In this episode, Professor Sean McMeekin talks about Joseph Stalin, FDR, and how American liberals nearly gave the country over to Communists. He also talks about the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:00:52.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:00.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:12.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:22.000Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:01:39.000Very special guest here, and we're going to talk history, communism, the rise, the fall, and then the rise again with Professor Sean McMeekin.
00:02:34.000Well, so after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a period of, you can almost call it triumphalism.
00:02:41.000The most famous phrase was probably Francis Fukuyama was talking about the end of history.
00:02:45.000We had this image of Yeltsin bellowing on the tank.
00:02:47.000It looked like communism was dead, buried, finished.
00:02:50.000There was even talk about this kind of Nuremberg trial for communism that everyone was maybe hoping for, wishing would happen in the same way that the Nuremberg trials helped put Nazism to rest and ruin and destroy its reputation forever.
00:03:03.000I mean, I discovered when I looked into it, although I lived through it at the time, I remember hearing about how the Communist Party was vaguely on trial in Russia, but the details were a little murky.
00:03:11.000I learned later what had actually happened in 1992 was that the Communist Party had sued Boris Yeltsin because he had outlawed the Communist Party.
00:03:21.000And his position, effectively, was it wasn't just a party.
00:03:23.000It was kind of this criminal organization conspiracy fusing together with state structures to produce this totalitarian oppression.
00:03:30.000And they did talk about some of this at the trial, but in the end, here's the thing.
00:03:35.000And they were re-legalized, and very soon they were actually the largest political party again in the Russian Federation, and they very nearly defeated Yeltsin in the 96 elections.
00:03:45.000That was the discordant part about the story from the outset.
00:03:48.000If history had supposedly ended with this Western triumph, why did we have Tiananmen Square in 1989 in China?
00:03:56.000May, June 1989, this incredibly dark story, this massacre in the streets of Beijing.
00:04:02.000And then, of course, the CCP endures in China to this day and has given the world many treats over the past few decades, most recently with COVID lockdowns.
00:04:12.000So, first of all, congratulations on your work.
00:04:16.000I know dangerously little about this, but we'll try our best.
00:04:20.000Compared to you, I know more than the guy in the street.
00:04:24.000Is it one of the reasons—that's such a great point, I've never thought of it—that there was this clear, like, we must put the philosophy of fascism on trial in Nuremberg to put it to rest.
00:04:33.000Is one of the reasons that never happened because the intelligentsia of the West actually agreed with a lot of communistic— I think there's something to that.
00:04:45.000The pretense of communism, of course, was always that they were going to create this better world.
00:04:50.000It was a sort of universal ideal, an ideal that, of course, has led to a lot of death and destruction, but an ideal many people believed in.
00:05:00.000They thought it's not fair that the rich have too much and the poor have too little and that some people don't have enough to eat.
00:05:06.000And this idea, a vague version of this idea will always, I think, appeal, particularly to younger people who believe in whatever the phrase is, social justice or education.
00:05:16.000I mean, we know that these words are loaded, but there's always some kind of sympathy, I think, that people have for this idea.
00:05:21.000Whereas Nazism is a little bit harder to defend because it was a little more specific to one nation, to one race, and it seemed to be chauvinistic and aggressive and was associated with military aggression.
00:05:35.000It was not something that had a lot of admirers, really.
00:05:38.000Across Europe, there were fascists, of course, but meaning once...
00:05:49.000It's not like there were—I mean, people are always saying there are Nazis under your bed and so on, but in fact, Nazism has been basically dead and disappeared since 1945.
00:05:57.000Communism, unfortunately, I think in some form or other will always be with us, just because the idea continues to appeal.
00:06:02.000Let's define our terms, because I think that is one of the struggles.
00:06:43.000Today it might be even broader than that.
00:06:45.000It might be the internet or it might be airplane travel.
00:06:48.000And that day it probably would be the main roads, the main railroads, the main avenues of communication.
00:06:53.000That is, government control of a large part of the economy and the destruction or eradication of private property.
00:06:59.000In practice, most communist regimes try to do this to one extent or another.
00:07:03.000They actually would go out and they would, for example, nationalize the banks, which effectively meant nationalizing people's bank accounts.
00:07:11.000I mean, in Russia, they actually had An agency devoted to safe cracking so they could crack into people's private bank accounts.
00:07:17.000They would try to nationalize agriculture.
00:07:19.000They would create these collective farms or state-controlled farms.
00:07:23.000In practice, none of these regimes ever quite succeeded.
00:07:26.000The Soviets and the Chinese probably came closest, or maybe in an even more, I think, draconian and dark way, the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian, completely eradicating the private sector.
00:07:37.000But the fact is, it's impossible to do that.
00:07:59.000You had an industrial collapse, manufacturing collapse.
00:08:02.000The economy just basically didn't work.
00:08:04.000And so for a while in Russia, amazingly, in the 20s, they actually tried to bring back They allowed people to buy and sell again, because without that everyone would have, again, they would have starved.
00:08:18.000The enduring take that I get on campuses is, well, communism hasn't been tried.
00:08:25.000As a historian, how do you then respond to that?
00:08:54.000Eventually you get even jokes about how hungry people are.
00:08:58.000Most of the jokes that came out of Cuba in the communist era, for example, had to do with food.
00:09:04.000Essentially, it would be something to the nature of A school chef would be asked, like, what are some problems that the communist regime still tries to face?
00:09:16.000And he would list a couple, and he would say, like, what do you think is the biggest problem?
00:09:20.000And he would say something like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
00:09:41.000You try to plan every single thing that people are going to need over a period of months or years, you get things wrong.
00:09:48.000There's simply no way of predicting how many cars people will buy, how many industrial inputs a certain industry will need.
00:09:57.000The only things that worked a little bit, and this is maybe a slight exception to the rule, particularly in the Soviet era, Are things that they would produce for export.
00:10:05.000And that's because, let's say, you talk about the AK-47, for example, famous Soviet export or, you know, MiG airplanes, weapons, basically.
00:10:12.000Because they traded those in the international market, they had to work.
00:10:17.000But at home, if there's no market to function, the goods don't have to be any good.
00:10:20.000Most of them are shoddy, or as Gorbachev would say, you know, supposedly we could send satellites into outer space and we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, but our refrigerators don't work.
00:10:32.000And that was kind of the classic problem.
00:10:34.000What is it about human nature that doesn't mix with communism?
00:10:39.000Well, I guess it's partly that people's needs are various.
00:10:43.000And the other thing is that people want, and this is just pretty basic, if you're going to consume something, if you're going to buy a product or use it.
00:10:52.000And the way a market economy basically works is that if your product is no good, people stop buying it.
