There’s a person I think about from time to time. We don’t know his name, his exact age, or his precise occupation. But we do know when, where, and how he died: March 29th, 1461, near the village of Towton, in Yorkshire in northern England, the victim of a massive blow - probably from a poleaxe, a wicked axe blade mounted on a six-foot handle - that destroyed the left side of his face. It left behind only fragments of bone where his eye socket and cheek had been, and probably killed him instantly. His mutilated corpse was then stripped naked and thrown in a mass grave along with several dozen other similarly mangled bodies, where they all remained for the next five centuries.
You’re so good, Patrick. Your work touches me in ways that few are able. You’re ability to use historical lessons to demonstrate the “rhymes” from history to the present teach those who listen meaningful lessons. Thank you.
Brilliant article. Informative and chilling. I hope it is not a harbinger of things to come but I cannot fault your argument or the historical precedent. November really is an existential election.
For eighteen years I've been annoyed by the name "Homeland Security" as in the 2002 Homeland Security Act and a year later the Department of . . . The word Homeland conjured for me the Nazi use of the German word for Fatherland. But I knew there was more beyond just that distasteful allusion. I couldn't put my finger on exactly why it was so odious. Until now. This excellent essay enables me to see that the American government's utilization of the phrase Homeland Security was a disgusting milestone. It was the point when it became okay (as in no longer considered shameful) to admit we were an empire. Why? Because if you need to name the place where most of your people live as the Homeland, then you must have (as in own and/or control) other lands. Which, of course, we had and have.
I remember being in high school and blown away by that wildy Nazi-evoking word that I'd never in my life heard before.
Nowadays, having done some military adjacent work, I'm guessing it was probably current in the military in 2001. They love slang, and the dumber and more aggressive ("Army Strong") the better. Doubly so if a perfectly serviceable english word already exists, but a lower-reading level word/compound word can be used (soldier/warrior to "Warfighter").
Homeland is unquestionably fash as fuck though, no denying it, this is just about what I spent 2004-2005 freaking out about happening. And every dem or lib who ever used the word without it coming out dripping in irony and contempt helped midwife this current nightmare.
Great post. Scary. But great....So many questions.... - does everything get better if Biden prevails - or will we be dealing with this for years to come? Is Tronald Dump a buffoon or does he know exactly what he’s doing? Would an effective tyrant in the future be more successful Or is this the wake up call the average American needs to understand that a republic requires participation and attention....does scrolling through Twitter all day long make us more informed or more prone to hyperbole...
This is a pretty bad take, especially since you are a history professor.
1. The percentage across the multiple departments within the DHS of vets might be around 30%, (28% in DHS directly and roughly 33% across the USG as a whole), but that 30% includes analysts, logistics, etc…they are not all cops and that is far from all that DHS does. This is either an intentional conflation or a lazy one.
2. The idea that Law Enforcement is mostly made up of prior vets and they have taken home that violence from the wars with them to the local PDs is also another lazy accusation. It assumes that the vets that are in LE are combat or combat trained vets, assumes that they can only react with violence and assumes that is the reason for actions people are witnessing in a 2D environment via videos from protests. No context or possibility for other reasons to be driving these things? It also ignores that only roughly 20% of LE nationally are vets.
3. The implication is that the wars have somehow caused these actions, again, this is either intentional false conflation or a lazy bit of writing as we have had far worse riots in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s, the 1960’s and 70’s and far more violence to boot.
4. The Border Patrol is, (under ICE), over 50% Hispanic, that does not support the narrative you are pushing in relation to their effect on illegal immigration so I noticed that was left out. Also left out is that their actions have been going on long before Trump. He might be a terrible President, but this has been going on long before he came into office.
5. The idea that this is some new phase of violence ignore history and that you are a history Professor and do not mention this is concerning. One has to simply go back to the early 1900’s and you will see far more violence and far more severe incidents of violence due to the labor, anarchist and Marxists movements of the time.
