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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of History 102, starring me, Rudyard lynch, and our co host, Austin Padgett. And today's conversation is about the Cold War. But before we started the show, we were talking about how children have different levels of abstraction from adults. And it's interesting to see sort of the level of mental development that children have versus adults.
- [00:40]
B
Yeah. And it's, it's, it's interesting because you see a kid playing with the stuffed animal and you think, oh, that's silly. They think it's real and they are really into it, as if it's real. Like they're, they're enjoying and playing out a narrative, but at the same time, a second later, like my toddler would say, but he's, it's not real. It's my draft fee, but it's not real. So they can draw that distinction while still being able to. They can indulge in thought, experimentation and fantasy without having to get attached to whether this thing is actually real or not. It doesn't have to actually be real for them. And I mean, there's probably some interesting contexts in which people struggle with that as adults, where it's like, it's kind of. It speaks to the highly autistic versus the feminine and where you can't kind of integrate them. Yeah, that's what toddlers are doing a lot when they're playing with stuffed animals.
- [01:37]
A
I said it was impressive that your toddler could deal with that many levels of abstraction at once. And it speaks to something a lot of authors on mythology talk about. Because if you look at developmental psychology, from children to adults, there's a fairly, there's a quite strong parallel stages of abstraction individuals go through over the course of their life. And then the stages of abstraction societies do. And modern society is roughly at the developmental level of a teenager, where we're rebelling against the natural order and we're defiant out of defer. Defiance's own sake. And we're, we're arrogant, but we're also self critical because teenagers have that sort of. It's the alchemical rubedo. The rubedo is when a life form first emerges and it spurs itself outwards and it has all these internal contradictions, but it explodes. And because teenagers don't have a place in the world, they simultaneously Sort of feel the arrogance of, I suddenly have all of this energy I didn't before. But they also don't have an established social role or identity. And that's something we see the whole thing about if historic teenagers had similar psychological issues as modern teenagers, is they did. But there were social institutions that captured that dissatisfaction, and we don't really have those today. And if you compare children's developmental level, it's quite similar to ancient societies, where there's a weird paradox when you're trying to philosophically study especially sort of older ancient societies like Egypt or Babylon, where they have these mythologies that often have these deep symbolic archetypal points that are more advanced than a lot of the philosophic points modernity deals with. But they're also silly children's stories on their own level, where the priest classes understood these things in the complex archetypal level. But for most people, it was literally that Ra was the sun God, and he rose and fell. And Joseph Campbell talks about this where he said, a lot of these early ancient societies, they thought that by imitating the gods and imitating these archetypes, they took on their attributes. And it's similar to children play acting. When children play act, they're going to take on the attributes of these adult roles as the first step of forming them. And for these ancient peoples, magic was literally just how they saw the world, because the ability to differentiate your perception of your environment versus the actual reality is only something that the ancient Greeks developed in that era of history. And so if you feel an emotional attachment to the sun rising, that emotional attachment is literally the sun. And that's how children perceive the world.
- [04:37]
B
How does this relate to how boomers are less able to distinguish between AI? Because I feel like in some senses, my toddler would already be ahead of an ancient person because he can see something on the TV or a cartoon, and he can understand it's not real. But if you just showed someone a TV who lived 2,000 years ago, their first instinct might be like, this is a window into the spirit world or something real.
- [05:05]
A
It's hard to mentally categorize how they perceive the world because their categories were so different, where they didn't really have a concept of real in the way that we do. And that sounds really strange to the modern mind. But the Australian concept of dream time, that there's the. Among the Australian Aboriginals, there's these archetypal forms that dream in this reality. So they're not real in a literalistic sense. They're sort of regal in the way it's funny. Majority doesn't even have a concept for what I'm trying to articulate. The platonic forms is the only thing I could reach for.
- [05:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, real. Real. I think I can pivot it back a little bit to the Cold War thing, too, because it's like you mentioned earlier, with Cold War being the topic of today. It's like you mentioned with teenagers when they get to that stage where they're like, oh, this isn't real, and then they. They freak out. And it. It's true. Like, a lot of this stuff is. A lot of the. Like, the Empire stuff is crazy. But then you still live in a country, and you still live in reality where you're grounded by, like, obligations and dependencies and fragility. And so you have to be like, the toddler, where they're able to enjoy the show and, like, participate or enjoy the game. Let's say games, a better example. And participate in the game to improve things without kind of freaking out over the fact that it's not all perfect or figured out.
- [06:48]
A
Yeah. I have two things. First of all, I want to share my own story from when I was a kid about thinking about this stuff when. Where. When I was a child, my mom ordered me some dragon pens, and they arrived a few months late. And then I asked my mom, will these dragon pens inevitably stop working? And she said, yes, everything inevitably stops working. And I burst into tears, and I said, okay, if it's inevitable that they're gonna stop working, it is. In fact, they have, in fact, already stopped working. Because if something is inevitable, they. Then it's functionally already occurred.
- [07:24]
B
Your pen was, like, at a battle, being like, I'm already dead.
- [07:28]
A
Yeah.
- [07:28]
B
Let us advance one time, because my
- [07:31]
A
mom was kicked in the head by a horse when I was 6 and she nearly died. And I asked my dad, does everyone have to die? And he said, yes. And I said, does that include you? And he said, yes. And I said, does that include me? And he said, yes. And so I thought I was 6. I thought, wait, we're all going to die. I'm a child, so how do I maximize my own life to do as much as possible before I inevitably die with this knowledge?
- [07:55]
B
And I feel like six is almost late to figure that out, which is kind of more maybe of a uniquely Western American thing.
- [08:02]
A
I was actually. I was 4.5 when my mom got kicked in the head by a horse. I recently learned that I thought it was 6, that I was actually 4.5.
- [08:11]
B
Right, right. But like, I feel like people avoid those topics with two and three and four year olds.
- [08:17]
A
Yeah.
- [08:18]
B
Like they're capable of understanding that too. And they are. I feel like it. It's actually easier to understand. It's the same thing with learning languages, how it's really easy to absorb and learn a language when you're before two or three, because it's just like, obviously that's baked into the reality of the universe. But if you shelter them beyond that point where they have to learn when they're older, it's actually a lot harder. Like, kids shouldn't be figuring out that they die when they're like 10 or 11. It's like you're gonna give them complete trauma because you've allowed them to exist in this world for so long.
- [08:54]
A
Yeah.
- [08:55]
B
Under this illusion.
- [08:56]
A
Like, we do the same thing with sex, where we only explain when people are like, age, or at least when I. Things might have changed since due to porn, but when I was growing up, people only explained sex when you were 11 or 12. And so you're getting this new information at peak immaturity.
- [09:11]
B
Right.
- [09:11]
A
I'm currently reading Erich Fromm, who's one of the great psychoanalytic thinkers of the last century. And I like him a lot more than the other psychoanalytic thinkers. And he talks about how one of the things modernity robs people of is the sense of mortality and tragedy, which he says are innate human baselines that you need, where the tragic sense of life is really central to. If, especially if you're a high agency person, if you lack agency, you can ignore the tragedy of life and have someone else take care of it. But if you are in a position of responsibility or agency, you have to assess the innate sort of tragic character in the Greek sense that everyone is flawed, everyone is eventually done in and fails due to their greatest strength evolving into their greatest weakness. And everyone has their own character arc that they have to follow for their own motivations. And if you're an adult living in the real world, you have to understand that this is true of you and everyone else you will deal with, who also is in a position of agency and responsibility and the sense of mortality when you do away with the reality of death, which we've done, people die in hospitals and they get buried. There's no death on tv. Is you've created a sort of formless existence. And that's scarier than having a really dramatic existence, because when life is formless, you can't tell up from down. But once you know that, you must die. It creates a degree of sort of realness to your life.
- [10:47]
B
Right. Also ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Like you're still going to die and you're still going to get closer to dying and all those problems are going to compound. And I feel like it's. If you underserve that aspect of your psychology, like you said, tragedy is part of the human experience. If you underserve that psychologically, then you're probably going to like unconsciously manifest tragedy just so your brain feels normal.
- [11:11]
A
Yeah. One of the weird psychological things modernity does all the time is we think if we don't think about an issue, we don't have to deal with it because responsibility is so distributed in our society that you can get away with that until you can't.
- [11:26]
B
Fragility everywhere.
- [11:28]
A
Exactly. It's funny, I haven't read a single one of Nassim Taleb's books, but I've integrated basically all of his books as load bearing theories in my mind. So Nassim Talebs had a huge influence on me through osmosis.
- [11:42]
B
Interesting.
- [11:43]
A
But I haven't read a single one of his books.
- [11:46]
B
I really, it was one of my favorite filters back in the day when I read his book and I like heard about the concepts first, but then read the book and the books were worth reading because the number of examples he provides for every topic is huge. And it's elucidating any sort of category, lens topic. It's useful to provide a bunch of examples because it gives you certain context that lets you talk about it beyond the repetitive theory.
- [12:13]
A
Yeah. So this is a good transition. But it's easy to forget how recent the Cold War is. And it still hangs a huge shadow over the world today where, when, when the, the Soviet Union fell in 1989-1991, both of my parents were already adults. And basically every person in a position of authority today lived through the Cold War. And the Cold War was palpably traumatic to Western and global civilization in a way we haven't examined. Where the 20th century was quite traumatizing for a variety of independent reasons, where World War I made us doubtful of all of the older social institutions and values, World War II made us doubtful of the West's core itself through Nazism. And then you have industrialization and the rise of feminism and the moral degeneracy, and all of them add up to something bigger than each of their component parts. But the Cold War was traumatizing and it's easy to not think about it because Modernity lacks mental subtlety because the Cold War didn't cause a nuclear war. And the Cold War is a really dramatic event. And I've been trying. One of the really strange elements of modernity is you will have the most staggeringly insane things ever, and then the societies that live through them have no way to process them. And so the Cold War is this period when, over the course of 60 years, or like 40, 50 years, whatever, the industrial world was always on the knife's edge of complete annihilation, where at their peak, nuclear war would have killed over a billion people, at least potentially 2 billion people. And people lived with the knowledge that at any bad day, that this would all end. And there were several periods in the Cold War when it nearly did end. And this has done a lot of sort of psychological damage to the industrial world in a way that's hard to articulate. And Dan Corlen has a really good podcast about this. I listened to a bunch of Dan Corland's podcasts during my gap year after high school, and I listened to his podcast, the Introduction of the Atom Bomb, And I wasn't really excited to listen to it because it's not an era of history I thought that much about. But afterwards I thought it was one of his best podcasts because he talked about all of the social and economic implications and just political implications of the atom bomb. And it's just staggering. And first of all, we haven't been able to sort of accept the victory that we didn't lose everything, which I think that's really good. And, yeah, I. If I were. If I had the authority to do this, I would make a yearly holiday of we did not end the world during the Cold War. I think that's something that justifies as much, if not more celebration than winning the World War to the Civil War or the Revolution, because the costs, if the Cold War had gone hot, would have been so staggeringly high. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that the threat of nuclear war was so jarring that it created a reflexive dislike of masculinity and aggression, or even just sort of like the masculine principle in the world, masculine principle of agency. And a lot of the psychology and the issues we have now is a sort of irrational descendant of this, because when the boomers were growing up, this whole idea of we're on the verge of nuclear war was everywhere. And I've met so many boomers who say war is never justified. And I've met at least a dozen boomers who said that slavery is preferable to war. And I thought, what? And it clicked for me. When I think of war, I'm thinking of the war in Afghanistan or the thirty Years War or historic wars that are limited in the boomer frame. It's either the world wars or it's nuclear war. And so it creates these false mental dichotomies. And because it's a traumatic experience, you can't get people to step out and be rational about it. And this Cold War trauma is piled up on top of a mountain of other cultural trauma that in a highly complacent society, you can't get people to acknowledge any of it, let alone each individual issue, Right?
- [17:09]
B
Because if war is nuclear war, then you can't have war at all. So it almost creates this kind of reactionary effect which makes people almost like, similar to a complete philosophical peace person, like a Quaker or something, just through this connection. And then it's kind of like every war that we have, there's a narrative attached to it that this is going to be World War 3 or nuclear war, and that's the reason why we can't do it, or the reason we're doing the war is maybe to prevent nuclear war. It's. It still all surrounds this kind of reason. And it gets to some really complicated questions about as technology advances, it's not just nukes, right? There's a million ways to cause devastating damage technologically. And so it's like, how do you, how do you buy yourself like 20, 30 years to normalize relations or, or change the geopolitics of the planet before we get to a point where like, it's a, it's a free for all.
- [18:17]
A
Whoa, man. We could institute the Hermetica on a social basis to assess people's level of consciousness and responsibility and potentially use AI to assess this. And my personal theory is you could use an AI to assess people's level of consciousness and responsibility. And so if we're in a situation where America degenerates into barbarism or evil totalitarianism and a future totalitarian government wants to start a nuclear war, the ability to do that is under the eyes control. And then the AI assesses you're not mature enough for it.
- [18:52]
B
Well, that would be one solution. My typical solution is to just like avoid Thucydides trap by just getting stronger. So because if we do Thucydides trap without a supply chain, right? If your supply chain breaks down, but now you're in a war and all you have to fall back on is your high tech destructive advantage, then it's like that puts pressure on you to use it. So I'd rather get ahead of Thucydides trap, delay deterrence and other nations and then become economically strong enough and also stop the globalist stuff so that other nations don't feel like you're a total threat in the sense that you're going to control their policy and the way they live. Right? Like, do whatever you want. Just don't, don't shoot people or fund cartels. But like, I don't care what your tax rate is or what your social policy is. Maybe people will become a little less sensitive.
