Hello, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change.
I really appreciate that. My name is Ross Kenyon, I'm the
host of Reversing Climate Change and I have been for about 8 1/2
years now. I've been working in climate for
that same amount of time as well.
This podcast is a repository of learnings, observations,
thoughts, feelings, the gathering of so much content
about so many different topics. This is a little bonus episodes,
the topic so broad I couldn't hope to do justice to it, but my
goal is to say something that might make you think as a little
bite sized episode before you go about your day.
Normally I run a little segment at the beginning of the show
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I'm also just going to skip telling you about why you should
give the show 5 stars rate and review it, blah blah blah and
become a paid subscriber. I'm going to skip that today.
You know, I just don't feel like doing it.
I don't. I don't always love the begging.
So hey, I'm just going to give this one to you.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Who said that? I think Jesus said that.
He did not say that. Actually, I think that was
Aleister Crowley or someone like that.
OK, whatever. Weird start weird start to this
show. OK, so actually today I'm going
to talk about Veteran's Day. I have long appreciated this
holiday. Many of the big holidays,
they're treated as a day off. There's not much of A
remembrance, There's not much of A federation that takes place on
them. But I actually think veteran's
day is one that can be really beautiful.
I like thinking of it in its original method of celebration.
It's Veteran's Day, but I actually like referring to it
and thinking of it and casting my mind backwards into when it
was called Armistice Day. after World War One, on the 11th hour
of the 11th day of the 11th month, World War 1 ended.
World War One is not a very well understood war.
As an American, we very much, we very much look to World War 2 as
our sort of defining war. I think for the most part it's
the most easily understood of them.
In actuality, it's much more complicated than it looks, but
the story is seductive. The bad guys very obvious.
The Nazis are the bad guys. And obviously this is
complicated though, because the US was allied or did Lend Lease
and then was allied with the Soviet Union.
And this created a whole bunch of storytelling difficulties
here that I don't necessarily need to go into right now.
But suffice it to say, Allies good, Nazis bad is like a
suitable stand in story. For the most part.
World War One does not have that.
If you ask people what World War 1 is about, I think in many
cases they probably couldn't tell you.
I think if you do get an answer, the answer is something like
treaties. And it was about why you
shouldn't be allied to so many countries.
Because once the diplomatic deal start triggering, 1 is forced
into war. And therefore we should be very
careful about which kinds of alliances we should actually see
with other nations. Which is a fine point.
And there are books that explain this and document this very
well, books like The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.
This book has come up on a number of shows.
It's a great book. She's an amazing writer, amazing
popular historian. Highly recommend reading any and
all Barbara Tuckman books, even ones that maybe haven't aged as
well as others. Like I think her her book on
Vinegar Joe's Stillwell in China.
I read a book recently that really challenged some of her
scholarship about China. But whatever.
Like Barbara Tuckman is an amazing author, great
storyteller, and she documents how the Western powers
essentially sleepwalked their way into World War 11.
Of the common things that gets said about it is that it was an
alliance system built by Otto von and Bismarck, Prussian
unifier of the modern German state, who is such a skilled
statesman that only he could have unwound the sort of
doomsday machine of August 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand
was assassinated. He was the only one who maybe
could have kept the alliance system from clanking onward into
large scale protracted war. And when one thinks about World
War One, they're pretty much always thinking about trench
warfare and how brutal and slow moving and how pointless it all
felt. I recently watched the new All
Quiet on the Western Front, The new 1 from 2022 on Netflix.
I thought it was a brilliant film, had a lot of humanity in
it and a lot of the big WTF of World War One.
You have the death of idealism. You have kids who were brought
up with the Latin is dulce at the quartermask pro patria Mori.
How sweet it is to die for one's country, essentially.
And the war is going to be over by Christmas.
And of course it ends with most of your friends, or nearly all
of your friends dying in gruesome ways, being put in a
position where you have to enact intensely brutal violence
against others. Witness suffering, and the
suffering is for goals that hardly seem worth the sacrifice.
And people think of the Western Front is going over the top, as
it was called, going out of the trenches and running across no
man's land. And even if you took the first
system of trenches of the enemy, there is defense in depth where
there's lots and lots of trenches behind that on both
sides. And there's troops kept in
reserve so that when that does happen and there is a
breakthrough, the troops in reserve can rush back in and
push the enemy back out. Static.
Now we associate World War 2 and German generals like Heinz
Buderian with the Blitzkrie lightning warfare.
This is a reaction to getting bogged down in World War One.
How do you create in a system of very long trenches like there
were in World War One? The blitzkrieg in World War 2
was using air power and armor and mechanized and motorized
troops. How do you create a very small
breakthrough in the line and rush a lot of troops through
there and get into the backfield essentially?
And that was done to amazing effect in World War 2.
Once the the German invasion of France in 1940.
Here I'm like, I'm looking at and right now how long it took.
It took about six weeks to conquer France in World War 2
just because of the focus on mobility, speed, concentrating
power at very narrow points, breaking through, and new types
of weapons for which trenches were not successful at stopping.
