The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1217: We Are Still Fighting World War II w/ John Fieldhouse

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

59 MinutesPG-13John Fieldhouse joins Pete once again. This time they read and comment on Antony Beevor's recent article for Foreign Affairs magazine entitled, "We Are Still Fighting WW2."We Are Still Fighting WW2Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete'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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Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana show. And it's been a while. Mr. Fieldhouse is back. How are you doing, sir? Not bad. Like I said, it's Dr. Admiral. Fleet Lord of Appalachia.

Oh, man. So someone sent me this article and considering how much World War II has, the discussion of World War II has reentered the zeitgeist thanks to people like Thomas 777 and Daryl Cooper and a lot of others, obviously Pap Buchanan, people like that, I thought this article by Anthony Bivore who, Antony Bivore, even though he, I consider him to be a left libertarian-ish. But he did write a really good book on the Spanish Civil War, and he's written a couple good history books, and he gets the facts right, as far as I can tell. He wrote an article for foreign affairs saying, entitled, We're Still Fighting World War II,

the Subtitle, The Unsettled Legacy of the Conflict that shaped today's Polit. So, yeah, are you, you know, what's your take on the fact that World War II is so much more discussed now? Is it just time to, is it time to shatter myths? I think in a lot of ways is the fact that, you know, that's sort of like the metaphysical paradigm, for lack of a better word, how the last few generations have defined the world and we've seen things, whether explicitly or not. So we're at a situation where it's now possible to, you know, even examine those, you know, presuppositions, those perspectives and why we have those perspectives, which is what people like, you know, Thomas and Daryl are very much doing. And a lot of the, I think, the reaction in mainstream media is, it's almost like the establishment sees itself as, you know, the host, the body politic, which they're not. But they see themselves as that.

And they see any person engaged, any kind of, I would say, what they call revisionist history, which I wouldn't even say that we're doing that. But it sees anything that attacks the narrative, even when it's doing so by stating facts that everybody knew in the past, is it looks at us as a virus. And it's almost like we're seeing a host, you know, trying to kill off what it sees as an infection. And that's part of why I think World War II is suddenly back in the zeitgeist with the establishment. Yeah, the problem is even when Pap Buchanan wrote his book, there's just way too much velocity of information now. So, you know, Pap Buchanan can write his book and he can get on C-SPAN 2 to talk about it. But the fact is, is that now you, somebody, you know, an idiot like me can go viral and get a million people looking at what I'm what I'm saying and two million people

what I'm saying and you know just call myself an idiot but you know what I'm saying you know could very well be true and it could it could go right up against the established narrative yet yeah if it catches on and people people agree with the message and even look into a little bit it's really hard for that for that host to be able to hold off or prevent that virus from from entering. Yeah, and part of this is, I think, has gotten so weird. And even we can see in the last, I don't know, was it 13 years since Buchanan put his book out about Churchill and Hitler is these are not controversial facts at the time, right?

I mean, they weren't things that every person knew, but some of the general World War II knowledge would know the majority of those things. just like a lot of the things we did in the past or historians talked about the past concerning the Third Reich or Italy during World War II. These were things that we would say challenge the narrative today were pretty mainstream, right? Historians had a fairly balanced understanding. They may not present it as a balanced manner,

but they had a fairly balanced understanding until very recently. The weirdest thing I think we're seeing right now that gets back to the whole like the host attack what it sees as an infection is basic, uncontroversial facts are now just stating those things. This is now seen as a partisan political issue, even when historical knowledge was never seen that way. And these are not very often controversial facts, if that makes sense. Yeah, I was just looking. It came out in 2008, 17 years ago, and social media was, I mean, Twitter was at its infancy.

I think I just made my first Twitter account in 2008. Facebook was something very few people were on. So information wasn't being blasted out there like it is today. So, I mean, I think really is a sign of the times and a sign of what technology can do. Yeah, like one of the best examples, and I'll shut up, is we were talking one time offline about the old time life books that came out in the late 80s, early 90s about World War II. And, yeah, these were, you know, produced by Time Life books. So these were coffee table books that weren't what we'd call serious history. But they were, you know, documented as history.

And they were very willing to present, you know, the side of the Third Reich of the Axis and in the Soviets and other actors there, you know, in honest detail. And it's weird that today a book like that would be seen as explicit Nazi propaganda when it was just doing history. And again, me and you were not that old. Yeah. Yeah, the, you know, those time life books, you, you, I have one on, um, Stalingrad. And it presents it, I mean, I, I, down the middle, like what happened. There really isn't a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of narrative there. So, yeah.

Yeah. All right. Anyway, let me start reading this article because, um, you know, I think he does a, a pretty good job of getting into what, you know, just get an idea of what he sees. and I think a lot of people will see some of their thought in it as well. So BIVOR starts, history is seldom tidy. Eras, eras overlap and unfinished business from one period lingers into the next. World War II was a war like no other in the magnitude of its effects on the lives of people and the fates of nations.