- [19:49]
A
That's sustainable for a single generation under very strong leadership. But over the course of centuries, you don't really have control of stuff like that. And a take I have is I don't think anyone's really in charge of the historic process. When World War I started, practically every single government in Europe wanted to avoid a war, but they were stuck in this compromising situation guided by sort of the spirit of that era that put everyone in a situation that they wouldn't have asked for. And let's say you're a new ruler in America and you take power and it's generations after previous people degenerated the society. And so you're already operating out of a not very good deck of cards. And so when you're looking at the future of a nation over the course of centuries, it's not that people are really in charge. The organic nation makes decisions and then the leader on top can adjust parts of it.
- [20:50]
B
Right. Iran's a good example of this because it's like, yeah, maybe I want to normalize relations, I want to do the, the peace thing. But like, maybe that would have worked better 40 years ago than after 40 years of conflict with them to the point where if they establish deterrence in a year through missiles or advancing drone tech and have the leeway to create bombs and are still kind of this belligerent actor, then maybe they're not going to be in the mood to make friends with us. Like, you know, one year is a lot, is not a lot of time to kind of change expectations around a relationship. So there's, that's kind of like a past obligation that keeps you stuck. And then you think, well, is the best path to like buy ourselves another 10, 20 years of deterrence until the global landscape shifts.
- [21:43]
A
You also can't project a single strategy onto everything. That just gets psychotic. If you say I want peace in every single context, you're going to end up with the worst possible sort of coag, you're going to end up with the worst possible end point. Because peace under every context means I will enable the worst quality players who do not respond for my calls to peace, and then I will hurt the genuinely good players who are willing to listen to my calls of peace.
- [22:11]
B
And it turns into kind of suicidal empathy to the point where you're in this Western filter and then you wake up and you're like, wait, every country in the Middle east is against Iran. Wait, like China isn't even supporting them that hard or openly. And it's kind of like one of Iran's things was they're being. They were so outright. And their violation of international norms. Like normally when you fund terror organizations, you're supposed to do it secretly and through like a back channel of money. Or when China gives money to Iran, it's under a pretense. They, they maintain this pretense, which is like, I don't know, this, this face thing. And Iran not doing that kind of gives the US Extra leeway to also violate the international order without getting called out too hard by players like China because China sticks to the face game and so they can't. Outwardly, I don't know. The. There's a broader point there I was getting to, but maybe you can see how it relates.
- [23:14]
A
I'm going to make this digression and then start with World War II, where I don't like the term suicidal empathy, because people are almost always using the term sympathy, where sympathy is feeling sorry for someone and empathy is understanding them. And in most cases, if you empathize with the various groups that the left is trying to do so you will realize that it's not actually good for them. Where if you empathized with these third world nations, you'd realize that they were not at a level of maturity for what we're giving them. Or if you empathize with the left, you realize that they're psychotic, sort of. They're a psychotic messianic cult. But because empathy is theory of minds and understanding and sympathy is feeling sorry. So the left has very poor empathy and very high sympathy for the groups they choose to.
- [24:03]
B
To suicidal sympathy.
- [24:05]
A
Yeah. So the origins of the Cold War lie in World War II. And, and it's one of those eras of history where you really can't overstate how rapidly the shift occurred. And I've always felt sort of bad about not giving World War II enough justice. Sorry, not giving the transition out of the world wars enough justice in these videos, because when we make the World wars videos, we'll talk about these huge, titanic conflicts that consume the entire topic. But for both World wars, the aftermath to these wars was as important as the wars themselves. But it often gets left out. And I've been meaning to make an interwar era video, but I want to read a few more conflicts because I know there was a lot of really important cultural stuff going on, especially in Europe, that decides the present that I have to read about. But you can see the seeds of the Cold War very strongly in World War II, because the alliance between the Soviets and the Western powers was always strategic at best. Where the British and the French were planning on declaring war on the Soviet Union in 1940 during the war, because the Soviets were working with the Germans due to the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviets were attacking Finland, which the Western countries were quite sympathetic to. And that would have been a catastrophically terrible decision. And During World War II, General Patton and Winston Churchill wanted to start a war with the Soviet Union right after World War II ended, where the west would use the nuclear advantage against the Russians before the Russians could get nukes. And I think that would have been a horrifically bloody war. And the logic that Patton and Churchill were using was that the Marxists are going to just keep growing, being a thorn in Western civilization, so it's best to use nukes on them early. And it's complicated where the Western countries had significantly more genuine freedom of speech and freedom of discussion than they do today. And so in Britain, France and America, which are really what I'm talking about when I say the Western countries, they had lots of people who were highly sympathetic to Communism and they had lots of people who are very much against it. And that line went through their ruling regimes and every element of society. Where for the pro Marxists, as an example, FDR was reliant on a lot of socialists in his cabinet. And so plenty of them were giving out information to the Soviets. MI6 was compromised by Soviet agents and the socialist government in Britain was anti Soviet, but it was also not really giving the Soviets justice for how dangerous they were. And so you had an Overton window of some people in the Western countries who wanted to declare war on the Soviets and saw them as basically satanic. And then you had other people who were highly amelioratory to them. Where Hollywood had civil wars about this, where a lot of the screenwriters were Marxists. And then Ronald Reagan with one of the big film agencies did a purge of the Marxists from Hollywood during World War II. And so the Cold War, you can see a lot of the buildup in the contradictions that emerged with the division of Europe over World War II, because World War II started as a conflict where the British and the French were trying to protect Poland from being divided up by the Germans and the Russians or this intra European nation state conflict. But then it devolved into this civilizational sort of destruction of Europe, where Europe was divided up between its two great diasporas, the Russians and the Anglo Saxons, Saxons who split Europe in half. And as Winston Churchill said, from Trieste to Stralsund. And I think of that because, as Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, which is seen as sort of like the denouement of the Cold War, and that involves democratic publics knowing where Trieste and Stralsund are. Trieste is on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast, on the border with Italy. That's where Gabriel d', Annunzio, who was one of the great Italian fascist figures, he sort of campaigned in Trieste before he became a national fascist figure. And then Stralsund was the city state on the Baltic coast of Germany that the Swedes held as a possession for several hundred years. And Winston Churchill, as I said, he was vociferously against both the Nazis and the Soviets. And he said that this would be the start of a new dark age in Eastern Europe, that the Soviets would crush the human character and free speech and art and all these things. And you can see the division inside Western governments with how to handle the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, where the Soviets militarily occupied everything east of the Elbe, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and they occupied modern Moldova and the Baltics. And this was accompanied by a mass shuffling of ethnicities west, where Poles were kicked out of these areas they had been in for centuries to be replaced by Ukrainians. And then millions of Germans were kicked out of modern Poland to move to modern Germany, where the Poles were shut, were shuffled west. And the Soviets killed millions of people. They raped millions of women in an utterly brutal conflict. And there were people in the west who were very much against this, like Churchill, who wanted to land a Western army in Yugoslavia and then march up to Vienna to liberate Hungary. And you can see these divisions at the Tehran conference, where there were two great conferences to divide up Europe. Tehran was the first one where they met in Iran. And Iran was in a weird place where the northern part of the country was Soviet occupied and the south part was British occupied. And kicking the Soviets out of Iran was one of the first sort of was one of the first instigating issues of the Cold War where Stalin was willing to keep north Iran if, if the west didn't give him too much crap for it. But the west gave him enough pushback that he decided to pull back. And the deal with these various conferences and Churchill wanted the Danube to be the line between the east and the west. Where there was an American army in Czechoslovakia that made it to Prague, which is where a lot of the Holocaust camps were. The very few Holocaust camps that the Westerners uncovered were around Czechoslovakia. And then we gave that back, we gave that to the Russians and the Russians said they would honor these treaties. Where Churchill penciled out Hungary is 50, 50 for our influence, Yugoslavia is ours, Bulgaria is ours. But then the Russians just floored the entire area. And FDR was supportive of this. Where FDR and then later Anthony Eden who is the British Prime Minister who let go of India, they were, their attitude was if we help the Soviets, then the Soviets will respect us and help us on our side. And this was staggeringly naive because the way the Soviets operated is if you give us an inch, we will take a mile. And so a lot of conservative authors talk about how FDR was sort of too kind to the Stalin. And I think that that is clearly true if you look at the way a lot of his cabinet operated, especially stopping the British from being more sort of anti Soviet. But at the same time the Soviets had a friggin huge army that was three times our size that militarily occupied Eastern Europe. And so if there were Soviet armies in Bulgaria and in Germany and in Hungary because the Soviets had to conquer Budapest in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, I don't think that we could have really negotiated that much more of Eastern Europe.
- [32:49]
B
Right. Even if the US tried to. And it's funny because Churchill trying to take Yugoslavia or divide various countries in your Eastern Europe between the Russians and the British Empire is kind of cynically viewed as Churchill trying to like steal a few countries and being just like the Nazis or the Soviets and trying to like extend the empire like a bad guy. But in reality, like the alternative was the Soviet occupation. And he, his, his attempts to make those treaties were exactly in that context. It wasn't just like random, let's be
- [33:31]
A
real, 1940s and 50s Britain was not going to occupy these countries. Even 19th century Britain wouldn't have. Were when Britain liberated Belgium and Greece, making them independent kingdoms, they were not British colonies. The British genuinely let them have independence. So there was this very rapid tipping point from Stalin being Uncle Joe, where in American propaganda During World War II, they referred to Stalin as Uncle Joe and the USSR as our allies to being our rivals. Within months of World War II ending, where they held a conference at potsdam, at Frederick II's palace outside Berlin. And the line that split Europe went something like this, where Western Europe became American satellites and the Elbe river was the dividing line in Germany, where we split Germany half and half with extra cream. But the Russians took a lot of the eastern half of Germany they got and then gave it either to Russia, where they settled old Prussia with Russian settlers and they moved a lot of Poles. So even though the Russians got half of Germany, they really. The part they kept was like a quarter. And that was old Brandenburg and Czechia went to the Russians, Hungary went to the Russians. The Russians militarily occupied Vienna and then shuffled it back to the West. And Yugoslavia was a communist state that was formed because Tito was a gorilla in the mountains who spent years fighting against the German occupation because the Germans had used Croats to genocide the Serbs, because they said the Croats were racially superior. But the Croats were really. The Croats were Slavs like the Serbians, but the Croats were at least Catholic, which made them part of sort of Western civilization's umbrella. And Tito was able to unify Yugoslavia by being half. I think he was half Croat, half Serbian, but he was also really tough. And he used Communism as a way to hold down all of these various ethnic groups. And Tito resisted the Russians and the west supported him in doing so. And Tito was one of the most nearly assassinated figures ever. Tito, much like Castro, had dozens of assassinations, but he was able to carve out the first of these independent, non Moscow based communist states. And Yugoslavia was still a brutal Marxist state, but it had less stuff like gulags or overt thought control or that stuff.
- [36:26]
B
Why did they have. Did it need to use fewer secret police to keep their population in line? Because they were constantly under assault from every direction. Kind of that they were in line anyways.
- [36:37]
A
Stalin and Ma were sort of. Not sort of. Stalin and Mao were evil in a way that's outside the overton window, where there's a certain degree of brutality that's needed to maintain an autocratic state. And if this is the healthy Overton window, Stalin is in San Marcos,
- [36:59]
B
right. And Yugoslav, Tito was just like, I'm just like a regular evil dictator.
- [37:03]
A
Yeah, like crazy. And Albania was a of a similar vein where they also, under their dictator, Enver Hoxha, they were A Marxist state, but they were a really schizo one where they spent a huge amount of their national income on bunkers and statues of the leader. They're, they're like one of those eccentric Central Asian dictatorships and they allied with Mao just for the memes. When there was a Sino Jap. When there was a Sino Soviet split, Albania allied with China and they took in the Maoist ideology. Well, no one else in their continent were allies with Mao and, and they
- [37:46]
B
did it just to be like the guy at the party who's rooting for the sports team that is from the different town that everyone's against.
- [37:52]
A
It's like, so there's one person, it's equivalent to the Khazars converting to Judaism. So they weren't reliant on the Byzantine Christians or the Muslim Arabs. And they ironically, in a lot of anthropological surveys, Albania has hollow similarities to China. Albanians score very similarly to the Chinese on a lot of anthropological stats in a way that people from Dubai score very similarly to people in Rio de Janeiro where there's similarities in the Irish and the Afghans.
- [38:27]
B
Interesting. Yeah. The Cold War is kind of a mess. The stands are still such a wild place.
- [38:36]
A
They are.
- [38:37]
B
It's like, what is even going on out there?
- [38:40]
A
Dictatorships, they're still there.
- [38:43]
B
It's the only place in the world, I think, where there are still nomadic, relatively nomadic Turkic people.
- [38:50]
A
I spoke to a guy recently who's a right wing philosophy professor who lives among nomadic tribes in Kyrgyzstan.
- [38:56]
B
No way. Yeah, I made a hilarious joke about that because there was the, you know, the, the meme about the Jews being the Khazars, even though they're unrelated to the Ukrainians. So I made a meme about a Jewish guy reading a 4chan form or something and seeing like the real Juden and seeing a picture of a Khazar on horseback. And he's like, that's my real identity. And so he travels out to the stands and tries to rediscover himself. I thought that would be kind of a funny twist on that.
- [39:25]
A
Yeah, make that a Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks comedy.
- [39:29]
B
Exactly.
