Behind the Bastards - Part One: Kissinger

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Starting point is 00:02:23 Oh, Sophie, this plate of behind the bastards is so heavy as we walk through this hallway. Oh my gosh, is that David Anthony and Gareth Reynolds with a heavy plate of the dollop? Oh no, oh no, I'm losing control. Oh god, you guys are slipping too. How was that? That was so bad. I couldn't disagree more. That was the most organic, just real thing I think I've ever heard.

Starting point is 00:03:01 Natural. Yeah, like you're really good at this. The only thing I'm noticing is you didn't have plates, so I'm wondering how... I was wondering as I started it, are they going to join in or am I going to just have to commit fully to this? Now, that's something where if it's me, I just let you go and then let you hang inside for a long time. I was a dog in a yard that wanted to leave it, but was like, I'm not supposed to leave, so I was on the other end. I wanted to join. Oh gosh, well this is just a wonderful time.

Starting point is 00:03:34 Obviously, again, you are Dave Anthony, Gareth Reynolds, host of the dollop, the podcast that invented being funny about history on the Internet. Thank you so much for sitting down with us today. Thank you. We've always, for a long time, I've wanted to do something with you, so. And we've talked about this, but yeah. This has been like bouncing back and forth for a while, and it was just one of those things where it's like, well, when we finally do our six-part series on Henry Kissinger, it's going to be the worst thing we've ever had to do. Save it.

Starting point is 00:04:12 I'm a therapy session set up right afterwards. Dave married a therapist in preparation. That's good. Really putting in the deep work to make this series a success. So my working title for this, which they probably won't let us use, is Henry Kissinger, a big sack of donkey balls. What's wrong with that? Can we do that, Sophie? I'm perfectly fine with that.

Starting point is 00:04:36 What are you talking about? What do you guys know? Like, I kind of think maybe it's a good idea to start with, like, what's your Cliff's notes? We'll have you do it, Dave, because you're the one who reads things normally. I think that's the right order, by the way. What's your Cliff's notes of Kissinger? You know, Kissinger, the thing that obviously stands out is Vietnam and Cambodia, and that's just reprehensible beyond all words. He's really been a part of just so many horrific foreign policy decisions and had his... He's always getting in there.

Starting point is 00:05:11 He's always a part of the business. It really was. I don't know if he is now, but for a long time, he was always a guy who would come in and go, why don't you do the worst thing? Yeah. And that's the thing that's interesting and even a little bit difficult about talking about him. Because he's not one of these guys. He's not like, you can't say with him like you can without a Saddam Hussein, like, oh, he ordered, he started this war on this date, you know?

Starting point is 00:05:34 Or he ordered this man. I mean, you can, actually. But he's not like a... He's not on paper, supposed to be a warlord or an elected leader. The thing that he is good at doing is getting the ability to do stuff that warlords and dictators do by sitting in the back rooms with people who are the ones who on paper hold the power and convincing them to let him do stuff. And he's the best at that there's ever been. We've had a couple of figures on our podcast who I would relate to.

Starting point is 00:06:05 And I would say maybe Kissinger is like the war crimes forest gump. Where it's like, just kind of, you're like, oh yeah, he invented shit happens. I don't know he invented that phrase. That's incredibly... I mean, that's honestly a better title than the one I came up with. That is the perfect title. I mean, it obviously forest gump is blameless and Kissinger is not. But it does get at the fact that he's just like, he's just there.

Starting point is 00:06:35 He's just in every fucking photo of guys doing a war crime. It is baffling the number of things he's connected to. I should probably just start, stop selling it. But I do kind of want to talk about the fact that he is this kind of back room figure in a lot of the worst things that happened in the 20th century. Because we're going to spend episode one, by the time this episode's over, he's not in the White House. He's not running shit. This is an episode where we talk about like his early life and his ideological roots. Because that's what underpins all of the things that he does.

Starting point is 00:07:11 He's not a guy, people talk about like what Kissinger believes and Kissinger himself has written a bunch of books about what he believes. My opinion as an amateur guy studying this dude is that I don't think he believes things as much as he beliefs and ideas are weapons that he uses in order to get people to let him do horrible things. And he is the master of using beliefs and moving between different groups of people who on paper are ideologically opposed and getting them all to agree with whatever bullshit he wants to do. Because he's really good at talking about ideas like a fucking philosopher. Like that's his super power. They might just have trouble understanding him, I know I have. Sure, whatever, what did we agree to? Oh God.

Starting point is 00:07:52 I was going to ask Gareth before we get started here, is your German accent locked and loaded? I mean listen, as to the disgust of the German people, it is. That's fine, that's fine. I think we can all agree after the 20th century the Germans lost the right to be angry when people make fun of their accent. That's how I feel. It's like Texans, you know, everyone can do a Texan. Yeah, that's how I feel. I don't think I can.

Starting point is 00:08:19 I can make any accent sound kind of English and sort of Spanish at the same time. And yet can't do English. It's really just sort of this amazing ability to. See, whenever I do a non-American accent, it just drifts Russian at some point, like 100% of the time. Oh my God, well this is your time. Now you can shine with what's going on. I know, I know, I'm ready to just yuck it up over. Speaking of which, there's a number of roots of what's happening between Ukraine and Russia right now that you can tie back to Henry Kissinger.

Starting point is 00:08:51 Jesus Christ. I mean, that's a little bit less his, the area that he fucked around in, but he did some fucking around there. Like one of the things, we are spending six episodes talking about Henry Kissinger and we're leaving some shit out. Yeah, you have to. I mean, he's been around so many years. I mean, just the fact that he was still palling around with Hillary Clinton in the election. And you're like, what is that guy doing there? Don't you know he's bad?

Starting point is 00:09:14 And he's, the thing that is so interesting about Kissinger is that he does have this equal, he's equally good at talking to like people who would call themselves liberals and progressives as he is to like far right neocons. Like he's, I mean, I think you could say that part of what that reveals is that the ruling class in this country are all in agreement about things more often than they disagree about things. But part of it is just that like he is so charming. We will be talking a bit about Kissinger as a sex symbol, which is a thing that happens. And I am so sorry that we have to discuss it. No, I was hoping that he would say this because I've wanted, I've wanted to fuck him for so long. Like that's one of the main things.

Starting point is 00:09:54 He's hot. I call it Henry Fuckinger. I've always wanted to do that. Kiss is not enough for me. That's just the taste of what I'm after. Oh boy. We'll A-B test the forest gump and the fucking your title. We'll just see what plays best in Pau Kipsey.

Starting point is 00:10:13 So Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27th, 1923 in the city of Firth, Germany. The Kissingers were a Jewish family. And so given that this is Germany in the early 20s, you can tell we're not off to a great start already, right? This is not going to be a story that begins in a particularly pleasant place. He was born in a very chaotic world. The great year was like five years past when he comes on to the planet. Everything is falling apart in Germany and a lot of other places. The year he's born, Primo de Rivera seized power as the dictator of Spain.

Starting point is 00:10:46 Mustafa Kemal took power in Turkey. The Bulgarian prime minister was assassinated in a coup. It was a troubling time to be a baby. But Heinz's mother and father had some reasons for optimism. While Firth was not an attractive city, in fact, one contemporary described it as stifling in its narrow dreariness, our ungardened city, city of soot. It's a city. It's a city.

Starting point is 00:11:10 It's a working class factory town. But because of that, and this is the period in which the working class is a lot more left-wing than folks tend to give it credit for being today, it's like a haven for Democrats. Not like our Democrats, but people who support democracy as opposed to want to go back to having a Kaiser. So Firth is... Who wouldn't want to go back to having a Kaiser? He was so awesome.

Starting point is 00:11:32 Yeah, and it worked so good. Yeah, I want to have a king who gets us into World War I and wax off about his mom's hands. That sounds great again. Well, now that I know what we're talking about, let's dance. I'm in. I want a Kaiser. So Firth is, in some ways you could see it, its reputation in Germany is being kind of like Portland today.

Starting point is 00:11:56 It's a very left-wing town. It's seen as a haven for socialists. But it's also kind of like Selma, Alabama during the Civil Rights era. Because Firth has a very large Jewish population. And the period in the late 1800s is when a lot of... There's essentially apartheid against Jewish people in Germany for a long time. So Firth is the city that has Germany's first Jewish lawyer. And it has a bunch of their other first Jewish exes, person who does this job,

Starting point is 00:12:21 because it's this very progressive city with a very integrated Jewish community. So it's this mix of... The Nazis aren't going to like this town, right? Like Portland. Yeah, like Portland. Yeah, it's got some similarities between a couple of things. So Heinz's parents, Paula and Lewis, had grown up in Imperial Germany, where Jews were restricted from holding certain jobs,

Starting point is 00:12:42 going to certain schools, living in certain homes. And this had ended by the time the Kaiser had. So Lewis Kissinger, Henry's dad, came of age in a period in which a Jewish boy could actually build a professional life for the first time in mainstream German society. He was a member of the first and almost the last generation that this would be true of. Why? What happens? Oh, Dave, we may need to do a separate podcast series. I've never read any German history.

