The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1017: The Policies That Led to the Pearl Harbor Attack w/ Josiah Lippincott

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

67 MinutesPG-13Josiah Lippincott is a former Marine officer and is currently a PHD candidate at Hillsdale College.Josiah joins Pete to share some information from his PHD thesis on the causes and effects of the United States war with Japan.Josiah's SubstackJosiah's Author's Page at American GreatnessJosiah's Telegram PageGet Autonomy Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I look forward to trying to do a lot more this year with the show, and any support you can give me helps with that. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. For the first time, Josiah Lippenka. How are you doing, Josiah? I'm doing really well. Thank you for having me on today.

No problem. It's already a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so I am a former Marine officer, and also I've attended the graduate program at Hillsdale College. I'm a PhD candidate there, and I've been working on a dissertation on the Far East, as well as some of my more popular writings, which people can find at American greatness, American mind, as well as my substack. So I'm a writer, I'm interested in current events, and I'm interested in foreign policy.

Cool. I'll get you to plug all that stuff at the end. Sure. So what we were talking about before we went live, it seems like you're one of the people who didn't get his Twitter account back. Right. No, and that's a big reason why I'm here tonight is I take every opportunity I can to talk about my work. I think it's important. You know, I think we live in a regime that actively tries to censor people like me. And so there's a need to keep pushing the message, I think.

you know, regardless of, you know, what kind of means there are available. You know, it's hard to lose a platform. You know, I think on Twitter I was getting something like 8 million hits a month when I was banned. And so substack is just a lot smaller, but it's still, I think, worth doing. And, you know, again, I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk about these ideas in public. It's always helpful. Yeah, we had, you know, you said that since your concentration is the Far East, And especially when it comes to the World War, the World War II, I've done a lot of work on the European theater,

especially concentrating on Germany and Germany, Russia, England, those three. But really haven't gotten into a lot of the Pacific theater. And, you know, the, let's start off with this. I have a tendency to believe that, from what I've heard, a lot of the soldiers who came back from the Pacific Theater dealt a little easier with what they saw there than the ones that came home from Europe because basically they weren't killing people that looked like them. What do you think? What do you think about that theory? You know, I am not, you know, I think the consequences of the war on the ordinary soldiers, I think there were some negative. effects, certainly, that came out later. But I do think that the quality and intensity of the

combat in the Far East was often sharper than it was in the European theater. So I don't know if it was, if the effect was to make the consequences of the war less striking on the individuals who fought. Because I think in some ways, the kinds of combat that they endured really were just, just, I think, more brutal. I mean, if you see footage of Okinawa during the fighting. I mean, you have American troops walking up to caves with flamethrowers to light Japanese soldiers inside on fire. You know, I was stationed on Okinawa. And you see footage of the devastation of Naha, the main city, during the war. And it's unbelievable. I was an artilleryman by training. And there's something you can do in an artillery battery called a sweepin zone, which is where you

use the battery or a battalion or however large of a firing unit that you're using. and you target in such a way that every shell falls just outside of the lethal range of the other shell. So the effect from the air when you look at the devastation is that you just have overlapping shell holes in a sort of matrix pattern along the ground. And footage that I've seen of Naha after the fighting was that kind of artillery barrage. I mean, just unbelievable. I think the Japanese have a word basically means like a typhoon of steel, represent the artillery strikes in 1945 there. So again, I think a third of the population of Okinawa died. That's in one battle and just the consequences of the devastation of the fighting. So I think

from my perspective, you know, I'm not an expert on the impact of the war psychologically or soldiers accounts, but what I can say is that the type of fighting in the far east was often extremely brutal. And, you know, I've read scholars who've kind of presented that as a kind of race war and there might be something very much to that and it's disturbing to say the least yeah so what is uh what's your take on why that whole thing started yeah so it's a it's a complex set of affairs and we can go deep on it we can you know cover the surface whatever you know think is useful for your audience i would say the the root cause of the war which is in the pacific and really of a American involvement in World War II, which, you know, again, flows through Pearl Harbor.

You know, America, there was fighting with Nazi Germany in the fall of 1941. There are some who argue, I think, compellingly, that the war between Nazi Germany and the United States began in September 11th, 1941. But there was, so there was combat in the Atlantic. However, it was not the event that crystallized the World War II for the United States and got the Congressional Declaration of War. So the root cause I see in the Far East, and strangely, is that the American desire to preserve Chinese sovereignty and to enforce the open door note was the proximate cause of the war in the Pacific. And I don't think that's well known. And I think once it's explained, I think it can definitely change the way Americans view that conflict. The way it's typically presented is that Pearl Harbor came out of nowhere.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese woke up and chose violence. They killed a bunch of Americans in an unprovoked surprise attack that was against the laws of war, and then their brutality and aggression then launches the conflict. But I think a more nuanced and more historically accurate account of the war would delve into the diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States over Japan's presence in China. and that I see as the primary cause of the war because it sets in motion the military conflict, I think.

What's the open door note? The open door note was actually two, but the second one is the most important. It was signed or issued on July 3rd, 1900 by Secretary of State John Hay. It's important to establish a little bit of background here. During the 19th century, the Chinese regime was in a state of basically full-on collapse. There was a series of wars in China. There were two

the first and second opium wars that China fought with the British. The result of the first opium war fought in the 1840s was the Treaty of Nanking. And that's how Britain takes Hong Kong and then it gets extraterritoriality rights and then open treaty ports within China itself. During the 1860s you have the Taiping rebellion in China, which may be the most brutal war in human history. Scholars can't really even say how many people died. They estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 50 million. The Qing Dynasty basically has a harder and harder time maintaining its control of China. Western powers are increasingly encroaching on Chinese sovereignty and taking territory as warlords carve up the internal portions of China and establish quasi-sovereignty.

authority in various areas. So what you see is that by the end of the 19th century, China is in a state of collapse. The Qing dynasty has a hard time maintaining sovereignty. And in 1894, 1895, Japan and China fight a war over the Korean Peninsula. And that war in Japan's view is a war designed to preserve them from the dagger pointed at their heart in Korea. And so the Japanese fight that war. There's something called the Donghawk Rebellion. There's a peasant uprising in Korea.

