Eight oh six, a fifty five KRCD Talks station. A very happy Friday Eve to you, Hi, and please to welcome to fifty five KRC Mornings. I'm a next guest author Michael Walsh. He has written quite a few books, Last Stand. You probably read quite a few of them.
Author of Last Stands, more than fifteen other novels and nonfiction book, classical music critic for Time Magazine at one point received the two thousand and four American Book Awards Prize for Fiction for his gangster novel There's Another One
You Can Read and All the Saints. He wrote popular columns from National Review, which he used under a pseudonym to put into the book Rules for Radical Conservatives, There's One for You, and his other books Devil's Pleasure and The Fiery Angel are examples of the enemy heroes and triumphs and struggles of Western civilization, which allows us to pivot over to the book we're talking about today, his new book, A Rage to Conquer Twelve Battles that change
the course of Western history. Michael Walsh, Welcome to the Morning Show. It's a real pleasure to have you on today.
Thank you very much. Brian So.
There are a lot more than twelve battles, and I suppose a lot of them could have impacted Western history. First off, what interested you in this topic? And then how did you whittle all of the wars that have been waged by man over the years down to the twelve that you selected.
Well, I've been very interested in military history my whole life. I was born actually on the Marine Corps base in Campellshire in North Carolina, and my father was a Marine officer who fought in Korea and elsewhere. So that's part of my upbringing. And as you mentioned, I read a book called Last Dance four years ago which was quite successful, and that examined why men fight when everything seems to be lost, But they don't cut and round, they fight.
So this book is an outgrowth of that book, and I wanted to look at twelve battles and the commanders who led them to talk about masculinity again and talk about what it takes to be successful at what is, unfortunately one of the most fundamental human endeavors there is, which is warfare.
Now I want to approach is sort of in reverse order, and we could start with the Trojan War and Achilles, which I'm very interested in talking with you about. But the last one, the most recent challenge, the Battle of nine to eleven and how it was ultimately lost by the United States. Would you put a little more flesh
on the bones of that conclusion. I think I get your point, But that was just my attention gravitated toward that, considering it wasn't, you know, a traditional form of warfare unless you look at sort of maybe our invasion of.
Iraq. Well, that's turned out to the most controversial part of the book. And I remember when an author writes a book, he's finished the text about a year before it comes out. So it's not like blogging or anything. It's it's you have to into this well in advance and try to figure out what readers are going to
be interested in. But nine to eleven struck me as an example of a commander President Bush who didn't understand the rules of warfare and didn't have the stomach to fight the battle that needed to be fought, unlike all the other guys in the book, which include you mentioned Achilles, who's you know, quasi fictional, but obviously it's based on
somebody real wayback. But Caesar and Constantine the Great and General Patten and the other people I talked about, And so as a result, we didn't really believe that war was declared on us. And if you think we won the Battle of nine to eleven, go to the airport and see if they let right.
That's a great point, you know, behind all this the whole idea of warfare though, Michael, I'm a profound constitutionalist, little l libertarian, am I. But we end up launching missiles and dropping bombs and taking people out in foreign lands that we against him. We have no declaration of war. And you know, with technology being pervasive, more and more foreign actors and folks that we might not consider friendly to us have that technology and could equally do the
same thing to us that we're doing to them. Congress never declares war. Are you get an authorization? You used a military force to deal with nine to eleven and it ends up lasting twenty plus years to serve as a justification for conflicts literally everywhere.
Well, it's disgraceful. It's part of the forever war mindset, which is true of people at both parties, by the way, and if you don't think so, just look at one of the Senators from South Carolina John love Child, who never saw war he personally didn't want to fight in, but didn't want somebody else to fight in. The fact is that we got more declared on us, and we simply refused to accept it. So this event happened, and
then we refused to address the issue. We went to other countries which had little or nothing to do with it. Uh cut to twenty some years later, and we even immediately pull out of Afghanistan. It was a disgrace. And that's what I said in the book.
Well, I think you're probably in good company with my listening audience on those conclusions, sir. Now back to Achilles again. One of the reasons I was drawn to that is because there is a lot of fictional element associated with Achilles, like the Achilles Heel story. But what was his importance?
Is it?
Ilium?
Yes? Yeah, said Troy. Yeah. The Iliad, which is one of the foundational great poem along with the Odyssey of Western Culture, talks about something that we now know happened. We're not sure to what a steate did, and Homer comes down to us himself as a semi mystical figure, but something happened there. But what's great about the Iliod first fall to great great work of art, and secondly, it does describe in graphic and gruesome detail how warfare
was conducted around roughly one thousand BC. Uh, and that is the beginning of the West's first clash with the East. So the obviously the Greeks were on the western side of this divide and the Trojans uh Troy is now and where western Turkey is Uh, they were the east. And this is a theme that runs throughout Western history.
Alexander's fight, Alexander's fighting the Persians. Uh, there's this constant battle within Rome against the Parthians, who are also sort of quasi Persians, which is one of the threads of the book. But you have to start with the very first war story and that's.
It understood, and fast forward over to the Crusades, the first crouquete Crusades.
Bohemond, Yes, yeah, no one has heard of Beaulamonte except for the.
First time, sir. This is it man, I've just been introduced to Bauhemont.
