RockneCAST

The Ukraine War: Echoes of WWI and Sarajevo (#264, 11 Nov. 2024)

On Veteran's Day, we remember the World War I, the War to End All Wars. For an excellent read on this topic, read A World Undone by BJ Meyer.

In this episode, I reflect on Veterans Day and the historical significance of World War I, drawing parallels to the current Ukraine war.

In particular, I explore the question: is Ukraine War more like the events following the Sarajevo Crisis of 1914 or the Munich Crisis of 1938?

I argue the former.

In my view, the current geopolitical landscape resembles the prelude to World War I more than World War II, emphasizing the dangers of miscalculation and the aggressive posturing of smaller states backed by larger powers.

RockneCast know that I have been beating this drum for quite some time now, but for good reason. Our leaders have cited the Munich Crisis as a reason to risk war with Russia. It's precisely the wrong lesson and nearly led us to WWIII.

Let's hope that our future leaders remember both the lessons of WWI and WWII. Unfortunately, leaders like Anthony Blinken, John Bolton, and Victoria Nuland have demonstrated a level of ignorance that would make a history undergraduate blush and nearly resulted in world ending catastrophe.

Duration:: 48m
Broadcast on:: 11 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

What is going on, guys? It's Veterans Day, and during Veterans Day we remember our nation's veterans and their sacrifice, and we also commemorate the end of World War I, the war to end all wars. I thought it would be helpful, given that it is Veterans Day, to explore this topic of World War I and its relationship to the present Ukraine war. In my view, we came precipitously close due to the incompetence of President Biden and his State Department of Precipitating World War III. We do not know how close that we came to that. Ultimately, I do not think that is going to come to fruition now, but I thought it would be helpful, given the fact that we're remembering the 106th anniversary of the end of hostilities in World War I, to connect it to World War I, World War II, and us avoiding World War III. For this episode, I'm going to explore a little bit of the end of World War I, some of the beginning of World War I. I'm going to share with you a really good book on World War I, for those of you who are interested. It's called A World Undone, The Story of the Great War, by G. J. Meyer. We're going to cover the Munich Crisis of 1938, and we're going to explore one basic question relating to the Ukraine war. And here, I'm going to act like a professor and give you all an essay question that I'm going to give myself an essay question. Class, is the origin of the Ukraine war, in terms of U.S. involvement, is it more like the beginning of World War I, Sarajevo Crisis, that precipitated World War I with nearly 20 million killed, or is it more like the Munich Crisis of 1938? Importantly, provide analysis and facts for your answers. Support this with facts. Now, like most essay questions, there is no right or wrong answer. There's a gazillion different facts, but I expect you to identify some salient facts and persuade me that, in fact, Munich is the basis for why we should support Ukraine in a war which could have easily left to World War III, which is something we all want to avoid. There's various levels, so let's first off talk about the basis for the United States support in the Ukraine region. There's a variety of reasons given. The reasons that are given by the people like Anthony Blinken and other educated literate that went to places like John Hopkins, is that it violates international law. We cannot tolerate nation states, crossing borders illegally. And so we have to enforce nation states from crossing borders illegally, but of course, we all know that many of the same people who want to prevent nation states from crossing borders illegally also have no problem with individuals crossing borders illegally. But to the reason for why we should support Ukraine, that's one reason. But the other reason tends to relate to Munich. What do I mean by Munich? This is something that is given by nearly every politician as to why we should support Ukraine and give them all of this military hardware to support them against the Russians. Think everyone knows that Ukraine has a reason to fight against the Russians, they're trying to preserve their territory, and I don't begrudge them from detecting their territory. But the question of course for the United States is, and in particular, the United States people, why should we in the United States act as a essentially guarantor or a nation on the other side of the world that has no military financial or socioeconomic benefit for this country? So in other words, why should we act on behalf in a bar fight, have some little puny whim go up to the bully and then punch the bully and then ask us to fight, that is essentially the reason. Now people on both sides of the aisle and they're equally incompetent people like Lindsey Graham on the one side and people like Mitt Romney on the Republican side, then of course Biden and Anthony Blinken on the Democratic side, how is that we don't know our history? The reason why the United States should go to war against Russia potentially, I mean that's essentially where we are and by the way, if you look at the laws of war, we're pretty darn close to acting as a belligerent, which is we are ordinary providing coordinate strikes for Ukraine in the Russian territory, we are providing arms, we are providing training. As far as we can tell, we do not have actual military