Japan wants to protect interest there. They're worried about the Russians. And so there's this conflict on the peninsula. At the end of the war, that first Sino-Japanese war in the 1890s, the United States actually participates in the peace treaty negotiations. Japan, despite winning militarily, is basically put aside in the negotiations. They don't get everything they feel they deserve. And European powers like the Russians and the United States, as well as the British and the French, also get carve-ups of

territory within China itself. So there's a sort of toxic stew brewing within China regarding attitudes toward foreigners. By 1890, there's a movement, which we know in English as the boxers. It's an anti-foreign element. And eventually, there's an attack on the international legate within Beijing. And then by the summer of 1900, the United States needs to send in troops to protect American. Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they?

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actually on summer vacation and is not in the white house and the vice president at the time was deeply ill and on the verge of dying so bizarrely the secretary of state was the sole figure in the American government who could make foreign policy at that time. It was actually Abraham Lincoln's former secretary who had now, 40 years later, was Secretary of State. So John Hay in July 3rd of 1900 issues the open door note. And the note is important for a kind of final line, which says that the United States wishes to protect China's peace and safety as well as its sovereign integrity. And it's a striking line because the point of the note was to try and coordinate the United States was trying to coordinate the foreign powers in China and establish a sort of modus vivendi that would allow for all foreign powers to kind of equal access to trade in China,

prevent any one power from conquering the country and kind of negotiate this approach to China, which would prevent it from being conquered, essentially. So that line, though, in the open door note, in the second open door note in July of 1900, specifies that America has an interest in Chinese sovereignty. And I think that's a unique and critical moment in American history. The United States ties itself to China in a way that invests Americans in preserving China's independence. And I believe, and I believe I can show, and I'm doing so in my dissertation, that the early American foreign policy, understanding of the founding that it basically governed the United States up through the Spanish-American War was non-interventionist and designed to protect the natural rights of Americans. And it viewed consent and protection of rights as the two basic elements of foreign policy.

But once you get to the open door note, you see this progressive view, which sees America as a force for spreading democracy or uplift is another way of understanding this. basically America's are going to be a force for good. We have this altruistic foreign policy, and it is tied to Chinese sovereignty in the open door note. And so in 1922, there's something called a nine-power treaty signed in Washington, D.C., where the United States makes explicit that it is the policy of the American government to preserve Chinese sovereignty and to try and keep China to be a coherent whole that won't be conquered by foreign powers. And it's that policy that ultimately puts America onto a collision course with the Empire of Japan.

What is it about Korea that they were fighting over? Well, so to go back a long way, Japan has, for one, has limited natural resources. It is also vulnerable to external attack, especially across the Straits of Tsushima. So the distance between Pusan and then Fukuoka in Japan is roughly about 60 miles. And so in 1271 and then 1284, the Mongol horde under Kublai Khan attempts to cross those straits to invade Japan twice. And that's where we get the term kamikaze. There was a typhoon in 1271 that kicks the Mongol forces away from Japan, and they're saved by this divine wind, the kamikaze. And so from that point onward, Japan has this profound concern with being invaded from the Chinese mainland.

And so once you have the Perry Expedition, Japan emerges out of self-imposed isolation in the mid-1850s. They need to modernize. They are afraid of being conquered. And they begin to look outward to see where they can both gather resources and protect themselves from foreign invasion across the Korean Peninsula. And there's also a very profound concern with the Russians, especially Russian access to warm water ports within China. So that's sort of the geopolitical situation that the Japanese are concerned with. The Shandong Peninsula within China and then with the Korean Peninsula, both are geopolitical concerns for the Japanese Empire. All right.

Come up to the 30s. And what's transpiring that causes the United States to? It sounds like you're saying because they were tied to China. Right. Then there's going to be tension with Japan. Explain some of that. Yeah. So in 1931, the Japanese take over Manchuria.

That conflict is, it ends by 1932. It's relatively quick. But the Japanese now possess the most resource-rich portion of China falls under their control. In 1937, the Japanese began the second Sino-Japanese War, the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Essentially, the Japanese are looking for, and the Japanese militarists in particular want to expand Japanese presence

on the Chinese mainland as a way of gathering resources and ultimately securing themselves a sort of sphere of influence, which they can then use to become a major power in their own right and to alleviate economic problems at home. The Japanese being fighting, that second Sino-Japanese War lasts from 19, 1937 through 1945.

And that's where you have the southern strike, the Japanese launch into Nanking, and it kind of leads to... Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it. If you ask me, it's the fastest way to a meltdown.

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Keep it to yourself. What has been known in the West is the rape of Nanking. And there's a lot there to dig into in its own right. And, you know, it's regardless, the point is that the Japanese have begun military operations throughout China. It's a major conflict with the nationalists who are led by Chiang Kai Shek. He leaves the Kuomintang, which is this sort of quasi-socialist-slaish socialist, but very much a nationalist Chinese movement dedicated to establishing a republic in the aftermath of the collapse of the Qing dynasty in the 1910s.

So what's happened is Japan has major incursions into China itself. The United States takes issue with this under FDR. From the very beginning of FDR's presidency, there's a sort of ongoing. international pressure from the United States on Japan to get out of China. And this comes to a head in 1940, in 1941. So what happens there is Nazi Germany invades France. The French government collapses in May of 1940, but the French have overseas colonies, the leading one of which is in Indochina. That Indo-Chinese colony is crucial to the Chinese forces in the nationalist government, who receive supplies through the South.

So within that position, the Japanese then see an opening with the Vichy government to put pressure on the Vichy government and the French colonial administrator within Indochina to allow them, the Japanese, to station troops within French Indochina to cut off supplies flowing to Chiang Kai Shack's government through the South. So over the span of 1940, 1941,

the French and the Japanese in Getsk, age and some highly complicated diplomatic back and forth. Eventually the French realized their position of trying to keep the Japanese out of their colony is untenable. And then in early 1941, they allow the Japanese to send and station significant numbers of troops in northern Indochina to try and allow the Japanese to cut off the supplies to the Chinese government, the nationalist Chinese government. When that happens, the United States, States begins setting in motion in a much harsher economic embargo that specifically targets gasoline. And this has been going on since 1940 through 1941.

