The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History by Michael Walsh

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History by Michael Walsh Amazon.com Award-winning author Michael Walsh looks at twelve momentous battles that changed the course of Western history. A sequel to Michael Walsh’s Last Stands, his new book A Rage to Conquer is a journey through the twelve of the most important battles in Western history. As Walsh sees it, war is an important facet of every culture – and, for better or worse, our world is unthinkable without it. War has been an essential part of the human condition throughout history, the principal agent of societal change, waged by men on behalf of, and in pursuit of, their gods, women, riches, power, and the sheer joy of combat. In A Rage to Conquer, Walsh brings history to life as he considers a group of courageous commanders and the battles they waged that became crucial to the course of Western history. He looks first at Carl Von Clausewitz, the seminal thinker in the Western canon dealing with war. He then moves on to Achilles at Ilium, Alexander at Gaugamela, Caesar at Alesia, Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, Aetius at the Catalaunian Plains, Bohemond at Dorylaeum and Antioch, Napoleon at Austerlitz, Pershing at St.-Mihiel, Nimitz at Midway and Patton at the Bulge with a final consideration of how the Battle of 9/11 was ultimately lost by the U.S. and what that portends for the future.About the author With six critically acclaimed novels, as well as a hit TV movie, journalist, author and screenwriter Michael Walsh has achieved the writer's trifecta: two New York Times best-sellers, a major literary award and, as co-writer, the Disney Channel's then-highest-rated show. The 1998 publication of As Time Goes By -- his long-awaited and controversial prequel/sequel to everybody's favorite movie, Casablanca -- created a literary sensation; translated into more than twenty languages, including Portuguese, Chinese and Hebrew, the story of Rick and Ilsa landed on best-seller lists around the world.

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on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Timmy, amazing man on the show. We're talking about his latest book out January 28th, 2025. Michael Walsh joins us on the show his book is entitled a rage to conquer 12 battles that changed the course of western history we're going to get into it with him and we're going to learn some interesting stuff because i always say on the chris voss show

the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history so learn from your history damn damn it, people. That's why we have authors like this on. He is the author of more than 15 novels and nonfiction books. Michael Walsh was the classical music critic for the Time magazine and received the 2004 American Book Awards Prize for fiction for his gangster novel and All the Saints in 2004. His popular columns for National Review, written under the pseudonym david kahane is driving that pronounced correctly yes but we're developed into the book for

rules for radical conservatives his books the devil's pleasure palace and the fiery angel examine the enemies heroes and tribes and struggles of western civilization from the ancient past to the present time he divides the time between connecticut and ireland boy that's a jump from one end to the other welcome to the show how are you michael hey thanks chris i'm great that's great to be with you which one has better whiskey ireland or connecticut ireland yeah well we make our own we make our own in ireland and we prefer to scotch but that'll get it you scotch yeah i guess i got that i was a little off wasn't i there so give us the dot coms where can people find out more about you on the interweb sir well i don't have much of a presence on the internet to be frank i

there's really nothing for me to send any of our readers or listeners to i'm a kind of old-fashioned guy i i write books and i them, and luckily people buy them. And I am involved very much in Twitter. So I am at TheAmanuensis, T-H-E-A-M-A-N-E-S-I-S, E-U-S-I-S, TheAmanuensis. That's me. And I'm on Facebook as well. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book, A Rage to Conquer?

Well, I think the timing of it is just lucky for me. I published a book four years ago called Last Stance, which was coming out right at the time during the dispute over the 2020 election. So many people said, oh, well, it's like Trump's having a last stand and you've written this book about last stance. And that was about famous military last stands. This one is about famous battles and famous conquerors who have dominated their epoch as military commanders. And so once again, it has kind of a ring for today. I was saying on Twitter just yesterday or the day before, I used to compare Trump to Julius Caesar, especially having survived his political and personal assassinations. But now I compare him with Trajan, who was the Roman emperor

who expanded the territory of the empire to its furthest extent in the second century. So, what the president has done in just a week has kind of illustrated the thesis of this book, which is great commanders take command, and they go till they're done, whether they're either they're totally defeated, or they're totally victorious. There's no retirement, there's no negotiating, there's no half measures, you just finished the job. So I picked 12 battles, including 9-11, and I examined what was the strategy, what are the similarities between these guys? I mean, we're talking about men like Alexander the Great, of course, Caesar, of course, these are all very well-known people,