00:10:58.000So you have to either improve the product or you go out of business.
00:11:00.000And the problem under a planned communist economy is basically that there was no incentive to either work harder, there was no real incentive to get higher wages because wages were supposed to be centrally controlled.
00:11:13.000In practice, they would give higher wages to skilled engineers and such, but products And so you'd get shortages and you'd get shoddy products.
00:11:24.000But I think people's nature, the reason eventually would rub up against human nature in a maybe more profound way is that most people, maybe some people do, but most people don't like being hectored and surveilled and controlled and told what to do.
00:11:37.000At least enough people don't that fortunately...
00:11:55.000I suppose the countries where communism was adopted with perhaps the least conviction when it was imposed at the point of a gun, in Eastern Europe, for example.
00:12:04.000In Poland, a good example of this, because communism was so unpopular in Poland from the earliest days, because it was kind of seen as this almost alien imposition by the conquering Soviet armies, by the Russians, who Poles generally had various reasons to resent and hate going back decades, if not centuries.
00:12:20.000They didn't actually go as far as they did in other countries.
00:12:24.000So agriculture, for example, private agriculture was to some extent reluctantly tolerated.
00:12:28.000They did not go quite as far in Poland as they might have done in other countries like Bulgaria, for example, where the communist regime had a little bit more legitimacy and popularity.
00:12:39.000But they all tended in the same general direction.
00:12:41.000You'd have secret police, you'd have surveillance, you'd have state constitutionally.
00:12:55.000They even would give assignments to all their satellite countries, what you're supposed to produce, what sports you're supposed to specialize in.
00:13:04.000So everything had to be planned and controlled.
00:13:05.000And the problem is most people would balk at that sort of thing.
00:13:09.000It's just against human nature to constantly be surveilled and told what to do.
00:13:14.000I have a question on that in a second.
00:13:15.000Why do the regimes end up so incredibly violent?
00:13:21.000Well, there have been a lot of sympathizers who always say that there's nothing inherently violent in socialism or communism.
00:13:27.000And my main response to that is you have to read the source texts.
00:13:30.000You have to actually go back and see what Marx was saying, see what some of Marx's own Somebody like Gracchus Babouf, who launched the so-called Conspiracy of the Equals in the French Revolution, which inspired Marx, was quite open about the fact that you would have to put class enemies and counter-revolutionaries to death.
00:13:49.000He talked about, for example, from his political career, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, there was this brief period in Paris called the Commune, which maybe wasn't a perfectly communist regime.
00:14:44.000The violence is an inherent part of...
00:14:47.000In fact, civil war, this was his phrase, you have to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.
00:14:53.000And then once you've achieved communism in one country, that country will be effectively opposed to all of the other non-communist countries.
00:15:00.000So it will be in a state of war with them.
00:15:02.000So you get a kind of wave of civil wars and interstate wars engulfing the earth.
00:15:08.000And he was not saying this is what I hope won't happen.
00:15:11.000He was saying this is what has to happen.
00:15:15.000There maybe have been a lot of sympathizers who shy away from the violence, but I honestly think if you look at the evidence, Is it rooted in resentment?
00:15:38.000There's definitely an element to this.
00:15:40.000Communists in nearly every country where they succeeded in grappling with the regime and then eventually seizing power By necessity, they have to put the arms in the hands of a lot of angry young people, usually young men, sometimes women as well.
00:15:56.000And while some of them were intellectuals, the party leaders were usually intellectuals, a lot of the foot soldiers.
00:16:02.000Sometimes they would literally just empty the prisons.
00:16:04.000They did this after the Russian Revolution.
00:16:06.000Sometimes they would recruit former soldiers who were already alienated or disaffected or already had kind of acquired a taste for violence.
00:16:14.000The real muscle in, for example, the Bolshevik Revolution, red October of 1917, actually came from either deserters from the army or people in the Russian Navy or in the Russian army.
00:16:25.000The so-called Red Guards were mostly actually, some of them came from factories, most of them actually came from the army.
00:18:23.000And this is basically what happens in Russia in 1917.
00:18:25.000It's like a gigantic mutiny in the Russian armies that Lenin and the communists push along for their own purposes.
00:18:31.000Wasn't it a relatively small group of people?
00:18:33.000And if I'm not mistaken, the czar actually...
00:18:39.000Like, the rebellion could have been thwarted.
00:18:41.000Well, the February Revolution, which is separate from the October one, is one where the Tsar probably could have intervened, and he nearly did.
00:18:48.000He actually did issue orders for loyal frontline troops to go to Petrograd and suppress the revolution.
00:18:54.000He was talked out of it by his generals, who were getting bad advice from these liberal politicians.
00:19:07.000Unfortunately enough, he spent a lot of 1917 with warrants for his arrest plastered all over Russia because he participated in a couple of failed putches before the final one that succeeded.
00:20:10.000Basically, you had to have superior force.
00:20:12.000They would literally count up, like, how many men do we have under arms and how many men do our enemies have under arms?
00:20:17.000You know, there's this very almost reductionist element to communist philosophy when it comes to politics and violence.
00:20:22.000Like Stalin would later famously say, asked about the pope and his possible influence.
00:20:27.000Well, how many divisions does the Vatican have?
00:20:29.000They're very, very crude and reductionist in this way that they actually did literally see it as you have to overwhelm your enemies by force.
00:21:27.000No need to spend hours in a retail store waiting your turn.
00:21:30.000Simply call Patriot Mobile's 100% U.S.-based service team from the comfort of your own home or office, and they'll have it activated in minutes.
00:22:12.000that's always something I don't understand.
00:22:13.000How did a Christian nation embrace Yes.
00:22:19.000There are different ways of looking at it.
00:22:21.000Some historians, and they don't usually tend to be Russians, have proposed that there was something in the Russian Orthodox Church that had always been a bit friendlier to state power than either the Catholic strain or the Protestant strains of Christianity.
00:22:35.000And to just run to the czarist regime, the state played a huge and powerful role.
00:22:40.000Peter the Great, for example, actually abolished the Patriarchate.
00:23:00.000The communists would go into churches and they would have these ceremonies where they would expose old bones and say, look, these are relics.
00:23:31.000Well, as far as an electoral majority, it's hard to say they did because we just don't have the evidence.
00:23:36.000But obviously a lot of their enemies and opponents were either killed off or fled Russian immigration, the emigres.
00:23:41.000And they were able to propagandize, particularly the younger generation.
00:23:45.000So they would have these things like the pioneers and the komsomol to indoctrinate people into the faith.
00:23:50.000And they did ape or even mimic some elements of the old Russian Christian tradition, the icons, for example, that Russians would traditionally have over their mantelpiece.