Starting point is 00:13:08 I'm kind of so excited. So he starts work, Lewis, as a teacher in a secular private school when he's 18, and he holds the job for 14 years. And he was a very patriotic person. He's also an orthodox Jew, so he's very religious, but he considers himself a German first and foremost. And his family is very patriotic. His brother fights in World War I, so does his wife's dad.

Starting point is 00:13:32 Two of his cousins die fighting for the Kaiser. And when the war ends in German defeat, you know, there's all these rumors spread throughout the far right that the nation's been stabbed in the back by an alliance of Jewish bogeymen. Heinz, or sorry, Lewis, kind of, he sees this as happening, but he doesn't think that it's ever going to, like, take hold. Henry would later recall that his father would regularly say, we live in an age of tolerance, so his dad is not right.

Starting point is 00:14:00 I'm sorry, are you talking about America in 2022, or are you talking about Germany? Yeah, we are talking about this on the day that Texas just announced a fun new law. Yeah, this is like, you know, Henry's wrong about a lot of stuff. His father is also wrong, but for a much sadder reason. Sounds like there is a psychic gene in the family. I see us being tolerant for a generation. Germany will be a watchword for tolerance.

Starting point is 00:14:26 We will be a bastion for all types. Poor buddy. Yeah, so it's interesting because, like, the Zionist movement is rising in this time, and Kissinger's family rejects this whole heartedly because they're so German, right? Like, they don't want to ever leave. So, obviously, the Nazi party rises consistently through Henry's childhood. Firth was initially safe from this just a few months after Heinz is born in September of 23. The Nazis and other far-right organizations hold a German day in Nuremberg.

Starting point is 00:14:59 Several caravans of them pass through Firth, sort of like Nazis do today in a lot of places. And, you know, they were looking for a fight when they drove through. They went through Firth because it's the town where you can get a fight, and they got one. This is like, right after Henry is born, a mob of brown shirts are assaulted by a hundred strong crowds screaming, kill them, and down with Hitler, which is pretty rad. Okay, let's end the story there. I love it. It's a great ending. And that's the tale of Henry Kissinger, a kid who was a baby when some dudes did some rad stuff. All right.

Starting point is 00:15:33 So Firth was integrated enough that Heinz initially attended a public school with Christian classmates, which was not common for Jewish kids in this time. Yeah, he's like going to school with other kids who are not Jewish. Eventually his dad puts him in a private school, but that's also an integrated private school. So while his education is secular, his family's very strict orthodox. He attended Hebrew school, which he hated. I found a quote from another Jewish guy who grew up in Firth at the same time, that gives an idea as to why Henry was not a big fan of his early religious education.

Starting point is 00:16:05 Quote, Religion was a study and not a pleasant one, a lesson taught soulessly by a soulless old man. He thrashed formulas into us, antiquated Hebrew prayers that we translated mechanically without any actual knowledge of the language. What he taught was paltry, dead, mummified. And that, I think, is broadly in line with how Henry feels, because he doesn't grow up very religious. So Henry is a little kid. He does a lot of religion stuff.

Starting point is 00:16:32 But as he grows older, he rejects his father's passion for faith and his dad's interests in classical music and theater. Instead, Henry Kissinger falls in love with soccer. He is a huge soccer head. What the fuck is happening? I know, right? Oh, wow. Firth has a locally renowned team.

Starting point is 00:16:53 They're one of the best teams in Germany. And so their kids' teams, which are feeders into this whatever team, are very competitive too. Henry was playing in a youth league when he's six years old. And he later recalled, quote, I wasn't really very good, though I took the game seriously. But now what about soccer? We should just talk about that. Oh, sorry, never mind.

Starting point is 00:17:13 So his real prowess early on was in strategy. As this quote from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, a book named Kissinger, like the guy, makes clear, though no great athlete, Heinz Kissinger was already a shrewd tactician, devising for his team, a system that, as it turns out, is the way the Italians play soccer. The system was to drive the other team nuts by not letting them score, by keeping so many people back as defenders.

Starting point is 00:17:36 It's very hard to score when 10 players are lined up in front of the goal. So immediately, Henry Kissinger as a kid is like, you know what will help us win and also make this game no fun at all? Yeah, we need to poison their water. Henry, what are you talking about? We must fire bombs their homes. We know what to do. Set dynamite under their keeper.

Starting point is 00:17:55 No, we are six, but we will pock the bus. There will be no joy in soccer. Remove the keeper's hands. He is as a six-year-old doing the soccer equivalent of carpet bombing. So he gets so into soccer that he starts to neglect his studies, and his father actually bans him from playing for a while. The older he gets, Henry has more and more conflicts with his dad, a thing that no one else has ever experienced.

Starting point is 00:18:24 And yeah, he would regularly, after fighting with his father, bicycle over to the home of a friend who later recalled, he liked being with us. It seems to me he had a problem with his father. If I'm not mistaken, he was afraid of him because he was a very pedantic man. His father was always checking Heinz's homework and kept a close watch on him. Heinz told me more than once that he couldn't discuss anything with his father, especially not girls.

Starting point is 00:18:45 So his dad's not like hitting him or anything. He's just like really, really annoying to Henry. And just pay attention to your studies beyond anything else. I think I like this girl. She's not going to the same school. Focus, Henry. Focus. Well, he's clearly a dick who's like, you can't be a professional soccer player at eight.

Starting point is 00:19:06 You have to go to school. He's clearly an asshole, dad. Yeah, I mean, he's definitely the villain of the story. No doubt. So Henry is magnetic to women from a, well girls at this point, from a very young age. What the fuck is happening? I know. It's really weird. It's weird.

Starting point is 00:19:23 And this is, the quotes about girls really liking him at this age come from his father. But like, this also happens when he's in his forties and the secretary of state. So I'm going to say his father's probably telling the truth. I mean, at no point have I seen any version of Henry Kissinger. We're like, man, I mean, that is hot. It is weird. That got memory hold. Because there were New York Times stories about how much women like Henry Kissinger. Because he looks like a lump of clay you could mold into anything.

Starting point is 00:19:51 Potentially. He never looked good. No, yeah, no, no. But it's weird. I mean, yeah, he's the gut like, yeah. We'll talk about some of the things he said about sexuality later. I know you're all getting real excited for that episode. Yeah. That's getting worse than Cambodia.

Starting point is 00:20:13 At one point, one of his friends was actually ordered not to hang out with him because he had, quote, earned a reputation as a skirt chaser. And this is like when he's nine. Wow. Early. Little Henry come rocket Kissinger. First time I sex was nine. So, you know, like at this point, he's rebelling against the family religion.

Starting point is 00:20:38 He's hanging out with girls. He's playing a hell of a lot of soccer, which seems like a decent childhood. But obviously, you know, the Nazis. So in the mid twenties, the German nation goes on strike against some shit. France was doing Versailles stuff. We don't need to get into it. Inflation goes crazy, right? This is the wheelbarrows full of cash time.

Starting point is 00:20:56 This hurts the Kissinger family badly because if you're like a, if you're a private laborer, if you're working for a private company, you can generally like strike and organize to get your salary adjusted to like deal with inflation somewhat like it's still bad, but it's less bad. If you're a public servant, you don't get shit. The salary stays the same while inflation jumps up. So this is really a disaster for the Kissinger family. And of course, economic trouble coincides with a constant acceleration of far

Starting point is 00:21:22 right violence. Later as an adult Kissinger would note without a motion that he was somewhat regularly chased through the streets and beaten up by Nazi thugs as a child. That's tough. Yeah, that's tough. No punch lines. No, no punch lines, but there is something weird about that because he's talked about this a few times, but every time he talks about this, it is so that he can

Starting point is 00:21:44 emphatically state that this part of his life had no impact on him. Yeah, it's really weird. It's very strange. The literal impact of fists had no impact upon him. Yeah. In 1958, he declared, quote, my life and first seems to have passed without leaving any deeper impressions. You don't get to say that, by the way.

Starting point is 00:22:04 I feel like you don't. I feel like you don't. I feel like I said that to a shrink once about my parents' divorce and then wept. Yeah. It didn't do anything. It didn't do anything. I mean, what's this fluid coming out of me? Yeah, in 1974, when discussing the times he was beaten in the streets by Nazis, he

Starting point is 00:22:21 insisted to a reporter, quote, that part of my childhood was not a key to anything. I was not consciously unhappy. I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not that serious. It is fashionable now to explain everything psychoanalytically, but let me tell you, the persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life, which is really interesting. Right? What the fuck?

Starting point is 00:22:42 I know, right? I'm sure the reporter's like, I'm ready to ask follow-ups whenever he stops talking. Anyway, you're not supposed to remember before 10. Anyway. I went numb. That's how I can kill. I went numb at nine. I don't feel anything.