6. Shoot forward to the 1960’s & 1970’s, again, far more domestic violence in terms of riots, violent protests and actual targeted violence by left wing organizations. In one 2 year period, (1971-72’), there were over 2500 bombings in the US alone. That is not a typo, that is 2500. That leaves out the bank robberies, jet hijacking, etc…that also occurred during the period and almost exclusively politically motivated. It was, like the anarchist and Marxists violence before it, almost entirely driven from the left spectrum of the politics.
7. The idea that we are an Empire in the sense of Rome is a tired cliché, we do most of what we do around the world to attempt to maintain stability. Why? The Bretton Woods agreement and the ensuing Cold War are the reasons why. I would also add that Rome or the British Empire never paid huge sums of money to rent small spaces of land, trained the local host nation for free and supplied them with arms for no cost either. Do we do it out of love? No, we do it out of real politik and in the hopes of using power projection, promoting stability in a region for trade and we do in fact try to promote human rights. All of those things are in our interest with the last one being a positive in terms of making the world a better place for as many as we can.
8. The idea that we are now somehow collapsing is like every other time that it has been said since Post WWII. As soon as The Cold War ended the academics came out of the woodwork and began to predict the same thing, that the US was collapsing. This theory is almost always pushed by academics and pseudo intellectuals. Here is the real rub, I think secretly many of you hope that it is true. Thankfully people to date have always been wrong, but one day it will happen, but it will be long after both of our bones have long turned to dust.
We can should do better, but the ahistorical writings coupled with presentism is a bad look for a History PhD.
Recommend the following for good reads:
“Days of Rage-Americas Radical Underground” by Bryan Burrough's
“The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder” by Peter Zeihan
“The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny” by William Strauss and Neil Howe
"Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security)"- Graham Allison
"On Grand Strategy" book by John Lewis Gaddis
There are many others of course that would give you a better understanding of things you are writing about, perhaps a better start would be anything by Gaddis really, but in the interest of honesty I am bias towards his writing. And frankly, just taking some time to do some research on the US Military would go a long way too. The lack of knowledge presented about the military, vets and the effects of combat or who serves and what they do saddens me to read in the article and the comments section.
Wow! Someone lays out a concise, detailed response and that is the best you can do? Then you ban them. I guess your next series will glorify the greatness of Communist and Fascist regimes.
Are you trying to imply that by training police and militaries in foreign countries that we are doing this benevolently without self-interest, which “creates stability”. What a joke! We have cultivated and manipulated the elites in countries around the world to do our bidding. That is why there is always a net loss to those countries comparing investment vs resource and wealth extraction. The first actionS of the IMF and World Bank are always to set up a SAP program, to sap the wealth of the country through debt repayment which requires opening them up to free reign of foreign corporations and removal of any subsidies or protections for the poor and middle classes. This does nothing but destabilize them per Pinochet in Argentina. But to go into detail would require you to read a few books.
I think of the "looking like soldiers but not being soldiers" as a problem with not enough military or policing training. When I see these guys running their rifles are not secure. They look right and hold the rifle pointing left while holding a line. They don't line up correctly, they overlap, spacing is random, everything is unstable, they can't know for sure what the guy next to them is doing. Military men don't do that, they know how to stand in a damn line. They can run while holding a rifle. They know not to shoot kids holding boom boxes in the head. In the real military that causes nothing but trouble, even if nobody cares about the kid, it's too public. All the training those guys are missing is the "how and why not to shoot people during a riot" type. These guys are thinking for themselves, with no clear leadership and not enough time together to work as one force. They're a dozen Rambos waiting for their big break. They will never win in Portland. It would be hard to win in Portland, but a correctly trained military might be able to.
It seems to me that what we are seeing in Portland in the form of a paramilitary force, unaccountable and apparently unrestrained by local agencies is essentially no different from what we have been witnessing for the last twenty or so years in the militarization of state and local policing in our cities across the nation as a whole. The SWAT tactics in the form of "No-Knock" raids, the deployment of military style assault vehicles in our urban settings and the at times apparently unprovoked police violence we are seeing seem to be obvious manifestations of the military style training at a South Carolina police academy that I recently viewed on a PBS program. The cadets marched in step, chanted "boo-yah" in unison and except for the difference in uniforms, seemed no different from the Marines. I almost expected them to exclaim, "Semper Fi".
