The Pete Quiñones Show - The Complete Cold War Series w/ Thomas777 - 3/3

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

5 Hours and 35 MinutesPG-13Here are episodes 11 through the Livestream Q&A of the Cold War series with Thomas777.The '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' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 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.

In ESB, we're tumonted to the Fubble. That's the fogg of we'll have brought to the country to the GONSQaeda on Ours Gaveachian-Valeworna through chishtas such as people the very much

the GUE. Not that's a little bit of Ourses 2,000 euro to doanskidl every year, on FUDD Nairn. Faye OU.S.

Bresha foe to the people at ESB. www. slash communities. Catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you.

Even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Cooper. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial

Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria, terms and conditions apply. Brokewagon Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. In ESB, we are chumontad of the Fubble. That's the fogg of WILEA, and talk to the Hurtzger's Coathe's value for the value of honour for the organisation, through chisdice to her public the Government. Not that, but it's a balance of €2,000 €2,000, the people every year

in the world. A few years. Foy Oursh Brescia for when the people at ESB.comaee slash communities. 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 that you were hosting me

as always. Today, I uh, an aspect of the later Cold War that has to be kind of 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 mistakes, some kind of neoconish, something kind of like paleo-liberal, 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 the ab... it's 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 really fascinating book but it's about the only guy I can think of who's written a dedicated book about like the post detente 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, you know, in a research and development

capacity for decades before that. But the perfection of those things, you know, I mean, including the internet. the survivable command and control platform. I mean, the stuff all came out of 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 have 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 and 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 this 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 right and it's big it's big not to write about the deep state in varying capacities you know I guess I guess because William Crystal or whatever

like, you know, in 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, it's that, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, why these things exist. I mean, some aspects are emphasized more than others. And some can attract budgetary pork more than others, you know, in the post-bular epoch, 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 came out of the Cold War, and specifically they came out of the strategic nuclear paradigm that, you know, the regime was, um, was structured to, uh, wage. What's, um, anyway, post-Vietnam, uh, I'm of the belief, uh, from, you know, 73 to, uh, to, to, uh, to 83, approximately grenade, Grenada was a, 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 1950s, I mean, realistically, with the exception of Germany,

which was owing to unfortunate accident of geography and geostrategic reality, you know, 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-Leninist state.

We want to live like people doing 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 of Tulluric utopia and, you know, plenty. And really, we're just kind of, you know, miserable places to live. that didn't matter. It was foreseeable that America could become this kind of garrison state, literally surrounded by a third world,

including Mexico and Latin America, that basically was solidly in the Soviet camp was animated by a revolutionary impulse towards Marxist Leninism. And, you know, the United States basically

you know, like meaningful interdependence as 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 project hard power would have been profoundly compromised too. So it was foreseeable, again, you know, like that's kind of like what Millies was getting out the Red Dawn scenario. Like, yeah, it was silly to, you know, to envision, you know, a Spetsnaz perist shooting 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 margist leninism had lost in like

you know the the marketplace of ideas or whatever you know people who still bandy thomas pain or whatever and claim that you know through like the process of reason and like meaningful discourse we all like arrive with truth like that doesn't mean anything in in the world of power politics. And it certainly didn't mean anything amidst, you know,

amidst, you know, what a 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 poach, uh, um, enough proverbial butter as they needed to, if, uh, you know, they had, they had access, um, to the world as their kind of proverbial orchard as it were. So there's important to keep in mind, okay? Ready for huge savings?

We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th, because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal mustabs. When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trading boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Cooper and discover our latest.

offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. This is the world situation after America had drew from Vietnam. Now Nixon, you know, Nixon was the author of detente. I mean, Brezhner, have obviously had to be receptive to that but uh it really um this this really was a america was kind of determining the course of uh 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 as America transferred authority for the defense of the Republic of Vietnam

you know to Saigon you know 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 on their own terms. So that gave, I think, I mean, that was just practical, number one, I mean, there wasn't, there wasn't the political will, you know, to waive another Vietnam War in sub-Saharan Africa or even in Latin America,

you know, in 1973. But also, it kind of provided an opening to get the Soviets to the table without, 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. You don't have some hawks interpreted it that way. And the Soviets, what's important is the Soviets didn't interpret it that way. But the real lynchpin of detain

was the Salt Treaty, strategic arms limitation talks. I'm not going to bore everybody with 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 how many warheads and what kind of throw weight and megatonage could be packed on to those pre-existing platforms but it also limited 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 and including including including next generation early warning systems if this kind of tech could be frozen or if not frozen agreed upon to not be deployed that this would build in some kind of

additional stability which I think is incredibly fatuous but that's a different issue in any event this was in May 1972 by

1976 a few things that happened to undermine this Bergen-Degnaut 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 90th 73 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. 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 tapes. You can hear Nixon and Kissinger and Nixon lamenting, I'm not going to repeat the language because that would probably upset

the YouTube sensors 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, Bresnev 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 really this was profoundly serious alert status wasn't what it is like after the Cold War

and like post 9-11 it wasn't this like meaningless thing it had actual it had actual significance and it actually it material and concrete terms and 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 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 decided to wait and see it's not clear to me

according to a guy named Andre Danielovich who was he was a a colonel general or it's equivalent I guess that'd be a three star I think in the needle current arm like military guys in the comments correct me even wrong and I'm not a military but um

his testimony uh in the 90s that he gave to the Wilson Foundation and some of those NGOs types I think is instructive and I think it's credible what he said was he said that the 1970s 703 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. Is that the Soviet Union couldn't incrementally mobilize in that way? There was a binary kind of

alert structure. Like either you were at war or you were not. And when you were at war, either 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 um one of the issues that um one of the issues that uh 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 um um protocol was was triggered like very little could stop it you know and uh 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 alert structure was uh something that gave the the soviet general staff 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 She's a staff. So, I mean, these, Danielovich was a powerful man. And he also, he was, um... Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. Essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design.

They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in, boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services

Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. He was kind of the statistics and research man on the Soviet general staff. So what he did in 1976, and this was not accidental,

976 is generally agreed upon some some historians and some defense intelligence types posited in 1974, 74, 75, a handful as 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 nuclear war against NATO and or the United States jointly or severally

on on terms of parity as regards forces in being. They were always disadvantaged as regarded you know the strategic nuclear forces until then. You know, despite 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 parity but what Danielovich did was he oversaw the first computer analysis scientifically

um structured um quantitative simulation of a general nuclear war. Okay. Coding all available inputs, you know,

and the Soviet general staff was pretty uncorrupted by ideology. You know, this was not, you know, some kind of cheerleading exercise so that they could, you know, deliver, you know, some kind of hackneyed official statement, you know, to the general secretary and say like, you know, see, comrade, we, we can defeat the imperialist. There was nothing like that. very legit. And what

Danielovich's conclusions were, was that under best conditions in a general nuclear war, the Soviet military would be utterly powerless if the USSR was hit with a splendid first strike. They have no

ability to retaliate effectively. Even if early warning did perform adequately and 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 Pact, allied estates who were also targeted in varying capacities.

In the aftermath, it'd be virtually impossible for the Soviet military to rebuild and reconstitute critical infrastructure because over three quarters, the heavy industry would have been just outright annihilated. and finally Europe would would be reduced to a wasteland like even if you

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 and obviously that you know had profound implications for the Soviet Union as well. So what this

led to was a couple of things. The way to really understand why the Soviets 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. 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, that's a fact. Okay. However anyone feels about Russia, however anybody 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, 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 rate or in some way approximately caused by hostilities. I mean, 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 this informed policy. But beyond that, by, by 1979, you know, we're, under conditions of true strategic parity, I mean, potentially, we're talking about the window of decision-making, an event of a general war of, 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 weapon 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 you 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 even 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 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, you know, before there's even like, mobilization or before like early warning you know is even is even activated

you know so um these are not things that human minds can adequately identify interpret contemplate and respond to so we're talking about incredibly dangerous conditions okay

now I missed 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, rose to the ranks as well. After this 1976 war game exercise, the Soviets realized that, you know, they had to try and find a way to develop, develop a flexible response whereby, you know, they had the capability to fight and win a nuclear war, or at least, you know, 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. Okay. And this is significant to the final phase of the Cold War. But what remained paramount was, you know, was the ability of, you know, the ability to survive a smutted for a strike or to deterrent with, you know, a survivable deterrent. So another Soviet military type who offered his testimony, you know, in the aftermath of 1991, was a guy named Alexander Likovsky, a major general.

Likovsky was present pretty much when, you know, the inner Politburo of the inner Politburo of 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. Ready for huge savings?

We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the North West. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area,

and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.a.e. 4.n. Northwest. On December 8th, 1979, there was a meeting held in Brezhnev's private office. You know, Brezhnev was the general secretary at the time still, you know, and he would be until his death in 1982, but he was increasingly, you know, suffering dementia and all manner of health problems.

I believe, as I said before, that Andropov, Gromiko, who was the foreign minister, and Oostanov, who was then Secretary of Defense, and he was this big war hero. Like, when you think of those kinds 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 card out of granite or something. Like Ustinov was kind of one of those guys. but the issue at hand was the present situation in Afghanistan. And Adropov and Usenov in particular were gravely concerned about it. And what Lakowski says is he said that the way on drop-off and Adropo was in terms 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 in 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 Moslems

on the southern Soviet frontier like into their panumbra or orbit and the U.S. ambition is to encourage that sentiment you know, by whatever

means possible. Now the reason for this was among other things by 1979 Soviet war planners 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 were 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 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, their space center to this day

that still were 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, or what are 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, this is what Lakovsky stated. You know, I mean, fell back a lot on kind of appeals to Islamic paitism and couching Marxist Leninist kind of gobbledy gook and those

terms. The Kremlin had a hard time kind of discerning those signals. They thought that Amin was likely going to kind of court like an Islamist coalition around like a nominally Marxist led in his government

and then 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 forces to be based on. forces to be based there, including things like

pursing two missile platforms. And in the end, drop off, Usinov, 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, I mean,

he had no intention of doing that. He wasn't what he appeared to be, which was a basically doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, accounting for the kind of the peculiar cultural nuances of his country. But unfortunately, what was 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 Andropov 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've got to remove I mean

you know by by way of special action which everybody understood meant he's going to be whacked he's going to be replaced with with Carmel who was the Soviet Union's preferred for whatever reason the KGB said that this is the man

and we can rely you know it was just some kind of cypher 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

of power but uh 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 Usenov put this to O'Garkov, who was chief of the general staff, and he was outraged. And Usonov 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 O'Garikov said, that's not going to be able to stabilize a situation. And 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, or you were to teach the poet girl?

And reading between the lines, Ogarkov 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 basic capacity. 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, you know, which was in drop off by that point, Grameko and Oostinov. And this was a totally unofficial meeting of hand-picked officialdom.

You know, this didn't go to the Supreme Soviet. This didn't go to some, you know, officially convened subcommittee of the Politburo. There wasn't even any record of it other than the notes of the meeting that I just referenced. Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shelf voucher or a spend-anywhere card? when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favourite retailers

or choose a Spend Anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use and totally flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit OptionsCard.I.E. today. On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee.

Christmas nights at gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar. Savor festive bites from Big Fan Bough, expertly crafted seasonal cocktails and dance the night away with DJs from love tempo. Brett take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com.

When And drop-off died, apparently the notes of this meeting were in a safe. every Soviet general secretary had a personal safe and when he died it was opened which seemed strange almost like mafia like in my opinion I'm not being corny I mean like quite literally

when Brezhnev died I think he had like $10,000 in American cash which at that time was a lot of money he had like he had like some sheba's regal or some kind of like mid-shelf like brand of American liquor

and like a bunch of personal effects. And Dropub had a whole lot of... He had a whole lot of fairly sensitive stuff, including apparently the notes from this meeting, which was the only documentation that had even occurred, which is crazy because the Soviet Union... The Soviet Union was brazen. The Soviet Union in some ways was...

It didn't respect convention in the international system. You know, stuff like the downing of flight, 07 and other things, but they were obsessed with their own 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. Um, this wasn't this ordinary, I mean, the Soviet Union was secretive and paranoid, but like not, this isn't how they did things. You know, and um, when, uh, when, when even within the

the inner party, literally, you've got that kind of like mistrust. So you're resorting to this kind of ad hoc decision making with kind of like a mafia codery of officialdom who are loyal to like the defecto

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, catastrophic decision making but also it means the proverbial center cannot hold. And I'm actually someone who thinks pretty highly of Andrompah,

within the bounded rationality of, you know, rather the amoral, you know, within an amoral, purely amoral discussion of power of 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 had to do with critical judgment relating to the, you know, relating to the nuclear paradigm, you know, and the need of the Soviets to protect at all costs key command of control infrastructure in Asia in order to survive a bow from the blue assault. and preserve a survival 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 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 um 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, the 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 started 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

coterie 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 and 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 gonna I'll I'm gonna 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, uh, AWACs aircraft, we're 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, Well, the President of the United States is the President of the United States. You know, he's the sole national representative of the people of the American people. Secondly, Article 2 confers upon the President, you know, the Power of 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 patently 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 that'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 8586 but a list of a designated national command authorities what's called national command authorities there were 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 was 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 line okay designated safe houses somewhere on military bases some were purposed structures that were designed and built for this purpose that they could be shuttleed due

to survive the initial assault. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together, we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.e.4 slash Northwest. Employers, rewarding your staff?

