June 4, 2022 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Well, are you enjoying tonight's live broadcast, ladies and gentlemen, or are you not?
It is Saturday evening, June the 4th.
I'm James Edwards already this evening.
Of course, as you know, how could you have forgotten so soon?
First hour we went to London where we spoke with Adrian Davis about the situation in France, not just revisiting the recently held presidential elections, but also looking forward to the forthcoming elections in the French National Assembly that's going to be taking place this month.
And Adrian expertly gave us the insights on that.
And then a very special event in the second hour during which our TPC fan favorite Sam Dixon, not appearing as a guest tonight, but rather as a guest host.
And he conducted a wonderful interview with Charles Bosman, who appeared live from Russia there with RussiaInsider.com.
And now we've got another top five guy coming on to round out what has truly been a powerhouse broadcast, and it's Mark Weber.
Now, what do I mean by top five guy?
Well, he occupies one of those extremely coveted and highly sought-after positions.
No, he is actually one of the top five guests we've ever had in terms of the number of appearances he's logged.
And there's very good reason for that over all these years.
Mark has been with us many, many times, and you never have to listen to his analysis long to figure out why we have him back so often.
So with that said, Mark, welcome back again.
Thank you very much, James.
It's good to be on again.
Thank you.
Your last appearance with us took place on February the 26th.
So people, I would actually encourage you, as I did in the last hour with Charles, to go back and revisit that archive if you happened to miss it live or didn't catch it in the days that followed.
That is an evergreen assessment of the situation in Russia.
Even though it was two or three months ago now, it still remains quite timely.
We had Mark on that night, and of course, he was scheduled to appear that night even in advance of the onset of the hostilities that had taken place and manifested that week there in Eastern Europe.
But the treatment he gave that situation, I went back and listened to some of it in preparation for this week's program a couple of days ago.
It's really something you need to revisit.
That was his last appearance, but he's back on tonight, and we're going to continue the conversation from the previous hour with Sam and Charles talking about Ukraine.
And I understand, Mark, you are going to make references to World War II and to the larger trajectory of U.S. foreign policy.
But I am going to really turn this over to you as well to take as much time as you need to develop this.
Take it away.
Thanks a lot, James.
Well, you were right.
When I spoke before, the latest phase, you might say, of the war had just begun, and it dominated the news for weeks.
I've been really struck by how intense the media coverage of the war was for quite a while.
But now I see that the Johnny Depp trial has toppled that at the head of the headline play.
And that's very typical in America.
There is a long Trajectory of getting very excited about something in the news cycle, and especially a war.
People get very excited about it.
It dominates the news, and then people lose interest, and then people wonder, well, what was all the excitement about if they even remember what was going on?
But the war continues, but it's been played down now and supplanted by other news.
But that's why I want to emphasize the larger context of the Ukraine war and what it means for America.
I brought up some of these points, I think, before, and so many others have as well.
What's the larger principle?
What's the larger basis on which U.S. foreign policy should be made?
Because in a society like ours that's so much dominated by headlines and politicians and people getting excited and showing solidarity or not or marching or whatever, it can be a very jerky thing, which happens over and over.
People get excited and then they lose interest.
Everybody remembers we had the big Black Lives Matter marches two years ago, and then people were demanding, defunding the police, all this crazy stuff.
That's all gone, gone with the wind.
And now cities all over America are asking, are trying to get policemen in because of the enormous crime rate.
And a similar kind of sobering is taking place, I think, with the Ukraine war.
Many, many people in the weeks since I appeared last are wondering where do we go from here and what's going on.
But I want to make a bigger point about the dangers, not just of the Ukraine war, but of the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy in recent years, of which the Ukraine war now is just one aspect.
And that's this tendency of the United States to get very excited about wars with this idea, we're the good guys and we're going to come in and we're going to make it all better or we're going to change things.
This is a very dangerous thing.