boots on the ground, but you can pretty much darn well that there are probably private contractors that wink wink nudge nudge are not a formerly affiliated with the United States, but in fact are fronts for various involvements of the United States in for a little bit of facts related to this assertion. There was an article in the New York Times of all places about six months ago outlining how deeply in mesh the CIA already is in the Ukraine with this various networks of NGOs, unaffiliated military contractors, all sorts of things. We are a believer, we're belligerent, now we don't actually have large amounts of troops, but we are a belligerent, we are supporting Ukraine. There's been one argument that is given that that they try to explain these are some of the top people in the world, right? I mean, these are the best of the best. And the argument that they always give us is Munich in 1938. I've done a lot of podcasts on this topic and I'm doing another one because what maybe think of this was is that it's the 11th hour of the Southern day of the 11th month. It's Veterans Day and I'm going to make it my mission so people remember World War I. I actually think that the situation that we have here today in 2024 is much more like the situation leading up to World War I in the summer of 1914 and I will explain why when I get to that particular topic. For now, the argument that is given by Anthony Blinken to the public writ large and Joe Biden, Alan C Graham and Mitt Romney is Munich of 1938 and of course we've talked about this before, but for those of you who haven't heard this, that podcast, what is the lesson of 1938 in the Munich conference? Munich was a meeting between the then British prime minister in 1938 between Adolf Hitler and double Chamberlain, the prime minister of Great Britain. The topic was one topic. In the lead up to World War II, Hitler started looking to reclaim a lot of the territories that were lost in World War I, including Poland, but also in German speaking regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire that he considered should be part of Germany. Now whether she should have or should have been right on that particular topic, that was what was teed up for the conference of 1938 between him and double Chamberlain. Hitler's position was is that if we don't get peace here, I am going to go to war and take over the sedate and land Germans, and the sedate and Germans were a German-speaking area of the Czech Republic that were more culturally affiliated with Germany. They spoke German, they considered themselves German, they were German culturally, but due to the kind of the random and arbitrary lines of the Versailles conference, we're then inside another nation state of the time it was Czechoslovakia. So he said, we're going to go to war, we're going to take back this territory that either we lost or was part of us, but we really need to get these people back into the fold because they really are truly Germans. Neville Chamberlain during this particular peace conference came to an agreement, and the agreement was as follows, if you promise us and you sign it on a piece of paper that you won't attack any other countries will let you have sedate left. And he was very, very proud, and so Hitler's like, done, I guarantee, of course, Hitler had his fingers tied behind his back. He was kind of like Lucy promising that she wouldn't pull the football with Charlie Brown. So Hitler was totally lying. He was totally jumping never to Chamberlain, but he promised in writing that he would not attack any other European countries. Neville Chamberlain got off the plane in Britain and literally waved the piece of paper around and he had declared, I have achieved peace in my era. And what happened after that, where that essentially took over Germany. And then of course he attacked Poland, getting no intention of honoring the promise he had made and World War II started. The lesson of Munich, as it's been reported out, is never given to an aggressor. Although none of us want war, if you get into a bully, that only will further inflame that bully. They will only continue to attack you so even though you don't want to go to war, sometimes you have to do it because if you don't, that bully will attack and they will attack viciously. And the very thing that you fear will become even worse. To use the analogy of answer, it's like saying, I'm not going to go through chemo because I fear that the chemo is going to kill me, but then you don't do anything about it and the cancer metastasizes and grows. And the very thing that you fear becomes ten times worse. And this is the argument that is given to us for why we should support Ukraine. Yes, we don't want to go to war. We have no desire to go to war. But if we don't go to war now, Vladimir Putin is going to be at the gates of Berlin. He will then take over Poland. He will re-cucker the Baltic states. He will go on a mad dash for power and he will that stop until all of Western Europe is under the Russian spell. This is the argument that is given, and it's given more as an assertion than without any actual facts to support it. The question of any historical analogy is, kind of like legal analysis when you're looking at a particular A's, is your set of facts that you have more like this case or is it more like the other case? And I'm not necessarily going to do a deep dive into I do not think, and my answer is I do not think that if we don't support Ukraine that Vladimir Putin is going to all of a sudden take over all of Western Europe, it'll just briefly summarize why I'm into that's the case. First