Why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card when with options card you can have both? With options card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favourite retailers or choose a spend anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, It's easy to use and totally flexible.

They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit OptionsCard.I.E. today. They were to report in to a SAC NORAD every day as to what they're, you know, as to their goings, coming some goings. When they left town, you know, they had to report like every six hours or something. I mean, this is a revolutionary system.

Okay. Carter also, that was president was directed 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 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... This was the end of Daytona. This is America saying that, you know, if God forbid we go to war with Warsaw Pact 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 reasonable. You know, so the idea is, you know,

civilian control, as intended and demanded by the Constitution, is going to be guaranteed, guaranteed, you know, 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 win. We're going to fight to win a nuclear war.

National Command authorities are going to seek to end hostilities as quickly as possible, if that is possible. But there's nowhere this horse shit. 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, we're in a wage total nuclear war against you. In kind

and drop off who is becoming more powerful you know, pretty much every day in the final months of the Brezhne 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 an imminent attack or something, but that's pretty much exactly what the German Reich did, what the Kaiser Reich did, what, I mean, 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 true 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 what I mean? It's not and, you know, one of the problems with these treaties, however well-intentioned they were, like salt and salt too, which was the cabalos was put on that by the invasion of Afghanistan, by the way. And then later 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 the Cold War was unusual conditions. But, I mean, 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, it's with deeper parodies is that, yeah, a lot of this stuff. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.n. Northwest. Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff, with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free. And even better, you can spread it over five different occasions. Now's the perfect time to try OptionsCard.

OptionsCard is Ireland's brand new multi-choice employee gift card packed with unique features that your staff will love. It's simple to buy, easy to manage, and best of all, there are no extra fees or hidden catches. Visit OptionsCard.orghumed today. That made nuclear weapons more accurate, more deadly, more powerful was because guys at Los Alamos, or guys in Kazakhstan and USSR, are you know we're like developing you know weapons purpose tech to do that but other stuff

like command and 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 you can't just say like we're going to we're not going 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 they were coming up on about an hour we'll get into that stuff next time as well as

Aval 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 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 yeah yeah

thanks man I really enjoyed this yeah um blogs yeah for the time B you can find me on Twitter I don't know how long it'll last at Rio underscore Thomas 777 I really

launched a telegram channel. Just look for Thomas 777 or 3-7 Mafia. You will find it. I'm going to be more 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 the podcast is. Real Thomas-777.7.com. 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 frankly I don't know about video production at all. I promise it's coming imminently, hopefully by next week, but it's coming. And that's Thomas TV on YouTube. But for Thomas TV, the first T is a 7,

you will find it. That's all I got. All right. Until the next time. Appreciate it, Thomas. Thank you, Pete. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekina show.

I've been waiting for this one, part 12, the Cold War series. What's happening, Zamas? 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 the strategic paradigm in Reagan's first term, because that's essential to understand really the final phase of the Cold War. war and the reason why 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 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, you know, kind of the zenith of nuclear war technology as it was in, you know, that can't be overstated. And this idea that, you know, just cooler heads could present. veil, you know, to invoke Curtis LeMay's kind of aphorism. That's not really possible when you're talking about, you know, certain technological variables, as well as certain, you know, as well as 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 chief executive or a general who's got a great deal of um 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 hesitation it's just not possible okay it's that's not the way it's not the way that's not the way human systems work um and that calls for certain remedies um 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 in terms of production modalities, in terms of how people at scale, perceive information, and develop political sensibilities, which totally changed with the advent of television and the ability to broadcast, you know,

over and across thousands and thousands of miles, and quite literally turned the world into one place. in terms of, you know, the concepts being, you know, asserted. 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 Norfolk. Norbert Weiner.

Okay. He published a book called Cybernetics or Control and Communication and the Animal and the Machine. That sounds very strange, animal's kind of science fiction-like, but Winer was a constantly serious person. He wasn't some crank.

And he coined the term cybernetics. And within Winer's vernacular, as cybernetics point 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 operator at least, you know, at least to initiate machine processes, you've got to take care, you know, to structure how that relationship ensues and how it's sustained throughout the duration of processes. Okay. there's got to be mutual intelligibility, you know, between what the human mind is telling the machine to do.

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 whiner 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 um the there was not a good coupling um 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, you know, that the human couldn't keep up with without significant pain or sometimes at all. You know, these machines often were dangerous and even when functioning as intended, you know, they harm people.

You know, and that's not, 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 showpoints and it's also going to hurt people, which itself is not good. I mean, I think we can all agree on that. But also, it's going to really going to sour the human operator's view of the machine. You know, and even if only subconsciously, even a very duty-bound or conscientious person

or a true believer, you know, particularly somebody in a military role who... Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.Northwest.

Employers, rewarding your staff? Why choose between a shelf voucher or a self-foucher or a Spend Anywhere card, when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's

favorite retailers or choose a Spend Anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use, and totally flexible. They can even re-gift

or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit OptionsCard.comptus that rule they're in. You know, if this machine causes them pain or difficulty or frightens them or, you know, 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. So what Weiner 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 to be, you're talking about, You're talking about being user-friendly, okay? I mean, nobody used those terms then, but 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 structurally. machines like we would 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 it couldn't be something totally alien and um you know to what i mean at the end of the day you know like the human brain is just an incredibly complicated

um highly evolved like you know uh like feedback mechanism the purposes we're talking about okay i mean 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 wasn't just a way of, you know, kind of guaranteeing, you know, maximum efficiency, you know, in terms of 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. element in terms of, you know, or in terms of design engineering. Okay.

And I think it goes out saying he's right about that. If you, if you cut like the brass tax with guys like Steve Jobs were talking about, you know, 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 Winer didn't just make. make these things up. I mean, there's an intrinsic, there's like an intrinsic existential reality to these things he was positing. 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 postulate's therein. That was really the earliest, that was really the earliest discussion of, you know, automated navigation, analog computing.

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 forebearer of IT as we know it um this is the first time people talked about AI in an applied capacity um it uh it led to neuroscientific modeling and most importantly uh viner Reiner was always um was always uh he was always emphasizing the importance of communication and communication regime and also like physical structure like across distance that was integrated that was reliable and most importantly that was survivable okay and it's almost importantly

not just as a 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 in the final in the final 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 events in terms of crisis resolution or you know um the deterioration of of of remedial strategies you know

in the general war but the um the uh it's very clear to you know both it's even people who uh even people who write pretty good histories of the late Cold War. 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 a hard power terms but but it just in general terms it really orbited around you know america's nuclear capability uh its ability to wield dance 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 have been courted quite successfully as a strategic ally this was uh this was the variable or set of variables that everything revolved around between the superpowers okay so there's that too um even uh it just the existence of 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, you know, some of the things Brezhnev said before

he lost his marbles and, you know, about the Soviet Union must avoid, you know, a general nuclear war at all costs. I'm sure that he meant that. I'm sure Reagan, like, corny and kind of made for sound by television that some of the things he said in the matter may have been, I think he earnestly believed those things. But moving on, the way the Soviet Union responded to this emergent strategic landscape was very interesting. 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 even America 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 setting of the role of general secretary. As I've said before, I believe he himself, Grameko and Usenov, were very much kind of the strifect of the concept of shadow government. but he was the eminence behind the KGB really for the duration of his of his of his life okay um and

on strategic matters um all in sundry in i can tell you that in 1981 uh you know the endropo was the key decision maker and those in his immediate orbit what um when with this intelligence operation was uh called project rion or ryan literally ryan it's an acronym it's an acronym 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. And drop off addressed key members of the Politburo as well as the general staff. and he said, look, you know, we're losing the Cold War on key fronts, you know, political and technological, that very much nullify or the advantages we do have. And one of those fronts was in computing. I think there was less than a thousand computers in the Soviet Union in 1981. I mean, you give you an idea, which is bizarre. When 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 the kind of formal logic that they had in America, like, really built, you know, like the kind of like early, like, analog computing industry. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest.

We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your air. area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.4. Northwest. On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee Christmas nights at gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out.

at the Gravity Bar. Savor festive bites from Big Fan Bell, expertly crafted seasonal cocktails, and dance the night away with DJs from love tempo. Brett take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com.

Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. But that's, that warrants its dedicated episode, like how, um, uh, how computing in the Soviet Union really was it really was sabotaged or like interseen rivalries within the design bureaus you know and you can't create a high-tech economy, you know, based on a central plan. I mean, I mean, you can't base a traditional manufacturing economy on a central plan. But particularly you're talking about high tech and IT.

I mean, there's just no chance that it's going to produce what's required, you know, in order to meet the needs of, you know, of nuclear war command and control planning. But with what they did have, what, what Project Rion aimed 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 from the United States and NATO, and determine when these indicators could be relied upon that, you know, to, 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 10 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 impossible to spoof it it is you know like before um before there's any any, where there's any command and control indicator in America in 1981, you know, that strategic air command, you know, is going to scramble its heavy bombers, you know, that the Minuteman missiles are about to emerge in their silos. Like, you've got to be able to identify the variables before there's any actual, you know, command and control indicator. which, I mean, it says a dawning proposition, I mean, it doesn't, is almost comically inadequate. But it also, it creates a very dangerous circumstance. If you've got to be able to identify evident 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 raises a difficult question. You know, it's like, okay, let's say that there could, let's say attack indicators, you know, codable attack indicators could, in fact, be reliably identified. And that there was a machine that, you know, could pretty reliably

evaluate these things and could, I'm stillifying this for the sake of the 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, it where you're running into a kind of paradigm where increasingly, like, the winner 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, just perverse incentives to attack even when not under imminent threat, if you follow me. Well, is this wasn't any. anything new at the time. I mean, Ellsberg talks in his books about how, you know, 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 on 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 D. Ripper 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 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 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, you know, multiple warheads, you know, being slammed onto a 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 the opening, like, the opening sequence where, you know, they're running this command post-exercise, you know, and one of the misleaders won't turn his key.

That was part of the issue. But then in the movie, 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 gotta know he's gonna know he's gonna assault him before he does you know which he was there was like gallows humor but it's also not entirely inaccurate i mean that's that's what was changing things plus the um you know like i said the in nuclear war if you're under just being able to identify that an attack is underway characterize the nature of that attack then determine a response um based on survive surviving forces or probable surviving forces

and then giving the order to retaliate. In 1960, you probably had about an hour to do that. Okay, in 1981, you had 10 minutes to do that. You know, arguably, you had five minutes. Like, by the time the Soviet Union fell apart, its basic assault strategy was going to be, it always parked 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-launched 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. 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. Like I said, 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 a, in an American um in an in an American defense um capabilities you know vis-a-vis Warsaw Pact that's what that's what changed and plus the uh you know the I mean that's the problem with anything designed to preserve the um it 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 limit the number of platforms,

those platforms will become more efficient, will become more effective, you know, the killing technology. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person, so together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community.

Find out more at airgrid.com. On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee Christmas nights at gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar. Savour festive bites from Big Fan Bell, expertly crafted seasonal cocktails and dance the night away with DJs from Love for. tempo. Bread take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. We'll become more and more catastrophically utile, you know, things like this. and plus two the 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 uh what was a was an orbital bombardment delivery mechanism i mean it was it was it was it was uh

it was other things too, but, you know, that, that's, that was first and foremost its role. It wasn't, it's role wasn't to take, you know, civilian schoolteachers into space to do experiments on goldfish and zero gravity or something. But, um, these are the things that were kind of destabilizing what had been, um, I mean, the, the paradigm was never truly stable. That's why what people say, but, um, it was becoming unmanageable, like, owing to these, um, owing to these, um, owing to these variables um this really reached the zenith in uh 1983 you know there was the there's the able archer command post exercise in 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

bi-annual exercise called Reforger which was military short end for return of forces to Germany it was this it was this mass military exercise wherein the forces in being

in Germany and there's 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 those forces in being deployed to Europe 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, actually, on the logistics side and the command of control side, this actually was important operationally. And it also demonstrated political will to the Warsaw Pact, and that was important. What ABLER. 383 was a concomitant with Reforger.

It was a command post-nuclear war simulation. And it included even civilian chief executives. You know, like Margaret Thatcher, like went to her, you know, went to like the designated, you know, know uh um fall out shelter you know uh the uh helmet coal um with similarly like disappeared 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 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 russians have been attacked many times or the auspices of you know peaceful military exercises by their enemies so there's that but then also um pretty much every indicator of an imminent bolt from the blue nuclear assault

was emergent in uh the able 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, 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 to. time how fast it's going to be and what stuff it's going to entail in a real war situation. So, yeah, I mean, 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. that it's both instructive as to you know, not how tense things were between, 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. 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, you know, kind of prompted by people like Casper Weinberger and a lot of the team B types.