It was a combination of many conflicts, including ethnic and national hatreds, that followed the collapse of four empires and the redrawing of borders at the Paris Peace Conference, after World War I. A number of historians have argued that World War II was a phase of one long war lasting from 1914 to 1945 or even until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a global civil war, first between capitalism and communism, then between democracy and dictatorship, what Nolte called the European Civil War. World War II certainly brought the strands of world history together with its global reach and its acceleration at the end of colonialism across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Yet despite sharing this international experience and entering the same order built in its wake, every country involved created and clung to its own narrative of the great conflict. I think him pointing out how colonialism basically became something that needed to be fought against, You know, and you would see in the next several decades, even Rhodesia, Rhodesia had to go in Africa, the way Africa was conducting itself needed to be changed. Yeah, and it presents a very interesting picture to us of how the Western allies began self-attacking post-World War II. Yeah, right. Even the matter of when the war began is still debated.

In the American telling, it started in earnest when the United States, entered the conflict after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And the German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States a few days later. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, insisted the war began in June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, ignoring the joint Soviet and Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, which marks the start of the war for most Europeans. Yet some trace its origin back further still. For China, it began in 1937 with the Sino-Japanese War, or even earlier with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Many on the left in Spain are convinced that it began in

1936 with General Francisco Franco's overthrow of the Republic, launching the Spanish Civil War. These clashing worldviews remain a source of tension and instability in global politics. Putin cherry picks from Russian history, combining homage to Soviet sacrifice and the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, with the reactionary ideas of exiled Tsarist white Russians after their defeat by the Communist Reds in the Russian Civil War of 1917 to 22. The latter include religious justifications for Russian supremacy over the entire Eurasian landmass, from Vladivostok to Dublin, as Putin's ideologue Alexander Dugin has put it, and a deeply rooted hatred of liberal Western Europe. Such ideas have also begun to

circulate within the U.S. President Donald Trump's orbit. I would stop right there and point out that he's doing what, you know, Daryl points out that the American left doesn't have international enemies. They have, you know, domestic enemies and international groups that remind them of their enemies and, you know, equating, you know, the American right with Russia right there, you know, it's explicit on this part. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design, they move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leone and Terramar.

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Step outside and be captivated by the Wild Atlantic Surounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dune-Beges. Search Trump, Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kosh Faragea. Yeah, he also says Putin's ideologue, Alexander Dugan, and there's a lot of debate over just exactly how much influence Dugan has over Putin. Yeah, I've interacted a little bit with Dugan,

and I promise you that Putin is aware of him and is interacted with his ideas and interacted with him. That's not the same thing as saying that Dugan is in charge of his foreign policy. Putin has rehabilitated the World War II area Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who, as a Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov has said, was directly responsible for even more millions of deaths than Hitler. The Russian president goes so far as to insist that the Soviet Union could have won the war against Nazi Germany on its own when even Stalin and other Soviet leaders privately acknowledged that the Soviet Union would not have survived without American aid. They also knew that the U.S. British strategic bombing campaign against German cities forced the bulk of the German Lefouffa back home from the Eastern Front, thus giving the Soviet's air supremacy. Above all, Putin refuses to acknowledge the horrors of the Stalinist era.

As many soms, as Mary Soames, the daughter of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill recounted to me at dinner in 2003, Churchill asked Stalin during an informal meeting in October 1944. what the Soviet leader regretted most in his life. Stalin took a moment to reflect before he quietly answered the killing of the Kulaks, the landowning peasants. This campaign peaked with the Holodomor in 1932- 1933 in which Stalin deliberately inflicted famine on Ukraine, killing more than 3 million people and instilling a hatred of Moscow

among many survivors and their descendants. I would ask real quick, does anybody think that Stalin really said that to Churchill? No. I don't believe that at all. Yeah. I could absolutely believe that Stalin thought that, but would he say that to an ally that he still saw as a competitor? I refuse to believe that. I don't think he would say that to his closest confid on it. Yeah. He's just not the kind of person who admits to something like that. He would default to something much less substantial. Yeah, and especially because to the larger point that the author brings up the role of, you know, the great mythos of the Second World War and how it impacts different country. By saying that Stalin is essentially saying that, you know, his mythos is just made up.

So I don't think he did that. Yeah, he's also in bringing up the holodomor and using this as an example, he's also, it looks like you can use. well, why did certain Ukrainians side with, you know, with the Reich? Yeah. Just like certain ethnic Russians and, you know, Tatar's and, you know, people who are half-Mongles who join, you know, SS auxiliaries, you know. The Nazis were surprisingly diverse. World War II also produced an often uneasy balance between Europe and the United States. Hitler's hegemonic ambitions forced the United Kingdom to adopt its self-appointed role of world

policemen and turned to Americans for aid. The British were genuinely proud of their part of their part in the ultimate allied victory, but they tried to hide the sting of their declining global influence by spouting the cliche that the United Kingdom had managed to punch above its weight in the war and by clinging to their special relationship with the United States. Churchill was dismayed by the prospect that U.S. troops might simply go home after the threat from Moscow ensured that Washington, oh, sorry, Churchill was dismayed by the prospect that U.S. troops might simply go home after the war in the Pacific ended in 1945. Although American attitudes continue to fluctuate between seeking an active global role and retreating into isolationism, the threat

from Moscow ensured that Washington would remain deeply engaged in Europe until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, the first major continental war in Europe since World War II is in its fourth year, driven in part by Putin's selective reading of Russian history, while deadly conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere threaten to spread further. The Trump administration, meanwhile, appears to be casting aside the United States global leadership in acute-infused tantrum. 80 years ago, the end of the World War II paved the way for a new international order based on respect for national sovereignty and borders, but now a steep bill for American ambivalence, European complacency, and Russian revengeism may finally be coming due.