And there's an article by a man named Irving Anderson in the Pacific Historical Review, which I think gives a good overview of how that embargo was put in place. Anderson argues that FDR did not want a full-on embargo. Anderson claims that FDR wanted to avoid war with Japan in 1940 and 41. However, there were elements within the American government led by Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, who pushed very hard to basically cut off supplies to Japan. And the Secretary of, I believe the State Department in 1938 had indicated that if Japan lost oil resources, they would go to war definitely in the Dutch East Indies,

because they needed the rubber and oil production that was available there. But throughout 1940 and 1941, a combination of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Loughian, as well as George Walden, who was the head of the Shell Vak Corporation, which had, I believe they were stationed out of the East Indies. This is Shell now. The company we know is Shell. So basically you have a mixture of American, Dutch, British, and commercial interests that are working together in 1940, 1941, to cut off oil resources to Japan. By the summer of 1941, FDR freezes Japanese assets within the United States.

They can no longer use their bank accounts there to buy American oil. He cuts off a supply of what was known as aviation gasoline. it's a more refined product. But they were still selling a more crude product to the Japanese. In the summer of 1941, the Japanese sent oil tankers to San Francisco to pick up oil supplies. They try and use American dollars. They pull out of Brazilian accounts to try and buy that oil. The Treasury Department under Henry Morgenthau slow walks the Japanese application to purchase this oil.

And they use some legal powers they gained in 1940. And so basically what happens is by September of 1941, the Japanese have come to realize that they are not going to be able to buy that oil. They only have a six-month supply left. American demands that are given to the Japanese include basically a complete surrender of all of their territory in China and terms which they view will basically ensure they're no longer a sovereign country. Faced with those demands from the American government, the Japanese war faction, led by Hideki Tojo comes to power. I believe this is October of 1941. Tojo comes to power.

The plan is set in motion to bomb Pearl Harbor. The Japanese continued negotiations knowing that there's very little, if no chance, that they will succeed. And they've kind of dedicated themselves to a strategy, a quick knockout blow at Pearl Harbor, which they hope will allow them to expand their empire into the Pacific Island territories,

seizing the needed oil and rubber resources that they need in order to continue their war in China. So, you know, that's kind of a long account, but I think gives the sequence of events, I hope, in a cogent way, showing there's a very clear connection between the American commitment to China. That commitment then leads to interference in Indo-China. That interference then leads to, you know, pressure on the Japanese, which they ultimately cannot get out of economically.

And that, I think, more than anything else, yields to, in the Japanese mind, a military solution. It really is a lot easier if you just think that they woke up one morning and were, you know, had too much tea and decided. Yeah. Yeah. So what did they think was going to happen? Did they think that by bombing Pearl Harbor that they were, the United States would abandon Hawaii? Well, I think, you know, just based off of, and again, it's kind of odd, a lot of the Japanese sources on their thinking are kind of trans, not a lot are translated to the English.

and a lot of them, you know, from my understanding, I don't speak Japanese, are badly translated. That's what some of the scholars claim in sort of these internecing scholarly debates. But my grasp on the Japanese understanding of their political situation as well as their military strategy was that they understood that they did not have the military political or economic resources to wage a protracted war. It seems the Japanese believe that even if they took the Dutch East Indies, that that that sort of action would provoke the United States because of the American garrison in the Philippines. So they thought even if they seized the territory they wanted, the Americans would then send

the fleet stationed at Honolulu where they would send that to fight the Japanese and then they would lose. So in the 1904-05 war with the Russians, the Japanese won by winning one decisive conflict, the decisive set-piece battle. That's why it really was a draw. It really wasn't a win for Japan. Yeah. I mean, it was very close.

I mean, had the Russians had the ability to follow up, the Japanese probably would have lost, honestly. But in this, so I think in their minds, they thought they could buy themselves enough time to secure the resources they need and then negotiate a sort of settlement with the United States. So it's key. Kind of another detail is that the American fleet at Pearl Harbor had until 1940 had been stationed at San Diego. So the movement of that fleet to Pearl Harbor in the Japanese mine. mind was a threat. Expansionist. Yeah, it was you know you move the fleet 2,000 miles

closer. And also at the time, American fleets in the Pacific were, some of them would engage in provocative actions with the Japanese. They would sail in the Japanese harbors, launch smoke screens. And, you know, again, there was a lot,

so there's a kind of a scholarly fight over this, especially among revisionists over, was FDR trying to provoke war in the Pacific or not? And I'm, you know, I don't think it actually ultimately matters how, what one finds out on that question because I think the overall contours of American policy make very clear that FDR was ready and won at war at some point. Now, whether they got it when they wanted, that's a different question. So I guess that this is the point we can talk about, what's it called, the Zimmerman Telegram? Yeah.

Yeah. That's the World War I telegram to the Mexican. Oh, no, which is the one that, no, yeah, World War I, sorry. I just finished, we just did a World War I series. Which is the, who has had the telegram that FDR knew, they said FDR knew that they were going to be attacking Pearl Harbor and it got buried? You know, there's, you know, I'm not, there's a couple of different claims that I've seen regarding FDR's for knowledge of the, of the Pearl Harbor attack. one so America was decrypting Japanese diplomatic cables all throughout

1940, 41 or for a good portion of that through the magic system and so they knew a ton they knew the Japanese were interested in Pearl Harbor they knew the Japanese were close to war the Japanese themselves were like we're going to cut off negotiations at this point unless we get what we want if we don't get that things are going to happen the night before Pearl Harbor happened

the Americans had already decoded this 14 point state that the Japanese were sending in. It mentioned times of when the documents needed to be delivered by. And that was basically anybody who read that could have seen something's going to happen on December 7th. And it's just bizarre because you see FDR spent the morning of December 7th like looking at a stamp collection. George C. Marshall was allegedly on a horseback ride.

He's the Army Chief of Staff. Couldn't be contacted. People were trying to reach out to him. They weren't available. You know, the commander, husband Kimmel, who was at the Naval Commander there, the Commander-in-Chief of all Pacific forces in Honolulu did not have access to magic decrypted documents.