Napoleon, of course, but also the last of the great Roman generals in the 5th century, just a decade or so before the Western Empire fell in the year 476. This you can't, it sounds like you're making it up, you can't make it up. The last great Roman general fighting with the last of the Roman legions defeated Attila the Hun. You wonder, well, you never thought of those two guys in the same sentence before, but his name was Flavius Aetius, and he conducted the battle that stopped the Hunnish invasion of what's now France and sent the Huns back heading east again. So Aetius is someone that we don't know much about, and I really enjoyed writing about him. And another of these commanders, who we don't talk about much today,

was a giant of a man, according to all the contemporary accounts. And this would have been at the end of the 11th century, so around 1099. His name was Beaumont, B-O-H-E-M-O-N-T. He was a Norman. Remember, the Normans had just conquered England in 1066, and after that, they went on to conquer other places, among them Southern Italy and Sicily. So he was a Norman from Southern Italy, and he led the First Crusade along with three or four other guys. But Beaumont was their best fighting general. And his contribution in this book is two battles, Dora Lehm and the Battle of Antioch, because of how they show what a commander does under incredible pressure

and against almost insurmountable odds to win. So this is a book about winners. But it's also most important, Chris, it's a book about men. I was born on a Marine base in North Carolina, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and raised in the Marine Corps. My father was stationed all over MCRD in San Diego. We were in Honolulu for a few years, Washington, D.C., of course, a couple of times. And I've been struck by how the popular opinion of men has changed so dramatically since the feminist revolution of the 70s. And frankly, I was sick of it. So when I wrote Last Stands, the original subtitle of Last Stands was going to be Why Soldiers Fight Till All Is Lost, When All Is Lost. And I said, no, no, that's not why men fight when all is lost, because that's not necessarily true of women.

It's not. And in A Rage to Conquer, I mentioned on several occasions where the women who were in the middle of the battles defected to the enemy almost immediately once they saw their men couldn't take care of them anymore. And this is a very interesting, it's a sexual strategy, of course, for survival and reproduction. But it happened in the First Crusade. It happens elsewhere in great battles through history. Women are not normally in the front lines or in the lines at all up until recently. But during the Crusade, for example, this vast army is marching from France, what's now France and Italy, to the Middle East.

They brought along their women, their wives, their mistresses, children, prostitutes followed the camp. There was always a huge contingent of women in any of these great land battles from the Middle Ages. So there was an occasion when the Turks broke through the lines, and the women almost immediately stopped helping the Crusaders and offered themselves to the Turks and literally said, take us to the harem. And then Bohemond, my commander, came right into the middle of that fight, busted a few Turkish heads. And then the women got with the program again and started helping the crusaders,

dragging off bodies, bringing water, doing the support functions that they were there for. And that struck me, you know, what does that say about, first of all, the essential nature of the sexes, not just the modern wishful nature of the sexes? And what is the most optimal use of both sexes in battle? Now, this book is frankly a celebration of toxic masculinity.

So there, I said it. Let's just call it masculinity. There's nothing toxic about masculinity. Well, these guys are toxic in that they kill an awful lot of people so that's well it was my that word i yeah i guess so i guess i guess you could call some of that toxic but you know i mean technically the women that were writing the reward of those men who were conquering uh certainly didn't feel it was toxic you know what i mean it's it's interesting

how that always plays out it's like when when you know the history goes to the conquerors i guess history is written by the conquerors but you know i mean a lot of those men that were doing those things for their women to provide for their women to provide for uh their stuff you know it didn't no one no one's really complaining about it then. So that's all I'm saying. No, that's the point I was trying to make. Yeah. In both the last days and this book,

and now the publisher has commissioned a third volume in this series of military history. And the point I wanted to make was we have to understand all of this stuff in context. And in my books, you were kind enough to mention at the opening, Devil's Pleasure Palace and Fire Angel. Those are more philosophical and artistic treatises. But everything I've done in the last 10 years has been to try to explain where we are today,

how we got here, what is the historical background of it? Because you have a lot of people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, not knowing the historical background of whatever it is they're reacting to. And we've lost a sense of history, especially in the United States, but throughout the West. And I'm trying to restore that somewhat. Okay. Yeah, I can see why. So, you know, there's a lot of the battles that are on here you have listed

and a lot of these are interesting. Like I say on the show, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. The Battle of 9-11, that's one that I think everyone can agree on that we remember the most recent because most people don't remember anything past three weeks. Talk to us about how, why we ultimately lost that as the United States in accordance to your study of history and read on it. How do we lose that?

