Making Sense - Sam Harris - #97 — The Impossible War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick discuss their new documentary, The Vietnam War, which premieres on PBS on September 17th, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray very soon after that. In this conversation, the filmmakers discuss their thoughts on the Vietnam War and what it means to be a veteran of the war, and what they hope the documentary will teach us about the experience of those who served in the conflict. They also discuss the impact of the film on the lives of veterans and their families, and how it changed the way we think about the war and the people who fought in it. Sam Harris is a writer and host of the podcast Making Sense. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and has been featured in The New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Hollywood Reporter. His work can be found on Amazon, and he is a regular contributor on NPR and NPR Worldwide. His music can be heard on many other platforms, including SoundCloud, and his music video is also available on SoundCloud and Vevolution, which you should check out on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Thank you for listening to this episode of Making Sense! Subscribe to Making Sense: The Making Sense Podcast! Subscribe to our new podcast on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to our podcast on Stitcher.com/Making Sense Subscribe on Podchaser and Stitcher Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your fellow podcast listenership on the Making Sense podcast on the Podcasts and other social media platforms on our Podcasts on the PodCharity and Podcasts Connected to the Podcasts Listings Join Us on FB and Subscribe to Our Podcasts & Podcasts On Podcharity Subscribe & Share Us On Social Media Places Learn More About Meep & Subscribe to Their Story on This Podcasts And Places To Watch It Outtro Music on Podcasts Outtro Browsing Places And Places And Podcasts A Podcast on The Vineyard On The Podcasts Collectorship And More Thank You - Thanks & Share This And This And Other Things On This Podcast # & And This & This And Such A Review And This Other Things , This And More On This And Their Story On This & Such And Such And This ... -- A Thank You & Such A Good Vibee

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.480 Okay, a few new speaking dates to announce.

00:00:49.960 The links are not yet live on my website, but you can mark your calendars if you live in

00:00:54.920 the relevant cities.

00:00:55.740 I'll be in Seattle on December 6th, San Francisco on December 7th, Boston on January 11th, D.C.

00:01:06.740 on January 12th, and Philadelphia on January 14th.

00:01:12.260 Those last three are surrounding the January 13th date in New York, which is virtually sold

00:01:21.020 out, I believe there are 12 seats left last time I looked, so more to come about those

00:01:27.880 events.

00:01:29.200 Supporters of the podcast will get a link to tickets on September 20th, and then tickets

00:01:35.260 will be available to the general public a week after that.

00:01:38.380 So you can see my events page on my website for more details, and you can also join my email

00:01:43.400 list if you want to hear about these things in the most reliable way.

00:01:47.140 Okay, today I am speaking with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

00:01:53.740 They are filmmakers who have made some of the most beloved documentaries of our time, and

00:01:59.920 certainly changed the way that documentary films have been made over the last few decades.

00:02:05.760 And they're releasing their latest film, The Vietnam War, this weekend on PBS.

00:02:10.500 It premieres on Sunday, the 17th of September, and it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray very

00:02:17.040 soon after that.

00:02:18.540 This documentary is in 10 parts.

00:02:21.300 It's 18 hours long, and as you'll hear in this conversation, it fairly blew my mind.

00:02:27.160 It really is a remarkable piece of work, which took Ken and Lynn and the rest of their team

00:02:32.580 10 years to make, so you'll hear much more about it and my experience watching it over

00:02:38.660 the next hour, but I really recommend that you take the time to watch this series.

00:02:44.720 If you thought you knew something about the Vietnam War and what it was like to live through

00:02:50.220 it, I would dare say even if you fought in that war, there's something to be learned from

00:02:56.000 this documentary.

00:02:56.640 So, now I bring you Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

00:03:06.980 I am here with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

00:03:09.720 Ken and Lynn, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:03:12.260 Thanks for having us.

00:03:13.340 Our pleasure.

00:03:14.320 Well, listen, to say that I'm a fan of your work is certainly an understatement, and I think

00:03:19.820 that's probably an understatement for almost anyone who encounters your work.

00:03:22.860 You have made so many amazing films together, probably most famously the Civil War, which

00:03:29.580 virtually everyone has seen, I imagine, but there was Prohibition, Jazz, Baseball, just

00:03:35.340 so many great films, and these are miniseries, really.

00:03:39.120 I mean, these are many hours long, and now you've released, or you're bound to release the

00:03:44.200 latest, which is the Vietnam War, which is 18 hours long.