Reagan had an idea, Reagan, he greenlit the deployment of the person, too, 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 if 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 the continent. It was not deployed at all in depth. And specifically in Germany, looking at a map of NATO 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 things. But it was also, you know, the understanding 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 these Pershing two platforms, which are not only, not super hard and they're totally vulnerable. I mean, there's no such thing 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 if it's not a survivable

platform, you know, so the Soviets 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, anybody who understands these things and understands what the implications, these indicators were, you know, anybody looking at this on the Warsaw Pact side would have said, you know, these people are basically preparing a wage in nuclear blitzkrieg, you know, and there was some truth to that, frankly. Kind of the genius of Reagan, if you want to

give them props for something, and I'm not any kind of huge like Reagan fan in history. But what what Reagan's State Department did was they said, well, you know, we'll remove

the Persian twos from Europe. You know, if all theater-based nuclear weapons, you know, NATO-Morsaw pact, if we agree to like remove all of them, you know, but that's the price essentially of, of, 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 masked SS19s. those are one of those um those one of those physically huge uh missile systems you know that were based on trucks but it's got brilliant in its simplicity those mobile launch vehicles they the so we could move them around every day like literally so it's like it's like the one like the one from the movies like the one from the movie spies like us guys yeah exactly um exactly yeah that's I saw that movie I saw that in the theater with my mom and a little kid. That's hilarious.

But it's actually an awesome movie. But yeah, the air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans.

Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together, we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.com. North West. On the many nights of Christmas,

the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee Christmas nights at gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar. Savour festive bites from Big Fan Bell, expertly crafted seasonal cocktails and dance the night away with DJs from love tempo.

Brett take and fuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. But the Soviet idea was they were threatening Europe with annihilation with these deployments. And they were doing it to basically decouple Europe's national security policy and the respective NATO states from that of America,

basically saying, like, look, like, you know, if, uh, if you avail yourselves to uh to nato um and the united states you know 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 um western europe as long as that indoors i mean it was and you know deployment of the pursing too was a way of of rooking that that um that ambition um so it's more complicated than just Reagan being you know some gonna it's not a hawkish uh there's not a reckless hawk um and it's not just a matter of uh you know pentagon types and defense intelligence types saying well let's spoof let's spoof Ivan you know to the brink and see what he does i mean there wasn't a aspect of that too but it is um it is um it is

It is slightly more complicated. I'm more than slightly, but it, I got to pause when it's a brief on my water. I'm really dried out. Is that okay? 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, Yaqui's 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, 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 it accounts with Gorbachev. But all these things were a process and, 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 general. nuclear war. In 19503, 9052,

952, 19602 in Cuba, 973, you know, in the Mideast War, 1983 with Able Archer Reforger and the emergent, you know, deep parodies that

you know, gave rise and drop-offs Project Rion. Like, this would be coming unsustainable. and more and 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. And Gorbachev gets kind of a bad rap.

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, six, the planet. Okay, like a, 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 and it's planned economy is different than, you know, globalism. We know it. But, you know, about half the planet was reliant in some way, you know, even if which just, you know, occasional grain deliveries, you know, or strictly, you know, military hardware to wage, you know, some ongoing, you know, some ongoing, you know, localized conflict.

You know, about half the, about half the planet was reliant on the Soviet Union. Just as, you know, the competing blogs were reliant on the United States and Europe. I mean, this was, I, in the preceding 500 years, there's nothing comparable to that. except, you know, the, except that the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And even that wasn't, like, it's 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 actually a learned guy. But the, you know, they're, and you got to look at, you know, you got to look at stuff, you know, not just, you know, in, like, Chichin and Dakistan, but also, like, you know, the Balkan Wars is 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 punctuated shock of Soviet collapse. But point being that it was getting, the conflict diet was getting, it was getting, it was getting impossible to control. And Gorbachev realized that the Soviet needed a way out of the Cold War. Okay. and

drop off because it drop off was the consummate realist 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 is this the way out of the Cold War

but I mean to say that to say that this was dangerous um 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 is the man of the of love 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 III happens. You know, I mean, that's, I guess people under, like, 45 or so, like, can't even conceptualize that. But it's, I'm sure I sound like an antagonous old guy, but be as it may. This also, this goes to show you how, um, how, uh, 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 the the uh the battle for central america you know uh nicaragua becoming a proxed literally a proxy regime of the ddr of the soviet union

you know the uh the the the the proxy war in chile you know which led to uh you know um Peniche removing, you know, the Soviets client in Alende, you know, the war in El Salvador. I mean, the Soviets are trying to rectify the strategic imbalance by carving out of a communist bloc on the continent. 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, 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, the, this is not a good thing. I mean, however you, wherever you fell on,

I'm talking about, you know, people who are saying, I'm talking about crazy, he's like Peter Arnett and like the the kind of the kind of crazy Karen is you know calling for nuclear disarmament and I'm talking about people are actually sensible whether you whether you love Reagan or not or whether you or whether you you know were particularly on board with the kind of cold or enterprise you know this was not the for the front of the Soviet Union kind of you know we talked about in previous episodes you know kind of becoming like the only true superpower because the third world is, you know, basically signed on with, you know, with Marxist Leninism.

So America is this kind of like, this kind of like fortress, garrar state. I missed a hostile world of, of, of tin pot dictators and kind of crazy, uh, Shaguarifera types. Like, that would not have been a good thing, man. Can I ask you something? Can I ask you something before we go? Yeah. 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, 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, um,

America is carrying out terrorist acts against its allies and Germany. Like even before that, it's like Turkey is a... Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together, we can create a more reliable, sustainable

electricity supply for your community. out more at airgrid.I.E. 4.S. Northwest. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Under-insurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.I.E. Forward under insurance, brought to you by Insurance Ireland.

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 Kissinger 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 um the kids are made that point even back then he's like what like what like so so so like NATO is 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 even if um even if you needed some kind of like in name only uh 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 willy-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 Shaghan cooperation organization is actually a pretty forward-looking alliance in all kinds of ways. You know, and 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 Pact still exists. Yeah. You know, this is Warsaw Pact. You know, any, you know, any, any, any, 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 country's natal,

and any contract and a treaty at the end of the day is just a permissive. contract. The express conditions of it have to be rational, you know, and there is not. And it's like, okay, an attack on Hungary against free as an 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's, it doesn't make any sense. And this, but part of it is just kind of the foolishness of the bureaucrat, like this idea that, you know,

neighbors exist for its own sake because the point of it is to just exist. And, like, it's just this awesome thing for reasons nobody can articulate. You know, 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 express conditions, like the Yalta, because, like, that's how America and the Soviet Union won World War II, Like, I mean, should Austria start invoking, like, con trees, you know, entering into the Habsburg Empire? Like, I don't, it doesn't make any sense. Oh, man. It's a clumsy way of preserving the fiction that 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, this is great good. Yeah, this is really good. I know you got to get out of town, so do some plugs and, yeah, do it. Yeah, thank you, Pete.

You can currently find me on Burbap, Twitter, that is, at Real underscore number 7, H-O-M-A-S-777. You can find me on Substack at RealTomass 7777. 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 i got when 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 draw that imminently when I get back. But for the next few 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. I 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 doing nothing, I just wanted to like put people on notice about that because when it happens, like, people seem to get upset. I mean, I appreciate that. I appreciate people I care enough about my content that they get upset. 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, it's a, you think they, I mean, realize that's like a make work, um, uh, you know, Orwellian bureaucracy. But you think they have 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 on 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 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 the channel promo so that people know that, you know, by April 1st, I'll have uploaded the first episode, you know, and 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 gonna are gonna 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 like permanently kicked off burbap again 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 on notice um about that but yeah well one of these days what we should do is we should go over that intro video and just have you detail like

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 so the reason we became like good friends but he basically asked me like what kind of movies where my he's like I know the kind of shit you're into but he's like giving you like have it as 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 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 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 And like I think people appreciate that because he's a really funny dude. And, you know, yeah, you'll, so you'll, you people get to meet him and kind of see what he's about. But yeah, the response to everyone has been overwhelmingly positive and I really appreciate that. And I believe it'll be worth the wait, 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 typing myself. And, you know, all we have to do is make sure that, you know, people 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've got to get on cozy.

It's like, well, I don't know Nick Fuentes. I mean, I like, like, like, at all. I've never, I've never spoken to the dude even by like, like, text or something. I'm not going to, like, presume, like, he wants my shit on his freaking platform. I'll ask him, you know, I mean, but it's, 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, you know, 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 you can upload directly pretty much unless you're trying to upload an entire freaking movie link thing. I mean, it's like I, all those 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 saturate a lot more than that, but it'll be, I realize I'm going to get ganged 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 they're like, as soon as it ended, I immediately deleted the video. Because, I mean, 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 done. There's this one dude, I don't want to drop his name because I don't want he seems like an apolitical guy and I don't want to like people start terrorizing him like Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest.

We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable

sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.com. North West. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee, a visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse.

Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with breathtaking views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness is Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com.

Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. He's like this, he's this kind of like crazy like, like horror and cult movie guy. Like he gets strikes constantly over just like total bullshit. Like literally like it seems like and he's constantly apologizing with subs. He's got him 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.

My point being, I mean, yeah, we're absolutely going to get terrorized like you are, but that doesn't matter. The whole point is, you know, like, I do have a YouTube channel right now that people kind of like YouTube'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, that 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 then.

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, who know how to, you know, kind of remain in contact. Yeah. Yeah, I've started, I've started streaming when I do my streams to Odyssey and Rumble and, um, immediately uploads a bit, shoot, you know, the dark side of the internet. And yeah, no, exactly.

Exactly. So I don't even know what, what do you want to talk about today? today last time we covered you know able archer um and uh you know the kind of command and control concerns um relating to the deep parodies emergent post detente because that 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, 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 did they taunt? 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, 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 an nuclear war okay i mean a lot of people were and um my mom always like i don't want to drop some highly personal weird thing my my mom was kind of like apocalyptic in her thinking quite literally and this didn't help any um 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 um and even a little kid, obviously I couldn't, it was, 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. Now, honestly, like, if the, if I'd been like a, you know, a guy pushing 50 in 1983, I frankly, like, wouldn't really care. I mean, it's not, that's not some fucking edge lord shit, like, legit. I mean, you just, like, learn, like, you just, like, You just like learn to, you come to terms with things and, you know, the 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 007.

What was KAL Flight OO7? KAL Flight OO7, it was a Korean Airlines flight, obviously, from New York City, yeah, from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, which in those days was the common flight pattern. You know, South Korea was a key kind of Cold War proxy client state, but, you know, this was not the South Korea of the 2000s, you know, the ninth largest economy in the world or something, you know. Other than in kind of political and military terms, the Rojordogne was kind of a backwater. So on these flights to Korea, there tended to be a lot of heavy personages from the national security establishment, the diplomatic corps, you know, these kinds of these kinds of, you know, communities.

and KAL 007 was no exception. What befell KAL Flight OO7? Well, KALO7 straight into Soviet airspace. At about the same time, we're talking within 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 protocol was.

You know, 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 KL-O-7, A Boeing 747, even at visual range, looks almost identical to an AWACs aircraft. Okay. And in those days still, for certain deployment of certain weapons platforms, you would advance deploy a what's called a MASSINT, M-A-M-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, 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 of control in Central Asia, you know and and then saturating them uh with um you know um with with with heavy bombers and and naval based weapons platforms would potentially you know uh would would potentially accomplish a splendid first strike in a bowl from the blue scenario um or in a uh in a general war scenario you know that would be that would be the way america would escalate anyway um 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.

Everybody died, of course. This was a huge international incident. It was almost comparable to 9-11, not in terms of the attrition and the lives lost, but it was incredibly shocking to people. On board, the aircraft was

Larry McDonald, the U.S. Congressman, who also was the chairman of the John Birch Society. And one of the power, he was Ron Paul's like mentor in Congress. Yeah, 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, he was like the man they love to hate. And these, these, these, uh, concert of caucus types.

He was kind of like their, their, their night in shining armor. And, um, you know, knock out. knock down, drag out, you know, congressional battles. But he was a, he was a Democrat. 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. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are of, vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in

person, so together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.Northwest. Ireland's largest award-winning light show experience is back. Wonderlights is now open

in three spectacular locations, Malahide Castle and Gardens, and Marley Park in Dublin and Photo House in Cork. Follow the enchanting walking trail that will captivate all ages as the night comes alive with dazzling displays and unforgettable moments. Who will you Wonderlights with? For dates and bookings, visit wonderlights.I.E. He, 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 packs 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's and you had some other personages who weren't elected officials, but, you know, we're very much insinuated into, into Bellway 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 its vision of, you know, of political. the ward around of the world and lo and beholding how does he die you know he dies with you know dozens of other people on this um on the civilian airliner that right yeah i think there's 269 people you know he dies with like you know hundreds of other people on this 747 you know

that's unsramed only blown out of the sky by you know soviet warbird um it uh it it really really really upset people and the Soviets in typical fashion um you know went into kind of you know went into kind of garrison mode uh and started claiming that first they claimed that this didn't happen at all you know then they claimed that was a deliberate provocation and the United States wanted this to happen you know so that you know they could um so that they could uh you know provoke a war um and that that kind of rhetoric itself i mean that that was grossly irresponsible i mean this is very very bad um the uh in the the united states in turn regan'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 evil Evil Empire speech March 8th, 1983 just almost exactly 40 years ago, as of a couple days ago.