Well, okay, I'll start at the beginning to kind of explain the context. So, why I wrote that chapter, because originally this was going to be just, you know, the past. It was going to end with World War II and Patton. But then I thought, the more I thought about it, especially I travel a lot. I just came back from five months in Europe, in fact. It seemed to me in retrospect that President Bush reacted completely incorrectly to 9-11 and that we effectively lost that battle and if you don't think if you don't think we lost that battle then why are you taking your shoes and belts off at the airport time you go on a plane every single time so what well what bush did was he criminalized

in advance 330 plus million americans because of the actions of 19 mostly Saudi Muslims who destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This seems to me to be a vastly stupid way to approach any kind of casus bella, any kind of declaration of war. And I do, at the end of this, this will be the most controversial chapter in the book, I do say, imagine what Caesar would have done. Imagine what Alexander the Great would have done. Imagine what the Beaumont of Antioch would have faced with such a provocation. I'll give you an example of something that did happen, and it's also in the news today, just to show you that

history eternally recurs. As I think it was Marx that said, history never repeats, but sometimes it rhymes. In this case, it does rhyme. And this is in Gaza, a place that America has never heard of until relatively recently. But Gaza sits sort of at the bottom of the Levant, that is to say, the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean, just on the way from effectively what's now Israel into Egypt. It's always been a problem. Alexander had to go through Gaza as he was waging his campaign against the Persian Empire. And he had beaten the Persians twice.

Then he decided to go down, resupply himself, because of course he needed to be near ships who could bring him supplies from Greece and elsewhere. So he's hugging the coast, going south, and he runs into Gaza on his way to Egypt, which he wants to conquer as well. That was run in part by the Persians. Gaza gave him a lot of trouble, and Alexander was a commander who led from the front all the time he's always fighting he's a fighting general there aren't very many of those at all but that's one of the reasons i ended with patton too because patton was literally a fighting general yeah so he gets to gaza and gaza's a wall city like most cities are in those days and he sets about to besiege it now this is really

important for modern readers and listeners people listening us to understand. The rule of siege warfare was very clear. An investing army would come and say, surrender the city. Your option was surrender the city or fight. So if you surrendered the city you were going to still lose. The men would be enslaved, the women would be sent into

slavery, the children would be enslaved. But if you fought back and lost, everybody would be killed. Almost everybody. And that was just the rules of the game, and everybody knew that. So Caesar encounters this a couple of times in the Gallic Wars, and other generals encountered this.

But Alexander's there first. So he has to fight a very tough siege against Gaza, which annoys him and annoys the Macedonian troops that he's with. And Alexander's very severely wounded in this battle, because he's fighting at the front. And at one point, an Arab who had been fighting on the side of the Persians who were the rulers of Gaza in those points, snuck in under a kind of false flag of truce and wounded Alexander quite badly. So Alexander dispatched him. But that made him so angry that, and the Gazan resistance, that they captured the city they completely

destroyed this i remember yeah knocked it down to the bricks and that there was a eunuch who was the administrator of the city and alexander being a big fan of the ilad decided to give that eunuch the treatment that Achilles gave Hector. He tied his ankles, actually he ran thongs through his feet and dragged him around his body around the city to show that he had conquered. And that was the end of Gaza. That's the point is that he couldn't let this thing be a thorn in his side. So they had a chance to surrender. They didn't surrender. Everybody gets killed, sold into

slavery, whatever. And then Alexander goes on to Egypt, conquers Egypt, becomes essentially the pharaoh of Egypt, and then finally defeats Darius II, Darius II, at the famous Battle of Galgamel, which I talk about in the book.

