The Pete Quiñones Show - The Complete Cold War Series w/ Thomas777 - 2 of 2

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

6 Hours and 33 MinutesPG-13Here are episodes 10-16 of the Cold War series with Thomas777.The 'Cold War' Pt. 10 - The Vietnam War Comes to an End w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 11 - Nixon, Detente, and Their Inevitable End w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 12 - Able Archer and Operation R.Y.A.N. - w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 13 - The Downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007- w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 14 - The 'Red Square' Flight of Mathias Rust - w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 15 - The Berlin Wall Comes Down - w/ Thomas777The 'Cold War' Pt. 16 - The Q&A Finale - w/ Thomas777Thomas' SubstackThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete 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.

Today, happens to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the Vietnam War. And we couldn't think of anyone better to have on to talk about that than somebody that is gracing me with his presence on my podcast and going through a Cold War series right now. So, how you don't know? I'm doing well. Thank you. Well, I appreciate you inviting me. here's the first question I wanted to ask because I was I was writing questions on the last episode we did and I realized the episodes were for the end so did public opinion help in ending the war I mean yeah because the internal situation in any state in any modern state I mean whether you're talking about a nominal you know multi-party democracy I mean the terms that that signifier was utilizing the Cold War or whether you're talking about, you know, the, the Communist States of the Eastern Bloc.

In a state, in a general mobilization, especially, but in any policy, ongoing policy initiative or structure that directly affects the population, like public opinion is impactful on that policy. You know, no, despite the kind of mythology of democratic peace theory or whatever, there are not states that, exist that are just totally at odds of the body politic. Not any government in existence, nor has there been in the modern era that just has absolutely no mandate. You know, it's completely immune to public opinion.

There's not anything to work. But what I was saying a moment ago, and I'm going some more with this, it's not just like a old guy tangent. I'm listening to Michael Savage, and he's got Colonel McGregor on. I know that people don't know some people are that I don't like McGregor either. That's not the point. Savage

kept on talking about the Russians kind of foibles in Ukraine and saying, this is like Vietnam when, you know, the Pentagon just wouldn't really fight the war. And McGregor, to his credit corrected, Savage, McGregor's like, look, man, like, Vietnam's a fucking scalp hunt.

We killed a huge amount of people in Vietnam. It was not this, like, pussy footing around, like, hey, we want to be, you know, we got a placate world opinion. We don't want to, like, kill any Vietnamese. It was, I mean, part of my language, it was a fucking gooked scalp hunts, okay?

but you don't win wars just by going out and killing as many people as possible. You don't win wars by, you know, manufacturing dead people. If you did, I think throughout 1942, the Vermeck had something like a 15-to-one burn rate and, like, major engagement with the Red Army. Okay, I mean, does the Greater German Reich exist today? Did it win the war? It killed a whole lot of people in Russia? No.

But the issue with public opinion was that, it wasn't so much like the court history is two things it's what Michael Savage said it said oh America wasn't really fighting the Vietnam War you know or was doing brutal things but you know these things were you know not the war was there wasn't

a general mobilization in place and you know America wasn't really applying force the way it should that's part of the narrative the other part is well the Vietnam War was wrong so all these people rose up and just forced you know evil Mr. Nixon to stop what he was doing like nothing like that happened

And, you know, 70% of combat infantrymen and nom were guys who enlisted, you know, and the remaining 30%, probably, you know, there was some truth of the fact that there was, like, a poverty draft, you know, when the standards were kind of lessened on, you know, who would be, you know, considered, I can't remember what the classification scheme was, but, I mean, there was some truth to that. But this idea that there was either this draft revolt or America just became like a country of peace mix and that ended the war. But what it did do, I mean, Johnson was in fact lying to the American people. And what he was saying was not being any sense. And he was getting on TV directly concentrating McNamara. On top of that, unlike, you know, the New Dealers War, where Roosevelt would literally have you arrested if you were a media guy who criticized him, his policy, or you engage in defeated. which constituted everything from saying maybe the war is not a great idea to reporting on, you know, America actually, like, losing in the field. I mean, I'm not meaning this up.

Like, this is, comparing the, comparing the view of, or the orientation of the executive branch, you know, in 941 to 45, and from 96, 5 to 73, it's like night and day. You know, like, if you think Roosevelt would have tolerated, you know, Abby Hoffman, or some counterpart or some counterpart to like Dudley holding 100,000 ban protests waving national socialist flags in Washington like you're dead fucking wrong like why this was allowed

and like why this kind of nonsense you know why Cronkite was allowed to be embedded at ICOR and at Longbin when you know LF like Sappers were assaulting it

I mean that's a whole other issue but people realized something was wrong um there was major attrition in vietnam like young americans were dying in large numbers um and it was clear that it was clear that johnson was lying okay nixon who swept the country as we've talked about and creton abrams to replace westmoreland nixon uh was in fact winning the war i believe in in in military terms i mean the political side of it was totally different. Well, the in-country as well as domestically

in his regard to the internal situation in the United States. Nixon did do some foolish things, however. Like we talked about in our last episode, you know, how Kissinger and Nixon, they kind of wade his personal war on Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, and that's not what you do if you're the president. And then they went to you with publicly layered of like leaking the secret bombing of Cambodia. First of all, why you admitting to that? Because that's terrible PR. Secondly, why you like having this knock down, dragout fight in public with Melvin Laird?

Like, how does that look? Okay, so even people who are enthusiastic about, you know, kind of the policy shift of Nixon, Creighton Abrams, and all of that, they're like, okay, why are all these conspiratorial intrigues happening? What exactly is going on? You know, and then the media really, you know, the, I'm sorry to feel, if this seems scattershot, but I'm trying to. to present a linear narrative the best I can. You know, the Kent State, maybe a lot of people know this. I don't think they do, though. You know, the Kent State shooting of the students of the National Guard,

that was a protest of the assault on Cambodia. Okay, you know, late in the war in 1970, the reason why people freaked out about the assault in Cambodia is because to them it indicated a wider war. In a sense, it was, but Nixon was not lying. Vietnamization was well underway. There was an active disengagement. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam was taking on the brunt of combat duties. And Cambodia was key. And we'll get into that if you're willing to when we got the time. Nixon really kind of neutralized the strategic game of Warsaw Pact in Vietnam by affecting the sound of Soviet split. wherein China and their proxy, the Khmer Rouge, came to be totally at odds with the Soviet Union and Hanoi, and an active proxy war between communist superpowers developed, you know, between the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge.

I mean, whether the Khmer Rouge were evil or not, I mean, that's another issue. But point being, there was complexities to widening the war in Cambodia that couldn't really be finessed in PR terms. And the fact Nixon, what had been going on with him, Kinsinger and Laird, it seemed rotten. These things kind of conspired to really turn public opinion against what was underway. So, yeah, I mean, I realized I was long-winded and some of a scattershot, but yes, there was a huge impact. It was one part, the anti-war movement, which was in part, I mean, it was a fifth column regardless, but in part it actually was funded and organized by agents of Warsaw Pacted intelligence services.

There was a hostile media apparatus. Even those that weren't, even those aspects of national media that weren't hostile, Johnson, who did a lot of incredibly stupid and kind of incomprehensible things, allowing media to truly be embedded in the field with combat elements in a war like Vietnam,

with free fire zones. I mean, that's literally insane. You know, it was inevitable, even if something like me, I hadn't broken. At some point, some newsmen would have had raw footage of GIs wasting like women and kids. I'm not saying as American troops are evil or something at all. I'm saying like that's what happens in a free fire zone. Okay. And in good wars like World War I and two, that happened also. But in Vietnam, going to the peculiar nuances of the strategic

environment. That kind of thing happened in alarming earnest, if that makes any sense. But point being, yeah, so some of this was self-sabotaged. Some of this was kind of like the peculiar, some of it was people not really understanding. Like, I mean, TV was still new then, basically.

I mean, part of it was, you know, especially Johnson, you know, who was a guy who was like born in nearly 20th century, like not really understanding things. Part of it was Johnson was fucking insane. part of it was you know you had a you know

you had a domestic situation that had been actively subverted which was literally the opposite of the situation the new dealers confronted you know when they mobilized for war I mean it was on top of that too

I mean there was there was incredibly dangerous things afoot you know 62 was the Cuba crisis 73 was the next major crisis in the Middle East which I think in some ways was more dangerous than ABLE Arch 83. Okay, but in the interim, you know, you had, there was 5,000 Soviet military personnel on the ground in North Vietnam,

you know, intelligence types, you know, some of these guys are training the North Vietnamese on Sam missiles and things. But there was the constant fear, you know, during these operations like lineback, or are we going to kill a bunch of Russians? and then, you know, are we're going to, is, what the fuck's the Kremlin going to do then? Maybe nothing, or maybe they're going to treat it as an act of war. This is, like, incredibly dangerous stuff. And there's the ongoing, you know, issue in Europe where, you know, you had, you know, you had, you know, you literally had 300,000 U.S. troops,

nose and those and those with the Red Army, the Foley Gap and then the Northern Plain. I mean, and say nothing of, you know, occupied Berlin, like it. people don't realize I mean you don't realize I mean you remember because you're old enough and I do I mean I didn't live through Vietnam but you know I do remember vividly the early 80s and being afraid of

of nuclear war I mean people don't realize like how tense things were and in a daily capacity that was strewn with people's lives and even people who basically were patriotic according to the terms of you know the era and even people who weren't particularly anti-government, there was a certain weirdness of the Cold War sinking in.

It's like, okay, like, you know, even people who didn't have, you know, teenage kids, at least some kid on their blog had gotten blown away Yanom or some relative of theirs. You know, they got this constant fear of, like, nuclear attack. You know, the economy was going to shit. Like, despite what people like Oliver Stone tell you, like, Vietnam didn't, like, make everybody rich. Like, yeah, there's always war profiteers and Zelensky types. there were 500 years ago, there were 5,000 years ago, there were in 968 or today.

Yeah, there were guys who were profiting from the Vietnam War, but the Vietnam War was killing the American economy. You know, I mean, like, it was, these were not like good times, okay? That's one of the, and America didn't really write itself until Reagan's second term, honestly. I mean, there's other contributing factors, you know, like the energy crisis and the need to, like, restructure, like, certain aspects of America's, of America's consumption, the energy consumption in order to account from new realities. But it literally took like a decade

and a half for like America to like unfuck itself from Vietnam, like in terms of, you know, the national economic profile. But somebody was all of those things. The big, the big issue with the Paris peace agreements is people... Well, let me just, let me just say.

You were, you were, You're talking about the economy and they were almost literally doing two wars because not only are they paying for Vietnam, but now they have this war on poverty, that they're having to print money over. And so you, of course, you're going, things are going to go to shit because when you're also, you're throwing millions of money on. You're also throwing millions upon millions by millions of dollars to develop, you know, know, ICBM systems that, you know, can be super hardened to withstand, like, first strike. You know, like, you know, keeping B-52s constantly in the air, like, with nuclear payloads, keeping 300,000 men in West Germany, you know, keeping, you know, developing and maintaining, like, a fleet of Minutemen missiles as, you know, as the primary deterrent, you know,

keeping nuclear-capable submarines in the water, like, this is unbelievably expensive. One of the reasons why, like, Reagan went all into when the Cold War wasn't just because, you know, he, you know, he had, like, balls or something or because he, you know, he, you know, he wasn't, like, a pussy like Carter or whatever, like, dumb things people think today. And, like, America could wage the colder longer than Ivan, but America was running out of money to fucking do it, too. You know, you can't, you cannot sustain that indefinitely. You're either going to go to war or you're going to face some kind of structural crisis like the Soviets did, and then the odds of war happening becomes exponentially more likely. I mean, you know, this idea somehow, like, America, like, it definitely, you know, maintains, like, a 600-ship Navy, you know, could have continuously, like, fielded, like, you know, newer and more weapons, you know, like the B-2 platform, and, you know,

and, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, Jerry. I don't people like to talk about it. It's like some kind of pipe dream, you know, people like, you know, Mr. Ted Kennedy and the epoch, but it wasn't. Like Jerry Pornel said, like, orbital space, had the Cold War endured in the 1990s. Like, orbital space had to become what naval warfare platforms were to strategic nuclear planning in the 80s. I mean, at some point, the money would have run out. You know, like, again, they can't. Well, that's also why President Nixon ended Bretton Woods. I mean, it makes it easier if you get off the gold standard and you can, you know, accelerate the money supply, too. Yeah, very much so. But it's also, too, he was genuinely worried. He was generally worried about, about, like, a run on the gold reserves.

I mean, it was just like a real, that was a real prospect. especially because it's like outside the scope and we can talk about this in another episode and I'm not an economist but I do know I am something of an economic historian and that I have like a basic conceptual picture of a of other structure of American economic policy changed and just like how globalism kind of gradually became a reality you know and how the kind of information age you know changed the way financial markets function where the road and aside of all these things

you and I just raised the 1970s that was the dawn of the information age okay I mean you could say that like the kind of machines that like touring machines

were like I don't mean like that I mean like the digital age I guess I should say that the dawn of that was the 1970s and things from the 1970s to now things changed just rapidly you know and that that was altering the way business has done

and the way like money is conceptualized in my opinion, for better and for worse. I mean, it was, it was not, it was not all negative, although there are any negatives. But, you know, these kinds of punctuated, these kinds of punctuated changes are, they're, they're stressors, you know, like I, they, they, they, they, they cause, they, they make, they make crises more probable of all sorts. So, yeah, it, you know, but the main, what I kind of wanted to emphasize on, you know, I mean, like all things related to Vietnam, even today, even though kind of the, like the taboo is no longer around the Vietnam War, obviously, as it was for, you know, when I was a kid, like when you were a teenager, I'm sure, but people, it's still, like, ill understood, so this is the idea of the Paris peace talks, like, guys in kind of the mainstream right, even some guys, like, on the dissident right. they do it as like, oh, well, Congress screwed Nixon over and just, you know, cut off the money supply and, you know, the tangible military aid to the Republic of Vietnam, you know, so the South couldn't defend itself. And, you know, Hanoi was just rubbing its hands together and never meant to, like, abide the rules of the, or the material, express conditions of the peace agreement. It's not really true.

You know, and then there's, like, other people who, you know, people on the left and kind of like, Asian historians, they just claim that, like, well, Nixon was just making, you know, make a fool the American people and, like, pretending to accomplish peace. That's not true either. This was kind of a, if you, the view from Nixon and Kissinger

and, uh, and across the aisle, you know, Jop and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, the central committee, the Communist Party of Vietnam, there's like a lack of shared premises real large. And if you read the, the statements

what Hanoi was saying to Cosvin, Cosvin, COSVM, that's an acronym. It's sent for Central Offices South Vietnam. There was the anglicized acronym for what amounts to the Central Committee of the Viet Cong, okay, based in South Vietnam.

And what they communicated to them was that, in their view, what the ceasefire meant, what the peace agreement meant, was that America would disengage that

communists in South Vietnam like formal party members, Viet Cong suspects, you know, sympathizers all in sundry would no longer be treated as enemy combatants. A roadmap would be implemented as it were

for what was supposed to be implemented in 1954, you know, which was eventually, you know, like countrywide elections, which never actually happened, in part because of the constantly you know the kazi changing regime in Saigon never allowed to happen like that is true

and they wouldn't allow it to happen because it would Vietnam would have gone red so I understand that completely but the two regime in Saigon immediately after like the ink was dry basically like a major push happened in key areas especially border

territories like with Cambodia as well as the quang trade province you know key uh key key operational areas of of communist uh control that were like strategically essential for them to be able to bargain from a position of strength and in advent of hostilities access logistically uh what they needed to in cambodia and um when it became clear that the south was going to was going to continue to you know trying to annihilate what remained of the Viet Cong, the North responded

with conventional means. And their reasoning was always South Vietnam is not a sovereign country. There are not two Vietnam's. The North never accepted that. So their notion was well, kind of like the

provisional IRA and you can say this is in bad faith, their view was always, you know, we're going to lay out our arms, but you've basically got to, like, allow, like, you know, full representation to the Communist Party, and, you know, you've got to give our people, you know, equality of status at the polls. And, you know, added to that, obviously, there's epistemological problem with communism because they claim that

they're practicing a kind of science. And if you refuse to abide, what they claim is the inevitable science of history, you know, which is, like, advancing socialism, you know, you know, you you're basically engaged in some kind of oppression of humanity in general. Like quite literally, this is like what they'd say. You know, whether you're talking about East Berlin, whether you're talking on Moscow, whether you're talking about Prague,

whether you're talking about Vietnam. So there's like an added, just kind of like this added, like, inability to come to terms that, like, framed, like, uh, Hanoy's conceptual horizon. However, um,

Nixon basically put Saigon and as good as stead as it could have been in terms of political legitimacy and in terms of bolstering their case in the Court of World Opinion which actually mattered then and the way it didn't, it doesn't now.

And the 972 offensive colloquially called the Easter by like military geeks and like historians on sundry that was stopped in its tracks. I mean, American air power

were devastated North Vietnamese Armored columns, but the Army of the Republic of Vietnam actually stood and fought. And, like, I think I made the point some weeks back that they get a bad rap, you know, because they're always kind of panned as, like, this cowardly

forest with, like, crooks, and, like, when we're full a little jagged, the only time we see the Arvin on screen and some Arvin captain, and he's wearing, like, some faggity, like, fucking silk scarf, and he's literally pimping some girl to the Marines. Like, hey, you want you want to boom, boom, and, like, and that, Like, you literally never see a portrayal of them as, like, anything, but, like, scumbed eggs or, like, pooties.

And, like, that's not fair. I mean, I'm not a Vietnam veteran, so, like, I'm sure those guys had their own axe to grind with them people. But I'm talking about historical record, just like as a dude who, like, writes about historical topics. There's nothing else of the 72 offensive and the fact that it would stop and its tracks, like, acquits the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Okay, that's not all air power, okay? So, yeah, there's that. But that's kind of the way to understand the Paris Peace Agreement.

It wasn't just Kissinger being duplicitous or Nixon, you know, being a snake. Or, I mean, what would Nixon gain from that anyway? Like, because if anyone knows anything about Nixon knows. Like, Nixon's a guy who, like, he's a rare American who lived historically in absolute terms. Like, all Nixon never thought about was his, like, contribution to history. Like, Nixon never, ever, ever would have just, like, it just like, you know, pulls some kind of ruse and said, like,

the hell with Saigon, I don't care. You know, this, I'm just going to, you know, this is how I'm going to, like, try and shore up my cred, like, in the midst a Watergate, like, that, this nonsense. But it, um, but it's also, you know, the Sino-Soviet split, Nixon, if you read what Nixon wrote,

um, after the war, um, and post-Watergate, Nixon disappeared for about five years. But then he made a comeback, is a best-selling author, and as the Cold War heated up again, you know, people became very thirsty for serious analysis on geo-strategic things. And Nixon really had the Soviet Union's number in a way of remarkable. And he wrote a lot about why he went to China. And he said, like, look, you know, I basically realized in 1953, you know, as the stalemate Korea set in, like, we

had to decoppel Beijing from Moscow at all costs. I mean, yeah, we have to make compromises there. Like, yeah, you know, a lot of people would suffer in places like Cambodia because of that. You know, you can say it's callous, but Nixon was totally

open about that. But had that not happened, the communists would have won the Cold War, absolutely. You know, you'd have a communist world in America, it'd be this kind of garrison state that existed.

and had an ability to project power kind of like in 19th century terms like throughout like the Western Hemisphere probably as far as Greenland or something but it would you know it would basically be this kind of like island amidst like a hostile like Red World and that was a very real possibility

had things not developed what they did but in the more immediate capacity Nixon realized he had to court now when he did because that neutralized that neutralized the strategic advantage of Soviet victory by proxy in Vietnam

because you literally had a communist super state on the border of like, you know, their client in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge would stand with China no matter what. You know, it didn't matter that, you know, they, it didn't matter that they

clicked up with the Soviets and the Chinese and the National Liberation Front and Hanoi to fight the Americans. When things, the Khmer never liked the Vietnamese anyway and when things went bad between Hanoi or between Moscow and Peking, the Khmer Rouge would always be all in with China and its will, okay? So you had Nixon managed, you know,

what did the Soviets really gain in Vietnam? I was like, okay, yeah, like we talked. talked about Vietnam was that was where that was that was that was where the line in the sand was drawn you know when when the free world as it was called

you know like fought you know the communists in open combat it didn't matter it could have been anywhere but that's just where it was it was a political fight it wasn't a struggle for resources and territory and yeah the Congress won that but

it's like okay so now you know the Soviet's that basically, like, this kind of, they've got, they've got this, they've got this appendage beleaguered by, you know, hostile Khmer Rouge, Cambodia and, like, hostile, you know, communist China to what's north. And that is really interesting, too, because obviously this, at that time, the trifecta that truly ruled the Soviet Union, in my opinion, was Usenov and Dropoff and Grameko. And, um, you know, the Soviets hedge against China was India.

You know, that's an like true military interdependence develop between Moscow and India. And that's when Kissinger went all in with Pakistan. You know, and the Indo-Pakistan war was very much a Cold War proxy, resulting directly from the writing on the wall the Soviets detected from what was happening with Nixon and China. And then when that, I mean, that was all incredibly brutally. then the

Soviets pushed in Angola like immediately after that that's why the focus shifted to Africa as they're like Africa we can win you know like what's the West have you know they've got Rhodes or Rodriguez going down they got South Africa

South Africa's a pariah you know and plus like they wanted to fight the South Africans you know and that 50,000 Cubans showed up to fight the SADF you know and it was hey we're you know look at this racist oppressor state you know like we're

we're you know the worst Alpac believes in liberating people, you know, in the global south, or the colored world, take your pick with that. I mean, all these things are just, these things are just incidental, which is approximately caused by Vietnam. I mean, it's proxomely caused by the fact that Nixon and Kissinger were able to decouple peaking from Moscow, like in absolute terms. You know, I mean, I, you know, and the point that that rift could never be repaired. I mean, that's remarkable.

There would have been, I mean, along to the vagaries of Mao and I think just things are intrinsic to the Chinese national and cultural character, as well as just kind of racial differences and geostrategic issues, I think the Sino-Soviet alliance would have been problematic going forward, but

it definitely would have held together until at least, you know, America slash NATO was like vanquished within you know the Eurasian landmass and the Soviets

and the Soviets and the Chicago's going to handle the errands as later it owes entirely to Nixon and Kissinger that the Senate of Soviet split was that

fractures and that permanent I firmly believe that if that was like two kind of like wide widely off topic and you wanted to focus

more specifically and concretely in a piece of the story, but I thought it was important to make known. Well, here's one thing I wanted to bring up about the Accords. Yeah. Most, I would

say a lot of mainstream historians would say that South Vietnam was basically pressured into accepting an agreement that basically ensured that it was going to collapse. I mean, I think there's a political problem here.

Like, we're used to, I mean, we're not in the wrong way to characterize it. We're accustomed to the Department of State, just kind of issuing these ridiculous statements that nobody could possibly derive anything from, but, like, gross offense. I mean, in terms of, like, you know, the foreign regimes are directed at. Like, in the case of Vietnam, it was a very, it was a very, delicate minuet. I mean, first of all, I mean, like I said, at the office of this discussion, you know, we killed a huge amount of people in North Vietnam, I mean, and the South, but particularly, I mean, we, these were not people who had warm feelings towards America. You know,

I mean, this was a brutal war with racial overtones, frankly, okay? Secondly, like I said, this wasn't clear cut. I mean, arguably, it's always ambiguous if you're talking about national frontiers. And, you know, like, I know people talk like, you know, the borders of Ukraine are like absolutely sacred, you know, and like more holy than, you know, like some prom queen's virginity or something or that like, you know, the state of Poland is a sacred thing. I mean, but aside from like the garbage of that, the status of Vietnam actually was

genuinely ambiguous, you know, and the succession of governments, America really kind of mishandled that. You know, it's like, okay, I mean, you know, you had a guy like DM who straight, you know, who straight up whacked because it was pretty clear he was just going to go all in and say like, hey, look, I'll allow like a national election, you know, basically. And I, I think him being the kind of hostile that he was was looking to carve out some kind of, some kind of space in the regime, you know, for him and those like himself, you know, but he, obviously, you know, America wasn't going to tolerate that, but, you know, their successors, you know, he had a guy like two who was sort of completely a hard line on the communists, but that, that wasn't reasonable either,

you know, and they had to come to term somehow, and I believe Nixon's reasoning was, you know, just strictly like in theater in terms of the military situation and how it impacted the delicate politics. As I said, if, if there'd been a normal political situation in America and if you'd had, you know, if there hadn't been like quite literally a coup against Nixon, if you hadn't had a Congress that, you know, full of people who were essentially campaigning on, you know, building a career on, you know, condemning the, the promoted evil of Vietnam War. Had the Truman Doctrine been abided as intended, I think South Vietnam could have basically held off a Northern assault indefinitely. And as perverse as the logic that Body Count was, particularly as realized, you know, North Vietnam had been at war for decades.

And they, speaking of the burn rate, they were losing a huge amount of military age males. I mean, at some point, the Northern Vietnamese would not have been able to sustain that. You know, at some point, unless you're talking about some, unless you're talking about some crazy situation, like the FARC in Cambodia, where you're literally talking about dudes like living in the jungle, not metaphorically, literally, you know, who are like running cocaine and dope and, you know, carrying on some alleged insurgency for 50 years,

which probably is more than anything, just kind of like a cover for their little, like, narco trade and their bizarre kind of, you know, anarcho-primidivist existence. Like, you can't just carry on, you know, a revolutionary campaign for decades on decades. And we're not talking about a low-intensity campaign like the PIRA in Belfast.

I mean, even that is difficult, but, you know, we're talking about, you know, the North Vietnamese army was actually a crack army. And we're talking about combined arms assaults, you know, where mass numbers of men are dying, you know, where, you're, you know, you're assaulting with, you're assaulting with columns of T-54 tanks. They have to be fueled.

You know, they're being, they're getting close air support from MIG-17s that, you know, with pilots, they have to be trained extensively, and when they die, it's hard to replace them. You know, you're periodically, you know, your capital city is periodically getting, like, bombed into the fucking Stone Age. You know, I mean, like, this does take its toll at one time, you know, I mean, and that I don't the Vietnamese initially thought it would probably take them until about

1979, 1980 to win the war like Hanoia, I mean. And there is interesting talk because obviously anyone who spoke in the on the Central Committee like picked their language carefully, you know, as people do in government, but particularly governments at war and especially, you know,

the communist regimes, the Cold War. You could tell these guys were nervous like military and civilian alike. like look basically beyond 1980 all bets are off like translated and really in the lines like we can't sustain this indefinitely

you know so there is that but what I think I did want to raise I made the point that in my opinion and I'm not a criminologist I don't speak Russian but I do know something about the Soviet Union

and I believe firmly that the Soviet Union was at at Zenith when the shadow executive was the trifect of Usinov, Grimico, and Dropoff. And Dropoff really, really

had the United States as a number. Okay? And he under, in a way that most Russians don't, and the way, frankly, most, like, Eastern Block types didn't. And that's one of the reasons why he was so effective. And he very much understood that if you can really, really fuck with

um, you know, the, the, the internal situation of America and carve out a genuine, like, single-issue opposition on a matter of war and peace, you can really, really foobar their system. You know, that's kind of like America's weak point. Just like solidarity was like the weak point of these Iron Curtain regimes. And like in similar, you know, similarly structured things.

You know, solidarity, of course, was, it was basically a Catholic social teaching movement that was at base, you know, like, labor union, you know, that was demanding what the party was, was always promising, but never delivering on. And that was like kryptonite to the, you know, Marxist-Leninist cadres that ruled. You know, it, uh, so, yeah, there was, it's kind of a perfect storm of things that made, um, you know, made the situation untenable vis-a-vis South Vietnam. But I also, I mean, And again, I want to widen the discussion just a bit. I got to come down to the point again, because people I have with Vietnam's as weird anomaly

or this unique and remarkable evil. You know, like we talked about, the reason I raised this with CETO, you know, S-A-T-O, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the 1954 dual accords of Korea and Indochina, and the Truman Doctrine, like, this was entirely congruous with U.S. policy after the Second World War. The cost of waiting the Second World War, among other things, was when these primitive as hell third world nations, which are those they truly were primitive, like people living in huts, when they come under assault by Ivan, you go defend them, and your kids go defend them, and your tax dollars go defend them, and you lose those things. I mean, this was very well understood. you know um that was the cold war that came to an end um in part because uh watching and realized it wasn't tenable part of was the revolution in military affairs but part it was just it took uh

it took 30 years for uh the damage brought by world war two to be repaired and for these states like korea to be built into like functional client states with uh a comic capability their own i mean that's you know, I don't really see what America could have done. Within the, I'm not, I don't think World War II had been fought, obviously,

but within about irrationality, if I'm, if I'm Kennedy or if I'm McNamara or if I'm Nixon in 16, in February 69, you go to the office, like, what am I for doing in Saudi East days?

I say, okay, the Truman Doctrine's off, the Cold War's off, we're not going to defend Vietnam, we're not going to treat commitments, you know, we may not even defend West Berlin. I don't know because war is

bad and just people don't like it and it's messy and people die. I mean, like, what do you other people think should have been done? You know, I mean, that's arguably that's why it was incredibly aside of the fact, don't genocide your own civilization, it was incredibly stupid to wage World War II because this was the result.

You know, I mean, okay, well, now you get to fight Ivan for the rest of the planet. I mean, you know, and that's what happened. so this um was like nobody really explained to me it's like it was good to incinerate you know

it was good to incinerate you know 150,000 people at Dresden but the most evil thing ever was other than you know the quote of Holocaust was like blowing away like Vietnamese villagers at mili I'm not trying to be flipping because that's that's fucking horrible okay like both of those

things are horrible but nobody can tell me like why the latter is like you know the day America lost its innocence but the forum was just like something that like had to be done you know like it doesn't there's a lot of dishonesty about vietnam you know it's kind of like it's kind of the dishonesty of world war two in reverse you know like and this is faded because it's faded because it's fatal memory but i mean you remember because you're a little just a little more than me like vietnam was presented as like the worst war ever waged for like reasons no one could articulate you know like why

Yeah, and the whole thing was very cynical and ideologically driven, but yeah. Well, is that because everything after Nuremberg has to have a moral component to it? If you apply to a moral component to anything, then if you start with morality, it's a good war, it's a bad war, then you can, I mean, you're basically pulling at the heartstrings of middle America of Protestant America, church-going America, and you're going to leave them around like a dog.

Of course, but my point is it was arbitrary. You know, and it's like the, like it was, I realized why people were doing this and I realized why this fifth column developed the way it did

and why they focused on Vietnam, but in absolute terms, like this doesn't make any sense. You know, and like I said, Vietnam's exceptionalized. Like people, you know,

the narrative presented by, you know, people like Ron Kovic, people like Oliver Stone, you know, people in the era like Abby Hoffman, was that this like kind of conspiratorial design. It's like, look, man, like the Truman Doctrine is very clear. Like America deployed in pretty much exactly the same way in Korea and the Dominican Republic in 65. In Bolivia, a run down Che Guevara, up decades later in Nicaragua and El Salvador, although obviously, Those weren't, you know, those weren't deep deployments. Like, is it not, like, America abiding the Truman doctrine and, you know, realizing it had to fight a Soviet client regime to maintain credibility amidst, as the era of strategic parity was imminent, like, it's not some, like, weird thing. You're, like, hard to, like, difficult to decipher. Like, I, you know, and again, like, nobody can explain to me why, like, why, why, like, annihilating Europe. and sacrificing your son on Guadalcanal is like awesome

but you know like losing your son at Ayadran or Ksan is like this great evil like when America lost its innocence like it's just it's just stupid and um

you know it's and it's beyond stupid it's you know well it turned well they just said that it it just really became a a trope that it wasn't the war to fight that there was nothing good about this war.

68, you know, even Kronkite is saying that the war can't be won. Well, yeah, and again, too, like imagine... I mean, there are... But think about this. Like, imagine in 1943, imagine after, you know, the U.S. Army didn't meet the Vermacht in combat until 43, and they got their asses kicked, the Cassarine Pass. Like, imagine if Walter Winchell had gone on the radio and said, Mr. Roosevelt's a liar, World War II can't be won.

