WWII: The Origin Story of the US Empire
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What's up, what's up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I am Dave Smith. I am riding solo for this episode. Rob is out, but he'll be back with me tomorrow for the members-only stream. If you want to catch that, make sure to go sign up at partoftheproblem.com. That's where you can go to support this show if you enjoy it and you'd like to help keep us going.

you get a bunch of stuff when, when you sign up, you get the shows live ad free uncensored. Uh, plus you get the members only episode every Thursday and there's lots of other goodies too. Uh, so go check it out at part of the problem.com and a quick reminder, me and Robbie, the fire Bernstein will be out in Casper, Wyoming, uh, this weekend, comic Dave Smith.com for tickets there. And for the rest of our, we'll be touring, uh, all the way through the rest of the year. So I hope to see some of you guys out there on the road.

All right. So what I wanted to do for today's episode, as you guys know, typically this show, we cover current events.

Every now and then we'll have episodes where we just kind of do more of a theme episode on something that's like a broader topic. And I thought we would do that today. And it was the reason I had this idea is because if you guys are on social media, you quite possibly have seen this already. But my guys, Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson, really started.

set the internet on fire uh there's just it's i think it's rarer that people used to have a term say like they they broke the internet when it was like the dominant thing that everyone's talking about and i feel like there's so many shows on the internet now that that's rarer um but this one definitely did it and the uh kind of corporate establishment media types were losing their minds um

let's say a certain type of conservatives were also losing their minds about it. And it was because they got into a discussion involving World War II. So I kind of thought maybe we would do an episode on World War II. Listen, just...

let me start by saying, obviously, I guess full disclosure or something like that. I am a little bit biased about this particular controversy because I really love and admire both Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson. I just love these guys. I think they do great work and just,

Personally, they've never been anything but great to me. So, okay, I'm a little bit biased going in. But I got to say, I thought the podcast was so good. I highly recommend it. I knew they were going to be great together. And I just, you know, I highly recommend it. I think it was excellent. And I'm really looking forward to Daryl Cooper's project on World War II. So...

Let me start with this and I'm going to play in a second. We'll play the clip of what I think was the most controversial part of the episode. And we can kind of break it down a little bit. But I would just let me preface everything I'm about to say by just saying, as is true with most issues, I am not the expert.

i am certainly not the expert on world war ii and if this podcast is not going to be like an exhaustive comprehensive you know history on world war ii or anything like that as is typically the case i'm i'm not an expert on this but i have read enough about it that i can point you to the experts and as as is typically the case right

Like, okay, there are people with far more expertise on the history of Israel and Gaza than I have, or the history of Israel-Palestine, I should say, than I have. Daryl Cooper being one of those guys. But I know enough about it, and the things that I know about it are like narrative shattering for the other side.

And so that's why I'm able to go and like win all these debates on the topic is because I know enough about it. I've read enough about it. And what I know about it completely destroys the argument that's being put forth from the other side. So that's, that's, I kind of how I feel about this world war two stuff also. One of the things, so I talked a bit about world war two when I was on Tucker Carlson, I believe the first time.

And was it the second? It was I think it was the first time. And one of the things that I brought up was this. And I think Daryl Cooper made a somewhat of a similar point, but he really proved the point right. And that is that there is this power around World War Two that is just unlike anything else.

And it is this third rail where you are just not allowed to talk about it if you dissent from the popular understanding of what happened. And immediately, no matter what you're saying, if you at all dissent from the official story

you will be labeled as some type of like pro Hitler, pro Nazi guy. It's, it's really, really stupid. Um, it, it like on, on the intellectual merit of it, there is nothing to the argument. It's like, if you were to say, um,

You know, I don't know if you were to say, ah, we shouldn't have fought the war in Iraq. That doesn't make you pro Saddam Hussein. And like, if you just use that example, right, you would immediately think like, yeah, how stupid would you have to be to say that somebody who goes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney never should have gotten us into the war in Iraq or they mishandled the war in Iraq or any of, if you bring up any of their blunders,

That obviously in no way is saying you endorse Saddam Hussein or like his worst policies or something like that. By the way, unrelated, the U.S. government actually did endorse Saddam Hussein's worst policies, which was probably gassing, you know, a bunch of Shiites in the 80s. But OK, anyway, regardless of that. So World War Two is.

I think we could all recognize, right, that it is, and this is part of the reason why it's so important to talk about it, because it is given this emotional energy that there's really no other war.

That that it has it, you know, like if I if I were to say we never should have fought in World War One, there is just no energy to that. That's not going to be a controversial statement. That's not going to get clipped and spread around. That's not going to lead to like a Twitter mob being furious. There's just nothing like that. If I were to even say Woodrow Wilson was the great villain in World War One.

Again, there's no controversy there. If I had said, you know, I mean, the Civil War has a little bit of it. Like, if you're on the South side of the Civil War, you might, you know, that might rub some people the wrong way. The American Revolution, you could say whatever you want to about the American Revolution. We never should have fought Vietnam. We never should have fought the war in Iraq. That's just obvious. No one even... But, man, if you question the official narrative of World War II, there is this...

There's just an energy about it. There's a storm that breaks out. And that in itself is worthy of further investigation. Like, why is that? And what I have what I said on Tucker's show, and I think this is right.

is that essentially the reason why World War II is so different than any other war. And like, if you really think about it, right, it doesn't really make any sense. I mean, look, there were two world wars

Why is one of them radioactive to talk about, but not the other? I mean, you could say it's because it's more recent, but again, Vietnam's a lot more recent than World War II. And that's, you could say whatever you want to about Vietnam. Iraq is way more recent. You could say whatever you want to about that war. The reason why World War II is different is because World War II is the origin story of the American empire.

