The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Classic Format Conversation with Michael Walsh

And fitting for the Three Whiskey Happy Hour podcast that our first guest in the revived series is someone who not only traces his ancestry back to Ireland, but who spends a lot of his time in Ireland a living today and that person is Michael Walsh, whose most recent book is called A Rage to Conquer Twelve Battles that changed the course of Western History. Before I get into it with Michael, you should know that he is a

true renaissance man. He's written over twenty books, worked as a senior foreign correspondent for Time magazine for almost twenty years. He has written classical music and made many classical performances, and his books ranged from novels to books about classical music and modern opera, and books about things like the

insidious effect of the Frankfurt School. And now this book that we're talking about today is the second of a projected three volumes to talk about the glories of warfare, and by that he means that modern sensibilities are all against war and fighting, and of course he recognizes it as a trade of human nature, a necessity that should be grasped with relish rather than with the fashionable dread of modern times. His first book in a series was called Last Stands, Why Men Fight when all is lost?

And the current one, as I say, is a rage to conquer. And so let's get into it with Michael, and I think you will find this conversation fascinating. Well, Michael, this is your nineteenth book, by my count, A Rage to Conquer, Twelve battles that changed the course of American history. And I haven't read all your books. I've read, I don't know a quarter of the maybe, but this is my favorite so far. I just had a delight reading through it. And I'm actually not through the whole thing.

But every chapter I'm having great fun. So it's a sequel to Last Stands. I want to come back to the Last Stands book later actually and get straight into this book. So twelve battles, but it's wrapped inside of thesis, which is you're rehabilitating war. I remember graffiti on a bomb from the First Gulf War in nineteen ninety one that said give war a chance, which play on that stupid old John Lennon lyric. I think it was again

big Wark raad again. Well, and I think hopefully this isn't too much of a simplification to say your thesis is that war is normal, natural, praiseworthy, something to be admired and not abjured the way it is in modern times. Is that too the summary of of what you're trying to get at here.

and we grew up in that. But you know, old cultures like you and I grew up, were born and raised right after the Second World War, and we've really lived through a time of extraordinarily a peaceful world comparative to World War Two, and I just think we have to face the fact that war is inevitable. And the most important takeaway I have is that war is not a failure. I think that we've come to this notion I think post World War two, especially with the UN

that war can somehow be preempted or avoided. And it represents a misinterpretation of Classovitz's famous dictum that war is policy by other means. And as I go to some length to point out, but he actually said it, war is policy with other means. The German word is very clear. I don't know why it's been so consistently mistranslated, but if you say by to me, it sounds like, well, everything else has failed, so now we're using other means.

Whereas properly understood, warfare is a tool in the diplomatic kit to be used when necessary. It's the acts behind the glass basically, but when you need it you use it. So that's really the thesis behind all the discussions in Rage to Conquer.

power that you'll appreciate. He would, on the first day of class pass around to World War two M one rifle and explained how it worked, and then he'd fix the bandet, describe how to use the bayonet when you're out of ammunition, and he was very lyrical about it. And then he would end by saying holding up the gun and say, this is the basic tool of diplomacy. Next class we'll start talking about the basic tools of military power. So that was very much your understanding of

class what you're just explaining. And they don't make professors like that any more, needless to say, and so I am hearing echoes of certain Then other person you remind me of a bit was well, maybe I'm jumping ahead too far, but your last chapter about the post nine to eleven World and how unserious we've been about things. Remind me of my late friend, who you may have known was Angelo codevillav Oh well, right, yeah, you know.

Angelo used to say, I'm not sure you ever wrote it anywhere, but he used to say, as you point out in your chapter, the Saudis were up to their necks in what was going on behind nine to eleven. I think we know that's the concealed part of the nine to eleven Commission report. And he said, you know a lot of those royal family people live in those high rise luxury hotels. We just ought a round up three thousand of them and execute them, as you know, right,

as retribution for what they connived in. And I okay, anyway, the point is is this is a real breath of fresh air when so much treatment of a warfare and conflict, as as you say, is sort of I put it sentimental continism. Oh right. Anyway, that's my commentary on your very sound commentary. We're in heated agreement about all this. I think let's take a look at some of the battles.