off, just that nothing more, we all learn in elementary school, apparently not the people that go to John Hopkins, in the United States, we have something called the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially said fourth, that we will not tolerate that as the United States any foreign interference, not only in the United States, but in all of Latin America that's North and South America, that you can say that that's outdated and we don't actually apply that. And in fact, the Monroe Doctrine was given to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis as to why we should go to war against the refugees. And basically JFK just lost his temperance of a fuck, fuck them and no doctor, and we don't really do that anymore. But if you look at American foreign policy over the course of the 20th century, we absolutely have implemented that actual policy through Panama. I guess that wasn't really a foreign interference, but Granada was a grenade out was a situation where there was fear of Soviet influence, Panama, we've interfered, Nicaragua, we interfered because we thought the Soviets would be there. There's all sorts of example, the Dominican Republic in 1965, various levels of Haitian intervention, obviously Puerto Rico 1898, we evicted the Spanish. All sorts of different examples of the time where the United States absolutely implemented the Monroe Doctrine. Why is that important to Russia? I mean, if you can't see this, I don't know what to do for you. The Ukraine nation state, when Tucker interviewed Vladimir, this is about, I'm not relied on tuck and Vladimir's historic recitation of this, I've read probably three to four volumes of Viking history. The roots, the Chiavian roots were Swedish Vikings that settled in Kiev. The Ukraine and Russia have deep historical ties that were, they were part of the same culture. Now, of course, there are some variations, much in the same way that the Germanic peoples in Austria and various different people, yes, of course, there's variations, but they have deep historical ties that have been forged over at least 1200 years. One of the first sacred spaces of the Eastern Orthodox Church is in Kiev. Ukraine was part of Greater Russia for hundreds of years. Most recently, they were part of the same nation state leading up to the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. They were part of the, I don't think that's necessarily a reason to go to war, but it was quite clear that the, that due to people like Victorian, Newton, Nolan, and John Bolton, they were encouraging NATO to expand to Ukraine. Now just imagine you had a historical enemy that you've been fighting for a hundred years in essence the Russians have, no longer is in that, I can say 200 years, Napoleon invaded Russia. World War I, the Germans and the Russians fought each other, two-way stands still, but there was a huge attack during World War II, the Nazis, and they were Nazis, they were literal Nazis, chilled 20 million Russian soldiers, I don't know what the exact number is for World War I, but I believe it was something in the order of one to two million Russian soldiers. No, like you would respond and say, "Oh my God, we're not, we're not the Nazis, we're not going to attack." But if you look at Russia and you ask them, "Is Germany going to attack in 1931 before the rise of Hitler when you had a modern Western liberal state?" You don't never imagine that. So they literally had fought for a hundred years and during World War II they lost 20 million people. And Vladimir Putin is asked to allow military bases with offensive capabilities right on its own border where you get people like John Bolton and Lindsey Graham saying that, yeah, we should support them and we should go after Vladimir Putin, not only that, and the rest of the Russian people. Of course, there's a legitimate fear there. If you can't see that, you are willfully ignorant. If the United States just imagine a hypothetical right now, China has never attacked the United States militarily or in it, I think these other engagements sabotage, I think they've been engaged in fraud, if China put a military base and see a dad, Juarez, with all sorts of military capability, of course, the United States would not tolerate that. I don't care if it's even, maybe AOC would because she's breathtakingly ignorant. Of course you wouldn't. So the whole point here is that Russia absolutely has a basis to fear this type of encroachment. So what we're saying in the United States is we can have the Monroe Doctrine, but Russia can't. Every great power has a sphere of influence. So it is not like Munich and the reason why it's not like Munich is that there's no reason to believe that if there is peace in a neutral Ukraine, that Russia's going to attack even more. There's no reason to believe that whatsoever. And of course, we will see if there's peace in Ukraine, we'll see what he does on into the future, but I'll make a prediction that's not going to be the case. So let's get back to World War I and the lead-up into World War I, because we're told that the Ukraine is very much like Munich, that if we don't go after the Soviet Union or now modern Russia, I'm already showing my age, they will be on the gates of Berlin. That's the argument that is given. But if you read books like the world I'm done, and you can say a lot of things about me, but this is not that I've like, oh my God, I've seen it on Ticker Carlson, and that's what I believe. Though I actually read the 800, how many pages is this book? It's 772 pages, including the index. And in terms of actual words on the page, 715, I read that book