Angry Planet

What’s a fascist anyway?

It’s a word we heard a lot over the past few years. If you’re on one side of the political debate you probably used this word earnestly. If you’re on the other side, you probably think people use it because they’re too embarrassed to call their political opponent Hitler.

But it’s an important word with several very real definitions. Musolini is not Hitler is not, dare I say it, Tr0ump. But, from a certain point of view, all these men are fascists. Worth noting at the top here that Jason doesn’t  agree with me on this point. Or, at least, doesn’t always agree with me. With all this baggage around the term fascist, is it even worth using?

Here to help us figure that out is Jason Stanely. Stanley is a professor of Philosophy at Yale and the author of the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.

• 11/23/20

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PULP EPIC. MALE. MAN’S ILLUSTRATED. MAN’S ADVENTURE. BRIGADE. VALOR. You’ve seen these magazines before. You either grew up with them or you’ve seen their bizarre covers online. There’s always a man with rippling muscles, sometimes he’s fighting a pack of weasels, other times he’s eying a scantily clad dame. Sometime’s there’s a Nazi, sometime’s there’s a woman in an SS uniform with a few buttons missing.

The Pulp magazines of the Cold War shaped the culture and thinking of an entire generation of men. The sons of World War II veterans learned a fantasy version of the war from lads mags and then took those fantasies with them when they rushed headlong into their own war: Vietnam.

Here to tell us all about the Pulp magazines and how they shaped our perceptions of the Cold War and Vietnam is Gregory A Daddis. Daddis is a retired Army Colonel who served in both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He’s a professor of history and the USS Midway Chair in Modern History at San Diego State University. His new book is Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines.

• Recorded 10/29

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The phrase climate change was originally created to soft-pedal global warming. A hotter planet doesn’t sound good, but, hey, climates change all the time - from winter to summer and back again.

But it turned out to be an accurate description for what’s really going on. Deserts are drying, wet places are getting wetter. Crops are dying, and so is livestock and in some places it’s increasingly unsafe to go out during the day?

So, how is this affecting human conflict? The assumption is that climate change will make things worse, but how much worse?

To tell us, we have Stanford Professor Marshall Burke, who has studied the issue extensively and written numerous papers on the subject.

• Recorded 10/22/20

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Law and order, it’s one of the catchphrases of this election. Crime rates, in some cities in America, are on the rise but crime, in general, is down. But 2020 has been a chaotic year and our news feeds are filled with violent images of militant groups, protestors, riots, burning buildings, and everything in between. The sad fact is that not all crime in America is reported on in the same way, that the protest movement is overwhelmingly peaceful, but not always, and that police militarization has exacerbated all our current problems.

Here to help us untangle some of this is Danny Gold. Gold is a Pulitzer Center grantee, a documentary producer whose work has appeared in VICE Nice, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He’s also the host of the new Underworld Podcast—a series about the global criminal underworld.

• Recorded 10/6/20

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Armenia and Azerbaijan are at war. Why? It’s complicated. What’s the nature of the conflict? That’s also very complicated. It’s so complicated, in fact, that Russia, Syria, and Turkey are all involved. And it threatens to pull in their allies, all over a war that’s been “frozen” since 1988.

Here to help us untangle all of this is Aram Shabanian, a graduate student of Non-Proliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He also runs The Fulda Gap, a site dedicated to using OSINT to understand modern war. And he’s a member of the Armenian diaspora community in the United States.

• Recorded 10/16/20
• The Roots of the conflict
• Nagorno-Karabakh
• Why this war got so violent so fast
• Extrajudicial killing
• How the war was announced via a music video on YouTube
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSh5tm2Hmn0
• Why 2020 has been going on for at least four years
• The Iran of it all
• Military spending on either side
• What happened when the Soviet Union ended
• The regional players, explained
• How this all ends

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Remember back when the Berlin Wall fell and history ended? Back when we won the Cold War and America was embraced by allies old and new, becoming the world’s only superpower. The Gulf War was fought and seemingly won.

Actually, maybe you don’t. It was the end of the 1980s, after all.

George Bush - no, not that one - stood at the center of events, and inside that center stood James A. Baker III.

To tell us about the man who ran Washington, and why he remains important, we welcome Peter Baker of the New York Times who wrote the book with his wife Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The couple’s book, coincidentally, is called The Man Who Ran Washington.