00:24:00.000Instead, you would have, of course, images of the new sacred figures, Lenin, later Stalin, so that there was a way in which they...
00:24:21.000The czars mishandled the agrarian to industrial transition, and this opened up the communists with an opportunity to strike.
00:24:31.000Well, land reform was the great question of late czarist politics in Russia.
00:24:36.000It was an extremely difficult question.
00:24:39.000Right up to the 1860s, Russians liked to remind Americans serfdom was abolished one year before the Emancipation Proclamation of the United States, which is true, but they didn't really sort the problems out right away, although one could say, of course, it took a while for us to sort out our own problems here.
00:24:54.000They couldn't quite figure out, for example, did the serfs have to Did we want to turn them into these kind of entrepreneurial peasant capitalists?
00:25:10.000The one great figure who tried to solve this problem, Piotr Stalipin, and this is in the first decade of the 1900s, he did actually put forward some far-reaching reforms.
00:25:21.000Not quite the same thing as maybe the Homestead Act in the U.S., but it was kind of a similar idea.
00:25:28.000They were trying to allow them to set out for some of the virgin lands of western Siberia to basically create these kind of almost pioneering type homesteads.
00:25:37.000Unfortunately, Stalipin had warned that for this program to work and for Russia to modernize and enter the modern age, she needed peace.
00:25:49.000And that's why the First World War was so critical.
00:25:52.000He said this in, I think, 1909, give us 20 years of peace and you won't recognize the country, that we'll be able to not solve all problems, but resolve some of the tensions.
00:26:02.000The peasants would then become a little bit more of a bulwark of conservatism, as they were viewed in some countries.
00:26:14.000Yeah, a little bit like this with, they have this thing called a commune where they would divide land up according to...
00:26:25.000Stalipan wanted to turn the peasants into stolid kind of middle class citizens.
00:26:31.000Subjects still probably because you had monsters.
00:26:35.000The First World War, which broke out in 1914, and Stalipin, unfortunately, was also assassinated in 1911.
00:26:41.000So that kind of cut off a lot of these possible paths that might have led to really a more humane and I think also a more prosperous Russia.
00:27:04.000I mean, to kind of bring this story up to Stalin and say that the greatest boast that any communist regime has ever had is that Stalin allegedly industrialized the country and then, of course, defeated Nazi Germany in the war.
00:27:19.000there's just enough truth in it that you can see why people have made this argument ever since and why the Russian government to this day still views the victory in what they call the Great Patriotic War as kind of the
00:27:30.000the glue the the the origin story to some extent of the core mythology of the core mythology of their existence right a number of problems of this first of all russia was rapidly industrializing before the first world war with growth rates approaching 10 and so not unlike china in recent years even if there might be some holes in the economy we haven't been told of there are all these headlines about the stupendous growth rates that was the russian story before 1914 uh the germans for
00:27:57.000We were the first to modernize Russia.
00:28:16.000In fact, the Russian economy, of course, When Stalin did go back in this kind of mass mobilization drive, the arms build up, the five-year plans launched or backdated to 1928.
00:28:45.000They relied a lot on imported machinery, expertise, engineers.
00:28:50.000The collective farm or state farm of Kalkoz, almost like the emblematic institution of Soviet communism in the early 1930s, was actually based on And it appealed to Stalin mostly because it was basically the world's largest farm, 95,000 acres or something.
00:29:11.000A lot of the factories were not only designed, but often they were direct copies of those in the United States.
00:29:18.000It was the Arthur McKee Corporation that designed Magnitogorsk, like the world's largest steel town.
00:29:44.000They were sort of just acquiring them by trading raw materials.
00:29:46.000And then the Lendley story, which is one of the big themes I talk about in Stalin's war.
00:30:02.000Sometimes they would use spies, so they infiltrated the U.S. aviation industry.
00:30:06.000They had a team of almost 30 spies working in American universities.
00:30:10.000And then I ended up kind of either stealing or adapting or reverse engineering a lot of American designs.
00:30:24.000After the U.S. entered, well, even before the U.S. entered the war in 1941, after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 41, They didn't have to spy anymore because the Roosevelt administration just gave them everything.
00:30:36.000They literally would just let Soviet engineers tour around American factories taking notes, taking photographs.
00:30:42.000Oftentimes they would just ask for things.
00:31:01.000But the secondary part, that is Germany first, the secondary part was that the number one priority of the U.S. Roosevelt declared in the wake of Pearl Harbor was assistance to Russia's offensive by all available means, meaning our number one priority was not defeating Japan, was not even fighting Germany ourselves, it was supplying the Russian armies.
00:31:29.000That's a great question, and I'm glad you asked.
00:31:32.000I think that the most interesting archival revelation in Stalin's war, although I did a lot of work in the Russian archives, in the Soviet archives.
00:31:41.000No, my favorite sort of archival find, believe it or not, was in the Bulgarian archives.
00:32:02.000But anyway, so the Bulgarian minister to Berlin, one of these tirades.
00:32:06.000The reason he was angry was because Molotov, the same one who had signed the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact, where Hitler and Stalin had, of course, carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
00:32:16.000They had agreed jointly to invade and carve up Poland together.
00:32:19.000The Soviets were given these spheres of influence.
00:32:22.000They had to actually split the difference on Lithuania.
00:32:24.000Lithuania was first supposed to be in the German sphere.
00:32:38.000And when Hitler makes his decision to break with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union, Molotov had come to Berlin to basically negotiate a sort of update to the Molotov-Ribb-Drop Act.
00:32:51.000A couple of months before this, Germany, Italy, and Japan, what we usually call the Axis, they had signed before the war something they called an Anti-Commontern Pact.
00:33:01.000That is, it was against the Communist International, against the Soviet Union.
00:33:12.000It was against the Anglo-Saxon powers, meaning Britain and the United States.
00:33:16.000Interesting because the U.S. was supposedly still neutral, although Roosevelt is doing everything he can to make sure that the U.S. is actually very firmly on the side of Britain.
00:33:35.000They were, after all, already cooperating and carving up Eastern Europe together.
00:33:40.000Stalin, however, drove a really hard bargain, which is kind of remarkable when you consider that the Germans had really done almost all the work.
00:33:46.000They did all the work in destroying Poland's armies.
00:33:48.000The Soviets marched it a couple weeks later.
00:33:51.000The Soviets, they just get to march in.
00:33:54.000Basically, they would even do it in this cynical way where right after the fall of Paris, so this is in June of 1940, when the world is focusing on Paris, and you might remember the Casablanca, all the dramatic scenes of the German troops entering Paris.
00:34:09.000Stalin decides that that's the time to send his ultimata to Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania, and the Soviets invade those countries, only no one really noticed, because everyone's focused on France.