00:03:48.460 Is that correct?

00:03:49.740 Yes.

00:03:50.260 10 episodes, 18 hours.

00:03:51.840 Yeah, so I am about 15 hours into it.

00:03:55.700 Don't spoil the end for me.

00:03:57.060 We win this war, right?

00:03:59.380 I really don't want to do a spoiler thing for you.

00:04:03.300 I've had a full immersion experience that most people watching it on PBS won't, because

00:04:08.020 I have the discs, and I've watched those 15 hours in the last 48.

00:04:14.580 Oh, wow.

00:04:15.300 It's really, really amazingly intense, and it strikes me that this is an utterly unique

00:04:22.300 document for reasons that you couldn't fully control.

00:04:26.100 I mean, first of all, there was an endless amount of footage of the actual war, which you

00:04:30.820 can't say of every war.

00:04:33.160 And there's also the fact that there were so many people who experienced the war who are

00:04:38.420 still alive who you could talk to.

00:04:40.120 And then there's the additional fact that we are at enough remove from this particular

00:04:45.220 war in time, now about 50 years, so that you can have this perspective on it and give it

00:04:50.300 this amazingly even-handed treatment.

00:04:53.460 And finally, and this is something you really had no control over, there's the fact that

00:04:58.160 you're releasing this now, at this moment in history, and it has a resonance, which I

00:05:03.760 really, I feel like it wouldn't have had, had you released this, let's say, in the first

00:05:07.720 term of Obama's administration.

00:05:10.040 I mean, it strikes me as an incredibly relevant and prescient document right now.

00:05:16.720 It's like looking into a time capsule, but it's also, I also felt like I was looking into

00:05:21.740 a crystal ball that was 50 years old.

00:05:24.160 And so I don't know if it strikes you that way, but it just seems like this is a gold

00:05:28.700 mine, yeah.

00:05:30.040 This is the great gift of history that we always forget, and I would suggest that had

00:05:34.760 we released it 10 years ago, it might also have stunning and different kind of resonances.

00:05:42.960 Human nature never changes, and so whatever's going on now, the past is always going to resonate

00:05:49.120 with it because we can see features of it.

00:05:51.100 But I think it's quite startling right now, and nothing that we intentionally timed the

00:05:57.700 completion of the film to.

00:05:59.480 Indeed, most of the editorial work was done on this before the caucus and primary seasons

00:06:05.820 began in the election.

00:06:07.140 But this is a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against

00:06:13.100 the current administration, about a White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, about a

00:06:18.960 president certain the press is lying, making up stories about him, about asymmetrical warfare

00:06:25.620 that confounds the mighty might of the U.S. military, about huge document drops of stolen,

00:06:32.280 classified material into the public sphere that destabilizes the conventional wisdom and the

00:06:38.580 current conversation, and accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time

00:06:44.060 of a national election to a foreign power to help them influence that national election.

00:06:49.720 Yeah.

00:06:50.220 That's pretty stunning.

00:06:51.100 Yeah.

00:06:51.280 But all of these were true back in 2006 when Lynn and I began working on it, as they are still true

00:06:57.680 now, and all of them and dozens more are from Vietnam that resonate in the present.

00:07:03.640 Strangely, some of the resonances are inconvenient, or at least uncomfortable, in that their polarity

00:07:10.400 is reversed in a way.

00:07:13.300 I mean, so for instance, there was some, I forget which administration did it, I guess it was LBJ.

00:07:18.680 At some point, there was the allegation that Russian operatives were stoking the anti-war movement,

00:07:26.360 essentially.

00:07:26.640 And, you know, whether or not that could have been true then, it certainly played as a completely cynical

00:07:32.420 bit of paranoia, whereas now we have this increasingly well-documented meddling of Russia

00:07:38.860 into our system.

00:07:40.320 It was a bewildering experience, frankly, to watch this film.

00:07:43.520 Yes, and then you have the actual evidence that the Nixon campaign reached out to South Vietnam

00:07:48.280 to get them to boycott the peace talks that had suddenly improved and were improving Humphrey's chances.

00:07:57.220 And Johnson gets wind of this and calls up Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate,

00:08:03.200 and said, this is treason.

00:08:05.040 And Dirksen says yes.

