Angry Planet - Spartans, Confederates, and the Cult of the Loser

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

State Houses across the country are filled with monuments to losers, traitors, and terrorists. General Robert E Lee and Benjamin Tillman are lauded alongside figures like George Washington. The reasons why are complicated, but they’re bound up in something called The Myth of the Lost Cause. If you’ve never heard of this or don’t understand why it’s so critical to understanding American history well, honey, you probably ain’t from the South.Here to help us understand what’s going on is Dr. Robert Thompson. Thompson is a historian working for Army University Press and the author of the forthcoming book Clear, Hold, and Destroy which is about the American war in Vietnam.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. Everyone wants to be like a Spartan warrior. It ignores the fact that they lost. It ignores the fact that they came from a very militarized society. It paints over all these bad things.

And everyone just focuses on how these 300 decided to hold. this one pass. But it rarely do they get people when they get into it note that they end up losing. It's almost, it's pretty much all for not. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time

will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with immunity, and when it is near to completion, if you talk about intervention. You don't get freedom of people.

Freedom has never state-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hello, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. State houses across the country are filled with monuments to losers, traders, and terrorists. General Robert E. Lee and Benjamin Tilbon are lauded alongside figures like George Washington. The reasons why are complicated, but they're bound up in something called the myth of the lost cause, or the lost cause myth.

If you've never heard of this or you don't understand why it's so critical to understanding American history, honey, you probably ain't from the South. Here to help us understand what's going on is Dr. Robert Thompson. Thompson is a historian

working for Army University Press and the author of the forthcoming book Clear, Hold, and Destroy, which is about the American War in Vietnam. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Well, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So in the Confederate context,

Can we get the really basic explanation of what the myth of the loss cause is? So before I can answer, as a government employee, I got to get out some boilerplate. The views expressed are those of myself and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army or the U.S. government. All right, with that all the way. So the loss cause, or be lost cause, there's quite a few of them. But in the American context, there's uppercase L, uppercase C, loss. cause. And that's this myth that comes out after the American Civil War. It comes out of a

defeated South trying to keep basically the same political apparatus, white supremacy, former slave owner is still wanting to retain power. And myths are created to say, of course the South was going to succumb to the larger union. We didn't have as many people. They ground us down. And it's way to say we didn't really lose, we just succumb to larger numbers. That's kind of in a nutshell. It really, when you say it like that, it seems so ridiculous. And I can't like, you are not taught this, like growing up in school in the South in America, you are taught a very specific version of those events. And being out of it for a few decades now, I would, if always, felt to me as if it's about attempting to retain some sort of honor after the fact. Do you think

that is part of it? Is that what this is about? It's trying to save face in some way? Yes. That's a big part of it, especially because all these myths try to make the failed Confederacy into something that, like, greater than it ever was. And they try to, people who buy into it are really the propagators of the lost cause. We're trying to create. something that never existed. They're trying to say everyone in the South fought for freedom, or they ignore the slavery part, or they mentioned the slavery parts. We were benevolent slave owners and people in bondage wanted us to succeed,

that kind of craziness. But they also have to deal with the fact that there was a lot of your average white southerners who didn't want to fight. There was forced conscription. There was a lot of desertions. And so the lost cause helps pave over that. we had all these volunteers or they went off to fight the damn Yankees, but it ignores that maybe in some places no one was readily joining said state army. It was forced conscription.

Again, a lot of desertions like Lee's army. I forget the exact number, but he was dealing with a lot of people just saying, nope, walking away. you know, it paves over these institutional failures of the Confederacy then and puts all the blame on somebody else. Oh, definitely. So how has this affected America's, like, culture and the way it views its history, do you think? The lost cause is a great example of the difference between history and then constructed memory. And so through the lost cause, you're able to, like, change how people, remember history.

And like we know maybe like the Union won X battle, but through the lost cause, the Confederacy didn't really lose it. Maybe we didn't win it, but we fought really hard and general was put on a great show and they dance around actually being defeated. And people over time have bought into that.