And I don't know if people, it was not a long speech, and it hit really, really hard. 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, 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 decades 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 gotta say that this was in fact a great speech and it wasn't corny or misplaced and I mean people people are always accusing Reagan 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 kind of it was Ted Kennedy who coined the actual

phrase Star Wars to describe SDI which itself is moronic but um calling the Soviet Union the evil empire wasn't just a 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? I'm not saying that that was misplaced, I think that was entirely appropriate. Within the bound of rationality of the Cold War, 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 it's understandable in context why he would think that. Okay. And plus, I think it's just a damn good speech, okay? That's not foe, it's not that kind of cringe-soaring language that these, these kind of these 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 that can't be denied. It's kind of incredible to me that there'll be those thing, there's like middling speeches by like Churchill. We're 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 platitudes. You know, people hold this out as like just this kind of an 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 um 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 uh I can't Somebody will correct me if I'm wrong I believe that the 70s 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 used 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's era 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 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 any i mean first of all i i i got nothing but esteem for the vaughn 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 were victims of the war too and i don't i don't see how they could be construed as controversial and helmet 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 was in some ways, like Priscilla was to Elvis, you know, and the way she just aside 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 of. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.4 slash Northwest. For a post-war president, but there was a kind of Reagan derangement syndrome. You remember that? If it rains on Sunday, it's because of Reagan. Like if your cornflakes don't taste good, it's because of rink. Reagan. Like, everything that happened in the world

is like some work by Reagan. Like, yeah. So, 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, were and are cynical about the Cold War, even people who don't particularly, even people think Reagan was just some kind of like glorified

pitchman. I mean, that, that was a great speech. And, um, you know, it, I don't think it was gratuitous. But again, it did, it did sound like a war speech. and Dropov and You know Ustinov

Grimiko Chernenko I mean all these guys who constituted you know the inner inner party I mean they'd all lived through the war

with the German Reich I mean they They say they were sensitive to these indicators it doesn't even begin to kind of scratch the surface

of them you know the kind of depth of their fears of these things but that's um this is

what's important too to keep in mind as to why this this you know 1979 to 84 and 85 was so dangerous you know like what happened you know like what happened to detente what killed it

what what constituted detente in brass tax terms in terms of policy of uh you know the east block and um you know the west slash NATO and what what kind of treaty

um if not law because I mean 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 detain 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 in strategic terms. 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-à-vis Europe, I mean, that was That was an open-ended question. I mean, where did Europe stand? The 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 dyads. 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 would have been the end of Europe, quite literally. You know, it would not have survived. You know, or if it did, it would have been some sort of, you know, it would not have been, it would not have been Europe as we know it anymore, okay? This kind of brought, 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 anything relating to a detente treaty making um because they claimed that they supported the people's republic in china because they were the true like marxist leninist vanguard but other than that um every every member state in nato and the warsaw pact plus uh norway plus um you know um plus uh spain which i don't think was a 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 be to in 1973, the 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 1, 975. Now, this followed two years of negotiations

of this kind of tortured process wherein, again, 35 participating states plus the United States in Canada. Did I disconnect for a minute? No, you're good. Okay, I'm sorry, for some reason the freaking

your, my video kicked out. Okay, the Helsinki Declaration, it constituted 35 participating states. You know, all the, all the member states of NATO in Warsaw Pact, you know, plus Sweden, or plus Norway, plus Spain, the United States plus Canada. What it came, with this, 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, Jury 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 NATO-Morsop Act, refraining from the threat of use of force to advance 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, and hostile terms, and, you know, the affairs of the constituent states, either 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, always been struggling for legitimacy.

You know, they weren't even recognized as, as a state until the 70s by, you know, a majority of this planet. But the Warsaw Pact, or the Iron Curtain, the Iron Curtain, rather, the States by and the Iron Curt, and they constituted 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 their proverbial trophy case and, like, admire their own, you know, great career or whatever. This had, like, actual impact. That's important to keep in mind. But what really got to open the door to this,

what really made this possible, what really made detente possible was the situation between the two Germany's. And specifically, the sent to see of Vili Brandt. Who is Ville Brand? Ville Brand was this crazy kind of 68 or socialist. I mean, 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 like 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 um of um you know the the of america france and the uk um um um um um um you know the um It was situated completely within, you know, the territory of the DDR. So the governing mayor of Westboro land, he had unusual clout, okay? Brandt was the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of 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 X-N-L-N-L-L-N-Lat, like, you know, 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 Férez

combat capability, which was a big deal because the BundesFair 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, there was a slew of other, you know, kind of, Brandt's apologists and supporters were pointing the fact that, you know, the number of Germans made the poverty line, you know, like fell from, you know, 2.9% 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 the typical kind of like socialist stagnation writ large you know but hey you know the end of 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 when when social Democrats or greens later on you know gain majority and status than any of these, you know, in any of these

West European states. But more importantly, Brand'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 of Czechoslovakia. But, you know, he condemned, Brant formally condemned the invasion.

But, you know, he, uh, the, 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, a career running crisis

into a way of staying alive. but it this reached it's kind of Zena in 69 when he agreed to meet

uh 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 of state um contra you know the the head of government you know who was you know

the general secretary of the SEC uh 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 um and this uh understandably this really really outraged um you know not just people who had fans behind the wall um but also uh you know people who had real concerns about um the fact that the

soviet union wars up pact had 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 shalleness in a real way um owing either to malice or any malice or naivete or it didn't matter. And this, in my opinion, it was kind of the zenith of a Warsaw Pact power politically. Because what had always been, the way

Warsaw Pact wins is a demilitarized Germany. You know, I mean, this was the subject of the Shatlin 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. But,

what, um, What brought this down is fascinating. Willie Brant's, or Billy Brant's top aide, you know, his and the Social Democrat Party, like, secretary, was a guy named Guter Giam. Okay. And Guillaume was connected to hip to Billy Brant. He was this kind of, he was this kind of, he was this kind of,

he was this kind of shifty looking guy frankly you know always wear dark glasses he was always dressed impeccably but you know he truly was ubiquitous like when Brandt went on vacation you know Gianne like went

with Brandt and his family too like they were that close and it was believed that basically Brandt was a womanizer you know he he liked pussy too much he was a drunk like Brandy Villey was his you know kind of nickname

friends and foes alike called him that um he relied on guillaum you know to kind of like hold it together okay um well in 1974 at april 24th giam gets arrested because giam was uh he was a stasi officer and he had been for his whole life he was quite literally deployed to the boonis republic to get close to anybody he could and he got close to villi Brandt and he quite literally made Brandt uh chancellor i mean like think about that like think about what a coup that is and guillaume was able to uh steal the uh eyes only um 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, you know, and like how long they had known. You know, and this was this owed to Marcus Wolf who was, 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 directorate for reconnaissance. and uh

guillem was his like like the mole that became geom this was his this was his operation you know from inception to conclusion and uh wolf made the point that geom's arrest and exposure um this is really kind of what killed uh the ambition of uh warsaw pact and everything they'd accomplished because after that um the the Bundes Republic became basically a police state. You know, like they, a couple years subsequent, the Bader Meinhoff faction, you know, the Red Army faction, you know, in 97, that was the German autumn, as it was called. You know, they kidnapped and murdered a number of, you know, of highly situated personages, you know, industrialists, conservative politicians, people of this nature.

you know, the, it, this is really what facilitated the ascendancy of a man like helmet Cole or the chancellorship. And this is when West Jersey, this is when the Bundes Republic

like rejoined the Cold War in earnest. You know, and then all bets were off. And it also, there was something just profoundly sinister about this. I'm not saying that in like a corny way, but, you know,

um, 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 Tejj, 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. And that's that there's an 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 so much, like, East Block apologists. I mean, they realized that, like, the communist truly were just aiming to subvert the Buddhist Republic, render it defenseless, you know, penetrated by any means necessary, you know, and thereby, you know, remove Europe from the American defense umbrella for all time, okay? I don't want to get into an argument about what the implications of that are in like world historical terms. People know my opinion, but that's not important. We're talking about the bound of rationality of the Cold War. And in its epoch, how people viewed these things vis-a-vis d'etat and the Helsinki of course and everything else.

So you look at that situation. And then, you know, like we talked about last episode, the assault in Afghanistan, you know, 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 throw weight in the european theater um you know and reagan's way returning the serve was the deployment of intermediate range uh nuclear weapons to uh you know to the boonist republic to Italy to the Netherlands and 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 you know 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, like I said, 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, um, 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, in 1984, it's not so much that,

you know, it was this punctuated moment, like 73 when America reached Defcon 3 or like 62 when the question was you know are the story is just going to

run the blockade it was just kind of ongoing 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 could deteriorate into nuclear war before anybody even knew what was happening. Owing a large part, too, the state of, you know, weapons development then and commanding 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 Cuban 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 Marsden 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 the Gorbetross ascendancy and,

kind of what ended this strategic paradigm is significant. And the role of Mattias Rust, the Roost, you know, the kid who flew his prop plane into Red Square, that's a fascinating story, and it's got huge significance for the kind of internal, for criminal intrigues that, you know, led to, led to a real policy shift, by the fact that it costs many,

many Stalinist hardliners in 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 Chertenko era and the ascendancy of Gorbachev next episode. So I think that's how 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 even in those days there was you could recover audio from from from wrecks like the black box I guess the Soviet's 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 a 747 like I said looks basically just like an AWACS of the era like even at visual range the Soviets are like you know why why

we're not just being spoof 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 Sukoy 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 crumlin and stuff you know sometime in the 2000s you know he he testified um to this British filmmaker about everything that happened. And 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 going to, he's like, I didn't think it was, you know, a precursor to an attack. But he's like, it didn't make sense what it was doing. You know, he's like, I thought something wasn't right here. What some of these FAA types, some of 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 aviation and anywhere else these days, to identify your true position. In those days, it wasn't. 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 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 bertcher franks

were like obviously the Soviets are just doing this because they can and they hated McDonald anyways so 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 grind me shit I mean they you know in the same epoch you know they it's clear now like they they retain some freaking you know this this turt to try and murder the Pope.

Like, you know, they, uh, the, uh, these popular front for liberation of Palestine guys were going berserk, you know, they were the guys who blew up the discotheque in West Berlin. Like those were, those guys were like in the employee 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, is it 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 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 what I said it was yeah but I got understood what my point was I could see why people who weren't crazy you could think that

you know 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's died. I mean, 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 last congressman. He was actually worth shit. He was a good dude. I mean, I missed the days when there was, like, Democrats. He weren't just, like, not, like, shitbags and perverts, but they actually were, like, dudes who 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, in the Cold War, I mean, politicians now, they're like, they're like total deviance and losers because, like, no man has got anything going on in

his life, like, goes into politics. But the Cold War was different, you know. You had, you had, like, real guys and you had people who had something to offer who went into public life, you know, like McDonald. You know, I mean, it's, and it's a tragedy, you know, and as were, you know, the right, those other 269 people on board, you know, and there was, like I said, it was mostly official types and business people, but, you know, there was still,

there was a couple dozen women and kids. I mean, the thing was fucking awful. But, uh, yeah. Yeah. Well, Clugs and we're out of here. Yeah, like, again, too, like, I'm being terrorized by Burbap,

so, like, please don't pay it any mind. Um, I, 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 on Tgram you can find me on Substack

Real Thomas 7777.com My YouTube channel is Thomas TV the trailer or the promo is 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 my, that's my job. as well as well today all right man i appreciate it till the next step yeah thank you pete i want to welcome everyone back to the piquino show thomas how are you doing i'm all right thanks for hosting me yeah man so um last time we talked uh talked about yaki and talked about spangler and it's time to get back

to the cold war series episode 14 what he got for us today yeah we left off with abel archer in the Andropov era. I mean, to me, the Andropov era was properly from, you know, about 1964 until he died. I mean, I, you know, like I said, I think he was, 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. I mean, when Brezhnev became elderly, he, he was no longer, you know, I mean, he was no longer mentally competent the last few years of his life. but Bresnev was a serious personage. You know, I mean, there's a reason why he replaced Khrushchev, you know, like he was writing the ship.

He was writing the ship after the, you know, the kind of disaster that was Khrushchev in power political terms. You know, and Brezhnev was, in a lot of ways, he was kind of a true Stalinist, you know. I mean, but the true, I mean, a state at the scale of the Soviet Union, you know, even, you know, even accounting for the fact that, you know, the Russian, the Russian political error, 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,

when you, particularly we would consider, you know, the, the way that Marcosas-Lennon in the States were organized, whether, 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 scheme was. It wasn't, you know, something that they aimed to realize. I mean,

that's how they, they truly had, you know, an economy that, you know, had abolished the price mechanism and was, managed by thousands upon thousands upon millions of inputs.

So I mean, no, what I'm getting at is that no, no matter how much of a brilliant you know, personage, Brezhnev, would have, might or might not have been. Like, no single man could have managed that. So, I mean, the point that kind of the

trifect of Soviet power was really end drop off, Grameko, and Oostinov. Dimitri Ustinov, the field marshal. And, you know, particularly on the mayor's at 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 And drop off decision. And I think we got into that. And the decline of that trifecta, I mean, most frankly, I mean, And Dropov died and then Ustinov died shortly after. I mean, that's really what allowed Glasnosed and Peristrika, like, as policy to become develop and evolve the way it did.

