← The Gist
The Gist
Escaping the Nazis. Then Going Back
00:37:24
Daniel Kehlmann joins to discuss The Director, his novel reimagining the life of G.W. Pabst—a brilliant German filmmaker who escaped the Nazis, only to voluntarily return. Kehlmann grapples with how much human suffering we’re willing to accept as...
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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
Hi, it's Mike and on Tuesday I'm doing a Substack Live with Mark Oppenheimer. Now what a Substack Live is. You go on Substack and I invite you to come mikepaska.substack.com and you sign up for Substack. Sign up for my substack and then you watch me talk live with someone you know, upon having said it out loud, I think I overestimated how complex it was and how much explication it needed. But maybe I need to explain or at least sell you on Mark. If you've heard him once, I need no sale. But executive editor of Ark, which is a magazine of religion, politics, etc. He was on to talk about Gate Crashers, which is the history of Jews and antisemitism at Ivy League schools. That was a great podcast and we're going to talk all about the stuff that he's been talking about, which includes Jews and anti Semitism, but also journalism. And it's been the fifth year anniversary of the Harper's Letter. He was talking about that on his substack. So I invite you Tuesday, 6pm Mark Oppenheime Summer It's Monday, June 30, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. A growing number of citizens are turning their backs on the agenda of Donald Trump and I am talking about the disgust over immigration crackdowns, the distaste over tariff wars that go nowhere, the dissatisfaction over inflation. Yes, that is all going on and it's all picked up by the polls that Show Trump is underwater 6% more disapprove than approve. But actually a reason why citizens are increasingly anti Trump is that just a little while ago they weren't citizens. They were elected officials in the Republican Party and they are finding out and have for years that there is no future for them in opposing Donald Trump. After the former purges of Kinzinger, Cheney, Meyer, Upton, Gonzalez, Herrera, Butler gone. Neda Meyer dead, Marmalade dead. It was clear Trump way or the highway. Then came Bacon. Don Bacon, former Air Force general, Nebraska congressman, said earlier this year that Trump was engaged in appeasement with Russia. Said earlier this week, I'm not running again. And we now come to Thom Tillis, one of two Republican no votes on the and I don't believe I have to call it this, the big beautiful bill, he argues correctly, it would increase the deficit. It would very much hurt North Carolinians via Medicaid cuts. And then there are the energy provisions which he is a former technology executive and management consultant, called out specifically as ill considered and destructive. Here is how he ended a speech on the floor of the Senate yesterday.
- [02:44]
Thom Tillis
And so I hope that my colleagues recognize it's half baked. It's another reason why we should go back to the House, Mark, and get Medicaid right, so I can come on the floor and tell my colleagues on the other side of the aisle why they're wrong on all the attributes of the House, Mark, why they are wrong on some of their characterizations of the tax bill, and why they will be wrong on an energy policy that makes sense. But I have to vote against the bill from my own party that I have never parted from before because we're rushing to an arbitrary deadline with people who have never worked a day in this industry, maybe philosophized and written a few white papers on it, but haven't gotten their hands dirty. I have, and this is another segment of the bill that needs to change. Thank you, Mr. President.
- [03:30]
Mike Pesca
Thom Tillis then tore off his mike lapel and as it turns out, turned his back on elected office after his party turned its back on him. He will not, he announced yesterday, run for reelection another citizen against Trump, one you could argue might do more good as a senator fighting Trump. But it is a tough argument to make. Trump is inspiring more and more former senators, soon to be former senators, to not make that argument, to just go away or be chased out by what the party has become. On the show today, I will do a spiel based on a conversation I had earlier with Ben Wittis of Dog Shirt tv, but more importantly, lawfare. I was on his morning show called Dog Shirt tv, decided to just clip an interesting portion of it which will serve as the spiel. But first, Daniel Kelman's latest novel is called the Director. It is about a real life figure, G.W. pabst, who escaped the Nazis and then went back to Austria. Very odd. Kelman's methods are to take real people and sort of live in them so that we begin to understand their milieu and possibly their motivations. Was a really interesting conversation that got beyond the specifics of this excellent new book and into realms of the ethics and tactics of his methodology. Daniel Kelman, up next. Daniel Kelman has written a novel about an actual director who came to America from Germany and then went back. His name is one of the great directors of German cinema, GW Past. And what Daniel Kelman does is he takes historical characters and he inhabits them and he uses them to drive the Plot forward, but also question what's going on in society. The name of the novel, which is like many of his books, certainly a novel and certainly invented, but also deeply reported, journalistic, historic and. And name of it is the director. Welcome to the gist.