And it's manifest not just by Democratic presidents or Joe Biden, but also by many Republicans.
One of the most remarkable things about this Ukraine war has been the almost unanimous support for a large-scale American military support for Ukraine by both parties with very little consideration of what the consequences for this are for the United States, not only internationally, but also here domestically.
There was not a single Democrat who voted in the Congress against this $40 billion, quite a lot of money, $40 billion package of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and only a few, only a few handful of Republicans really opposed it, only a few of them really on principled grounds.
That's a dangerous thing.
And as one congressman even said, well, there's a lot of talk about us being at war.
I don't remember when we even voted for war.
In other words, once again, there's this almost emotive, highly emotion-driven thing to get into war because we're going to be on the side of the good guys against the bad guys.
And later, when the thing is over, people wonder, well, what was that all about?
As we've done in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries.
One of the good things about this war, though, has been the voices of people like Pat Buchanan, John Maersheimer, Doug Bandau, and others who are representatives of what's called a realist outlook on U.S. foreign policy.
Because the dominant narrative, not only by Democrats, but also by many Republicans, including George W. Bush and others, is a kind of, well, they call it idealistic, but a kind of utopian idea of U.S. foreign policy that's driven by trying to make the whole world something like what the United States is, with all the problems that that involves and what all that means.
And this is a very delusional, dangerous thing, and it leads over and over to the United States getting involved in wars that turn out to be major fiascos because of the delusional idea that we're going to go in and fix everything or make everything and make it some sort of copy of the United States.
What an insightful opening salvo from Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, ihr.org.
It's a daily read of mine.
Please check it out, support it.
We've still got the remainder of the hour with Mark Weber capping off a night of really top flight in self-reading.
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Ladies and gentlemen, one of the easiest shows I can remember hosting in a long, long time.
My work has been made easy tonight and not at the sacrifice of content.
When you've got excellent talent, it is quite easy to just put them on and let them shine.
And each of our four guests have been brilliant tonight, truly Fab Four in terms of commentators.
And closing the program tonight is our good friend Mark Weber, the accomplished historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, and author, educated both in the United States and Europe.
He holds a master's degree in modern European history.
And doesn't that come in handy for conversations such as this?
Mark, you were mentioning in the previous segment the news coverage and how it has abated a little bit over the course of time.
Of course, when Americans, and not just Americans, but really most people now, they have the attention span of a goldfish, it's easy for them to lose interest even in wars.
And that might not necessarily be such a bad thing for the sake of letting this thing sort itself out as it would do naturally because there is no nuance.
There is no, I say this a lot for all of the talk about believing in a diversity.
There is no belief in the diversity of opinion with regards to our establishment news outlets.
It is all one voice, and you think about it, and it's really amazing of all of the different outlets out there with regards to the establishment, all of the different news channels, all of the different newspapers and magazines and what have you, and all of the different reporters and journalists that work for these institutions.
Not one of them, Mark, has a difference of opinion on something as important as a war.
There's not one of them that sees this from another perspective.
Well, that's why programs like this and commentators like you are so important.
Well, thank you.
Yes, it's only now that we're hearing more voices of sober realism about the Ukraine war.
But we've seen this over and over.
After 9-11, the public was willing to go along with attacking and invading and occupying not only Afghanistan, but then Iraq.
It's only later that people think, oh my gosh, what a disaster that turned out to be.
And eventually the United States leaves, rather under a cloud.
And we've seen this over and over happen.
But the consequences, of course, are very bad, especially for the United States today, because we have such enormous problems here at home.
One of the great downsides of all of this is that these wars provide a kind of diversion from the enormous problems we have here at home.
When a country is trying to be a so-called leader in the world, it can only play that role when people around the world at least respect it or hopefully even admire it.
That's increasingly not the case with the United States.
Americans are even, as polls show, very, very concerned about the trajectory of what's going on here in this country.
