Welcome

Spring is here, and I’m back at work on scripts. You might be aware of it, but I took a group of students to Greece and Italy for Spring Break. When I got back to the US, my allergies went haywire. 5 days after I got back I lost my voice thanks to bronchitis brought on by the post-nasal drip. Yeah, tons of fun.

Anyway, since last week I’ve written 3 scripts and I just started a fourth. While they are all intriguing, I think the one that most of us will find chock full of information is the third, episode 4.19 “Southwest Pacific Theater Part 1” and 4.20, which is part 2. Sure, it has the usual stuff about General Douglas MacArthur (perhaps a little bit that some don’t know about him), but I found the information about the British in Singapore and Malaya (two places I visited back in my Navy days) to be the most intriguing.

Even more so was the little bit about the Dutch. Don’t forget that the Dutch had an empire as well, one which was based on the Spice Islands. Of course their empire in the region, along with the British, would disintegrate (as it would for the British and French) thanks to WWII.

Then there is episode 4.21, which is going to look at Japan in the aftermath of their stunning victories. Let’s face it, by April their war machine was running roughshod over everyone they encountered. They’d taken a ton of territory, so who could blame them for being in a celebratory mood?

I hope you tune in to these episodes, as I think they are all quite fascinating, and each one presents material that I think most of us have never heard. Or if we did, we forgot it long ago.

Speaking of things in history people have forgotten, let me encourage you to join our Patreon. We have two ongoing bonus series over there, first is “1983: The Year the World Almost Ended” along with “Quagmire” the story of the US in the Middle East. You also get all episodes commercial free (everything is available at the $10/month level). So head over to Patreon.com/americanhistory and sign up today.

One of the things we often here is how great it was during WWII. Or at least how united everyone was. Sometimes I hear folks say things like “if only we could get back to those days.”

I often tell my students the best day in history is tomorrow. The WWII era was no picnic, something you’ll see as this season goes forward. There is a myth that the country was united, but it is just that: a myth. Yes, 16 million Americans served in the war in some capacity, but not all saw combat. And there was dissent. Some thought the war was unnecessary and others continued to fight for equal rights.

In other words, if you are being presented with a 2 dimensional, black and white narrative, then I’d suggest you should question that story. History isn’t Star Wars (as much as I love Star Wars). It’s more like Game of Thrones (the books not the show, we don’t talk about the show). There are no “good guys and bad guys.”

So, as season 4 goes along, we will deal with some of these myths. By switching back to the homefront from time to time it will allow me to break the monotony of the battles. While they are exciting, and there is a lot to talk about, I will not be doing a minute by minute breakdown of each one. That would be tiresome and it’s just not my thing.

But we will cover them, and we will be starting that soon. First, I want to talk about the build up of the industrial capacity and how the US geared up for the conflict. That should be two episodes and then we will start with an episode called “the US Navy Strikes Back”. By summer we should be into the Battle of Midway and eventually Guam.

Until next time, I hope you are enjoying Season 4. Questions? Feel free to email me and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

As we embark on Season 4, I’d like to invite you to follow along using the maps included down below. Sadly it is difficult to edit the actual “show notes” page for each episode, so I’ll place all important maps here. As we go along this will be updated to include more maps, and perhaps images.

It’s confession time for me. I’ve not really followed what is going on, and has been going on, between the State of Israel and the Palestinians. If I’m totally honest, it always seemed a bit far away and complicated. Then, when I did take an interest (after 9/11) I, embarrassingly, bought the story being peddled by the U.S. media. You know the one: Israel is the good guys. The only democratic state in the Middle East, etc…

However, as the years have gone by, the sheer inhumane treatment dished out to the Palestinians by the Israeli government has moved me to reassess my beliefs. Aided by the amazing work done on this issue by Scott Horton and the LIbertarian Institute, as well as antiwar.com I’ve come to have a much deeper understanding of this.

Now before we go on I should make sure you understand being against what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza strip does not make one anti semitic. There is a difference between the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Do not conflate the two things. They are totally seperate.

First, lets address the Palestinian people. One of the lies peddled by the pro-zionist folks, including their allies in the United States, is the idea that there is no such people. They are “simply Arabs” and, unlike the jews, there are plenty of Arab majority states. Further, this is based on the idea that the Roman empire kicked the jews out of the province of Judea. The Jewish diaspora and all of that.

This is totally and completely false. First, the Roman empire did not have the means to remove large numbers of people from an area. They did not have trucks, railroads or any of the technology which would be needed in order to remove large numbers of people from an area. The Jewish historian Schlomo Sand notes, in his book The Invention of the Jewish People that “…the Romans never deported entire peoples… it did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers…” He even reports that when he was conducting research for the book he visited the library at Tel Aviv University. Unable to find the collection dealing with the Roman exile of the Jewish people, he asked for assistance. He was told that there was no collection. Why? Because there wasn’t really an exile.

