War illiteracy: Russia vs. Ukraine in March of 2022.

there is a rarely discussed distinction between factual learning and attitudinal learning in the title of this video i'm proposing to you a distinction between military literacy military illiteracy right but what i mean by literacy in this case is understanding what you read i don't mean that you have memorized uh a catalog of the munitions of war right i don't think that you're someone who knows what the serial numbers mean on the side of different kinds of munitions and tanks i'm not talking about being burdened with a whole lot of factual learning but i am talking about an attitude talking about an attitude and a sensitivity towards the reality of war that i think has to be cultivated over a lifetime and that i now see is shockingly absent from both the journalists and the political leaders of our time these are people who don't know war these are people who don't understand war who cannot think in terms of realistic 21st century warfare and of course their illiteracy is dangerous for us all now start with an example some of you will relate to and understand right away there is a much more successful youtuber much more successful than myself there's a very successful youtuber called adam something his formal educational background is in urban planning something that's political nothing to do with war and he lives with the dangerous delusion that being an expert in something means he's an expert in everything and in two different videos he picked up the newspaper headline a claim made by mainstream journalists in mainstream newspapers oh um russian attack helicopters are useless russian attack helicopters are going to be completely immobilized and useless during this conflict because the ukrainians have shoulder-mounted missiles because men on foot will have shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles now i don't expect any of you to recognize the brand name of the hardware i don't expect anybody to recognize the model number i don't expect anyone who's engaged in political and democratic discourse about these things or engaged in journalism about these things to be spending time uh looking through the back pages of the hardware catalog that you order these things from looking at the technical specifications what i expect people to be able to do is to reason these things through to their utmost limits to deal with the ramifications and implications of the assumptions they carry with them into these political debates and the factual assertions they're making you know even someone like adam somebody you know it's probably needless to say he's he is somebody i i despise so adam something is actually named you know he's someone i have a great deal of contempt for but i can recognize that in his way politically he is trying to make the world a better place another comparison hassan [ __ ] assan abby someone i have a lot of content for someone i despise politically but of course i can recognize the goodness of his intentions as now increasingly he finds himself wading into the details of how these wars are fought including specific claims about the efficacy of shoulder-mounted missiles now what do i mean reasoning things through if shoulder-mounted missiles if they made attack helicopters useless if they made aerial bombardment from airplanes useless or very limited value in war that would have already been true in the syrian civil war just a few years ago that would have already been true in the american invasion and conquest of iraq just a few years before that that would have already been true when the afghan people including the taliban were fighting against the soviet union these types of propaganda claims this type of hype for shoulder mounted missiles it goes all the way back right you can already find it in newspapers reporting on our allies in afghanistan when they were fighting against the soviet union now reason it through think about it now the most ridiculous thing is this claim is not only made about aircraft about the ability of a man on foot with a shoulder mounted missile to destroy an attack helicopter what a claim just and just visualize yourself just think it through just flesh out the fantasy imagine if it's your life on the line imagine if you are hiding in a foxhole with a shoulder-mounted missile and you've got to get out to take your shot just visualize it for a minute you know again sympathy is an analytical tool i'm not telling you to sympathize with people just so that you're overwhelmed with emotions but think about the fear and the agony where your life is going to be traded to take a pot shot at an attack helicopter an attack helicopter that is armed with exactly the type of anti-personnel weapons that you have no armor to sustain shots from forget get i'm trying not to get detectable deals just start to think about how implausible that is whether it's in syria whether it's in you know ongoing wars in north africa now like libya or you know uh the use of attack helicopters in northeast africa and fighting various forms of muslim extremists who are there you know attack helicopters are devastating all these wars whether it's in iraq whether it's in afghanistan okay for some reason now we're fantasizing that these are tremendously effective weapons from unarmored men on foot to use they're going to hide in a foxhole pop out and they're going to destroy an attack helicopter they're going to destroy a bomber for a fighter jet screeching overhead you know there's a lot of things to visualize here and if you've seen footage of this you know when someone fires a gun or just a rifle a normal rifle right you'll notice you can't really see the bullet exiting the muzzle of the rifle it's too fast to really be captured on screen but when they fire these missiles especially as the missile is first leaving it's quite slow isn't it you can really see it taking off more like a model rocket think about that think about how much time there is for this attack helicopter and it won't be alone right for this squadron of attack helicopters so this this group of you know airplanes are attack helicopter even more astonishingly these propaganda claims are being made and they're being repeated on social media about men on foot and their ability to disable and conquer tanks armored tanks armored personnel carriers that allegedly these russian tanks they're useless they're helpless now because men on foot can just use a shoulder mounted missile you know an astonishing an astonishing ridiculous propaganda claim you know and again if that were true if that were to just reason it through think about the last 50 years of warfare think about any of the discussions that have been going on about wars in your life why would it only be true now why is it that suddenly suddenly shoulder-mounted missiles used by men on foot now the fundamental point i want to get at here is i already can't see that in the description this video um before i even had a youtube channel i got out and promoted this hashtag hasht hashtag socratic method is dead now partly it's a joke it is partly something i joke around about but it's partly something really serious i try to draw attention to i think in the 21st century most people do not have anyone with them in their lives that they can where they can challenge each other and really reason things through this way like unfortunately i feel that the era of socratic method is dead it certainly doesn't happen in universities it certainly doesn't it's not a reality that universities professors will take the time to sit with their students and reason these things through i think what i just said to you you can maybe imagine hypothetically a very kindly university professor very generous with his or her time sitting down and talking to a student a student who was influenced by hassan [ __ ] or influenced by we just have vaush being mentioned influenced by mainstream newspapers but maybe influenced by youtube or like uh uh adam something you know and said okay look so i know you've read this about these shoulder missiles i know you've read all these things about the the success of the ukrainian people and resisting russian congress okay but have you have you thought this through okay but if that were true you know if that were true then this would also be true right this i know this is not using a really narrow definition of socratic dialogue i'm using it in its broadest sense where you end up challenging each other or challenging yourself to really reason things through fully the term used in a more academic context they always say to tease out uh ambiguities tease out implicit assumptions i don't i don't real this is very british to me to tease something out i don't you know i i guess what when you have curly hair you you tease out your hair as you're as you're combing it is that what the image comes from yeah melissa i'm asking melissa melissa's hair and does anyone in the audience have hair can anyone yes teasing your hair so yes you tease your hair to make it more volume okay so melissa says you tease your hair to make it have more volume and not to make it straighter okay i'm just pointing at the implicit metaphor of of speaking about teasing out you know i do very little to my hair so i'm sorry if i don't if i don't know the proper terminology we have 26 people in the audience none of you have hair no hit the thumbs up if you have a second guys it helps more people join the broadcast as it's going and help more people discover it later uh too but i'm glad to have you all here and obviously you know it's it's hard to make time for these things it's hard for me to make time to do this broadcast and i understand for you guys it's hard but i hope i hope this has this kind of function in your lives also i think it's something tremendously important about really challenging yourself to think these things through all the way and deal with the implications of the political positions you've adopted to deal with the implications of the solutions to problems that you yourself propose that you yourself espouse because my fundamental concern that i'm expressing through this hashtag socratic method is dead my fundamental concern is that we live in an era now where people make bold declarations on instagram people make bold declarations on twitter and my my experience is even in the university classroom people stand up and make bold declarations that sound very much like a statement on twitter on instagram it's just it's instagram in real life and then they they sit down and that is it there's this kind of single stage of a declaration single stage of analysis and nobody is really willing to think through and challenge okay okay but if that were true if that were a good solution let's have some more dominoes fall here let's really think through the implications so there are a lot of this a lot of these examples kind of in my own life and where this is the role i play for other people in as much as i have time to engage in in this broadest sense you know um socratic dialogue i had a long time supporter of the channel talked to me in the last few days you guys might have seen him in the comment section here uh his name is manan goenka so he's his name has been used bubble here so i feel fine to say it he was asking me about united nations policy uh basically in alleviating starvation and the term used in the industry is quote-unquote food security so initially i've talked about my youtube channel years ago it is something i know about is i have experience but totally different topic but you know right off the bat a lot of what i'm doing in that conversation is saying to him and he did appreciate this he thanked me repeatedly i said well you know look most of what you're going to hear from the united nations most of what you're going to hear from these charities and partner agencies it's a very peculiar kind of propaganda and let's think about it if what they were saying were true this this and this would also be true in fact you know um you know my point being here it may seem tremendously vague to say oh you have to think things through to their to their conclusions you have to think them through to the utmost limits and consequences of of what they what they mean uh but it becomes quite precise as soon as we're dealing with any specific example this way what would it mean if attack helicopters were made obsolete by shoulder-mounted rockets that would have all kinds of consequences and we would have seen those consequences already in syria and afghanistan in iraq et cetera how can that possibly be true now and only now and again reasoning through what if it were me what if i were on the battlefield how would i get close enough to a column of tanks to use this and then how would i get away with my life afterwards if i managed to pop out of a foxhole where i've been concealed by camouflaging where no one discovered me it's very likely to be discovered i pau and i got one shot with one shoulder mounted miss up before the tank i'm targeting shoots me or the three other tanks in the column shoot me how effective is that really how effective can that be and you know if it were true if it were true that shoulder-mounted missiles are so effective against tanks why why aren't they all just men on foot wouldn't it be way more effective a thousand men marching on foot without armored personnel carriers why do you think we do like there are all these knock-on consequences to the hypothesis to the way the problem is being formulated and to the into the solution now i know this comparison to starvation and food insecurity it may seem like a stretch okay one is war and one is dealing with very technical hardware in war okay that's that's one type of conversation and then there are humanitarian claims made about people needing food like isn't that isn't that straightforward no no no they are very similar because in both cases what you're trying to justify basically are governments committing millions of dollars sometimes instead of a government it's a big charity uh the bill gates foundation or something like sometimes there's a big church that really kind of behaves like a government has so much money and you're trying to say to the bill gates foundation or any charity like this or you may be saying to say the european union uh you know as a federal representative of many different governments okay here's our situation in northwestern laos here's a situation in northeast cambodia and this is why we want you to give us 10 million dollars to deal with starvation to deal with food and is the problem starvation is the problem food and scrutiny is this the solution all right it's really much more slippery it's much more difficult to deal with than these claims about military tactics uh you know just give you an example i have worked in i have lived in