I'm going to be brutally honest. When we conquered Europe de facto and occupied the whole Western half, we really weren't doing that because of respect for their borders, their national identity. No, it was an occupation. Yeah. And we can, after that, we can discuss whether or not it was just or a fact that. or should have happened. And that's a much longer discussion. But let's not pretend we did it out of absolutist moral reasons. And this is one of the things that Bivor does.

And just my reading of his Spanish Civil War book, getting the idea that he's more of like a left libertarian. He basically blames the whole Ukraine conflict on Putin's selective reading of Russian history while invoking the United States global leadership in a confused tantrum. Because it's the United States global leadership, quote unquote, is what provokes what happened in Ukraine. Yeah. As I've said, as I've said clearly, if I was president,

if I was president of Russia, I would have invaded in 2015. Yeah. To put my cards on the table, I'm hard neutral in this war. I don't support either Russia or the Ukrainians. And I happen to know some very good people from both camps, as cliched as that is. And my concern more than anything is the American need to involve itself and things it doesn't understand and then try to micromanage things. It does not understand is what caused this. And in doing that, I'm not justifying what Putin did. you know, but I'm explaining that this didn't have to happen. And because of, you know, politicians in the United States who didn't know what they were doing, primarily, you know, people in the Biden administration who put a senile dying man in office so they could get what they want started a war, which killed lots of Ukrainians.

And if you actually care about them, you should, you know, be opposed to the actions that caused that. Especially the politics behind it. All right. more than a number. The sheer cruelty of World War II was scared, was scared into the memories of several, is that scared, oh, I'm sorry, the sheer cruelty of World War II was seared into the memories of several generations. It was the first modern conflict in which far more civilians were killed than combatants. This could have been made possible only by an ideologically fueled dehumanization of the enemy. Nationalism started to a fever pitch and racism promoted as virtue on one side, and Leninist class, warfare that endorsed exterminating all opposition on the other. So how's that not? So what's, what's better, racism or classism? Yeah. Well, I know this is rhetorical, but we automatically know what the default establishment answer is. Tellingly, after the war, Soviet diplomats fought to prevent class warfare, which would have included the Soviet Union's mass killing of aristocrats,

Busha, and landowning peasants, from being mentioned. From being mentioned, in the United States' 1948 genocide convention. In all, some 85 million people died in World War II, a figure that includes those who perished from famine and disease. Nazi Germany killed around 6 million Jews, among other people in the Holocaust. No comment. Almost a fifth of the Polish population,

also nearly 6 million people was lost. The Chinese lost well over 20 million, more of whom perished from famine and disease than from from, fighting on the battlefield. Estimates of Soviet deaths range from 24 to 26 million, many of them needlessly. Stalin was aware in 1945 that the total exceeded 20 million, but he owed up to just a third of that loss as he tried to conceal the extent of the horror he had unleashed on his people. The international relations scholar David Reynolds has noted that Stalin settled for seven and a half million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic, but not criminally homicidal.

Yeah. Just real quick, digress. One of the points that I always bring up and discussing the impact of the Second World War in terms of casualties was it 38, 1938, or excuse me, 1940, the United States and Soviet Union had roughly parity in population. Soviet Union sort of apples and oranges because of their expansion of Poland and whatnot, who was considered a citizen, who is not. So it's an approximation. But they had roughly the same population. in 1940. And Soviet Union endured something like 20 to 30 times as many casualties as the United States. And the best way to understand this, and I've heard multiple historians bringing that up, is imagine in one month you absorb as many casualties as the United States did in the entirety of World War II, and then the month after that, and then the month after that, and you go on for 20-plus months.

And that's what the Soviet Union did. And again, I'm not pro-communist in any sense of the word. I'm not ethnic Russian, so I have a lot less concerned for them. But as an American, the average American is simply incapable of understanding the amount of human suffering and sacrifice that the Soviet Union, Soviet people put into this conflict. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite legal items, all reduced to clear. Home essentials to seasonal must-habs.