The classic thing that people point to here, as well as the
Maginot line in old yarn, is that generals are always
fighting the previous war. And one of the lessons learned
from World War One in France was that they need to better prepare
static defenses to make sure that when Germany invades again,
they will be able to hold them at the French borders and not
give any ground. This is the wrong lesson, the
wrong conclusion to draw from World War One.
It was much more fluid on the Eastern Front.
Battles like Missouri and lakes are famous for German mobility.
It was not uniformly static trench warfare like it was on
the Western Front. And there are even places that
are very important to Australians and New Zealanders
like Gallipoli that started off as being a zany Winston
Churchill based out flanking maneuver.
How can we break the Western Front and open up another front
and knock Turkey out of the Central Powers?
And it didn't work. It just led to massive amounts
of death and bogging down in another system of static
fighting in Turkey. Though I suppose I should really
be saying the Ottoman Empire. It's confusing sometimes because
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was the founder of the modern
Turkish state after the Ottoman Empire collapse at the end of
World War One, commanded Acolipoli, which is one of those
funny parts of history there. So whatever it was in Turkey
slash the late Ottoman Empire, you can watch All Quiet on the
Western Front to get a sense of what it was like 1917.
I think he's a brilliant film to There is so much good writing.
There's so many good memoirs. And one brief side note is that
if you haven't seen All Quiet on the Western Front, it's worth
reading for another reason, which is that it is the book
that Donald Trump has seen him say several times that his
favorite book of all time is All Quiet on the Western Front.
Which is a really interesting book to name because it does not
have that dulce at the core of mass Propatria Mori vibe to it.
You would expect. It has a sense of the futility
of war, of generals commanding troops to do things that are
there to preserve the troops honor that actually don't make
any sense that might lead to them losing their lives for a
very small amount of ground. It doesn't even matter and it's
sort of disregard of human life. It's really interesting sort of
pacifistic books to appreciate, like it has sophisticated
themes. It's such a mournful book.
It's hard for me to to watch or to read anything about World War
One and not think about the Lost Generation, what came after in
terms of art with modernism. Read someone like minus
Hemingway or look at the art of Pablo Picasso and it's hard not
to just see that the assumptions of the old world being
obliterated. In fact, the quality of life
globally after World War One was much lower than it was during
the turn of the century period. It was a hard time to exist.
It just seems such a rupture. Much of the world order was
based upon how much more civilized we were than the rest
of the world and how there was a sort of presumed right to rule
that had this sort of Rudyard Kipling, white Man Burden kind
of feel that Western civilization, Western Europe,
America deserved to dominate the world because they were so much
more civilized and elevated than everyone else.
And World War One was one of these great fracturing moments
when I think it became clear to everyone, especially those from
the countries that fought in World War One, how big of a
fraud that was. It's hard to make a claim of
being the most civilized people on Earth, only then to to see
what happened at the Psalm or Passindale and still with a
straight face claim to have world leadership.
And so you see art that is so disillusioned, so much breaking
can't even represent reality in a straightforward way at this
point. Like it doesn't even make sense
to do so anymore. Of humanity losing its way in
such a desperately tremendously horrific way is the legacy of
World War One. It isn't even like it ended and
the bad guys lost. It's actually really hard to
just say the bad guys in World War One for several reasons.
But my understanding of it, this is one of those topics that
people will always be fighting about.
So please don't think that I have the final word on any of
this. Me summing up World War One in
like half an hour is not enough time to understand World War
One. Please understand that.
But one way to understand what happened in World War One was
that it was a Ducydides trap. Essentially, Germany was a
rising power. It was industrializing, becoming
more and more powerful, but it's also surrounded on all sides.
There's no natural barriers really with Germany.
It's not a great place to be. You have Russia to the east, you
have France to the West, and then you have the UK right above
you. And then they'll do things like,
and this is maybe where the the ally system comes in that is
really touchy. But the Triple Entente alliance
between France, the UK, which by the way are historical enemies,
France and England, I should say, and Russia, I mean, that
is, that doesn't feel good at all.
Functionally surrounded. And so for various reasons that
were set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand of the Habsburg state that governed the Austro
Hungarian Empire, Germany essentially tried to win A2
front war as fast as possible doing something called
Schlieffen Plan blah blah blah. I'm trying not to get bogged
down in details. It's too much in any case
though. Why do I love Armistice Day?
These battles were so destructive, so disgusting.
Truly hell on earth. I think if you were trying to
find which of the historical moments were truly the worst on
earth at any given point, I think being on the Western Front
in World War 1 is a top contender.
Real close. Like there's something that I
can think of that I can give it a run for its money, but I think
that's pretty close. And when Armistice Day happened,
it wasn't like when you think about World War 2 ending, World
War Two had BE Day and BJ Day, victory in Europe and victory
over the Japanese days. And those have a really clear
story. The US1, the other side
surrendered and it was a total capitulation and no negotiated
settlement. World War One ends with a
negotiated settlement and it's a really intensely difficult deal
for Germany. They had to give up a lot of
their industrial capacity. They couldn't really have a
military they owed in a ridiculously huge indemnity that
they had to pay back. It was such a bad deal that it's
so delegitimize the system that far right and far left parties
after the Versailles Treaty we're basically guaranteed.
