Hey, what's up, you guys? So unless you follow me on social media or subscribe to the Martermade Substack, we haven't connected in a while, so I hope you're doing as well as I am. But if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, really any major newspaper in the country, or if you watch CNN or MSNBC or the Bill Maher show, or pretty much any political media you can think of, you've probably seen my name a few times this week. For those of you who haven't heard, oh how I envy you. We should all envy you, See, I was invited to be a guest on the Tucker Carlson show, and the episode we recorded dropped last Monday. It was about two hours long, so for about two hours, everything was quiet. And then the world exploded. Tucker told me that in 30 years of being in media and being at the center of so many controversies, he's forgotten most of them in that time. He'd never seen anything like it. The meltdown was truly epic, and in addition to all the media attacks, the White House itself even issued a statement, condemning me. I can't imagine anyone at the White House sat through two hours of me and Tucker Carlson talking together, but that's okay, because neither did most of the other people who were losing their minds in public all this week.

I didn't know what we were going to talk about going in. So for a while, we talked about Jonestown, some of the lessons I've drawn from podcasting in general. But then Tucker wanted to talk about World War II, and specifically, Winston Churchill. I told him that I considered Churchill one of the chief villains of the war, though I said in the interview that it was hyperbolic and meant to be provocative. I thought that might dampen the provocation somewhat. It did not. The conversation became more provocative from there, needless to say. In the days since, I have been called a Holocaust denier, though we never talked about the Holocaust, and anti-Semite, though we never mentioned Jewish people in this context. They came up when we discussed the 1968 New York City teachers' strike, maybe one or two other places, but never in the context of people who were killed in the war. But no matter, you know how these things go, Once the dog gets hold of a bone, it doesn't let go until it loses its flavor, the dog finds a new distraction. A lot of people listening to this are probably new to the Martyr Made podcast and have come to see what all the fuss is about.

As for the rest of you who have been here a while, I wanted to comment on the controversy one time to hopefully answer any questions that you might have about what Tucker and I discussed. This will be my last word on the topic until my next series, which will tell the story of World War II from a perspective to which many people have never been exposed in their whole lives, namely the enemy This is the enemy's perspective. That'll be the name of the series, enemy, the German's War. And the first episode will drop as soon as I can get it done. I plan to do another couple of episodes before starting this series. I've been doing background reading and preparing my notes for a long time now, but duty calls, and I have bumped it to the front of the line. The good news I'm happy to report is that the world has changed, my friends. Ten, 20 years ago, the attack I faced this week would have easily shut my mouth and ruined my life. One of the reasons some people are reacting so hysterically is that this week proved that they no longer have that power.

Every single person who knows me personally, every friend, every relative, every acquaintance, anyone with whom I've had even a single direct human interaction, online or off. Every single one of them has had my back and gone to bat for me. Ten, 20 years ago, they might have been able to scare some of those people. Not anymore. They might be able to destroy someone when the accusations are true, but they no longer have the power to destroy someone with lies and slander. And the reason for that is you. I work for you. And though I've always been grateful for that, I've never felt more blessed by it than this week. I work for you. I only have to explain myself to you, you and no one else. Nothing that the New York Times, CNN, or the White House communications staff can say will change that. So I appreciate your support, not only the support that allows me to speak freely, but the moral support as well, which has been overwhelming. For all of last week, Martermade was the number one podcast in all categories on iTunes, ahead of the Joe Rogan experience, ahead of the Tucker Carlson show itself.

Pretty amazing for a show, a six-hour episode about suicide cults, human sacrifice, and coal miner strikes. As I record this now, Sunday Night, Martyr Made is number one on Spotify in all categories. So thank you. You've told the mob what you think of their witch hunt just by being here. If you'd like to offer more than moral support, the way to do that is to subscribe to the Martyr Made sub stack. It is only $5 a month or a year, and you will find dozens of subscribers-only podcasts, essay series that often amount to medium-length audiobooks, interviews, Q&A's, and more. And more being added all the time. And finally, for those of you on Twitter or X, I guess, I'm going to start a subscription option there that will include subscribers-only interactive spaces where you can speak directly with me and where I'll have special guests to talk about books and topics we cover on the podcast. If you're already a subscriber to the sub stack, I'm going to grandfather you in with an X subscription, which is great for you because the X subscription is going to cost more than five bucks a month. I figure if journalists and other haters want to listen in on our conversations, they should at least have to pay for it.

If you're listening to this and you're not subscribed to the Substack, but think that the X subscription thing is something you'd be interested in, the best thing to do would be to go and sign up for the sub stack right now so that you're grandfathered in as well. I will release more information about this soon. Anyway, here's my last word on the topic of Churchill, Hitler, or World War II, for now. Again, thank you. I cannot say it enough or with more sincerity. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Here we go.

I'm content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr.

The people will always remember it.

No, they will forget.

Hell does exist.

God is a thought.

God is an idea.

Here.

It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist. But it's a reference is to something that transcends all thinking.

Why do we must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion?