However, you know, Gorbachev was Andropov's protege. And that's the reason why he truly was Andropov's successor. You know, this idea that Gorbachev was 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, 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. 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 this kind of placeholder was insinuated into 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 see the Soviet Union as it existed, you know, in the 1950s and during the 21st century, but even they didn't see the whole system just like dissolving, you know, like the way it did. So the people were suspicious of Gorbachev. It wasn't because they thought, like, you know, he's going to sell the party down river or something. It was because, you know, you had these discrete percentages who, you know, to whom kind of like

the up-and-coming comissars had like individual loyalty to, you know, and Gorbachev, despite the fact that he'd been in drop-offs guy, I mean, it, that carried a lot of clout, but it wasn't, it wasn't enough, you know, to just, to just hand him the reins in, like, in absolute capacity without, you know, any kind of, um, without, without, without, without anything being finessed beforehand and, like, you know, promises being made. you know, and got a certain ceremonies being stood upon, as it were. But Chernanko was not, in his youth, he actually,

the guy was kind of like a pure commissar. I mean, he obviously, you know, he served in the Red Army, you know, during the, you know, the Russians and the Russians today called the Great Patriotic War. He spent his entire career at 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 intermediate.

mediary, 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 where 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, But as far as a general officer goes, it was Odom.

And William Odom, he was, it's kind of the one, you know, he was kind of the one like, you know, 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, you know, 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 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. Sharonenko, if you're going to go to war, Sharonenko is a guy who you kind of want in the general secretariat. Yeah, but at that point he was doddering 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 Cherniko 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 brains so um it didn't matter that chernango himself was totally out of it because obviously like his protégés 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 have to have the reins to Gorbachev, even if you thought he was a great prodigy, because, you know, I mean, he was in his 50s. He wasn't, like, young in absolute terms, but he was, like, a Spratt, 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 D'Dropov, and 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, you know, intrigues that led to Chernanko getting installed as general secretary. 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 uh as gorbachev succeeded um chernenko who died in office just like and drop of did and just like bresniv did um you know and that hurt the soviet union in in in terms of their optics in a basic way um in 82 like bresdnev you know dies um like a year and ten months

later like and drop off dies and then literally 13 months later like chernango 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, they've got these doddering old men like one after the other, like you just literally keep dying. That's not a good look, you know, and especially contra Reagan, who, uh, I mean, these days Reagan wouldn't seem like purely 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 at all like an affectation so you've got like Reagan who's you know Reagan's always got a smile on his face always got perfect hair you know the guy is like sharp as a fucking tack and you know he's got a sense of humor to rival like he's got a dry humor to rival Johnny Carson you got like him and then you got like literally dottering shaking Brezinev was like, you know, dropping dead a week later. You know, you have to replace

him, it's like even worse. And like, you know, he's, you know, he's dead within, you know, within less than two years. Like, it indicated like a real structural problem. But that's why, that's why there's no much uncertainty around Gorbachev because,

like I said, um, he was, uh, he was the youngest man in the Politburo. His main rival was a guy named Grigori Romanov. who was very much a hawk on um on um on um on um strategic matters 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 purchasing two deployment was uh you know that was the primary like theater um based nuclear weapons platform for the U.S. Army and deployed in the Bundes Republic or in Italy or

in the Benelux countries. That's at the cavitation range of Moscow. And the impetus for that was Soviet deployment of SS19s and SS20s, obviously the intention of Soviets was 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 to the United States.

And as long as you'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'd think of it today, that was incidental. Like, the reason people fly out of the

grain party is because Germans were genuinely terrified of of Germany being the designated like nuclear battle theater of World War 3 and like I don't follow them for that okay I'm not I'm not the same 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 know my house being like a designated you know like nuclear battlefield deal between Ivan and America.

Like, you know, it's not, we, we can't really conceptualize what that was like. And I mean, it's also, you know, West Germany was like, 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 the, 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, a real war. It's like this, it wasn't like, so, he's like, he's like, the national vokes army and these, like Soviet grunts. They weren't, like, loafing around, playing cars. Like, these guys were, like, treating it like they were at war. And I mean, so was like the Bundeswehr.

And so was, like, the U.S. Army, but it's, there's not, it'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. Then there's like the sheep dog and they like they had clocked

and 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 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 it as it may, like,

Reagan's like Reagan's like Reagan's big kind of first like foreign policy coup in like diplomatic terms was was getting to the Soviets at the table 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 what 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 a 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 bitery. 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 um there was a lot of resistance um within uh

the Soviet military establishment especially from people like Usenov to this happening um so obviously Gorbachev did you know like succeed Cherenico and Romanov one of his first one of his first first acts of general secretary was like sideline

Romanov he didn't he didn't like punish the guy but he basically like retired him like you know, with, in Gentile kind of powerlessness, okay? So, but what Gorichov still had was, and then, 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 Gorichov 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, I'm not saying this like punitively or like the way that like neo-cons say it, like it's some bad thing. It's just a reality. Like the trajectory. And I mean, Russia also is like existential threats that they face as a 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, in like America or like the UK.

even during the Cold War. But what changed that, what kind of allowed Gorbachev to essentially purged 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, 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

a Cessna like prop plane, okay? Like it... And what he did was he ripped out a bunch of the interior, like including all the 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, 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 being this was like a very like awesome event you know it was like it was wild but matthias roost he uh he leaves from helsinki finland and he breaches 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 reversed a splendidly kind of like reverse situation of what happened with KAL-O-7 which was you know shot down as it was misidentified

Rousse was flying this little plaque this little prop plane that looks at visual range and what's exactly like a Yakov-12 which it was used all over the Soviet Union for various purposes you know like in the

Siberian wilderness they used them because you know kind of like Alaska like that's your base means of travel in there. Like on the open step, like surveyors and like naturalists would like use them, you know, 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 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 line bag 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 the fact that this kid could fly his air aircraft into Moscow, and he crossed like several designated air defense

um um you know um um um checkpoints and uh

apparently at first uh there was a there was a rookie um ground control crew and uh when they sent the signal out

for uh IFF you know identification friend or foe Rousse switched off his 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 possibly hostile like so then like when he breached like the next kind of

you know the next kind of the hurdle verbally speaking 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 saw it looked to be like a yackle level like on the gate 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 kind of like the splendid reverse of what happened with the with KLF like 007. But at the same time, again, too, like 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 Gorbachev did was it gave him essentially the mandate

to clear out basically like anybody in uniform that he did not like. exactly what he did. The, like, 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, like,

this guy just, like, lands. Like, he landed on a bridge adjacent to Red Square in the middle of the afternoon. He gets out on, 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, 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 other, 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, eye witnesses. He'd 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, you know, like, like, two hours later, like he was arrested. Let me ask you a question because there's something, somebody might ask this question. Yeah. Everybody gets the idea that 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 is 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. And that was 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 was a lot of stuff you couldn't see and a lot of places you couldn't go and like you'd be followed you know in like at least casually you know because like everybody was it was like a foreign, there was like an entire KGB

director to like keep an eye on like foreign visitors 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 flagged you like the real these were the Soviet Union is that was hard to leave. It wasn't hard to go eastward.

Basically, like, throughout the eastern block, you could basically go where if you wanted. But, you know, a citizen of the Soviet Union, he was not going to be able to visit America. He was not going to be able to visit the UK. He might be able to visit the Buddhist Republic if he's like a trusted person in other terms, but

that was kind of the issue. And it, especially during the 60s, there was a lot of guys, like I remember, and this was kind of dumb at the time. Like, I really despise Bill Clinton, but, like, Rush Limbaugh 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 part of Cruz's big thing. Like, hey, if you want to, 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 all dudes with, like, party, you know, their fathers were partymen. There's no way these guys are just going to be like, fuck you, I'm defecting. You know, but like it. I mean, 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, 1965, there's, like, a good chance you would have, like, visited the Soviet Union because, like, they cultivated that.

Some of that started to change, you know, kind of, like, post-a-taunt, like, a Soviet Union 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 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 place is fucked. You know, like, I don't want to go there. But, and like, and again, I think that's, I think that's kind of twisted, frankly. I would have loved to go to the Soviet Union, like, because it would have been.

pretty awesome. Like not cool to live there, but like to see, you know, like it. But that was kind of the deal. And it's also, and it's also and like, depending on like the, you know, but yeah, the, the, uh, the, uh, it was basically, uh,

you know, the Soviet Union, like, welcome tourism and 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 was like nobody had any 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 the U.S.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. and is 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, um, It, um, but the Soviets too, like even with, even with some, in the show of the Americans, which in some ways is hokey, but in some ways it's really dope. The guy and like his wife, who.

It's one of my favorite. It's one of my favorite shows of all time. Yeah, the lady who like stands in as his wife, you know, like they, 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 a enamored with the American way of life. And that actually is like legit. like the guys the kb and the gru at 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 the party or you've just been kind of like you know like it's the kind of the you know the kind of um fascination such things hold over you has kind of been like right out of you or like smashed out of you but yeah it's uh

the 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 so you and then they're just still here and they're just like they never went home and they're just still here 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 endrop up version of the secret speech he addressed the Politburo and he said like look he's like we're at 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 text house 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 you know it's for America from America and you know in a bad harvest you know he's like we've got less than like a thousand you know like computers in in America like a computer as a kid's toy. He was just like going down the list, okay? 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 bed 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, you know, he was like posing as like a, as like a West Germany. in a Polish descent or something. He got a job with like this IT for him 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 a while,

he just like stopped 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, you know, 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 like the guy said that.

that like he's like what should I do he's like you thought about like mocking up like paperwork to say he like died of AIDS or something is that 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 probably I mean he's like 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 but um so he basically said he's like you know like by that time he had like a wife with like no idea like what 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 going to do? So like, I just kept going to work. I just kind of like kept waiting for it. And then I turned the TV and like the Berlin Walls coming down. You know, and like, so yeah, like this. There was a, 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 were guys like that. And in the reverse, too, um, there was a, Jen's Carney. he defected the other way to the DDR and um like nobody even knew what happened to him like was presumed he defected but he just like disappeared

um he was an Air Force guy um you know he was he had knowledge of like he was he was a cryptographer okay but uh jens Carney like if the wall comes down he hides out like pretending to be like a Dutchman or something i think that was ordained his cover story was that he was a dane and then finally some like Bundesfare

or like US Army like MP types like who the fuck is this guy you know just when they were kind of like going down the rolls 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 what went over the 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 got fucked off 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 penning on doesn't 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 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 Shastasi. You know, kind of the one way that, like, the worst up-pack consistently beat NATO was, like, with their espionage. You know, like, it wasn't even close. Like, it, uh, and yeah, they put a tremendous

emphasis on human intelligence in a way that, you know, like, we didn't. And 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 Mattias Ross, I mean, what became a him is rather tragic. He was sentenced 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. It 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 he had this guy with, like, no history of, like, violence. I mean, what I'm getting at, I think the Soviet Union destroyed him, like, psychically. 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, they didn't... Like I said, I'm not... 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? You know, I speculate the same thing happened to him. And after that incident, apparently, he never got in trouble again, but 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 and spends a lot of time

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, I don't want to be a casualty of World War III as a countervalue, you know, as countervalue in the wind and um you know i i i i've got love and respect for the russian people and you know like we should you know we should 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, 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 to 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 it. depth and you know he's we cannot allow the ion of treaty to be put the paper like 10 be put the paper and some kind of like um 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 that that allowed gorbachev to to to to sideline and sandbag like all of his enemies and I mean from then on it

it really was his show until like you know that he was until the challenge from Yeltsin was emergent but that's what we should cover next episode and that

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 United States as like junior partner and like ruling the planet. It was basically they wanted to like recreate like the New Dealer concept for like how the world would be run. And like the T&D types who not only hated the Soviet Union,

but literally wanted to see like torn apart, like Yeltsin was their guy. And that's like what's key to understanding this here. And that's why people have mixed feelings about Yeltsin, I think. But it's, um, and then of course, like the kind of variable to spoof things was that, you know, all the, the nationalities like all went crazy.