Starting point is 00:22:59 It is. You know, I got assaulted by a Nazi when I was 33 and it left a mark. Any time, just growing up in that environment without being assaulted is going to leave psychological damage. If your parents had kept you completely safe from street violence, it couldn't not. It's like, Henry, this is the only time I'm going to speak sympathetically to you, but it's fine if being beaten by Nazis is a child left a mark on you. It's the only time you want to Matt Damon him with your Robin Williams arm.

Starting point is 00:23:32 Yeah. It's okay, man. It's okay, buddy. It happened. It's interesting. The ways he explains why this didn't leave any mark on him are very interesting. I want to quote from Henry Kissinger in 2004 now. I experienced the impact of Nazism and it was very unpleasant, but it did not interfere

Starting point is 00:23:51 in my friendship with Jewish people of my age so that I did not find it traumatic. I have resisted the psychiatric explanations which argue that I developed a passion for order over justice and that I translated it into profound interpretations of the international system. I wasn't concerned with the international system. I was concerned with the standing of the football team of the town in which I lived. You can't do both. You can't pay attention to this soccer.

Starting point is 00:24:14 Obviously. No one thinks, Henry, that as an eight-year-old you were like, well, this is going to impact the way that I believe state power should be used when I'm secretary of state in several decades. If you have a car accident as a kid, you're not thinking, well, this is going to make me unable to let other people touch me when I'm 33. I'll hate freeway merging. Obviously, man.

Starting point is 00:24:41 I don't know. There's a degree to which, in terms of this is the period in which you can be sympathetic to him, I do think there's probably something to be said that if you have this childhood, maybe you don't want to give the Nazis anything. Even this left an impact on me, right? Because like, fuck them. I don't want to say that it had an influence on me, which I get. No.

Starting point is 00:25:01 Having grown up in a traumatic childhood, you can shut it down and tell yourself that you're fine. The way he survived it was to shut his emotions down a little bit and tell himself that he was fine. Actually, it is, by far, probably the most traumatic thing there, and created a fucking monster because he didn't get any psychological help. I'm a monster, naturally. It is not nature versus nurture.

Starting point is 00:25:32 I would have killed just as many people if it weren't for the Nazis. I would have been a despicable piece of shit either way. Don't judge my family. So as the 20s roll to an end, the political situation in the Weimar Republic gets correspondingly more dire. In 1925, during a Nazi rally in Firth, Hitler himself had called it the Citadel of the Jews. The local response at that point in 25 is overwhelmingly negative, and in 1927, only 200 people in Firth were members of the Nazi party.

Starting point is 00:26:04 Hitler visited the city again in 1928 to little effect. The party just got 6.6% of the vote in local elections that year. But the Great Depression rescues the Nazis' flagging poll numbers. As Firth's economy collapses, people grow more willing to listen to the fascists. In the 1930 elections, Nazis surged from 2.6% of the vote nationwide to 18.3%. In Firth, they won 23.6% of the vote, which is four times better than they'd done two years earlier, and very frightening for a lot of relevant reasons to today. Police electoral successes continue to pace the next year, and by 1933, more than 22,000

Starting point is 00:26:44 furthers were Nazi voters. I want to quote from Nile Ferguson's book again. On April 9, 1932, 15 SA men were set upon by Iron Front members as they left the pro-Nazi yellow lion pub. Two months later, Nazi supporter Fritz Reingruber was beaten up for being a swastikist. The same fate befell another Nazi caught selling the NSDAP newspaper, the Volka-Schwebeo-Bakter. The police watched helplessly on the evening of July 30 as a mob threw potatoes and stones at a Nazi motorcade going from the Firth Airport to the Nuremberg Stadium.

Starting point is 00:27:13 The car carrying Hitler himself was among the vehicles. But just a year after Hitler's car gets pelted after the Nazis begin to consolidate power when Hitler's the chancellor, the mood is very different. On March 3, there's another torch lit parade by the Nazis through Firth, and on the evening of March 9, a crowd of between 10,000 and 12,000 people gathers outside one of the bars there to watch the raising of the red Nazi flag. So, you know, it gets bad pretty fast. Can I just flag the person who brought the potatoes to the rock throwing event?

Starting point is 00:27:46 Yeah! I feel like he turned first. Yeah. Oh, we're doing rocks! Oh! Oh! That was a drawing of a rock! Those looked like potatoes, Al!

Starting point is 00:27:57 Good lord! You know what? I'm gonna say it right now. If he brought rocks, he might have killed Hitler. We could have avoided it. That's the guy! That's the guy! For want of a rock World War II happens.

Starting point is 00:28:11 Oh, did you guys see my potato hit that car? It really smushed it! It looked mashed! I do love the idea that he also boiled it before. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't want to look weird. So Louis Kissinger lost his job teaching once the Nazis came to power. Henry, again, who'd never gotten along with his dad, watches his father collapse into

Starting point is 00:28:38 what biographer Thomas Allen Schwartz describes as a quote, state of immobility and psychological depression. Louis withdrew into his study, according to Henry's brother Walter, while the world outside veered closer to nightmare. In his book, Henry Kissinger and American Power, Schwartz writes, Kissinger and his brother saw the progressive segregation, isolation, and humiliation the Jews of Firth experienced. Even their attempt to watch soccer games came with the risk of their being beaten by young Nazi thugs.

Starting point is 00:29:05 The world of Heinz's childhood rapidly collapsed, and his parents and the older generation of Firth's Jews could not protect their young from the hatred around them. After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Kissinger's mother began to look for a way to leave Germany. A cousin in the United States was willing to provide the financial support that would allow the Kissinger's to immigrate. In August of 1938, after a last visit with Paula's elderly parents in Lüterschausen, where Heinz saw his father cry for the first time, the family headed to New York.

Starting point is 00:29:33 Only three months later, during Kristallnacht, the synagogue and Firth, like hundreds of others throughout Germany, burned to the ground in a night of orchestrated violence. Three months? Yeah, I mean, that is crazy. When Henry leaves Firth, there are 2,000 Jews in the Jewish community. At the end of World War II, there are 40. Oh my God. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:53 Three months is so... I mean, that is... Barely. I mean, really. Barely. That's like... Yeah. They stay as late as they possibly can. Right, yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:02 At least 13 members of Kissinger's family would perish in the Holocaust, obviously, being what it is. I don't know that you can... It's not super easy to get exact numbers, but his family is as devastated as you would expect of a German Jewish family. He does acknowledge, for the first time he admits that some part of this had an influence on him. He was moving away from Germany and going across the world to the United States. He says, and this is, I think, him being somewhat honest, that the deepest impact of all this

Starting point is 00:30:32 was, quote, all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed. Many of the people that one had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities. People will say, we'll talk about this later. He's very much an order obsessed guy. Like, okay, yeah, I get it. I get where that came from, you know? Right.

Starting point is 00:30:54 Yeah. I mean, that's very common for that happen in Chile and other places where it all falls apart into authoritarianism. There's a lot of people who are like, I just want it to be the same. Yeah. Well, yeah. You hear that all the time here, too. I mean, not like that, obviously, it was far more dire.

Starting point is 00:31:12 But there are a lot of people I know who keep saying that shit here, who keep being like, I just want it to go back to normal and you're just like, that shit has fucking sailed. That is not, you know. Yeah. It never does. It never can. But we all do it. Like, even the kind of like obsession with 90s nostalgia is evidence of that.

Starting point is 00:31:30 And not because the 90s were like a perfect time, but because like, yeah, you weren't aware of how fucked, like, like Henry, like your dad hadn't collapsed into like an unable to handle himself. You're just like, let this get too aggressive and not like, oh my God, we don't have money. Yeah. You went from, oh my gosh, you know, the OJ Simpson trial, what a mess to, well, now a plague has killed a million people. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:55 Right. Oh my God. It's very better. Give me that time capsule. Yeah. It's so funny, the parallels, because I'm, I literally am writing a doll up right now and the guy turns into an authoritarian and his dad shut himself in his house and isolated. It's so weird how these things.

Starting point is 00:32:17 I mean, shit, if you, I mean, just to continue off of that, Dave, Hitler's dad dies when he's a little kid. Yeah. Pludges the family finances and situation and insecurity and chaos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's when, when something that seemed stable from your early childhood collapses, perhaps

Starting point is 00:32:35 it hasn't influenced. Oh my God. Yes, maybe. Despite what Kissinger said. Despite what Kissinger said. But you know what Henry Kissinger loves, the products and services that support this podcast. Oh God, Robert, no. Well, I look, Henry is one of the few VIPs on Island where you can hunt children.

Starting point is 00:32:57 Anytime he wants, he gets a free three bedroom apartment on the child hunting Island. Sophie that knows. Yeah. Because for some fucking reason he is still alive. Yes. Well, let's be honest here, this is essentially as eulogy because when we finish this podcast and it's published Kissinger should die. It's possible I'm planning a dark occult ritual using my own blood and a candle I bought in

Starting point is 00:33:26 Mexico to deal. I mean, I'm not going to say I'm not doing it, you know, it's a voodoo doll podcast. Anyway, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Next season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

Starting point is 00:34:07 In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Starting point is 00:34:33 Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

Starting point is 00:35:04 My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

Starting point is 00:35:36 podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

Starting point is 00:36:13 that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Have you guys gone to the island where you can hunt little kids for sports?