this year. And it's by G.J. Meyer and it's called in World War I, it's a fantastic book to learn about and understand. One of the saddest things I think about World War I, is there was all of this sacrifice. And yet it's totally obscured by what happened in World War I. In the lead-up to the American support for the Ukraine, I heard almost no commentators say that we should remember the lesson of Sarajevo as opposed to the lesson of Munich. What do I mean by the Sarajevo, the lesson of Sarajevo as it manifested itself in the beginning of World War I? And here we'll get into a little bit of the history here, where we have to learn about that. In the lead-up to World War I, this time period in Western Europe was characterized by a number of rivalries that had emerged between various nation states and various formal alliances. Now, some of these alliances involved former formal treaties to defend one another. Others were kind of informal understandings. The two great powers that kind of manifested themselves once the war emerged was the triple untut, which is the United States, Great Britain, and France. Triple powers there. The reason why it was called an untut is that it was kind of an understanding. They had no formal treaty to enter the war on behalf of the other. The United States did not enter until 1917, was spring of 1917, and saw only about a year of contact, and the other was the Central Powers, which was Germany, Austro-Hungaria, Ottoman Empire. These are the kind of the three main empires that were involved, and let me back up a little bit. The triple untut, I'd say the main one would be Russia, the ally between Russia, Great Britain, and France. After the United States entered, then it was more just kind of pulled the allied powers that were kind of fighting Russia. What's the key issue here in terms of what led to this war, and here you'll get into what happened in Sarajevo, and why it mushroomed into this humongous war, and it's important to understand that. Why did Sarajevo start the war? In the lead up to World War I, there was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is kind of a very interesting thing that I would like to do a deeper dive on. It was this large empire in the middle of the Europe that was a true multicultural empire. It included all sorts of Christians, and it included some Muslims that were in the Bosnian area, getting sort of German speakers, Hungarian speakers, certain parts of Bulgaria. There were all different nationalities and ethnicities that were part of this thing called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I believe they may even have two sets of capitals, one in Budapest and the other in Vienna. It was just a super multicultural polygot of nations that wasn't really a nation-state. It was a true empire of various nations that lived within this thing called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One of their most recent entries into this empire was Bosnia. Bosnia had been only recently covered, and they were previously part of the Ottoman Empire. Bosnia and Serbia, there was a lot of tension between these two powers. There was a lot of tension between Sarajevo and Belgrade, and there's just a lot of sort of issues sort of percolating up through this particular exercise, before he had the part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The second in charge, Archdupe Ferdinand, was kind of calling this rest of the state, and he toured the area, he toured the part of Sarajevo, and was trying to win support for the Austro-Hungarian crown. In the process, he was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist, Mr. Pritzota. From that point, and that occurred, let's say it occurred in like June 28 of 1914, from that point until the middle of August of 1914, led to one of the greatest human slaughters ever recorded in the history of all humankind, and no one had expected it. Now here I want to identify one aspect of how did it get from June 28 of 1914, and here G.J. Meyer talks about this in great teal, and he talks about what was on the lines of both Frenchmen in June of 1914, before the outset of it. No one was fearing war, no one was thinking it was about ready to break out, no one was anticipating this great, huge, human slaughter, they were thinking about other things, they were thinking about their local soccer teams, they were thinking about all sorts of things, no one thought about that. So from the time of, and no one intended it, no one wanted this huge major conflagration. So from June 28, nearly six weeks later, even after it occurred, June 28, the days afterwards, no one thought, oh my gosh, world war one is going to happen, huge war is going to break out, no one thought that. Well, how did we get there from June 28 of 1914, this huge massive slaughter in which millions and millions, probably something on the order of 50 million men died, and just for totally pointless reasons, and here, what I want to get into one aspect that is actually very similar to what's going on right now in the war. You had a series of small actors that were acting cyber aggressively, because they have the full backstop of the world's towers. So here the bar fight analogy is perfectly appropriate. So imagine if you're in a ball, and there's some guy that's like an MMA fighter. And you know, you can kick the living fit out of you. You go up to this MMA fighter, and you literally punch him in the nose. And this family of the fire, like looks at you, and you're like, you sure you know what you're doing, and you're like, yeah, why do you have that level of confidence, because you're not