Angry Planet - ICYMI: Talking About Russian Propaganda in 2015

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

As Jason and Matthew sleep off their holiday induced Turkey Comas, War College presents an episode from the early days of the show. Here’s what we said back then—The media in Russia is lively, often entertaining and largely state controlled. Still, an illusion of freedom remains key for the Kremlin to maintain its grasp over a country that spans 11 time zones.In this episode of War College, we look at how Russian president Vladimir Putin crafts his message for both internal and external consumption.For many in the West, watching Russian TV is like staring into a broken mirror. At first glance, networks such as RT seem like any other channel, but viewers who watch long enough are treated to a bevy of bizarre pundits and conspiratorial spin.That’s by design.We’re speaking with journalist, author and former Russian TV producer Peter Pomerantsev. His book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible explores Putin’s postmodern dictatorship and how the Kremlin uses television to control the country.“If Stalin was 75 percent violence and 25 percent propaganda,” Pomerantsev explains. “Putin is 75 percent propaganda and 25 percent violence.”You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello out there, War College listeners, it's Matthew, and I'm here to introduce today's episode, which is going to be a rerun because Jason and I spent Thanksgiving eating turkey and hanging out with our families. So we're bringing you an episode today from the archives. It's one from December of 24th. It's almost two years old, and it was covering what was then current events at the time. Interestingly, though, those events have come to shape our national discourse in a way. I don't think either Jason or I, or even the guest, really, could have predicted. The guest is Peter Pomeranzov, and we are talking about his book, Nothing is True, and Everything is Possible.

And it's all about how Putin's propaganda machine works, and the way Russia destabilizes the very idea of truth and democracy to spread its soft power. Now, this was, again, back in 2015, these were kind of new and interesting ideas that not a lot of people were talking about, but we were. And for my money, Peter's book on Russian propaganda is still one of the best around. If you really want to understand the point of it, which was not in this previous election cycle specifically to elect Donald Trump, it's much more common. complicated and I think much more interesting and much more insidious than that. So here I'll let Peter tell us take a listen to an episode from 2015. If Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% propaganda and 25% violent.

You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. Today, we're speaking with Peter Pomeranzo, a journalist and former Russian TV producer. His book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which, by the way, is a fantastic title, explores the Kremlin's weaponization of information. So thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me. So Peter, I want to open with a quote from your book and then a question. so you say that TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country, referring to Russia. It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism, one far subtler than the 20th century strains. Can you explain to us what this new type of authoritarianism is, and how is it more subtle than its predecessors?

Sure. I mean, the big difference between, well, there's two or three big differences between contemporary authoritarian isms, and it's not just Russia, there's several, there's several ones we could focus on. And that was one Russian professor who very well to me. He said, like, if Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% propaganda and 25% violence. You know, in a world where there's just so many more information mechanisms, new authoritarian can use them to a much more superficial. sophisticated degree. I mean, the way it was more sophisticated, and it is shifting now,

was that if the Soviets would basically suppress any kind of descent and try to hammer home one big message, Putin's tebocracy was much more cunning. It would allow sort of pockets of freedom. It would allow liberals to exist. But then it would frame and manipulate them in a certain way to make them at the end of the day strengthen Putin in the Kremlin. I mean, in a world, there are so many media resources, you can't censor everything, you can't suppress everything, but you can be subtle and sort of play it. I mean, so I'll give you a few examples. So you do have talk shows in Russia. I mean, if you've sort of debating shows, political debating shows, they're actually very, very good. But they're centrally scripted. So there's a sort of fake

left-week party, which is created in the Kremlin and run by the Kremlin. And there's a fake right-wing Party, which is created and run by the Kremlin, and they kind of debate with each other. Both of them are so absurd that they make Putin look sensible by contrast. Or, for example, one of the institutions I worked for in Russia was something called snob media, which was run by, created by Russia's richest man. And it was meant to be like the Russian version of the New Yorker, plus there's going to be a TV channel which never materialized, but there was a publishing house. And there was a website, sort of an elite Facebook, sort of a closed Facebook.