But the point is that these old commanders brooked no resistance. It's estimated Caesar killed a million Gauls who were Celtic people like me, like the Irish are, in the course of his completely illegal, by the way, conquest of Gaul. The Roman Senate never proved that. he just did it on his own and he knew that if he did not succeed he would be brought back to rome and executed as a traitor that was seized when caesar crossed the rubicon after he comes back from gaul he knows he's got to win this civil war or he's literally a dead man. So they played for very high stakes in those days. And we don't, I'm not advocating mass murder on the scale of Alexander or Caesar,

but the point is that negotiation never ends a war. Never. It just halts it for a while while both sides rearm and refigure their strategy. Rearm and refigure, I guess. Yeah. I'm sorry. One last thing, Chris. We had a great general in America, Ulysses S. Grant, and his initials stood for, well, that actually wasn't his real name, but it became his name.

And it was a joke, but later on they stood for unconditional surrender grant. So the Confederates asked terms from him early in the war. He was still fighting out in what was then the West in Tennessee. And what are your terms? And he said, unconditional surrender. That's it. The end. No peace, no drawing lines. No, none.

You quit and you give up. And then he was lucky enough to find his adjutant general, Sherman, who said the same thing. The way you win a war is by overwhelming force until the enemy is absolutely 100% crushed. And that way you save lives and you end the situation. So here we are after 9-11. We're fighting useless forever wars in countries that had nothing to do with 9-11 and that made no geographic or geopolitical or military sense for us. These things have to get ended, and I think this is where we're headed now. Yeah, the forever wars. Do you think with 9-11 and what you wrote about in the book, was it a mistake to go into Afghanistan or was the mistake when we opened the front that seems to have been, from my understanding, George Bush's ego, Dick Cheney's money making, that they wanted to go into Iraq to basically beat out his father his father had never finished off iraq and and so the boner was that the junior would w would go in and finish off the thing was the mistake

that we went into afghanistan or was the mistake that we expanded into iraq or was the whole thing just a mistake in your historical no i think going out into afghanistan to eliminate the taliban which who by the way, are back now. So you see we didn't really eliminate the problem. Good job there. Yeah, great job. I'm glad we spent all that money and got all those boys and girls killed for absolutely nothing. But sure, why not?

That war should have been over in two weeks. Technically, Afghanistan was, right? Yeah, it was. But then we decided we could turn it into a Jeffersonian democracy. Yeah, an imperialistic sort of thing in Iraq. Well, it's a group of savages who have fought off everybody from the time, speaking of Alexander the Great, of Alexander the Great. And whooped the Brits a couple of times, too. So that was stupid.

And then going into Iraq was just beyond stupid. It was partly because Daddy had not finished the job. I have a very low opinion of George Bush I, and I have a low opinion of George Bush II, too, because all of our resources were wasted on that irrelevant force. The declared enemy, and it could have been more clear, because bin Laden, who I mentioned as the general who won 9-11, understood that he had declared war on the United States of America. But he knew there was, we wouldn't do anything about it. We would not rise to the provocation. They blew up two embassies in Africa.

Then they blew up the World Trade Center. And we would not finish them. Yes, they hunted down bin Laden and eventually killed him. Yay. Good. But that didn't remove the source of the problem, which is Islamic terrorism, and it's still happening. As I said, I was in Europe for the last five months. There were a couple of knife attacks in Germany at a Christmas market with innocent people walking around being attacked by radical Muslims. So that's how I can show you that we lost the Battle of 9-11. We still have the problem.

How do you see, you know, we're in a situation right now. For those maybe watching, our YouTube channel is like 18 years old. So people watch it 10 years later. So for those in the context of this conversation, it's currently 1-27-2025. Donald Trump has just taken office for a second. And he's said that he will end the war in Iraq. How do you view the war in Iraq in context of some of these battles that you've you know researched in history any any ideas on what the future holds or maybe just whether or not it was a smart play any

thoughts you have on it you mean the ukraine sorry i'm sorry the ukraine war yeah with russia well i spent a good deal of time in the soviet union i was i went there first in 1986. i was there when chernobyl blew up oh wow that was fun that was fun i only found out about it after i got out of the ussr because of course they would not admit it and i left just before the coup against gorbachev in 1991 so that was august of 1991 and the soviet union was gone by Christmas, right, basically. And I first encountered the mention of the name of Vladimir Putin when I was in Dresden, East Germany, in 1985. And I was at an event that was being hosted by the East German government,

