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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:54
I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
0:57
All right, guys.
0:58
We've got a special guest on the podcast today.
0:59
His name is Michael Walsh, so he's the author of many novels and nonfiction books, and he's
1:03
got a new book out right now called A Rage to Conquer, 12 Battles that Changed the Course
1:08
of Western History.
1:09
This is actually a follow-up book that he wrote called Last Stands.
1:13
This discussion today, we talk about the combination of these two things, but this isn't just
1:17
going to be like a history conversation, even if it was a military history conversation,
1:21
that would be interesting enough and in and of itself, but it reminded me of a conversation
1:24
I had last year with Raymond Ibrahim, where we discussed defenders of the West, and we
1:28
discussed the Crusades and the Christian defenders against Islam and things like that.
1:33
In that discussion, we didn't just talk about war tactics and things that happen hundreds
1:36
of, or sometimes in some cases, thousands of years ago.
1:39
We were talking specifically about things as it pertained to what we're living through
1:41
right now, and that is very similar to what we did with Michael Walsh.
1:45
So, we started by talking about how to become a writer and different things like that, but
1:48
then in his book, Last Stands, the thesis of that book is War is of Necessity, and by
1:54
theology, a masculine preserve.
1:56
And so, what is it about Last Stands?
1:58
Why do men fight in Last Stands?
2:00
Why do men desire Last Stands and things like that?
2:03
Why don't we want to die quietly in her bed?
2:05
Why do we want to die after a fight with an alpha wolf, which we talk about there a little
2:10
bit, I made a maybe somewhat obscure movie reference, and he actually picked up on it.
2:14
And so, we talk about that.
2:15
Why men like to fight, but then specifically why they're down with Last Stands, and then
2:20
we get into the new book, a rage to conquer, and we talk about clash wits, and Alexander
2:25
the Great, and Caesar, and Constantine, and Napoleon, and Nimitz, and Patton, and different
2:29
things like that.
2:30
And so, I asked them specifically some questions about Achilles, which is for all intents and
2:33
purposes, a fictional character, and a book of otherwise people that we know actually
2:38
existed in history, the connection between Achilles and Alexander the Great.
2:42
We got into some detail there, but then the afterword of this book, the afterword is very
2:47
interesting, because for a lot of us, we don't really read four words or afterwards, and
2:50
when I get it, you're just trying to get through to the meat of what you're reading.
2:53
But the afterword is about, it's called of the battle of 9/11.
2:57
And so, he's specifically talking about as Americans, how we have basically stopped trying
3:02
to win wars.
3:03
We're no longer looking to win wars.
3:05
We're trying to make sure that our enemy can be stable after we defeat them, as opposed
3:09
to moving for full, full defeat, right?
3:12
So as Reagan would say, you know, hey, what are you going to do against the Soviet Union?
3:15
He's like, we win, they lose, and we've kind of lost that as Americans.
3:19
And we weaved in and out of a bunch of other different subject matters.
3:21
So I really, really enjoyed my time with Michael.
3:22
So I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
3:24
So without further ado, let's get into it.
3:27
Michael Walsh, welcome to adult to life of man's podcast.
3:31
Thank you very much, Kyle.
3:32
It's a pleasure to be with you.
3:34
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
3:35
I got to say, just even in our short interaction before we got on here, I think we're going
3:38
to get along swimmingly today.
3:40
But for guys in my audience, you know, I obviously recorded an introduction.
3:44
So they kind of have an idea of who you are, but for you, you're a professional writer,
3:47
but you've been a writer for a very, very long time.
3:50
This has been your career.
3:51
You've done it in a bunch of different types of modalities and, you know, print methods
3:54
and different things like that.
3:55
So for you, let's just talk about writing at what point did you realize, okay, this writing
4:00
thing isn't just something I'm good at, but let's try to make a career out of it.
4:03
Well, I guess that's, thank you for that question.
4:06
This could play start.
4:07
I guess that was about five years old.
4:10
Okay.
4:11
Wow.
4:12
So I read very early, I was reading at two and words have been a very important part
4:18
of my life.
4:19
My mother was very influential in getting me books to read.
4:26
My father is still living.
4:28
He's 98 years old and was a career military officer in the Marine Corps and fought in
4:35
the Korean War and Vietnam War.
4:39
So we moved around a lot and I had two things that I really loved, which was reading and
4:45
playing the piano.
4:46
So I've done both of those professionally and semi professionally my whole life and I guess
4:53
I went to college at the famous Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, which seems
5:00
like an odd choice for the firstborn son of a military war hero.
5:05
But it's something I wanted to pursue and I needed better instruction than I had had
5:11
growing up sort of haphazardly as you move every two or three years.
5:15
So you always having to change teachers, change friends, change locations.
5:20
And about halfway through Eastman, I guess I decided I can do this and I can write about
5:26
music and indulge myself in both my passions simultaneously.
5:31
So right out of college, which was the end of 1971, I had a chance to join the staff
5:39
of the Rochester, New York, Democrat and Chronicle, the morning newspaper there.
5:45
And that was it.
5:47
I mean, it was just sheer dumb luck, as most people's careers are, but you pursue what
5:53
you want and you make your own luck, I think, and that's something I've preached.
5:58
I learned from my father and I preach it to all of my students as well, that luck doesn't
6:04
just happen to you, it's not a thunderbolt, it's the residue of design as one famous definition
6:10
of luck is, and you have to be ready to jump when your moment comes to jump.
6:15
So the newspaper offered me a job and I took it and it wasn't in music at all.
6:20
I was a baby police reporter when I started, which was the best way.
6:27
That's how you learn to be a journalist, you learn to be a journalist by doing the grunt
6:32
work, which always started on the night police beat.
6:36
And that's the beat that makes you grow up faster than just about anything other than
6:41
actually joining the Marine Corps and going to Camp Lejeune, where I was born, or Paris
6:46
Island or MCRD in San Diego, because you would counter life for the first time.
6:52
You counter dead people for the first time, you know, you're 21 years old and 22.
6:57
And one of my first stories was a mafia hit.
7:03
We had a fairly active mafia in Rochester in those days and it was subordinate to the
7:08
Buffalo, New York was the larger gang, but our guys casually whacked each other and in
7:13
this case, one of them got whacked and police, I was in the police bureau where you sit in
7:19
the middle of the night waiting for things to happen and the guys said, "Hey kid, you'll
7:22
move on.
7:23
You've got a fresh one."
7:24
So I hopped in my car and I drove out and there was this poor dead guy who'd been basically
7:30
blown in half with a shotgun at close range.
7:34
And that was a real wake up call, I think, because we lead sort of sheltered lives in
7:40
the United States and to see violence up close like that, it was a great story and that's
7:48
how I looked at it and that's how journalists do look at it.
7:50
It's not, "Oh, boo-hoo, the poor guy's dead."
7:52
It's, "Wow, this is a front page story and I better get my act and get the facts and
7:56
get back to the office and write this up so it's in the paper tomorrow morning by four
8:02
o'clock in the morning."
8:03
So that's what I did and I think that was a fundamental thing because as a novelist,
8:09
I've written one, two, three, six novels so far and most of them have some kind of cop
8:15
or murder or thriller aspect to them.
8:21
So it's odd, I'm an effete classical music pianist and critic and I'm also a Marine Corps
8:29
raised aficionado blood guts.
8:32
So they've come together in this new book, "Rage to Conquer."
8:36
Well, I do want to kind of connect all those dots as we work our way through because we
8:41
are here to talk about your fantastic new book, "A Rage to Conquer," which is a non-fiction
8:45
work of history, but this is actually a follow-up book to a book that you released in 2020
8:50
called "Last Stands," "Why Men Fight When All Is Lost."
8:53
Yes.