slept in i've worked in villages that were officially listed as starving and we're my own charity and weren't the only ones but we had big sacks of rice with the united nations world food program logo on them and we're handing these sacks of rice to starving quote-unquote starving people didn't say this they're starving on paper they're starving by decree [Laughter] they're de joure starving okay but i'm there on foot i'm there in person first problem these people own farms okay they're not farm workers they're not factory workers they're not living in a refugee camp they're not you know the proletariat it's the last one but they'd like to say as marxists like they're not nomads they're not homeless all right now in every society even in the third world society owning a farm is wealth and if you were starving your options would include selling the farm right and in case you didn't know farms also produce food they just it's not all they produce you can produce cloth they can produce all kinds of things too there are other kinds of small cottage industries like weaving on these farms like you know weaving is an example of a cottage industry on a farm there's there's real money okay i got another problem for you they own motorcycles they own shoes they own cellular phones and they have connection to a cellular phone network now what does starvation mean what does food insecurity mean i'm there in person there is a store selling food i'm i'm buying food store right you could in theory get trade your cell phone for food you could sell your motorcycle and buy food that's not the reality of the situation here there's a much more difficult to understand kind of political agenda that the government of laos is pursuing that the government the european union is pursuing that you know a number of different kind of foreign governments are involved in there was a case i personally wasn't involved in but i had a friend who was involved in the northeast of laos where specifically the government of france it was their development project right you have but you have a number of different powerful wealthy actors and most of the people on the ground aren't like me brief digression just exactly what sentence there was a project in vientiane the capital city of laos millions of dollars to preserve a swamp u.n partner agencies involved right wetlands biodiversity in the wetlands i'm there in person and i know the wetland does not exist it's a construction site a chinese company very directly like the communist part of china the chinese government a chinese company is building a sports stadium a number of apartment buildings i think there's also a supermarket showing there's new roads it's it's an active part of urban development this this swamp this quote unquote wetlands right now i didn't have this conversation directly myself i talked to someone else in the humanitarian sector who said oh yeah yeah i know the guys who run that project and you know i said to them well you know so this is obviously all a slight paraphrase how can this project go on how can you have international funding to save the wetlands when the wetlands don't exist now their understandings had followed that story over a couple of years at the time the funding proposal went in you know at the time this project was was proposed and international funding was secure and there were meetings with those with the united nations or exactly where they were far distant lines at that time the wetlands did exist and apparently i mean i was told the second hand the guy's attitude was our number one priority is not to save wild animals our number one priority is not biodiversity conservation our number one priority is not any particular swamp right our number one priority is to keep our office open particular forests come and go particular wetlands that's my agenda his agenda was to get the salaries of his employees paid to get his own salary paid right to keep the office open to keep the project ongoing even if the swamp only exists on on paper this is the swamp by the creek this is a wetland by the great even if though the wild animals and the biodiversity you're conserving is completely fictional okay i know it might sound ridiculous but like who else who other than me would go to that village and say the problem isn't the scarcity of food food here is not scary and the problem isn't even the poverty of the people and now i can tell you what the problem is it's this this this and and a lot of the answer to that question what the problem is is very disturbing it's very politically upsetting to everyone involved it's a lot of things people don't want to think about don't don't want to talk about um so you know if that sounds far-fetched to you that people would lie about that you know there's money involved but there's not just money involved there's the combination of money and the holier-than-thou ego trip of being a hero all right and money corrupts most people you know what corrupts the rich you know what corrupts people who are already born with money it's that holier than that we go trip it's it is the delusion it is the ego trip right it is this kind of false morality right it's being able to present yourself as a hero that's what got her okay and that is a massive motivating factor for people in the military people in government service people in the united nations people in humanitarian agencies elected and unelected people in government bureaucrats okay they want to be a hero so it's not as simple as saying they're going to fake it just to get this next just to get this next paycheck um [Music] okay the level of disinformation the level of self-deception and intentional deception of others in a time of war it's gonna be even higher it's gonna be in the next level my mother is in some ways a typical marxist in some ways extraordinary in some ways exceptional if you have really known marxists is very different from reading their work on paper if you really know marx says face to face one of the stunning and strange things about them is that in this subtle way they are pro-slavery so something marx has said at the beginning of my whole life i've heard this from different nuances is that what they believe in is you know dialectical materialism they believe that history passes through a series of successive stages in which one development enables and makes possible the next it is entirely common for marxists to say that they regard slavery in the united states of america as something positive something that made the wealth and world domination of the united states america possible that america was a kind of slavery fueled empire that it was only thanks to only because of the slavery that the united states of america you know engaged in that you know they become wealthy and successful oh [Music] socratic method is dead so tell me within the united states of america before the civil war what was the wealthiest area and what was the poorest the areas that had slavery were they wealthier than the areas that did not in the 50 years or 100 years after the civil war what were the wealthier areas and what were the poor over a few more centuries when you compare the history of the united states of america to the history of south america let's just say the whole spanish empire in south america because today they're all separate countries but in the past they were closely linked parts of the spanish empire you know havana cuba was this great center for slave trading that was connected to the whole of the caribbean the whole of south america what the countries that are today venezuela so on and so forth they were all linked to havana cuba and they were linked to spain why why do you think it is why do you think it is that the places that had the most slavery and that sustained and continued it for the longest are today poorer than the countries that had less slavery well the percentage of their population that was slaves was less and that ended it first it's a it's a fascinating theory you've got there but boy if that were true right hmm south america should be wealthier than north american should have been at every stage like century by century or decade by decade that should be the pattern we've seen gee why is it that england became wealthier than egypt right egypt had slavery first and it continued having slavery the longest like for many more years or centuries however you want to put it right egypt has a better climate has a better location incredible location on the mediterranean in terms of trade trade going in all four directions right the advantages of the egyptian empire century by century over the long haul right and if you think slavery is an advantage egypt should have consistently dominated every century as they went past right egypt should be the most powerful fabulous place in the world today to have nothing but disadvantages compared to the northwestern corner of europe compared to the dutch you know gee she great great theory cool theory bro thinking things through all the way to their utmost extreme dealing with the implications dealing with the consequences of our assumptions in politics of the solutions we're proposing you know see it's it's not something as simple as socratic dialogue in the you know university textbook since the term right but there's something really important here and i'm not going to say there was a golden age before the internet like i'm not going to say oh things were so much better before but i'll tell you something before the internet people used to talk about politics while sitting around a table and playing cards like people did have more face-to-face interactions with people and they had the experience of someone saying you don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about and and dealing with that the internet has made the world better in many ways i i ordered this t-shirt on the internet i ordered this book on the internet you know i wouldn't have this book without it maybe it's a bad book i don't know yet you know um there are ways in which the internet has made the world a better place right but i'm very concerned about the way in which it's enabled a certain kind of self-righteous ignorance of people who go through their whole lives and they never have to think things through they never have to deal with the implications of their beliefs now in case you didn't get the the subtext you know um i am indeed you know suggesting to you that the whole marxist view of the material development of capitalism from so that that it's all [ __ ] that it's deeply incoherent it's not just morally wrong that it's kind of economically and and factually wrong right but there's a necessary next step here where we question our motivations where we question the morality of what we're saying and what we're saying why would anyone say that russian attack helicopters are worthless that they're useless there's motivation there and there's a moral choice about what kind of person you're going to be why would anyone say that ukraine is winning the war this comes back to the title of this video it comes back to you why would anyone say that why would anyone even say it's a deadlock or it's it's even that it's like 50 50 with both sides um [Music] if ukraine had conquered half of the crimea in the last few weeks then maybe 50 50. right you'd be able to say hey look you know russia has taken 50 percent of western ukraine whatever i say but at the same time the ukrainian troops made in advance they made an invasion and they conquered half of luhansk and half of doneness and half of uh crimea they conquered half of the areas the russians had formally held the russians have mortar and artillery fire trained on kiev trained on mariopol trained on odessa trained on every single major city in ukraine do the ukrainians have have any artillery fire hitting moscow right now do the ukrainians have you know batteries of mortars set up and firing on st petersburg have the ukrainians simultaneously pressed into russian territory in retaliation have the ukrainians even taken a chunk of uh belarus oh you think it's even like you think it's 50 50 you think it's or you think you think the ukrainians are winning you think the ukrainians are in a position to force the russians to sign a treaty that would give back donetsk luhansk the crimea you think that that would be winning do you think the ukrainians are one inch closer to in that sense winning this is war literacy this is military literacy this is just thinking through all the way the implications of the things we assume and say thinking through fully the way we've defined the problem the way we're we're talking about the solution and you know the extent to which it's not just the left wing you know the left the right the center mainstream journalists mainstream politicians the extent to which those people are detached from the reality of war is terrifying all right i am afraid you know i'm not afraid so much of the weakness of our leadership i'm afraid of you know the weakness of our of our followership my father you know grew up surrounded by world war ii veterans uh his own school teachers i think all of them he had school teachers who were physically scarred from world war one even not just world war ii people who had disabilities from the wars my father went and visited europe as a teenager when the aftermath of world war ii was kind of still on the ground you know buildings were still under reconstruction and this kind of thing still it was over don't even wrong it wasn't been over for years but the the consequences of that and i remember he told me how you know how bitterly the germans were still hated and how he was hated when he spoke german he could he knew a few words of german as he was you know casey you know he was a white canadian who spoke english as his first language you know um he should have been speaking french but you know as he was traveling around europe this he was he was doing the backpacker tourism of his day and you know i do think one of the defining problems in my father's life is that he never got this cloud of oblique out of his life he never escaped the shadow of the sense that he was a coward because he never fought he never fought for anything he believed in he didn't fight you know obviously he was too young during world war ii but you know he didn't fight in world war ii he didn't fight in any of the wars that came and went after that and that instead you know what he did was he developed himself into this very insincere smart alec communist he developed himself into someone who supposedly you know was too pure to take a side in the vietnam war you know and uh if you lived through those years it was one war after another it wasn't just the future you know the cold war contained within it a whole lot of hot wars you know well what about what about the korean war