Eric, We have been talking about and ostensibly requiring training, including racial sensitivity training programs for police in many police depts. for at least thirty years however we continue to see evidence of police bias and brutality against not only minorities but many others, including lawful protesters with alarming regularity. What pervades policing as we know it is an attitude within the police culture that police see themselves as "us", the good guys vs. "them" the people they are pledged to protect, as suspects and potential "perps". There was a study published in the NY Times about thirty years ago that reached this conclusion after interviewing numerous police officers, mostly whites, but also minority officers assigned to minority neighborhoods in inner city NY. The fact that the whites almost always lived in relatively far removed white enclaves might seem to explain some of this but the study concluded that this attitude was also quickly adopted by the minority officers as well.
What is clearly needed now is a frank discussion of what it is that we as a people want our police to do and how we want them to do it. All too often police have prioritized the protection of property over protection of people. In the south, police forces are said to be descended from slave patrols charged with returning escaped slaves, (property) to slave holders. In the North it has been said that modern day policing traces its origins to the draft riots of 1863 in NYC in which a mob comprised mostly of Irish immigrants rampaged through the city for three days, vandalizing property and attacking black residents and even burning down a black orphanage. In the years since then we have witnessed the police routinely used by politically connected business moguls to quell lawful labor union strikes, even firing directly into crowds of unarmed civilians again prioritizing the protecting of the interests of property owners over public safety and even firebombing black urban neighborhoods, (Greenwood in Tulsa in 1921 and Philadelphia in 1985). Now we are witnessing a police action by the federal government, superseding the authority of the state and local elected officials and violently attacking peaceful protesters in Portland, OR because a few renegades threw red paint and or spray painted graffiti on a federal building.
As to shootings being mostly justified, I think that depends on one's perspective. Is it justified to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back? Is it justified to shoot someone because one decides that he is "acting erratically"? I understand that these are rhetorical questions, however the failure of us to hold police accountable has allowed these questionably "justified" shootings to continue to occur too frequently. The police culture says that " it is better to be tried by twelve than to be carried by six" but what we all saw in the eyes of Derek Chauvin as he wantonly ignored the pleas of George Floyd as he lay dying was a total disregard for human life. Only a militarized culture that sees the supposed enemy as less than human can explain this. Note that military trainees must be taught this attitude in order to be able to kill in wartime. Hence the description of enemy in derogatory terms,( Japs, Gooks, etc.).
Unfortunately the prevalence of police shootings is a direct consequence of our gun culture in which the increasingly dangerous availability of firearms has resulted in a country where we are all afraid of each other and police are no exception. This problem also demands a national reckoning but if Sandy Hook didn't do it, I don't know what will. However the fact of the existence of a historically entrenched toxic police culture must also be reckoned with. The violent treatment of civilians at the hands of police, choke holds, tear gasings, maimings by the use of supposedly non-lethal weapons ,etc. may indicate the need for better training but without accountability and a revamping from the ground up, the toxic police culture is not going to change. At the very least this must begin with the teaching of mutual respect not only of police for the citizenry but vice-versa. This requires a nation that is united in the quest for true equality for all. Instead what we see is a terribly divided nation led by arguably, the most divisive president in our history.
Love that comparison that Mike Duncan & you have made.... I’m curious if you think the US Empire would have had more than or be equivalent to the Roman Empire in the amount of resources available to them and it’s ability to project power.
Love the new show topic (ancient history) too BTW. I had no idea it would be that interesting! Thanks for all you do, buddy.
It is refreshing to find someone with similar thoughts, but who's had the time, expertise, and validity (via podcast audience) to really bring it into focus. Thank you.
If I may attempt to address Steven's questions: I believe our thinking is too dominated by the "Great Man" approach to history, and that this bipartisan American Empire is an emergent behavior. What rules and actors most contributed to this behavior? Which locust started the swarm? It's impossible to know.
What we do know is the relationships that created this plague must be broken.
Every death by every service member of all the 20th Century Wars was caused by three men- William Randolf Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Theodeore Roosevelt. Until they practiced their influence, America knew better than to get entangled in foreign wars and conquer different countries.