8:54
And so as we talk about that, obviously the title is, as you would expect, it's a book
8:59
about "Last Stands," but you mentioned off-air that your dad, a United States Marine Corps
9:04
legend, he fought in a last stand.
9:07
And so it would make sense that at some point in your writing career, you would take your
9:12
journalistic chops, but also your storytelling chops to tell stories about real-life "Last
9:18
Stands" and bring it to us.
9:20
But again, you didn't experience them yourself.
9:22
You mentioned you were the first born son of the United States Marine Corps veteran for
9:26
a lot of people.
9:27
They are generational Marines, right?
9:29
And so that's just not the route you took.
9:31
So did all that kind of coalesce with the writing of "Last Stands"?
9:34
Yeah, it did, except I didn't think of it until the last minute, which shows you how
9:38
bright I am.
9:40
When I conceived the book, I was really thinking of it along the lines of the Spartans at Thermopylae
9:46
Custer, of course, "Last Stands," the last stand of the British at Rarks drift in the
9:52
movie "Zulu," which is the movie "Zulu" was based on, which just celebrated its anniversary
9:58
of that battle the other day.
10:01
I chose General Grant at Shiloh, because although Grant went on to much bloodier battles than
10:08
Shiloh and much more dispositive battles, it struck me as I was reading during my research
10:16
that had Grant lost that battle.
10:19
That was it.
10:20
It was Game Over for the Union.
10:21
And we only know that in retrospect, but it was Game Over because he would have been sacked.
10:26
He was already semi-looked at his scans because he had allegedly had an alcohol problem.
10:34
He had quit the service.
10:36
He had gone into civilian life.
10:37
He had failed at that.
10:38
He had come back because the Union needed people and they needed people with army experience.
10:45
But if he had lost that battle and Sherman was his right-hand guy there, you'd never
10:50
heard what I heard of either one of those guys again.
10:54
That might have been the deciding factor in the Civil War.
10:58
It happened very early in the first year or so of the war, but it was the point where
11:03
Grant, who I admire more than almost anybody, realized, "Hey, Holy cow, this is not going
11:09
to be over in two weeks.
11:12
These guys have come to play, and so have we, and we've just fought the bloodiest battle
11:18
ever, basically, with a tremendous amount of modern firepower using 19th-century tactics,
11:26
early 19th-century tactics."
11:27
It's the moment when technology caught up to the mechanics of warfare, and neither side
11:34
really knew how to adjust to that.
11:37
First World War was similar to that, whether they were fighting in 19th-century war with
11:40
20th-century weapons.
11:42
I thought, "Well, Grant, that was a last stand for Grant."
11:45
He even knew it because they got beat real bad that first day at Shiloh, and they were
11:50
pushed all the way back to the river.
11:52
He meets with Sherman, and Sherman says, "Well, we took a hell of beating today, didn't we,
11:59
Grant?"
12:00
He says, "Yeah, but we'll get him tomorrow."
12:03
At this point, he was able to rally, and his genius for tactical warfare took over,
12:08
and the Confederate General was killed, Al-Pursud, Sidney Johnston, and they were able to push
12:13
bar guard back, and then they won, but then Grant knew at that point, he was way out on
12:20
the Western Front.
12:22
The war was really being fought in the D.C. suburbs at that point.
12:27
He realized this is going to be a half a continent, certainly, wide war.
12:31
It's going to take everything we got, and these guys are not going to give up until we
12:36
beat them decisively.
12:39
That was the genius of Grant, and the genius even more so of Sherman, who said the most
12:46
merciful way to get a war over with is to clobber them as hard and as fast as possible,
12:53
and Grant also had learned from Caesar in a way that you only offer mercy after your
13:02
enemy is totally defeated.
13:04
You don't negotiate your way out of a fight, and I think growing up in the Marines, this
13:09
was the lesson I was taught very early on, is that the fight's over when your enemy is
13:13
on the ground cannot get up again.
13:15
That's it.
13:16
That's when the fight is over, and we don't fight like that anymore, and one of the purposes
13:20
I wanted to achieve, one of my goals for last dance was to make people aware of this again.
13:28
You can't negotiate your way out of a war.
13:30
You can't fight it half heartedly.
13:32
You're either in it to win it, or you don't fight it, and America has, we'll talk about
13:37
this more later on, I'm sure Kyle, but America's forgotten that.
13:41
Anyway, as I was writing this book, I suddenly thought, "Oh, hey, Gee, I know somebody who
13:46
was in Elastan.
13:47
It's my own father who lives in Florida and who never talked about, especially the chosen
13:55
reservoir and the Battle of Sol, but he was at the Inchon landing as well.
13:59
He was in the whole first wave of the Marines, and then they got caught up by the Chinese
14:05
up the top of North Korea there at the reservoir, and were surrounded, a hundred thousand Chinese
14:11
to a couple thousand Marines and some army units on the other side of the reservoir.
14:17
And they had to essentially do the hardest thing in military lexicon, which is conduct
14:23
an organized fighting retreat.
14:26
Usually when you're in retreat, you're dead, so one of the principles of war, and this
14:31
runs, by the way, from the Greeks to today, nothing changes.
14:37
You hold the line.
14:38
If your line breaks, you lose.
14:40
That's why they keep saying hold the line.
14:42
When there's a hole in that line, you've got to plug it, or your enemy's going to come
14:45
barrel in right through, get in your rear and kill you.
14:49
So the Marines had to maintain a front while going in the other direction.
14:55
And one of them said, we were advancing in another direction, which people, civilians,
15:01
which was, by the way, the dirtiest word in my father's vocabulary, wouldn't understand
15:06
how you're reaching, you're running away.
15:09
They're not running away.
15:11
The two five survived, the Marine Corps survived, the first Marine division.
15:17
Had the Marines lost, there would be no Marine Corps today.
15:21
The Chinese goal was to annihilate the Marine Corps.
15:25
And remember, at that point, I was born in '49, so the Marines were on the bubble at
15:30
that point, right after World War II.
15:32
There was a lot of sentiment to get rid of them.
15:34
Like we don't need them anymore.
15:35
We just won the big one.
15:36
It's going to be peace forever, blah, blah, blah.
15:38
What do you need amphibious landing troops who are some of your toughest guys?
15:44
And the Marines fought hard to stay that they didn't get swallowed up by the Navy completely
15:50
and fought for their own integrity.
15:54
So that was one of the Chinese goals was we got the whole first Marine division basically
15:59
here, it wasn't that big, trapped, and we can annihilate them with enough manpower.
16:03
Well, they forgot they were fighting Marines.
16:07
So then I thought, gee, maybe that'll be the last chapter of my book.
16:11
And I went down to Florida, and I sat with them, and I just let them tell the story.
16:15
So I recorded the whole thing, and I've obviously edited it for various dramatic reasons to
16:22
let him tell the story of what it was actually like to be in a last dance.
16:26
And you know what he said?
16:29
I said, we were ever scared, which of course is a totally foreign notion to Marine officers.
16:38
And he said, no, and I said, well, he said, we went to work.
16:46
That's it.
16:47
It's a job, and you do it.
16:49
And what you learn is if you obey your training, if you follow your training, and if you don't
16:56
break, if your spirit doesn't break, you have a chance to live.
17:01
If you give up and run and throw your arms down, you're dead, man.
17:03
You're just dead.
17:04
So you might as well fight it out to the end.
17:06
And that's really the moral of last dance, is why men fight women don't, by the way.
17:11
And that's why I'm very much opposed to women in frontline combat, but that's the whole
17:16
another subject.
17:18
But men just don't run from a fight.
17:21
They don't.
17:22
And American men especially don't run from a fight and it's extremely, it's an extremely
17:27
sad commentary on our country that we haven't won a war since 1945.
