Okay, so.... as you'll have noticed, we haven't been that productive lately. We've both been going through some stuff. However, we are both still committed to the show. To tide you over while you wait for us to get our acts back together, here's a public release of an old Patreon-only bonus episode from August 2021. It's a general chat in which Daniel and Jack react to some contemporary news, and Daniel tells Jack about his visit to a museum while on his holidays. More interesting than it sounds, hopefully. Content warnings for some discussions of atrocity and war, and one satirical use of a slur (by Jack). Also, owing to technical difficulties, this episode doesn't have the absolute greatest sound, but it's perfectly listenable. The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History https://www.nuclearmuseum.org Shaun, Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go Abigail Shrier Twitter thread about gender identity paperwork. https://twitter.com/AbigailShrier/status/1431045305592545280 Becoming a patron brings access to all other bonus episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
content warnings always apply okay and uh it's which of the which bonus episode is this eight now by I think it's eight.
I think it's eight.
Yeah.
Bonus episode eight.
Welcome to bonus episode eight.
Paying customers.
God love you.
And yeah, this is the second.
I mean, hopefully I'll get this out before the end of August.
This is the second bonus episode of August, as promised, because, of course, you you didn't get one in July.
So technically the last one was your July one.
So this is your August one.
Although it looks like we are going to default on our usual quota because we probably won't get a second main episode out in August.
We're catching up, we're getting closer.
The issue is that, and I realized this as we kind of ran into the stress of the last couple months, is that All three years that we've made this podcast, we have run into scheduling problems in July and August.
Yeah.
So I tend to think maybe we just need to admit that to ourselves going forward and just like do a slightly reduced content load and just admit that that's going to happen in July and August.
I don't know.
I'm not very good at admitting problems to myself, Daniel.
This isn't my forte.
I tend to go into deep denial about things.
Yeah, no, it's true.
It's true.
I've been incredibly busy the last month or so, and Daniel has been on holiday, haven't you?
Well, the irony is that I was very busy until I went on holiday, and I very much intended to bring a microphone and to record a podcast, at least a bonus episode, while I was on vacation.
But as it turns out, when you are visiting friends and family who are not professional podcasters or semi-professional podcasters, they don't have a podcast recording studio set up where you can just go and hide in the closet and record podcasts.
It's actually a very weird thing.
That people do.
It's to have a nice quality microphone just set up all the time.
Even in this age of Zoom, it is kind of an ask to be like, hey, is there like a quiet room where I can go and record for two hours on Saturday?
No?
Okay, yeah, no.
So you don't have a room where it's lined with books, which form a sort of a makeshift soundproofing system complete with a microphone and oh, okay.
yeah but i did i did i just just to let the audience know i did do a shitload of re-listening to brett and heather yeah and various bits that will show up on the next full episode uh i have Just in case you were wondering if Daniel is in any way a well-balanced person, he spent his vacation listening to Breton Heather clips.
Talking about Ivermectin, so much Ivermectin, so much Ivermectin.
That sounds really healthy.
The Ivermectin thing has really exploded, hasn't it, since we did our Ivermectin episode.
It's all over the news now.
The cable news networks have caught wind of this and they're just doing their thing, you know, sort of wall-to-wall laughing at people who are raiding their feed stores for horse dewormer.
People who are literally shitting their own intestines out, their own intestinal linings are being removed.
Don't worry about that.
That's a rope worm.
It's fine.
You won't miss it.
It's not meant to be.
I'm genuinely not laughing because this is fucking awful.
And I don't I don't like the way this sort of this is played for laughs by by some people, you know.
Oh, yeah.
Look at the look at the dungaree wearing people taking farm animal medication, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, these people are victims, at least to the degree that, you know, I mean, you know, there is I mean, there's some nuance there.
But, you know, if you're.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of these people are white supremacists, and that's where this this ideology comes from, to one degree of consciousness of white supremacy or the other.
But yeah.
It is a complex issue, but I don't think it's funny.
Let's put it that way.
I mean, it is.
There is some humor.
I'm not going to not laugh.
So you're just going to straightforwardly say you do think it's funny.
Fine.
I think it is.
It is amusing and horrifying.
And that's so much of what we do on the show in general.
You know, actually, actually, Jack, it is funny.
That was that was your point.
That was my point.
I do.
I don't know.
It is.
Anyway, it's complicated.
I have complicated feelings about it.
It would just be really nice if they would just if they want to take the horse to warmer.
I don't think they should do that, but I just want them to take the vaccine to to get us to the point to where we all get to just live more full lives again.
That's the thing.
You know, just don't take things where there's an animal on the box.
You know, that's my.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
That would be my...
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's a lot of that.
And oh, God, Afghanistan has exploded.
And a lot of people have suddenly discovered a deep and abiding concern for the well-being of the people of Afghanistan.
They didn't have it like last week, but now they're desperately concerned.
That's correct.
If you agree with Biden pulling out of Afghanistan, then that means that you just don't care about women.
That's really what that means.
Of course, we didn't care about those women until Biden decided to pull out of Afghanistan.
Yeah, you know, we didn't care about all the women who were killed by the ordinance that the US military dropped on Afghanistan.
No, we don't care about those women, you know, just, you know, yeah, the women, you know, sold as sex slaves by the warlords of the Northern Alliance who were our allies when we invaded in the first place.
That was didn't care about that.
That was feminism.
Yeah.
This is an old, I mean, this is going to kind of link up, I think, with a little bit of what we're going to be talking about later.
But the history of Western imperialism is replete with this sudden, tearful concern for the well-being of women.
Like, you know, Richard Seymour talks in his book, The Liberal Defense of Murder, about how loads of stuff that the British Empire got up to in India was justified in In Britain by the, oh, we're so concerned about Hindu women, you know, and sati, the practice of widows being killed and stuff like that.
It's a very old refrain, very old hypocrisy, this one.
Don't you remember the Purple Fingers there, Jack?
They got to vote 20 years ago.
That's the important thing.
That's what we brought to them.
We gave them that.
They couldn't have done that on their own.
They needed us to help them.
We just feel bad.
We just feel bad for having to come there.
We felt we just feel bad.
We just feel bad for having to come there.
It's just so bad for these people, you know, so many, so many Biden liberals I've seen on my feet in the last couple of days being like, you know, you leftist didn't say anything about all the bombs that Trump dropped.
And now, now that Biden's in, you complain about a couple of terrorists being hit by a drone strike.
It's like, actually, I was complaining the whole time.
And it was liberals who cared a lot more about the civility politics of Donald Trump than about the continuing war.
Yeah, I talked about that quite a bit.
Yeah, me too.
There were a few assholes here and there who did the, well, you know, say what you like about Trump, but he hasn't started any wars.
But there were plenty of us pointing out that Trump had actually escalated the violence of the Of the American Empire to a staggering degree, particularly in Afghanistan, actually.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we did it on this podcast a couple of times.
I'm pretty sure we did once or twice.
Yeah.
So, yeah, maybe maybe US imperialism is bad, even if it comes in the in the with coded in the blue Democrat.
Yeah.
Even if there are rainbows on the bombs, it's still bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Yeah.
I don't know.
What else?
Oh, I'll tell you what I'm obsessed with at the moment.
That fucking Abigail Schreier tweet.
Did you see that?
Which one are you referring to?
Because I see a lot of them.
Exactly.