You pick a lot from antiquity, you know, Achilles, Alexander, Caesar, Constantine, And I guess maybe I went to unpractice to say a lot of those are a long time ago and remote from you know, modern history, and although they're important to ancient history, seems to me the presumption there is that the Western history is one long continuity and that without those we wouldn't be where we are today, which I think would be a novel proposition to a lot

of people who think that's just antiquity and has no relevance to our world today.

beginning a new hope. But we go back to Greco Romanism. And I've made the distinction in this book, and I will make an even more in the third book in this series, which I'm writing right now. That I believe we are a Greco Roman civilization not a Judeo Christian civilization for many, many, many, many, many, many many reasons. But as far as our Western civilization starts, it starts

with the Iliad, and it starts with Homer. Now that is roughly contemporaneous with the origins of Judaism, as you know, so that the Trojan work takes place about twelve hundred BC, So do the early stages of Judaism and Moses and the Egyptian captivity, etc. Homer rights in eight hundred BC, which is right around the time that Judaism is coming together as a mosaic faith. Augustus becomes emperor, right around the time that Jesus is born and Christianity is born,

and Rabbinic Judaism is begun. So these religions and histories bump into each other constantly. But from my own point of view, and this is not to argue religion, I'll do that in the next book, but I've got to leave the folks wanting more. From a historical point of view and from a literary cultural military point of view, we really start with the Greco Roman period. So that's why I began with the Iliad and with Alexander the Great.

the calibi thrown that episode in Western history. But then from there you jump up to Napoleon, and I'm thinking, is there a reason you skip some of the battles in between, or maybe this in your last book and I just don't remember it. I'm thinking, you know, if the Polish cavalry doesn't show up at the Battle of the Ponto, more of Europe would be Islamic hundreds of years ago, as opposed to only half a quarter Islamic today.

We'll come back to that anyway, so what was you What were your criteria for picking the back battles and excluding certain other ones that might be.

to eleven. In the current well very long war, we're fighting against Islam, even though only once it seems to think that it's right, which is a problem. So that's why also I wanted to get the notion of heroic individual commanders front and center in each one of these battles. That's why it's Xander and Caesar, it's Constantine, it's a guy nobody's ever heard of called Asius, who stood off until of the hun at the Battle of the Catalonian Plains.

And by the time I was getting past that those origin stories, I thought Napoleon was the next person to do. He just is more so than Wellington in a way. And remember that Napoleon and Wellington never fought each other until the very last battle, which was water Booths. Napoleon dominated the nineteenth century in a way that very few men have dominated a century, and that's a century filled

with dominant medicinalities. So I just was irresistibly drun to Napoleon, partly for his tactics on battlefield, but mostly because he represents the artist as hero. Forget that he's a military commander. He is a self made man of lowly relatively low origins. He's an Italian for one thing, who is French by pure acts of a treaty. He never even learns to speak French very well, as men made fun of them

all the time. His accent was apparently terrible. And yet by sheer personality he wins the Battle of Austerlitz because he knows Alexander and Caesar. He studied them very carefully, and each one of the battles enrage to conquer not each one, but many. You will see the commander goes, oh, yeah, Caesar was in this exact same position, and what did he do to get out of it? Well, that's what I'm going to do. And so you see this constant

repetition of battlefield tactics and maneuvering and strategic maneuvering. Even more important that echoes down through the ages. So that's why I left. That made that big leap to Napoleon. And then we move into the World War II Commanders on Battle in nine to eleven.

I think maybe you're of lingering importance. But yeah, but I mean the other one did anyone bring up to you? And again, forgive me if I missed it in the previous book, Uh, it skipt the Civil War battles or the Civil War itself, which seems to me was quite pivotal, not just to America.