00:34:19.000And they're doing this in this kind of cheap slapdash way.
00:34:22.000Again, the Germans are fighting genuine, serious military opponents.
00:34:26.000The Soviets, they could barely even, and they didn't quite subdue Finland when they tried to.
00:34:30.000So Stalin is kind of like this jumped-up Mussolini, this jackal-like figure, but he decides that he wants to kind of bully and boss Hitler around.
00:34:38.000He says, I will join your pact, but only if you meet about five conditions.
00:34:43.000He wanted the Germans to basically withdraw all their troops and personnel from Finland.
00:34:49.000They only had a few people on the ground there.
00:34:51.000That was because they needed nickel to build their panzers, their tanks.
00:34:54.000They also wanted the Germans to withdraw from Romania.
00:34:59.000because they desperately needed the oil there.
00:35:01.000They're getting almost half of their oil supplies from Romania.
00:35:04.000And here's where it gets really interesting.
00:35:06.000Stalin also demanded a right to invade Bulgaria and station troops at the Turkish Straits that is on the Bosporus.
00:35:15.000Now, his reasoning here is that Britain, although he was not at war with Britain, which was also interesting, because Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany, but not the Soviet Union, he still saw Britain as hostile, and he thought that maybe they could threaten him through the Straits, into the Black Sea, or the underbelly through Ukraine.
00:36:59.000A lot of Russia's neighbors have, of course, always seen Russia as a bully who invades her neighbors, and the Russians think they are a country that's frequently been invaded across the vast European plain, whether it's Napoleon or Hitler, of course, as you pointed out, Sweden.
00:37:12.000And the Swedes make it as far as Poltava, this great battle in the early 18th century where they're actually basically conquering large parts of Ukraine.
00:37:28.000You would not believe the way they were chomping at the bit to finally get back at Russia by joining NATO.
00:37:33.000But so in 1941, here's where the story goes.
00:37:36.000Hitler does make this decision, and we know he issued some of these directives as early as December 1940, about six months before the invasion.
00:37:44.000They get delayed a little bit when they get kind of sucked into the Balkans and Yugoslavia, which is a story we can maybe talk about a little later.
00:37:50.000But the thing is, everyone assumes that...
00:37:53.000The Russians were kind of taken by surprise.
00:37:56.000There's this story where Stalin collapses in this kind of drunken stupor.
00:38:03.000know they're all these kind of legends about the story.
00:38:06.000The thing that is so bonkers about this narrative is that the Russians had spent of course And it's not just that they're preparing for a defensive war.
00:38:48.000Within a couple minutes flying distance of the Reich.
00:38:52.000A lot of people know the story about how when the Germans invade, they knock out more than a thousand Russian warplanes on the ground in the early hours.
00:38:59.000Right, and the office, but what were they doing there in the border districts?
00:39:02.000They were there because Stalin was preparing Was he preparing for an offensive war?
00:39:09.000The way they talked about it in their war gaming was more like they thought the Germans would sort of telegraph this giant punch and then they would have a counter-strike.
00:39:43.000Everyone thought it would happen, but part of the reason why...
00:39:51.000The only exception is he left the Soviet Union to Tehran, and that was because Tehran, this is for the conference in 1943, Because Tehran was under military.
00:40:00.000This is actually a huge problem for Roosevelt, who's like this invalid, who keeps trying to get Stalin to come to places like Alaska, or maybe England, or somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Stalin keeps luring him.
00:41:13.000He wanted everyone to be even more paranoid than he is?
00:41:16.000Well, so there are a lot of different theories about this.
00:41:18.000One of the more interesting ones actually has to do with, again, although they never met, they're kind of...
00:41:24.000So you had in Germany the famous Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, and it was only six months later that the so-called Kirov affair breaks in Russia, which is sort of the proximate cause.
00:41:35.000So this is when this party boss called Sergei Kirov.
00:41:38.000And again, one of the theories about it is that Kirov supposedly won this sort of like inner party poll and Stalin thought he might be more popular and maybe he was a rival.
00:41:47.000So Stalin had him killed the historian who looked most closely into the evidence.
00:41:51.000Believe me, he wrote an 800 page book just about this.
00:42:01.000And kind of learning from Hitler, who in the Night of the Long Knives had a lot of the most enthusiastic Nazis, like Ernst Röhm, the founder of the Sturmabteilung, or kind of the essay of the Stormtroopers, you know, he had them killed.
00:42:32.000Like if you look at the evidence presented against people in the show trials or the pretext used for these kind of purges and the mass murdering of party members, a lot of it was also xenophobic.
00:42:44.000That's the part a lot of people maybe don't know.
00:42:46.000There was a lot of paranoia about espionage.
00:42:48.000So a lot of Polish ethnics or German ethnics, even a lot of Koreans were either deported or executed in the 30s.
00:44:03.000Shouldn't you be looking into doing that too?
00:44:09.000And this is a great part of your book, which I haven't read, but I just love the thesis, because we do have, what do you call it, a Germano-centric view of the world?
00:44:56.000A lot of people have tried to make the argument at the end he was just about power, that he was kind of this, eventually turned into a nationalist or something.
00:45:03.000But, I mean, no, he actually came up through the party.
00:45:05.000He was very much a fanatical, believing communist.
00:45:08.000You know, he was well-rounded in the sense that he was pretty well-read.
00:45:14.000He obviously had some charm and some charisma, but he also had a brutality that was evident from the very first days.
00:45:19.000Some of this came from the kind of almost bandit culture of the Caucasus with vendettas.
00:45:24.000And you'd read these stories about, you know, kind of like bandits and rebels, you know, kind of basically meting out vengeance to their enemies.
00:45:32.000So that was obviously part of his milieu and his worldview.
00:45:34.000He was personally involved in this famous bank heist in Tbilisi or Tiflis in Georgia in 1907.
00:45:42.000This is one of the ways in which the Bolsheviks, the communists would raise funds was, of course, by taking other people's money.
00:45:46.000Taking other people's money, which then once they were in power, that's literally what they did.
00:46:03.000I mean, one way in which I have to say Stalin, again, not that I find him sympathetic, but He was not usually involved in sort of street demonstrations, street violence.
00:46:15.000He would often shy away from any risky situation.
00:46:18.000You know, after the July days of 1917, when they tried to arrest him, he adopted a disguise.
00:46:23.000You know, he fled into the Finnish countryside.
00:46:25.000Stalin was arrested many, many, many times, sent to Siberia.
00:46:28.000He spent the war actually in Siberia, in the underground, whereas Lenin was often, you know, he's in Switzerland, you know, kind of living it up in Zurich, of all places.
00:46:39.000I think he always had, again, a little bit more.