- [39:30]
A
And with the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, it was a brutal process because the Soviets had to crush these areas cultures to occupy them. And during the earlier division between Molotov, Ribbentrop, the Soviets killed off a lot of the Polish nobility and their intellectuals and priests in the part of Poland they had occupied. But there was an additional wave of repression where a real sort of moment the Poles hate is there was a Polish resistance movement that fought against the Nazis in World War II. And they seized part of Warsaw right when the Soviets were occupying it. And their hope was to team up with the Soviets and fight the Nazis. What the Soviet army did was stop on their side of the Vistula river, have the Nazis murder all the Poles, not help them because the Poles were backed by the British, and then conquer the city once all the Poles died.
- [40:39]
B
It's so weird that dichotomy you mentioned about how like instantly it flipped to being oppositional and obviously the Soviets doing all these terrible things in these countries we were just pretending to care about. And the fact that like half of the US and the leadership were full on Soviet Marxists, like FDR's vice president who got sidelined from Truman was a full on Marxist, like very, very close. And it's just funny in the context of narratives of like Hillary Clinton narratives of like Russia control or whatever, like you want to talk about foreign, foreign control and alignment, it was like, I mean, and this is also kind of a perennial thing in history where you'll be. When, when do these like ideological things take priority over nationalism? Because I feel like it happens all the time where the real battle is just like completely split up among countries between their factions, like the Jacobites in Scotland and the French. And
- [41:37]
A
it's one of the things Carl Jung said is that once people lose the threat of genuine starvation and physical threats, you're going to start seeing psychological plagues take on sort of the Darwinistic selection pressures that famine or plague would in the pre modern world. And you can see elements of that in the early 20th century. It metastasized later on. But it's one of those things where it fluctuates based on context. And modernity does multiple levels of mind fucking, which makes it hard to analyze. But there was the element that Soviet allies were in the Western governments and it was multiple tiers of it between. Most of the people who were Soviet allies were not hardened Marxists. They were what the the Soviets called useful idiots. And the Soviets had well established demoralization and propaganda campaigns. And it's really dystopian and kind of horrifying how much of the modern West's culture was just unironic Marxist propaganda. Because a lot of the postmodernist authors that we build our worldview from were just unapologetic Marxists who openly said, I wrote this because we needed a new argument for Marxism. The arguments we have about America being a wasp, Anglo oligarchy and a lot of modern feminism, a lot of sort of the, the racial discourse was literally designed by Marxists for the express purpose to hurt the society. And you don't have to believe me, you can read Marcuse, or I have a funny story about Marcuse, I have to say it. You read Marcuse, you read Yuri Besmanov, you read Solinsky, you read any of these people, and they have very set psychological manipulation tactics which just became the new reality where Yuri Besmanov is the most obvious one, where he talked about how Marxists would try to disrupt every level of a functioning organic society through attacking these various social institutions. And in the 80s he defected from the Soviet Union to America and he said, within a generation, Marxist will seize control of your society. Because we already have the institutional power. We just need to have the old guard die off. And that's exactly what happened. But there's an interesting contradiction where Yuri Besmanov would refer to the people that they would use in the west as useful idiots, like the feminists or the race activists or these people where the useful idiots won and they survived longer than the Cold War. And one of the great weird reversals of my life is that I had been told that communism had lost. And the only people who still believed these Marxist ideas were sort of ivory tower fools that would lose. Ivory tower fools in academia or in the media who would gradually get discredited. But the iron, the ironic thing is it didn't matter if they just were discredited because they had the institutional power, right?
- [44:48]
B
It's like, oh yeah, don't worry about them. It's just like a few of the professors. Meanwhile, Marx is the number one prescribed author across college campuses. It's like, wait, yeah, wait a minute, how did the old guard win again? And it's kind of like it flipped on a dime because the right would put up with the Uncle Joe stuff during the war because they, it worked for them. But after the war, when it switched and then suddenly the Soviets were a threat, they edged out these guys who were like full blown communists as you described, like very scary. They didn't just go away, they were still there. And they, they like took over the leadership after that specific old guard.
- [45:29]
A
Yes.
- [45:29]
B
Went away. A real issue that coincides with Hollywood.
- [45:33]
A
Yeah, a real issue is that the sort of the useful idiot liberals, if they support freedom of speech, if they support stuff like helping, I don't know, helping starving children, those could be genuinely held opinion. Actually, I don't think they're genuinely held because they will always criticize the right in the establishment, but they never hold the Marxists accountable. So the sort of passive liberals don't actually believe the things they say. They believe in the gradual acid on Western civilization, which is why James Burnham in the 19th, in 1961, said that the endpoint of this would be the suicide of the West. And I read something recently where Marcuse, who was the one of the big thinkers of sort of critical postmodernism, he said that the idea that sex is genital to genital is innately oppressive because it leaves out other things like anal sex that homosexuals do. And I thought, how mentally broken are you to think up a concept like that? I texted that to Merrick, and Merrick's reply was just gay. Or one of the great feminist thinkers, Dworkin, she said that the act of sex was innately patriarchal because it involves the male sort of penetrating the female. And so this means that humanity should not biologically procreate, which is just. Or Simone de Beauvoir, author of the Second Sex. No one read that book because it's 700 pages. And by the end of the book, and this is the most seminal, seminal. This is the most seminal text of modern feminism, it says that because I feel bad that other women have to enter into these relationships with men in order to have children, we should erase the institution of motherhood and instead basically have community state boarding schools instead of families.
- [47:30]
B
Right. I love when you can connect these crazy philosophies to their real world manifestation and see that it actually has a logic to it. Like you said, what was the one where the woman said that, like, all sex was rape and therefore we shouldn't procreate?
- [47:44]
A
Andrea Dworkin.
- [47:46]
B
Yeah. So I said there's in that the modern manifestation of that is a woman wading through a pool at a park chasing ducks because they're having sex. And duck sex is notoriously, like, conceived of as, as rapey because of all the, like, things that they do to what. I'm not going to go into the, the biology of, of ducks, but it's considered like a, you know, a rapey kind of interaction. And so this woman is going in, chasing these ducks, saying, you stop it. You get off of her. You get off of her. And it's, it's, it's a perfect manifestation of that very specific ideology that happens, didn't it? That it's a real thing.
- [48:29]
A
Oh, my God. One of. So Andrea Dworkin was a meme in the 20th century. If you talk to someone above a certain age who's educated, they'll probably know who she Is. And she had this whole thing where she would complain of being. She was famously obese and ugly and she would complain about getting drugged and raped by this handsome waiter in France. And she would constantly use this as victim signaling. And the joke at the time was like, man, no one's going to rape you.
- [48:59]
B
It's just wine, lady.
- [49:00]
A
I love that. These videos are not monetized. I can just say this stuff and then advertisers won't bat an eye.
- [49:08]
B
Oh, is that why?
- [49:08]
A
This is.
- [49:09]
B
Why, did we say something?
- [49:11]
A
No, I mean, this is. This is.
- [49:13]
B
I feel like we have enough viewers to be monetized.
- [49:15]
A
No, we don't, because. So it's the whole ad blockade that 95% of ad dollars are controlled by the left. It's because I have to compare my main channel's viewership to this channel. And it's a deeply unfair system where people who have like 1:10, my audience in a different industry who aren't political can make more money than me.
- [49:38]
B
Right, right, right.
- [49:39]
A
But so back to the Cold War with the conquest of Eastern Europe, you saw the rise of a series of Soviet satellite states with differing levels of authority. And the Soviets were unwilling to turn all of this into just the Russian Empire. And so, for example, East Germany was a place they really treated cruelly. And the East German Marxists, because Germany had a long Marxist tradition, they were extra careful to be sort of submissive to the Russians and a lot of sort of concepts of political correctness. You can see in East Germany, as the Soviets tried to sort of inculcate guilt in the Germans, both the Nazis, and colonialism. Political correctness is a Soviet term, actually. And the Soviets would have. Would have quotas for you're of a certain race or a certain social class, thus you get expedited social status increase. And then Romania was a brutal dictator named Chachescu, who was extra harsh compared to the others. And in places like Hungary or Czechia, they had their own sort of periods where they reverberated against the Marxist control because the Russians didn't control these places directly. And they had to find loyal, loyal Marxists who would follow their orders unwaveringly. And in most cases, the international Marxist community was under direct orders from Stalin. They would just listen to everything Stalin said and followed the orders immediately. But there were periods where they had to kill off local Marxists who were too patriotic. And in Hungary and in Czechia, in Hungary first, I believe in 1957, they had a brief period of liberalization because they thought that because they were on the edge of the west, they could get an extra degree of latitude. But in both Hungary and this also occurred in Czechia, I believe in the late 60s, the local Marxists were allowed a certain degree of leash. And until the point where they allowed genuine freedom of speech in elections. Then the Soviet tanks came in because the Soviets tried to maintain this illusion. We're not an imperialist government, the Americans or the genuine imperialists. Although America actively pushed and enabled the d. The d. Colonialization of the third World by European powers. So you can't really.
- [52:28]
B
Of leftist projection.
- [52:29]
A
Yes, exactly. And so they occupied Eastern Europe. And whenever these societies tried to get some degree of freedom, the Soviets crushed them. And we largely cooperated with the Soviets in letting them control Eastern Europe. Although there were. Because the dissidents in Czechia and Hungary assumed we would support them. But when the time came we didn't. And I think there's a degree of validity that I would not start World War three over Czechia and Hungary. I'm sorry they are not important enough to warrant a billion deaths. But later on a lot of the Americans tried to help dissenters in these places give them support. And the gradual dribble of culture in from America was significantly more important than any direct political stuff we did. Because as they. And this was helped by America having a significant Eastern European diaspora community. So we had lots of people in America who could speak fluent Polish and pass for being polished. We had lots of people who could pass for a litany of East European ethnicities because that's where their family was from. So they made useful sort of translators or allies or that stuff. And there was a taping point when people started to realize that this was the new sort of period and this was the new moment in history. And you saw the sort of formation of what Mackinder called the heartland versus the interior. And Mackinder was a big thinker from the Pre World War I era. And he had a famous line that whoever controls the heartland controls the world. Because this was a period when these great continental sized powers were emerging like America and Russia and China. And Mackinder's thesis was that whoever controls the largest geographic land mass will dominate the world because they have access to the largest reason region and largest resources. And I call this risk thinking that if you get the entire continent, you get the bonus pack. And we tested this thesis with the Cold War. And if you hang out and read in foreign policy wonk circles, people still quote Mackinder. And I don't understand why, because we exactly Tested his thesis because the Soviet alliance at its peak was a perfect map of his heartland centered in East Europe, which was his core heartland. And then the fringe exterior was perfectly mapped onto the American alliance where the New World, Western Europe, India, East Asia was part of the American alliance. And then the heartland people lost. So we know his thesis is wrong. And you see that the Iron Curtain block crystallized around a region I called the former Mongol Empire. And the former Mongol Empire is an area that keeps on popping up anthropologically in a variety of stats between authoritarianism or totalitarianism. Places where you can't drink, the industrialized societies where you can't drink faucet water, societies that treat women poorly, societies that have the sort of exogamous clan social model. And the reason that the former Mongol Empire is the cultural area it is. And the only regions that are part of the former and also the modern China Russia alliance, the only areas in the former Mongol Empire that weren't part of the Iron Curtain block are Iran and Pakistan in the Middle east, where Islam was quite immune to global communism because communism can only emerge in societies. The breakdown of the religion and the family. And in Islam, the religion in the family was strong enough that you didn't have the same sort of social atomization that created communism. Where if, yeah, if the family and the community can insulate social tension, you're not going to get political radicalism. Which is why in the Middle Ages there was basically no political radicalism, which,
- [56:46]
B
so you could say the actual like most extreme jihadi Muslims are actually the least Muslim because they're also the ones that are most amenable to third world is communism.
- [57:00]
A
So like I said.
- [57:02]
B
Or is that just because they're in a fight?
- [57:04]
A
I said political radicalism. I didn't say religious radicalism, where okay, if, if your society has a cohesive religion and family, when things get bad, their goat people will devolve into religious radicalism. And that's what, that's why medieval Europe or 17th century Europe had religious radicalism or why Islam does. But global Islam in its current form was a creation of the 20th century that was a reaction against communism. Where these authors went were often educated by the Soviets because the Middle east did go through. Actually I was wrong. The Muslim worlds did actually go through a pro Soviet phase. They weren't actually communists, it was bunker regimes, but that was the Arab countries. The former Mongol Empire is Persia, Turkey, Pakistan, which were all American allies.
- [58:00]
B
Got it. Okay, so then getting back to like what creates this center of the map kind of determinism like what was that guy missing? And that that made like risk out and catan in. Basically it was.
