Angry Planet - What will cause the next Holocaust?

Episode Date: December 9, 2015

The conditions necessary to allow genocide – to provide one group the psychological “permission” to kill another en masse – come together all too often, in Europe during World War II, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Cambodia. This week on War College, we try to understand what those conditions are, and whether climate change may be the trigger for the next great Holocaust.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. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. In a general way, climate change means that there's going to be migration from south and the north. Both in Eurasia, Africa, and in North America, the question is, how quickly we're going to act to slow it down.

The conditions necessary to allow genocide. To provide one group with the psychological permission to kill another in mass come together all too often. In Europe during World War II, more recently in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia. This week on War College, we try to understand what those conditions are and whether climate change may be the trigger for the next Holocaust. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I am Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. With us today is historian and author Timothy Snyder. Snyder's research focuses on recent European history and especially the Holocaust. His newest book is Black Earth, The Holocaust as History and Warning. Professor Snyder, Tim, thanks so much for joining us. Very glad I can.

So this book, along with Bloodlands, is a very careful examination of the conditions necessary for something like the Holocaust to happen. Can you describe what the conditions are? We usually think about the Holocaust as if it were a story, and that means we usually narrate it. We think about it in terms of people's memoirs, or we think about it in terms of a film that we might have seen, a Hollywood film we might have seen.

We think about it as having a kind of necessary narrative structure where things start out good, they get worse, and then they end in the most absolutely terrible kind of way. And I think we get carried along by those narratives in such a way that we don't actually see all the causes. So we, of course, do see the cause of anti-Semitism, political anti-Semitism. We see discrimination in Germany. We understand that Hitler mattered and so on.

But what we don't see, I think, is that for a Holocaust to happen, you need much more than people who are anti-Semitic. You need much more than authoritarian state. That's part of it. But even within that part, even within Hitler's mind, even within the ideology, which we all understand to some extent or another, you can see that other factors are necessary. Because what Hitler was about was not just making Germany an authoritarian state or a national state or an anti-Semitic state. What he was about was changing the planetary order. What he was

about was mobilizing our sense that we need more, that we want more, and that that's legitimate. His anti-Semitism actually was the notion that all notions of ethics that might restrain us from taking more are somehow from Jews, by Jews, and the service of Jews. And in practice, Hitler understood that in order to carry out something like a Holocaust, one had to go well beyond Germany and destroy other states. So even to the level of the ideology, it's clear that this thing that I call ecological panic, the desire for more and more, in the sense that that's legitimate, and then this thing that I call state destruction, moving beyond Germany or necessary.

In practice, that turns out to be completely right. In practice, there is no Holocaust to speak of in Germany while Hitler's in power before the war. the Holocaust is something which takes place beyond Germany during a war which has fought for resources in places where Germany ends up destroying other states. So ideology, ecological panic, and state destruction are the factors that I would mention. When you're talking about the scarce resources,

because that's something that really has a lot to do with today and hopefully we'll get to a little bit more of that later on. But did his fears have any sort of foundation in Germany at the time? This is the part that gets really tricky because the simplest way to run the argument would be this kind of Malthusian or mathematical way where you say, aha, there was objective scarcity and therefore people did the things they did. But in fact, societies aren't like that. Political systems aren't like that. People aren't like that. It's not that we rationally look at resources and make rational decisions.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that's just not how things work. What happens is that you have a combination of two things. You have certain real sources of scarcity, which were present in Germany plus a political interpretation. So were there real problems in Germany? Yes. I mean, especially if you compare it to say the United States now or Germany for that matter now, you had very reason to believe that international markets were not a reliable source of food. Reason number one is that during the blockade of Germany, during and after the First World War,

Great Britain, which at the time was the big champion of free markets, right? Great Britain actually blockaded Germany, which is the most fundamental violation of free markets that you could think of. And then, you know, after the workforce said, well, there's no reason to be concerned. Naturally, if you're Germany, you would be concerned that your food supplies are dependent upon another state, which happens to dominate sea lanes around the world. Second reason is that if your Germany, you would decide to feed yourself, you actually can't do it with the technology of the 1930s. The only way to do it would be to sacrifice a good deal of the industry that you have. And the industry that you have is what makes you a wealthy, prosperous country, and it's your future. So there is some basis for all of this.

