June 9, 2025 • 20 mins
Michael Walsh is a best-selling author of both fiction and non-fiction. His new book, "A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History," is a remarkable read. Important history told through exciting stories, elite erudition, and even a glimpse into the author's own opinion -- such as that America has not since Patton had serious military leaders who knew what victory meant and what it took to achieve it. (I wonder what ADM Stavridis will say about this.) This is a book that is simultaneously thoroughly enjoyable while also reminding me of how little I know.
Michael was the classical music critic for Time Magazine, something which comes through quite clearly in the new book, which you might find surprising.
A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History: Walsh, Michael
Featured Excerpt: A Rage to Conquer - The History Reader : The History Reader
Michael was the classical music critic for Time Magazine, something which comes through quite clearly in the new book, which you might find surprising.
A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History: Walsh, Michael
Featured Excerpt: A Rage to Conquer - The History Reader : The History Reader
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Over recent days, I started reading and then finished reading
a fascinating new book, in fact, fascinating enough that I
asked the author if he could send a copy of
it to Admiral Stevritis, which he kindly He kindly did,
and the book is called A Rage to Conquer Twelve
Battles that Changed the Course of Western History. Author is
(00:24):
Michael Walsh, who joins us now on KOA. Michael, thanks
for thanks for joining us on the show. Quite a
fabulous and fascinating book.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
And so you know, thank you right up front for that.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Well, thanks for having me on Ross So I appreciate it. Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'd like to actually start where you start in the book,
talking a little bit about about Klauswitz and correcting and
I don't know if you have if you have a
way to get a slightly better audio thing going on there?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
No, there isn't. Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Klauswitz is often quoted, and I'll let you quote it
and then give the correct quote. But saying that war
is a continuation of So why don't you talk about
how it's normally discussed and what it really is and
why the difference is important?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Well, it is important. It's the most famous thing clause
of it's never said. Actually, it's often quoted as saying
war is politics or policy by other means, And I
think that has been taken to mean over the years
that when all else fails, when diplomatic negotiations fail, then
(01:35):
and only then do you turn to actual combat. But
what Costs actually says in German, which I read, is
that war is politics or policy with other means. That
is to say, it's always always a tool in the
(01:57):
political arsenal. It may be the first too, it may
be the last tool, but it is a subject to
the guidance of the political will of the country engaging
in war. And I think that little difference between the
word by and the word with In German the word
is mith mit. So it's very clear that it's with
(02:18):
makes all the difference in the world for closet its.
And it elevates warfare to something that Emmanuel Kant made
that point one hundred years earlier, which is that warfare
is the natural state of human beings and peace is
the aberrational state. So what we fuss about negotiations and
(02:38):
negotiated settlements, we've actually got to stick by the wrong end.
I think.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, So again I'm fascinated by this because I studied
I studied foreign policy, nuclear strategy, and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It was what I majored in in college.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And I you know, that's a long time ago now,
but I think I always heard word close of it's
quoted incorrectly, now that you've corrected me, or corrected everybody.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Who reads a Rage to Conquer.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
And like you said, it's one change in one small word,
but the change in meaning is massive.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Well, I'm about to give a speech here in Washington,
DC tomorrow at the Institute of World Politics, which is
a graduate level school for people who want to be
in or already are in the intelligence business and the
diplomatic core. So it's very narrowly tailored to those particular
(03:39):
facets of American foreign policy. And I want to make
this very point at some length tomorrow, which is, look
for the little things. Don't get fooled by the big things,
because that's not necessarily where the truth lies. And I'll
give you a very quick example is that we're making
(04:00):
a lot of noise about China now and China as
our principal enemy, and all of which is true, except
that I don't think that we should fear the Chinese militarily.
They are. They have never been any good at fighting wars.