00:46:43.000Trotsky tried to caricature him as this kind of comrade card index because he controlled the personnel files and he was a bureaucrat.
00:46:59.000I mean, again, one of the other theories about why he became quite so violent in the 1930s is that, well, there's this line he said, Now, after the death of his wife, he lost his last warm feeling for other human beings.
00:47:11.000And what's curious about this is that you might think he would say this after his wife, Nadia, committed suicide in 1932.
00:47:19.000In fact, he said it after his first wife died in 1907.
00:47:22.000But when his second wife committed suicide after this night when he had kind of berated her in public, so maybe he felt vaguely guilty about it.
00:47:31.000But he responded to this very kind of Stalin-esque way by making sure he had lists of anyone who was there that night, you know, who knew anything about it, which might be compromising and eventually had a lot of them executed.
00:47:41.000So he was he was obviously ruthless in the way that he would deal with his enemies.
00:47:46.000Now, he had a certain, you might call it almost like a flexibility in foreign policy, as you might say from the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact.
00:47:56.000But I think, and this is one of my big arguments in the book, he did have a kind of central animating motivation or principle in foreign policy, which was effectively to exacerbate wars and conflict in the capitalist world because that is what would lead communists to triumph.
00:48:10.000I mean, that's very Hegelian in some ways, right?
00:48:13.000Create the tension and dialectical continue.
00:48:16.000But isn't that at odds with what so many communists will say, that America is this colonialist, internationalist project?
00:48:23.000Communism seems to be far more internationalistically expansionist than...
00:48:35.000An example of this, so in the book and also in this op-ed that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal on the 80th anniversary of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, this is what they signed in April 1941, which is perverse in a lot of ways.
00:48:48.000One of the things people never understood about Hitler's strategy or his complete lack of strategy in the war is that Japan had been hostile to the Soviet Union really for most of its existence.
00:48:58.000and said they'd actually intervened in the Russian Civil War alongside Britain, France, and the U.S. They had fought against the Soviets in the Far East in 1938, 1939, and they were, of course, allied to Nazi Germany.
00:49:09.000And so why did Hitler not even bother telling them about his plans to invade Russia?
00:49:13.000He didn't trust them, and so he didn't tell them.
00:49:22.000Now, what I pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, and I talk about this in the book, is that Stalin's goal in signing a neutrality pact with Japan is very clearly to try to pressure or hint or suggest that it might be better if the Japanese attacked British and U.S. positions in the Pacific instead of the Soviet Union, which is, of course, precisely what then happened.
00:49:41.000Part of this was because also Stalin gave it a bit of a shove.
00:49:43.000He had agents in Washington, including Harry Dexter White, second in command of the Treasury Department.
00:49:51.000Well, some of them were on the payroll.
00:49:54.000Some of them, like Harry Dexter White, were more like just sort of volunteers who sympathized with communism or with the Soviet Union.
00:50:00.000Yes, he was actually heavily involved, among other things, in even the creation of things like the World Bank and Bretton Woods in 1944.
00:50:12.000So he wrote up the so-called whole note.
00:50:14.000So this is basically the last sort of diplomatic communication with Japan right before Pearl Harbor.
00:50:19.000So basically it's sort of this ultimatum.
00:50:21.000You must withdraw all of your troops from China and from Indochina, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc., or else.
00:50:28.000Just basically like you have to withdraw them all because by then the U.S. had effectively had a de facto embargo on things like oil, all these things Japan desperately needed.
00:50:36.000The Japanese were trying to negotiate some type of a compromise.
00:50:40.000They had a couple of different proposals which were rejected by the Roosevelt administration.
00:50:47.000It was actually based on a draft handed to him by his Soviet handler, a man called Detali Pavlov, earlier in 1941.
00:50:57.000So the reason I got in trouble with the Russian government was I pointed this out, that the whole point of the neutrality pact was to try to basically encourage the Japanese to attack the U.S. and Britain, and the Russian foreign ministry—there's actually a tweet on the 4th of July a couple of years ago.
00:51:11.000They denounced me by name, and they said that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving empire, which, of course, had no imperialistic or warlike intentions of any kind.
00:51:26.000More talk in the book of Europe, just in part because that's kind of where a lot of the really dramatic and also devastating military action and so many of the casualties of the deaths are happening.
00:51:35.000In a lot of ways, Stalin's foreign policy was actually more effective in Asia, because you think about this, it's almost incredible the way it worked out for him.
00:51:42.000So, signs of neutrality back with Japan.
00:51:44.000Japan attacks the United States and British positions across the Pacific.
00:51:49.000Then for the next four years, the U.S. wages an extremely expensive, bloody, so-called island-hopping campaign against Japan.
00:51:55.000They could have gone in through China instead.
00:51:57.000That's another question which has to do with Soviet influence operations.
00:52:01.000And then at the very end of the war, Stalin's position, which he laid out at both Tehran and Yalta, it was so cynical, it was unbelievable.
00:52:09.000He literally said, you know, I will not enter the war against Japan.
00:52:12.000Roosevelt asked him dozens of times, can you help us against Japan?
00:52:15.000It's not just that Stalin didn't help.
00:52:18.000U.S. pilots who would stage bombing raids on Japan, who had to land on Soviet soil, were arrested and interned in Soviet labor camps during the war, including the pilots of the famous Doolittle Raid of April 1942, who were actually sensationalized in a Hollywood blockbuster film, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.
00:53:02.000That the war is in Europe, and three months after the war in Europe ends, and not a moment sooner, we will enter the war in Japan at a price, and that price is negotiated in Tehran, which basically included the Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria, North China, Korea, Sakhalin, the Kura Islands, and so on.
00:53:18.000So I don't want to let something slip.
00:53:20.000I've never heard anyone say this either.
00:53:22.000We could have based our operation out of China.
00:53:28.000There are a number of reasons that we didn't.
00:53:30.000I mean, it would have been difficult because the Japanese had made these moves down into Indonesia and Burma.
00:53:35.000But there was a lot of talk all through 1943.
00:53:38.000There was a guy called Chenow in the U.S. Army Air Forces, and he thought that we should basically focus more on China.
00:53:44.000We had to open up the Burma Road for supply.
00:53:46.000He also thought we could do a lot with air power alone.
00:53:48.000But to get serious war supplies to China, we would have had to go in through the Bay of Bengal, this whole operation they called Buccaneer.
00:54:56.000What you're saying is that in the Great War that is the modern crucifixion of modernity, it's the most important event that we talk about in reference, good and evil is centered around how we view World War II.
00:55:16.000You're saying in that war so much of the political decisions were influenced by communist sleeper cell agents in our government?
00:55:27.000Both the agents in our government and also people who weren't necessarily answering to Soviet handlers but who were extremely powerful.