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Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbioghush Farage. World War II brought the stands, a strands of world history together. It is not enough to remember the dead, many of whom were deliberately rendered nameless by their killers. For those who survived, the prisoners of war and the civilians imprisoned in camps, the conflict changed life incalculable ways. Those resigned to their lots were often early victims. The most likely survivors were those with a burning determination to return to their families, to hold on to their beliefs, or to bear witness to unspeakable crimes.

many often captured soldiers did not make it home. Those from the Soviet Red Army who had been forcibly recruited by the German military were rounded up well in German uniform in France and handed over to Soviet officers who executed suspected leaders in the woods before transporting the rest back to the Soviet Union. What a negative way to say they, sorry, what a negative way to say they left the Red Army and joined who they saw as their allies. Exactly. There the soldiers were sentenced to slave labor in the frozen north. Just days after Germany's surrender, British forces in Austria ordered the more than 20,000 anti-communist Yugoslav nationals in the area under their jurisdiction to be handed over to communist Yugoslav authorities who shot and then buried them in mass graves. British forces also handed over to Soviet authorities Cossacks who were Soviet citizens but had fought.

fought for Germany. The British government almost certainly knew that a harsh sentence awaited these soldiers, but feared that letting them go would mean the Soviet authorities would hold on to British prisoners of war that the Red Army had liberated in Poland and Eastern Germany. The Red Army also rounded up 600,000 Japanese soldiers in northern China and Manchuria. All of them were sent to labor camps in Siberia and worked to death. For decades after the war, its memory lived on in those who had experienced it first hand. The post-war, that... Yeah, I was going to say it was for decades after it lived on.

It's like, yeah, but it didn't even end for, you know, a decade plus. The last German POWs didn't leave until 1956. Any person knows who I am in real life, my real life namesake, my uncle, you know, it was a POW until like 1950 in the Soviet Union. You know, Germany didn't have an army at this point. It didn't even have a unified country or a government that was, you know, accepted by outside. countries at that point, but somehow the prisoners still stayed there for a decade plus in a foreign country. So we say this, you know, these tragic things lived on for decades afterwards.

And you want to say, look, man, it's like, this didn't even end for a decade plus afterwards. Yeah, there's a book called An Eye for an Eye, which talks about Germans who were sent to a prison basically afterwards that was manned, quote, manned by a woman of a certain background who proceeded to torture them all to death. Yeah. Yeah, the war didn't end. For a long while after. I mean, and ideologically, has it ended?

Ideologically, no, or at least they're trying to keep it from ending. And to his earlier point, he says, you know, lots of historians see First World War and Second World War is just one larger conflict. And, you know, lots of people saw the occupation. in division of Germany post-World War II as part of that war. So again, for my family who were in German, you know, when the wall came down, it was an 89-90. To a lot of them, they saw, you know, that damn war that started in 1914, where their uncles marched off the war, finally that damn thing was ending. It didn't, but, you know, that was the perspective they had.

And as you said, you know, a lot of people, they're, you know, fighting tooth and nail to keep us from giving up that worldview. Yeah, one thing that Americans, many Americans do not have is a long view of history. They still want to, they still cry about the, those crazy Iranian students who stormed the embassy in 1979, not knowing that that was three decades in the making. Yeah. Yeah. And when that was brought up, I remember it was it, 2008 by Ron Paul brought it up, and John McCain said that's ancient history.

It's like, you know, somehow the 50s are ancient history, but the 40s are not. You know. The post-war order was shaped by generations whose aim was to prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again. But for those who did not experience the conflict and look back from today, the casualty kind of World War II may be just a figure. It is difficult to truly absorb the reality of tens of millions of deaths. Losing this direct connection to the past means losing the shared resolve that for 80 years has produced an unbroken, if highly imperfect, great power piece. And that right there is the central part of his argument, you know, the buried statement.

It's not just that people could die. More importantly, people will give up on supporting the project that he's part of. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I've said Bivore is, he's a good historian. He will give you the facts. But there's something, there's always something behind it. So the problem is, for a long time, for like something like the Spanish Civil War, the facts were so distorted and only coming from like the hard left.

Yeah. That you didn't know what was happening. And it wasn't until people like Payne and Bivor started writing and more archives were opened that, we got the truth behind what was happening. Because I'm doing a lot of research for one of our friends dealing with interwar Germany. One of the things you see in a one of the big issues in American scholarship is because of, you know, Americans who actually have the combination of fluency

in reading and writing the German language as well as, you know, some military and political understanding to be able to, you know, turn this into something more than, you know, modern day leftist crybaby history. It's weird as so much of the actual good history that you can work with on the subject, you know, the Interwar World War II came out in the 50s until about 1960. And even some of the newer stuff, a lot of the newer stuff on that area that's pretty good. You go back and you look through their sources and basically they're citing the earlier stuff. So it's a weird issue where it's like America gave up the desire to actually do the work of real history, if that makes sense.

Yeah, well. Real history makes people, once people start understanding what really happened and the myths and the fairy tales melt away, then people start looking at their, not only their government, but just the whole, the spirit behind it and question, question it. And they can't have that. Yeah. The fights that didn't end. The war left the world an entirely changed place.