There's all these monuments at Confederate battlefield, well, actually not, there's all these Confederate monuments at Civil War battlefield fields that praise general so-and-so or, I know, this unit under, and then, okay, great, but they lost that. If you ever been to Gettysburg, every state that participate has a monument there, and all the Confederate ones completely ignore the issue that, yeah, you lost, and oh, yeah, you were fighting for slavery. None of that appears on any of it. It's the one for Virginia is a great example. It's this huge statue of Lee towering over his men and, like, in a godlike,

situation and they're like, what is this really about? And it's really just twisting history to create something that never existed. And I was actually at Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary. It was a weird thing. I was covering it. And it's the first time I've ever been there. But one thing that really struck me was the reenactors were mostly from the South. And it's not that there weren't Union battalions or whatever you'd properly call people who were having a good time. But the South, man, they were more enthusiastic and they talked more about their roots. They talked about their great-grandfathers or great-grandfathers who'd actually participated. Do you think that's, is that common?

Yeah, for decades now, probably longer than decades, but for at least for generations, let's put that way, since the end of the Civil War, we've seen a lot of movements to try to focus on what they say is like heritage. And we hear like heritage, not. hate and it's trying to say great grandpa so-and-so fought for the Confederacy. He didn't fight for slavery. He fought for freedom or he fought to defend his own home and that kind of stuff. And we still have in some states what they call Confederate Heritage Month, like Mississippi. It's really big in Mississippi. And it tries to honor these basically traitors in such a way that they can keep them as heroes and they ignore like slavery they ignore all the negatives and it keeps

this memory alive. Some people are like these were great people but then you can point out they own slaves or they fought for human enslavement or simply just committed the act of treason against the federal government. So for me from like my point of view like Confederate Heritage Month is like a really month-long celebration of all these loss cause, all the tangents of the loss cause. And a lot of people digest it because they don't want to think that maybe their ancestors fought for something terrible or that they were just simply traitors and losers. Yeah, I'm like calling it the cult of the loser. I've always thought it was a good way of thinking about it. And I think it's important to point out that this is, we're focusing on the Confederacy

right now, as I think in the American context, it's one of the most pernicious. But this is something that is not, that doesn't just happen in America. And one of the big examples that I can think of that we absolutely love are, is the, the Spartans, right? At Thermopyla, the 300 are, is a lost, is a lost cause myth. That's probably a great one. The idea that you have these 300 Spartans who fight valiantly against the mass hordes of Persians and then it, like, everyone wants to be like a Spartan.

warrior. It ignores the fact that they lost. It ignores the fact that they came from a very militarized society. It paints over all these bad things. And everyone just focuses on how these 300 decided to hold this one pass.

But it rarely do they get people when they get into it. Note that they end up losing. It's almost, it's pretty much all for nut. And these Spartans aren't like heroes in a way. You've got to put them in a larger context. I think you see the very same thing with the Confederacy. So it's the same kind of

idea as just different time, maybe some different nouns, but the same concept. And what about, how does this play out in place like Rhodesia? Because you've got that similar kind of thing there, too. Think of like Rhodesia, if you put in the context of the Cold War, you have, and in the Second World War, you have the rise of basically wars of decolonization. So, across Africa, Asia, you have efforts to expel any messages of the colonial regimes, kicking out the Dutch in Indonesia, the bridge just from about everywhere, the French from Vietnam. And so you also have the Soviet Union and then Red China to an extent where they promise to support all of these wars of national liberation. And so what makes that, this is going to get

more complicated because you have the United States saying it's fighting for freedom, but it's also more fearful of what it sees as monolithic communism. And so it's supporting these very racist white supremacist regimes, like the one in Rhodesia. Because it's more, the United States and a lot of Western European countries fear communism more. And so they're willing to look the other way that, oh, yeah, this is a dictatorship or essentially apartheid. We don't want the communists gaining any influence. but it's the same idea that like in Rhodesia that they fight a losing war. Rhodesia doesn't exist anymore.

