central part of your of your ideology if that's what you're claiming then the rest of this is bullshit like nobody I would point out back on that well I would point out that uh uh France and England both acted as the guarantor of other uh small countries and other ethnic groups he's basically throwing that in their face so all right you know and at the same time nobody's saying dude you're lying and also you're in violation of these these yeah these treaties and there's so much that goes into this so like at this point there was plenty of evidence that he was full of shit yeah but there was also more evidence that no british mother wanted to send her son

to the continent to die for a second time in 20 years and no frenchman wanted to send his son to go and die in another country after 10 million people have been killed plus 100 million due to the flu. Like there's a lot of war weariness and I dare say that there's some level of like feeling guilty about the Treaty of Versailles a little. Like

okay, you know, you swore at the kids so you're going to let him come in tardy for the next week. Yeah, I'm got that kind of vibe. Yeah. So yeah. Meanwhile, in Manchuria, from 1931 to 1932, Japanese soldiers invaded Manchuria, proving the League of Nations to be a toothless organization because this was a blatant invasion of aggression against China. The Japanese set up a puppet government known as the Manchukuo, or no, the Manchukuo government. Yes, Manchukuo.

Yeah, that ruled on behalf of Japan from 32 to 45. They invited the last emperor of China, Puyi, to act as the head of state for Manchuria. So it looks like they're restoring legitimacy. And they set up Japan as the savior of China from their revolution, at least nominally so. Now, he did so, but he was absolutely just a figurehead. This became the forward base for the Japanese army to prosecute the second Sino-Japanese War, starting in 37, leading to some of the absolutely most horrific atrocities of the war and led to casualties of upwards of 10.6 million Chinese

and about 3.6 million Japanese. Yeah. It's awful in all the ways. Yeah, which has left scars in East Asia that color the relationships of all of those. countries to one another to this day yeah um yeah i mean it's yeah horrendous poland uh we know very clearly was invaded by nazi germany and soviet union starting in september of thirty nine this kicks off the phony war for about a month and then the real

war uh all the way in europe um nearly a million polish soldiers were killed in the battle uh the bombings the destruction of towns and that added to the five and add to that 5 million Polish civilians and Jews who died during this war. Norway in April of 40 was invaded by the Nazis. There were very few casualties because Norway gave up quickly and was occupied very effectively. Two-thirds of the Jews living in Norway actually escaped ahead of the Nazi occupation, but close to 1,000 were killed. These sound like tiny numbers compared to the amount of people who were slaughtered during World War II,

who were Jewish but still a thousand killed is awful. Norway actually had a fair amount of folks who actually cited with the Nazis, similar to Quisling and there was a resistance as well that was about 40,000 strong in Norway

and largely they tied up Nazi soldiers more than anything else like got them like hunting them down in Norway. But Norway quickly quit because and a lot of the lowland countries ended up doing that

because the Nazis struck hard, struck fast, and showed like, you want more? And they're like, no, no, we're good. And there is a kind of a forgotten lesson here that by 1942, most of Europe was under the Nazi flag. Most of the continent was.

And most of the places governments were willing to be vassalages under the Nazi government and turn in whatever ethnic minorities were being asked for. There is a large, we're okay with this new world order because this is beyond our imagination

going on in 42. Yeah. That's not to say there's not resistance movements the whole way through. There certainly are, and it's certainly not to minimize the awfulness of what the Nazis had planned to do

and we're doing, but most of Europe was minimalizing it. Yeah. Yeah, and the point that occurs to me when you're talking about that is once the phony war turned into the real war, what became very clear to the British and the free French after they, you know, fled and were in exile and everybody else all of the allies figured out very quickly that the Germans by necessity had figured out how to fight the next war right while everybody else was doing what historically everybody does which is they were still fighting the last war yeah and the Germans set the terms for the next war and then won quickly yeah yeah

And, and there is a very profound level of psychological impact. Yeah. Yeah. Involved in that. Like the, the rapidity with which the Germans overtook Belgium, you know, ran, literally ran around the Maginot Line and, you know, just rolled over France. you know there is an aspect of shock and powerlessness yeah it's amazing how quickly you can shock people into inaction and capitulation when you're awful yeah um we see this happen time and time again we human beings are very good at normalizing whatever conditions they're under yeah that gets

used against them. Yeah. So Denmark was the next one listed in the pamphlet, and it was part of the same invasion as Norway. The British were actually reluctant to reinforce or move toward the Scandinavian countries because they didn't want to be responsible for another World War I. So it's like Bad Samaritan 101. So instead, they looked into post-invasion naval blockades rather than a land war option.

The Nazis wanted North Sea access. So Norway and Denmark were pretty important targets for them. The Nazis invaded Denmark as a protective measure against Allied invasion of Denmark. At 4 a.m., the Nazi ambassador to Denmark told the Danish foreign minister this as German troops and, well, told them that like we are invading as a protective measure. And he told them at 4 a.m. as the German troops and planes were advancing on Denmark. The Nazis captured the garrison at the citadel of Hansenstatt, Danzig, 20 minutes later. So by 6 a.m., because of the threat of the Luftwaffe bombing Copenhagen, the Danish king capitulated with the condition that he be allowed to retain political independence domestically. The Nazis agreed, which is both shocking and what saved most of the 8,000 Danish Jews from the Holocaust.

cost. King Christian held off the Nazis and their demands handedly until the summer of 43, and even then he made sure they warned as many of Denmark's Jewish population as possible so that they could flee the country before being rounded up and deported. The result was that 477 Danish Jews were deported by the Nazis and 70 were killed. This is the lowest percentage of Jews killed by the Nazis in any occupied territory. it's it's hard to argue with capitulation when you manage to save all but 70 yeah uh or if you want to go if you if you managed to say all all all but 477 like because those were the ones who were rounded up and deported 3,000 danes in occupied Denmark and 2,000 Danish volunteers for the Nazis and a thousand

merchant sailors for the allies died during the Nazi occupation among that 3,000 Danes who were killed fighting against the Danish Nazis, about 850 of them were resistance fighters. Most of the Danish resistance seemed focused on sabotage and smuggling goods in and out and people in and out. After the Nazis started insisting on deporting Jews for the Holocaust, the Danish resistance started reacting more violently as the Nazis took over the whole government in 43, and the Gestapo raided and deported 2,000 Danish police officers to Germany. so you actually had a time where some cops were not bastards with nobody worrying about the protective government

all the gloves were off now right and from 43 onward they were a more effective sand in the gears because now they're not worrying about like well we have to keep things nice for the for the king who's keeping us safe it's okay let's go let's fucking do this let's pour all the sand let's pour all the sugar in the gas tank yeah they saved allied pilots They killed nearly 400 Danish and Danish Nazis and informers, and they fucked up their rail lines in advance of D-Day and so on.

So the Danish story of resistance is an interesting sign wave. Yeah. That basically after 43, they were like, okay, you overthrew our government? Fine. Fuck you then. Fuck you. Yeah. Now Greece is the next one mentioned.

And Greece, both Britain and France publicly guaranteed their freedom, along with Romania. in April of 39, similar to how they guaranteed it for Poland. British officials hoped to continue keeping Mussolini neutral, but they let him go after Albania instead. This seemed to keep Italy out of Greece until the spring of 40, but as it was obvious that Italy wanted more than just Ethiopia and Albania, the British fleet stationed at and around Greece became more of a challenge for Mussolini. But Mussolini chose to attack the Greek Navy and forced the British to put up or shut up,

shut up and it was largely a naval battle at first and skirmishes arose around the Bulgarian and Albanian borders. But by October 28th, the Italian army was engaging the Greek army on Greek territory. The Italians had also invaded Egypt from Ethiopia, which

slowed the British response in Greece because that's a British colony. The Italian offensive failed by November of 40 and they stayed bogged down until January of 41 when the Greek army actually pushed the Italians back into Albania. It sucked being Albanian at this time.

Now, because this threatened the eastern front of Germany's Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis pushed aside Italian troops and invaded Greece themselves in March of 41. So this is one of those, oh, shit, we succeeded to. You rolled a crit. Yeah. And, oh, the damage you did just unleashed to the beast. Yeah. That was March of 41. on April 20th of 41 the Nazis accepted Greek surrender yeah like it was quick quick and then they let the Italians save some face by including them as part of the signatories

during this fight about 83,000 Greek casualties and 102,000 access casualties the Jewish population in Greece prior to the invasion stood around 77,000 but by the end of the war only 11,000 survived most Jews from Greece were deported to to Auschwitz and Treblinka. Notably, the Italians did not take part in the deportations, by the way. The Germans did it all. Greek resistance kind of devoured itself, so there wasn't much in the way of an organized and effective resistance.