- [58:16]
A
So the reason that it crystallized in that middle of the map was the Russians were able to basically defeat all their neighbors and then they got China. Where the shortest answer I can give is that the former Mongol Empire was not pluralist enough to support genuine capitalism because capitalism is dependent on cultural pluralism. In other contexts, between is, does your religion allow tolerance? Do people associate with those outside their clan structure? Do you have an independent market, an independent nobility from the government where due to the threat of nomadic barbarian invasions, the Russians and the Chinese had to build these highly strict authoritarian structures that when those societies adjusted to modernity, they went for communism. And I don't think that's deterministic. Where China was a huge variable. And I, I want to say this so I don't forget about it later, but there was this ideal that communism was just this sort of like the chaos gods in Warhammer. It was just this powerful force that just rolled across the world. And one of the things Todd Emanuel said was that that wasn't true. Communism was popular in certain cultural and political contexts and it wasn't able to spread successfully outside of that. Although I don't want to get deterministic. Where in Western Europe, as an example, the French in the Italians nearly voted in Marxist governments in 1946, 1947. Where after World War II there was this huge popularization of Marxism in Western Europe due to the trauma of the war and the Americans intervened and potentially falsified the results of the election. We definitely funded capitalist parties and fused different right wing coalitions together. I don't feel any guilt about that because if France and Italy went Marxist, they were very pro Moscow Marxists. So we would have seen the Iron Curtain move to the English Channel. And once a society goes communist, it can't go back because the Marxists consumed the entire organic culture. And so there is a timeline where west especially, let's say where America's weaker or the outcome of World War II is different, where France and Italy in Western Europe go Marxist. And there's also timelines where China doesn't. Where China was a weird situation that they. A third of China with its largest population concentrations were under Japanese occupation. And this was coming out of China's warlord period where the old Qing Manchu monarchy failed and there was regional warlords that were getting consumed by the Nationalist government under Chiang Hai Shek, which was a weird Frankenstein ideology including National Socialist elements. Chiang Hai Shek himself was a Methodist. They had, they were allies with the capitalist finance families. They had Confucian elements, they had sort of socialist state planning elements. It was just sort of, I will build a broad tent coalition of everyone who wants a functioning China. So the Marxists, due to the Russians giving Mao Zedong Manchuria in northeast China, which was the industrial heartland of China, where the Japanese built out a lot of factories, they were able to defeat the Nationalists, conquer all of China. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan. And I have a wonderful board game. It's rated one of the best board games ever. It's Twilight Struggle and it's a board game about. It's about the Cold War. And I'm going to use it over the course of this video because it's a profoundly useful tool of analysis. But they have the literal China card where China, Maoist China is a wild card that the Russians start with. And you have to give away the China card under certain contexts. And I think that's a useful frame because Maoist China was such a weird country where I think it had 300 million people at the start of this. And somehow the population increased radically under Mao. And in Maoist China they would keep the men and women in different barracks and they would be allowed to sleep together like once or twice a month to allow procreation. But somehow, I mean, the population didn't grow during the Great Leap Forward, but it grew on either side of it. Just human character. And Maoist China started out as an ally of the Soviets in a very vociferous one where Stalin was scared of Mao because Stalin thought Mao was completely insane. And watch the modern China video where Mao, Mao was more brutal than Stalin by any metric. Through purging political rivals, purging any free thinkers, being brutal to China's ethnic minorities and then starving over. Stalin killed 40 million people. Sorry, right. Mao killed 40 million. Stalin killed 20 million. And the Sino Soviet alliance lasted until Mao died and Khrushchev took power because Khrushchev walked back a lot of Stalin's decisions and Khrushchev had this whole speech about Stalin was. Was too brutal. And Mao said, bro, Stalin wasn't brutal enough. You're just being cringe. And so the Soviets and the Russians had a falling out. Sorry. The Soviets and the Chinese had a falling out in the early 60s and Mao was stuck in his own direction. And it was a deeply strange country because until the 1980s, all of China combined had an economy smaller than Spain or Canada. And Spain wasn't even an industrialized country at this Point, this was not modern Spain. And. But at the same time they had a huge, potentially the largest military on earth. They had nuclear weapons. And so until Nixon made the deal with China in this, in the late Nixon was late 70s, I think, early 70s, whatever. Nixon made the deal with China in the 70s. Everyone looked at China like, what are you guys doing?
- [64:47]
B
That's almost like a sci fi or a fantasy novel to have that little technology but also have nukes that. I mean, it makes Iran today look like a technological superpower compared.
- [64:59]
A
Yes.
- [64:59]
B
To China back then. What a weird mix. And also, I mean, it's nice they didn't blow anybody up because you think maybe that's the most extreme example of a context where we're in trouble, where you give nukes develop from a higher civilization to like a lower one. But there's multiple dimensions of lower, I guess. Right. And China had other advantages even if they didn't have, you know, running water yet.
- [65:25]
A
China in the 1970s was a significantly more primitive country than it was in the 19th century for the vast majority of Chinese. My dad told me a story of he once met a guy who, or he once worked with a guy who was one of the first people when China industrialized. So he was going around there looking at factories and industry in the 1980s, and he said it was such a strange situation where he'd talk to people and it was. No one would speak honestly, but they were clearly very traumatized. There were these bizarre disjoints and everything. And he would always worry, did I just get this guy killed by saying the wrong thing? Because of the way the Soviets or the Maoists worked is that you'll see these photos of Americans and Soviets shaking hands when we defeated the Nazis and Stalin shot all of those guys who shaked the hands of the Americans in those photos because they spoke to American, which could have made them potential contaminants.
- [66:22]
B
Right. It's. It's a crazy reactive lens. And it's kind of an example of how Stalin was so totalitarian by European standards. It's like you're just pruning, pruning people casually like it's a slightly green leaf on a tree or something.
- [66:38]
A
Yeah.
- [66:39]
B
And then, and then, you know, Stalin can't believe kind of what he's gotten away with in Europe. Can't believe what he's done relative to their standards. And then he meets Mao who's like, yeah, let me show you how we do it in Asia, buddy. Okay? People are rice. Okay? You have many pieces of rice, many People, some analogy.
- [66:55]
A
There's a saying that Marxists treat human lives like Americans treat ammo clips.
- [67:02]
B
That's hilarious. And the Soviets are kind of the perfect intersection of that because they didn't even have enough ammo to kill all the human lives that they gather to kill. Like they can use bullets for all their executions because they're like halfway in between Asia and the US US makes a lot of bullets. Asia kills a lot of people. The Russians just can't decide exactly.
- [67:24]
A
Let's take a brief break.
- [67:26]
B
That's good.
- [67:30]
A
I'm going to divide this geographically first and then do it chronologically. Where much like our current new Cold War between America and the Russo Chinese alliance, you have the heartland and then its perimeter. So you can look at sort of an oval like circle across Eurasia and the two great fronts in the Cold War because it was really a global conflict. But the two big ones were the North European Plain and then the Far east where I start. In the North European Plain you had military forces pitted against each other with Germany being seen as the dominant battleground. And a great author from this time period is James F. Dunn again one of the great military authors. And I'm just depressed that I don't know how. Well a lot of his stuff about how war is waged has aged today. But if there was a war, the American plan was to hold the Soviets on the Rhine to have a sort of sustained retreat until they could see if we could stop the Soviets on the Rhine. And there was this ever present threat of the middle of Europe becoming a war zone. And I always wondered as a teenager when I shadowboxed this if the Americans could hold Denmark as a peninsula against the Soviets. But. And then you also had, even northern Italy was under the threat of Soviet invasion and her Harry Turtledove has a great book about if the Korean War escalated and what a war between these two powers in the early 50s would have been like. Because there was a brief period when the Americans had nukes and the Soviets didn't. Where you could have had a world war that would have looked like the World War II without immediate nuclear annihilation. Because in 1951 the Americans didn't have enough nukes to end the Soviet Union and the Soviets didn't really have any nukes. But after the North European front, Greece had a civil war between the American backed faction and the Russian backed faction. Turkey under the Kemalist Ataturk regime were American allies. Iran were American allies under Reza Pahlavi who was a military. He was a Colonel installed himself as emperor or shah and he ran Iran as a totalitarian regime. He would forcibly collectivize agriculture and have a secret police. Pakistan was an American ally and India was indeterminate. They were the first sort of like quote third world country where India built its identity around not being Soviet or American but they took in socialist economic doctrines, they bought Soviet weapons. And then China was a Russian ally initially. And then the second great front was in the Far east where you had the Korean and the Vietnam hot wars which were the two great hot wars of the Cold War that killed millions of people. And you have the Iron Curtain from Stralsund to Trieste and then there's the Bamboo Curtain which is in the East. And that's not that I didn't, I didn't. You're muted.
- [70:47]
B
The Bamboo Curtain, what's that?
- [70:49]
A
So I read this from Matthew White, I'm going to reference this book again. He calls it the Bamboo Curtain and that's Vietnam, Korea, Japan.
- [70:57]
B
Interesting. I like that name.
- [70:59]
A
I like it too. It's human. And you can really see a very stark division ideologically between east and. The test on communism has been run so many times. I've just come to the conclusion that a lot of the population does not process physical reality because you have east and West Germany where West, even today West Germany is vastly wealthier than East Germany in the north. And South Korea to a completely homogenous population, one of them capitalist and the other communist. And to use Korea as an example, the north had used these sort of. The Soviets would keep sort of zoo Communists they'd say like we have a zoo of these different Marxists who study here where every country you'll have oh, we have our little French Marxists, we have our African Marxists, we have the American Marxists, we have the Korean Marxists, we have all of the different ethnicities of Marxist. So if Greece happens to be a Marxist state we can paratroop in Greek Marxists who are loyal to Moscow. And so the ruling dynasty of Korea had been living in Siberia for years hoping a Marxist regime conquers Korea. And they became one of the most brutal of the Marx of the Marxist regimes, killing a million people. And South Korea was under capitalist landowner leadership because Korea had a landowner slave owning system and dominance. Korea had one of the longest lasting slave trades in history from the before the birth of christ until the 1950s when the Americans abolished it. And America tended to ally not with democracies but with reactionary local nobilities because there were very few genuine democracies on Earth, at this time in 1970, there were less than 10 capitalist democracies on earth. And most of them weren't really capitalist. They had a lot of socialism mixed in. And so when you're looking at Latin America, a friend of mine once divided Latin America's politics between the Marxists, who say, if you work with us, you can take the nobility's land and the right, which said, if you support my title to be a nobleman, you get to keep your plot of land and your daughter won't marry beneath her station.
- [73:30]
B
And as well, it's almost like the ideological consequences came after. In the beginning was just like these people have this kingdom, this is this exiled monarchy. Would you like an army to take it back? And then they got embedded on those sides.
- [73:44]
A
Yes. And Matthew White covers this well, where because he looks at the Cold War, at all of these distant conflicts, and about 11 million people died in these Cold War adjacent conflicts. And so the Cold War killed about as many people. It killed more people than the Thirty Years War, which really killed over a third of Germany's population. In the 70th century, the Cold War killed a little bit less people than the Napoleonic Wars. And of the conflicts, Vietnam killed 3.5 million, Korea killed 3 million, which was a huge part of Korea's population. Then the North Korean government killed an additional million. On top of that, Afghanistan, which the Soviets invaded, killed 1.5 million. Mozambique killed nearly a million 600,000 people, died under the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia, half a million people died in Angola, half a million people died in Indonesia, 200,000 people died in Guatemala, 200,000 people died in Greece, nearly 100,000 died in El Salvador, 60,000 died in Laos, 60,000 Marxists were killed in South Korea by the right wing government. 50,000 people died in the Philippines, where we killed off the Marxist revolt, where the right wing government killed off the Marxist revolts. 30,000 people died. 30,000 Marxists were killed in Argentina, 30,000 Communists were killed in Nicaragua by the right wing government. And then 30,000 right wing rebels were killed by the Marxist government in Nicaragua. And the image I'm painting here is you did have the periphery where there were multiple levels to this, where the first phase was the phase of American hegemony when we had the atom bomb and the Soviets were just recovering from World War II. And so we had the upper hand early. Then there was the period of Soviet resurgence, which was as much a crisis of internal confidence in the west as genuine Soviet strength. And then towards the end of the Cold War, the West Gained the advantage again. And you have these fronts along the edges, but then you also have these conflicts over the former Soviet, over the former Third, over the Third World, in Latin America, in Africa and in Asia, where the European decolonization meant that at the start of the Cold War, practically outside Latin America, the entire Third World was under European governance. But by the mid to late 1960s, these were independent countries and nothing filled the void. And you saw a series of trends between a lot of Arab countries became what's called bunker regimes. And a bunker regime is small ruling ideology, keeps down disaffected peasant majority population. And because Israel was an American ally, that meant that a lot of Arab countries which were opposed to Israel felt the need to take in Third World socialism and Third World socialism sort of weird where it's not actually Marxism. And if you looked at the Soviets planners in Moscow, they did not take these countries seriously. The Soviets were sort of hesitant to treat Cuba as a real Marxist country they said is right next to the Americans. They never went through the bourgeois phase. They can't be treated as a real Marxist country. And then you look at Africa, the Soviets sent these places funding. But for example, Ethiopia was a brutal Marxist regime. And so when you have the Live Aid concert where all these rockers were saying, man, let's send all this money to Ethiopia. The reason the Ethiopians were starving was because there was a Marxist government on top, not due to agricultural issues. And that money was stolen. Where a really funny, I don't know if it's funny, the Ogaden War where Ethiopia was under a monarchy under Haile Selassie, who was the figure that was put back in power after the allies drove the Italians out of Ethiopia. For just a brief memory of how short the 20th century is, Somalia invaded Ethiopia to get the Oghaden region from them, which is an ethnically Somalian area of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government failed, a different tribe seized power, made Ethiopia a Marxist state. I believe Somalia was already a Soviet ally. So they flipped sides because the Soviets started backing Ethiopia. So the Somalis had to get their stuff from the Americans. And that's how incestuous this stuff in the Third World was. Where in Angola as an example, they had a brutal civil war between Marxist and right wing factions. And this was a conflict. The Cubans came in, the Soviets came in on the side of the leftists. So there were Cuban mercenary armies in Angola and then apartheid South Africa, which controlled Namibia and was allies with Rhodesia, they were fighting in Angola against them. And you can magnify this where in Africa and the third World, it's not useful to see these as genuinely political events. They were tribes who were trying to seize the apparatus of central government and they could invoke these political differences as a way to get authority. But it's not like these socialist governments were actually socialists. They were just using this as a rationalization to give their tribe more stuff.