You know, victory of the Axis is imminent. Like, dude would have been arrested if not disappeared. You know, I mean, like, it's a joke. Well, you can't make this up. You know, like, people acting with just some, like, normal occurrence or just, like, sound journalism. And again, I mean, Americans are this weird idea. Like I said, the two are kind of most puzzling this to me, because it's otherwise intelligent people, you know, who present this, these things.

I'm about to raise. You know, it's not just, like, dumb people repeating moral trips they've heard. It's like, the guys to say what Michael Savage did, I mean, Savage isn't smart, but their arts market to say it's like, oh, America was, like, just pussy footing around in Vietnam. And we killed him, like, three million people, and it was literally, like, a

fucking scalp hunt. You know, and, yeah, nothing to say that but shade on, on the Vietnam Army. I've got a lot of respect for them, guys. And, um, I, but, I mean, look, man, it's be real. Like, we killed a fucking huge amount of those people, and we were being like, we were, we were doing, like, cowboy shit around it's, you know, like, so it's, like,

don't pretend that, like, you know, don't pretend, like, killing millions of these fucking people with, like, firepower that was purpose to fight the Soviet Union, like, it was, like, some, like, low-key thing that was, like, not, not real war. But also the, um, like, when people claim, like, well, Vietnam was just, like, a stupid war, it's like, look, I mean, like I said, even part ways of Mirr's camera on this, you know, like, you don't, uh, it. You know, you don't fight, you didn't fight wars in 1968, you know, to, like, have access to, like, more, like, grain reserves, you know, or, like, you know, control the ability to, like, you know, ship, like, silk out of, out of, out of the fucking, you know, out of China back to Europe or something. You know, like, it didn't matter where Vietnam was, you know, that's where the line to say it was drawn, that's where the Reds pushed, you know, and if you're going to win the Cold War, like, wherever the Reds pushed, it might be Bolivia, it might be Iran. It might be Vietnam.

It might be Angola. Like, it might be West Berlin. Like, that's where you fight them. You know, like, the issue is, like, who's going to, you know, the cold or was fought in every, in every aspect of conceptual, political life. You know, like, economically, like, culturally, like, technologically and militarily. You know, you can't be picking shoes, like, where you fight. You know, and that's, plus, like, war is like, we talked about war arrives like the seasons. I mean, that's, that's the problem with Klausowitz's victims, like, taken to kind of this sort of, like, like, logical extreme. It becomes, like, irrational. Like, you know, like, you don't just, like, go to war to, like, affect, like, policy ambitions by other means. You know, like, war arrives, like the seasons. And there's a bounded rationality to warfare, absolutely. And war is a rational process the way that's fought. But, like, you don't, like, you don't like the, I don't like the trade arrangements that I have a country-wide. I, I don't like the, I don't like the trade arrangements that I have a country-wide.

I know, I'm going to launch a massive assault on them. Like, that's, that's not how things work. And that deal I said, like, I want to sell you my house. Maybe if I go to your house and, like, beat the shit out of you, like, that'll help me, like, get a better deal. I mean, it's, like, not, that's not what people think. You know, like, and that's not, like, things are done. You know, like, and it's not, I realize that sounds silly, but, you know, the, you know, this is a very important point. And that's one of the things.

that's why there's that race Sorrell, it's not just because I mean, like, his ideas on aesthetics and things and the way, like, people view, like, labor and the way, um, identitarian things in, in political life. I mean, he deals with those things in intelligent ways that's giving it to people like us.

But it's, like, ontological view of, like, conflict. Like, this is something that happens. Like, it's not this rational thing. It arrives. Like, it's, like, why you find, like, a girl attractive. It's like, why, um, it's like, why certain symbols, like, take root like during cultural epochs it's like it's it's like why winter comes we're at war now you know war arrives i mean that i realize i was a bit far afield but um yeah i think that's important

i mean in that doesn't regard to vietnam but in the case of vietnam it's particularly kind of neglected it you know yeah but go out i'm sorry oh no problem well we're coming up on the hour so let me end with this because i know you can probably go on a little bit about this um the common trope even till today is that the united states lost the vietnam war what what is your opinion when you hear somebody say that what thoughts come into your mind i mean i agree with john paul van for those that don't know uh van was a really interesting guy and a really troubled guy he had kind of like a horrible upbringing um like his mom was literally like an alcoholic prostitute, like, didn't know his father,

joins the Army Air Corps, his train as a pilot, World War II ends before he sees action. When the Air Force made an independent service, he wanted to stay in the Army, so he became an infantry officer. Long story short,

he commanded a company and then a Ranger battalion in Korea, David Hackworth, a young David Haggwood was under his command, and Van became his whole badass okay he had problems with alcohol he got into such shit with an underage girl I mean typical like warrior type

who was his own worst enemy but like a really brilliant soldier and when he left the service he was one of the before his last kind of role in uniform

he was one of the first guys deployed MacVee okay military assistance command Vietnam in 1962 and the reasoning there, like we talked about, there's very much a special forces war. You know, counterinsurgency, direct action,

identifying cadres, and eliminating them. Okay? 64, after two years at MacV, Colonel Van retires. He becomes this independent, like, defense

consultant. Now, lo and behold, a year later, this, like, massive buildup happens, and Van is, like, what the hell are you doing? and Van said he was able to get back to Vietnam as a civilian and he ultimately died in

1972 in a chopper crash but he Van wrote a book of a bright shining lie and this kind of put the Vietnam War in perspective for me in terms and I was a kid

and I highly recommend it to anybody Van said basically what I said at the outset of this discussion I was basically barring from Van. Like, look, you don't like win wars. War's not a kind of to see like how many people you can kill. You know, you don't like win a war by like ranking up the biggest

body counts or by winning all the battles. You know, you win wars by by annihilating the enemy's ability to fight you know, by destroying his infrastructure and his, you know, and his ability to reconstitute

and continue to wage war and by breaking his political will to wage war in any number of ways. And some constellation of those things, like, wins the war. So, no, America lost the Vietnam War, but Americans look at this, like, a football game or something. Like, hey, we killed more of those people. Like, okay, great, man. Like, again, the Vermacht killed something like, their burn ratio was something like 15 to 1.

I'm not exaggerating. Okay, I mean, does that mean, like, the German Reich won World War II because they killed 20 million Russians? I mean, it, you know, and it's not a football game. game, like saying like, hey, at I had Drang, like, we kicked morphia knobs, they didn't really win, or like, whatever Westmoreland's Coke was. And, you know, um, the, uh, and Van was absolutely right. The problem with America is that it upset with firepower. That's something that America borrowed from the German general staff of old,

but with kind of, without the kind of, uh, tactical flexibility and intelligence of the German general staff. It's like the American notion is that firepower solves all problems. It doesn't matter what it is. If you throw in a firepower at it's going to be defeated. Nothing can stand up to a American combined arms. That's not true. I mean, yeah, I guess there's no, if you, if you threw it a firepower in Vietnam,

you would continue to kill huge numbers of people. You could probably turn it into like a non-functional country. I mean, especially you had one resorted to nuclear and biological weapons. But that's not, you don't wage war to just, annihily countries. You know, that's why the Carthaginian piece has become like this mythological thing. I mean, I assume

I'm not in general, but I do know something. So no, I mean, America America lost the Vietnam war because it it was, I mean, again, too, it's like, what's your victory metric? I mean, like, the minute

the minute those guys, those little yellow guys with with red stars on their pith, the helmets were running into Saigon with their clanshanikoff, they looked too big for them. And these guys were running. They were double-timing. These guys, they've been wore it for

30 years. Think about that. I mean, that's when Hanoi won that war. Okay? I mean, it... So the, the, um, you know, I, I look at that, and then if you look at

man when I see that, because again, it's like some pride thing or something. Like, like I'm making fun of their favorite football team. or something, you know, and like I said, I've got all, I've got huge respect for the Vietnam Army, you know, I just, that's like my dad's generation. But they're, like, fascinating guys. And, like, that's when the U.S. Army

was, like, at its best. And plus, it was like, cool. You had, like, that was the only time, like, well, you had, like, weird old in the Army, too. You had, like, weird, like, long-haired guys and, like, and, like, weird rednecky guys. And, like, yeah, like, crazy-ass. Like, dude, like, huge afro.

Like, fucking, I don't, I'm, like, being silly, but, like, not, you know, I'm like, I really play about a trope, but I'm the last person who's going to, like, saying anything nasty about, like, the Vietnam Army. Like, those guys are, like, the best, they were, like, legit, like, what's cool about America, like, legit, you know, but going around saying, and it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't their fault. Like, they, those guys, those guys fought splendidly, like, they, they performed very, very well. But, uh, no, America actually did not when the Vietnam War.

No. All right, well, let's end it there. Thomas, please give your plugs. And, uh, yep. Yeah, man. Um, you can find me on Substack, which is kind of like my permanent home. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com.

I'm back on Twitter again, but I get, I get fucking nude from there, like, all the time. But, I mean, if you look for me, like, you'll find me there. But I, it's, don't be, like, sad if, like, you look for me and I'm gone. I mean, I literally get banned from there, like, every, like, several weeks. um i'm at uh real capital r e al underscore thomas seven seven seven on twitter um i am watching my youtube channel man like and i talk to my uh long-suffering um editor and like production guy and he's ready to go so this weekend i got to record more with mr pete here and i've got to record for my own pod and i got to record uh with a couple dear friends of mine

for the channel content that's going to go to my editor and then it's going to launch so you can find my channel at Thomas TV on YouTube I'll I link it on my substack and I link it on my Twitter if you can't find it

but there's nothing there yet but there will be in like a week yeah like literally in a week like right around the first of uh right on the first week during the first week in February but that's what I got oh and I my my second book in my Steelstorm series just dropped You should get that at Imperium Press.

It's Imperiumpress.org. The book is Steelstorm 2. It's the second one of five. It's Frank Herbert-style science fiction. And I think I've gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback on it. I wouldn't keep writing them. So, yeah, and thank you for that, everybody. I really, really, really am honored by that.

But, yeah, that's all I got, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignonas show. Part 11 of the Cold War series. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing very well, man. Thank you for... Thank you for hosting me, as always. Today, an aspect of the later Cold War

that has become neglected by a lot of historians. There's one guy in particular. His name's Mark Ambinder. It's kind of hard to put his politics on the map on some on some mistakes some kind of neoconish

something kind of like paleoliberal even kind of like Walter Mondale type liberal he's become something of a presidential historian he wrote a book

called The Brink which was about it was about the able it's about about half it's about like the able archer

war scare and the rest is kind of about nuclear command of control and the final phase of the Cold War and you know

the deeper parodies therein and kind of how this informed policy and it's a really fascinating book, but he's about the only guy I can think of who's written a dedicated book about like the post-de-taunt

pre-peristrika Cold War, which I don't really understand because that's tremendously important. A lot of the technologies we take for granted, just in day-to-day life, you know, telecom stuff. It literally like came out of that epoch. I mean, this stuff was

in people's contemplation in a research and development capacity for decades before to add foot the perfection of those things including the internet the survival command and control platform I mean the stuff all came

out of like late Cold War you know strategic planning and the degree to which the potentiality of and preparation for a general nuclear war

kind of shaped American life in ways prosaic and profound that really can't be overstated. You know, I've people under about 45 they don't remember that. And even some people who are older,

it didn't like impact them in their daily life in concrete terms. So they think I'm overstating it, but I'm not. And if you look at the structure of the U.S. government, you know, as I'm always going back to the point, it's quite literally like structured to wage the Cold

War and not much else. And the strategic nuclear dimension of that obviously became preeminent owing the technological and existential realities. But, you know, what I'm getting at is that this is not just

some kind of like esoteric, like peculiar point of interest. These people who, you know, and it's big now to write about the deep state in varying capacities these, you know, I guess because William Crystal or whatever, like, you know, and guys

of that kind of ilk who write for those kinds of publications because, you know, they, since they've started like banding the term in like the last like five, ten years, now it's like okay to do so. So, you know, people write about these things, you know, in a very kind of

contemporary way, but it's like, okay, if you want to understand the deep state, you've got to understand the late Cold War. You know, Um, it's that, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's why these things exist. Um, I mean, they, some, some aspects are, are emphasized more than others. And, you know, some can attract budgetary pork more than others, you know, in the post-puller epic, obviously. And like, there's been cosmetic changes to a lot of these things, but that's just what they are. They're cosmetic changes. You know, they, they came out of, um, they came out of the, uh, the Cold War and specifically they came out of the, uh, the cold war. And specifically, they came out of the, strategic nuclear uh paradigm that uh you know the regime was um was structured to uh wage what's um anyway post vietnam uh i'm other belief uh from you know 73 to uh to uh to 83 approximately grenade grenade was a was a big moral victory in addition to you know being um

tactically significant in ways that I think most people don't really consider. I don't want to get into that yet, but the point being let's say 73 to 82 perhaps. I'm not the belief

America was actively losing the Cold War militarily. Okay, politically, no. In terms of values, if you will, and legitimacy, no. But that didn't really matter because the battle in the, you know, the Cold War

was the battle for hearts and minds. After the, after the 1950s, I mean, realistically, with the exception of Germany, which was owing to unfortunate accident of geography and geostrategic reality, you know, they,

they had to find a way to deal with the Soviet Union and the communists. But nobody in Europe, nobody in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was like, you know what, We want a Marxist-Lenin estate. We want to live like people doing the East Block. Like nobody thought that way.

Okay. And nobody in the developed world in North Asia thought that way. People who did think that way were in sub-Saharan Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, you know, in the global south. This was still very much an animating principle. Okay. And it could be foreseen pretty easily. It's like, okay, it doesn't matter. if, you know, in the world in 1983, you know, it was clear to everybody and, you know, kind of

in the free, in a developed free world that these Stalinist states just generated a lot of misery, created economies, a shortage, you know, didn't deliver on these promises of Tulleric utopia and, you know, plenty, and really we're just kind of, you know, miserable places to live that didn't matter like it was foreseeable that you know America could become

this kind of garrison state literally surrounded by a third world you know including you know including Mexico and um and Latin America that basically was solidly in the Soviet camp

was animated by a revolutionary impulse towards Marxist Leninism and uh you know the United States basically you know like meaningful

interdependence as you know economic or otherwise would just be cut off okay and the only meaningful currency would be you know

the ability to protect military power but again you know if if the global south and similarly situated developing states were pretty much all in the Soviet

camp you know the ability to the ability to project hard power would have been profoundly compromised too so it was foreseeable again you know like that's that's kind of like what millies was getting out the red dawn scenario like yeah it was silly to you know to to envision you know spetsnaz parachuting into Colorado Springs and shooting up the local high school but the political map that he kind of envisioned like an intro where it's like you know West Germany becomes, you know, West Germany withdraws from NATO because it's green and soap them. Government,

you know, decides to, like, just go all in with the Soviet Union. NATO falls apart. The Global South goes all in with Ivan. You know, so that you have, like, America kind of standing alone, you know, with a couple remaining states like the UK and Australia that, you know, really are kind of, you know, not meaningful powers in their own right. And, you know, it's a red world with America as kind of this is literally

this like garrison, okay? I mean, that was the real risk by the late Cold War post-Vietnam. It wasn't that, it didn't matter that, you know, Marxist Leninism had lost in like, you know, the marketplace of ideas or whatever, you know, people who still

bandy Thomas Payne or whatever and claim that, you know, through, through like, the process of reason and, like, meaningful discourse, we all, like, arrive with the truth. Like, that doesn't mean anything in the world of power of politics. And it certainly didn't mean anything amidst, you know,

what a, amidst, you know, what in most delicate times, people referred to was the colored revolt, you know, within the developing world. You know, I mean, this was very, this very much could have become reality. And a Soviet Union, a Warsaw pact, that basically

could plunder, you know, the collective capital resources of, you know, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, it could pretty much stagger on indefinitely. You know, I mean, it doesn't matter if, you know, the value added in absolute terms to their economy is nil.

It wouldn't matter if, you know, they were experiencing, you know, like 1.2% growth annually. You know, they could, they could certainly, the Soviets were certainly good at manufacturing guns, and they could, and they could, They could poach enough proverbial butter as they needed to if, you know, they had access to the world as their kind of proverbial orchard as it were. So there's important to keep in mind, okay? This is the world's situation after America had drew from Vietnam.

Now, Nixon, you know, Nixon was the author of detente. I mean, Brezhnev obviously had to be receptive. to that but it really um this this really was a america was kind of determining the course of a the conflict paradigm in the developing world because the Truman doctrine was what carried the day and you know Nixon the Nixon doctrine superseded the Truman doctrine you know the Nixon doctrine which was you know announced formally as you know Saigon as America transferred authority for the defense of the Republic of Vietnam, you know, to Saigon. You know, and Nixon declared that, you know, in certain terms, America's not going to, you know, take direct action to intervene in states where the internal situation, you know, precludes those states from, you know, resisting communist subversion from within or without, you know, on their own terms.

um so that gave i think uh i mean that was just practical number one i mean there wasn't there wasn't the political will you know to wage another vietnam war in sub-serran africa or even in latin america you know in 1973 but also uh it kind of provided an opening um to get the soviets to the table without uh without further compromising american credibility you know in some kind of pitiable way it didn't appear to be it didn't appear to be

America like folding the flag and quitting the Cold War even if some hawks like interpreted it that way and the Soviets, what's important is the Soviets didn't interpret it that way but the the real

the real lynchpin of detain was the salt treaty strategic arms limitation talks um i'm not going to bore everybody with you know the minutia of it the important details are that it limited not just nuclear forces in being and the destructive power of existing platforms as regards like you know how many warheads and what kind of throw weight and megatonage could be packed on to those pre-existing pre-existing platforms, but it also limited countermeasures, you know, deployment as well as purportedly development of countermeasures. The idea being that, you know, emergent deeper parodies,

you know, including things like decoys, you know, including things, you know, like interceptor, missiles, you know, including including next generation early warning systems if this kind of tech could be frozen or if not frozen, you know,

agreed upon, you know, to not be deployed that this would build in some kind of additional stability, which I think is incredibly batuous, but that's a different issue. In any event, this was in May 1972. By 1976,

a few things that happened to undermine this burgeoning detente regime, which ultimately was was as, you know, was unceremoniously ended in 1979 for one reason in particular we'll get into in a minute.

But a couple of things happened subsequent to salt. First and foremost, there was the 19703 war. On October 6th, 973, as people know, Syria and Egypt preemptively assaulted Israel. The Arab armies, particularly the Syrian army, performed better than anticipated, frankly. This Israel had a real problem on its hands in tactical terms. Israel responded by marrying nuclear warheads to their Jericho missile platforms, in part to try and terrify the error of them to submission,

in part as a ploy to force a reluctant Nixon administration to reprovision and resupply them because the Israelis were desperately running short on munitions and everything else they needed. The ploy worked on the Nixon take, you can hear Nixon and Kissinger and Nixon lamenting, you know, I'm not going to repeat the language because that would probably

upset the YouTube censors if this ends up on YouTube. But, you know, Nixon was not happy at the state of affairs. The Soviets responded by deploying service warfare frigates and

amphibious assault craft to the Port of Alexandria. And this was not publicized at the time, but the White House knew those service warfare frigates were carrying nuclear weapons. As the IDF surrounded the Egyptian 3rd Army, Brezhnev contacted the White House and said that if the Egyptian army were surrounded and destroyed, the Egyptian 3rd Army were surrounded and destroyed, and if the IDF continued to Cairo, the Soviets were going to deploy and intervene

directly, you know, to save Egypt. Nixon responded by ordering DefCon 3 alert status. The first time there'd been such a raise an alert status since Cuba in 62. This was profoundly serious. Alert status wasn't what it is after the Cold War and post-9-11. It wasn't this, like, meaningless thing. It had actual significance. in material in concrete terms

it changed the status of forces okay it indicated real readiness to wage war is what I mean okay at DefCon 3 during the Cold War it meant that strategic nuclear

bomber forces were on alert status such that in 15 minutes they could be scrambled and deployed it meant it meant Missileers in their silos order to strap in to, like, their command chairs and prepare for

incoming ICBM assault. You know, so, I mean, it was very, very serious. The Soviets responded in kind. The Soviet defense minister at the time was Gretschko, who was soon

to be replaced. He asked the Kremlin for 70,000 troops to be mobilized, and deployed in proximity to the battle space. Which didn't happen, obviously. Why that didn't happen is not entirely clear. Did Brezhnev put the brakes on that, deliberately? Did the Soviet general staff decide to wait and see?

It's not clear to me. According to a guy named Andre Danielevich, who was a... He was a colonel general, or it's equivalent. I guess that'd be a three-star, I think, and then he'll heard on, like, military guys in the comments, correct me if him wrong, and I'm not a military, but. His testimony in the 90s that he gave to the Wilson Foundation

and some of those NGO types, I think, is instructive, and I think it's credible. What he said was, he said that the 1970s, crisis exposed real weaknesses in the Soviet command and control system and its ability to respond to crisis in the moment and that

the Soviet Union wasn't really capable. He said the Soviet Union couldn't incrementally mobilize in that way. There was a binary kind of alert structure. Like either you know either you were at war or you were

not. And when you were at war either you know the nuclear trigger was cocked and ready or there was no chance of that happening. So basically and interestingly because you know during the Tsarist era one of the issues that one of the issues that

Holveg was dealing with in Germany and you know the lead up to the great war is that once like the Tsar is a mobilization protocol was was triggered like very little could stop it you know and to put the brakes on it

mean that you know the the the russian empire returned to a state of uh you know of peace time vulnerability so i think that's interesting okay um not just for trivial reasons but at any event um the inability the inflexibility and um the lack of uh you know um the lack of a nuanced uh alert structure was something that gave the Soviet general staff pause. And I mean the Soviet general staff, it was modeled very much on like, you know, the old German general staff

and, you know, as was the American, as was and is the American Joint Chiefs of staff. So, I mean, these, Danielovich was a powerful man. And he also, he was kind of the statistics and research man

on the Soviet general staff. So what he did in 1970, And this was not accidental. Ninety-six is generally agreed upon some historians and some defense intelligence types posited in 1974, 75. A handful is late in 19707. This was when the Soviets truly achieved strategic parity in terms of their nuclear forces in being. This is when the point at which, inarguably, the Warsaw Pact could fight a nuclear war against NATO. and or the United States, you know, jointly or severally on a, on terms of parity as regards

forces in being, okay? They were always disadvantaged as regarded, you know, the strategic nuclear forces until then, you know, despite, you know, despite, you know, with the Pentagon claimed, you know, in the run up to the 1960 election, in spite of what, you know, subsequent administrations alleged about, you know, force levels. This was the moment at which the strategic balance became, you know,

one of a true parody. But what Danielovich did was he oversaw the first computer analysis scientifically structured quantitative

simulation of a general nuclear war okay um coding all available inputs uh you know and the soviet general staff was pretty uncorrupted by ideology you know this was not you know some kind of shielding exercise so that they could you know deliver you know some kind of hackneyed um official statement you know to the to the general secretary and say like you know see comrade we we we can defeat the imperialist was nothing like that it was really legit and what danielovich's conclusions were was that under best conditions in a general nuclear war um the soviet military would be utterly powerless if the ussr was hit with a splendid first strike they have no ability to retaliate effectively okay even if uh early

warning did perform adequately and uh the soviets were able to retaliate at least 80 million soviet citizens would be dead and god knows how many more you know in warsaw packed allies allied estates who are also targeted um in varying capacities in the aftermath um it'd be virtually impossible for the soviet military to rebuild and reconstitute critical infrastructure because over three-quarters a heavy industry would have been just outright annihilated. And finally, Europe would be reduced to a wasteland. Like, even if you reject the kind of Carl Sagan, Doomsday, you know, hypothesis of nuclear winter and all that kind of thing, there's no way Europe could survive a general nuclear war.

you know i mean you're talking about literally the death of europe um and obviously that you know had profound implications for um the soviet union as well you know um so what uh what this uh led to was a couple of things um the way to really understand um the way to really understand um the way to really understand why the Soviet invaded Afghanistan owes to what I just described in terms of real anxieties about their ability to fight a nuclear war and survive, not even win, just survive, okay? Now, I know nobody likes the Russians these days, and I mean, I guess most people don't really like the Russians anyway. I'm not trying to be, like, big a date or mean.

I mean, it's a fact, okay. However anyone feels about Russia, however, everybody felt about the Soviet Union. Russia, the Soviet Union, in the 20th century, they lost more people at war than all other states combined. Okay.

You know, in the, between 1941, 9045, like, one in seven of their population was, like, died by war attrition, okay? Or of starvation, or in, you know, a bombing raid or in, in some way approximately caused by hostilities.

I mean, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, the status was impactful on their collective psyche, I mean, doesn't even begin to describe, you know, the degree to which disinformed policy. But beyond that, by, uh, by, by 1979, you know, we're, uh, under conditions of, of of true strategic parity I mean, potentially we're talking about the window of decision making

an event of a general war of minutes, you know, minutes, you know, like five or ten minutes, or in best case scenario, you know, 15 or 20 minutes. And, you know, we're dealing with weapons systems and we're dealing with, you know,

levels of social organizations at scale wherein, like, human decision makers are increasingly being sidelined. You know, that was reality, okay? Like this idea that just, oh, well, if we have sensible men, you know, at the controls, you know, cooler heads will just prevail. And, you know, it's unthinkable that some general nuclear war would happen. That was not the case at all. You can find yourself at war before even realize what's happening.

and in the case of nuclear war again we're talking about being forced to render decisions within minutes you know if you've been realized you've been hit you know I mean there's that too the possibility of decapitation

raises a whole new possibility or set of possibilities you know if the enemy can potentially essentially achieve a splendid decapitation strike, then the issue becomes like, well, you know, how do I identify imminent indicators of attack before there's even, you know, before there's even like a mobilization or before like early warning, you know, is even, is even activated, you know,

so there are not things that human minds can adequately interpret, identify, interpret, contemplate, and respond to. So we're talking about incredibly dangerous conditions, okay? Now, amidst all of this, the Soviet Union, and to their credit,

to the credit of the general staff, I mean, as they indicated a moment ago, they were kind of the best of that system. Them and probably some of the KGB, I mean, that's where I drop off came from. That's where Mr. Putin, you know, rows of the ranks as well. After this

1976 war game exercise, the Soviets realized that they had to try and find a way to develop a flexible response whereby they had the capability to fight and win in nuclear war, or at least

respond to any nuclear assault with a devastating counter strike in the form of a survivable deterrent but they realized that they had to basically the Soviet Union by way of a frankly progressive-minded general staff they tried to implement their own revolution

in military affairs and this is significant to the final phase of the Cold War but what remained paramount was uh you know was uh the ability of you know um the ability to survive a smudded for a strike or to deter it with you know a survivable um a survivable deterrent so another Soviet military type who offered his testimony

in the aftermath of 1991 was a guy named Alexander Leikovsky, a major general Likovsky was present pretty much when you know the

the inner pole if we can call it that way, convened to discuss the invasion of Afghanistan that's documented. So his testimony at least you know, I see no reason to think he's not a credible witness, but it's documented that he was present

when he stated he was present. So, you know, he's as much of from him, we get as much of an insider's perspective on the decision-making process as we're going to get. Um, on December 8th,

I mean 79, um, there was a meeting held in Brezhnev's private office. Um, you know, Brezhnev was the general secretary at the time still, you know, uh, and he would be until his death in 1982,

but he was increasingly, you know, suffering dementia and all matter of health problems. I believe, as I said before, that Andropov, um, Gromiko, who was the foreign minister, and Ustinov, who was then Secretary of Defense, and he was this big

war hero. Like, when you think of those guns of Red Army generals, it got like rows and rows and medals, you know, and looked like they're, you know, they got, they got, like, a visage. It looks like it's cut out of granite or something. Like, Oostinov was kind of one of those guys. But, um,

the issue at hand was the present situation in Afghanistan and Adropov and Usenov in particular were gravely concerned about it and what Lakovsky says is he said that the way on drop-off and Adropo was in terms of holding court it wasn't Brezhnev

and drop-off said that look the efforts undertaken by the U.S. intelligence apparatus you know central intelligence DIA you know elements of the state department that are fact, intelligence, you know, oriented.

He said that their big plan is to beef up Turkey, you know, concede to the Turks, you know, within reason, whatever they want in Central Asia, you know, so long as the Turks are willing to play ball with a NATO war plan. And ultimately, he said that the goal, the Turkish goal is to bring Sunni Muslims on the Southern Soviet frontier like into their conumbra or orbit

and the U.S. ambition is to encourage that sentiment by whatever means possible. Now the reason for this was among other things, by 1979, Soviet warplanners realized that if America was going to launch a preemptive assault of the Soviet Union,

it was going to basically force the Soviet Union to fight a two-front nuclear war if you can think a nuclear war is having fronts but the point is they're going to assault from the Pacific as well as from the West, okay? They're going to do that for a few reasons World War III would have been decided

by naval weapons platforms and eventually by those like an orbital space but by 979 Asia would have been key for reasons that we can get into at some point but it's kind of too there's kind of too much there

to, you know, to vote with the rest of this episode to that and nothing else. But the big Soviet concern also was that Soviet command and control to fight a nuclear war was based in Moscow and it was based in Kazakhstan

where Star City is. You know, there's space center to this day that's still a Russian spacecraft are launched from. The big concern was that Pershing missiles deployed you know in proximity to Kazakhstan

would be targeted at Star City and you know again like if we can I mean it's an imperfect descriptor but at event of a two front nuclear assault in the Soviet Union it would be blinded and then it would be decapitated and that would be the end of it. So

why the concern in Afghanistan. Well, Amin, who was a communist, he was this revolutionary firebrain in Afghanistan who'd become the president. And he was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist.

Owing to the kind of peculiarities of or one of the kind of peculiarities of the culture there, which I can't speak to in any kind of, you know, meaningful capacity, but just generally, and this is what Lakovsky stated, you know, Amin fell back a lot on kind of appeals to Islamic paitism and couching Marxist-Leninist kind of gobbledy gook in those terms. The Kremlin had a hard time kind of discerning those signals. They thought that Amin was like,

likely going to kind of court like an Islamist coalition around like a nominally Marxist Lenin's government and then he was going to pivot to the west through Turkey and become this client regime of the sort that America always wanted Iran to kind of become and was going to welcome you know forces to be based there you know including things like pursing two missile platforms and in the end

drop off Usenov, Grameco view like this was the checkmate scenario in the Cold War and secondarily a lot of people don't know this Afghanistan actually has fairly substantial uranium deposits Pakistan

was literally at war at the time intermittently with the Soviet ally India who was their hedge against China which in turn you know Mr. Kissinger and some of his successors

and the Chinese courted Pakistan and started giving them everything they needed to wage war with India. You know, so what I'm getting at is that this was this was not Andropov being crazy or this was not just Soviet

paranoia. Like this actually was very forward thinking strategic logic. And they were 100% wrong about Amin. He had no intention of doing that. He wasn't what he appeared to be, which was a basically doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, you know, accounting for the kind of the peculiar cultural nuances of his country.