And for the United States to pose as an enormous policeman or lecturer for other countries and how they ought to be and what we ought to be doing around the world is increasingly difficult when we have such horrible, difficult problems here at home that are embarrassment.
And the world sees that.
The world sees this.
But back to the basic thing with the Ukraine war.
Yeah, the media attention is not what it used to be.
But that's the difference between the public and leaders.
The public can be swayed and influenced by scenes of destruction and families being destroyed and so forth in Ukraine.
And the natural reaction of most people is, well, we've got to do something.
And people are naturally very sympathetic.
We don't get pictures of the impact of bombs and wars in the ones that we ourselves have carried out.
We get them only when it's other countries that have invaded or attacked other countries.
We didn't get that kind of coverage in the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, from the point of view of victims.
But we did in the case of Ukraine, and that has the natural people respond the way you'd expect them to.
But that's the difference between the mass of people and propaganda on the one hand and leadership on the other.
Leaders are supposed to be beyond that.
But increasingly in American society, our politicians are driven in the Congress and so forth, not by concern and long-term concern for the country and the world, but by going along with the media.
And that's why they, over and over, the Congress votes overwhelmingly for these sweeping resolutions for U.S. military action, as they did in 1964 in Vietnam, as they did in 2003 with Iraq, and as they did just now with this big aid package to Ukraine.
And that's the difference.
That's one of the big problems of American society in a larger way is the lack of real leadership or principle on the part of our politicians.
And that goes back to this basic message that I want to try to emphasize.
The way that U.S. foreign policy has veered far, far, far away from the idea and the principle of foreign policy that the founders of America had.
It's a cliché.
It's been said over and over again.
But George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and American leaders in the early part of our country stressed the importance of staying away from permanent alliances with foreign countries, to avoid having so-called permanent friends or permanent enemies, but instead to focus and concentrate on making this country as good and as sound and as healthy as possible, rather than going out,
as John Quincy Adams says, searching for monsters to destroy.
And that's been a big problem in U.S. foreign policy for a long time, of which now the big enthusiasm for standing with Ukraine is a part.
Because at the end of the day, I want to emphasize very strongly, I have enormous sympathy, and all of us should, for both Ukrainians and Russians.
They both deserve our vote, people's, and both sides deserve our respect and our concern.
But that does not mean that we should be involved in taking sides in this conflict.
And above all, the big concern of the United States should be to not only avoid our own involvement, but to do what we can to try to bring the war to an end.
Because at the end of the day, the people that are suffering and dying and having the greatest misery and cost are the people of Ukraine who we supposedly have the greatest sympathy for right now.
That is something that cannot Cannot be overstated.
And you're exactly right in that.
And you touched on a couple of things there that were mentioned in passing by our previous guest in the last hour, Charles Balzman, about number one, the $40 billion aid package.
That is obviously just getting pilfered.
That is not going to change anything.
We didn't have enough money to build a border wall to secure our country.
But we have $40 billion to give away to Ukraine.
The amount of corruption there is unimaginable.
And Charles was hopeful, Mark, as you seem to be, that people will realize, perhaps at some undetermined date in the future, that this action and the actions that America has taken, just like the actions America took in some of the other conflicts that you were referring to, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., that the people will find out, perhaps sooner rather than later, that our actions thus far in this conflict are not in the interest of our people and this nation.
Right.
Well, it's not so much that the people will find out.
It's that we tend to learn, not through a greater awareness of these things, because the awareness and the basic problems were known even before the war began.
We learn only when everything goes bad.
I mean, we didn't learn the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, so to speak, until finally everybody acknowledged that it had turned out to be a disaster.
That's the bigger problem.
And you'll find over and over in just the last several weeks with Ukraine, all of this congratulatory stuff in the media about, oh, Russia is really being, they're really being punished.
Oh, we're really getting them.
NATO's going to be bigger.
No, out of all of this is really a greater awareness of just how limited U.S. role in the world is.
The majority of countries in the world are not siding with the United States.