And it's the war that justifies, you know, in quotes, that justifies supposedly

America being the world empire and America dominating the world. And it doesn't matter how, you know, what connection to reality that has or whether that is a justification. It's just that's that's what they rely on in order to justify a continued American dominance over the rest of the world. And this is and literally like if you're, you know, if you're my age or older, you're

You know that like the talking points from my father and grandfather's generation were that we'd all be speaking German. That was like the slogan. We'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for World War II. Now, forget the idea that there's just nobody can make an argument that Adolf Hitler ever had a plan for

to like sail across the Atlantic Ocean. You know, after conquering England, he was then going to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, invade and conquer the United States of America and institute mandatory German classes. You know what I mean? Like there's no connection to reality, but it's just this kind of blanket way of saying,

The whole world would have been essentially the worst nightmare in the history of the world if it hadn't been for World War II, if we hadn't fought this war. And then, of course, you know, after that, that's all there's left to say. And then what are the lessons of World War II? The lessons are, and there's really only one, and the one lesson is that Neville Chamberlain was the bad guy and Churchill was the good guy.

And that Neville Chamberlain was he wanted to appease Adolf Hitler and that he gave him Czechoslovakia. And that, you know, I guess the lesson is that they should have gone to war earlier or they should have gone to war when Hitler first came to power or something like that.

But as somebody who has been, you know, has become one of like a fairly prominent anti-war voice, I can tell you that you every single time, every single time. I mean, I don't know. I've done, I think, like maybe 10 or 11 Israel-Palestine debates over the last year. And I don't think there's a single one where World War II wasn't brought up.

it's just constantly the justification you know if you go oh my god what israel is doing to gaza is horrible they go well what about dresden what about what we did in world war ii because it's supposed to be an immediate get out of morality free card i mean if we did it in world war ii then it's got to be right you know like we did it and obviously you couldn't be questioning whether world war ii was right or wrong that's just a given

And so that's kind of the, you know, it's like the lessons that are extrapolated from that. And also, by the way, I get called Neville Chamberlain every time. You know, if you want to, if you think we should work out a deal with Vladimir Putin, you're Chamberlain. If you think we shouldn't overthrow Saddam Hussein, you're Chamberlain. You know, it's like, that's all, that's the only lesson. As if the only lesson from history is that appeasement doesn't work.

rather than a lesson from history ever being a case where aggression didn't work, where preemptive war didn't work, because there's also several examples of that, many just from the last 20 years. Okay, so let's, you know what, here, let's go to Daryl Cooper's clip. I challenge everyone to actually listen to the words he's saying, and then we'll kind of talk about World War II and the point he's making and why the reaction is so hysterical. So here's Daryl Cooper.

And I told him that I think, and maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic, maybe, but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn't kill the most people. He didn't commit the most atrocities. But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story,

Right. And don't leave anything out. You see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.

Or just, I mean, at every step of the way, like people are very often, I find, surprised to learn. There's a two-step process. Why don't you just make the case for that? Okay, so you've made your statement. A lot of people are thinking, well, wait a second. You said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar. Yeah. Well, and the next thought that comes into their head is that, oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain, therefore his enemies, you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth were...

Stalin.

They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 saying,

from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering or people they're rounding up. And so it's two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched. And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people. We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?

and so this is like two months into the invasion right and like my view on this uh you know i argue with my zionist uh interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in gaza

look man like maybe you as the you know the germans you felt like you had to invade to the east maybe you thought that stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in romania that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of europe would be under threat and whatever it was whatever it was that like maybe you thought you had to do that but at the end of the day you launched that war

with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control. And millions of people died because of that. Okay. So that is, I think the heart of the clip that is really causing all the freak out. And I just, to be clear here,

The reason why I wanted to play that is because Daryl actually goes out of his way when he prefaces prefacing the part about Churchill, when he's saying that he thinks Churchill was the great victim or excuse me, the great villain of the war to say that, you know, I might be being a little hyperbolic here, but here's the point that I'm making. And.

Then, of course, what really drove people nuts was, again, they're all saying he was pro-Hitler, but he went out of his way to say, just because I'm saying he's the villain, and I'm not saying he's the villain because he killed the most people or he was like the app actually had the most blood on his hands. He's saying that he was more responsible for the war happening than anybody else.

And essentially the argument is that the war was avoidable and that Churchill pushed at every step for the war, which also, by the way, is true. That is just true.

But then he turns around and says, well, no, I'm not defending the Nazis because no matter what the situation is, if millions of people come under your control and millions of them end up dying, that's on you. And even if you take the best, the most charitable interpretation and say that they had no choice but to invade Poland, they had to invade Poland or whatever.

Um, and even if, even if you're, you're saying like, you know, as, as some of the more, uh, you know, Nazi sympathizer types will that like, oh, they didn't mean to kill all these millions of people, you know, it was just the middle of a war and they had them in camps and they all ended up dying. Okay. It's still on you.

because you still launched a war without a plan to ensure their safety. And like, the onus becomes on you. You're responsible for those people now. And essentially the point he was making, which I think he never actually got to, but that he was saying like, I feel the same way about Israel with Gaza. That it's like, you can't just launch a war and go, well, we gotta get these Hamas guys and we don't really have a plan for how to protect the hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children there.

