Michael's Podcast Pick - The Cold War: What We Saw
The Berlin Airlift. The Korean War. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Space Race. Vietnam. Detente. Reagan. Solidarity. Gorbachev. The tales of these earth-shaking milestones have been always been told as a series of individual events, completely apart from each other. But they were not individual events; they were individual threads in the tapestry of the Apocalypse That Didn’t Happen. And because they were all part of the same ongoing story, they need to be treated that way. Check out the new 12-part podcast series, "The Cold War: What We Saw." Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you listen to podcasts!
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Back in July last year, I told you about this show, Apollo 11, What We Saw.
The host, our pal Bill Whittle, took you back in time to what it was like to live through the space age and one of the greatest endeavors of mankind, the moon landing.
And now, Bill has hosted a new season of the show, The Cold War, What We Saw.
If you are a highfalutin scholarly academic, or even just a plain old history buff, then you will want to check it out.
Bill captures what it was like to live through major events like the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Space Race.
And the story ties all of these milestones together to give us a clear picture of the apocalypse that never happened.
If you're close to my age, you weren't here for any of those events.
But the story is so well told and the setting is so brilliantly descriptive that as you go through these events, you start to understand the battle not only for economic freedom, but for civilization itself.
They've already released two episodes of this 12-part series, so you already have some to catch up on.
This is a perfect time to listen as the 2020 election starts to heat up and we can see where the left has gone full-blown communist in so many of their policies and in their language.
Take a listen to this 10-minute preview of Episode 1.
And if you like what you hear, just go to dailywire.com slash coldwar and start listening to this incredibly important story.
You can also find it on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall was torn down by the people that it had divided for three decades.
Berliners were euphoric.
They were euphoric because the Berlin Wall was not merely a wall between East and West Berlin.
It was the wall between East and West, period.
It was the division of humanity into two different camps.
And since names and labels are always changing and morphing, not to mention carrying decades of emotional baggage, let's reduce it to the most simple, emotionally neutral terms.
On one side of the wall, the eastern side, were the collectivists, who believe that society takes precedent over the person.
This collectivism was advertised as new and scientific, but the fact is that collectivism has been the default condition of humanity since humanity began.
No, the actual newcomer to this clash of visions were the individualists on the western side.
The first government in history dedicated to the idea of the individual being more worthy of protection than the state had just turned 170 years old when the 40-year conflict known as the Cold War began.
With the world in ruins after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy, these two ideologies had come into head-on conflict here in Berlin.
It quickly became evident that Soviet leaders were not interested in a free, unified Germany and were determined to induce or force the Western powers to leave Berlin.
Certainly the American and Western people do not want war, but all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights, by attempting to placate aggression.
From the East, the collectivist idea known as communism had slugged its way for mile after bloody mile, limping, then striding, and then running across Eastern Europe from the Nazi high-water mark at Stalingrad.
The individualist ideology arrived by sea, storming ashore on the beaches of Normandy and, after being staggered once or twice, was racing across Western Europe in a gasoline-fueled Red Ball Express.
Now, part of this idea was known as capitalism, but that was merely the economic system.
Politically, morally, economically, and practically, these were called the forces of freedom for the simple reason that that's what they were.
And as the collectivist nightmare known as German National Socialism wavered, collapsed, and then imploded, these two antithetical ideologies met in Berlin, for it was in Berlin, where one world war had just ended, that the next world war was about to begin.
No one felt this divide more than the defeated Germans themselves.
To them, the wall, this war of ideologies, had an immediacy not felt anywhere else.
The nation and former capital Berlin split in half one camp occupied by the armies of the Soviet Union and the others by the armies of the United States, Great Britain, and in a rather generous gesture, France.
There was nothing theoretical about the Berlin Wall.
It was cold, thick, high, and deadly, and it was a daily reminder to those on both sides of the sheer monumental luck.
The city block you lived on, determining the fate of you, your children, and their children.
No wonder they went at it with hammers and crowbars and even bare and bloody hands.
But all of us who watched it happen felt that giddy, euphoric, mind-boggling sensation that had nothing to do with living in Berlin or even in Germany.
...top story.