- [79:33]
B
It's like we said earlier, it's almost like the ideology flows later as a consequence of the alliances and then, and then, and then the ideas that might seep in afterwards. But in the beginning it's like purely politics. And like what is the bunker regime phenomenon? Right. It's kind of like, like the consequence of early industrialization where it gives the regimes technological ability, advantage and ability to kind of control their populations. Because it really stems from the industrial bureaucracy. Because you have two ways to manage complex modern society, which is strong market institutions or bureaucracy. That's the only way you can control a mass society. So it's almost like there's almost like a scale from bunker regime to democracy, but they can both be either, sorry, bunker regime to democracy, but they can both either be run by bureaucracy or market. So like you can have bureaucracy, democracy, a bureaucracy, bunker machine, bunker regime or a bunker regime that's pro market or a democracy that's pro market. So it's like you got, it's kind of a useful spectrum to think of things.
- [80:48]
A
Thank you, that's a very good point. And they were using socialism as a rationalization to centralize power. And it's remarkable that western journalists and authors treat a lot of these thinkers as great statesmen. If I read a lot of books from this era and they'll say, like Nayeeray, the leader of Ghana is a great man and he shoved Ghana into poverty. And Cote d', Ivoire, which was capitalist, became much richer than Ghana. Although Ghana had an origin in the English parliamentary system where a lot of liberal authors liked Ghana because they were technically a democracy, but they were really a dictatorship under Naira Ray. And also the socialist backed ones kicked out the European experts where while Cote d', Ivoire, which had a capitalist dictator, he kept the French experts to keep it running and they had the skills that allowed it to flourish. Or the dictator Bakasa and I believe he's Picasso. Was Cameroon or somewhere around there? I don't think it's Cameroon, maybe a neighboring one. He was completely insane. He named himself emperor and he gave himself all these ostentatious titles you should look up and if you look at just A variety of these places where Tanzania was a socialist country under wait, Naira Ray was Tanzania, Ghana was someone else, Kenyatta was Kenya and he had the same issues. And so in Tanzania you had these forced socialist housing that put the nation in mass famine. And then when Tanzania shifted out of socialism and went to capitalism, even though they were the most lightly populated area in East Africa due to disease issues, they became wealthier than Kenya, which was a much better off colony because Kenya kept more of these socialist principles. And so you can see these dynamics play across in Africa and in the Middle east you have a weird dynamic where a lot of these Middle Eastern bunker regimes are Bonapartist, where they're socialist, but they emulate Napoleon more than they emulate the Bolsheviks.
- [83:01]
B
Right. Which is like they're the Napoleon part, not the French Revolution. Yes, but it's like still related in this kind of continuum.
- [83:09]
A
Or you look at the IRA and I'm, I'm Irish. So I, in the cultural milieu I grew up and there were a lot of people who were like supportive of the IRA or at least look, did not knew people who were in the Iraq. Yes, the IRA were Marxists, but they were also Irish nationalists. So if you were to associate in IRA circles, you would have people who would be ostensibly very culturally right wing and often capitalist under this Marxist leadership bracket. There is another one of these, Algeria, where Algeria was this horrible multi year war, where there is this fusion among the brutal fln, where when people think of France giving Algeria independence, they're not thinking of how the ruling government would shoot the dissenter. They kicked the Jews out, they kicked the over a million white migrants in Algeria out. And they used the combination of Islam and Marxism as a rationalization for sort of their brutal autocratic rule. And Algeria was not a country you were really allowed to Visit until the 2010s. You still probably should not visit Algeria. But I once knew a historian who was an older guy. He was born in the 40s and during World War II he was trying to go to Algeria because his historic speciality was St. Augustine of Hippo and the early church. And he could only go there in the 2010s with security because you couldn't go there. And there were certain points of the Cold War where a lot of the world was very dark. And we talk a lot about the issues today and there are very real issues today. But if you were to go back to 1970, the Western world was doing quite well, better than today. But if you were to go across Latin America, you have these conflicts over these various regimes. Like we just looked at Guatemala where the white nobility brutally crushed the native potentially Marxist rebels. Same thing in El Salvador. They were a left wing regime for a while in the poorest area, which is why they recently supported the Bukele. Because oftentimes the areas that were inoculated against the Marxists were the one are the ones who sort of go right today. And in Peru you had the crushing of the Marxists. In Brazil they were under a military dictatorship. In Argentina, in Chile they had right wing populist governments that crushed Marxists and killed hundreds of thousands of them. Where in Chile the Marxists were elected into power and then the right launched a coup against them. And then in Africa you had all the dynamics we were talking about in the Middle East. And then in Southeast Asia they had the post colonial dictator socialist phase under Sukarno. And then Sukarno was leaning too much on the Marxists to establish his power. Where the Marxists were heavily ethnic Chinese minority coded. Same thing as Malaysia which had a Marxist rebellion the British had to spend over a decade putting down. And then Suharto under the military launched a coup, wiped out Sukarno's government, made Indonesia a right wing military dictatorship, followed by Indonesia going through decades of industrial growth. And that's the consistent thread in a lot of the third World where first generation Soviet sympathizing socialist bunker regimes. What then happens is that these give the Marxists too much leeway. Military dictatorship emerges by the end of the Cold War where Matthew White makes the point that the Soviets and the Americans funding these multiple factions genuinely did make the third World a lot bloodier. But once the Marxist threat was removed, these military dictatorships mostly became democracies. And the reason there's very few right wing military dictatorships is almost all of them became democracies. Because the right wing dictators genuinely did care about the national good. And so they allowed the democracies to form and they didn't really fight them. But then once you have universal suffrage they become left wing.
- [87:28]
B
I mean you see this pattern everywhere. It's the pressure to transition to democracy is really interesting and it's funny to distinguish like when it actually results in a shift from bureaucracy to markets or vice versa or not. Because I'm just thinking of like a million examples and like, like Thailand's the classic one where they have the military junta kind of validated culturally by the monarchy. Still pressure to transition into a democracy. Monarch dies, looks like it's going to go to democracy. But the last Couple years it's kind of doubled back down on. On the. The bunk or the. The military maintaining control even post king. This is just funny to watch how this stuff transitions.
- [88:17]
A
This is profoundly un PC. But political ideologies only really made sense in the 19th century when they didn't have power. Where the 19th century was the last point political people argued about actual ideas. If you read 19th century debates, they're talking about these abstract concepts. By the 20th century IDE a vehicle to get people more physical stuff. And once you hit that point, the actual ideologies don't matter that much because it's a justification for power. And you can see these dynamics in the first World and even more the second World. But by the time we get to the third World, it's like a fourth level abstraction where you have these ideologies that didn't even make sense in the first world that are now being used to rationalize these societies which are not ready for them. And even the division between first, second and third World, that's a Cold War designation. I'm considering making a video on the main channel breaking them down because I think the first, second, Third World distinction is still important today, but it's fraying enough. I don't think it's really that. I think it's partly useful, but it's also not where there are lots of countries like Iran or Mexico or there's a lot of countries that sort of bleed between each of the levels where Turkey's. I mean a lot of Middle Eastern countries are industrialized now, but they're not First World countries. And then you have First World countries that have de industrialized where my friend Samo Bersha has a term called the post industrial world. And so the first second Third World was a Cold War idea because First World's the American allies. Second World is the Iron Curtain block or especially the Soviets. And then the term Third World was invented by Mao because when the Chinese Communists split off from the Soviet Communists, they said we are our own thing and we are going to invest in the developing world so that they become Maoist allies. And then the Indians jumped on this axis. And then for example, the Germans had the idea of the third way where we will develop a third way between socialism and capitalism.
- [90:28]
B
Some that's hilarious because they didn't mean to put themselves at the bottom of a 1, 2, 3 hierarchy. They're trying to like distinguish and elevate themselves as a third party. It's like I'm a third party, a third option. And we're like, okay, well now you're last.
- [90:43]
A
It's also funny that I read books from the 20th century and I'm always struck about how much has changed since then. Like I'm reading a book by Eric from right now and it's really shocking how sort of soft and Wishy Washy the 20th century was in a way that the 21st or the 19th century really can't relate to. If you're in right wing discourse today, we'll say that Cold War era America was like too left wing, but Cold War era America was the far right of that Overton window.
- [91:17]
B
How do you mean that?
- [91:18]
A
So within their context, yes, because America was seen as the most capitalist country, the most religious, the most religious industrial country, the most traditional people would say like, oh my God, in Texas. They still, they're still religious, they're still capitalist, they're still unironically Anglo Saxon. And so it's weird because biology has a point that in the Cold War, America was the right wing power and the Soviets were the left wing power. Now Russia is the right wing power and America is the left wing power.
- [91:52]
B
Right. And then you're kind of like reducing the terms left and right there to a specific lens. But whoa, man, it's. Yeah, that would, and that would be most closely associated with like the globalist versus nationalist lens.
- [92:06]
A
Right?
- [92:06]
B
Which is then when we get into this point about the current US elite counter revolution and how Russia is kind of like again in this middle ground between like bodies and bullets where they can't, they can't quite decide where they don't. They don't want global government telling them what to do, but they also don't want hermetic competitive pressure pressuring them to give up their oligarchy. So they're like, you know, they don't have enough for either, either plan.
- [92:35]
A
Politics is no longer politics. It's like Jungian archetypes where the coalition of the right we are part of is like the ascendant masculine. We believe in freedom, we believe in competition, we believe in merit, we believe in growth. That's like the Jungian idea of like the ascendant masculine, the left is devouring feminine. And then the authoritarian bloc like China and Russia, they are the constrictive decaying masculine. And, and so these things are because maus Utopia strips away culture so that anything that's left is like pure archetype because you've removed all the noise.
- [93:16]
B
Right. So the feminist made us team up with the toxic masculinity when before we were we didn't need them.
- [93:22]
A
We're not talk. We are healthy masculinity.
- [93:25]
B
I know, but we, they made us team up with unhealthy masculinity just to beat them. It's like we didn't need, we didn't
- [93:31]
A
want to do this one. Someone once said one of the great consequences of feminism was that Chad and Nerd had to team up and they're now friends.
- [93:40]
B
Oh, right. I love the. The Chad, Nerd, Chad chud ts archetypes.
- [93:46]
A
And so to go through the Cold War chronologically because we hit it geographically. A real tipping point for the Cold War was George Kennan, who's a big author. He'll keep popping up. He and Isaiah Berlin were big philosophers who were at the American embassy in Moscow. And he sent out a letter telling the American public, do not trust the Soviets. They're totally power hungry. They want the death of Western civilization. And that was controversial at the time because the American left kept on trying to be conciliatory to the Soviets. And in the late 40s you saw several different tensions. A big one was the Berlin airlifts where the Soviets surrounded our island in Berlin because we split Berlin with a western area and an eastern area. And that's sort of a great microcosm because our area of Berlin had a single highway leading it out. And the Soviets blocked off the highway to see if we'd give up Berlin. And we flew in all of their supplies for months till the Soviets gave up because we weren't willing to lose it. And it was a power show of what we could do because we could supply a place like air by air, like that, but the Soviets could not
- [95:02]
B
right a logistical flex.
- [95:04]
A
Yes.
- [95:05]
B
It's kind of like what you spoke to earlier about how like you talk one thing about Churchill trying to get colonies in the east. But even the line that we did get when you said the actual battle plans, if something broke out, our real line was way further west than what we had politically secured.
- [95:23]
A
And that's a great point. So the first great political conflict was the Korean War where that happened because
- [95:36]
B
we.
- [95:37]
A
This is like. It's like a Gen Z dating failure where it's just a failure in communication, getting a low trust equilibrium where America, the American foreign policy drew a line just sort of casually of the perimeter we would defend without even thinking in. The Koreans, coming from a shame based Asian culture took this to mean greater significance than the Americans. So we didn't draw South Korea into our defensive perimeter. And one of our sort of projections in one of the press statements we released into the North Koreans took that to mean they could invade the south without consequence. America pulled our military forces in to protect the South.
- [96:17]
B
That's hilarious, because I just watched one of those videos where it showed the time lapse of the troop numbers and the moving lines and the colored territories shifting.
- [96:25]
A
Yeah.
- [96:25]
B
And it looked like there was like a weird extra energy inserted into, like, making a marginal gain around that line. And then the actual territory was drawn just a teeny, teeny fraction below it. Like they were really trying hard to get that last 1% to meet that line you mentioned and then eventually gave up around a very similar line. But I can see exactly the psychological motivation through the graphic now that you've described it.
- [96:55]
A
And I've been wanting to make a video analyzing Korea as a society on the main channel for a while because they're the one Asian society I haven't covered in a civilization video besides Tibet. And also they're interesting because they have a huge cultural output and they're one of the very few countries to move economic brackets in the last lifetime. They move from a poor country to a wealthy country very rapidly. But Korea is also interesting because they manifest multiple dystopias as a society. North Korea is a communist dystopia. South Korea is a capitalist dystopia. When Korea was conquered by Japan, they were a colonialist dystopia. And then before that, they were one of the poor, oppressed, slaves. They're one of the poorest countries in East Asia, and they were a slave society. So I'm going to make a video like the the Story of Four Koreas. So the north conquered the south, and they steamrolled most of it pretty quickly because the northern half of Korea was the better industrialized, wealthier half, which really shows how much communism screwed them over. And so the South Koreans survived around Pusan and at the bottom part of Korea, the North, sorry, the Americans under MacArthur, who was our general in Pacific in World War II. We launched a naval strike on the west coast at Im. Imjin, Imjon, whatever, surrounding the North Korean army, shoving them back North. And I read two histories of Korea recently. I read Fehren Box and after it's a 300 page book. And I thought this war is simple enough that it's hard to get invested enough in these military operations because Americans attack the coast, we push back up further north. And then we started war with the Chinese because we didn't think the Chinese would intervene in Korea. And so the Marxists attack. Mao Zedong launched A huge army that wiped out the American really did a lot of damage to the Americans. And we didn't expect that because the communists were willing to fight with a enormous brutality where Mao was actually trying to kill off his own army because he had incorporated a lot of nationalist troops into his forces. So he was trying to start a war to kill off the nationalists so they couldn't cause issues later. And he wanted to get rid of a bunch of dissenters too and show off to the Russians how dangerous he was. And the Marxists were willing to do stuff like climb on top of mountains or live without food to surround the American forces. So they wiped out a few American armies and we had to restabilize basically where the modern border is. And I know the thing you're talking about where the difference in the current border at the 38th parallel and the one we had at the end, it's. They're very close, but they're slightly different. So it was line, go down line, go up line, go down line, stabilize. And I read another history of Korea lately that I started to, which was written by a doctrinaire Marxist who was saying stuff like the South Korean government was racist and imperialist and the North Korean government had more equal mixed managed political systems and was more like respectful of local customs. And I thought the degree of ideological goggles you need to make North Korea the good guys is staggering.