the one that's actually going to do the fight, it turns out you've got four guys behind you, one as a Marine, one is Israeli Special Forces. The other is, you know, Green Grey from the Army. I mean, these guys are the baddest of badass. Even though you're kind of a beta, you got four badass houses, and they love you. They think you're hilariously funny, and even though you're kind of a gigantic, listen, you don't care because you got the backstop of these mofos right behind you. This is exactly what happens in World War One. Serbia acted super aggressively in terms of the Nationalists, so after this assassination occurred, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was very powerful in its own right, but not powerful enough to beat Russia, right, issued a series of demands to the leaders in Belgrade that they knew that Belgrade couldn't keep. Among other some of these demands were, you know, you had to obviously turn over the perpetrators. The whole series of demands, there's 10 demands that were made. Belgrade was basically like, well, there's some of them, like obviously we'll turn over the criminal, but we're just not going to do these things. So they acted hyper-aggressively to Austro-Hungary, and Austro-Hungary was saying, "Hey, well, we're going to go to war." Well, why did Belgrade feel so confident and so aggressive towards Austro-Hungary? Because they had cultural ties to the Russian Empire, which had one of the strongest militaries in the world, they knew and that they believed that the Russians would come to their aid, so they could be that small guy in the bar fight, punching above his weight, knowing they had this large body of badass soldiers in the millions who were ready to defend them. Austro-Hungary had very strong ties to the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm and to the Prussian State, which also believed that it had an interest in defending the German-speaking peoples and its ally in the Austro-Hungary state. And so Austro-Hungary acted aggressively towards Belgrade, and neither they could go to war, because they knew that if Russia attacked Belgrade, Germany would come to the aid of the Austro-Hungary. So Austro-Hungary acted very aggressively, knowing they had the back-top of the Germans. They had an alliance with Germany. Russia also had another alliance to defend against with France, and so they kind of knew, "Hey, you know, Germany's a real punch of badasses, but if we attack them, we are going to have the support of the French, because the French have pledged to defend us, because it was a formal alliance between the French and the Britain." Germany, of course, knows this. They're not dumb, and they'd been studying this for, like, 30 years. And the theorists came up with an idea that they knew, just like, you know, Napoleon or even Hitler afterwards, they knew that they couldn't win a two-front war. How do you address? That's called the Schlieffen Plan. How do you address if you can't win a two-front war? What you do is, it's kind of the World War I version of the Blitzkrieg. You've got to go to war, and you've got to quickly and decisively defeat France. Once you defeat France, all you have to do is have a hold the army there, and then you can put all of your soldiers back onto the Easter Front. And they very nearly did this in the fall of 1914. They didn't quite get to the gates of Paris, but they almost got there. Well, how can you get to France? You can either go through the Ardennes, which Hitler tried to do in World War II, or really the only path is to go down through the below-countries, Luxembourg, Holland, and Belgium. Britain comes into play and says, "Hey, even though they have no formal treaty to defend France, they've wanted the neutrality of Belgium guaranteed." So of course, there's no way that Germans could attack France without going through Belgium, and this then invites the Britons into the attack. So in summary, what led up to this conflagration within six weeks from no one thinking there would be any mass slaughter or war to be involved in one of the worst wars of all time. World War I in some ways was, I think, even worse than World War I. I don't know that it necessarily was in terms of body count, but in terms of sheer whiteness and slaughter, it was about as bad as everyone. And keep in mind that a lot of the top experts in June of 1914, no one thought it would lead to this. Well, Ira rely on the historian Richard Fogarty, and here's the quote that he gives. I think most of the people involved either thought or hoped that by saying and knowing they had the support of the rallies, they could actually avoid the war. In other words, Austria won't dare do anything to Serbia if it knows Russia's behind it, and in the Austrians think Russia won't dare do anything to know if they know the Germans will get involved. And that's partly correct, but the other flip side of that is, hey, if we attack, there's no way they're going to attack. There's no way Russia's going to attack Germany knowing that Germany is going to go to World Russia. So, in some respects, they thought they had the backing and they could act freely knowing they had the backing of these stronger powers, and so that's ultimately what happened. It was a series of trip wires, and the whole purpose of these trip wires had a good purpose. They were trying to have security in peace of the European continent, but what happened was, is each power felt that in order to enforce the treaty and especially this is true with Germany, they felt if they waited for France to win and to attack, they couldn't win a defensive war. They had to