00:08:06.460 And in our film, the next call that you hear is Nixon sort of saying, oh, you know, Mr. President,

00:08:11.720 I'd never do this.

00:08:12.680 And Nixon's lying and the president knows it.

00:08:15.300 And so you have an exact correlation, just as the other one seemed kind of absurd and paranoic.

00:08:22.400 But now, true, this one is, you know, a fact, but we're now trying to connect the dots in

00:08:30.920 this moment about that.

00:08:32.580 So it's, you know, plus I change.

00:08:34.880 Yeah.

00:08:35.780 So let's step back from the actual content of the film for a moment and just talk about

00:08:40.280 your making of it.

00:08:41.700 And then I want to move through the story a little bit systematically, because it's,

00:08:46.780 it really is an education that most of us haven't had on just how damaging the Vietnam 0.95

00:08:54.540 War was to our society and to Vietnam. 0.90

00:08:57.740 And it was a disaster on, on so many levels.

00:09:01.520 When did you guys decide to make this film?

00:09:05.000 Well, we, we've been thinking about the Vietnam War as one of the most important events in

00:09:09.680 American history since the Second World War.

00:09:12.320 And it's been sort of on the back burner for many years, sort of lurking there, along with

00:09:17.040 many other subjects.

00:09:18.260 And when we finished our film on the Second World War, we hadn't been broadcast yet, but

00:09:22.660 it was around 2006, Ken turned to me at one of the mixing sessions and said, you know,

00:09:27.040 we really, we have to do Vietnam.

00:09:28.720 And I remember saying, I agree, which part?

00:09:31.760 And he said, all of it.

00:09:33.080 And I said, okay, that's great.

00:09:34.420 Let's do it.

00:09:35.060 And yet we took a big, deep gulp because we knew even then how enormously complicated

00:09:40.020 and challenging the story would be to tell.

00:09:42.860 And it has turned out to be the case.

00:09:44.520 We really wanted to try to tell it from every possible side and to listen to people who have

00:09:49.100 very strong feelings about it, sometimes conflicted feelings.

00:09:52.300 And to understand Vietnamese perspectives as well as Americans.

00:09:56.320 And so it took us 10 years to kind of wrestle this enormously challenging story to the ground.

00:10:02.100 And the footage you have is amazing, both the contemporaneous footage of actual battles,

00:10:08.880 which you appear to have from both sides.

00:10:10.620 You have North Vietnamese footage too, right?

00:10:13.360 Yes.

00:10:14.020 It's just astonishing that this even exists.

00:10:16.240 And you seemingly have an endless amount of footage of our own side, which is also,

00:10:22.820 it just strikes me as strange that it exists in so many cases.

00:10:27.100 Well, we had a free press that was unfettered in their access to the war and the theater of war,

00:10:34.900 in this case, unlike World War II in Korea, where the press was very much censored and controlled.

00:10:42.560 And Vietnam represents that one outlying situation that permitted the press at great risk to themselves.

00:10:50.640 And in fact, hundreds of journalists and videographers and filmmakers and sound men were killed during the course of the war

00:10:59.640 to provide this, you know, seemingly bottomless amount of footage.

00:11:05.620 What happens, though, is that they congregate in archives all around the world.

00:11:10.720 And a traditional film production only has the resources to spend a little time in each archive, if they can even get there.

00:11:17.960 So what happens is that we tend to push around our plate the same footage over and over again.

00:11:23.320 And it's footage that we have, but we've also had the luxury of spending a decade and having the deep dive

00:11:29.740 and permitting us to go into the archives and spend more than just a cursory amount of time,

00:11:35.580 but literally months and years getting to know them and finding out all the nooks and crannies of that archives,

00:11:41.600 not just footage, but also still photographs, to benefit this production.

00:11:46.100 So while the classic images are there, the classic famous moments, we are able to deconstruct them in,

00:11:55.060 we think, a different kind of light, whether it's the napalm girl, Kim Fook,

00:11:59.120 or it's the assassination of Lem in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive by the head of the national police, Luan,

00:12:06.040 or other famous things, we can in some ways deconstruct them.

00:12:10.380 But more importantly, for these quotidian moments with fighter pilots and helicopter crew chiefs and marines

00:12:16.860 and army guys ambushed or in battle charging up hills, you have a kind of immersive experience that places you there.

00:12:26.180 And one thing you should know is that 98% of the footage comes to us without any sound.