17:35
So there's a lot of three points that we're going to get into in this discussion.
17:38
I just, I really appreciate the thoroughness with which you're answering this.
17:42
You know, I, I echo your sentiments about women in combat positions, frontline combat positions.
17:47
I've elucidated that quite a bit on my show.
17:49
So we don't necessarily need to, to really go into that, but to put a bow on last stands,
17:55
the thesis of the book is, as you just said, war is a, well, actually, you know, the subtitle
17:59
is why men fight when all is lost, right?
18:02
So there is this fact that men will have a last stand and they will fight to the end.
18:06
And there's a funny meme going around the internet.
18:08
I'm not sure if you've seen it or not, but, or I'd say it's a little video where it's
18:11
like how women prefer to go out and it's, you know, they're surrounded by family and
18:16
it's, you know, quiet kind of serene environment.
18:19
And then there's the, the part from, I think it's Game of Thrones where John Snow is standing
18:24
there with his sword and there's an entire, he's by himself.
18:28
And there's an entire on, oncoming, uh, cavalry, uh, heading, heading his way or cavalry heading
18:34
his way.
18:35
And that's how men prefer to go out, right?
18:37
Like in a blazer, glory are at the end of the movie, The Gray with Liam Neeson, where
18:39
it's him versus the alpha wolf.
18:42
And it's just, you mentioned that because that movie ends.
18:45
So, and agnatically and you know what's going to happen, but you know, he's won that battle
18:50
already with the wolf.
18:52
Correct.
18:53
He's already one.
18:54
If not, he's going to go out the way he wants to go.
18:57
Very very very.
18:58
That's right.
18:59
That's right.
19:00
And so, but I wonder how that attaches to your thesis, your main thesis of last dance,
19:04
which is war is a necessity of biology, or it's a, uh, necessity and biology, a masculine
19:12
preserve.
19:13
That's a quote from rage to concert to a rage to conquer war is of necessity and biology,
19:18
a masculine preserve.
19:19
Yeah.
19:20
So how does that tie into this whole concept of, of last stands and then obviously we'll
19:24
make our way into a rage to conquer, uh, well, I just wanted to make the argument for masculinity.
19:31
And this, that book came up in 2020, uh, it was right.
19:36
It came out in December of 2020, 2020, and it sold out within 72 hours, just gone.
19:42
So we missed the whole Christmas selfie season because it was such a surprise hit for the
19:47
publisher.
19:48
And we hope not to make that mistake, um, this time, um, but, uh, Trump had lost the election
19:54
and there was still the fighting over the election over the, what was it stolen?
20:00
Was it not stolen?
20:01
You know, the, the country was, uh, very agitated and it just caught the public, um, fancy that,
20:09
uh, there are some things worth fighting for.
20:12
And I don't want to litigate the 2020 election in this conversation, but, uh, uh, men needed
20:19
to hear it's okay to fight.
20:21
I mean, we've had, I, I, especially, uh, had had it up to my keister, as they say, with
20:28
the notion of toxic masculine, it's like, it's like Jack Nicholson, you're [inaudible] right.
20:34
I'm a toxic male and you want me on that wall and the girls know this.
20:40
They know this.
20:41
So it's a handful of, uh, of Herodans who, who's complained about toxic masculinity.
20:48
Let me give you an example.
20:49
I, I use this sometimes in my lectures, if you take group of men, say 10 or 12 football
20:54
team size and group of women, um, and you give them a task, because men are task oriented
21:01
women aren't, uh, and you say, okay, guys, take that hill or build that house or whatever
21:06
it is, whatever the goal is, the men will almost instantly organize themselves into
21:11
an effective platoon.
21:13
One guy's obviously the big dog.
21:14
One guy's, you know, the computer guy.
21:17
One guy is the linguist one.
21:20
You have almost a Hollywood cliche, but men just do it instinctively.
21:23
Women won't, they'll fight to see which one of them is the queen bee.
21:27
And so all of their energy will go against each other, whereas men realize the enemy
21:32
is not us.
21:33
It's those guys over there and they will organize to, um, to, to fight off whatever the thread
21:40
is.
21:41
It's just a biological fact, men are bigger and stronger and faster than most females.
21:47
And we like it that way.
21:49
I, I think the most important thing is we're not cowards.
21:52
And as we said about the Liam Neeson movie and other things, if you go out, when you're
21:57
a kid, you dream of going out in a, in a blaze of gore.
22:01
If you're that kind kid, you know, you want to die and pressing the girl while you hold
22:05
off entire regiment of screaming, whatever they are.
22:09
That's either hitting, it's either you hitting the home run to walk off the world series
22:12
or dying in battle or both.
22:13
Yeah.
22:14
That's what it is.
22:15
Really?
22:16
Yeah.
22:17
So I think that's the male animal.
22:19
And I was just tired of seeing it slagged off.
22:22
And now we're here to rage, uh, with the rage to conquer.
22:27
And in this book, I wanted to hit, um, who were the great commanders and what were their
22:33
masterpiece battles?
22:36
And all of these stories I have found from the beginning of last dance to this book.
22:41
And now they've commissioned a sequel.
22:43
There'll be a third book in this series.
22:46
Great.
22:47
Um, they all share things in common.
22:49
What you find is when you're, say, researching the battle of Alicia, which is in the new book,
22:55
it's Caesar's final battle against verse and Gatoricks and the, the Celts in the Gauls
23:01
in France, and Caesar does the famous double wall thing, puts a wall around Alicia that
23:08
he's outside the wall.
23:09
And then the other reinforcements are coming and puts a wall around himself.
23:12
So he's in a sort of double situation in which he can lose everything at any moment, but
23:17
manages to defeat a vastly larger group of ghoulish warriors, uh, for multiple reasons.
23:24
But then I realized, well, that's the same position that Beaumont of Toronto was in at
23:30
the battle of Antioch when he first besieged Antioch, then entered Antioch and then got
23:35
counterattacked by a huge Muslim army that he had to march out and defeat as Caesar did
23:43
at the, at the enemy's weakest point, the, the one advantage that people have if they're
23:49
surrounded is you don't have to beat the whole enemy, you just have to get out, right?
23:53
So you can constrain all your force on the enemy's weakest spot.
23:59
And if you win, you've busted the siege.
24:02
So, so here you have battles hundreds of years apart, thousands of years apart in some cases
24:09
where the commanders have reacted instinctively the way their predecessors did, or perhaps
24:15
they've studied the battles.
24:16
That happens later on, of course, because these battles get taught, but, you know, Napoleon
24:20
knew Caesar extremely well, he wrote a whole book about the Caesar's military abilities.
24:31
And I found that's interesting.
24:32
No matter what the technology is, these battles still connect on a tactical level.
24:39
So like anybody, any officer, you know, from Captain on up to Bird Colonel will understand
24:47
what I'm talking about, and then the generals have to know this stuff and they don't teach
24:53
it as much anymore.
24:54
I'm astonished to find out from some of my friends at the service academies and elsewhere,
25:00
you know, they're too busy with DEI and how they look in a, in a pin of four.
25:06
So, but I think, you know, things have changed, Kyle.
25:09
I mean, I've come back from five months abroad, right?
25:12
So you're a paid Trump and they hate America and they think they do anyway, they don't.
25:17
They actually all want to be us, but they don't admit it.
25:21
And having left before the election and having watched the election from Hungary, which is
25:27
a wonderful free country run by a great statesman named Orban.
25:35
And then coming back in this morning, getting up in a free country, it's like getting up
25:40
in a liberated country that we've been, we've freed ourself at least temporarily from insanity
25:47
and wokism, stupidity, aggressive nastiness, de-platforming, suppressing free speech.
25:56
I mean, all of these things in the left says, why are you guys so angry?