I need to narrow it down, don't I?
She tweeted, I think it was earlier today, this picture of a form That had been filled in by.
Oh, yes, I did.
I did.
Yes, I did.
Go ahead and explain it because I did.
I did see it and responded.
So please continue.
Oh, I didn't see you responded.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She she tweeted like a photograph of this form that a kid, I think she said the kid was 12 years old, had filled in at school for the school's gender support unit.
I think she called it.
Of course, you have to take everything she claims with a grain of salt.
I just love gender support.
I love gender support unit.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, particularly if you know anything about that fucking book of hers.
I haven't actually read it myself, but I've been going through Cass Aris' videos about it, as again, previously recommended on our show.
And Cass Aris just rips that fucking book to pieces.
It's, you know.
If it wasn't so venomous and awful, you'd feel sorry for the author.
I don't.
No, no, don't feel.
And I've listened to Abigail Shrier on a number of podcasts as well.
And believe me, she she deserves none of your sympathy.
No sympathy whatsoever.
Yeah.
It's just a book that just I mean, Cass Aris is quite careful in how she phrases things.
But this is a studiedly dishonest, fraudulent book, I would say.
I would use the word fraudulent.
Crackpot book.
Yeah, absolutely.
Transphobic.
And yeah, Abigail Shryer is the author of that book, so you have to take everything she says with a grain of salt.
But she claims in her tweet that this is a form filled in by a 12-year-old kid at a school which has a gender support unit.
As you say, it's quite a funny phrase.
Yeah, this is the SCSD.
I have the I have the tweet open in front of me.
The piece of paper is the SCSD gender support plan.
Confidential, right?
So confidential.
Yeah, yeah.
So we really shouldn't be seeing it at all, you know.
But this is about the fact that this kid in question is non.
I mean, I don't know if the phrase actually appears on the form, but non-binary.
Uh, they want, um, they, them pronouns, et cetera.
And, uh, this is obviously, and this, this stuff on the form, like, you know, do your parents know about your decision?
Would they be supportive?
Why haven't you told them, et cetera.
And it seems, I mean, I don't know.
I'm seems pretty great to me, to be honest, looking in the form school offers this service to this kid, you know, uh, trying to help them out.
And, uh, this has been, um, presented to Twitter by Abigail Shrier as like this scandalous
awful thing and and she's she phrases it like um you know the the mum wouldn't he or the mom i should say um wouldn't even know about this if it hadn't been for a teacher with a crisis of conscience which translated out of nazi into normal human moral language as far as i can tell means that this teacher betrayed the confidentiality of one of her students by
Basically, just completely unauthorizedly revealing the contents of a confidential form about this kid's gender that he's sharing with the school for the purposes of support in this incredibly difficult moment.
Just shared it with the parent?
Like, what gets me is just completely, just absolutely for granted.
She takes it for granted completely without offering any justification or explanation, at least in that first tweet, about why it's just obvious to her that this is an outrageous, terrible thing, that I read it and I just think, well, this looks fine to me.
I don't see the problem.
And she presents this teacher's actions as like a brave whistleblower when it's appalling.
And I just this is like preying on my mind all day.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is this is essentially, you know, if it was 20 or 30 years ago, you can imagine a similar thing with a gay child who comes out to a parent or to a counselor or to, you know, if the progressive school in that era had, you know, some support network for, you know, gay children, for queer children who, you know, were not comfortable going out and coming out and telling their parents.
There's a reason that children, even 12 year olds, don't tell their parents things about their gender identity and sexuality.
And that's generally because they can't trust their fucking parents.
And if you don't get that, you probably had parents that both loved you and were very supportive of you and never made you feel uncomfortable for anything that you felt in your life.
And I can tell you, most of us did not grow up in that kind of environment.
And certainly a child questioning their gender identity, or at least wanting to use they them pronouns, who is not, who is openly saying, I do not want to tell my parents about this.
There's a reason you don't tell the parents.
Like it's just, it's just fundamental.
And the people who believe That this is awful and horrifying are people who basically believe that children should be words of the parents and that the parents know best and they expect, I mean, this is the clear indication of Abigail Schreier's tweet thread.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm trying not to read more into this than I should be, but the clear indication is this child is just confused and the parents are going to take care of this problem and nip it in the bud and make sure that this doesn't happen anymore.
And the school will be irresponsible by indulging this child's dangerous delusions.
Right.
It's essentially... That's not what I think.
That's the assumption underlying the tweet, isn't it?
Abigail Schreier's tweets and the support for her as opposed to the school is going to lead to child abuse.
Like that's what it is.
That's what this is.
Period.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
I mean honestly like looking at this assuming that this form is real I mean we were kind of like making fun about the gender support plan and confidential or whatever but if we take this form as a real thing I agree with you I think it's good and the child clearly like is filling out the form in a way that indicates that they know what I mean these aren't like checking boxes this is you know The question is, is there a plan to come out to them?
And the answer is, frame group knows of name preference at this time and pronouns.
Like, this is someone clearly with an understanding of what they're doing and what information they're comfortable being shared with whom at any given time.
This isn't some, you know, forced into a box or something like that.
You know, this isn't like, you know, social contagion or, you know, anything like this.
This is obviously something that has been, that is thoughtful on the child's part.
Yeah.
And this is, by its appearance anyway, this is an attempt on the part of the school to ascertain how to treat this child with respect according to their identity.
As they understand it at this time, which is all that can be said of any of us, how we understand our identities at any given time.
You know, a 12-year-old might change.
That's what 12-year-olds do.
They change, et cetera.
We all do that.
They're trying to ascertain what do we call you now?
What pronouns do we use now that is respectful to you, that makes you comfortable in a place where you are supposed to be comfortable so that you can learn, right?
And they're trying to ascertain if there's anything they can do to help with this child's socialization and development, this seems like a wholly responsible thing to do.
And it's being presented like what's actually happening is the school has sort of made an appointment for the child to go to have its genitals surgically rearranged without the parent's knowledge.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, because it's always this catastrophizing with transphobes like this.
And Abigail Trier is building a very lucrative career on this kind of bullshit currently.
I think the reason it got in my head so much is just the unspoken, blithe assumption of the underlying... You can tell an awful lot about somebody from what they feel they don't have to explain.
Absolutely agreed.
I mean, it's horrifying.
I mean, to me, it's just I don't know, maybe I'm just like plugged into transphobes enough right now that this obviously it's horrifying, but it's horrifying in the way that I expect Abigail Shrier and people of her ilk to be these days.
But yeah, no, it's it's it's it's terrible.
Yeah, it's that old thing where, you know, you're not surprised, but you're shocked anyway.
Right.
Yeah, but to get on to the main subject of this one, which is going to be a loose just chat, but as we've been saying and joking around about, you've been on holiday.
And one of the things you did on your holiday, what I did on my holiday.
We're not trying to do what I did on my summer vacation as a podcast episode, but this is a little bit what I did on my summer vacation podcast episode.
We're not doing that, but we are.
We're definitely doing that.
Yeah, no, I got to visit the American Southwest for the first time and actually visited, I spent a few days in Albuquerque.
And it's a, you know, to me, there's the British person of a certain age.
The word Albuquerque just immediately conjures up like Bugs Bunny.
Burrowing underground and popping his head up and, you know, saying, oh, I took the I took the wrong left turn Albuquerque.