led by Erich Honecker. It was a very cold day. It was February. And it was observing the 40th anniversary of the destruction of Dresden by the Brits and the American bombers. So we took out a city that, you know, was the jewel of Central Europe and demolished it. So as propaganda stunt, they had reopened the opera house there, which is why I was there. And anyway, in order to get around East Germany, you were always assigned a babysitter. You couldn't just wander around by yourself. And my babysitter mentioned that there

was a new KGB resident in Dresden named Vladimir Putin. So that was the first time I heard that name. And so I've kind of watched his career ever since. I would say this about the Ukraine war. Russia is not an enemy of the United States. Russia is an adversary. China is an enemy. There's a very important distinction there what Putin is doing put yourself put in Putin's

shoes without sounding like an apologist for Putin you were a high-ranking intelligence officer your country suddenly collapses almost overnight it's all gone and all of its component parts are broken apart and vanished, including what's now the Ukraine. I know they've dropped the the because for politically correct reasons, that is to say, they just call it Ukraine now. It's a separate country. It's not a province of Russia, but the Ukraine was always a province of Russia. And in fact, Russia, the idea of Russia, in part began in Kiev. That is, it's like if the Canadians had come and taken away Boston, right? And we really wouldn't move to Boston.

But historically, it would be similar. That was now under French-Canadian occupation and had been for the last 40 years or so. Boston, yes. been for the last 40 years or so boston what putin was trying to do is reconstitute not the old ussr which which was unworkable and unwieldy but the old what the russians called the rodina r-o-d-i-n-a the motherland and that basically consists of belarus which is the old white russia so-called white russia's poster red Russia, and half of the Ukraine. And he's got the half of the Ukraine that he wants. Now, the Ukrainians put up a hell of a fight, and the West and NATO have done everything they could to provoke Putin into a larger war,

which I think is insane, insane, especially when, under the terms of the agreement we made with this the dying soviets we we told them we would not push nato right up to the russian border well they want to put ukraine in nato which would push it right up to the russian border and if you know anything about russia and hitler and napoleon found out the hard way. They don't like being pushed. And you can only prod the bear so much before the bear stands up and gives you a thorough whacking. But Putin's taking back what he thinks of as territorial motherland Russia. That's the simple explanation for that. Yeah.

He sees himself as Ivan the Great, I think, or something like that. I don't know. Peter the Great. Yeah. Peter the Great, I think, or something like that. I don't know. Peter the Great, yeah. Peter the Great, yeah. Well, the Russians had never understood. They've never made up their minds, are they Easterners or Westerners? They've never made up their minds. And Peter the Great, who founded St. Petersburg, was a Russian who wanted to be a Westerner.

So he famously came to Germany and the West, maybe Holland too, in disguise and worked as a shipbuilder or something to learn how Western Europe was so far advanced over Russia. This was in the 18th century, I believe. So he brought back the notion that we have to be more like the West. Stalin, when he was involved in World War II, made it quite, he dropped communism in World War II. You didn't hear a word about you're fighting for communism. Nobody cared about communism. They were fighting for Mother Russia. And so he enlisted both the Russian Orthodox Church, which he despised,

even though he had studied for the priesthood there, and the patriotism of the Russian people to fight what still remains the most titanic clash of armies ever at Stalingrad, where you had a million men on each side fighting in the sub-zero temperatures in Stalingrad. They reverted to communism, of course, after they won the war. So I think Russia is very patriotic, but they are conflicted. Are they part of the West or not? For example, in the Russian language, there's a lot of French, which you notice when you're there. I don't speak Russian, except just to kind of get around, but you see and hear a lot of French words, and that's a residue, if you've read War and Peace by Tolstoy, the Russian upper classes always spoke to each other

in French. Russia was a peasant language. French was the language of diplomacy and culture and civilization and all that stuff. So there's still a lot of attraction of the West to Russia, but they're not quite there yet. And what we should have decided, since I was there for the end of the Cold War, I can speak with some authority about this, at least from my personal observation. Bush won, blew the end of the Cold War. Reagan had given him a victory. Reagan was a great commander in this sense. When he was asked about the Cold War, they said, what should happen? He said,

we win, they lose. That's what a commander-in-chief does. He sets an objective and a goal and lets his generals implement it. But Bush, we bought the Soviet Union for a penny on the dollar. It collapsed, and its collapse was very visible to those of us who were there. I know when I first went in 86, some of the CIA guys who accompanied us on this trip were saying, oh, it's a first world country, it's got nuclear weapons, it's the other global superpower. Then you got there and you realize that was all complete crap. It was a really functioning society in which the morality had gone out the window. Every man could be bribed and bought. Now, half the women were freelance prostitutes,