what about you know get into really dealing with a decade by decade you know conflict by by conflict i think it is completely true of my father that he never dealt with the shallow questions of what it means to be a man to be a real man all the toxic masculinity built into that and he also never moved on to dealing with the deeper and more profound questions you know now i'm not using this to i could launch into a deeper lengthier critique of my father's psychology uh if you guys are interested ask some questions i see a few questions coming into the chat you know um i'm a nihilist i specifically preach a philosophy called historical nihilism it's not just a political philosophy it includes a philosophy of the self philosophy of the life of the mind philosophy of what it means to be a distant intellectual how to live as a distant intellectual how to live as an artist philosophy of art there's a lot to it it's not just you know politics or political science but sure the main thing we talk about on this channel under the heading of historical nihilism is my nihilistic approach to politics i think you know one day after i made a video here on youtube it was a live stream in which i was really explaining to you the ways in which all the propaganda claims about ukraine are [ __ ] you know going back to the very fundamental question of what is the difference between russia and ukraine anyway what is the difference between the russian language and the ukrainian language is this worth killing and dying for you know like i'm willing to question in a nihilistic way to what extent is vladimir putin right to what extent is vibrant right when he says the ancient origin of the russian people is in kievan rus you know look it up guys to what extent is vladimir putin right when he says that the russian people and the ukrainian people have always been one people and they should be one nation to what extent is that as my point being as unsympathetic as vladimir putin is as evil as vladimir putin is to what extent might he be right in some of these propaganda claims and then even if he's wrong does this justify you risking your life like it's one thing to say oh yeah yeah putin's wrong 50 000 people should die to prove the point what if it's you my dude what if it's your son your daughter what if you have some skin in the game what if you're risking your blood or even look guys like maybe two percent of people die in combat in war like two percent of people who sign up a lot of people spend the whole [ __ ] war just boiling potatoes you can sign up for the army you spend the whole [ __ ] time boiling potatoes you know you work in the kitchen and you you know your life is not really online that way but still you sign up for a three year contract and you you lose three years of your life boiling potatoes shining boots shoveling ditches are you willing to risk three years of your life no danger let's just say hypothetically you're you you never face a bullet or a gun or a bomb or a blade let's let's just put let's just say hypothetically three years of boredom in a military camp are you willing to risk that or you were willing to risk that for your son or or for your daughter why to fight for the future of ukrainian independence but this is my point guys i believe it was the day after i made that video which you know it discussed it for many it's i think it's more than an hour long that video discuss it from many different angles in a nuanced way but it certainly has this nihilistic element running through it okay the day after i got in touch with canadian military recruiting and i got in touch with ukrainian military recruiting i showed that email to some friends i wrote an email saying look i'm 43 years old i don't speak the ukrainian language but you know here's what i have going for me you know are you guys willing to take me on you want to let me join the ukrainian army okay to fight for a cause i don't believe in all right being a nihilist isn't about being lazy being a nihilist certainly isn't about being a pacifist i can sit here and cynically keep scorn on this propaganda notion that ukraine represents democracy whereas you know russia represents tyranny that you like you know that russia represents a corrupt bad regime whereas ukraine represents a morally pure incorruptible regime oh oh does anyone remember poroshenko does anyone remember you know uh i'm going to get her name wrong julia team of sorry jesus yulia julia timoshenko yes poroshenko it's a long time ago does anyone remember what ukraine was like before 2014 and then how suddenly after the maidan protest suddenly basically in 2015 you know ukraine starts to fashion itself ukraine starts to present itself as this martyr for western democracy for for supporting western europe the eu so i can sit here and i can set out for you a whole nihilistic analysis of what's wrong what's [ __ ] about these propaganda claims and i just did set out for you why it's [ __ ] to pretend like the ukrainian soldiers are invulnerable because they have shoulder-mounted rockets when they're fighting against attack helicopters and tanks i can say it's [ __ ] it's [ __ ] it's [ __ ] and at the end of that conversation i'm gonna ask you what now what next and i for my part i actually did write in to volunteer that's to be on a it's going to be on my cia [ __ ] rap sheets if the cia has a file on me there's going to be a footnote to a footnote at this date he talked to canadian military recruiters on this date he talked to the ukrainian military recruiters you know to report this because i can say this is all [ __ ] i don't believe in any of it and then i can ask myself okay what what can i do to make things better what can i do what's my what's my part so guys by the way this may seem like a totally unrelated example it's it's related profoundly do you think i believe in american indian spirituality do you think i have any [ __ ] sympathy for you know getting high and dancing around a fireplace as a part of a ritual still carried on to this day by the cree people the ojibwe people like do you think that's what i'm into do you think like you know if you've seen my videos criticizing christianity as a religion do you think i just completely abandoned my critique of monotheism when instead of christianity it's native american monotheism it's korea ojibwe whether wherever you are in the united states you know do you think do you think i celebrate that do you think i support that do you think i'd want to teach my own daughter to to you know participate in these you know ceremonies in a tent in a teepee dancing around a fireplace and getting high it's not worth describing the details do you think i even believe in say dream interpretation within first nations spirituality did i have any [ __ ] sympathy at all for people interpreting dreams and hallucinations this way and ascribe significance all right i'm not just a nihilist from nine to five it's 24 7. i'm not just the nihilist when i'm criticizing islam or christianity right i'm also a nihilist on when i'm criticizing buddhism the religion traditional spirituality of the kree of the egypt way when i'm criticizing right okay okay you're live in the 21st century all right and i was living in saskatchewan i don't believe in any of this [ __ ] right i don't believe in any of it okay but what next what now you know what kind of person am i going to be what kind of role am i going to play what am i going to do to help and in effect i volunteered to be a part of the cree language revival movement cree and ojibwe they're very close to it i signed up at the university paid money and poured years of my life into it it's like okay i can do this i have this skill set from working on this kind of politics and these languages and i can be a valuable positive part of this movement you know now you know guys i don't but i'm a nihilist i don't valorize cree culture you know i don't i don't trust i don't valorize ukrainian culture you know the ukrainians are a bunch of meat-eating drunks i don't like anything about ukrainian culture i really don't and they're also anti-semitic they'd probably just hate me for being jewish you know there's a lot of problems with ukrainian there's a lot of things i don't support and they wouldn't support about me from their perspective i'm a vegan jew who wants you know and maybe that's why they didn't recruit me maybe they said vegan jewish i don't know i don't know uh other people i think got an email back but you know there could be other reasons why they decided it wasn't worth it i was too old or or i only said i can do 200 push-ups and not 300 push-ups whatever it was you know um you know my point is it's really false to see the world and to see your role in taking action and changing the world as being built on the basis of this kind of belief it's not that you subscribe to an ideal you believe in something and therefore you risk your life for it and again risking your life we normally think of just you know rolling the dice as if taking a chance on death the main way in which we risk our life it's not facing bullets right the main and more important way you have to think about risking your life is risking five years of hard work whether that's five years of hard work boiling potatoes or five years of hard work studying the chinese language five years of hard work studying the kree language the ojibwe language like okay i'm gonna undertake this humble hard work for three years or five years or whatever it is and the risk you're taking with your life right in this way it may have nothing to do with the difference between between life and death well it's just something you want to jump in with um this is a good time to comment guys who would actually read your your comments but i don't know if you got the same one i've got to just read melissa's expression obviously there's a lot of different stuff yeah obviously there are a lot of different things to talk about there but i don't have something prepared i was just sometimes when i'm not listening to you i don't know when you're gonna stop so you know i don't know if there will be an opportunity to even say anything um [Music] look i i agree with you having heard so much in the last few weeks about the conflicts in ukraine and what people have to say about it either professional journalists i i've just been embarrassed basically to watch a lot of the professional journalism uh discussing this subject uh but also private posts uh posts that i've seen from people and you know on my facebook or you know just elsewhere online uh just the level of military illiteracy and you know i don't want everything to go back to ancient greece and in our conversations but just the fact that i've read but every everything was back in scripture just the fact that i've read the history of the peloponnesian war i really do think although warfare has changed immensely since then uh just the concept alone of reading about warfare i think a lot of people maybe they they read about it in a history textbook in high school and then they never read it you know you don't have to read anything about history you don't have to you know it's not required um so i i just think a lot of people are living in complete ignorance um about warfare and how this is we are always basically living on the edge of of war um at any moment in the modern age and uh people people like to live in a dream where the this isn't the reality yeah and i would just say it's it is also a a self-righteous dream i mean it's that people don't people don't fantasize but fantasize about these things in a way that's humiliating to them or challenging them or means they have to do a lot of hard work they think about it in a way that puts them on this podium when they're on instagram when they're on twitter and i think frankly even when they talk to their own family members where they feel empowered by the the delusions they they choose to embrace now i have a great quote here uh in the in the audience so this is from ben hodges i i don't know that i've seen this as a white house sports spokesperson let's just look up the name uh okay so yeah he's in effect uh he's in effect a spokesperson for the american side here um u.s military uh person so here's a quote quote absolutely ukraine is going to win this russia is not going to get into kiev russia has made the decision to transition into attrition warfare [Laughter] so um look guys i'm going to use an example this just came up spontaneously with melissa it really wasn't because melissa asked me a question it was just that i was looking at and hearing all of this illiterate news reporting and discussion and so out of the blue without melissa asking about it i sent melissa a series of photographs of what russian mortar equipment looks like so i just want to say morter i'm just going to give you guys the words it is a very strange word in english you don't hear it often right in the news what you hear about is shelling and and melissa appointed she said oh well thank you for sending me this and explaining this i'm going to tell you in a moment just what it was i explained to her oh wow i hear this stuff about shelling in the news and i try to visualize what are they actually talking about like what are these shells you know you don't mean shells from a pistol what do they mean by shelling okay so i center photographs of the particular hardware that the russians use mortars okay the word mortar in english is the same word as mortar and pestle we still have this in in modern english okay it is it is a word just for something that's shaped like a bowl and if you go back and look at the type of mortar in the military sense used during the napoleonic era pardon me during the napoleonic era and even sort of the the late medieval era they did look more like a mortar in the sense of a mortar and pestle so this is a kind of slaying term that has become formalized in the english language it's now part of the dictionary denotation of the word mortar they are very small they're very cheap they're very lightweight um i showed melissa pictures of specific heavy mortar models that can be rolled around like golf clubs so you know like in american culture people have golf clubs and have a little caddy they have two wheels they can roll it and obviously you look at the size of these things you could load at least 20 of them onto a truck depends on how well you pack them into a truck you know you can set up 20 mortars right and if you're within 10 kilometers of the target they can then fire shells more mortar rounds however you want to put it they can fire incendiary shells for example 24 7. and it costs next to nothing this doesn't have the kind of cost of a guided missile you know the united states of america uses these very very expensive missiles that fire from a um a submarine you know this is