To further drive this point home, the American Reform Jewish movement in 1885 declared that it did not see the Jews outside of “Palestine” as constituting a diasporic people who longed for a return to their homeland. There are more sources who echo this sentiment. But note how no one ever offers any of this to counter the prevailing narrative. What we have is an effort to propagandize the American people. When one does not offer anything more than one side, it is engaging in propaganda.

So who are the Palestinians? They are former Jews. People who were living in the Roman province of Judea. They never left. Some of them became Christians with the rise of Christianity. But, and this is important, others converted when the Muslims took over the territory from the Byzantine Empire (the eastern Roman empire) in the 7th century. Why? Because while the Arab-Muslims were tolerant of other “peoples of the book”, they charged a tax for the ability to continue to practice your previous religion. And while not all of the people there converted, many did. Thus you had a group of Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Muslims.

You may not have realized there were Palestinian christians, but there are. In 2007 Congressman Henry Hyde wrote a letter to then president George W. Bush decrying the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was destroying what was left of the dwindling Christians there.

But of course the Christians aren’t the only ones who’ve suffered in this seemingly endless conflict. The Palestinian people suffer under what former Prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin himself referred to as an apartheid state. He isn’t the only one. Even David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, used the term to describe Israel in the aftermath of the war in 1967.

I don’t use that term lightly either. Israel subjects the Palestinians to more than just annoying checkpoints (even ambulances have to stop) and other low level repressions like travel permits (“papers comrade”) and roads that are “Jewish only.” The people live a life of poverty in which basic things such as water, education, electricity are all, at best, unreliable. Nevermind the actual abuse dished out by the occupying military forces: beatings, torture, murder, ethnic cleansing, indefinite detentions without so much as a trial. All of this is common. Imagine how you might react?

I’ll have more about this in an upcoming episode of the patreon only series “Quagmire in the Middle East.” Head over to Patreon and sign up. There are already two episodes in the series (new ones release every other month, and you will get every episode commercial free as well as access to about 12 hours of other goodies available no where else.

I had a run in with a “twitterstorian” on Saturday, and let me tell you, it was shocking. Well, not really. This 23 year old “historian” was spouting the same neocon imperialist drivel about the 1991 Gulf War as you’d expect to hear from George W. Bush circa 2003.

His major contention is that Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown because he was a genocidal maniac. If you haven’t been paying attention, that is the usual claim. The North Koreans don’t trust the Americans? They are crazy. Putin? Genocidal maniac. Xi of China? The narrative is starting to paint him in the same light. Iran? You know the drill. Crazy maniacal enemies.

When confronted with the simple question: name one instance of genocide visited upon Kuwait by Iraq that justified the invasion. Crickets. Of course. Well, not just crickets. Plenty of curse words and the usual ad-hominem attacks.

What set off the war? Well, as always, it’s more complicated than the usual monocausal answer given by “twitterstorians”. As you will find out in the episode (episodes???) the Iraqis were worried by the massive debt they’d sustained in the Iran/Iraq war, a war which was essentially a US proxy war against the Iranians. Iraq was our dog in that fight, and the war was essentially given the green light by President Jimmy Carter. To complicated the picture even more, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were selling a massive amount of oil to keep the price down, which hurt Iraq’s ability to service its loan debt. And there were claims of Kuwait slant drilling, essentially stealing oil from Iraq. In the end, the U.S. Ambassador essentially said to Iraq, this is an inter-Arab fight and not our business. You know the rest of the story.

Or do you? Maybe not. Or perhaps you know it, but have forgotten a lot and never truly connected the dots. That’s where I step in. I decided I’d monetize this knucklehead and give you, the listeners, some joy. I’m in the process of writing a massive episode looking at the history of American involvement in the Middle East going back to 1980. No, I’m not going to go back further (although I could, and there are references to previous events). What was originally going to be a simple 20 minute look at 1991 is turning into a MASSIVE episode. The outline alone at this point is 10 pages and I’m not even at 1991 yet!!!

I even have my sound guy working on a special intro for this one of episode. Who knows? It might turn into a totally separate bonus series. Either way, it will be available on Patreon soon (unless it’s a series, in which case just the first episode or two will be there). I’m also going to release a teaser, so if you are just a subscriber to the free show (and I appreciate everyone of you all) then that is cool.

Interested in joining the Patreon? Click on the link on the side of this page and for $5/month you too will have access to TONS of bonus content including the series “1983: the Year the World Almost Ended.” All in all there are over 10 hours of bonus material, plus Patreons at all levels get access to the free show commercial free one week ahead of the rest of the world.