That's my association.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, because Albuquerque is just a fun word, right?
You know, it is.
Yeah, that's that's all it takes.
But yeah, it's one of those places that's doomed to be a punchline like Timbuktu.
Right.
Yeah, the other big cultural reference that people know is Breaking Bad is the other big one.
I've never seen it.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's the whole show is set and much of it is filmed in Albuquerque.
So yeah, if you want to know what Albuquerque looks like, that's That is what it looks like, although it is it is unspeakably gorgeous.
I mean, it really was this kind of like experience of visiting and not quite knowing, you know, like what to expect and then just kind of like seeing those mountains and seeing those those deserts and just kind of going like, well, this is the most gorgeous place I've ever seen in my entire career.
I'm sorry, I was doubting this for a moment, but yeah, no, this is clearly among the most gorgeous places that exist.
No.
And ironically, the weather, not not as bad as, you know, here here in my area.
It's been in the 90s with high humidity for the last month or so.
And there it's in the 90s, but very, very arid.
And so in comparison, it's just it's it's a walk in the park.
So, yeah, there definitely was this feeling of like, wouldn't it be nice to just stay?
I sit for my stuff.
Yeah, that's fine.
Go west, young man.
We shall see.
Anyway.
It's your manifest destinating to colonize Westwood.
Oh, I mean, I took the train out and the train.
You are an American.
You just got the genetic drive to go west wherever you are in any situation.
I just need to go commit a couple of genocides out west somewhere.
Yeah.
And then I'll be fine.
You know, no, we took we took Amtrak out because I've been like, you know, I've been getting into, I've been watching a lot of like train videos and like Amtrak videos and stuff in my copious free time.
And I, I'd always wanted to do like a cross country Amtrak trip.
And so we just decided like, okay, if we're going to go out to Albuquerque and see friends, let's take the train.
And so it's like 25 hours from Chicago to Albuquerque on the train route is called the Southwest Chief.
So many of these Amtrak routes, they have, you know, names that are derived from the names of old routes and old trains.
And, you know, it's not quite as bad as the one literally called the Empire Builder.
Welcome aboard the decapitated squaw.
Exactly, exactly.
No, but the Southwest Chief is the old name for the Santa Fe Chief line, which was an independent line from the Santa Fe Railroad.
But yeah, when Amtrak took it, they renamed it apparently.
Anyway, so we spent the day on Amtrak to get out there and then we went and saw some people and ate a lot of great food.
There's amazing food in Albuquerque and went to some museums and such.
And the one that really made me want to talk about this on the podcast was we went to the Nuclear Museum, the National Nuclear Museum in New Mexico, in Albuquerque.
And let me see, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.
New Mexico.
Now, New Mexico.
Yeah.
Why is there?
Why would there be a nuclear museum in New Mexico?
Oh, I know, it's because of Roswell.
They got it from the crashed UFO.
It sounds as if large chunks of the American West were first decimated of their Native American populations, and then those portions that were not given away as reservations largely turned into testing grounds for U.S.
military apparatus.
Yeah, it's almost as if New Mexico was the home of the nuclear project and the Manhattan Project back in the 40s.
Almost.
Actually, I think it was, wasn't it?
It was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you were joking, but it was.
Anyway, enough humor.
Yep.
And, you know, I've had long had sort of an interest in, I mean, like, if you're a science nerd and you grew up on, like, sci-fi of, like, Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, etc., all of whom, you know, were working writers talking about nuclear things in the 30s and 40s and afterwards, all of whom actually worked for, actually, like, did some testing and such for the army during World War II.
Um, and you know, something that Clark didn't.
Clark was British, obviously.
But, you know, you grew up with that kind of stuff in your childhood.
You get a natural interest in the history of nuclear energy and nuclear science.
And, you know, something that I've long kind of, you know, as a kid, I was the guy who like, I knew all the radioactive elements and had a history.
I had read books about the atomic bomb and the way that the atomic energy was generated and created and the history of the science.
Even as a young child, I had an interest in nuclear fission and fusion and the basic radioisotopes and that sort of thing.
You know, I read the two part Richard Rhodes book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Dark Sun, which is about the making of the hydrogen bomb when I was in my early 20s or something like that.
And so I've long had this interest in this kind of material.
And, you know, when we said, hey, let's go visit our friends in Albuquerque.
They've been in the South for a week or for a few days.
I was like, well, what can we do in Albuquerque?
And the immediate thing was like, oh, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is there.
Let's go.
I mean, you know, we'll spend 10 bucks in a couple of hours and go check it out.
It'll be, you know, something to do.
Right.
And I was expecting this to be tilted in a certain political direction.
I was unaware of the degree to which it would be tilted in a particular political direction.
For instance, when you drive up to the Nuclear Museum, there is a model of an atom, and the atom is actually a beryllium atom.
Um, beryllium is one of the, uh, it's a, it's a product that is used to kind of create the irradiating material that converts, um, uranium into plutonium.
There's a complicated kind of nuclear chemistry process there, but you know, so there's a, there's an atom of beryllium.
Nowhere in any of the exhibits inside the museum does it explain this process.
However, there is an extended bit of, you know, in-museum lore that describes exactly why we absolutely had to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Literally, like, the beginning, like, you walk into the museum, and first of all, it is, like, staffed by volunteers.
And by volunteers, I mean elderly military veterans.
Yeah, literally wearing like the caps of the you know, these are these are all military guys like that.
That's who was manning this thing.
The original location for the nuclear museum was actually at the Kirtland Air Force Base back in the late 60s.
And then eventually it moved a couple of times.
And now it's now it's similar on the base, but it's clearly Tilted directly in that direction towards a very hagiographic view of the US military and the Cold War.
But you walk in and you have like a few displays that are like sort of, you know, Marie Curie and, you know, Enrico Fermi and the kind of people who, you know, did the early kind of like scientific work about, you know, like kind of working out the structure of the atom, et cetera, et cetera.
And then like literally you turn the corner and suddenly it's like the Nazis were invading Europe.
They're building the bomb.
They were going to get there first.
The Nazis, which if you listen to this podcast, you know, I agree.
The Nazis are terrible.
Don't get me wrong.
Yeah, but it's certainly, you know, controversial stance.
There's absolutely no like the Nazis are going to get the bomb.
The Nazis are going to do it.
They were building it.
They were going to have it.
And so we just had to do it first.
It is absolutely pervasive.
The one thing in the museum that sort of questions this is there is some photos of Nagasaki, I think it's Nagasaki before and after, and there's this famous photo of this tricycle that was been ridden by a three-year-old boy who got knocked off of it when the blast hit.
And so this photo of the tricycle Is an exhibit in one corner of this museum.
But no extended conversation about the long-term effects of the radiation there.
No questioning of whether it was right to drop the bomb or not.
No question about how the U.S.
Building the bomb led to the Cold War and led to the excesses of the Cold War.
None of that, none of that happens.
It's all, it's completely justified.
It's, it's, it's all whitewashed.
And it's our brave military heroes going out and they just had to do this, you know, ultimately.
And it reeked of like the most obvious kind of propaganda.
And it really, like even, even the people that I was with at the museum, some of whom are not, you know, quite as, Quite as sensitive to these things as I was.
Found it disquieting.
It was quite an experience.
And then as you continue through the museum, then they cover the Cold War, of course, in the most, you know, the rescues are coming kind of way.