When I was nearing the end of the Jonestown series, I asked a friend who's a private investigator to help me get my hands on some police reports about a certain incident. I don't know if he was allowed to do that, but he came through more than I'd hoped, and I was able to read about dozens of incidents involving someone, usually a husband or father, holding his family hostage in a standoff with police. Most of the incidents involved drugs, and the overwhelming majority of those involved methamphedidine. Amines, which is what I had asked my friend to help me find. For each incident I read about in the police reports, I found what I could in newspapers and other media reports. And for the federal cases, I read whatever I could find on the Pacer website. Some of the incidents ended peacefully. Others ended with the death of the hostage-taking husband or father at the hands of police. But nearly half ended when the man murdered his family and killed himself. Jim Jones, as those of you who listen to God's Socialists know, was hopped up on amphetamines pretty much every day for about 10 years leading up to the murder, suicide in Guyana.

I had read enough about the delusional and often violent paranoia caused by long-term amphetamine use that I expected to learn something about what happened in Jonestown in 1978. And I did. I decided to tell the final episode of the Jonestown story from a different angle because trying to tell it as an amphetamine-fueled murder suicide of the kind I spent a month pouring over in police reports was taking too much out of me. Sometimes I still regret not pushing through and doing it that way because I do believe that's what happened. Anyway, there was something else that I began to see, both in Jonestown and in the various hostage reports I'd been reading. The behavior of the police during the incidents was was not the same in every case. Some clearly understood the explosive and unpredictable nature of the circumstances and did their job by trying at every point to de-escalate. Others were clumsy and out of their depth. But in some cases, there was simply no getting around the fact that in a standoff with a psychotic, paranoid man threatening to murder his family, the police acted in ways that made the situation worse. They used threats, pressure tactics, and some even insulted or humiliated the man inside the house with a gun, maybe hoping to shake him up and get him to expose himself, or maybe just because cops are human beings and tired, frustrated, and angry themselves.

Whatever the reason, they clearly acted in ways that made the situation worse, often with catastrophic consequences. As I worked my way toward the end the Jonestown story, I found myself feeling a lot of bitterness and outrage, and those of you who have listened to it will know that this probably leaked through, at the forces aligned against people's temple. After all, here was a paranoid, delusional man with his family, out of his mind on amphetamines and sleep deprivation, ranting about revolutionary suicide, and political and law enforcement officials, egged on by an often vindictive group of former members with an ax to grind, chose a maximum pressure approach that escalated the cult members' sense of isolation and persecution, their feeling that there was no way to relieve the pressure and no way out. In all of the books and documentaries about Jonestown, the former members who escape before the end are held up as victims and heroes. But I did not view most of them that way. In my opinion, many of them were not victims at all, but were in fact perpetrators. They enabled, encouraged, and egged on Jim Jones, taking the reins of people's temple themselves as Jones health and capabilities deteriorated.

They administered the organization location. They led the late night struggle sessions. They ordered the break-ins and harassment campaigns. They recruited and deceived the people who would eventually die with Jones in the jungle. And then they jumped out of the car after it was already on fire and headed toward a cliff. Some of them left for personal reasons, and many left simply because it turned out that farming in an off-grid settlement in the South American jungle was harder work than they expected. Many of those who joined the group known as the Concerned Relatives were bitter toward Jim Jones and the remaining leadership group personally, and any desire to avert disaster for the hundreds of innocent people stuck in Jonestown was quite secondary to their desire to take down Jim Jones. I don't say they were all like this, but some of them were, and they were often the most energetic of the activist former members. It was at their behest that US authorities took notice of Jonestown, and it was their initiative and information that set the tone of the official response. Are they responsible for the deaths of the people at Jonestown? Obviously, they did not force Kool-Aid down the throats of anyone.

So in that sense, no, of course, they were not responsible. We don't know what would have happened if the outside forces would have taken a more de-escalatory approach. It is certainly possible that Jonestown would have ended the same way. Yet whenever I think about the story, I can't help but come away with the feeling that these people were real villains in it. Sure, Jim Jones started the ball rolling and pushed it forward at critical moments, but there's no reason to speculate about his role in the disaster. Without Jim Jones, those people would not have died out there. But Jim Jones was drugged up, out of his mind, delusional, paranoid, a speed freak father holding a gun on his wife and kids. So when I criticized the outside forces for being more interested in hanging his head on their wall than in saving the people of Jonestown, I don't find it necessary to repeatedly add the caveat, but Jim Jones was worse. If I criticized the escalatory actions of police during a standoff that led to a murder suicide, I don't need to follow up my accusation with a ritual denunciation of the murderer inside the house.