- [100:25]
B
Yeah. And with the, the territory it looked like, like it. The territory that went that they lost below the original line kind of looked maybe strategically insignificant. It was kind of like broken up land on the coast, like maybe not an easy place to occupy. So it just took like way too long for them to find the natural strategic barrier over the fakely drawn one.
- [100:52]
A
Korea is also a very difficult area to fight in, which is why they've been able to sort of wipe out Chinese and Japanese forces much larger than theirs. And it's why the Mongols never conquered Korea. They negotiated Korea in as a client state because Korea's mountainous, it has hot summers, cold winters. And the Koreans are also quite tough fighters. And so you saw the division of Korea into a North and a South that had very different trajectories. And so Korea's 1951 and that nearly caused a larger war because the Soviets were sending planes to fight for the North Koreans and the Americans knew that the Soviets were fighting against us. So we had a legal right to start a war with north with the Soviets over it if the Soviets were illegally fighting against us. And Douglas MacArthur wanted to nuke Manchuria. Because there was this tension inside the Americans when we had this military advantage for the first few years of the war with nukes, because we used the nukes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And America had this crisis of identity of we thought we were the good guys, the anti imperialists, the country of peace and prosperity. And here we are managing this global empire with these enormous weapons that we never wanted. And so the American command had lots of people like Curtis LeMay or General Patton or MacArthur who were of this older generation, said we need to fight the Soviets. But you also saw the introduction of what we called whiz kids in the older generation of sort of military chad types. They hated the whiz kids. And I understand why, because they were all of these experts in things like technical fields or engineering or from Harvard or whatever. And the older generation of military commanders were quite intelligent. They studied the classics, they had read at the history of war. And they had a more sort of intuitive emotional grasp on war, which is. That's one that consistently wins. The technocratic. Yeah, no, no, the technocratic attempt at war always fails because it doesn't grasp the intangibles. And there, there were several examples of this where we tried to do technocratic innovations in war, sort of incorporating management theory into our military, and that backfired. The Soviets were obsessed with that stuff where they would hyper obsess and structure their military operations which just made them hyper rigid and inflexible. Where the Germans were part of that older school of warfare which allowed them a much greater degree of flexibility. And for example, when America tried to incorporate a lot of these scientific innovations into things like the Vietnam War, the guy who we were basing it off literally made up all the results. And this was a huge scandal because there were a bunch of scientific results like almost no one in war actually fires at the enemy. They're just shooting rounds off to appear like they're fighting. Or there's ideas that most people who fight in wars don't actually care about the outcome or a lot of stuff like, like that. And the results that he was using he just made up. And so the American really.
- [104:14]
B
His own biases. Those are kind of leftist biases. Yes, seemingly.
- [104:18]
A
Exactly. And so we brought in all of these military things that we thought were scientific but actually had much worse results. Or the American military operates under the British model where you have cadets who pass courses at West Point and then they get put in positions of military responsibility with no experience. The German model, which works way better is you have squad commanders and Then your performance in the war is how you get promoted. And so the generals in the German military were all people who were former squad commanders with combat experience.
- [104:58]
B
Right. And that.
- [104:59]
A
Well the.
- [104:59]
B
And the stereotype with World War II is that the Americans were even the more flexible ones than the Germans. And that's why we could adapt where they had to plan. So it's like an even further extreme of that. But then after the Cold War we kind of go. Or during the Cold War we go more into relying on bureaucracy. And there's a perfect analogy to this, which is construction. Right. You'd have the guys that build the houses and they have, they know how, they have experience, they know maybe what they could change, what new material they could add. They know the fastest way to do that. They understand the constraints. And then you have the guy that is licensed and comes from college and you need that guy on site to even be allowed to build. And he also controls what you do. And so there's a ton of resentment because they don't understand the actual challenges. They don't like, you can figure it out more through trial and error, technical know how than like this top down kind of over analytical analysis.
- [105:59]
A
It's deeply cringe Chungus. It's like the Babylonian elite. It's like the Babylonian priest class demanding you pay a priest for everything. Same logic. I mean the reason we have these regulations, they don't actually do anything. It's like an ancient priest class giving incantations on something to bless it, to keep us safe. Yes.
- [106:18]
B
If we don't have them, then we'll start dying or something. And this is another example from Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile, which I really loved as a tangible example of anti fragility was the way the Romans would guarantee that a bridge was safe was that they would make the builder of the bridge build his house under the bridge so his whole family would live there. So if it collapsed, it would crash. And this is like the origin of tort law and legal liability, where you put the liability on the person and actually increases safety more than creating an overarching set of planned rules that not everybody's even going to follow.
- [106:57]
A
I don't believe that because the Romans had a sort of almost industrialized manufacturing sector. I think that might have happened a few times. But the Romans were operating at a scale where a single architect would build a bunch of these.
- [107:10]
B
I was wondering that like how many built bridges would an architect build? It's probably contextual, but at the same time a Lot of those bridges were big projects. Like, it probably depends how big of a bridge you're talking about.
- [107:21]
A
I could see that happening in a handful of sort of like, historic moments, because history is weird and big enough that weird things can happen periodically. So America considered nuking the Soviet Union and nuking. Nuking the Far east, where we considered nuking Vietnam and Korea. And Harry Truman told MacArthur no, that we should nuke Manchuria in Korea. And I think that's a solid decision because the Soviets had said that if they did that, they would have invaded Western Europe. And in this brief period, America had the atomic advantage, but we didn't have a lot of bombs. For example, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we told the Japanese, if you keep fighting, we're going to drop more nukes. But that was a bluff because we had dropped all of the nukes we would have for the near future because it takes a while to make them. And the Soviets got American nukes through Rosa Luxemburg, who was a Marxist traitor and defector, who gave them the keys on how to make nukes. And the Soviets had their own nuclear program that they detonated in Kazakhstan and up by the Arctic Sea. And Stalin just assumed there would be a war with the West. He didn't think there was a timeline where there wasn't one. So Stalin was constantly preparing for one. And when Stalin nearly genocided the Jews before he died, the reason was he saw the Jews as potential American allies. And Stalin built up military formations and kept conscription going. And America offered to do the Marshall Plan, which was our big effort to rebuild Western Europe. We offered to also do it for Soviet Eastern Europe. And Stalin said no, because he didn't want these areas to like the Americans more, and he didn't trust the Americans. And it's not impossible that if we had nuked Korea and Manchuria, the Soviets would have invaded Western Europe because that was the trigger Stalin was looking for to start a war with the West. And Stalin was willing to lose a few cities with nukes because the Soviets had three times the American military. So even the Harry Turtledove novel covers this well, where even if the Soviets took out, even if the Americans nuked Kiev and Moscow and Petrograd or Leningrad, the Soviets could have still punched an army out to the Rhine or northern Italy. And in the Harry Turtledove novel, and I think this is accurate, what happens is that much like the Cold War, the Soviets make an initial punch, and then the Americans use nukes and a larger population to gradually wear the Soviets down.
- [110:04]
B
Right. But you can't exactly nuke the armies in Europe. So you get them out and let them, let the Americans nuke the empty cities is kind of amazing. I, I love how the Soviets reaction to nuclear weapons was. We can take that, we can handle that. We can, we can take that hit.
- [110:21]
A
Nice, bro. I see you have a big, you have a big missile, but I have a bigger country this crazy.
- [110:29]
B
We can take that damage. I think. Can we survive that? I think we can survive this.
- [110:35]
A
Stalin's. Stalin's death was a serious turning point in the Cold War where Khrushchev was a lot more chill. Soviet Union was still bad, but it came less psychotic. And Khrushchev, there was a scandal where he had to bring in American grain, where the Soviets were dependent on American food to feed their populations, even though the Soviet Union had the most fertile land on Earth and they had a lower population density than America because their agricultural system due to collectivism was so inefficient.
- [111:06]
B
And that's why you couldn't nuke them. Genius strategy.
- [111:11]
A
If you starve first, the nukes don't matter. And Khrushchev is famous for his line, we will bury you, which he said to the West. And there's a weird element to the Cold War where there was no point where the Soviets were genuinely stronger than the Americans, but the Americans had been demoralized enough, we thought they were. And this is something this thing I talked to a friend about recently where if you look at the Cold War versus our perception of it, America was terrified of the Soviet Union because we believed their propaganda unironically and we were going through our own nihilism and our own self doubt. And this was exacerbated by the Vietnam War where Sputnik, when we, when he went against the Soviets for when we ultimately did the moon landing, which is a cool aside to the Cold War, in Twilight Struggle they have an extra. You can get a few extra sort of victory points. By putting a Soviet man on the moon. Right, sorry. By putting a man on the moon. And Sputnik had a huge effect on American education, where the Soviets were the first able to put these sort of satellites in space. Where when I was growing up, we had a huge emphasis on STEM against the humanities, which screwed me over as an individual because I'm terrible at STEM and good at the humanities because Sputnik made us worried about the Soviets beating us in stem. But physics and chemistry were the only two fields in the sciences where the Soviets were competitive against us because biology was tainted by blank slatism. The humanities were heavily tainted. And so Sputnik created a crisis of confidence. And we thought the Soviets were mass industrializing and growing more rapidly than us due to the propaganda. And the Soviet Union had a larger population and a larger military than America, so they were a genuine threat. But it's hard to overestimate how much the Soviets scared the Americans. Where our red scare under McCarthy that was anti Soviet. And I was watching a CNN documentary on the Cold War which spent more time talking about how McCarthy was bad versus Stalin's purges. And that's an example of how big the ideological bias was. And this is stuff I wouldn't know about lest my dad told me, because it's sort of been whitewashed. But there was a. So back in the 20th century, they said that the czars were worse than the Communists. And they said that people were starving under the czars and then in the Communists they were fed and the communists taught them literacy and industrialized Russia. None of that is true. And only the most far right people during the Cold War in the west were accurate at how bad the Soviets were. If you talked about the stuff in the west, you were called the reactionary. You were called whatever their version of the word schizo was. But all of the people who said the worst things at the Soviet Union when the records came out were accurate. And there hasn't really been a grappling with that. And people would say stuff like, oh, the Soviets love their children too. Oh, there are people just like us to cover for a genuinely totalitarian regime which was horrifically abusing its own people.
- [114:27]
B
That's a perfect example of like, no, you don't underestimate how different parts of the world value human life. It's not the same. It's not just all like, they care about their kids in this in the same way they don't. And that's important not because it means you can kill their kids. And it's okay now. It's important because it's going to inform the way they react and the way they react to you. And it's annoying too that we're trying to. Like I remember reading about Sputnik in high school and the way that it was in, in the history book. It was like, even then it was still like a sore spot. Like, I can't believe they beat us to that objective. And it has some sort of significance. It's like when you're reading about your team lost a sports game or whatever to arrival. And it's annoying that we like try and compensate for that by saying more education in physics or more in chemistry or more tests, instead of just like the real key, which is, as Marc Andreessen recently said, enabling neurodivergent individuals to be creative and do things like that's how the west wins, not by being bug men.
- [115:35]
A
Yeah. It makes me think of two things. First of all, we said the line, our enemies care for their children. But what if you have wokeness, which is a movement genuinely opposed to having children? That's a scary rival to have. Because if someone is opposed to children and procreation and that stuff, it makes you sort of remove the goggles. For what level of human sort of normalcy can we treat them with? That's the first thing. And secondly, a lot of these anti capitalist arguments are not. I don't want to be forced to work these long hours and do this extra stuff. I don't want anyone to do it. Because if you're in a wealthy capitalist society like America, if you have the free market, it's going to naturally mean that you as an individual don't have to struggle as much for what you want while accepting the knowledge that someone else will succeed vastly more than you. And in that lens, it makes you realize this is all about envy.
- [116:31]
B
That's why I hate when people say you need like a puritan work ethic or something to make capitalism work. When the entire point of capitalism is to make you have to do less work for more results. And then you can choose whatever you want within your current place, but the place itself is what's going to make the difference. If you're working 50% in 2000 tech versus 60% and 1600s tech, it's the that 5% is not going to be the difference maker. Yes, it's about the underlying conditions and transformation that you're creating.