Because of them, we decided to get into the Empire Game along with Britain, Germany, France, Belgium and Holland. Only this time, we would stake out he Pacific. Why in the world were we in the Phillipines, or even Hawaii?
If it wasn't for Japan trying to emulate us, they wouldn't have had the need to obtain raw materials and oil to become a first-world power. If we have had our Pacific fleet base in San Diego, there would've never been a Pearl Harbor. If we didn't decide to take the Phillipines as a spoil of war, there would've never been a Bataan Death march. If we'd have never been at war with Japan, we'd have never had to suffer through the Korean and Vietnam Wars? If we'd have developed our own domestic Petroleum resources, who would've cared what happened in the Middle East?
Frontier? Settlement? We had enough wild land in the west and new land up in Alaska that could've settle hardy people. Many would've perished, but the tough ones would've made America better.
This “bringing the war home” is even more explicit than Just vets and militarized police. HaVe you read Valentine’s book CIA as Organized Crime? He first wrote about the Phoenix program which was an extra-legal program to fight the Viet Cong with assasinations, torture and bribery. Then he was given free reign by Wm. Colby to interview agents. He shows how the Phoenix program was brought home (think Fusion Centers) and then rolled out world wide.
Great Post. One day I hope you fill the gap between the fall of Rome and the Crusades: Maybe "Muhammad to Acre", but also dealing with the dark and early middle ages in europe. Rise of Venice was a nice start; but Mongols? I loved the Ottoman episodes, but what happened to 650-1350? Deeply grateful for your incredible podcasts.
And by the way police forces like to hire veterans as they are easier to train. Somewhere on the radio I heard a history of policing in the US and this information was included.
They hire vets because there is a Federal Law and there are often State Laws that give vets preference. His entire view that the wars have come home and to the police departments, be they local or federal, is so far off from being accurate that it would be and should be discounted by anyone who does basic research on the topic. The number of vets from all of our wars is small, the number of vets from the current wars is even smaller and the number of vets who were trained in combat, (as in Special Operations Forces, MPs, Infantry, Rangers, etc..) is terribly small in proportion to those who have served.
You’re so good, Patrick. Your work touches me in ways that few are able. You’re ability to use historical lessons to demonstrate the “rhymes” from history to the present teach those who listen meaningful lessons. Thank you.
Brilliant article. Informative and chilling. I hope it is not a harbinger of things to come but I cannot fault your argument or the historical precedent. November really is an existential election.
Terrific analysis!
For eighteen years I've been annoyed by the name "Homeland Security" as in the 2002 Homeland Security Act and a year later the Department of . . . The word Homeland conjured for me the Nazi use of the German word for Fatherland. But I knew there was more beyond just that distasteful allusion. I couldn't put my finger on exactly why it was so odious. Until now. This excellent essay enables me to see that the American government's utilization of the phrase Homeland Security was a disgusting milestone. It was the point when it became okay (as in no longer considered shameful) to admit we were an empire. Why? Because if you need to name the place where most of your people live as the Homeland, then you must have (as in own and/or control) other lands. Which, of course, we had and have.
I remember being in high school and blown away by that wildy Nazi-evoking word that I'd never in my life heard before.
Nowadays, having done some military adjacent work, I'm guessing it was probably current in the military in 2001. They love slang, and the dumber and more aggressive ("Army Strong") the better. Doubly so if a perfectly serviceable english word already exists, but a lower-reading level word/compound word can be used (soldier/warrior to "Warfighter").
Homeland is unquestionably fash as fuck though, no denying it, this is just about what I spent 2004-2005 freaking out about happening. And every dem or lib who ever used the word without it coming out dripping in irony and contempt helped midwife this current nightmare.
Great post. Scary. But great....So many questions.... - does everything get better if Biden prevails - or will we be dealing with this for years to come? Is Tronald Dump a buffoon or does he know exactly what he’s doing? Would an effective tyrant in the future be more successful Or is this the wake up call the average American needs to understand that a republic requires participation and attention....does scrolling through Twitter all day long make us more informed or more prone to hyperbole...
This is a pretty bad take, especially since you are a history professor.