So the war of now the war of national liberation was ultimately successful in Rhodesia. But yet supremacists hang on. Oh, the Rhodians fought so well or look how cool they looked in. They bind to that propaganda ignoring the fact that Rhodesia existed for what 15 some years really. Let's give it a little bit more credit. It lasts longer in the Confederacy. but still it's really, you know, short-lived in the grand scheme of things, but yet the white supremacist stuff is what people really latch on to.

And that's what keeps the memory of it alive, because you can take that imagery and use it some Confederate celebration, or you get neo-Nazis, maybe using the Rhodesian flag. It's all interchangeable because it all speaks to the same white supremacist, like, views. Dylan Roof famously was super into Rhodesia. and heterodeja patch on his jacket. So then this kind of connects to a question I have, which is,

what do you see is the real world consequences of keeping this kind of history alive? I think it speaks a lot to trying to keep ideas going. People will maybe quickly say all about heritage, but the real thing, it's not, maybe at the individual level, someone's really concerned about the fact that they had a relative who fought for the

Confederacy, and they think that for some reason that should be seen only in that context. But I think the larger movement is this white supremacist movement, and it doesn't really mind word. It's happy to waive, white supremacists are happy to wave a Confederate flag at a neo-Nazi rally. Confederates are happy to wave a Nazi flag at one of their rallies. And these images, these symbols, again, are like interchangeable. Any group can use them because they all know ultimately what it means. It means the same thing, white supremacy.

And there's enough probably, there's enough people that are willing, especially, you know, the age of the internet to disseminate this information. You can find people who are like minded. You can keep this stuff going. So maybe you can't wave a Nazi flag in Germany, but you can wave a Confederate one. And you say, and you send the very same message. I think that's signaling, that messaging keeps this stuff going. It's actually interesting just to talk about the Spartans again for just one second is the myth is actually also in some sense about Western supremacy then as well, that they fought back the barbarian people who weren't the same color and didn't have the same beliefs in freedom. And the Spartans slowed people down, slowed the Persians down enough to make all the difference.

That's the myth. And it's funny because it's the one I was taught without any blushing. And it's definitely right. That's a really important point is that it's this idea of the West verse, the barbarian hordes, that the purity of the West is being defended against people who want to destroy it. And that's, that is, if I remember correctly, that's the same thing I was probably taught when I was, like, in school, in high school, at least. And in high school, I learned the lost cause. I didn't know anything different.

It was told that they were defending freedom. They fought valiantly. They had better leadership, and the North just slowly beat him into submission. And it's the same thing you could say about the Spartans and the Persians. The Spartans fought really hard, but the Persians eventually just beat him into submission. They didn't really lose.

They just didn't win and dance around that stuff. But it serves the same purpose. It's trying to save enough face for it so that you can use it later, and enough people will not question, oh, wait, what happened to those Spartans? Like, what was the outcome of that war? I grew up mostly in Northern Virginia, but my dad was in the Army, so we moved around quite a bit. But I would call Northern Virginia home. Just asking because you're talking about the way you were taught.

And so I was just wondering where that was. And also, if I could ask, like, how long ago was that, that you're still being taught about the lost cause in school? probably I learned about like the American Civil War and it was in high school that would have been 2000 2001-ish I graduated in 2002 but I just remember because it seemed odd to me I think I was probably maybe a junior in high school and that's probably me when the first of my questioned what I was being taught because I was like wait but the Confederacy is so good why'd they lose so bad and no one really wanted to answer that and I'll I was like, okay, and that stuck with me. And then when I got to college and took more history and had a great advisor, I realized, oh, this is what they called the lost cause. That's when I finally got a name for it. How do you think, without going on like a tangent about high school textbooks and the monolithic power of Texas to determine what's taught in high school textbooks?