really really expensive you know try to calculate how much each missile strike caused the united states firing missiles long-range missiles from a helicopter is also very expensive okay having one truck deploy 20 mortars and then have 20 guys maybe 40 guys sit there and pop in the the it was gonna say rockets they're not even really marcus rockets their mortar rounds and have them shell a city you can completely destroy a city in 24 hours and there's no limit to how many mortars you can set up once you're in range i said 20 you can set up a hundred right and again each one if you look this up they get even smaller than that they get really tiny the actual size of the explosives is small and the the uh the tube that they fire out of is very small right it's it's likely if you put in the word artillery you will instead get images of the largest the most frightening russian artillery uh vehicles shall we say you know and it's kind of natural human curiosity gravitates towards these these enormous machines of war okay that's not what it takes to reduce an entire city to rubble okay that's not what it takes to win over now we're in a situation right now where we're gonna talk about the russian strategy in terms of what's overt and then what's hypothetically covert on an overt level what vladimir putin is saying to the ukrainians is 100 consistent with my analysis of this war since 2014. uh now i'm going to raise the question like maybe i'm wrong maybe what putin's trying to do covertly is different so i said but on an overt level what putin is saying to the ukrainian government is if you want this to stop if you want the russians to stop dropping bombs shelling using mortars using uh artillery if you want the russians to stop destroying ukrainian cities then the government of ukraine has to sign a document recognizing the independence of donetsk and luhansk and either recognizing the the independence of crimea or recognizing it as russian territory but one way or another stating that ukraine will never again make a territorial claim that ukraine does not consider it ukrainian territory donetsk luhansk uh crimea so since 2014 that is what i thought putin's agenda was and at the earliest stage like around 2015 it seemed to me then that he was maybe willing to say let's split it 50 50. let's pretend ukraine has won something like you guys can save face you can you can you can pretend you've won something where russia would give back donetsk and luhansk but russia would keep crimea that it would be like okay we'll pretend it's a 50 50 split that is not remotely at 55 but okay we will recognize you as ukrainian territory to next new hampshire but russia would keep you know uh crimea which is really what the war is is all about okay so now it's it seems like today unambiguously the offer is no you missed your chance like maybe if ukraine had capitulated right back in 2014 2015 maybe they would have gotten a better deal but now too many years have gone by too many years too many billions of dollars too many body bags now russia is saying they're gonna take all three to nets luhansk and crimea and if you want kiev back if you want the russians to just give up their claim to the west of ukraine or the remaining part of ukraine then you have to capitulate and then that's that's the new 50 50. that's the new way to let ukraine say face say okay ukraine gets to exist at all and recognize this russian page that is overtly what vladimir putin has been saying at this point um it is possible that covertly instead what he wants is to just conquer and rule all of ukraine it's possible like it's possible that that overt uh offer of peace negotiations is just 100 a dead end distraction tactic and that actually putin wouldn't wouldn't give it to um and if so it's a smart tactic you know it's it frames it in a certain way the western press is reporting the evacuation of the entire population of kiev as if it's a victory for the ukrainian side as if it's a victory for the american side as if it's a victory for nato think about the level of cultural acceptance of cowardice we've got going on here guys so you're telling me running away to live in a refugee camp is victory right you're telling me that's bravery telling that's good that's the ukrainian side winning no it's not it is most likely that putin has simply been waiting for these evacuations to proceed before increasing the military pressure on kiev and all the other major cities and when i say increasing the military pressure i mean two things one mortar mortar shelling whatever i say devastation to the use of uh explosive and incendiary shells or mortars which can completely you don't need anything else that can be a sufficient tactic as soon as you have a stable camp in range to use mortar and artillery the war is over okay babe a little bit too hard to find can you see machiavelli's discourses that's pretty cool if you think this is new in terms of war literacy and war illiteracy machiavelli in the discourses on livy he already says the old era of war is over because now we have artillery now we have mortars it's fundamentally the same technology now as soon as the enemy is in range to use artillery and mortar fire to destroy your city the war is done right now the the only footnote we have to add so machiavelli do this all right the journalists in our time don't know this the major political leaders in our time i feel don't know this like you know maybe there are some exceptions but most of the democratically elected leaders in the west they do not understand this machiavelli all right uh you can say machiavelli was ahead of his time i just think he was a man of his time the footnote you have to add to this is uh airplanes aerial assault is that you can then make a counter argument say well if the enemy can come in and set up mortar fire they can come in and set up artillery but you can defend yourself by sending out aircraft to destroy it either before it fires or as soon as it starts firing that's a counter-balancing element we all know that's not the case in ukraine right now ukraine does not have the dominance of the skies they don't have an air force that can that can wipe out uh russian artillery encampments russian uh uh mortar placements but even so if you know what happens with incendiary weapons as soon as they're fired on a city city lights on fire and it burns then it's game over now if the city is fully populated you could have a million people die i mean people run away it's unlikely to be millions uh just be honest probably a hundred thousand people you know per se you know it's normally just because people get up and run i like that we was talking about this the other day when you're looking at the total body count for even the atom bomb the american use of nuclear weapons in uh hiroshima and nagasaki well why is the body count so low well people get up and move you know it's not that many people in the blast radius and people you know so you know it's even the most devastating weapons you'd be surprised how low the uh the bodyguard is but it is most likely russia is waiting i mean obviously they're keeping up the pressure uh approximately one million people have already fled kiev so maybe another million are going to flee this city empties out and then you can just win you can just use incendiary mortars and it's game over okay again you don't have to read the you know you don't have to read the fine print in the military equipment catalog and know the exact you know model of of the incendiary weapons of the shells of the of the mortar devices this is very broad war literacy as opposed to war illiteracy that we're talking about okay and then the other thing you can do once you know a significant percentage of the um of the civilian population has evacuated is you can just occupy the city with soldiers on foot you just have to march in and take it and i mean i was laughing out loud to melissa day before yesterday or something because i saw a ukrainian ukrainian news broadcast this is basically propaganda from the ukrainian side that was describing how heroically the ukrainian people are resisting the russians but the actual news footage they were showing was of the russian army parading in and occupying a city and i say parade intentionally the russians who were walking in they had no concern that they were under fire they were not defending themselves in any way you know it didn't look like the ukrainian civilians were happy about it people were not cheering but all of the ukrainian civilians there they were accepting the russian occupation of their of their city or town that was what i was seeing on cameras like well what i'm seeing is the exact opposite i'm seeing the total absence of armed resistance as the russians occupy this this particular place i'm not saying it's the whole of ukraine is like that but i'm not seeing a gorilla resistance guerrilla warfare or whatever you want to say bitter partisan of bitter end fighting that's not what's going on here at all and sorry if you just think about a parade you got tanks and you got men on foot rolling in to occupy a town if there is just one sniper up in an apartment building once you're into urban warfare there's just one team of snipers shooting down right that what happens to your military parade right like if you think the military parade means nothing you think it's just symbolic no it demonstrates the total absence of guerrilla resistance but this this is not vietnam the reality on the ground of the ukrainians who have capitulated the ukrainians who are today living under russian occupation some of whom have been under occupation since 2014 right the reality on the ground is not it's not like the vietnam war it's not at all and by the way i do know the history of vietnam war a very small percentage of the vietnamese people supported communism like that's the reality many vietnamese they wanted an independent democratic country they didn't want to be ruled by communists it wasn't the case they had massive uh support at the ground level it was very you know internally the divisions between different vietnamese political camps those are intensely felt and they were to some extent killing each other they weren't just killing americans [Music] i'll just say i really like this discussion and i really like what you could say about cowardice yeah and just being nihilistic about even what you hear on the news living with this every day not nine to five 24 hours five days a week i live with no belief in what i hear on the news i'm not going to put my faith in somebody saying no ukraine is winning uh when if you just do a little bit of analysis as you've as you've you it's more analysis than a little that you've fleshed out in this video so far um but if you really do think it all the way through um examining just a simple statement like that like yes ukraine is winning yes right what does that mean right and exactly what you're saying here um right they don't even have ukrainian army doesn't even have snipers that are willing to shoot at people during this military parade yeah as you said yeah so um you know and again by the way you have a human heart think about it from the other side think about if you were one of the russian soldiers and you were facing these conditions too i mean you know again i sympathy is an analytical tool you may find it hard to sympathize with vladimir putin specifically or hard to sympathize with the specific soldiers that are on the ground but take the time to do it and even just visualize those things and thinking through i think it helps you get over some of these propaganda notions i'm mostly hearing left-wing propaganda with this i'm not seeing a lot of right-wing prop piano but you know really really really just thinking about well what if it were me who had a shoulder-mounted rocket and i'm gonna take out a group of attack helicopters like gee this starts to seem implausible if i'm actually like you know sorry just thinking through what if what if i were in mariupol trying to resist the army occupying the city and that like step by step we're going here yeah yes exactly and just the the basis for this is outrage and seeing uh people dying in war um when people are dying in war and we've just been ignoring it uh so that it's that by itself is enough to just totally uh totally incapacitate people's ability to reason through this they just they they see this horrifying image they think this is terrible the russians are you know clearly the evil side uh i have to stand up and just shout to anyone who will listen that this is this is horrible um number one yes it is complete illiteracy in warfare two completely just disregarding what happened in 2014 yes that the ukraine was already invaded in 2014 and there was there was shelling in 2014. i just saw it the other day um and nobody i don't remember that at all uh you know this kind of outcry this outrage at that showing at that time right uh but just just the you know immobilizing of people's brain power in this uh you know what you said about about uh yeah being the center of russia at one time yes you know that just just be clear that is the origin of the russian nation so it's not just at one time kiev was the capital it's kind of at the most important time it's their foundational myth it's it's you know the origin of the of the nationality of russia not just the country of the empire is kiev and ruse it's it's the city of kiev that's where it all that's where the story begins that's where chapter one of your history textbook begins for history of russia whether at the primary school level high school level or university going in yes so i i admit my ignorance on this level i mean that you you told me about this uh oliver uh oliver shields a fan of your channel and also has his own youtube channel uh so he sent me you know this document about the republic of al gore i'm sorry yes pronouncing it but just this level of history learning about you know how many people who are standing up and and denouncing russia for this great have any grasp on it and like you said i know i know a lot of people might understand it but they wouldn't send their own daughter or son into war you know of course you know that's a different level but just like being able to admit like okay maybe there is some like repeat this very briefly like the discussion wouldn't be worth having if one side were totally good and one side were totally evil like so i've discussed this i also have a book chapter chapter four my my book is on uh patreon right now if you pay one dollar on patreon you can read the first four chapters of the future of an illusion and i don't even know you can read a lot of my other book too no more manifestos so there's there's a lot of work but this is one of the things i've i've recently put emphasis on is you know um recognizing in a