He wasn't given them. The FBI arrested Japanese spies who were kind of indicating things they were interested in, which involved Pearl Harbor. The FBI was tapping the Japanese embassy. They were getting their phone traffic. I mean, there were so many documents and so many pieces of evidence

that should have been clear to American policy makers if anyone had put any of these puzzle pieces together, war is coming, the Japanese are likely to take military action when they submit these demands. American troops should be ready.

And what comes out of this, I think, is a view of the incompetence. So Pearl Harbor gets attacked the morning of September 7th, 1941, about I think 730 in the morning, or right around that time period. the American garrison in the Philippines is attacked seven hours later and they are caught with their pants down on the ground. So in my mind, the argument for FDR's foreknowledge is, okay, you have all these pieces of evidence that seem to indicate that you should know what the Japanese are up to. On the other hand, there's the incompetence argument, which is you, Pearl Harbor literally gets attacked and the Americans in the Philippines are not ready to defend themselves at all.

And the point is, if you knew the surprise attack is coming, what is the benefit of being caught with your pants down instead of having troops ready at the guns on your anti-aircraft weapons? Call them, you know, put them on general quarters an hour beforehand. And then, you know, you could take actions that would allow you to get what you want, which is the attack by the Japanese, but then also resist it in a way that doesn't make you look like an idiot and incompetent. So I don't know. I mean, either way, the American policymakers were kind of gunning for war. So, you know, as to specific telegrams and information that's come out behind that, you know, I'm familiar with some of the literature. But my overall take is you can just look at the publicly admitted documents, the speeches, the policies, the everything, the briefings, the things that the most earnest mainstream liberal historians will say. and you can indicate American policy in the Far East was provocative. And, you know, then the question of FDR's foreknowledge, I think, isn't, it isn't that important.

It just, you know, people wanted war and they got it. So when they do declare war on Japan and they start and they start heading out, what's the purpose? What are they, what are they expecting to do? What are they, I mean, are they unconditional surrender? Are they basically what it ended up being was then becoming a vassal state of the United. States or what was it at first? What was the plan? Well, it's a great question. And it's actually the answer is given before the war even launches. It's the August 1941 document, the Atlantic Charter, which includes a description of what the allies intend to accomplish during the war.

I mean, it is a call for essentially a global new deal. And I have it here, the text of that document. And the sixth point of the Atlantic Charter is the claim that after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, the Allies hope to see establish a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want. So that claim is directly mimicking FDR's Four Freedoms and its Domestic New Deal. And that claim there is really the aim, I think, of American War aims, was the creation of a new international order that would deprioritize state sovereignty,

that would elevate international liberal institutions like the United Nations. And the goal was to use a united front of all of the world's leading, leftist powers. So at the time, predominantly the United States and the Soviet Union and the creation of a new planetary regime in terms of a world order. And so you can see that. So at the same meeting that produced the Atlantic Charter, there is a joint statement released by Winston Churchill and FDR, which basically states support from the United States and Great Britain for the Soviet Union. It praises the brave Soviet forces who are pushing back against Nazi tyranny and the invasion and kind of calls for an end to Hitlerism.

So by that point in August of 1941, you see that the Americans and FDR are very clear about what they want the post-war order to look like. And then the eighth point of the Atlantic Charter is the complete abandonment of the use of arms to settle international disputes. So what that means is you're not going to have sovereign states anymore. Because sovereignty means you can choose when to go to war or when not to go to war in line with what you perceive to be your interests. By 1945, that older sovereign order is gone. And one of the arguments I make now is that the end result was that in our world order, there are no longer our sovereign states.

Germany is not a sovereign state. Japan is not a sovereign state. I would argue the American people are no longer politically sovereign. We do not get a say in questions of immigration or questions of war and peace. Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown.

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They're right here at Beacon South Quarter. That designer's sofa you've been wanting. It's in Seoul, Boe Concept and Rocheburoix. The Dream Kitchen? Check out at Cube Kitchens. Beacon South Quarter Dublin, where the smart shoppers go. Two hours free parking, just off the M50, exit 13. It's a Black Friday secret.

Keep it to yourself. You do not get to vote for policies at the ballot box on those issues, just simply. And so, you know, I think overall, you know, the allies are very clear. This is what we want. And they state that in the Atlantic Charter. And then there's a joint statement in January of 1942 in which they again reaffirm the allies do what they intend to do during the war. And it is to the creation of this new global order.

It's interesting from my research that they could probably think that Russia, the Soviet Union would be down with it, considering how many Western companies were already doing business in the Soviet Union were keeping their, basically created their industry post-revolution and post-terror. And then at the end of the, at the end of the war, you, Stalin just backs out of everything. And the neo-conservatives, the neoconservatives pop up. And yeah, they try to, now it's like, oh, we're going to do that without Russia. Right. Right, right, right. And I think one of the points, and I think this is something, you know, the liberal naivete about the communists was not that they couldn't have known or didn't know the Soviets were brutal. What they didn't realize was that the Soviets and the communists generally were not going to forgive them for being so milk toast.

They really thought they could have, I mean, I think the post-190 shows what the liberals really wanted to do well before then. So promoting gay rights worldwide decolonization, very important. Anti-racist, that vein of thought was present in FDR. And it's one of the shocking things, at least to me that I've learned, is, wow, you can see the liberal internationalist program. It was president in Lenin, but only for one group. Yeah, right. But you can see, yeah, but you see for FDR, they want that planetary decolonization. And it shows you that I think so much, it's just someone asked me, like, why are right-wingers or conservatives or libertarians now so much more interested in World War II?