How do we teach Confederate history in American high schools? how do we fix this? How do we change this narrative? And how do we do so without alienating a huge part of this country? I think we have to not be worried about alienating. I think that's been a problem since the failure of reconstruction is this trying to get along and not make anyone feel bad about the past. I think we should be enough removed from it where people shouldn't be insulted if they learn that great-grandpa or great-grandpas fought for Alabama on the side of the Confederacy and guess what? Probably not the best thing to do. And I think when it comes to actually like teaching it, it should, terminology matters.

You have to stop giving the Confederacy more legitimacy and agency than it deserves. And it was never recognized by any foreign country. One of the last, tangents of the lost myths as the Vatican did. But that's not true. The Pope never gave them an audience. And it's okay. So literally no foreign recognition. So technically never a country.

It's really just a bunch of slave owners and rebellion against the federal government. And so I even, like when I talk about it with other people, I try to just call it the slavers rebellion. I don't call it the Confederacy or whatever because that's really what it is. is. It's slave owners fighting to keep their institution alive with hopes eventually spreading it more. And then thanks to the lost cause too, we only call the United States Army the Union. What's the U.S. Army? They're going up against a legitimate federal entity. And so I also try to remember that too. It's not Confederate versus Union. It's the slavers versus the United States Army or the United States Navy. So I think those words matter too. And I think if we teach it that way,

we can help legitimize the North, what it's doing, and then also put Confederacy back in the right context. That it's these states in rebellion in an effort to keep slavery alive. You're listening to Angry Planet. We're going to pause there for a break. Welcome back to Angry Planet. We are talking about Spartans, the Confederacy, and the cult of the loser. It's funny as we're talking about this, I feel like in popular culture, maybe the past 20 or 30 years, it's been played as silly. Like when someone calls it the War of Northern Aggression, we see that. And there's a certain amount of, that character is ridiculous.

And we mock that character. And I think that maybe hasn't worked. Yeah. Like the derision and the like allowing this to continue and for us to play it for laughs to a certain extent in pop culture, has maybe had an effect that we don't like. That's just an observation I had. Yeah, I imagine you'll probably still find someone who's calling it the War of Northern aggression seriously. Maybe you go to some museum somewhere and you hear someone say it. And they mean it like, that's how they learned. That's how they know it. They're being dead serious.

And I think it's, I don't know how you change that individual mindset. Maybe over time you can change the larger idea that I can't take, when someone says the War of Northern aggression, I just can't take it seriously because my brain immediately goes to Fort Sumter. I'm like, it didn't shoot itself. But yet, I don't know how to like get that into someone, Ted, did actually make me change their mind. I've learned that over time that I can argue with Neo-Confederates all day long

and you're not going to change their mind. mind. They're dead serious that their take on history is right. You're arguing religion with them. It's an article of faith. Right. And, yeah, and facts don't care about your feelings, unfortunately, as they say. So if we can broaden our focus here, you're writing a book on Vietnam. I am. Do you see some of the similar kind of thinking permeating the way Americans think about Vietnam, especially the Defense Department officials? So Vietnam is, as you could say, it's complicated like the American Civil War. It doesn't have as much of this, like, lost cause as religion.

But there's definitely this, like, this similarity to me a certain veteran is like, we were winning it when I was there in 1967 and we were winning it then. It kind of made me the same way as a soldier who maybe was at served under Lee in like 1862. We won at Chancellor'sville. So we were winning when I was there. okay but we don't win like the u.s loses in the end the confederacy lost in the end and there is definitely some officers army officers who had that shared that same idea that we were winning when we were doing this but then we started to lose if only we had done

this differently and then i think you if you read memoirs of just about any major U.S. official at the time. They're trying to dance around like their responsibility. I was doing this with the best interest and there's no like really guilt in it. It's just trying to explain away why stuff didn't work. I'm trying to make you think, oh, if only they had more time or only if this one thing was different or maybe we should be more sympathetic to them. They really didn't mean to broaden the war this way. There's also part of this that often has a betrayal in it that if it only wasn't for X, we would have won. And sometimes it's actually in their own leadership.