nuanced way what is good within the evil side's argument or what have you that's really important that's really an aspect of of maturity in politics adolf hitler was opposed to cigarette smoking was opposed to women drinking alcohol during pregnancy no he was wrong about almost everything else i mean you know you don't feel i really do think he was a [ __ ] i think he was an incredibly stupid person really i mean a lot of people have this a lot of people talk about this kind of evil genius trope i don't think he was an evil genius at all i think he was an idiot but you know again understanding you know the complexity and contradiction and really dealing with and then understanding what is still the people to this day what is appealing to people about nazism and neo-nazism why it still matters today and it matters right now in the ukraine conflict in case you hadn't heard why this comes up again again this way and then and then dealing with with that you know so this this is this is important all these different fields but look um in terms of a one-sided so a great question from spen spen says can i get the book some other way suspend uh that particular book i was gonna publish it today but maybe tomorrow the next day uh veganism the future of an illusion that will be for sale on uh amazon amazon.com really within just a couple of days the other book is taking longer the other book is called no more manifestos so i don't know a couple of weeks or something but yeah you can get them on amazon i'm just being honest i don't know how much it'll cost i i'm gonna put it as cheap as i can kind of thing but there's some details you don't know until you know like you don't know until the end i can't promise you any particular price of this minute because i i don't know the system works to that level dealing with um yeah but i'm dealing with uh amazon self-publishing for both so yes the short answer is yes and frankly even if you are supporting me on patreon i i hope people will go and read the book that way uh anyway sorry pleasant distraction thanks for the thanks for the question um myanmar okay some people sincerely support vladimir putin east and west like there are some americans who are pro-russia and pro-putin you know and and we're talking about people sincerely now if you step down a level into the insincere and cynical support for russia some people are making a lot of money out of the oil industry you know some people have corporate concerns and investments some of them have reasons to support russia or to tolerate vladimir putin because they're making millions of dollars whatever the situation is like there were there were business interests and these kinds of things there are people who are into conciliation and cooperation for insincere reasons but you know there are people in sincere support okay that's russia that's putin we talk about myanmar talk about the [ __ ] military dictatorship in myanmar nobody supports them nobody sympathizes with them like that's closer to like pure evil in terms of politics then even like during during his first election during like we joined with the first couple months of the regime of adolf hitler there were all kinds of people including the prime minister of canada who were super optimistic about hitler they were like oh hey this is going to work out you know with you yeah well some of them later regretted uh [ __ ] uh the psychologist carl young hilarious go back and read carl young's support for adolf hitler it's [ __ ] oh yeah oh yeah and he did later regret it and some people praise his later writing where he's regretting it i don't forgive you carl young i think that i think there's a really deep judgment who that dude was no all kinds of people were were optimistic about this and again like sympathy is an analytical tool i'm not asking you to have sympathy for the devil you can just sit around and weep in your shreddies weeping your breakfast cereal you know my point is you can sympathize in order to understand the phenomena right so in this sense you know myanmar after so many decades of suffering and sorrow they finally return to democracy deeply flawed democracy semi-democracy blah blah blah they finally reinstalled uh aung san tsuchi in a kind of symbolic leadership role right she wasn't really you know in terms of political power the leader but okay she was not in prison anymore to this fragile frail old woman who's not vegan she's not she'd live a longer healthier life if you're a vegan convert honks on sushi to veganism guys you know okay so there was this progress there was this hope for myanmar nobody supports this military not even communist china you know they're not happy about it they're like willing to tolerate it because business is business they have their own policy and approach to these things do you think nepal is happy about it you think india is happy i think malaysia is happy but not even cambodia not even hun sen the leader of cambodia nobody's happy about this what the [ __ ] you gonna do about it homeboy now look i have had to ask myself at many many different points in my life thought i was going to learn the burmese language i've had to ask myself at many different points in my life if i was going to learn one of the ethnic minority languages within burma so languages like shan languages like moan all right like i can't count i would have to sit here and think like there were many different kind of junctures in my life where i sat down and was seriously looking at committing myself to learning one of these languages again whether burmese or one of the minority languages in important i'd have to go down a list for you probably 10 different points in my life but one that was uh very memorable and you know emotionally moving for me um just a couple of days before my daughter was born some divorced this is when i was together with my my ex-wife and i forget this is four days before what but it was in the period we were just getting ready for the birth and you never know exactly what it's gonna be so it was four days or seven days or two days but you know in the days leading up to birth and we got got everything prepared and i'm doing all you know i'm doing all the cooking and cleaning you know you know my my ex-wife is putting her feet up and you know uh making a lot of vegan macaroni and cheese this kind of stuff you know uh but we're sitting around and you know i i said to her then it was just in the lead up you know in some ways you have a lot of time you're really just waiting to give birth kind of thing and i there were there were violent political events in burma at that time and i said to her look will you let me show you because she had her own scholarly background in languages and politics of of asia and i had my because look you know we could do this like you and me could make the decision today and we can really go into burma we can specialize in burmese politics you know including the ethnic minority and i was trying to show her how the writing system works just saying so i can read and write burmese because i learned pali it's like learning latin and then you study italian except it's way harder because it's southeast asia but like you know there's this ancient language i'd already learned and i learned to read and write it in the burmese tradition then you know and i was trying to show her and the ways in which burmese was similar to languages she had studied and of course she already knew it's connected to history and politics and um i remember my ex-wife being so kind of uh contemptuous and [ __ ] in response to this that you know i got i got very upset i said to her like like what you know what's the matter with you like i'm trying to talk to you seriously about you know what we're gonna do with the next 10 years of our lives like what we're doing politically and what we're doing intellectually because she had given up on like five different things she'd been doing with her career i had been forced to give up on five different things i was doing with my life i didn't want to she made decisions that forced me to completely throw everything i was doing in the garbage you know i'm looking for hope and belief in the future and how i can make a positive difference in the world and i'm saying there seriously look we can just and it has everything to do with doing it together if you guys haven't studied a language sitting alone with a book is very different from me just having one other person who's doing the the speaking exercise with you right like you know we could do this together and you know she could take her background and i could take my background we could go into this and make a difference uh just saying this is not a boast but obviously that's true some of you know who my my ex-wife was or who she is put it this way not only is it true that i could have made a difference in burmese politics and my ex-wife could have made a difference in women's politics not only is it true that we could have made more of a difference together and learning to read and write blameless [ __ ] if you think about who my ex-wife was and what her phd prepared her to be able to do like what paths she could have taken right after finishing her phd right actually actually that's probably the biggest difference she could have made that's probably the best path she could have gone on for to get into burmese whether mainstream burmese or an ethnic minority tradition of burmese like shan actually you know like like if you compare it to what difference could she have made in beijing china good luck what we have to ask those little time what difference it's going to make in taiwan even you know that's that's actually a place where at that time and then in the 10 years that followed well coming up on 10 years since i split up with my my ex-wife not yet but anyway you know so again it's not just a hollow bows but you think about opportunity cost okay my point is again we're not just talking about risking your life it's not just saying to you hey strap a strap on a bandolier hey you can be you know uh arnold schwarzenegger or something you know even if you try even if that's what you sign up for most of the guys who sign up to join the army thinking they're going to be arnold schwarzenegger they're peeling potatoes they're carrying sacks of ammunition they're digging trenches they're doing all kinds of mundane tasks that make the military operation possible or or worse you know whatever you know really you can find your whole military care can be doing paperwork you know and that's you feel that's not what you signed up for well you know guess what you signed up to follow orders not give orders and you know you may have thought you signed up to be a hero you don't get to be a hero and you may even worse you sign up to be a hero you end up committing crimes against humanity and let me just let me just digress to say this there are a lot of people in the media now making a big deal of the fact that some of the ukrainians are neo-nazis all right if you make the decision to sign up to join the us army right now because you support joe biden's policy let's just say you're you're a moderate centrist you support joe biden's policy if you sign up and join the us army do you think you won't work with neo-nazis do you think you won't have a guy in your unit who can [ __ ] shoot a machine gun like nobody else yeah that guy's our best gunner and he's a [ __ ] neo-nazi and you get along with them and you break wherever you eat lunch with that [ __ ] neo-nazi you know it's hard that's what war entails war entails that someone who would be your worst enemy in peace time becomes your best friend because he knows how to shoot a [ __ ] machine gun he's actually good at his job and that's the guy you rely on to pull the [ __ ] trigger and yeah you know yeah you know brad he's kind of a [ __ ] neo-nazi but you know and the reverse is true too there's some [ __ ] neo-nazi like brad he signs up whatever because he went maybe he wanted to fight against the taliban whatever he wanted to fight against and his best friend becomes a translator who's ethnically you know arab he's racist against arabs but now his best friend is an arab translator you know he signs up and he has a close friendship with a black guy who's also really good at firing a machine gun that's what war does that's what war does to people for better and for for worse right now if you're in a [ __ ] us military base in virginia you will have friends and colleagues who are neo-nazis in the united states of america do you want do you want to venture i guess what percentage of men in service the american army right now are neo-nazis nobody wants to know you think the research is hard to do it's not hard to do you think the cia you think the cia doesn't have a [ __ ] button they can press that's based on filtering and reviewing every single email sent and received by every single man on active military duty you think they can't press a [ __ ] button and tell you right now what percentage of people in the us army are neo-nazis it's one button you think you're like you know look all armies do this okay right now let's say you're the you're the government of israel you need to know how many of your own soldiers are religious fanatics of various kinds of course every email every text message from every phone for anyone who's in the israeli military of course they're filtering it for keywords of course they are of course they want to know how many guys in active duty in the israeli army how many are left-wing left-wing wing nuts let's put that with you know a little bit crazy on the left-wing how many are right-wing wing nuts how many and like even just like within judaism how many of them are moderately religious and some of them are how many are really religious to the point where this could be a problem this could be a problem in a battlefield situation in terms of a trust in terms of intelligence in terms of reliability you think you think nobody in the [ __ ] cia knows how many of these guys are neo-nazis they work with neo-nazis because that is war there's a guy here in canada if you google you'll find this guy but i don't even want to use his [ __ ] name there's a guy here in canada who finished a university degree uh and he i forget he was like 25 or 30 but he was older than the average army recruit but he'd finish his university degree and he was the stereotypical antifa left winger you know he identified as both an anarchist and a communist you know they try to play this game like oh you can take anarchism and communism and call it anarcho-communism it's like you can take freedom and tyranny you [ __ ] get a piece of [ __ ] but he was playing the same game the antifa people were like oh it's it's not communism terrible communism you know uh he was one of these pieces of [ __ ] from my perspective he was