They've lost every war they've fought, except the civil wars
(04:24):
they fight with each other, which are brutal, and their
whole policy of warfare is based on a book by
Sun t Su which is called The Art of War,
and the main takeaway from that book is never fight
unless you absolutely have to. It's much better to win
your battles by deception of the enemy, and this is
(04:48):
how the Chinese fight through deception and misdirection rather than
head on military conference. So it's the point I'm going
to make tomorrow to the people that diplomat and spies.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, my audience.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Slightly outside of the scope of a book, but I'll
stick with you on this for a minute. So my
take is that the Chinese seemed to be doing a
lot of things to remedy their failures as a military
power in the past, with hypersonic missiles and a very
(05:24):
large navy and doing everything they need to do to
be able to actually win a shooting war if there
is one, which is not the same as saying that
they have the leadership or experience or skill set because
hardware by itself is not going to win a war.
But I probably take the military threat there maybe a
little more seriously than you do.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Well, I would say, just look at the North Koreans.
They tried to build a big fighting ship and it crashed,
and then if they launched it the other day, and
so obviously there'll be some executions and permit kingdom. And
the boat doesn't float, is the point.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
But China and North Korea are very are very different,
and China doesn't China is an incredible manufacturing power that
most people don't understand these days. They always think of
cheap Chinese junk. But that's not what's going on over
there anymore.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Well, actually it is what's going on over there, because
the Africans are finding out that. First of all, the
Chinese have come in to build lots of infrastructure for
the Africans. Now they're collecting on it, which the Africans
weren't expected because they're used to Western power is just
giving them stuff, right, and it's falling apart. That's the part.
(06:36):
The quality is not at all as good as a
Western manufacturing company can make. And I'm not here to
diminish the Chinese because it is outside the scope of
the book. But my point is, look at the little things.
For ross that sun Zou says, don't fight, fool them?
How about that that goes back thousands and thousands of years.
That is deeply ingrained in the people. So the reason
(06:58):
I began Right to Conquer with clauds of it is
that as a Prussian military officer who had gotten walloped
by Napoleon at the height of the Napoleonic Wars in
the first century of the first a decade of the
nineteenth century, he had first hand experience with seeing a
major army like the Prussian army absolutely destroyed by the
(07:20):
French army destroyed, and Clausibits was captured and he was
imprisoned in France or at the company. He was a
gentleman and an officer, and later he came back into
the fight and fought with the Russians at Ordino against Napoleon.
So he learned a lot of practical, useful battlefield tactics
(07:40):
and concepts. And that's why we still read on war today,
and that's why I started with my book about war
with prosidants.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
We're talking with Michael Walsh.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
His really fascinating new book is called A Rage to
Conquer Twelve Battles that changed the course of Western history.
Just in the interest of time, I'm going to probably
skip over Julius Caesar and and move up to Alexander
the Great. And there's a really interesting little little note
(08:10):
in here about the origin of the word cult. I
wonder if you can talk about.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
That a little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Well. The cult that comes up mostly in the I
think in the Constantine chapter about the cult of Christianity
or the cult of Jesus or the cult of Mary.
Cult is not a bad word. It has some unfortunate
secondary meetings, now meaning something that crazy people are attracted to.
(08:38):
But all cult means is to cultivate. It comes from
the Latin root to grow, and it meant a sect
breaking away to be devotional towards some figures. So Christianity
at the beginning, when it was a subsect of Judaism,
was known as the Jesus Movement or the Jesus cult.
(08:58):
And the cat will know their veneration of the Virgin
Mary not worshiped. That veneration is often misinterpreted by others
as a cult of the blessed Virgin Mary, which it is,
but it's not in the sense that Heavin's Gate, the
guys that killed themselves in California some years back, or
(09:19):
the People's Temple. It's not a cult in that sense.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
I'm just going to ask you a very broad question here,
because there are just too many things I could answer.
Tell us anything you want my listeners to know, to
give them a sense of Alexander the Great, and then
you know they can read the book for more.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Sure, well, Alexander the Great starts the Western tradition of warfare.
