To the Perplexed (w/audio)

Well, that was interesting. I say “was,” even though it’s still ongoing, because I figure that being officially denounced by the White House must be the peak of an experience like this, but who knows… I’ve been surprised more than once this week. I have been very gratified that all of you have chosen to stick with me through this time, and that many of you have joined us since it happened. Martyr Made has been the #1 ranked podcast in all categories for several days now. We live in a new world. No official White House denunciation, or hit piece in a national newspapers, or rabid Twitter mob, can change the fact that I work for you guys, and only you guys. Today, more than most days, I am very grateful for that. Most of the invective lobbed my way this week has been either uninformed or simply in bad faith, but there are good faith people I respect, including some of you, who have questions, and this message is to you.

This will be my final word on the matter until the first episode of my upcoming series, Enemy: The Germans’ War.

When I was nearing the end of the Jonestown series, I asked a friend who is a private investigator to help me get my hands on some police reports about a certain kind of 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 methamphetamines (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/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 listened to God’s Socialist know, was hopped up on amphetamines pretty much every day for about ten 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 poring over in police reports was just 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 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 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 made fun of 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 were 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 of the Jonestown story, I found myself feeling a lot of bitterness and outrage at the forces aligned against Peoples’ Temple. 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 axe 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 escaped before the end are held up as victims and heroes, but I do not view most of them that way. In my opinion, many of them were not victims at all, but in fact were perpetrators. They enabled, encouraged, and egged on Jim Jones, taking the reins of Peoples’ Temple themselves as Jones’ health and capabilities deteriorated. They administered the organization, they led 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 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 innocents 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 the 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, and there is 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 criticize 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 criticize the escalatory actions of police during a stand-off 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 but only focus on Israel?” What is there to say about Hamas? Hamas sends suicide bombers onto buses full of women and children in the middle of the day. We know what Hamas is, and it is a waste of my breath to criticize them. The same thing happens when I criticize the role NATO and the United States played in creating the conditions that led to war in Ukraine. “Why are you a Putin apologist?” 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 did, but what about Al Qaeda in Iraq? 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 2 was made in the same spirit. World War 2 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 fifteen years later.

World War 2 has cast this spell on us for for eighty years. Virtually every war on which the US has embarked in the years since has been justified by claims that the enemy leader is “the next Hitler,” and that our only two choices are 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. Bari Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard an “Assad 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 Ladin’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 2, the Ur-myth of the American-led 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 it once it became controversial, commented that Gray’s thread was excellent, and I agree. I like and respect Gray very much, so I re-posted and recommended his thread before even reading it, because I knew he would approach the controversy with good will. 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 fleshing it out, is nothing that hadn’t already been said decades ago by British historians like Alan Clark, 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 1940, 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 Oran in July 1940 as a sign of British ruthlessness.” 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 & regardless, there were no good terms to be obtained in 1940 that made fighting on a worse alternative. Also a united Europe (esp 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 the 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 & 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 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. 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 am 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 2 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 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 proposals on offer. Author Nicholson Baker, in his book Human Smoke, describes a conversation between author Cyril Joad and a friend after Chamberlain rejected Hitler’s recent call for peace:

(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 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.”

Joad 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 are 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 worst, we can always begin the killing again.” Even a day of peace was a day of peace. Joad 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 of 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 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 it 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 2 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, 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 Jewry 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, which 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 eyebrow given the way I put it. Part of the reason is that I am 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, I dropped them into the middle of it to fend for themselves. Far from absolving the Germans, my point - and I did get to this by the end - was that even if one accepts all of 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, they were your responsibility, and 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: 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 antisemitism of the Third Reich guaranteed that Jews would be among the last in line. That is not to say that Jews were not massacred. Of course Jews were massacred. Peoples of all ethnicities were massacred, and it would have been quite a mystery if the Jews were an exception - doubly so, given the Third Reich’s unique antipathy toward them. It is simply to say that even the most generous interpretation of Germany’s actions toward 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, and the fact that it was just two months after the invasion of the USSR was launched, 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 that the British government knew people were starving in the camps and ghettos, but rejected any and all appeals to find a way to relieve their situation. Mass starvation, though it was well-understood that it would not affect the Germany 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 Hoppner, 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.) 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, who did 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, it would not be particularly controversial:

* The war faction in Britain refused to countenance peace with Germany, despite lacking any capability to change the terms of war on its own.

* Germany’s offers to negotiate may or may not have been sincere. It is perfectly possible, as after previous confrontations, a peace deal would simply 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.

* 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 or 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, Josef Stalin, whose stack of bodies put Hitler’s 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 is probably more to say, but if I keep going I’m going to spoil the upcoming podcast series. 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.

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