25:59
And I say, because you've tried to ruin our lives.
26:02
We didn't do anything to you.
26:03
We don't care about you.
26:04
We don't care if the guy wears a dress.
26:06
Just go away.
26:07
Just leave us alone.
26:08
That's all right.
26:09
We don't care, we are not the monsters of your imagination that think all these right
26:17
wing guys are out there just looking to attack and kill us and take no, we don't care.
26:23
We don't care.
26:25
What we will do is fight for what's ours and to preserve the country that we all theoretically
26:31
love.
26:33
So that's why I've written both of these books.
26:36
And I want to make it acceptable to talk about it again, the way it used to be when
26:42
I was a boy.
26:43
Hey, guys.
26:44
Real quick, as you've heard me describe before, I am incredibly conservative about the supplements
26:48
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26:49
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26:59
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28:17
Well, Michael, that's why for a lot of reasons undaunted life, a man's podcast exists.
28:22
You know, I always put on this planet by God to equipment to push back darkness.
28:25
And if we pretend like darkness isn't there, that's a problem.
28:28
And if we can't get to the darkness because we're dealing with a bunch of red tape, that's
28:31
not very good either.
28:32
We'll get to more of a discussion about America here in a second, but to talk about a race
28:36
to conquer, I want to read a quick quote from the introduction here.
28:40
To die for instead of merely to fight and kill for, this is the secret of motivation, discipline
28:44
and military success, although it is rarely if ever stated as such.
28:48
Alexander Newett asked it Caesar, Constantine, ETS, Beaumont, Napoleon, and Patton.
28:54
Let them in see you, whether charging furiously at the head of the companions confidently
28:59
swallowed in the red cloak of Caesar or strutting with the swagger stick in the ivory handled
29:03
pistolas of Patton.
29:05
As in love, so as in war, passion is one of the prime motivators.
29:09
And when a commander can get his troops to focus the order or his on his own person, victory
29:14
is often the result.
29:17
This is a book where, you know, you talk about closh wits and Alexander the Great and Caesar
29:22
and Constantine and Napoleon and Nimitz and Patton, and we're going to get into a couple
29:26
of these these folks here in just a second.
29:29
But you know, I was reminded of stories of Napoleon where, you know, men would be dying
29:33
and they would be quoted later as saying like, if only the Great Napoleon would ride over
29:39
my body on our on France's way to victory or some sort of form of that and to well adjusted
29:45
modern men or to women in general, they read that and they're like, that's insanity.
29:49
That doesn't make any sense at all, but it absolutely makes sense because I understand
29:54
the masculine heart and the masculine soul, but for you, why is equal to last stands?
29:59
Why you why now why focus on what you focused on in a rage to conquer?
30:03
Well, nobody else was doing it.
30:06
That's the funny part.
30:07
Yeah.
30:08
When I when I talked to my agent, spend my agent for a long, long time, then with the
30:12
same agency, my whole career.
30:14
And I said, I got this idea for a book called last stands, and she said, oh, there must
30:17
be million books about that.
30:18
And I said, I don't think so.
30:20
And they weren't.
30:21
I mean, it seems like a finally a $500 bill sidewalk.
30:25
And then I went to my friend, Victor Davis Hanson, who I've known for years and years
30:30
and years.
30:31
Yeah.
30:32
Victor and I were on a cruise together, I think to Hawaii, we were both speakers on a hill
30:38
scale college cruise.
30:40
And I said, here's the here's the proposal, tell me what you think of it.
30:45
And I said, I don't want you to think I'm working your side of the street now, you know,
30:48
that if you're, can I have your blessing, basically, to do this?
30:53
And Victor said, sure, why not?
30:55
And he gave me a great blurb, and he gave me a great blurb for this book as well.
30:59
And he read the thing, and I thought, well, if I can get a past Victor, I think I'm okay.
31:05
And so the book came out to this success it did, but it's simply because nobody else was
31:09
doing it.
31:10
They just weren't saying, hey, guys, it's, it's okay to be you.
31:14
It's not iron, John, it's not even what Jordan Peterson does, you know, to sort of tell young
31:21
men, it's okay to be young men.
31:23
It's, I don't think he said, okay, it's great.
31:25
It's great.
31:26
Hey, guys, you can get killed doing this.
31:28
And I know every 20 year old says, yeah, I'm totally in.
31:31
They're not afraid of this stuff.
31:33
They want a chance to shine.
31:36
And yes, young men get killed in battle and generals generally don't.
31:39
But those generals have been those young men.
31:43
Napoleon was certainly a fine soldier.
31:46
Patton was a, Patton was very seriously wounded at World War I in his butt.
31:52
So it wasn't a war wound he liked to boast about, but it was very debilitating and his
31:58
life was saved by one of his orderlies.
32:02
Constantine the Great grew up with his father was one of the Western emperors, had to fight
32:07
his way all the way down to Italy and win that great battle at the Millvian Bridge to
32:11
really reunify the Empire again, Aidsius, who most people don't know, was the last of
32:19
the great Roman generals.
32:21
It was the last great battle of the Roman legions, which were basically non-functional.
32:27
Just less a decade plus before the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.
32:33
But he had been a great warrior.
32:36
He had been a hostage.
32:38
You can't make the stuff up Aidsius who defeated Attila the Hun, yes, that Attila the Hun had
32:45
been a hostage of the Huns and he'd grown up with Attila the Hun.
32:49
This is like a movie, right?
32:51
And he had learned how the Huns fight, how they ride, how they can shoot from horseback,
32:58
so many of these stories of Western warfare against Asia, which is really the whole narrative
33:06
of our history is that, like in the Crusades, the Franks were bigger and stronger.
33:12
They had big horses, they were armored and the Turks were kind of like the American Indians
33:16
against the US cavalry.
33:18
They were fast riders, they could fight from horseback, they circled and then they ran
33:24
away real quick, so they wouldn't engage, and it was always a frustration on the part
33:30
of whether it was the Franks under a bowman did Godfrey or any of the other times the
33:37
West encountered East that they had to learn how to deal with these new tactics.
33:41
But Aidsius, he knew what Attila was going to do and he lined up his order of battle
33:47
like a chessboard.
33:48
I go into this at some length in the book because it was the best defense he could make.
33:55
And he had learned from earlier Roman history and the battle is considered to be a kind
34:00
of standoff, but actually the Romans won it because the Huns quit the next day.
34:06
They just disappeared overnight and that was the end of the Hunnish penetration all the
34:11
way into what's now basically Central France.
34:16
So you see the same stories and the same tactics and you go, there's a thread here and I want
34:22
to follow this thread all the way to the end.
34:25
So I'll pick it up again in the next book.
34:28
Okay, very good.
34:30
And so I want to pick up the thread on our discussion of a race to conquer with chapter
34:33
two where you talk about Achilles.
34:36
Now again, the subtitle of the book is 12 battles that change the course of Western history.
34:41
But you know, Achilles is a fictional character, you know, perhaps based on a real person or
34:46
a mountain nation of a bunch of real people, right, you know, could be an amalgamation
34:51
of a bunch of different people that was sensationalized over time who knows.
34:55
But just if you're skimming the title of the book and the chapter titles, you might be
34:58
a little confused by the inclusion of Achilles in there.
35:02
And so let's just let's just start our discussion there because then I want to move on to Alexander
35:06
the Great.
35:07
And there's an interesting connection between the two of them.
35:08
So why discuss Achilles?
35:10
Well, yeah, let me just back up one beat if I can, Kyle and say the first chapter is
35:15
about classmates and right, the most Americans don't know who cause this is and he is not
35:22
taught as widely even in the academies as he used to be, but he's for our listeners and
35:27
I'm sure 90% of our listeners know he was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic
35:34
Wars and was a captive of the French briefly and then went back to Berlin after Napoleon
35:43
had destroyed the Prussian army, destroyed it and wrote a series of essays which turned
35:51
into a book called On War, in which he talked about everything he learned about battle.