He inherits the throne from his assassinated father. He's a Macedonian,
he's not even a real Greek. Plus he's been educated
by Aristotle, who Philip had brought to Macedonia to teach
his precocious son. So he not only thought I was
(10:01):
going to fight, some how to think, and he told
him to appreciate literature. And one of the things that
Alexander carried with him off his life short as it was,
what was copy of the Iliad, which he read and
re read and reread and took into battle. That, of course,
is the origin story of Western military action. The Greeks
(10:22):
and the Trojans at Troy which is now in Turkey.
So from Alexander comes everything. For example, since Gaza is
in the news today, Gaza was a problem for Alexander
in three hundred DC. He was trying to get past Gaza.
It occupies it like the right turn from as you're
(10:43):
coming down from Jerusalem and the Levant, and you want
to go toward Egypt. So if you have to take
a big right there, well, Gaza city is right in
the middle of that, and they wouldn't surrender. And Alexander
fought a very very difficult siege against the gazas is
almost assassinated by a spy. But his revenge on Gaza
(11:05):
was terrible. He tore it down, He killed everybody, and
he took the commander and pierced his ankles and put
a thong through them and dragged his body around Gaza
the same way that Achilles did Hector in the Iliad.
So the larger point, which what's kind of what we've
started with, is if you know the little things, you
(11:26):
can see the big things coming. But if you don't,
if you miss the meaning of the word with and buy,
if you don't reat sun Zu and know the Chinese
don't want to fight, they want to trick you into
giving up. If you don't understand that Gaza has always
been a thorn in the side in the conflict between
West and East, then everything seems to surprise you. And unfortunately,
(11:50):
in many cases in America, because we are not as
attuned to these things as the people who actually live there,
we don't know that. So we come in, you know,
the great American innocent abroad and say, well, why don't
you fix this? Why don't we negotiate this? And you go, dude,
did you ever read the Iliad? And the answer, of
course is no, we didn't, and that's why we have
(12:10):
such problems with sorting this thing out. But sorting all
of the things we don't understand at first plans.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Out excellent, fascinating answer.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
And for the record, if you asked me that question, Ross,
if you read the Iliad, my answer would be yes. So,
and I just want to tell listeners right, this book,
A Rage to Conquer is a fascinating read. And we're,
you know, sort of intentionally and unintentionally not going to
do it full justice here because I want you to
just go buy it and read it. So I'm gonna
(12:40):
have to skip over a bunch of things like Constantine
and uh. But I want to I want to spend
a little time with you and and the and your
stuff about the uh, the Crusades. It is some of
the most fascinating history I've I've ever read. What's the
guy's name, Bohemond or something.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Like that, Yes, Beaumont of Toronto. We don't think much
about him today, but he was the lead commander the
two most important, first two big battles of the first group,
said and had the Crusaders lost either of those, that
crusade would have been over. But instead, in just a
span of a few years, from the Pope Urbans the
(13:19):
second speech at Clairval in ten ninety five ninety six
to the capture of Jerusalem in ten ninety nine, the Europeans,
without a central command, but without even countries really at
this point, there were various little duchies and principalities amounted
this mass invasion of the Middle East and accomplished their objective,
(13:41):
which was to storm Jerusalem and besiege it and take it.
And they did. And Hoaman is one of the lesser
known to the general public commanders in that in that war,
but he was a massive man. He was a big Norman.
You know, another little thing. It's always the little things
for us. Why was a Norman general going to the
(14:05):
Holy Land. Well, he was born in Italy, and the
reason that he's born in Italy was because the Normans
conquered England, if we remembered correctly, in ten sixty six,
turning England into what became England really the mis mixture
of French and Anglo Saxon. They also conquered all of
southern Italy and North Africa and Sicily, they had big
(14:27):
kingdoms there, so a lot of Norman knights came and Beaumont,
who was you know, he must have got a big man,
especially for the time, maybe six of the sixth Day,
huge muscles and an iron will not to be defeated
by the brand new tactics that the Turks, the Turkish
mounted horsemen with art the bows and arrows used against them.