attack. All of these powers felt that if they didn't attack first, the other side would attack and they would be in a much worse situation. So very quickly, they found themselves in an area where they didn't feel that they were going to be able to win unless they acted very aggressively. The other thing, the top of the top experts in this particular timeframe were the experts in the old ways. Most of them had had military experience during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, nearly 44 years before. They did not understand the perils of modern warfare, and here we'll rely on the work of G.J. Meyer in the world I'm done, and here he talks about the machinery of death. He talks about the armies of Sarajevo in terms of what risks they knew that they were actually getting involved in. He said, the war had broken out at the end of almost a century of dizzily accelerated advances in metallurgy, chemistry, and five-decision mass production. What a moment in history with a weapon was immeasurably more advanced than even a few generations before, and the war itself accelerated everything still further. The nations involved were not only the world's military giants, but its military and industrial leaders as well. They rolled out one innovation after another, year after year. Whenever one side produced an implement of destruction that promised to tip the scales, the other side came up with something even more deadly to preserve the deadlock, and in here Meyer writes, "The armies that mustered after Sarajevo did not understand the potential of the weapons they had already possessed. Did not know the tactics they had learned in school were obsolete? The stalemate could not be broken until two things happened. The generals figured out to do with the power that the Industrial Revolution had placed in their hands, and they found solutions to such innovations as the machine gun and the submarine. They were all trained in a previous area that they had these massive amounts of technology that they did not know that they even possessed. I mean, they knew that they possessed them, but they still used tactics that they had previously learned. So a lot of these warriors, it used to be that you had the opportunity to take a line, or one of the strategies that the previous generations of military leaders would do would be the mass assault, take a position on the front line, and throw enough men at them, and it certainly will go age in the muskets. You just couldn't reload the damn things quick enough, but with the machine guns, you could unload as much as you want, and so the matter of how many men you threw up against a fortified position, it would just lead to slaughter after slaughter after slaughter after slaughter, and they had no idea that they were about ready to unleash that. And I think of, and I'll finally bring it back to the Ukraine. Ukraine is acting hyper aggressively. They're launching, think about this. And even today, they were launching rolls towards Moscow. You would never do that unless you felt you had the full backing of the United States. And so I think the situation we have here is much more like World War I than it is in World War II with a unique thing for the Palestinian World War II, and here's why. You have a small state of big, relatively speaking, but Ukraine is not a huge, it's a regional power, believe it has something on the order of 44 million people, where it ranks in terms of the economy, but not a super huge power, which is right on the western border of Russia, acting extraordinarily aggressively towards the Russian state. Now I'm not saying aggressively by defending itself, but when you're sending rockets with American names on them to Moscow, the only way you do that is you think you have the full backstop, the military backstop of the United States. You have an incoherent administration where they constantly say, "You know, Ukraine gets to decide when the war will end," which is perfectly reasonable. That's perfectly reasonable position, except for Ukraine, it's not a acceptable position for us. We need to have a clearly defined endgame. If we're supplying the money and munitions, we get to tell them what they do. The people are skeptical of why Donald Trump is going to be able to end the war, because Ukraine doesn't agree, it's just getting yanked, the military and financial support. It's that simple. Europe is too weak to fight a war. They've been dominated by a lot of total liberal limps. They need the United States. Trump knows this. He is going to be able to stop the war within 24 hours. I think that this question of, "What do you have? You have NATO." One of the problems with how they've expanded NATO is that it's creating a lot of hidden risks that none of the countries are fully really involved and they'll really know how to define or even really know what they're getting into. For example, what's assumed that Russia attacks so about 10, 15 years ago, that it's limited decision to extend NATO production to Estonia. Are you really willing to go to war with Russia? If Russia were to conquer Estonia, would you really be willing to do that? Why? Are you willing to send your son or your daughter to die if Russia goes to war in Estonia? Or it's not. You're not willing to do that because it has nothing to do. It will not affect the military or the well-being of the United States at all unless you accept this Munich argument, which is Munich is very, very in, you know, if you don't attack, if you don't protect on one border, soon it will be your border, which again, I mean, be aside about the leaders in charge of not giving