Yeah. And still, with that many groups, they did manage to kill roughly 21,000 fascists, which is pretty dope, but it cost about 20,000 lives of Greek partisans. So it was almost an even trade. Yeah. The occupation saw an additional 20, 250,000 Greeks get killed by the Nazis and the Italians.

And this gave the Nazis a naval presence in the Mediterranean and would harry the British naval supremacy in two places now. Yeah. Then the pamphlet goes on to mention the Netherlands. The Netherlands were part of a Battle of France, the Battle of France, along with Belgium, because the low countries were on the way to France. You got to get through those to get to France. It lasted a total of a week.

and the Nazis just absolutely tabled the Netherlands. They destroyed Rotterdam from the air, captured the airfields in Rotterdam and Hague, with massive paratrooper invasions and threatened to bomb more cities. The speed and the brutality and the sheer effectiveness of all of this led to the Dutch quickly capitulating because they knew that they were outclassed in all the ways that mattered. And because of the interlocked approach to defense that the Dutch and the Belgians had,

they weren't able to shift their plans to address the realities of German advances very effective either so the Belgians and the Dutch kind of relied on each other to keep this defensive line going and now the Dutch are out because the German people

didn't like the idea of invading their Dutch neighbors though as early as March of 39 Nazi propaganda ministry began ceding the media with the worry of a French invasion in order to create a buffer state for France. So we're not attacking the Dutch. We're protecting the Dutch.

And since the Germans hate the French, largely due to tremendous enmity going all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War, but also World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. More recently. Yeah. Yeah. They were more able to cede the German invasion

of the Netherlands as a preemptive protective measure. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands evacuated to England and set up a government in exile there, the Netherlands was actually one of the longest occupied countries in the war, and more than 210,000 Dutch people were killed. Almost half of that number, about 104,000 were Dutch Jews who were exterminated by the Holocaust, and another 70,000 Jews were murdered more slowly by the denial of food or medicine. So that is 174,000 Dutch Jews

murdered by the Nazis. Now, the initial deportations of Dutch Jews started in February of 41. Okay. So again, they are moving fast. It's almost like the war is what's necessary to do what they really wanted to do, which was kill all the Jews that they could. Yeah. Over 300,000 Dutch in Amsterdam alone struck, went on strike to protest it. Okay. And what they were protesting was actually at that time a relatively small group of Dutch Jews being. deported in February 41. So all over the country, there's these strikes that rise up, and they are harshly put down by the Nazis after three days.

But in many ways, these demonstrations being so massive throughout the entirety of the country, stymied the German efforts to get the Dutch to come to the Nazi side of things. So now they don't have Dutch support. It's we are occupying you. And that is later going to lead to one of my favorite strikes, which is the milk strike of 43 where the farmers in the Netherlands refused to supply the Nazis with milk and they legitimized an armed resistance movement. Nice.

The Dutch resistance movement was very active, but it was also very fractious. You had a lot of, I mean, this is, this is not where Life of Brian got Judean people's front, people's front of Judea, but it's very similar. It's along those lines. Yeah. And it's hard to calculate how successful they were during the whole of their occupation because of this very thing. But it was a very active resistance, if not completely fractious.

Now, the next country that was on the list I'm going to go into a little bit more detail on is Belgium. They were invaded along with the Netherlands, like I said, that interlocking defensive strategy. They took about two and a half weeks to completely subdue. Far more people died in Belgium. There are almost 250,000 casualties plus another 200,000 who were captured. Most of the dead were actually French, though. And remember, Belgium is a relatively new country.

It's actually older than Germany. But when we talked about the Smurfs, we talked about how Belgium is a nation without an... It's a nationality without a nation, right? Right. So France, the French lost nearly two million men as prisoners of war in the Belgian. campaign um which this kind of makes sense like yeah you know if you look again at world war

one uh german air superiority was way too much to overcome for belgium even with the raf helping and the french infantry helping king leopold asked for an armistice at the end of may of 1940 uh the british and the french were super mad at this swearing that the belgian capitulation was a betrayal of their alliance which is pretty much as french and british as it gets yeah During the Nazi occupation of Belgium, over 40,000 Belgians were killed. So there's a huge spat of violence at first, right? The invasion cost 250,000 casualties. Okay.

During the occupation, 40,000 more would get killed. And remember, casualty is death and injury. Right. 20,000 of the Belgians who were killed, though, were Jews who'd been deported and murdered during the Holocaust. King Leopold was declared incompetent to reign by the rest of the Belgian government oh yeah and they the government went into exile in France and then to England Leopold continued to seek a semi-autonomous statehood within the German European world see this is that acceptance of the New World Order and he went to

Berksdegaden to ask Hitler personally he was denied all requests so yeah um Belgian workers, a high number of whom were professionally competent, were often deported to Germany to work their factories. Belgium was then put on rationing, and while 180,000 Belgians volunteered to work in Germany, compulsory deportation to Germany started in

1942. They were made to work in the towns that the Allies bombed the most. Of course. Yeah. I mean, Like, this is evil 101. This is if a bad screenwriter wrote it. Yeah. They were made to work, like I said, in the towns where the allies were bombing the most.

And when the forced deportation started, another 200,000 Belgian workers went into hiding. And that's when their resistance movement really got started in any meaningful way. Okay. So that's 1942. Most of the Jews who lived in Belgium were in the city centers, as often happens. in Europe, and a large number of them were recent refugees from the Eastern European countries and Germany. So roughly about 75,000 Jews lived in Belgium, and the Nazi occupiers started passing

anti-Jewish laws as early as October of 40, but the Belgian civil government just simply refused to comply with the legislation. So, oh, cool, nice law. I'm going to put it over there. Yeah. So the Nazis grew more heavy-hand. but not as centrally organized which was interesting to me it was more like they encouraged and then started looking the other way when their soldiers would burn down a synagogue and shit like that oh so you don't have the i was just following orders yeah you know um now starting in may of 42 belgian jews saw a huge increase in nazi policy against them in belgium twenty five thousand jews and romani were deported in the next two years and nearly all of them were murdered in the camps during this time a lot of the resistance turned to hiding Jews and smuggling them out, especially the Catholic priests and

the nuns. In fact, there was even an attack on a train that was deporting Jews to Auschwitz by the Belgian resistance. They stopped, they delayed a train and rescued with the help from the train driver who drove it as slowly as he could so that people could jump off without risking death. They rescued 233 people from that train. Unfortunately, the Nazis were persistent as fuck and re-abducted almost half of them and marked most of the rest who were on the train for immediate murder. So, now

let's talk about France. France only lasted six weeks from May 10th to June 25 of 1940. A lot of this might be because they lost 1.9 million soldiers into the defense of Belgium, so essentially we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. Oh, fuck, we have to fight them

over here now. Yeah. This was personal for Hitler and he made sure that the French signed their surrender in the same exact box car that the German armistice has been signed in World War 1. Yep. In fact he made sure that he sat in the same spot as Marshall Falk and then

he left midway through the meeting to show how little respect he had for the French. This was the biggest example of Blitz Creek. It led to Dunkirk. It showed how underprepared a hope and cringe was against German and

Amphetamine's use and daring do. Yeah. Once the Netherlands and Belgium fell, it was about a month before France did, and it stunned the world, actually. Everybody was shocked that one of the great powers of World War I fell in six weeks. Yeah. Again, underprepared hope and cringe versus amphetamine and let's go. Yeah. Once the Netherlands and Belgium fell, oh, yeah, I already said that.

This split France into occupied France and Vichy France. The Free French was the government in exile. It was an illegal government. The legal government actually capitulated. Almost 50 concentration camps were set up in France for the Holocaust. That's something that you don't hear much about from France. Over 13,000 Jews living in Paris alone were rounded up in July of 1942. That's one month by pro-Nazi French.

and sent to Auschwitz, where they were all murdered. So these are French people turning in French people to the occupiers. Yep. All told, about 77,000 French Jews were deported to death camps during the occupation and the Vichy regimes of France. Vichy, France gets to exist because they're down to do that. Many of the Jews living in France were refugees from Germany from the last few years. So you get the same fucking, like, it followed me. About a quarter of all the French Jews died during the occupation.