The Iron Curtain between East Germany and West Berlin has come tumbling down.
This has been a city physically divided for 28 years, but now it's come together, East and West, in a spontaneous outburst of emotion.
We all cried when the wall came down because with it collapsed from our shoulders the death sentence that we'd all been living under.
Because you cannot possibly understand how the world could be locked in a life and death struggle for half a century unless you can put yourself in the position of those of us who live through it or live through any part of it.
You see, when the Berlin Wall fell, it began to dawn on me like it began to dawn on all of us.
There was going to be an actual future, and despite all odds, we were going to live to see it.
And this is what we saw.
Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is...
The only answer to communism is a massive offensive.
Communism must be a system of international control and conformity.
You and I have a rendezvous with...
Never give in.
Never, never, never.
Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
From Stettine in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
If you had grown up during the Cold War like I did, then we both have something in common.
It didn't matter which side you were on because what we all shared was universal.
If you were a kid when I was a kid, the one thing you were pretty certain of is that you were never going to get to be an adult.
My dad was a hotel manager, and so I grew up in Bermuda.
That meant I never got subjected to those civil defense films that featured rows of bright-eyed American kids at their school desks who, an instant after the brilliant flash of light coming through the window, would immediately and automatically duck beneath their desks and cover their heads with school books.
You remember.
Duck and cover.
I didn't have to deal with Saturday tests of the air raid siren, and I was nearly an adult when I first saw training films that showed what to do if you were caught and I was nearly an adult when I first saw training films that showed what to do if you were caught in the open without time to get to a bomb shelter,
Now, I was old enough by that time to laugh off the absurdity of using a newspaper to protect you from the heat flash of a thermonuclear weapon, and I wasn't yet old enough to realize that wrapping yourself with a newspaper was, in fact, excellent advice, as was duck and cover.
I didn't have to deal with any of that since I was not going to American public schools in American suburbs, but rather attending British public schools while growing up in one of the last of the British colonies.
That nuclear war stuff barely registered at all.
I was on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.
It all had nothing to do with me.
Now, of course, the fact that the 20-mile-long, fishhook-shaped island that was my home at the time housed both a United States Air Force Base at one end and a United States Naval Station at the other, well, that was all far too theoretical for me.
But surely, it was not lost on my parents that if the nightmare did come true, That tiny island and everything and everyone on it would soon become radioactive dust in the upper stratosphere.
Unlike millions of other American kids back in the suburbs who, as a result of good luck or bad maybe, were not within the lethal blast radius of multiple Soviet thermonuclear warheads, those of us who grew up on a beach in Bermuda would not have had even the slimmest chance.
You know, many times a day I get asked, Bill, you suave and handsome devil, how is it that you know so much about everything?
And the answer is very simple.
I have a very high level of confidence and a very low level of awareness.
But there's some good news.
I had to spend 25 years poking around trying to get all this stuff together, and mostly I just pretty much fake it, but you won't have to.
There's a streaming service out called The Great Courses Plus.
What it is, is a bunch of unique perspectives from engaging experts in their fields on a wide range of topics.
You know, there's subjects like American presidents.
You can get one on exoplanets or travel photography, stress relief.
And with the great courses, you have the flexibility to watch them or just listen to them just about anywhere.
Just as one example, they've got a featured course out now called The Skeptic's Guide to American History.
And if you've seen what they've been doing to history in the public sector out there, it's about time somebody asked questions like, was the Cold War inevitable?
Yes, and you can get all kinds of in-depth, objective understanding about the past and how it still affects us today.
Now right now they've got a special offer.
You can get that awesome feeling of pride that I often feel, but you'll actually have earned yours if you sign up for The Great Courses Plus.
They're offering my listeners this amazing deal.
It's three months of unlimited access for just $30.
That's $10 a month.
But it's a limited time offer, so you're going to have to sign up today using my special URL. Get all the details at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash cold.
A few years ago, I met a guy who was about my age, which, to my amazement, happens to be 60.
And like me, he was an American boy growing up overseas on an island.
Only he was an Air Force brat.
The island he grew up on was Okinawa, and his father was a B-52 pilot based at Kadena Air Force Base,