- [06:00]
Daniel Kelman
Thank you.
- [06:01]
Mike Pesca
So your father was both a victim of the Nazis and a director. Was that a driving force as a subject matter?
- [06:10]
Daniel Kelman
I mean, it was certainly a driving force to get me interested and to think at some, someday, some point in my writing life, I will write about the Nazis and the Third Reich. And also on the other side, directing films is one of the few things I feel I have really some knowledge about how they work. Like first hand knowledge, not research knowledge. Like, I grew up on movies, on film sets and in the theater when there were rehearsals happening. And I did some work for the movies myself in the last few years. So I felt it was the perfect subject matter for me. Even though Pap's story is of course much different, it's kind of the opposite in certain way of the story of my father and my grandparents. But there is a lot that made me feel personally connected to it.
- [07:08]
Mike Pesca
What was this? Just tell me a little bit about your father's work. What was the scale of his film? Were they the German equivalent of blockbusters, art film? What was it like being on the sets with him?
- [07:19]
Daniel Kelman
It was something that people aren't really aware of anymore, that it once existed. It was theater for television in a way. So it was television films, Fernse Spiel in German, where they did. And it's kind of unthinkable today, but in the 60s and 70s, they took place by some of the world's best playwrights and did them at first live and later recorded on primetime television.
- [07:54]
Mike Pesca
Right. We did that in the US in a show called Playhouse 90. And those were some originals, but Requiem for a Champion and some other great works of art were originally commissioned for that show.
- [08:05]
Daniel Kelman
Yeah, so he did a lot of that in the German equivalent of that. And he specialized then on a writer called Joseph Rothschild, who is one of the great Jewish writers of the 30s and 40s. And he wrote a novel called Radecki Marsch about the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. And that was. My father did that as a two part television film which went all around the world. So that was kind of the equivalent to a blockbuster in the sense that, well, it was literally actually kind of a blockbuster because you could only see it once when it was on tv. So people did actually stay at home to see it because there was their one Chance. And there was another chance, and this.
- [08:50]
Mike Pesca
Was in the days of the monoculture, and everyone in Germany would be talking about it. And that was your father's film.
- [08:55]
Daniel Kelman
Yes.
- [08:56]
Mike Pesca
Interesting. Yeah. So what. What about Pabst, before you started living inside his skin as a literary figure, what was your understanding of him? And what's Germany's understanding? Or maybe, maybe not. Maybe Germany is not the right question. Maybe the film community.
- [09:13]
Daniel Kelman
Yes, you asked exactly in the right way. Because as a household name, as a figure who maybe used to be on everyone's lips or mind, that is completely gone, like he is for the general public, he's forgotten. Other than his two big colleagues of the silent movie era, Murnau and Fritz Lang, who are still kind of known by people who are interested in film history. People have heard of Nosferatu or Metropolis, but they usually haven't heard of Pandora's Box or Joyless street, which were Pabst Big movies. But among movie scholars, he's still very well regarded. He still studied at film school. And the reason that he is forgotten to the general public had a lot to do with his bad choices he made in the Second World War, because after the war, he did continue making films, but only in Germany and Austria and abroad. He was seen as a Nazi collaborator, which is not quite accurate. It's not totally wrong and it's not quite accurate. That's why I wrote the novel, because his story is so strange and interesting, but it led to him being generally forgotten.
- [10:37]
Mike Pesca
Yes, that watch that which makes him pariah to the Germans, makes him an interesting character to a top German novelist.
- [10:45]
Daniel Kelman
Exactly. Yes.
- [10:47]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So he. And we should establish this. He's living in America when the Nazis are in power. He's writing in Hollywood, but he's not having a good time of it, because, for one thing, he doesn't speak English well, which is an underrated aspect. We always hear about all these great German minds who came to build the bomb or the space program, but maybe we don't really think about how. Well, how good their German was. Okay, so that's one thing. And then he gets notification that his mother back in Austria is ailing. So tell me. I think from now on we'll just. Tell me about your character. And if you wish to say, now, here's what I know of the real Papst, but tell me what your characters, because this is what novelists love to do. This is a moment, a crucible moment, a moment of tension. What compelled you about that moment and how your character go to make the Decision to go back to Nazi occupied and run Austria.