What's important, though, is that Hitler takes those fears and anxieties, and he adds to them an ideology, which has two parts. The first part is to say that it's legitimate to be afraid about resources. There's no reason not to, and it's legitimate to want ever more. This is really important. The Hitler says is that our fears and our envy, these emotions are totally justified. and that anything which might restrain them is artificial and Jewish. That is, in fact, a big part of the content of his anti-Semitism. The other part of what Hitler says is that the way to ensure access to resources is to move beyond Germany

and to take more land. And that, of course, is not actually true. I mean, it would have made much more sense to rely on pesticides and boring things like hybridization of grains and irrigation than to take more land. But that's the logic that Hitler was actually. able to pass on. So it's a mixture. You have to take people's emotions, fears, you have to say those fears are justified, then you have to get them some mission where that emotion can be realized. And Hitler succeeded in doing that, which is what concerns me that someone else could succeed

in doing that as well. And that's interesting that you're talking about him turning away from kind of these agricultural and scientific solutions, because this is a time also when Fritz-Hobber had invented a new way to put nitrate into the soil. There's a lot of, there's the green revolution, going on at the same time, right? But he used kind of science, Hitler used science to his own ends in his ideology. Is that correct? The word science can mean a lot of different things. And when we say the word science, your listeners will have a lot of different associations. What Hitler said was science gives us a portrait of the world. Hitler was a Darwinist in the bad sense of the word. He took an extreme social Darwinian view, which was that

animals do nothing except seek after more resources. People are just like species of animals. We have no other purpose except to seek after more resources, land and food, above all. There's nothing else in life. That's all there really is. Any idea you have in your head about something besides that probably comes from a Jew. That's his extreme version of anti-Semitism. So for Hitler, science gives you a portrait.

It's a fixed portrait of natural struggle. Hitler says it's a scientific law. it's as sure as the law of gravity. That's right at the beginning of Mind Comp. Now, what that means is that science is not what other people might think it is, namely a field of experimentation, a mode of learning, a fashion of testing hypotheses, and have then the ability to change the relationship between people or between people and nature by way of technology. Hitler explicitly says, and this is really interesting, he explicitly says, science is not that. Or insofar as it is, it might create new technologies, but those two technologies

cannot change the fundamental relationship between people and the world. So there are these long, unread sections of MnKamp and his second book in which he specifically talks about, he specifically talks about nitrogen fertilizer, irrigation, hybridization of crops, all the things which, as you say, make up the green revolution. And he says, these things exist, but they can't change the relationship between people and land. That's really important. For one thing, for Hitler, it has to be true, because for Hitler's whole worldview to

work, we have to be in this, we have to be in this infinite and unending struggle for resources. But what's even more interesting than that is what Hitler says in the second book. And here I think we catch on to something which really has present resonance. Hitler is not saying exactly that these things don't work. What he's saying is they will never work enough for us to be satisfied. And what does he mean by satisfied? By satisfied, he doesn't just mean that you have enough food in your belly. He means that you feel yourself to have the highest standard of living in the world.

He makes the claim that Germans' understanding of consumer satisfaction, not from objective, but from subjective sources. And those subjective sources are their perception of how well Americans are living, right? And if Germans are measuring their happiness by way of how well Americans are living, that means they have to have as much technology as the Americans do, right? But also as much land. So at the end of the day, you still have to take more land. I think this is really important because what Hitler manages to do is that he confuses,

he gets life and lifestyle all mixed up together so that we think it's legitimate. It's a matter of, as it were, survival for us to go off and starve millions of other people in order to preserve our life. But what he means by life, actually, is the sense that we have the best lives in the world. That's what he thinks Germans deserve as the highest race. We would never quite put it this way, but I think when you read his work, this is some of the stuff which strikes a little bit close to home. And I would say a little bit too close to home, which is why we ignore it. So that actually, I mean, we do talk about fighting for the American way of life in this country.