Starting point is 00:36:49 Yes, it's wonderful. It's amazing. It's also fresh. Didn't expect it to be that fresh. So good. So Kissinger today has idyllic recollections of his early years in the United States. He often talks about walking down the streets of his new neighborhood, seeing a group of boys walking towards him, and crossing the street because he's, you know, he's afraid

Starting point is 00:37:17 he's going to get beaten. And then he would realize like, oh, that doesn't happen here, which obviously it did in other parts of the US. I can beat them. I should start beating those boys. Yeah. They're just wearing brown shirts because they like brown. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:31 Henry, this is a country where some people who wear brown aren't Nazis. Some of them are. Some of them are, Henry. Different did not mean easy, though. The Kissinger spent their first years in a crowded Bronx apartment living with family. Lewis got sick and even more depressed. Paula had to take control of the family and handle shit. He became a caterer and started a business that became the family's lifeline.

Starting point is 00:37:52 The neighborhood they lived in was dominated by Orthodox Jewish families with a familiar background. A lot of them were from other parts of Germany. And so the Kissinger's benefited from the help of several community organizations and getting back on their feet. He benefits a lot from the fact that, you know, there's not really a government support network, but the other Jewish refugees who have come over from Europe have built support networks to make it easier for new folks coming in.

Starting point is 00:38:18 Henry's teen years were a mix of school and synagogue. He failed his first driving test, but excelled at soccer. And he grew to admire many aspects of his new home, including, quote, American technology, the American tempo of work and American freedom, which I might say is in direct opposition to the American tempo of work, but whatever. Kissinger was frustrated, though, by the casual approach to life that he saw in his new peers. He thought they were superficial.

Starting point is 00:38:44 He wrote at the time that, quote, no youth my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with, which, well, yeah, okay, Henry. All right, Hank. Fair. I like if you come over from Nazi Germany and you're like, people here seem carefree and shallow. And your school is like, yeah, and your schooling was basically like some old dude being like, you didn't read these right, you know, like you're going to be like, geez, these guys

Starting point is 00:39:08 are really not focused on what matters. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to be too critical, but New York can use a little bit of Nazism. You know what I mean? It's a little loose. Good lord. So because of all of this, this is why one of his biographers, Schwartz, describes young

Starting point is 00:39:25 Henry as socially inept. He's not great at talking to, he's not great at dealing with his new peers. He did start dating again, though, first a girl who was a refugee from nearby Nuremberg, but most of his focus was on schoolwork and soccer. Kissinger graduated George Washington High School and started at the City College of New York. He took classes at night so he could work during the day at a brush cleaning factory some of his cousins owned.

Starting point is 00:39:49 These brushes are filthy, boys. Keep going. Let's do dirty shit. It's the most amazing, like old-timey job ever. It's basically like all I can picture is just like the jobs are either like pressing sheets or washing brushes. These brushes are not going to clean themselves, gentlemen. How many times do I have to tell you?

Starting point is 00:40:10 And the corollary is some mom being like, Billy, you didn't take your sister's brushes to the cleaning shop, what are you going to do now? It's very funny. Everything old-timey is funny. People are going to think this in the future about, I don't know, having water. So at this point, Henry's ambition in life was to get, quote, a nice job likely in accounting. One biographer noted, quote, nothing that happened to Kissinger during those years encouraged him to read more widely.

Starting point is 00:40:42 His historical interests were as underdeveloped when he was 20 as when he arrived in New York as a boy of 15, which is the first normal thing about him, that like, yeah, dude, you know, whatever, like he's a kid, yeah. We're about to get into the studio 54 years, I feel like. Yes. So World War II happens, starts for the United States at least. It started elsewhere a bit earlier. But for the U.S. it's structure- All right, we'll do it.

Starting point is 00:41:07 Yeah. When Henry is 21, he did not initially feel called to volunteer for service. But when he got his draft notice in 1943, he complied and joined the roughly 16 million Americans who became soldiers during this period. And if it weren't for this, Henry Kissinger probably never would have been a figure of historical importance. Again, he just kind of wanted to be an accountant. But being drafted successfully disrupted his plans for a quiet, boring life and thrust

Starting point is 00:41:33 him into the world. That says it all. Yeah. It's not. Maybe don't draft this guy. Right. Yeah. Don't draft with me.

Starting point is 00:41:43 Just write counterfeits. I could be like, you don't, I did not actually see your Venmod this year. So I tried to read the process. Yeah. There's a future where he just has really strong opinions on W-2s. Yeah. Exactly. We missed that one.

Starting point is 00:41:57 You know, you put yourself as 1099, but I feel like it was actually more like W-4. Or he does like a Bernie Madoff thing. And either way, it's a much better future than the one we got. Yeah. We'll take the Madoff ending for him for sure. Yeah. Fine. So we have letters that Henry sent to his brother Walter during training.

Starting point is 00:42:16 He purported to like the, quote, middle Americans he met there, but warned his sibling, don't become too friendly with the scum you invariably meet there. Well, hello. Hello. So he did pick up a little something from the Nazis. He did. He's a little bit, right? He also advised against having sex with the, quote, filthy syphilis-infected camp followers,

Starting point is 00:42:39 which is too specific to have been random. I think Henry Kissinger had a bad experience with a camp follower. Everyone at camp has syphilis. I don't know why every girl I fucked had syphilis. I fucked one girl got syphilis. Every one of them has it. I am patient zero of the syphilis epidemic. That's right.

Starting point is 00:43:07 That's why it's so real surrounded by counselors. So the army administered a series of tests, which Kissinger excelled at, and he earned entrance into a special training program that sent particularly bright soldiers to college. He received his American citizenship in 1943 while he was at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. The program lasted just six months, and Henry finished 12 engineering classes. During his off hours, he would hitchhike home and see his girlfriend. He was a brilliant student, recognized by his roommates as the, quote, brainiest of a very intelligent class.

Starting point is 00:43:40 One classmate recalled, he didn't read books. He ate them with his eyes, his fingers, and with his squirming in the chair or bed, and with his mumbling criticism. Jesus Christ, that's too... Use more salt if I'm being tricky, but other than that, you'll be good. It sounds like a book. This is a really weird way to describe it, dude. It's kind of what, what the way he looks now is like he eats books.

Starting point is 00:44:02 Yeah. Yeah. Everyone, everyone had like a visual, like, ooh, reaction to that, to that line, like, ooh, cringe. I now kind of want the story of that classmate. Like, yeah. What caused you to describe a dude reading books that way? Well, at my college, I ate analogies.

Starting point is 00:44:20 I just would just, just devour them. I'd eat them like a synonym, you know? His professors would use Henry to explain complicated concepts to the other soldiers. And for a brief period of time, he had status and respect, which he'd begun to crave as a young man. His time in this program was cut short because, you know, D-Day, we decide America's like, we're going to do us a Normandy landing. And the army's like, well, we probably don't need smart people for that.

Starting point is 00:44:48 Let's pull these kids out of the class and train them how to get shot by MG42s. Hey, guys, we actually want to talk to you over here about something totally different. You guys, no, no, not you, not you, Chad. You stay right there, Chad. Talk about these other guys. Thank you. Good luck. So Henry and his classmates get sent back to basic training where the drill sergeants,

Starting point is 00:45:05 according to Henry, took glee in tormenting the college kids, which I don't know, probably true, while he was preparing to go overseas. And this is what my grandpa was doing in World War II, and I hope he bullied Henry Kissinger. I hope my grandpa got a chance to give Henry Kissinger some shit. Fingers crossed, right? He did. Thank you. He did.

Starting point is 00:45:27 He did. Absolutely. So while he was preparing to go overseas, his biographer, Schwartz, writes, even in the misery of Camp Clairborn, however, Kissinger stood out, selected by his commanders to provide soldiers with a weekly briefing on war news. Although he did the job well, Kissinger was more impressed with another older German refugee in an American uniform, Fritz Kramer, who came to Camp Clairborn in May 1944 to speak about the meaning of war.

Starting point is 00:45:54 After Kramer's impassioned talk, Kissinger wrote him a note, Dear Private Kramer, I heard you speak yesterday. Check you. Oh, sorry. That's basically, yeah. Yeah, he literally, like, it's like, I liked what you had to say. Can I help you? Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:46:08 Like, it's literally, what the note is, scare. Check you. Yeah, Kramer responded almost immediately to the simple fan letter, returning a few days later to seek Kissinger out for conversation and dinner, insisting they speak in German, not English. The Lutheran Kramer later said that he was taken with this, quote, little Jewish refugee he had met who he believed, as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything. Wow.

Starting point is 00:46:32 That's an interesting way to describe him. Sounds like a guy who eats books. Yeah. And this guy, Kramer is a Prussian, which I don't know the degree to which that means anything to a lot of people. The Prussians, so there was most of the resistance the Nazis was from the left. Once the Nazis got into power, the resistance to the Nazis that meant anything was Prussian. Not because they were good dudes, but because they were way too conservative for Hitler.