In the combatant nations, few lives were. left untouched. Many women whose fiancés were killed in action never married or had children. Others found that returning men could not cope with the reality that women had taken over the running of everything, making the men feel redundant. The backlash was strongest in continental Europe. In Germany, men who had been imprisoned during the war heard for the first time of the mass rapes committed mainly by the Red Army. They felt humiliated that they had not been there to defend their women. Nor could they handle learning that the women had dealt. with the trauma in the only way possible by talking to each other about it.

In France and other occupied countries, men who returned from prison camps and forced labor in Germany, wondered how women without any means of support had managed to survive and began to suspect them of relationships with enemy soldiers or black marketeers. Not surprisingly, these responses produce a socially reactionary period that lasted through the 1940s and 1950s. Again. What's he saying here? Yeah, exactly, right?

somehow the problem was the men were away and the women got by. It's like, again, I want to remind everybody. 1956 is when the last POWs left, the Soviet Union. So it said the 40s and 50s were really reactionary. And you want to say, look, shithead, they weren't even back in the 40s. You know, let's, you know, cause and effect is a little bit off in what he's talking about there. So, yeah, it's, this is a good example of not just bias, but really bad history and some very basic facts here. Intense political conflict persisted even after the end of hostilities.

In August 1945, well after the fighting in the European theater had ended, the Soviet Union began to release ordinary Italian soldiers that had captured in the latter part of the Axis Powers campaign to take Stalingrad. These soldiers were sent home without their officers. However, because the leader of the Italian Communist Party had appealed to Moscow to delay the return of high-ranking prisoners who might publicly condemn the Soviet Union and hurt the party's chances in upcoming elections, communist groups gathered at railway stations in Italy to welcome the returning soldiers

who they expected to be more sympathetic to their cause. They were appalled to see the soldiers that scrawled the words, Abbasso communiso, down with communism, on the train cars, and fights broke out at the stations. The communist press labeled the returnees who criticized the Soviet Union in any way as fascists. Keep in mind that if these were Italians fighting on the eastern front at that point, most of them would have been volunteers after the creation of the Italian Social Republic and the removal of Mussolini as the Prime Minister of Italy by the Crown.

So these were people who voluntarily chose to continue fighting after that point. You know, so to say, hey, they were shocked that they're anti-communists, like, no shit, that's why they were there. And being put in prison by communists for several years, you know, kind of reinforces their preconceived notions. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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The Lidl New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28 to 30 November. Lidl, more to value. And now this is over the same year. It's leargoal to the Glewere and not the Gerey in Aundun, and leant of Gaela to give a time of either. In Ergird, we're dig tour in one-of-he in one-hae to find-vin-vunner. It's a ush, chrothed, a young-lectricer, on as the shrews,

all the time, gnaw, and people cariffa waintschewak Aweigh to go ahead. The sheer

cruelty of the war was seared into the memories of generations. Borders were obliterated or redrawn during and after the war.

Many people who had been displaced no longer knew their nationalities. Large populations sometimes entire cities were uprooted,

evacuated or killed by paramilitaries, secret service and troops. In 1930, okay. The ethnic Germans of East Prussia and the rest of the of Eastern Europe who were forcibly moved, you know, West if they weren't killed, they were very well aware of their ethnicity. So his cause and effect and his attempt to portray, you know, you know, post-2000 ethnic ambiguity

onto this is, you know, his bias is not exactly, is not borne out by the facts. In 1939, polls from what suddenly became Western Ukraine had been dumped in the deserted spaces of Kazakhstan or Siberia and left to starve. This Polish city of Levo was occupied twice by the Soviets and once by the Nazis who sent its Jews to death camps. After the war, Levo was given a new Ukrainian name, Levov. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where British, Soviet and U.S. leaders met to disgusty organization of post-war Europe, Stalin forced the allied powers to accept that the whole of Poland was to be shifted to the west, receiving former German provinces on the

western side, while the Soviet Union absorbed Polish provinces to the east. To complete the execution of this plan, the Red Army carried out the largest systematic forced removal of a population in modern times, transplanting more than 13 million Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians. Daryl, a good episode on this topic called the anti-humans. Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting emotional just thinking about that one. Yeah.

We can talk about that one offline. Yeah. As his discussion at Yalta continued at the Potsdam conference in August 1945, Stalin's desire to expand Soviet territory became clear. He showed interest in assuming control of former Italian colonies in Africa. and suggested the removal of Franco and Spain. Quote, It must be very pleasant for you to be in Berlin now after all your country has suffered.

Avril Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, remarked to Stalin during a break in the talks. Stalinied the ambassador without changing his expression. Sir Alexander went all the way to Paris, he replied. The line was hardly a joke. The year before, the Soviet leadership had ordered plans to be drawn for invasion of France and Italy and a seizure of the straits between Denmark and Norway. In 1945, Soviet General Sergei Stemko told Sergo Beria, whose father had been a feared secret police chief during the Stalin era,

it was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe falling into chaos while Britain and France would be paralyzed by their colonial problems. This Soviet leader's thoughts created an opening, only on learning that the United States was close to building the atom bomb where the plans abandoned. Even in Moscow's appetite for expansion was not. World War II, of course, was also the dawn of the nuclear age. Many regarded the invention of the atom bomb with horror and considered the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a war crime.