These are two different classes of offense, and only one is worth arguing about or even discussing. What is the point of criticizing someone who murders his family and kills himself? I often run into this same misunderstanding when talking about the Israel-Palestine situation. Any criticism of the behavior of the Israeli military in Gaza is met with the inevitable question, Well, what about Hamas? How come you're not criticizing Hamas? Why are you letting Hamas off the hook and only focus on Israel? What is there to say about Hamas? Hamas sends suicide bombers onto busses full of women and children in the middle of the day. We know what Hamas is, and it's a waste of my breath to criticize them. The same thing happens when I criticized the role of NATO in the United States, the role they played in creating the conditions that led to war in Ukraine. What, are you a Putin apologist? Just imagine if after the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal broke in 2004, someone had tried to divert criticism using this tactic. Why aren't you criticizing Al Qaeda in Iraq? Why are you only focusing on what US occupation forces are doing, but not what Al Qaeda and Iraq's doing.

It's absurd, and we shouldn't be cowed by it. My statement, which I said at the time was hyperbolic and intentionally provocative, that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, was made in this same spirit. World War II was perhaps the greatest catastrophe in human history, and the starting point of any discussion about it must be that of all the possible outcomes that could have resulted from events leading up to the conflict, the one that ended up happening was the worst of all. Given that the choices made in the 1920s and '30s led to the worst possible outcome, it is worthwhile to ask whether different choices might have led to a better one. In recent decades, only one such counter factual has been permitted in polite discourse, namely that of the cop who insists that the murder suicide could have been averted if only the SWAT team had been sent in right away. And he might be right. Once the man inside kills his family, anyone arguing that the police should have been more conciliatory will find few sympathetic ears. But the lessons we take from the last crisis inform our response to the next one.

And too often, the lessons we take are wrong. The lesson taken from Jonestown, for example, was that the tragedy might have been averted if US authorities had taken harsher and more decisive action. And this lesson shaped the official response to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, 15 years later. World War II has cast this spell on us for 80 years. Virtually every war on which the US has embarked in the years since World War II has been justified by claims that the enemy leader is the next Hitler, and that our only two choices sources, or to fight him now or to fight him later when he's stronger and more dangerous. It's clever rhetorical jiu-jitsu that frames those advocating for peace as the ones actually advocating for a bigger and more violent war. Barry Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard an Asaad Toady on the Joe Rogan experience, attacking her moral character and effectively accusing her of treason, simply because Tulsi advocated for a de-escalation of the Syrian Civil War. When Dr. Ron Paul pointed out that Osama bin Laden's own words confirmed that US military intervention in the Middle East fueled Al Qaeda's hostility toward us, Rudy Giuliani called Dr. Paul dangerous and accused him of blaming America rather than the terrorists for 9/11.

These tactics work less and less often, and most of you will have seen through the cynical abuse of language by Weiss and Giuliani in these examples. But As we've seen this week, they remain powerful when it comes to World War II, the ermyth of the American leg global order. My friend, gray Connolly, a well-read Australian lawyer and staunch champion of both Churchill and the British Empire, wrote a thread on X to counter my claims about Winston Churchill's culpability. Elon Musk, who recently recommended my interview with Tucker before deleting once it became controversial, commented that Gray's thread was excellent, and I agree. I like and respect gray very much, so I reposted and recommended his thread before I'd even read it because I knew he would approach the controversy with goodwill. But what struck me is that Gray's defense of Churchill did not really dispute my central claims. He pointed out that what I had said in the interview, and in my X thread, later fleshing it out, is nothing that hadn't already been said decades ago by British historians like Alan Clarke, AJP Taylor, and others who were trying to understand the events that led to the loss of their empire.

After listing attempts to avoid a wider war in 1939 and '40, gray writes, Churchill and his government, and the Empire, however, were never going to make peace. There would be no surrender. The formerly Allied French fleet was sunk by the Royal Navy at Iran in July 1940 as a sign of British ruthness. The crux of Gray's argument is what follows, This was not just Churchill, though. The British Empire was not in as weak a position as made out, and regardless, there were no good terms to be obtained in 1940 that made fighting on a worse alternative. Also, a united Europe, especially under Nazis, is unacceptable for British security. Winston Churchill was not any villain, but simply was Prime Minister. He was the head of a wartime coalition government that was, come what may, committed, as all in the parliament were, to see the war through, even at the destruction of our empire. It is inconceivable in mid-1940 that any British government could responsibly seek a peace or even armistice with the Germans. Quite apart from the Nazis themselves, British policy aimed at a divided Europe via war and economic subsidy. Well, unless I'm missing something, this is not far off from the claim I was making, except that it shifts the blame I attached to Churchill onto British Imperial policy in general.

I admit that making it about Churchill himself engages in the same unfair demonization as pinning gaining total blame for the Iraq war on George W Bush rather than on the US security establishment. And I'm happy to concede Gray's point on that. However, I'd note that distributing responsibility to larger groups or forces is often a tactic used to absolve the people most responsible of any accountability for their own role. In other contexts, I was just following orders is not considered a valid defense. Nevertheless, I'm I'm happy to concede the point that it is a mistake to focus too much on one man, and Gray's thread will be in my mind as I work on the upcoming World War II series. But it leaves open the central question of whether there were off-ramps available that might have resolved the crisis by means other than the most deadly and destructive war in human history. The fact that the man inside might have murdered his family in any case is not an excuse for the police to avoid a conversation conversation about what they might have done differently. No historian disputes the fact that Hitler and his generals genuinely wanted to avoid war with Britain and France.