Like in Germany after World War I, there was the pernicious myth of what they called the stab in the back, which I have no idea how the hell you say that in German, but I'm sure it's very long. It's such an important part of the myth about World War I that it was the leadership that failed us, not the soldiers, not the military. And I just was wondering if that's prevalent in other lost causes. In the case of Vietnam, General William Westmoreland is like the scapegoat for a lot. Like he didn't fight the war correctly. He didn't know what he was doing. They paint him out like either to be just someone who's completely aloof or just essentially someone who's just trying to make everything worse on purpose. So he's blamed a lot.

And probably the past 10 to 20 years, there's been a lot of work to try to rehabilitate him. maybe not on, definitely not on the scale of people trying to rehabilitate like Irwin Rommel or any of those other like contemporary figures. But enough to say he knew what he was doing. He did his job and it didn't work. And then that's always critics always juxtaposed him to his, the next person who took over Macfee and that was Creighton Abrams. And they paint Creighton Abrams as like this guy who was going to win the war.

He only needed so, you only needed a little bit more. time. If only we had given him a couple extra years, we could have won. And if you like look at any of the primary sources or even the secondary stuff, you realize he was fighting the same war. He changed some of the words around, maybe a little bit more money went to different areas, but he was continuing the status quo that Westmoreland had established. So again, people like trying to change like using the um kind of change their memory trying to change using memory to change history do you feel like you see that going on to with iraq and afghanistan i think we're still really like in the grand scheme of things close to iraq and afghanistan we are one of them's almost

20 years old crazy but yeah i think what makes these ones out like maybe more so Afghanistan is that technically we're still there. It isn't, the wars aren't over. Iraq maybe is a little bit further along in that. But when we had, what, a couple of years ago with ISIS making lives like really difficult, then there was a lot of doubt, oh no, is this going to go the way of Vietnam finally? And I think there's probably some chatter. If we ever get a truce between Kabul and the Taliban, what's going to happen after that?

will it really become, we're going to get a repeat of South Vietnam? Is it going to collapse? So that's what I mean. I think we're too close because we're really, we're getting towards the end game, but it's not over yet. Sometimes it feels to me like in Afghanistan specifically, more so than Iraq, it was a very different situations. That it feels like we've built, now we've built in lost cause justifications into the continuation of the war. Sometimes it feels just like what you're saying about Westmoreland with Abrams. We're living in a world where those voices were listened to, and we're giving the generals a few more years. And we're buying into this lost cause myth in real time. Or do you think we're just still too close?

I still think we're too close, but you can definitely see some warning signs. I don't think any historian would say, oh, I think this is going to turn out spectacularly. I think from the get-go, everyone was a little worried, hey, we've done this kind of thing before. It's never ended well. And so I think the scenes of Vietnam were like dancing around people's heads. They're like, hey, we did, we tried this. We tried something really similar and it didn't work out. And so far, I think the solution to that has been like, let's do this longer.

Let's draw this out over like two decades and see if duration makes the difference. But it's going to, I think what happens in Afghanistan is going to be able to, that's certainly going to be different than what's happened in Iraq. Iraq, I think, has shown that, hey, it wasn't the most successful thing, but, at least Iraq's on its own feet, pretty much. Afghanistan, we're still on that. We're still trying to talk truce with a Taliban. Like, we didn't get rid of the Taliban. There's still a force to be reckoned with. They still hold a lot of sway across the country. So what's going to happen? Are they, you know, going to sign a peace deal and then within two, three years, overthrow the government? So I think, maybe some cautious optimism is warranted, but I think, again, a lot of historians are you like, hey, we've done this before. There's a lot of warning signs. So, you read up on Vietnam if you're not sure. So I have to, we have to ask. We have to talk about January 6th. When we saw a contingent of folks backing a president who lost Storm the Capitol,

I've been wanting to talk about this. I wanted to do a lost cause episode for a while. And then watching that, it really became more important to me to talk about. And watching that was a big part of why. Do you see echoes? Do you see the building of a new lost cause myth around President Trump? Yes. And I think with state of technology, especially like the Internet, it's a lot easier to create these myths or conspiracies.