I mean, I guess that's supposed to be high-minded ideals more than it is material goods, though, right? Well, I mean, what we mean when we say we're fighting for the American way of life is something that exceeds my competence. Okay. We generally, I think, have in mind, I think in the nice version of that, what we're saying is that we would like for other people to enjoy some of the better things about our way of life. But I think, yeah, in the dark version of that, we would be saying that it doesn't matter what happens in the rest of the world, provided that our way of life here in America persists. And that whole notion of fighting for a way of life is confused around the edges in a way which maybe we should be focused on. All right, so we're kind of talking about one of the parts of your book that fascinated me the most, which was the way the American dream and American Western novels and American pop culture kind of influenced Hitler.

And I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, and how it shaped his conception of, I'm going to say this word wrong. Leibens realm. Leibons realm? Okay. Tim probably says it better than I do. I'm sure. He probably says it, yeah. Let me start again in a slightly different place. Okay.

So much of getting history right is undoing the things that we think we know. And the things we think we know are generally the things that are implanted in our minds from, you know, national history education when we're too young to defend ourselves. So if we know anything about Hitler and America, what we were taught in school, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong in your cases, but what we were taught in school was that Hitler did not like the United States. He said it was too multicultural. that we were mongrelized racially, that we could never win the war because there were too many black people and too many Jews, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, he did say those things.

But he said them in 1942 after Germany was at war with us. Once Germany is at war with the United States, Hitler can, of course, no longer say, as he said before, that America is the coming world power, that the American people are a young and strong race, that the Americans have everything that Germany needs and so on. He obviously, once he's found, once he's fighting the British and the Soviets and the Americans, he can't say things like that out loud anymore. But if you go back to his actual work, mind conf, but especially the second book, it's clear that the United States for him is the model of how you build a land empire. The sea lanes are closed. You can't have another maritime empire.

Britain assures that. But he's very reassured by the existence of the United States of America because he sees the United States of America as, as he believes, Aryan peoples. Germans and Scandinavians, pushing across an empty continent, destroying whatever is in their way, wiping out native peoples, using slavery, and creating this unbelievably prosperous and flexible economy. And so his notion is that if the Americans, who he sees, I mean wrongly, of course, but who he sees as basically Germans, if the Americans can do it in North America, the Germans can repeat that same feat in Eastern Europe. And his metaphors about this leave no room for doubt.

He talks about the Volga, which is the river that runs through Russia. defining European Russia, that the Bulg will be our Mississippi. He says, you know, when he talks about invading Eastern Europe, he says, who will remember the Red Indians? When he talks about Ukraine, he makes references to all the grain that comes from Canada and so on and so forth. It's absolutely clear that what he also says, the history of the American West will repeat itself when Germany invades Eastern Europe. He's impressed by the fact that the Americans have been able to not only control a good deal of land, develop that land very quickly, and create the standard of living, which is unparalleled. And he believes that the future of Germany is going to have

to consist in matching that level of standard of living. So this thing which we call the American dream was also part of what Hitler was pursuing. In the conclusion of your book, you examine how the concepts of standard of living, Leaven's realm, and global warming could come together. Can you help us to understand what you mean by that? And are there specific places that are more vulnerable than others to this kind of conflict? So I'm going to I'm going to stress that whatever I say about the present and the future comes from a very specific place. It comes from this reanalysis of the Holocaust itself. If you think of the Holocaust just in terms of ideology, then you can tend to believe that it's just a matter of a kind of moral self-correction. If we behave well and

teach other people behave well, everything will be okay. What I'm convinced of is that that's not actually true that if other conditions like ecological panic or state destruction are present, then those kinds of ideologies, hitlerian ideologies, other kinds of exclusive destructive ideologies will find more purchase in society. So I'm looking at a mixture of those three factors as a source for the event itself. And once you do that, then the Holocaust leads to different understanding to the present and different projections towards the future. All I'm stressing is that we all basically already look at the Holocaust and draw conclusions

for the present and future, mine are different, not because I am such a genius about the present and future, but because my analysis, the Holocaust, is different. It has more factors in it. So looking at the present and the future, the first thing I would say is that we have had a whole series of genocides since the Holocaust. And if we have other factors in mind besides Hitlerian ideology, if we have state destruction and ecological panic in mind, then Darfur, for example, or Rwanda make a lot more sense. In both cases, you have this thing called ecological panic, and you also have some problems with the state, especially in the Sudan case. If we look at the contemporary world, in Syria, you have unfortunately, tragically, basically a textbook case of

