Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
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
(00:25):
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
(00:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Thank you very much. Brian So.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
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,
(01:40):
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,
(02:03):
unfortunately one of the most fundamental human endeavors there is,
which is warfare.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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
(02:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
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
(03:04):
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
(03:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
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
(04:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:11):
that's what I said in the book.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Ilium?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
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,
(05:56):
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.
(06:18):
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
(06:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It understood, and fast forward over to the Crusades, the
first crouquete Crusades.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Bohemond, Yes, yeah, no one has heard of Beaulamonte except
for the.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
First time, sir. This is it man, I've just been
introduced to Bauhemont.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:56):
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
(08:18):
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
(08:42):
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
(09:03):
Lam and then regrouped and they marched Bellvoid Antioch and
in a brilliant siege took Antioch against vastly, vastly superior numbers.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
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
(09:34):
bunch of Europeans that wanted to go plunder and look
for treasure as opposed to liberate the country.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
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
(10:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
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.
(11:03):
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
(11:25):
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
(11:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
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
(14:06):
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.
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
(00:25):
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
(00:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Thank you very much. Brian So.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
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,
(01:40):
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,
(02:03):
unfortunately one of the most fundamental human endeavors there is,
which is warfare.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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
(02:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
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
(03:04):
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
(03:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
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
(04:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:11):
that's what I said in the book.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
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?
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Ilium?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
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,
(05:56):
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.
(06:18):
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
(06:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It understood, and fast forward over to the Crusades, the
first crouquete Crusades.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Bohemond, Yes, yeah, no one has heard of Beaulamonte except
for the.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
First time, sir. This is it man, I've just been
introduced to Bauhemont.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
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
(07:32):
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
(07:56):
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
(08:18):
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
(08:42):
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
(09:03):
Lam and then regrouped and they marched Bellvoid Antioch and
in a brilliant siege took Antioch against vastly, vastly superior numbers.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
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
(09:34):
bunch of Europeans that wanted to go plunder and look
for treasure as opposed to liberate the country.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
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
(10:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
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.
(11:03):
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
(11:25):
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
(11:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
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
(14:06):
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.
Brian Thomas News
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