None dispute the fact that Germany made several peace overtures once Hitler's bluff was called in Poland. Everyone, of course, disputes that these overtures were sincere and the idea that the British government was under any obligation to take them seriously. But that was not universally true at the time. In early October 1939, when it had become clear that Germany was not alone but had an understanding with Italy and the Soviet Union, former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George suggested that Parliament might go into a secret session to discuss the peace proposals on offer. Author Nicholson Baker, in his book Human Smoke, describes a conversation between author Cyril Jode and a friend after Chamberlain rejected Hitler's call for peace. Peace. Cyril asked D, D is the friend, Cyril asked D whether he thought Chamberlain should have negotiated with Hitler after Hitler's peace offer. Yes, of course, said D. Wars should never be begun, and as soon as they were begun, they should be stopped. D then listed off many war evils, the physical and moral mutilation, the intolerance, the public lying, the enthronement of the mob. Once Once a war has started, D said, the only thing to do is to get it stopped as soon as possible.

Consequently, I should negotiate with Hitler. Jode said, Ah, but you couldn't negotiate with Hitler because you couldn't trust him. Hitler would break any agreement as soon as it benefited him to do so. Suppose you're right, D said. Suppose that Hitler violated the peace agreement and England had to go back to war. What had they lost? If the worst comes to worse, we can always begin the killing again. ' Even a day of peace was a day of peace. Jode found he had no ready answer for that. Before the summer of 1940, British intransigence could be justified by the fact that Western Europe remained in opposition to Germany. Once Germany conquered France and chased the British expeditionary force off the continent at Dunkirk, however, the terms changed in a way that highlights one of my main criticisms of Britain's war policy. As gray said in his thread above, the strategy of the British Empire toward Europe had long been to use a combination of financial and military means to play one nation off another in order to avoid the emergence of a continental power capable of challenging the empire. But that strategy had run its course in the summer of 1940.

There was no power left to play off against Germany. The war was over, and Germany had won. There was no plan and no possibility of Britain mounting a reinvasion of Europe to change the outcome on its own. Yet Britain refused to entertain terms of peace, even when they were offered at the height of Hitler's power. The question then is, why would Britain insist on continuing a war she had no means of fighting? True, the hunger The fear blockade made life hard on the continent, but it could not starve Germany into submission now that the latter had a pact with Russia. The only weapon available to the British was aerial bombing that amounted to random acts of terrorism against European civilians. The truth is, the only hope Britain had was that the United States, the Soviet Union, or both, could be pulled into the war to bail them out. Another way of putting that would be that the British strategy was to turn a war that was basically over into a global conflict that, under the most optimistic circumstances, would result in the deaths of many millions of people. And of course, that's what happened. Although far from benefiting or even preserving the British Empire, World War II brought it to an end and handed the world over to conquest by the United States and the USSR.

Churchill's refusal to even countenance Hitler's peace overtures and his tendency to escalate British bombing campaigns immediately after they were made made no sense to much of the German leadership. Hitler pointed out, correctly, it turned out, that a war between Germany and Britain could only end with the destruction of the British Empire. And it was widely believed by German officials that Britain's irrational escalation of the conflict was proof that international jury was influencing British policy without regard for British interests. This was the view among Third Reich leaders. The worsening bombing campaigns against German civilians, even as German planes, were forbidden for months from retaliating in kind, and the continuation of the hunger blockade as it began to bite the occupied civilian populations, intensified Hitler's sense of paranoia and claustrophobia, and his sense that there were forces larger than Great Britain, whose only war aim was to see Germany destroyed. You might say he was delusional, paranoid, that his own choices had brought Germany to the brink. But that is beside the point. The point is that he's the man inside the house with a gun pointed at his family. As for the atrocities that took place in the East, I certainly could have been clearer during my interview with Tucker, and I don't blame people for raising an my brow, given the way I put a few things.

Part of the reason is that I'm not very good at interviews. They make me anxious, and as you heard, I jump around, leave points half-finished and open to misinterpretation. That's why I rarely do them. The other reason is that this part of the discussion was a continuation of a discussion Tucker and I were having off the air. And rather than circle back to provide viewers with the full context, as would have been appropriate, I dropped them into the middle of it to fend for themselves. Far from absorbing the Germans, my point, and I did get to this by the end, was that even if one accepts all the revisionist excuses and rationalizations for German behavior on the Eastern front, even if you take them all at face value, Germany still launched an invasion with no plan to feed or care for the millions of people taken under its power. That is murder. Maybe your supply lines hampered food distribution. Maybe the fighting had stopped crop cultivation. Maybe you had no choice but to decide which people would eat and which would starve. You launched the war. You took those people captive, and they were your responsibility.