So far I’m done with six episodes. Those were fairly quickly written, as I’d read enough to make it easy to do, plus I’ve lectured on things included there, such as the Meiji restoration. Now the heavy lifting so to speak has begun. I’m writing a couple of episodes about the Chinese Revolution and Chiang Kai-shek and Mao and the communist party in China. I know enough about all of this to be dangerous, but it’s not my forte, so episode 7 is taking a few days.

Now you might be asking why is a podcast titled “The American History Podcast” would be doing episodes about Japanese and Chinese history? That’s because China is going to play a major role in our tale, and I want to be sure you have the important context about how China got to where it was in the 1930s and 1940s. The same, more obviously, holds true with Japan, perhaps more so.

So the season so far is unfolding as follows: 1. Introduction, 2. Meiji Japan, 3. Japan in the Early 20th Century, 4. The Rise of Militant Japan I, 5. The Rise of Militant Japan II, 6. China in the late 19th and early 20th century, 7. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao I, 8. Chiang and Mao II, 9. Sino Japanese War I.

I’m considering making the two episodes about Chiang, Mao and the Chinese revolution and all of that into one large massive Dan Carlin style episode. I haven’t made that decision yet. We shall see.

Until next time, stay safe and stay kind to each other.

And it’s gonna be awesome, if I do say so myself. So far I have about 56 episodes planned, but I’m sure that number will grow as we move from the planning stage to the actual writing.

So, what is season 4 about? WWII in the Pacific. Amazingly it feels to me that this is a topic/area of American history that is often overlooked. When we think of World War II it seems, at least in the media, the European theater gets all of the attention. So I really want to do a deep dive into the Pacific theater, and look at it as has not been done before, to the best of my knowledge, in a podcast.

We will look, of course, at the United States and Japan as well as the battles. But we will also look at the Soviet Union, Korea, and China. We will give attention to southeast Asia and even India. The British, the Dutch and the Australians will all have a role to play in this massive narrative.

Finally, not only will we look at the big names: MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance, Chesty Puller and others, but the every day sailor and marine, soldier and airman who fought the war.

If you head over to the resources page I’ve posted most of the sources that will be used to write the scripts (as of this writing in April 2021). I’m sure I’ll be adding to this list.

When does the series begin: August, 2021, in just under 4 months. Until then enjoy the ending of season 3.

As season 3 continues to progress, we are getting ever so close to finally talking about the Great Depression. I’m quite excited about this part of the season, as some of the greatest myths of American history, ones that endure down to today, deal with the Depression. Some of these are the idea that President Hoover was all about the free market and did nothing to try and solve the economic woes of the nation. A second one is that FDR and the New Deal got the US out of the Depression. No and no. IF one acknowledges the fact that FDR didn’t solve our economic woes, then one often argues that WWII is what did the trick. This is also false, as you will see

So far I’m working on several episodes all at once. First we have episode 3.29, the causes of the Depression. We will be looking at some of the historiography and especially the argument offered by economist Murray N. Rothbard (PhD Columbia University) as to just what caused the crash. I think you’ll find it enlightening. Then there is episode 3.30, FDR and the election of 1932. I’m going to focus in this episode a bit more on politics than is normal for the show, so I hope you enjoy that one. Finally is 3.31 The New Deal. This is likely to be a mega episode, one in which I cover the New Deal in its entirety, both the 1st New Deal and the 2nd. I had planned on breaking it up into two separate episodes, but as of this writing I’m likely going to do just one. Of course that is subject to change, so don’t be surprised if you get two episodes out of it.

Until next time, stay safe and be kind to each other.

Wow, 2020 is the year that keeps on giving. Historians in the future will have a field day with this year. I really have given up trying to figure out 2020 and I’m just riding the wave of insanity hoping to make it to 2021 in one piece.

One of the crazy things about this election (in an election full of crazy things) is the fact that the polls were just so wrong, and this isn’t the first time the polls have been wrong. It makes one wonder why are they getting it so wrong? Is there something going on out there that they just aren’t seeing?

Another question that historians will deal with is what does this election (and the election of 2016) actually mean? Get over the political rhetoric and the intense feelings, on both sides, and analyze what is going on. I did an interview just over a year ago with Misha Leybovich, and he felt this election was going to be a realignment election, one which saw the US swing away from the “age of Regan” and divided government to one which would swing back to big government.

However, it appears that didn’t happen. Instead, despite polls saying there was a “blue wave” coming, it looks like whomever actually won will do so via a razor thin margin.

What I think is going on is that there is a realignment taking place. The democrat party appears to be moving to becoming the party (if it already wasn’t) of elite opinion makers, celebrities, big bankers and the upper class. Oddly, the 1%.

On the other hand, it appears the Republican party is moving to become 21st century populism. Now, if you are thinking that populism is left-wing, you are right. At least it was in the 19th century. But in the 1950’s at least one sociologist used the term more broadly to describe the anti-elitist trend in American politics.