But unfortunately, what we've decided was, at the conclusion of this meeting, like Oskie said, he was kind of sitting there thinking that this was just kind of like a typical, like, intelligence briefing but and drop off just kind of like looked at you know at every man in the room and said well you know our plan is going to be this you know we we've got to remove i mean you know by by way of special action i mean which everybody understood meant you know he's going to be whacked he's going to be replaced with uh with with carmel uh who was the soviet union's preferred for whatever reason the kjb said that is the man

and we can know, it was just some kind of cipher. I don't know anything about the man beyond that, but, you know, he, I believe, he, until 1986, so for most of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, like he was at the helm. And drop-off said,

in order to preserve, you know, he anticipated, you know, some kind of smooth transition to power, but, you know, just in case, you know, he, he said we got a plan for the contingency of civil unrest and you know deploy at least some contingent of forces on the ground there um and uh this was put to uh he said off put this to ogarkov uh who was

chief of the general staff um and he was outraged Usenov said, well, to be on the safe side, don't worry, we're going to deploy 75,000 to 80,000 troops in theater. And Ogarikov said, that's not going to be able to stabilize the situation. This isn't a conventional military problem anyway. And apparently Usenov said, are you saying, you know, comrade, are you suggesting that you were to teach the poet girl? And reading between the lines, Ogarov realized, that if he continued on this path of, you know, conscientious resistance, he would be disappeared. If not physically, which was very possible, you know, he would have found himself,

you know, unpersoned in some, in some basic capacity. The, this tells you, too, about the divide. between again the military leadership and the true kind of vanguard, which was of the Communist Party, I mean, which was

in drop off by that point Grameko and Oostinov. And this was a totally unofficial meeting of hand-picked officialdom.

know this didn't go to the supreme soviet this this didn't go to some you know officially convened subcommittee of the politburo um there wasn't even any record of it other than um the notes of the meeting that i just referenced when indropov died apparently the notes of this meeting were in his safe every soviet general secretary had a personal safe and when he died it was opened um which seems strange almost like mafia like in my opinion like quite i'm not i'm not being corny i mean like quite literally um when uh like when brezhnev died i think he had like ten thousand dollars in american cash which at that time was a lot of money he had he had like he had like some chevas regal or some kind of like mid-shelf like brand of american liquor

and uh like a bunch of personal effects um and drop up at a whole like a whole like lot of he had a whole lot of fairly sensitive stuff including apparently the notes from this meeting which was the only documentation that it even occurred which is crazy because the soviet union the soviet union was brazen the soviet union in some ways was uh it didn't respect convention in the international system you know stuff like uh the downing of flight o seven and other things but they were obsessed with their own like internal protocol like this is something just like wasn't done. Like, you can tell, in my opinion, the Soviet Union was in trouble at this point

that they were doing things this way. This wasn't just ordinary, I mean, the Soviet Union was secretive and paranoid, but, like, not, this isn't how they did things. You know, and when, when even within the inner party, literally, you've got that kind of, like, mistrust. So you're resorting to this kind of ad-house. hoc decision-making, you know, with kind of like a mafia coterie of officialdom, you know,

who are loyal to, like, the de facto decision-maker on war and peace questions. Like, that's a very, very bad situation. I mean, just in terms of the potential for, you know, the potential for, you know, the potential for, you know, catastrophic decision-making, but also it means the proverbial center cannot hold. And I'm actually someone who thinks pretty highly of Andropa, within the bounded rationality of, you know, rather the, like, the amoral, you know,

within an amoral, purely amoral discussion of power politics. I think Andropa was probably the best man that system produced other than Stalin in purely, you know, power political terms. But, um, this uh this is how this is what underlay the decision to go to war in um Afghanistan you know it was not you know to fight Islamic fundamentalism like Islamic consciousness definitely was an aspect it was a part of the constellation of factors but not not in the way like people think about it it wasn't because like Osama bin Laden was radicalizing people

or something or because the CIA created bin Laden or whatever kind of stupid stuff people say it very very much absolutely um had to do with critical judgment relating to the um you know uh relating to the nuclear paradigm you know and then neither the soviets to protect at all costs um key command of control infrastructure in asia um in order to survive uh uh a bull from the blue assault and preserve a survivable deterrent. And I think that's fascinating. I mean, not just because I, you know, I don't think it's just because I have a strong interest in the topic. I mean, this is, it goes to show you how during the Cold War, you know, warfare within very secondary theaters, every peripheral theaters had, you know, profound significance

in a way that, you know, before a sense, like just wouldn't like it's not emergent within you know um ordinary uh security paradigms let me ask you about let me get get a subject in here um or yeah it's probably too much right now to talk about maybe um for a subsequent episode are you going to talk anything at all about um what the carter white house had to do with um possibly you know there's that famous uh the famous line of we're going to give them we're going to give Russia

their Vietnam by pushing them into the Afghanistan conflict that arrived somewhat later like as Carter was going out movie Charlie Wilson's war I think it's kind of lame and it makes Wilson himself look like this great

it makes them look like this big like playboy and this like great guy as well as like this kind of strategic genius to realize that, you know, there was a soft vulnerability, as it were, in Afghanistan. When it became clear of the Afghans, we're going to fight. And the seizure of the Grand Mosque by extremists in Saudi Arabia, including a lot of guys who ended up joining bin Laden himself, that the Iranian Revolution, ironically,

because, I mean, you know, the first true Islamic Republic, revolutionary Islamic Republic was like a Shia Republic that very much inspired Salafi, Mujahideen types. These things kind of coalesced, and, you know, guys from far and wide sort of streaming into Afghanistan to fight the communists. And I don't think people really saw that coming.

When that became clear, it was around like carter was on his way out Reagan was on his way in and the Reagan doctrine you know for the minute Reagan took the oath of office it was clear that you know the team B Cottery had won out

and the Reagan doctrine was like we're going to fight Ivan pretty much reveries insinuated and we're going to give the people under arms we're fighting the Reds anything they need what Carter did what I'm going to get to momentarily Carter deserves a lot of credit Carter totally changed

the command of control structure and brought it back within constitutional parameters as well as just putting an end to the kind of garbage that had made America vulnerable in strategic nuclear terms. You know, Carter said that, like, you know,

this centering debate around, you know, mutually assured destruction, which never was doing anything more than a talking point anyway, that's over with. You know, we're going to, I'll, I mean, I'll get into that now. Like, it was, the issue was this, okay, by the time Carter took office, Carter realized very quickly a few things were afoot.

First of all, strategic air command had just decided by that point that in the event of a general nuclear war, the president, and all civilian decision makers are just going to be dead within minutes. So why bother, you know, really, like, advising the president about nuclear war decision-making anyway? Because strategic air command from the looking glass, AWACs aircraft, were just going to, like, fight the war, you know, from that command post and oh well it sucks the president's dead but that's just the way it is

Carter said that's not acceptable okay first of all the president of the United States is the president of United States um you know he's the sole national representative of the people of the American people secondly article two uh confers upon the president you know uh the power commander in chief it doesn't confer that upon strategic air command or like general Curtis LeMay or General Thomas Powers or General whoever. Okay. That's patally unconstitutional.

Finally, what the hell are we doing, just saying like, you know, we're just going to like throw our hands up and accept that like the government is going to die immediately in event of war. Like, it's not how you prepare to fight and win a war. So what Carter did was

and these measures weren't perfected and implemented until about 85, 86, but a list of designated national command authorities what's called national command authorities there are people from the president on down you know all the way down

like 40 people total you know if like one man and they're almost always men is dead the next one will take up a command and control authority this is pre-cell phone and pre-GPS so all these people they were issued ID cards

that, you know, where they were given a cipher that upon being contacted, you know, by SAC, NORAD, an event of war, you know, they'd be able to reply to a challenge with, like, the correct, you know, like, the cipher code or whatever.

But the National Command authorities are the people who would direct nuclear war like an event that the president and his cabinet are dead. And, like, on down the long. line, okay. Designated safe houses, some were on military bases, some were purposed structures that were designed and built for this purpose, that they could be shuttled due to survive the initial assault. They were to report in to a SAC NORAD every day as to what they were, you know, as did their goings, coming some goings. When they left town,

you know they had to report like every six hours or something i mean this this is a revolutionary system okay um carter also that was president's director of 58 pd 59 carter said that you know he reiterated that america will never you know will never utilize a nuclear first strike in order to resolve um a national security exigency however if America finds itself in a nuclear war and this is in the language of PD 59 America will fight to win a nuclear

war and it will develop and maintain forces in being to fight and win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact and they represented a that represents this was the end of Daytona

okay this is America saying that you know if God forbid we go to war with Warsaw Pact you know and there's escalation to general nuclear war like America's going to treat nuclear war like it does any other conflict modality America is going to fight to winning nuclear war that's also one of the reasons why continuity of government is important if there's nobody to negotiate

the end of the war that's not that's not reasonable you know so the idea is you know civilian control as intended and demanded by the Constitution is going to be guaranteed through these continuity of government measures

we're going to spare no expense in maintaining a survivable deterrent and our strategic doctrine is going to be an event of war we're going to fight and we're going to fight to win a nuclear war National Command authorities are

are going to seek to end hostilities as quickly as possible, if that is possible. But there's no one of this hoarshit of, you know, like, we will not fight a nuclear war and these weapons can never be used. It's like, you know, you threaten those nuclear weapons, you know, you're in a wage total nuclear war against you.

In kind and drop off who is becoming more powerful pretty much every day in the final months of the president of regime the way he interpreted that and you could say this is the most punitive possible way but

just in realist terms if your enemy suddenly and kind of jarringly adopts a different strategic posture that tends to be a war indicator I mean not like not of imminent attack or something something, but that's pretty much exactly what the German Reich did, what the Kaiser Reich did, what, I mean, that I'm not saying, oh, like, the Germans are bad.

I'm saying that in the Russian experience, when their primary adversary does this, it means that something is afoot, you know, and that something usually is that, you know, the executive of the adversarial power is preparing the population to mobilize for war, or at least he's doing what he has to do in order to concentrate war fighting authority in his office, so that he has that option in order to use as, you know, as leverage against the Russians. And there is some truth to that. I'm not going to lie. And that's not good or bad.

I mean, that's just statecraft. But arguably, this caused an escalation and tensions. But, again, I mean, the Soviet Union had just gone into Afghanistan. You know, I mean, it's not And, you know, one of the problems with these treaties, however well-intentioned they were, like salt and salt two, which was the cabas was put on that by the invasion of Afghanistan, by the way. And then later to the start treaties, I mean, even if you, I think on principle, on principle I have a problem with that kind of, with those kinds of agreements. because bargaining away

your preparedness and ability to survive is not legitimate I realize that Cold War was in usual conditions but I mean even

even if you think that those that sort of thing is the most well-intentioned you know mechanism for preserving the peace

you can't somehow like stop technology you know and I mean the issue with deeper parodies is that yeah a lot of this stuff

that made nuclear weapons more accurate, more deadly, more powerful was because guys at Los Alamos or, you know, guys that in Kazakhstan and USSR, you know, we're like developing, you know, weapons purpose tech to do that. But other stuff, like commanding control tech, a lot of that stuff just, it emerges. It's emergent, you know, due to all kinds of endeavors, you know, some profit-driven, some not, some military purpose, some not.

I mean, you can't just say, like, we're not going to, we're not going to know things that we come to know because we've got to like keep weapons from becoming even more dangerous you know so that and that's really that's really what sdi was about and i think we're coming up on about an hour um we'll get into that stuff next time as well as um evil archer and grenada and all that fun stuff and like i said before i can't remember if we were recording already or not but a lot of the fellows they want us to talk about stuff especially like uh especially a lot of like the English guys and French dudes because you know a lot of Europeans like fought in Angola

and stuff and it's just like a cool conflict we should do a dedicated episode about stuff like the Dominican Republic about you know like Latin America and the contra war and about like Angola but I don't do that like a dedicated episode if that's cool I mean it's your show I don't want to tell you like

this is what you should do that sounds good yeah yeah thanks Ben I really enjoyed this yeah um blogs yeah for the time being good find me on Twitter. I don't know how long that'll last.

At Rio underscore Thomas 777. I relaunched a telegram channel. Just look for Thomas 777 or 3-7 Mafia. You will find it. I'm going to be more active on. I'm going to be active on there on the regular starting this

weekend. I've got too much shit going on right this minute, but join the channel. I'm going to try and get it popping again. You're finding a substack. That's what podcast is real thomas seven seven seven seven dot subsection i am launching my youtube channel i know there's been like many many delays things are coming together i got an incredible editor i've got a lot of people helping me because i frankly i don't know about video production at

all i i promise it's coming imminently hopefully by next week but it's coming so that's and that's thomas tv um on it's on youtube but for thomas tv the first t is a seven you will find that's all I got all right until the next time appreciate it Thomas thank you thank you I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana show I've been waiting for this one part 12 the Cold War series what's happening Thomas hi how are you thanks as always for hosting me it's a great pleasure and a great honor and a

privilege legit thank you very much oh no problem I'm glad you're feeling better and yeah let's get down to it yes sir i want to talk about um the strategic paradigm in reagan's first term because that's essential to understand really the final phase of the cold war and the reason why it a resolution was truly forced you know we'll get into gorwich off um like next episode when i get back from this weekend trip we'll we'll deal kind of more with the soviet side you know, just conceptually, but also just in terms of, you know, the factual record, because I realize we haven't dedicated a lot of attention to that yet.

But, you know, the degree to which human decision makers were becoming less and less significant within the strategic arms race, and, I mean, we're fighting in general. if you're talking about the zenith of of nuclear war technology as it was in you know 1981

that can't be overstated and this idea that you know just cooler heads could prevail you know to invoke Curtis LeMay's kind of aphorism that's not really possible

when you're talking about you know certain certain technological variables, as well as an organization at scale of hundreds of millions of people, quite literally. You know, it's not, you can't, even if you're a chief executive or a general who's got a great deal of authority, you know, intrinsic, not just to his mandate, but, you know, in terms of, you know, key decision makers subservient to him, being willing to execute his orders

basically without a citation. It's just not possible, okay? It's, that's not the way, that's not the way, that's not the way human systems work. And that calls for certain remedies when we're talking about something like nuclear war planning, you know, where quite literally decisions need to be rendered in minutes.

You know, but even where that, not, you know, a necessary kind of remedial measure, you know, to apply and aim to research and perfect an ongoing way. It was understood that, you know, the way man related to technology was becoming kind of the key question, not just in terms of fighting future wars, but, you know, in terms of production modalities, in terms of how, you know, people at scale perceive in information and you know develop a develop political sensibilities which totally changed with the advent of television you know and the ability to broadcast you know over and across thousands and thousands of miles you know and quite literally turn the world into one place in terms of you know the the concepts being you know asserted um and early on kind of the early as

a game theorist I mean he was a game theorist among many other things but kind of the first public intellectual who really sort of articulated this in like a very kind of concrete form was a guy named

Norbert Norbert Weiner okay he published a book called cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine that sounds very strange and what's kind of science fiction-like but I Winer was a constantly serious person

he wasn't some crank and he coined the term cybernetics and within Winer's vernacular cybernetics were literally referred to self-regulating mechanisms of all kinds he cited the earliest

examples of you know servo mechanisms, you know, be them hydraulic, electric, or mechanical, that were error-sensitive and their feedback, you know, even like something like a Roman aqueduct, you know, in a primitive way, not primitive in terms of its construction, but primitive in terms of, you know, the applied technology utilized, you know, was an example of, you know, error-sensitive machine learning. Okay. Now, when you add humans into the equation, I need a human-operative. operator at at least you know in a at least to initiate machine processes you've got to take care um you know to structure how that relationship um ensues and and how it's sustained

throughout the duration of processes okay um you there's got to be mutual intelligibility you know between what the human mind is telling the machine to do um and the human mind has to be not only comfortable, like literally physically carnival with the machine that it's operating, but it's also got to be sensitive to, you know, the feedback emergent from the machine. Okay. One of the reasons why, and Winer was sensitive to this, there was such a revolt of the laboring cast, when there truly was a laboring cast, you know, working on an assembly line of any kind, whether it was a slaughterhouse, or whether it was, you know, a, um,

or whether it was a textile mill, in the early 20th century, it was incredibly unpleasant. It was difficult, it was physically painful. There was not a good coupling that had been achieved between the human operator and the machine. You know, the human felt overwhelmed by the machine or the machine was forcing a pace of work

that the human couldn't keep up with without significant pain or something. at all you know these machines often were dangerous and even when functioning as intended you know they they harm people you know and that's not that that's going to do a couple of things i mean it's going to do more than a couple of things but first and foremost it's going to create certain inefficiencies and choke points um and it's also going to hurt people which itself is not good i mean i think we're going to agree on that but also it's going to really going to sour the human operator's view of the machine you know and um even if only subconsciously even

even a very duty bound or conscientious person or a true believer you know particularly somebody in a military role who you know topics that role they're in you know if if if this machine causes them pain or difficulty or frightens them or you know they they're always worried that they're going to be somehow harmed or mean by it that that's going to compromise their ability to interface and function as intended um so what whiner did was he said look you know these machines need to be accessible you know the ability to initiate and program them in a rudimentary way as intended you know at the critical moment required you know it's got it's got to be you're talking about like you're talking about being user friendly okay i mean nobody used those terms then but

that's that's what he was talking about and he also said that you know one of the ways Not just to kind of guarantee, you know, an appropriate coupling that's both safe and efficient to the human operator, but that also, you know, is going to, you know, create a kind of punctuated advance and our ability to develop, you know, machines that truly learn, you know, through error-sensitive feedback is, you know, it's like we've got to start structuring machines like we would have a human nervous system. Okay, not literally and say like, you know, okay, this is the way the brain is structured, you know, I've got to make my, I've got to tweak my babbage device to look more like that brain, obviously. But, you know, it couldn't be something totally alien. And, you know, to what, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, like the human brain is just an incredibly complicated, highly evolved, like, you know, like feedback mechanism. The purposes we're talking about, okay? I mean, it's a lot more than that. But, you know, so making machine thinking or machine learning at that, you know, as it was understood.

at that time as human-like as possible in rudimentary terms. Okay, that that wasn't just a way of, you know, kind of guaranteeing, you know, maximum efficiency, you know, in terms of the, the interface of the human or like the animal in Winer's terminology with the machine. But it also, you said this is the path that kind of, you know, greater development in terms of, you know, in terms of our design engineering. Okay. And I think I think it goes out saying he was right about that.

If you, if you kind of like the brass text or what guys like Steve Jobs were talking about, you know, and I'm not a computer guy or a tech guy at all. But I've read a lot about jobs because for better or worse, he was a very significant person. And when he talks about design optics and aesthetics, you can tell he's doing it like the way like a guy who's not an engineer, but is more an engineer than he is like some artist or like, you know, kind of eccentric like architect. I know I tried to convey the image of the latter, but he was the former. And I guarantee that he said, I guarantee that as a young man, he definitely read cybernetics, and if he didn't, you know, like the stuff he was reading was so insinuated

with that kind of ethos, like everybody would describe it, that he very much took that on as his own. Okay, and also just, I mean, a wider didn't just make these things up. I mean, there's an intrinsic, there's like an intrinsic existential reality to, these things he was positive, you know, it's just, that's the way machines work, that's the way humans think and feel, that's the way they interface in very basic terms. And cybernetics and the postulates therein, that was really the earliest, that was really the earliest discussion of, you know, automated navigation, analog computing, in the way that we understand it,

or understood it, you know, in the later 20th century. And, you know, which was the, you know, the forbearer of IT as we know it. This is the first time people talked about AI in an applied capacity. It led to neuroscientific modeling. And most importantly, Viner Reiner was always, was always emphasizing the importance of communication. And communication regime and also like physical structure, like a cross-distance that was integrated. that was reliable and most importantly that was survivable okay and it's almost importantly not not just the general proposition but in the case of nuclear war i mean that's everything you know um

so these are things that understand we're talking about nuclear war we're talking about the cold war paradigm and especially in the uh in the final uh in the final um in the final phase of uh of the cold war um the cold war conflict paradigm okay it um these things uh can't be overstated and it like the desires of of human decision makers you know particularly those you know in public roles it really was not up to them like the course of of uh of events um in terms of crisis uh resolution or you know um the deterioration of of uh of remedial strategies you know in the general war but the um the uh it's very clear too you know both it's even people who uh even people who write pretty good histories of the late cold war um like the guy what's his

Yeah, Mark Ambinder. Sorry, I was having a senior moment. Ambinder, he de-emphasizes the degree to which, kind of like the trajectory of American policy, very much had a nuclear vector. And what I mean by that is that, you know, a U.S. global policy, and not just in hard power terms, but just in general terms, it really orbited around, you know, America's nuclear capability. its ability to wield that it's a credible threat you know the response of the eastern block and the Soviet Union as well as China I mean despite the fact that China by that point had been courted quite successfully as a strategic ally this was this was the variable or set of variables that um everything revolved around between the superpowers okay so I mean there's that

too um even uh it just the existence into these capabilities and uh you know the continuing emergence and new technologies to to perfect the effectiveness of these things um that it dictated the course of policy between the superpowers it doesn't matter what anybody's rhetoric was it doesn't matter what anybody's intentions were or how much they may very well have been committed to peace you know i don't i don't doubt that um you know some of the things bresnev said before he lost his marbles and you know about the soviet union must avoid you know a general nuclear war at all cost i'm sure that he meant that i'm sure reagan like corny and kind of made for sound by television

and some of the things he said in the matter may have been i think he earnestly believed those things but moving on um the way the soviet union responded to this emergent strategic landscape was a very interesting um in 1981 the soviets launched the biggest peacetime dedicated peacetime intelligence operation in its entire history which says a lot because the soviet union for the duration of its existence really was mobilized for war in a way that um even um you know even america uh in the 1980s, which was very much, you know, on a war footing would view as extreme. And Dropoff, who in 1981 was still a year away from, you know, a senator of the role of general secretary.

As I've said before, I believe he himself, Grameko and Usenov, were very much kind of that's trifect of the concept of shadow government. But he was the eminence behind the KGB really for the duration of his, of his life. Okay. And on strategic matters, all in sundry, I can tell you that in 1981, you know, Endropo was the key decision maker, and it was in his immediate orbit. What, um, what, with this, this intelligence operation was called Project Rion, or Ryan, literally RYAM. it's an acronym um that uh for a russian language phrase which translates to nuclear missile attack or

nuclear missile assault or something in that order i'm not going to try to pronounce it and butcher it and embarrass myself but the entire purpose of rayon rion was this um and drop of uh address key members of the poet borough um as well as uh the general staff and he said look um you know we're losing the cold war on key fronts um you know political and technological um that very much nullify or are the advantages we do have and um one of those fronts was um in in computing i think there was there was less than a thousand computers in uh the soviet union in 1981. I mean, you give you an idea, you know, which is bizarre. What do you think about it, that the Soviet Union, they'd logged far more man hours in spaceflight than the United

States had. And, you know, they were cringing out these chess masters who, you know, were schooled in a formal, the kind of formal logic that they had in America, like, really built, you know, like the, you know, the kind of like early, like, analog computing industry. But that's, that, that warrants it's a dedicated episode like how um uh the uh the uh like how computing in the soviet union really was it really was sabotaged um or like interscene rivalries within the design bureaus you know and um you you can't create a high-tech economy you know based on a central plan i mean i mean you can't you can't base the traditional manufacturing economy on on a central plan but um particularly you're talking about high tech and IT i mean it's you're

you know there's just no there's just no chance that it's going to produce what's required um you know in order to meet the meet meet the needs of uh of um you know of nuclear war uh command of control planning but with what they did have um what uh what what what project rion to do was to anticipate a bolt from the blue nuclear strike by using the computing technology they did have alongside human analysts to monitor indicators to identify monitor codable indicators you know from the United States and NATO and determine when these indicators could be relied upon you know to to um that that that that that an imminent nuclear assault was you know was a foot um such that uh with the technologies of the day apparently with submarine launched ballistic missile

platforms you know as well as intermediate range missiles which you know if deployed in theater um by nato would uh reach their targets you know within five or ten minutes you know we're we're talking about it's not you know early warning is not enough i mean no matter how sensitive it is no matter of impossible to spoof it is you know like before um before there's any before there's any commanding control indicator in america in 1981 you know that strategic air command you know is is going to scramble its heavy bombers you know that um that the uh the minute man missiles are about to emerge from their silos like you've got to be able to identify the variables before there's any actual you know um command and control indicator um which

I mean, it says a dawning proposition I mean, it doesn't, is almost comically inadequate, but it also, I mean, it creates a very dangerous circumstance. If you've got to be able to identify imminent assault indicators, you know, based upon,

you know, based upon apparently benign events and human behaviors at scale that could very, very easily be misread. I mean, this goes beyond fog of work kind of stuff but it also

it raises a difficult question you know it's like okay let's say let's say that there could let's say um let's say attack indicators you know codable attack indicators

um could in fact be reliably identified um and that there was a machine that uh you know could pretty reliably evaluate these things and could

I'm stillifying this for the sake of counterfactual, you know, spit out a probability ratio of what the likelihood is that, you know, these indicators mean, you know, an attack is imminent. If there's a 10% probability, you know, if you preempt it with your own attack, if it's anything over 50%, if it's 1%, like you see what I mean? Like, where you're entering into a kind of paradigm where increasing, like the winner um is going to be the one who just preempts in absolute terms and when he's confident that you know he can at least survive a retaliatory strike um just perverse incentives

to attack even when not in a remnant threat if you follow me well is the this wasn't anything new at the time i mean elsberg talks talks in his books about how you know the The department he was in in the late 50s and early 60s, they were wargaming this. They had already come up with the concept of the nuclear sponge by that point. I'll tell you what's changed. Parity. It wasn't until 1975 that there was true nuclear parity between NATO and Warsaw Pact.

That's why these guys, like LeMay, and even Thomas Powers, who gets kind of, Thomas Powers was actually the model for Jack Dipper and Strange Love, It wasn't LeMay, but LeMay was kind of similarly lampooned and lambasted. Their whole notion was that if, you know, eventually, you know, a general nuclear war is imminent with the Soviet Union, we've got to go to war now. If you wait 10 years, there's going to be nuclear parity. We can't win that. You know, now, yeah, we'll take 50 million dead, but we'll survive.

They won't. plus there was um one of the reasons why the salt talks kind of became obsolescent it wasn't just that you know this soviet invasion of afghanistan meant that the state department and as well as congress no longer had any interest in you know pursuing a follow-up kind of regime until much later we'll talk about that later but like deeper parodies um you know uh multiple warheads you know being slammed onto existing, pre-existing platforms, you know, creating like these

massive throw weights, you know, and create, like, reduced circular error probable. You know, the perfection of penetration aids and decoys. You know, the ability to spoof enemy early warning. And the emergence of AI. You know, like the

movie War Games is actually a great film, and it's a smart film. I mean, some stuff in it's corny because it's Hollywood and it's you know a movie that was aimed at like teenagers but some of it's actually very smart and uh the opening uh like the opening sequence where um you know they're running this command post exercise you know and one of the missileers won't turn his key that was part of the issue but then in the movie um like the civilian advisor i think it's supposed to be thomas schelling he says like look like why we can't we can't wait until you know it's clear Ivan's going to assault.

You know, we got to know he's going to assault even before he does. You know, which he was, there was like Gallo's humor, but it's also not entirely inaccurate. I mean, that's what was changing things. Plus the, you know, like I said, the, in nuclear war, if you're underdising, being able to identify that an attack is underway, characterize the nature of that attack, then determine a response based on surviving forces or probable, surviving forces and then giving the order to retaliate um in 1960 you probably had about an hour to do that okay in 1981 you had 10 minutes to do that you know um arguably you had five minutes like by the time the soviet union fell apart its basic its basic assault strategy um was going to be

um it always parked uh uh uh to uh two typhoon-class submarines within striking range of the eastern United States, okay? The idea was that they were going to launch a volley of

a submarine launch ballistic missiles at the press trajectory that would airburst over the entire east coast and, you know, create an EMP blackout, then follow up with a massive volley

and basically like annihilate the eastern United States. And, you know, if they could do that fast enough and assuming their systems went off without, you know, a glitch or whatever, they had a reasonable probability of winning a nuclear war. If it was truly like a bolt from the blue attack, you know, stuff like this wasn't possible in Ellsberg's day. He was foreseeing that it would be at some point, even if he couldn't foresee the exact platforms. But by 1981, there was parity as regards forces in being.

and arguably the Soviet Union had the edge you know like I said this in terms of data that since the wall came down it's been verified it's not just it wasn't just like missile gap nonsense you know the kind that people were banning the 1960 election the you know create just kind of to insinuate this idea that you know

there was a gap in American in an American defense capabilities, you know, that's what changed. And that's what changed. And plus the, you know, the, I mean, that's the problem with anything that I was designed to preserve the, that was designed to preserve stability. You know, whether you're talking about, like, you know, the strategic arms limitation talks, you know, whether you're talking about these arms reduction agreements you know you can't you can't just freeze technology in situ you know it's like and even if you even if you limit the number of platforms those platforms become more efficient but become more effective you know uh the killing technology will become

more and more catastrophically util you know things like this um and uh plus to the uh orbital space you know becoming the key kind of emergent battle theater was changing things too because you know you launch um like the outer space treaty you know technically banned orbital bombardment platforms that didn't mean anything and also the space shuttle obviously was a what was a was an orbital bombardment delivery mechanism i mean it was it was it was other things too but you know that that's that was first and foremost its role it wasn't It's real wasn't to take, you know, civilian school teachers into space to do experiments on goldfish in zero gravity or something. But these are the things that were kind of destabilizing what had been, I mean, the paradigm was never truly stable. That's why people say, but it was becoming unmanageable, like, owing to these variables. This really reached a zenith. in uh 1983 you know there was the there's the able archer command post exercise in november 7th and um that was really that was really the way to look at that too i mean for those

that don't know there's this biannual exercise called reforger uh which was short military short end for return of forces to germany um it was this uh It was this mass military exercise wherein the forces in being in Germany. There was about 300,000 U.S. troops that are backed up by a contingent of about 200,000 other NATO elements, contributions by other naval elements. I mean, but the Reforger exercise was an event of a general war in Europe with Warsaw Pact. How rapidly can we reinforce that? those forces in being deployed to Europe, you know, before they're totally overrun by Warsaw Pact.

Okay. So, I mean, it was actually important. It wasn't just a make work, fake work thing. I mean, it actually, on the logistic side and the command and control side, this actually was important operationally. And it also demonstrated political will to the Warsaw Pact, and that was important. what abel arch 83 was was um a concomitant with reforger it was a command post nuclear war simulation and um it included even civilian uh chief executives you know like margaret thatcher like went to her um uh you know went went to like the designated you know uh um fallout shelter you know uh the uh with cull with similarly like disappear from sight i mean when you consider project rion when you consider um you know the kinds of deep parodies that were causing real alarm on on

on both sides of the cold war um this seems incredibly risky you know because what you're doing is this command post exercise and you know the the russians have been attacked many times under the auspices of, you know, of peaceful military exercises by their enemies. So there's that. But then also, pretty much every indicator of an imminent bolt from the blue nuclear assault was emergent in the Abel Archer exercise. Okay?

Now, on the one hand, yeah, if you're going to plan a nuclear war to win it, you've got to run those kinds of exercises, okay? and they've got to be as real as possible. And also, if you want true data on how fast, you know, the Warsaw Pact, you know, then in existence at that moment, you know, how fast they would respond, you know, to being spoofed, you know, that's how you corral your data about, you know, what the response time, how fast it's going to be and what steps it's going to entail in a real war situation. so yeah i mean there's there's there's a deep internal logic to that but it also there's a very good chance that you know your enemy will perceive this as you know indicators of an actual attack and you could find yourself in a general nuclear war very very easily um that uh it's both instructive as to um you know not how tense things were uh between you know you know

actors, but also it shows you the degree to which, you know, like we were talking about a minute ago, the degree to which, you know, conditions of absolute peace, you know, could become conditions of general nuclear

war, I mean, rapidly. You know, there wasn't this kind of like, you know, scaled escalation over, you know, over days or weeks, or even hours, you know. The second aspect of this was Reagan is you know kind of

prompted by people like Casper Weinberger by people like Casper Weinberger and a lot of the team B types um Reagan had I Reagan um he green lit the deployment of the person to

intermediate range ballistic missile platform to Europe to the Bundes Republic to Italy to the Netherlands some of the UK I believe but I don't think they ever arrived this would have

this would have given NATO a profound edge in theater nuclear weapons and so deployed they could reach Moscow within minutes okay this really terrified

Soviet war planners and for good reason And there's a nuance here, too, that I can't remember we raise it for or not, but ironically, owing to a, you know, politics, NATO was very forward-deployed, like literally the way it was deployed in West Germany, in the Netherlands, and, you know, all throughout the continent, it was not deployed at all in depth, and specifically in Germany, looking at a map of NATO deployment. deployments, U.S. Benelux, British forces were in offensive deployment. Okay, like they can't be denied. So if you're a ring, now, some of that had to do with, you know, there's a way kind of placating, you know, people like the Greens who literally didn't want, you know, like, NATO forces to be seen, you know, and it was a way of kind of mitigating

the kind of basic hostility over the fact that Germany quite literally was occupied. There was all kinds of kinds of things. But it was also, you know, the understanding was. was if Warsaw, if in one Warsaw Pact moves, you know, like what difference does it make? We can deploy in depth all we want. They're going to break through, you know. But from the Soviet side, it's like, okay, we've got NATO and kind of permanent offensive deployment. Now they're deploying, now they're deploying these Pershing two platforms, which are not only not super hard and they're totally vulnerable.