And my claim is that the world order we live in now is so much a product of that conflict that in order to understand where we are now, you have to go to the foundation of the world order. And it is found in World War II and in the liberal policies implemented during and after the war. And so that's where I see my scholarship is trying to describe that system in a way that people can hear. I think, you know, and I've said this before, the European theater is just so bound up. You know, like everybody's calling everyone else a Nazi today. So it just makes it, it has this theological, moralistic quality to it, that makes analysis really difficult. But the Far East does not have the same level

of vitriolic and mythological Thanos versus the Marvel Avengers kind of view. And so it makes it, I think, easier and better to kind of explore the consequences of the war within that context. And I found to be a really helpful vehicle for engaging in that kind of analysis. Yeah, Thomas 777 calls at the

post-the Nuremberg regime everything everything after Nuremberg that was that became that was even there was too far right wing according to the academics and everybody else basically became criminal well and I think you see that so there was a quote unquote Nuremberg for the Far East the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and I've been working through that I'm going to work through it in my dissertation because it is important One of the interesting things that distinguishes it from Nuremberg is that there's dissent among the prosecutors and the judges. Radhabited Powell. So this is great.

So the United States decides to bring in an Indian jurist to come be on the panel of judges for that trial. Well, Powell is an auto-dictat who's taught himself the older understanding of sovereignty under European international law. So when he gets there and he sees the new framework, he's like, this isn't right. And so he has this massive criticism. I think it's like some like 400 plus pages of his dissent, just explaining why he thinks that the proceedings are illegitimate under international law. And I think it's not a perfect dissent, but it does really capture the problems in the new system that we've created.

Because once you declare war, a criminal act, right? Once you establish the idea that after war, you can have trials, then war can no longer be bracketed by policy considerations. You can't have limited war. Every war becomes a totalizing war. You don't treat the enemy soldier. He's not a POW. He's a murderer. And you then, how can there be peace?

How can there be peace between the forces of good and the forces of evil? You know, we execute murderers, or we used to, in America. But now when you have your enemy combatant as a murderer, you can do anything you want to him. And so I think you see this sort of totalizing war comes out of World War II. And I think it means the destruction of the older Christian natural law slash natural rights understanding of international law that governed Europe from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century all the way up through World War I and World War II. Yeah, it's when you have to get rid of sovereign immunity and you basically say, okay, this this wasn't a government, it was a criminal gang. Right. And that's the only way that you can carry out your proceedings and basically destroy the rule of law, the international rule of law.

Well, where are we going to go from there? Yeah. So, I mean, and this is maybe one of my more radical arguments that there is a straight line from the IMTFE in Nuremberg. And the fire bombing of German cities and the atomic bombings and fire bombing within Japan, there's a straight line from all of those events to 9-11 and to the insurgencies in Vietnam, to the war in Korea, to the insurgency in Iraq, and the war with the Taliban. Is effectively what's happened is there's a new mode of warfare that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants because the allies during World War II did not draw that distinction.

Not really. I mean, when you're bombing cities full of women and children, the argument is they're all part of war production. And it's okay to target them. It's okay to take actions that will kill a bunch of them. And then you have people like FDR in conversations with Stalin saying we should just shoot 50,000 plus German officers after the war because they're criminals. So once you're down that road, you're declaring there's a certain kind of political regime, which is in itself a criminal enterprise. So why should it surprise anybody that Joe Biden is out there talking about war on the American people? They're arresting Donald Trump because they view him in the same light as they viewed Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Himmler, all of these people. That's the way the liberal mind works.

And how can you have rule of law? You can't have it. And so this is a big fight that I've had with a lot of the mainstream traditional conservatives who want to preserve the post-1945 order. You can't do it. it doesn't matter how much you cuck. These people will always view you on the side of the fascists. And they are going to use

legal maneuvers to destroy you. That's what the rule of law means. It's a political tool to wipe you out. So when conservatives talk about we need to preserve the rule of law, it's like we don't have the rule of law. We can't have that. Laws are founded in legitimacy

and the sources of legitimacy for this world order are profoundly different from the ones that came before. And why would why would Muslim nations and Muslim groups even bother becoming legitimate when they'll just be declared illegitimate? It's actually safer for them to be not state sponsored. Oh yeah. Just be out there on their own. Well, yeah. And there's this document, the Fatwa against the United States by Osama bin Laden.

And he justifies the 9-11, the use of suicide bombing on the basis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claims it's hypocritical. And arguably, that, is a correct inference. And it's, of course, a very problematic one. It was horrible watching those planes ram into the Twin Towers. But if you don't want a world in which that's happening, you have to enforce the sort of legal and moral protections. You have to bracket war. And that means you have to accept that war will have elements of injustice that cannot be purged from it. It means that when you have troops fighting on the battlefield, there will be war crimes that you as the victor are not going to prosecute. In order to have peace, you need an amnesty. You need to forget amnesia. You need to

forget the crime so that you can say, okay, in the name of the greater good and the greater justice, we need to not try and get perfect justice. But liberals can't accept that. And that's the, that's the reason they demanded unconditional surrender. It's the reason they demanded the, the, the completes the trials after the war, all of those things flow from the sort of hyper-idealistic understanding of human life. And I think the communists and the liberals share that in common. They want to transform the world and make it perfect. And they can't do it. And that desire for utopia is crazy and will result in massive brutality. And it has resulted in massive brutality. Well, and you see in that they still, knowing what they created, they still are

are able to create outrage, especially among the people and among their pundits and among their apparatchiks who may not even know any better that it's like, oh, I can't believe something like like 10-7 would ever happen. October 7, how could that ever happen? And you have people frothing at the mouth and it's like, wait a minute, this is, that's something that would have happened, you know, a thousand years ago, that's something that happened all the time. That's, that, right, what happened there, is actually more legitimate than launching, you know, launching this Afghanistan bombing campaign where you just bomb everything. And I think what comes out of this as well is like the, the kind of war where you can take prisoners,

you treat them humanely, you fight under a flag, you sign a treaty with the government when it's over, you don't kill civilians, you don't rape them. That is the aberration in human history. That is the aberration. And we're going back to, as you said, the pre-European style warfare, which is just war of annihilation. So the older war, you know, it'd be like, is Israel just going to wipe out Gaza?