- [11:50]
Daniel Kelman
I mean, I will, yes, I will talk a little bit about what really happened and what I made of it because it's a kind of. Because I think in this regard what I made is not completely different from what happened. He did go back, he had a bad time in Hollywood. He got to make one film which was called A Modern Hero, which is very hard to come by. I managed to see it and it's unbelievably bad. It's thinking that one of the great masters of modern film, film has made this movie. It's as if somebody gives you, I don't know, a Barbara Kartlin novel and tells you this was made by Vladimir Nabokov. You kind of. It's hurtful to watch. And the reason it's hurtful is because they didn't let him do any of the things he was good at. He was one of the inventors of modern movie editing. And they didn't let him edit his own film. They didn't cast. Let him cast the actors he wanted. So they gave him a script he hated. They gave him the actors he didn't like and they didn't let him edit the film afterwards. And so what then happened, according to his own story or the way his family later framed it, is that he got a notification that his. Well, that several, several relatives were actually sick and he had to go back really quick. That was before the war. The Nazis were already in power, but the war hadn't. There wasn't yet a full on war, so the border was still open for people who were not Jewish, which he wasn't. And so he went back and then of course the war started and he was trapped and he had to deal with that situation. What got me interested is that it is more complicated because he was generally regarded as a communist. He was a real enemy of the Nazis.
- [13:54]
Mike Pesca
I mean, that was his nickname, right? Yes.
- [13:55]
Daniel Kelman
The Red Pabst. Yeah. Which is a pun in German because it means the Red Pope, but also Pabst, the Red, Red guy. But in there's something that another German writer who wrote for the Americans actually wrote a great dossier for the American occupying force after the war about German collaborators. Pointed out about Pabst. He said, you don't just go back into Nazi Germany without having some contact to these people. Because. And that's what I then thought. He must have known they wouldn't arrest him. He must have known they actually wanted him back. Even if it was only supposed to be a brief visit. He must have known that he was basically welcome. And that changes the situation just a little bit, but it makes it more complicated. And so that was the version I decided to go for in my novel. Pabst gets actually contacted by somebody who works for Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda. And he, of course, fiercely rejects that approach, but he still remembers. I could go back. I could just see what happened. So he does that, and then he's trapped, and then he is actually not eager to work for Goebbels. He's actually. They put a lot of pressure on him. He's forced to do that. But then he discovers something that he knew all along. He actually likes to make good movies. And the Nazis are giving him a tremendous amount of resources, and he has more artistic freedom. And this is, of course, the supreme irony of the whole thing. And that is also something that was true for the. For the real GW Paps in Germany. He had more artistic freedom in Nazi Germany than he did in Hollywood.
- [15:48]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [15:48]
Daniel Kelman
And so how could he not enjoy that?
- [15:50]
Mike Pesca
And he's not made to make explicit Nazi propaganda, except for the fact that if the Nazis can show great art is still emerging from Germany, it has a propagandistic element.
- [16:02]
Daniel Kelman
Exactly. There is a propagandist urge behind the whole thing, on. On the side of Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda, but not in the way that they force him to make propaganda films. And if you watch the two films which have survived from his work under the Nazis, they are actually. They are not propaganda, and they're actually not so bad as films. One of them is really good. And that's the other thing that got me to write this novel, that I thought, this is such a. Of course, there can be no question about it. If you're in Hollywood and you're free and your son goes to a high school in Hollywood and you're in America, and then suddenly you end up making films under Goebbels in Nazi Germany. There is a lot of things. There are a lot of things that went wrong in your life, and you made a lot of wrong decisions, but still, it's not quite clear where exactly he made these wrong decisions and how he got from how he actually got into this very dark place. And that's what I found so fascinating.
- [17:11]
Mike Pesca
Does he, or at least your Pabst, have to make intellectual accommodation to square his cognitive dissonance with his ideals and what he knows, or could know even more of the atrocities of the Nazi regime?
- [17:26]
Daniel Kelman
Yes, he has to make these accommodations Every day. Because that's what a totalitarian state does, forces you to make compromises every single day. And that's something I really wanted to write about in detail without always pointing it out. It's something that the reader has to just experience. You can't even have a nice round of coffee in Nazi Germany without suddenly realizing that the cups are somehow you. Them before in the flat of the Jewish neighbors, because the possessions of the people who got arrested and taken off to the camps, they were sold off to the neighbors. Not explicitly, implicitly, to turn them into accessories, to make everyone complicit. That's what the Nazis were so good at. And then on the other side, of course, on a movie set, as in all industries, the Nazis used forced labor, like a lot. That's why German industry was really.