I mean, there's not such things as a truly defensive nuclear weapon, but the only way you can use a perishing system platform is if you're on the attack. you know like it's because it's it's not a survivable uh platform you know so the soviors weren't being crazy or weren't crying wolf or something and even um even um robert gates admitted this kind of later in his memoirs um you know the he said you know and um anybody who understands these things and understands what the other cases these indicators were uh you know anybody looking at this on the Warsaw Pax side would have said, you know, these, these people are basically preparing a wage in nuclear blitzkrieg, you know, and, and there was some truth to that, frankly. Kind of the genius of Reagan, if you want to give him props for something, and I'm not any kind of huge, like, Reagan fan in history. but uh what uh what uh what um what ragan's uh state department did was they said well

you know we'll remove uh we'll remove the pershing twos from europe you know if all uh if all theater-based nuclear weapons you know native orsau pact if we agree to like move all of them you know but that's that's the price essentially of um of um of of dismantling the system. And, I mean, too, in defense of Reagan admin, the impetus for the deployment of these platforms, it was because they're a hell of a good way if you're going to wage no longer a nuclear war to do it.

But also, the Soviet Union, they'd massed SS19s. Those are one of those, those one of those, physically huge missile systems you know that were based on trucks it's got brilliant in its simplicity those mobile launch vehicles the so we should move them around every day

like literally so it's like the one like the one from the movie like the one from the movie spies like us yeah exactly um exactly yeah that's so I saw that movie I saw that in the theater with my mom and his little kid that's hilarious but it's actually an awesome movie but yeah the

but um the soviet idea was uh they were threatening europe with annihilation with uh with these deployments and they were doing it to basically decouple uh europe's uh national security policy and the respective natal states from that of america basically saying like look like you know if uh if you avail yourself to to NATO and the United States is nuclear deterrent

you know you're we consider you to be a fair target and we're going to continue to target Western Europe as long as that indoors I mean it was and you know deployment of the person too was a way of rooking that that ambition

so it's more complicated than just Reagan being you know some kind of cool. It's not got a hawkish, uh, it's not got a reckless hawk. Um, and it's, it's not just a matter of, uh, you know, Pentagon types and, in defense intelligence types saying, well, let's spoof, let's spoof Ivan, you know, to the brain and see what he does. I mean, there was an aspect of that, too, but it is, um, it is, uh, it is slightly more complicated. Um, I'm more than slightly, but it, um, I got to pause when it to read my water. I'm really dried out. Is that okay? Um, um, um, um, um, Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, thank you, Pete. And, yeah, the, I mean, on the one hand, I obviously, and I mean, this isn't really material for disgusting. I mean, obviously, my sympathies in history are what, you know, Yankees were. And I realize this is very much a way of holding Europe hostage quite literally to the Cold War.

But at the same time, I mean, it, within the bound of rationality of that, Europe was afforded, Europe was ultimately made more secure because, again, Reagan's ultimatum was, you know, a nuclear-free Europe. And that was accomplished, you know, ultimately. I mean, it wasn't until well into Reagan's second term. and after, you know, the kind of concord of what it comes with Gorichoff. But all these things were a process in, you know, like I said, next episode we'll get into the view from the Soviet side, quite literally, but there had to, the crisis cycle is becoming more and more critical.

And if you look at it in, you know, the Korean War, the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, really that very well could have led to a general nuclear. war or a um in fifty three uh not ninety two ninety three nineteen sixty two in cuba nineteen seventy three you know um in uh the mid east war nineteen eighty three with uh you know able archer forger and the emergent um you know uh deep parodies that you know gave rise and dropoffs um

project rean like this would becoming unsustainable and more more dangerous basically every decade you know like i had the cold war endured into the you know another 20 years there probably would have been a nuclear war by the late 1990s like i firmly believe that you know um and gorbachev uh gets kind of a bad rap um i mean he was residing over a structural crisis that i think is basically unprecedented in the modern era okay the soviet empire constituted like a one of six the planet okay like uh and every the world was literally divided um such that you know half the world was essentially you know the soviet system was insinuated into it through kind of i mean i mean

interdependence and when you're talking about you know merges let it's planed economy is different than you know globalism we know it but you know about half the planet was reliant in some way even if which just you know occasional grain deliveries you know or uh or strictly you know military hardware to wage you know some some ongoing um you know some ongoing um uh localized conflict you know about about half the about half the planet was reliant on the soviet union just says you know the the competing blogs were lying on the united states and europe i mean this was i i i in the preceding 500 years you there's nothing comparable to that except uh you know the except that the fall of the western roman empire

um and even that wasn't like as punctuated i mean the soviet union fell apart like in months you know i mean in that the fact that there wasn't there was violence people have forgotten that now but i mean you know they're you know they're um and you got to look at uh you know you got to look at stuff uh you know not just you know in like chichita dachistan but also like you know the balkan war is as as direct i mean remote as they were in relative terms from the soviet union i mean you got to look at those things as approximately caused, you know, by the the punctuated shock of Soviet collapsed.

But point being that it, uh, this was getting, the conflict dyad was getting, it was getting, it was going impossible to control. And Gorbachev realized that the Soviet needed a way out of the Cold War. Okay. And

and drop off, because in drop off was the consummate realist, uh, and drop off realized, you know, what has to contemplate is the way out of the Cold War to, you know, wage a preemptive nuclear war against the United States.

And, I mean, I mean, America was thinking that too, you know, and vice versa, you know, is this the way out of the Cold War? But, I mean, to say that to say that this was dangerous brinksmanship, it doesn't even scratch the service. It's much ridiculous these days. And people like,

you know, this is the world Ukraine. This is like, this is the most dangerous time ever in world history. it's like the fuck is the mayor with you i mean it's it's literally insane that people think that way you know like the like the single issue basically in every presidential election for 40 years was you know do we have a survival nuclear deterrent um you know and as the man of the law is going to keep us alive you know because there's there's like a very real possibility that you know we might become the mega dead when world war three happens you know i mean that's

i guess people under like 45 or so like can't even conceptualize that but it's um i'm sure i sound like an antagonous old guy but be as it may this also this goes to show you um how um how uh how critical these these these wars in the periphery were um in the 1980s and something you know we'll get into this in the next episode um But, you know, the battle for Central America, you know, Nicaragua becoming a prox, literally a proxy regime of the DDR, the Soviet Union, you know, the proxy word Chile, you know, which led to, you know, Pinochet removing, you know, the Soviets client in Alende, you know, the war in El Salvador. or, I mean, the Soviets are trying to rectify the strategic imbalance by carving out a communist block compounded. That would have changed everything. You know, I mean, and it's the Soviet Union was doing some things right.

I mean, like I said before, I think from 1973 until about 1982, the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War in military terms. In political, sociological, technological terms, they were losing. and in pure military terms, they were racking up victory after victory after victory. You know, like in Africa, in Latin America, in East Asia, like, you know, this is not a good thing. I mean, however you, whoever you fell on, I'm talking about, you know, people who are saying,

I'm not talking about crazies like Peter Arnett and like the kind of crazy Karen is, you know, calling for nuclear disarmament. I'm talking about people are actually sensible. Whether you love Reagan or not or whether you or whether you were particularly on board

with the kind of cold or enterprise, you know, this was not, for the president of the Soviet Union kind of, you know, like we talked about in previous episodes, you know,

kind of becoming like the only true superpower is a third world is, you know, basically signed on with, you know, with Marxist Leninism. So America's this kind of like, this kind of like fortress

garrants. state, I missed a hostile world of tin pot dictators and kind of crazy shake of our types. Like, that would not have been a good thing, man. Can I ask you

something before we go? So I What is NATO today? I mean, what? I mean, it's not NATO. So what the hell is it? I mean, it's the alibi.

America invokes for unilateral aggression. But, I mean, there's something, even if that's your notion, like, NATO, those kinds of alliances are obsolete anyway. And it's like I said before, like, you know, so America's carrying out terrorist acts against its allies in Germany. Like, even before that, it's like Turkey is the only, probably the only, like, combat capable, like, other, like, NATO member. And like America's periodically

at war with them like by proxy. So it's like, is America obligated to attack itself because it's like, its ally Turkey has been attacked and like incident to the NATO charter. It's like an express condition. I mean, that's one thing that's like goofy. This was made in the 90s. Like Kissinger said that in the late 90s. I met Kizinger

in 1999. And to his credit, you know, he was one of the few voices who really was coming out against Clinton's war on Serbia. And the Kissinger made that point even back then. He's like, what, like, what, like, so, so, so, so, so like, so like, to provide a nuclear umbrella of defense against, like, you know, the great power of Slobodan Milosevic. Like, it doesn't, like, that's not, I, even if, even if you needed some kind of, like, in name only, you know, sort of, um, it's sort of, you know, force, structuring alliance, you know, to allow America kind of, like, deploy, to deploy whoever wanted, uh, Willie.

nilly, like, it doesn't make sense to, like, try to maintain the NATO fiction. Like, it just doesn't make sense on its face if you're going to try and do that. I mean, that's why the Schengen Cooperation Organization is actually a pretty forward-looking alliance in all kinds of ways.

You know, and it, it's got a military aspect. It's got an aspect of economic independence. You know, it accounts for the kind of the fluid nature of the current strategic landscape. Like, Russia didn't say, like, well, Warsaw Packs still exists. Yeah. You know, this is Worsesau Pact. you know like any you know any uh any any any uh if any foreign troops like set foot in

Kazakhstan we're going to wage nuclear war on you like I mean that doesn't you know it's like even like a principle of law too again aside from the kind of absurdity that in bad faith the consulate natal any contract and a treaty at the end of day is just a permissive contract it the express conditions of it have to be rational you know and there is not and it's like okay an attack on Hungary as for he doesn't attack on the United States like America is obligated to go to war with itself because it's attacking

Turkey which is its ally like it doesn't you know I mean it's something I'm being I'm being a jig off and deliberately obtuse and I kind of am but yeah it doesn't it doesn't make any sense and this but part of it too is just kind of the foolishness of the bureaucrat

like this idea that you know neighbors exist for its own sake because it's the point of it is just exist and like it's just it's just an awesome thing for reasons nobody can articulate you know uh it like it doesn't it's like well but they have reasoning it's like okay well does that mean that like the america should abide like the trust conditions like the yelta because like that's how america and the soviet union one world war two like uh i mean should should austria started invoking like countries you know uh entering into the hapsburg empire like

I don't, it doesn't make any sense. It's a clumsy way of preserving the fiction that this, this is, that this is some kind of like, you know, that there's some sort of like common defense architecture and not just, you know, unilateral aggression. That's, I mean, that's, that's, you know, the short answer. Well, yeah, and I know you got to get out, yeah, this is really good. I know you got to get out of town. so do some plugs and uh yeah do it yeah thank you pete um you can currently find me on berb app

uh twitter that is um at real underscore uh number seven h oms 777777 you can find me on substack uh at uh um real thomas 7777.7.com check out the chat on there because i'm active there i'm back on tgram uh just search out my name and you'll find the channel um it uh yeah what i'm going out of town um the next few days i get back on sunday and then monday i'm going to start shooting dedicated content for the channel a long last um so that's what i'm going to be working on um and that i will drop that imminently when I get back. But for the next two days, I'm not going to be like real active content wise. If you got to get a hold of me just like be patient until Sunday, please. That's all I got.

Appreciate it, Thomas. Thank you very much. Thank you, Pete, very much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show. What's going on, Thomas? How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm getting terrorized by Twitter again. I mean, after nothing, I just wanted to, like, put people on notice about that because when it happens, like, people seem to get upset. And, I mean, I appreciate that. I appreciate people that care enough about my content that they get upset if I think it's going away. But what happened, I realized what happened, periodically, I, uh, complaints are lobbied against my account, um, by the Office of the Protection of the Constitution in the Bundes Republic. I mean, you think they, I mean, realize that's like a make-work, you know, Orwellian bureaucracy.

But you think there are better things to do than harass a kind of creator in America. But they've done that before. Every time they do it, Twitter finds some arbitrary reason or no reason at all to suspend me or ban me. They claim that I'm banned for a week. I mean, I'm trying to disengage from Twitter as much as possible anyway, you know, but I know. a lot of people that's kind of still like where they try to find me and stuff but um if i'm not back on twitter in a week i mean just like hit us up on substack or on tgram and i launched uh the channel promos that people know that you know by april first i'll have uploaded the first episode you know and

I, I, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my guy, Rake, who, you know, he's just incredible with what he can do with, you know, video editing and things like that. And he and I are, are going to, are going to bear down on, on filming next week. So, I mean, don't, if we're, if, if we are, if we are, if we are, if we are, if we are, if we're, if we're, if we're, like, it doesn't matter. It's happened like nine times. so but that's that's that i just wanted to i just wanted to like get people put people and notice um about that but yeah well one of these days um what we should do is we should go over that

intro video and just have you detail like and where every i mean i saw some video drone in there and i saw a couple yeah i saw a couple other things just to like highlight and yeah he just asked me uh yeah i mean he's like a movie guy too he's like i mean he's one of us you know like not just in terms of politics but you know like he's like a culture guy and like an optics guy and he's into like style and stuff and movies and it's why the reason we became like good friends but he basically asked me like what kind of movies where he's like I know the kind of shit you're into but he's like giving you like have it us in your favorite movies it's like I did and uh like all those them are in there and there's like a bunch of other just like crazy stuff but it

it's yeah it's really incredible man I'm not I'm not just like I'm not just like stroking myself because you know it's like my content um i it's like really freaking cool but uh yeah you know i'm very very lucky to have him on board man and he'll he'll be in front of the camera sometimes too and like i i think people appreciate that because he's uh he's he's a really funny dude and uh you know um yeah you'll you'll you people get to meet him and and kind of see like what he's about but yeah i the response has been overwhelmingly positive and I really appreciate that and I believe it'll be worth the weight not because like I'm so great or anything but I think I've got a sense of what people want to see and hear about and I'm really really dedicating kind of like all my time and energy to you know providing that in a quality capacity so yeah I think it'll be very good man well yeah and all we have to do is make sure that um you know people all also subscribe to the Odyssey channel because I think we all know that the YouTube channel is probably not going to last.

Well, they're going to, yeah, I mean, it's, there's going to be like copyright strikes all fucking day, but also, I certainly figure out what I'm doing. I mean, they're going to cancel it. But I mean, that's fine. I'm basically going to saturate every platform I can. You know, everybody's like, you got to get on cozy. It's like, well, I don't, I don't know Nick Fuentes. I mean, I like, like it all.

I've never, I've never spoken to the dude even by like text or something. I'm not going to presume like he wants my shit on his freaking platform. I'll ask him you know, I mean, but I'm not going to I'm not going to just like assume like, oh, of course he wants my shit on his, on his platform. But even if we don't fuck with Cozy, you know, there's plenty of other

platforms we can utilize that are friendly or at least neutral. It'll be fine. And you can upload video direct or you can shoot directly on substack or um you you can upload directly um pretty much unless you're trying to upload like an entire freaking movie link thing i mean it's like i it all fails i mean i'd yeah i'd be like just you know uploading my stuff to odyssey and subs stack i mean we're going to say i trade a lot more than that but it'll be i realize i'm going to get gained from youtube the reason i dropped it there

is so that people can find us and know about it but yeah it'll be all right i streamed to youtube yesterday in the middle of the afternoon. And as soon as it ended, I immediately deleted the video because I just knew what some of the stuff, some of the stuff that we said in it was just like, it was, it's what I've gotten strikes for before.

I mean, I'm dumb. Does this one dude, I don't want to drop his names. I don't want I mean, he seems like an apolitical guy and I don't, I don't want, I don't want to like, people are terrorizing him. Like, he's like this, he's just kind of like crazy like

like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, cult movie guy like he gets strikes constantly over just like like total bullshit like literally like it seems like and he's constantly apologizing with subs he's got over like 20 000 subscribers because like it's just constantly getting yanked and it's it's um you know uh i mean for the most dubious of reasons like my point being i mean yeah there we're absolutely going to get terrorized like you are but that's that doesn't matter the whole point is um you know like i do have a youtube channel right now that people

kind of like YouTube, it's kind of like their first go-to for stuff, but it'll be fine, man. I mean, I built the substack, basically with no social media presence, because as soon as I launched it, I was like the first time got permanent from Twitter. I didn't get back on Twitter about nine months. You know, I didn't have an Instagram, man. Like, I got on Tgram, you know, after about six months, but it'll, I mean, it'll be fine. You know, people, people are loyal and they follow us. And we've got, we got a good, you know, community of people who know how to, you know,

kind of remain in contact. Yeah, I've started streaming when I do my streams to Odyssey and Rumble and immediately uploads a bit, shoot, you know, the dark side of the internet. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. So I don't even know. What do you want to talk about today? Today, last time we covered, you know, Able Archer.

And, you know, they're going to command and control concerns. relating to the deep parodies emergent post-de-tonant because that that's that's kind of the key that kind of nexus of events and causes that's kind of the key juncture of of of of um you know final cold war tensions that approach true crisis dimensions but there's a context to how and why that happened and I want to get into that today, like what happened to detente. We're going to go a little bit backwards, okay? And as we mentioned, Abel Archer happened in October 1983. There was immediate precursors to that that dramatically exacerbated tensions and really kind of created in, you know, in, it kind of generated a zeitgeist of not war fever. But what it seemed unthinkable in the few years before suddenly became very possible again. And there was very much an atmosphere of terror. I mean, you remember that actually a little older than me. I was a little kid, and my mom was singularly terrified in an earlier war. Okay, I mean, a lot of people were.

My mom was like, I don't want to drop some highly personal weird thing. My mom was kind of like apocalyptic in her thinking, quite literally. and this didn't help any and obviously my dad was re-insinuated into the Cold War so it was strange but everybody I mean it was like everybody in the country was like

that I mean to some degree or another you know and I can't emphasize that enough to younger people and he was a little kid obviously I couldn't it was a few more years before I could fully understand what this was about but you you fully even as a small boy

I fully grasp that you know this was monumentally terrifying um now honestly like if the if they if i'd been like a you know a a guy pushing 50 in 1983 i frankly like wouldn't really care i mean it's not that's that's not some fucking edge lord shit like legit i mean you just like learn like you just like learn you come to terms with things and you know the they're kind of frailty of life and things don't seem scary anymore but yeah as like a kid or like a young person like it was It was kind of awful. But in any event, let's dive into it.

What preceded Able Archer by several months was the destruction of Korean Airlines Flight 307. What was KAL Flight O.O.7? KAL Flight O.O.7, it was a Korean Airlines flight, obviously, from New York City, or, yeah, from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, which in those days, was the common flight pattern. South Korea was a key kind of Cold War proxy client state, but this was not the South Korea of the 2000s,

you know, the ninth largest economy in the world or something, you know, other than, other than in kind of political and military terms, the Republic of Korea was kind of a backwater. So on these flights to Korea, there tended to be a lot of, a lot of heavy personages from the national security establishment, the diplomatic corps, you know, these kinds of, these kinds of, these kinds of, you know, communities. And KAL level of seven was no exception. What befell KAL Flight O.7? Well, KAL-O-O-7 straight into Soviet airspace.

and about the same time we're talking like within you know a couple of hours of an American aerial reconnaissance mission during the late Cold War America was constantly spoofing Soviet early warning or buzzing it you know to see kind of what would cause it to light up

proverbially and to kind of gauge what their you know what their um what their protocol was you know the literally the order of operations, you know, when hostile aircraft breached their airspace, possibly incident to a nuclear attack. And unfortunately, for the passengers and crew of KLO7, a Boeing 747, even at visual range, looks almost identical to an AWACS aircraft. Okay.

In those days still, for certain, deployment of certain weapons platforms, you would advance deploy a, a, what's called a massant, M-M-A-S-I-N-T aircraft, in order to acquire targets, in order to discern, you know, what air defenses were present, as well as to interpret, detect and interpret. you know, any electronic signaling, which could then be, you know, deciphered or interpreted to paint a picture of what the state of enemy command and control was within the target area, you know, theater-wide. And this was also a particular concern, because as we discussed in the last episode, American nuclear war planning by 1982, 83, essentially involved forcing Warsaw Pact to fight a two-front nuclear war. If we can even think of nuclear combat as having fronts. Assaulting the Soviet Union hard in the Pacific, knocking out their command and control in Central Asia, and then saturating them with heavy bombers and,

and naval-based weapons platforms would potentially, you know, would potentially accomplish a splendid first strike in a bowl from the blue scenario. Or in a general war scenario, you know, that would be the way America would escalate anyway. So this had all the telltale signs of something potentially very, very dangerous. in the eyes of, you know, the Soviet Union and their people interpreting

breaches of their airspace. So the flight was intercepted by a Sukoy 15 interceptor. It was destroyed. All, everybody died, of course. this was a huge international incident okay um it was almost comparable to 9-11 um not in terms of the attrition and you know the the lives lost but it was incredibly shocking to people um on board the aircraft was uh larry macdonald the u.s congressman who also was the chairman of the john Birch Society and

one of the council he was Ron Paul's like mentor in Congress yep and confidant and he was the last true Southern he was the last true Dixie Crat McDonald was viewed as you know these like Mother Jones types who he was like the man they loved

to hate and uh these um these conservative caucus types he was kind of like their their night in shining armor and um you know knock out knock down dragout you know congressional battles but he was he was he was a democrat um he ran as a democrat for the you know for the entirety of his career and he was really the last true like right wing democrat but he you know again not only was he a bircher but he was you know chairman of the birch society and he'd only been nominated to that

position a few months before he died um he uh you know again he was one of the founders of the Western Goals Institute, which the British Conservative Monday Club was very much affiliated with them, as was the World Anti-Communist League. You know, people who know the history of these Cold War Pacts of the right, well, these will be familiar organizational names. But, you know, Jesse Helms initially was supposed to be on that flight. I mean, this was a big deal, okay? I mean, not just because, you know, you had these public, you had McDonald and you had some other personages who weren't elected officials, but, you know, we're very much insinuated into Belway policy corridors. But, you know, it was, there was something almost kind of like cinematic about it in all the worst ways. You know, here's this guy's like a lifelong anti-communist. You know, he's been saying his entire professional life, the Soviet Union is dangerous. It only understands force, this only currency it can, you know, employ in order to assert it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it this vision of um of uh you know of um of political ward around of the world and lo and behold how does he die you know he dies with you know um dozens of other people on this um on the

civilian airliner that read yeah i think the 269 people you know he dies with like you know hundreds of other people on this 747 you know that's unceremoniously blown out of the sky by you know soviet warbird um It really, really, really upset people. And the Soviets, in typical fashion, you know, went into kind of, you know, went into kind of garrison mode and started claiming that. First, they claimed that this didn't happen at all. You know, then they claimed that it was a deliberate provocation and the United States wanted this to happen, you know, so that, you know, they could, so that they could, you know, provoke a war. and that that kind of rhetoric itself

I mean that that was grossly irresponsible I mean it this is very very bad um the uh in the the United States in turn Reagan's people said that the Soviet Union was obstructing search and rescue

operations which they probably were you know I mean it got it got very very ugly um and uh this was uh this was um

a couple months prior um there had been uh reagan's uh evil evil empire speech um march 8th 1983 just uh almost exactly 40 years ago as of a couple days ago and i don't know if people it was not a long speech um and it hit really really hard i you can find it obviously on YouTube, or at least you used to be able to, I don't know, I would assume it's still there, but you know, um, in some, there was, there was some of the normal, you know, kind of state of the union type policy stuff, but the core of it was, um, you know, Reagan essentially stealing people for the possibility of nuclear war. And I, I know that, you know, for at the time, and then for decade subsequent it's being kind of a favorite of people on the left um mind you i'm not some great

reagan apologist as i think people know but it's because i got to say that this was in fact a great speech and it wasn't corny or misplaced and i mean people people always accusing regan of being this kind of moron with his head in the clouds who was always invoking stuff like star wars like you know it's really it's really kind of it was ted kennedy who coined the actual phrase star war as described SDI, which itself is moronic. But calling the Soviet Union the evil empire wasn't just a corny floating signifier. The actual relevant text is what Reagan said,

and I quote, let us pray for the salvation of all those who live in that totalitarian darkness. Pray they will cross over the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth they're the folks of evil in the modern world

so in your discussions of nuclear freeze proposals I urge you to beware the temptation of pride the temptation of blithely declaring itself above it all and label both sides equally at fault to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil

that sounds like a war speech okay um i'm not saying that that was misplaced i think that was entirely appropriate within the bound of rationality of the cold war um a very very strong statement had to be made and drop off took that to mean that Reagan is planning to sue for war and um i it's it's understandable in context why he would think that okay um and plus thing is just a good speech okay that's that's not foe it's not that kind of cringe soaring language that these uh these kind of these these these beltway types are are prone to invoke these days i mean it was it didn't it didn't seem a hokey at the time you know and um and um it it was uh it was there there was genuine strategic paradigm shift underway

that was profoundly destabilizing okay i mean i i i said frankly the Evil Empire speech is better than any speech Kennedy ever made, okay, just an objective terms. And again, I'm not any kind of, I'm not any kind of Reagan lover or something, but that can't be denied. It's kind of incredible to me that they'll be those like middling speeches by like Churchill were just kind of drunk and like mumbling about, you know, like, we will never surrender. You know, or like Martin Luther King with this kind of, just these kind of like nonsense

latitudes. You know, people hold this out as like, just this kind of incredible. example of of um of of of modern oratory it's like really man like the evil empire speech is kind of is this is his peak okay i mean um not just going to the not not just not just going to the you know profanity of the language but the context in which was delivered um at least i think so like I said, I'm sure people just claim that that's, you know, that's, you know, love for Reagan or something. But again, is it generally accepted that Anthony Dolan wrote it? I believe so.

I mean, that's Reagan was not, Reagan could shoot from the hip and speak very well. I mean, that's why he was, you know, dubbed the great communicator. But Reagan did not write a lot of his own, you know, long form speeches. I believe, I can't, somebody will correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that the 76 Republican Convention, that was Reagan's other really famous speech. I believe he wrote most of that. And that was remarkable because generally Reagan didn't. That's why, you know, the Bitburg speech, Buchanan wrote that.

And it wasn't just Nancy Reagan, he was that as an excuse to throw pattern to the bus. But Buchanan actually wrote that speech. Like it, and that was, you know, in Reagan, zero, it wasn't yet at the point where, you know, just, it was part of the course for, you know, presidents and candidates for the White House, you know, just to rely on, you know, people to write their, their copy for them. I mean, some people did, some people didn't, but yeah, Reagan generally didn't. I remember the, uh, the Bitburg controversy is like it was yesterday. yeah i mean that's we'll get into that on the next episode as we kind of approach peristrike gun stuff but that that was entirely appropriate and how anyone i mean first of all i i i got nothing but esteem for the vaf and ss obviously i mean those guys were heroes but um even if you

completely reject that take it was entirely appropriate the regan said he said these he said these men were victims of the war too and i don't i don't see how they could be construed as controversial And Helmut Cole essentially insisted that, you know, the word that, the German word that be acknowledged. Like, if anything, if people wanted to throw mud on somebody for purported, you know, fascist sympathies, like Cole would kind of be the guy to hang that on. But I think it was, among other things, it was an excuse to sort of excise you can from the Reagan, from Reagan's inner circle. Nancy really was in some ways

Like Priscilla was to Elvis You know And the way she just decided That she like hated some guy Or hated some guy's wife Who was part of the Memphis Mafia So he had to go Like Nancy did that too

Like I'm not There's a certain kind of woman who does that I'm not trying to trash females at all But I mean everybody knows that's true And Nancy Reagan was a very strange bird Like she really was In all kinds of ways I'm frankly surprised

It's I mean that's a whole other question It's strange that she was, I mean, she was Reagan's second wife, you know, once he picked her up well after he had kind of decided he wanted a political career of some sort. It's very strange, but that's my read on it. And, yeah, obviously, you know, like we talked about, it wasn't nearly as extreme because Reagan truly did have a pretty remarkable mandate for a post-war president. But there was there wasn't a kind of Reagan derangement syndrome. you remember that like yeah you know if it rains on sunday it's because of reagan like if if if your cornflakes don't taste good it's because of regan like everything that happened in the

world is like some work by regan like yeah it so that i mean that was part of it but um but yeah the um regardless like i said i mean even even people who you know we're and are cynical about the cold war even people who don't particularly even even people think ray was just some kind of like glorified pitch man i mean that that that was a great speech and, you know, I don't think it was gratuitous. But, again, it did, it did sound like a war speech. And Dropov and, you know, Ustinov, Gromyko, Chernenko, I mean, all these guys who constituted, you know, the inner-inter party.

I mean, they'd all lived through the war with the German Reich. I mean, to say they were sensitive to these indicators, it doesn't even begin to kind of scratch the surface of, you know, the kind of depth of their fears of these things. But that's what's important, too, to keep in mind is as to why this

this, you know, 1979 to 84 or 85 was so dangerous. You know, like what happened? You know, like what happened to, what happened to detente, what killed it? What, what constituted

detente in brass tax terms in terms, in terms policy of the East Block and you know the West slash NATO and what kind of treaty if not

law because I mean we we can never really talk about treaties as binding law it can never be anything but permissive but particularly during the Cold War it was kind of more like a statement of good faith than anything but it did you know it did have

it did have moral force, okay? Really what kind of constituted detente with rubber met the road. One of its big kind of aims, and for a limited time, we're going to get into

why this was problematic as it was constituted. One of its big ambitions was to kind of take off the possibility of war in Europe. Take that off the table. As we talked about, there was basically two issues, and strategic terms.

You know, there was obviously America and the Soviet Union could come to real blows in any number of theaters, although the primary diet was Europe. But the Soviet Union vis-a-vis Europe, I mean, that was an open-ended question. I mean, where did Europe stand? There's several constituent elements in NATO, like, where

did they stand individually? And so far as they did have, you know, a cognizable, you know, discrete policy independent of the NATO, structure, you know, what was their relationship to the Soviet Union in pure geostrategic terms? I mean, this had tremendous significance politically, not just for, you know, global stability or the potential of a crisis diads, but also it was understood by everybody.

I mean, even a conventional war in Europe with, you know, modern combined arms, it would have been utterly devastating you know i mean that there would have been the end of europe quite literally you know you would not have survived you know or um if it did it would it would have been some sort of you know um it would not have been it would not have been europe as we know it anymore okay um this kind of brought um quite literally every european state exempting Albania, which is always which was under the

rule of Inver Hawksa, you know, and they had all their little bunkers. Everybody knows like with the Hawksa Bunkers. Well, like Albania was protesting like any anything relating to a detente treaty making because they claimed that they

supported the people's probably like in China because they were the true like Marxist-Leninist vanguard. But other than that, every member state in NATO and the Warsaw Pact plus Norway plus you know plus

Spain which I don't think was in NATO yet because it was 73 they signed on for what came to be called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe which was going to mean in in 1973 to 1975 it was held in Helsinki Finland, the final phase of it, which came to be called the Helsinki Accords, or the Helsinki Declaration, between July 30th and August 1st, 975.

Now, this followed two years of negotiations of this kind of tortured process, wherein, again, 35 participating states plus the United States and Canada. did I disconnect for a minute no you're good okay I'm sorry I'm like for some reason the freaking um uh you're by my my video kicked out okay the Helsinki declaration it constituted 35 uh participating states you know all the all the member states in NATO in Warsaw Pact you know plus uh plus Sweden or plus Norway plus Spain um the United States plus Canada um what it what this declaration came to constitute was it was supposed to be basically you know a kind of a kind of quasi bill of rights that was understood to be you know kind of like

represent the fundamental rights of man de jure on both sides of the iron curtain you know it was a sovereign equality respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty of all you know constituent states of natal morsel up act refraining from the threat of use of force to advanced policy initiatives, other than defensively, which I realize that's kind of meaningless in existential terms, but it has political currency in these kinds of situations. You know, a recognition of the territorial integrity of states as existed then, you know, with the, you know, the post-war boundaries that have been drawn, the peaceful settlement and disputes, not intervention in hostile terms in, you know, the affairs of the constituent

States, by their NATO or Warsaw Pact, and a basic, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. And this was a big one, including freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Okay. Now, Brezhnev made a very big deal about this, okay? And this was before he was, you know, really compromised in terms of his mental faculties. And so did Eric Hanuker, okay, because Hanuker especially, because he used, Jeremy, he always been struggling for legitimacy. You know, they weren't even recognized as a state until the 70s by, you know, a majority of this planet. But the Warsaw Pact, or the Iron Curtain, the state is fine the Iron Curtain, the Soviet sphere of influence. They were always going to, they were always clawing for respectability, which, you know, in the Cold War context was essential because this really was a battle of zeitgeist and which system.

and which superpower would become the world system. You know, this wasn't just cosmetic or something, and it wasn't just, you know, it wasn't just these kind of career statesmen, you know, wanting a feather in their cap, you know, so they could, like, look at, you know, at their proverbial trophy case and, like, admire their own, you know, great career or whatever.