Gazans wipe out the Israelis. That's the older, that's how war is conducted. It's just a cycle of endless cycle of violence to one person basically exterminates the other. And that's obviously a problem for a lot of different reasons. It's incredibly brutal. But, you know, some people, and I noticed this is an error that just drives me crazy. the Americans during the Civil War the Union Army March the Sherman's March to the Sea

People were like well that's total war It's not They were not trying to kill all the civilians They are not trying to They're not engaged in a sort of totalizing warfare That's designed to kill civilians And to treat enemies as partisans The desire was to prevent that

And even under civil wars under international law as framed You could treat your enemy as a partisan Which means an illegitimate combatant You can kill them on site And in the American Civil War, that was not the attitude. The union government claimed that they could have treated the Confederates as partisans, but did not, and treated them like they were legitimate combatants flying under a flag in order to bracket war. And you can see the bracketing of that kind of conflict in the modern day, that attitude has been completely lost, and we've destroyed it.

And so now you can see these sort of conflicts where everybody's a target. No one is safe. Uniforms don't matter. There is not a state involved. It's going to cause a lot of pain and suffering, I think, in the future. I think the future of war is ugly and brutal in that view. Okay, let's go back to the Pacific. Sure.

So it takes three and a half, four years of a battle. Why? Why did it take that long? Because the Americans didn't want to negotiate. You know, it's just like they wanted unconditional total surrender. I mean, look, I'm speculating. a little bit. I hope to have the evidence to back up this claim. I believe that by the battle of Midway in 1942, the war in the Pacific could have been over. It could have been over. The United

States after Midway, and you probably could have justified it to the American people, too. Been like, yep, they bombed us at Pearl Harbor. We upped them up out of Midway. Now we're going to sign a deal. The Japanese are going to give, you know, they're going to give us back the Philippines, or they're going to leave the Philippines, we're going to sign an indemnity, we're going to establish different spheres of influence and the war is going to be over. That's how war was conducted up until World War II. You'd have limited conflicts. People would fight over political territory, weapons, money, whatever the dispute was, and then you'd call it a day. But in World War II, in the Pacific, there was no existential national interest for the United States. We were fighting

because we wanted to save China from being invaded, which was probably going to happen anyway. But in order to do that, then FDR is like, well, we need total unconditional surrender from the Japanese. And so by 1944, the Japanese are putting out peace feelers. They want to surrender, but they keep putting like, they're like, well, can we keep some garrisons in China? We want to keep the emperor. We don't want our

government to have to be completely destroyed. And every time the Americans say no, no, no, no, no. And by August of 1945, there's, they just, you know, Truman decides to nuke the Japanese. And what's crazy and I follow Paul Hamm, a journalist, an Australian journalist who wrote a great book

on the bombings of the nuclear bombings. By August of 1945, even after the atomic bombings, the Japanese did not surrender because of the atomic bombings. They surrendered once it became clear that the Soviets had invaded Manchuria and would no longer negotiate an end of the war. That's what caused the end of the conflict. And it's amazing.

And the same time, the American's Secretary of State Burns at the time was like, yes, we'll allow the Japanese to keep your emperor. And so based off of those claims, the emperor was like, okay, I'm going to accept the peace deal. and put out and accept. And so we had a conditional surrender. It's hilarious. We fought all this for the unconditional surrender,

didn't even get it, and nobody seems to care. But a bunch of Americans died in really brutal combat. The battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa make no sense. Every American who died to take those islands, that was a waste of human life. It really just was. And it's like, what was that for? We've got to invade the mainland.

Why would you need to do that? That's insane. If you really wanted to, you could just starve the islands to death. But why would you want to do that? What do you mean they won't surrender? And this idea, the Japanese were just fanatical and crazy and under no circumstances we're going to surrender. So that is absolutely not true.

There was a peace faction within the Japanese government and there always was. Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it. If you ask me, it's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff and it doesn't get faster than appliances delivered. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock. But next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.org, part of expert electrical.

See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight branda. And it was true. We disempowered that peace faction by making crazy demands, or FDR disempowered the, you know, in Cordell Hull while they're negotiating with the Japanese. They're like, well, we're not going to allow you to preserve your sovereignty in the Far East and you can't have a sphere of influence, you can be a vassal state of the Americans and the British and the Soviets ultimately. And the Japanese are like, well, we don't really want to do that.

And so then, of course, you've got to retcon everything. Oh, is the rape of Man King's what caused the war? Actually, that's kind of shady. The big sources we have on that are from the Chinese communists, and I'm sure they're totally trustworthy. You know, it just, to my mind, just to go back to your question, the reason you have war for so long and so many people die

is an unwillingness to negotiate because there's an unwillingness to accept anything less than a complete revolution in planetary foreign policy and world affairs. You've got to have the global new deal. And anything less than that, the allies and FDR were just not willing to accept.

And so you get crazy. Well, it seems like we see something like that now is when it comes to basically anything, but especially Ukraine. It's like, at me, from what I understand, everything I've read, Putin was willing to negotiate in March of 2022. Absolutely. He's right.

He's like, all right, let's, let's end this. And then you get to the point where you're like, he should have just went balls out and like went after Kiev. I mean, just bombed Kiev. I mean, if you're going to, if you're going to do this, just do it, you know, you're going to get called the Nazi anyway. I mean, what the hell? They either want him to or waiting for him to die of something, and I saw the interview last week, doesn't look like he's sick, or they're using him to depopulate Ukraine. I mean, nothing else makes any sense. Yeah, I mean, one of the things is helpful is once you realize that American foreign policy is made by these women in pantsuits who are absolutely crazy, it becomes a lot clearer what's going on.

Someone like Samantha Powers, nuts, just bloodthirsty. You know, Victoria Newland, vicious. I mean, it is hard to describe. I think Victoria Newland is one of the most prominent war criminals in the world today. And so is Barack Obama. So is Joe Biden. So is George Bush. These people are all war criminals who, if you were to put them up against the Nuremberg standard,

every single one of them would have been executed at Nuremberg. But they're held up today because they're on. They're on the good guys team. They're fighting for human rights and gays and we're going to have mass migration. And that's why it's all okay. It's BLM. So it's okay to invade. You know, I think every single Ukrainian that's been killed, their blood is on Joe Biden's head.

And on that of his staff, these people are vicious and ugly in the worst possible way. We are led by some evil clowns. They're a mixture of malice and incompetence that really, I don't know, has rival in human history. The war in Ukraine never should have happened. NATO should have never expanded. NATO should have gone away in 1991. There was no reason for it. It was over.