they would do anything. So when I came back, we went to the White House, the Reagan White House, I had gone with the famous pianist, Vladimir Horowitz. So it was a big international thing. And I wrote the cover story for Time Magazine about it. And I said to some of the folks in the White House, they've lost. It's a war. It's over. The society is collapsing. And I went on the air in New York on Lillian Samuel's radio show. And she said, what do you think is going to happen? This was 86 now or 87. And I said, well, I think Germany will be reunited within five years. And I was way off. It was two years.

Oh, wow. That's still pretty good, though. Well, the wall came down in 89. I was there for that. And I had my sledgehammer. I borrowed a sledgehammer from some German guy and banged out some chunks of it myself. And I have them actually here in the house. And I gave a lot of them away, but I have one big piece still left. But I had watched this, and you could see that these socialist countries were defeated.

Nothing worked. Everything stank. It's, I guess, what Cuba is like today. It's pretty bad off in Cuba right now. Well, what I thought was the most symbolic thing was that there were very few cars on the roads in Moscow in those days because they were expensive and they were crap. And people would drive without their headlights on. You never drove with your headlights on. And I thought, wow, this is great.

A whole country with nuclear weapons that drives around in the dark. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think that Reagan would have handled it. But, of course, he was turned out. And Bush just completely blew it. Completely. And you're talking about a senior, right?

I'm talking about, yeah, Poppy. Yeah. Who had been the CIA director for a year. Yeah. And should have known better. But he had very poor advisers. And so did W, who had Cheney, who was a leftover from the Gerald Ford administration. So that's how far back Cheney went.

And he was just so stuck in his worldview that he couldn't see the opportunities that existed. But, you know, we make mistakes and here we are. This is the world we live in. Biden has done his best to pick a fight with Russia via NATO. NATO should have been disbanded in 1945 after the war ended. That was the only point of NATO.

So that kind of plays into my argument that we've been on a losing streak since 1945. What do you think my understanding is Russiaussia is on its back foot and we've been using as a proxy war uh what do you what do you think where russia's at right now in your experience with russia because i mean there almost was a run on the banks the federal reserve actually had to come out on telegram and say no your money's safe there's inflation is out

of control he's having trouble funding it. Do you think that we actually have him on his back foot? Well, Russia's always on its back foot until it's not. That's kind of interesting. One of the most decisive decisions, if I can repeat myself, was made by Napoleon, who decided that he needed a mayor. The point of the story is of such little things his history made napoleon decided he he couldn't have a child with josephine she was okay he was worried about himself she had two kids by a previous marriage

but she didn't give napoleon any any kids boys. He had a couple of illegitimate sons by his various mistresses. But he needed a dynastic heir. So he had a choice. He could marry Alexander the Great's, no, no, no. Czar Alexander's younger sister, who was a teenager. Or he could marry the daughter of the Austrian Empire emperor, who was related to Marie Antoinette. So he chose poorly. He married the daughter of the Austrian Emperor. Had he married Alexander's sister, he would never have invaded Russia, or certainly not when he did. And of

course, that was the end of Napoleon,on because the russians did what they always do they retreat retreat retreat retreat retreat suck you into this endless country and then kill you and that's what happened so russia's always in trouble the russian i love the russians but they're very odd they put it this way i said one of the times I came back, I said, a Russian man who doesn't wake up in the gutter covered with his own puke every morning thinks he didn't have a good time the night before. I mean, they really are, they're hard drinkers. They're always in a kind of dour, gloomy, pessimistic mood. It's just part of the whole Slavic soul, I think.