It's had, like, actual impact. That's important to keep in mind. But would really, kind of open the door to this, what really made this possible, what really made detot possible was the situation between the two germany's and specifically the sent to see of Vili Brandt. Who is Vili Brandt?

Ville Brand was this crazy kind of 68 or socialist and he was middle-aged by that epoch. You know, he was of the war generation. But he'd been the governor, he's been the governing mayor of West Berlin. And Berlin to this day remains like, you know, an independent polity, all the several German states or prefectures are.

But during the Cold War, it had special status. Or, like, you know, when the inter-German borders and tags, it had special status. You know, because it was a quasi-protectorate of, you know, the, of America, France, and the U.K., it was situated completely within, you know, the territory of the DDR. So the mayor of Westboro, the governing mayor of West Berlin, he had unusual. clout, okay? Brandt was the chairman of the Social Democratic Party from 64 to 87, and most significantly, and to understand his kind of contribution to history, as it were, accidental or not, or, you know, literally like accidental or not, like, you know,

what he kind of, what he kind of fumbled into. He was the Chancellor of the Bundes Republic from 96-9 to 75. He was this big, you know, he was this big liberal reformer. He really compromised the Bundes Fehr's combat capability, which was a big deal because the Bundesphere was the spearpoint of NATO. In the first decades after the day of defeat, they really were like a crack military force, and they had to be because their opt-for was, you know, the National Volks Army. This should all be very clear.

you know um there was a slew of other you know kind of um brand brant's apologists and supporters where i's pointing the fact that you know the um the number of germans meet the poverty line you know like fell from you know 2.9 percent to like you know something totally marginal but entrepreneurial activity also dropped down to zero you know i mean it was a typical kind of it was it was the typical kind of like socialist stagnation writ large you know but but hey you know know, and to cope for those that defense such things are, we got this great education system and now nobody's poor anymore. I mean, everybody, this is a very common, this was a common occurrence,

you know, when social Democrats or Greens later on, you know, gained majoritarian status in any of these, you know, in any of these West European states. But more importantly, Brad's big thing was Ostpolitik. He wanted a true, like, reconciliation with East Germany, okay? and towards that end, 17, he reestablished diplomatic relations with Romania. He entered into a trade agreement with Czechoslovakia.

You know, he restored formal relations with Yugoslavia. This was set back in August 68 when, you know, with the Kremlin's invasion in Czechoslovakia. But, you know,

he condemned, Brant formally condemned the invasion. But, you know, he, He basically renegotiated the ruling coalition, you know, with the free Democrats and, you know, who moved back to continued reproachment with the worst up act. And that was that was kind of his way of finessing, you know, what could have been a career running crisis into a way of staying alive. But it, this reached just kind of Zena in 69 when he agreed to meet, he agreed to meet with Willie Stoff, who was. East German premier

who was, you know, in this kind of Byzantine DDR system, technically the head of state contra, you know, the head of government, you know, who was, you know, the general secretary of the SCD,

which by then was Hanuker. But he agreed to meet with Hanuker, too. And so he basically, in one fell stroke, he basically, you know, gave the DDR, the legitimacy that it had been attempting to capture really from inception. And this, understandably, this really outraged, you know, not just people who had family

behind the wall, but also, you know, people who had real concerns about the fact that the Soviet Union was out packed, a genuine momentum then. in military terms um and frankly in political terms in the third world like we talked about you know like it appeared that brant was was uh was selling europe out uh to the shalomis in a real way um owing either to malice or naivete it didn't matter um and this in my opinion was kind of a zenith of uh a worse off act power politically because would it always been the way worth of wins is a demilitarized Germany. You know, I mean, this was the subject of the

Stalin note, as we got into many moons ago. This is what the Soviets always wanted, okay? And it looked like they were going to get it, albeit in some gradual capacity. What what brought this down is fascinating.

Willie Brands or Billy Brandt's top aide, you know his uh and um and the and um the and um the social democrat party like secretary was a guy named gunter giam okay and uh giam was uh connected at the hip to uh to billy brant and he was this kind of he was this kind of he was this kind of shifty looking guy frankly you know always were dark glasses he was always dressed impeccably but you know he truly was ubiquitous like when brant went on vacation you know, Guillaume, like, went with Brandt and his family, too.

Like, they were that close. And it was believed that basically, you know, Brandt was a womanizer. You know, he liked pussy too much. He was that drunk. Like Brandy-Villy was his, you know, kind of nickname, you know, friends and foes alike, called him that. He relied on Guillaume, you know, to kind of, like, hold it together. Okay.

Well, and nice. 1974 at April 24th, Guillaume gets arrested because Guillaume was a stasi officer and he had been for his whole life. He was quite literally deployed to the Bundes Republic to get close to anybody he could and he got close to Billy Brandt and he quite literally made Brandt a chancellor. I mean, I think about that. Like, think about what a coup that is. And

Guillaume was able to steal the eyes only above top secret NATO nuclear war plan from the Chancellor's safe and he was able to deliver it to East Berlin and from that point forward

it was never clear like what the Stasi knew and like how long they had known you know and this was this owed to Marcus Wolfe who was um you know kind of the he was kind of the genius of the ministry for state security

he was the he was the he was the chief of the foreign intelligence directorate or the main director for reconnaissance and Guillaume was his like the mole

that became Guillaume this was his this was his operation you know from inception to conclusion and Wolf made the point that Guillaume's arrest and exposure, this is really kind of what killed the ambition of Warsaw Pact and everything they'd accomplished. Because after that, the Bundes Republic became basically a police state.

You know, like they, a couple years subsequent, the Bader Meinhof faction, you know, the Red Army faction, you know, in 1977, that was the German army. as it was called, you know, they, they kidnapped and murdered a number of, you know, of highly, of highly situated personages, you know, industrialists, conservative politicians, people of this nature, you know, the, uh, it, uh, this is really what facilitated the assentancy of a man like Helmut Cole, the chancellorship. And this is when Westchester, this is when the Bundes Republic, like, rejoined the Cold War in earnest, you know, and then all bets were off. And it all. And it also, Also, there was something just profoundly sinister about this. I'm not saying that in like a corny way, but, you know, the intelligence game, for whatever reason, the Russian, the Soviets, and now the Russians are very, very good at it. They were always way, way better at it than NATO, for whatever reason. And this was a testament to that. You know, about 10 years after the Guillaume affair, Hans Tej, you know, who was the chief

of the counterintelligence directorate of West German intelligence. He just literally defected to East Germany. Okay, I mean, there's nothing, there weren't any people going the other way of that standard. I mean, yeah, there's people, there's people

like, you know, Suvorov, you know, not the Suverov, but, you know, the guy who's pen name was Victor Suvorov. You know, there's mid-level Soviet officers. There's even a couple of generals, but nothing like this. you know um and that's that there's entire value is written on why that was but the point is

it this kind of killed anybody's idea you know even kind of the most stalwart you know kind of soge them like east block apologists i mean they realize that like the communist truly were just aiming to subvert the buddhist republic um render it defenseless you know penetrated by any enemies necessary um you know and and and um and thereby you know remove europe from the american defense umbrella for all time okay um i don't want to get into an argument about what the implications of that are like world historical terms and people know my opinion but that's not important we're talking with the bounded rationality of the cold war and in its epoch how how people viewed these things vis-a-vis d'etat and um the helsinki cores and everything else so you look at that situation

and then you know like we talked about last episode um the assault in afghanistan you know the uh the emergence of deep parodies you know and um and uh and the soviets attempt to um to remedy that you know by by deploying uh even more uh weapons platforms, the massive throwaway in the European theater. You know, and Reagan's we've returning to serve was the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons

to you know, to the Buddhist Republic, to Italy, to the Netherlands, and other key theaters. And that's that's basically how I mean, you can see kind of like a perfect storm of causality

leading to the leading to the status of tensions by 1983. I don't think that there's I don't think that there's a comparable sort of crisis cycle in the Cold War. I mean, there was, like I said,

There was 1973, you know, where the Soviets actually, they deployed nuclear weapons, you know, to the Middle Eastern Theater in anticipation of a general assault in support of their Egyptian ally. 1962, obviously, you know, the world, the United States and the Soviet were very close to nuclear war. But that was well before, that was well before nuclear parity. had been achieved so it yeah okay i mean i realized it sounds like it being flippant but if america took 20 million dead it it still would have won i mean there would have been no more soviet union you know um that's got different implications you know and it's not it's not so much that you know 1982 to 84 it's not so much that you know it was this punctuated moment like 73 when uh um america reached defcon 3 or like 62 when the question was you know are the story is just

going to you know just going to run the blockade it was just kind of ongoing it was it was just kind of it was just kind of like never ending state of elevated tension or it seemed that at any moment, you know, a general crisis could deteriorate into nuclear war before anybody even knew it was happening, owing a large part, too, the state of, you know, weapons development then and command and control technology, which is essentially neutralized early warning. That's what's important to consider, I believe, because I do get asked by people, like, well, why was this so dangerous there wasn't some you know moment like in the human missile crisis so there wasn't some ultimatum issued you know like when the soviets declared that you know if the israelis annihilated um you know the egyptian army

and then um and then marchion in cairo that you know the soviets would intervene and then if if met you know by comparable american forces that you know they'd resort to nuclear weapons in order to prevent their own people from you know being surrounded and destroyed similarly but that's um that's kind of what i got for today because i don't want to the gorbitross ascendancy and kind of what ended this um strategic paradigm is significant and the role of matthias rust the roust you know the uh the kid who flew his uh who flew his prop plane into red square that's a fascinating story and it's got huge significance for you know, the kind of internal, like, for prominent intrigues that, you know, led to a,

you know, led to a real policy shift, by the fact that it costs many, many Stalinist hardliners and key roles their jobs. But I, that, I think we should say that for next episode, because, again, I want to deal with, you know, the end of, the end drop of Cherenko era and the ascendancy of Gorbachev next episode. So I think that's all I get today. Well, let me ask you this. The shooting down of 007, there had to have been close calls before. There had to have been planes that flew into airspace. Why was it that one?

Not to put on a tinfoil hat and everything. And like you said, that flight would always have someone on it of significance. But why do you think it was just at that time? It was just that was the perfect storm time? that was the perfect storm time it's not clear why because you know even in those days there was um

you could recover audio from um from um from from wrecks like the black box I guess the Soviets tried to hail this plane and like I said a 747 apparently I'm not like an aviation guy like I like warbirds I think they're cool

but I don't know anything about like the you know particulars of it apparently at 747, like I said, looks basically just like an AWACs of the era, like even at visual range. So the Soviets are like, you know, why, why, we're not just being spoofed. This is, you know, this isn't, this is an early, they're trying to detect our early warning and how much it's lit up. um they tried to hail the pilot on you know whatever the you know international emergency frequency is and it was dead silence um this sucoy got on his tail and made clear that like it was you know

at attack range you know um and it still didn't deviate from its course you know um the pilot who took it down um obviously you know he was forced to lie by the kremlin and stuff you know sometime in the 2000s you know he he he testified um to this british filmmaker about everything that happened and uh he's like yeah you know he's like when i got the order to the fire i didn't hesitate and he's like i didn't think it was he's like i didn't think we were gonna he's like i didn't think it was you know a precursor to an attack but he's like i it didn't make sense what it was doing he's like I thought something wasn't right here um what some of these FAA types some these like investigator types and guys who know aviation claim or like what they think I mean

we take for granted that it's a hell of a lot easier I mean in in aviation and anywhere else these days to identify your your true position in those days um it wasn't um The consensus is that these Korean pilots were wildly off course. They had no idea they were in Soviet airspace at all. So like when a Suhugan got on their tail, Ivan does, their idea was the notion of probably Ivan does crazy things all the time. You know, it wouldn't even have occurred to them, like, we're going to get blown out of the sky.

Plus, yeah, the fact it was a perfect storm of concrete tensions. you know owing to the global situation but it's weird and it's weird that mcdonald was just having to be on that plane you know and it's like and then too like a lot of bircher types and stuff and not and other just like right wing guys not even like bircher cranks were like obviously the soviets are just doing this because they can and they hated mcdonald anyways they just killed him and i mean honestly i can see why people want to thought that because it's weird you know and um I mean, the Cold War was weird, you know, and it's, uh, and plus the, they, the Soviets did grimy shit. I mean, they, you know, in the same epoch, you know, they, it's clear now, like, they, they, they retain some freaking, you know, this turt to try and murder the Pope.

Like, you know, they, uh, the, these popular front of liberation of Palestine guys were going berserk, you know, they were the guys who blew up the disco tech in West Berlin. Like, those were, those guys were like in the, in the employees of the Stasi. And Operation Control, like, KGB was over the Stasi. It's like they, you know, obviously it's a different thing that, you know, to blow a civilian airline around the sky with, with a warbird. But it, you know, the Soviet Union was behaving, it was behaving very much like a lawless actor, you know. Well, I mean, but that wasn't top down, right? I mean, with the premiere of noon that they were going to do.

Yeah, I mean, this is just what happens. No, it was what I said it was. Yeah, but I got understood. My point was I could see why people who weren't crazy You could think that this was This was just the Soviets being brutes I mean that But yeah

I mean it was it was there was there was not like a deeper There's not deeper lore there But yeah McDonald was a and I mean it's sad McDonald died I mean I don't I'm not a fan of the birth society But there's some good guys in there like that is now And McDonald was probably He was only the last congressman

It was actually worth shit He was a good dude You know I mean it I missed the days when there was like Democrats who weren't just, like, not, like, shitbags and perverts, but they actually were, like, due to represented their constituents,

and McDonald's a guy who did that, and arguably, I mean, he died for him. He wouldn't have been on that stupid plane going to South Korea, like, if he, you know, wasn't acting as official capacity. I mean, you know, and in the Cold War, I mean, politicians now, they're, like, total deviance and losers, because, like, no man has got anything going on in his life,

like, goes into politics. But in the Cold War, it was different. you had you had like real guys and you had people who had something to offer um who went into who went into public life you know like mcdonald you know i mean it's and it's it's a tragedy you know and as we're you know those other 269 people on board you know and there was like i said it was it was mostly official types and business people but you know there were still there was a couple dozen women and kids i mean the thing was fucking awful but uh yeah yeah well plugs and

we're out of here yeah like again too I'm being terrorized by Burbap so like please don't pay it any mind I guess like in a week I'll be back on there but I'm trying to phase it out

as we kind of transition to the channel but I mean in the intro I mean you can find me a Tgram you can find me on Substack Real Thomas 7777.com my YouTube channel

is Thomas TV the trailer or the promo was up for the channel the intro rather I'm in the process of recording the first episode as I hope people gleaned

from the intro that my dear friend and bro Rake created for us I want this to be very high quality I'm not just like throwing shit out there you know so it takes time to produce it I'm piecemeal

getting the equipment I need to do this in a more expeditious capacity, but, like, please bear with me. I promise by April 1st, we will have, like, actual episodes, but that's, that's my, that's my, that's my jive as of today. All right, man. I appreciate it. Until the next step. Yeah, thank you, Pete.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnano show, Thomas. How are you doing? I'm all right. Thanks for hosting me. Yeah, man. So, um, last time we. We talked about Yaqui and talked about Spangler, and it's time to get back to the Cold War series, episode 14. What do you got for us today?

Yeah, we left off with Abel Archer and the Andropov era. I mean, to me, the Andropa era was properly from, you know, about 1964 until he died. I mean, I, you know, like I said, I think he was like the kind of eminence behind the facade of Soviet power that, you know, when Brezhnev was at the helm. That's not to say Brezhnev was some kind of cipher. When Brezhnev became elderly, he was no longer, you know, I mean, he was no longer mentally competent the last few years of his life. But Brezhnev was a serious personage. You know, I mean, there's a reason why he replaced Crucef, you know, like he was writing the ship. He was writing the ship after the, you know, the kind of disaster that was

Crucif in power political terms. You know, and Brezhnev was, in a lot of, of ways he was kind of a true Stalinist, you know, I mean, but the true, I mean, a state it's at the scale of the Soviet Union, you know, even accounting for the fact that, you know, the Russian, the Russian political era, it sends a contrary power in one man, even in times of peace, like in a way that seems peculiar in the West. I'm not even saying that punitively. I mean, it's just like an objective account of things. But, you know, the Soviet Union that it's zenith, it just was not the scale and complexity. I mean, I particularly wouldn't consider, you know, the way that Marxist-Lenin estates were organized,

where they're, you know, we're central planning, you know, truly was the order of the day, you know, not, I mean, that that's what policy was. That's, that's what the production schema was. it wasn't you know something that they aimed to realize i mean that that's how they they truly had you know an economy that you know had abolished the price mechanism and was um managed by you know thousands upon thousands upon millions of inputs um so i mean no what i'm getting at is that no no matter how much of a brilliant uh you know personage brezhnav would have might might or might not have been like no no single man could manage that so i made the point that kind of the the trifecta of soviet power um was really end

drop off uh grameko um and ustinov demetri ustinov the field marshal um and uh you know particularly i may as a war in peace and drop off was kind of the final authority and you know the decision to go to war in afghanistan was very much in drop off decision and i think we got into that and um the uh the decline uh of that trifecta um i mean most frankly i mean and drop off died and then usunov died shortly after i mean that's that's really what allowed glassnosed and peristrike uh like as policy to become develop and involved the way it did However, you know, Gorbachev was And drop off's protege

And that's the reason why he truly Was in drop off successor You know, this idea that Gorbachev's like this kind of crazy liberal Or that he was like this kind of Yeltsin, like Bafoon Who was just kind of like drunk On the prospect of You know, of kind of like slash and burn capitalism That's not true at all.

We'll get into the next episode Which will probably be kind of like close to the end of our series That's so, like, why, you know, why the Soviet Union went down in flames the way it did. But it wasn't because Gorbachev wanted to just, like, burn the structure down or, like, pull the plug. But when a drop-off died, his immediate successor was Constantine Chernenko, you know, who was kind of like this dottering fool in the eyes of the world. I mean, by that point, he was totally senile. But the reason why that this kind of placeholder was insinuated into the, the general secretariat was because there was a real battle within the Kremlin

as to which way the Soviet Union was going to go. Not even, it wasn't, nobody foresaw in the early 80s that, you know, the East Block was just going to come apart. Like nobody, you know, like we talked about before, there's people like Kennan and people like Yaqui himself, you know, who didn't the Soviet Union as it existed, you know, in the 1950s and during the into the 21st century, but even they didn't see the whole system just like dissolving you know um like the way it did so the people were suspicious of gorbachev it wasn't because they thought like you know he's gonna he's gonna sell the party down river or something it was

because you know you had you had these discrete personages who you know to whom kind of like the up-and-coming um uh commissars like had had like individual loyalty to you know and um gorbachev despite the fact that he'd been in drop-offs guy i mean it uh that that carried a lot lot of clout but it wasn't it wasn't enough um you know to just to just hand him the reins in like an absolute capacity without you know any kind of um without any without without without anything being finessed beforehand and like you know promises being made and you know and got a certain uh ceremonies being stood upon as a word but chernenko was not in his youth he actually the guy was kind of like a pure commissar i mean he obviously he served you know he served in the

Red Army, you know, during the, you know, the Russian Soviets and the Russians today called the Great Patriotic War. He spent his entire career in propaganda and as an ideological cadre. You know, like I said, the guy was like a pure commissar. You know, it's just like what he did, you know, and he was very much an intermediary, like, with a defense establishment, even though he didn't, like, spend a career in uniform, like, and they trusted him and they liked him. You know, so this guy, you can see with the Soviet Union, the fact that they took, you

know, William Odom, who we'll talk about a little bit later in this episode, you know, an American general, and probably the preeminent authority on nuclear warfare. And I'd say Thomas Schelling on the civilian side would be entitled to that moniker, but as far as a general officer goes, it was Odom. And William Odom, he was kind of the one, you know, he was kind of the one like, combat experience general officer who was saying in the wake of able Archer that like look the Soviet Union is serious

like they're not they're not pretending to be on high alert like they actually are and they actually are in a war footing and like the more you the more you spoof them you know the more paranoid you make them and the more likely it is that you know a real war is going to develop

before we even realize what's underway but um um odom uh you know um he he was right uh and uh the soviet union being that it was very much on a war footing and kind of the entire vector of policy had like a strategic nuclear axis um sharonenko if you're going to go to war chernanko is a guy who you kind of want in the general secretary Yeah, by that point he was dottering and senile, but the fact is the guy had tremendous esteem from the military, from the uniformed cadres to the design bureaus, you know, to the men who wore suits every day to work, but who were like the kind of military industrial complex as representatives in the public bureau. Like Cherneko was like a guy like none of them would have like disagreed on. And on the party side, you know, the guy had been basically chief ideologists like when he was young and had his brain.

so it didn't matter that churning him himself was totally out of it because obviously like his protegees or people who very much were you know viewed as carrying out like his will and legacy and if it was going to come down to like a general war with NATO um he's kind of a man you'd want there you would not want to hand the reins to Gorbachev even if you thought he was a great prodigy because uh you know I mean he was in his 50s he wasn't like young in absolute terms but he was like a spratz, like in the Soviet system. Like he was literally like the youngest man, like in the Politburo. But beyond that, much as he'd shadowed And Drapa's final year, when he was, you know, bedridden, basically, Gorbachev would literally stand in for him.

That's different than being the actual decision maker, particularly general secretary and a system like the Soviet Union. So considering the international situation, it wasn't just internal politics and egos and kind of literally Byzantine. um you know intrigues that led to chernanko getting installed um as general secretary there there's like an internal logic to it like weird as the soviet system was and kind of strange to us as the russian system is but um as as gorbachev succeeded um chernanenko who died in office just like Andropov did and just like Brezhnev did. You know, and that hurt the Soviet Union in terms of their optics in a basic way.

In 82, like Brezhnev, you know, dies. Like a year and 10 months later, like And Dropov dies. And then literally 13 months later, like, Cheranggo dies. It's like, so you've got this, you know, the world's, one of the worlds, you know, one of the world's only two superpowers, you know, the mighty Soviet Union. It's like they've got these dottering old men like one after the other, who just literally keep dying it's not a good look you know and um especially contra

Reagan who uh I mean these days Reagan wouldn't seem like really elderly but in those days people talk a lot of shit like you know Reagan's just this old man even though it was only about 70 which was old I mean in 1980 but Reagan the guy had like an absurd amount of energy you know like almost Trump tried to capture some of that and Trump is a high energy guy particularly for a guy who's like pushing 80 but um with Reagan it like was not a at all like an affectation so you've got like Reagan who's you know Reagan's why he's got a smile on his face why he's got perfect hair you know the guy's like sharp as a fucking tack and you know he's got a sense of humor to rival like he's got he's got a dry humor to rival Johnny Carson you got like him

and then you got like literally doddering shaking Brezhnev who's like you know dropping dead week later you know you have replacement it's like even worse and like you know he's you know he's dead within um you know within less than two years like it it indicated like a real a real structural problem. But that's why there's why there's so much uncertainty around Gorbachev because like I said he was

he was the youngest man in the Politburo. His main rival was a guy named Grigori Romanov who was very much who was very much a hawk on on strategic matters. He

he uh he staunchly opposed any kind of compromise or intermediate nuclear forces in europe as we talked about last episode that that's what prompted the pershing two deployment was uh you know that was the primary like theater um based nuclear weapons platform for the u.s army and um deployed in uh the bundus republic or in italy or uh in the benelux countries um That's at the cavitation range of Moscow. And the impetus for that was a Soviet deployment of SS19s and SS20s. Obviously, the intention of the Soviets would to decouple European strategic policy from Americas. If you threaten Europe in nuclear annihilation and tell them, like, look, in a general war,

we're going to target you simultaneously, the United States and as long as they're in NATO like there's no way out of this that changed things and I believe that's one of the things that really put the Green Party on the map okay like environmental stuff or like social justice stuff as we think of it today

that was incidental like the reason people fly to the Green Party is because Germans are genuinely terrified of of Germany being the designated like nuclear battle theater of World War III and like I don't follow them for that okay I'm not anything nice to say with the Green Party but it's easy to be able to say now like

Oh, those guys are all just like faggots. It's like, okay, man. But like I, you know, some guy in the Buddhist Republic in 1980, like, he wasn't just being a faggot if he's like, you know, I don't like it. I don't want to be the designated, like, I don't want to be the designated, like, I don't know my house being like a designated, you know, like nuclear battlefield between Ivan and America. Like, you know, it's not, we can't really conceptualize what that was like. And I mean, it's also, you know, West Germany was like a rough state. People have no idea.

People have no idea what it was like there. I mean, my parents lived there for three years. I was born there. You know, my dad had to go through Checkpoint Charlie. Yeah. I mean, it was, he said it, the closest definition to dystopian that there ever was. Well, yeah, it's like William Odom, speaking to him as well as some of these line officers. And like, even my dad was never like deployed there.

But I mean, he was in the Bundes Republic and he was at the inter German border many times, you know, like in that era. And he's like, it was like, it was like, it was like a real war. It's like this, it wasn't like so, he's like the, he's like the, he's like the, he's like the national the Volks Army and these like Soviet grunts they were like loafing around playing cars like these guys were like treating it like they were at war and I mean so is like the Bundeswehr and so was like the U.S. Army but it's

there's not like a joke or something where it's you know like it um I think people imagine almost like that old cartoon where there's like where there's a there's like the fox and he's like trying to like get the chickens and there's like the sheep dog and they like they had clock it he's like hey Carl like they say him you know and then they kind of

like pretend to go through the motions I mean, I'm sure there, I'm, I'm, I'm sure there are, like, like, hostile borders like that, but, like, inter-German border, like, it was not the case. I mean, like, you know, I mean, yeah, but it, um, so, you know, but be as it may, like, Reagan's, um, Reagan's, uh, like, Reagan's big kind of first, like, foreign policy coup in, like, diplomatic terms was, was getting to the Soviets at the table of, on the INF treaty. and the way he did it was he said, like, look, like, you know, we'll take the Pershings out and we'll take any comparable and, like, successor systems, like, off the table. Like, well, basically is, like, we can either have a nuclear-free Europe, or, like, we're going to be shoving these theater-based weapons up your ass at decapitation range, like, in perpetuity.

And the school of conventional diplomacy, like, that's not the right way to do things, because it's, like, very, very vitery. But when you're talking about, when you're talking about strategic nuclear conditions of parity, when you're talking about kind of the strange, if you're talking about the stakes like the Soviets had in this, that actually was like a brilliant move. And Reagan deserves like mad credit for that. But there was a lot of resistance within the Soviet military establishment, especially from people like Usenov to this happening.

So obviously Gorbachev did, you know, like, secede Cheranenko and Romanov, one of his first, one of his first, one of Gorbachev's first acts, the general secretary was like sideline Romano. He didn't, he didn't like punish the guy, but he basically, like, retired him, like, you know, with, with, in Gentile kind of powerlessness, okay? So, but what Gorichov still had was, and then, and then, and then Usenov died almost immediately after, okay? Usenov died, I believe, at the very start of 1985. It was late 84 or 85. But within the military itself, like Gorosov had a tremendous amount of opposition. And they had clout. I mean, in America, like, the military during the Cold War had a huge clout, but it was like nothing compared to the Soviet Union. Like, the defense establishment, even now in the Russian Federation, they, and I'm not saying this like punitively or like the way that like neocons say it,

like it's some bad thing. It's just a reality. Like the trajectory. And I mean, Russia also was like existential threats that they face as a crime. country that most states don't but like the trajectory the course of policy is set um by the defense industry in a way that it's not uh in a way that it's not um you know in a state like like in like america or like the uk even during the cold war but what changed that what kind of allowed gorbachev to essentially purge any kind of hostile general officers is really fascinating

and the immediate catalyst of that was the flight of a kid like literally a kid named Mattias Rust or Roost. He was a German kid and he took a Cessna he didn't have many flight hours. He only had about 50 or 60 like hours of flight time.

He rented a Cessna F172P which is like you know like a Cessna like prop plane okay like it and what he did was was he ripped out a bunch of the interior, like including all, but like the pilot seat, and he replaced him with auxiliary fuel tanks.

And what he did was, he tested out kind of his chops on long flights. He flew to the Faroe Islands. He went to Iceland. From Iceland, he flew to Bergen. And ultimately, he did this because his idea was to fly to the Soviet Union, which seems totally insane, and it was.

But what he, what is no... He claimed he did it as like an emissary of peace and to build like a proverbial bridge between the Bundes Republic and Moscow, which is actually pretty profound. I'll get to that. And kind of how this was actually videotaped by a British tourist who was on the ground in Moscow. That's why like everybody saw it. There was a little kid. I remember this was like a very like awesome event. You know, it was like it was wild.

But Matthias Roost, he leaves from Helsinki, Finland. And he breached the Soviet airspace with the intention. with the intention to reach Moscow. Now, how did he do this? Okay. We're talking about kind of a splendidly kind of like reverse situation of what happened with KAL-O-7,

okay, which was, you know, shot down as it was misidentified. Roof was flying this little plant, this little prop plane that looks at visual range and what's exactly like a Yakov-12, which was used all over the Soviet union for various purposes um you know like in the uh in the siberian wilderness they used

them because you know kind of like Alaska like that's your basic uh means of travel in there like on the open step like surveyors and like naturalists would like use them you know um like party members that use them just kind of like shuttle around so like the sudden appearance of like the cessna like it wouldn't really throw alarms um in conventional in a conventional situation But Moscow was known to have, like, the toughest air defenses in the world. Like, it's telling, like, during Linebag or two, you know, when downtown Hanoi was hit, the kind of final massive strategic air operation against Hanoi, like, downtown Hanoi was considered to be the most fortified city in the world, like the hardest target in the world other than

Moscow. And, like, nothing, and the Soviets very much cultivated this, not just the image, but you know moscow was supposed to be like the hardest of all targets so the fact that um the fact that this kid could fly his aircraft into moscow and he crossed like several uh uh designated like air defense um um you know uh um checkpoints and uh apparently at first uh there was uh there was a rookie uh ground control crew and when they sent the signal out for

an IFF, you know, identification friend or foe, Roost switched off is communication equipment and like went dark. And not knowing what the proper code was to send out like over the airwaves for like what the status of the aircraft

was. These guys, these Russians on the ground like drop the code for like friendly instead of like unknown like possibly hostile. like so then like uh when he breached like the next kind of uh you know the next kind of um a hurdle verbally speaking um you know he he'd already been like identified as like as like a friendly aircraft and then like as he as he approached like moscow like moscow air defense like it's like you know they they saw it looked to be like a yackle level like on the gate

at the at the gates of moscow like they didn't even think twice about it was not it's not a war plane. And if it's here in the first place, obviously it's okay. I mean, so it's this weird kind of like failure, you know, like I said, it's kind of like the splendid reverse of what happened with the KLF like 007. But at the same time, again, too, like in under normal kind of peacetime conditions, this wouldn't really be an issue. But this had a horrible effect. I'm like the prestige of the Soviet military. And what, what Robb did was it gave him essentially the mandate

to clear out basically like anybody in uniform that he did not like and that's exactly what he did. The officer core of the Soviet military was just completely freaking like smashed. Roost himself, he literally landed in Red Square

and the footage is crazy because this guy just like lands. He landed on a bridge adjacent to Red Square in the middle of the afternoon. He gets out and he like waves and he says you know like I'm German, you know, I'm from West Germany and people like, you know, like, what the fuck? And he said he landed, he said originally

he thought about landing in the Kremlin, but he said that, then he realized if he did that, like, he'd be arrested by KGB or FS, or GRU and, you know, the Kremlin just denied that, like, it happened. You know, so he's like at least, I mean, he'd have no idea of knowing that, you know, there'd be this, like, this British tourist, like a video camera,

camcorder, but at least it'd be like eyewitnesses, be like, hey, I saw this dude land. He, like, this happened. You know, you can't just say it didn't. But he, um, Roost was, uh, you know, like, like two hours later, like he was arrested. Um,

let me ask you a question because there's something, somebody might ask this question. Yeah. Everybody gets the idea that the, the Soviet Union was this place that was actually absolutely locked down. No one went in and out. And you just said that, immediately the first person who confronts him as a British tourist.