Now here is where it gets interesting. Are we seeing the GOP move towards a more, shall we say, right-wing populism while the democrats move towards becoming left-wing elitist? It’s a question worth pondering and the years to come will certainly prove interesting.

Before you go (and leave thinking I’m insane), think about this: elitist isn’t just rich. Sure, Trump is rich. But has he ever been, culturally speaking, elitist? He’s kind of a brawler, a guy from Queens who is comfortable operating in the world of the World Wrestling Entertainment. Joe Biden, no where near as rich as Trump, is not poor by any stretch and a political insider. Kamala Harris was a prosecutor for the state of California and about as elite as you could get. One of the problems with all of this is that populism and populists can confound categorization because of the fact that they sometimes combine aspects of both the right and the left.

One of the things I’ve railed against for many years now has been the idea, at least here in the United States, that communism was not really all that bad. It was fairly prevalent in academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it has only gotten worse. There are many reasons for this, but one of the major ones, in my humble opinion, is the fact that most people really don’t understand economics.

A prime example was my interaction with Bryan Young, a free-lance writer for Star Wars Insider and blogger. Amazingly Young, on twitter, asserted that our leaders are sacrificing us for capitalism. He then says that we will “explain that it’s a system that already treated everyone unfairly, and then when the pandemic hit, they still chose to try killing us to save it.” Oh but it gets better. He says the economy IS an abstract thing and that “We don’t live in a world of actual scarcity. It’s an artificial scarcity to create misguided notions of supply and demand for masturbatory capitalist fantasies.”

So much he says is just plain idiocy. First, let’s take on that last part. The world isn’t one in which actual scarcity exists. Seriously? Did this guy pass high school economics? There is only so much water. There is a finite amount of wood. There is a finite amount of iron, etc… But our desires are unlimited. How do we match our desires with resources? Economizing.

This is the basic idea, and when I taught economics it was the first lesson. Even someone as rich as Jeff Bezos can’t buy EVERYTHING he wants. There are trade offs. If you make, for example, $100/week, you have to spend wisely because your desires are unlimited, but your money supply is not.

This leads to the economic problem itself. As a society, how do we decide what goods and services we should produce, considering that we have limited resources at our disposal? Private property solves this problem.

Before we go on, it should be noted that individuals engage in purposeful actions in order to satisfy their desires. However, those desires we satisfy, we do so in order of preference. And preference is subjective. And, by the way, our preferences are not measured numerically. By this I mean that if I pick vanilla over chocolate ice cream, this purposeful action indicates that I prefer vanilla. We can’t determine “how much” I prefer vanilla over chocolate.

Then his ideas about supply and demand. This is so ridiculous I actually don’t even know what to say. This is so crazy that I seriously was at a loss for words. First, Bryan does not understand (and he is not alone in this misconception) that capitalism is simply the market economy. The market economy, to paraphrase the late great Ludwig von Mises, is all about cooperation. “Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individual’s life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management.” Interestingly the same folks who argue Trump is “literally Hitler” want to give the government (led by Trump) the ability to plan out every moment of our lives.

So what does all of this have to do with history? There has been, for decades, an inability to look at communism and call a spade a spade. As the great American historian Eugene Genovese noted in the mid 1990s, historians in the west, many of whom were self professed communists (and he was one) “knew everything essential and knew it from the beginning.” They knew about the crimes of communism, the gulag, the starvation, the impoverishment of millions of people, the denial of human rights to millions of people, from the start.

Furthermore, Genovese notes the horrors of the system did not arise from perversions of the system. They were inherent in the ideology itself. “We were led into complicity with mass murder and the desecration of our professed ideals not by Stalinist or other corruptions of high ideals, much less by unfortunate twists in some presumably objective course of historical development, but by a deep flaw in our very understanding of human nature… and by our inability to replace the moral and ethical baseline long provided by the religion we have dismissed with indifference, not to say contempt.”

What is sad is that most historians have no training in economics at all. As Thaddeus Russell has noted, the only “economist” he was ever told to read (and he has a PhD in history from Columbia University) was Karl Marx. This is my experience as well. I have a BA and an MA in history and I’ve completed the coursework for the PhD as well. At no point did we actually read any economics, except Marx. It is almost as if there isn’t anything else to read.

However, economics is something historians should understand, and this lack of training in it is a weakness. As Mises said, Economic theory is “the indispensable tool for the grasp of economic history. Economic history can neither prove. nor disprove the teachings of economic theory. It is on the contrary economic theory which makes it possible for us to conceive the economic facts of the past.” A rudimentary understanding of economic theory is necessary if one is to understand the past, as economics is part and parcel of every day life. Human action IS what both historians and economists study.

Sadly, as evidenced by my interaction on twitter, as well as my years spent in academia, economics is not something most people understand.