(14:49):
I've always found him a fascinating figure and he's well
worth the space I was devoted to him.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
So I've got about four minutes left and I'm just
going to say to listeners you just need to buy
the book A Rage to Conquer, because I mean the
chapter on Napoleon is worth buying the book just for
that one chapter.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
It's just incredible.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
And then the stuff about American generals in World War
One and World War Two, and maybe we'll mention patent
in the context of the last thing that I want
to ask you about. Michael, you are not shy with
certain opinions and and and actually found that made the
(15:33):
book more interesting than some history books. And you say
at the beginning and at the end that America has
lost what it needs or lost what it needs to
understand when it comes to war. And this sort of
ties in in a way to a listener text I
(15:54):
just got. Can you ask mister Walsh to comment on
nine to eleven, the Battle of nine eleven and how
we lost it?
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Yes, well that's that is the last chapter. It's a
short chapter, it's an afterward. But what I and it's
the most controversial. So what I said was we failed
in our response to nine to eleven because we did
not hold the proper parties responsible. We fought it as
a police action. Effectively, we did not go after the
(16:26):
people who plotted it and who financed it. And everybody
in Washington knew who they were, The Saudi Arabians, now,
whether the official government santioned this or whether it was
a wink wink, we failed to remember they're all cousins.
We failed to remember that they're all family. We huzzled
(16:47):
their family out of the country with the building still burning,
and we did not put Saudi Arabia in its place.
And what I say is what would Caesar have done?
What would Alexander have done? What would Caesar have done?
What would Napoleon have done? And we know the answers
that it was very clear in warfare that you fought
(17:08):
it till you won. You did not fight it with
an exit strategy in mind, and you did not fight
it to be ended at the bargaining table if you
were negotiating your losing. And that's the takeaway from that chapter.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Give me one minute here on how you would compare
or rather contrast George S. Patton versus current US military leadership.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Well, there's the current US military leadership. It's a course,
a lot of it is political. And remember that during
the Civil War we had political generals fighting on the
Union side very much at the beginning, and they were terrible.
They were buddies of congressmen and senators from the president whoever.
(17:56):
It wasn't until Grant, who had been a professional soldier
as with Westboyne, comes into the fight and Sherman, who
is his sidekick. Once they take over, the Union army
completely changes and Grant hates these political generals because they
don't know how to fight them. They don't know how
to win. And what Grant, very early in the Civil
(18:18):
War was confronted by the Confederates saying, what terms do
you wish us to surrender? Grant said, unconditional surrender period.
That's it, guys, you lose. It's what Reagan said to
the Soviet Union. And I was in the Soviet Union
when I fell apart. He said, we win, they lose.
(18:40):
That's what happened. We do not fight that way anymore.
And we have these army guys, big tubs of lard,
like General Milly with a chest full of fruit salad,
who's never done a damn thing in his life to
win a war.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
And that's why we lose.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
That's why we haven't anything of significance since World War Two.
I mean, as you noted your book, like we won Grenada, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right, So I think that was an incredibly.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Powerful part of your part of your book as well.
Last quick thing. I'm just about out of time, but
I need to mention this. It took me a while
to figure it out. I was doing a little more
reading on you, and I'm like, how the heck does
this dude know so much about classical music?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Throughout this book.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
You've got references to Caesar in this opera and Alexander
in that opera, and Napoleon in this concerto. And it's
really quite incredible. I like classical music, but not to
degree that you do. And then I found that you
were the classical music critic for Time magazine.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
I was, Yes, it was a classical music critic for
twenty five years, two newspapers and at Time Magazine.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
And what I want to do in this book, real
quick is to show people that it's not you can't
look at these things in a vacuum. Yeah, that Napoleon
was wanted to be a novelist, already conquered the world.
He Beethoven wrote the third Symphony, Heroica Symphony upout Napoleon.