You know, we were just forced into this Cold War.
There's a TV in the corner showing like Red Dawn.
It wasn't quite well done, but they were showing, like, duck and cover, you know, in one of the things.
And, you know, it was, you know, the Iron Curtain speech, I think, was, you know, showing at one point, and a whole lot of, like, military hardware.
Well, this is the thing that we used, that we were going to use to launch tactical nukes in the event of, you know, Russia invading Poland or whatever.
And then you kind of keep going through and they eventually there's this whole like outdoor area where they just have like, you know, I guess they're decommissioned actual like military apparatus, but they have, you know, some missiles.
They've got, you know, a B-29 bomber and they literally have, and I'm going to send you a photo of this and you can put this in the show notes, but they literally have a mock-up of the Trinity bomb testing rig.
They literally have the Trinity bomb testing rig, a mockup of it, outside where you can just kind of go walk and look underneath and go, Oh yeah, that's the gadget there.
This is where they dropped the first bomb, because where they actually dropped the first bomb is like 20 minutes drive from where the museum is.
There was something about, and the reason I wanted to do this, and I know this is kind of unfocused, right?
But the reason I wanted to talk about this is... Hey, I'm sorry to interrupt.
Didn't they like test the bombs on Native American land?
I mean, I know it's all Native American land, basically, but...
Certainly, there was no, there was no kind of discussion of the like, sort of after 1945 bomb testing regimen.
And they tested some of them incredibly close to reservations or something like that.
Absolutely.
The original bomb, the original, the original Trinity bomb testing site was, I can't, I I don't think that was on like literally Native American land and that one was small enough in comparison to what was going to come later that it seems it's a little bit but that was that was kind of way off in the middle of nowhere.
I mean that was like this like super top secret site.
Apparently you can go visit it if you are lucky.
Two days a year they actually open that up to car traffic and you can actually go go visit that's like one day in April and one day in September or something like that.
But it's actually kind of really difficult to get out to actually get to go see the actual original site.
That's funny.
I'll let you get on, but I just want to say it sort of chimes with something.
I live in quite a rural area in the south of England, and I live near what is essentially a ghost village.
There was a village, I won't name it or give identifying information, but there was a village that was essentially, it was about 100 years ago I think, more than 100 years maybe, essentially just sort of taken over by the Ministry of Defence and all the people were chucked out and the village was kept there for training, for military training.
And every now and again you can go there, they They perform a service in the church like every year or every couple of years or something like that.
But that's the only time anybody's allowed to go there when like once a year.
The rest of the time, it's all off limits within Ministry of Defence land and it's used for training the army.
And it's this weird sort of eerie, ghostly, deserted.
I mean, I've never been there, but just knowing it's out there is kind of eerie somehow.
And it's this kind of monument to British imperialism, I feel like.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, and again, you see that all the time.
I mean, again, most cities in the US, or at least regions, have a local military base.
I lived in Huntsville, Alabama for about 10 years, and that city exists because of Operation Paperclip.
And NASA, ultimately.
Yeah.
You know, literally, like the big convention center in downtown Huntsville is Wernher von Braun Convention Center.
Like, oh yeah, yeah.
Our big convention center, it's literally named after a Nazi.
Literally named after a Nazi.
That guy that's named after shook hands with Hitler, like worked with, I don't mean like Hitler's brother or, you know, some guy named Hitler, I mean like the Hitler, like during the bad times.
Yeah, that's right.
He was an artist friend of Hitler's and then went on to build rockets.
No, no, no, he built rockets for the Nazis.
Not like when they were sharing beds in the homeless shelter in Vienna before.
No, it's when he was He was the Fuhrer, you know.
He was actually reporting to him about, oh yes, the bomb is coming on very well, sir.
Yes, that's when he shook hands with him.
Yeah, no, it was that era.
And then later on he got to be, you know, just he got to hang out with Walt Disney and do fun things, talk about space travel for kids.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, the vestiges of American empire are all over this country, but nowhere more so, I think, than as I said earlier, the Southwest, where, you know, big chunks of the land, like something like 95% of Nevada is just owned by the US, it's federal land.
It's just owned by the U.S.
government and it's used for various, you know, kind of military training, military testing.
And that's not something you sort of, you know, unless you care to look at that fact, unless you care to Google for that, that's not something that's very highly advertised.
But it's absolutely true.
People think of Nevada and think, you know, Las Vegas or Reno or, you know, kind of whatever.
But no, it's essentially a military stronghold.
That's what Nevada is.
Yeah, it's where they keep the UFOs.
Area 51, as we know.
No, that's New Mexico.
Oh, I thought it was Nevada.
No, there's a ton of... I mean, New Mexico is weird, man.
Like, there's a lot of... I was talking to... I don't think she met.
I was talking to Shan Martinez because she apparently used to live in Santa Fe.
And it's like, you should totally move out and live in Santa Fe.
You would love living in Santa Fe.
But it's filled with like, it's like one step removed from like esoteric Hitlerism all the time.
And I was like, yeah, we spent a day in Santa Fe.
And I know exactly what you mean.
It's, you know, it's, it's real, real close.
There's there's a it's, you know, they call New Mexico the land of enchantment.
And it's for a reason, trust me.
It's I mean, Michigan is basically like the state of militias.
So it's not, you know, it actually is a step above in terms of, you know, moving to a particular state.
But yeah, I mean, the vestiges of white supremacy, they live everywhere, all around us here.
Yeah, you just have to be able to open your eyes and see it.
But yeah, no.
Fabric of the country.
But yeah, you were saying about the... I just wanted to say that, like, there was this feeling, I'm not trying to kind of, I just, I was walking around outside at these, like, weapons of war.
And I was, you know, standing in that Like hearing the crunch of the gravel and I'm not trying to like overstate this or make it into something but there was something about like actually feeling the weather of New Mexico and standing on this ground where this gorgeous country And feeling like the crunch of the dirt beneath my shoes and seeing these like instruments of war that had been decommissioned.
And then like seeing the people around me, seeing like this infrastructure and these people who were proud, who were proud of what they had done, who were proud of their service, who continued to volunteer.
One of these guys was talking about the Rosenbergs and I was like, well, they were hardcore communists, of course.
So of course they had to be executed.
I mean, it's just like, Jesus Christ.
I mean, just as an aside, you know, well, duh.
Yeah, obviously.
They were traitorous communists.
There's not a more nuanced take on that.
You can't give me one?
No, there's no nuanced take here.
But you just think about the amount of human ingenuity that went into this stuff.
Like, brilliant people.
Manhattan Project was literally staffed by like, almost to a person, everyone had a Nobel Prize at that time, or would go on to win a Nobel Prize.
You know, these are the most brilliant scientists, the most brilliant people in the world at that time, some of the most brilliant people who've ever lived.
And the Millions of hours of manpower of people loading these bombs and loading these planes and learning to fly, and this giant military apparatus that was built around this idea, this idea of conflict between these nation states, and just how utterly foolhardy it all was, and it all still is in the end, and how like pointless, how much useless activity is created beyond like the blood and the
Bombs and the only enormous human cost of the people who were victims of U.S.
imperialism during this era.
Not to set that aside, not to say that that's valueless, just the amount of stuff we could have done, the things that we are now facing down this barrel of climate change, and we are facing down this barrel of all these problems that we have in this world.
And if the people who were tasked with building those bombs and manning all that and keeping all that military apparatus and keeping all this military system in place.