Because you don't have Grant to come take Vicksburg. Later on, the whole war effort collapses right there, up against the banks of the Tennessee River. And when I did that chapter, I got on the car and I drove myself from New England to Shiloh, actually to walk that battlefield. And when you get to the part where they're right at the river, this is the end of day one. They've

been surprised, attacked. Sherman has blown off the reports that there's this giant Confederate army right out there behind the trees. Grant's up the river recuperating from a riding accident, and he was the best horseman in the army, and his horse had slipped in the mud and landed on his leg, so he was rec operating from that. If they were to have been pushed into the river on day one, that was the end of it. So that's why I let that stand in for the Civil War for this current project.

of people's will be worse than the wars of kings. Why, because of technology, we're now going to have you know, total wars we later called it, in which civilian casualties and civilian damage would be much greater than it ever been before. And then you combine that with technology, and you know, one of his later essays, I think it was mass effects in modern life. He says, I'll paraphrase, the problem with modern warfare is there's no or as

much less scope for battlefield heroism. The generals who used to be on their horse, like Napoleon, like Marlborough, like Grant and Lee, they're now remote from the battlefield, and so they're not as decisive as they once would have been, you know, in those older battles. And so, in other words, the nature modern warfare has changed. It has lost its I guess I may say it's manliness in some ways.

And so I mean, how do you regard that argument and you credit that with being a factor in why or mass opinion has turned so against war or regards it the way it does.

assault on the MACHTI was already dead. He killed Gordon and then he died, And then there was the Battle of Omdumont, and Churchill was a young, young officer, and he wrote famously there's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at an Okay, so you got shot at and missed. After that, his military judgment is horrendously terrible. He's the architect of Gallipoli for one thing, which was Blatant's stupidity. He was the architect of the soft underbelly theory that

got Americans killed at Anzio and didn't work anyway. At no point is he a great strategic military thinker. He has lots of great qualities, and I'm not going to get into an argument with Larry Arn't about Churchill or right, But I don't think he's a great military mind. And I think he presided over the dissolution of the empire. I mean, he has a lot of negatives in his

column that the Churchill fan club seems to ignore. But I think see his experience was riding that horse and getting shot at by some Arabs that couldn't shoot straight, and therefore he wonders about that. But Patten gives the light to that. Patten gets shot in World War One his orderly carry. He's right in the front. He and MacArthur wandering around in costumes saying Ill us right, and Patten gets shot in the butt and has to be

dragged into a shell hole and then brought back. He was always at the front, and so I quoted John Keegan at the beginning of this book about great commanders, which is in front always sometimes never. Okay, still have a great commander who's never at the front. Nimitz is a good example of that. Nimmits fought the Battle of Midway from Honolulu where I grew up, Pearl Harbor. As a matter of fact, when I grew up and I was going to high school, i'd walk out my front

door and see Pearl Harbor. It was right there from so I lived with that as a young teenager. But Nimmus won that war because he understood the enemy and he had a sense of technical innovation. His great genius was, hey, we're a little short on aircraft carriers, but hey, that Midway island that's an aircraft carrier just doesn't go anywhere. So what we'll do is hide our other aircraft carriers behind it, and the Japanese will sail right into the trap.

And that's what happened, and we put four of their carriers at the bottom, and that really broke the offensive power with Imperial Navy. The war's over at that point, but the mopping up campaign. Don't get me started on Deglas MacArthur. The mopping up campaign also obviously follows that, So I think that's only partly true. I think Alexander wore a plume, Talbot kill me, Caesar wore a red coat. Here I am you want a piece of me? I'm right here, and rat commit and Napoleon did too, and

that and their men loved them. What we have is a bunch of political generals, plush bottomed fruit salads who have never done a goddamn thing and have risen in the peacetime professional army. I'm also against the the all the all volunteer army. I think it's very bad. I think it's bad for them. I think it's bad for young men. I think it's bad for women. I think it's bad for everybody. And the results, well, tell me the last war we won.

It looks like a grinded out technological war of who can bring the most killing capacity from our modern machinery and who wants to sign up for that.

They'll kill us. But what's lacking isn't so much battlefield exposure. It's just plain leadership. You don't You haven't had a leader among military for my lifetime, basically. I mean, I remember very vaguely, I think, or maybe it's in my childhood MacArthur's farewell speech after Truman fired him. And what figure has there been, even though I think what MacArthur's vastly overrated, What figure has there been of that national stature who was a military person?

of the greatest battlefield commanders we ever had. But you couldn't let Patent run the whole thing because it would been off the rails and you needed to unleash that dog of war only when necessary. Marshall was very similar. Marshall wanted a command but very early on the Army had realized this guy is an organizing genius. So why do we want to get him killed off as a as a first lieutenant or a captain when we can, you know, stash him at Fort Belvoir in Washington and

learned the bureaucracy. It's important to remember, I think for our audiences we didn't have them professional.

in every one of those wars. Remember that Grant had been a graduate of West Point and had served and had resigned his commission and gone off. He was lonely. He was stationed out in Nowheresville, California and the Oregon territories, and he was lonely and homesick, and he missed his wife so and he drank too much when he was off duty. He was never on duty drunk. So he quit.