00:12:32.260 And we have to therefore then research ourselves what an M16 sounds like as opposed to an AK-47,

00:12:39.620 as opposed to a traditional tripod-mounted machine gun, as opposed to other kinds of armaments,

00:12:45.720 and what the sounds of the engines of an A3 as opposed to an A4 sound like,

00:12:50.740 and what they actually look like to get it straight.

00:12:53.380 And so much of the years involved in this is the attempt at verisimilitude,

00:12:59.320 and in many cases those battles that you referred to have new footage, perhaps never-before-seen footage,

00:13:07.540 but also a sound effects track that may number into 150 or 160 individual sounds to create the moment of battle.

00:13:17.260 I didn't know that, but in retrospect it seems like the sound design was amazing.

00:13:22.380 I mean, there was something, I felt like I had not actually seen war footage like this before.

00:13:28.240 Well, we were our own sound editors we've worked with for years and years,

00:13:33.420 and they are a remarkable group of people.

00:13:35.960 What was the most telling test was when we would have playbacks of the completed episodes

00:13:40.980 and invite periodically the head of the archives, say at CBS or ABC or NBC,

00:13:47.920 a principal source of material, as you can imagine,

00:13:51.540 and watching them watch stunned at how their footage had been used,

00:13:58.300 intermixed with their competitors' footage,

00:14:00.600 and then finally brought to life with this complex sound effects.

00:14:04.320 And they found themselves as distracted and immersed into the story

00:14:09.920 when their job was to sort of evaluate the uses of it.

00:14:14.040 And we felt thrilled, and they were extraordinarily helpful at every juncture

00:14:18.900 in making sure we could find and get every lost bit of footage,

00:14:23.880 every obscure bit of footage.

00:14:26.340 And that extended to still photographs and audio tapes from the presidential library,

00:14:32.080 the presidential tapes that are so extraordinarily intimate and damning.

00:14:37.000 Yeah, I mean, just to have that as a resource, I mean, those LBJ tapes are unbelievable,

00:14:42.640 because what you have, both in the case of LBJ and Nixon, I guess Kennedy too,

00:14:48.240 you have the ultimate mind-reading machine.

00:14:51.600 And what is perfectly obvious from the earliest stages of this war

00:14:55.960 is how hopeless it appeared even from their perspective.

00:15:00.820 And yet we meander further and further into this quagmire for years and years.

00:15:07.460 And there's a point in the series where you think,

00:15:10.680 surely the war is about over, given what we're hearing,

00:15:14.060 and yet it's just beginning.

00:15:16.160 I want to ask you a little more about your process before we dive into it,

00:15:19.080 but perhaps you can address this question.

00:15:21.320 How is it, given what they were clearly thinking,

00:15:25.940 that this war was possible, that it unfolded the way it did?

00:15:30.820 Well, you know, we don't have historians appearing on screen

00:15:34.500 interpreting what is the story being told.

00:15:37.600 So we really try to just put the pieces together

00:15:40.180 and using this remarkable real-time audio of conversations in the White House

00:15:45.740 as you hear LBJ and Nixon and Kennedy talking about what they're doing

00:15:50.640 and their decision-making process

00:15:52.260 and the information they have available to them.

00:15:54.580 And then you have to, as a viewer, sort of try to think yourself about,

00:15:58.300 well, why are they continuing to prosecute a war

00:16:00.600 when they don't think they have a very good chance of success?

00:16:03.880 And one of the things that comes up again and again

00:16:06.040 is that they're worried about getting re-elected.

00:16:08.740 They're worried about their popularity.

00:16:10.080 They're worried about whether the American public would want to be told

00:16:13.180 that we're not going to win the war.

00:16:14.940 That's a pervasive theme, a drumbeat from very early on.

00:16:19.780 And that's, we live in a democracy.

00:16:21.340 That's a real question for people who assume, you know,

00:16:24.420 the greatest levels of power.

00:16:26.440 They're always worrying about getting re-elected.

00:16:28.480 And the Vietnam War is a huge byproduct of that.

00:16:33.160 Yeah, it was this concern over the loss of face,

00:16:36.200 which it is a kind of psychosis.

00:16:39.140 When you actually understand what's happening on the ground

00:16:43.340 and you're just sending waves upon waves of people

00:16:47.160 to die for something that, on every level,

00:16:50.680 the descriptions of these battles where the whole goal is to take a hill,

00:16:56.440 but there's no point in actually taking the hill.