Yeah, Britain is siding with the United States in the Ukraine thing.
Germany will go along because it's a country that was essentially created or the government was created by the United States after the Second World War.
Some other countries will go along with this because they have to.
They're already united with the United States through NATO and so forth.
But most of the countries of the world are not.
And the American position in the world over the last 30, 40 years has been inexorably, has been steadily declining.
Its power, its influence, its ability to snap its fingers and make other countries do what the United States government wants them to do has been declining.
And that's been going on for because the U.S. economically and so forth, financially in the world, has been declining.
And it will continue to decline in the years ahead.
And of course, domestically, we have increasing problems here at home that we're not able to deal with.
And so that's a larger term trend that has to be kept.
And so it's hard reality that's making people more aware, unfortunately, and not the insight that leaders should have.
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
Mark Weber, IHR.org, doing it as only he can.
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You're listening to Liberty News Radio, USA Radio News with Tim Berg.
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Mark Webber, the fourth and final of four brilliant guests tonight.
I, as a host, bask in the glow of their luminescence.
And Mark, let's get back to the topic at hand.
It's been a while since we've really had a deep dive on Ukraine.
So as the stars align tonight for us to do that with both you and Charles Bosman, I think it is time well spent because again, we don't want to lose our focus because this affects not only our extended kin on the other part of the European world, but could, if it truly goes awry, could very well affect us too.
And it is affecting us, of course, in terms of not necessarily minor things like gas prices and food costs and things like that, but we certainly don't want it to escalate into some sort of a hot war.
And so I would, with that, Mark, open up this segment by asking you the impossible question, the same question that sets you up as a guest to fail as I presented it to Charles, and that is by asking you to make a prediction here with something so volatile and something with so many determining factors.
But what do you think this looks like three months from now, six months from now, and at Christmas time?
It's hard to know three months or two months or six months or one year, but I think it's safe to make this basic prediction.
The basic prediction is the war will end in a way that's not satisfactory to those people who want to defeat Russia or to win in the way that the Ukrainian president right now and many people think.
That is, it's not going to end with the restoration of Crimea back to Russia or the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine back to Russia.
And it will not end with Ukraine on the path toward being a member of NATO.
And it will end also with even greater destruction, misery, and death for the people of Ukraine.
That's the sad reality of the whole thing.
Because at the end of the day, this war is not going to end with Ukrainian or American or any other troops going into Moscow and taking over Russia and dictating to Russia.
It's going to end at some point with Ukraine having to accept some very, well, right now, uncomfortable realities.
Mark, realistically, if you don't mind the interjection, I don't want to lose the question because I think you're onto something here.
And I would ask you, if you were the arbiter of peace here and you could dictate the terms, what would be the best resolution for whites worldwide?
Obviously, neither Russia or Ukraine or the current regime in Ukraine are going to get everything that they want.
But if you could dictate how this thing ends, what is best for all of our people?
One of the biggest criticisms I have of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is over the Ukraine situation because the United States, with wiser, prudent leadership, could have prevented this war from even happening in the first place.
That's the real tragedy of the whole thing.
The United States pushed and pushed Russia and provocatively kept on talking about how Ukraine would or might be a member of NATO, which means the stationing of hostile, for Russia, military forces in Ukraine.
The former American ambassador to Russia just a few weeks ago said rather cynically that the United States was never realistically going to have NATO, Ukraine and NATO anyway, that the American government, he said, and this is the former U.S. ambassador, said the United States was lying.
Well, who knows?
But it's one of the reasons why pressing Russia in this way and breaking pledges made to Russia not to expand NATO have led to this terrible war with the consequences for with terrible consequences, especially for Ukraine, but also for the world.
Now, the United States, well, the base, so what should have happened a long time ago, even before all this happened, is the United States agreeing to take into account the legitimate security concerns of Russia.
That is, not putting American military bases in NATO.