And anyway, so it was dedicated to creating a new type of Russian, what we called Global Russians. And you could tell everyone how awful Putin was. Mashigtsin, you know, the great Maschegs, I'm sure you know, was one of the editors. You know, it was, it was, you know, an arc, a Noah's Ark of liberalism in many ways. But at the same time, we were all really aware. work there. My God, this is being funded by Russia's richest man. There's no way he couldn't have done this without the Kremlin's kind of permission. And that was kind of the point. So, I mean, the point was to give liberals a place to breathe and sort of bend their frustrations. But at the

same time, it was called Snob. It was funded by Russia's richest man. The Krebren could easily go, look at these liberals. Look at their global Russians. Look at the lifestyle they promote. Their politics, liberal, and their lifestyle that promoted holidays in Europe, which is inaccessible to the vast majority of Russians. So the Kremlin could go, look at our liberal oppositions, funded by these sort of like the westernized, spoiled oligarchs. And sure enough, the guy who funded it then became the pseudo-liberal candidates at the elections. He got a very respectful 14%, soaked up the liberal vote, and then promptly disappeared from the political scene. you've kind of done his job. So it's a much, much subtler and much more kind of system than just like, you know, stupid old Soviet rule to suppress dissent and thus created a really sort of like strong anti-communist movement. So who's behind it? Who's thinking in such a, I don't know, a sophisticated, smart way?

Well, I mean, look, it developed. You know, we can look at the way it developed through the 90s. Actually, the first people who let it happen were Democrats. So, So in the mid-1990s, it looks as if Yeltsin, who was a more kind of pro-Western president, would lose the elections to the communists who'd really become social democrats by then. And so all the oligoths got together because they were really scared of this. And in order to save democracy, they hired a sort of a new type of political consultant called a political technologist, sort of a 21st century propagandist, to create sort of pseudo-scar stories. and help rig the vote and help rig the election.

And it's quite funny, it was a class of liberal political consultants who actually made this happen. A lot of them regret it now. A lot of them say openly that was the moment when Russia lost it in 96. So in order to save democracy, we used undemocratic means. But with time, kind of one of this class of political consultants emerged as, you know, as the most powerful one. A guy called Vladislav Sukhov, who's very much, you know, a tight guy's kind of figure.

He was a bohemian and a dissident, all kind of dissident in Soviet times, studied theatre, then became a PR guy, sponsors modern art festivals, writes postmodern novels, which are okay about cynical PR men. And he kind of, he calls himself one of the authors of the system. I mean, he talks about it openly, and he ran it for a while, he ran TV and political parties. But I wouldn't say it's one person. It's a very, you know, it's a big state, it's a very fluid, reactive state. Sook came to symbolize it in many ways.

I don't think anyone has total control. Not even Putin himself? Well, Putin doesn't... Oh, in that sense, you mean? As in like, is it... Putin is the arbiter of all the decisions. I mean, nobody's... The system isn't...

It is a postmodern system that way. You know, it can sort of work in various ways. And like, somebody in the provinces can be running their own mini-project or some of the oil and gas thing will be running their own mini-project. It's quite flexible. It's not actually very rigid that way. All right, we've said the word postmodern a couple times here. And in your book you say a postmodern dictatorship is one that uses language in the institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

And you kind of talk about how this model of Kremlin propaganda takes, kind of takes the West, digests it, and then perverts it. So could you explain how the Kremlin does this? How do they use the Western messages and twist them on television? And what exactly is do you mean by a postmodern dictatorship? So the key ideas of postmodernity are the idea of the, you know, or Bodri article, the Simulacra, yeah, a thing which looks like something but actually isn't it itself and something quite different. Simulacra is maybe the most overused word.

in Russian politics, all the analysts use it. So we have pseudo-political parties, pseudo-independent media. It's all pseudo. It all looks free, but actually once you get into it, it works to completely different ways. This was one of the great things of Khachemendu Kizza, the great Georgian reformer, maybe one of the most effective post-Soviet reformers.