And yet, the targeting of those two Japanese cities in August 1945 involved a weighty moral choice. Before the bombings accelerated the end of the war, Japanese generals wanted to fight on, rather than accept the terms of surrender issued in July by the Allied powers in the July 1945 Potsdam Declaration. For added context, and I'll make clear that I'm not pro-Japanese empire in this one, the, what do you call it, the demand, the condition that the Japanese generals required that the U.S. government would not give them was the requirement that the emperor could not be removed, that the country could not be forced to give up.

monarchy, which they were allowed to keep their monarchy after that anyway. So again, it's almost like they wanted to use this bomb and, you know, saying that they were going to fight on because we wouldn't give them their demands that we gave them anyways. And I also remind people that the second city where the bomb was dropped, was Nagasaki, which had minimal damage prior, was the center of Christian life, Christian community in Japan. So essentially, we found the good, clean, undamaged city where all the Christians lives and had to blow that one up too because they kept fighting on because they didn't get what we were going to give them anyways. So again, I'm a little bit cynical on how this is portrayed. Yeah, well, just know that Bevor is the kind of person

who will cry over Guernica, the bombing of Guernica and the Spanish Civil War. But he's not going to cry over the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Japan. No. They were prepared to sacrifice millions of Japanese citizens by forcing them to resist in allied invasion with only bamboo spears and explosives strapped to their bodies. By 1944, some 400,000 civilians a month were dying from famine in areas of East Asia, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia that were occupied by Japanese forces. The Allies also wanted to save the American, Australian, and British prisoners of war who were starving to death in Japanese camps. being slaughtered by their captors on Tokyo's orders. Thus, although the atomic bomb took more than 200,000 Japanese lives, that terrible weapon may

have saved many more in an unsettling moral paradox. Perhaps. But again, letting them keep the damned emperor, probably we would have ended the war sooner and saved everybody to include those POWs and lots of civilians in the Catholic Church. So, again, I'm not pro-Japan, but let's just say I'm very skeptical in this one. For better or worse, World War II reset the trajectory of global politics. The defeat of Japan eventually paved the way for the rise of modern China. The collapse of the British, Dutch, and French empires in 1941-42 marked the end of Imperial Europe,

and the experience of the war spurred the movement toward European integration. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, meanwhile, were elevated to superpower status. World War II also produced the United Nations, whose key objectives were to safeguard the sovereignty of countries, and to prohibit armed aggression and territorial conquest. The UN was very much U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's dream, and he was prepared to let Stalin have complete control over Poland to achieve it. Yet in February of this year, the United States turned its back on the UN's founding principles, voting alongside Russia and refusing to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine.

I remind everybody that the only time the UN has actively intervened as a force in a war was the Korean War, and that's because the Soviet Union boycotted and refused to use their boycott on the security council in order to prevent it from becoming an explicit American dominated United Nations officially war. So again, he's a little fast and loose with some of these facts. I will also remind he's writing for Foreign Affairs Magazine. He is. But you would also assume that people who work in the field of foreign affairs would know this. So at that point, he's either he's either intentionally lying or he's stupid and he's not stupid. World War II also led into the Cold War.

Some historians say that this new conflict started in 1947 with the Clay Robertson Agreement, in which British and U.S. authorities decided to industrialize Western Germany, provoking Stalin's paranoia. that year certainly saw tensions intensify with Stalin issuing an order in September for European communist parties to dig up their weapons in preparation for future war and setting the groundwork for the Soviet blockade of Berlin the next year. I do want to point out that the reason the Allies finally got around to allowing the reindustrialization and rearmament of West Germany was because finally the issue

that they could have another war there, both France and Britain. Britain were on the verge of having riots over having to reimpose the full-scale draft. So it became a situation was they were going to allow Germany to rearm. They were going to allow Germany, pretty much, tell them they had to go and impose manhood conscription, just because, or largely because France and Great Britain didn't want to do that on another generation to fight another war, which I don't blame them. But again, I know I'm rambling, but my point there is understand the reason that the former allied powers were so serious about treating Germany as an ally is because the fact that they were essentially what would be, you know, the battleground of a third world war. And we really would prefer that they go and fight that war and that we wouldn't have to go and mobilize, you know, forever for a war that may or may not come.