That is, agreeing that agreeing that Ukraine should be a neutral country, the same status as Finland or Austria.
In other words, there's no reason under that kind of situation that Ukraine can't be a prosperous and well-to-do, well healthy country, but it does mean that it's not going to be a challenge or a provocation for Russia.
And second, the recognition or acknowledgement that Crimea, the region of Crimea, which is ethnically not even Ukrainian, can be and will be part of Russia again.
But the U.S. position right now has been, and has been for a while, is now and has been that the borders of so-called Ukraine are going to be restored to what they had been.
Those borders are not sacrosanct.
Those borders were made by the Soviet Union.
They don't represent reality, either ethnically or historically.
And it's ridiculous for the United States to try to encourage war or continue to support one side or another rather than trying to bring about peace to uphold borders which are as artificial as the borders of the former Ukraine during the Soviet Union.
So basically, yes, the basic formula will be first, recognition and acknowledgement that Ukraine is a neutral country.
It's not going to be part of NATO.
Second, that Crimea will be Russian.
And third, that there'll be some special status.
Either it will be part of Russia or some special status for the eastern Donbass region.
And that's a solution to the thing that is far, far more preferable than the terrible destruction and misery and death that we have been seeing since February.
So, that being the case, and that being said, how secure we focus so much, of course, on the conflict and how this will be resolved and how bad it could get and where the chips will fall at the end of the day.
We haven't really focused so much on Putin's standing internally.
I mean, obviously, you're going to get a very skewed and biased look at him and his leadership and who he is as a person and what he stands for and what his nation is through the lens of a very corrupted establishment global media.
And this was something we didn't touch on in the last hour, and I don't know if you would have an answer for this, Mark, but how do you think Putin is being viewed by his own people?
That is something that nobody's talking about.
By all the accounts that I've seen, most Russians support Putin.
And what's more important is that his stand on this issue is one that any Russian leader would have taken.
Not just Putin.
This isn't something that just represents some fixation of Vladimir Putin.
It's the view that any Russian leader, no matter who it is, would take.
This is a pretty existential, basic issue.
It's a little bit like in 1962, no American president was going to tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba that were a threat to the United States, whether it was Kennedy or Nixon or whoever it was.
No American would tolerate that, and no Russian leader would either.
Much of the flim flam of American media is to concentrate on personalities and not on the basic interests of a country.
Vladimir Putin's view of this whole thing is not unique to Vladimir Putin.
It's a view that any Russian leader who has any real support in his country is going to take.
And there's been a lot of different views about how popular he is, but it seems like the military is not unhappy with Putin for having launched the attack in February against Ukraine.
They're unhappy that he didn't launch it with greater force than he actually did.
That he underestimated, apparently, the resistance and especially the response from the West, and that Russian leaders are unhappy that he didn't go in with more force.
But there's more and more reports about just how shabby and ineffectual Ukrainian military is.
I mean, they fight, by all accounts, very bravely and heroically, but they simply don't have anywhere near the military clout of the Russian forces.
And it's one of the reasons why steadily the Russian military continues to gain ground.
But anyway, this is, but the focus on Putin is in a sense misleading.
It's a funny thing how in America, whatever country we're at war against or hostile to has always presented the American media that he's crazy.
Saddam Hussein, he's insane.
Hitler's insane.
Putin's insane.
Well, they're not insane.
They might be wrong.
They might be misguided and so forth, make mistakes, but Putin is certainly not insane.
And it's a little astonishing for American media to keep pointing out or try to portray Putin as insane when our own leaders come short of the mark, you might say.
Ain't that the truth?
Ain't that the truth?
With a sociopathic, I mean, they're looking out for number one, not the collective, and damn them for that.
We've got to take one more break how fast this hour is going, as it always does with Mark Weber.
But we've got it for one more segment.
And we're going to round out the very busy show right after this.
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One more segment, if you can believe it, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm thankful to have Mark Weber for it.