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 what what these fools they call the chicken kievs speech were for bush forty one went to ukrain is like look like don't 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 you like not back ukrain independence like when exactly the ukrainians what exactly 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 uh um but i in my before it being clear like what america and its um 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 Ukrainians were so incredibly rash. But, but that's, um, that's, um, that's, um, the, um, um, the, um, um, um, um, the, fact that Washington and like the post-Ragan foreign policy team they wanted both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia to endure. Like, you know,

they, this, this kind of policy of, you know, let's try and detonate like every federated structure that exists. Then we can kind of like finesse them into, into like 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 it was the last serious.

president but uh i'm not saying like his kind of his kind of is going to his kind of is going to 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 um i don't want to uh i don't want to deep dive into that yet because that that that's that's going to take like an hour or an hour and a half so but that's uh that's basically all i got for today is i want to go ahead let's let's talk let's talk a about the 80s because yeah of course i remember it and it was a weird weird time it was big time there was okay so like new york was one of the murder i mean murder murder i assume there were

two thousand homicides a year like that that's wartime attrition yeah um i'm sure chicago i'm sure south side of chicago was the same way at the time um 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, 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 and i mean i i lived i lived literally three miles from glenview naval air station

um which was like a priority counter versus target like we would have just we there was no chance we would have survived you know and um it uh and i mean especially because like my dad was like insinuated into like you know like the the policy planning establishment i mean i realized like the cold war was like talked about in my house more than other people 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 in the United States. Like MAD is bullshit. Like Carl SIG is nuclear winner is bullshit. But it would have changed like life as everybody knows it. You know, there would have been 100 million people dead. huge swaths of the country

had been like unlivable. The survivors would 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 the fact that this was always a possibility and especially as human decision makers became increasingly sidelined. you know it being clear like this could 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 um yeah it was uh it was 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 were ballsy definitely but it was also like uh 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 the immediate adjambas 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 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 should stabilize that 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 an 80s. Like I was, I grew up in the 80s, but I was like a teen in like the 90s and like, people think 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, 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 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 a gun I pack with me for like no reason just 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 like all there was like yeah man there's this like 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 okay maybe like Larry Clark I think he's the dude who made that movie is 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 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 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 i'm not into like, I'm not into like fucking savage shit. And like, like, that stuff like bothered me, like as a kid. It's like, it seems like everybody like lost a fucking mind, like totally,

you know, and like a, yeah. Um, but yeah, no, that's, that's, I mean, again, man, that's why there's something too like zeit guys and not just like the random aggregation of like, pop cultural, like, symbols and, and people's kind of like, uh, you know, the discreet experiences in aggregate, like, you know, of, of, of the youthful generation and kind of like, what, 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, you know, there's, like, three years or four years of total chaos. And then, like, suddenly, like, everything's, like, normal again. You know, yeah. And, like, and, like, 40-second street goes from being this, like,

looking at, like, a nice circle of hell to be in, like, Disneyland, like, literally. Like, yeah, you can't just say, like, oh, that's because people got tired of a crime or something. it's like it's not how I'm not saying you gotta believe in God okay fine you get 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 yeah all right man

plug whatever you got and yeah man I'm still like I dropped on my Tgram the day. You can find me on Tgram. I think people really know my know. I'm trying to get stuff done in earnest and just so I can like shoot for my channel and it did

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 real 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 and just 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-m-as-7777. My primary home is substack, RealThomas-777.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 piquino's show we're almost done with this aren't we thomas the cold war series yeah yeah and um yeah no indeed it's um it's been quite a journey and we've gotten really really positive feedback which is great not you know because i i i need things to prop up my ego or something but there's uh you know everybody at least even people who aren't particularly plugged into revisionist history you know they have an interest in the war war two because it's just um you know the the kind of symbology of it and kind of the narrative of it is is all around everybody like the cold war like people under people under people under

about 40. They don't, I think that's changing somewhat, like, actually, like, corneous it sounds, like, one of the call-a-duty games was, like, special collapse for, I never played it, but I thought that that was dope that some of these, some of these game developer types, 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, you know, the, if you want to, like, literally, if you want to understand everything that's happening in power political terms today, like 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 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 am, you know, vis-a-vis the Cold War and Francis Yaqui and that kind of Higalian view of things.

You know, it's fun of me. If you want to understand why blood is being shed in Ukraine and on the Russian frontier today, like you've got to understand what developed between 1949 and 1989, particularly how it resolved. So the fact we've gotten like mad feedback is very inspiring. I feel like we're actually doing something constructive. Yeah, I think we get more feedback on this one than we did it on World War II.

Yeah. Yeah, and that I'm very excited about that. And yeah, moving forward, your idea to cover the Spanish War is great, and I'm really looking forward to that too. But, yeah, we can, what I wanted to get into today a bit, and forgive me if this talk is a little bit, it seems a little bit of scattershot. There's a lot of discrete causes to what caused,

what, you know, cause the inter-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 is 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 situatedness. And people forget, too, that, you know, the guy used to be. 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 the he ran to Moscow because 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 kind of became their man in Spain. He was like a commissar you know like fighting on the Republican side guys like Eric Hanaker he somehow escaped execution despite being you know a pretty high level

functionary or cadre in the KAPD organization but he was in prison you know by uh 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 Ubrecht who was kind of this dour intellectual you know kind of humorless you know cold-hearted

kind of functionary the most cliched or stereotypical sort you know he was 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 any I favors or not, the point is, like, these are the guys who really get odds with Germany, like, their own, you know, cultural, uh, me a little, 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 and who people like who the hell are these guys? You know, it's not the only way they the only mandate they had was you know proceeded from the barrel of

of Soviet guns and over a time a kind of party state apparatus did develop in the DDR particularly like the National Volks 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 inextricable 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 if people are going to become just habituated to do it and you know the 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 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 was best Germany. You know, I mean, you know, the DDR, the reason why they did, the National Volks Army, you know, their uniforms look like Vermont uniforms. They maintain some very end of the Prussian drill and the parade ground. You know, they, a lot of their their kind of mythology they drew upon like florian guyer in the peasants war you know they 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 they're kind of like hyper aware of like their tenuous claim to the man of power and um them kind of insinuating themselves into this

role ironically and somewhat perversely, but if you're a hagiolian, this makes perfect sense, they're kind of insinering themselves as like the guardian of like what remained of like, you know, the like authentic German culture. That's really interesting. And that, 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, nostalgia. You know, it's like a play

on like nostalgia. You know, 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 were 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, Frau Merkel, it's not an accident that she came up through the DDR. You know, and interestingly, there's a law. I'd say any German politician you know, who who was a citizen at DDR. It's literally against the law

to talk about their past, like in East Germany. So it was a criminal offense and when Frow Merkel 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, her folks were like

Communist Party people. There was no Communist Party in the DDR, as the socialist unity party. But the point being, I mean, she wasn't just, you know, she wasn't like an apolitical. You know, like her family was at least like regime loyal

in so far as party membership. But that Merkel's concord with Mr. Putin, you know, and the, the gas prom deal, which led to the Nord Stream pipeline. All these things like, owed like the Cold War, okay? And like the

owed like, you know, what the DDR was and what the inter-German border represented in like power political and, you know, 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 episode we got into, you know, the kind of thaw, the Gorbachev thaw. that was made possible in large part by Matthias Ruse'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 it's willingness to wage nuclear war against Warsaw Pact. And the way they did this was, you know, with the deployment of SS19, SS20 ICBM and theater ballistic missile platforms in Europe, as well as the deployment of the backfire bomber, which was America. maritime nuclear bomber. Like superficially, it had

things in common with the B-1, but it was purposed essentially to to nuke the Royal Navy and then like open up the 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, you know, effectively wage 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, all 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 could 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, was proximity to Kazakhstan, which was as important to Soviet nuclear command of control as was Moscow. know. But be 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, all the signatories declared that, you know, they'd honored democratic processes, people would not be discriminated against

based on political affiliation, sect, nationality. I mean, basically it was a... Basically, the Helsinki Accords could not coexist with the Brezhne doctrine, which is what the Soviet Union relied upon with their intervention in Czechoslovakia in 68. You know, this caused a problem

because on the one hand, the Warsaw Pact was desperate for, you know, like 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 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. 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,

you know, or defend the development and survival of socialism within its sphere of influence. So this was pretty 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 Zigno Bruginski is a key figure in his national security staff

was, like, Poland seemed to be the kind of, the kind of, it seemed to be the kind of like the natural place to try and, you know, create a wedge in Warsaw Pact. You know, um, if,

if, it was inorganic to the DDR, it was totally alien to 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. Um, people were staunchly Catholic. Uh, 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 accrue, not just the regime situated there. You know, it's a worse off egg 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 is 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 things 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 and you know 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 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 rations 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 prism 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 the basic 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 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 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, people protesting the party. I mean, since this is a very tricky situation. The way was resolved in Poland was, um, Gerald Zelsky became a general secretary. And he was a tragic figure. You know, he, there's this kind of visage of him as this sinister guy. He was just, you know, Polish military officer.

he always wore these dark sunglasses. The reason why is because he was of lesser noble birth. And when he was a teenager, when Poland was invaded by the Red Army, he was old family got 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 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 who was literally a kid who was like destroyed by the Guleg system, like, physically in some way and mentally, like, he became this kind of, like, this kind of military talent in these blocks. Like, it, there's something kind of like Shakespearean 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, there, there wasn't even, there weren't, there wasn't even the equivalent of, of, of, like, the DDR cadre in Poland, you know, for them to kind of insinuate as, as the ruling, uh, cast. You know, they,

took this guy. It was literally, you know, somebody destroyed by the gulag, you know, like, and I just find that fascinating. But, so, Poland stands alone is the only, it was 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, if,

Poland wanted to open a revolt. The Brezhnev Doctrine dictated that the Soviet army would invade to preserve the regime. And drop off, you can tell it was react with anxiety that this is

what was going to happen. That's something that's clear from the notes of you know meetings not just of the prosodyome, but of, you know, like the kind of inner, 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 Honaker, you know, Stalwart, as he was, as a Marxist-Leninist, He'd always pined for, you know, for East Germany to be recognized as 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, Hanukkahar finally got permission for a state visit to the Bundes Republic. And he'd been trying to accomplish this for, he'd been trying to accomplish this 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 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 uh but uh so there's this weird arrangement where hodaker goes to visit the bundus republic and uh the uh they they flew like the dDR flag but they flew the dDR flag slightly lower than like the booness republic flag and like uh they'd uh the uh he 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 like head of state. It was like this goofy, like half measure. 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. Um, in, in various capacities.

Cole was, uh, like a huge man. He was like this huge, like, bear looking guy, you know, like, uh, this kind of like big Bavarian, kind of like a Herman Garring type, you know, like big loud dude, you know, like, and just like a huge person. And like Hanaker, Hanukkah was kind of like this creepy, like nerdy eye, you know, like kind of, kind of how you like imagine, like, you know, the kind of communist from central casting.

This kind of like, this kind of like professorial dickhead who like nobody likes. So there's this photo, like, you know, like huge, like Helmut Cole. He's got like a big grin on his face. There's just like pissed off with him like Hanaker and like an East Block suit who's like, you know, five, even like it's like, he's like being dwe. worked by like, you know, it was a kind of like, you know, metaphor that seemed really resonant. I thought that as like a little kid. And then just the other week when I came across it 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 in that. But the, um, what ultimately happened, um, you know, know the convergence of all these things um it became it became at some point unthinkable even notwithstanding for the the intrigues of uh of uh you know within within the kremlin that allowed gorbachev to kind of rook his enemies and and and sideline any true you know um hardliners to aim to sabotage a peristrike on policy terms it at some point became unthinkable for the Soviet army to deploy, you know, in Poland or in, you know, East Germany if it came to that and, um, and do what they'd done in, in Hungary in 56 and in, um,

Chicago, Slovakia in 68. Um, you know what I mean? Zytegeist 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, prone to kind of Hegelian interpretations of these things. 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, liberals 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. That's why when people pose the question as the, you know, well, why, uh, 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 really the first chink in the iron curtain like the physical structure of the hardened border was the Hungarian government finally shut off the electric fences

that saturated the Austria-Hungarian border the guard towers remained they were still manned but 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 like Austrian counterparts

and uh begin 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 this is the first kind of indication that, you know, the, like, Warsaw Pact could no longer exist as it had, you know, for decades. Taking its cue from that, the Hungarian communist, and I know that Hungarians, Mayagers are really great people and they're really proud people. And they were actually at the forefront of anti-communist resistance. And, um,

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 motive they were cynical and that, you know, he was operating with an eye to preserve the party state apparatus. The point is that, you know, the, it was the Hungarian regime that really first, you know, kind of gave weight, you know, and they had a long, 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, you know, the existential reality that in Hungary especially, they wouldn't have survived if they hadn't made certain concessions. but um people forget that you know the hungry the austro-hungarian border is really where uh where um you know uh 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 hapsburg beginner as i think some people know who like follow my content um during the summer season and

there was always a lot of East German tourists in Hungary. And 1989 was no exception. Because Hungary is a beautiful place, I'm sure. It has such a reputation. But if you're East German, Hungary is one of the places you could visit, you know, like on vacation. And the idea which was hatched by Otto von Hapsburg, who was the last, he was the last crown prince of the Hapswer Empire. you know um he uh he said uh let's invite uh let's invite our german friends to a picnic um on the austral hungarian border

and of course you know like there were these these east german you know tourists swarm to the border um which was then opened up so they could you know travel to austria and then from there you know, they could get, you know, to the Bundes Republic. And this totally neutralized, you know, the inner German border and its ability to plug the proverbial sieve that, you know, had led to their hemorrhaging of population. And from that point on, you know, unless the East Germans were truly willing to open fire on their own people. And I can't think of anybody who would have been willing to take responsibility for that.

You know, nothing short of that would have changed things. And like I said, even before Gorbachev, I think it was already unthinkable. you know again like um hardline as a the ad drop of chernico 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 president of doctrine was dead for practical purposes um and it um 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, you're not talking about North Korea. You're not, you know, you weren't talking about, you weren't even talking about a place like Tujimada's Croatia, like, which I think it 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, their territory spanned one-six of the planet.

and the sphere of influence was, you know, in territorial terms, exceeded even that of the United States. I mean, outside of, you know, the Soviet Empire proper. But what I think is key with respect to 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 Shevdnardza. I always butcher the pronunciation of that name. He was the foreign minister 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 in the Reagan administration, they'd been somewhat sidelined by the Bush 41 administration. Cheney was kind of their man who remained. in proximity to

you know through 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 you know total nuclear disarmament and almost total you know reduction of conventional forces in being and moving forward even from that i believe can i answer can i

answer yeah no please do would that be coming from the same faction uh that today is you know responsible for wanting to topple putin that was the team the leg those guys are the legacy of team b and in some place this is they're very same people because like bush and baker their idea was like well 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 Commonwealth Independent States, like succeeding it as like junior partner. Cheney was on record. He was 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 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. You know, 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, Morgan Fow 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. It 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 matchful 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 at the highest bidder.