So it was murder. Tucker knew what I was saying, and again, I did actually say that in the interview. But what many people heard was the Holocaust was an accident or the result of logistical problems. That is not what I said. But to those people, I would still add this. Even if the deaths were largely the result of resource deficiencies and poor planning, it doesn't change the fact that Jews were targeted for death. Under circumstances that forced a choice between who would eat and who would starve, the built-in anti-Semitism of the Third Reich guaranteed that Jews would be among last in line. That is not to say that Jews were not massacred. Of course, Jews were massacred. Peoples of all ethnicities were massacred. It would have been quite a mystery if the Jews were an exception, doubly so, given the Third Reich's unique antipathy toward them. I describe many of these massacres in my series, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. It's simply to say that even the most generous interpretation of Germany's actions towards civilians on the Eastern front is still a description of murder. At one point, I mentioned a letter written by a concentration camp official back to Berlin in August 1941.

I emphasized the date in the interview and the fact that it was just two months after the invasion of the USSR. To make quite the opposite point of the one being attributed to me, which was to point out that excuses about resources and logistical problems cannot hold much water if prisoners are already beginning to starve just two months into the war. That means that Germany truly went in without making any preparations for their care, which under the circumstances was the same as condemning them to death. But the fact is, the British government knew people were starving in the camps and gh and rejected any and all appeals to try to find a way to relieve their situation. Mass starvation, though it was well understood that it would not affect the German army or even much affect German civilians, but only hurt the weakest, most vulnerable, and most despised among the occupied peoples, was considered an acceptable consequence. The letter I mentioned is perfectly genuine. It was written by Rolf Heinz-Hopner, an SS administrator at Posen, to Adolf Eichmann. There is an imminent danger that not all the Jews can be supplied with food in the coming winter.

We must seriously consider if it would not be more humane to finish off the Jews insofar as they are not fit for labor mobilization with some quick acting means, since that would be more agreeable than to let them die of hunger. Actually, I looked up the letter to quote it, and I was wrong. It was written in July, not August, less than one month after the German invasion of the USSR. So lack of food was, at the very least, used as an excuse for murder, one which may have helped overcome the uncertainty of men like this Hoppner, the people who would have had to carry it out, and who, if you take this letter, does not seem overjoyed at the prospect of mass killing. My point in bringing this up was that Churchill and the British government were warned over and over by many sources in many countries that the blockade would cause mass starvation among prisoners and occupied civilians, and they chose to continue the policy anyway. Basically, British strategy after the fall of France was to carry out a campaign of mass starvation and random firebombing, both of which predictably fell almost exclusively on innocent civilians until the US and/or the USSR could be drawn into a global war.

My position is really quite simple, and if we were talking about any other conflict, I think it would not be particularly controversial. One, the war faction in Britain refused to count in its peace with Germany despite lacking any capability to change the terms of war on its own. Two, Germany's offers to negotiate may or may not have been sincere. It is perfectly possible, as after previous confrontations, that a peace deal would simply have been interpreted as further British weakness, and Germany would have become even more aggressive. Nevertheless, I say the Allies had an obligation to try so that they could at least go into the coming conflict knowing that they had done everything they could to avoid the worst outcome. Three, Germany could not have carried out the atrocities in the East without the cover of a world war in which millions were already being killed. There are two objections to this. First, the SS started liquidating certain classes of people almost immediately upon the invasion of Poland in 1939. Already in 1939, a dissident German general would write in his diary of Jews being rounded up into barns and shot. Poland was in trouble, regardless of what happened with Britain and France.

But world war was never going to change that, and in fact made Poland's trouble immeasurably more severe. In the end, of course, Poland was saved from Germany just to be handed over to our ally, Joseph Stalin, whose stack of bodies put Hitlers in the shade. The second objection is that Hitler had always had his eyes set on the East and would have eventually invaded regardless of what the Allies did. And that may be true. Jim Jones and the hostage-taking father may have killed their families no matter how much they were appeased. But maybe not. And agree or disagree, that maybe is worthy of discussion. Well, there's a lot more to say, but if I keep going, I'm going to spoil the upcoming podcast series. As I said, this will be my last word on the topic until that series comes out, though I am happy to address subscribers' questions in the comment section. Thanks for reading or listening.

I've had to make a lot of hard choices throughout this series about what to cover and how much. Or really the hard choices generally come down to what not to cover. There have been very important events and individuals that I've had to give very short shrift, and I'm about to do it again here in a spot where... Well, part of the reason that I've been delayed getting this episode out was that I kept struggling over how to deal with the Holocaust. Should I walk it back and try to provide a bit of historical context for it? That's what I thought I was going to do for a while. For a while, I was rereading books on the Russian conquest of Lithuania and everything else you could think of. At one point, I had mapped out a brief with air quotes around it, I had mapped out a brief history of the Jews in Europe to provide some background and capped that with a section about interwar Germany and the Soviet Union, everything that was going on there. Because here is what most people know about Jewish history. Bible stuff, Bible stuff, Cain and Abel, King David, more Bible stuff, then Jesus, then almost nothing for 2,000 years, and then bam, the Holocaust.