What was the tourism situation as far as Soviet Union went? I mean, the Soviet Union actually, I can't remember the name of it, but until from the 1950s until literally 1990, the Kremlin published this magazine. It was called something like Moscow Life. And I used to see it at the newsstand sometimes and like flipped through it when I was like a little kid. Because, and that was like the Kremlin,

it was them like showcasing like why the Soviet Union is good. but also like it was supposed to draw like tourists and there's a lot of stuff you couldn't see and a lot of places you couldn't go and like you'd be followed um you know uh in in like at least casually you know because like everybody was it was like a foreign uh there was like an entire kGB director at to like keep an eye on like foreign visitors um but i mean yeah you could you could visit the soviet union as long as there was nothing as long as there was nothing about your background that that flagged you like the real these were the Soviet Union

that was hard to leave. It wasn't hard to go eastward. Basically, like, throughout the eastern block, you could basically go wherever you wanted. But, you know, a citizen in the Soviet Union, he was not going to be able to visit America. He was not going to be able to visit the U.K. He might be able to visit the Buddhist Republic

if he's, like, a trusted person in relative terms, but that was kind of the issue. And it, especially during the 60s, there was a lot of, guys um like i remember and this was kind of dumb at the time like i i really despise bill clinton but like russian limbo was i remember when bill clinton was running in 92 russian was like he visited the soviet union as a college student it's like okay but like a lot of guys did

like that was per cruz's big thing like hey if you want to we you know we're an open book you know we want american college students to come see how good the soviet union is and they in turn set some of their exchange students but these guys were old dudes with like party you know their fathers were party men there's no way these guys are just going to be like you i'm defecting you know i like it um i mean if yeah bill clinton's a total shit bag but the point is if you were if you were like going to harvard or like yale or like stanford in like nineteen sixty five there's like a good chance you would have like visited the soviet union because like they cultivated that um some of that started to change uh you know kind of like

post-a-taunt like a so you started to look more and more like scary to people frankly and I mean in the I know a lot of guys who are like five and ten years older than me like when I was a little kid who'd like visited East Germany and been like oh it's crazy but like nobody really wanted to go to the Soviet Union frankly like I

I mean whether it's like ignorant or not whatever but you know by like 1980 you know it was kind of like why the you know that that place is fucked you know like I don't want to go there but uh and like and again I think that's I think that's kind of twisted frankly I would love to go to the Soviet Union like

because it would have been pretty awesome like not not cool to like live there but like to see you know like it but that was kind of the deal and it um and it's also um um and it like dependent on like the you know but yeah the uh the uh it was basically uh you know the soviet union like welcome tourism in its own kind of way and you know but the fact is you know the the kind of splendid absence of like soviet citizens here in america like that was exactly why but it's like nobody had money. It's like let's say like, let's say I'm like Joe like, you know, or I'm Ivan, you know, in, uh, in the U.S.S.R in 1980. Like even if I was, even if I was like educated and at skills, I've got like no money. And even if like somehow it's a miracle I got, you know, like a visa

from the Kremlin, like I'm going to like land in Chicago or Philly or like L.A. It's big, hey, I've got zero money. I don't really speak English, but like give me a job. Like that's not, I mean, especially in them days too. Like stuff just didn't work that way. So yeah but it um it um but the so the so even with even with some in the show of the americans which in some ways it's hokey but in some ways it's really dope

the guy and like his wife it's one of my favorite it's one of my favorite shows of all yeah the lady who like stands in as his wife you know like when they show like what he went through like as like a KGB like deep cover operative they're basically making sure like he wouldn't defect you know and like just become like enamored with the American way of life

and that actually is like legit like the guys the KGB and the GRU at a lesser degree had a lot of sleep rages on the ground like those people in that show and they basically vetted them to be like you're not going to go crazy when you know you realize you can like you know you can kind of like get stuff in America you can't hear because it's like not you're either like you're in a seat and you're totally down for the party or you've just been kind of like you know like it's the kind of, you know, the kind of, um, fascination and such things hold over you has kind of been like, bred out of you or like smashed out of you. But yeah, it's, uh, it's, um, do you ever wonder if they, did you ever wonder if they sent any of those over here, like, um, towards the end of the Soviet, and then they're just still here. And they're just like, they never went home and they're just still here. No, there's a guy like that. The little, yeah. This one guy, uh, the Soviet Union had one And drop off speech during the Able Archer era, it was kind of like, it was kind of like the Adropov version of the secret speech.

He addressed the Politburo and he said, like, look, he's like, we're, he's like in military terms, you know, in key theaters, we're doing well, but he's like we were losing the Cold War. You know, he's like, uh, you know, he's like our tech sales industry is like compared to Japan is like primitive as hell. You know, he's like our agriculture. He's like, we're literally dependent upon. And out from America and, you know, in a, in a, you know, in a. a bad harvest you know he's like we've got less than like a thousand you know like um computers

in america like a computer's a kid's toy he was just like going down the list okay um that uh so the soviet union one of the things they did was they sent a lot of mathematicians and like guys with formal logic knowledge or guys who'd like bet in western europe like in a formal capacity as like an operative they sent them to america to get jobs like in nascent like IT firms and one of the guys who did that um you know he was like posing as like uh as like a wet as like a west german or like polish descent or something he got a job with like this IT firm in new york in like 1981 and he'd do like dead drops and new york subway and stuff and then he said that like the last basically after while they just like stop reporting you know and then like he said that like a guy came to his

apartment and just told him like you know like he's like i know what you're doing and he's like he's like basically like you should probably commit suicide or at some point like you're going to be killed you know because you're like a loose end so the guy said that like he's like what should I do he thought about like mocking up like paperwork to say he like died of AIDS

or something because that's something like the AIDS thing was huge he thought about like trying to like you know he thought about like just openly defecting you know but he's like that he's like he didn't have any con he's like I'm a deep cover agent they're probably they're not going to be happy about this you know it's like oh hey I've been spying on you the past decade but hey can I

defect because now like things went left foot um so he basically said he's like you know like by that he had like a wife with like no idea like what was real identity was i mean it's kind of like a tragic story but he said he's just like what the fuck am i gonna do so like i just kept going to work i just kind of like kept waiting for it and then i turn the tv and like the berlin walls coming down you know and like so yeah like this there was there was a the guy got like a write-off i think and actually the new yorker or something like back in like the 90s i'll see if i can find it and like um So you can, like, post a link. But it's, but yeah, there, there definitely were guys like that.

And in the reverse, too, there was, uh, Jen's Carney, uh, he defect, he, he, he, he defected the other way to the DDR. And, um, like, nobody even knew what happened to him. Like, it was presumed he defected, but he just, like, disappeared. Um, he was an Air Force guy. Um, you know, he was a, he was, um, he had knowledge of, like, of, he was, he was, he was a cryptographer, okay. but uh jens karnie like if the wall comes down he hides out like pretending to be like a dutchman or something i think that was or dan this cover story was that he was at dane and then finally uh some like boondisfair or like u.s army like mp types like who the fuck is this guy you know just when they were kind of like going down the roles like who's who actually is in the dDR and they're like that's this freaking that's this guy like you know a decade back just like you know went over uh went went over the wall like the other way you know as a freaking defector and he he got he got courts marshaled he got jammed up for like seven years or something i mean which i think it's kind of fucked up i mean it's like once the cold war is over unless you killed

somebody or unless you truly did something horrible like like passing eyes only nuclear secrets they should have just like let it go but you know the the depending on seem inclined to like let things go like that and the guy wasn't uniform when he defected so i mean it's it's like okay but yeah there are there are some very weird stories about that but yeah i mean it does beg the question like how many of these guys were they like just nobody knew about and they just like kept low-key and like you know went about their life um yeah probably more than people think because i mean i made the point before and a guy named john caller he wrote a really good history of the stasi you know kind of the one way that like the worst up act like consistently beat nato

was like with their espionage you know like it wasn't even close like it uh and yeah they they put a tremendous emphasis on human intelligence in a way that you know like like we didn't. So, yeah, I speculate it was like more of these guys than people think, you know, or thought. Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. But, um, Mattias Ross, back, I mean, he, what happened, became him is, is rather tragic. He, he was sent to four years at hard labor, but he was actually never sent to a labor camp. He was housed in isolation in Moscow.

And ultimately, he was released and then formally pardoned by Grameco when the Intermediate nuclear forces treaty was about to be signed as like a jettric goodwill and he claimed he wasn't mistreated and I believe he wasn't beaten or anything but there was something was like damaged about him and he later went to prison in Germany because he had a job

in some hospital and there was some girl that he had like an unrequited crush on and he straight up just like stabbed her and this guy had like no history of like violence I mean what I'm getting at the Soviet Union destroyed him like psychologically like whatever they did to him and you better believe that they didn't just treat of like some kid pulling

a prank. I mean, the you know, like I said, I'm not anti-Russian at all, or anything, but there's a long history of guys who were political prisoners of the Soviet Union, and they somehow came back like, damn it,

just or like not right. You know what I mean? And, you know, there's, I speculate the same thing happened to him. And after that incident, apparently, he never got in trouble again, but he you know, he seems to have had kind of like a sad life after that. And, You know, like I said, as a little kid, and then later, as somebody who spends a lot of time in the Cold War, I think Roast in some ways what he did was really heroic.

I mean, it was naive. I mean, he's lucky he wasn't unceremoniously, you know, blown out of the sky by a MIG driver or something. But, you know, I believe he was idealistic in the way that kind of like last Cold War generation of Germans was. And I think he really was like, look, like, I don't want to be. a casualty of World War III as a countervalue, you know, as countervalue ashes in the wind. And, you know, I, I, I've got love and respect to the Russian people. And, you know, like, we should, you know, we should, you know, we should find a way out of this paradigm that's going to destroy us all. I, I found it really profound as like an 11, 12 year old kid. You know,

I mean, maybe it's because I was a little kid, but, um, I maintain there was like something there. And he wasn't just like some crazy dude. Like, I mean, he literally, like, learned to fly like for this purpose you know i mean it's you had it in mind that it could make it and frankly i think it did man you know like it um you know i guess i mean you remember it was a big deal but the um that but that i mean obviously the what it shows you too all like discrete events that nobody is intending to have these reverberations like literally like if roost hadn't done that i can easily see uh i can easily see like you know the usenov loyalists who were still in uniform is like saying like look like gorbachev is he's compromising our ability you know to defend in depth and you know he's we cannot allow the ion of treaty to be put the paper like pen to put the paper and some kind of like quasi military regime in the soviet union you know like either like relegating gorbachev to the role of cipher or just like outright getting rid of him i i mean it's not like they weren't capable of that it like literally like what russ did

that allowed Gorbachev to to sideline and sandbag, like, all of his enemies. And I mean, from then on, it really was his show until, like, you know, until the challenge from Yeltsin was Emergent. But that's what we should cover next episode. And that's an incredibly complicated, like, people who didn't, weren't alive then, but also even people who are pretty serious students of the Soviet Union. The intrigues between Gorbachev and Yeltsin and what Bush and Baker actually wanted, like, Bush and Baker didn't want the Soviet Union to cease to exist.

Like, they wanted it to endure as it's kind of like federated, like, authoritarian structure that it totally abolished, like, the party. But that was totally disarmed and was kind of like, you know, accountable, you know, United States as like junior partner in like ruling the planet it was basically they wanted to like recreate like the the new dealer concept like how the world would be run and like the team d types who not only hated the soviet union but literally wanted to see like torn apart um like yeltson was their guy and that's like what's key to understanding this here and that's why people have mixed feelings about yelson i think but it um and then of course like the the kind of the kind of variable the spoof things was that um you know all the denationalities like all went crazy um you know and that's

and that bears on too like what the it shows you too like when uh you know like what what what what these fools they call the chicken kiev speech or bus 41 went to ukraine is like look like don't go like you're going to be committing national suicide if you decide you're going to like fight the russians don't do it which of course is like absolutely true so that's like a deal like you know Bush was a pussy. Like, how dare he, like, not back Ukrainian independence? Like, when exactly the Ukrainians, what exactly of the Ukrainians got out of losing, like, a quarter million people on their country ragged, or, like, awesome things, like, ensuing from this. I mean, it's not, like, whether you love hate or a neutral on Ukraine,

like, the idea that, like, Ukraine, like, provoking a general war with Moscow was, like, this good thing or, like, this, like, base thing. Like, it's, it's literally insane. But the, um, but I, in my, before it being clear, like, but America and its NGO affiliates and what have you were doing in Ukraine. If you're going to tell, if you told me like 20 years ago, like, yeah, like, you know, in 20 years, like, where will, like, the Russian army, like, be engaged? I'd be, like, in the Baltic. Like, I see, like, some kind of, like, really bloody, you know, like, asymmetrical conflict

of them, like, in the Baltic. Like, that's what I thought would happen, honestly. I, it frankly surprised me that, like, the Ukraine. Ukrainians were so incredibly rash, but, but that's, um, that's, um, the fact that that, the fact that Washington and, uh, kind of like the post-Ragan foreign policy team, they wanted both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia to endure. Like, you know, they, this, this, this kind of policy of, you know, let's try to detonate, like, every federated structure that exists, then we can kind of, like, finesse them into,

into like these these like fake client regimes that's like very much like a post-Bush kind of thing and like I'm not saying Bush 41 had like these great ideas I think he was the last serious president but I'm not saying like his kind of his kind of vision of like a neo like new deal was like some kind of like good thing but there's like an internal logic to it that like makes sense

and is like sustainable in a way that like the competing perspective like was not and is not but I don't want to I don't want to deep dive into that yet because that that's going to take like an hour or an hour and a half so that's basically all I got for today. I want to go ahead.

Let's talk a little bit about the 80s because I remember it. And it was a weird, weird time. It was big time. It was scary. Okay, so like New York was one of the I mean murder, murder, murder. There were 2,000 homicides a year.

Like, that's wartime attrition. Yeah. I'm sure Chicago, I'm sure south side of Chicago was the same way at the time. And but yet, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But yet you had a great amount of abundance. You had a lot of people getting rich, a lot of people getting wealthy. And then you still had this like nuclear shadow that was always overhead.

It was like a time when people were really, a lot of people were really having fun. but there was always this cloud hanging over. Lots of people don't understand either. I try to explain it to people. My earliest memories were being like afraid of the Soviet Union. You know what I mean? I lived literally three miles

from Glenview Naval Air Station which was like a priority counter versus target. Like we would have just there was no chance we would have survived. You know and it and I mean especially because like my dad was like insinuated into like the policy plan

planning establishment. I mean, I realized like the Cold War was like talked about in my house more than other people's. Like everybody was like that. And like when those stupid emergency broadcasting system tests had come on, like my mom would jump and like everybody would. You know, because it's like, and people don't they don't understand that. That's why I get pissed off

when people talk about like the COVID garbage. Even like a 9-11. You know, it's like, there's nothing comparable to like what would have been like a general Warsaw pact like nuclear assault United States. Like MAD is bullshit. Like Carl SIG is nuclear when it was bullshit, but it would have changed like life as everybody knows it. You know, there would have been 100 million people dead.

A huge swaths of the country would have been like unlivable. The survivors would have all migrated towards the equator. So you're basically going to have this like it'd be kind of like a giant wild west with a poisoned environment that was like America. Like no shit. And like just the fact that

it'd be like yeah, it'd be like world transform. You can't kill tens of millions of people within hours and not like have everything change. You know, and a the fact that this was always a possibility, and especially as human decision makers, becoming increasingly sidelined, you know,

it began clear, like, this could happen without even anybody intending to, just because the trajectory of variables is such that, like, it has to happen according to, you know, the indicators. Yeah, it was, uh,

it was, it was like night and day. And I, I think that some of the, some of the, like, the murder rate becoming totally lit for, like, a whole generation and people that's, like, acting kind of crazy.

Like, I think part of that, I think part of it was people, like, well, there might, this might not exist tomorrow, you know, so like, why, why not? I mean, it made people more ballsy, definitely, but it was also like, you know, there's, um, there, there, there was an aspect of like, you know, the apocalypse is like imminent. So, like, who gives a fuck? And, uh, the, uh, yeah, it was, it was weird, man. And like, and like, and the immediate adjad is weird, you know, like I, well, yeah, then I was

going to bring that up, man. The 90s is like, so the Soviet Union falls apart officially. And then all of a sudden, New York City gets cleaned up. You know, like the home, the crime rate drops. Homeless people are being bust out. 42nd Street is bought up by Disney, basically. It's like, it's a real weird correlation that shit like that happened. Well, yeah, that's one of the reason I'm, I mean,

it's one of the reason I'm very much like a Hegelian. Well, it's also the reason why, like, the early 90s were like anarchy, you know, and then suddenly shit stabilized and just, like, became, like normal again like to your point around like 96 like 95 96 but like that movie kids you know because I'm more I was born in 76 so I'm you know I'm like I'm like a 90s dude more than 80s like I was like I grew up in the 80s but I was like a teen I'm like the 90s and like people like kids are just like oh it's just like pornographic and gross I'm like yeah it's both those things but it's also like on the street in 1993 that's like what shit was like

and like anywhere you went like everybody had a chip on his shoulder like every idiot and his brother was like gang banging you for like no reason it's not like now we're just like hood do to do it because like they sell drugs it's like every idiot was like yeah i like rep this like nonsense gang and oh like i got like i got like a gun i pack with me for like no reason it's because i'm like a fucked up asshole like that literally was like the way shit was and like uh you know it and like all there was like yeah man there's this like like the races like fucking hated each other and like it's you know yeah man and it's like so like that movie yeah it's like Like, okay, maybe, like, Larry Clark, I think he's the dude who made that movie.

He's like, maybe that dude is a pervert and like a sick fuck. But, like, what he was, like, portraying was not, like, in his mind. Like, that shit was real. And I was a teenager in that epoch. It was like that. You know, like, uh, and I mean, this particularly made an impact on me, like, psychologically because it's like, I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, despite what people think, man, despite the fact, like, I've had, like, you know, I had like a heavy fucking drug problem and shit.

I'm a pretty, like, square, like, fucking white dude, man. Like, I'm not into, like, I'm not into, like, fucking savage shit. And, like, that stuff, like, bothered me, like, as a kid. It's, like, it seemed like everybody's, like, lost a fucking mind, like, totally, you know? And, like, I, yeah. But, yeah. No, that's, I mean, again, man, that's why there's something too, like, Zykeyes, it's not just, like, the random aggregation of, like, pop cultural, like, symbols,

and people's kind of, like, you know, the discrete experiences and aggregate, like, you know, of the youthful generation and kind of like what they associate with the times that they're growing up in like it's a real thing there really is like a spirit of the age and yeah like why I was like having for like 30 years

everybody was going totally insane and then suddenly like the nuclear specter like disappears and then like there's like three or four years of total chaos and then like suddenly like everything's like normal again you know yeah and like and 40 second street goes from being this like looking like a nice circle of hell to be in like

Disneyland like literally like yeah You can't just say, like, oh, well, that's because people got tired of crime or something. It's like, it's not, I'm not saying you've got to believe in God. Okay, fine. You can think God out of the equation. But there is, like, some kind of, like, invisible hand. Like, even if it's just, like, human decisions in aggregate, developing some kind of harmonious, like, you know, intent or, like, vector. You can't tell me there's just, like, random shit that happens for no reason.

You know, yeah, definitely. All right, man. Plug, whatever you got. Yeah, man. I'm still, like I dropped on my Tgram the other day. You're going to find me on Tgram. I think people really know I know. I'm trying to get stuff done in earnest and just so I can, like, shoot for my channel and it did I get a capacity, but I'm going to swamp with, like, content work and other stuff lately.

But I promise, that's why I haven't been really active with stuff, but I promise that is changing. You can still find me on Twitter. I don't know. I can be nuked there at any time. And also, as we get into the summertime, I'm going to, like, disengage there. kind of like fuck with my own website and my channel. But you can find me there for now at like Real underscore number seven,

H-O-M-A-S-777. My primary home is Substack, Real Thomas-777.7.com. And my channel is Thomas TV on YouTube. We're going to saturate when I start uploading like fresh shit there on like Odyssey and stuff. But for right now, like,

if you join the channel, on YouTube, like, you'll be hip to it, you know, when, like, new stuff is uploaded there and, like, when we kind of, you know, migrate to other places. But that's all I got. And thanks for hosting me, as always. This has been great. I appreciate it. Thank you, Thomas.

Yeah, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. We're almost done with this, aren't we, Thomas? The Cold War series? Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, no, indeed. It's been quite a journey. And we've gotten really, really

positive feedback which is great not you know because I I need things to prop up my ego or something but there's a you know everybody at least even people who aren't particularly plugged into revisionist history you know they have an interest in the World War II because it's just um you know the the kind of symbology of it and the kind of the narrative of it is all around everybody like the Cold War like people under people under about 40 Um, I, they don't, I think that's changing somewhat, like, actually, like, corneous it sounds, like, one of the call at duty games was like special collapse or I never played it, but I thought that that was dope that some of these, some of these game developer types, uh, you know,

they were, they were trying to, like, plug people into the history of, of the era, like, with, you know, those kinds of Sims. But, um, you know, the, if you want to, like, literally, if you want to understand everything that's happening in power political terms today you've got to understand of the Cold War result you know and it's I think it's particularly if you identify his right wing it's particularly impactful

in terms of you know where we are conceptually and before we went live like you know you're talking about you mentioned Paul Gottfried well yeah I mean it's hard it's hard as hell to find now which I think is very deliberate but Godfrey gave a talk

I think it was at I think it was at the H.L. Minkin Club. I don't even know if that's still a thing, but and his talk was called how the left won the Cold War. And it was really fascinating. And, you know,

and again, that's why even if one is, even if one's not ideologically situated in the same kind of camp that I, you know, vis-a-vis the Cold War and Francis Yaqui and that kind of Higalian

view of things, you know, know it's it's fun of me if you want to understand why blood is being shed in in ukraine and on the russian frontier today like you've got to understand what what developed between 949 1989 particularly how it resolved so the fact we've gotten like mad feedback um is i is very inspiring i feel like we're actually doing something constructive yeah i think i think we get more feedback on this one than we did did on war two yeah yeah and that i'm very excited about that um and yeah moving forward uh i uh your idea to cover the spanish war is is great and i'm really living forward to that too but yeah we can um what i wanted to get into today a bit and forgive

me if this talk is a little bit it seems a little bit scattershot there's a lot of discrete causes to what caused what what you know caused the inner german border to literally just come apart you know November 9, 1989. Some of those causes were laid, you know, around 1980, 81, when martial law was declared in Poland and the Soviet response to that, or more probably the lack of a Soviet response to that, part of that was kind of the bizarre nature of the DDR government. The East German government was not at all organic. It, you know, East Germany itself, it was literally a fake state.

like there's no it's not even like the case of like north korea where like northern korea is like it's culturally different in south korea in some ways you know they got a history of being you know a divided divided kingdom like east germany was literally the border was where the red army just arbitrarily stopped you know i mean so it's you have this complete you have this like rump state that you know isn't isn't precedent in terms of its in terms of geographic situated in this and people forget too that you know the guys I used to became the DDR government. There were some genuine, like, pipe hitters, like, Eric Milka, who literally wasted a cop in Vimar.

And then he ran to Moscow because, you know, he was a KPD street fighter. And then, and the NKVD trusted him, you know, and, you know, he kind of became their man. Speaking of Spain, Eric Milka, it kind of became their man in Spain. He was like a commissar, you know, like fighting on the Republican side. guys like Eric Hanuker, he somehow escaped execution despite being a pretty high-level functionary or cadre in the KAPD organization, but he was in prison, you know, for the duration of the war. And some people think that he was a double agent, and then he was like he'd fed Intel to the Gestapo

on the SD, which I don't, it's possible. And then there was Walter Ubrick, who was kind of this dower intellectual, you know, kind of humorless, you know, cold-hearted kind of functionary, the most cliched or stereotypical sort. You know, he was another guy who spent, you know, time in exile, like, after, after the National Socialist Revolution. So, like, all these guys were they were this cadre element that was at odds literally with their fatherland. like whether you're in anti-fathers or not the point is like these are the guys who really get odds with germany like their own you know cultural uh milo um you know they spent they spent the warriors uh either literally like fighting with the red army or in exile in moscow and then um you know when the dust settled in 1945 they were literally just like insinuated into this role it's like okay you know like you're

you're now like the cadre of the German Democratic Republic. You know, these, and who people are like, who the hell are these guys? You know, it's not the only way they, the only, the only mandate they had was, you know, proceeded from the barrel of a, of Soviet guns. And over time, a kind of party state apparatus did develop in the DDR, particularly like the National Vokes Army. which was officer and NCO heavy compared to a NATO army. And that was very deliberate because he had a bunch of military careerists whose, you know, fortunes were inextricably, like personal fortunes

or inextricably tethered to the survival and prosperity, if we can call it that, of the regime. You know, in any government that endures for decades, no matter how kind of contrived or unpopular it is, you know, people are going to become just habituated to do it. And, you know, people's fortunes are going to become, bound up with it in various ways so i mean that did happen but it was about the most like artificial of artificial states which is one of the things one of the reasons i'm always kind of tongue-in-cheek

saying you know like east germany he was best germany you know the dDR the reason why they did the national vaux army you know their uniforms uh look like vermic uniforms they maintain some very end of the prussian drill and the parade ground you know they a lot of lot of their their kind of mythology they drew upon like florian guyer in the peasants war you know they kept a lot of like you know they got a lot of the optics and kind of at least superficial trappings of the prussian statehood which is really the first kind of like modern welfare state you know that's not they can't be denied but the point is the dDR is kind of kind of like hyper aware of like their tenuous claim to the mantle of power and um them kind of insinuating themselves

into this role ironically and somewhat perversely but if you're a heck alien this makes perfect sense they're kind of insinering themselves as like the guardian of like what remained of like you know the authentic German culture

that's really interesting and I think people responded to that too in some basic way that's why in like the decades after the wall came down I think East Germans themselves like astrology you know it's like a play on

like nostalgia um you know they that that's that's you know kind of a media term that's bandied you know about people who grew up in the east who uh you know we still pined for like products you can't find anymore and kind of like the way life was in that era and you know i made the point too like uh frau merkle it's not an accident that she came up through the dDR you know um and interestingly is a law i'd say any any german politician you know who uh who who was a citizen at ddr it's literally against the law to talk about their past like in east germany so it's it was a criminal offense and when frail merkle was the chancellor to talk about her background a lot of people allege that she was a stasi asset which is possible

she was a young pioneer so i mean she her folks were like communist party people or so the social there was no communist party in the ddr is the socialist unity party but it uh but the point being, I mean, it wasn't, she wasn't just, you know, she wasn't like an apolitical, you know, like her family was at least, like, regime loyal, um, and so far as party membership, but that Merkel's concord with, with Mr. Putin, you know, and, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, the, uh, the gas prom deal, which, which led to the Nord Stream pipeline, all, all these things like, owed, like, the Cold War, okay? And, like, the old, like, you know, what the DDR was and what the inter-German border represented in like power political and you know

in in historical terms you know this stuff isn't just you know it's not it's not just like trivia about you know a strategic paradigm that's no longer extant but you know last uh last episode we got into you know the kind of thaw the Gorbachev thought that um was made possible in large part by Matthias Roost's flight. But before that, you know, we talked about, we talked about the NATO dual track strategy,

which ultimately led the intermediate nuclear forces treaty and why this was a big deal. The Soviet Union during drop-off had been very aggressively trying to decouple, you know, Europe from the United States

in terms of a strategic doctrine. and uh it's uh it's willingness to wage uh nuclear war against warsaw pact and the way they did this was you know with the deployment of SS19 SS20 um ICBM and uh theater ballistic missile uh platforms in um in europe as well as the deployment of the backfire bomber which was a maritime nuclear bomber Like superficially, it had things in common with the B1, but it was purposed essentially to nuke the Royal Navy and then open up the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap, which the Soviet Navy had to shoot in order to break out of, you know, the North Atlantic into the open ocean in order to effectively wage one. war against the United States. But the, um, the, um, when, uh, I made the point that Reagan's, uh, dual track strategy, which was the Reagan administration offered to remove all theater nuclear weapons platforms

from Europe, you know, um, ground-laught cruise missiles, as well as intermediate range ballistic missiles like the Persian too if the Soviets would abide the same okay if the Soviets wouldn't abide the same old bets were off NATO was going to continue to deploy theater nuclear forces

now arguably this led the Soviets to say well we've got nothing to lose and that's why they went all in in Afghanistan you can even go a step further and say like as we got into that this caused terrible anxieties about the possibility of a decapitation strike on, you know, on Moscow.

And, you know, we talked about how the real impetus for intervention in Afghanistan was proximity to Kazakhstan, which was as important to Soviet nuclear command of control as was Moscow. But as it may, what was going on during this era as kind of the Soviet Union was hardening its stance in power political terms there was odd things happening between the two germany's

we talked about the Helsinki Accords you know that was when the Warsaw Pact you know it all the signatories declared that you know they'd honored democratic processes you know people would not be discriminated against based on you know political affiliation sect

nationality I mean basically it was basically the Helsinki Accords could not coexist with the Bremen doctrine, which is what the Soviet Union relied upon with their intervention in Shagoslovakia in 68. This caused a problem, because on the one hand, the Warsaw Pact was desperate for, you know,

legitimacy and credibility in the world stage. On the other hand, the only thing holding the structure together, particularly after the son of Soviet split, was armed force. You know, the only thing making the Soviet Union's superpower was the fact that it had, you know, the world's mightiest military apparatus. The only thing holding a strategic alliance together, which it depended upon, you know, in order to achieve any strategic depth, you know, was the fact that if any of the satellite states try to throw off the shackles of one-party rule, you know,

the Soviet Union would directly intervene in order to defend socialism or defend the development and survival of socialism within its sphere of influence so this was this was very much tested in 1980, 81

that's when Poland came under martial law Poland was an interesting case because the owing one of the reasons why Carter courted Brzynski you know as a key part

of his Zignuprygyzinski is a key figure in his national security staff was uh like Poland seemed to be the kind of the kind of um it seemed to be the kind of um it seemed to be the natural place to try and you know create a wedge in Warsaw Pact you know um if uh if it wasn't organic to the DDR it was totally alien to Poland. Poland. You know, Poland was basically, it was still a largely, in the aftermath of the war, it was still, like, a largely backwards. I'm not saying that to be punitive or mean, but it was. It was still a largely backwards country. People were staunchly Catholic. They had a strong hatred of the Russians, you know, like ethnic grounds. So, communism really kind of had to succeed in Poland, okay, if for any kind of legitimacy to increase. not just the regime situated there. You know, it's a

Warsaw Pag generally. And towards that end, Poland was the recipient of a lot of subsidies, which in turn they used a build-up infrastructure, including one of the, what was at the time, like one of the world's most advanced

like commuter rail stations. Like Warsaw Central Station, like it's still like it's something like an architectural marble and at the time it was like wow this is this is remarkable but that that like those kinds of public works projects or something like the communists like seem to do pretty well at but as it may like one of the polls did with these subsidies is they they set about to create like a fairly diversified like manufacturing sector and you know the idea was that you know

they could build up equity and you know create something of like an export economy however like regionally limited you know um and and you know and and then uh you know and then become eligible for you know like long-term developmental loans and things and you know basically become like a some kind of like modern country or at least like on a par with like east of germany you know if not you know if not the west but um this obviously didn't work and uh you know the polls found like half the poll of GDP as of 79 i think was was was was debt um and uh the polls uh they were dealing with genuine shortages things like things like there was ration cards handed out for like meat and eggs and sugar like nobody could get tobacco

like cigarettes actually were being used as currency by 1981 i mean this is like prison like it's literally insane and one of the big one of the big problems in terms of rendering the legitimacy crisis was Polish workers were being saddled with you know like increasing demands in order to you know shore up again too like Poland was still

gambling on this idea that you know they could they could create like a viable manufacturing sector like fit for export. It's like Polish workers were being saddled with like more and more and more hours you know for like diminishing returns and they couldn't even get like the base to consumer necessities

of life you know like cigarettes like sugar. I mean, in a socialist state, I mean, this is preposterous, you know. So, that was basically the impetus for solidarity. And you can't, you can't take a labor union in a communist state who are

like, hey, we're, you know, we are the proletariat and, you know, we're not, we're having our surplus labor, literally robbed of us. You can't, like, take those people out and shoot them. Okay? I mean, like, you could, like, a bunch of Catholics or a bunch of, a bunch of fascists or a bunch of, you know,

of people protesting the party. I mean, so this is a very tricky situation. The way was resolved in Poland was Gerald Zelski became general secretary. And he was a tragic figure.