How could there not be? You know, soldiers are going
home, workers are hungry. What's going to happen?
The mainstream has so let us down.
Can we trust mainstream institutions?
And this is also a period where, as you probably know, a Lenin
has been was sent in a in a sealed boxcar to Russia
basically to knock Russia out of the war.
And the Soviet Union is now also simultaneously happening here at
October Revolution 1917. Stuff's going on.
Lennon Lennon's at work in Russia.
This is a really difficult time to enforce a strict peace deal
here. And what I liked about it is
that even though the US came in and helped tip the scale on the
sides of the Entente against the Central Powers, the day was
declared Armistice Day because it was more of a a day of
mourning. It wasn't about victory, it was
about the lives that were lost and about the tragedy of the
conflict overall. And I think that's a really
humane way to understand war and to understand forgiveness and to
understand just how do we bring people home in a way that helps
them heal and acknowledges it's not just thank you for your
service. It's not just did you kill
anybody over there. I think there's something that's
much more important about having a day of asking what was it
ultimately for? I think this is a really common
feeling for people who fought in America's wars in the Middle
East. It certainly is a thought for
people who fought in Vietnam. There's a sense of what was this
thing that happened to us, that we were both actors within, but
also history acting upon us. I suspect a fair amount of those
feelings are puzzlement. It's like trying to make sense
of what even happen. It's so bad in hindsight that
how do we go in there thinking that we are going to be able to
do this and it would be quick and easy and not ruin so many
lives? I think Armistice Day does such
a beautiful job of it's a pause to conflict.
It's a moment where even if it's temporary, as Armistice is often
are, it's a moment of turning swords into plowshares, the
symbol of Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, veteran's day.
It's less common in the US but in Commonwealth and UK and other
allied powers as far as I know. I think it's mostly like UK and
UK derived people's kind of celebration.
It's very much focused around the poppy, and the poppy is the
symbol of remembrance, of hope, of mercy, of sadness, of just
what the hell happened to us. Essentially, it's a day to
remember the dead. It's a day to remember what can
happen to all of us when things truly get out of hand.
I think it's really important that the default option should
be towards peace and to remember that even when one's cause is
just, war is not a simple matter.
I like reminders of our humanity.
The Poppy, Armistice Day, Remembrance Day.
Those make me feel mercy for the soldiers who fought and died,
who did brutal things to one another and places they've never
been. It makes me hope that there's an
afterlife where they can be reconciled to one another.
I think anything that stresses the mistakes that we've made as
a species, where we've picked up arms against one another,
asphyxiated each other with mustard gas, stabbed each other
with triangular bayonets, buried men alive under artillery
shells, collapsing dugouts that we should remember are the
people who are put into that position through naivety,
through bloodlust, through earnest patriotism, and remember
how easily it can be us in our lives too.
We aren't above the people who were put into these positions.
Thinking about it in this way is one of the ways that I think
equality and universality can be so important, because in your
life you may have caused to interact.
With War with Soldiers and Armistice Day asked this
question of was it worth it? Can we honor these men?
Can we honor these people who died by not putting people in
this position unnecessarily? Can we avoid this in the future?
The poppy, it's hard for me to even know.
Why is that such a beautiful symbol?
Flowers are such a wonderful symbol, or seemingly universal,
or very nearly so. The transient nature of beauty,
the flowering of youth, the awareness of 1's mortality and
of how brief and how fragile life is.
I'm actually going to read the poem that the poppy tradition
drives from by Canadian doctor from the Western Front named
John Mccrae. The poem is called In Flanders
Fields. Here it is in Flanders fields.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on
row that marker place. And in the sky the lark still
bravely singing fly scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago we lived, felt
dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and we're loved.
And now we lie in Flanders fields Take up our quarrel with
the foe to you from failing hands we throw the torch Be
yours to hold it high. If you break faith with us who
die, we shall not sleep. Though poppies grow in Flanders
fields one thing I like about this poem is that poppies as a
narcotic. There's also a sense that the
dead are not merely dead, they're sleeping.
There's a Christian resurrection of the dead.
There will come a time when they might live again.
Don't mourn for us. We're merely sleeping.
But I find to be a really beautiful, comforting thought.
Happy Armistice Day. I hope you enjoyed my I can't
believe I'm going to say this blitzkrieg through copies of
Pacifism of Armistice Day of all of World War One.
It's really too much. Sorry, I try not to get
distracted. There's too many interesting
stories, too many things that happened.
I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to World War
One for so many reasons. It's great, great place to look
where empires are collapsing, nations are coming about, the
modern world is being born at this time.
It's it's worth your time to study World War One.
I'd say I love World War 2 as well.
World War One is extremely impactful.
Thanks for listening. Happy Armistice Day.
Happy Remembrance Day. Happy Veteran's Day.