And if you don't understand the cultural context, you don't
understand the man, and you don't understand the subject so
(20:13):
I try to be as broad as possible in placing
these guys in their historical perspective.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It's one of the most interesting and dare I say,
intellectual books I've read in a long time. There were
moments that it made me feel a little dumb. There
were moments that it made me break out the dictionary
and look up words, which I almost never.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Do, and I appreciate that very much.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
The book is called A Rage to Conquer, A Rage
to Conquer twelve battles that changed the course of Western history.
The author, Michael Walsh, thank you for a fabulous book,
Thank you for a great conversation.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Thank you, Ross. I appreciate it very much.
Over recent days, I started reading and then finished reading
a fascinating new book, in fact, fascinating enough that I
asked the author if he could send a copy of
it to Admiral Stevritis, which he kindly He kindly did,
and the book is called A Rage to Conquer Twelve
Battles that Changed the Course of Western History. Author is
(00:24):
Michael Walsh, who joins us now on KOA. Michael, thanks
for thanks for joining us on the show. Quite a
fabulous and fascinating book.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
And so you know, thank you right up front for that.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Well, thanks for having me on Ross So I appreciate it. Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'd like to actually start where you start in the book,
talking a little bit about about Klauswitz and correcting and
I don't know if you have if you have a
way to get a slightly better audio thing going on there?
Speaker 2 (00:52):
No, there isn't. Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Klauswitz is often quoted, and I'll let you quote it
and then give the correct quote. But saying that war
is a continuation of So why don't you talk about
how it's normally discussed and what it really is and
why the difference is important?
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Well, it is important. It's the most famous thing clause
of it's never said. Actually, it's often quoted as saying
war is politics or policy by other means, And I
think that has been taken to mean over the years
that when all else fails, when diplomatic negotiations fail, then
(01:35):
and only then do you turn to actual combat. But
what Costs actually says in German, which I read, is
that war is politics or policy with other means. That
is to say, it's always always a tool in the
(01:57):
political arsenal. It may be the first too, it may
be the last tool, but it is a subject to
the guidance of the political will of the country engaging
in war. And I think that little difference between the
word by and the word with In German the word
is mith mit. So it's very clear that it's with
(02:18):
makes all the difference in the world for closet its.
And it elevates warfare to something that Emmanuel Kant made
that point one hundred years earlier, which is that warfare
is the natural state of human beings and peace is
the aberrational state. So what we fuss about negotiations and
(02:38):
negotiated settlements, we've actually got to stick by the wrong end.
I think.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, So again I'm fascinated by this because I studied
I studied foreign policy, nuclear strategy, and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It was what I majored in in college.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And I you know, that's a long time ago now,
but I think I always heard word close of it's
quoted incorrectly, now that you've corrected me, or corrected everybody.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Who reads a Rage to Conquer.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
And like you said, it's one change in one small word,
but the change in meaning is massive.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Well, I'm about to give a speech here in Washington,
DC tomorrow at the Institute of World Politics, which is
a graduate level school for people who want to be
in or already are in the intelligence business and the
diplomatic core. So it's very narrowly tailored to those particular
(03:39):
facets of American foreign policy. And I want to make
this very point at some length tomorrow, which is, look
for the little things. Don't get fooled by the big things,
because that's not necessarily where the truth lies. And I'll
give you a very quick example is that we're making
(04:00):
a lot of noise about China now and China as
our principal enemy, and all of which is true, except
that I don't think that we should fear the Chinese militarily.
They are. They have never been any good at fighting wars.
They've lost every war they've fought, except the civil wars
(04:24):
they fight with each other, which are brutal, and their
whole policy of warfare is based on a book by
Sun t Su which is called The Art of War,
and the main takeaway from that book is never fight
unless you absolutely have to. It's much better to win
your battles by deception of the enemy, and this is
(04:48):
how the Chinese fight through deception and misdirection rather than
head on military conference. So it's the point I'm going
to make tomorrow to the people that diplomat and spies.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, my audience.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Slightly outside of the scope of a book, but I'll
stick with you on this for a minute. So my
take is that the Chinese seemed to be doing a
lot of things to remedy their failures as a military
power in the past, with hypersonic missiles and a very
(05:24):
large navy and doing everything they need to do to
be able to actually win a shooting war if there
is one, which is not the same as saying that
they have the leadership or experience or skill set because
hardware by itself is not going to win a war.