But the origins lay much further back in June, 1941. Stalin had been traumatized by Operation Barbarossa the Nazi-led invasion of the Soviet Union, which began that month. He became determined to surround themselves with satellite states across Central and Southern Europe so that no invader could take the Soviet Union by surprise again. You have to accept that Victor Suvorov is lying, and many other historians are lying, and that Stalin is just saying, oh, we were just hanging out,

and all of a sudden, boom, we just got invasio. Yeah. In terms of Victor Suvarov, I'm not saying explicitly that he's correct, but I'm saying he paints a compelling image with all the evidence there that is highly suggestive of that. But to his point of saying that they developed all those satellite states there, and that was Stalin's strategy, I point people out that, you know, Russia slash Ukraine, that part of the Slavic world sits on the middle of the Central Eurasian plane and has very few natural borders, right? So essentially, there's two ways to protect the Russian heartland. One of them is to have a complete mobilization of your armed forces with or without nuclear weapons. The second thing is to go and build, you know, satellite states further out that could go and fight these wars instead of you. And that's just a reality of, you know, again, you live in the middle of a Central Eurasian plane with no natural borders. And at the same time, the person who's pointing out that this is what Stalin did in order to prevent another evasion of the Soviet Union is not willing to acknowledge

that that might be what Putin morally or immorally is doing in his strategic analysis for modern Russia. For centuries, Russia had been obsessed with dominating its neighbors to prevent encirclement. That is categorically untrue. I think in some ways, giving a biased way of saying they were doing what was necessary to preserve what they see as their existential survival, which is, you know, sort of whether or not you're going to have a biased or unbiased way of saying the same thing. It's so were they aggressive?

Like I said, again, they're trying to create some kind of war and barrier between them and who they see as their enemy. And is that aggressive? I mean, I'm not blaming them and I'm even though I'm not on their side. So let's look at the realities of how you would defend a landmass like Russia. Well, especially on the European side where you have most, where the population. Yeah. And again, I repeat this is like there's no natural borders there, you know.

The only thing that stops them things are people with guns, nukes, and, you know, another group of people with guns in front of them. Stalin's fixation was Poland. Putin has preserved this basic mentality, only for him the country's most vulnerable frontier is Ukraine, which he argues belongs to Russia. I don't think he argues that. I think he argues that there are parts of Ukraine that are Russian and that they belong as part of Russia. Yeah. And again, I'm not pro-Putin, but he's behaving in a manner that's completely rational for somebody of, you know, is his side, you know, in his circumstances. And our failure, our unwillingness of our political class to acknowledge us is what created this war.

When Putin acted on that claim with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he brought back a characteristic of the World War II era that had largely been absent of global politics since. Leaders, several of them empowered by the totalitarian systems they controlled, shaped the course of that vast conflict. From Churchill to Roosevelt to Stalin, their machinations reactivated the idea in the popular imagination of the great man driving the course of history. In recent years, political leaders have been comparatively less influenced. Had comparatively less influence. The globalized economic system, for one thing, greatly restricts their freedom of action and constant consideration of how a decision will play in the media makes many of them more cautious than bold.

For decades, it seemed as though the characters of leaders would never again determine the course of events the way they did in World War II. Putin's invasion has changed that. And Trump, taking Putin as a role model, has two. Do we want to stop right there? Yeah. In this, I won't go too deep because this would get into a huge digression of what I did in three, four years of grad school. But long story short, the management sciences and leadership science, which is basically overlapping.

We can talk that at length. But one of the big principles in managerial science is that the great man theory has to be refuted. It's part of people being interchangeable or fungible units. So again, managerialism, the thing that dominates the West right there, accepts as a core tenet that there are no great men, except for when it's presenting great men or women on their side as the epitome of a value. And I think part of what we're seeing right now in the breakdown of that order is like, you know, human nature is real. History comes back with a vengeance. And one of the things we're having to deal with is, as Thomas has said, there are people who are great men in the sense they are actually able to, you know, shape the course of history within limits.

And, you know, managerialism is the refutation of that. So when that proves to be a real thing, it's, you know, it's like we sort of killed their God. Yeah, and Putin is probably the avatar for that right now. Yeah, whether we want them to be or not, some people like Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore were examples of that. You know, it seems to be a universal aspect of human nature. But again, managerialism rejects that as a core principle. So their metaphysics are being challenged.

It's not just the morality or the politics is that. really, the way they see the universe has changed. Today, as Russia prepares to celebrate Victory Day on May 9th, Putin is determined to milk the story of his country's great patriotic war for all its worth. He may well revert the name of the city of Volgograd to Stalingrad. It was changed in 1961 as part of Soviet leader in Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. To highlight the Red Army's eventual victory over the Axis invaders in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the great psychological turning point of the war.

He may also sharpen the worst of his historical distortions, attempting to justify his continued war in Ukraine by claiming that the Ukrainians are Nazis, contradicting his own insistence before the invasion that Ukrainians were no different from Russians. That's not true at all. Yeah, I mean, that's just not what... It's a gross distortion of the realities of World War II.