That's it. And why did the Holocaust happen? Because a guy with a funny mustache was crazy. When you lay it out like that, it's such a ridiculous and impoverished understanding of the situation that I couldn't just leave it there. But every time I tried to deal with it with any thoroughness, it ended up being not just a whole episode, but a whole new series. And so I tried and I reformulated it and I tried again. And what I eventually decided to do was to just put that larger story off for a future series, which, fortunately now, much of the research is already done for, and the theme of which is going to be roughly described by a halfway decent book in that topic's orbit called Why the Germans? Why the Jews? And so we'll address the deep history of all that in that interwar period another time. But that still left me with the question of how to handle it right here, how to handle it here and now. I mean, to give you anything like a proper context was going to take a whole series, to spend too little time on it risks underplaying the absolutely central role that the Holocaust plays in the Zionist story and in Jewish self-understanding today.

And so in the interests of, I guess, let's just be honest, in the interests of shifting responsibility, but also just to help me break past this dilemma so I can finally release this episode so that Jocko doesn't choke me out, I'm just going to call in some heavy artillery and bring in a few other people with infinitely more sensitivity or talent or both at their disposal to bail me out. In doing so, my goal is not... When I talk about this, I go through this section, I want to make it clear that my goal here is not simply to emphasize the horror, the horror of the Holocaust, because we know it was horrible. So was the rape of 2 million German women by Soviet soldiers. So was the starvation of 3 million Soviet soldiers by the Germans. So was the rape of Nanking and the indiscriminate Annihilation of German and Japanese cities from the air by Allied heavy bombers. We know it was horrible. I want to emphasize something else, something that actually has a lot more to do with the story we're telling here. I'm going to let three people tell more personal stories, and I hope that my intentions here will become clear as we go through them.

This first passage that I'm going to read to you is from Timothy Snyder's shattering 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It's 1941, and you're in Ukraine. Ukraine, the same land that less than a decade before this had seen 6 to 10 million peasants murdered in Stalin's Holodomor. And so Snyder begins, quote, In Kyiv, in September 1941, a further confrontation with the remnants of Soviet power provided the pretext for the next escalation, the first attempt to murder all of the native Jews present in a large city. On 19 September, 1941, the Wehrmacht's Army Group South took Kiev, several weeks behind schedule and with the help of Army Group's center. On 24 September, a series of car bombs and mines exploded, destroying the buildings in central Kiev, where the Germans had established offices of their occupation regime. Some of these explosives were set on timers before the Soviet forces withdraw from the city, but some seem to have been detonated by NKVD men who remained in Kiev. As the Germans pulled their dead and wounded from the rubble, the city suddenly seemed unsafe. Safe. As a local remembered, the Germans stopped smiling. They had to try to govern this metropolis with a very small number of people, dozens of whom had just been killed, even as they prepared a continued eastward march.

At a meeting on 26 September, military authorities agreed with the representatives of the police and SS that the mass murder of Kiev Jews would be the appropriate response for the bombing. Although most of the Jews of Kiev had fled before the Germans took the city, Tens of thousands remained. They were all to be killed. A Wehrmacht propaganda crew printed broadsheet notices that ordered Jews of Kiev to appear on pain of death at a street corner in a westerly neighborhood of the city. In what would become the standard lie of such mass shooting actions, the Jews were told that they were being resettled. They should thus bring along their documents, money, and valuables. On 29 September, 1941, most of the remaining Jewish community of Kiev did indeed appear at the appointed location. Some Jews told themselves that since Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, was the following day, they could not possibly be hurt. Many arrived before dawn in the hopes of getting good seats on the resettlement train, which did not exist. 'Petite' in the West. People packed for a long journey, old women wearing strings of onions around their necks for food. Having been assembled, the more than 30,000 people walked, as instructed, along Melnik Street in the direction of the Jewish Cemetery.

Observers from nearby apartments recalled an endless row that was overflowing the entire street and the sidewalks. The Germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the Jewish Cemetery, where documents were verified and non-Jews told to return home. From this point forward, the Jews were escorted by Germans with automatic weapons and dogs. At the checkpoint, if no earlier, many of the Jews must have wondered what their true fate would be. Dina and Prunichiva, a woman of 30, walked ahead of her family to a point where she could hear gunshots. Immediately, all was clear to her, but she chose not to tell her parents so as not to worry them. Instead, she walked along with her mother and father until she reached the tables where the Germans demanded valuables and clothes. A German had already taken her mother's wedding ring when Prunichiva realized that her mother, no less than she, understood what was happening. Yet only when her mother whispered sharply to her, You don't look like Jew, did she try to escape. Such plain communication is rare in such situations when the human mind labors to deny what is actually happening, and the human spirit strives toward imitation, subordination, and thus extinction.

Prinitiva, who had a Russian husband, and thus a Russian surname, told a German at a nearby table that she was not Jewish. He told her to wait at one side until the work of the day was complete. Thus, Dina Prinitiva, Panitcheva saw what became of her parents, her sister, and the Jews of Kyiv. Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or shots fired overhead in groups of about 10 to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten. Panitcheva remembered that people were already bloody as they went to be shot. They had to lie down on their stomachs, on the corpses already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for 36 hours. People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment. Each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and then all was black. Some people died thinking about others rather than themselves, such as the mother of the beautiful 15-year-old girl Sara, who begged to be killed at the same time as her daughter.