Starting point is 00:46:58 They were like, well, we want to fight on takeover all of Europe, but like with a Kaiser who has royal blood, not this like gross little corporal and stuff. And it's complicated because like a lot of those Prussians got murdered by the Nazis. And as a general rule, your sympathy is with the people who get murdered by the Nazis. But it's also like, yeah, you got murdered by the Nazis for the wrong reasons. Right. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:21 Right. They were like, we have one small note, but everything else is working great for us. They were the guys who were like Hitler's bad because he's not going to win the war against Russia. Right. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:32 So this guy Fritz Kramer would be in Henry's words, quote, the greatest single influence on my formative years. Since Fritz was a Prussian conservative, so for an idea of how fucking German Fritz Kramer is, he wears a monocle to make his Wow, I work harder to make his week. I work better. Oh my God. I am the craziest asshole ever and you know, Fritz hated the Nazis, which good, good. He also hated the communists, which you have to think there was some sus stuff there.

Starting point is 00:48:09 You know, communists, there's a mixed bag like everybody, but I don't think he's very nuanced about it. Schwartz also credits Fritz with expressing, quote, a respect for international law and emphasis on the moral basis of civilization. And what Fritz Kramer means by the moral basis of civilization is not the same as what I think maybe you or I might need. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:48:32 That, yeah, I think the most important influence Kramer had was he's, Kramer is very conservative and Henry is kind of a natural conservative and Kramer really reinforces this feeling in Henry, which is expressed by a growing sort of revulsion in Kissinger towards any ideas outside of the political median, right? Which you get why he has a tendency towards this. If your life, if your childhood is this like battle of extremes in your hometown, I get why you would kind of veer towards the middle. And this guy Kramer really turns that up to 11 in him.

Starting point is 00:49:03 One right up in the New Yorker notes, quote, he warned Kissinger not to emulate cleverly intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses, believing Kissinger to be musically attuned to history. He told him, only if you do not calculate will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people. So that's bad. So that's going to go really bad. I mean, and you really are like, I mean, this is his morphias.

Starting point is 00:49:27 We're just starting to be like, okay, this is. Yeah. And by the way, have you thought about maybe just losing the glasses and just going with the wand? That is so much like, punish your weak eye, you must punish the weak even when it comes to your eyes. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:43 He has found a kid who like has a problematic history of starting fires and is now teaching him how to build a fertilizer bomb. Yeah. Yeah. He's a bad influence. Yeah. Matches us so, so, but have you ever seen a Zippo? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:56 These are great. So Kissinger finishes training and is deployed with the 84th Infantry Division as it moves towards Nazi Europe. His division sees a decent amount of combat. He does not. He's a back ranker. He handles administrative and management tasks. And he finds the power and authority he gets through his time in the service intoxicating.

Starting point is 00:50:17 Though he never, again, he doesn't fight directly. He does earn a bronze star for a Valor because he helps catch and take out a Gestapo sleeper cell, primarily due to the fact that like he's just, you know, a very observant dude. In 1945, he participates in the liberation of a concentration camp, ALAM, A-H-L-E-M. I'm not 100% Sean, how to pronounce it. One prisoner at the camp remembered him as the young American who announced, you are free for Kissinger, the overwhelming memory of this experience with seeing inmates he described as being barely recognizable as humans and feeling the instinct to feed them

Starting point is 00:50:51 before learning that some were so starved that solid food would kill them. Shortly thereafter. Yeah. And one thing you got to say, he does not, like, he's not a sheltered upbringing, you know? I mean, like, you would be like, oh, maybe that could be the influence that made him be like, oh, you know, you can, there's good, you can provide, like, provide the people who are tortured and starved some, you know, help.

Starting point is 00:51:14 You could take away from this, like, my God, war is evil and we should do everything we can to prevent it, as opposed to, yeah, baby! Well, let's see how it plays out, Dave. Maybe this is the sixth part behind the Bastards episode about a cool dude who does nice things. I just brought you guys here to talk about a chill guy. So shortly after liberating this concentration camp, Kissinger writes an essay on his experience where he asks, quote, who was lucky, the man who draws circles in the sand and mumbles I am free or the bones that are interred in the hillside.

Starting point is 00:51:52 He concludes from the experience that this is humanity in the 20th century. So, I mean, an understandably bleak take from liberating a concentration camp, like, that's fair. You know what is a bad time to move to an ad plug? I didn't think we were going to be brave enough to do this, but fair enough. Oh boy! Wow, yeah. You know what makes me hungry?

Starting point is 00:52:25 Probably shouldn't go too far down that road. Let the ads do the talking. Let the ads do the talking. The ads are going to come and win the same way the Soviet Union did for the entire world. Wave after wave of men into Nazi trenches, anyway. I think we lost it. We had it for a minute. We had it for a second there.

Starting point is 00:52:47 I took it too far. You know, I took it there. Here we go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Starting point is 00:53:19 Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks.

Starting point is 00:53:43 He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

Starting point is 00:54:13 And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

Starting point is 00:54:44 It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

Starting point is 00:55:19 stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:56:01 Oh, we're back. So when the war ends, World War II, you know, that is, Sergeant Henry Kissinger finds himself as quote, the absolute ruler of a small village named Binsheim. He enjoys this experience. He really starts to like having power. One thing that we're getting here is that he adores having power over people. Yeah. He really likes it.

Starting point is 00:56:24 He adores, he celebrates repeatedly to his family that he has quote, absolute authority to arrest people. Jesus Christ. I'm a baby Kaiser. This is problematic because of what he does later. I will say, if you are a Jewish kid who has to flee Germany and then you come back and get made like the military head of a town that's full of former Nazis, I get reveling in it a little bit, you know.

Starting point is 00:56:51 Well, for me, I'm having beheading Tuesdays if that's me. So again, because of what he does later, this is unsettling, but like it's understandable in the moment. Yeah. Yeah. He appropriates a luxury home and a fancy car, both of which had to have belonged to some Nazi, which is like, it's what you do, right? He gets a butler, he brags back to his family that he's got a butler.

Starting point is 00:57:16 A Nazi butler. A fucking Nazi butler. Absolutely. He's been arrested for not giving me butter. Yeah. That is obvious. Now, that said, he's also, to his credit, really aware of not wanting the Germans in town to identify this guy who is absolute ruler as being Jewish, I think because he

Starting point is 00:57:35 doesn't want it to make things problems for people who's Jewish, people who stay behind in Germany. He makes other soldiers refer to him as Mr. Henry rather than by his last name. He's conscious. I think, quote, that the Jews were coming back to take revenge, and he had a reputation in general as being more objective as a ruler in this kind of period than most Jewish veterans in similar positions. In general, Henry counseled accommodation and rapprochement with one exception, communists.

Starting point is 00:58:04 Fuck you. Yeah. Of course. He's fucking asshole. I know, right? We had this like understandable period. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:12 I don't want to upset the Nazis, but these communists, oh my God. Yeah. And that's literally what happens. So the Cold War, you know, early stages in 1946, but already in that period, Kissinger advocates strict surveillance of German civilians for left-wing sympathies and suggests that they... Oh my God. You know what?

Starting point is 00:58:32 Yeah. The fucking Nazis just did a thing. Dude. Like... It's the conservatives. Yeah. The left is due. The left is due.

Starting point is 00:58:43 He doesn't want them... he also wants to ban communists from teaching at the local schools. Jesus Christ. What the fuck? How was he... he went straight Nazi all of a sudden. Yeah. He's definitely... well, let's say fascist. Let's say fascist. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:58 Okay. Yeah. Fascist. Now he's a fascist. Yeah. He does a bit. He does a bit. Mr. Henry.

Starting point is 00:59:06 He starts dating a Gentile German girl during this period. Because again, he's not very religious. His letters home to his parents, though, because they don't like this at all. They're like, you're losing your faith. And Henry gets very combative with them. He sees them as irrational, writing, quote, to me, there is not only right or wrong, but many shades in between. The real tragedies in life are not choices between right and wrong.

Starting point is 00:59:24 Real difficulties bear difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you and your world of black and white can't begin to comprehend. How's the dog? How's the dog? Yeah. Love you, mom. Love you, mom. Also, how's Crofts?

Starting point is 00:59:37 Is Crofts good? Is his tail better? And his parents, his parents have their reaction we all did where they're like, hey, how are you? But it seems like the war may have had an effect on you. I've said this ever since you met the monocle guy, but you're really intense. Maybe all of the things you've seen have had an impact on you. And Henry responds to this by getting enraged in saying not everybody came out of this war

Starting point is 01:00:11 as a psychoneurotic. Oh, that shows them. That'll teach them that. Yeah. That's fine. That's fine. That's exactly the exact right reaction of a non-psychoneurotic. When you're screaming, I'm not a psychoneurotic in letters, you're a psychoneurotic.