genocide going on, which has everything to do with ecological panic and with state destruction. I mean, the story is a complicated one, but it involves centrally the fact that the we decided, in what I take to be quite a mistaken decision, we decided to dismantle the Iraqi state, which led to more than a million refugees to Syria. Then after that, beginning two or three years after that, there was a series of four years of drought, which basically ended this thing, which we have always called the Fertile Crescent, which led to another million, actually a million and a half refugees to the Syrian cities, now from the Syrian countryside. This sets up the situation, which is the Syrian Civil War, which is the refugee crisis. It creates the space for

ISIS, which is carrying out, sadly, this textbook genocide against the Yazidi. But it also creates a larger world phenomenon where refugees are pushing into Europe. European politics is moving to the right. And the European Union may be on the verge of some kind of, if not disintegration, some kind of reformation. So these processes can lead to pretty far-ranging consequences. We'll focus, of course, on the bad ideology of ISIS and will focus on the bad ideology of Assad, and that's perfectly true. All I'm claiming is that there are long-term processes that are also at work. Now, that's only one variant. That's the local variant. The variant that one would want to be very concerned about the international variant, where a country which is roughly comparable to Germany in 1930s,

a country which has the ability to think ahead and make plans, reacts to ecological panic Not locally, not on this own territory, but by thinking about what other territories it needs to control, by weakening or destroying states beyond its own. So one scenario for this would be Chinese investments in Africa. China, like Germany in 1930s, is a very impressive state. It has right now it has very impressive growth rates. But like Germany in 1930s, it cannot feed its own population from its own territory, at least not without sacrificing all of its industry. It's dependent on international markets. That is, as the Achilles heel, and the Chinese leadership is very aware of this.

It's short on food, not just on food. It's short on water as well. And so the Chinese, as far as one can tell, are thinking ahead. They're thinking about Siberia. They're investing in Africa. They're thinking about other places in Eastern Europe. And the scenario one has to be concerned about is one in which the Chinese state believes that it must have territory beyond this own borders and that other people, for example,

in Africa, believe that they should control those territories, too. So that's one scenario. I don't know exactly how it would look, but it's the kind of thing that one has to be concerned about in the future where these three things might come together once again, state destruction, ecological panic, but also some idea according to which it's legitimate to take territory from other people. We should point out that at the moment, China is using money rather than force to buy this territory. And sometimes they call it investment. and other times I think there's maybe more outright buying of things. That doesn't negate anything that you've just said. I just don't want people to get the idea that there are actually, you know,

Chinese armies trying to accumulate territory at the moment. And yeah, it's a good point to emphasize, and I want to emphasize that talking about China, I'm talking about a projection and a negative one of what might be happening in a couple decades from now, because of course the Chinese are, They're very tactful about how they do these things. They invest, they buy off rulers and so on. This could lead, however, to a situation in which local states are not functioning.

The only thing which is functioning is the Chinese, let's call it, investment project. And local peoples, whether they're Africans or in some scenarios, Russians might resist this, right? Thereby leading to conflict between the Chinese control of territory. Whether it's legal or not is going to be less important to people who believe that they're about to start. the Chinese control of territory and the desires of the majority populations that are living around this this zone. And one should also emphasize that the Chinese are paying more attention than ever before to alternative sources of energy. They've signed on to voluntary global warming emissions targets with the United States. So it's entirely possible that they could have the other, they could go the other way completely and help other, and help the world.

I mean, these are just projections. They're not at all certainties or condemnations. you talk about Africa and how fragile so many of the states there are. I mean, again, I guess I'm asking you to project. Do you think that we're at any sort of particular crisis point? I think it is a fraught time. I mean, it's one reason that I'm glad the book was published when it was. I mean, I've been working on the book for 10 years in various ways,

and it's a history book and it involved reading all these documents and all these languages. But I'm glad it came out now and not five years from now, because I do think we're at some kind of moment where we have to decide whether our response to these kinds of events is going to be primarily short-term political or whether it's going to be primarily structural or maybe even ecological. What do I mean by these kinds of events? Well, in a general way, climate change means that there's going to be migration from south and the north, both in Eurasia, Africa, and in North America, the question is how. quickly we're going to act to slow it down. As this happens, it will always come through certain political modalities, like, for example, the Syrian crisis. It will never be the case that people just pick up and go, right? There will always be a state collapse here, a civil war there, a terrorist