The French resistance was famous for its resistance, as we know, taking almost a mythic status in many minds. To me, this is a reframing of a once great nation kind of idea. And it's totally valid. I'm not going to poo French resistance in any way. But it does feel kind of like they beat us so completely that we're going to reimagine. ourselves yeah i can i can see that yeah so um i don't i don't know where you're going to go from here i'm going to talk a lot about the resistors okay um so i'm going to i'm going to interject

here real fast so um by 42 uh-huh um Stalin because we haven't we haven't gotten to this to you know eastern yeah to the eastern front at all yet but when you talk about how rapidly France you know folded yeah um and and you specifically mentioned dunkirk and and what what that leads me to be thinking about in my head right now is when we the united states entered the war there was a lot of argument back and forth between our

strategists, our generals and all of our guys, and the Brits. And to a lesser extent, the Soviets were part of, they were part of the equation, but they weren't really part of the conversation, if that makes sense. Yeah. And Stalin was pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing for, you know, the us and the and the Brits to, you know, hurry up and do something in Europe. Yes. And in early 42, Roosevelt and our generals in the Pentagon were like, okay, look, we can invade the continent.

We can do it now. and they could not get the British to agree to it right because to the British it was that's that's that's that's a suicide plan like there's no way that's going to work no and it's and it's because of their one one school of thought historically is that because of their massive trauma of of having been on on the receiving end at that point of of Blitzkrieg, they were shell-shocked, like, institutionally, into not being capable of imagining an invasion of fortress Europe at that point. And so that's the reason that we have the North Africa invasion as the third front.

The soft underbelly, as they believe when Churchill said. Yeah. And, you know, I'm reading right now a book about the Pacific campaign. And what's interesting is the conversation that was happening between Roosevelt and Churchill wound up influencing the decisions that had to be made by Nimitz and his backing and forthing with MacArthur in the Pacific because Roosevelt, didn't understand the Pacific, didn't care about the Pacific, he was focused on Europe. He'd agreed in the Atlantic, the Atlantic, God, what was it called? Conference. Yeah, yeah, in the Atlantic Conference that we're going to persecute a European war first. Yeah. All efforts toward Europe first, we will just do a holding action in the Pacific.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, we've lost a significant chunk of our Navy. So, got to rebuild. and we've been lend leasing, you know, Atlantic word for a while. So, yeah. Yeah. So, but, you know, the, and I wish I could remember the title of the book.

But there's a fascinating study of the journals, the diaries that were kept by Eisenhower and a bunch of the other guys that were involved in all of this planning, which was directly contrary to their orders. Like they had specifically been told, you know, don't. be writing any of this stuff down don't don't keep a diary don't do any of this and still a bunch of them did because they they they realized that what they were what they were involved in was going to be important yep and so yeah but yeah the the the um the shock of having been so thoroughly Molly Whopped

left a lasting mark on the institutional psychology of the British military. Oh, sure. Yeah. So. Yeah, there was, um, the other thing was, you know, the ongoing agreement between America

and the USSR was you supply the bodies will supply the material. And after the USSR had done such a really good job of basically tearing down their, industry and moving it further east so that the the germans couldn't get it america was like okay you have a lot of bodies to throw at this so yes there like an instance where like everybody born in a certain year in in the USSR like 90% of them died yeah everybody born in 27 or something like that yeah everybody yeah it was yeah 20 27 yeah it would have been it would have been

20 it would have been a little earlier in 27 I think well no it could have been like um 20 25 because 27 gets you to 1940 you're 13 years old by 19 42 you're 15 years old by 94 yeah 17 years old all right and then the grinding happens because you're sending in as many as you can Yeah. So, but anyway, I don't remember the exact. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, no, you're right. There was, there was a, there was a massive demographic hit there. Yeah.

So, all right. So, uh, let's see. Um, the, the German, no, the French resistance, um, more than 40,000 of the resistors were killed in torture sessions and in prison sessions in the most brutal ways. I copied this list from another site Quote Beating shackling being suspended from the ceiling Being burned with a blow torch Allowing dogs to attack the prisoner

Being lashed with oxhide whips Being hit with a hammer Or having heads placed in a vice And the Beignoir Whereby the victim was forced into a tub Of freezing water And held nearly to the point of drowning

How's the first word spelled? B-A-I-G and then N-R. So Bainoir. Bay. Bay-N-A-N-A-N-A-N-R. Yeah. So basically like their version of waterboarding. Yeah, the dark bath.

Yeah. And here's the interesting thing is, is, you know, when we started waterboarding people, I'm going to use finger quotes for started. Like, we had instances of us waterboarding people well before that. It made its way into movies as a way of training Demi Moore to be. a seal um waterboarding is not new it's terrible and should not be done uh yeah much like every other torture but yeah but anyway so uh that was the list that i found uh they also would send a female friend or relative or a loved one of these captured uh to a nazi field brothel yeah uh most who were tortured talked and plenty of voice

torture by turning, but when the M-I-L-I-C-E was M-I-C-E was created to hunt-down resistors, 40,000 Frenchmen and women went into hiding and became the rural resistance, the famed Machi. So, Mili-S-E-Sae. Okay. So. I want to say something like M-I-S-E. Okay.

Or M-E-E-E-I-O-E-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-O-L-E. Yeah. So that was created to hunt-down resistors, specifically, 40,000 Frenchmen and women went into hiding and became the rural resistance, the maquis. Yeah. So I think I just said that. Meanwhile, the Nazis deported all able-bodied Frenchmen, age 20 to 22, to Germany for two years of slave labor service. And in 44, they expanded that number from 20 to 22 to 18 to 60.

Wait. Yeah. Hold on. Yeah. every able-bodied man yes age 20 to 22 right you have to give two years of slave labor service and then they expanded it from 18 to 60 yes holy the logistics of that are they've France has really good rail Germany has really good rail whoa yeah okay it's only worse yeah no I'm sure I'm and we're talking four hours of sleep a night

we're talking regular beatings we're talking food deprivation etc right the fighting between the maquis and the milisei only grew more brutal through 44 although there was a dip in milise morale after the battle of Stalingrad because they realized that the Nazis might lose and they might be seen for what they were yeah the resistance in France was vital in a It's assassinations and sabotage efforts in the first three months of 1944 in advance of D-Day, especially the phone lines. There's so much more here, but you get the idea. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

So the next thing in the list that the pamphlet gave us was Bulgaria. They weren't really invaded by the Nazis. They were neutral until March of 41, and then they aligned with the Nazis or allied with the Nazis until September of 44 when they then switched sides to the Allies. um yes opportunists well as survival yeah i mean look at where bulgaria is yeah this is true like again i we go back to um they thought they were free right and the guy says like yeah all of us all of us gave up you know yeah none of us said enough um but at the same time i'm not gonna i'm not going to they switched over to the right side I'm going to be okay with that

I'll give them a C minus you know yeah yeah um but the Bulgarians helped with the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia and this was largely because the Bulgarians didn't want to be taken over by the Soviet Union yeah because look what Poland had happened right yeah it's not like

the Soviet Union were like hyper good guys especially in Bulgaria Poland places like that it's God no bad it's just that the Nazis were worse again it's not like the Nazis weren't horrible but they're fighting against the British Empire like how did you turn the British Empire into the good guy to the good guy yeah like and and that's the thing is like there but for the grace go we like and the Belgians yeah you know and the French we've we've talked about the Congo like yeah so so what did it

cost? Well, 11,000 Jews that they helped to deport from Greece and Yugoslavia. So interestingly, though, Bulgarian Jews were not deported or murdered. Now, they were discriminated against in all sorts of ways because brand loyalty,

including service to the military and labor battalions, but Bulgaria also provided a way for Jews to leave without being slaughtered under the auspices of getting a foreign menace out of their country. Huh. Additionally, in Bulgaria there was never a really strong fascist presence more of like a monarchist right

wing with fascist sympathies um so i would say they were not conquered so much as co-opted and told what to do okay now as of the the writing of this pamphlet they'd also switch sides okay so now Romania um which interestingly gets spelled with a you and an O alternately throughout this pamphlet. Now, at first, Romania is neutral in World War II, but then the Iron Guard came to power in Romania after Romania refused to let the Soviets cross through their territory.