1. The percentage across the multiple departments within the DHS of vets might be around 30%, (28% in DHS directly and roughly 33% across the USG as a whole), but that 30% includes analysts, logistics, etc…they are not all cops and that is far from all that DHS does. This is either an intentional conflation or a lazy one.
2. The idea that Law Enforcement is mostly made up of prior vets and they have taken home that violence from the wars with them to the local PDs is also another lazy accusation. It assumes that the vets that are in LE are combat or combat trained vets, assumes that they can only react with violence and assumes that is the reason for actions people are witnessing in a 2D environment via videos from protests. No context or possibility for other reasons to be driving these things? It also ignores that only roughly 20% of LE nationally are vets.
3. The implication is that the wars have somehow caused these actions, again, this is either intentional false conflation or a lazy bit of writing as we have had far worse riots in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s, the 1960’s and 70’s and far more violence to boot.
4. The Border Patrol is, (under ICE), over 50% Hispanic, that does not support the narrative you are pushing in relation to their effect on illegal immigration so I noticed that was left out. Also left out is that their actions have been going on long before Trump. He might be a terrible President, but this has been going on long before he came into office.
5. The idea that this is some new phase of violence ignore history and that you are a history Professor and do not mention this is concerning. One has to simply go back to the early 1900’s and you will see far more violence and far more severe incidents of violence due to the labor, anarchist and Marxists movements of the time.
6. Shoot forward to the 1960’s & 1970’s, again, far more domestic violence in terms of riots, violent protests and actual targeted violence by left wing organizations. In one 2 year period, (1971-72’), there were over 2500 bombings in the US alone. That is not a typo, that is 2500. That leaves out the bank robberies, jet hijacking, etc…that also occurred during the period and almost exclusively politically motivated. It was, like the anarchist and Marxists violence before it, almost entirely driven from the left spectrum of the politics.
7. The idea that we are an Empire in the sense of Rome is a tired cliché, we do most of what we do around the world to attempt to maintain stability. Why? The Bretton Woods agreement and the ensuing Cold War are the reasons why. I would also add that Rome or the British Empire never paid huge sums of money to rent small spaces of land, trained the local host nation for free and supplied them with arms for no cost either. Do we do it out of love? No, we do it out of real politik and in the hopes of using power projection, promoting stability in a region for trade and we do in fact try to promote human rights. All of those things are in our interest with the last one being a positive in terms of making the world a better place for as many as we can.
8. The idea that we are now somehow collapsing is like every other time that it has been said since Post WWII. As soon as The Cold War ended the academics came out of the woodwork and began to predict the same thing, that the US was collapsing. This theory is almost always pushed by academics and pseudo intellectuals. Here is the real rub, I think secretly many of you hope that it is true. Thankfully people to date have always been wrong, but one day it will happen, but it will be long after both of our bones have long turned to dust.
We can should do better, but the ahistorical writings coupled with presentism is a bad look for a History PhD.
Recommend the following for good reads:
“Days of Rage-Americas Radical Underground” by Bryan Burrough's
“The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder” by Peter Zeihan
“The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny” by William Strauss and Neil Howe
"Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security)"- Graham Allison
"On Grand Strategy" book by John Lewis Gaddis
There are many others of course that would give you a better understanding of things you are writing about, perhaps a better start would be anything by Gaddis really, but in the interest of honesty I am bias towards his writing. And frankly, just taking some time to do some research on the US Military would go a long way too. The lack of knowledge presented about the military, vets and the effects of combat or who serves and what they do saddens me to read in the article and the comments section.
I'm deeply uninterested in your takes. Go elsewhere.
Wow! Someone lays out a concise, detailed response and that is the best you can do? Then you ban them. I guess your next series will glorify the greatness of Communist and Fascist regimes.
Are you trying to imply that by training police and militaries in foreign countries that we are doing this benevolently without self-interest, which “creates stability”. What a joke! We have cultivated and manipulated the elites in countries around the world to do our bidding. That is why there is always a net loss to those countries comparing investment vs resource and wealth extraction. The first actionS of the IMF and World Bank are always to set up a SAP program, to sap the wealth of the country through debt repayment which requires opening them up to free reign of foreign corporations and removal of any subsidies or protections for the poor and middle classes. This does nothing but destabilize them per Pinochet in Argentina. But to go into detail would require you to read a few books.