But I probably take the military threat there maybe a
little more seriously than you do.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Well, I would say, just look at the North Koreans.
They tried to build a big fighting ship and it crashed,
and then if they launched it the other day, and
so obviously there'll be some executions and permit kingdom. And
the boat doesn't float, is the point.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
But China and North Korea are very are very different,
and China doesn't China is an incredible manufacturing power that
most people don't understand these days. They always think of
cheap Chinese junk. But that's not what's going on over
there anymore.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Well, actually it is what's going on over there, because
the Africans are finding out that. First of all, the
Chinese have come in to build lots of infrastructure for
the Africans. Now they're collecting on it, which the Africans
weren't expected because they're used to Western power is just
giving them stuff, right, and it's falling apart. That's the part.
(06:36):
The quality is not at all as good as a
Western manufacturing company can make. And I'm not here to
diminish the Chinese because it is outside the scope of
the book. But my point is, look at the little things.
For ross that sun Zou says, don't fight, fool them?
How about that that goes back thousands and thousands of years.
That is deeply ingrained in the people. So the reason
(06:58):
I began Right to Conquer with clauds of it is
that as a Prussian military officer who had gotten walloped
by Napoleon at the height of the Napoleonic Wars in
the first century of the first a decade of the
nineteenth century, he had first hand experience with seeing a
major army like the Prussian army absolutely destroyed by the
(07:20):
French army destroyed, and Clausibits was captured and he was
imprisoned in France or at the company. He was a
gentleman and an officer, and later he came back into
the fight and fought with the Russians at Ordino against Napoleon.
So he learned a lot of practical, useful battlefield tactics
(07:40):
and concepts. And that's why we still read on war today,
and that's why I started with my book about war
with prosidants.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
We're talking with Michael Walsh.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
His really fascinating new book is called A Rage to
Conquer Twelve Battles that changed the course of Western history.
Just in the interest of time, I'm going to probably
skip over Julius Caesar and and move up to Alexander
the Great. And there's a really interesting little little note
(08:10):
in here about the origin of the word cult. I
wonder if you can talk about.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
That a little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Well. The cult that comes up mostly in the I
think in the Constantine chapter about the cult of Christianity
or the cult of Jesus or the cult of Mary.
Cult is not a bad word. It has some unfortunate
secondary meetings, now meaning something that crazy people are attracted to.
(08:38):
But all cult means is to cultivate. It comes from
the Latin root to grow, and it meant a sect
breaking away to be devotional towards some figures. So Christianity
at the beginning, when it was a subsect of Judaism,
was known as the Jesus Movement or the Jesus cult.
(08:58):
And the cat will know their veneration of the Virgin
Mary not worshiped. That veneration is often misinterpreted by others
as a cult of the blessed Virgin Mary, which it is,
but it's not in the sense that Heavin's Gate, the
guys that killed themselves in California some years back, or
(09:19):
the People's Temple. It's not a cult in that sense.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
I'm just going to ask you a very broad question here,
because there are just too many things I could answer.
Tell us anything you want my listeners to know, to
give them a sense of Alexander the Great, and then
you know they can read the book for more.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Sure, well, Alexander the Great starts the Western tradition of warfare.
He inherits the throne from his assassinated father. He's a Macedonian,
he's not even a real Greek. Plus he's been educated
by Aristotle, who Philip had brought to Macedonia to teach
his precocious son. So he not only thought I was
(10:01):
going to fight, some how to think, and he told
him to appreciate literature. And one of the things that
Alexander carried with him off his life short as it was,
what was copy of the Iliad, which he read and
re read and reread and took into battle. That, of course,
is the origin story of Western military action. The Greeks
(10:22):
and the Trojans at Troy which is now in Turkey.