- [117:04]
A
And yes, that is all correct. Over the 60s, so the Soviets got the atom bomb and this created an issue of the mutual threat of destruction, or so it was called Mad mutually assured destruction. And there's a movie of Dr. Strangelove which really talks about these themes in a darkly funny way. And by the time of 1961 when the Soviets and the Americans were facing one another over Cuba, because Cuba was a former American client state where Castro was a Marxist and he was originally sort of a wandering vagrant thug who he and his buddies seized power and he positioned himself as an American ally until he was in power and he made Cuba a brutal Marxist state. He was taking in Soviet missiles. And due to the way the Cold War worked, this was the first time Soviets would be able to nuke the American mainland. They would have been able to nuke targets in the American south, as far north as Washington dc. So this freaked the Americans out. And you had a standoff over Cuba with jfk. And this was one of the periods during the Cold War when we came closest to nuclear war. And I knew people growing up who had lived through this, and they said it was one of the most terrifying events of their life, where the only way the Americans and the Soviets could talk to one another was through a single cell line between them. So you would have this diplomacy of does the cell line ring? And we're going to have the discussion now, wait another day, wait for it to ring. And so JFK and Khrushchev were in this sort of high stakes debate where the ultimate agreement was the Soviets would not put missiles in Cuba in exchange if America took our missiles out of Turkey, which were what we had positioned against Russia. But the great joke here was that this was a few years out from the invention of the icbm, which allowed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which just made none of this valid. You could launch a missile over the North Pole from America to Russia. And what also happened was that nuclear submarines became strategically decisive. And the Soviet plan, if they had a war with America, was to use their quite advanced submarine corps to go around to try to hurt the American seaboard or the America's trade routes with Europe. And you could put these nukes on these submarines and put them anywhere. And for the Cold War, from this point onwards, the threat of MAD grew, where at their peak, the Soviets and the Americans had like 30,000 nukes. And the planning here was you had two scenarios for nuclear war, one of which was a staggered diplomatic nuclear war where let's say we bomb Moscow, Novozobers, Bersk, Vladivostok, Kharkov, the Soviets bomb Denver, Washington D.C. omaha, San Francisco. We stop and then negotiate the new treaty. I don't know if that would have worked because the other timeline is once it escalates, we knock out everyone's cities immediately. And we had so many nukes because the idea was, let's say the Soviets knock out our military bases that have nukes. We want to have three extra layers of nukes so that if the Soviets nuke all of each other's cities, we will still have enough nukes to defeat all the Soviets of the Soviets nuke our nukes. And this caused Jordan Peterson's spiritual crisis, where he wrote maps, meaning because he was looking at how do advanced industrialized countries get to this degree of derangement that this is seen as sane.
- [120:56]
B
That's. So I was going to mention both of those points because the way you were illustrating that, it's like, no, they're not just like, you know, making models. They're game planning this. They're actually like getting sucked into, like, this is what we're going to do and this is a real threat. Like, like, how do we manage this situation? Yes, it's not hypothetical.
- [121:18]
A
Game theory is a Cold War invention, actually, where the concept of game theory developed with navigating nuclear diplomacy like this, because nuclear diplomacy operates in a strategic sense different from normal war. And I've. I've had thoughts of this for years. I wish I could articulate better, but when you look at the map of these Cold War war rooms, and I have a great board game by the maker of Axis and Allies called War Room that has a map like this, it fits my entire floor is you have these huge transcontinental maps of. This is the Soviet bloc, this is the American bloc. And what does that do to your sense of the world? First of all, you radically simplify the entire world in the transcontinental blocks that. So America is not a single country. It's a federation of distinct ethnic groups. You've compressed all of that. You've compressed the difference inside World War II. First thing. Second thing is you've given national governments the power of gods, that they can end everything immediately. Secondly, you operate at a position of very high reactivity where time doesn't have a meaning because everything can operate immediately. Which means your sense of sort of long termism is destroyed. Fourthly, slight aggression can immediately escalate to total death, which as someone with ptsd, that's like the worst PTSD button to have. Number five, you split everything into these highly binary sort of divisions. And if you look at modern thinking, we have all of those cognitive biases where the boomers cannot move past the projection of the world. That made sense in these Cold War war rooms. Oh, yes.
- [123:08]
B
Wow. Yeah. So it's like we got this neurosis that was disconnected from the actual consequences. Because I was going to mention the Jordan Peterson example because it's a good example of how psychologically traumatizing this was for people at the Cold War, that you could literally have nightmares every night about an apocalypse. And so it's like, for them, it was like their version of climate change.
- [123:31]
A
Yeah.
- [123:31]
B
But the difference was that it actually could have happened.
- [123:34]
A
Yeah.
- [123:34]
B
Climate change for us, it's like a resonance of that neurotic pattern latched onto something.
- [123:39]
A
Yes. And we still have. It also generates an enormous amount of guilt. As John Keegan said, modernity has a huge issue between hyper safe, sterile industrial societies with the threat of nuclear Armageddon at any time or the world war. And this creates a psychic disjoint where we can't integrate our violent side. So it's too different from the peaceful side. Where in medieval Europe you had. First of all, in medieval Europe, life was much more dirty and gross and brutal, so you couldn't hide from that element of the human condition. But also you had all of these layers between jousting and dueling and private wars and gangs beating each other up to the national level of violence. And so this creates a lot of weird neuroses in modern populations you don't see in earlier ones.
- [124:29]
B
Right. And I've heard, I think it was Malice Said said that he thinks the 20th century, 21st century will normalize violence in a way that the 20th century normalized sex. And those could both be like our reactions to the collapse of kind of both of those hierarchies or ways of.
- [124:50]
A
So if the map of the early 20th century was the Axis and Allies, big nation states fighting each other, and the map of the late 20th century was the nuclear war rooms, the map of the 21st century is a zombie apocalypse map map, like Plague Inc. Of this is the industrial world. These are the different countries. This is how much they have been corrupted by the zombie plague or the chaos gods of Mouse utopia, entropy. These are the areas that can cluster around an ideological archetype where people can fight back. Where if you look at the map of the air of the world today, it's a map of, okay, the traditional American culture and Christianity was strong enough that Red State America can resist mouse utopia better. And then you have Israel enough of an external threat that they can keep their population and identity up.
- [125:43]
B
And so the map, the only example of that trend, right, positive birth rate, industrial society.
- [125:49]
A
And so the map of the 21st century is. It's sort of a spiritual map in the least spiritual society ever of what areas can find a subjective reason to live. And that's a totally different dynamic, which makes the boomers completely incapable of understanding it.
- [126:07]
B
It's crazy that the challenge is actually trying to find a reason to live. Which speaks to your point earlier about, like, people's ideology and their motivation. I forget the exact context of it, but you said something about, like, it's important what People believe because it. I don't know, whatever, you know, why it's important. But they're anti life. Yeah, they're form. They're four mouse utopia.
- [126:33]
A
We're not done with this video, but this leads too perfectly into the age of the Last Men video next week, which is about the exact thing we're going to articulating. And in the 60s there was this sense of the Soviet Union growing, but they were still dependent on the west and all these things. The Vietnam War was a huge negative turning point for America, which we mishandled the situation. But I also think we got too obsessive about it because Vietnam was a French colony. The local Vietnamese had developed a strong communist military faction by fighting against the French colonials and the Japanese. And so when Vietnam got independence, the north invaded the South. And we had an idea called Domino theory, which was if one area turns communist, an entire. All the neighboring countries did. And this was widely mocked as sort of delusional. But if you look back at the time, it was not because that. So Vietnam fell. Cambodia and Laos then fell. If you look at Eastern Europe, all of these countries fell as sort of a domino mechanism. And in Africa or the Middle east, when a handful of the Arab countries became Soviet allies, a bunch of the others did. So it wasn't an unreasonable worry. But we mishandled Vietnam because we weren't able to conquer the north because Mao had nukes by this point. And we didn't want to trigger a war with Mao in the same way we did in Korea. And so we had to hold this perimeter between the north and the south. And we would have won Vietnam militarily because the north launched a huge offensive during the Vietnamese holiday of Tet when the North Vietnam, the South Vietnamese weren't ready and we were able to slaughter them with our better military forces. Or you have battles like Khe Sanh, where the Americans were surrounded by the North Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese cared a lot more than the South Vietnamese. North Vietnam was a much worse regime, but the South Vietnamese didn't have the same ideological fervor. They were like a chill military dictatorship. And the North Vietnamese fought very hard. They would do stuff like build the most impressive tunneling networks in history or they would invade the south through neighboring Laos. In Cambodia, who were sort of. They were monarchies. And both of them became communist nations with Cambodia being the worst communist country, killing over a quarter of the population. With the Khmer Rouge, who are a. They would do like weird shamanistic stuff from the Cambodian perspective. And I forget if you lived In Cambodia, Dan McKinley is a great thing about this, where they were trying to sort of initiate a magical shamanic ritual to rebuild Cambodia. And it was the old slave classes murdering the old Cambodian nobility because Cambodia was a slave society. And they killed off everyone who could read, everyone who had glasses, anyone who could speak French. And ironically, the Pol Pot himself was an educated person who studied in Paris when Cambodia was a French colony. Yeah, of course, like Mao Zedong was from a wealthy peasant background. And. And Cambodia was so bad that when North Vietnam finally conquered the South, North Vietnam invaded Cambodia to neutralize them. Not really because they were that bad, but Cambodia was just a pain in the ass. And so America had to. We bombed and we sent people into Cambodia and Laos and we lost the PR war. And it's disgraceful in retrospect to see how traitorous a lot of the American people were. Where I would. I don't know if I would have supported the Vietnam War. Probably not. I'm fairly isolationist now, but I don't know, it would have possibly been more hawkish if I was a boomer. But the American left used this as an opportunity to simp for the Marxists, where you have the story of that actress who sat on gun for North Vietnam to sort of support the regime. American college kids would protest. And I have a friend who said a huge amount of boomer morality is downstream of why they should not have been socially ostracized for not fighting in Vietnam, because in every other historic society, if your nation demands it, you're expected to serve. And a lot of the boomer elite were against that. Where practically every single, almost no baby boomer president served in Vietnam because they would get the college deferment. Or like George Bush, that one of the Bushes, he worked on an aircraft carrier off the coast, which was sort of an easy position. Bill Clinton draft dodged. And so America left Vietnam due to a PR issue, even though we won the military campaign, partly because the American leadership lied to the public, saying we were always winning. And so when the Tet offensive occurred, the American people were thinking, what the fuck? I thought we were winning. And also it was the first televised war ever, and they didn't figure out how to do televised wars where in the Iraq or Afghanistan war, the American press made a deal with the American government that we wouldn't show the gore and the horror, but the American public saw war firsthand. And they had a visceral gut based, ew, this is gross reaction. Which made it hard to sort of maintain the War in the same way that the French won the military campaign in Algeria, but the French public lost the same reaction.
- [132:07]
B
It's kind of similar how to how videos of factory farming came out and then people were like started to be more against meat. But then you're like wait, you still live in a world that requires nutrition and has a food system just like you have this security system. So like how do you improve it versus just like joining the opposition and this third world kind of third world this reaction which you see, I am
- [132:31]
A
very proud that I am the first major right wing thinker who is against factory farming. And I got it to get popularized. And secondly I also popularized the term third worldest and right wing discourse. So I like it when my memes get popular. And so Vietnam War was a huge loss of confidence for the Americans where we had a guilt based reaction around it. And until Ronald Reagan we were stuck in sort of numbness at the Vietnam War. People often talk about the 70s as a period of American decay versus the Soviets and that wasn't true. Where the Soviets were declining under Brezhnev and the Soviets kept going for a decade longer than they should have because they were able to export oil to the Americans. And we had lost a lot of confidence with Jimmy Carter with the oil embargo. And Watergate was a huge turning point at the time. Which is funny because Watergate levels of corruption happen every week today and no one cares. And the seventies were just a. It was an. It was the first great economic pain after the post war boom. And the Cold War gradually stabilized in a negative constellation wherein the 70s, most of the world was governed either by these dictatorships or by socialists. Where Latin America was military dictatorships who had knocked out the communists, Africa was dictatorships, even Spain and Greece were military dictatorships. And it looked as if the Soviets were doing better or just genuine nihilism. And the thing that ended the Cold War was the neoliberal revolution because it looked like the Western bloc and the Soviets were grinding each other's gears. But the neoliberal revolution and the Soviet failure in Afghanistan were the two tipping point variables. Where because the Soviets had thought that both of us were declining, but what happened instead was that due to the increase in capitalism and deregulation pushed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the Anglosphere saw a staggering breakthrough in technology and wealth that dragged the entire world with us. Where the computer revolution was something that gave the Americans a massive advantage as well as the Internet. Where the Internet was actually developed during the Cold War as a Basis from Asimov's foundation novels, where these computer guys were reading the foundation novels. Asimov wrote about, if there's a future dark age, let's make this institute of scientists who can live out in the wilderness and rebuild civilization. And they thought, if there's a nuclear war, we want a way for universities and intellectuals to compare technical notes. Which is how we got the Church. Yes. Which is how we got the Internet, which I'm great grateful for.
- [135:26]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [135:27]
A
Yeah. And so the Internet gave the West Internet and computers gave us an advantage. We also had a breakthrough in some military technology, which is why we could crush Kuwait in the Gulf. We could crush Iraq in the Gulf War so strongly, so quickly. And when the Soviets saw that the west wasn't decaying, we had a huge growth spurt is kind of when they gave up. Because, for example, demographically, the Soviets stopped having a sustainable birth rate, while America had a declining birth rate. And then we had a baby boom at the end of the 20th century. So America had a sustainable birth rate until 2010. And which. We forget how recent that was. And the neoliberal revolution, you could see that the Soviets would look at that and think the game was up because Latin America, about a third of Africa, Southeast Asia, and many other places, became capitalist democracies starting in the 80s, and this preceded the end of the Cold War. And becoming capitalist democracies made these areas staggeringly wealthier. Where you saw the greatest growth and prosperity and technological advance ever. And that wasn't just in sort of ways. We think about where in places like Peru, when I was there, they would talk about how people remembered starving within living memory. But you had huge industrial cities. If you go to Asia, as I know you have in places like Malaysia or Korea or Japan, they had the same growths. India stopped its socialism under Nehru to industrialize. And China became an American ally under Nixon. And they started industrializing under Deng Xiaoping to have the most rapid industrialization ever. And so because the neoliberal breakthrough created so much wealth, it forced the remaining totalitarian regimes, such as apartheid, South Africa. I don't know if apartheid's really totalitarian. It was if you were black. And Soviet Russia to liberalize, because there was this shining alternative of we can be rich and happy without oppressing people. And when you get. You get to Gorbachev, he was one of the first of the new generation who hadn't seen the Russian Civil War or the first generation where Marxism was dependent on these ideological formations that had sort of aged out by this point, because Marxism is, doesn't offer otherworldly benefits. So it's dependent on material progress. But they had run the Marxist experiment where the Soviet Union had been decaying, where they had a brief growth spurt in both population and technology after World War II, much like our baby boom. But then it was stagnating. And Adam Curtis talks about the hyperreality that no one believes Communism in the Soviet Union for over a decade before the initial fall. And when Gorbachev took power, he thought I was a student in Western Europe. Let's make Russia a liberal free democracy because we can see this is working for everyone else around the world. Not everyone, but many populations. So why can't Russia. And what it did was it called the bluff that no one believed in Marxism anymore.