35:57
And one of his most famous aphorisms is, well, there's two of them.
36:03
One is the fog of war, which he never actually says, sort of like elementary, my dear Watson,
36:09
which Holmes never actually says, but fog of war, and the other is that war is diplomacy
36:18
by other means effectively.
36:20
And I read, I speak and read German, so I was reading this book in German for this project
36:29
and I noticed that it doesn't say that, the other say by other means, war is diplomacy
36:36
by other means.
36:37
He says, war is politics by other means rather not diplomacy, I've got to get this straight.
36:46
Yeah, policy is war by other means, this negotiation stuff.
36:51
He says with other means, his implication is that war is not the only thing left after
36:58
everything else fails.
37:00
What he means is that war is a tool of policy with other means, so you negotiate, but you
37:05
have war too, and if you need to, you pull the trigger on it.
37:09
So I go through Closovitz's first chapter, which is just the essential part of that book
37:16
and explain what he learned from these conflicts against one of the greatest tactical generals
37:24
who ever lived.
37:26
So that just sets the tone for the whole book, and then what comes after from Achilles to
37:30
Patton is examples of how Closovitz understood war to be.
37:37
So why Achilles?
37:38
Well, two reasons.
37:40
One is, I'm a great believer in, people don't just totally make stuff up about their origins.
37:48
They just don't, generally speaking, if you ask, if I ask you, hey, where are you born,
37:52
what'd you do?
37:53
I mean, you'd probably tell me the truth, there's something approximating the truth.
37:58
You don't say, you know, I'm actually an astronaut from outer space, or I was born in Samoa,
38:02
or was it, do you say something that's ridiculous?
38:04
Yeah.
38:05
And I don't think the Greeks made something up.
38:07
We know something happened at this battle site, which is now in Western Anatolia.
38:13
And we have these poems that have come down ascribed to the blind poet Homer, and they
38:22
are both the Odyssey and the Iliad are two foundational texts in Western storytelling
38:33
and narrative drama.
38:38
When you read the Iliad, you realize how much you think you know about it, that you don't,
38:43
which is it doesn't have the Trojan horse in it for one.
38:46
If you kind of get into the end, you say, where's the Trojan horse?
38:49
It doesn't show up.
38:51
A lot of the myths or the death of Achilles is in the Iliad, either.
38:56
He's alive at the end of this.
38:58
But what makes this poem so great to me as an artist is it's a perfect example of storytelling.
39:05
It's highly descriptive in the violence of his battles.
39:11
And yet at the end, there's the rage of Achilles, which is the famous opening line of the rage,
39:16
something muse of the rage of Achilles has finally been quenched.
39:21
And when Priam comes to take the dead body of Hector back into the walled city of Troy
39:29
for a proper funeral, Achilles allows him to do this.
39:33
So it ends on this strange note of subdued note, and it's just so perfect and so poignant.
39:41
But one of the points I wanted to make is in the battle description, there's never a clash
39:46
of forces.
39:47
It's always one-on-one.
39:49
It's a Trojan and a Greek, and they'll confront each other.
39:52
And one of the things they do is say, who are you?
39:55
I am so-and-so son of so-and-so from Saba Baba.
39:58
They give little short biographies of themselves, and then they fight, and the fight usually
40:03
lasts about two seconds, because the trick was to pierce the armor right here.
40:10
This is your weakest spot here, and this part was not covered by the armor.
40:14
So if you could gift a spear or sword into the guy there, it would finish him.
40:21
But because Homer is such a great descriptor of the end of life, you read about the earth
40:28
sucking up the blood, you read about the spirit rising, and then sinking to Hades, it is Western
40:36
warfare.
40:37
So I thought you can't just start with Caesar, which is always a temptation.
40:47
But start with Achilles, because he was obviously modeled on somebody, and this battle obviously
40:53
happened at some level, however it's changed on its way down to us.
40:59
And it lays out basic fundamentals of how we view conflict and how we talk about it.
41:04
So it was a model for me as a storyteller, and it's a model for me as a military historian,
41:09
too.
41:11
Very good.
41:12
And then in chapter three, you get into a discussion about Alexander the Great.
41:16
And there is a connection between Alexander the Great and Achilles that you can inform
41:20
us on.
41:21
But if I just stand back, because this chapter is on a 30,000 foot overview of Alexander
41:27
the Great, I mean, we get into the nitty gritty about things he did when he was 12 years old,
41:31
and he tamed a stallion and some certain things he did in battle, even with his father.
41:38
But I'm just so astonished that here we are in 2025, and we're talking about this man
41:43
that died in his early to mid 30s.
41:46
And it's not just because he has an easy to remember name, right, not because it's just
41:51
kind of a cool name.
41:52
And certainly not because of the terrible movie that was made about his life here 20
41:55
years ago or so.
41:56
Yeah, that's too bad.
41:57
So what is it about?
41:58
Yeah, it certainly was too bad.
42:01
What is it about the legacy of at least what we understand of what happened in history
42:06
with Alexander and Alexander's father for that matter, who kind of gets short into the stick
42:10
as it comes to history?
42:12
Yeah.
42:13
But what is it about him that is so enduring for history and for everybody?
42:18
Well, the connection with Achilles, of course, is Alexander was mad about the Iliad.
42:22
Alexander's private tutor was Aristotle for crying out loud, and he traveled with the
42:28
copy of the Iliad wherever he went, slept with it.
42:32
So he had memorized this poem.
42:34
And Achilles, the first thing he did when he left cross the Bosphorus and landed in what's
42:41
now Western Turkey, but was then Anatolia, was make a sacrifice to Achilles, to go to
42:47
the temple, and to I think even to touch Achilles's armor, he brought some souvenir with him.
42:58
And he felt that he was, he gradually kind of went crazy and became a god himself, but
43:06
he felt he was the lineal descendant of Achilles and that his job was to outshine the greatest
43:13
warrior in Greek history.
43:15
So Alexander, each of these chapters fairly long, because I wanted to get you into the
43:23
whole world of it, not just the battle.
43:26
I mean, I had some criticism at last stance as well, you didn't talk enough about the
43:30
actual fighting fighting itself, and there was a lot about the background in this and
43:34
that.
43:35
And I have a kind of a eclectic magpie brain and talked about what operas were based on
43:41
this particular battle, but I want you to have the whole resonant world of this.
43:46
And with Alexander, you have to start with his mother, Olympias, who's kind of a witchy
43:52
woman.
43:53
And that's one thing Oliver Stone got right in that movie with Angela and Jolie playing
43:58
that part.
43:59
His dad, who, as the Greeks, this is now after the Spartans and the Athenians and all that.
44:06
So they're on the way down and this quasi civilized group of Macedonians who spoke their own version
44:15
of Greek and really weren't even considered Greeks by the Greeks, suddenly become an informative
44:21
military power because Philip II, Alexander's dad, has reorganized the phalanx and equipped
44:31
with these extremely long spears called sarissa, and they were much more effective than the
44:39
standard Greek phalanx.
44:41
And Philip knew how to maneuver them.
44:44
So as I said in one of the two books about the phalanx, they become giant threshing machines.
44:50
It's almost a pot.
44:51
You have to flank them and come in at them at the sides because they will just roll crush
44:55
you as they move forward.
44:58
And Philip brought Alexander up to understand the principles, but here's where Alexander's
45:03
genius kicks in at the battle of I think it's Cara Nia, where Philip comes down into Greece
45:12
proper and is fighting against the Thevans and the Athenians.
45:19
He puts Alexander, Alexander's a great horseman.