And part of the realities of World War II is you had two giant forces between Germany and the Soviet Union. Soviet Union being communist. Germany being the Third Reich being national socialists, and despite the fact they didn't support ideological fascism, certain ideological fascist groups were associated in line with them. But if you're stuck in between these two giant forces that are going to crush you, you can either be a victim or you can participate in one side that you see as being in your interest. And there's a reason why so many people stuck in the middle said, you know what, they would much rather support the Third Reich than the Soviet Union. And again, part of our worldview as Americans post-World War II, you know, refuses to acknowledge that, you know, maybe being crushed by the Soviet Union, decide that, you know, we essentially turned against as soon as the war was over, that maybe being destroyed by them was not in the best interest of themselves and their nation. well basically what you will hear um a lot of them most americans say and you will especially get this out of the libertarian camp is is that all all that was was well i mean they'll use the term status of course but it was two authoritarian groups fighting for power yeah well there was no hugging kisie loving you know mutual co-op in the middle those are to two groups so you got to deal with one group or the other. And the reality is most of those groups decided at the Third Reich,

rightly or wrongly, you know, was the more reasonable actor. And the fact that, you know, repeatedly so many groups made that decision, you know, that's a pattern that probably bears investigation. Yeah. I hope that's one of the, uh, one of the things that Daryl will undertake in this series, because that's, that's an important thing is when you're, when you're, when you're, When you've been brought up in a paradigm, in a paradigm like he's describing here, where, you know, there are no great men and there are, you know, basically we found what works. You know, the end of history happened. Liberalism won. And to step outside of that is to move to authoritarianism.

You, I think that's one of the reasons why most Americans cannot deal with the interwarial. war period because it wasn't black and white. It wasn't that, you know, there was a reason there were groups calling themselves socialist who weren't, you know, historically socialist. Yeah. There was a, yeah, there were, yeah, go. No, it needs to say, that I'm neck deep in doing research for right now. And it's, it's such, I mean, say, amazing or complex. It almost sounds like I'm, you know, an artist talking about the beauty of it. But it's, it's so much more complex. And there's so much more to the

that in so many levels, that it's like so many details just get swept away in the case of narratives that the average American is not capable of even understanding the basics of this, much less trying to grasp the enormity, the complexity that not just understand, they can't understand the level of complexity was there. So it's more than anything in attacking the post-World War II liberal world order perspective, it's trying to get people to understand, you know, the enormity and complexity of those relationships. Yeah, this sentence right here is one of the things that just standing alone, if this sentence was standing alone, I would agree with.

In truth, there is no one set of conclusions to draw from World War II. I mean, I think that's obvious. Yeah. The war defunders. Yeah, the big conclusion, I think, is the way, the manner in which the First World War was ended, created all these problems. And I see, I know I'm considered extreme for saying that, but, you know, Churchill said that. So maybe we should take his word for it.

Well, everyone said that back then. Exactly. Anyone who was looking at the rise of the NSDAP was like, well, I mean, they would, no one left out, you know, Versailles. Yeah. Yeah. And just like one of a million examples of that, because I'm reading a biography. of a herman Earhart right now, who was a bunch of his torpedo boats had to be taken to the scaffold, given over to the end of the war. And again, the German Navy had a lot

of communist infiltration at that point. And the British, we know the British, you know, supported the communists there because they were the enemies in order to stabilize Europe, or stabilized Germany. But one of the things the British Navy told the German ships that they were escorting is if they see a red banner anywhere, they're sinking that entire ship and they're killing everybody aboard because they're not going to allow communism on their shores since they had to, you know, taking the boatsmith, they had to put their German sailors ashore in the UK until they took them back. So, you know, they saw that as a contagion. It's like they were willing to kill everybody on a ship because there was a single communist there, you know, so we're ignoring things that,

you know, were black and white obvious that everybody talked about. And then Churchill's said explicitly. The war defies generalization and does not fit into any easy categories. It contains countless stories of tragedy, corruption, hypocrisy, eagomania, betrayal, impossible choices, and unbelievable sadism. But it also contains stories of self-sacrifice and compassion in which people clung to a fundamental belief in humanity despite appalling conditions and overwhelming oppression. Their example will always be worth remembering and emulating, no matter how dark today's conflicts become. I agree. They're probably not about the people that he wants me to agree with him about.

Yeah. I'm assuming that this is only about a certain group of people that you're, you know, the allowable, the allowable groups. You're not allowed to see. I think the one thing that you can say came out of the European Civil War, 1914 to 1945, and especially saw this, starting with the war in our own nation in the 19th century, is the demonizing of the enemy. Yeah. Of just the dehumanization, the scorched earth, the killing of civilians just to kill civilians, just for the fact that you're going to kill civilians, which are things that the same historians,

historians like these people will, you know, decry the Tilla for, and, you know, quote, quote, barbarians of the past. Yeah, exactly, right? And I say this as somebody, I'm a combat veteran, I was a military officer,

all this stuff I've done in my doctoral level writing is about, you know, the development of military units and insurgencies. So I'm not a pacifist, and I understand the reality. of war, and war is always going to be here. But as you said, by creating a moral

binary, we've created a situation in which anything can be justified against your enemy, and then we're shocked when some of those things are done by our enemy against other people. And I'm not arguing for anybody to have an inherently benevolent

attitude towards human nature, but we need to understand the consequences of choices and how we can attributed to those choices, or not us, but people in power. Yeah. Yeah. I think we'll end it right there. Thank you, Mr. Fieldhouse.

I always appreciate talking to you. Anytime. Like I said, I'm willing to come on, and I tend to ramble lots of short pieces like these talking through are really good, and appreciate it. You're, believe me, you're not a rambler. You listen to my show. all right take care of yourself thank you thank you