outbreak here. And we can just focus on those political things and say, well, if there were no terrorism, if there were no state collapse, if there were no bad leaders, if people wouldn't migrate. That, I think, is the wrong answer, because we can't stop those things from happening. the only thing that we can't actually influence a little bit is the climate. Also, there's the question of our own ideological way of handling this, which, you know, frankly, in the American presidential debates, as in, you know, European debates right now has not been admirable, and this is what I worry about. If the world is changing in a certain way, and it is, that means inevitably people from the

southern and come from the north. If we process this just in terms of, well, those people are outsiders, they're uneducated, we don't want them, blah, blah, blah, blah. If that's the only way we process it, then, then we are basically doomed. And so in that sense, I think it is kind of a turning point for us, because the states that are in question are not just the Latin American states or the states in the Near East or the states in North Africa, which might collapse.

In the long term, the states that are in question are also the European states, and for that matter, our state, right? Because if you create a world or if you just happen to live in a world, you don't have to say it's your own fault. But if you're living in a world where there's this kind of climate pressure for south and north migration, the states, even the prosperous, robust ones in the north, like the United States, like the States of the European Union, have to have a way to process that, which goes beyond just a kind of immediate ideological reflex

of exclusion. And, I mean, one of the reasons why it would be good, actually, to have some kind of consensus about global warming is not just because it would be true and wise and so on. It's that it would give people a feeling that you're doing something about this problem, because it is a problem. I mean, it's a problem for, first of all, for people in the South who are going to be suffering. But it's also a problem. for northern societies, you know, who can integrate, but have a legitimate concern of how much they can integrate and how fast. And one way to flip the whole discussion would be to say that having a policy about global warming

is a way to reassure ourselves that we have an answer or some kind of an answer to these things which day to day people find so emotional. Finally, just to sort of talk about science, do you think that like the Green Revolution, which sort of changed the food equation, at least for quite, quite a long time. Do you think that there's science out there that can help us to deal with climate change as it's happening now? Anything that can help ameliorate it? Anything that will help ameliorate it? I want to play out your first reference because it's really important. The Green Revolution means transformation of agricultural technologies. It's a package of

hybridization, fertilization, irrigation, which meant that Europeans, in the 1950s, no longer were worried about food shortages. They're worried about food surpluses. That is a very dramatic change. It's only really happened once in human history. Up until the second half of the 20th century, basically every human society ever was concerned about food shortages. Food was always a part of politics.

We are the only generations. Us in the United States, a couple generations of Europeans, for whom food could be separated from politics. That has never happened before in world history. new, it basically defines our entire lifestyle. It defines what we take for granted about about what's political and and what's not. So all I'm trying to say is that technological changes can be very fundamental and they can change society and politics so fast and so decisively that we don't even notice what it was like before. Or to put it a different way, the main

difference between us, you know, in Germans in the 1930s is not that we've learned from the Second World War. I think that's largely a nice story we tell about ourselves. The main difference is we just have enough food and we are not worried about needing more land. That is the main difference. It's really easy to be ethical when you're not concerned about shortages. The moment you're concerned about shortages, even people who think very well about themselves as individuals and as nations, fractures start to appear very, very quickly. And there are plenty of examples from recent American history, which make this very clear. Okay, that's all just as prologue, because what I want to suggest is that, of course, there are ways in which client, in which,

science could affect climate change. And if we allowed those things to happen, we could be looking at a very different world. I mean, the techniques, as I'm sure you know, I mean, it was meant to be a softball question. The techniques that we have are already more than sufficient, right? The problem is not the existence of the science. We have wind, we have solar, we have fusion where a little bit of investment could probably make a huge difference. We even have ways where we could deliberately plan to soak back carbon that we've already emitted. This could be done for a little bit of a very small percentage of GDP in the United States and around the world, it's just a matter of having the political will to do so. The question is whether we accept that we should do this and whether we do it