It's like, okay, well then that's on you. You just murdered all those people and you can't do that. You can't get, you're not allowed to do that. Anyway, let me say it like this, okay? Because I really do think that this is the most important way to view World War II when you're talking about these things. World War II is despite what, what,

Modern credentialized historians, all of whom do not hold a fucking candle to Daryl Cooper. I mean, they do not know half as much as he does. For people who don't know, I've been talking up Daryl Cooper everywhere I can. I promoted his Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem podcast.

I promoted every chance I get. It's just the most incredible thing. It's like a 30 hour, six part podcast series is essentially a book on tape about the history of of the creation of Israel. And it's just unbelievable. The guy is just totally brilliant. So World War Two is a

In many ways it's remembered as like whatever the the triumph of good over evil Kind of I think sometimes it's it's almost like remembered as like what prevented the Holocaust as a historical as that is That it's like it's like we saved the Jews or something like that, even though like that's not what happened They were not saved the Holocaust happened. That's kind of you know, it should be the takeaway but

It is just kind of the right this we'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for this war But if you could just kind of remove the stuff that you're already, you know that we all grew up just knowing like knowing to be the truth without ever having to like waste your time reading a book about it or anything the World War two was Objectively the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world. I

That's what it was. It was the biggest bloodbath, the biggest mass slaughter campaign in human history. There's nothing comes close to it. The numbers just are there. They're impossible to comprehend, like to really comprehend them. And if you just start with that basic fact.

that this was the worst thing that ever happened, I think that will allow you to kind of, it kind of gives you permission to view things in a slightly different light. Because when you recognize that this was the worst thing that ever happened, then you also have to recognize that like, oh, so it's kind of a failure across the board. Like,

All the leadership is somewhat responsible for this because I mean, if the worst thing in the world happens, I suppose theoretically you could say the worst thing in the world just happened to us and we had absolutely no choice. But at the very least, it wasn't great leadership if you led into the worst thing in the history of the world. And it kind of transfers the onus on you to say, OK, even if the other side is worse in the worst thing, if the worst thing in the history of the world happens, you're

The onus is now on you to be like, was there any avoiding it? Was there ever a chance to not go down this path? What were the options here? So, okay, two, you know, like I would say a couple of things. First of all, I'm going to recommend

I'm going to try to keep the recommendation short just because I'll give you a place to start. But as I have many times, I really highly recommend if you're interested in this topic, read Pat Buchanan's book on it. It's called Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. And the unnecessary war is a Winston Churchill quote. It's how he described the war after the war.

Like he was looking back at it and going, man, okay, yeah, we really shouldn't have done that. That turned out to be a huge mistake because of course Britain got totally like destroyed and they lost the British empire. It was a disaster for, for Britain. And the fact is, if you go back and read, if you go read Pat Buchanan's book on it, you could just see, he makes a pretty compelling case that there were on the

During the lead up to the war, there was off ramp after off ramp after off ramp that lots of people could have gone off of. Like the war didn't have to happen. And it's just not true that it's exclusively the Germans fault that it did. Now you can, there's a whole lot of blame to go around. And of course, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan make really good,

enemies when the victors are writing the history books to be like well look how evil they were you know in a similar sense Saddam Hussein is a really good villain to be like well look how evil he was and yeah he was he did a lot of evil shit still doesn't mean the war was justified still doesn't mean the war was inevitable now

The other thing that I would recommend that people check out is there's a propaganda film from, I believe it was 1946, called Hitler Lives, which was American propaganda. It was written by Dr. Seuss.

Okay. Is it, you know, I'd like to use to have these old school propaganda videos because somehow like in our grandparents and great grandparents day, that was the type of thing that would move them, I guess. But so anyway, there's this, so it's immediately after the second world war and they're, they're giving you, it's great to go look at. You can find it on YouTube. It's great to watch because it, it just, it's a window into what the

The propaganda was for the time, like what we want the American people to believe about this war that we just fought. And one of the things that's notable about it is that Jews are not mentioned. The Holocaust is not mentioned, but what is mentioned is the German race.

And how evil it's, it's a racialist attack against the Germans. And they're basically saying, look, these Germans tried to take over the whole world twice. And we had to go to world war to stop them both times. So you keep your eyes on these shifty Germans.

because, you know, they're going to try to do it again. It's inevitable. That was the American propaganda immediately after the war. Not like, oh, we had to go liberate these Jews because Adolf Hitler is such a bigot or something like that. Like that didn't come up at all. And in fact, the bigotry was directed in the other direction against the genetic Germanic people or whatever. So anyway, I just think both of those are worth your time.

Okay, so on top of my first insight being that World War II is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world, the other thing I would encourage people to consider is that you can't understand World War II absent World War I, and that essentially...

The whole game is that World War II was a continuation of World War I, or if not a continuation, an inevitable result or a direct result, if not inevitable.

And World War I is just completely indefensible. One more book that I'll recommend is Wilson's War. That's a book on World War I, but I think it's kind of necessary to understand that to understand World War II. And so in World War I, by the way, not Charlie Wilson's War. I know there was a movie and a book by that name, just Wilson's War. And so anyway, so Woodrow Wilson,

who was elected in 1912, he won his re-election campaign campaigning on the, he kept you out of war. That was the democratic slogan for him at the time. So he was bragging about how he had kept America out of World War I.