shit about our own border. But that's kind of the issue here. Now the other thing related to the end of World War I, so talk a lot about the beginning of it. Look at the end of it. All these men, literally tens of millions of men died. Europe I think is still recovering demographically from the loss of men that occurred during that war. What was the result of it? It was basically a stalemate. None of the parties were really strong enough to impose its will on the other. And very shortly, the Allied powers were so devastated by that war, they just didn't have the political or military will to go to war with Germany again in the 1930s as they started breaking the treaty. So neither side really got what it loved, tens of millions of people died and they ended up nearly in the same place that they started. And that's exactly what's happening in Ukraine. At the beginning of this war, Russia conquered most of the eastern Don Vaus region and has not been able to even articulate and it's virtually changed, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men have died on both sides and the geopolitical situation is still a stalemate. Ukraine cannot support itself. Ukraine cannot continue to go on indefinitely and hundreds of thousands of men have died. And that's very similar to the outcome of near one that occurred on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month at the end of the war to end all wars. Note my sincere quote, you know, some of these particular podcasts, I have no idea how many people are listening, but I'm going to tell the table that the Ukraine situation is much more like the events leading up to World War I than the events leading up to World War II. And I think that's extraordinarily important because what led to World War I was a series of small acts when none of them really realized the consequences of the larger forces that they were triggering. And that's exactly what's happening here. I don't think we really realized how close we were to World War III. You know, if there's one errant missile, if there's one errant, you know, they were actually attacking Russian territory using weapons that have been first by the United States. What would you expect Russia to do under those circumstances? And then they had a situation where they couldn't even articulate whether it's good. I mean, what do we want, what do we want? And Russia would have collapsed and you would have had all these loose loops circulated around. That would not have been a good day. And of course, if we lost, we spent all this time, all this treasure without advancing American interests there. And then of course, the only real interest of identify was Lindsey Grant talking about taking all the minerals from Ukraine, which of course is just a new form of materialism. So I hope that we're able to learn from history. For those of you who actually are interested in history, I strongly advise you to read the world on down the story of the Great War from 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer. It's a very good book, at least you're going to have some reading. I mean, my whole point is, is when you think that you can hold a position on a place without actually doing any of you on the topic, and I'm not saying readings alone, I don't think Donald Trump does a lot of reading, but God, he has so much real world experience. I would much rather take a foreign policy class from Donald Trump or someone like him that I would some of these professors who only read is a part of the solution to wisdom and understanding, but only part of it, you also need to have that real world experience. So that's it for this episode of the Rachni Canada, like we give thanks to all the veterans that have served. We hope and pray for the wisdom of our current leaders that they can less remember the lesson of Sarajevo and avoid the false analogy to the lesson of Munich, and that our country can finally be led by competent leaders that know what the hell they're doing. And I don't know where Anthony Blinken at all learned about their foreign policy, but they are mind-blowing and competent, and they can go have a party with Victoria Newland, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and they can all give each other a reach around while they're having a good time, but these people are terrible people. They are incompetent, and they all those led us to World War III. So yes, I'm very mad at them because they have no idea what they are talking about. I hope you enjoyed this particular episode of the Rapping Cast. I'm still going to focus primarily on wellness with occasional detours in the foreign policy books, politics, things that I want to talk about, but we will continue to do a lot of really good stuff, including the offers like Take Not Un. I'm going to be doing some really good episodes on the Black Hawk War, which I think you really loves, and just a lot of really good fun stuff when you continue to use high-quality episodes, really spread the word of the Rapping Cast, and I hope you all had a dignified and wonderful veterans holiday. That's it for the Rapping Cast, and I'll tell the next time you and I see each other on the Rapping Cast.

On Veteran's Day, we remember the World War I, the War to End All Wars. For an excellent read on this topic, read A World Undone by BJ Meyer.

In this episode, I reflect on Veterans Day and the historical significance of World War I, drawing parallels to the current Ukraine war.

In particular, I explore the question: is Ukraine War more like the events following the Sarajevo Crisis of 1914 or the Munich Crisis of 1938?

I argue the former.