Here there was, even at the end, a thought and a care, that if she saw her daughter shot, she would not see her raped. One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped in after it and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing. Nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761. Since the bodies were later exhumed and burned on pyres and the bones that did not burn crushed and mixed with sand, the count is what remains. At the end of the day, the Germans decided to kill Dina Prinitcheva. Whether or not she was Jewish was moot. She had seen too much. In the darkness, she was led to the edge of the ravine, along with a few other people. She not forced to undress. She survived in the only way possible in that situation. Just as the shots began, she threw herself into the gorge and then feign death. And now I'm going to leave Professor Snyder behind and let Dina Prunichevai tell the rest of her story as she related it to the Russian writer Anatoly Kuznetzov.

All around and beneath her, she could hear strange, submerged sounds, groaning, choking, and sobbing. Many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living. Some soldiers came out onto the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies, firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living. But someone, not far from Dina, went on groaning as loud as before. Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies. They were Germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing on those which sowed signs of life. Among them was the policeman who had examined her papers and taken her bag. She recognized him by his voice. One SS man caught his foot against Dina, and her appearance aroused his suspicions. He shown his torch on her, picked her up and struck her with his fist, but she hung limp and gave no sign of life. He kicked her in the breast with his heavy boot and trot on her right-hand so that the bones cracked, but he didn't use his gun and went off, picking his way across the corpses.

A few minutes later, she heard a voice calling from above, Dmitriy Denko, come on, start shoveling. There was a clatter of spades and then heavy thuds as the earth and sand landed on the bodies, coming closer and closer until it started falling on Dina herself. Her whole body was buried under the sand, but she did not move until it began to cover her mouth. She was lying face upwards, breathed in some sand and started to choke, and then, scarcely realizing what she was doing, she started to struggle in a state of uncontrollable panic, quite prepared now to be shot rather than to be buried alive. With her left hand, the good one, she started scraping the sand off herself, scarcely daring to breathe, lest she should start coughing. She used what strength she had left to hold the cough back. She began to feel a little easier, finally Finally, she got herself out from under the earth. Dina's eyes were full of sand. It was pitch dark, and there was the heavy smell of flesh from the mass of fresh corpses. Dina could just make out the nearest side of the sandpit and started slowly and carefully making her way across to it.

Then she stood up and started making little footholds in it with her left hand. In that way, she pressed close to the side of the pit. She made steps and so raised herself an inch at a time, likely at any moment to fall back into the pit. There was a little bush at the top which she managed to get hold of. With a last, desperate effort, she pulled herself up and she scrabbed over the edge. And as she did, she heard a whisper which nearly made her jump back. Don't be scared, lady. I'm alive, too. It was a small boy in vest and pants who had craw out as she had done. He was trembling and shivering all over. Quiet, she histed him. Crawl along behind me. And they crawled away silently without a sound. Dina Prunacheva survived the horrors of Babiar. The young boy who had escaped from the ravine with her called out to her as they sought to leave the area. He warned her that danger was near. Motin, the young boy's name, called out to her, 'Don't move, lady. There's Germans here. ' The Germans killed him on the spot. But not understanding what he said, she made good her escape.

End quote. Now I'm going to play for you a recording of an interview that I found. This is something that the BBC did a while back. This is an interview with a man who was... He's an elderly Jewish man who was interned in several concentration camps as a boy. His name was Jacob Bresler of Poland.

Jacob Bresler of Poland. This 16-year-old boy has been in the ghetto at Lodz and five concentration camps. He's lost trace of all his family. I am the lost Jacob Bresler. I am 86 years old right now and going on 87. I grew up in a place called Unyeow, and that's in Poland, not far from the German border. I came from a large family, four sisters, one brother, my parents, and we were 65 first cousins, and I'm the only one who is alive. My father was a very intelligent man, very loving, but yet strict. In 1939, when the war broke out, I became the sole supporter of my family. My father was taken away right away. They kept him in jail, and they took him away to Pozenle. I I was separated from my mother and the rest of the family in 1942. My mother and two sisters were taken to Chalmno, which was an extermination camp. They were the first ones to be gassed in trucks. Two of my sisters were taken to a camp in Pozenijn. I was sent with my brother to get a lodge, and I worked in a factory for two years there.

My father was in Pozenijn, and I've heard that there is a transport coming with prisoners from Pozenijn. And I had a promunition that somehow my father will be among them. And sure enough, after a while, I have seen columns of wrecks coming towards me, and I ran into them and I asked them, Do you know Chaim Bresler, who is my father? He said, No. Then I went on the lines until somebody said, Yes, there is a Chaim Bresler here with us. And they pointed me to the direction where he was. And I hardly recognized him because he was... He didn't look like a person anymore. He was a skeleton. It They took him to a prison called Charny-et-Skego. And I asked my boss, who had great connections to everybody, I said, I would like to take my father out. And he said, How are you going to feed him? You can't get a ration for him. Well, I managed to get him out, and he was with us for about four days or so. And then one day, I came home from work, and there was a note on the table, I have returned to prison because I cannot take away your piece of bread that you are sharing with me.