And at the time of the Civil War he was working and failing in a little tanner shop in Galina, that is I think his father owned, one of his relatives. And he said, hey, you know, I've got a captaincy in the army. I'm actually a professional soldier. So they gave him a command immediately, and then he made his bones rather quickly after that. But we had to start

World War One from a standing start. To General Pershing, who is the hero of the World War One section in my final big chapter, he had been a career army officer, but he had well, he was like at the what's the name of that place in San Francisco, the presidio, Yeah, the presidio he had there. He had also commanded a troop of black soldiers in Southwest, which gave him his nickname of black Jack. That's where that came from. He was the white officer in charge of

an all black unit. And as a result, so when World War One comes, Pershing is the most senior figure and it's up to him to suddenly organize an army out of nothing, out of Aisle of Armbolice basically. And then we got caught with our pants down again in World War Two and had to mobilize. Now, luckily, America in those days was capable of doing such a thing, and we could turn civilian production like Henry Ford's automobile assembly line into making tanks and trucks, so we were

able to do that. But the standing professional army was something the founders warned against, and no one really thought that was a good idea because that was a tool of tyranny. That's why you have the Third Amendment, for example, that the army can't come to your house in California and say here, we're putting a tune of soldiers in your den. Have a nice day, right, yeah, right.

quite sure how I can characterize it. So let me share one sentence with our listeners from page three seventy one, quote, the Imperial Romans would have gone full to Lenda st On, Saudi Arabia raised its cities, destroyed the ka'aba, leveled the mosque, occupied the oil fields, seized its wealth, executed its leaders, and sold the populace into slavery. They knew an existential struggle when they were in one. So I mean, that's when that blows your hair back, and you know.

don't realize that. For example, with general, the rank of general, there's gradations of it, and you get the first two from your service. So you get promoted to brigadier general, and you get promoted to major general lieutenant general, which is three stars you get from politicians, and then four stars, and then there's on eve been a handful of five stars in the history of the country. So and oftentimes

offices are created that require three stars. So the head of the National Security Agency, for example, must be a three star. So if you're up for that job, you're going to get promoted to a three star, and then you're going to be the head of the National Security Agency. There are a number of positions in which that is a requirement. So you know, in the rockdvertizing monster that is the US government, we create roles and then fill them.

That doesn't mean we have more generals or more top generals, and it doesn't mean any of them that have any military in the field experience, except accidentally. It just means more, you know, more generals, that's what it means. Yeah, right, last question on military subjects, and then I want to

change to Ireland for a few minutes. I have seen you tweet out here and there and make other brief comments that all seem to point in the direction of thinking we are overestimating China as a military threat to us, and so say a little bit more. And you did mention that, I think here in your last chapter of the book. And I gather it's not that they're not building lots of ships and planes and rockets that are bad things, but that they're actually not very capable as

a war fighting civilization. Is that fair enough?

career wasn't honorable. It wasn't something to be remember that is a giant bureaucratic hat, and military people didn't rise to the top. So their generals were Koreans. And now I can speak with some familial interest in this, since my father is a veteran of the Chosen Reservoir, a battle that the Marines fought against the Chinese. He's one of the last survivors. He's ninety nine years old.

Is they withstood that assault, maintained unit cohesion, and took everybody home basically that could get there. I think he must have weighed one hundred and twenty pounds by the time he landed after they came back. So China doesn't have a great track record. They can fight civil wars, then their civil wars are astoundingly bloody. I like to point out General Gordon beat them with a swagger stick.