You can find people who are like-minded more readily. you can share that information. Now people create memes and you can easily doctor like tweets. And so I think there's a lot more room now. There are a lot more tools at the disposal to propagate these myths. And I think January 6 really shows what happens when all these people like get together and start sharing these ideas that they're able to create a movement. They're able to create a mass of people with a similar objective.

of rather quickly. It didn't take decades or generations. It took a couple exchange of tweets, a couple emails to each other, some postings on some message boards. And here you got like basically malicious showing up, not legitimate militias. I have friends who would not like me using that term because these guys aren't legitimate,

but they think they are. They think they're doing something good. And that's probably where the myth comes in, that they're being righteous, that this is what people need them to do. That's interesting. I hadn't had someone put the finger on social media and our new modes of communication really being an accelerant to this kind of stuff. Because you're right. Usually this kind of thing takes generations to build up to. It takes, and sometimes like with the lost cause myth in the South, institutional support at the local level. And this was decentralized, happened online, and happened very quickly. What do you think there were repercussions of this are going to be? I think we might see more accountability on social media. I'm cautiously optimistic about that.

I'm more concerned about what happens at the highest levels in terms of how do we approach these illegitimate militias, these armed groups who are more than happy to claim to overthrow the government but are now showing signs that they're actually willing to fulfill that mission they've for themselves. And I know the United States has been very apprehensive to deal with these groups since the 90s that like let them fester on their own, whatever, keep eyes on them, but let's not like actually go in and try to dearm them or engage them physically. I think now we're at the precipice of what do we do? Like we ignore them for 30, 40 years and this is where we're at.

So we can't really ignore them anymore. So how do you basically take power away from these groups without starting some kind of larger, more violent insurrection? Right, because for the younger listeners, in the 90s, there were a couple of high profile, I'll call them failures, high profile failures of the American government to try to tamp down on militia movements. and it ended up being the fuel for conspiracy theory and reactionary movements going forward. So I think, yeah, and a hands-off approach has not worked well. I think the Bundy Ranch situation really sent a message to what you would call illegitimate militia movements that they could get away with stuff. I am curious, though, where's the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate militia?

So I come in on the side that the National Guard is the inheritors of this militia system, that they are state raised, they can serve at the federal level. They are governments recognize them. They are well trained. They are regulated. So to me, that they fulfill all the requirements set out in the Constitution. So for me, if I were to go tomorrow and say, I'm going to create my own militia. I'm going to get some guys who think like me. we're going to arm up and we're going to go buy some random configurations of camo and start parading around in front of a state capital. I would then be, in my eyes, more like a terrorist group than anything legitimate, that I'm not in any shape or form on the same level as a National Guard unit. That I'm playing militia. I'm playing National Guard. But it certainly doesn't stop them. It's amazing to me when I first saw.

I think people can't possibly have forgotten Timothy McVeigh and the destruction of the Murrah building right in Oklahoma City. Some people absolutely have forgotten. It's, yeah. Yeah, it's 94. It's long enough ago that, yeah. But it's, yeah, this has been deadly for a long time. And you had Timothy McVeigh, you had interestingly Ruby Ridge, which is actually, that's a good lost cause story, I think.

There's this memory. I can't remember the guy's name. Maybe you do, Robert? Randy Weaver. Randy Weaver. Okay. And the government went in because he was doing some nasty stuff and some, story, Matthew.