00:55:35.000Harry Hopkins, for example, who's literally sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom for most of the war, he's almost like Roosevelt's right-hand man, and he's running the Lend-Lease operation where we're basically ramping up the vast hydraulic machinery of the entire U.S. economy.
00:55:48.000We retool, for example, the pork industry so that we could supply the Soviets with the famous spam, the Tusanka.
00:56:05.000We were giving them the rubber for their tires.
00:56:07.000We were sending them trucks and Jeeps and Harley Davidson motorcycles, some of which were actually re-gifted to Stalin's Polish stooges so they could go around and hunt Polish patriots with them.
00:56:31.000Philosophically, again, he was not communist, but I think he thought that the Soviets were kind of on the side of progress, and he thought that European imperialism was on the way out.
00:56:41.000So he consistently favored Stalin over Churchill, to an extreme degree.
00:56:45.000Just to make sure we're all keeping score at home.
00:56:47.000Who killed more of their own people, Stalin or Hitler?
00:56:53.000If you count up all the deaths throughout Stalin's reign, you'd probably have to get up close to, again, just kind of spitballing a figure, somewhere around 30 or 35 million.
00:57:21.000Stalin killed maybe 3 to 4x what Hitler did of whatever population that they were overseeing.
00:57:28.000I mean, almost certainly, you could say, if you're talking about the consequences of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, where the Soviets allegedly lose 27 million people, you could maybe put that in Hitler's tally, I guess, even if a lot of them were actually killed by the Soviets.
00:57:41.000Under that, wasn't Stalin equally the villain then of World War II?
00:57:45.000Well, I guess that's the difficult question because the war ends up becoming so aligned with Stalin's interests on almost every front.
00:57:52.000This is one of the big themes of the book, that he's kind of the key victor.
00:57:56.000It's not that the U.S. doesn't gain anything from the war.
00:57:59.000Basically, the U.S. pushes the British Empire into receivership and starts picking it apart, a little bit like going down like a scarecrow or a vulture or something.
00:58:24.000The armies that would eventually conquer Asia and then link up with Mao and supply Mao with a lot of his weapons, that is the Soviet Far Eastern armies, were mostly supplied with weapons, largesse, war materiel, foodstuffs, boots, etc., by the United States, the U.S. taxpayer.
00:58:41.000Just to give you an example of the volume we're talking about, about 8.25 million tons of war materiel was shipped to Vladivostok by the United States during the war.
00:58:53.000through Japanese territorial waters when we were at war with Japan.
00:58:59.000Japan let it through because the Japanese thought, oh, this is great.
00:59:02.000The U.S. is sending all their weapons to Stalin where they're not fighting us as well as they might.
00:59:07.000And so they kind of just let it through.
00:59:08.000And so then Stalin waits until after the U.S. has done all the work against Japan until Japan has, because the U.S. chose not to supply China, Japan had started removing more and more soldiers back to the home island.
00:59:20.000So Manchuria, which is where Japan originally was, is almost stripped of troops by the time Stalin says, OK, now we move.
00:59:26.000So Stalin then makes his move in Asia with U.S. weapons and supplies basically into territories vacated by the Japanese because of the U.S. war against Japan.
00:59:35.000So how should then, based on your book, Stalin's War, and this is fascinating.
01:00:07.000I have to give Roosevelt credit that when he wanted to, he could actually play a kind of ruthless rail politic.
01:00:13.000And this is a real contrast, his approach to Britain versus his approach to Russia.
01:00:18.000The Lend-Lease Act, although applied to Britain, the British actually had to pay us for it.
01:00:23.000In the Basis for Destroyers Deal of 1940, for example, we basically picked off the carcass of the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere.
01:00:31.000Britain didn't finish paying off her World War II debts to the United States.
01:00:34.000So when he wanted to put the squeeze on in the interests of the United States, he could.
01:00:40.000For whatever reason, he either had this sympathy, this soft spot, this blind spot for Stalin, which I think in the end did have very deleterious consequences.
01:00:49.000So the Lendley story, I'm willing to give Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt, let's say, in the first year or two after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
01:00:57.000I might disagree, but there's a rational argument to be made that the U.S. had a national interest in ensuring that the Soviet Union wouldn't collapse.
01:01:04.000Maybe Hitler would have been a greater threat had he had the resources of Russia at his disposal.
01:01:13.000which might have ended with a kind of sunset clause after the first year, the first or the second protocol in June 42 or June 43. So after Stalingrad, that's in the winter of 42, 43, or after Kursk in the summer of They're clearly not going to lose.
01:01:30.000We could have said, look, okay, we're happy to help you survive.
01:01:34.000Now you're on your own because we don't want to send you 400,000 trucks so that you can invade Europe.
01:01:38.000Once the barbarians are not at your gate, we're going to calm things down a little bit.
01:01:41.000Instead, I don't know if you remember the movie Spaceballs, but you remember instead of, I think instead of hyperspeed, they had ludicrous speed.
01:01:48.000Instead, after 43, when it was no longer really needed, there wasn't much of an argument for it, we ramped it up to ludicrous speed.
01:01:55.000In the most generous interpretation of FDR's own view, what did he think a post-war Europe would look like?
01:02:03.000Well, this is an interesting question.
01:02:05.000I think in some ways Harry Hopkins is right-hand man.
01:02:08.000He argued this a bit more explicitly than Roosevelt.
01:02:11.000I mean, Roosevelt definitely wanted the Soviets to be a partner.
01:02:13.000And Hopkins was a communist adjacent guy?
01:02:16.000Hopkins was absolutely full-throated sympathizer, not a party member.
01:02:21.000But he was saying that basically because the Soviets would be all-powerful, it was a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, we're making them all-powerful with our Lend-Lease aid.
01:02:29.000Because of that, we should do everything we can to please them and befriend them.
01:02:36.000Roosevelt, again, is not quite as extreme, but I think he sees the Soviets as a partner in creating this new world order based on the United Nations with European empires all kind of being pushed to the curb.
01:02:54.000And we go so viral on TikTok, we get billions and billions of views.
01:02:59.000You see, that's real money flowing into small businesses.
01:03:02.000Like AZTacoKing, who went viral on TikTok and hit $1.3 million in sales in their first year.
01:03:07.000Now they're hiring more staff to keep up.
01:03:10.000Or Bluff Cakes, who started as a home baking side hustle and became a national cookie brand.
01:03:15.000Or the She Mechanic, whose business tripled in just one year with help from TikTok.
01:03:20.000Now she's in a bigger space with a bigger team.
01:03:23.000TikTok is helping small businesses thrive, and that's adding up to more jobs and more growth.
01:03:28.000And over $24 billion flowing into the U.S. economy.
