James Holland: prediction

Transcript context

…Which are fascinating. And war is hell, and there’s many ways in which it is hell. Just for a little bit, the steel man, what Darryl, where he might be coming from is since World War II, the simplistic veneration of Churchill, so saying Churchill good, Hitler bad, has been used as a template to project other conflicts to justify military intervention. And so his and other people like Libertarians, for example, resistance to that overly simplistic veneration of somebody like Churchill has to do with the fact that that seems to be by neocons or warmongers in the military industrial complex in the United States and elsewhere, using Hitler way too much, using Churchill way too much to justify invading everywhere and anywhere. Well, I do agree with that. I think oversimplification of anything is a mistake. Life is nuanced. The past is nuanced. It’s okay to be proud about certain things, and it’s okay to be disgusted by other things. That’s absolutely fine. We have a complicated relationship with our past. It doesn’t need to be black and white, and life is not a straight line. And of course, the Allies made plenty of mistakes in World War II. Overall, I think they made the right calls. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting is I think that the Allies, for the most part, use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the Axis powers do. And good, because that means they prevail. I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq. So Donald Rumsfeld is going, “We don’t do reconstruction.” Well, you freaking well should do. If you’re going to take on this particular challenge, you’ve got to see it through. That’s simply not good enough. It’s not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, “We’re going to change things around. It’s going to be great. All the women are going to have education. They won’t have to cover up their bodies anymore. Anything goes. We love liberalism. It’s great. Let’s make Kabul into a thriving city once more,” and then suddenly bug out. Because what’s going to happen? You’re going to undo everything. And this is a bit of a segue, Lex, but I remember being in northern Helmand Province back in, when was it? January 2008. And British troops had just taken over an absolute dump of a town called Musa Qala, and I remember talking to this Afghan guy. He just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad the Allies wanted, which they put those cages with rubble in the protective wall. Is it called HESCO? I think it was called. Anyway, I said to him, “What do you think about the British being there?” And he just went and shrugged at me and lifted up his hands and said, “Well, if they stayed great, but they won’t.” And he said, “If they stay, then brilliant.” But he said, “I’ll tell you what he said, Taliban weren’t great, they weren’t fantastic.” He said, “But I could leave my purse on the wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week and no one would touch it.” He said, “Will they bring that kind of order? Will we have peace here? They’ve just chopped down my willow trees. Thanks a lot.” h it. I could leave it on a wall for a week and no one would touch it.” He said, “Will they bring that kind of order? Will we have peace here? They’ve just chopped down my willow trees. Thanks a lot.” You’re seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture, ethnic differences. You’re trying to impose a Western-centric view onto a nation which isn’t ready for that. Now, there are ways in which it looked like Afghanistan was starting to emerge, and there was a path, and then just at the critical moment, the West moves out with catastrophic consequences. What you have to say though is that in the West post-1945, the rehabilitation of Italy, of Japan, of Western Germany was really good. The consequence of all that destruction, all that turmoil was thriving, high-producing democracies, which burst forth into the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order. So the lessons of the previous generation, from the First World War, had been learned, even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people is unprecedented in 1945.…

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