university educated and he signed up to fight in afghanistan in case you didn't know i signed up to fight against isis not that many years ago didn't work out for some reason canadian army um and and that's on my record too if i if we talk if i now apply for a visa to go back to china if i apply for a visa to go back to thailand you think their government can't press a button and just see a record of oh he signed up to join the army and of course they can of course they can any well-organized military government in the world and when like whatever you apply for a business visa you apply for a whatever a student visa of course they can and they can press a button and see oh this person how what are their religious views of course what do you what do you think what do you think [ __ ] what do you think email exists for and if if they couldn't you'd say they were incompetent if they couldn't you'd complain you'd say why didn't the government cash this guy when the next terrorist attack happens of course they do they do that for giving visas people who apply for visas of course they do it for people signing up for the military or specific uh military side um anyway there was this piece of [ __ ] left-wing extremist in the canadian army and he went and got himself killed i forget if he died in afghanistan or if he died in iraq i'm sorry i just forgot which one but you know i relate to this story on many different levels but there was this attempt in the canadian mainstream media and i i 100 assume it was like handed to them by the federal government the government of canada to make this guy into a hero like oh here's this really good guy here's this really morally good person who signed up to fight and die and he fought and he died you know um [Music] you know okay so i can sit here and say oh this guy is a communist this guy is uh whatever he's this kind of college boy phony anarcho-con okay all right but if i were deployed with him if i were digging a trench with him and living in a tent with him and i'm fighting in the war with him right that's what war does it brings communists and fascists together it brings all kinds of people together who otherwise would hate each other right to to fight or die you know that's that's the kind of clarity that violence brings to to human life okay great great question from javier nice to hear from you javier and i i got your email and replied to you a couple hours ago javier asks quote how do you approach the idea of primary sources in a topic that is in unfolding in real time like this great great question um with all this misleading information how do you cope with reading primary source documents you know i mean in a sense informally i'm saying this to melissa all the time like it's just it's not something i normally do broadcast about or write articles about it's like what i hate about the kind of what i hate about the mainstream media and twitter and what i hate about the way in which mainstream media relies on twitter you have journalists and their form of research is reading things on twitter and quoting people on on twitter is this really strange way in which they disregard the motivations for people saying these things so you know to give you an example i was you know i was just shouting just to be just for the sake of being more entertaining in the conversation melissa but like i see these youtubers reporting on news stories saying oh you know the ukrainian side it has these strategically important missiles it's like if they had strategically important missiles they would not be in the newspaper they would not be encouraging you to talk about this on twitter and on youtube like the strategically important missiles in this conflict are the missiles nobody knows about and that they would literally kill you for talking about or revealing the location of as opposed to like these propaganda photos that are being actively given to you and and shared right now i'm just pointing out that's not even talking about news being fake or misleading it's just about recognizing what the motivations of people are in in creating and sharing and propounding news this way you know like so it's the simplest thing to say but you know people are saying this for a reason and when people are silent they're silent for a reason and things are secret for a reason um you know and some of the things that nobody is talking about are more significant than what is being shared and propounded openly so i've raised the issue again and again of what about syria what about what the israeli army and israeli intelligence are doing in syria now because the russian position there has been vitiated um what i want to say the russian position there is the the excuses for uh tolerating the russian russian cooperation with uh the assad regime in syria those have ended so now now that uh attacking the russians in syria is fair game what happens what are the israelis going to do what have they already done secretly like what is because a lot of what israeli intelligence in the israeli military does i remember that day one when the syrian civil war popped off is israeli intelligence israel military and the israeli air force they went in and did a whole lot of things rather which you know i'm not saying it was a not saying nobody mentioned it in the news but there's very little recognition or discussion of that and how how important it was strategically so you have israeli making was there and another one i've drawn attention to repeatedly is what's happening on saccharin island what's happening on the current islands what's happening on the disputed border between japan and russia and i've been sending melissa links about this and you know melissa sent me a screenshot of a youtube comment uh where someone in ukraine someone who was ukrainian said hey japan you guys should now invade russia and and take back you know reconquer sackland island reconquer uh the kuril islands you know it's now is your chance because we have this war with russia you know again these things aren't secret nobody's talking about it i listen to the japanese news and a certain percentage the japanese news consists of direct propaganda statements the japanese government and they have stepped up the propaganda on this japan is openly saying well guess what we're not happy about our border with russia guess what we don't accept this we don't except a bunch of tough talk you know or can you back it up you're gonna do something well okay so again some of my analysis it has already proven to be true i mean someone else from 2014 proved to be true also but some analysis just a few weeks ago it has it has played out in this way there are these other fronts um another one is what what turkey is going to do i think there's no point speculating about that but you know there's certainly best cases and worst case scenarios there uh you know so the answer to this question is you just have to look at all reasoning as motivated reasoning and all communication as having a very definite intention like you know you look at these statements and for every one of the statements whether it's from a government or from a journalist you can add and that's what they want you to think you know that's what they want you to know and you know there there there is an agenda here so actually for me it's not that hard to cope with but you think about the background i come out of um what does anyone say about the history of slavery in thailand well that's what they want you to think you know that's what they want you to know and then there's all these things that are that are not being said what does anyone say about the history of buddhism and how the buddhist religion was connected to slavery in thailand oh what happens if you're the one guy even at cambridge england even in oxford england you know what if you're the one guy willing to talk about slavery and buddhism in the history of thailand and then you know there's a lot of silence and then these intentional statements but you know in my experience you know even dealing with the history of french colonialism in cambodia in laos it's amazing the extent to which you're always dealing with this kind of motivated reasoning so you know i just say for me i'm just i'm just being honest this is just subjective for me it's not different for me it's not a change to shift over to deal with primary sources right now as as history unfolds and how deceptive they are how they engage in deception and i think if anything what's hard to deal with is the possibility that people are just telling the truth uh just real real briefly so i'm wondering what most people say most of us are saying but you know what if when vladimir putin says this he's actually telling the truth that you know that's possible what if when joe biden says this go back watch my video on joe biden's secret plan uh for the indo-pacific there's the there's this possibility that this really is joe biden's plan this really is american foreign policy in the next 10 20 years we don't know so that's actually somebody starting to deal with is what if it's what if it's not deception yeah i was just going to comment about your article that you posted many years ago about saccharine island and about the indigenous question of the indigenous people of sacramento island uh so i was just reading it because you shared it to your patreon and i wanted to point out just this this part you were analyzing some a government document from russia uh from the soviet union yeah so they were categorizing or they were um characterizing sacklin as being part of russia immemorial i remember i remember that phrasing since time immemorial section was about how the indigenous people were now having to live in different houses they were having to live in a totally different society and with different culture a different culture than they ever had before so this is this direct opposition that is is that was a primary source i mean that's the government source um you know you have to be uh conscious of that when you're when you're listening to president biden today when you're listening to uh even uh zelinski today right look you know but i mean i'm i'm used to it i mean i guess it's just i read all primary sources this way for any historical period any context you know one of the ones that's a real laugh is uh when did yunnan become part of china now if you want to talk about tibet this is even more income when when did tibet become part of china you know but when did yunnan become part of china when did dil become part of china when did sipsong panna sichuan bana in chinese pronunciation when did simpson panna become a part of what all chinese will tell you and including chinese who admit this is a lie five minutes after you show you're not an idiot is since the han dynasty [Laughter] let's let's so the the han dynasty starts in 206 bc and it says the handles [Laughter] so you know this is this is kind of normal uh you know i'm sorry it's false in case you weren't guessing what i'm saying this is a lie people lie this way you know constantly um and they lie when they have nothing to gain so you know i mean when i was younger i regarded these lies as intentional i as i've gotten older i've really had to appreciate how stupid most people are most of the time so in some ways i've become more morally permissive but more intellectually demanding where i you know i blame stupidity more and i blame evil and intentional dishonesty less uh most countries exist with this type of very deep um contradiction you know within themselves china has many china has numerous you know i saw lately i've seen many many interviews from russia but one of the recurring late motifs when people in russia today this is like within the last two weeks right now in russia when they want to say that they don't really support the conquest of your criminal they're saying they're kind of polite you know they're not being trenchant they'll often say oh you know russia is so big already you know we have why would we need to conquer ukraine such an enormous country we just do have so much land with so much territory and a couple people said you know these are just these are just man on the street interviews random normal russians and these are the people who who want to politely and vaguely oppose the war not trenchantly oppose the war but some of them said you know russia's problem is that we're under populated not that we are overpopulated don't have enough land but you know russia is so big russia has so much lantern for how long has sackland island been a part for how long has siberia been a part of russia what really is the moral relationship between the russian nationality which is deeply involved with ukraine with kiev and ruse and so on and kazakhstan and central asia like okay like if this is your justification which is in some ways understandable it's iridentism if you don't know that german politics it's very good to know uh so okay so if you have an if you have an irredentist justification for conquering ukraine that this is part of the ancient homeland of russia uh well you know um looking a little bit further east you have you have a whole lot of territory that's somebody else's that somebody else is indigenous to you know and uh sorry it's this massive issue staring you in the face including i mean as i've mentioned the border with japan is is a huge in office in ceremony yeah i just want to say maybe this is uh two i don't know on the nose or if this is too um ironical to talk about it in this way um to hear americans critiquing uh the invasion of ukraine as a genocide yes now i know a lot of people in america they don't even have ancestors who were involved with the genocide of the native population in the united states however uh just the kind of uh panic and outrage that i've been hearing from the american media um it's just hypocritical in this way because the american empire is based on uh genocide and it is it came up the last time you were talking about this the annexation of hawaii well today right why why is hawaii part of the united states and guam you know the marshall islands um and all this uh it's it's um kind of hypocritical to to uh you know criticize russia in this way um although i right we still hate vladimir putin but we can recognize the hypocrisy in one side's arguments yes and the fact that they have eliminated the native popular the fact that uh yes the colonists eliminate the population to such an extent that they couldn't fight back um you know and there was just you know uh or you know they failed they failed to uh uh fight that so so i want to jump in here uh the other propaganda-based parallelism we see in the press today i hear it again and again and again is the comparison between russia's invasion of and china's hypothetical invasion of taiwan where is the ancient origin of chinese