45:21
He tamed the stallion, Bosephalus, who was untamed, bullets, et cetera.
45:27
And he got this teenage Alexander in charge of his cavalry.
45:30
The Greeks put cavalry on their phalanx, put the phalanx in the middle, basically.
45:34
And they had some sort of skirmishers on the front and they had backup trips in the back.
45:39
But the cavalry was largely there to protect phalanx of the phalanx as it moved forward.
45:47
And the gulf in Greek warfare was to get the cavalry in your opponent's rear and then it's
45:54
game over.
45:55
And most of these battles only last a day.
45:58
They very rarely went two or three days.
46:01
Some did.
46:02
But there's this struggle and then it's like a giant scrum and then whoever wins, that's
46:06
it with the battle.
46:07
Anyway, he's got Alexander on the left.
46:11
And Alexander is directly opposite the Theban band, which is interesting because they were
46:17
among the best warriors of the Thebans, who were a little bit outsiders to the rest of
46:24
the Greeks.
46:25
The Theban band consisted entirely of male homosexuals, so one older partner and one
46:32
younger partner.
46:34
And they were wiped out in this battle, but they were all buried together.
46:37
They found the Greeks buried them, but they buried them as partners, which I think is
46:42
a very, has a kind of modern contemporary ring to it.
46:46
But Alexander does something in that battle.
46:48
It becomes his signature, which is he comes across the battlefield diagonally.
46:55
And no one seemed to know how this they never did learn how to stop this thing.
47:01
So Philip won that and then later Philip was assassinated and as Alexander takes over,
47:07
he gets his best horsemen called the companions and they now ride with Alexander on the right.
47:13
And so every time the Greeks come up against the Persians in their war against Darius II,
47:18
there they have two flanks with Parmenian on the left, Alexander on the right and then
47:24
the main force in the middle.
47:26
But at every time, every, literally every time, there's a moment in the battle where
47:31
Alexander pulls his opponent's left flank that is Alexander's facing and on the right
47:37
away from the center and kind of faints.
47:41
And just as they make the commit to moving, he comes right across them again diagonally,
47:46
but this time from the right, smashes right through the middle and in ancient warfare,
47:52
the king Darius or whoever usually is right in the middle.
47:57
He's put his at the back of the middle supervising the fight.
48:00
Alexander comes down like a lightning bolt and glam, that's it.
48:05
And so Alexander does this to Darius twice, really three times at the Granicus and finally
48:13
at Galgomala and Darius flees twice in these three encounters.
48:22
So that was Alexander's genius is to know that he was a kinetic general and the only
48:29
one who I think can compare to him and that is Napoleon, who these guys had a preternatural
48:36
ability to tell you where their enemy was going to be half an hour from now or 10 minutes
48:43
from now, even before the enemy knows he's where he's going 10 minutes from now.
48:48
So Napoleon does it at Austrolets, Alexander does it at Galgomala, this just runs through
48:54
some of these great kinetic warriors who were experienced battlefield commanders.
48:59
Absolutely, that was one of the most interesting parts of that chapter.
49:04
But as we discussed off air, perhaps the most interesting part of this entire book for me
49:09
is the afterward and for the most part, for the most part, I will read every word of every
49:15
page of a book before I have the person on the show so I can talk intelligently and connect
49:18
this to that and connect that to all those things.
49:20
But sometimes afterwards are just kind of like, this is just kind of an add on thing
49:23
who really cares.
49:24
But it was the title of the afterward that really caught my attention and I was so glad
49:29
that it did because I ended up going through the entirety of that content, but it's called
49:33
"Of the Battle of 9/11" and so set the stage for us because we're going to have a decent
49:39
discussion about that afterward.
49:42
What would you define as the Battle of 9/11?
49:44
Well, the Battle of 9/11 is kind of a throwback to a funny, you should ask, ancient Greek
49:50
warfare or Roman warfare in that it was over in a day and the US lost and I think the most
50:03
controversial part of this book is I think that just about everything the Bush administration
50:09
did in response to that was not only useless but made the situation infinitely worse and
50:18
that we have had forever wars since then and we don't win them, we don't want to win them,
50:25
we don't choose to win them, we don't fight them with the force that we have at our disposal
50:29
because that wouldn't be sporting I suppose, that Bush reacted poorly, which I suppose
50:39
now in retrospect, you know, we all, those of us who are conservatives, obviously voted
50:44
for him over Al Gore and Kerry later on, but he didn't apply maximum force against
50:55
the enemy and the reason he didn't, possibly Cheney, who remember had been Secretary of
51:02
Defense under Gerald Ford to his Chinese dinosaur already by the time we get to 9/11
51:08
and the idea was in the post-war consensus, there are states and states fight each other,
51:16
they are the entities that go to war with each other, but when we were dealing with
51:21
bin Laden who had a real genius for this, he understood, he was protected because he
51:29
was stateless, you couldn't say let's get the Saudis for this or let's get the French
51:34
or those Japanese bomb Pearl armor, let's get Japan, the Empire, not all Japanese people,
51:40
the Empire of Japan, that's our enemy, so since bin Laden had already been effectively
51:49
expelled from Saudi, Bush's reaction was wrong because in his opinion, there was no
51:58
state against which to fight, so suddenly we picked on Afghanistan, which is, even Alexander
52:06
the Great, you know, he went through Afghanistan and then he went through Afghanistan and came
52:10
down into what's now Pakistan and India, but it's been a thorn in everybody's side
52:15
for a long time, the Brits never could quite conquer it, the Soviets couldn't conquer it,
52:19
in fact we helped bin Laden fight the Soviets back in the 80s, but it's like it's his best
52:29
friends with the Taliban until they're met on the battlefield, my opinion was you should
52:35
have eliminated the source of the antagonism which is Islam, that the only thing you can
52:44
do against an enemy, a cultural enemy, which Islam very much is, is to attack its fundamental
52:55
beliefs, so for example, you have how many Muslim states in the UN, 29, 39, there's a
53:01
lot of them, but if you take them at their word, it's one entity, it's the Uma, Islam
53:09
there is the Dara Harb of the Dara islam, so everything that's in the Dara islam is Islamic
53:16
and is one unity, one brotherhood, one Uma, it's not racial, it's purely religious, but
53:23
the Dara Harb is where they fight and we're in that, so I think that we should have taken
53:28
the word of Saudi Arabia and I think we should have neutralized Mecca and Medina and also
53:37
the Shia version is Jom Karan which is near Tehran, where they're literally sitting around
53:43
waiting for the magical 12th Emon to appear out of a well, which is where he's been living
53:50
for all these years and I think that would have, based on historical record of our war
53:58
against Islam, when they're decisively defeated, they stay quite quiet for a long time and
54:04
I think to have done something to their holiest shrines, because they certainly don't respect
54:10
ours, that would have neutralized them, but instead Bush fought a stupid war against Iraq
54:16
which had nothing to do with anything, isn't even a real country anyway, and we've paid
54:22
the price for it with allowing the terrorists to roam free, Germany's filled with them now,
54:30
there's a stabbing almost every two weeks by some Afghan, or it doesn't matter what
54:38
country it could be, so I think the point is that you're in a world where you're fighting
54:43
a stateless enemy and you have to figure out how do we fight a stateless enemy, and
54:49
do we want to fight it to the end or do we just want to keep it behind a kind of wall?