Yeah. Well, he's an amazing figure and he is the hero of this particular chapter because he won two critical battles in the First Crusade, which was recalled by the Pope in response to the Byzantine Emperor, the emperor of the eastern part of the old Roman emperor Empire, to liberate the holy sites of Christianity. So this was in the very late eleventh century, and Beauma was a great,
big Norman. The Normans had just conquered England like thirty years before, and many of the Normans joined the Crusade and went to the Holy Land to fight. And Beaumont himself was a Norman from southerns had conquered the lower part of Italy and Sicily and ruled it for many, many years. So Beaumont led his troops, and he was
a giant of a man. He was a tactical genius and was able to stave off defeat in the very first battle the Crusaders fought against the Turks, and he was able to win and keep a whole the siege of Antioch and caused that city which was crucial to the path to Jerusalem, which he then took for himself. And he kind of drops out of the crusading narrative.
But in two places he really stepped up and shows the superiority of Western arms and also the size that the Franks were much bigger than the Turks, and they had a problem. The Turks were very mobile, kind of like American Indians against the cowboys or the cavalry in the American West that come in, shoot run away, come in and shoot run away. And the crusaders were frustrated they could never get their hands on them. Well, Bowman
finally did and fend it off. This ambush. They could have ended the crusade at a little place called Dora Lam and then regrouped and they marched Bellvoid Antioch and in a brilliant siege took Antioch against vastly, vastly superior numbers.
Now, in terms of the crusades, you said, the Pope issued this, you know, request, and everybody needs to go there to help out. And I understand this was was it largely viewed by people as a legitimate, you know, calling from God, like that this was a necessary religious thing to do, because you know, over the years, there's a lot of speculation that well, now there's there's a bunch of Europeans that wanted to go plunder and look for treasure as opposed to liberate the country.
Yeah, well there's an answer for that, which is but the first crusade was successful, most of them went home. They didn't stay. Himself was a Lackland who took part of the turf that was conquered, and so did the others, But most of them went home. And a point I make over and over again in the book is that almost all these wars have some religious component, and from the earliest time, success in war was contributed to your God, and failure meant that you had not lived up to
the demands of your God. You hadn't prayed hard enough, sacrificed hard enough, you had you lost because of insufficient fabelity. This is a constant theme throughout Western history. It's very very interesting and it makes sense.
You know, if you'd believe in a supreme power and you're beholden to them, and you actually have a belief system that involves you know, God and acts of God, then yeah, you're going to step up to the plate because basically your soul is contingent upon it where you're going to end up in the afterlife.
Right, Yeah, Well, you also got a complete remission of sins if you went on the cru that was part of the deal. And also what's interesting is the Church guaranteed your property because the Church was the only power, you know, the Roman Empire having fallen five hundred years earlier, six hundred years earlier. Uh, and you were immune from lawsuits. And there was there was a bunch of upside. A lot of them died on the route trip France and what's now Germany, uh, all the way to the east,
to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. But there were some some bennies, shall we say, uh with it, But I would say it was mostly fueled by religious ardor. And that was true with the Muslim side too. They believed in the prophet. They were they were undefeated up to that point. They had never encountered any opposition that stood up. They rolled through the remnants of the Roman Empire, they rolled over Persia, conquered Iran, Islami sized Iran. They
were they were used to success. And the first time they came up against the Franks and got walked and they were it taught them something to and and this war, now that particular war has been going on for a thousand plus years, that's the Israel Gaza conflict. That's where that starts.
It's amazing that that has been raging for that long. And you did bring up the travel. I was going to ask you about that in terms of the the the crusades, that that distance in the time it would take to get from point A to point B to fight and then come back home. I'm just I suppose that we're still under a feudal system then, correct.
Yeah, more or less, the kings of Europe had not really quite emerged yet. So what that's called the Princess Crusade because remember, there's no France, there is no Germany right as we know it. So these were little princeings of various little principalities around Europe that that got together and organized an army, uh and they had specific leaders
and they accomplished that. It's an amazing logistical feat when you stopped to think about it, that they came all that way by land and sea, over a terrible terrain, and lost a lot of their people, but they just
kept going. And there were times they didn't want to go, but they felt they had to go, and so they seized upon any sign that God was with them, most famously at Antioch, where they were getting They were having a very hard time with the giant Turkish army, and then one of them discovered what he purported to be the holy the tip of the Holy spear that had pierced Christ's side at the time of the crucifixion, and using this rusty piece of iron, they went into battle
holding it up and won. So naturally they thought God was on their side. At the Crusader motto was DEUSLOVL God wills it, and they would shout at us they would move into battle. Fascinating stuff.
Fascinating stuff, Michael Walsh, the name of the book, A Rage to Conquer twelve battles that changed the course of Western history. Michael, what we've done for you and for my listeners problem primarily because they're going to want to get a copy of the book. It's on my blog page of fifty five carosee dot com. My listeners know where to go and get a copy of the book.
There's a link to to where to buy it. And it's well received on Amazon and if a fascinating range of topics again from the Trojan War all the way through nine to eleven. I appreciate you talking with my listeners and me today Michael and spending some time here, and thanks for writing the book and documenting this important history.