But that didn't last for very long. And ultimately, based off lies like the Lusitania, America got involved in World War I. Now, America or the war in Europe was essentially in a stalemate.

okay so they're you know um like the english and the french had put a blockade around german this was uh around germany this was a clear violation of like international norms at the time typically speaking like you would you know you might try to starve an army like you might you might not let food be shipped into like a military base but you weren't gonna like

starve the women and children of a nation that was pretty wild but they did that and then as a response to that the the Germans you know engaged in like submarine warfare and then they had the most advanced submarines and their for a while Germany was winning the war but then it like kind of just turned into a stalemate where essentially total victory was off the table for anyone

Um, however, late into the war, the Americans got involved and America at this point had, was not really known as a military superpower, but we were, um, an industrial power and we turned that industrial capacity into military capacity. And we came in, we were fresh. All, all the others were, um, were, you know,

had been fighting in a war and their, their resources were very depleted, but then America came in. And as, as is broken down in this book, uh, by the way, I'm blanking on the name of the author. I, sorry, go, let me pull this up for you here now so I can actually have it. Or Jim Powell, Jim Powell. Sorry. I used to be a lot smarter than I am. Jim Powell. He was, so as he breaks down in this war, in his book, Wilson's war, um,

The essentially when America got involved in the war, the first thing they did was bribe the Russians to stay in the war.

Because we were worried that they were getting, you know, like their forces were at the point of exhaustion. They were going to pull out of the war. So we brought, we were like, hey, we'll send you. I remember boots were a huge issue. Like they had like, they didn't have shoes for their military. And so we sent them a bunch of boots and a bunch of oil and a bunch of just other materials that you would need to keep them in the war.

And so we kept the Russians in the war. And a few months later was the Bolshevik revolution.

So essentially, Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky, these guys were able to overthrow the Russian government because the Russian military was still involved overextended in this war. And so the case made in this book, which I think is a pretty overwhelming case, is that this is what led to the communists taking over in Russia. And, you know, so if you could just think through all the implications of that, there's

That like all the people who were killed by Lenin and Stalin, the entire Cold War, the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam. This is all a result of America getting involved in World War One and bribing the Russians into staying involved in World War One. So anyway, fast forward to the end of World War One is, you know, you guys know the answer. We want it. And.

What ended up happening solely because of American involvement that never would have happened absent US involvement is that they they won a total victory and they made Germany take full responsibility for the war now this

Even I think in like your public schools, you kind of learn that this was true. Like it is kind of this part alone, I think isn't even that controversial. This is kind of just accepted wisdom. Not that we maintained that wisdom, but the idea that the treatment of Germany after World War One was awful and that it was awful. It was unfair. And then it led to the rise of the Nazis.

I think this is pretty standard history and is at least very largely true. Like Germany certainly had some responsibility for World War I, but the idea that they should take all of the responsibility made no sense whatsoever. And so not only, so they imposed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, which was basically

designed to humiliate them internationally. And the treaty was just like, it was unbelievable. Like they, they had to take full responsibility for everything in the war. You know, interestingly, Wilson insisted that the, uh, the, like the German military was

And like their right wingers weren't allowed to even sign the treaty because it was like they don't even get a seat at the table. Screw them. So they made essentially, you know, the like the German Democrats sign.

have to sign the Treaty of Versailles, who, by the way, were disproportionately Jewish. And that comes into being an interesting factor in this whole thing. And it was total bullshit. Like, the military was done. The German military was not fighting anymore. They had lost the war. But still, they were never technically on the hook for the treaty in Versailles. And it was these guys. And that was something that Hitler loved to point out.

So anyway, so the Treaty of Versailles is imposed on Germany. They owe all of the war debt. They're 100% responsible. I forget this. I'd have to go back and check. And you guys can go look this up if you want to. But it's pretty wild. Of course, Adolf Hitler later tears up the Treaty of Versailles. But if the Treaty of Versailles had stood, I think the Germans would have been paying money. I think it might be into the 1990s.

Maybe it was the 1980s, but it's something crazy like that. Like if they had enforced that treaty, essentially Germany would have been paying forever. Their grandchildren would have been paying for World War I. It was something like insane like that. And then there's all types of stories that you can go read about

Like when they couldn't make the payments, how the French would just like comment because they didn't have a military anymore either as they had to disband or a great, it was greatly reduced if they had one at all. And like the French would just come in and just go down to like a coal mine and just take the coal.

Like they were just like just a national humiliation that is impossible for Americans in the year 2024 to understand. And we've had Joe Biden as president for four years, and we still cannot even begin to wrap our heads around something like that.

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Step up your game, go to sheath.com. And of course, if you use the promo code problem 20, you will get 20% off your next order sheath.com promo code problem 20 for 20% off. All right, let's get back on the show. Um, so there's a, I'm almost thinking, sorry, I just have like other tangents in my head here now. Okay. I will go on another tangent because I just find all this stuff really interesting. And again, this is not.

anything like the official history of World War II. It's just me talking about why I find this stuff interesting and why I think it's important to rethink some of these things. But anyway, you know, one of the questions, even if you just took like kind of the standard version of history of World War II,

It does seem like if you're just in, if you're at all a critically, you know, an independent thinker in any sense, there are just some immediate questions that come to your mind. Like why?

You know, OK, Adolf Hitler's a madman. Start with that. He's a you know, he's he's a horrible person. And by the way, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much you disclaim this. Like even in that clip we showed Daryl Cooper, he he explicitly disclaims now just because I'm criticizing Churchill doesn't mean that I love him.