If they had been able to do, to spend 20% of their time doing something to help prevent climate change, we would not be here now, you know?
And it's just like, I know that that's sort of a passé thing.
I know that that's, you know, like, well, duh, war's bad.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, duh.
Who doesn't know that?
But I really did have this very powerful emotional experience just kind of like being in that environment and being in this place that was that tilted in the direction of honoring all of this and then having this like it wasn't even a revulsion I mean there was a revulsion but it was so much just a like the pointlessness of it all just struck me immediately you know.
Absolutely.
That was the feeling I had that I wanted to try to express.
And I'm sorry if I'm not expressing it very, very thoughtfully or whatever, but I really did kind of get that very strong emotional response to just being there.
Yeah, no, I know what you mean.
The waste of not just life, but the waste of human ingenuity and human talent and human ability.
Science, this incredible collective endeavor of humanity, you know, used for this purpose of destruction.
And it's traceable back to I mean, it's traceable back to imperial competition, which stems directly from the fact that we organize the world in this way, where we're organized into competing blocks, competing for resources.
Ultimately, of course, it comes back to the fact that the way we reproduce our societies is based upon profit and growth and stuff like that.
And it's so completely pointless, because if...
The things we could accomplish if we put our abilities, you know, as our collective abilities as a species to solving problems rather than causing them and providing for human needs instead of this monstrous competition.
It is staggering and depressing and upsetting.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I mean, just so destructive of the working class, right?
You know, my father served in the Air Force during Vietnam.
Yeah.
I think he joined the Air Force so that he would not be drafted into the Army.
Ultimately, you know, you see the writing on the wall and you go like, well, would I rather be in the Air Force or in the jungle?
And, you know, he chose to serve his stint where he, you know, Would be less likely to die as you know, sure.
And he, you know, he's no longer with us.
He didn't talk about it.
He didn't talk about it all that much, but he certainly never, you know, kind of took, I mean, he did serve in country, you know, for a brief time.
And there was never a sense of like him kind of lording his veteran status or anything.
In fact, he was, I think he was frankly a little bit ashamed of it, you know, of having been there and done that.
I won't speak for his motives and for his feelings, but it was obviously something that he was aware of and something that he did in his life, but once it was done, he left it behind.
I mean, you just, and even then I see what it did to his life and what, you know, how many more opportunities he might've had had he not been forced into that position.
Because this was before I was born, obviously, but I think pretty clearly he kind of suffered from some of the PTSD for the rest of his life.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
I mean, I think about my my grandfather, my my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather was in the army, but he was a chauffeur, which is fine if you can get away with it, be a chauffeur during the war.
But my maternal grandfather was a he was actually a soldier before the war broke out.
And he was God, he was all over the place.
He was in He was in Cannes.
He was, as I've talked about on Twitter, he was one of the men that went into Belsen after the Nazis basically just sort of handed Belsen over and walked out and left the Allied troops to take over the problem that they left behind them.
And my maternal grandfather was one of the few men in the regiment or squadron or whatever, who knew how to use the tank mounted flamethrowers.
So he was one of the men that burned down the huts, the prisoner huts, you know, that were lapping with typhus and God knows what else.
And there's like, there's famous footage from Belson of some of the huts being burned.
And I can't tell you that he's one of the men in the film, but he might be, because we know he did that.
And he just, He never talked about it.
He never talked about it.
And, you know, there are there are, you know, not not to be too personal, but there are there are undoubtedly things that stem from his experiences in the war that affected him and the rest of his life that affected, you know,
My family going forward, and also from my maternal great-grandfather, who was in the First World War, who came back shell-shocked, as they said back then, and was apparently just mentally and emotionally damaged for the rest of his life.
And there is a legacy to this.
There is a legacy that is felt to this day in my family, I know that.
And yeah, it is this incredible damage, even to the men that that come back.
You know, there is an incredible damage and it goes down the generations.
And this is just such a shatteringly awful thing that it's It's like we started off talking a little bit about Afghanistan and the absolute glib cynicism.
You know, you think about that poem by Siegfried Sassoon about the crowds that cheer the men who are off to war, you know, and how they just don't have a clue.
I can't remember the words, but they don't have a clue what these men are going to.
And These people that use what's happening in Afghanistan now, this dreadful situation in Afghanistan, to basically agitate to continue or restart this war, this forever war that's been going on for 20 years now.
And you think, you people, you just don't have a clue.
What you're advocating for, or you either don't have a clue, that's no excuse, because you should if you're going to advocate for it, or you know and you don't care.
And I honestly don't know which is worse.
But nobody, nobody should be banging the drum for this filthy thing.
I'm not a pacifist.
I believe that war can be necessary.
That sounds incredibly glib to just say, doesn't it?
But I mean, World War Two was probably necessary.
I mean, we can't.
I mean, you know, but even that that hides an incredible amount of, you know, why was it necessary?
How did it get to the point where it was necessary?
You know, there was.
Yeah.
Saying it was necessary depends upon sort of choosing an arbitrary point in history and sort of sticking a pin in the map of time and saying, right from here, It was necessary, you know, and why not?
Why not stick the pin in earlier and say, well, here we go.
This is this is a different story.
If you hadn't done this, that and the other.
Well, I mean, there was this just talking about Afghanistan, you know, there was the The Onion article like years and years ago, which was, you know, you know, father proud to have son serve in the same war.
You know, served in, you know, where, you know, the idea is like, oh, yes.
And now my son is going to go off and fight the same conflict.
And then there was literally a piece a year ago that did exactly that, like a legitimate piece of news.
It seems to be the same generation served, like the son was conceived after the father came back and went on to serve in the same war.
And it's like, yeah, no, this is how inspiring.
Yeah.
We live in a very messed up world.
And of course, the people who go on to be, at least in this country, a lot of the people who go on to serve in the military are people with no options to move ahead in their life otherwise, or people who come from largely, you know, impoverished backgrounds and impoverished, you know, history, who want to go to college.
And the only way to get the only way to get it paid for is to go and serve the empire for a few years and hope you live through it.
And that's, you know, and it's hard to it's hard to You know, I know people who served in the military.
I know people who proudly served in the military who do not agree with my politics, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, and, you know, there's a it's it's complicated, but there is a, you know, a lot of people go in believing, you know, I'm serving my country.
This is keeping America safe from terrorists or whatever.
And, you know, once they're there, they, you know, a lot of them realize what's really going on.
And it's just true that like military veterans are some of the strongest You know, left-wing voices, you know, when they come out.
Some of them come because they see up close what Empire actually does, right?
I can't say that about my grandfather that I was talking about.
He was a flawed man.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah, certainly not my father either.
I wasn't trying to make that.
No, no, no, no.
He was a flawed man in many ways, and he had attitudes that I found and continue to find disgusting.
But he was, you know, in obviously his different time and context, he was one of those people that joined the military because he didn't have other options, you know.
And he found himself at one point, you know, upside down in a tank for days with a corpse, you know, and walking into Belsen and seeing the people in there.
And he came back from that because he joined the army As a young man, and that was the best option for him in life.
There was nothing else.
And yeah, it's not my story to tell.
I won't say anything identifying.
I won't name anybody.
And I'm quite certain the person involved doesn't share my views about these things.
But I have had contact with somebody whose partner went to the war in Afghanistan as a soldier and came back with drastic life-changing injuries and I don't know.