NATO existed at best, you could say, to fight the Cold War. The Cold War is over. The Soviets are gone. And then you've got these crazy boomer politicians talking about Putin's trying to rebuild the USSR. It's like, you are high as a kite. Like, something's just wrong among these politicians, like over 65. There's a great, you know, right when the war kicked off, I was driving to the airport.

So it's like one of the only times I would ever listen to NPR. And one of these old lady hosts is on there talking to the CIA agent about the war. And she says at one point, she has the slip. She says, well, the USSR's nuclear arsenal, meaning Russia and Putin, I said, what do you think this is? 1983? And here's the thing. The woman, the USSR wasn't the USSR in 1983. No, and the point is that in 1983, that Lib woman would have been just over the moon with anger against Ronald Reagan for strategic defense initiative, mild anti-Sovieta policies.

Grenada, yeah. Yeah, you just, this is undemocratic and we need to work with the Russians, blah, blah, blah. And now it's just ferocious, violent hatred because now they're not as leftist. And Putin is not a conservative. Putin is a Lib. Putin is a Lib who did all the COVID crazy stuff. He's a boomer con. He is. He talks about Nazis. Yeah, Putin is talking about how the Ukrainians are Hitler. It's like, you are a boomer. I think Putin just endorsed Joe Biden or maybe I was snookered by the Twitter. I don't know. And honestly, it doesn't really matter. The point is, it's like, he's a boomer. Putin is a boomer in an old world. He really is trying. I think he's a really cautious politician. I think he didn't want to go to war in Ukraine. I think he was pushed into it by the more hard right factions in Russia. And by the simple geopolitical fact that you can't give up your near abroad to a foreign power. Stationing nuclear missiles outside Kiev is going to be the kind of thing that gets a Russian leader kicked out of office, just simply.

And Putin knows that. And it's like, this seems so simple. The United States could just be like, look, we're not expanding into NATO, into Kiev, into the Ukraine, not our problem. That's your near abroad. And you just draw a line in the map. All the former territories of the old Soviet Union are in your near abroad. So their foreign policy basically needs to be pro-Moscow.

and the foreign policy of Europe needs to be, you know, Poland. Poland can go either way. Doesn't really matter. The Poland's not a real country. And by the way, the polls are probably the dumbest at foreign policy of any regime, maybe in human history. I mean, they just literally can't seem to figure out what they need to do. But anyway, it's like the polls need to either go with the Germans or they need to go with the Russian. It might be because they're just such good people.

The polls. If you know any polls, they're the sweetest people. They're the nice of people. But I would never, never trust one to run your foreign policy. That'll just go badly automatically. You invite them to a party. You know, a poll at a party is going to be a lot of fun. But when in foreign policy, it's amazing.

It's a country with no natural borders surrounded by great powers on both sides. And they're like, our solution is to flip the middle finger to both of those powers. And this has throughout Poland's history has resulted in being. Yeah, it's like, you can't do that. Like, I don't know how to explain this to you. You don't have a, you are going to. to get owned. Anyway, that's a, sorry, it's just

seeing the, like the polls, if it, if it hadn't led to so many people getting killed throughout the, the, the last hundred years, it would be hilarious, but as such, it is a cause of endless, and horrible for the polls themselves, always getting conquered,

raped by their quote unquote allies and their enemies. It's really not even, not even a question. And then when the, and then when they do have politicians that rise up and they want to do something, they act more like a hunter than anything else. And it's like, guys, come on. Yeah.

No, Poland, you know, again, it just, it goes to show it's like politics in Europe could be so much more stable than it is just by admitting that there's certain spheres of influence that you just need to have. The Russians are not, you know, like Russia at one point was trying to join NATO. At that point, WTF, what are we even doing? That's so stupid. It doesn't even make any sense. It's like, this is dumb.

This is really dumb. And, you know, honestly, Trump doesn't, if I were Trump, I'd just be like, we're pulling out of NATO. We're just done with this. There's no reason to keep going with the Germans. It's like, if the Germans, it's like the Russians are not going to conquer Europe. They don't want to do that. That's not even on the agenda. They couldn't do it if they wanted to.

I mean. How would you want to rule? Why would you want those complete cucks to be part of your, to be part of your kingdom, be part of your empire? The Russians can sell oil to the Germans if they're a sovereign country. And that's really all the Russians, I think, want to do. And instead, no, in a liberal mind, it needs to be Putin, who is Hitler, who is Donald Trump, who is the 13th invisible reincarnation of the devil is going to invade. And then there, and it's like the chain of the causation doesn't even make sense.

It's like listening to people with Trump derangement syndrome. It's like, you're just on a different planet. Like you're not, Trump is a fascist. It's like, no, he's not. Like, yes, Trump is an anti-Semite. That's why he has a Jewish son-in-law and he goes to the whaling wall and where's a Kippa. It's like, what world are you living in where you think that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler? And yet there are people in this country and substantial numbers of them in power who really do think that way.

That is their reality. January 6th, they thought they were about to be like destroyed by the boomer Woffin. It's like crazy, craziness, absolutely detached from reality. Well, and I want to apologize for the Europeans because we're just as cucked as you are. But the, yeah, and this is something you can't get, you can't make people understand is they believe that everybody, that everybody in power that Washington, D.C. is like this Machiavellian group of, I mean, and no. And then you tell them, you tell them, no, they actually do believe these things about Donald Trump. They're like, no, no, they're just playing a role. It's like, no, they're a reflection of us.

And there are people all around you who think that Donald Trump is a fascist. And there's no, I mean, if you've ever, like, the idea there's like a secret in a room where they all know stuff. It's like, people are idiots. And you know they're idiots based off of what they do. Like if you listen to Kamala Harris talking public, you're like, that woman, I don't know, she might have an IQ over 80. Maybe, maybe. I'm willing to consider it, but I don't think so. I mean, you just listen to this woman.