So from Alexander comes everything. For example, since Gaza is
in the news today, Gaza was a problem for Alexander
in three hundred DC. He was trying to get past Gaza.
It occupies it like the right turn from as you're
(10:43):
coming down from Jerusalem and the Levant, and you want
to go toward Egypt. So if you have to take
a big right there, well, Gaza city is right in
the middle of that, and they wouldn't surrender. And Alexander
fought a very very difficult siege against the gazas is
almost assassinated by a spy. But his revenge on Gaza
(11:05):
was terrible. He tore it down, He killed everybody, and
he took the commander and pierced his ankles and put
a thong through them and dragged his body around Gaza
the same way that Achilles did Hector in the Iliad.
So the larger point, which what's kind of what we've
started with, is if you know the little things, you
(11:26):
can see the big things coming. But if you don't,
if you miss the meaning of the word with and buy,
if you don't reat sun Zu and know the Chinese
don't want to fight, they want to trick you into
giving up. If you don't understand that Gaza has always
been a thorn in the side in the conflict between
West and East, then everything seems to surprise you. And unfortunately,
(11:50):
in many cases in America, because we are not as
attuned to these things as the people who actually live there,
we don't know that. So we come in, you know,
the great American innocent abroad and say, well, why don't
you fix this? Why don't we negotiate this? And you go, dude,
did you ever read the Iliad? And the answer, of
course is no, we didn't, and that's why we have
(12:10):
such problems with sorting this thing out. But sorting all
of the things we don't understand at first plans.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Out excellent, fascinating answer.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
And for the record, if you asked me that question, Ross,
if you read the Iliad, my answer would be yes. So,
and I just want to tell listeners right, this book,
A Rage to Conquer is a fascinating read. And we're,
you know, sort of intentionally and unintentionally not going to
do it full justice here because I want you to
just go buy it and read it. So I'm gonna
(12:40):
have to skip over a bunch of things like Constantine
and uh. But I want to I want to spend
a little time with you and and the and your
stuff about the uh, the Crusades. It is some of
the most fascinating history I've I've ever read. What's the
guy's name, Bohemond or something.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Like that, Yes, Beaumont of Toronto. We don't think much
about him today, but he was the lead commander the
two most important, first two big battles of the first group,
said and had the Crusaders lost either of those, that
crusade would have been over. But instead, in just a
span of a few years, from the Pope Urbans the
(13:19):
second speech at Clairval in ten ninety five ninety six
to the capture of Jerusalem in ten ninety nine, the Europeans,
without a central command, but without even countries really at
this point, there were various little duchies and principalities amounted
this mass invasion of the Middle East and accomplished their objective,
(13:41):
which was to storm Jerusalem and besiege it and take it.
And they did. And Hoaman is one of the lesser
known to the general public commanders in that in that war,
but he was a massive man. He was a big Norman.
You know, another little thing. It's always the little things
for us. Why was a Norman general going to the
(14:05):
Holy Land. Well, he was born in Italy, and the
reason that he's born in Italy was because the Normans
conquered England, if we remembered correctly, in ten sixty six,
turning England into what became England really the mis mixture
of French and Anglo Saxon. They also conquered all of
southern Italy and North Africa and Sicily, they had big
(14:27):
kingdoms there, so a lot of Norman knights came and Beaumont,
who was you know, he must have got a big man,
especially for the time, maybe six of the sixth Day,
huge muscles and an iron will not to be defeated
by the brand new tactics that the Turks, the Turkish
mounted horsemen with art the bows and arrows used against them.
(14:49):
I've always found him a fascinating figure and he's well
worth the space I was devoted to him.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
So I've got about four minutes left and I'm just
going to say to listeners you just need to buy
the book A Rage to Conquer, because I mean the
chapter on Napoleon is worth buying the book just for
that one chapter.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
It's just incredible.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
And then the stuff about American generals in World War
One and World War Two, and maybe we'll mention patent
in the context of the last thing that I want
to ask you about. Michael, you are not shy with
certain opinions and and and actually found that made the
(15:33):
book more interesting than some history books. And you say
at the beginning and at the end that America has
lost what it needs or lost what it needs to
understand when it comes to war. And this sort of
ties in in a way to a listener text I
(15:54):
just got. Can you ask mister Walsh to comment on
nine to eleven, the Battle of nine eleven and how
we lost it?