You know, and that's why everything, all the goodwill, like, achieved by Bush Baker Concord was just, like, was just like, you know, nuked, like, proverbially, um, subsequently. And then, you know, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh,

the assault on Serbia, you know, which was deployed a strategic logic other than basically just to say, like, we know, we're going to like, we're going to break Ivan's face to get him out of the Balkans. Like, like, why would you even do that? But, I mean, it's some, you know, that, uh, those, those the two, that's, that's what's underway today. Um, that's why,

these like neocon types and like they're 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 like how dare he like in modernity Ukrainian is not to wage some like suicide suicidal war against Moscow

for no reason I mean like it's but that's yeah I mean that's at PMS understand me too like I'm not saying obviously anybody who's not a freaking idiot should realize I'm not advocating 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, 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 a 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 know, 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 team like even though like class divides us like it i'm i'm i'm not going to sit here and like i would not like trash them because frankly like their vision was like far better than anybody else's 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 horse regiment armored cavalry who patrolled the fold a gap like they fought like at

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 it's that's where you got to see the you know the post revolution in military affairs like US Army which I

believe was like the US Army at Zenith like that I think that can be argued you know fight against like Warsaw Pact weapons platforms and And the political climate globally, like, it's something that, like, has never been seen before and will, like, will never be duplicated. You know, and that's, and that, that was, so it's not just, I, it's not just an addendum because it was post-November 9th, 89, but pre, you know, pre-dissolution of the USSR. Like, you've got to really understand that as kind of not just the zenith of American power in absolute terms, but. also kind of full like the realization of like the bush baker kind of a vision of a of of 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 uh by buffoons like clinton and um you know people who would uh you know who would place uh their petty you know kind of ancestral hatreds over uh

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 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 with the 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 point. over the border, ladies like, you know, screaming at East German officers saying, just let me go, let me go. Well, what happened at, what happened at the East German border was the, as the situation in Hungary, kind of became like more and more unmanageable, you know, with like East Germans, just, you know, hopping over to Austria and then do, you know, and then, and then to the West German embassy,

and then like onward, you know, the Buddhist Republic. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Hanukhner, well, Eric Hanuker, Hanuker stepped down because there was, you know, a lot of these protests that were underway in East, in the DDR, we're demanding that Hanukkah resign, among other things. Hanuker steps down, um, the, the, the Volkscomer, uh, appoints egon Crens, which was, who was, who was, like the heir apparent anyway he was the guy who was like being groomed like as you know successor um Crenz uh ordered uh the interior ministry to draft uh regulations that were less uh

that were less oppressive unless 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 uh the uh kreinsas gerald gerrard gerhard gerhard who was among other things uh the voks poli tye chief who uh were responsible for you know border checkpoint security um among other things um he ordered he ordered him to order to order the him 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, uh, find some way, you know, to grant visas to people that appeared like nominally like democratic but you know would is would there'd still be incentives them to like remain and you know not not defect basically um 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 uh you had people already like massing at the checkpoints you know um and it's his opinion of what the new 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 over from, like, Western,

uh, television and radio reps. And finally, uh, the spokesman, uh, for the interior ministry, uh,

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 a reporter said, could you repeat that, does that mean that there's no longer any travel restrictions? And when does this go into effect?

and this this spokesman said well I believe it goes into effect immediately and then the people in 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 like threw open the gate you know it's like they were they're going to get stampeded

they're either going to be a riot or there's going to be a riot or um 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, you know, the will to kind of make this happen. You know, like corny as it sounds, like people power. if you can get me just sounding like a frigging 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.

It's fascinating. But Chussecu was the one man. One of the final Warsaw Pact summits, Romania is fascinating because Chussecu, 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 for a radical 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 tianman and even hannker 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 uh but yeah the uh we'll get into that too because that's fascinating um and it's it's the outlier yeah and i mean for all kinds of reasons but yeah the uh the uh and then and then and then mr mrs chuchescu i saw that i saw that when i was in my aunt's house in ventura that christmas and i seeing the chuchescu's get get blown away like on tv and 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 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 uh to the courtyard to be shot like the one guard like what his hand of his dude 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 well uh well uh yeah well uh yeah well

We'll cover that. We'll cover Gulf War and Bush Baker in a final episode. We'll get into like Borwich offers Yelton too. And so, yeah, we might go a little bit longer next time, or that's okay with you. I think that'll be great. All right. Plugs.

Yeah, I mean, for the time being, I'm still on Twitter. So seek me out there. It's Thomas number seven, HMAS, 7777. It's official underscore Thomas 7777. My primary home right now is Substack. Real Thomas 777.substack.com. I'm back on Instagram. I got to go out of town end of April, but May, first week in May, I promise the channel is we're shooting dedicated content.

Like my crime partner and my erstwhile editor who is a prince of the realm, I swear. like he's the reason why all this stuff gets done because i'm freaking illiterate with that stuff but um i we're we're we're we're we're we're we're we're 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 martyr 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 it's it's it's a freaking lot of work, man. What it's coming, I promise, man.

Yeah, here's what I go. Yep, appreciate it. Until the next time. Yeah, thank you, Pete. All right, I want to welcome everyone to the, the Q&A wrap-up show for the Cold War series with 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 all, 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 here 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.

I mean, it isn't, it isn't. It's not, it's not so much a geography as destiny calculus. It has to do with power potential, not just of material resources, but you know of mentioned material as you know the Germans used to refer to you know human population

as not just in terms of their biology but in terms their capacity to bear culture and things like that Europe as this kind of rump peninsula you know forever on an enemy footing with Russia artificially

instigated and maintained by the United States is never even if the United States would drew 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 in cultural terms, you know, Europe is always, you know, 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. The New Dealer alliance with Moscow wasn't just a sort of alliance of convenience because Europe and the Third Reich was just so evil. Like on its face, that doesn't make any sense. What this was is it was competing viewpoints of a global. socialist order, you know, one being the New Dealer perspective, the other being the Marxist Lenin's perspective, 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 ways more insidious because it had an ability to insinuate itself into European cultural life amid 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 marcus Leninism was a horrible system it was brutal it persecuted people it was hostile religion it was it uh it persecuted people who were who were deemed politically unreliable it was anti-human um I'm not acquitting that at all but again um it didn't aim to tear out the root of cultural life and carry out uh 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, Yaqui pointed to the Prague trials, a Prague trial relating to what came to be known as the doctor's plot where these 12 medical people were tried for treason and conspiring against 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 obviously them purging, you know, the Jewish element from their leadership cast. And they weren't doing it on some quote-unquote 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 with their 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 the ranks of the cadres 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 the traditional enemy of the West

is the Jewish diaspora, and that diaspora is their world of social existence is the progenitor of the ideological tendency is most inimical to Western survival. and finally again, if you view Europe's path to salvation and paroch 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 Yaqui'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. 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, all, all kind of historical existences need to be eradicated, you know, so that's something 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 kind of human culture in any in any form than um that America wasn't is you know and I I emphasize the people that 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 wanted to eradicate people's understanding of themselves as cultural um um

you know as culturally situated like it it uh it literally plotted the genocide Europe up and you know and drafted up entire treaties i don't even like the sexual habits of germans and how we can work you 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 to america like as a government i 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 assisting that there's somehow right in anger opposed what is going on. Yeah, it's when somebody will bring up like you'll talk about El Ducce 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 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 communist and not just out and out communists, but, you know, of the kind of Adorno and Gramsie type who were, you know, very much, quote, cultural mercists. I find that to be a troubling term. I don't like it.

but just for the sake of coherence, you know, 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 know, you don't like national socialism or fascism, like, if you don't like any of this stuff, like, why would you celebrate just destruction? Why would you celebrate Europe being literally annihilated by communists and by these crazy new dealers want to like eradicate the concept of race from this planet 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 like a bougie kind of fixation. really an obsession of respectability. And there is people, they want to, like, purge them. People are, like, ambitious in the wrong ways.

They want to, like, purge their own minds of, like, unclean thoughts. And not hating fascism is an unclean thought. So they try and cope by saying, like, yeah, like, I hate the regime. But, you know, I hate you off Hitler even more. 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 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 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 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 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 with kind of the Euro-Communist and socially radical element

kind of split off from Orthodox Marxist Leninism well the Bader Meinhauf faction they kind of had one foot in both with camps. And as it turned out, they were very much a client actor of the Stasi, the Eastern Ministry for State Security. And they were very much kind of like the brainchild of Marcus Wolf, 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 intelligent organization, probably fielded by anybody in the Cold War.

But the Bader Mineoff faction their notion was to basically render the Bundes Republic ungovernable through terrorist activity. You know, just in kind of conventional terms that

non-state 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 was during the period when, you know, Billy Brandt was, was seeking genuine reconciliation with East Germany.

And, the idea was, it was, it was really 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,

and the, and the Buddistan, and, and, and sympathetic forces, you know, within, uh,

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 a rapprochement with the ddr and the so this kind of thing will no longer be happening like 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, I mean, that's debatable. And I don't want to, I don't want to start some sort of argument with people who have those kinds of sympathies. But, um, that was basically the Red Army faction. And they folded their flag, like, officially in 1990. I mean, which, which goes to show and people acted like this was strange at the time. But I mean, the epoch, it, it, it should have made sense that it's, it's, it, it, it should have made sense that it's. 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 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 took up with the NPD, you know, which is the legacy party of the socialist party.

So, I mean, there you go. And like people, like Der Spiegel, which says incredibly stupid things with alarming regularity. They were like, see, this man's insane. He was a communist, and now he's anti-Semitic. But it's like anybody with like a fucking brain, like, we just like explicated 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, I mean, that's, I mean, that, that, it's just like a case in point.

I mean, it shouldn't surprise anybody. But I, they were interesting, they were an interesting case and an interesting case and an interesting element, um, within the cold war, but that's a good film about him called the Boddermenoff complex. I highly recommend it. It's got Bruno Gans and it's Brito Gans. He's the guy who played Adolf Hitler and, the Uintergang. All right. Muzio Savola over here, five dollar super chat. What does Thomas think of Stalin's war by McMeekin? Have you read it? Yeah.

It's a shot full of data. Um, 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 um anybody who accepts that conceptual narrative is it taints the entire right 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 in 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 abolishing the fact value distinction in your own way and, you know, you're reducing history to 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. 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 Barbarossa. And this is the only way to understand the Second World War. That was the catalyst.

And as any military type will tell you. 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 power is the currency of politics. It's the only currency politics. Everything else is addressing. So a state that is mobilized to such a degree as the Soviet Union was, not only is it never truly benign, it is actually the precise opposite. So J.M.R. Cowboy asked, was that the same Red Army Rangles, White Army fought against her a different one?

What? We're talking about 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 Twitter from under your Europe posts. He said, Someone would like to hear mention of 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 talks about, you know, when Moscow talks about. it's enemies Nazis. I mean, first of all,

Ukrainians are idiots. So, I mean, 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, their 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 listen to Dead Kennedy's records. Like, it makes conceptual sense. The way a kind of nationalist authoritarian Russia, that would definitely be possible. But it wouldn't, it wouldn't look like, it wouldn't look like Mussolini'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, 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 nation. 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 you're not, 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 meaningful way and it's not it's not gonna 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 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 strategically and they're like not doing that

at all you know like erasianism doesn't have any legs. You know, like, it's like something cool that Russians like to talk about and that it's 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 stuck in my mind. The true Soviet brutality, true communist brutality in the Soviet Union as well as in the States that emulated the Soviet Union, reached its zenith in the revolutionary phase. 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 like people they didn't like Whether they were Kulaks, whether they were like, you know, 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, it was, it was neither truly organized nor was a truly scattershot, but that's really where the bodies got stacked off. And there really was, there truly was, as Robert Conquest documented, you know, a Soviet death camp system. I'm not being colloquial or using, you know, hysterical language or something. The really brutal aspects, kind of programmatic aspects, after the day of defeat in 1945, the American authorities were just as bad. They starved out millions of Germans.

It was endemic, and if not encouraged, you know, like just tolerated more than tacitly. You know, the Morgandout plan, in a sense, very much was implemented, although not realized to its full extent as an invasion of it. Going to a strategic situation. but I'd say back to your question and the kind of four corners of it the forest population 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 story

Soviet army and police who made that happen. My opinion is that's the most kind of, that's the strongest example of like naked brutality. And I mean, people will come back and say like, well, you know, the Germans were ethnically cleansing, you know, 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 just perpetuating a programmatic campaign of ethnic violence after cessation of hostilities. You know, there's, I don't really think that the latter can be justified in any absolute sense. And it's not, it's, it's not 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 want to see what I don't take anyway, you know, if you're a man of the West, if you're pro-white, and if you want your race to survive, even if the third Reich was literally the most evil regime that ever existed, you don't, you don't cheer on the ethnic cleansing of your own people. I mean, this is, this is brass tax stuff, you know, and one doesn't need to be. So to the diagonal Machiavellian to understand aside from that, that, you know, politics, power politics does take place somewhere beyond good and evil.