Starting point is 01:00:25 I've got syphilis when I'm going to the camp. If all they're saying is like, hey, Henry, do you think maybe seeing a concentration camp has left some mental scars that you need to heal from? Hey, maybe I should drown dad in the toilet. All right, buddy. All right, pal. We're just talking. We're just talking.

Starting point is 01:00:42 We're just writing letters here, buddy. We're just writing some letters. That's all we're doing. It's one of those things. This is a period of time, obviously, like one of the things that causes what happens later in American history is that 16 million Americans go to war, and a bunch of them get traumatized, and they come back to a world where their dad was always like, if you talk about your feelings, I'm going to hit you.

Starting point is 01:01:01 Yeah. Henry's family doesn't seem to be like that. His parents are like, hey, do you want to talk about your feelings? And he's like, I'm not crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, obviously the fact that this is a time in which like men don't fucking do therapy does have an impact on it, but I think his family's probably more understanding

Starting point is 01:01:21 than most. Well, he also has no, I mean, even now he has no acknowledgement of like his trauma. So he probably even in the actual moment, I mean, you're probably even more defensive, you know? Yeah. In 1947, Kissinger finally decides to leave Germany for the second time. On Fritz Kramer's advice, he applies late to Harvard, and he was accepted, winning one of the two national scholarships the school gave New Yorkers each year.

Starting point is 01:01:45 Now, Chappell and Trap House did a tournament of evil people from Harvard. It's awesome. And Kissinger won. So that's cool. That makes sense. Oh, boy. The Ivy League. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:01 Good at producing bad people. Maybe we should look into that one. So one of his classmates recalls, and he obviously he does, like, it's Henry Kissinger. He's very good at school. One of his classmates recalls that he, quote, worked harder and studied more than anybody else on campus. He ate school. He ate school.

Starting point is 01:02:19 Couldn't stop him from shoving pencils in his mouth. He ate the campus like Godzilla would have. He nearly died. He almost died from lead. His studies so absorbed him that he ignored the people around him. He made, quote, no lasting friendships with other students. He seemed scarcely aware of the extraordinary range of people gathered around him. So Kissinger's ideology evolved along the lines Kramer had started him off on.

Starting point is 01:02:44 He agreed with Goethe, I believe is the name of the German philosopher, that if he, quote, had to choose between justice and disorder on the one hand and injustice in order on the other, I would always choose the latter. So well, there we go. He's made his choice. Yeah. Very telling. Like we know.

Starting point is 01:03:01 We know. We get it. Yeah. Yeah. It's just nice to know we're like around the time like, okay, so he was pretty defined. Okay. So Henry, you know, some other people who thought that order was more important than justice. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:14 They had an impact on your childhood. Yeah. Yeah. No shit. Yeah, right. But yeah. It's just, it's just such a. It's how trauma works too.

Starting point is 01:03:23 It's a strange thing that he, it's so conscious. Like he. Yeah. He's completely aware of it. Yeah. Like he's. Like a psychopath. He might be.

Starting point is 01:03:32 I mean, I think if you're, I try not to do too much like the psychoanalyzing people, but like fucking maybe. Right. Well, psychopaths are very good at the stuff you talked about. Yeah. Living people over in the room. Yeah. You know, ladies, man, like there is a, they, they learn how to be a human.

Starting point is 01:03:49 And then they sort of. And a lot of you got syphilis at camp. And a lot of them get syphilis at camp like Henry Kissinger. Yeah. Well, Sophie, can we, let's green light some Henry Kiss, some, some t-shirts that are just Henry Kissinger with his face writing off from syphilis. People are going to want to wear those. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:06 Just Kissinger. He's making the kissy, kissy lips and his lips are falling off. Yes. If you would like a Kissinger. Let me French Kissinger you. Yeah. So he meets his second mentor at Harvard. Henry Kissinger has a lot of mentors and this is maybe a lesson to never mentor anybody.

Starting point is 01:04:27 You never know. They might become Henry Kissinger. Yeah. Don't teach people things. Yeah. Sabotage them at every step, right? Yeah. Next time you drive past a kindergarten, throw them a textbook that's all lies, you know?

Starting point is 01:04:40 Eat this. Slow them down. Yeah. So his second mentor is this guy, William Yandel Elliott. And Elliott is a professor at Harvard. He's also very politically connected. He had advised several U.S. presidents on international matters and Kissinger was drawn to this guy because not only is he a respected educator, but he's really well connected to people with power.

Starting point is 01:05:04 And Elliott, one of the things that he is famous for being a big advocate of is what's called realpolitik, as embodied by, you know, and particularly the guys that Kissinger grows up admiring and that Elliott, you know, helps teach him to admire. I mean, like Klauswitz and Bismarck, these guys who are like Bismarck is the dude who makes Germany, right? We get a Germany because Bismarck orchestrates over a period of, like, I think it's decades. Gradually he welds all these different German principalities and kingships together and then helps to orchestrate this war out of which emerges Germany. Like, that's the kind of dude that Otto von Bismarck is.

Starting point is 01:05:43 And he is kind of the master of the kind of politics that Kissinger comes to respect. And Kissinger calls Klauswitz and Bismarck philosophers of history. That's how he sees this guy, these guys. Which is not really what I would call Otto von Bismarck. Like, he's very good at what he does, obviously. But not, I wouldn't call him a philosopher. I want to quote now from the book Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin. From these thinkers, Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how history operated.

Starting point is 01:06:12 It was not a story of liberal progress or of class consciousness or of cycles of history or of cycles of birth, maturity, and decline. Rather, it was a series of meaningless incidents, fleetingly given shape by the application of human will. As a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out historical causes of their misfortune. So, yeah. Yeah. You know.

Starting point is 01:06:40 Good stuff. It's maybe not... Yeah, you can think about that however you want. A lot of folks who analyze the Kissinger in this period sees on one sentence in Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, and his thesis is titled The Meaning of History. Oh, boy. That kind of explains a lot of what comes to be going down. What a bold paper.

Starting point is 01:07:06 It is, right? I mean, honestly. He's not a dude who makes like little leaps. Right, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Why do we love? This is the line, the realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an inward experience. Which is, you know...

Starting point is 01:07:25 You mean it again? The realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an inward experience. Wow. And this is heavily influenced by French existentialism. His thesis cites Jean-Paul Sartre a lot. And both Sartre and Kissinger think that morality is not an inward thing, it's determined by actions, which is not an unreasonable thing to believe, right, that like, what matters is what you do, you know?

Starting point is 01:07:49 Right. There's that line from the Bible, you're not damned by what goes into your head, but like, what comes out, right? Like, that's not an unreasonable thing to believe. Sartre, he believes that like, action creates the possibility of individual and collective responsibility, right? That morality is determined by action, but that our actions create this possibility of like, individual and collective moral responsibility for things.

Starting point is 01:08:13 Kissinger does not come to that conclusion. Kissinger believes that morality is determined by action, but he also thinks that like, moral indeterminacy is a condition of human freedom. It's this idea that you can't be bound by morality and be free. If you want to freely act, you have to be able to act above morality, right? Well, that's just giving yourself an excuse to do heinous acts. Yeah, I mean, a lot of his intellectual development is him, and also a lot of this is obviously all of this, one of the things that you have to account for is all of this analysis of like,

Starting point is 01:08:49 his development intellectually comes after he does all the horrible things. Like, so? Right. And including from him, and from like the people who are sources who are saying this is what he was like as a kid, there is that degree of biasing, right? Like that this is after he is the person that he is, because if he had gone on to like, just be a professor, nobody would have given a shit about what Henry Kissinger believed. The accountant said that.

Starting point is 01:09:10 We'd be like, yeah, look, just, what do I owe? Yeah, yeah, tell me what the IRS gets, man. I don't need another lecture on this. And Kissinger's the fact that he becomes so kind of, moral relativism is the word of use. I don't even know if that's right, but like this idea that like, freedom and morality are kind of like, inherently opposed, this upsets a lot of people around him, including people who are like his big supporters, including that Professor Elliot guy at his retirement

Starting point is 01:09:38 party, Henry Kissinger, Elliot's retirement party, Henry Kissinger and a number of students gather to like, bid him farewell. And journalist David Halberstam wrote that Elliot had positive things to say about almost all of his students who had gathered there. But when he reached Kissinger, he said this, Henry, he began, you're brilliant, but you're arrogant. In fact, you're the most arrogant man I've ever met. Kissinger became ashen faced.

Starting point is 01:10:01 Mark my words, Elliot continued, your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day. Oh, that is amazing on so many levels. Like at your retirement party to be like, Hey, and you listen, shit bag. Chill out. And then for that also to be totally incorrect. Like, you know, I saw this like clip of some, some guy in like Atlantic City talking to Trump when Trump is going like, well, what is, what makes a Native American? And the guy just goes, sir, I'm glad you're never going to get into any real power.