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August of 39, Romania refused to come to the aid of Poland, despite a treaty saying, we will come to the aid of Poland. I think they caught the scent in the wind. They were like, uh soviets and nazis what are we this is this is a losing this is a losing fight like yeah exactly and then after the low countries and france fell romania sought to grab territory from hungary

with italy mediating the nazis then pressured king carroll of romania to give back recently one territory to bulgaria which undermined the people's faith in king carroll leading to the rise of the iron guard which was hyper anti-communist, super-fascist, very religious, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist. So they really didn't like the king because he wasn't a prick enough. Okay, wait. Yeah. Okay. These are the green shirts, by the way, because everybody had a color.

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, come on. So they're anti-communist. Yes. Like, rabidly anti-communist because, yeah. They all are. And, and, you know, massive, massive authoritarian right wing. Yes.

And anti-capitalist. Yes. We want to control everything. We just don't want it going to the workers. Okay. Yeah. That almost sounds like a weird kind of upper-class syndicalism. Yeah, it's fascism.

It's the separatism of fascism. Yeah, okay, yeah, all right, that makes sense. You know, they are super fascist, like, and fascists want to control everything. Yeah, it is a controlled economy. It's just a controlled economy for the sake of the elite. All right. Yeah, well, for the sake of the state. Oh, fuck that.

So, and who the state serves. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we already, we already had that argument back three episodes ago. All right. They were green shirts, and they were enabled by a man named Jan Antonescu. and King Carroll at first thought he could control Antonescu seeing the far right as monarchists but he didn't realize that Antonescu cared more about

ultranationalism than he cared about monarchism and as a result Antonescu wanted to be dictator and was willing to have top Romanian officials assassinated in order to become dictator. He forced the abdication of King Carroll who went into exile and in November of 41 Romania joined the Axis powers. four days later they executed former Romanian officials without trial after the Iron Guard attempted a coup against Antonescu

and a pogrom at the same time he put down the coup and then adhered the Romanian government to Germany then he turned around and said okay and now we're going to help with Operation Barbarossa and he committed half a million troops to the attack grabbing Odessa amongst other cities by August of 44, King Michael of Romania, the son of Carol, led a coup that ousted Antonescu and then switched Romania to the side of the allies. Wow. Now, that didn't stop the Soviets from taking over Romania in September of 44, forcing

a virtual unconditional surrender. And this likely shortened the war by about half a year. If you don't have Michael cooing Antonescu and switching Romania, you see, still have all those soldiers at German disposal. Yeah, that makes sense. Now, half of Romania's Jews survived the war, but that tells us only half did.

And Romania aided in the deportation and murder of over 260,000 Jews in Romanian occupied territory. Not just Romania, but Romanian occupied territory. Occupied, yeah. Now, then they mentioned Yugoslavia, which at one point was a country.

So in our lifetime, we saw stopped being a country, actually. Yeah. Now, initially, Yugoslavia stayed neutral, hoping that Italy would stay busy with abortive attempts at doing anything worrisome. Right. Hitler initially didn't want to open a bulk in front either because he's like,

because it's a mess. And it's a third of the continent. So let me just take care of this wing over here. I got to the Atlantic. Then we'll come down and take care of the bulgy part. because also it was really close to the Soviet Union and he'd already bought himself time with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact so he could just focus north and west

and then France fell in 40 and Hitler had other plans right so then he turned east now the Yugoslav government entered into a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union the same month as France falling so May of 40 but then a month later the Soviet Union expelled Yugoslav ambassadors and so at this point it's only a matter of time And so then Yugoslavia gets invaded by the Nazis on April 6th, but not just the Nazis. A combined effort of the Nazis, the Italians, the Hungarians, and the Bulgarians.

These are all Axis allies. Right. Yugoslavia didn't stand a chance. The invasion didn't get past day 11. Wow. Yeah. On April 17th, the kingdom of Yugoslavia, which had hoped to be allied to the Axis for its own survival, had to surrender unconditionally. And this was largely due to the fact that the population thought that the Nazis would liberate them from their oppressive government that was friendly with the Soviets.

And that's another story that doesn't get told. There are a lot of European countries that sided with the Nazis because they were like, these guys will save us from the Soviet Union. Yeah. Now, because it's the Balkans, the different ethnic groups within the kingdom of Yugoslavia did not want to be grouped together. yeah uh you know i i'm it's you know uh i i was told that this was the the this section of the crucifixion you know yeah um the uh and many of them sought to use proximity to the nazis to settle their scores hey i sidled up to you can you help me slaughter these guys right yugoslavia got carved up along those ethnic lines but with different access powers

getting primacy over them yep so slovenian croatia which contained Bosnia and Herzegovina Herzegovina Jesus went with the Nazis Italy got southern and western Slovenia Montenegro as well as Kosovo and some coastal parts of Croatia Bulgaria got northern Macedonia and parts

of eastern Serbia Hungary got northern Serbia. The Yugoslav resistance such as it was was deeply fractured between leftists and royalists. Yeah and and that's great Leftist royalists, and there were partisans, like beyond that, there were, you know, pro-Nazi, pro-fascist, partisans, like in various and sundry areas, the Serbians had their own ethnic rivalries, religious rivalries. The Ustate, or no, the Ustaze in Croatia, were mostly Croatian, but also some Muslims.

They genocide it as hard as they could against the Serbs, the Jews, the Roma, and the anti-factuals. fascist Croatians, because that was more important. The royalists who were mostly Montenegrin and a majority Serbian did the same against Muslims, Croatians and Serbs who were leftists. The Italians ethnically cleansed areas of Slovenians and Croatians in the areas that they controlled. The Hungarians mostly genocided Serbs and Jews. Between 600,000 and 1.7 million people from Yugoslavia were killed during the occupation.

and this is a lot of fructitious, like, now is our chance. That includes upwards of 60,000 Jews who had fled from other places in Europe ahead of the expansion of the Nazi state. The resistance movement did manage to kill almost 105,000 if you also count those that were held as POWs by Yugoslavia, but they also killed about 15,000 Italians during the war. So, I mean, you have the Balkan Peninsula, right? is, I mean, it is the least peninsula-looking peninsula there is, but technically it is a

peninsula, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is an area that the Ottomans and the Austrians constantly fought over. Mm-hmm. This is an area that the Soviet Union was bumping up against. This is an area that the Italian Empire, like, there is so much deep, what was the Battle of Kosovo was like 850, like something like that, like that, like just like there's so much like enmity

that is just drenched into the roots of the ground that the Nazis taking over just kind of took the lid off of Yugoslav's control. And remember, World War I started here. Like, there's... Keep in mind, children. Yeah.

You know, the thing that keeps kind of being a theme is this is the part of Europe, where like it's just it's a mess you know because because there's there's so many layers of migration and colonization and conquest yeah conquest and reconquest and reconquest and it's it's right there at the juncture of europe and asia yeah and you know i mean you know the fucking Vikings were part of the problem back in the seven and eight hundredth. You know, and so there are so many competing languages and so many competing groups of people that, you know, trying to impose any kind of system of borders on that is, is.

I mean, it took a dictator. Yeah. it took tito yeah at the end at the end of at the end of world war two when when you know Yugoslavia became part of the iron curtain it yeah it took it took tito it took being a satellite and having tito like both yeah and then as soon as that ended like i used to come i used to talk about this with my students um when i taught world history and geography um i said it's like a pressure cooker if you pull the lid off of the pressure cooker when it's going it's going to be messy and and and that's that is the pressure that colonialism brings it might create

a sense of order um but it's an oppressed order and as soon as that is lifted people don't rise up together against the one who wants oppressed them they breathe and bump into each other and start all over again yeah yeah um you know just like any other place where where you've seen colonial powers pit ethnic groups against each other yeah looking at you africa again you know well let's let's look hang on looking at you all of europe in africa again yes yes i know where you were going good point yeah yeah yeah looking at you colonial powers doing this in africa to to to the people of africa yeah that's yeah thank you for for pointing me not to maum that were the problem It was English.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the, the, like, there are volumes of history that could be written just about World War II in the Balkans. Because it's, it's, it goes back to, okay, well, before I can tell you about that, I need to explain to you about. And before I can explain that, you know, it's like what we do on here. I'm like, well, okay, so now we've got to wind the wayback machine back to the 8th century. Right. We've got to go before the Ottomans.