- [18:38]
Mike Pesca
The extras would be. I mean, there are a few films where the extras were bused in from work camps. Yes. Roma bust in and. Yes, maybe they were then, once they were done filming, sent off to their deaths.
- [18:49]
Daniel Kelman
Yes, there were a few films where that was done. It. It. The. When Pabst is doing that in my novel, I have to be very clear about that. That is actually fictional. Pabst was never tied to any of those films where they actually used people from the concentration camps.
- [19:11]
Mike Pesca
But Riefenstahl was.
- [19:12]
Daniel Kelman
Yes, and he was the co director for two weeks at least on the film where she did that, Tiefland. And then also there was, as I said, there was a huge amount of forced labor. And those forced laborers, the minimum age was 10 years. So on his film sets, as on all German film sets, there must have been underage forced slave labors just carrying cords or carrying boxes or building the sets. And I feel like there's not such a big moral difference between allowing that and having extras from the camp. So there is a lot of complicity you have to enter in every day. And he tries to justify that with this old trope about the supreme importance of great art. He will say, and he does say in the novel, he does say, all this will go, but art remains, and what we are doing is art. And so this is kind of justified. And of course, I don't think this is correct, otherwise I wouldn't have written the novel. But I also do think that great art is very important, and some great pieces of art were made under terrible circumstances. So I don't reject the argument altogether, but I let him utter it under circumstances where it feels kind of really stale and old and not really convincing anymore.
- [20:43]
Mike Pesca
Right. Where he's Saying it to prove it to himself as much as whoever his audience is. But let's just say that there is an argument about the power of art and how art lasts the test of time. And it is the great human achievement. This doesn't mean that the artist who sees himself as accomplishing these great works of art, and by the way, most of the time the artist will fail. But let's even say it is the artist who achieves a great work of art. It doesn't absolve the artist of selfishness, of worse than selfishness. They can say, I'm doing this for the reason that excuses, uses my actual ethics and morality, because it's this category called art. But I would say, and I think from reading your book, you would say, yeah, you can achieve great art. That doesn't get you off the hook for the morality of your endeavor.
- [21:38]
Daniel Kelman
Yes, absolutely. You have to. I think that's one of the big moral challenges. Everybody in life encounters moral challenges. And art, that's. That's the big moral challenge that artists encounter. You can lead a decent life and still try to make great art. And some people really were able to do that. And it's quite easy to justify yourself by always saying you're a great artist. And then there's also the question, always the question. As you said, most of the times you fail because most art fails or it doesn't become as great as the maker hopes it will be. And then the question is also, what if you fail? Then you have been a terrible person and your art is not that impressive. So, so then what remains of, of, of all of your efforts?
- [22:32]
Mike Pesca
But the more interesting thing is, but what if you're Picasso? What if you're Gauguin? What if you're someone who actually is horrible?
- [22:39]
Daniel Kelman
Yeah.
- [22:40]
Mike Pesca
How much more of a pass do we give you than the failure who's just telling himself that it's all justified by art? How much more of a pass do we give you than Harvey Weinstein?
- [22:51]
Daniel Kelman
It's a great question. And I mean, if you look, for example, at Fritz Lang, who was the arguably even greater director of silent movies, the way he behaved was a lot like Harvey Weinstein. Like, if you read his extensive biographies, he behaved so terribly. And it was a general sense of everyone that as a great director, genius, and I mean, Wetberg behaved terribly. I mean, he did actually not work for the Nazis, he rejected that. But he sexually harassed every single actress who ever worked with him in the most terrible way. And it was kind of unthinkable to get a role for a female actor in his films without having to have intimate relations with him. And we have made a lot of progress in the way that back then everyone just thought that's how it works if you're a great director. And of course that's not how it works. But it still means we should not stop watching his films, of course. And that is not a trivial thing to say, I feel, because there is something dark about works of art if you know that they have been made under really troubling circumstances and that people have suffered for them. And then again, it's there's not a clear red line. But at some point, if you know there have been too much human suffering, has, has been necessary or has been, well, has been caused to make this work of art, then you actually do lose interest. It's just a natural reaction.