54:55
So when you look at European history, one of the last stands was the Battle of Sigetvar,
55:01
which the Hungarians and the Croatians fought against the Turks, who were marching west
55:09
into Europe, and they made a last stand at this little town in southwestern Hungary called
55:16
Sigetvar, and they all got killed, but it stopped the Turkish invasion in its tracks
55:23
and they didn't come back for more than 100 years when they then went up against Vienna,
55:27
and they were decisively defeated at Vienna, and that was the end of it, but people forget
55:32
that the fear of the Turk was terrible throughout Europe, you scared your children by saying
55:39
the Turk will come and get you, they carried off millions of European, especially women
55:44
and took them to the harems in the Islamic lands. By the middle of the late 18th century,
55:54
Mozart writes an opera called the Abduction from the Suralia, which is about a hero whose
55:58
girlfriend has been kidnapped by the Turks, and he has to go and take her away from out
56:02
of the harems. It's a comedy, so that the Turkish Islamic threat had been neutralized
56:08
at that point, and western artists could treat it in a non-threatening way, but the relentless
56:15
push of Islam to the west was only stopped in the 17th century, 16th century, and now
56:23
it's back. It's just a matter of reading history, so I think we have to really think about what
56:32
as Sean Connery says to Kevin Costner in the Untouchables, what are you prepared to do?
56:37
What are you prepared to do? When they knocked down your two biggest buildings to try to
56:41
destroy the Pentagon, that seems to me to be a casu spell eye of epic proportions to
56:46
which we did not respond in kind. I'll leave it in.
56:50
Well, and Michael, I certainly agree with that, especially as we look back, because evil
56:54
doesn't stop itself. You hear about these people to where it's like, how many times
56:58
does a mass shooter just decide, ah, that's about enough. I think I'm finished.
57:02
That doesn't really happen, but then in addition to that, this connects to something you said
57:07
earlier in our discussion, you can't negotiate with militants. You can't negotiate with belligerents.
57:13
If they are defeated, then you can negotiate with them. But if they're express written,
57:18
and on many cases, purpose is the destruction of every single one of your people, and they
57:23
will all die in the process if they want to, then that's something that we look at. I remember
57:27
reading Raymond Ebrimes, Defenders of the West, and you talk about all these, these great
57:32
heroes that defended Europe during the Crusades and different things like that. It kind of
57:36
fast forwards to something that you discussed in that afterward, which is W. Bush, uh, talking
57:42
about those acts of violence of 9/11 were, were violative of the fundamental tenets of
57:47
the Islamic faith, but if you understand abrogate, well, here's the thing, Michael, if you understand
57:52
abrogation, and if you understand that the least abrogated of all the seras in the Quran
57:57
being the ninth Surah and the ninth Surah being the most bloody and the most directive
58:01
of violence to, uh, the apostate or to the infidel, then you understand that something
58:08
like Muslim extremism is not technically correct. It's Muslim fundamentalism. And it goes to
58:13
a quote that I want to read that I thought was rather poignant from the afterward here.
58:17
Even in death, bin Laden, a savvy commander had taken the measure of his enemies. He understood
58:23
there was no longer an American flag to rally around much of the academy and the media had
58:28
long since decided that the United States was an illegitimate country invalidated by African
58:33
slavery and a legacy of quote unquote colonialism and hence unworthy of respect of allegiance.
58:39
He since that since Vietnam, the fighting spirit had gone out of the Americans, that
58:44
total victory was now considered excessive and even rude. And I think this goes back to
58:49
something that you, you talked about the beginning again is you can't defeat your enemy until
58:53
you defeat them. Like they have to be defeated. They don't have to be injured. They have to
58:58
be taken out entirely. And it seems like we've lost the stomach for that as Americans.
59:02
Well, Napoleon famously said, if your goal is to take Vienna, take Vienna. That's it.
59:11
Don't fart around with a bunch of other stuff. Do it. And we no longer, people don't understand
59:17
you obviously do and every military kid and every military guy I know does that you have
59:25
sex strategy and objective. Well, we do the first two okay, but objective we suck at because
59:32
we have no objective. The objective is let's punt the ball down the field and let the next
59:37
guy deal with it. But the Islam as you as Abraham and you are correct in saying I think
59:46
the fact it was Erdogan who said there's no radical Islam. There's only Islam. That's
59:52
it. It's got a book and that's it. He's the leader of a NATO country, believe it or not.
59:57
Believe it or not, which is ridiculous. But I say if Palestinians want to state, give us
1:00:03
Constantinople back and then we'll start to talk. But that's a whole nother subject.
1:00:07
You have to have an objective. So remember, Patton, who's one of my heroes and at the end
1:00:15
of the war, he pulls off the Battle of the Bulge, which is akin to what the Marines did,
1:00:20
except the Patton's on the attack and he suddenly turns 90 degrees to his left and brings three
1:00:25
divisions to relieve the siege of Baston. And then Ike tells him you can't go to Berlin.
1:00:30
You mentioned how frustrating that was for Patton not to go to Berlin. The objective was
1:00:35
take Berlin and kill Hitler and of war. That's it. But we had to give that to the Soviets and
1:00:41
in fairness, they had lost many, many, many millions of people in that war against Hitler.
1:00:47
Which, by the way, was between two socialist countries, but we'll just leave that for later.
1:00:54
But where is the objective? What was Bush's objective to turn them into
1:01:00
Jeffersonian democracies? Not going to happen. It's like he'd never read a book about his enemy.
1:01:07
And while we don't have enemies anymore, we just have friends we haven't met yet.
1:01:11
Whereas our enemies just have us who they haven't killed yet. And until you understand that hard,
1:01:17
cold truth, you will lose forever. You will lose. You cannot win. You've defeated yourself in both
1:01:24
feet. And I think this is what so infuriates me. And part of the reason I wrote both of these
1:01:30
books is to argue for what my hero general Grant said. Unconditional surrender. Those are my terms.
1:01:40
Unconditional surrender. Reagan, whom I met on several occasions in the White House,
1:01:46
famously asked, "What's your objective in the Cold War? We win, they lose." That's it. That's
1:01:52
what a great political leader does. You don't give them a detailed battle plan. You say,
1:01:58
"We win. Take Vienna. Capture whatever." And then you let your generals within that framework
1:02:05
of what's my objective, total victory. Okay. Do anything, whatever it takes, you do it. And why
1:02:11
we've lost that is really the subject, if I can just plug a couple more of my books, which are more
1:02:17
about philosophy and religion. The book I wrote called "The Devil's Pleasure Palace" back 10 years
1:02:23
ago, which turned out to be a very influential book in political circles, is really about
1:02:32
who we are as a people, as westerners, as Christians and Jews, of course, but mostly
1:02:40
what they used to call Christendom and what animated that civilization, how did it reach the heights
1:02:46
that it did, and why we can't let it fall apart. So, I think "The Devil's Pleasure Palace" and
1:02:55
another book called "The Firey Angel" are two in a series, and then "Last Ants and Rage" are two
1:03:01
in a series, and now I will write a third, which will address these topics of religious warfare.
1:03:07
The third book will be about religious warfare, because some of the bloodiest battles we've ever
1:03:13
seen have been religious warfare. They haven't been states fighting each other, they've been like
1:03:19
the 30 years war, which most people don't know anything about. Decimated, no, decimated, forget
1:03:25
it, killed 40% of the population of Europe in Germany, basically, when it was the new Protestants
1:03:32
against the old Catholics, and that was the bloodiest war. Civilians were, I don't want to hear about
1:03:38
civilians in Gaza. There are no civilians in warfare. The 30 years war settled that in the 16th
1:03:44
century. We're past the idea that there's any distinction meaningful. We incinerated people by
1:03:55
the hundreds of thousands in Dresden, in Hamburg, in Germany's country. I love, I speak German,
1:04:01
I raise both my children there, one of my children was born there. Berlin, I was in Berlin when the
1:04:07
wall came down. I was in the Soviet Union where Chernobyl blew up too, so I've had a kind of front
1:04:13
road, oh, and I left just before the coup against Gorbachev. So I was right there at the end of the
1:04:17
Soviet Union as well. Again, on the ground and seeing things that I didn't think the media, and I was
1:04:24
in the media at that point, I was writer for Time Magazine. I thought we were missing. I thought
1:04:30
I thought our intelligence agencies did, especially the CIA did an incredibly poor job. What have
1:04:35
they ever been right about? Honest to Pete, I came back from the Soviet Union in 1986 right after Chernobyl
1:04:44
and went on the air in New York City with a famous lefty talk show host named Lynn Samuel,
1:04:51
so it was delightful. And she had me talk about it and she said, well, what do you think? And I said,
1:04:55
I think Germany will be reunited within five years. Well, I was off by two years. It got reunited
1:05:03
three years later, because I found when I walked around and even talking to agency people,
1:05:10
they were seeing a country that wasn't there. They were looking at it through certain kinds of
1:05:16
glasses. And I could see that it was dysfunctional, it was falling apart. Everybody was breathable.