So before the Ottoman Empire, when we go back to the Seljuk Turks, like, what? Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's, it's honestly, got to go back to the Romans. And then. Speaking of colonial powers. Right.

You know. Which by the. the way, the Romans had the damnedest time in that area. Shocking. I wonder why. You know, again, it took, it took Augustus. Yeah. And, you know, and the thing is, even as you and I are having this conversation, being the committed progressives, at least, that we are, like, there is, there is this kind of understanding of where the appeal

of an Augustus could come from yeah is is you know this is that this is why this is seductive is like yeah you know if if you if you open the pressure cooker too soon you're going to have a mess but you know well we saw the case the counter argument is well you know but if you leave it going long enough you get a really nice stew yeah you know at the expense of what like stew is made of meat yeah but also you know we saw this with the Holocaust. After a lot of camps were liberated, Allied soldiers

had to lock back up the prisoners and restrict their diets. Yeah. Because they would kill themselves. Gorging. Yeah. Getting the food that they desperately needed. Yeah. So. Yeah. If somebody, if somebody

is starved for long enough and you just let them eat, they're going to want to cause organ failure. Yeah, they're going to die. You know, and so I'm not, and this is a very clumsy metaphor to pull forward to this, but like when order has been imposed by a colonial power to such an extent that your identity

no longer matters and you have to keep that private as well, if you remove that colonial order fast your identity will immediately reassert itself and let you enable you empower you encourage you i don't know what verb to strike out against those who previously had wronged you i think i think the way that it occurs to me is when you have defined your identity, when a colonial power has put you in a position to define your identity as in opposition to other groups. And when you have had that identity, like you said,

you know, subsumed to, well, you know, we are all, you know, Yugoslavs. And you are, you are defined or that, that part, of you is you know pushed down and and you know you're not allowed to express it but it's still there yeah and it is defined in opposition to other groups who are also being oppressed and uh you talked earlier about different groups using proximity to the Nazis as a way to get power under colonial get back at people that there was an unresolved thing when the colonial power came in yeah yeah and and part of part of the colonial thing is well you know our relationship to the colonial power has been this and that's become a defining part of that

you know sublimated ethnic identity and so psychologically how do you when when that colonial power is removed, all of a sudden, you don't have that as a point of reference for defining that part of your identity anymore. You get what I mean? Yeah, I do. There's a difference between you getting to define it and others defining it for you. Yeah. And very often, again, look at what Europe did in all of Africa.

You take groups that already have conflict, and then you put that against each other and sidle one up to you so that they depend. on you and then when you leave they don't attack you they attack the one that you made the warden you know yeah and and we see that time and again i mean and and you know it's it's very also very easy to blame someone who was in the pit with you for the fact that you were both thrown in a pit yeah because they're the ones you can strike at and if you've got 1200 years of enmity built up about that that that will just add to it you know so all right so those were all the places they talked about the pamphlets so i'm going to come back to the pamphlet now while the early

leaders of communism in the soviet union advocated world revolution Stalin modified that policy in 1927 he exiled trotsky and others who opposed his position at the greatest soviet contribution to the world that the greatest Soviet contribution to the world socialism would be a demonstration to the world that socialism would work in one country. On the record, the avowed Soviet policy has been peace through international collective security, if possible, or strong defenses by its own efforts if collective security failed. Originally, excluded from the League of Nations, the Soviet Union joined in 1934. So I'm going to break in here. They had been excluded and then allowed to join in 34. Notice that 34 is after the fascists get elected to power. Yes.

Okay. During the next five years, it took, it is talking about Soviet Union, took a strong stand for collective action against aggression. After the Munich sellout in September of 38, pursuing its realistic policies, the Soviet looked, the Soviet Union looked to its own protection. The Soviet made a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, which the Nazis broke, and a five-year non-aggression pact with Japan in 1941. Through pledges at the conferences at Moscow, Tehran, and Yalta, and through daily repetitions to its people, the Soviet Union has reaffirmed its aim as lasting peace through international cooperation.

This attitude toward peace has been recognized by leading Americans. Former Undersecretary of the state, Sumner Wells said, quote, when the Soviet Union entered the League of Nations, even the most obstinate were soon to be. forced to admit that it was only, that it was the only major power which seemed to take the league seriously, end quote. Donald Nelson, former chairman of the war production board, stated, quote, I know from what I saw and heard in Russia that the leaders and the people of that great country are anxious to work with us. They know that only world cooperation and enduring peace can produce the rapid internal development of Russia, which is their main concern, end quote.

So there's a lot in here to unpack. First, it mentions that Stalin modified the policy in 1927. Right. Stalin, seeing the failure of communist efforts against being slaughtered by the KMT in China and seeing the need to protect Soviet Union from a worldwide reaction to the communist international efforts pulled back. Stalin stepped back from supporting worldwide revolution overtly and then began exiling and purging his party as he also implemented his first five-year plan, having handled the stickiness of crises abroad

and tamped down dissent at home. So when the Soviet Union came into existence, Lenin and Schrozky and several others were very big on it's a world revolution. And China had its revolution, right? And Sunyat Sen in 25 and then Mao gets going and stuff like that. So there's this like, oh my God, the Soviets are supporting world revolution.

and they were, and so he was afraid that there would be your reaction. In all fairness, Woodrow Wilson had sent Marines to go help the, you know, the Russians fight against the Bolsheviks. Yeah. So, yeah. Now, some of this was also in response to the English leading a charge of isolation against the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe economically and politically as well. So he's like, fine, we can't play with y'all.

Fuck y'all. We're going to do a develop our own thing. Right. but also i'm not trying to push world revolution folks just leave us alone like there is a layer of that oh well i mean you know Stalin for for all of his many other qualities whatever you want to say they were i would say false yeah to yes um he was he was certainly not a dummy no by any stretch of imagination he was he was a very cunning political operative yes uh which is part of the reason why lennon did not trust him um you know and he he saw i mean he had it he had a very good track

record for reading a room no matter how big that room was and at this point he's looking at the biggest room conceivable right and so yeah there's the Of course, there's an element of that. I think, you know, part of the analysis also has to be that by doing that, it also benefited him in giving him an avenue for consolidating his own control. Oh, yeah. The purge could look on the international stage, like, look, I'm getting rid of the crazies and also served all of his own interests. Yeah. Yeah.

you know um so you know what what i find interesting about the way the pamphlet is is describing all of this i love the i love the very precise wording of the stated policy yes of the soviet union because there are allies in 45 like yeah well yeah and and i you know um and i wonder in in the state department as or in the war department as this was being written How much, okay, we need to think about how are we going to put this, you know, was going on there because the same people who were advocating for this being handed out to the troops right now in 45 knew that in another year or two because, you know, didn't know, didn't know what was, you know, what was, you know, know how soon it was going but at this point you know we we knew which direction the world was going going but we didn't know how much longer it was going on right right they knew that in another year to maybe three you know we were we were not going to be looking at the

Germans as our adversary anymore the adversary was going to be Stalin I don't know how many people in the State Department thought along those lines so much as like we're putting that on hold and then it's coming back. But also remember the idea was after you defeat the Nazis, then we're going to turn around and fight the Japanese. And there was a distinct possibility of two things happening, both of which were unacceptable and yet both were polar opposites. One, Soviet Union would turn around and help like they promised to at Yalta, I believe. Yeah. And, that could have been a bit of a disaster for American interest because then the Soviet Union has territory in Asia or two they can't help because they're two they've been bled white by this war and then we're going to have to do all that shit alone and meanwhile they'll get to recover. So like there's a lot of a lot of wheels here but one thing that's definitely true is that Stalin here's an interesting thing.

Stalin and Hitler were born within a year of each other, I want to say. Sounds right, yeah. Both had mommy issues. Both were born in a different country than the one they ended up in charge, total control over. Mm-hmm. You know, interesting. But anyway. So Stalin sees England leading this starvation campaign, right?

Economic starvation of the Soviet Union and the 20s. as, look, the imperialists are trying to kill us. Yeah. And he's also like, I can't fight that and promote worldwide revolution and consolidate my power and keep the Soviet Union safe because World War I absolutely did represent a Japanese, or not a Japanese, a German incursion into Soviet territory. And the Soviet memory is also the Russian memory. and so they also remember Napoleon.