Hitler right just because I'm criticizing Dick Cheney. It doesn't mean that I love Saddam Hussein But even when you do that, it doesn't matter. I mean the the papu canon book that I just recommended Churchill Hitler and the unnecessary war he says I can't remember if it was in the book or if it was in an interview I mean he certainly says some of it in the book too, but I remember I think it was a c-span interview once and

where they asked him just point blank, they go, what was your opinion of Adolf Hitler? And the first thing he said was that Adolf Hitler was an evil, satanic figure.

And Pat Buchanan is like, you know, Pat Buchanan has got to be, I think, in his 90s now. He's an older guy. But so if you could imagine this is a devout Catholic, really old school square conservative.

So when he says satanic, it's not in the way that like me or you like throw the word out there kind of lighthearted. I mean, he's like a devout Catholic saying this guy was satanic. It's the strongest possible language with the deepest possible meaning to this guy, meaning he came from the fucking devil, not from Jesus, you know, like that is like, or at least he maybe not came from the devil, but you get my point.

And they still say he loved Hitler. Like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you say. But even if Hitler is this evil figure, it's like, okay, why was he put in power? Why were people following him? What was that about?

Doesn't that in itself just warrant some more understanding? And why is it that we wouldn't, why would we not want to understand the most important and most horrific chapter in human history?

And, and, and couldn't you at the very least be like, yeah, we should be allowed to have conversations about this. We should be allowed to talk about this. That shouldn't be discouraged. You shouldn't be like labeled, you know, some horrible name because you think maybe there's a little bit more to the history than the, than the textbooks teach us. Maybe perhaps I love when like a revisionist history is used as like a pejorative as if, oh, you're a total revisionist because like the, the,

implication is that what like the official narrative was 100% right.

The halls of power just told the unabridged truth after the war. And then, of course, this is why I recommended the video Hitler Lives, because you realize this wasn't even the official truth at the time. All of this is revisionist history, including the Holocaust having anything to do with why America entered the war. That's totally revisionist history. That's just not true. One thing, and I'll give a shout out to Brett

I forget how to pronounce his last name. It was like Varad, Varad or Varad. The old school sucks podcast. They were the ones who first put me on to this. They used to have this great viral video. I don't know. I'm sure it's still up somewhere, but it was like in the early days of YouTube. This was one of like the great viral videos that,

that they put out there on the School Sucks podcast. But just for anyone who doesn't know this, this is kind of a side. It's not real. I mean, it's kind of, it's part of it. But it's one piece of the question of why the Germans fell in line with Adolf Hitler so much. And okay, so in the Prussian Empire,

Which was the you know, it's the Hitler was was leading the Third Reich. So this is in the Second Reich which is the German Empire that preceded the you know that preceded the Nazis so the the cultural and geographic precursor of the Nazis like in this land a Hundred fifty years earlier or something like that. They had this problem of

They had a major problem that was very concerning all the way up to the top of the Prussian Empire. And the problem that they had was that the king would get into these military disputes and he had a conscripted army of soldiers. And sometimes these soldiers would do these ridiculous things like run away.

like they would just be on a battlefield against an opposing army and they would like run or piss themselves and get killed you know and like they're if you could imagine you know you you think of like in the late 1700s or the early 1800s or something like that there's nations are not as you know like glued together

As they are today. And I know right now in 2024, they're kind of falling apart a little bit. But, you know, still there is something where like if we're if we're going to fight a war in Iraq, let's say it's just a given that we can do that, like that the president of the United States can marshal the resources of the entire country to go invade another country.

Forget the arguments about whether we should do that or the war worked out or anything like that. But none of us question that that can be done. Like logistically, the mechanisms for that exist. Forget whether you think lockdowns or the response to COVID was good or not. Obviously, if you listen to this show, you know it wasn't. But we can do that.

And nobody really debates over whether we can or not. Like if the federal government, when there's the outbreak of COVID, says, hey, we want to have lockdowns and we want to have the – what's the – I apologize. I'm blanking on. But what was the bill – not the bill, but the law that Donald Trump evoked, the –

The thing about, you know, that he could just direct all of the nation's product productive capacities toward COVID. We could just say, okay, we're,

We're making masks and ventilators and we're sending them to New York and LA and these hotspots. We're going to have the Federal Reserve print up trillions of dollars. We're going to pass out checks for the people out of work. We're going to have big bailouts for corporations. The idea that you can just do all of it, that you have the power to control an entire nation is a relatively new phenomenon.

It was not so easy in the 1700s to do something like that. And I think I think Daryl made a point like this on Tucker's show. Maybe it was something he said elsewhere. But we tend as like modern Americans, we tend to have this view of like a king. If you're thinking about a king in the 1600s or something like that, you think to yourself, oh, well, this king had absolute power.

I mean, that's what it is to be a king, right? Like our politicians don't have that type of power. Our politician just has a four year term and he's got to work with Congress and that's got to be constitutional and the Supreme Court could strike it down or something like that. But in your mind, you're like a king just gives an order, just goes dance for me. And then you, you know, give me your wife and you give me your house and he could just do whatever he wants to.

That's like a caricature. That's not real. The truth is that the power that our central government has is godly compared to the power that any of these monarchs had. It's just a fact. I mean, if you were in the 1700s, if you went to some remote village, in their minds, they may not even be part of your society really.

You know what I mean? Like they live independently and they've never even been to one of the cities and they, it's just a totally different thing. I remember reading about this in a, in Scott Horton's phenomenal book on the war in Afghanistan, a fool's errand where he was talking about this. And it's something that I think I had heard about this before reading the book, but he kind of broke it down. But one of the things that's just really interesting to the American mind, right?