I enjoyed that last little piece in the last segment about a little projection going on, it would seem, with regards to who's crazy and who's not, who's working in the best interest of their people as a leader should be doing and who's not.
And of course, we know that it's exactly the opposite is how it is being presented.
With regards to Putin and Russia, Mark, and I certainly, after answering this question, I want to give you a long runway to finish developing your treatment here.
But what about the additional provocation now of enlisting Finland and Sweden as NATO members?
And NATO's role, by the way, and NATO's role, by the way, overall in the future of our nations.
Well, by all really rational, reasonable standards, NATO should have been dismantled after the Soviet Union fell apart, and Soviet forces left Eastern Europe.
That was the purpose that NATO was set up to deal with, supposedly, was the challenge of the Soviet Union having taken over and controlling most of Eastern Central Europe and the Soviet Empire.
The Soviet Empire is gone.
There's Russia, which is much, much smaller than the original Soviet Union.
And there's no more Soviet troops in Poland or East Germany or Hungary and so forth.
But NATO now exists not as a defensive alliance, but as a projection of American power in the world.
One of the proofs of that is that under the banner of the NATO, of NATO, the United States insisted that Germany and Britain send troops, British and German troops, to Afghanistan to give some sort of substance or meaning supposedly to NATO and to help shore up the U.S. role in Afghanistan.
Of course, when the U.S. troops left Afghanistan, so did the British and German troops, because NATO doesn't really exist as any kind of independent entity.
It's a projection, an extension of American power.
But this is extraordinarily dangerous because NATO commits the United States to the so-called territorial integrity not only of Finland and Estonia and Latvia, but even of tiny little Montenegro, which was the most recent country to join.
This is all crazy because membership in NATO is not like having friends on Facebook.
It's a military obligation with dangerous consequences.
And few Americans are really willing to go to war with Americans dying and a lot of other people being killed and dying to ensure the territorial integrity of Montenegro or Latvia or Estonia, however much we might sympathize with people in those places.
So anyway, that's a bigger problem.
You know, the big thing, going back to a point earlier, there's an old saying that a fool learns from his mistakes and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
And we're seeing in the case of the Ukraine war, the leaders of America have not learned from our own mistakes and mistakes of others in the wars that we have engaged in or launched or whatever over the last 30, 40, 50 years.
Instead, we keep making similar mistakes over and over again, not learning.
And there's a reason for that.
The big reason is America can afford to do it because wars for Americans take place overseas.
They don't affect us in a direct way.
This is a big, both good thing and a bad thing about American foreign policy.
It was at a very early age I learned in Europe that people around the world see war very differently than Americans.
They see, for almost everybody, war in Iraq or Japan or China or Germany, it means bombs falling.
It means armies tromping around.
It means plunder.
It means terrible destruction.
For us Americans, the Vietnam War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, those happen far away.
They don't affect us, at least in the obvious way, that wars affect other people.
And so we don't see war in the same way that other peoples do.
And there's a tendency in the United States to go to war rather foolishly without real understanding or awareness or grasping of just how terrible the consequences would be.
And we can also afford to do it financially because the dollar is still the world's reserve currency, and we can run up these enormous, fantastic debts, basically handing off the bill to our children and grandchildren because the dollar is still accepted around the world.
But this is foolish.
And any person understanding history understands that.
But our politicians don't care because the focus of American policy, both foreign and domestic, is the here and now.
What's going to be good for the moment and not good for the long-term interests of our country, our people, or the world?
Well, I think what we know to be in the best interest of our people, this nation, our country here in America, of course, there's a difference between a nation and a country, and we talk about that a lot.
But for the world as well, is very much runs contrary to those of the elites who are managing or mismanaging these precious commodities and resources.
Mark, I know, well, we've got about five minutes remaining.
The last couple of times you were scheduled to appear, we had had a topic in mind.