Oh, yeah. Like historically, you know, and so this idea of Russia being invaded constantly by the continent of Europe is a very worrisome one. So one of Stalin's first goals is to protect the Soviet Union. He cares more about Soviet security than he does about worldwide revolution, and he shows that to the world by pulling back support of the international. And then he also, you know, he says, look, okay, they're going to try to starve us, we're going to make us okay. And one of the guys who disagrees with them the most over this is Trotsky, because Trotsky wants a worldwide revolution. And Trotsky disagreed vehemently with Stalin, specifically over the Chinese communist efforts. Stalin actually was encouraging the communists in China to unite with the KMT and bring about a more bourgeoisie revolution from within.

He's like, look, you can't do the peasant thing like we did. It's not going to work for you. Trotsky, ever the idealist and rarely a realist, kept seeing worldwide revolution as the goal, and he gets exiled by January of 28. Yeah. Now, there's also mentioned in the pamphlet of being excluded from the League of Nations.

Now, here's the deal. Russia was in 1918 a failed state that was beset by a revolution that nobody in Western Europe wanted to have. happen um germany actually was the one that captured lenin put him in a boxcar sealed the motherfucker and sent it into russia yeah right yeah so no one in western europe liked it central europe was like oh fuck finally we've got some breathing room um and and so they were left russia was left out league of nations at first yeah is there a failed state it's you know

yeah now the excuse given was that the two sides that were claiming led legitimacy, neither side was legitimate yet, so the League of Nations didn't want to take sides. But really, the League just didn't want any communist states in the League of Nations. Yeah. Also, America wasn't a part of the League of Nations because the Senate never approved the treaty, go figure. Shock. Yeah. Now, there's also talk of something called the Munich sellout.

I just brought up Czechoslovakia of 38, how they weren't in the room where the decisions makers made peace for our time. and Czechoslovakia was the sacrifice that sealed the deal. What this showed the Soviet Union was that Western imperial powers would rather mollify than stand up to fascists, which means that the Soviet Union is on their own, and they have to create their own accord with fascists in order to survive until they can fight the fascists. Now, the pamphlet also mentioned the non-aggression pact. This was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Act, right? This is something that we taught in 10th grade high school the whole time I taught 10th grade high school It was signed in late August of 39 and it was a secret pact of non-aggression and it basically recognized that the Germans had a sphere of influence and the Soviets had a sphere of influence and where they'd overlap

They would respect each other's fear of influence and neither would aid or ally themselves with an enemy of the other for 10 years So from 39 to 49, the Soviet Union was not going to lie with France or England or Denmark or Belgium or the U.S. or whoever jumps in against Germany. And Germany is not going to lie with Romania or Poland. It sounds like kind of a one-sided deal. It does. But remember, Stalin had purged a living fuck out of his army. Yeah. So he's buying time.

He's like, sign that fucking like. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Now, a week after they signed it, they both invaded Poland and split the bill. Stalin was keen to do this because he saw how feckless against Hitler's defiance of prior treaties, treaties, the Western empires were. He's like, I have to side with them because they're not going to do fuck all about shit, and they've been trying to starve us. Yeah. He also saw how far Germany had come, and he saw how their need for resources had grown. And he noted that I've got a few more five-year plans that I need to get done before I could stand hard against these assholes.

So temporary alliance where we hold our nose is going to buy him two sets of five-year plans, uninterrupted by fascist expansion, because we each have a sphere. Right. And then the Soviet Union would be ready. That was kind of his long-term plan. Hitler liked the idea because he never intended to keep the treaty for 10 years. Yeah. And he knew that this would get around any possible secret deal with France. the Soviets had because he learned from World War I.

Now, there's also a mention of a five-year non-aggression pact with Japan. This is because Stalin wanted to avoid a two-front war. And he had been engaged in border conflicts, also known as a Soviet-Japanese border war, which ended with a ceasefire in September 15th of 1939, 14 days after they invaded Poland. So he knew he'd have to do some maneuvering. And while the Germans invaded Poland on September 1st, Stalin waited until things with Japan were settled. He actually didn't invade Poland until September 17th. I misspoke.

So he waited two days because he got the treaty with Japan. He's like, all right, now let's go get some Poland. Yeah. And that shocked everybody in the West. That's the thing about secret treaties. So in April of 41, which is an interesting coincidence on a number of levels, the Soviet Union and Japan entered into a non-aggression pact that would last for five years. So that takes you to April of 46. Right.

Honestly, this pact let both the Soviet Union and Japan focus on what they thought was the bigger danger. The Soviets would be able to focus westward as Germany had been expanding a lot in the last two years. And the Japanese would be able to focus on grabbing English holdings in Asia and knocking America. and knocking America out of the war before she even got into it. Stalin technically broke this pact about a year early when he invaded Manchuria a few days before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now they also mentioned the Moscow conference and I think this is referring to the third Moscow conference because there were like six Moscow conferences and this one had the Moscow declarations come out of it so if so it happened in October, November of 43. The Moscow declarations were the first real mention of what would become the United Nations Security Council. It also set the tone for the persecution of the war, unconditional surrender of access powers, and not quitting until all the allies get it. The U.S., the U.S.S.S.R also made a declaration on Italy that fascism should be stamped into oblivion and that the Italian people should get a chance to come up with something else based on democratic ideals.

They declared the Anschlauss, Nolen Void, because it was imposed on Austria, and that a free Austria should come out of a defeated Nazi Germany. And the declaration, the Moscow Declaration on Atrocities came up with the Declaration on Atrocities that came from this conference. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin noted, quote, evidence of atrocities, massacres, and cold-blooded mass executions, which are being perpetrated by Hitlerite forces in many of the, the countries they have overrun from which they are now being steadily expelled they recognize that in in 43 if we're talking about the moscow conference of 43 and that once germany was defeated the germans who carried out these atrocities would have to be judged by the peoples they harmed and if there was no single country to which to turn them over a joint decision would be made by the allied powers to punish them.

This sets up the Nuremberg triumvirate, the, the Tribune. Yeah. So then there's a mention of the Tehran Conference. The Tehran Conference, this is where the big three met, not just the diplomats. They met from November of 28th through December 1st of 1943. So this is Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. In this meeting, they decided several things. First, they decided to help the Yugoslav partisan against the,

the Nazis. Second, they decided to get Turkey to join on the Allied side. Third, they decided to open up a second front, finally in France by May of 44, which they missed by about a month. They also agreed to come up with fake plans to trick the Nazis. Yep. Politically, they also agreed to partition Poland. Now, I found this fascinating because there was a meeting between, I believe it was Stalin and Churchill, specifically and basically one of them took out two match sticks and just said well here's the current borders of Poland and they just moved one over to the other side and like and those

are the future borders of Poland and one of them I forget who said did we just see the second partition of Poland yeah because the first one was a big deal yeah so they they agreed to that Further talks, just, I would like to point out, the Allies also engaged in having discussions about countries without having those countries be a part of it. Yes. So, yeah, further talks were also had formally about the actual United Nations, like they're planning for victory here, even in 43. They also, the big three, also failed to determine what would happen to Germany post-war in terms of occupation and partition. And finally, the Soviet Union agreed to attack Japan after Germany was defeated, but nothing specific was settled. But it's just like we have agreed that in concept, we are down for this.

Yes. Now, Yalta would be the last meeting of the big three. Right. That's unbeknownst to this pamphlet because Roosevelt's still alive in March of 45. Yeah. Yalta happened in February 4th to February 11th, 1945. So a month before this pamphlet comes out, Yalta happened. That's just, again, like this is a time capsule of a pamphlet.

Yeah, of a very specific moment in time. Yes. Now, mostly, Yalta was a conference to decide post-war goals. France had been liberated by this point, so had Belgium. So it was appropriate to have such discussions. And by the way, Charles de Gaulle was not invited to this conference. conference because the United States and the USSR did not want him there. Yeah, well, yeah, there's a variety of reasons for that.

Sure. Now, Stalin revisited the partition of Poland. He also agreed to, he said, look, you give me the borders I want. They can have free elections. Yeah. And Stalin always saw Soviet security as a territorial thing. Well, historically. He'd abandoned the international because he said global agreements don't matter for shit if we don't have history.