Is that as so as we were invading Afghanistan and our boys are going to like, you know, not even the most rural parts of Afghanistan, but some of them, some like somewhat rural places in Afghanistan. And one of the first things they'd have to do is explain to these people what had happened.

And they had to like explain to them that like, okay, listen, there's some Arabs that are hiding out in, in Afghanistan and they attacked. And I think one of them had to say at one point that they attacked a village known as New York city because the people in Afghanistan, or at least some of them, uh,

Not only did they not know 9-11 happened, not only did they not know that there were some Arabs hiding out in their country, they didn't know what New York City was. You know, like they didn't even know that the new world exists. And that's something that's kind of hard for Americans to wrap their heads around. But anyway, OK, I'm digressing a lot here. So the Prussians were having this problem. Their army was just like abandoning.

And they needed an army that would fight wars when the king told them to fight wars. And so they came up with an invention to solve this problem, which was largely successful. And the plan was to get them young, that you had to get them the kids of the society and brainwash them to be obedient servants of the state.

And they called this invention school. And this was imported to America by Horace Mann, the godfather of education. He adopted the Prussian model.

You may have asked yourself certain questions like, why does this word school? And why do words like kindergarten, you know, like, man, that sounds awfully German. You know, like, why do we have these words? Okay. Why is it that school, the way school is designed is that you go in and the first thing you do is pledge allegiance to the flag of your nation. Right?

That's an interesting start to the day. Anyone ever really think about why that is? Why is the whole training of school to sit in a, and some schools are getting better about this, but traditionally it's sit in a line of desks and memorize and regurgitate. That's the test. Can you take the information that you are given and then spit it back out?

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Okay. So anyway, by the time the rise of the Nazis, this has been a practice in Germany for a while. And that's part of the reason why, uh, why people were so, um, obedient toward Hitler. Now, but again, that's a little bit removed from the conversation that Daryl was having or the most important thing about world war two, but as a libertarian and kind of a nerd about this stuff, I just find that to be so interesting. I think that's like the craziest thing ever that we all like literally the geographic and, uh,

cultural precursors to the Nazis came up with a system to indoctrinate their children into blindly following the orders of the state. And we have that system in our country explicitly borrowed from them. Now, Horace Mann had something he wrote about it where he was like, well, you know, if the if the Prussians can use this model toward their aristocratic ends, then surely we can use it to teach, you know, good limited republic something, you know.

So, OK, he was saying we're using it for different, but still kind of a similar type thing. OK. Oh, one of the other major reasons why people followed why people followed the Nazis and ultimately followed Adolf Hitler is that they were running explicitly against the Treaty of Versailles being imposed on them.

I mean, that's a huge component of it. Now, if you go back and look at the history of it, the Nazi party, you know, the Nazis pretty remarkably quickly go from like Adolf Hitler giving, you know, talks in bars to being in power.

It's a pretty quick transition, a matter of a few years. I guess the Nazis come into power in the early 30s. But if you go look at it, there was elections in, I think it was...

Again, double check me on the dates and details of this because a lot of this is off memory of stuff I read years ago. But there's some I think it's 1928. The Nazis get the Nazi party gets totally humiliated in the elections. They just they don't put it together at all. The German people, even with the Treaty of Versailles imposed on them and all these things, they're just not going for this Nazi stuff. And it's not till after 1929 when they end up like winning a lot of seats.

in the German elections. And why was that? Well, that was because the Great Depression and the Great Depression was not contained to the United States of America or to London. The Great Depression really hit Germany hard. And what ended up happening was, okay, so let me rewind this a little bit here too. So Woodrow Wilson, who got us into World War I,

Before getting us into World War I, he created the Federal Reserve, or at least signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, which created a central bank. And the central bank started printing a ton of money. And part of that was to fund the war effort in World War I. And then there was all this money being printed. And as we know, what happens here, right? Okay, there was a bubble. The bubble is known as the Roaring Twenties. And what happens with bubbles? They

they pop and the bubble popped in 29 and this is what started the great depression and so woodrow wilson who created the federal reserve and got us into world war one and this is why truly why he's the worst president in the history of the united states of america he's not only responsible for the communists he's also responsible for the nazis

His actions led directly to that. In 1929, the markets crashed. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, and all of these investors started calling their loans that they had given into Germany. So now, not only does Germany have to pay for all of the war debt, which they can't afford, they now have to repay every loan that they've been given, which they can't afford. And so what did they do? They printed their way out of it, and this leads to the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic.

Um, this is the, like hyperinflation real deal. I, you can read stories about how people were like, you know, and I don't know exactly like if every single one of these anecdotes is true, but there were wheelbarrows full of cash. Like there are pictures of people wheel barreling around their cash. There's one story supposedly of a guy who, uh, cashed an annuity that he had been, you know,

putting into his whole life and that he cashed his annuity and went next door and bought a cup of coffee with it. Now, I don't know if that story exactly is actually true, but it was wheelbarrows full of cash levels. On top of that, there was also like what you could call in some ways, like the precursor to, um,

like wokeism or something like that. I don't know exactly how you want to describe it, but the, um, kind of cultural degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, including a lot of very weird stuff about like, like, I think kind of the origin of a lot of the modern trans ideology stuff actually started in the Weimar Republic, which is kind of

interesting and strange, but it's just kind of like this cultural decadence being promoted, international humiliation. Then you throw in hyperinflation and then you had the rise of the Nazis. And of course, Adolf Hitler was able to say, well, look, we have this horrific communist threat over here to the east of us.