He has bad takes but your take is read “the fourth turning?” Isn’t there a Q Anon blog you should be on right now?
I think of the "looking like soldiers but not being soldiers" as a problem with not enough military or policing training. When I see these guys running their rifles are not secure. They look right and hold the rifle pointing left while holding a line. They don't line up correctly, they overlap, spacing is random, everything is unstable, they can't know for sure what the guy next to them is doing. Military men don't do that, they know how to stand in a damn line. They can run while holding a rifle. They know not to shoot kids holding boom boxes in the head. In the real military that causes nothing but trouble, even if nobody cares about the kid, it's too public. All the training those guys are missing is the "how and why not to shoot people during a riot" type. These guys are thinking for themselves, with no clear leadership and not enough time together to work as one force. They're a dozen Rambos waiting for their big break. They will never win in Portland. It would be hard to win in Portland, but a correctly trained military might be able to.
Loved your article, thanks for writing.
It seems to me that what we are seeing in Portland in the form of a paramilitary force, unaccountable and apparently unrestrained by local agencies is essentially no different from what we have been witnessing for the last twenty or so years in the militarization of state and local policing in our cities across the nation as a whole. The SWAT tactics in the form of "No-Knock" raids, the deployment of military style assault vehicles in our urban settings and the at times apparently unprovoked police violence we are seeing seem to be obvious manifestations of the military style training at a South Carolina police academy that I recently viewed on a PBS program. The cadets marched in step, chanted "boo-yah" in unison and except for the difference in uniforms, seemed no different from the Marines. I almost expected them to exclaim, "Semper Fi".
Eric, We have been talking about and ostensibly requiring training, including racial sensitivity training programs for police in many police depts. for at least thirty years however we continue to see evidence of police bias and brutality against not only minorities but many others, including lawful protesters with alarming regularity. What pervades policing as we know it is an attitude within the police culture that police see themselves as "us", the good guys vs. "them" the people they are pledged to protect, as suspects and potential "perps". There was a study published in the NY Times about thirty years ago that reached this conclusion after interviewing numerous police officers, mostly whites, but also minority officers assigned to minority neighborhoods in inner city NY. The fact that the whites almost always lived in relatively far removed white enclaves might seem to explain some of this but the study concluded that this attitude was also quickly adopted by the minority officers as well.
What is clearly needed now is a frank discussion of what it is that we as a people want our police to do and how we want them to do it. All too often police have prioritized the protection of property over protection of people. In the south, police forces are said to be descended from slave patrols charged with returning escaped slaves, (property) to slave holders. In the North it has been said that modern day policing traces its origins to the draft riots of 1863 in NYC in which a mob comprised mostly of Irish immigrants rampaged through the city for three days, vandalizing property and attacking black residents and even burning down a black orphanage. In the years since then we have witnessed the police routinely used by politically connected business moguls to quell lawful labor union strikes, even firing directly into crowds of unarmed civilians again prioritizing the protecting of the interests of property owners over public safety and even firebombing black urban neighborhoods, (Greenwood in Tulsa in 1921 and Philadelphia in 1985). Now we are witnessing a police action by the federal government, superseding the authority of the state and local elected officials and violently attacking peaceful protesters in Portland, OR because a few renegades threw red paint and or spray painted graffiti on a federal building.
As to shootings being mostly justified, I think that depends on one's perspective. Is it justified to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back? Is it justified to shoot someone because one decides that he is "acting erratically"? I understand that these are rhetorical questions, however the failure of us to hold police accountable has allowed these questionably "justified" shootings to continue to occur too frequently. The police culture says that " it is better to be tried by twelve than to be carried by six" but what we all saw in the eyes of Derek Chauvin as he wantonly ignored the pleas of George Floyd as he lay dying was a total disregard for human life. Only a militarized culture that sees the supposed enemy as less than human can explain this. Note that military trainees must be taught this attitude in order to be able to kill in wartime. Hence the description of enemy in derogatory terms,( Japs, Gooks, etc.).