He was like, we live, and he's quite a lot, we live in a world where nothing is what it seems. I mean, the police are not actually police. They're involved in racketeering. The tax agency, and not the tax agency, all the signs you see. are something else. So that's what we mean. Also, we mean by the loss, the lack of any one coherent narrative, many, many, many, many little narratives and the lack of a stable social

individuality and role. But just coming back to this idea of some alacra, because that's the most coherent one when we talk about policy. So take elections in Russia. Russia has, you know, elections with different political parties running against each other and competing and, you know, there are debates on TV. If you were to just tune into it, you would think, oh my God, it looks just like America. However, everybody knows who's going to win, at priori. Everyone knows that they will be rigged. And there's a great essay by Stephen Holmes about this, the New York University professor,

it's actually a ritual. It's actually a ritual where you go and pretend to sort of take part in the serious votes. Everyone knows exactly what's going to happen. The faking is quite transparent. The state is saying, we are so powerful. where we can fake these results. And, you know, the whole point is for the state to show its power. So even though it's authoritarian power.

So through the ritual of a democratic vote, or looks like a democratic vote, you're actually reinforcing an authoritarian model. So that's one, I think, very, very good example of it. And that's sort of a, you know, a fairly pointed one, because elections is always what we sort of associate with democracy. So that's actually taken from the West in a way, right? I mean, that's, I mean, the Western idea and ideal of democracy. And you talk about how the U.S. is used.

Foreign media is woven into the Kremlin's version of the media. Right, you talk about Larry King quite a bit in your book and his RT show. Yeah, well, not quite a bit. I think Larry King has two lines in my book, but there are very important two lines. I apologize. You talk about Larry King as an example in your book. Well, Larry, look, so I mean, here we're talking about RT, which is Larry King had a show in RT, which is the Kremlin's foreign broadcaster. It's not in Russian.

It's an English, Spanish, Arabic, a few other languages, I think. So RT is very interesting, again, for the same reason. So RT, when you switch it on, looks just like CNN on the BBC. I mean, down to the music, you know, it's like, it's very, very similar. The presentation, everything. Switching on and going, oh, look, it's just another sort of like. international TV news channel. And its slogan is very interesting.

The slogan is Question More, which is a really clever slogan because that's very much the Western ideal of what journalism should be all about. I don't know if you saw their advertising in Washington, D.C. It was sort of Tony Blair preaching before, really nicely sort of drawn posters, Tony Blair preaching before the Iraq War.

And below it says, this is what you get. I said the Iraq War, if you don't have a second opinion. And then Coden Powell. as well, which is, you know, how can you possibly disagree with that idea? That's, you know, the essence of Western, the Western ideal of journalism is to question more and question power and have a second opinion. But then RTE used that ideal to kind of do something very, very interesting. They sort of, well, basically they destroy, well, they destroy sort of the line between sort of information and disinformation. Once you sort of get rid of the art,

idea that there's any kind of sort of, you know, objective truth out there, which is, you know, there probably isn't. They kind of take that to its extreme by saying, well, then it's fine for us to do disinformation. Or they'll have experts who aren't, which literally just, not cases, taken off the street a lot of the time. A neo-Nazi from Germany will suddenly be key German expert on European affairs or somebody from Linda LaRouche's organization will suddenly be key American an expert on world development. Because once you get rid of, you know, once you take the very noble idea of questioning more of undermining sort of hegemonic truth and you take it to its absolute extreme, you can basically say there's no difference between a Cambridge University

professor and a freak. And so they take that, so strangely, they take a very, very, you know, healthy idea and they take it to kind of like a place where it starts to undermine sort of its own, it's an ideals. So again, a little bit like election. You take elections and you push them to a place, which is the opposite of their original meaning. So that's why RTE is very interesting. And Larry King, God bless his soul and God bless his conscience,

had a show on this. And I really liked the advert for it, because it was Larry King going, come and watch my new show on RTE. And then it was like all the words that we associate with good journalism, I don't know, you know, truth-seeking, research, you know, bravery, all these words sort of going very, very, very, very fast across the screen. And just visually, it was sort of taking all the cliches of Western journalism and sort of putting them through this kind of fast-forward effects, which in the end sort of makes to feel almost meaningless.

You know, they just become just words. and it always seemed to be like a big effew towards Western journalism. We can take your cliches and we can destroy them from inside. I don't know if they meant that. You know, sometimes an advert says something deeper than it's the people who created it, intended it. All right, War College listeners, we're going to pause here briefly for a word from our sponsors. You are listening to one of the older episodes of the show, I believe the 18th one that we recorded.