• Recorded 10/9/20
• Hey, remember the 1980s?
• Who was the man who ran Washington?
• Foreign policy as the presidential big leagues
• The nightmare of facing Jim Baker in an election
• “Baker was Bush”
• How to win the Iraq war only to lose it later
• How to navigate the end of history
• Sibling rivalry between Bush and Baker

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Things feel surreal all the time now. We’re told that some of our favorite online personalities may just be sock puppet accounts for foreing governments. Russia, in particular, is supposedly a master at the new soft power internet based information warfare. Some people still believe that Trump is a Russian agent, the end result of a longcon forged years ago by the KGB and ushered into power by Russian trolls. Qanon, anti-vaxers, ant-maskers, shitposts, and doing it for the lulz. It can be exhausting. But understanding the myths of the modern age and how they permeate online is a key to understanding our world today. 

Here to help us figure this all out is Nina Janckowicz. Janckowicz studies the intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in DC. She’s also the author of How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict. She’s also … a huge musical theater fan.

• Recorded 10/8/20
• A brief digression into musical theater
• What is an information war anyway?
• Russia and active measures
• Why Russia is better at it than America
• Ukraine and the human cost
• Poland and the dangers of building a government on conspiracy
• Allowing RT on American soil
• The responsibility of Twitter and Facebook
• Finishing up with a little Sondheim

Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.

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Nations rise and nations fall, as do their governments. Today, some people say the United States and its treasured republican virtues stand at a crossroads.

But how can you tell? Are we dealing with the mere panic of the moment, or something worth panicking about?

To help us get a grip on what’s going on, we’re going to reach into the past, today, to see if history is repeating or just rhyming.

Joining us to help us get a grip—and we could probably all use to get grip right about now—is Patrick Wyman.

Wyman is the host of the Tides of History podcast, which looks at moments when the world changed, including recent examinations of the world’s first farmers and the effects of plague on the Roman world.

• Recorded on 10/2/20
• What defines a Republic anyway?
• The Res publica
• “Don’t quote laws to men with swords”
• How the Roman republic worked
• A contract with the gods
• How the grain dole worked
• The private sector
• Why it’s so hard to maintain a Republic
• How cynicism degrades the political system

Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.

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What’s the difference between a Proud Boy and a Boogaloo Boi? Are Patriot Prayer and Patriot Front the same thing? If I wear a Hawaiian shirt while eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, does that make me a member of a far right group? How many of these tacticool bearded weirdos are there, really, and are they dangerous? If it feels like the world today is weirder, wilder, and grosser than the one in the past … I feel you. 2020 has seen an explosion of Far Right groups and if you find it hard to keep track of them all, you’re not alone.

Here to help us order and sort the Proud from the Boogaloo is Jason Wilson. Wilson is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian and Bellingcat.

• Recorded 10/1/20
• What’s a proud boy?
• The Proud Boys debate moment
• Why Portland is the rallying point for far right groups
• What the Justice Department knows and what it’s doing
• Shirt movements, modern and historic
• Boogaloo bois
• What the numbers tell us
• The John Birch Society
• The Eisenhower Conspiracy

Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.

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You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.

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America is perhaps more conservative today than it’s ever been. For some on the right, Obama, Biden and Clinton look like socialists. For people on the left, they look like moderate republicans. There’s a reason for both of those views that’s steeped in America’s recent past. U.S. culture was shaped by a suave and smooth talking President who promised we could be a beacon of hope for the world and a shining city on a hill.

Here to talk about what happened is Rick Perlstein. Perlstein is a returning guest and the author of the new book Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980. The book is, among other things, the story of how a Southern Evangelical Democrat paved the way for a divorced actor from California to ascend to the presidency and shape America’s destiny.

• Recorded 9/10/20
• How voters go from voting for Johnson to voting for Nixon
• America’s moral reckoning, from Vietnam to Watergate
• What Star Wars tells us about America today
• Stable government under a crook vs unstable government under an honest man
• Call of Duty: Cold War and the hero worship of Reagan
• Jimmy Carter as the redeemer of America’s sins
• The nightly hostage wrap up
• How the Camp David Accords set the Middle East against Carter
• Afghanistan as a stop on the Hippie trail
• When Carter cancelled the Olympics
• Nuclear debates
• Rick’s Reagan impersonation
• How the press and politicians misread the moment

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You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.

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