But it does not make sense. It's like something about a coconut tree and the context and the, it's just insane. Biden's got dementia. I mean, he's doing the Alzheimer's walk as he's trying to get ice cream. And it's like these people are not geniuses. They do not have a plan that stretches beyond the next six months. There, it's, it's, and so you should not assign it in powers they don't have. And this is not my way of being like conspiracy theories are wrong.

My point is, look, you don't give them too much credit. It's like the Alex Jones type argument. What is it? He's like, there's like a scheme for global depopulation. It's like, no, it's actually the exact opposite. The plan for the left is to import a billion members of the global south into the United States. That's kind of vaguely what they're trying to do. There is no, the only people who are the only people who are depopulated are the ones who are, you know, European Christian civilization.

Anything connected to that they hate. But you know, don't, don't, you don't want to give them too much credit because if you do that, then it makes it sound like there's nothing we can do. And it's like, there's actually a lot that can be done because these, again, these people are not impressive and they are very vulnerable. I think especially now. Well, I mean, there are people behind the scenes who are conniving who can get things done, who know how to wield power. Sure. And they can target people. They can make examples of people.

They can make examples of a former president. Sure. But it's okay. And they can get away with it. No one's ever going to pay for it and everything. Okay, yeah, but that's just government. No one ever pays for it. Right.

It's so rare. Yeah, but I think there is. I think there is some fear among the American leadership class. like we are vulnerable. You are vulnerable. I mean, things are not going to get better. I mean, you know, it's like the housing market. What's the average price of a house over $400,000 right now? That's insane. And it's a 7% interest rate. If you're under the age of 40 right now, if you're, if you're under 30 right now, you can kiss your hopes of owning a home within the next 10 years, basically goodbye. It's not going to happen. So what do you do when a huge portion of the population is like,

we have no money, we have don't, I don't own my own house. I'm not. married. And then of course you've had all these people encouraging these sort of freaky-diki sexual orientations. So for one, you encourage people to do stuff that's like weird and they make themselves into social outcasts or into strange human beings who can't have a healthy relationship with other people. And then you're combining that kind of misery with an economic misery. I think our ruling class, if there's anybody there whose brain is functioning, they should get, this is not going anywhere that you want to be. You know, they should have stopped in the 90s. It should have been like, okay, it's true. We raped the blue collar white middle class and got rid of them.

Okay. You know, free trade is going to do that to a country. Okay, so what do you go from there? You could say, we're going to pump the brakes on the crazy. So you just take all the racial and sexual activists and you're like, out. We're not doing that. And you emphasize, we're going to just have standard neoliberalism if you want to use that phrase. And you're going to put the brakes on immigration. You don't need immigration. You could just have a liberal America. It's like people would have probably gone along with a lot of the socially liberal stuff for a long time. And it's like you probably could have gotten that to last,

I don't know, 100 years plus, but nope, just doubling down on the stupid. And I think by the end of this decade, American politics can look dramatically different. I mean, once Trump, no matter what happens in 2024, 2028 and beyond is going to be very alien to what we understand now.

And that's my sense, at least. A lot of people, think that this this if if this election does happen that it's going to be the last and yeah i would say this is depending on who gets elected i mean the the secession talk can increase a lot and i mean i just i think a lot of people are getting to the point where and i think politicians are starting to see this and i think elite elites are starting to see this that people just don't really want to somebody in Montana or Montana is not a great example because Montana has become shit.

Someone in North Dakota doesn't want a New Yorker to, you know, dictate who, you know, who rules over them. And I think the apathy that people are showing towards politics is probably what's going to, what will cause the most change because I think that's when elites see that and they're like, okay, we need a circulation of the elites. We need some, you know, we need something the other Pareto would talk about. And then you see something new happen. Yeah. And I don't know, you know, I don't like secession talk for a couple of reasons. One, it's way too legal. You know, that's a legal argument. People I think should talk about the rights. You, the government, and you don't have to, if rights

make you sad and there's a big faction on the right that's this way. Okay, talk about the government needs to protect ordinary people. And we should have a say in who rules over us. I think that's the American tradition and it's worth clinging to in this time. Protection and consent. I want to be protected. So crime, just protect people's right to life and liberty and property. That is going to be a winning campaign, I think, going forward. And you know, a lot of people like to despair about American politics and there's something kind of comforting about that like just being like well there's nothing we can do you're just kind of huddled down with your friends and i don't think it's a good attitude to have because i think there's a lot that could be done um i don't think it's good to just stare into

the liberal abyss because it it can blind you to seeing other things that are quite hopeful and you know i think you know as you're pointing out you know liberalism is so widespread it's not really sectional lines. It's, it's, you know, here in Hillsdale, Michigan, life is very different than it is in Ann Arbor. And it's an hour and a half away. It's like a different planet. Like people there think COVID is real. And no one out here ever really had, there was never the same level of crazy. There were pockets, but it wasn't ever on the same. By the summer of 2020, everyone was like, COVID is over if it was ever even real. And people were like opening businesses and stuff. And it's like when you have, so it's not really section.

so much as it's it's this this attitude ideologically between the left and the right that can you know often like urban and rural or urban suburban like going just a mile or two just dramatically changes the political landscape in a place and so that I think bodes for the future it just kind of shows any kind of if we do god forbid see political violence I think it'll be much more along the lines of insurgency and guerrilla warfare than it would be a long you know armies fighting each other or something like that and you know just and I think there should be avoided because I think that could be very maybe a very protracted violent brutal affair just depending on how it goes down and it's just like in my plea to the the the elite class is Trump need you let Trump win just let him win and then back off let him deport a couple million of these recent illegal immigrants like try and stabilize a situation and if we can do that I mean maybe we can buy ourselves some time.

And if not, then just get ready to write the lightning, I guess. Tell everybody where they can find your work. Please plug whatever you want. Yeah, absolutely. So the biggest way you can find my work is on American Greatness. I published there basically biweekly. And then I publish at my substack, which is Lipincott, L-I-P-I-N-C-O-T-T, and it's at .substack.com.

And that's where I have my, a lot of my writings I collate there. You can also find me on Telegram, but I'm definitely the most active on Substack right now. And I would direct people to go find my work there. All right. I appreciate it. And come back in the future, please. Yeah, Pete, thank you so much for your time.