That's why he was called Chinese Gorgon's garden. Right before he got killed at Khartoon, the Japanese beat them twice in the nineteen thirties with a platoon of Katana swordsmen and some sushi. I don't know what they did, but they beat China twice. So I don't think they're a good military power. I think they're building a lot of stuff, but we know the quality of what they build is bad.

The Africans are finding out now that it's a faustian bargain when you let them in to build dams that collapse, some roads that don't work, and nothing works. And I also have been told by some people that much of the technology that they have stolen in order to produce their stuff is booby trapped.

grandma there, But it's I've been. I went back and reunited the family is fifty two years ago and since then acquired the property, built the houses, really established a whole life there.

of the protest. I mean, the march stretched for I don't know ten or fifteen blocks, I forget what that main street is, and that ended up in a rally in front of the customs house where the speakers, and I wasn't familiar with any of them, but I listened to their speeches and I thought they were all very good. These were crazy people. The crowd was very diverse, as

you know, as we were supposed to. We're taught that we have to a factor into things these days, and so I got the sense that, you know, there is not a lot of press coverage of Ireland and the American media, and you've got to work to find it in you know, the British press or the Economist, which is you know, no good of course. And then someone told me just this morning about a tweet that apparently is exploding on x as we call it now today

as we're talking, and it goes something like this. I couldn't find it, but apparently it says something like, if you're an American visiting Ireland and you say I'm Irish, they say, no, you're not. But if you're Somali fresh off the boat twenty minutes ago, oh of course you're an irishman. So this question seems to me is you're splitting Ireland down the middle, as it ought to and as it is other places. What's your sense of the matter. Okay, go ahead.

Captains have been to street titans of Hollywood, politicians presidents of the United States, Ireland nothing and a certain resentment has grown up on both parts that the returned Yanks come back and say I'm Irish, and the Irish say, you are the son of a bitch who abandoned us to the family. We hate you. You left us in our hour of need. Whether they articulate that or not,

is that is the undercurrent. So they really hate the diaspora of people like me and a lot of my friends, and they have rushed because they're a slave state still they now slave state of the what I like to call the eussr under ilsa she wolf of Brussels there who, by the way, has never been elected to anything. Yeah, the Irish politicians have all sold out to Brussels. And so when people say, well don't they why aren't they helping the Irish people, I tell them that's not their job.

Their job is to answer to Brussels. They don't care what happens to you. The population has increased by a million and a half of a very short span of time. Most of them are not ethnic Irish. But to say ethnic Irish is to be a racist. The word they most fear is racism. So if you don't think that's Somali who, by the way, destroyed his passport on the plane, walked through customs waving and was immediately given food, shelter, money,

you name it, you're a racist. My village happens to be the one that took the first first wave of Ukrainian refugees. They put them in where a tourists town and in the summer, hotels were all filled with tourists. Now they're filled with Ukrainians and they don't have to obey the laws, they don't have to register of their cars. They get free money every week and you see them lining up of the post office. And these are able bodied draft dodgers, that's what they are. And there's no

sugarcoating it. And They laugh at everybody because they're sitting there free. Yes it's raining, the weather is terrible, famously so, but they're collecting free money and they're going to do it for as long as they can get away with it. And as soon as they leave, you'll see even greater influx from Africa, North Africa, Central Africa, Afghanistan. Romanian Gypsies are now quite prominent in the criminal subculture of Dublin.

We just have one now that turns out the father is the head of the Roma Community Civil Rights League or something, and the Sun is running eight brothels in Dublin and the Irish shirts done by this because they have no experience with the world. They really believe all of the problem that they have been fed about the goodness of man and the brotherhood of man. And we're all exactly the same.

government is never going to stop. It's never going to stop importing foreigners because the EU, US Ireland is basically empty space and it's a dumping ground for the EU's migration problems, so you can't walk to Ireland, so you've got to come by boter by plane and they'll just keep They literally fly them in the government advertised in Africa for people to get on planes and come to Ireland at government expense to stay and live.

off the Israelis. The Israel closed its embassy in Dublin because it couldn't take it anymore. And the Irish just see see that's more proof of these perfidious Jews. Look what they're doing. You can't trust them. They're everywhere, they run the way. It's a mass outbreak events of insanity,

and it is incredibly disgraceful. And I'm pleased to say there are a number of US diasporans with audiences and money and influence who are going to organize against this because we don't want to see Ireland go down the drain. It didn't suffer under the English terribly for eight hundred years, only to throw itself in the arms of Brussels. You know, it's like that line from Man for all Season, I

could see selling your soul. But for Wales, you know, basically eight hundred years of fighting the British, who were a real worthy opponent. But for Brussels, King Leopold, who are we talking about here? It's really stunning. I'm glad you had a good time and some of Ireland. Dublin's never been a very nice city and it's worse now.