Wait, wait, I got a, I'm sorry. There's the, the, Ruby, these are all really interesting cases, I think. First of all, McVeigh had militia connections, but was more of the lone wolf kind of situation. The Weavers, and this is, again, this is part of why they have become, they were like the first martyred group, I think. The weavers were isolationists living on top of a mountain that had dealings with white supremacist groups. And were certainly like white supremacist curious and had part of that stuff was incorporated into their ideology. And he had, the feds had tried to turn him into an informant into that white supremacist group. And the way they had done that is by

basically tricking him into selling them modified shotguns. And then they used that as the justification for the raid on his home in which he, his wife, his dog, and several of his children died. And that is that, I would call that a high profile failure on the part of the federal government, which helped blossom into, it turned him into a right-wing martyr. And it is something as we go forward and we start dealing heavily with a heavy hand with these groups again, I am worried about creating more Randy Weaver's in the sense that I'm worried about people like Ashley Babbitt becoming martyrs to this cause. And I think that's why during the Bundy standoff, you saw the government remembered how Laco went, how Ruby Ridge went, and what the fallout in the myth of sphere of the right wing reactionary was afterwards and then had a more hands-off approach to them. But it sucks because I don't know if it feels like you can't, like no matter what you do,

you're screwed. You either give these people a martyr or you go hands off and you signal to them that it's okay to take over government buildings. And now here we are. I know it's more complicated and the groups are discreet and have different motives. But broadly we saw like right-wing reactionary storm the capital. I don't know. Sorry, I get very specific about my right-wing nut jobs in America. It's really helpful to me. I appreciate it.

And with that rant, I don't know where else we go in the conversation. And I think, I think Waco is interesting, too, because it was, I think that that was a, that was a separatist religious movement that happened to be carrying guns and was treated as a militia movement, but really was. No, it's all complicated. It's all very complicated and strange. And I think this lost cause stuff is going to, is going to be troublesome for us. I think we were seeing a new lost cause myth build around the president. I don't know where that's going, but I'm worried about it. So I will ask, I will ask Dr. Thompson, how do we teach history going forward about all of this stuff without turning it into fuel for reactionary forces in our culture? Some of the mindset that you have to tell it like it is, not sugarcoat it, not try to make both sides happy. I think it has to be stated exactly like it is and that you can't be like this side also did something similar. You can't play both sides. You have to follow the primary sources and show the chronology and show that this is where we started and this is how we got here. we bring in other historical examples to show that, hey, this isn't unique.

It's happened everywhere. It's happened in other places. And look at these similarities. This could happen again. Or this is what happens if you don't do something. You get this kind of regime. And so I think it needs to be taught like it is and with connections to this broader idea that if we take this stuff for granted or if we don't push back, we could lose. everything. Yeah, and I feel like that's, when we talk about truth and reconciliation and unity

in America right now, I think that's really important. We can't, we've spared people's feelings for a long time in this country. And I think we've seen the intense dangers of doing that now. And perhaps it's time that we stop and start treating each other like adults again. Absolutely. And I think if you want to go back to the American Civil War for a moment, like, Reconstruction fails because eventually both sides are like, hey, let's just get along. Let's ignore some of the bad stuff and whatnot. We'll turn our blind eye to various former Confederate states getting rid of their legitimate governments and reinstalling white supremacist politicians and basically recreating the old South into the new South.

I don't want to see that happen again because there's only so many times. reconstruction can fail that every time we try to move that bar up, something happens and we're back to trying to pick up the bar. I think maybe now would be a great time to try to fulfill all these more progressive ideas. I think the only way you can do that is by not just trying to ignore and get along. I think there are consequences. Parents teach their children that, hey, if you do this, there's a consequence for it. And I think we, like you said, we have to start treating everyone like adults. and that there are repercussions, that if you try to overthrow the legitimate United States government, this is what happens. Dr. Robert Thompson, thank you so much for coming on to the show and talking, walking us through this.

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Do you want to plug your book? It comes out in May. Is that correct? Sure, yeah. So my book is cleared hold and destroy. It's about pacification and the American War in Fouian province, which was a part of South Vietnam. comes out in May 2021. And it's with Oklahoma University Press. So you can find it there. It should also be on Amazon. Excellent.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, listeners. Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell is created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, please follow us on Twitter and on Facebook. We're at Angry Planet Pod pretty much everywhere. And we have a substack. angryplanet.substack.com or just angryplanetpod.com

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