It's a conversation with author, journalist, and former reality television producer Peter Pomeranzov. We'll be back after this. All right, War College listeners, thank you so much for sticking around. We are back, our wonderful conversation from 2015 with author and journalist, Peter Pomeranzov. He's telling us all about his book, nothing is true and everything is possible. It's been very interesting to listen to this episode now, especially in light of everything we know about Russia and how some of its proper. Aganda operations work and have been working here in the United States, probably even earlier than 2015. Now let's get back to this conversation where I believe Jason has an interesting anecdote about seeing RT for the first time.

I have this feeling that RT, or at least RT.com, used to be a little bit more subtle. And the reason I say this is a couple of years ago, I don't know if you were, remember there was a American, at least alleged American spy who was a fairly low-grade official in the Moscow embassy, who was wearing, at least according to the RTV footage, a bad wig when he was caught. I think that was true. Yeah. Everyone covered that. Well, it was absolutely fascinating, though, because, of course, they broke the story.

and I remember sitting in a newsroom people wondering, oh, wow, who is this RT? And I think at least at first it was kind of subtle, people didn't really recognize it as Kremlin propaganda. And I don't know. When I watched RTV not very long ago, it was right before the Russians stepped in and started bombing in Syria. and they were talking about the U.S. bombing in Syria. And on the television channel, one thing I noticed is exactly what you were talking about. I mean, they did seem to have experts off the street. And they spoke about when they were talking about the U.S. bombing of ISIS,

they referred to it very specifically as bombing civilians in Syria. And I don't know. Was it more subtle? I mean, was it always sort of this level? I mean, they had some prominent anchors walk out a couple of years ago saying things had gone too far. You know, it actually started as a soft PR project, quite classic soft PR project, just doing fluffy stuff about Russia. And then nobody wanted that. And they kind of changed in 2008 during the Georgian War.

But they go through peaks and troughs, you know what I mean? My sense is that maybe they've really decided to zero in on the kind of, on the viewer they feel isn't. catered for in the US, which is the kind of fringe left and fringe right view. I think before maybe they were going for a slightly more, you know, maybe PBSy sort of view. So I don't know, but listen, they occasionally do really good stories. I mean, they have a couple of, you know, it's all mixed in. It's the whole point. You do a good one.

You do a good one. You do a good one. So even now, you could switch it on and see a perfectly good story. So my sense is that after Crimea got really, really, really crass during the war in Ukraine. That's when they were told off by Ofkog, the British regulator. And like in the US, we have regulators in the UK. And they've been told off, I know, four or five times, which is, you know, a lot for just, you know, telling lies, basically. So I don't know.

I mean, I think it's a tool of Russian foreign policy. So if the foreign policy is very sharp at the moment, at that moment, they'll really go. for it, if the foreign policy is being friendly with the US, maybe they'll change their approach in the next couple of months because now Russia and the US are buzz and buddies again. All right, I have a question for you, Peter. You actually worked in Russian TV. You were a TV producer. How overt is the control from your bosses? Like when you wanted to tell a story that they didn't necessarily want to tell, would they just, how did that work? How did they kind of steer the ship? Well, listen, I worked for an entertainment channel

Because when I arrived When Iceland was working with Russian channels Which is 2006 to 2010 It was already kind of dodgy to work for in these channels So I was working for, you know My background is in entertainment So I worked for a channel which brought the sitcom to Russia And bought stand-up comedy to Russia

And brought some reality shows to Russia And all that kind of stuff There was very, I mean, they were actually Because they're an entertainment channel They could do really risque stuff in their comedy I mean, they did a Russian version of a British sketch called Little Britain where they could do really risque stuff without ever naming names. I mean, there was a regular sketch about Russia's most corrupt,

Russia's only uncorrupt traffic cop. And he's like, you know, he refuses to take any bribes. And he lives in Penaureen, his wife has always, he must become corrupt like everyone else. And there was a sketch about a hospital where, like, you know, there's a room where you pay a bribe, and, you know, you get this incredible sort of like, sort of, you get incredible healthcare and prostitutes and everything,

and then next door is the normal one where, and just the sort of a national health thing, and the people just dying horribly. Well, I've got to say, though, speaking as an American here, I don't know about the NHS, that is actually literally the case. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, I think we know, the whole world knows about America's health care

due to the excellent subjective and analytical reports to Michael Moore. But the difference in Russia is you just give a bribe to the doctor. You just put in this pocket. You don't pay it to an institution. It's not. You know, they haven't got to the point where corruption becomes market capitalism. It's just corruption still. Maybe they'll mature into that.