00:16:59.360 And once they take it at the cost of hundreds of lives,

00:17:02.740 they occupy it for like an hour and then walk on down the other side

00:17:07.400 because there was no point in getting the hill in the first place.

00:17:10.120 The picture of futility that develops here over the course of the series,

00:17:16.920 you basically live out the political implications of it hour after hour

00:17:22.360 as you see the resistance to this war building.

00:17:25.720 Again, before we jump into the content,

00:17:27.360 I want to just ask you a little more about your process.

00:17:29.600 How do you collaborate on a film like this?

00:17:31.920 I mean, are you together most of the time?

00:17:34.100 Are you in different states?

00:17:35.180 I live and work in New Hampshire and Lynn lives and works in New York.

00:17:43.480 So the New York office became the kind of production center during the production.

00:17:48.740 The film was edited in New Hampshire.

00:17:51.200 And so there's, thanks to the way we're talking now,

00:17:55.500 all sorts of ways in which we collaborate instantaneously on this.

00:18:01.180 And it's just, we have an extraordinary group of colleagues,

00:18:06.020 Jeffrey Ward, the writer I've worked with for, you know, 35 years.

00:18:12.240 Editors I've worked with for, you know, even, you know, that amount of time as well,

00:18:18.060 30 plus years.

00:18:19.560 Co-producers that have assisted us, people who are researching pictures.

00:18:24.100 It's an extraordinarily close-knit family divided between New Hampshire and New York

00:18:30.320 and lots of communications.

00:18:32.380 And it's a wonderful process.

00:18:34.600 And you're right to focus on that because process is everything that we're about.

00:18:40.780 We're not about setting a prescribed research period and then followed by a writing period

00:18:48.500 out of which is produced some document that is now written in stone

00:18:51.680 that informs the shooting and the editing, but in fact, an open-ended process that never

00:18:57.260 stops researching, that never stops writing, that is constantly willing to shoot or reshoot

00:19:02.480 or add a new interview and is always looking for new material, whether it's footage or still

00:19:07.940 photographs.

00:19:09.020 And I think more to the point, it's easy to say never stop researching, but that means

00:19:13.640 constantly being aware, particularly on a subject as controversial and as constantly shifting

00:19:19.820 as the scholarship about Vietnam, aware of the most recent scholarship.

00:19:24.340 So we find a lot of our work just changing, you know, a number from four to three when we

00:19:31.420 find out that that was how many regiments of North Vietnamese soldiers went down the Ho Chi Minh

00:19:37.360 trail that month to try to get it right.

00:19:40.240 The last year and a half as we were sound editing and onlining and mixing, we were also removing

00:19:46.760 adjectives and adverbs that we thought maybe, perhaps, might have suggested a particular

00:19:53.060 bent.

00:19:53.540 We had no agenda.

00:19:54.940 We had no axe to grind.

00:19:56.320 This was not a polemical piece.

00:19:58.260 We wanted to be umpires calling balls and strikes, and it was hugely important that our process

00:20:03.860 serve that, and it has for a long time.

00:20:06.080 And I think this production, more than anything else, bears the fruits of that kind of diligent

00:20:13.080 adherence to process insofar as this was the most challenging of any production we've ever

00:20:20.140 engaged in and very satisfying because we were able, even in the darkest moments, to

00:20:26.220 trust to our process and to yield to it and understand that eventually structures and arcs

00:20:34.200 and storylines would emerge, that things that we seemed overly identified with would be lost,

00:20:40.380 that new things we would have to incorporate, that the little darlings would all have to

00:20:46.240 be eliminated, but new ways of understanding it.

00:20:50.980 We, you know, filmmakers, particularly my experience is when you have a scene that's working, the

00:20:56.360 last thing you want to do is change it if it's working.

00:20:58.880 But inevitably, in every scene, you found out new information that complicated each minute

00:21:04.860 dynamic within every scene, and instead of sort of pushing back and perhaps settling,

00:21:12.040 we sort of reveled in and moved towards that complication and tried to, every time, engage

00:21:19.740 what was difficult about this and proved our point that we felt all along that particularly

00:21:26.820 in war, but also in many other things, more than one truth can obtain at the same time and

00:21:33.180 still be a truth.

00:21:34.000 There's not a moral relativism to that.

00:21:36.900 There is just depending on your perspectives.