And we have the bankers who have totally destroyed our economy. And then you got these people who the Germans themselves are not really German in his view, who betrayed us and who signed on to the Weimar Republic, excuse me, and signed on to the Treaty of Versailles. And so, by the way, what did all three of those groups have in common? Well, they were...

There were disproportionately a lot of Jews involved in them. And so, of course, this just it was just like worked perfectly into Adolf Hitler's narrative that it's like, look. And of course, he had he had the captive audience from the school system. So it was like, look, you've been totally humiliated. You've been totally wrong, wronged. Your life has been destroyed. Your great national pride has been destroyed. And look, it's all these people's fault.

So this is how kind of like the thing started unfolding. Anyway, the point that Pat Buchanan really harps on in his book, and this is essentially his argument, and I'm saying, I think this is, I think this is right. It's like, I'm persuaded by his argument here. His argument is basically that the Holocaust is,

Well, okay. Let me actually start it from a little before that. So his argument is that war guarantees are reckless. Um, war guarantees, uh,

put a burden on societies where they make these promises that then has a tremendous moral hazard because the country that has a war guarantee now feels comfortable doing things that they wouldn't have otherwise done, that they're made recklessly, that they lead to wider wars, and that essentially England's war guarantee of Poland

is what led to the Second World War and that the Holocaust happened in the war and that it was a war crime. So his argument is that, look, Adolf Hitler was certainly hated Jews. He certainly blamed Jews for all of their problems. However,

He didn't end up going genocidal. It's like that was ultimately a war crime. And he was like, if you didn't have the war guarantee with Poland, you wouldn't have had the war. And if you didn't have the war, you wouldn't have had the Holocaust. That's essentially his argument. I think it's a pretty compelling one. Now, you may disagree with the argument, but really, you got to admit there's an argument there. And it's a legitimate argument to make. So

After Munich and after Chamberlain is humiliated, one of the things that the major thing that Pat Buchanan is arguing, and I think Daryl Cooper would agree with him here, although I'd be interested to ask him, but the major catastrophe, the major blunder was that Chamberlain then gave a war guarantee to Poland. Now, Poland was in a dispute with Germany over Danzig.

And Danzig was, I think, you know, go again, go double check me on this, like 90% German. It was like a German speaking town that with a few hundred thousand people there, and it was a strategically important, you know, something like the port or something like that was strategically important, you know, like still to this day, that's a big deal. I do think that, you know,

city kids like myself, you know, someone who grew up in New York City, living in 2024. This can sometimes be lost on us how important like things like that are. But you know, this is like why New York City is New York City. It's like because of the harbor, like that's why it became like such a like, important city. So anyway, Danzig was was

Hitler wanted this city back. And it had, just to be clear here, it was stripped from them in the Treaty of Versailles. This was part of Germany before that.

So it was like they lost this city. Now, as Hitler's throwing out the Treaty of Versailles and rebuilding the German military and rebuilding the German economy, he also wanted this strategically important port back. Now, what he actually asked for was like a corridor or at least a partial corridor to Danzig. So he wanted like a train that would run there. So

So like that, you know what I mean? So that there was transportation between Germany and this city that used to be part of Germany.

However you feel about it, whoever you think was right or wrong there, that's what the beef was over. And Chamberlain hands a war guarantee to Poland and his own his own finance, excuse me, his own foreign minister was furious about this. Couldn't believe he did it. He is like cursing him out after it happens because he's like, listen, you just you

gave England's war powers over to a bunch of Polish colonels. Like now they get to decide if we are going to war. And so ultimately they, because they,

Because the British Empire at the time, who is still largely viewed as the toughest motherfuckers in the world. I mean, you got to think this is before this is in between World War One and World War Two. It's not like America is the superpower in the world. The British Empire has been the superpower in the world. Now that changes in World War Two. But

At that point, that was still the truth. And so now the British Empire just made a war guarantee with Poland. And so now Poland, instead of feeling any type of pressure to negotiate with Hitler, goes, fuck you, Hitler. We're not giving you shit. Okay, so now they get into a thing and then ultimately Hitler ends up invading. And they had given Poland a war guarantee and so they followed through on that and went to war. And the argument being made is that that was totally unnecessary. Right?

That the idea that we would have a world war over whether this German city was controlled by Germany or Poland made no sense. And just to add on top of that, which is the craziest part of all of it, is that Poland didn't end up being protected.

It's not as if like we fought that whole world war, but then Poland was liberated. The second world war gets fought. It's the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity. Tens of millions of people are killed. And then Poland is subjugated by Joseph Stalin until 1989. That was the result of it. They lived under an equally evil regime.

you know, a totalitarian leader who killed more people than Adolf Hitler. So anyway, this, the real point, I guess, of all of this, of this episode is that like, number one, I just find that, I think this is a fascinating history. Number two,

You know, if the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world can't be examined and we have to just blindly listen to whatever the propaganda is, then obviously that leads to some real problems. And I do think that the...

The kind of the caricature that if you say any of the things that I've just said to you over the last hour, that the takeaway from that is that what somehow you think Adolf Hitler was a good guy or somehow you think like the Holocaust was OK. That is just I mean, that's just profoundly stupid.