To see the horrific bomb attack in Kabul the other day, and to see the cover of the Daily Fucking Mail in this country, and to see their headline, what is it?
The Tragic Consequences of Surrender.
What the fuck is the matter with you people?
Trying to twist this into surrender.
No, no, we've got to stay.
We've got to stay because, you know, we just stay there another 20 years.
Well, and all the, you know, like, well, we're still in Korea.
We're still in Japan.
We're still in all these other places.
Why can't we just be in Afghanistan for another 50 years?
And it's just like...
Suddenly the American empire will develop an interest into helping Afghanistan to become a thriving, democratic, independent society that isn't based on theft and gangsterism.
And one of the most disgusting things is this chatter about how, oh, well, you know, what can we do?
The people of Afghanistan don't want to defend their new society.
They're happy for the Taliban.
Well, and what the Nazis are saying, they're like cheering on the Taliban at this point, you know, because like, well, they don't like gay people in their society.
And they're just, you know, this is these are the actual, you know, actually positive government.
The government that the people want is the Taliban.
And, you know, like, hey, I mean, you know, even to the degree that's true, that just speaks to how terrifying the U.S.
occupation has been.
Right.
You know.
People aren't going to go on the streets and fight to the death for a corrupt, you know, foreign controlled kleptocracy, you know?
Right.
And like, it's like, well, we put so many trillions of dollars into the Afghan military and they can't stand up for themselves.
And that just shows like what losers they always were.
All right.
And it's like, no, all those trillions of dollars, they were Burned in a pit in Bagram because, you know, whenever a Humvee got a flat tire, they'd replace the entire Humvee and just burn the thing, just burn everything to ashes.
Yeah.
That money was literally burned in a pit to the degree that money makes sense on that level to begin with.
But this was Halliburton feeding money into itself from the public coffers.
Yeah, Eric Prince got it all.
Our tax dollars did not go to educating Afghan women.
Our tax dollars didn't go to making a more liberated society in Afghanistan.
Our dollars, our tax dollars literally went to be burned in a pit to fund Eric Prince and Dick Cheney.
That's what was happening in Afghanistan for the last 20 years.
It's just a giant flaming pit throwing money into it.
Yeah, that's what we were doing.
Like, that's it.
And the American political system is just this merry-go-round that alternates between the insane party whose job is to just say to American capital, Yeah, feed on yourself and everything else around you.
Go ahead, go crazy, eat whatever you want.
And the party whose job is to step in every now and again and say, no, no, calm down.
Stop that.
Stop literally soaring quite as fast, soaring the branch that you're sitting on.
So American capital kind of doesn't absolutely implode or, you know, self-devour every eight years and then, you know, give way to the insane party that says, yeah, go on again after a while.
That's, you know, and the American empire is entering a period of retrenchment and because it's contracting, because it's encountering serious Long running crises and this, you know, Biden is just in touch with reality enough to say, yeah, actually, we have to we have to do a bit of a Hadrian here.
We have to retreat within our borders and and dig a bit of a hole for a bit.
You know, that's what This has nothing to do with whether people in Afghanistan, you know, have or want democracy.
You know, if you actually think that any of this is motivated to any meaningful degree by considerations like that, then you're living in a fucking fantasy world.
Can you hear the cat?
I can hear the cat, yes.
She got left alone for a few days, and now she is very insistent that she gets... that is like a floor above me and probably 20 feet away.
That's how loud she's been crying the entire time.
Anyway, listeners, please know I do not torment my cat, I promise.
She was well cared for while I was gone, but she definitely missed the attention.
I don't know.
I feel like that's an episode, right?
Yeah, no, I didn't even get to talk about the The Imperial War Museum.
Yeah.
I mean, if you've got things to say, you know, please go, please go on.
I mean, we can, we can keep going.
I mean, certainly we owe the audience a little bit of content here.
I feel like we, we spent like the last bonus episode, just kind of talking about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we're continuing to do it, but it is like, it is relevant here, right?
Like the questions of, you know, the, the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in, you know, Quote-unquote Western democracies than the United States in particular is intimately connected to the history of empire and ultimately the failures of that empire to maintain any kind of legitimacy and the American government to
Maintain legitimacy in the eyes of its voters, partly because we continue to expend resources towards empire with no kind of will to wear what the people actually want with it, you know?
And Nazis jump in and say, well, we're the true anti-war people.
We're the true anti-war perspective because No one else is sort of asking the questions of like, well, what do the people want?
What do the people get out of this?
And when like mainstream liberals tend to support the things that Biden does when Biden does them, because it's our team and don't actually have a principled, you know, resistance to the imperial war project, but merely a sort of a process oriented one.
We can go into Iraq, but we have to have a coalition.
We have to, the UN has to do this.
You know, we didn't check the right boxes to do our imperialism.
That's the answer that the Democrats give, you know.
And there's been so much conversation, good conversation, which I've participated in a bit on Twitter, of like, what did the years, like the people, the younger people listening to this, like the 25 year olds listening to this, have no clue what the years between like 2001 and 2006 were just like.
You know, in terms of any opposition to the war machine and you're like this, like Pinko Kami is going to come and destroy the world, you know, kind of thing.
I mean, I am a Pinko Kami now, but I wasn't then.
He's a pinko commie now listeners, largely because of me.
I mean, you push me in the right direction.
Let's put it that way.
You push me in the right direction.
The man thinks for himself.
Don't worry.
I'm not claiming otherwise.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
I have Jack's hand up my ass and it's not giving me ivermectin treatments.
Yeah, it's nothing to do with politics, though.
That's just the private stuff.
Anyway, continue.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've seen some of this discourse as well, this trying to get people to understand what it was like in the aftermath of 9-11.
It really was.
I mean, it was it was unhinged.
It was hysterical.
And you hear there was the tweet from somebody.
It was like, you know, every American life lost in Afghanistan, we should we should destroy an Afghan city or something.
And it's people on Twitter are like, what the fuck?
And somebody responded to that with.
Yeah, this was basically everybody all the time in 2002, you know.
It was just it was everywhere.
It was absolutely every fucking TV drama was about Muslim terrorists.
And you I mean, it sounds a weird thing to say because we had literally the world's biggest anti-war movement.
I mean, it was It was relatively brief in real terms, but millions upon millions of people around the world organized and marched against the invasion of Iraq.
Not so much against the invasion of Afghanistan, I'm afraid.
I was against it, but a lot of people weren't.
Most people were in favor.
In Britain and America at the time, although again, largely through media misinformation.
But even in the face of a massive media mobilization to manufacture consent, to use that phrase, millions of people around the world resisted the drive to war, the drive to invasion, I should say.
I hate it when people call it the Iraq War.
It wasn't a war, it was an invasion.
And yet, In just vast swathes of the conversation, in vast swathes of the culture, which was still in some respect a monoculture back then as well, before the internet had really fragmented cultural reality the way it has now, it was just absolutely hegemonic, this hysterical, unhinged, paranoid, Islamophobic drive to aggression.
I mean, it wasn't forbidden, you could do it, but it would be met with instant hysterical condemnation from almost all quarters.
You know, probably the best media organisation on the planet when it comes to this was the BBC, and the BBC was fucking awful.
The BBC was completely behind the British political establishment.
Although, funnily enough, the last bonus we talked about was in the loop.