civilization if you open a textbook even if you choose intentionally to open the chinese history textbook used by the chinese government itself used by school children high school students university students in china like the official history approved by the government of china do you think in chapter one what's this chapter one the ancient origins of the chinese people do you think taiwan is even on the map like at what point does taiwan enter that history at what point does it become an important place but like you know the chinese people do not have the delusion that taiwan is part of their ancient homeland you know taiwan's indigenous people are not chinese taiwan's indigenous languages are not chinese when europeans first arrived in taiwan the traders and christian missionaries who got off the boat did not encounter chinese people they encountered the aboriginal people the indigenous people what do you want to say the native people who were not chinese and indeed the expansion of chinese hegemony over taiwan it was partly a response to european colonialism the threat that like well if china doesn't expand its sphere to control this type of formerly unimportant island if they don't take over a greater role in dominating this island maybe europeans are going to use it as a trading outpost or what have you yeah so the other thing i'm i'm skipping here is the importance of piracy uh europeans they're they're an interesting piece of the puzzle but actually the other big problem the chinese from from beijing's perspective or from nanjing's perspective but from from the mainland transit the other problem was could controlling piracy so if you allowed this uh island to remain this kind of lawless frontier um controlling the indigenous people wasn't a problem these became harbors used by pirates and some of the pirates were very powerful um they you know they were not easy to to oppose i don't see okay so this is this is a digression but it's a very significant one okay every russian child even if you're a russian growing up in the united states of america like you're not part of the hill but you're ethnically russian and you get interested in the history of russia when you open that textbook page one is chapter one it's gonna deal with kevin rose the story begins with this seminal period where the center of russia and the origin of the russian people was in kiev is in the area that's now ukraine and moscow doesn't exist and it isn't mentioned for many centuries i'm sorry i don't have it memorized how many centuries it is but you know of course when moscow first is mentioned it isn't an important place yet it isn't the center of a great empire but like moscow was a distant remote uncivilized place and the beginnings of russian history are there in in kiev do i sympathize with vladimir putin no do i support putin in this no i support democracy you know i also don't build my own politics on claims about ancient homelands and ethnic identity and you know this kind of thing that's that's not my approach to politics you know i've said this many times to friends of mine and they're often shocked like face-to-face conversations i remember being in cambodia and saying to this guy i really hate him now but he's a friend of mine this frenemy of mine kind of colleague in front of me but later i learned to hate the guy i remember saying to him you know the indigenous people of germany are german like the way you're using the concept of indigenous it's false like indigenous doesn't mean tribal indigenous doesn't mean poor indigenous doesn't mean backward or something like it doesn't have any like you're using the word indigenous in a way that's really false and like i hate to tell you this but like so we're dealing mostly with cambodia laos and thailand and stuff but like you can't talk about cambodia as if the cambodian people are not indigenous like this doesn't make sense you know so really dealing with this it's something we have to deal with in politics all the time and by the way look cambodia has a terrible system of government right now um there's an argument that cambodia thailand laos and myanmar could all become one country you know what i mean like the fact that you recognize the cambodian people or indigenous talent that doesn't mean the best thing for them is to have sovereignty in a separate state there's an argument that all of those countries could modernize and improve by integrating and creating a larger newer uh country just just to give an example like the fact that you recognize the importance of this kind of ancient history doesn't mean that you let it dictate uh all political outcomes forever certainly until a few weeks ago nobody thought it was the destiny of russia to reconquer kiev and reunify you know modern russia with the territory of ancient cave and roots that idea existed i mean certainly i think everyone has just read an intro to russian history textbook i think that idea has been around but vladimir putin successfully moved it up from from a footnote to history to a major priorities made it into the grand arc of russian history being the reunification of the russian people and yes the reunification of moscow and kiev you know so just point out there were very real propaganda reasons to create this parallel between russia's invasion of ukraine and china's theoretical hypothetical invasion of taiwan but that parallelism is in many ways profoundly misleading i don't want to get too far off topic but i just i want to say i appreciate that you said that you don't live with this belief that wherever a group of people are indigenous to you know live with the iridesce belief that uh you know you've had the experience of moving to places you know around the world and having to really consider am i going to live here the rest of my life is this going to become my culture we're living right at all times with it's a choice where we're living and and what country we're trying to uh identify with the politics and identify with the culture the history the language and for you in particular like i i really admire that about you and of course you know uh of course i admire you for many reasons a lot of things showing smoking yes so i know i i i recognize that i have some bias in this but i really do admire that you made the effort to lead to learn create an ojibwe that if you're going to live in canada that you're going to try to win the native language of the indigenous population and this in a sense um i believe is is um maybe i shouldn't say i believe because i'm trying to be anonymous here uh i'm just kidding um but this this in effect like you are um living separate from this idea of indigenous right so yes um you know i'm not going to move to norway and think just because this is my blood that i'm going to fit in here this is you know really i can't help that you're not you're not entitled to have a voice in norwegian politics because of your blood just making it more more real more specific however if you spent five years studying the norwegian language like five years isn't that a long time you could put in the work and then all of a sudden you really are entitled you really are part of it you know yeah yes right so when you think about this baby you could do this also in myanmar as you talked about this this possibility of studying the burmese language and really making a difference in this critical um you know conflict uh you know just just living with that too um you know most people they can't they have they have no control over over where they're born of course but at a certain point you have to live with your yes where where you are choosing to live and what kind of um cultural assumptions you have yeah yep so no you're right she's drawing out something explicitly that within this broadcast has been implicit that i think that this type of responsibility is a choice that you can take it on you know um you can be ethnically black and choose to become you know uh politically and intellectually japanese now the japanese people are racist the japanese are xenophobic there's a sense in which they'll never accept you but you can imagine let's say it's a black american who's very passionate about martial arts okay let's let's just leave it at that just have a simple example it's a black guy who becomes totally fluent in japanese and he becomes some kind of karate champion or martial art champion in japan let's say he appears on tv a couple times does some interviews then he opens up his own martial arts school there's a sense in which people will always be racist against him you know even if he speaks japanese perfectly and you know can read them right after so many decades and there you know there will be some you know but still after some number of years and some level of commitment and some mastery that they respect you for again you can be a martial artist you could be a medical doctor i mean you can do anything just something that people respect you know at some point he's uh you know he's earned his right to have a voice so my point is this is something you take on it's not it's not it doesn't exist passively because of your blood or from where you happen to be born but it's work no matter where you are it's working right yeah just just a parallel example one of the videos that you sent me about sacklin island and there was an interview of a an ethnically japanese man who was raised learning russians in russian and he's identifying as russia he says i would feel like a foreigner in japan this is just the reality uh you know um so in the sense like i i if we have democracy in ukraine in russia if we have democracy uh in hawaii shouldn't we all have the opportunity to to say well this if we want independence we all have to vote for it if we want to have you know started you know making such a broad proclamation here but it's just you know this this is the real issue here is that uh people in ukraine and people in russia don't have this this choice um yep yep well and you know i mean i think that really is the great unanswered question for the 21st century and probably it will still be the great unanswered question for the 22nd century i just doubt we're going to wrap it up within next 80 years what about direct democracy and you know france is not that big a country there are some provinces in france that might want independence spain is not that big a country already there are a couple different provinces in spain that might want independence this is a very simple you know challenge for direct democracy can you decide that through a plebiscite can you decide that through a referendum well take a few more steps and start really dealing with the implications for direct democracy in the 21st century in the 22nd century that is the great unanswered question and i think at this time i think a lot of people have a sense of it's danger i think a lot of people don't even want to ask it um i have not seen a single news broadcast entertain the question of what americans would say if you directly had a referendum about whether or not america should help ukraine whether or not americans you could have a question should americans be allowed to volunteer to join a military corps that will go over and fight in ukraine against the russians like if that were the question we're not committing everyone to fight but we're going to have a volunteer wing of the army where men who already in the army can volunteer and also members of the public can volunteer to join who will go and fight without being uh drafted without being forced to fight to go and fight the ukraine war what percentage of americans would vote yes for that today you know now it's different in 2014 and 2015 today in 2022 and march 12th that's tomorrow you know if tomorrow people vote on that whoo i don't you i'm just saying i've only lived in the united states for very short periods of time you know i don't have a lot of like you know what percentage of texans would vote like i think a very large percentage what percentage of new yorkers you know americans love democracy americans love to fight for democracy a fight like this and they've all been seeing the same news broadcasts we've been seeing i don't know but it is very easy for me to imagine more than 55 percent of americans would say yes let's go fight the russians or let's allow people who want to fight the russians to fight i think there were a lot of tough americans who were willing to take that that chance you know uh hey here's a good question what if japan had that kind of you know that kind of referendum i just want to say about the japanese people you guys know i have studied japanese politics formally in university and also has my own interest um there is this reputation the japanese have that they're just a bunch of [ __ ] you know they're just that they they don't like to fight you know neither in terms of face-to-face conflict nor war or whatever else well there's another side to japanese culture and it's really the side of their culture they keep out of the movies and they keep off of tv like it's there they just don't celebrate it the way americans do like how many guys in america really are the arnold schwarzenegger type you know like how many people really are bellicose and warlike how many people in america are men of action shall we say use a vague term how many people really are this this this type well that tiny minority in america is celebrated i would the difference with japan it isn't the absence of that character type um it's the fact that they don't celebrate it in the movies on tv uh in the mainstream culture that way and i think people who really live in japan really study japan they know about that they know about that kind of tough warlike side the japanese culture that's still there you know so what if you start having more direct democracy where that voice gets to be heard and where those people get to make decisions because currently i mean any of these parliamentary democracies there's no there's nothing democratic about the decision to start a war and there's nothing democratic about the decision to end a war um to say we have indirect democracy is really an insult to direct democracy you know what we have is on the democracy so you know i think that's the great that's the great question and look guys so just to come back to the other example i used before nobody supports the military dictatorship in myanmar but right if we had if we had direct democracy i'm just i'm just being real with you i'm i would i don't know what percentage of americans or what percent of japanese people would support a military intervention in myanmar like that might be way less than 50 that that also wouldn't suppress life isn't fair a lot of people want to help uh me and sorry want to help ukraine fight russia and very few people want to help myanmar fight its own military terrorship