I would not underestimate the Russians. They're capable of pulling it out when they need to. Sometimes you play your best game when you're on the back foot, maybe. I don't know. Or you learn to roll with it. I mean, it's a giant fucking gas station, really, the whole

country is what it is. But yeah, it's interesting. It'll see. It's interesting giant fucking gas station, really, the whole country is what it is. But yeah, it's interesting. It'll see. It's interesting to see how it plays out. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how, I don't know, the whole thing. It has been kind of interesting to see what Benjamin Netanyahu, you talked about someone who's been running from, you talked about Caesar, where Caesar would be in trouble if

he ever stopped the war, the civil war he's fighting benjamin not you know he's been doing the same thing but it's interesting to see the expanded war that they've done in fighting beyond october 7th helping cause i don't know if it helped cause the collapse of syria but certainly they've gone and cleaned up after the collapse of syria all the war bases and stuff and and how it almost seems like the proxy war that we've been fighting with Hamas and Iran through funding and giving arms to

Israel has kind of helped collapse that whole situation there and maybe put Iran finally maybe in its place. Maybe, I don't know. Well, this is a point I make right at the beginning of A Rage to Conquer, which is that war emmanuel khan said peace is not the normal state of people living side by side war is the natural state peace is the average the the thing about about warfare i'm sorry i lost my

train of thought there i was just about to make another point. Oh, I know. It is, war is the primary engine of social and technological change. Technology raises its game for military purposes. Always has, always will. Sometimes technology outruns the ability of human beings to use it. The American Civil War was a good example. They were fighting a sort of Napoleonic War at the beginning, but with modern, then modern weapons, cannons and better rifles and everything. So, war is a great disruptor.

I think the reason that the State Department types and the peaceniks types don't like it is that they're fundamentally rock conservatives they don't want anything to change they they the devil they know is better than the devil they don't know and for example the people who were most dead set against the collapse of the Soviet Union who do you think they were? Who? The CIA. Well, it keeps them in business, right? Well, that's it. It keeps them in business. And they had a modus operandi with the KGB.

You don't do this. We don't do this. You kill one of our guys here. We'll kill one of your guys here. We'll swap some spies at the Gleenekebrücke in Berlin. But otherwise, nobody smashes the other guy's rice bowl. And so the ones who fought the hardest against the collapse of the Soviet Union was the agency. That's funny.

Did you ever see The Russia House? Yes, yes. The Russia House. It's such a beautiful movie. There's a line in it. I forget the name of the actor from Jaws says, but he goes, you know, it's a little hard to sell wars and funding to Congress if there really isn't a war.

Because they, you know, I won't blow the plot line of the movie, but there's a line that he says something to that effect. Like, we can't get a war funded if there is no wars, basically. Or, you know, we find that the other person doesn't have the same. Well, Bush 2 fixed that. We've had war since 2001. Absolutely no point. That's the thing. It just keeps the supply chains running.

So there's a lot more. Me, Cheney, and Halliburton, very rich. I call it the Dick Cheney presidency, the W presidency. I voted for George Bush, and I was degassed. I was just like, this is fucking bullshit. With Dick Cheney and the no big contracts to Halliburton, I'm just like, well, we see what the motive is behind this

war. Anyway, we'll be paying her for years, so enjoy it, folks. Anyway, guys, final thoughts as we go out on dot coms. Where can people find out more about you on the interwebs? Well, I have a Wikipedia page. I had a website which is going to be transformed into something else, so I might as well tell you about that. Sure.

It's called the-pipeline, like an oil pipeline, dot org. And we ran that for four or five five years and it was mostly about energy issues although we dealt with the covid hoax and you know electric vehicles a lot of the stuff that we were trying to raise awareness about against actually and we published two books one is called against the great reset which was an anti-world economic forum book with a roster of very distinguished contributors. And most recently, I commissioned and published Against the Corporate Media. two and have watched with dismay as I went all the way to Time Magazine at its height in my own journalistic career at the wreck of the media now. It's just terrible. So, we have two books, Against the Great Reset and Against the Corporate Media, and the-pipeline.org

is a treasure trove of articles, some of which I'll be adapting into online books for readers. But the new website will be up I hope soon, and then people can find me there as well. Well, thank you very much, Michael, for coming to the show. We certainly appreciate your opinion. And, you know, the one thing man

can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. So please, folks, study damn history, and I'm tired of repeating the same things. Can we get over this? Human nature. If I didn't show the cover of this book here, which is quite well done, going from ancient warfare to World War II,

which really gives you the outline of 12 battles that changed world history. And there'll be a link for it on the Chris Voss Show. Thank you very much, Michael, for coming on the show. Folks, start at the book, wherever fine books are sold. Rage to Conquer, 12 Battles That Changed the Course of Western History, out January 28th, 2025. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.