I was very angry. And I ran to prison, and I scoled him, and I said, Papa, why did you do that? And he said to me, I don't live anymore. If this is life, he says, I don't want it. But you are young. See that you survive. Those words rang in my ears throughout the concentration caps, and that's why I survived. I wouldn't give up.

I didn't want to I didn't want to tarnish that story with my own voice. I wanted you to hear an 86-year-old man describing his murdered father 70 years after the fact. To hear his voice. At the end of the war, Jacob was the only member of his entire extended family still alive. Experiences like this do not leave you. They impose themselves on a life in such a way that they set personalities in stone, stuck and reliving that painful moment again and again and again. When enough people share experiences like this, the character of whole peoples crystallize around them with a new self-understanding and with a new relationship to each other and to the rest of the world. Finally, I want to read you a few diary entries from the diary of an unknown woman, unknown Jewish woman, from the Tarnupal ghetto, where many of Galicia's 500,000 Jews died. 7 April, 1943. That interview gets me. Excuse me. 7 April, 1943. Before I leave this world, I want to leave behind a a few lines to you, my loved ones. When this letter reaches you one day, I myself will no longer be there, nor will any of us.

Our end is drawing near. One feels it. One knows it. Just like the innocent, defenseless Jews already executed, we are all condemned to death. In the very near future, it will be our turn, as the small remainder left over from the mass murders. There is no way for us to escape this horrible, gastly death. At the very beginning, in June 1941, some 5,000 men were killed, among them my husband, God. After six weeks, following a five-day search between the corpses, I found his body. Since that day, life has ceased for me. Not even in my girlish dreams could I once have wished for a better and more faithful companion? I was only granted two years and two months of happiness. And now, tired from so much searching among the bodies, one was glad to have found his as well. Are there words in which to express these torments? End quote. It can be easy for 33,761 corpses to become numbing, especially when it happens over and over and over. But there's something about reading the diary of a young wife searching among corpses for days, hoping, if you can call it that, hoping to find her beloved husband, something about that that brings you back down into the mud.

This was real. Oh, yeah, I know it was real. I read about it in school, or I have a Jewish friend with grandparent, or maybe you're Jewish and you had a grandparent. No, no, no. This was real. Okay? Close your eyes and look around you at the field of bodies stacked. Smell them. And look at the distraught young wife, flipping over, rotting bodies, hoping, not hoping. What do you feel in this a situation? See the distraught young wife, flipping over, rotting bodies in this field of corpses, one by one, hoping to find her faithful husband that she had married only four months before the German invasion. This was real. The diary continues, quote, 26 April, 1943. I am still alive, and I to describe to you what happened from the seventh to this day. Now then, it is told that everyone's turn comes up next. Galicia should be totally rid of Jews. After all, the ghetto is to be liquidated by the first of May. During the last days, thousands have been shot. Meeting Point was in our camp. Here, the human victims are selected. In Petrakov, it looks like this. Before the grave, one is stripped naked.

Then forced to kneel down and wait for the shot. The victims stand in line and wait their turn. Moreover, they have to sort the first, the executed, in their graves so that the space is used well and order prevails. The entire procedure does not take long. In half an hour, the close of the executed return to the camp. After the actions, the Jewish council received a bill for 30,000 zloty to pay for used bullets. Why can we not cry Why? Why can we not defend ourselves? How can one see so much innocent blood flow and say nothing, do nothing, and wait the same death oneself? We are compelled to go under so miserably, so piddlessly. Do you think we want to end this way? Die this way? No. No. Despite all these experiences, the urge for self-preservation has now often become greater, the will to live stronger, the closer death is. It is beyond comprehension, end quote. It was beyond comprehension. It was, and it remains beyond comprehension today, despite the millions and millions of words that have been written about the Holocaust. You can tell that by the almost religious significance significance that this event has taken on throughout Western civilization.

Or not even almost. It has become a religious symbol. What I mean by that is that it's looked upon as something without precedent, without cause, To even inquire too deeply into precedence or causes will draw suspicion. To look into the details of the symbol in a way that doesn't have official sanction. This can result in predictable social rituals of denunciation and purgation. Or if you're in many European countries, you can actually be jailed under anti-heresy and blasphemy laws. We don't call them that, but that's what they are. The point I'm trying to make is that If you're a Gentile out there listening in a Western country, you know the power of this symbol, the Holocaust, the power that it has over your own culture and society, and how large it looms over your own culture's self-understanding. And so try to imagine, and we can't really, but try to imagine the space that it occupies in the minds and the cultural identities of Jews. We're going to come back to this later, but I want to leave you with that for now. If you're one of my Jewish listeners, I don't have to tell you, but I have found that even many of my Jewish friends have to really stretch their minds to try to understand how this would have been situated in just where, just where this would have been situated in the psychology of the Zionists in Palestine once it became clear exactly what was going on.