It's really, really stupid. And I don't care if there's some stupid people online whose takeaway really is that Adolf Hitler was great and the Holocaust was okay or the Holocaust never happened or like whatever. Still, people who aren't that are allowed to have this conversation. We're allowed to talk about this. You know, World War II, you know, has...

like i have i have family members who were very much involved in it my grandfather on my mother's side um was a jew who escaped nazi germany and he was the only one in his family who made it over and he came over and he enlisted and then went back and fought um in world war ii and then he was a uh a translator um after the the war um there's

I don't lightly speak about World War II. Like, I have a profound respect for how terrible it was. And particularly because of my family, I have a profound respect for how terrible it was to be a Jewish person who lived in Nazi-controlled territory. It was not a good place to be, man. And, you know, one of the things that I think

You know, because of that, because it was so terrible and for Jews under Nazi control, I think there is an impulse or a desire to make that the entirety of the story.

Again, not in 1947 when Dr. Seuss is writing the script for Hitler Lives. That wasn't the story then. But decades later, that became kind of like the justification. And almost that's what you're supposed to take away from the story.

But there's much more to it than that. The Jews were not the only ones who suffered in World War II. And I've said this for a long time. I don't think that we should claim a monopoly on it.

You know, there were massive, like unfathomable human rights violations during the Second World War on a scale of which the world has never seen before or since. Thank God.

Um, it's not just, you know, the, um, it's not just the Holocaust. That's, that's a part of it, you know, a particularly horrible part of it. Um, but again, Jews were not the only, uh, people who Adolf Hitler killed. Um, he was awful. I mean, uh, before he went after the Jews, he was going after, um,

Like the handicapped and like the mentally impaired. Just think about how evil that is. Right. To like go after the weakest amongst you in a society. But not only that, I mean, there's also just like, you know, the there's also just atrocities committed by the allies, right?

I mean, like the bombing campaigns in Germany where they just, I mean, completely took the gloves off and just bombed cities. Not city, and not like one or two bombs. Like just destroyed full cities, full of women and children. Even when the military was out somewhere else, it's like all that was left behind by definition were non-militant, non-combatants.

Because the military was somewhere else. And there's just women and children, you know, and they just slaughtered them. The nuking of Japan, the firebombing of Tokyo. I mean, like this is targeting of civilians. You want to get into Stalin's march through Europe? That Joseph Stalin's army raped their way to Germany with explicit permission.

You know, just like horrible things. And then, of course, which rarely comes up. I know my my friend Candace Owens has taken a lot of heat for talking about this, but it happened. And so it's fair game is that ethnic Germans were ethnically cleansed by the millions after the war.

After the war, like if you were anywhere in Eastern Europe and you spoke German, you were in trouble. Your life was in jeopardy. Many of them were executed just for the crime of speaking German. And like, again, I think as all of us could recognize, right? Like the whole look when if you think about Adolf Hitler's treatment of the Jews.

And like whatever his gripe with the Jews was like, you know, I mentioned some of them, you know, they were the ones who were the communists or they were the ones running the big banks or like they were the ones who didn't appreciate his art or something like that. Right. Nobody from our like even just from a normie perspective, no one. If you hear about Adolf Hitler's treatment of the Jews, no one goes. I wonder if those Jewish investors really did fuck him over on his art.

You know, I mean, maybe he was a really talented artist and he did get screwed over there.

It's like, do you know whether that's the truth or not? Does anyone care? Does it matter at all? Of course it doesn't matter. The point is, who cares if they screwed you over or didn't? You don't get to just do that to other people who had nothing to do with it. You don't get to just seize some Jewish guy's business and then lock him up and throw his whole family in a concentration camp and then ship them off to a death camp and that you can't do all that because some people who were Jews maybe did something bad to you. You're not allowed to do that, right?

Okay, well, that exact same moral understanding is why you're not allowed to just kill ethnic Germans after the war. You can't just do that to them because some other people who also spoke that same language supported the Nazis, or even if they supported the Nazis, you're not allowed to just murder people for supporting a government. And if you could do that, every person on the planet is like fair game to be murdered, just about. And so really, yeah,

I mean, the takeaway to me essentially is that this is, look, winners of wars write the history books and they're written for a reason. And the real story of World War II is not just all the people that died. That's obviously a very important part of it. But what came out of World War II, and this is why this story has developed over time, and it's not the same as it was in 1947 today, but what really happened was that the world changed.

And the new order was established. And the new order, including things like international law that didn't exist before, things like the United Nations that didn't exist before, then the whole point of the international law was at least the stated point of the creation of international law was that you're not allowed to do that stuff anymore. And not just what Hitler did, but the way that the Americans and the way that the Russians fought the war, you're not allowed to do that stuff anymore.

And at the very least, I would say that if we ever want to break it, you know, because this is like the origin story of the American empire. And now we're living through the collapse of the American empire. And so it also does make story that this kind of founding myth also gets destroyed along with it. And I think that's a good thing. And then I think that, you know,

I really, really hope people, and I think now because he's just blown up so much from this Tucker appearance, I think people will check out Daryl Cooper's series on World War II. I'm not sure exactly when he's going to have that out.

But I will tell you, man, his series on the early history of Israel-Palestine conflict was just incredible. I guess technically it's not the Israel-Palestine. It's like the Zionist-Palestine conflict because the series ends with the creation of Israel. His deep dives into Epstein was just, like, incredible. The dude is a legit, like...

brilliant historian. And I think that all of this stuff is really interesting and really important to actually understand. And yeah, the official narrative is just missing a lot. I mean, it's missing so much. I mean, look, just on the most...