You know, there's this kind of visage of him as this sinister guy. He was a Polish military officer. He always wore these dark sunglasses. The reason why is because he was of lesser noble birth. when he was a teenager, when Poland

was invaded by the Red Army, he was old family, he sent to a gulag and he became, his eyes were destroyed by the glare of the sun off the snow in the labor camp he was in. So, like, he couldn't stand light. So, like, he'd wear sunglasses all the time.

And, I mean, it tells you something, too. Like, this guy was literally a kid who was, like, destroyed by the gulag system, like, physically, in some way and mentally. Like, he became this kind of, like, this kind of military talent in these block like it there's something kind of like shakespeare about that but it's also it tells you something about the way like poland was brutalized by by communism it's like you know there there was no

there wasn't even there wasn't even the equivalent of of like the dDR cadre in poland you know for them to kind of insinuate as as the ruling cast you know they took this guy it was literally you know somebody destroyed by the gulag you know like uh and yeah i just find that fascinating, but so Poland stands alone as the only it was the only, it was the only East Black satellite state that was under

the direct rule of a military man. And it was literally under martial law. Now as this developed first under Carter, then under Reagan's first term, it raised an interesting question. Because according to the, if Poland wanted to open revolt, the

president of the Brezhnev doctrine dictated that the Soviet army would invade you know to preserve the regime and drop off you can tell it was racked with anxiety that this is what was going to happen

that's something that's clear from you know the notes of you know meetings not just of the presidium but of you know like the kind of inner polar borough like de facto like you know the cadre that

made the decision to assault Afghanistan, like we talked about the other week. But simultaneous to this going on, East and West Germany were engaged in this kind of delicate minuet of reproach. And Eric Hanuker, you know, Stalwart, as he was, as a Marxist-Leninist, he'd always pined for, you know, for East Germany to be recognized as like a truly sovereign state, you know, with a somewhat independent foreign policy. And it was bizarre because on the one hand, on the one hand, the DDR, they were viewed as kind of too Stalinist, like even prior to Gorbachev, but they were simultaneously viewed as being too cozy and friendly with West Germany. I mean, there's something bizarre about that. But in 1987,

Haneker finally got permission for a state visit to the Bundes Republic. And he'd been trying to accomplish this for, for, for like a decade. And initially in, in 1984, when he first put it to the Soviet Politburo and the foreign ministry, Chernanko said, you know, make no mistake, you know, that this is not a visit aimed at reproachment, it's to establish lines of demarcation, which is like a typically like Soviet answer. It's like both like obnoxious and obtuse and hostile, but also doesn't really make any sense. And like, but, so there's this weird arrangement where Hanukkah goes to visit

the Bundes Republic. And the, they flew like the DDR flag. but they flew the DDR flag slightly lower than like the Bundes Republic flag and like they'd uh the uh he like like a band greeted him like a military band like when he disembarked you know in bond

but like nobody would salute him as he would look ahead of state it was like this goofy like half measure and there's this really striking photograph because like Helmut Cole who uh he and Merkel whatever their respective faults and there are many I mean they

they were the really the only post-war German chancellors who did anything really to restore German sovereignty in various capacities Cole was like a huge man he was like this huge like bear looking guy you know like

this kind of like big Bavarian kind of like a Herman Gering type you know like big loud dude you know like a huge person and like Hanukkah Hanukkah was kind of like this creepy nerdy eye you know like kind of how you like imagine like you know

the kind of communist from central casting and it's kind of like, this kind of like professorial dickhead who like nobody likes. It's like there's this photo like, you know, like huge like Helmut Cole. He's got like a big grin on his face. There's this like pissed off with him like Hanuker and like an East Block suit who's like, you know, five five and like

it's like he's like being dwarfed by like you know, it was like kind of like metaphor that seemed really resident. I thought that as like a little kid and then just the other week when I came across it and in this book in the 1989

revolutions. I'm like, wow, that's really striking. I wasn't sure if it was just like Mandela effect, me like remembering it as being more like profound than that. But the what ultimately happened, you know, the convergence of all these things,

it became at some point unthinkable, even notwithstanding for the intrigues of within the Kremlin that allowed Gorbachev to kind of rook his enemies and sideline any true you know

heartliners aimed to sabotage peristrike in policy terms it at some point became unthinkable for the Soviet army to deploy you know in Poland or in East Germany that came to that and do what they've done in Hungary in 56

and then um chico-slovakia on 68 um you know what i mean zeitgeist is a real thing man i mean like i think people who take historical revisionism seriously i don't think any of them would disagree with that but um but uh even if you're not you know trying to kind of hegelian interpretations of these things um and the the pressure of you know like world moral consensus that's a real that is a real thing It's not just something that, like, end of history, liberal is bandy about. And what was possible in 1968 or 978 or even 1981 was no longer possible by, like, 1986, 1987.

I mean, it just wasn't thinkable. And I, that's why when people pose the question as the, you know, well, why, why wasn't there a Tianman Square moment? It's like, well, consider it like this. what actually happened at the inter-german border in the moment it was happening i i a lot of people didn't even um fully realize what the precipitating catalysts were in april of 89 um really the first chink in the uh in the iron curtain like the physical structure of the hardened border was uh the

government finally shut off the electric fences that saturated the austria-hungarian border uh the guard towers remained they were still manned but uh there literally was an electric fence like running the perimeter you know it uh you know i it i mean um and uh by may uh the border guards uh there was this there was this big deal uh the border guards uh in hungary like met with their like a ashton counterparts and uh began dismantling like sections of of the barrier you know and they like the the austrians obviously invited you know like western news crews and stuff and uh this is the first kind of indication that you know the um like warsaw pact could no longer exist as it as it had you know for decades um taken its cue from that

the Hungarian communists and I know that Hungarians are really great people and they're really proud people and they were actually at the forefront of anti-communist resistance and I'm not praising the communist regime there at all but to their credit

Hungary's foreign minister Horn realized that, you know, travel restrictions had to be lifted. Even if his motives were cynical and that, you know, he was operating with an eye to preserve the party state apparatus. The point is that, you know, it was the Hungarian regime that really first, you know, kind of gave weight, you know. and they had a long history post 56 a compromise and again, I'm not saying because they were

good men or something or principled. I think a lot of it owed to the existential reality that in Hungary especially they wouldn't have survived if they hadn't made certain concessions. But people forget that the Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian border is really where

where you know the kind of thaw began and what's fascinating too, at least I think so because I've got kind of a fascination a fascination with a halfsburg in beginner as I think some people know who

like follow my content during the summer season and there was always a lot of East German tourists in Hungary and 1989 was no exception because you know Hungary Hungary is a beautiful place, I'm sure. It has such a reputation.

But, you know, if you're East German, Hungary is one of the places you could visit, you know, like on vacation. And the, an idea which was hatched by Otto von Hapsburg, who was the last, he was the last crown prince of the Hapser Empire. You know, he said, let's invite, let's invite. our German friends to a picnic on the Austro-Hungarian border and of course, you know, like there were these East German

tourists swarm to the border which was then opened up so they could travel to Austria and then from there they could get, you know, to the Bundes Republic and this totally neutralized the inner German border and its ability to plug the proverbial see

that you know had led to their hemorrhaging of population um and from that point on uh it and you know unless unless the east germans were truly willing to the open fire on their own people and i i can't think of anybody who would have been willing to take responsibility for that um you know there's nothing short of that would have uh would have uh would have uh would have changed things. And like I said, even before Gorbachev, the, uh, when I, I think it was already unthinkable, you know, again, like, um, a hardline is a, the Adropov, Chironinco regimes were, I think it was kind of the same regime, as I've indicated, for reasons I've indicated before. Um, it was clear even by then that, you know, the Brezhnev Doctrine was dead for practical purposes.

and the Soviet Union was a superpower. Like, people forget that sometimes. You're not talking about Saddam's Iraq. You're not talking about, you know, you're not talking about North Korea. You're not, you know, you weren't talking about a place like Tudemad's Croatia, which I think was a great regime. And my point is, you know, this thing, the Soviet Union still was accountable in some basic way. you know as a superpower i mean they they um they their territory spanned one sixth of the planet

and their sphere of influence was um you know in territorial terms exceeded even that of the united states um i mean outside of you know the soviet empire proper but um what uh what i think is key with respect to the how the cold war ended is what was happening in Washington and how Bush 41 and James Baker proceeded that's the only thing that facilitated Gorbachev's like the realization of his and Edward Shevittnardza I always butcher the pronunciation of that name. He was the foreign ministry who succeeded Grameco, later became president of Georgia. But in foreign policy terms, Shevardnadze was, he was really kind of the go-between in some ways, between the Kremlin and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

And as we talked about Team B and the kind of hold they had over the trajectory of policy. and the Reagan administration they've been somewhat sidelined by the Bush 41 administration Cheney was kind of their man who remained in proximity

to the sovereign level of power but Baker and Bush as I've discussed before their vision was not the Soviet Union being dismantled quite the contrary they at least wanted the Soviet Union to endure until total disarmament was realized um you know total nuclear

disarmament and uh almost total you know um reduction of conventional forces in being and moving forward even from that i believe can i answer can i answer up for yeah no please do would that be coming from the same faction uh that today is you know responsible for wanting to topple Putin. Those guys are the legacy of Team B. And in some places, they're very sane people. Because, like, Bush and Baker, their idea was like, okay, they basically wanted to, like, re-institute what had been kind of like the New Deal idea, like the New Deal Concord,

of like the world ruled by the United States, the Soviet Union, or like something like a Commonwealth independent states, like succeeding it as like junior partner. Cheney was on record is literally saying like fuck them I mean the Soviet Union they lost you know let's detonate it let's basically detonate like all the all the republics you know the nationalities

you know let's tear the Soviet apart let's like loot what we can keep Russia permanently down you know let's surround it basically we'll turn Ukraine into like a garrison state we'll turn Georgia into a garrison state you know and basically you know

keep our basically, you know, Morgenthau playing in Russia. Okay. Those are the guys who won out from Clinton administration onward. I mean, Clinton was a complete buffoon in foreign policy.

Like, he literally was just like a fucking buffoon. He was basically, he was basically a Machiavillian on the order of LBJ, like, in terms of his politicking. He was like a matchable politician. Like whether you think that's, like, lawable or not, kind of depends on your perspective.

But he had, like, zero interest nor understanding of foreign policy like none. So basically it was like available the highest bidder. You know, and that's why everything, all the goodwill like achieved a Bush Baker Concord was just like

was just like, you know, nuked like proverbially subsequently. And then you know, the the assault on Serbia, you know, which was deployed a strategic logic other than basically just to say like, we're going to like, we're going to like

we're going to break Ivan's face to get him out of the Balkans. Like, why would you even do that? But, I mean, it's some, you know, that, those the two, that's what's underway today. That's why these, like, neocon types and, like, they're kind of a sentence. They still, at this day, like, Rake Bush 41 over the close for verbally for the chicken Kiev speech. So, like, how dare he, like, in modern, the Ukrainian is not to waive some, like, suicide

suicidal war against Moscow for no reason. I mean, like, it's, but that's, uh, yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, PMS understand me too. Like, I'm not saying, obviously, anybody who's not a freaking idiot should realize that I'm not advocating, like, some kind of like new deal or vision of the world, like 2.0. But what Bush and Baker accomplished was truly masterful, the Gulf War coalition is unprecedented. You know, and the fact that basically, like, Bush 41, like at the whole world,

like, like, trucking in the palm of his hand. Like, that's crazy. You know, and he, um, uh, he'd courted the Arab world in a way that, um, was with an eye toward a genuinely, like, normalizing, you know, the Middle East and, and kind of defanging the Zionist lobby. Like, that's not as, again, I'm not saying Bush 41 was like, our guy, like, at all. But he represented something very different than the neocons and very different from, like, even you know even most like rhino types you know like that and same thing with baker like these

guys were like the old you want to like like the old protestant establishment the last time they were like at the helm like that was it okay so and frankly like in some basic way like those guys are like my teen like even though like class divides us like it i'm i'm i'm still gonna sit here and like i would not like trash them because frankly like their vision was like far better than anybody else is, like, post-war. Like, now I was saying the fact, you know, the war shouldn't have happened. But that's, um, that's what I want to get into next week. And, um, the Gulf War, uh, the Gulf War is like an addendum to the Cold War.

Like, it really is. And like, to the, even, you know, uh, Black Horse Regiment, Armored Cavalry, you know, who patrolled the Fold a Gap. Like, they fought, like, at, uh, 73 Easting. That's where there was McGregor, like, he was a black horse regiment. Like, there's all kinds of, And plus, too, I mean, that's where you got to see the, you know, like the post-revolution and military affairs, like U.S. Army,

which I believe was like the U.S. Army at Zenith. Like, I think that can be argued. You know, fight against, like, Warsaw Pact weapons platforms. And the political climate globally, like, it's something that, like, has never been seen before and, like, will never be duplicated, you know, and that's, and that, that was, so it's not just, um, I it's not just an addendum because it was post

November 989 but pre you know pre uh pre uh disillusion of the of the USSR it like you've got to really understand that is kind of not just the zenith of American power in absolute terms but also kind of like the realization of like the Bush Baker kind of a vision of of a of foreign policy moving forward other of globalism rather like um

Which was, you know, burned to the ground within half a decade by, by buffoons like Clinton and, you know, people who would, you know, who would place their petty, you know, kind of ancestral hatreds over a, over a meaningful, you know, historical development. But, yeah, that's what all I got for today, man. Well, let me ask you this before we go. I mean, I was watching, I was watching it on TV on November 9th. Wasn't anything that, you know, I expected then. We didn't have the internet. We couldn't keep up. No, I watched that CNN.

Yeah. And so how did that happen? Because you can go on YouTube now and you can watch. There's videos of seeing people pouring over the border. Ladies like, you know, screaming at East German officers saying, just let me go. Let me go. Well, what happened at, uh, What happened at the East German border was, um, the, uh, as the situation in Hungary,

kind of became like more and more unmanageable, you know, with like East Germans just, uh, you know, hopping over to Austria and then to, um, you know, and then, and then, uh, and then to the West German embassy and then, like, onward, you know, to the Buddhist Republic, um, the, uh, the Volkscomer well first of all Eric Hanuker Hanuker stepped down because there was a lot of these protests that were underway

in the DDR were demanding that Hanuker resign among other things Hanuker steps down the Volkscomer appoints Egon Krenz who was like the heir apparent anyway he was the guy who was like being groomed

like as you know successor Um, Crenz ordered the Interior Ministry to draft, uh, regulations that were less, uh, that were less oppressive and less Byzantine, um, that would, uh, allow people exit visas, you know, which it was totally arbitrary and capricious, like, who would be a granted one and who wouldn't be. like it didn't make any sense but the Crenza asked Gerald Gerhard Gerhard Louter

who was among other things the Volkspolice chief who were responsible for you know border checkpoint security among other things he ordered to him to order the to order the Interior Ministry, you know, to draft some kind of workable, you know, like visa application system

that in their, what they were hoping was that people who were political unreliables, they could basically just like send them away to West Berlin, you know, with good riddons. But, you know, they could find some way, you know, to grant visas to people that appeared like nominally, like democratic. but, you know, would there'd still be incentives to them to, like, remain and, you know, not defect, basically. Generally, that would be, you know, to not, like,

to only, like, give, afford, like, one member of a family, like a visa, you know, stuff like that. But the way this was communicated was, you had people already, like, massing at the checkpoints, you know, an anticipation of like what the new like law would be like awaiting the announcement and uh you head louder um and uh these interior ministry officials you know who are being bombarded with uh with questions not just from like dDR state media

but all from like western uh television and radio reps and finally this spokesman for the Interior Ministry he read aloud the statement from the Voxcom about the status of the new law which was that private travel restriction was now

permitted and it's not clear if this was a broken memo or like you know teleplex or whatever or if it was just poorly drafted but then we're a reporter said, can you repeat that, does that mean that there's no longer

any travel restrictions? And when does this go into effect? And this spokesman said, well, I believe it goes into effect immediately. And then the people at the checkpoints that started charging the border. Now,

nobody was willing to open fire on these people. So the border cops overwhelmed. After a while, they just threw open the gate. You know, it's like, what are they going to do? It's like they were they going to get stampeded. They're either going to be a riot or there's going to be a riot or

you know, the Shazzi was going to deploy like, you know, the eternal security troops and start you know, like killing people. And like none of these guys wanted any part of that. I mean, if not for ethical objections, because they didn't want to be held responsible. So it was basically just like the momentum of of, you know, the

will to kind of make this happen. You know, like corny as it sounds, like people power. If you can give me, you're sounding like a friggin' hippie or something. But that's basically what went down. And then 40 days later, Romania decided that it was...

Romania is kind of horrifying, man. Like, not the country. Romania is freaking awesome. fascinating. But Chusescu was the one man, one of the final Warsaw Pact summits, Romania is fascinating because Chuskou,

he played both sides of the aisle. He got Kennedy to take Romania off the target list for strategic nuclear weapons. And he basically drew down the Romanian army to like nothing but like an internal like a means of internal

oppression. For all practical purposes he quit Warsaw Pact. Okay. You know, it was a, it was not, despite being this kind of arched Stalinist, he was not particularly cozy with the Kremlin, but he, during the fight, October 89, at the final Warsaw Pact summit where internal security was obviously on everybody's mind, he said, like, we've got to do with the Chinese comrades did at Tianmen. And even Hanukkah apparently looked at him, was like, what the hell's a man with you? Like, at least don't say that out loud. Like, you know, like it's a, but yeah, the, uh, we'll get into that too because that's fascinating um and it's it's the outlier yeah i and i mean for all kinds of reasons but yeah the uh the uh and then and then mr mrs chuchescu i saw that i was in my aunt's house in ventura that christmas and i see in the chichescu's get get blown away like on tv that i mean this is this is like young people understand this is like you know consumer internet was basically where you can see video was like 10

years away 15 years away like this was like that's freaking crazy and it's it shook me up as like a young teen that he killed his wife too because there's like I mean she was a terrible person but she was an old lady they just like wasted her like I remember like one of the guards they were leading leading them to the

you know the to to the courtyard to be shot like the one guard like put his hand of his sister's elbow and she just like shakes it off like that I mean she was like a hard lady but it's like the point is she was like an old woman i mean it's like that kind of shocked me as a kid man but but yeah we'll uh well uh yeah we'll cover uh we'll cover that we'll cover golf war and bush baker um in uh final episode

we'll get into like borwich offers is yelton too um and so yeah we might go a little bit longer next time or that's okay with you but yeah i think that'll be great all right um plugs yeah i mean for the time being i'm still on twitter um so seek me out there uh it's thomas 7 777 it's official underscore thomas 777 7 my primary home right now is substack uh real thomas 7777.com i'm back on instagram i am i i got to go out of town um end of april but may first week in may i promise the channel is we're shooting dedicated content um like my crime partner and my my erstwhile editor who is a is a is a prince of the realm i swear like the he's the reason why all this stuff gets done because i'm freaking illiterate with that stuff but um i uh we're we're we're

cranking out like fire shit like i promise but i am like he and i we're like a two-man freaking operation. I mean, it's a lot of work. And I'm not being a murder, right? I'm an incredibly lucky person. But that, coupled with these manuscripts I'm trying to finish, coupled with keeping up with all those other shit. I mean, it's a freaking lot of work, man.

But it's coming, I promise, man. Yeah, that's what I got. Yep, appreciate it. Until the next time. Yeah, thank you, Pete. All right, I want to welcome everyone to the Q&A wrap-up show for the Cold War series. Thomas 777.

How are you doing, Thomas? I'm very well. Thanks. And yeah, thanks for accommodating this format. Like I said, it just seems to make sense. And I know that a lot of the subscribers have been eager to, you know, ask questions and stuff and kind of get a more discussion-based format going. So, yeah, that's great, man.

Can I start with a question from me? Yeah, of course. All right, cool. We talked about this in the Yaki Spengler episode I did, but a lot of people who have just started hearing about Yaki, hear that Yaki was, you know, after World War II, and especially, you know, from after 1950-ish, he took the side of the Soviet Union over America. Can you explain why he would do that? I mean, in geostrategic terms, it's the perennial... principle that the only way that Europe is truly going to be an autonomous actor, the only way it's going to be able to compete as a superpower, is if some sort of Concord is accomplished with Russia. You know, this, some people suggest that this is a kinder's World Island hypothesis. I mean, it isn't, it isn't.

Um, it's not, uh, it's not as so much a geography as destiny calculus. Um, it, uh, it has, it has to do with power potential, um, not just of material resources, but, you know, of, uh, of mentioned material as, you know, the Germans used to refer to, you know, um, human population. It's not just in terms of their biology, but in terms of their capacity to bear culture and things like that. Um, Europe as this kind of rump peninsula, um, um, you know, forever on an enemy footing with Russia, artificially instigated and maintained by the United States, is never, even if the United States withdrew its forces in being from Europe, but that status quo remained. Europe would never, ever be able to, you know, emerge again as a true power political actor of any significance in hard power terms. I mean, obviously, in economic terms and cultural terms, you know, Europe is always, you know, kind of the center of the world, okay, in many respects. But, so there's that part of it.

Secondly, Yaki, not incorrectly. He identified what the Cold War is basically an in-house controversy in ideological terms. You know, it was the New Dealer alliance with Moscow wasn't just a sort of alliance. of convenience because Europe was in in the third right was just so evil like on his face that doesn't make any sense you know um what this was is it was a competing viewpoints of a global socialist order you know one being the new dealer perspective the other being the mercic linens perspective um colluding in order to annihilate fascism and any competing iteration of political order that would, you know, come to dominate the 20th century and all centuries subsequent.

So, you know, one was not superior to the other. You know, it's not like America represented the West, contrary, you know, the alien Soviet Union or the socialist Soviet Union. And America, in a lot of it was more insidious because it had an ability to insinuate itself into European cultural life. you know, amidst the occupation regime, I mean, in a way that the Soviets just were not able to. And finally, there was just a difference, there was a divergence of intent. The Soviet Union wasn't trying to socially engineer, you know, white Europe out of existence. You know, I mean, yeah, Mercer's Leninism was a horrible system. It was brutal.

It persecuted people. It was hostile religion. It was, it persecuted people who were deemed politically unreliable. viable. It was anti-human. I'm not acquitting that at all, but again, it didn't aim to tear out the root of cultural life and carry out a programmatic genocide, quite literally, you know, by annihilating, by annihilating European culture at the root. That's exactly what America aimed to do. And in more concrete terms and in more crude terms, not crude in terms of, you know, disreputable or something, but just in kind of more basic terms. Also,

you know, Yaki pointed to the Prague trials, the Prague trial relating to what came to be known as the doctor's plot. You know, where these 12 medical people were tried for treason and conspiring

against, you know, the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, and 11 of 12 of these people were Jews. Okay, a lot of them were involved with Zionism. You know, they, it was obviously the Warsaw, what was to become the Warsaw Pact, the East Block, it was obviously them purging, you know, the Jewish element from their leadership cast. And they weren't doing it on some quote-to-quote racial basis or something on sectarian basis. And their alibi was, well, you know, it's incidental that these people are Jewish, you know, we can't abide this kind of counter-revolutionary

treasonous activity, you know, it doesn't matter if, you know, it hurts people's feelings that, you know, there's certain, certain ethnic groups are concentrated in the ranks of these undesirable elements, you know, we're going to realize, you know, justice no matter what. But it was obviously, you know, a deliberate effort to purge Jewish influences from, from the ranks of the, of, of, of, of, a judge, raised in the eastern block. So if your notion is that, you know, as Yaqui's was, you know, that Europe has to be liberated from enemy influences, if it's going to survive, let alone thrive. And if your idea is that, you know, the traditional enemy of the West is, you know, is the Jewish diaspora. And that diaspora is their world of social existence. um is the progenitor of uh you know the most the the ideological tendency is most inimical to western survival um

and finally again if if you view europe's path to salvation and power political terms as you know a concord with moscow i mean all those things you know all the roads lead to moscow if you'll allow the metaphor i mean that was yaki's perspective you know the And that's basically shouldn't be controversial. I mean, the reason why the Soviet Union was dangerous, the reason why it was insidious, wasn't because it was going around doing the kinds of things that, like, the American government does today. You know, it's not, it wasn't trying to, it wasn't going around declaring that, like, gender doesn't exist or that, you know, you, everybody needs to breed, you know, everybody needs to breed into, like, one kind of, like, non-race. And, you know, you know, all, all kind of historical existences need to be eradicate.

you know so that some kind of like equity can be achieved or like nobody has a historical memory so we're all the same like that would never occur to the soviet union okay um that doesn't make them good guys but it makes them far far less dangerous to uh you know racial survival and and and kind of human culture in in any in any form than um that america wasn't is you know and i i emphasize the people that what what what the american regime does today this isn't something of like recent vintage you know it's not like it's not like the u.s. government was like doing good things or wasn't insane until like 1990 or something or until like 2016 like they've always been I mean the New Deal regime

from inception it was totally insane it had totally insane ideas it was always sexually perverted it always it always wanted to eradicate people's understanding of themselves as cultural um

um you know as culturally situated like it it literally plotted to genocide Europe and you know and drafted up entire treaties

I don't even like the sexual habits of Germans and how we can work utilize this to undermine their potential to breed I mean like this really really sick stuff you know and I mean some people can't accept that I mean whatever okay if people have some like vestigial attachment to America

like as a government I I don't care but they're They're not people I have any common cause with. And I think they're incredibly diluted if they insist on retaining that sensibility while also insisting that they're somehow right manner opposed to what is going on. Yeah, it's when somebody will bring up like you'll talk about El Ducche and somebody will post the picture of him hanging upside down. And this person is like somebody who's like pro America, pro, you know, would seemingly be on our side, I remind them that the people who did that to him are the people who are ruling over

you today. They're the, they're the same people. And you're just basically cheering on the people who. Well, yeah. Yeah, it wasn't a bunch of guys. It wasn't like a bunch of like good old southern guys who were like, we don't like Mussolini because he's a socialist and he's not keen to the Second Amendment. Like they were like, yeah, they were like out and out communists and not just out communist, but, you know, of the kind of the kind of Adorno and Gramsie type who were you know very much quote cultural Marxists I find that to be a troubling term I don't like it but

just for the sake of coherence you know that that's that's like the vernacular but yeah I don't I don't yeah I don't understand how I mean like it's like even even if even if you've got no affinity for you know kind of like European

ideological tendencies or even if you you don't like national socialism or fascism like if you don't like any of this stuff like why would you celebrate this destruction like why would you celebrate like europe being literally annihilated by by uh by communists and by these like crazy new dealers want to like eradicate the concept of race from this planet and and and view like man as some kind of like instrumentality to serve like good government i mean that's completely perverted but like i said i think it's

there really is uh like a bougie kind of fixation like really an obsession of like respectability and there's people they want to like purge them people people people are like ambitious in the wrong ways they want to like purge their own minds of like unclean thoughts and and and and and and and not hating fascism is an unclean thought so they they try and cope by saying like yeah like I hate the regime but you know I hate you know of Hitler even more and and and that's the worst thing ever like I mean I don't know I try I think I'm I think I'm somewhat empathetic in terms that I'm pretty good at putting myself

in the position of other people. I mean, just in like practical terms. I mean, that's, there's a heavily psychological aspect to political life, you know? And so I'm not saying I've got like great insights or something, but I have thought about this a lot. And I believe what I just indicated is like the source of a lot of that foolishness.

I got another question that was submitted before I do that, if anybody is watching on YouTube and they want to go up to the PIN comment, that connects you to entropy and you can do super chats there. All right. Someone asked, you mentioned a couple of times, but didn't get into it. Can you do a quick overview of the Red Army faction? Yeah, the Red Army faction or the Bader Meinhof gang, they were kind of unique because they were emergent in 19, Like in 1968, I mean, a lot of things happened of a revolutionary nature, including splintering within the socialist camp.

You know, that's when we talk about cultural Marxism, that's really what kind of the Euro-Communist and socially radical element kind of split off from Orthodox Marxist Leninism. Well, the Bader Meinhuech faction, they kind of had one foot in both camps. And as it turned out, they were very much a client act. of the Stasi, the Eastern Ministry for State Security. And they were very much kind of like the brainchild of Marcus Wolfe, who was an incredibly dangerous individual. And he was the

best intelligence man that Warsaw Pact had, in my opinion. He was the best intelligence man and the best intelligence organization. Probably fielded by anybody in the Cold War. But the Bader-Mindoff faction, they

Their notion was to basically render the Bundes Republic ungovernable through terrorist activity. You know, just in kind of conventional, the kind of conventional terms that Nazi actors under arms, especially during the Cold War, like going to the unique paradigm they're in, like for seated. But they also, that was during the period when, you know, Vili Brandt was seeking genuine reconciliation with East Germany. the idea was it was it was it was very layered okay because on the one hand on the one hand

the idea was very simply like strike a blow against you know like America and the in the buddisfair and and sympathetic forces you know within the federal republic but secondly it also gave people like brand like an

alibi like see these are extremists you know we have we're nothing like them you know we want to approachment with the DDR and the Soviet Union for peace, so this kind of thing will no longer be happening, which is really kind of brilliant, but they, um, they were very effective. And they, uh, they had, um, they had substantial contacts with a popular front for the liberation of Palestine, general command. Um, they, uh, I think they probably were, uh, I think they probably had contacts with the provisional IRA, although some people's, um, um, they, uh, I think they probably had contacts with

the provisional IRA, although some people's, I mean, that's debatable. And I don't want to start some sort of argument with people who have those kinds of sympathies. But that was basically the Red Army faction. And they folded their flag, like, officially in 1990, I mean, which goes to show. And people acted like this was strange at the time. But, I mean, the epoch, it should have made sense that it's like, well, I mean, these, this isn't some fake organization. I mean, they did have grassroots support, especially among, you know, the state. student population and younger people, but they very much were, like, at operational terms,

they were very much like an organ of the Stasi. And Horst Mallor, interestingly, he wasn't a direct action element within the Bader Meinhof gang, but he was a lawyer who worked closely with them. He ended up going to prison for, quote, Holocaust denial and, quote, promoting racial hatred you know a few years back and because like immediately after the wall came down like he he took up with the

the NPD you know which is the legacy party of the socialist party um so I mean there you go and like people like they're Spiegel which says incredibly stupid things

with alarming regularity they were like see this man's insane he was a communist and no he's anti-Semitic but it's like anybody with like a fucking brain like we just like explicated about about, you know, why a pro-Soviet disposition is what any, like, you know, quote-unquote neo-fascist would basically, you know, be disposed to. I mean, that's, and I, that's, I mean, that, that, it's just like a case and point. I mean, it shouldn't surprise anybody. But I, they, they were interesting, they were an interesting case and an interesting element, um, within the Cold War. But that's a good film about him called the Bottom Off Complex. I highly recommend it. It's got Bruno Gans and it. It's got Bruno Gans and it. Brito Gons. He's the guy who played Adolf Hitler and the Winter Gang.

All right. Musio Savola over here, $5 super chat. What does Thomas think of Stalin's War by McMeakin? Have you read it? Yeah. It's a shockful of data and that data is well sourced. Other than that, it's typical court history that was written in deliberate hostile dialogue with

Suvorov and Yakim Hoffman and it came out at the same time as Hoffman's bogg memory serves you know it's just the implication obvious that somehow the Soviet Union created the world's first like truly modern like warfare state it created like the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen arguably will ever see yet this was exclusively for peaceful purposes or for no reason you know when the Germans attacked for no reason because they're evil.