And I don't want to pivot too abruptly here, but of course we are at the mercy of the events of the world and allocating you to talk about what's happening in Ukraine.
These last two appearances has been time better spent.
But if we could give them the audience, that is, a preview of what I hope will be a soon forthcoming topic of conversation that you and I will have on this broadcast, and hopefully not the too distant future.
This book, Stalin's War, I know you had made mention of some of the even the effects of the world wars and how it is still playing in this current episode.
I don't know if the tide of World War II has fully even begun to recede yet, or even finished washing ashore.
But this book, yes.
One point I want to make in regard to World War II and Ukraine is how blithely dismissive the United States was of Ukraine and of the peoples of Europe, not just Ukrainians, but...
but millions of others during World War II.
Nobody, during the Second World War, and this point needs to be stressed, and we'll go into it later on another occasion, the United States was an ally of Stalin during the Second World War, who by any standards was far more repressive, far more brutal, racked up far more deaths than any other leader of his time.
And yet he was considered a trustworthy partner of the United States in the Second World War.
And if anybody in the United States in World War II had said, well, what about the Ukrainians?
They would have been shouted down as betraying the great alliance with the Soviet Union.
In other words, in the Second World War, this good guy, bad guy, look at the world blinded America, or American leaders refused to see the horrible consequences of its alliance during the Second World War with Stalin.
And the whole theme of the book, Stalin's War, which we'll talk about in more detail in another time, is how central and important the role of Stalin was in the Second World War.
Because above all, the country that did the most fighting, killing, and dying during the Second World War was the Soviet Union.
It was brutal, it was terrible, but there's a big tendency in the United States to take credit for what's called the good war, the Second World War, when the real country that did the most fighting and killing was the Soviet Union, which we're embarrassed about if people want to even talk about it.
But that's the big point, is that America goes into these wars and looks back on them with very little regard for the historical reality because we don't pay the consequence.
We don't pay the price of wars in the way other countries do.
And so even win or lose, life goes on in the United States for most Americans, much the same, or at least seemingly the same.
And so we were able to get away with that.
And that's one of the reasons why I think awareness about history is so utterly important, because that's a good guide to what our country or any country's policy in the world and place in the world should be.
But Americans don't have that kind of awareness for a number of very objective reasons in our own history and our own legacy.
Ladies and gentlemen, the book is Stalin's War, A New History of World War II.
It's by Sean McMeekin, and you can find more information about it at the IHR store at ihr.org.
Mark Weber's wonderful institution.
We will have Mark on for a full hour to give a book review on that evergreen topic, as we call it.
But it is interesting, in fact, that all of the suffering and all of the brutality and all of the injustice that the Russian people suffered under the communist and Bolshevik regime happened to inadvertently inoculate them from the real poison of Western liberalism.
And because of that, they have emerged as perhaps the key to our future as a race.
Whereas I don't know where the West is going, certainly not in the right direction presently.
But it is a topic we will cover.
And Sam mentioned this in the last hour.
Had Putin been, or if Putin were a leader who was integrating his society to water down the founding stock, if he was tearing down churches instead of rebuilding them, he would be on Times, he would be Times Man of the Year, and he would be making all of these rounds in the media.
Mark Weber, my good friend, iHR.org, folks, final word to you.
Just seconds remain.
Well, I urge people, of course, to check out our website.
I praise you for hosting this very, very important forum for voices that are dissonant voices.
And it's just astonishing that we live in a society that the same people who have been wrong again and again about the Iraq war, about American politics, about all sorts of things, they're still praised in our media and given a forum.
And dissident voices like yours don't have anywhere near the outreach and the impact that they ought to have.
So I'm very grateful to you and Great Very Philford for being on with you on your show.
Thank you so much, Mark.
Mark Weber, true leader for our people and one of the greatest analysts and commentators we've got.
Mark Weber for the entire program tonight and our entire roster of guests, Adrian Davis, Charles Bosman, Sam Dixon.