1:05:22
Every woman was a prostitute. It had lost. I came back to my basically said, and later said to
1:05:28
people in Washington too, this country has lost a war. It's like Germany in 1945. And it's beaten
1:05:37
and it's going to collapse. And it did. So I don't particularly take any credit for that insight,
1:05:44
but I was one of the few who had it. And I've tried to apply that to both last dance and rage
1:05:50
to conquer. Well, I want to read the last quote of a rage to conquer. There's the human condition
1:05:56
in a show, be prepared in mind, will soul and body, then start the battle and see what happens.
1:06:02
It's the best we can do in the end. It's all we can do. I was going to make that the end of the
1:06:06
interview. However, you just said something that triggered something in my brain. So I got one last
1:06:11
question for you. So you talked about the time period of the people group or the women to become
1:06:16
prostitutes and all the other different things. Well, I saw recently, where somewhere in the
1:06:21
neighborhood of 10% of American girls aged 18 to 25 are currently prosecuting themselves on the
1:06:27
only fans website. And so these are people wear an incredibly small amount of women make an
1:06:33
unbelievably large amount of money selling videos and pictures of themselves having sex. But then
1:06:39
you have 10% roughly, which is I think I forget what the the population number is, but it's a
1:06:45
significant amount of the population of the United States are girls that are trying to make that
1:06:51
a career that that is their career move. And a lot of these people are their college educated
1:06:56
or they're currently in college. And this is just something to where it's like, nobody wants to be
1:07:00
grow up and be president one day. Everybody wants to grow up and be an influence or whatever the
1:07:03
hell that means. And so in a way, if you go back to, you know, his name's escaping me right now,
1:07:09
but the communists, when they released that list that was read into the congressional record and
1:07:14
said, here's all the things that we're going to do to rot the United States from the inside since
1:07:18
it's way too laborious to try to attack them from either ocean, or they're north or their south,
1:07:22
where they currently have people that are okay with their presence. We're just going to rot them
1:07:26
away from the inside. And I am pessimistic by nature. And so I have to check myself a lot, Michael.
1:07:32
But I feel like we've rotted. And I don't know that a Trump presidency or even a Trump
1:07:39
into eight years of ants or something like that is enough to to undo the rot. I think we can slow
1:07:46
it. But it's kind of like what my buddy, John Cooper says, it's like, hey, Republicans are taking
1:07:50
us to hell too. It's just we're going to go a lot slower. Right. And so what are your thoughts on
1:07:55
kind of the current state of the United States, and how we will kind of go into the future for,
1:08:03
you know, future generations? Well, I'm encouraged by the election of Trump. I was in
1:08:09
that of the Trump White House during the first term on various small matters. And people speak
1:08:18
very, very highly of JD Vance, who I don't know. Four of my good friends have been appointed to
1:08:24
top top level jobs in the Trump administration. So and I know they are righteous hard, and they
1:08:31
are going to do the best they can. I think it's up to us men, Kyle. It's up to your generation. I'm
1:08:36
75. I've fought all my fights. And I enjoy my rural lifestyle in Ireland and here in New England,
1:08:44
where I am now. I think women need women are in trouble. Feminism has ruined them.
1:08:53
Somebody sent me a picture of the day showed a woman, young girl, protester wearing a Palestinian
1:09:02
kafir, whatever they call it, with a mask on holding up a sign that said horrors for Palestine.
1:09:08
And I said, this is stage feminism. And then my friend Dan Greenfield wrote to me privately and
1:09:15
said, no, end stage feminism is that girl wearing a burka holding up horrors for Palestine that we
1:09:21
have, yeah, we have misguided our women. And I mean that in, in a neutral sense, we have misguided
1:09:29
them of what we expect from them as men. People wonder why why why is a population not increasing?
1:09:35
Why are young Japanese boys not having sex? What? Why are young people not interested in even dating
1:09:42
anymore? They're why do why do women prostitute themselves on? It's it's like the old Amsterdam
1:09:49
red light district, you know, but it's on the internet and you can see at any time you want for
1:09:54
free. I think men need to regain their manliness and they need to take control of the situation
1:10:02
because I'll go back to that opening thing I mentioned. 12 men will have an objective and they
1:10:07
will get it done. 12 women will fight among each other and nothing will get done. And I didn't
1:10:11
think this up. Camille Palia, who I adore, said maybe she was left on the hands of women. We would
1:10:19
all still be living in grass huts and she's absolutely right. And that is not a slur on women. It is a
1:10:26
recognition of the different functions we have biologically, morally, physically, spiritually,
1:10:32
everything else. We work together. We're not antagonists. And that's my plea. And I think a
1:10:38
lot of young women will read this book too. This was this, let me just end by saying last
1:10:43
time was a book that was hit because women gave it to their men and said, read this. Yeah, be like
1:10:49
that guy. Be like this, Athenian women. I want to see you back here either with your shield or on
1:10:56
it or on it. Yeah, you don't come back with no weapons in your hand. That's it. Well, we need to
1:11:03
relearn that lesson. And unfortunately, we are having a hard time. But I do think there's some hope
1:11:08
for for the future. But it's up to you. I sir. Yeah, and that's why I'm glad to be in this fight.
1:11:16
I've dedicated my life to this fight. And you mentioned Camille Paglia. I mean, she was one of
1:11:20
the people that drew the lines that all of these great civilizations towards the end of their runs
1:11:25
as civilizations and as dominant hegemon's in this world, they became obsessed with sex and gender.
1:11:31
And we look at where we're at right now, and we got there a little faster than the Romans and the
1:11:36
Greeks did. But we're here nonetheless. But Michael, I've really, really enjoyed our conversation. I
1:11:40
really enjoyed digging into your work. But that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get
1:11:43
off your chest? No, I just hope people go buy the book and I hope they read it and enjoy it.
1:11:48
And I hope they'll be eager to for a third one in two years, which is what's going to get started
1:11:55
on any day now. Well, hey, you hurry up and get started. And we'll have you back on here in a
1:11:59
couple of years. Thanks, Michael, pleasure. Thank you. There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed my time
1:12:03
with Michael Walsh. But before I let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
1:12:06
Add in Dawn to life, our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that
1:12:09
forges spiritual mental and physical resilience. So I've got a link to Amazon where you can buy a
1:12:13
race to conquer. And then you can obviously go through there to look at any of his other books.
1:12:17
And I've also got a link to his entire Amazon page. So it's very, very easy to get to. I've got it
1:12:21
there for you in the show notes. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Wherever you're listening
1:12:25
to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five star review. If you want me to come
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I N F O at undonton.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website
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for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way.
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Just go to www dot undonton.life. And as always, we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing
1:12:47
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1:12:51
which is off their self titled debut album on Face Down Records. The links are in the description.
1:12:56
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness. Keep forging spiritual,
1:13:02
mental and physical resilience. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:13:26
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