I mean, that's, I mean, that, I, maybe it's just me becoming cantanker as an old, but I think it's just me becoming a more rigorous and discriminating historical writer and researcher. Anybody who accepts that conceptual narrative is, it taints the entire rest of their research, even if they're facts and their data, like the raw data is good and worthwhile.

So there's nothing wrong citing those kinds of sources. And I'm sure people who dislike me or dislike the kinds of things I write will turn around and say like, well, you know, you're just, you're abolishing the fake value distinction in your own way and, you know, you're reducing history of polemic. No, I'm not, but you don't have to be like pro-fascist or anything to accept that the Soviet Union was what I just said. It was the first fully realized warfare state that was totally mobilized for war. it was animated by a doctrine of revolutionary warfare and exporting revolution and it was the single most powerful military actor on the world stage on the eve of barbarosa and this is the only way to understand the Second World War that was the catalyst of you know and as any military type will tell you um capabilities let alone forces in being

are never benign you know they only have one purpose that is to wage war and the capability to wage war equates to power in its most distilled sense and um power is the currency of politics it's the only currency of politics everything else is addressing um so a state that is more as a such a degree as the soviet union was not only is it never truly benign it is actually the percentage of the face the opposite. So J.M.R. Cowboy asked, was that the same Red Army, Wrangles, White Army fought against her a different one? What? We're talking with the Red Army faction? That's what I'll wait and see. But I'm going to take a question.

I'll take a question off of, off at Twitter from under your, your post. He said, someone would like to hear mention of, with A. James Greger brought up in faces of Janus the possibility that instead of Gorbachev, the USSR, would end up with a version of what basically could be called Russian fascism. Yeah, I don't accept that. And Russia's conceptual poll stars are totally different.

That's why I try to explain to people. When Moscow talks about, you know, when Moscow calls its enemies Nazis, I mean, first of all, Ukrainians are idiots so I mean they they'll run around like slaughtering Slavs on the order of some like crazy Jew and claim they're doing it like for the white race or something because they're

fucking crazy and they're morons but beyond that the Russians lost 30 million people fighting the Third Reich so like they're they call people Nazis and fascists as like a stand-in for enemy it's not because like they're pink-haired fat

girls who are into like lesbianism it's not because they're it's not it's not because they're like a bunch of crazy jewish people it's not it's not because you know they they listen to dead kennedy's records like it makes conceptual sense um the way a kind of a kind of nationalist authoritarian russia that would definitely be possible um but it wouldn't it it wouldn't look like it wouldn't look like musselini's italy did you know transpose the 21st century and it wouldn't even look like uh it wouldn't even look like this you know the syrian bath rule in syria like it'd be like weirdly russian its optics would even if only superficially be very much bound up with

orthodox christianity um the uh the uh the military would have disproportionate clout you know more than like you know the political cast which would kind of like neutralize any like truly political projects of an ongoing nature You know, like, it'd be, it'd be kind of like, it'd be kind of like 10 miles wide and, like, one inch thick, okay? Like, it's not to say it'd be, like, a weak state, but I'm talking in terms of, like, an ideological catalyst, there's, like, wouldn't be much there. Okay, I think Russia is, frankly, I think when Putin goes, either because he dies or, or he actually finds a successor that United Russia can live with, that's probably what you're going to have, okay, but it's not, it's not going to be, it's not going to be fascistic in any means. of a way and it's not it's not going to be some weird like eurasianism like Alexander Dugan like fantasizes about like that just not that would have no

currency you know and um and for there's something like they had to take off the former Soviet republics in central Asia like the stands to be kind of colloquial and like dumb about it like they'd have to be looking to Moscow for their cues like culturally politically and and strategically and they're like not doing that at all You know, like, Eurasianism doesn't have any legs. You know, like, it's like something cool that Russians like to talk about and that it says a thought experiment. It's certainly, like, not impossible, but that the Eurasian moment was the Soviet Union, okay? And like, it's gone.

It's not ever coming back. Here's another question from Twitter. How brutal was Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe? It always seemed to me that Stalin's crimes from the post-war era get brushed over by mainstream historians. no that's a great question and yeah i saw that on my timeline earlier this morning and it's stuck in my mind um the true true soviet brutality true communist brutality in the soviet union as well as in the states that emulated the soviet union reached zenith in the revolutionary phase uh the soviet union exterminated around 10 million people before a shot was fired in the second

world war you know these are political unreliables these were ethnic groups that that the regime didn't like you know these were people who uh as kevin mcdonald exhaustively researched and pointed out in his paper Stalin's willing executioners um which was very cleverly returning a certain goldhagen you know when you something like 70 percent of uh of the nkvd like direct action element was jewish during like the the the height of the revolutionary phase and these people just like suddenly accounts with people they didn't like whether they were Kulaks, whether they were like Belarusians, whether, you know,

there were people who, you know, a lot of radicalized, very, very vicious, you know, Jewish people underarms didn't like. I mean, this was what, it was neither truly organized,

nor was a truly scattershot, but that's, that's really where the bodies got stacked off. And it really wasn't, they're, they're truly it was, as Robert Conquest documented a Soviet death camp system. I'm not being colloquial

or using, you know, hysterical language or something. The really brutal aspects, programmatic aspects, after the day of defeat in 1945, the American authorities were just as

bad. You know, they they starved out millions of Germans. It was endemic and if not encouraged, you know, like just tolerated more than tacitly. You know, the Morgan's Out plan in a sense very much was implemented,

although not realized to its full extent as an invasion going to a strategic situation. But I'd say back to your question and the kind of four corners of it, the fourth population trend transfers, the literal ethnic cleansing of millions of German people from lands that they had occupied, in some cases, for a thousand years.

That was very much something Washington encouraged in some ways participated in the planning of directly, but operationally, it was the Soviet army and police who made that happen. um my opinion is that's the most uh kind of that's kind of the most like that's the strongest example of like naked brutality and i mean people will come back and say like well you know the the germans were ethnically cleansing um you know uh the soviet union and they were but it was a race war okay and there's a difference between that sort of activity underway terrible as it is incident to a total war and you know just perpetuating a programmatic campaign of ethnic violence after cessation of hostilities you know there's i i don't really think that the latter can be justified um in any absolute sense and it's it's not it's it's only what aboutism oh but the

germans did bad things as any place and also finally and i know nobody asked but i'm going to to stay weight my own take anyway you know if you're a man of the west um if you're pro white um and if you want your race to survive you have even if even if the third right was literally the most evil regime that ever existed you don't you don't you don't cheer on the ethnic cleansing of your own people i mean this is this is a brass tax stuff you know and um one doesn't need to be some sort of died in the old machiavellian to understand aside from that that you know

politics power politics does take place somewhere beyond beyond good and evil if you'll allow the overused you know kind of kind of reference so

you got a question here what was the deal with the Rosenbergs you said you'd talk about them in one episode but never got around to it I totally forgot about that yeah um no we can um i thought about having like just a dedicated like atomic age episode you know like beginning with um the proliferation of the bomb in nineteen forty nine 48 49 you know going through the the early cold war and um the new look and and you know

kind of when when every everybody in the national security apparatus said like you know it's weapons on the brain, like, through, you know, de Tots and then finally SDI. Rosenbergs are basically what they appeared to be. I think I certainly don't, they certainly should have been executed. I think at least Julius Rosenberg. I think Ethel Rosenberg wasn't, like,

I'm not saying she was just like a stupid woman or something. There's plenty of women who, particularly in radical politics, or very smart and very dangerous. I think Ethel Rosenberg was not one of those I think she was kind of along for the ride Okay, that doesn't excuse her whole liability But Julius Rosenberg He was kind of like an orthodox, like Jewish radical

Not Orthodox Jewish I mean like an Orthodox radical who was Jewish Okay, but he I think I think in some ways Though his From what, from his own testimony Just to his own intimates

Not under oath or anything I believe his notion was somewhat like that of Chris Boyce. The guy was the subject of the Falcon and the Snowman, although Boyce, obviously, is a far more sympathetic character. I believe aside from Rosenberg's own kind of socialist leanings, he believed that in order for stability to reign, you know, the burgeoning kind of bipolar system

and prevent, you know, the onset of another round of just massive, you know, interstate violence, there would have to be, you know, a true balance of forces between the superpowers. And that could only be achieved if, if Moscow had the bomb. You know, and again, like I said, like I, he didn't say this an open court or something or, you know, he didn't, he didn't raise this to the judge, you know, in the hopes that he'd be spared the gallows. These are the kinds of things he said to, like, his friends, you know, like reading between the lines. that was why the Rosenberg became these kinds

why the Rosenbergs became these people who were held out by the usual suspects that see this this horrible anti-Semitic lynching of these people that's incredibly weird because they're about the least sympathetic defendants I can think of but that's there's like not really anything there I mean it's like Leo Frank

like Leo Frank was a child molester and a murderer but like you're supposed to feel bad that he got lynched because apparently it was terrible that this guy who, like, victimized little kids got lynched. I don't, I don't quite understand that, but it's something,

it goes to sort of the kind of, like, moral bankruptcy of the people who come to the defense of these personages in history. Like, I'm not saying that, like, lynching is good. I think he's a frank. I mean, I believe in due process in a real sense, but I also

don't feel bad if child molesters and people will harm children and get killed, okay? And anybody who makes it out, like, there's some terrible you know terrible instance of a of a of a rough justice i mean i'm not and i'm not comparing selling nuclear secrets i'm honestly like they have nothing at all in common okay and um i can easily see myself like pan passing nuclear secrets not to ivan but uh you know i'm the last man is going to sit here and and act like fucking prissy about such things but um you know if there's in the

the modern era, there's really no clear case of high treason than what the Rosenberg did. And what the Rosenbergs did, except maybe for the Cambridge 5, it just in terms of the sheer kind of like gravity of their ongoing espionage. But yeah, there you go.

I realize that was long-winded. But the short answer is like there's nothing there. It's exactly what it appears to be. You're supposed to feel bad for Jewish communists for some reason because you know, any time they face consequences it's because of need anti-Semitism or something. I just want to remind people that in the pinned comment in the chat,

you can do super chats over on entropy, but let's get another question from Twitter. In one episode, you mentioned the Marine Corps and Air Force were able to adapt to Vietnam, but not the Army. Can you elaborate? Sure. That's a great question. The Air Force was interesting. And it was very dynamic in that era.

We'll start the Air Force first, okay. They became an independent service branch. People like Billy Mitchell, even before, you know, the Second World War, I pushed for that because there was an understanding that, you know, Army thinking had become kind of stagnant, okay? And also, it just, the Army was not particularly comfortable with new technology. They just weren't. That's not a political take.

That's a fact. But it's also, too, it was like the science of aviation, and particularly military aviation, it was something everybody was learning by doing. You know, like when Curtis LeMay for started flying in, you know, in the inner warriors, that's when pilots were still, like, flying by, like, visual sight of, like, you know, terrestrial land features and things, you know, and trying to match it up to, like, a paper map. Okay. Okay. Now, the Air Force, obviously, by the time the real escalation got underway in Vietnam in 65,

the, there was, you know, the Air Force, they'd been, their bread and butter was strategic air command, And that also is what they owed not just their lobbying power to, but also their kind of preeminent position in the kind of American defense establishment structure. They were able to pretty rapidly repurpose to a conventional role, but a conventional role that was difficult to realize. you know, these Arclight bombers, these B-52s, those were purpose, those were, those were, those were, those were purpose to attack with nuclear weapons, okay, in a strategic capacity. Switching them to a conventional, repurposing them to a conventional role, you know, in a conflict like Vietnam, where frankly, until, you know, 1972, you didn't even. really have like true combined armed set piece battles where they can really kind of shine um the fact that they were able to you know kind of wreak so much havoc on uh the ability of the north vietnamese uh not just reconstitute forces but you know to uh to sustain infrastructure not just

command of control but you know any any and all kind of basic infrastructure relating to the war effort that's pretty remarkable and um it's also the uh um it was more more naval aviators but some air force aviators too they got engaged over the battle space um tactically and uh vietnamese pilots are pretty good and they're obviously were soviet pilots like flying sorties too that's a brunt dog fighting back you know that that's the whole reason why uh why um you know taggle air command like uh you know got got a boom and that's why uh and that's why in the naval side like you know top gun got created in the first place. That's what I meant about the Air Force.

I think it's in the Marine Corps. The Marines, they were used to doing more with less just because of the nature of their missions and deployments. You know, the small wars manual was written by, you know, officers and NCOs who'd been fighting in Nicaragua, like in the 20s and things. The Marines better understood how to, like, you know, the need for, you know, kind of like, in the field diplomacy with indigenous elements like stuff like that and the um the u.s army you know after world war two it was just like singularly obsessed with firepower you know and um

like look what they did in vietnam it's like uh you know let's let's show up as heavy as possible let's have guys wearing fatigues that we'd have them wearing in the inter german border you know like carrying around like rations and metal cans you know uh and toting like 60 pounds worth of gear on their back in like 110 degree tropical heat like that's not i mean that that's the whole thing's absurd like army special forces totally shine you know but that's but this was before like socom was like was like bros with like goofy beards and sleeve tats who like think that they're the police or something like this was when like these guys were like genuine weirdos or like they're like their own branch the military and um they were really they were really up on some

progressive and dynamic like tactical doctrines that's what I meant and I think that the 1960s army was actually pretty squared away okay they were very very well suited to fight Warsaw Pett but they were not they just lacked like operational flexibility in a way that was needed but it's just I mean the US Army the US Army had a hell of a time in the Far East one of the reasons I like the way the thin red line Nobody likes that movie, but I think it's a dope movie.

Not just I love Terrence Malik, but it's about the U.S. Army in the Pacific, and, like, nobody thinks about that. And, you know, it's all about the Marines and the Navy, and that's where, like, a lot of naval and Marine War legends were made. But the U.S.R. in the Pacific was Fubar, and, like, in all kinds of ways. Not just because it was viewed as the secondary theater, but it's just because, like, the army was fucked up, like, fighting in Asia. You know, like, and they were, it's, they, they were not. like at the command level. I'm not talking about, you know, the guys in the field, like doing, you know, I'm not talking with the actual infantry men who were game as fuck.

But, like, the guys making operational decisions, it's like they didn't, it like didn't compute that, you know, this was not, we're not, we're not, we're not fighting Verdun or Bella Wood, you know, just with, against, against the Japs, you know, it's not all the same. Yeah, that's what I meant. But I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a military, man.

So, I mean, look at me, obviously, okay, but I, I'm sure that, military sites will say i don't know what the hell i'm talking about but i i i mean whatever okay i mean that's that's my position i think i can back it off so uh over here on youtube uh vivacristore is uh he has a comment and then a question says i saw i saw b1 lancer flying low over chicago the other day thought red dawn was happening but it was just opening it was just opening day for the cubs no there they're there uh that That aircraft, as you know, I mean, that was meant to go in low, going fast, and strike superhardened targets.

And in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, it was a bad bitch. And the B2 was the B2. It was an immediate successor. It was a B1 on steroids with stealth capability. Yeah, it's a fascinating aircraft. And Ivan's answer to that was the backfire, or what Nathan's. called the backfire. It was,

its actual names that Tupilov something. But yeah, no, that's, you see, uh, you see some,

uh, you see some cool aircraft over, uh, over Chicago, man. So his question was, why was the Soviet Union and company so hostile to Freemasonry and why was this sentiment shared with their right

Higelian enemies? I'm not an expert on freemasonry at all. Um, What I do know about it is that people on the right always hated Freemasonry. Like in America, Freemasonry, like, is nothing. I know some people in the conference are going to be like, oh, bullshit. Like, they wrote everything or whatever. Like, I can even have a dozen, like, fraternal organizations that have way more clout than is now than the Freemasons in America.

Like, the Masons are actually viewed as kind of like lower, bougie, kind of trashy stuff here by a lot of people. they are i'm just telling you what i'm not saying i think that i'm telling you that's the way like a lot of fucking people look at it especially like social register types back when they had clout in europe is a totally different story the uh the freemasons reviewed by uh by um by the third rike as like rosa crucian types you know they're like these fifth columnists who are you know they're they're neither loyal to race nor king nor country nor kin you know they're they're they're They're, you know, they're basically, like, a bourgeois fraternal society that's intrinsically subversive, you know, and that is, you know, these people, these people can't be relied upon because their only loyalty is to, is this kind of like an odd set of beliefs, which in reality often is nothing deeper than kind of cover for, you know, ambitious social climbers to pretend as if there's, you know, some kind of deeper ethel. their you know to their covetousness um of station and things okay in terms of the russians i don't

have a good understanding of russian culture at all um i don't read or speak russian i uh i think i've got a good understanding of their political heritage and how their decision-making process in war and peace terms plays out but i i cannot tell you like what the russian take is on freemasonry or like why the ivan's like viewed them as insidious like why why why the german viewed them that way and this proceeded like the you know the National Souls with Revolution but why the why the Third Reich in particular like viewed them as like a an undesirable element like that's why there was a dedicated there's a dedicated police creepo department or directorate dedicated to like spying on

freemasons. And like I think in some capacity, like it endured after the war. Like, if memory serves, like, when, uh, when, um, when the West German, when the Bundes Republic, like, national police were restructured. And like, that's when like, GSG9 became this like badass special ops force. Like, I, I think I remember

reading something like, they were still, like, spying on freemasons and fucking with them and they made a bunch of people mad. Like, oh, this is like, you know, nuts use of redogs. Like, how dare you? Like, uh, but yeah, I don't, I don't have any insight of that, man. Like, you'd have to talk to the, the Russian fellas in our circles or some of the European guys. Where was the other, one of the other questions was, can you give your opinion of

Yuri Besmanoff? I don't really have one, because I haven't, I haven't, like, read enough of his stuff. Like, what, what, like, what, like, what specifically, like, his take on Peristrike on Glass Nost or, like, his character or what? like honestly about what's it there's a famous video in 1982 83 where he he's talking about how um it was a soviets who subverted the subverted the um yep the institutions and everything that basically everything yeah yeah yeah he's one of those guys who he the he the guys who yeah the peristrike of deception like the guys the same guys who did that like cite him a lot i don't the so

Union was basically what it appeared to be, man, from, especially from Brezhnev onward. Like, Khrushchev was kind of a wildcard in like policy terms. I don't mean like an ideological terms, but it, I mean,

like the subversion, since it was coming from Moscow, it, uh, in the, in the, in the, in the,

when the labor movement was, uh, was truly a national phenomenon with, with, with political, cloud manufacturing economy the terrestrial manufacturing like national economics was the order of the day you know um really until uh until 1960 they're about yeah you better believe that uh you better believe the common term and later common form they were they were totally insinuated

into that you know and there was major unions that were shot through with like soviet influence Okay, got a last gas bat was like the Welsh minor strike. So like the Kremlin was pouring a bunch of money into those efforts, okay? But that's the reason why, and again, I view it as a very imperfect signifier for all kinds of reasons. But I understand why people about cultural Marxism. Traditional Marxism is Latinism does not emphasize culture. Everything is superstructure. It's all labor.

It's all production. It's all capital. you know, it's all how people's conceptual horizons and social behavior and, and class and cast structuring, like, derives from labor and production schema, you know. So, like, if you asked, like, even the most radical kind of, like, traditional Marxist Leninist in 1950, if you, like, asked him about stuff like homosexuality or, like, feminism or, like, about race relations, you just, like, tell you, like, none of that is important. like these are bourgeois fixations or concerns and you know only the alienation of the you know not just the not just the exploited proletariat but you know the people who profit from it you know they exist also in debate circumstances and you know not not being not being invested in actual like you know power processes of production as humans need to be you know to live you know psychologically healthy lives you know they're drawing upon you know these these kind of super structural meaningless like ephemera like the surrounds like human life these are these things don't matter like that's literally what their take would be like they'd have no they have no interest they either have no interest in these kinds of culture concepts that we are so familiar with or they'd say you know that's just not important you know okay maybe it's interesting maybe it's useful maybe it can be

exploited to some discrete purpose but it's just not important you know that's that's the key difference so when these bircher types would talk into the 80s about how like everything bad that happens is coming from Moscow I mean that was like a fucked up perspective for all kinds of reasons and it

it's just like I mean not sensible and pregnant reasons and obvious ones but that's also just like not that's just not what like Sovietism was about you know it just wasn't talk a little bit about um talk a little more about latin america and how um why was the marxism of moscow why was um the way moscow ran things rent rent things so attractive to so many in latin america

i mean because the whole marxist leninist uh particularly leonist you read lenin's um imperialism The process that he describes, like in today's terms, the legacy of Marxism is global systems theory, you know, like Immanuel Wallerstein kind of stuff. Okay, even after Marxist-Leninism kind of lost its animating power and kind of context in much of the world, it's still, and especially kind of some of its successor iterations captured sort of the fascination of Latin America. because it very much was contextual there. Like Latin America was and is kind of this hyper-exploited primitive economic backwater. You know, that's like resource-rich in terms of things like agricultural commodities. And not really owing to any kind of conspiracy, but owing definitely to kind of structural design, it remains mired in this kind of primitiveness.

You know, owing to the kind of odd racial dynamics, there's like this incredible. sharp cast distinction you know like there's like pretty much every kind of cliche that you know from the Leninist specifically the Leninist kind of playbook of history that's described

that describes capitalism in punitive terms you know is like very is like plainly evident in Latin America okay and again not not for conspiratorial reasons but for you know the peculiar kind of somewhat tragic heritage of the region that's why

it's um and it's interesting you raise that um i was reading the the wilson center which i think is kind of abominable in a lot of ways but their archives are very useful and very interesting um when bush and skowcroft bush 41 obviously and baker and helmet coal you know we're negotiating with gorbachev particularly as regarded specifically was regard to what you know the art tree, but generally, you know, the kind of extencies related to ending the Cold War, something that Cole and Bush and Skowcroft also to Gorichov was like, look, like, however we leave this, you know, assuming that, you know, we can come to terms on nuclear weapons, assuming we can come to terms on, you know, a basically complete drawdown in forces and being in Europe,

you know, he's like, we need your guarantee that your satellites in Latin America are going to stop exporting revolution, you know, and obviously they couch this in, like, the language of diplomacy and in the language of American propaganda, you know, like subverting the democracies in Latin America. But this is very much on their mind, which is fascinating. And this makes sense. But that's, that's why. And, but there's also, I mean, like, Latin peoples are, they're, they're political romantics, man. You know, I'm not saying that, like, to make fun of them in a negative way, like, quite the contrary. It's like, and make some, like, effective partisans, you know, so you're going to, you're going to be able to get, you're going to be able to get a bunch of Cubano's or a bunch of Argentines or a bunch of Salvadorians, you're going to be able to get them to kind of export the revolution in a way that you wouldn't, a bunch of North Koreans, okay? I mean, let's be honest. I mean, it's like all those things. It's like historical. It's anthropological. It's, it's cultural. It's, dare I say, racial. I mean, that's why.

well you would mention before we started going live that there were a couple things you might want to comment on yourself is there anything you wanted to get out there i just i just yeah i want to i want to and we'll deal with this more to dedicate a pass on in a more current events discussion but i the degree of which the uh what people like Bush, 41, Skowcroft, Baker, Nixon himself, and, I mean, made a mistake, like Nixon played a key role in ending the Cold War. Like, the vision that they had for world order, obviously, you know, I don't agree with that vision, but there was something noble about it and something both pragmatic and developed about it. The degree to which this was just utterly sabotaged, deliberately thrown in the trash, so that, you know, we could have this kind of free-for-all in these states like Ukraine, and they can be turned against Russia as these kind of like suicide torpedoes, you know, with the ultimate purpose in mind of, you know, ultimately deteriorating Russia's ability to defend its. itself from such attacks, the point that, you know, it rushing to be stripped of its natural

wealth and looted. I mean, that's incredibly grotesque, man. Like, everything, everything about how what developed subsequent, um, to, you know, the Bush Baker regime is just grotesque. That's the only word for it. And it really is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it literally is criminal, you know, and that should, that's why I get so offended when these idiots, like, wave these, like, Ukrainian flags. Like when they're cheering on, like you're, you're cheering on destruction and mass homicide literally for no reason, you know, for the profit of a handful of incredibly evil people. You know, like there's the fact that anybody can look at that is like some good thing or that that's like preferable to like what was accomplished in 1990. It's just unconscionable.

Okay. And I realize it's important ignorance because these people don't know anything, but it doesn't make it any less disgusting um you know when i i behoove people i want to do a dedicated golf war episode because that that's a that's a natural kind of like book end to the cold war um not just like in linear terms but like in conceptual ones and that i want people understand why i defend bush 41 a lot i don't defend bush 41 because i like i like these fucking Yale assholes or because like I have something in common with social register types. I get

tired of that too. I don't like when people call me like a quote wasp it's like look at me like don't be fucking basic. Do I look like a wasp to you? Like if I wanted to be a wasp which I don't like I would never ever be allowed like in their environs. Okay like the fact

you know yeah there is like some sort of like tribal commonality between people like me and the bushes but it's like I'm gonna I'm not I'm not going to, I'm not going to out you right now, but your last name is like Norman dynasty. No, I mean, that's true. Like, uh, but I, I've got some people in my lineage who are like incredibly, like, prestigious, but we're also like unbelievably fucking trashy.

Dude. Same. Same. Same. But like, my point is, like, if I showed up it, if I showed, like, kinds of places that, like, the bushes hang around, like, unified was, like, flush of money. Like, I'd be, like, showing. that door. Even if I was like, even if I wasn't, you know, like, you know, even if I like got a haircut and was like behaving myself, I guess that's kind of my point. But aside from all of that, like, you know, we, we don't need to agree with, you know, the kind of conceptual perspective of like Nixon or Bush 41. But these guys were motivated by good intentions, you know, at least as much as intentions can be good, like in power political matters.

even if they weren't I mean like let's say let's play devil's advocate and say there's nothing good about this in like moral terms but it was it was incredibly ambitious and it was you know it was world transforming in a way that is laudable and on for it you know the the the kind of impact onness of things like that I think is is it represents like a good and in its own terms and the uh the fact that that was immediately succeeded by these like you know, by these conceptual illiterates and just, you know, like, literal like bandits, you know, just like bandits, mafiosi, like, you know, just kind of like the lowest of the low,

like, uh, what kind of human carry on animals? Eaters of the dead, literally. I mean, that's unconscionable. And that's, um, and also, it also, I mean, it forces a question as to what, you know,

what, what, I mean, you know, people fought and died waging the cold war i'm not talking i'm not talking with these fools in washington i mean like regular guys you know and this was this was this was this was in the time when you got you got a draft card and you got forced to do it you know what we didn't have like this like dickhead police department for an army you know like it was um you know like what basically like all the sacrifices that those guys made you know uh and they were they were they were a bunch of white Christian guys mostly that was essentially like completely fucking neutralized

among everything else by this by this kind of like you know Semitic crusade against you know Byzantium but yeah no that's all yeah this was really great man I hope everybody we got one we got a late we got a late question if you're okay with that

yeah it's from William S over on entropy yeah would NATO would NATO have been able to hold West Germany in a seven days to the Rhine scenario? No, I don't think so. No, definitely not. And that's what, that was, that raises an interesting point.

A game that scenario, many, many times, with a couple, with a couple different game platforms that I think are basically, the variables are, the variables they chose to code and when they coded them are basically accurate. No, the only thing. that was William Odom's big concern because

the only thing that would have stopped that onslaught is theater nuclear weapons okay and to hold to hold to hold Warsaw Aged armor in say

1985 in the North German plane and the fold of gap you know if you're going to you're going to start you don't have to start hitting them with grunge and pershing twos, okay, and what would the Soviets do? You know, would they, like, would they escalate? I mean, to countervalue with salt?

I mean, I don't know. But even if they didn't, it's like, okay, well, now the Bundes Republic is a nuclear battlefield. You know, I mean, that's, and that's somewhat pure, but I don't, um, no, I don't think. think uh i don't think um no i they the warsup pact would have uh worse up pact would have reached uh would have reached the rhine in five to seven days and uh and nothing could have stopped them the um the idea was um natal war planning was like late in the game i'm talking like kind of the final iteration of uh of um of um of natal war gaming was that uh the uh the uh American,

the British and Benelux tankers. Like the British and the Benelux guys, they were responsible for the North German plane, like American, like black horses at the fold of gap, basically. The idea was that if they could hold Warsaw Pact for 72 hours,

NATO could be rapidly reinforced. And and presumably like stage you know a counteroffensive that you know under best of circumstances would have been able to hold the enemy at the north at the inter-German border but it's a fascinating question

I highly recommend Russell Stofley's stuff on NATO and he he gamed a lot of this stuff with a bunch of former Mermacht officers it's really freaking cool but yeah that's a great question man I mean I love that kind of stuff. Yeah, Robert in the comments says seven days they would have been in

Rotterdam and Ant Warpon. No, 100%. They would have been chilling on the river era, like whistling at girls. All right, man. Do your plugs and we'll end this. I know everyone appreciate this. We got 126 people

watching on a last minute unannounced stream. So. No, freaking awesome, man. No, I, yeah, again, sorry, man. Like, I was feeling probably since I got I feel a lot better now. It's been crumbies and I got back from Lynchburg. And I should have announced, like, checked with you if you want to do this sooner.

But I'm stoked that people were happy with this kind of change in format. It seemed appropriate. But you can find me on Substack at Real Thomas 777. That's Substack.com. Probably most of the people who tune in regularly know that. The channel is on track. I've been apologizing. kind of inert lately because I've been I've needed time to get bad to people because I was feeling

really shitty but every like we're on track for like production and stuff and um a bunch of um a bunch of people have been donating to like help exploit the process like which is awesome and I mean like I said I include the caveat like if we raise zero dollars that is totally fine like nobody should feel obligated to you know to um to the donate you know hard-earned cash just for the sake, like, expediting, like, content production. Like, there's something's important in this world that we, too. There's something's not so important. Like, our content is not one of those more important things.

But, like, a bunch of people have donated, and that's, like, that's, like, incredible, man. And that, like, that, like, this is dope. But don't anyone ever feel obligated, man, like, 100%. Like, I'm not just being, like, gracious. But, um, we're still on Burbap. I'm going to disengage as the summer goes on. Um, but right now, that's right drop, a lot of stuff. Just kind of, like, housekeeping stuff, as well,

as like, you know, notifying people we're doing. It's real, all caps, R-A-L, underscore number seven, H-M-A-S-777. I'm still on T-Gram. I'm going to up my T-Gram game and get more active there, especially as I kind of like slide back from Burbap. I'm on Instagram. I'm on TikTok. I don't know TikTok is, like, fucking retarded,

but, like, a lady friend of mine, like, uh, she had the idea that, like, I can make some funny TikTok videos, I'm going to start like experimenting with that some and see only it takes them to like nuke me for like you know any number of things but yeah that's where we're at right now man

and um oh and on June 9th unlike some fucking people who'll go on named who like organize like really gay events where gay things go on and they like charge people like fucking half a stack to like go hear about gay stuff

like once a year or so like I see if people like convene in Shytown to hang out. And like last year we went to see craft work and it was fucking awesome. Like this year we're going to go see the murder junkies at Reggie's in the South Loop. If you can like scrounge you up like $15 and get here like you can go, it's like 15 bucks to the door. But a lot of people are are excited about that from what I'm leaning from the feedback. So that's June 9th. If you want to go like save the date and like I said last year we had a lot of fun man and we'll hang out and stuff too.

before and after the show um but that yeah that's that's all i got man for my plugs all right man i'm gonna stop the recording now and then uh youtube afterwards so uh thanks a lot until the next time yeah thank you man i want to thank everyone on youtube who showed up to uh at the last minute i mean this was uh more than we expected at the last minute and uh thank you for the the couple people who dropped the drop super chats i really appreciate that especially since uh youtube is basically taking away all my monetization and everything so no that's that's uh yeah they're the freaking vultures man but no this this was great man again thanks um thanks for um abiding the kind of changing format yeah just like i said a lot of people i mean not just lately but like since

we started um the series they they wanted like a Q&A kind of format so i figured that it would this would be like a good time for it so yeah this was this was great man