Actually, one of the big arguments for fighting corruption is just why don't you just institutionalize it, you know? just make it exactly. Have it like in the US. Have it done for shit. So actually, being an entanglement channel, they could do a lot of a lot of really risque stuff. But I also worked in their documentary department.

And one of the things they wanted to do was stories about teens, because it was kind of youth-oriented. And when I started doing stories about teens, I just found a lot of the stories had a political edge because it was about teens being beaten up by the cops, which is a real problem. Teens, you know, being sent to the army.

is national service in Ukraine. And, you know, there's a terrible problem with hazing in Russia, like, really bad. I mean, a lot of suiciders story about suicides among conscripts. And these shows rated well because they were about people's lives, and people enjoyed them,

and young kids enjoyed them. But suddenly that made it political. And when I pitched the next one, they were like, go and do one about footballers' wives. So it's everyone kind of decide to themselves and everyone senses where the lines are. And it's much,

more a case of self-censorship in that sense, rather than anything else. People just instinctively know that they've gone too far. You were just talking about the military service. That was another really interesting part of your book. You wrote, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that moulds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service. And I wanted to see if you would speak to, like, explain to us what those rituals of avoidance are and how they shape those people's relationship with the state. Sure, sure. I mean, I always find this fascinating as well. It's a great question. So, you know, compulsory national military services, one of the, you know, basic ways that many

states build loyalty and identity. So Israel, clearly, probably the most obvious example of a state that's people really become Israeli when they're in the army. So Russia has compulsory national service. Certainly in Soviet times, going through the army was a big, big deal and a big part of you. really, you know, in a sense being broken by the state. That's where you were kind of broken in and humiliated a lot and you became a good Soviet citizen. Nowadays, there's still compulsory national service,

but everyone who can gets out of it. But some people, if you're studying, you know, if you're a student at the university, that's one way of getting out. And actually there's all these sort of, again, there's some black, there's all these pseudo, sort of higher educational institutions that get founded, that you just pay some money and say you'll study.

there and that gets you off. But not everyone can, you know, that's a lot of money. Imagine like just buying a college degree. It's going to be pretty expensive. So a lot of people can't afford that. So what do they have to do? They have to pretend, they have to get like a letter from a hospital saying that they're physically unfit, you know, that they, you know, you've got asthma or diabetes or whatever. And that basically involves both the young person and their parent, essentially kind of being sucked into a world of corruption, even if they never wanted to be corrupt. Because you firstly have got to find a doctor who's going to give you this false piece

of paper. You've got to find it. You've got to pay him money. That it's not, I mean, this is where Russia is so much fun. The doctor won't just give it to you. You still have to come into hospital and spend a week there pretending to be really ill. So already a young person of 18 is already learning how to sort of like to, sort of like, to survive in the society, he's going to fake it.

A bit later when he grows up, he's going to pretend to vote. And everybody knows that they're pretending, but everyone kind of plays along, because this is the way society is formed over a long period of time. So you lie there pretending to be ill, then you get out, and then you still have to go to the military place where they will test you again. You'll give them the letter. They'll test you again, but, you know, they go along with it as well. You usually have to give another bribe there.

And so, you know, to get out of military service, you've gone through the this whole kind of sort of labyrinth of faking it and bribery and corruption, which actually makes you the ideal citizen of contemporary Russia because all your life you're going to be

faking your voting in elections, faking your taxes, you're part of this game, but where you're actually very dependent on the state, because once you've faked it, firstly psychologically you're a little bit like that. Corruption, always a great way. It always corrupts the person who's the bottom, you know,

at the bottom of it giving the bribe as all as a person demanding it. And you kind of learn to think it's normal. You know, if you're already faking it from the age of 18, then you know, it's no big deal to then kind of like go and pretend that you're, you know, voting in a real election or pretend you're paying the taxes when you're not. We had a guest just a couple of weeks ago, Mark Galiati, who was talking about the fact that Russian military conscription is only for one year. and that in fact it's very, very hard to train anyone

and then turn them into good soldiers. And he said, basically, you have like three months of someone you can actually use on a battlefield before they're gone. So I guess what you're saying would actually almost explain that. It's about breaking people in. Mark is the world's biggest ex-exeter on the Russian military. I mean, so I actually have no idea what happens on the battlefield.