Which was a riff on the disagreement that opened up between the British government and the BBC at the time about the BBC reporting about the doctoring of the dossiers, you know, the Dodgy Dossier and everything.
But even that was after the war and the criticism of the government was comparatively very mild.
And the government's response was just hysterical and the BBC's own response to it was to realise that it had gone too far and to instantly, well not instantly, but to most of an extent just capitulate and institutionally change itself to be even more slavishly lapdogish and obedient to the government line on On imperialism.
So this is the long-term cultural effect of this.
It's not something that kind of happened and then passed.
It was assimilated, and it became the new normal.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, my favorite, like, anecdote or just, like, reference point for, you know, just how terrible the media environment was at that time was the show 24.
Oh yeah.
Which literally existed as cultural defense of torture of brown people.
That's what 24 was, to the degree that was literally cited in Supreme Court decisions around the time.
Yeah, it was the most depraved, paranoid Fox News fantasy imaginable.
And it was primetime entertainment watched by millions.
And we've got, and just to kind of bring it back to, you know, kind of the Cold War and the nuclear era and that sort of thing.
I mean, I think it's worth, you know, now, It's almost like we, there is this kind of cultural memory of nostalgia for some of that stuff that even sort of the satirical versions of, you know, like kind of the duck and cover stuff and the fallout shelters, et cetera.
It's become like genre furniture to a degree.
And it's become this kind of cultural referent and it's become something that sort of, it happened in the past.
It's disconnected from our current reality.
It's disconnected from kind of who we are and we can laugh and joke about it and we can make commentary on it because it's not really a part of who we are now the way it used to be.
But there's a clear through line between imperialism of the atomic age, the imperialism of the Cold War, And the current, you know, global war on terror, you know, the kind of the floundering end of the global war on terror stuff that's going on now.
And there is this, you know, are we going to look back on, you know, 2003 era, you know, very serious dramas is, you know, is that going to, are we going to, you know, have like 24 Like, you know, is that going to become part of our future cultural furniture, where we just turn it all into a joke and turn it into this era?
I mean, I don't think it's visually distinctive in the way that the 50s and 60s, you know, the kind of atomic age stuff is.
So, you know, maybe not.
It is just I don't know like it's it's just I don't know again we did this in the last episode I promise we won't keep doing this but there is this thing of just getting older and having watched this happen for 20 years and just realizing that like it never changes it is never going to stop until we make it stop that's just the reality of it yeah and I think that that's the thing that I sort of like hit
Again, standing there, I mean, I was rereading a bit of Richard Roth's, I found a PDF of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and chapter 14 is called Physics in Desert Country.
And this was from a Robert Oppenheimer who ended up, who was, you know, kind of a bit of a leftist in his early days, and who was kind of foisted out of government jobs after World War II, in part because of his kind of leftist history.
But he was a thoughtful man, not a pacifist, but certainly, you know, someone with left leanings, certainly someone with sort of peaceful leanings, who believed that he kind of had to do this thing of joining the Manhattan Project and ultimately running the Manhattan Project.
He was the person who ran the thing.
He was the one man without a Nobel Prize among all the other people doing the other groundbreaking scientific work.
But one of the phrases that I remember was that he's, you know, he came to work in New Mexico and he came to work for the Manhattan Project.
And he had said that his two great loves of his life were physics and desert country.
And this would allow him to, doing this work would allow him to combine those two great loves.
And I think that, again, kind of standing there and kind of seeing this in that moment, Physics in desert country was kind of what I what my brain kept coming back to over and over again was that, that like, it's hard to call it naivete, right?
It's hard to call it like, like, how many, you know, if we if I was in that situation myself, And I had technical expertise that was absolutely required by the United States government to combat a real threat, you know, a real, a real war that needs to, that we need to fight, that has to, we have to, you know, defeat this, this other imperial threat.
How easy it would be to be convinced to build this terrible thing because The real fear that the other side is going to get it first.
Like, and I mean, you know, like that people made reasonable decisions in the sense that they could, they made reasonable decisions in the moment that even they knew were going to lead to terrible outcomes, but did it anyway.
Like, that's the thing that I kind of keep coming back to.
And of course, there are people like Edward Teller, who was like, just build the bombs bigger.
He becomes he was a super right wing shithead who ends up being the father of the hydrogen bomb and hydrogen bomb largely exists because Edward Teller made it exist.
Fuck Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer.
You get some.
I'm going to give you I'm going to give you a little bit of credit, like better than Edward Teller by a country mile.
Yeah, a couple of pieces of media sort of returned to me.
The first is the sort of the opening act of the rubbish fourth Indiana Jones movie, you know, that Harrison Ford made when he was an old guy.
And it's set kind of in the middle of a nuclear test.
And I think it's in New Mexico and sort of Indiana Jones escapes from the nuclear bomb by climbing inside a fridge, which, of course, is very scientifically plausible.
But yeah, that kind of makes me think of what you were saying before about the, you know, the cultural representation of this being just so cuddly and just a part of the furniture of the culture.
And yeah, that's what's happened.
And that is what's going to happen to To the horrors of the war on terror.
I think it already has happened.
The production of cultural amnesia has already started and it's definitely happened re the atomic bomb and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the other piece of media that I remember is incredibly formative to me.
I saw it when I was very young and it's This has stayed with me my entire life.
It's still one of those key things, both the television series and the book, The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski.
And there's an episode where Bronowski talks, and it's a chapter in the book, where he talks about the development of the This is kind of what I was talking about before, you know, with science as this great collective project, because this is one of Bronowski's things.
He talks about science as a great collective social and artistic project of humanity.
And one of the chapter episodes is about Nuclear physics, you know, the development of nuclear science, quantum theory, etc, etc.
And it culminates in the story of the development of the atomic bomb and its use as a weapon against these largely civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And Bronowski tells it through the story of Leo Szilard.
Who of course was one of the men that worked on the Manhattan Project and he was the co-signatory with Albert Einstein of the letter to FDR urging him to set about the creation of an atomic bomb because they were worried that the Nazis were going to have it and of course then you have the issue of the why didn't the Nazis end up with it and Werner Heisenberg and
All that stuff, you know, it's now pretty well established that Werner Heisenberg wasn't a secret pacifist anti-Nazi who was deliberately sabotaging his own research.
He just made a mistake, you know.
And yeah, so the Nazis were on course to get the nuclear bomb.
And just to be clear about it, you know, why did all those Jewish scientists come to the United States instead of working in Germany?
Gee, why did that happen?
I wonder.
Absolutely.
Why were the Jewish scientists in particular very determined to not let Nazi Germany get the bomb?
Well, you've got to wonder, don't you?
Well, it was their Jewish science that they were, their degenerate Jewish science, they were pushing it on the Americans, controlling the Americans.
Oh, it's not even funny.
But you still hear that.
You still hear that in places where, you know, the Nazis, the Nazis I listen to like there was an episode of the Daily Show where they started talking about like quantum theory isn't real.
It's all just like created by Jews and it's all relativistic.
And then the next episode, they get apparently a bunch of emails from like their fans who are actually physicists who are like, oh, no, no, quantum theory is definitely real.
Like, yeah, no, yeah, no, it's it.
It was created by Jews.
It's totally real.
It's absolutely.
Sometimes this work is good to me.
They get enough emails they had to, like, retract.
Jesus Christ.
