Matt's Podcast Pick - The Cold War： What We Saw
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
180.16034
Summary
In July, friend of Daily Wire, Bill Whittle, hosted this excellent four-part series podcast called Apollo 11: What We Saw, in which he takes you back in time and experiences the space age. Now, Bill has a new season of his show all about the Cold War: The Cold War, What we Saw. And as the host, Bill captures what it was like to live through major events like the Berlin Wall, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the story ties all these milestones together to create a picture of the apocalypse that never happened.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
So back in July, friend of Daily Wire, Bill Whittle, hosted this excellent four-part series
00:00:04.980
podcast called Apollo 11, What We Saw, in which Bill takes you back in time to live through and
00:00:10.800
experience the space age. Now Bill has a new season of his show all about the Cold War. Be
00:00:16.660
sure to check out The Cold War, What We Saw. Not only is it a very compelling story, but it's also
00:00:21.260
an important reminder of what it's like to live with no future, which is where we're going to
00:00:25.360
end up if the far left makes it to the presidency. As the host, Bill captures what it was like to live
00:00:31.620
through major events like the Berlin airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the space
00:00:36.300
race. And the story ties all these milestones together to create this picture of the apocalypse
00:00:40.720
that never happened. The story is so well told and the setting is so brilliantly descriptive that as
00:00:45.600
you go through these events, you start to understand the battle not only for capitalism, but for
00:00:50.540
civilization itself. Take a listen to this 10-minute preview of episode one, and if you like what you
00:00:55.180
here, just go to dailywire.com slash cold war and start listening to this incredibly important
00:01:00.400
story. You can also find it on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:05.980
30 years ago, the Berlin Wall was torn down by the people that it had divided for three decades.
00:01:12.940
Berliners were euphoric. They were euphoric because the Berlin Wall was not merely a wall
00:01:17.760
between East and West Berlin. It was the wall between East and West, period. It was the division
00:01:24.160
of humanity into two different camps. And since names and labels are always changing and morphing,
00:01:29.380
not to mention carrying decades of emotional baggage, let's reduce it to the most simple,
00:01:34.540
emotionally neutral terms. On one side of the wall, the Eastern side, were the collectivists,
00:01:40.300
who believe that society takes precedent over the person. This collectivism was advertised as new and
00:01:45.960
scientific, but the fact is that collectivism has been the default condition of humanity since
00:01:50.840
humanity began. No, the actual newcomer to this clash of visions were the individualists on the
00:01:56.760
Western side. The first government in history dedicated to the idea of the individual being
00:02:02.540
more worthy of protection than the state had just turned 170 years old when the 40-year conflict known
00:02:09.060
as the Cold War began. With the world in ruins after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan,
00:02:15.860
and fascist Italy, these two ideologies had come into head-on conflict here in Berlin.
00:02:21.780
It quickly became evident that Soviet leaders were not interested in a free, unified Germany and were
00:02:27.680
determined to induce or force the Western powers to leave Berlin. Certainly the American and Western
00:02:35.040
people do not want war. But all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been
00:02:42.160
successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights, by attempting to placate
00:02:49.080
aggression. From the East, the collectivist idea known as communism had slugged its way from mile
00:02:54.880
after bloody mile, limping, then striding, and then running across Eastern Europe from the Nazi high
00:03:01.720
watermark at Stalingrad. The individualist ideology arrived by sea, storming ashore on the beaches of
00:03:09.000
Normandy, and after being staggered once or twice, was racing across Western Europe in a gasoline-fueled
00:03:15.480
red ball express. Now part of this idea was known as capitalism, but that was merely the economic system.
00:03:21.700
Politically, morally, economically, and practically, these were called the forces of freedom for the
00:03:27.820
simple reason that that's what they were. And as the collectivist nightmare known as German National
00:03:32.720
Socialism wavered, collapsed, and then imploded, these two antithetical ideologies met in Berlin,
00:03:39.500
for it was in Berlin, where one world war had just ended, that the next world war was about to begin.
00:03:46.640
Now no one felt this divide more than the defeated Germans themselves. To them, the wall, this war of
00:03:53.060
ideologies had an immediacy not felt anywhere else. The nation and former capital Berlin split in half
00:03:59.660
one camp occupied by the armies of the Soviet Union and the others by the armies of the United States,
00:04:05.900
Great Britain, and in a rather generous gesture, France. There was nothing theoretical about the
00:04:12.360
Berlin Wall. It was cold, thick, high, and deadly, and it was a daily reminder to those on both sides
00:04:19.740
of the sheer monumental look, the city block you lived on, determining the fate of you,
00:04:25.840
your children, and their children. No wonder they went at it with hammers and crowbars and even
00:04:31.240
bare and bloody hands. But all of us who watched it happen felt that giddy, euphoric, mind-boggling
00:04:37.740
sensation that had nothing to do with living in Berlin or even in Germany.
00:04:41.900
Our top story, the Iron Curtain between East Germany and West Berlin has come tumbling down.
00:04:47.800
This has been a city physically divided for 28 years, but now it's come together, East and West,
00:04:59.780
We all cried when the wall came down, because with it, collapsed from our shoulders the death
00:05:05.120
sentence that we'd all been living under. Because you cannot possibly understand how the world could
00:05:10.180
be locked in a life-and-death struggle for half a century unless you can put yourself in the
00:05:14.040
position of those of us who lived through it, or lived through any part of it. You see, when the
00:05:18.960
Berlin Wall fell, it began to dawn on me like it began to dawn on all of us. There was going to be
00:05:24.040
an actual future, and despite all odds, we were going to live to see it. And this is what we saw.