there are always i mean one is an internal civil war you know and one is an international war with an aggressor you know invading there are all kinds of differences it's not as simple as just saying racism but you know racism might be a fact and look as i've mentioned this before um i count as jewish i'm not a member of the jewish religion but genetically i count as jewish if you think that doesn't matter if you think it wouldn't shape my experience in poland in ukraine in russian it's huge the extent to which there would be racism directed against me cannot be underestimated um these are intensely intensely anti-semitic parts of the world which was crucial to my decision not to learn russian you know obviously to neither learn ukrainian nor russian but if you're going to learn ukrainian you're going to learn enough you're going to learn some level of russia anyway um the two languages are so similar that really was a choice for me academically in terms of career and everything else and everything would be so different today if i if i'd gone down that path so you know um so i've got we got we got more questions about anime so god that's exactly what i'm saying in anime everyone is a [ __ ] and everyone who watches anime is a [ __ ] and you know i'm i'm sorry but this is the you know part of my own you know toxic masculinity yeah you took the words part of my own toxic masculinity in attacking video game culture and anime culture is to say you guys are a bunch of [ __ ] [ __ ] and you girls too sorry women too it's equal up to women who are into anime women who are into video it's the same [ __ ] it's it's even worse you know and you know all those people when i say [ __ ] what do i mean i mean you're locking yourself into a perpetual childhood you know it's it's not just about masculine versus feminine it's really about adulthood versus childhood it's about a lifetime of making excuses versus taking on responsibilities and ambitions that don't don't they don't really have to do with masculinity they have to do with being a man with being an adult and women are welcome to to get it man i mean to say i'm equal opportunity is an understatement i i support women even more doing it and we've talked about that for at least five years in the channel but i can remember sitting down with melissa and talking to that at length where it's like look all of these things for women they're even harder and like the level of disrespect women get from their own parents and like you know like when women want to step up what they have to deal with yeah yeah so no um yeah shout out to larry thanks larry i can take the comment so i got just one uh question here from the audience i'm seeing your comments uh come in um you know there's just one question here i think i should i should i should answer uh sean stone's comments quote what is your prediction for the future of this war isil i was wondering if someone would would ask that my prediction for the future of the war is 100 based on my analysis of joe biden why because at this time i do not think any other anti-russian leader is showing any initiative so why am i emphasizing this to start i may be wrong for this reason okay there are some wild cards there are some people other than joe biden who could do something decisive i'll give you two really exciting examples china can flip the script on russia china can turn around and say they oppose imperialism whether it's russian imperialism or anyone else's imperialism china can stab russia in the back and there'd be massive advantages for china that would that would think about the next hundred years think about what a win it would be for china to turn around ah you [ __ ] around find out oh you signed this agreement with us five days before the beijing olympics and now you pull this [ __ ] on ukraine and that's our opportunity to go after you what does china want china wants mongolia and they can take it and they can take it away from russia forever if they flip the script and stab russia in the back now that's great power politics baby i wasn't born yesterday i know this [ __ ] works and we've been through this before this wouldn't be the first time look up history of the iron triangle policy china has flipped the script on russia repeatedly actually on small-scale proofs but one side on a huge scale they did it once and it defined the whole cold war period it's a massive issue the sign of soviet split you know that was not a cold war that was a hot war all right red hot bullets flew china can take the initiative and in doing so they would take the initiative away from joe biden which is exactly what they want to do and that's why this is a possibility worth talking about china could also take saccharin island that used to be part of china i'm not kidding you know that whole area they could take away a big chunk of siberia but yes china wants mongolia china would like to have more power in central asia uzbekistan tajikistan etc they don't need it they don't but if china wants to dominate central asia and mongolia mongolia is really separate from central asia they can do this now and china is the weaker partner in the the current dyad the current you know well it's actually it's a three-way partnership right now china russia and iran that's bizarre but that's the current anti-american alliance it's a literal military alliance they do military exercises together well china has everything to gain by backstabbing russia here including just territory so yeah they could take the initiative away from biden xi jinping would be the one man to make this or unless senior members this is also possible see i wasn't born yesterday senior members of the communist party who want to get rid of xi jinping this is their opportunity to do that and take over or they can say hey the communist party of china is opposed to great power imperialism no matter who it is whether it's america or russia that's always been their position that's why china won't conquer nepal that's why china you know there are all kinds of things china could do they're not gonna that's why china doesn't invade myanmar like there are whenever those things happen well there's an option that china says no we oppose imperialism period um even want to be to their advantage so you could have a circle of senior officials in china who are tired of waiting for xi jinping to retire who say this is our chance they get rid of xi jinping they wrap themselves in the anti-imperialist flag which every man woman and child in china has been born they've been raised you know from the bottle from the milk bottle from the cradle to the grave they have been raised to believe that that china is anti-imperialist you know and then you'll have a huge advantage huge reversal situation including um you will completely revive the chinese economy by reconnecting it at least with western europe probably with america too probably economically america will embrace you again if you now turn the tables on put so that's possible um so this is not my prediction i'm saying it's possibly possible either because xi jinping himself does it or as they say there are people at the top of the chinese communist party who want to get rid of xi jinping for a variety of reasons but just including their own promotion they want to be the next leaders well this is their chance and once this chance is gone what's gonna happen in the next 10 years xi jinping is has said he's never going to retire never is a long time so yeah that's that's possible and then the other one worth mentioning is um turkey so i don't want to get into huge details here i'm pro cyprus i'm pro-greece i'm like politically i'm anti-turkey but similarly if turkey were to actually march troops they were to actually send a large contingent of the turkish army to go and fight russia in ukraine that would be a huge political victory for turkey suddenly turkey is the darling of the european union suddenly turkey is the hero of the americans and the british and the french and ukrainians obviously you know uh there would be so much them to gain including even short-term economically right and russia is not going to nuke turkey and by the way we're not talking about turkey invading russia then sure russia with new turkey you're just talking about turkey sending peacekeeping troops to ukrainian territory to be within ukraine that would be a big turning point and guess what now you've taken the initiative away from joe biden that's that's what it would do would massively make turkey more powerful and you you'd be saying to the french and the germans guess who's in charge you know so there's a ton there's so much for turkey to gain and it's obvious uh their elected dictator but the leader of turkey he's he's thought about it and he's talked to putin about it because he and putin used to be close friends and they're not anymore so turkey can flip this uh so those two significant machiavellian footnotes my prediction for the rest of the war is based on the analysis of joe biden and the assumption that joe biden is from here on out the only anti-russian leader who's making any decisions so yeah we have india being being mentioned i've talked a lot about india in earlier videos i'm just being honest that's why i didn't talk about india in this video i there were a lot of hours talking about politics of india india and its political connections united states india and china so i'm sorry i'm just apologizing guys i'm not going to get into india because video we're going for but you could point that out in terms of my assumption that that joe biden alone is going to take the initiative well that means france is not taking the initiative germany is not taking initiative like it's pathetic but this is obvious england is not taking initiative but sure you could also say india it's this shows that india is not going to take the issue and so far that's completely the indication that india is going to stand back and do nothing and try to basically passively profit from a kind of neutrality that embraces both sides that's so far what india has been doing and it is quite possible the vast majority of people in india do not care that's hard to establish but how how much does this matter to india um by contrast myanmar matters much more to india like you know this is just part of life on earth uh but you know it's so i'm not i for this video i'm not seriously including india in the analysis but that's i have a footnote that we made other videos talking about that at great length so given that joe biden has all the initiative and is making all the decisions in my opinion joe biden's strategy is now completely clear footnote what if i'm wrong what if everything joe biden is saying publicly is an intentional deception and he's actually going to do the exact opposite that that's possible i'll mention that again later but based on what joe biden overtly communicates his words and his actions joe biden's strategy is to allow russia to destroy its economic and political position in the world which the russians have done it's for joe biden to sit back and say russia is making itself into a pariah russia is making itself into the new north korea and it is in our interest again this is not my opinion this is joe biden's opinion i may disagree with joe biden at many levels but joe biden's opinion is that it is in america's interest to sit back and allow russia to render itself a laughing stock subject of scorn and hatred and oblique to render itself the next north korea and maybe this will bring about or hasten the end of the putin regime but if not joe biden's perspective is that it's good for america and it's good for western europe if for the next 10 years the next 20 years look if putin continues to rule for 10 or 20 years that the russia will in this sense be a burnt match they will have spent all of the political capital they had and they will be reduced to a poverty-stricken uh pariah state that no longer so here's the point russia will never again be in a position to do what they did in syria and if anyone experienced the humiliation of the american policy being trumped by the russian policy in syria it was joe biden because that happened on his watch with barack obama so russia will never again be in the position to be king maker in syria to control politics whether that's in central asia the middle east around the western world that you know in a sense you can even interpret this cynically as the sort of ultimate passive-aggressive revenge for the humiliation that america endured in syria and that's specifically barack obama injured in syria and that's specifically joe biden in german syria you can read this psychologically as joe biden getting even for for what went down in syria and uh to some extent of course it has to do with iran i know the average american doesn't give a [ __ ] about iran everybody who was educated at west point and everybody who works in the bureaucratic elite in washington dc and came out of [ __ ] uh what are they coming they come out of [ __ ] uh princeton new jersey this [ __ ] all those guys are obsessed with iran their their world [ __ ] revolves around oh yeah [ __ ] that's a that's a great example the difference between elite american culture and the hoi polloi the masses don't give a [ __ ] about iran but those people are obsessed with it all those guys um whether they come out of uh out of princeton or to the actual you know military establishment so yes what russia did with syria what russia did with iran and both of those are still ongoing right up to including 2022 there's a sense in which that that's a kind of that's a kind of revenge so yeah that's joe biden's strategy so unless someone else takes the initiative that's what's going to happen next and the the tragedy is it's therefore in joe biden's interest to let the status quo in ukraine just continue kindling to just let this burn and that's my prediction for what's going to happen and it doesn't really matter if you pour 300 million dollars on the fire or 10 billion dollars on the fire 10 billion is the headline grabbing statistic that's being bandied about these days um joe biden's attitude and his strategy is the roof is on fire let the [ __ ] burn and doesn't really matter if 90 from joe biden's perspective now my perspective doesn't matter if 90 of the population of ukraine flees as refugees or 50 or what because from that cynical machiavellian perspective letting ukraine burn is the most efficient way to destroy russia and destroy the regime of vladimir putin it's more efficient than fighting a war it's more efficient than cia covert ops it's more efficient than nuclear missiles all you need to do is sit back and let it happen and from that incredibly cynical perspective nobody could care less about the extent to which the city of kiev is going to become a rubble-filled parking lot