- [138:55]
B
Right. And, but it also, why did it fail so many times? Right. Because like the Soviet transition didn't really work out that well. Probably because they weren't able to distinguish between like bureaucracy and market institutions which you can't just necessarily pop up. But this is also the era of international business. Right. Which has a lot of negative connotations because of offshoring and stuff. Stuff. But it was also really cool. And just because we went around this is when American businessmen were going all around the world going to these countries for the first time as they opened up and creating these awesome businesses. I mean my dad was in the Middle east and he would like paint, they would let him paint buildings for free. If he put the logo on it. It was kind of like Wild west capitalism. And it was a really cool stuff and a really cool lifting up of all these places. And we didn't have to deregulate and kill our own industry to do that. We could have just done that and not killed ourselves. That's where the real problem was. But it's like a real, it's kind of an amazing historical moment and a great American victory. It's almost like a global victory lap surrounded by Coca Cola running water and like Disney.
- [140:10]
A
I've seen both sides of the age of neoliberalism. The pre 2008, pre Trump sort of upswell and then the downswell. And people forget how nice the upswell was. As they like to say, when people talk about degeneracy killing civilizations, they never think about how fun the degeneracy was initially.
- [140:30]
B
And, and that was a building period for a lot of.
- [140:33]
A
Yeah. And I, I will say again, this was the era of the most rapid increase in wealth and freedom and general well being ever. It just also happened to culminate in the crisis we are currently in. And so the thing with the fall of the Soviet Union is you have to hold frame bra, you have to maintain masculine frame. Where what worked in China was that because the government had centralized authority and they never surrendered that they could let capitalism come in gradually. In Russia, they sped up the process too much. Where if, let's say Putin was in power at the time, Putin would have gradually transferred communism into something like a personal right wing monarchy and you would have gradually let capital. I don't know if Putin would have done this as an individual, a figure like him, a right wing autocrat could have, but because they let all of this happen at once. I mean I've compared the fall of the Soviet Union to like a pathetic Gen Z relationship before where the Soviets like oh my God, let's see other people and let's have polyamory and then their client dates in East Europe or like, okay, cool, we're going to date the Americans. Wait, why are all of you dating the Americans? Because America's more hot. And it was this process where the Soviets were saying, oh, you'll still be part of the same allied bloc. We'll still talk to each other. And the East Europe was like, no. And the Soviets said, okay, we can be part of the same trade alliances. At least you guys won't join NATO. We'll have an in between bloc between us and the Americans. East Europe said no. And it was a lot of, I mean I've said before about how when the Soviets were going to retake the Baltic countries which were independent before World War II, the Baltic nations made this huge armband around their national borders and no one believed in communism. So the Soviet tanks were unwilling to shoot on these, these Baltic protesters. Or when the Berlin Wall. I'm surprised they didn't mention the Berlin Wall before, but it was there. Bad things happened when the Berlin Wall eventually came down. The Soviets weren't willing to do it. And the fall of the Soviet Union is comparable to the fall of European colonialism where it only makes sense in sort of the rose tinted glasses of that society. And one of the things I have to say before I forget it is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was brutal and it was Afghanistan was Vietnam for the Soviets, but worse. And Afghanistan has been on the fringe of the Russian empire for a while. They thought about it a lot during the Great Game versus the British in the 19th century. But Afghanistan had a Soviet puppet state that the Afghans kicked out of power. So the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to reinstate their regime. And this was a brutal war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. And people say that if America was more brutal in Afghanistan, we would have won. But the Soviets were very brutal. They would burn villages, they would kill defectors, but the Afghans still fought back. And America actually funded the Taliban against the Soviets for years because the Taliban emerges as the Muhahideen or the anti Soviet military organization. And the Muhahideen, they became the new government of Afghanistan and they defeated the full Russian army. And this first of all humiliated the Russians. And they used a conscript military against Afghanistan. And the Russian people felt gross about occupying this country because the Soviets were supposedly an anti imperial power. And the Soviets fought in Afghanistan for over a decade. They pulled out right before the fall. But Afghanistan was a symbol to everyone, especially in the Soviet Union, that they were a defunct power.
- [144:18]
B
I was going to bring that up earlier, like how did they get around the contradiction of supposedly being the anti colonial one if they had all these military adventures themselves that were brutal?
- [144:30]
A
You can have plenty of ideological contradictions if you shoot anyone who disagrees.
- [144:37]
B
Yeah, but we didn't have to agree with them in the west, or at least some of us.
- [144:42]
A
We were just, we were naive and foolish and we were high on copium. And is there a better ending to this than I miss? The ending is we get to have a moment of joy in the end of the 20th century when ideology had been defeated for the end of history, man and the rise of neoliberal consumerism where East Europe became an American ally. China mutated out of communism to be authoritarian state that had mixed capitalism in its economy. And the few surviving communist nations were Cuba, hopefully not for long, North Korea. And then you had these weird bunker regimes emerge in Central Asia to differing levels of sanity. And then the third world largely became American allies. And then nativist schizos where the people who would have been Soviet allies back in the day got money from the Chinese or they didn't get money. And communism largely survived in mutated degenerated form in the west through wokeness.
- [145:47]
B
Right. And my thinking of like how did the Soviets get away with this reputation is I get how they can do dissent in their own country. But I'm just thinking of like, like everybody in Ireland siding with like every Soviet or every colony, every country that's basically opposed to the American empire.
- [146:06]
A
It's like it's because the hidden we
- [146:09]
B
care more, that's why. Right.
- [146:11]
A
It's first of all, I apologize for interrupting you. But secondly, it's because the Hidden conceit of the last century is that off totalitarian toxic femininity doesn't count. The, the events of the last century don't make sense if you don't realize that there was a consistent attempt across the entire world to not acknowledge the toxic feminine. If you kill people for equality, it was okay, right?
- [146:39]
B
Because then you're just reacting like what else is an oppressed person supposed to do but go to violence? Which is kind of how people talk about Palestine. It's like how would you expect them to behave any other way? It's like, like, well, you need some civilizational standards maybe. Even if you don't expect them to achieve it, you still have to have a sense of like good and bad. And that's why it's such a, a problem. If you get so upset about the American empire that you start reactively rooting for all their opposition, then you're basically like a mirror of the ant American empire which has turned away from values into like this. Although it's returning now, but, but it was like okay for forever. You have, it's going for this global control totalitarianism and it's aligning with anybody. As long as they're on their side, they don't care if they're a dictator, we don't care if they're a communist, we don't care if they're a theocrat, we don't care if they're anarcho capitalists will ally with you if we're on our side. And so there was. But they, they lost this vision of values because they're just trying to get everybody in one group.
- [147:43]
A
Yes.
- [147:44]
B
Versus if you're not going for global control, then you're just like happy when countries are better. Right? And you can kind of like help countries be better. And it's a, it's a totally different equation.
- [147:55]
A
The thing is that once you're assessing this stuff in a genuinely rational sense, you realize you have to throw away a lot of our current world because I think the 19th century was a society capable of genuine rationality. But in that case you end up with saying certain nations or certain ethnicities or certain social classes are superior to others because you're comparing their real world outputs. The 20th century was based upon the ideal of your actions should not determine your consequences. And we didn't openly say that, but we acted as if it was true. But if you have a worldview where actions do not equal consequences, it derails into madness sooner or later and it becomes what the Enlightenment, it's Really remarkable that enlightenment rationality should have been used to look at a variety of ideological options and pick the best one. What it actually became used for was structured denial of human nature, where every given thing we will now say it's opposite to have more control over it. Men have to be women, women have to be men, white people have to be browner. Developing nations have to act whiter. And so when you remove the idea that your actions have consequences, the main goal becomes inverting things out of their own nature which demonstrate this was all based upon envy and resentment. Because no one can be happy with what they have, they must now become their opposite.
- [149:37]
B
And ironically, what is the main aspect or feature of enabling? It's rationalization.
- [149:44]
A
Yes.
- [149:45]
B
Like that's how you.
- [149:46]
A
That's so.
- [149:47]
B
It's a weird perversion of rationalization.
- [149:49]
A
Thank you. That's a great line that innate. The main purpose, the main connector of enabling is rationalization.
- [149:55]
B
And like defining feature. Yeah.
- [149:57]
A
This transitions so well into the age of the last Men. Our next episode. But I want to say we should look back upon the Cold War as a happy event, that we didn't all fucking die and we got the happy ending of global prosperity and freedom. It's just that for every reaction is a counter reaction where the reason we're facing the current issues with the age of the last men and mouse Utopia was the Cold War ended too well. Where the world of the 20th century was going to hit an off switch in some way. One of the potential off switches would have been. One of the potential off switches would have been sort of global famine, which I should have said this, but we avoided global famine because at the start of the Cold war, there were 2 billion people on earth and then there were 8 billion at the early 21st century. And we got around that through Norman Borlaug and genetic engineering of food. And people say they're against all genetic engineering. And that's just an insane opinion to hold because in the 1960s, before the invention of genetically modified rice and wheat, India was on the verge of starving. And then with the introduction of these GMOs, India became a food exporter. That's how much more efficient they were. So we avoided global famine. We avoided nuclear war. We avoided horrifying 1984 esque totalitarianism. We avoided the Nazi. We avoid the Soviets winning. We avoided the Nazi or Japanese slave states. And the reason we have the current issues is that we avoided every other off switch. So the off switch that was left was mouse Utopia.
- [151:33]
B
Hilarious. Like the victim of Your success, in a way. And people have this idea with chemicals that even in the conception that you laid out, that it's creating some sort of dynamic that's going to trap us into like a total system collapse. But the reality is that, like, chemicals aren't the reason why soil health is bad, as we've talked about before. So soil, you're. When you're farming, you're basically farming the soil. There's nutrients and minerals in the soil, and you put plants in to extract those nutrients and minerals out of the soil so you can eat them. It's like the plant is the extraction mechanism for the minerals. So it's, it's like your mineral. It's like you're mining the soil.
- [152:15]
A
Soil, yes.
- [152:15]
B
So all ancient societies have always depleted their soil. And soil health has actually gotten moderately better since the 50s or 60s. And that's also connected to like, this chemical situation. It's not some inevitable thing that's trapping us in this situation. We can transition off chemicals, in fact, help us transition off of chemicals towards farming oriented around better soil health.
- [152:40]
A
Yes.
- [152:40]
B
Starting with the herbicides. And now we have other technologies that we didn't have in the 50s that can enable us to complete that transition. So there's a lot of like, positive stuff there. And then just finishing off on your point about like the Cold War ending too quickly is kind of defined by how the Soviets went into democracy, which, which was a problem because they didn't have strong market institutions. They had a bureaucracy. So what democracy meant was the oligarchy completely controlled the bureaucracy and there was no strong figure to fix that. And so then people look at that and apply it to our politics sometimes and be like, we need a strong man. But we're not in the position of the end of the Soviet Union. We have more market institutions. We can, like, recover through legal constitutional norms and an executive that cancels unconstitutional things rather than, like, changes the government structure. Like FDR more rather than, you know, use his system. Sure, but don't, like, don't like, make it. You don't need to make it bigger and become a total controlling figure. That's going to be a lot worse situation for us. We're not the Russians. Like, we, we, we can recover. This is other way, but it's because of these underlying conditions. And if we slip further in a direction where that calculus changes to, say, where I'm eventually wrong, then we're in trouble. And the point of that is it's really important to fix things before the underlying dynamic completely degrades and then you're back to like another square of civilization that will take a whole process to reintegrate yourself back up. Like we're really close to it. It parallels with farming where we're 10 years away from like 40% of farmers retiring because they're 60. And there's no path then for young people because it's so regulated, they're forced into being contract farmers. If that happens, it will lose control of our food system to these corporations. And if we wanted to reclaim control of our food system and there was no distributed farmers and no distributed knowledge, it would take 20 times as long than if we reclaim it now.
- [154:50]
A
Yeah.
- [154:50]
B
So we have a very short window to do the right thing before a lot of wrong things are going to happen.
- [154:56]
A
Remember George Washington and Monk, who was the British guy for the English Civil War? They created the greatest countries in history by letting go of power. And I'm going to finish on this and close up the video that before the Cold War fell, all the analysts thought the Soviet Union would make it into the 21st century. And after the Soviet Union fell, all the analysts said that it was a remarkable thing. It lasted so long. And let that be a reminder of how much history changes our perception of the world. And I will see you next week for the age of the last men.
- [155:33]
B
To the last men.
- [155:35]
A
Bye Bye.
- [155:35]
B
And the Last charge.
- [155:36]
A
Peace History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen, live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a Friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.