00:05:30.900
Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is,
00:05:43.960
The only answer to communism is a massive offensive.
00:05:47.480
Communism must be a system of international control and conformance.
00:05:58.460
From Stettine in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across
00:06:15.200
the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and
00:06:21.880
If you had grown up during the Cold War, like I did, then we both have something in
00:06:28.940
common. Didn't matter which side you were on, because what we all shared was universal.
00:06:33.760
If you were a kid when I was a kid, the one thing you were pretty certain of is that you
00:06:38.520
were never going to get to be an adult. My dad was a hotel manager, and so I grew up in
00:06:42.860
Bermuda. That meant I never got subjected to those civil defense films that featured rows
00:06:48.320
of bright-eyed American kids at their school desks who, an instant after the brilliant
00:06:52.640
flash of light coming through the window, would immediately and automatically duck beneath
00:06:57.300
their desks and cover their heads with school books. You remember. Duck and cover.
00:07:03.320
He did what we all must learn to do. You and you and you and you. Duck and cover.
00:07:12.380
I didn't have to deal with Saturday tests of the air raid siren, and I was nearly an
00:07:17.720
adult when I first saw training films that showed what to do if you were caught in the
00:07:22.020
open without time to get to a bomb shelter, namely, lying on the grass and covering yourself
00:07:27.060
with a newspaper. Now, I was old enough by that time to laugh off the absurdity of using
00:07:31.420
a newspaper to protect you from the heat flash of a thermonuclear weapon, and I wasn't yet
00:07:36.540
old enough to realize that wrapping yourself with a newspaper was, in fact, excellent advice,
00:07:41.300
as was duck and cover. We'll get to all of that later. I didn't have to deal with any of that
00:07:47.020
since I was not going to American public schools in American suburbs, but rather attending British
00:07:51.920
public schools while growing up in one of the last of the British colonies. That nuclear war stuff
00:07:58.040
barely registered at all. I was on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. It all had nothing to do
00:08:03.720
with me. Now, of course, the fact that the 20-mile-long fishhook-shaped island that was my home at the time
00:08:09.720
housed both the United States Air Force Base at one end and a United States Naval Station at the
00:08:14.840
other, well, that was all far too theoretical for me. But surely it was not lost on my parents
00:08:20.120
that if the nightmare did come true, that tiny island and everything and everyone on it would
00:08:26.120
soon become radioactive dust in the upper stratosphere. Unlike millions of other American
00:08:31.760
kids back in the suburbs who, as a result of good luck or bad maybe, were not within the lethal blast
00:08:37.740
radius of multiple Soviet thermonuclear warheads, those of us who grew up on a beach in Bermuda
00:08:47.940
You know, many times a day I get asked, Bill, you suave and handsome devil, how is it that you know
00:08:52.880
so much about everything? And the answer is very simple. I have a very high level of confidence
00:08:57.100
and a very low level of awareness. But there's some good news. I had to spend 25 years poking around
00:09:02.740
trying to get all this stuff together, and mostly I just pretty much fake it. But you won't have to.
00:09:06.800
There's a streaming service out called The Great Courses Plus. What it is, is a bunch of unique
00:09:11.860
perspectives from engaging experts in their fields on a wide range of topics. You know,
00:09:16.760
there's subjects like American presidents, you can get one on exoplanets or travel photography,
00:09:21.440
stress relief. And with The Great Courses, you have the flexibility to watch them or just listen to
00:09:25.140
them just about anywhere. Just as one example, they've got a featured course out now called The
00:09:29.000
Skeptic's Guide to American History. And if you've seen what they've been doing to history in the public
00:09:33.760
sector out there, it's about time somebody asked questions like, was the Cold War inevitable?
00:09:38.760
Yes. And you can get all kinds of in-depth, objective understanding about the past and how
00:09:42.900
it still affects us today. Now, right now, they've got a special offer. You can get that awesome feeling
00:09:47.180
of pride that I often feel, but you'll actually have earned yours. If you sign up for The Great
00:09:51.880
Courses Plus, they're offering my listeners this amazing deal. It's three months of unlimited access for
00:09:57.260
just $30. That's $10 a month. But it's a limited time offer, so you're going to have to sign up today
00:10:02.740
using my special URL. Get all the details at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash cold. That's
00:10:09.840
thegreatcoursesplus.com slash cold. A few years ago, I met a guy who was about my age, which,
00:10:16.720
to my amazement, happens to be 60. And like me, he was an American boy growing up overseas on an
00:10:22.300
island. Only he was an Air Force brat. The island he grew up on was Okinawa, and his father was a
00:10:28.700
B-52 pilot based at Kadena Air Force Base. He told me how he and his family would go to see movies at
00:10:35.840
the base just like any other family. Dad and mom and the kids and the popcorn and the sodas and the
00:10:40.980
good, the bad, and the ugly up there on the screen. But every now and then, in the middle of a Saturday
00:10:45.220
afternoon double feature, let's say, all of a sudden, two huge red signs labeled ALERT would suddenly
00:10:51.800
light up on either side of the screen. And before you even had a chance to look around,
00:10:58.100
the movie had stopped, the lights had come up, and every grown man in the audience was climbing
00:11:03.080
over the rows of seats, carefully pushing aside women and children, and running like hell for the
00:11:08.000
exits. Just go to dailywire.com slash cold war and start listening to this incredibly important story.
00:11:16.140
You can also find it on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.