If you'll allow the overused, you know, kind of reference. So we've 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. Oh, I totally forgot about that. Yeah. No, we can, I've thought about having, like, just a dedicated, like, atomic age episode, you know, like, beginning with the proliferation of the bomb in 1948, 48, 49, you know, going through the early Cold War and the new look. and you know kind of when when every everybody in the national security apparatus said like you know atomic weapons on the brain like through you know detente's and then finally sce i think i certainly don't they certainly should have been executed um i think uh at least julius rosenberg i think ethel rosenberg wasn't like i'm not i'm not saying she was just like a stupid woman or something

There's plenty of women who, particularly in radical politics, were very smart and very dangerous. I think Ethel Rosenberg was not one of those. I think she was kind of a long 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.

But he, I think, I think in some ways, though, from what, from his own testimony, just to his own intimate. It's not under oath or anything. I believe his notion was somewhat like that of Chris Boyce. The guy who's 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, um, interstate violence. There would have to be, you know, a true balance of forces between the superpowers. And that could only be achieved if, uh, 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. um 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 um but that's there's like not really anything there i mean it's like leo frank like leo frank was

uh 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 like terrible that this guy who like victimized little kids got lynched. I don't, I don't quite understand that, but it's something, uh,

it goes to sort of like moral bankruptcy of the, of the people who, who come to the defense of these, of these personages in history. Like, I'm not, 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 how molesters and people will harm children get killed, okay? And anybody who makes it out, like, this is some terrible, you know, terrible instance of a rough justice. I mean, I'm not, and I'm not comparing selling nuclear secrets I'm wasting kids at all. Like, they have nothing at all in common, okay?

And, um, I can easily see myself, like, pan-hasing nuclear secrets, not to Ivan, but, uh, you know, and the last man is going to sit here and act, like, fucking prissy about such things but um you know if there's in the modern era there's really no clearer case of high treason than what the rosenberg did and what the rosenbergs did except maybe for the cambridge five it just in terms of the sheer kind of like gravity of of their ongoing espionage but yeah there you go um i realized that was long-winded but the short answer is like there's 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, anytime they face consequences, it's because of mean 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 the Second World War pushed for that because there was an understanding that you know army thinking it'd become kind of stagnant okay

and also it just the army was not particularly carcable with with new technology they just weren't that's not a political take it's a fat but it's also too it was like the the science of aviation

and particularly military aviation it was something everybody was learning by doing when Curtis LeMay for started flying in the inner warriors that's when pilots were still flying by like visual sight of like terrestrial land features

and things you know and trying to match it up to like a paper map okay now the Air Force of obviously by the time be it but by the time the real escalation got underway in Vietnam and 65 the there was um you know the Air Force uh 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 they're 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 arc light bombers, these B-52s, those were purposed. those were those were those were those were purpose to attack with nuclear weapons okay in a strategic capacity um switching them to a conventional repurposing them to a conventional role um you know in a conflict like vietnam where frankly until uh you know So in 1972, you didn't even really have, like, true combined arms setpiece battles where they can really kind of shine. The fact that they were able to, you know, kind of wreak so much havoc on the ability of the North Vietnamese, not just reconstitute forces, but, you know, to the sustain infrastructure, not just command and control, but, you know, any and all kind of basic infrastructure relating to the war effort, that's pretty remarkable. And it's also the

It was more naval aviators But some Air Force aviators too They got engaged over the battle space Tactically And Vietnamese pilots are pretty good And they're obviously were Soviet pilots Like flying sordies too That's a brought dog fighting back

You know, that's the whole reason why Taggall Air Command Like You know got a a boom 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.

And 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 insin 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 wearing in the inter-German border, you know, like, carrying around, like, rations and metal cans, you know, and toting, like, 60 pounds worth of gear on their back in, like, 110-degree tropical

heat. Like, that's not, I mean, that's, the whole thing's absurd. Like, Army Special Forces totally shined, 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. and weirdos who were like kind of like their own branch of the military and um they were really they were really up on some progressive and dynamic like tactical doctrines um 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 apache but they were not they just lacked like operational flexibility in a way that was needed. But it's just, I mean, the U.S. Army, the U.S.S. Army had a hell of a time in the Far East. One of the reasons I like the way, the thin red line. Like, nobody likes that movie, but I think it's a dope movie. I just 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, they were not, like, at the command level. I'm not talking about, you know, the guys in the field,

like doing, you know, 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, we're not, we're not, we're not,

You know, just against the Japs, you know, it's not all the same. You know, that's what I meant. But I'm not, I'm not a military, man. So, I mean, look at me, obviously, okay, but I, I'm sure that military types will say, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I, I mean, whatever, okay. I mean, that's my position. I think I can back it up. So over here on YouTube, Viva Christo Ray, is, he has a comment and then a question.

says, 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, that, that aircraft, as you know, I mean, that was meant, that was, that was, that was, that was meant to go in low, going fast, uh, and strike superhardt targets and in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. It was, uh, 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 NATO called the backfire. It was its actual names that Tupil have something. But yeah, no, that's, you see, you see some, you see some cool aircraft over Chicago, man. So his question was, why was the Soviet Union and company so high? hostile to Freemasonry and why was this sentiment shared with their right Hegelian enemies? I'm not an expert on Freemasonry at all. 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 name you like have it as in 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 boozy 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 by, um, by the Third Reich as like Rosakrucian types. You know, they're like these fifth columnists who are you know they're degenerate they're there they're they're

loyal to race nor king nor country nor kin you know they're they're they're you know they're they're basically uh they're basically like a bourgeois fraternal society that's intrinsically subversive you know and that is um you know uh these these these people these people can't be relied upon because their only loyalty is to is this kind of like 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 some kind of deeper ethos to their you know to their covetousness 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 their political heritage and how their decision-making process in war and peace terms plays out. But I cannot tell you what the Russian take is on Freemasonry. Or like why the Ivens viewed them as insidious. Like why the Germans viewed them that way? And this preceded like the, you know, the National Social Revolution. But why the Third Reich in particular viewed them as like an undesirable element, like that's why. There was a dedicated there's a dedicated police um,

um, CREPO department or directorate, uh, dedicated to like spying on freemasons. And like I think in some capacity, like it endured after the war, like a 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 GSD9 became this like badass special ops force

like 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 Nazis of redox 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 Russian fellas and our circles

or some of the European guys um where was the one of the other questions was um 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? What? Like what specifically? Like his take on Peristrike on Glassnost or like character or what? It's that. It's a famous video in 1982, 83 where he he's talking about how it was a Soviets who subverted the subverted the um. Yep.

The institution. and everything that basically everything. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's one of those guys who, he, 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 Soviet Union was basically what it appeared to be, man, from, uh, from, especially from Brezhnev onward. Like, Cruciff was kind of a wild card in like policy terms. I don't mean like an ideological terms,

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

labor movement was uh was truly a national phenomenon with with political cloud manufacturing economy the terrestrial manufacturing like national economics was the order of the day you know um really until

until 1960 they're about yeah you better believe that you better believe that uh you better believe the common term and later common form, they were totally insinuated into that. And there was major unions that were shot through with like Soviet influence. Okay. Got the 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 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 to schema. You know, so like if you asked like even the most radical kind of, like

traditional Marxist Leninist in 1950, if you 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,

of, 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 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'd have no interest in these kinds of culture aspects 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 discreet 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 is 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 run run things so attractive to so many in latin america America. I mean, because the whole Marxist-Leninist, particularly Leninist, you read Lenin's imperialism, the process that he describes, like, in today's terms, the legacy of Marxism is global systems theory, you know, like Emmanuel 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 Americans, 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. Owing to the kind of odd racial dynamics, there's like this incredibly sharp cast

distinction. You know, like there's a 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 for conspiratorial reasons, but for, you know, the peculiar kind of somewhat tragic heritage

of the region. That's why. It's, and it's interesting you raise that. I was reading the Wilson Center, which I think is kind of abominable in a lot of ways, but their archives are very useful and very interesting. when Bush and Scowcroft, Bush 41, obviously,

and Baker and helmet coal, you know, we're negotiating with Gorbachev, particularly as regarded, specifically it was regarding the start treaty, but generally, you know, the kind of extencies related to ending the Cold War, something that Cole and Bush

and Skowcroft also to Gorbachev, I was like, look, like, however we leave this, you know, that, you know, we can come to terms on 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 why. And But there's also, I mean, like, Latin peoples are, they're, uh, they're, uh, they're, they're, their political romantics, man, you know, I'm not saying that like, to make fun of them or in a negative way, like, quite the contrary. It's like, it makes them, 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 Cubanoes 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 of things you might want to comment on yourself. Is there anything you wanted to get out there? I just, yeah. 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 to which the, what people like Bush 41, Skowcroft, Baker, Nixon himself,

and, I mean, make 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 you know, we can 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 offend itself from such attacks, the point that, you know, it, 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 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, like, when they're cheering. on like you're you're 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 uh 1990 it's just unconscionable okay and i realize it's important of ignorance because these people don't know anything but it's it doesn't make it any less disgusting um you know and i i behoove people I want to do a dedicated Gulf War episode because that that's a that's a natural kind of like bookend to the Cold War. Not just like in linear terms, but like in conceptual ones. And that I want people to understand why I defend Bush 41 a lot. I don't defend Bush 41 because I like these fucking Yale assholes or because like I have something to come with social register types. I get tired of that too.

I don't like what people call me like a quote was. But 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 envires. 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 mean, I'm 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 i've got some people in my lineage who were 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 that if i showed like kinds of places that like the boishes hang around like you even if i was like flush of money like i'd be like showing that door even if i was like even if i was you know like 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 um you know we we we don't need to agree with you know the kind of conceptual perspective of like nixon or push 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 um i do 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 for, you know, the, the, uh, the kind of impact on list 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, by, by these conceptual illiterates and, and just, you know, like, like, literal, like bandits. You know, it's like, just, 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, um, eaters of the dead, literally.

I mean, that, 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, 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, was in the time when you got a draft card and you got forced to do it. You know, 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 a bunch of white Christian guys mostly, uh, that was essentially, like, completely fucking neutralized among everything else by this, by this kind of like,

you know, uh, a Semitic crusade against, you know, Byzantium. But yeah, No, so, yeah, this was really great, man. I hope everybody. We got one, 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, there is an interesting point. a game to that scenario

many, many times with a couple with a couple different game platforms that I think are basically the variables they chose to code and the way 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, to hold, to hold Warsaw-up-ag 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 know, you have to start hitting them with Grinch and Missing twos 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, no, I don't think, I don't think, no, I, the Warsaw Pact would have,

worse up pact would have reached what would have reached the Ryan in five to seven days and nothing could have stopped them the the idea was NATO war planning was

late in the game I'm talking like kind of the final iteration of of um of NATO war gaming was that the American British and

and Benelux's 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 presumably like stage 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 Stolfely's stuff on NATO. And 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 Antwerp and warping. No, 100%. They would have been chilling on the Riviera, like whistling in Europe. All right, man. Do your plugs and we'll end this. I really I know everyone appreciate this. We got 126 people watching on a, on a last minute unannounced stream. So no, I'm pretty awesome man. No, I yeah, again, sorry, man. Like I was feeling promulums and I got, I feel a lot better now. It's feeling crummies and I got back from Lynchburg and I should have announced like to check with you if you want to do this sooner

but I I'm stoked that I'm stoked that people were happy with this kind of change in format. It seemed appropriate but um you can find me on substack at Real Thomas 7777.7.com probably most of the people who tune in regularly know that. The channel is on track. I've been apologizing we've been kind of inert lately because I've been

I needed time to get bagged to people because I was feeling really shitty. But we're on track for like production and stuff. A bunch of them, a bunch of people have been donating to like help exploit the process. Like we're just awesome. And I mean, like I said, I included the caveat, like

if we raise $0, that is totally fine. Like nobody should feel obligated to, you know, to donate, you know, to donate, you know, hard and cash just for the sake of, like, expediting, like, content production. Like, just something's important in this world that we too

there's something's not so important. Our content is not one of those more important things. But like a bunch of people have donated and that's like incredible man and that like that just is dope. But don't anyone ever feel obligated man like 100% like I'm not just being like gracious. But

we're still on Burbap. I'm going to disengage as the summer goes on. 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 rie a L underscore number seven HMAS 777 I'm still on Tgram I'm gonna up my Tgram game and get more active there

especially as I kind of like slide back from verbat I'm on Instagram I'm on TikTok and I know TikTok is like fucking retarded but um like a lady friend of mine like uh she uh she had the idea that like I can make some funny TikTok videos and I'm gonna 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, you know, and on June 9th, uh, unlike some fucking people who will go unnamed, 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. Hey, like, once a year or so, like, I see if people, like, convened in Shytown to hang out. And, like, last year we went to see craft work. 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 that door. But a lot of people are excited about that from what I'm leaning from the feedback.

So that's June 9th. So 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, like before and after the show. but that yeah that's that's all i got man for my plugs all right man i'm going to 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 uh

drop super chats i really appreciate that especially since uh youtube is basically taken away all my monetization and everything so no that's that's uh yeah they're they're 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-n 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 then.