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Yes, well that's that is the last chapter. It's a
short chapter, it's an afterward. But what I and it's
the most controversial. So what I said was we failed
in our response to nine to eleven because we did
not hold the proper parties responsible. We fought it as
a police action. Effectively, we did not go after the
(16:26):
people who plotted it and who financed it. And everybody
in Washington knew who they were, The Saudi Arabians, now,
whether the official government santioned this or whether it was
a wink wink, we failed to remember they're all cousins.
We failed to remember that they're all family. We huzzled
(16:47):
their family out of the country with the building still burning,
and we did not put Saudi Arabia in its place.
And what I say is what would Caesar have done?
What would Alexander have done? What would Caesar have done?
What would Napoleon have done? And we know the answers
that it was very clear in warfare that you fought
(17:08):
it till you won. You did not fight it with
an exit strategy in mind, and you did not fight
it to be ended at the bargaining table if you
were negotiating your losing. And that's the takeaway from that chapter.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Give me one minute here on how you would compare
or rather contrast George S. Patton versus current US military leadership.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Well, there's the current US military leadership. It's a course,
a lot of it is political. And remember that during
the Civil War we had political generals fighting on the
Union side very much at the beginning, and they were terrible.
They were buddies of congressmen and senators from the president whoever.
(17:56):
It wasn't until Grant, who had been a professional soldier
as with Westboyne, comes into the fight and Sherman, who
is his sidekick. Once they take over, the Union army
completely changes and Grant hates these political generals because they
don't know how to fight them. They don't know how
to win. And what Grant, very early in the Civil
(18:18):
War was confronted by the Confederates saying, what terms do
you wish us to surrender? Grant said, unconditional surrender period.
That's it, guys, you lose. It's what Reagan said to
the Soviet Union. And I was in the Soviet Union
when I fell apart. He said, we win, they lose.
(18:40):
That's what happened. We do not fight that way anymore.
And we have these army guys, big tubs of lard,
like General Milly with a chest full of fruit salad,
who's never done a damn thing in his life to
win a war.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
And that's why we lose.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
That's why we haven't anything of significance since World War Two.
I mean, as you noted your book, like we won Grenada, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right, So I think that was an incredibly.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Powerful part of your part of your book as well.
Last quick thing. I'm just about out of time, but
I need to mention this. It took me a while
to figure it out. I was doing a little more
reading on you, and I'm like, how the heck does
this dude know so much about classical music?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Throughout this book.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
You've got references to Caesar in this opera and Alexander
in that opera, and Napoleon in this concerto. And it's
really quite incredible. I like classical music, but not to
degree that you do. And then I found that you
were the classical music critic for Time magazine.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
I was, Yes, it was a classical music critic for
twenty five years, two newspapers and at Time Magazine.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
And what I want to do in this book, real
quick is to show people that it's not you can't
look at these things in a vacuum. Yeah, that Napoleon
was wanted to be a novelist, already conquered the world.
He Beethoven wrote the third Symphony, Heroica Symphony upout Napoleon.
And if you don't understand the cultural context, you don't
understand the man, and you don't understand the subject so
(20:13):
I try to be as broad as possible in placing
these guys in their historical perspective.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It's one of the most interesting and dare I say,
intellectual books I've read in a long time. There were
moments that it made me feel a little dumb. There
were moments that it made me break out the dictionary
and look up words, which I almost never.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Do, and I appreciate that very much.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
The book is called A Rage to Conquer, A Rage
to Conquer twelve battles that changed the course of Western history.
The author, Michael Walsh, thank you for a fabulous book,
Thank you for a great conversation.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Thank you, Ross. I appreciate it very much.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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