Sometimes this work is good to me.
Yeah, sometimes you can have a sick laugh in the dark.
But, yeah, it's incredibly moving, the way Bronowski talks about Zellard and...
And he connects it to other...
Other actor who connects Hiroshima and Nagasaki directly to Auschwitz, you know, as acts of dehumanization.
And yeah, I think I didn't get to talk about I think we've got an episode here.
Maybe I'll talk about the my experiences at the Imperial War Museum in London another time.
That could be an episode in itself, maybe combined with something else.
But yeah, that was one of the things I was going to touch upon the way We pay so much attention to some horrors of history and others are just normalized and neutralized and decontextualized into kind of this mush that we can't understand very studiedly.
Well, no, I mean, I would just I would just finish off.
I haven't read the Baranovsky, although I'm aware of it.
One of the things that is really clear in the Rhodes book, and in terms of like studying the history of, you know, atomic theory and quantum theory, and even going back to, you know, sort of the origins of organic chemistry, you know, these are all These are all basically, you know, again, German Jews developing all of this science from the beginning.
And, you know, like it all, you know, organic chemistry, like the fixation of nitrogen, both leads to fertilizers, which are now used to feed something like 1% of all of the energy produced on the planet.
It was used in the fixation of nitrogen, which is used to create fertilizer, which is used to feed people.
That's just true.
That's just something that is true about the world in which you and I live.
The other thing that it led directly to was dynamite and explosives and World War I.
Right.
Um, you know, it was it was it was kind of one in the same.
And the fact that these like Tweedy academics kind of working in the working with these kind of weird compounds and doing what is really very abstract work in terms of like understanding like How atoms are arranged to create molecules and how the internal workings of the atom, you know, how electrons orbit the nucleus and even the existence of the nucleus and the, you know, like that whole process is this very, like, abstract theoretical work, which then
Because it feeds into this war machine gets you suddenly it gets like massively funded.
And so the very real scientific advance, the very real understanding of the world, which has benefited all of us in terms of like, you know, I know, the complicated feelings about nuclear power, nuclear power done properly is, is pretty much another good, you know, Nuclear waste is a problem.
We can deal with that problem much more than we can deal with the problems of climate change from, like, fossil fuels.
Let's just put it that way.
I am a pro-nuclear power kind of guy.
You know, done properly.
Done properly.
Let me be clear about that.
Sans the profit motive.
Right.
You know, if it's actually being used to like service humanity, nuclear power can be can be very, very good for us.
Yes, we should be doing more of it.
And, you know, like radiation therapy and all kind of like, we got very real positive things from this science that was funded that we that we got like 100 or 150 years earlier, because you had an imperial war machine that needed it to incinerate.
Millions of people.
And that's just the reality of it.
So you had a good holiday then?
I had a good holiday.
I did not enjoy that museum.
I did not enjoy that museum.
The hot air balloon museum was much better.
I enjoyed that much more.
Go check that out.
And Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.
Actually, hot air balloons have been used to drop bombs on people.
So, yeah, well, there is that.
I agree with that.
That museum was quite good, though, because you can't enjoy hot air balloons either.
Officially, you're not allowed.
It acknowledged that reality and also placed the rest of it into context.
Had the Nuclear Museum discussed the issues in a more balanced context, I would have enjoyed the museum.
It was just so relentlessly one-sided, and that was the thing that really, really depressed me.
You know, that's where we are.
Yeah, well, as I said, I didn't really get into it, but it's not all that different in the Imperial War Museum in London.
They have like this exhibit about, you know, Fat Boy or whatever he's called, one of the bombs.
And, you know, they have like the The information panels on the side, you know, and there's this description of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that's phrased in this very careful, very neutral language.
It's in the passive voice, you know, the bomb was dropped on, you know, stuff like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's loads of Cold War blather around it that kind of makes it doesn't, you know, it doesn't actually depart from the facts in the text, but the way it's worded, if you weren't paying attention, you'd walk away thinking, yeah, that was kind of the Russians fault, wasn't it?
That we had to do that or something?
Highly recommend the Sean video about the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Oh, yeah, I haven't watched that yet.
Is that good?
It is.
I mean, I don't I don't know that.
I don't know that history as well as I know some of the other history.
But, you know, Sean unequivocally comes to the opinion that that the bomb did not have to be dropped and goes through a lot of a lot of relevant history.
So, you know, other others may know that history better and can kind of point out the flaws.
But I quite enjoyed that video.
So.
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm fairly convinced of that already.
I'm pretty sure I've read a book about that in the past.
I can't remember what it was called, but yeah, I must check that out because Sean's pretty reliably good.
All right.
That's it.
We have an episode.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd like to come back to the question of museums, because I do find museums interesting.
And I do have stuff to say about, as I say, the Imperial War Museum, as I do about various museums.
Actually, I could talk probably about the the Natural History Museum in London as well, fairly interestingly.
So if we can find a way to I've been to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
That was many years ago now.
Natural history museums obviously have their own biases in particular ways.
We could definitely talk about museums.
The weird thing is, like, I feel like the Natural History Museum is kind of even more like this unintentional document of British imperialism than the Imperial War Museum is.
Weirdly.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, no, no, I completely, I completely believe you.
You know, just, How many exhibits and where they came from and, you know, how things are described.
And I mean, I'm even just like science museums tend to tend to run into this, you know, the kind of whitewashing of the of the history and the reality of it.
And, you know, you haven't lived.
There was there was like a little kid's corner version of the nuclear museum was like, you too can be an imperial war assassin or whatever.
It's like, oh, my God.
It wasn't quite that bad, but it was like, you know, come in and look at Einstein and you can, you know, play with the little things and like how atoms work and just looking at it and going like, oh my God.
See if you can split this up.
See if you can see if you can see if you can see the propaganda at work.
Yeah.
Lots of little lots of little, you know, figures of Japanese people and you can knock them over.
It wasn't it wasn't that on the nose.
But yeah, no, it was it was pretty.
Anyway, let's wrap up here.
I think we're done.
Let's wrap it up.
Yeah.
Okay.
So thanks for listening.
Thanks for giving us money.
Tune in for the normal episodes, which will hopefully start to come a bit more reliably and regularly.
I think September, October, November, I think the rest of the year we should be I'm going to try to we're going to try to do extra episodes, I think, just to just to, you know, kind of put them out as much as we can, because we definitely been slacking off the last last couple of months, mostly because we're busy in our in our day in our in our daily lives.
But I would like to to make it up to you a bit in the for the rest of the year.
So we'll see.
We'll try to get we'll do we'll do as much as we can.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm going to try and get some of the stuff up on my Patreon quite soon.
Say nice things about us on Twitter.
Go to our YouTube channel, IDSD Clips, where there will be more clips forthcoming.
I'm going to put some more.
I want that, like if, I mean, it's the algorithm, you're kind of at the mercy of the algorithm, but I want there to be a chance that when people put Ivermectin into the YouTube search engine, they might actually get something, some good information come up.
That would be nice, wouldn't it?
Yeah, it would be good, wouldn't it?
What else?
Oh yeah, go to our rating on Apple Podcasts is only 3.8.
I think horrible people are downvoting us.
So go to Apple Podcasts and give us five stars and give us good reviews and yeah, do that.
Okay.
Every little bit helps.
Thank you.
Yeah, it does.
Yeah.
And bye.
Bye.
Bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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