Starting point is 01:10:32 And you're like, yeah. Oh, dude. Oh, dude. Well, and one of the things like this, the Professor Elliot is like one of the guys who helps get him his first big gigs and shit. Like he's a major bass. And I think this is kind of him belatedly being like, whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie, whoopsie. I'm going to go patronize a Cambodian restaurant just to make myself feel a little better.

Starting point is 01:10:55 Yeah, right. Tipped real well ever when he went to like Indian armies. I don't even need food. Just give me the tip slip. I don't even need the food. Just give me the tip slip. I owe you guys. I'm not going to tell you why.

Starting point is 01:11:05 Yeah, you go. Don't worry about it. Take everything. Here's my pen. I got to hang. Do you know if there's a Bangladeshi restaurant nearby? I'm actually hitting a lot of spots tonight and not eating. I'll be honest.

Starting point is 01:11:16 I got a long list. I'm going to a lot of places. No, no, not German. No, not German. No, not German. You know what? They're actually fine. I don't think I need.

Starting point is 01:11:26 Yeah. So his thesis. Well, that thing that he says to Kissinger, it should be what happens, but our society rewards psychopaths above anybody else. And to be fair, most societies. Yeah. So what he thinks should be is the opposite. What he's talking about is a just world, which isn't what this is.

Starting point is 01:11:51 And it's one of those things. This is something like that kind of mourned anthropological thinking, but like one of the reasons people will say is like, why we have psychopaths is that if you're in a band of 70 people who are like hunter-gatherers starving through the winter, it's helpful to have a guy like Henry Kissinger who can say like, well, these six people are too old and sick and we have to let them die, otherwise we'll all starve, right? That's a situation in which it's good to have a psychopath because you need someone who just doesn't give a shit about certain things.

Starting point is 01:12:21 When you have a society of billions that's global, it becomes a problem because that kind of thinking is not so useful and tends to just get millions and millions of people killed. It's not great. Anyway, Henry's thesis is published in 1950 at roughly the same time Harry Truman decides to send troops to Korea and to aid French forces in Vietnam. Professor Elliot told Kissinger that the Korean War was an example of the East quotes, testing the civilization of the West.

Starting point is 01:12:50 Yeah, people doing their own thing in their own country is a test to us like the Koreans and the Vietnamese having completely their own shit going on as a test of us in the United States. How dare you? You know, Ho Chi Minh, not wanting to be ruled over by the French is really a test of American power. It's very something, huh? I mean, and obviously they see that like the Soviet Union is orchestrating all of this

Starting point is 01:13:15 and the Soviet Union is involved too, but like it's not... They're just like, they're looking us in the eyes. They've got their own shit going on, dude. They are on the same level. How dare they do this? So, as the U.S. increased its commitments to a growing series of wars in Southeast Asia, Kissinger grew more dedicated to the work of a guy named Oswald Spangler. Spangler's book, The Decline of the West, is not something I am well equipped to describe

Starting point is 01:13:43 or explain in detail, but Greg Grandin is, so I'm going to quote from him again. Spangler waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality. He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct and creativity reigned. We have, Spangler thought, hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression. To get behind image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests and grasp what Spangler called destiny, one needed not information, but intuition, not facts,

Starting point is 01:14:18 but hunches, not reason, but a soul sense, a world feeling. Even enough, a statesman does not know what he is doing, Spangler wrote. But that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success. Oh, my God. And that is George W. Bush crawl out of a pile of goo now, like, I hate ass for our freedom. George Bush, like, pops out of Henry's Kissinger's back as a polyp in the wings. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 01:14:47 It's like Dr. Pimple Popper Pop. It's a two-headed Rumsfeld Bush-like thing, like, crawling. They know where they are, they're in the east, west, north and south. Kissinger finds this logic intoxicating, but he did disagree with Spangler about Spangler's primary contention, which is that civilizational decay was inevitable. Spangler argued that civilizations had spring, summers, autumns and winters, right, that they proceed through kind of like inevitable stages, and there's not really any way to stop this procession, right?

Starting point is 01:15:17 Which is, I think, a pretty reasonable, like, yeah, and civilization is going to have like a life cycle, right? That's a thing, like, historically, you can argue pretty well. Kissinger doesn't believe this. Everything dies. Yeah. Well, that's actually not what Kissinger believes. Yeah, and of course, the man who is like living way beyond his shelf life is like, told you

Starting point is 01:15:37 so. Yeah. Doesn't die. So here's Grandin again talking about Kissinger, how Kissinger grapples with this aspect of Spangler. Having lost a sense of purpose, civilizations lurch outward to find meaning. They get caught up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by history's cosmic beat, power for power's sake, blood for blood.

Starting point is 01:15:57 Imperialism is the inevitable product of this final stage, Kissinger wrote, summing up the decline of the West's argument, an outward thrust to hide the inner void. Kissinger accepted Spangler's critique of past civilizations, but rejected his determinism. Decay was not inevitable. Spangler, Kissinger said, merely described a fact of decline and not its necessity. There is a margin, he would write in his memoirs, between necessity and accident, in which the statesman, by perseverance and intuition, must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people.

Starting point is 01:16:28 So Spangler's like, yeah, it seems like when civilizations lose their purpose and start to age, they lurch outward and engage in wars of imperial conquest and a search for meaning, and that leads to disaster, which destroys them, and Kissinger's like, but what if you did the wars right? Yeah. But what if you were good at it? But what if I was involved in everyone? What if I was like Mickey in the corner of Rocky?

Starting point is 01:16:50 Yeah, it is an amazing, like this guy being like, here is what happens to empires every single time there's an empire. This is a thing you can go through history and see constantly occurs through thousands of years. And Kissinger's like, no, I can do it right. But to be like, no, you're pretty, you're pretty close. You're pretty close. Bye.

Starting point is 01:17:09 Yeah. So I'm just thinking, kill more. Like I heard what you said, ups and downs, but I think you wipe everybody out, you know. If you try drinking their blood. It is the same logic I have seen. Every time I've seen more than one person get stuck in the mud, it's always either one person get stuck in the mud or 50 do because one person gets stuck in the mud and the other 49 go, well, I saw what happened to that guy, but I think I can figure it out and get around.

Starting point is 01:17:36 It's almost like when you enter Congress, you've got a plan. I've got a plan. Oh, I get money? Oh, never mind. I don't have a plan. I have no plans. Well, I have a plan, but it's a different one and you are not going to like it. It's a lot more about a pool.

Starting point is 01:17:54 In 1951, Henry got a gig working as a consultant with the army on psychological warfare while he finished his graduate studies. Kissinger's doctoral thesis on the Congress of Vienna did not seem overly relevant to politics, but its first sentence had discussed nuclear weapons and proposed to readers that the efforts of British and Austrians made to contain Napoleon might be useful in handling the Soviet Union. I might argue, did Napoleon have a way to end all life on Earth if things went badly with containment?

Starting point is 01:18:24 Yeah, his hand. Was that a factor in Napoleon? It was not. Damn it. A sword. No. Kissinger believes he sees that containment is a failure, which it is because people do not like being colonies, and if the opposition to being a colony is communism, they'll be

Starting point is 01:18:41 like, well, let's try communism. Being a colony seems to suck. Kissinger sees that containment is a failure, but he also believes not that, well, why don't we just let people do things and just take care of our own shit. He's like, no, because containment's a failure, war with the Soviet Union is inevitable. Oh, god. Now, in Kissinger's view, this has nothing to do with the actions of the United States, but is instead, quote, because of the existence of the United States as a symbol of capitalist

Starting point is 01:19:10 democracy, it is literally the early extent of like, well, they hate us for our freedoms, right? Yeah. That's where he's starting down. Obviously, a lot of people are saying shit like this, right? This is not a Kissinger invention. You've got the John Birch Society, all sorts of shit down on this period. I don't want to give him too much credit there.

Starting point is 01:19:26 It's clear by this point that Henry was going to get into politics, although law enforcement was a possibility too, because he starts being a professor at Harvard, right? After he graduates and stuff, he starts helping out at stuff and teaching some classes. At one point, the school hosts an international seminar, and when he hears that a bunch of foreign academics are coming to Harvard, he calls the FBI and volunteers to spy on people for them. That's amazing. I mean, honestly, it is so amazing with his background to have that attitude.

Starting point is 01:20:01 It really is, it's hard. It's hard to get there. You got to give him credit. The man covers some ground. The man is a Batman villain. He really is. Yeah. His love of politics and his first attempt to build influence at Harvard is by starting

Starting point is 01:20:19 a journal named Confluence. Now, this is ostensibly a journal that exists to create what he calls an international forum for discussion, right? I just want to get good people talking from all around the world, let the ideas fly. It's like a Ted Talk kind of pitch. But he's really vague about, he doesn't really seem to care about what particular discussions he encourages. His critics would later claim that this journal was, quote, a fake, primarily an enterprise

Starting point is 01:20:41 designed to make Kissinger known to powerful people, right? He's just letting powerful people write articles because then he gets their phone number, right? He gets their mailing address. He's networking. Yeah, he's networking. Confluence leads to Henry's first mention in the Pages of the New York Times. And despite what his critics claim, which is probably broadly accurate, the journal did also publish some really significant figures, including Reinhold Neyber and Hannah Arendt.