And like you said, if we don't have territory to protect us. Because like you said, historically, they keep getting invaded from Europe. Yeah, that's that's that is a continuing like up to literally up to the. present day. Yes. That is a continuing part of like that's that's just a given. Yeah. Any kind of Russian nowadays.

Right. Geopolitical anything is. Buffer states. Buffer states, you know, defense in depth. Yep. You know. And they measure defense in terms of control of territory. Outside of their.

outside of outside of you're absolutely right i mean you talked about the trauma of dunkirk yeah we're talking about the trauma of the napoleonic wars the trauma of barb of frederick the great the trauma of the nazis like this happens repeatedly for them the trauma i mean like the trauma of the mongols like that's yeah but they came from the other side well yes but nevertheless you know you know uh i mean if you want to talk about the the the trauma of of the Teutonic order. Right. You know, in the Middle Ages.

It is just, it is a part of their national psyche. Yeah. It's part of that identity of being Russian is you need. Yeah. You know, and everybody from Europe is against us. Yeah. So they agreed to free elections in exchange for the borders that he wanted. He also, the big three, also agreed for a revamp of.

the Atlantic Charter because it was very important to the U.S. and the USSR that people could choose their own governments. I say the U.S. and the U.S.S.S.R because England is holding a whole lot of imperial holdings. Yeah. Yeah, the United

Kingdom had less interest in that. Yeah. Now, they also still wanted an unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The Big Three also agreed that Germany and Berlin would be split in two four zones. So now they're talking about the actual practicality.

Yeah. This is February of 45. Right. The war ends, what, like three months later, right? It's something like, well, the European war. Yeah. Yeah. What we, I want to go back to talking about, you know, revisiting the Atlantic Charter.

Okay. And that's, that's another reason for de Gaulle not being there. Yes. because de Gaulle would have been hard over he would have been he would have been Churchill's hype man right you know in terms of no we're not we're not giving up fucking anything yeah we're not giving up into China we're not giving up to we're coming back we're not giving yeah no yeah and so yeah this you know uh charl how about you chill out yeah no they just didn't let him come because they're like hey you're not

a legally elected member of your government at the end of the day they could pull that card now the big three also agreed that like I said Germany and Berlin would be split into four zones and this meant that but so

de Gaulle wasn't there but his interests were so they were like yes four zones the US the USSR the UK and France and Stalin said okay but France has to carve their territory

out of what you guys have not our part well yeah because territory is power right territory is defense so no I'm not gonna give up any part of the eastern portion of Germany their their sliver has to come out of your half of the pie

exactly yeah so Germany would be denotified and demilitarized this was the agreement and Germans would have to pay reparations in party by forced labor to or in part by forced labor to fix what they'd fucked up in their victim's country. So this was, this was a big, yeah.

The Soviet Union would enter into the war against Japan two to three months after the end of the war in Europe. This was agreed. And Nazi war criminals would be hunted and tried and their leaders executed. This was all agreed at Yalta. Now, the document also spoke of the war productions board. This was the administration whose job it was to convert civilian industrial production into war resources. This includes rationing and resource allocation. So scrap metal drives, victory gardens, recycling, etc. Also, nylons, frion, gas, silk, rubber, all of these things get

rationed. And then the food. Oh my God, the food. Stalin admired this effort tremendously in America, which makes a lot of sense. Here's some fun facts that I've always had bouncing around in my head. The United States sent 15 million pairs of boots to Russia and to the USS in only two different sizes. So you know, stuff more socks.

That's the less detail I had no down. Yeah. Okay. They sent 9,000 locomotives. Yeah. That's a lot of fucking trains. That's, that's a huge... Think about the tonnage of metal involved in that. Right? Yeah. They sent 400,000 jeeps and trucks.

Yep. 14,000 airplanes, 13,000 tanks, 8,000 tractors, 1.5 million blankets. Yep. 2.7 million tons of petroleum products. Yep. 4.5 million tons of food. An entire Ford Company tire factory. Yeah.

Yep. The unspoken, but damn near obviously spoken, almost said out loud by Stalin agreement, was Russia would supply the bodies, the U.S. would supply the materials. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And just to say,

when you talk about the aircraft, what's funny to me, as an airplane, kind of an airplane nerd raised by a massive airplane nerd, the airplanes that we sent to the Russians over the Soviet Union, over the course of the war,

one particular aircraft got designed. and sent to the Army Air Corps, and our pilots hated it. Really? Absolutely hated it. An aircraft called the Ara Cobra. Okay.

And one of the things that our pilots really didn't like was it was built with doors that opened sideways. Okay. Like automotive doors. And they were like, if I got to bail out, fuck that. Like, no. Yeah. But the Soviets absolutely fucking loved it.

Really? because it was one of the first aircraft that we built that was armed with a cannon it had a it had a nose mounted cannon okay and they they used it as a tank killer yeah and they yeah I could see them loving that shit fucking loved it yeah but yeah so we was like okay well our guys don't like it here you go right right so yeah yeah back back to the document yeah quote no we do not need to fear Russia we need to to learn to work with her against our common enemy, Hitler. We need to learn to work with her in the world after the war. Russia is a dynamic country, a vital new society, a force that cannot be bypassed in any future world. Wendell Wilkie in one world. Now, Wendell Wilkie had he had been defeated by FDR in the 1940 election, but afterward he was FDR's unofficial envoy during the war. doing this showed the unity of the American government, right? Wilkie is part of the loyal opposition,

and he recently changed from Democrat to Republicans so that he could run against FDR. He lost, but he was one of the many Republicans who claimed that he hadn't left the party, but that the party had left them. Right. I would just like to point out that that predates Reagan. Yeah.

Actually, no, maybe it doesn't come to think of it. I need to go find that. But anyway, it's right around. at the same time. So, Wilkie was not an isolationist, and this led to people courting Lindbergh to run, and Lindberg did not run. Right.

He had the, Wilkie had the endorsement of several business leaders, but also the CIO, and John Lewis, the leader of, the union leader of the United Mine Workers. But John Lewis himself had supported the America First group

because he was an isolationist, So he's got, John Lewis's got problems, not just his eyebrows. Yeah. But those are a problem. Oh, boy. Those are an issue. And his daughter, John Lewis's daughter also supported America first. There's a lot of fucking people who, until Pearl Harbor, once Pearl Harbor happened, they snapped back to their senses.

Yeah. Now, after being defeated, Wendell Wilkie urged his supporters to give their support to the president and not to obstruct things. It seemed that FDR had legit respect and regard for Wilkie and vice versa. Wilkie also called Lindbergh's anti-Semitism un-American. Wendell Wilkie was also a very ardent supporter for the Len lease agreements with the USSR and China as well, not just England. He gave radio addresses in October of 42, like you said, Pinko, gave radio addresses in October of 42 about his travels on behalf of America, sharing what he saw, essentially a radio address. video version of why we fight. He also wrote a book called One World, and it was a travelogue and a manifesto for why the U.S. needs to fight and why the world needs to fight. In many ways,

Wendell Wilkie was pushing the Atlantic Charter beyond Western Europe and advocating for the United Nations without knowing it yet, and he continued to argue against anti-Semitism in his book as well as imperialism and isolating anyone. He was in many ways ready for this new era. He adjusted instead of stayed stuck in what he thought was his path to power. Now, back to the document, quote, Our countries are joined together in a high cause, and I fully share your confidence that the unity of purpose, which binds our peoples and countries together in the prosecution of the war, will be translated into a close and lasting collaboration together with other

like-minded countries in the establishment of a just and enduring peace. that was President Roosevelt to Soviet ambassador October 4th 1943 and the Soviet ambassador that we're talking about is Andre Gromico Holy shit this guy had a history

he was part of why we got out of the Cuban missile crisis by the way Oh yeah but in this context he was an ambassador for Stalin who was very fond of FDR despite FDR being a very clear avatar of bourgeoisie politics.