- [24:29]
Mike Pesca
The name of the book is the Director. The Director is a real figure reimagined by the author. The real figure is G.W. papst. And Pabst, I should say Pope, it means. And Daniel Kelman is the writer of the Director and my guest today. Thank you so much.
- [24:47]
Daniel Kelman
Thank you so much.
- [24:48]
Mike Pesca
We've got more of Daniel kelman for our Peska plus subscribers. You get an extra 30 minutes of our conversation. This is a really good one. I was fascinated by it. I hope you will be, too. Go to subscribe.mike pesca.com Sign up for bonus features. They're not always as bonus as this. 30 minutes. You definitely get your money's worth. Ad free podcasts. Great way to support the show. Best way to support the show, some say. Subscribe.mike pesca.com Ben Wittis is the editor in chief of Law Fair, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. A friend of mine, he invited me on his daily morning show called Dog Shirt tv. And I do beseech you to check that out. I turned the tables on him. He went along with it because Ben's a very smart guy, a very knowledgeable guy, and I asked him a lot of questions about recent leaks about the US Bombing of Fordeau. So that is, you have to go to Dog Shirt TV and find that chunk of the conversation. But here I want to bring you what I asked Ben about international law of warfare, the international law of armed conflict. You might remember last week I was talking about the likelihood that Haiti was in violation of international law because they're fighting gangs, including barbecue. He's the gang leader with drones. And this runs afoul some international law. And it was a great conversation because I literally didn't know what Ben would say. And what he said was very elucidating. So I give you from this morning, the dog shirt. TV International law of war. Me and Ben Wittes. I did a spiel the other day on my growing impatience or just criticism of international law, and it wasn't anything to do with any of the context we're talking about. It was. I was going to ask you a trivia question, but it's too obscure. It was to deal with international law and Haiti. And Haiti is using drones because they're besieged by gangs. And so drones are these new tools. And you usually. Interestingly, right. It's when. When you have an imbalance of power, a way to balance out the power is the. The less potent side uses drones, although Russia uses them a lot too. Anyway, the Haitian government is using drones against gangs and it doesn't seem to be going great, but then again, it's a big uphill climb. And the international. The headline in the New York Times, depending if you read it online or in or in print, was likely to be illegal under international law or might be illegal, but they were saying it's illegal. And the reason it's illegal, you probably know this is there are two sad. You have to satisfy two criteria. One, is it a real problem going on? Yes, there's a real problem going on with the gangs in Haiti. And two, does your enemy have a clear command and control structure? And the enemy of the Haitian government are gangs? I guess the leader of the gangs is this guy named Barbecue. So Barbecue is not in uniform and Barbecue is not getting. Giving marching orders to steak tidbits and flank steak or whatever. And so therefore it might be out of compliance with international law. And so I did a spiel saying, come on, international law, what are you doing? You got to rethink what's going on. If this is your stance that the Haitian government can't use drones against barbecue, but what are your thoughts just based on everything I've briefed you on so far?
- [28:34]
Ben Wittes
Okay. So I have not studied this particular problem and therefore have no opinion about the appropriate use of drones in an intra state conflict with a criminal organization that actually does threaten to. Has destabilized the regime and threatens further destabilization of the regime.
- [28:58]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I would go beyond the, say the regime. Right. Like the society.
- [29:02]
Ben Wittes
Right.
- [29:02]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, Any. Any fair assessment of society. Right, Correct.
- [29:07]
Ben Wittes
I am instinctively suspicious of almost all law of armed conflict commentary about the use of drones. That is not because the, this particular world of, of international law was grotesquely ideological from the beginning and is overly conditioned by the desire prevent the United States from killing terrorists associated with Al Qaeda in the Fatah regions of Pakistan and the. And the tribal areas of Yemen. And so I do think this body of thought into a large degree has a. Is. Is sipped from a very poisoned ideological chalice early on and has basically gotten everything wrong.
- [30:13]
Mike Pesca
This.
- [30:13]
Daniel Kelman
That.
- [30:14]
Ben Wittes
That's my prejudice.
- [30:15]
Mike Pesca
This is the greatest answer I've ever gotten. I didn't know what you were going to say that I thought you were going to say. You have to be very worried about a government using no drones.