Unfortunately the prevalence of police shootings is a direct consequence of our gun culture in which the increasingly dangerous availability of firearms has resulted in a country where we are all afraid of each other and police are no exception. This problem also demands a national reckoning but if Sandy Hook didn't do it, I don't know what will. However the fact of the existence of a historically entrenched toxic police culture must also be reckoned with. The violent treatment of civilians at the hands of police, choke holds, tear gasings, maimings by the use of supposedly non-lethal weapons ,etc. may indicate the need for better training but without accountability and a revamping from the ground up, the toxic police culture is not going to change. At the very least this must begin with the teaching of mutual respect not only of police for the citizenry but vice-versa. This requires a nation that is united in the quest for true equality for all. Instead what we see is a terribly divided nation led by arguably, the most divisive president in our history.
Love that comparison that Mike Duncan & you have made.... I’m curious if you think the US Empire would have had more than or be equivalent to the Roman Empire in the amount of resources available to them and it’s ability to project power.
Love the new show topic (ancient history) too BTW. I had no idea it would be that interesting! Thanks for all you do, buddy.
It is refreshing to find someone with similar thoughts, but who's had the time, expertise, and validity (via podcast audience) to really bring it into focus. Thank you.
If I may attempt to address Steven's questions: I believe our thinking is too dominated by the "Great Man" approach to history, and that this bipartisan American Empire is an emergent behavior. What rules and actors most contributed to this behavior? Which locust started the swarm? It's impossible to know.
What we do know is the relationships that created this plague must be broken.
Every death by every service member of all the 20th Century Wars was caused by three men- William Randolf Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Theodeore Roosevelt. Until they practiced their influence, America knew better than to get entangled in foreign wars and conquer different countries.
Because of them, we decided to get into the Empire Game along with Britain, Germany, France, Belgium and Holland. Only this time, we would stake out he Pacific. Why in the world were we in the Phillipines, or even Hawaii?
If it wasn't for Japan trying to emulate us, they wouldn't have had the need to obtain raw materials and oil to become a first-world power. If we have had our Pacific fleet base in San Diego, there would've never been a Pearl Harbor. If we didn't decide to take the Phillipines as a spoil of war, there would've never been a Bataan Death march. If we'd have never been at war with Japan, we'd have never had to suffer through the Korean and Vietnam Wars? If we'd have developed our own domestic Petroleum resources, who would've cared what happened in the Middle East?
Frontier? Settlement? We had enough wild land in the west and new land up in Alaska that could've settle hardy people. Many would've perished, but the tough ones would've made America better.
This “bringing the war home” is even more explicit than Just vets and militarized police. HaVe you read Valentine’s book CIA as Organized Crime? He first wrote about the Phoenix program which was an extra-legal program to fight the Viet Cong with assasinations, torture and bribery. Then he was given free reign by Wm. Colby to interview agents. He shows how the Phoenix program was brought home (think Fusion Centers) and then rolled out world wide.
Great Post. One day I hope you fill the gap between the fall of Rome and the Crusades: Maybe "Muhammad to Acre", but also dealing with the dark and early middle ages in europe. Rise of Venice was a nice start; but Mongols? I loved the Ottoman episodes, but what happened to 650-1350? Deeply grateful for your incredible podcasts.
Hi, I enjoyed the article like I enjoy the podcast. Just curious: why did Eric get banned?
His comment seemed pedestrian enough, if a bit confrontational. Not nearly as confrontational as AnonymousBosch.
And by the way police forces like to hire veterans as they are easier to train. Somewhere on the radio I heard a history of policing in the US and this information was included.
They hire vets because there is a Federal Law and there are often State Laws that give vets preference. His entire view that the wars have come home and to the police departments, be they local or federal, is so far off from being accurate that it would be and should be discounted by anyone who does basic research on the topic. The number of vets from all of our wars is small, the number of vets from the current wars is even smaller and the number of vets who were trained in combat, (as in Special Operations Forces, MPs, Infantry, Rangers, etc..) is terribly small in proportion to those who have served.
You seem to try to tear down Patrick’s articles on here. What’s the matter? Did you have a crush on him but he didn’t reciprocate?
And police forces like to hire veterans. Easier to train. A radio program about the history of policing on NPR.