00:21:39.740 And as Lynn said, we had decided at the beginning to engage all sorts of perspectives, not just

00:21:46.280 American perspectives, but North Vietnamese, the winners and South Vietnamese, the losers who 1.00

00:21:52.200 lost not only a war, but their country, which disappeared off the face of the earth after barely 20 years

00:21:58.960 in existence.

00:21:59.560 And so every day was a constant reminder that that open-endedness, the willingness to be

00:22:06.520 corrigible, the willingness to suddenly realize you might have to double back on yourself, the

00:22:11.320 necessity to, at the very beginning, jettison preconceptions and baggage in favor of a Vietnam

00:22:18.100 war that betrays even those like me who lived through it, betrays our original, you know,

00:22:25.360 conventional wisdom about it.

00:22:27.440 It was exhilarating and humiliating and about as stimulating as you could possibly imagine.

00:22:33.540 I just wanted to chime in one thing about the way that we collaborate, because as Ken was

00:22:39.400 speaking, it's hard to explain, but, you know, we're documentarians, right?

00:22:43.920 So we're not making up a story.

00:22:45.920 We're actually trying to organize this enormous amount of material that Ken described into a

00:22:50.920 coherent narrative that works sort of chapter by chapter, scene by scene, episode by episode

00:22:55.920 into some kind of coherent whole over 18 hours.

00:22:59.960 And what happens is it's a process of distillation, and it's enormously creative, and it is enormously

00:23:06.220 collaborative.

00:23:07.080 And, you know, it really comes down to sort of intuitively suggesting ideas about what might

00:23:12.460 or might not work in the film, and then trying them out and listening to each other, and then

00:23:16.620 trying to make the film better.

00:23:17.980 And that is what we do day after day after day in a very open way that I think is unusual in

00:23:24.460 how most people go about their jobs, where you just get up every day, go to work, hear

00:23:30.380 to hear what each other has to say and how to make our film better.

00:23:33.460 And it could be little tiny decisions or huge decisions about, you know, what's in an episode

00:23:38.220 or what's in a scene or which character we're going to amplify and what we're going to cut

00:23:42.420 and what word we're going to choose and where we're going to put the comma and which picture

00:23:45.900 we're going to look at and what, you know, what music we're going to hear and where the

00:23:49.420 sound effect is going to go.

00:23:50.400 There's a million decisions, and it is, as Ken said, a process.

00:23:54.460 And one of the most, it's almost euphoric when we're all working together toward this

00:23:59.740 thing that ends up being bigger than any of us.

00:24:02.900 And I just feel very lucky that we get to do it together.

00:24:06.420 I'm glad you mentioned the music because talk about an embarrassment of riches.

00:24:09.960 Yes.

00:24:10.460 And it's actually a point that's made in the film about the protest movement, that somebody

00:24:16.280 at some point says that the protest movement itself was immensely empowered by just how good

00:24:22.800 the music of the time was, which is something I had never really thought of.

00:24:26.620 But that point is brought home in just how you score this thing, because it's just one

00:24:31.180 fantastic song after another.

00:24:33.740 I want to go back to something you said, Ken, about moral relativism, because what you get

00:24:38.300 here is not a picture of moral relativism.

00:24:40.360 The status of the war in so many respects is so ambiguous morally that it almost demanded

00:24:50.940 the kind of even-handedness you described.

00:24:54.060 Whereas you went there as though from Mars without any agenda, and you just let each side

00:25:01.900 tell its story.

00:25:02.820 And it's an amazing experience to witness a war from both sides in this way, where there

00:25:09.660 aren't obvious bad guys.

00:25:11.900 I mean, there are some obvious bad guys, and perhaps we can talk about that.

00:25:15.760 But the picture of the pointless wastage of human life and the gains, such as they are,

00:25:26.080 of civilization is brought home by this.

00:25:28.940 It's because it's just, you can understand both sides, and yet the whole thing seems

00:25:34.420 so profoundly unnecessary.

00:25:37.300 It is remarkable, and it's not a story you could have told, say, of our fight against

00:25:42.400 the Nazis.

00:25:43.780 No, and we did do a film, Lynn and I, on the history of World War II, and, well, it was challenging.

00:25:51.060 And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.

00:26:21.060 Thank you.

00:26:27.360 Thank you.

00:26:32.160 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 15, 2017

#97 — The Impossible War

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