fast enough, because the one thing you can't lose, the one thing you can't gain back is time. And so my concern is always that if we let it go too far, then the science won't be good enough. And then we really are in a situation where ecological panic is actually justified. And that's a desperately bad situation to be in. So we do have the science. It would be very, it would be relatively easy. I mean, compared to something like a moon launch or whatever, it would be relatively easy to get this online. It was just a matter of accepting that this is something that, that we need to do and that has to happen fast. Why do you think we have such a hard time accepting it then? You mean, we Americans? Because pretty much everybody else accepts it. You know, I mean, like,

the Syrian refugees who are in Europe, you know, like they know perfectly well that they were desertified, right? Like people, people know that there has been a massive change in the way they, like, islands in the Pacific that are going under, you know, they are perfectly aware that climate has changed. And it's, it's, I mean, it's very strong, it is a good question because it's, the question is how we have managed to build, um, what kind of mental or psychological barriers we've built around ourselves that we don't notice Russian submarines are on their way to, uh, the North Pole so that we don't notice that there's no longer snow on. Kilimanjaro.

You know, I mean, these are like things that are basically obvious, right? And so the question is not why do people think there's climate change. The question is how, how Americans, some Americans anyway, because it is a minority, have persuaded themselves that this is not happening. And I don't, you know, I don't really know the answer. I mean, I think part of it has to do with the fact that when there's, when you have a stable way of making lots of money, and this is perfectly understandable, and I'm talking about fossil fuels, of course, you don't want to be challenged, right? I mean, when you have a stable,

when you have a stable sort of, for example, energy industry, why would that, why would you want that to be challenged? And so you tell a story about how, in fact, it doesn't have the costs, which everyone in the world actually knows. But the other part, and this gets us back to the book, the other part, which is really important, this gets us back to Hitler, is the existence in your first questions, the existence of science itself, right? Because what Hitler said was, sure, there's science, but it's not actually different from politics. It's really all the same thing. Science just gives a support to the world where you compete for stuff, right? Now, again, that hits a little bit too close to home in America, and it's something that we should think about, because we often

confuse science with ideas of the free market. We think that the market is some kind of science, the market's going to deliver everything good. The market delivers lots of good things, but it can't deliver every good thing. It can't deliver the conditions for its own existence, for example. It can't deliver an ecosphere in which markets can take place. You have to say, okay, science is not just a metaphor for something, for some society that you like. Science is actually an independent sphere of research experimentation hypothesis, which you have to support and only the government can really do it, right? And so you have to break out of whatever ideological hold you might happen to be under and say the government needs to support science, even if you're in favor of the

market, the government has to support science so that markets in the future can function well. You have to accept that, to put it a simpler way, that politics, and science are really two different things. Because the move the climate deniers make is they say, they basically say bah humbug. Scientists are just politicians under a different name. They're just, they wear white coats instead of cheap ties. And they're just bringing one political message instead of some other political message. They try to bring it all into a political argument. And that is deadly wrong. That's deadly wrong. That's a mistake that can literally kill us. In fact, it is killing us right now. And it does go back to Mein Kampf because this is Hitler tries to

politics and science together and say that no, people who try to tell you that science can change the world, people who try to tell you that science offers hope, those people are Jews, those people should not be listened to, right? They are out of the box, they are illegitimate. You have to listen to my message, and my message is that competition, struggle is the only thing which actually counts. So, you know, I don't know why. I can't answer your question. I don't understand the American society to answer your question perfectly. All I can tell you is that these are mistakes that one cannot afford to make. One cannot afford to say that science is just another form of politics

and that these guys in White Coast are just another lobby, like other lobbies. That's a basic fundamental and really risky mistake. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. I think that I would recommend your book to everyone just simply because it is an alternate way of looking at history, not just the Holocaust, but I think it goes beyond that. And I found it informative towards what's happening now. I think what you said towards the beginning of our conversation

about parts of your book breaking down stuff that we were taught in high school and kind of driving through those myths and misconceptions was one of the most fascinating and important parts of the book to me while I was reading it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the conversation. I'm really glad we could do it. Next time on War College. There is a general belief, at least amongst Islam,

state militants that if you're killed by a woman, you're not going to go to paradise. So this makes them particularly a threat.