01:03:31.000Our most viral platform is TikTok, and by far.
01:03:35.000Learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy at TikTokEconomicImpact.com.
01:03:39.000We are winning the next generation at Turning Point USA and on the Charlie Kirk Show.
01:03:43.000Large in part thanks to us getting the message out at TikTok.
01:03:58.000Was Churchill worried or aware that FDR and his inner circle was quietly sympathetic to Stalin?
01:04:07.000Did Churchill express any concern about this and what a post-war Europe would look like?
01:04:12.000He did, although one of the things that I do in the book— No one's perfect.
01:04:21.000As early as 1939, because Churchill was so focused on Hitler and Nazi Germany and the German threat, he had a good relation with the Soviet ambassador, and he was beginning to signal, even before he became prime minister at the beginning of the war, he's first lord of the admiralty, before the war, he's out of the government entirely.
01:04:36.000But he was kind of suggesting that Britain might look favorably on Soviet moves in the Baltic region or in Finland because he thought they'd be a good counterweight to Hitler.
01:04:45.000He had talked about the idea of a grand alliance as early as 1938.
01:04:48.000So he thought that in the end, the best way to defeat Nazi Germany would be by getting the U.S. and the Soviet Union into the war.
01:04:55.000That was a large part of what he was thinking in the famous period of the kind of the finest hour when he's giving these famous speeches.
01:05:01.000He's thinking, look, we need to hold out long enough so that the U.S. and the Soviets will eventually bail us out.
01:05:06.000One of the ironies is that although he was much flippant.
01:05:11.000Again, it's not that he was in any way sympathetic to communism, but he was friendlier to Russia.
01:05:14.000He had the sense of almost like Russia's sort of brotherhood in arms from the First World War.
01:05:28.000Stalin never responded to his letters because Stalin was very loyal to Hitler until after Hitler, of course, broke with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.
01:05:59.000He was actually proposing a war to sort of eject the Soviets from Poland by 1945.
01:06:04.000I think he had some regret about his own role at Tehran and Yalta, but of course, mostly it was because Roosevelt just would not put up any fight at all over Poland.
01:06:36.000And I think the one area in the book where I come down probably hardest on Churchill is that I think he misread the situation in Yugoslavia.
01:06:52.000They're hosting a royal Yugoslav government in exile in London.
01:06:55.000Its legatee inside the country is a general called Mikhailovich, and his forces are called the Chetniks.
01:07:01.000They're sort of mostly Serbs, but sort of like Yugoslav royalists who are allies of Britain.
01:07:08.000And Churchill cuts off Mikhailovich and throws all his support behind Joseph or Yosef Broz.
01:07:16.000Tito, basically the communist, not realizing that Tito is actually answering to Stalin.
01:07:23.000And for the next almost a year and a half, it's actually Britain that gets most of the arms and supplies to Tito because the Soviets have no ability to actually supply him.
01:07:32.000But the whole time, and this is something...
01:07:40.000We know that Tito was not only responding and talking with Stalin and Molotov, but he was literally even reporting on Churchill's envoy, Fitzroy McLean.
01:08:01.000there was almost this romantic idea that, look, Tito's this kind of guerrilla fighter, and he's supposedly killing more Germans than Mihailovic.
01:08:35.000If you were in charge of how this was taught to children and to kids, how would you present that?
01:08:40.000It's difficult because when you're talking about kids, I obviously don't want to disabuse them of...
01:08:50.000But I do think we need to reckon with the consequences of the Second World War.
01:08:55.000First of all, for our own country, the erosion of our own basically domestic liberties, the way in which we ramped up the security state, created these organizations like the OSS, the future CIA, the Lend-Lease Administration.
01:09:08.000Congress effectively forfeits a lot of its supervisory role over U.S. foreign policy.
01:09:14.000You know, too much power is probably invested in the executive branch.
01:09:17.000There are a lot of consequences for the U.S., but also for the world.
01:09:19.000You know, that is to say, if it's a war of liberation, you know, tell that to the Poles.
01:09:23.000It's an amazing fact that Poland has still not received reparations from either Germany or the Soviet Union after being, of course, invaded and largely obliterated and turned into a smoking ruin by them in the Second World War.
01:09:36.000As recently as a couple of years ago, Poland levied a new reparations claim against Germany for about $1.3 trillion.
01:09:43.000And it was rejected, as always, because the claim is that Poland forfeited her right to reparations in 1953.
01:09:51.000That is to say, when she was an occupied Soviet communist satellite state.
01:10:03.000American soldiers, American pilots, the Seabees in the Pacific War.
01:10:08.000Heroic feats of endurance, engineering prowess, bravery.
01:10:18.000But we do want to ask what they were fighting for and what the result of that war was.
01:10:23.000Because the real problem I see with the good war kind of story, narrative myth, is that people are always trotting out Munich and appeasement.
01:10:32.000And this is the story which people use to justify almost any U.S. What's wrong with it at its core?
01:10:38.000Well, what's wrong with it is that the U.S., first of all, Doesn't always know what it's doing.
01:10:44.000Does not always produce the desired results.
01:10:47.000In fact, oftentimes the results are counterproductive.
01:10:50.000We've talked a lot about the Second World War, the U.S. intervention in the First World War.
01:10:54.000I obviously am not going to go into all of the details of the story.
01:10:57.000I know very little about what we're doing.
01:10:58.000But so the interesting fact is that the U.S. supposedly goes to war because of violations of kind of freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas with German U-boat attacks, and there's some vague notion that Wilson gloms onto the way he justifies to combat it.
01:11:13.000Or as the phrase is sometimes, A war to make the world safe for democracy.
01:11:19.000What U.S. intervention does instead in the First World War is by defeating the Germans who were then occupying Russia, it makes the world safe for communism.
01:11:27.000Because the Germans had sort of midwife.
01:11:31.000Basically, it allows the communist regime to survive.
01:11:34.000And so if we midwife communism into existence with our intervention in the First World War, the Second World War, we liberated Western Europe.
01:11:43.000We liberated some of the countries of Southeast Asia, although it didn't always go well in places like Vietnam.
01:11:51.000But most of northern Asia, eventually all of China, and of course the vast bulk of Eastern Europe, ended up under totalitarian communist rule.
01:12:00.000So if that was the result of the war, then I do think we have to ask whether the war aims, again, maybe...
01:12:18.000The brokering of the war, the negotiations, the decisions made, the allocation of resources, and above all, the diplomacy that, you know, effectively, we ended up handing over so much of Eurasian to Stalin.
01:12:30.000So, yeah, so then Yalta, that was the first time all three of those guys met.
01:12:56.000The trip to Yalta was even more dangerous because by then Roosevelt's blood pressure was so elevated that the planes could not go above, I believe, 6,000 feet.