- [30:23]
Ben Wittes
No, no, no, no copters. I think you have to. Well, so this is a subject that, you know, goes back to early lawfare history. And you know, I actually did an Oxford Union debate, which I lost, by the way, but. And I've been bitter about it ever since. I even put on a fucking tux for it. If I ever do another Oxford Union debate, it's going to be in a dog shirt. But I defended the moral propriety of the use of drones back when it was really unpopular and I was overwhelmingly outvoted by the students of Oxford.
- [31:05]
Mike Pesca
Was the proposal this house believes I commend Al Qaeda deserves it.
- [31:10]
Ben Wittes
I commend to people my speech, which I stand by. You know, that said, and I'm not saying it is good for the Haitian government to be using drones. I don't know what.
- [31:24]
Mike Pesca
They're totally understood.
- [31:25]
Ben Wittes
But I do think we should start with a healthy suspicion of a lot of international law scholarship in this area.
- [31:32]
Mike Pesca
Number two, what a great.
- [31:33]
Ben Wittes
Do not dismiss international law on the basis of dissatisfaction with the. With the way lefty law professors and organizations understand the law of armed conflict. Every plane that takes off at Newark airport that lands in a different country can do so because of international law. Every, you know, everything you buy that was built, made somewhere else is an expression that those trade relations are an expression of international law. And so I think it is really worth separating the international law of war and peace, which can be a real mess, from the international law of day to day life in which we are all operating in a fabric of such complexity that it is. That it has become invisible. And yet it is no less real because it is invisible.
- [32:43]
Mike Pesca
Brilliant point. And it gets down to basic philosophy of contracts on the flights taking on and off and everything adhering to standards. When it's traded internationally, both sides are highly incentivized. It's the classic win, win, positive sum total. Whereas with the law of armed conflict, it's Very much not always the case that that is true.
- [33:09]
Ben Wittes
Absolutely right. And also that it is so in every, you know, distinguished between international law, where the law is so in everybody's interest for it to work, that they implement it through all kinds of domestic legislation. And so you're not really aware of following that. You're guided by international law. What you're aware of is that you got on an airplane and FAA reg says the plane has to do X and Y and Z. And so, like, international law is a super, super complicated animal. You got to distinguish between public international law and private international law. You also have to distinguish between the powers that are implemented through agreements, that are implemented through domestic legislation or regulations and those that aren't. And you gotta do, you know, you gotta distinguish between instruments that are kind of aspirational, like we're gonna prevent this bot, you know, this powerful state from invading Ukraine, and those that are. That have more plausible and obvious mechanisms of actual enforcement.
- [34:35]
Mike Pesca
Right, agreed. But we're both against mustard gas.
- [34:39]
Ben Wittes
Yes, we are against mustard gas. And interestingly, yes, mustard gas. You know, the Chemical Weapons Treaty, which, you know, you wouldn't think would work because it actually kind of works. People, mostly states, don't use chemical weapons there.
- [35:01]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, they use those. They use those chlorine bombs, but I think it's more like those contracts. I think it's more like mutual self interest.
- [35:09]
Ben Wittes
It's also that they're super ineffective weapons.
- [35:11]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I know the wind. You don't want a weapon where the wind blows one way and it kills your own forces.
- [35:16]
Ben Wittes
Here is a. I'm going to leave you guys with a parable of international law. It is the late 19th century, and the czar of all Russias, Nicholas II, has a vision of the future and he is horrified by it. And that vision of the future is people dropping bombs from lighter than air aircraft balloons, dirigibles, and you could just fly over the other side and drop bombs on them and it would be super, super unfair. It would be a nightmare. And so in the Hague Ground Warfare Resolution, the Russians got the world to sign on as part of the Hague Resolution to the Anti Balloon Warfare Convention. And the United States is a party to it.
- [36:12]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [36:13]
Ben Wittes
And that is why we use drones, aircraft, spaceships, but we do not use balloons or lighter than air aircraft to drop bombs because we are still to this day party to the Balloon Warcraft Convention. And that is why when Hitler and Churchill went to war in the Battle of Britain, it would. They only used airplanes. And even V2 rockets, there were no balloons.
- [36:50]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show that just is produced by Cory Wara. Our development officer for the Virginia Territory is Michelle Pesca. The same thing further south for the Florida Territory is Astrid Green. The production coordinator is Ashley Kahn. Kathleen Sykes co edits the Gist list. Or maybe she edits and I co collaborate. Not really sure, still working that out. But she's on the Gist list which you could go to Mike pesca.substack.com Do Peru and thanks for listening.
- [37:24]
Unknown
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