Yes. Grimico liked a lot about America, but he also saw it as the perfect example of how capitalism grinds people down. He's the one who succeeded Molotov as the top ambassador toward the end of the war, and Grimico was the first U.N. representative from the Soviet Union. Oh, wow. Okay. Now, the next part of the pamphlet talks about race, and I think this is actually a perfect

stopping off point. So I covered war and peace and fascism Through the last episode and this one And yeah, the next part will be how fascists Yeah, we literally covered war and peace this time So the next one will be how fascists regard race And remember, this is some needle threading That's going to happen because America is a segregated fucking country

And our armed forces are segregated. Yeah. but what's what's your takeaway so far um that nobody has explored despite all of the alternate history that's been written about world war two and about all of all of these things nobody has explored in which sorry when you say alternate history do you mean like counterfactuals Like, what if so-and-so had won? Or do you mean, like, another approach? No, I mean, I'm talking about in the science fiction fandom sense of alternate universe.

Gotcha. Like, there's a whole long series from, I want to say it's Larry Turtle Dove that theorizes, you know, what would have happened if during World War II aliens invaded? Like that, that kind of thing. I played a miniatures game that was based in that. Yeah, and so nobody has written an alternate history, like, man in the high castle is an alternate history. Yeah, okay, so you're talking, yeah, counterfactuals. Yeah, counterfactuals. Yeah.

And nobody has explored the possibility of what would the world have looked like if everything that we just heard in this pamphlet talking about cooperation after. the war with with as they put it russia but with the soviet union yeah if if if if fdr hadn't died and that relationship between fdr and stalin had been what what we moved into the post war era with right like you know how how would the world have turned out differently yeah you know and Yeah, because, you know, honestly, Oliver Stone did a documentary for Netflix, if I recall correctly, and he really doesn't like Truman. And he sees, you know, the loss, Wallace's loss to take the Democratic spot from Truman as a huge tragedy. but Truman was very different temperamentally than Roosevelt and a lot of people kind of give him a pass

and yet he's I mean there's a doctor named after him you know but like he's kind of the reason the Cold War started in a lot of fucking ways yeah comes again personality predates idealism right and so yeah kind of like what you're talking to if FDR hadn't had a terrific headache yeah yeah you know if he hadn't chosen the guy from Independence

Missouri who was absolutely a shitbird in a lot of ways when he was a legislator and sided with a lot of shitbirds and yet he and Truman ends up doing some really good things too he's the reason the military got desegregated he's yeah you know he does

I'm not going to take away from the many things that he did achieve but also like his particular temperament did not play well with with Stalin and remember Churchill gets handed his hat and is his cane pretty quickly too

Oh immediately And so nobody who knows how to play with Stalin anymore Because remember there's all kinds of reports That Roosevelt absolutely sidled up to Stalin By kind of shitting on Churchill Yeah

And played the personalities Like Roosevelt was that guy Oh Roosevelt was not enough analysis, I don't think. The amount of scholarly work I've read on this is limited, but based on what I've seen, I don't think there's enough analysis of just exactly how profound Roosevelt's talent for reading individuals and maneuvering on and around. individual personalities

because he managed to make Churchill and Stalin both think he was their best friend. Yeah, and talk about two men who were diametrically opposed. Oh, and who detested each other. On an ideological level, never mind personality. Oh, well, yeah. Again, you all

tried to starve me. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, the only reason you side Like, there's a wonderful quote that Churchill has about Italy, and he says, in Italy, we can see that you have the perfect defense against communism. Now, no great nation can claim that they don't know how to defeat communism. He's talking about fascism. Oh, yeah. And then he shows up in Hamburg and he's like, oh, fuck this. And so he switches.

Yeah. But he originally, like, you know, there's a reason animal farm didn't get published when it did. So, yeah. Yeah, and so, yeah, I just, I just, I got to say, Oliver Stone thinking Wallace, not getting the nomination being a tread, like, have you, like, do you know, Wallace? Wallace. Wrong Wallace. You're not thinking of the right Wallace. Oh, okay, different.

Yeah, this is Henry A. Wallace. This is not, never mind. This is not the governor who gets shot and has a- George Wallace. Okay. Yeah. All right. Sorry.

No, we're bad. All right. But, um, yeah, no, Truman's, Truman's personality was profoundly different. Yeah. And yeah, like what, how, how much, like, what, what would that world have looked like, you know, is, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't think there's been enough, mostly because I think the possibility of that. universe has been scoured

from our consciousness like the yeah there's a big rush to justify two atomic bombs there's a big rush to justify the beginning of the Cold War like you're absolutely right yeah you know the very fact that school of thought for historians

yeah you know and yeah I don't know it's just me being a I guess a, you know, liberal cuck, but like how much, how, where could we be? Sure. You know, if, if, if the, if things had gone differently in that particular direction. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of what I'm, what I'm going to carry with me.

All right. What are you recommending people, uh, take in this, this week? Um, I'm going to recommend a book. And I mentioned it a minute ago, or a little bit ago, early. in this episode Neptune's Inferno the U.S. Navy at Guadal Canal

It was actually recommended to me by my dad and it is a study of just exactly how rapidly

the U.S. Navy as an institution had to learn the realities of fighting against the Japanese Oh yeah. Um, the, the ground campaign on Guadalcanal gets, gets a whole lot of attention in popular culture for meaningful reasons.

Like it was, it was absolutely hellish. It was, it was awful. But the number of sailors killed in and around Guadalcanal is not given enough attention. Uh, it was, it was a ferocious naval battle over multiple months. And in the early months of that campaign. the U.S. Navy got their hat handed to them hard and and as a as a force as a service that's that's what I was looking for they they had to very very rapidly learn how to adapt to new technologies and new ways of dealing with the modern milieu of naval warfare yeah I mean because didn't it shift from basically large battleships against large battleships to carrier groups. What's fascinating about, what's fascinating about Waddle Canal.

It's the last one where there was battleships, wasn't it? Yes, it was, it was surface combatants against surface combatants. Yeah. You know, Midway was when we got phenomenally, part of our victory was phenomenal luck. Yes. That was that Midway proved Yamamoto right in having considered the attack on Pearl Harbor a failure. Yep Because the carriers weren't there

And again, the Axis knew We're fighting a new war You know, the Germans figured out We need to ramp everybody up on speed And just, you know, move too fast for anybody to stop us Right And Yamamoto in the Pacific was like, no, it's all going to be aircraft carriers Yeah

Like we need, yes, we need battleships still And submarines And submarines Yeah But aircraft carriers are the new battleships Yeah And nobody wanted to listen to him because that wasn't where the prestige was.

Right. But, yeah. Okay, so Neptune's. Neptune's Inferno. Got it. Okay. It's the title of the book, and the author is James D. Horn Fisher. And I'm only a chapter into it, but it is absolutely fascinating, compelling, great read.

Nice. Highly recommended. How about you? I'm going to recommend they thought they were. Free, the Germans, 1933 to 1945, by Milton Meyer. I've recommended this before. This is a book where a Jewish sociologist goes over to Germany 10 years after World War II is over and interviews, I want to say a dozen people, no, 10 people who were ordinary Nazi party members. So some people, you have to join, some people, you join for political.

reasons or like occupational reasons like you know yeah the higher end jobs you have to join um and other people were like oh no no I was down for it um and interviews them like 10 years on and uh it's it's a fascinating analysis um

and he doesn't let them know that he's Jewish uh and they open up to him and there's you you remember I posted a really long fucking quote from this book at one point and it has stayed with me um one of the reasons I posted is so I can always come back to it.

But that came from this book. So I strongly recommend it because it's really interesting to hear what normal average everyday people living through awful times thought about their awful choices. Yeah. So anyway, let's see. Where can we be found? We collectively can be found on our website at wauwbwbwbwbwb. com. and we can be found as well on the Apple podcast app on the

on the Amazon podcast app took me a moment to get that one and on Spotify and wherever you have found us please take a moment to give us the five-star review that you know we deserve and hit the subscribe button and where can you be found individually sir well let's see you can find me along with all the crew of Capital Punishment. We have a new host, Emily sued, but myself, Justine Lopez, and the Capital Punishment crew, will be at the Sacramento Comedy Spot on, I think this is going to miss the August first show. So September 5th, October 3rd, and November 7th, come check us out. You definitely

want to get your tickets in advance. Go to sackcomedypot.com and click on the link for shows. That'll take you to the calendar. Find our show. Get your tickets. Fifteen bucks. we have really cool merch come and buy it and come and laugh and you're going to need to oh boy are you going to need to so let us take the load off for you on that

so well for a geek history of time I'm Damien Harmony and I'm Ed Blaylock and until next time keep rolling 20s