01:13:05.000So they basically had to deal with the risk of kind of flak and German anti-aircraft fire, basically because, you know, his health, he would not have survived the flight otherwise.
01:13:13.000And they didn't have the depressurization technology that we have.
01:13:20.000But no, Tehran, this is the thing everyone talks about Yalta.
01:13:22.000And Yalta's kind of where, finally, it's sort of There were some agreements there that were new.
01:13:31.000The one regarding the Soviet prisoners of war, it's really kind of shocking, where basically Churchill and Roosevelt agree, and the U.S. later called this Operation Keelhaul.
01:13:40.000This is basically referring to this hideous naval punishment where you'd be kind of like dragged behind a ship.
01:13:45.000This is how they describe the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war who did not want to go home because they were viewed by Stalin's government as traitors.
01:13:57.000Why is it that Stalin got to keep every country he invaded?
01:14:01.000Well, a lot of this, the thing that, again, people focus on Yalta, and this is one way in which they can justify it.
01:14:06.000And they could say, well, look, by the time of Yalta, the Soviet armies had already moved into places like not all of Poland, but like they had actually moved into Warsaw.
01:14:14.000You know, they'd started moving into places like Hungary and Romania, and they were actually occupying Bulgaria.
01:14:19.000So you could say, well, it's almost like a done deal.
01:14:21.000It's sort of a de facto thing they're just recognizing.
01:14:24.000The problem is that Roosevelt actually agreed to nearly all of these spheres of influence at Tehran in November, 1943, when the Soviets were still struggling to cross the Dnieper region
01:14:46.000His famous last stand, the Mediterranean strategy, where he wants to have more time for the 500,000 odd troops that the Allies by then have in Italy, the British, the Americans, Canadians, some French, to maybe do something in the Mediterranean, maybe an amphibious landing somewhere in the Adriatic, maybe bring Turkey into the war.
01:15:04.000Somehow try to kind of push into the Balkans, the underbelly of Europe, maybe even get there before...
01:15:13.000Roosevelt briefly entertained the idea and then someone apparently passed him a note under the table.
01:15:18.000And it was almost certainly Hopkins telling him to cool it.
01:15:59.000And what's amazing about this is Stalin actually, sorry, Roosevelt actually revealed to Stalin even before his own advisers or the U.S. public that he was going to run for election in 1944.
01:16:09.000And the reason he did this was because he said, look, you can have the Baltic countries and you could probably have Poland too, but just be quiet about it until after next year's elections.
01:16:20.000He even let the Soviets basically carve up what had been kind of the eastern part of Poland that the Soviets had been assigned in 1939 and then to push Poland's borders westward into Germany.
01:16:32.000What was amazing about this was at one point one of the British delegation actually said, are you actually proposing you want us to sign off on the Molotov-Rippentrop borders?
01:16:43.000And what was great was I think Molotov's line was, you can call them what you like.
01:17:07.000And so that's, to me, the really shocking thing.
01:17:09.000Again, by Yalta, you could sort of make the argument, well, there's not a lot they could do other than maybe threaten to withhold, lend-lease aid, and all the rest of it.
01:17:18.000Yalta is where some of the famous lines were uttered, though.
01:17:38.000And I think at one point it was Roosevelt who said that the election should be as clean as Caesar's wife, and Stalin replied, Caesar's wife was no virgin.
01:17:50.000Although she was the head of the Vistigil Virgins, apparently.
01:18:40.000So it might be a kind of, I think, more subtle or insidious type of development.
01:18:47.000I don't think it'll be quite as obvious as it was when, let's say, you know, the period of the Comintern or the Cold War, the Soviets would send out these advisors and they had these parties that answered to them that were funded by Moscow.
01:18:57.000The CCP doesn't operate in quite the same way.
01:19:00.000I think it's a little subtler in the way that it spreads its influence.
01:19:05.000So I think what we really have to watch out for are both those type of influence operations, but also, frankly, what we're doing to ourselves.
01:19:14.000The censorship, the surveillance, a lot of which, of course, they have tools at their disposal now.
01:19:20.000I mean, the Soviets could only have dreamed of having something like social media and Twitter and Facebook where the government could have potential backdoors into our private communications.
01:19:31.000They had to spend money to go out and bug places and send hundreds of thousands of spies and agents out to kind of keep track of people's thoughts.
01:19:38.000Now many of us just volunteer it for free.
01:19:41.000So I think the real thing we have to worry about is, again, maybe some new variety or new blend of statist surveillance and control of the population.
01:19:58.000Various periods, great proletarian cultural revolution, these kind of offensives which are partly directed from above but partly maybe burble up from below.
01:20:07.000We really have to, I think, be careful just about defending our own liberties.
01:20:13.000What would you say is the greatest misunderstanding about World War II that if you had your way to correct, the world would be a better place?
01:20:18.000I think the biggest misunderstanding is probably this idea of the liberation of Europe.
01:20:24.000And maybe, again, some of it is selective that more of us have probably been to France or we have some connection to Italy, and so we kind of know this part of the story.
01:20:32.000The story is much darker in Eastern Europe.
01:20:37.000In some ways, the war never really ended in Asia.
01:20:40.000In Eastern Europe, maybe it ended with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
01:20:43.000I mean, in some form, as it's still going on, that, for example, as some of my Polish friends or people who've read my book have reminded me of something I probably vaguely knew but hadn't really thought about until they told me, there are no statues of Churchill in Poland.
01:21:11.000I was in Poland a couple of years ago on the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, so this would have been, I guess, the 75th anniversary.
01:21:23.000And the scene was just absolutely unreal.
01:21:26.000I mean, with sirens going off and smoke in the air and almost everyone in the country participating in this kind of ritual about, you know, which was really kind of this doomed uprising that just led to nothing but kind of horrors for the population.
01:21:45.000I mean, it's a story of a war that the Poles fought bravely and on principle but lost virtually everything and were betrayed and abandoned by the West.
01:21:55.000So I think we have to remember that side of the story.
01:22:14.000The tenth is a more general history of the 20th century.
01:22:17.000There are these versions you might call the short 20th century.
01:22:20.000They go from about 1914 to 89. Wrap it up a bit with a bow of the fall of communism.
01:22:25.000and as you can see I don't think the story's over but I'm going to frame it a bit differently I'm going to go all the way back to 1900 and then forward to 2025 so the idea is less a story about either just ideology or just the world wars and communism but rather a story about Europe the west more broadly including the United States but particularly Europe it's placed in the world in 1900 and then Europe today so it's basically a decline and fall story phenomenal he bumps along the way Sean McMeekin thank
01:22:54.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
01:23:02.000Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.