But it definitely explained that it's much more about breaking people in. But the idea is very much to, you know, socialize people, make them part of, you know, make them part of the states rather than make them into great soldiers. All right, Peter, what do you see are the, what are the weaknesses of this system that you've described and are the cracks kind of showing? The weakness is that it's got nothing to do reality, you know, it's a pseudo, everything is fake, you know. There's, there's, there's, Putin is like this Tori Ador, you know, this bullfighter with this red cape of corruption and propaganda through which you avoid reality.

And that's what everyone in Russia says. When will reality catch up with Russia? Because this world of truth is actually quite a useful thing. There's a reason democracies allegedly try to stick to a real process. Makes us face up to the problems in the country. Elections make us sort of like checks, checks how well administration's action you work and so on and so forth. And so it's a system based on pretence

and fakery, at one point, should hit the iceberg of reality. I'm really mixing my metaphors. Every time Putin comes near reality, he finds a way out there so far. So, you know, 2012 there were mass protests calling for real democracy, a real modernization plan, and he looked in trouble, and he invented a fake war. He invented fake fascists in Ukraine, and, you know, this kind of complete an utter solution, but it was efficient to get his ratings back up.

Now, you know, that's kind of expanded into the war with ISIS. I mean, ISIS, of course, is a very real enemy and it does need to be dealt with. But again, he's found a new story, a new narrative that distracts from the sad reality of the way Russian economy and society is going. There is no domestic policy anymore in Russian TV. I worked on an EU project recently about Russian TV, and we did like an analysis of, content analysis of the news and stories on Russian news and current affairs. And there's hardly anything about social problems. It's all, when we were doing it, it was Ukraine.

It was all, you know, the global conspiracy against Russia, civil war in Ukraine. The whole world is going to, you know, going to hell. Only Putin can save it. It's like this movie about a world disintegrates into chaos with Putin as a sort of Batman-type hero to save it. Not a mention of sort of like, you know, hospitals or anything like that.

So, every time we think he's going to hit reality, he thinks of something bigger and better. And there's still a little big stories that he can think of. You can still do a big missile crisis somewhere. There was the Arctic War, which they were playing with. It'd go on and on and on.

Which when he runs out of stories, but he's like Harrizada in the Arabian nights. Thinks of another story. As soon as, you know, we think he's going to get executed. No, he pulls another one out of the hand. which is very much based on TV which comes back to our first thing. TV is obviously

sort of the satanic machine that cooks up all these new stories. They don't need to be that related to reality. With ISIS, they are related to reality.

In Ukraine, it was, you know, hallucinated a war into reality. So they just need to do good stories. So there you go. He's like a huge TV producer, a huge entertainment TV producer. Like I was a tiny entertainment TV producer

in Russia. He's like the great entertainment TV producer. Well, that sounds like a terrific point to stop. I don't think we're going to get much better than that. So thank you very, very much, Peter, for joining us. Oh, and let me mention the name of the book again. Again, I think the title's fantastic.

The book is, nothing is true and everything is possible. So check it out. That is it, War College listeners. That is our episode from the early weeks of December in 2015. I hope you found it as interesting as I did to go back. and listen to this during my Thanksgiving hangover. We will be back next week with a new episode of War College. I'm not going to read anything to you from the comments section today, but I am going to give you a little taste of some of the things that we've got cooking, some of the things

that are coming up. We've got a phenomenal conversation about the Battle of Cressy and its importance to England and the Longbow and all sorts of mythology around war. We've also We've also got a great episode coming up about Japan, Shenzhou Abe, in its role in the nuclear North Korean conflict. We're also about to sit down and talk to the international Red Cross about how to make video games more humane and bring humanitarian law into the digital world. It's going to be interesting. Thank you so much for listening. If you like us, please hit us up on Facebook or at Facebook.com. forward slash war college podcast. We're also on Twitter at war underscore college. And if you like us,

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