Starting point is 01:21:08 But while he claimed commitment to free discourse, Kissinger had a real tendency to publish right-wing shitheads, including Enoch Powell, a conservative British politician famous for comparing immigration to, quote, rivers of blood. Well, that's good. So that's good. I mean, I've always agreed with that. I mean, that is just... But you like blood rivers.

Starting point is 01:21:27 I love a blood river. Oh, my God. That to me is the laziest of rivers. Mm-hmm. Yeah, because you float real good on all that salt. Oh, yeah. It's molasses. That's freedom.

Starting point is 01:21:37 I mean, if you can say immigrants are like a river of blood, that's the freedom he's talking about. That's the freedom. You want to know what other kind of freedoms he's interested in publishing? Oh, God. Oh, my God. I'm going to quote from Niall Ferguson from the book Kissinger here. An article by Ernst von Salomon, a right-wing German writer who had been convicted for his

Starting point is 01:21:58 role in the assassination of Walter Rathenau, a German foreign minister in the Weimar Republic. The article provoked an angry letter from Shepard Stone of the Ford Foundation who had provided money for both the International Seminar and the Journal. So first note, he publishes a guy who's basically pretty close to a Nazi, a far-right German terrorist in the Weimar years, and it's so upsetting that a representative of the Ford Foundation complains. Oh, my Lord. I mean, if you can upset the Ford Foundation, you've really crossed that line.

Starting point is 01:22:29 Yeah. If the Ford Foundation is like your connection to a Nazi, worries me. Hey. And that's coming from us, who are really cool with that. You know who we are. We're like super fit into that. Look, I have the protocols of the Elders of Zion tattooed on my chest, like all Ford Foundation employees.

Starting point is 01:22:46 I'm going to throw a flag on the play. I'm still a flag in the play. And our new car is coming out, the Ford Stastica. Oh, man. So quote, Stone was appalled that Kissinger would publish an article by a criminal and a Nazi sympathizer like Solomon. Kissinger told Stone he disliked Solomon and opposed what he stood for, considering him a damned soul driven by the Furies, demonstrating a remarkable self-confidence for a graduate

Starting point is 01:23:16 student. Kissinger defended himself for publishing the article. I may err occasionally on the side of too great tolerance, partly because I believe our readers sufficiently mature to make their own judgments. Kissinger argued that what Solomon represented was a symptom of certain tendencies of our age. But that by appearing in a liberal journal like Confluence, Solomon was the one who was compromised.

Starting point is 01:23:36 Kissinger was not simply defending free speech. He had solicited the article from Solomon, telling the German about quote, having long admired your writings, even if I could not share your point of view. What? So, it gets better and more relevant to today because when there's an outcry against this, Kissinger writes a letter to his friend Kramer and says, I have now joined you as the cardinal villain in liberal demonology. Oh my God, this is fucking...

Starting point is 01:24:01 I know, he's just doing it now, he's just doing it now. He's got the monocle now too. It's like you're Glenn Greenwald talked to Joe Rogan. Yes, it's like, what the f- how? How is this still happening? How are you the pioneer of this, Henry Kissinger? How are you the pioneer of this? Oh, it's amazing.

Starting point is 01:24:22 By the way, his explanation, if you're me, just listen to it like, okay, he's not sure what he's saying, but all right, okay. So we got to hear from this Nazi who shot a dude. Because you... Okay, because you... All right, well... Because it'll anger the lips? As long as you said it's cool.

Starting point is 01:24:41 And next month, we have Ed Gein is doing a little number. Ed Gein's gonna walk us through lamp workings. And then we're having the Zodiac Killer on to teach us about proper parking techniques. Pentagramming. And coding. He'd actually be pretty good at that. So once he had finished his dissertation and graduated, Henry found himself in need of like aesthetic, he's doing like, he wasn't a professor at that point, but he was like

Starting point is 01:25:12 doing like graduate students, you know, helping to teach, whatever. I didn't do a college, so... But you know how grad students teach shit and stuff, but he wants like a full-on gig. He's trying to get an actual full-time job as an assistant professor, but he's not able to because most people don't like Henry Kissinger. I wonder what... I wonder any reason why that you can do that. A lot of people at Harvard are not loving it.

Starting point is 01:25:36 Not a huge fan of the guy. They're like the Nazi publishing Jew from Germany. Yeah. They consider him slightly problematic, so he drifts for a bit. He's unable to find work, and he's still doing some stuff at Harvard, but he's kind of a drift in his career. Until in 1954, he runs into a friend, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., at Harvard. Schlesinger had a letter in his possession from a former secretary of the Air Force,

Starting point is 01:26:03 demanding the Eisenhower administration's standard of threatening massive retaliation to the Soviets. The gist of this idea that the Eisenhower administration really kicked off was that if we promise the Soviets that if there's ever a confrontation, we will immediately send out a whirl-dending hail of nukes, then those lines won't get crossed. We won't have any kind of fight at all. If everyone knows those are the stakes, then nothing will happen. That's the idea.

Starting point is 01:26:29 Kissinger disagrees with this take, which is reasonable to disagree with. There's a lot of problems with the, we will end the world if there's any kind of issue. I'm worried where he's going to take it. Yeah, yeah, he's going to make it worse. He's going to make it worse. Use the nooks. You know what, guys? He sure does.

Starting point is 01:26:44 That's exactly what he does, Gareth, because Kissinger, yeah, we'll talk about what he does in a bit, but he writes a letter kind of writing out some critiques to this, and he has his friend Nelson Rockefeller send it to Eisenhower. He's friends with Nelson Rockefeller, by the way. Sure. Of course. Everyone is in this period. So, when the president rejects Kissinger's analysis at the advice of John Foster Dolis,

Starting point is 01:27:08 Rockefeller resigns, and he resigns from his job with the administration, which temporarily closes a door to Henry. But the letter that Kissinger had received was popular enough among other thinkers in Washington that it earns him a job offer, heading a study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, studying nuclear weapons and foreign policy. But of course, Henry's problem with massive retaliation wasn't that using nuclear weapons was unconscionable. It was that the world-ending nature of the threats the Eisenhower administration was

Starting point is 01:27:37 making meant they would never nuke anybody, and Kissinger thought this was a terrible idea. Absolutely. He thought that nuclear weapons should be used tactically to secure battlefield victories against the communists. What's happening? What? He thinks it's bad to have nukes and not use them?

Starting point is 01:27:54 Yeah, that's his ad, that's his angle. But in the fuck! Yeah, it's wild that in this argument between if there's a fight, we'll kill everybody, or what if we just try using nukes a little bit? The kill everybody guys have the more reasonable take. I mean, really, you're close, you're close together. Yeah, we can do it much, much faster. It's incredible.

Starting point is 01:28:20 And also, but like again, this is this, the people he's arguing with is the Eisenhower administration, Nelson Rockefeller is not a right-winger, who's like, this guy's got some shit going on, we should listen to him. And a lot of people who are not hard right dudes are like, yeah, maybe it makes sense, we got to be using these tactical nuclear weapons, we should at least consider the possibility. He makes a good point, he uses smart words, and he quotes from these smart people, talks about nuking folks. He's got a lot of words.

Starting point is 01:28:51 So that is part one of our epic series, Henry Kissinger, Jesus Christ, dude, maybe become an accountant. What a guy. What a guy. In part two, we'll talk about how he gets into power, so that's got to be a hoot for everybody. But I feel like before we do that, you guys, do you guys like do like a, like a giant influential popular podcast that maybe this podcast is heavily influenced by, is that something

Starting point is 01:29:17 you guys do? Are you talking about Rogan? Yes, yes, you are both Joe Rogan, right? The dollop. Yes. The dollop. It is your podcast. We believe in the nukes.

Starting point is 01:29:30 Yes, that was your six-part series, The Dollops, Why We Need A Nukepie. Yeah. Go for it, I tell you. Check out The Dollop if you have not already, just a fucking very, very funny podcast. You guys want to plug anything else before we roll out into part two? I mean, my ears a couple of times during this, but yeah, no, well, you can go to dolloppodcast.com, we're on a tour all over the place in Australia and domestically soon. That will be very exciting.

Starting point is 01:30:02 I am excited for touring, touring to exist again, the thing in our lives. Yeah. Fingers crossed. So until part two, go home and read some Oswald Spangler and then disagree with it in a way that makes you much, much worse. Yep. Yes. Put the monocle on the bad eye.

Starting point is 01:30:21 Yeah. All right. Hi, everybody, Robert Evans here, and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org. Now if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution, just Google akpress.org after the revolution. You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book. And if you pre-order now from either of these independent bookstores or from akpress, you'll

Starting point is 01:30:46 get a custom signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool. You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold. So please Google akpress after the revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it. You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

Starting point is 01:31:18 It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret

Starting point is 01:31:43 facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space. Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:32:20 What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Behind the Bastards - Part One: Kissinger

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