The rest of the country is great. It's beautiful. If you can take the weather, it's paradise and I love every second that I'm there, but the governments anti Semitism and its hatred of its own people is just unacceptable.

population of Europe by about fifty percent. I mean, nobody was free from that, and that was purely brand new faith Lutheranism taking on Catholicism. I treated the Sack of Rome in the sixteenth century by the Lutherans and the Swiss guards, saving the pope and rushing him to the Castel San Angelo in last stance. But these, and of course the ongoing battle between Islam and the United States.

Our problem has always been in bush well, starting with it, both bushes, but the notion that there's no state actors, so we have no one to punish. As I said, Caesar would laughed in that. Yeah, I see one right there, and that's what he would have done. And we don't fight the enemy that has declared war on us because Islam doesn't have a pope, so any mufty can issue a fat law that is like a federal gey parent binding on the entire planet, right, even though the judges in Honolulu.

out their main nuclear weapons development facility. What do you make of all that? As it was, we did not go far enough. But isn't that a sign at least somebody, at least Israel standing up for the West.

Hajj is very important. The Shia version is that down this well in Kum is hidden the twelfth Ebom who Will is waiting for the It's an apocalyptic version. It's he will emerge at the time of complete chaos and convert the world to Islam, and that will be the end times. So the radical Christians have the same basic theology about end times and then Jesus appearing and that's the end of the movie. But we won't go after

their buildings because that's not who we are. And that's giving up the fight before you even have the fight. That's the problem. Now, if Islam promises to stay like a good enemy behind its own borders, we don't have a particular problem with them, and the Europeans have learned how to deal with that since stopping them at Vienna in the seventeenth century. But you can't have constant encouragions and provocations. And that was why I made the point

about what Romans would do. Because Rome didn't last for two thousand years for nothing. It had a will to survive in a way that no other major civilization has ever had, and it took action when it felt it needed. Is that kind of an apologist for Rome? Yeah, absolutely it is. I think Roman civilization was great and well our existence to it well.

And my father I don't even know what his politics are, I literally don't, but what he incultated in me and my brother and my three sisters is discipline.

your training. If you're in trouble, observe your training. If you abandon your training, you're dead. If you observe your training, you have a chance to get out alive. So what they did was they immediately formed into their jobs. He commanded mortar platoons and began saturating the fields between the Chinese and the Marines to keep them backed off, and nobody panicked, and they all picked up and tried to get out of the pickle they were in. So it's

all about a military background. It's not about killing people. It's about discipline and getting your work done. I wouldn't have written twenty well, this is going to be twenty and then there's twenty one, and then there's twenty two. So they're all in the planning. It's just discipline that gets it done. You know, you can't shop down the tree with one blow, and you can't hit a five run homer. You have to do it every single day.

And so the first part of the question is, is am I right in saying that there's an essential connection with the way you perceive certain things with your musical training. And part two is you're serious composer, and maybe say this a little bit about I think you're working on a piece or maybe you've done a piece you're performing in Europe recently, So anyway to take both parts of those if you would.

So I'll be playing the program of mostly Franz List at the Brand Library in Glendale. It will also consist of a very rarely performed sonata by Wagner, who was Liszt's son in law, so it was a lecture recital but mostly a recital. And then I'll be playing it in London at the List Cultural Institute of the Hungarian Government in London, and then I'll be playing it in

Budapest's lists third hometown as well in November. But I'm writing a very large novel which has been in plan now for two or three years, which will incorporate music of all kinds into the fabric of the narrative. I see them as essentially the same activity, writing and putting the piano, and it's just kind of sums up everything I've devoted my life to. And hopefully that will be the last book I write, Steve, and then I'll retire to my jack in Ireland, I guess right, yeah.