Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms, episode 110. I have on show today one of most famous historian and colorful thinker on strategy of our time. He need no introduction to most of you, Dr. Edward Blutwach. Dr. Blutwach, welcome to the show. Thank you. Yes, I understand most people want to talk to you about geopolitic and such thing, but before we get to that, I know you have some unusual opinion about animal which is animal long concern of mine. I understand for example You do not like dog. No, I like cows. I Am the proud owner of many cows Yeah, and I admire what cows can do transforming little blades of grass into into leather, into horn, into milk and into meat. And if you think about it, these are the four things one needs to live on earth. Yes. Nice leather clothes, much better lasting

and a horn in order to make weapons, of course. And the milk and meat is the sufficient eating. And the cow meat has, by the way, every single mineral and vitamins and meat. So if you ate nothing but red cow meat, you'll be perfectly healthy. So I love cows and I hate dogs. Why? Because once, when I once was visiting the Finnish army during the winter training, and when a temperature goes below 35 degrees centigrade officially, but measured, you're not allowed to be outside the tent. So I was blocked by such a period. for more than a day and really 30 hours or so. And the only thing we could do in the tent was to observe the wolves that were running around in this part of Northeast Lapland. And the wolves are entirely independent. They are so dignified. As soon as the wolf would appear,

they would immediately look for the little tiny rises in those plains and stand on it and proclaim its presence proudly and so on. And to transform this clever, self-independent animal into a slavish beggar is something that I think is a horrible degradation and I hate dogs and I hate those who make dogs and keep dogs and like dogs. Yes, domestication is a terrible thing of what you say, it reminds me what you say of one of my favorite thinker, Conrad Lorentz, and he noticed that a domesticated animal compared to the wild species share certain unusual traits with a human. And he had theories that humans have been self-domesticating. This is terrible prospect, if true. I don't know if you agree with that. Well, I don't, but I approve of self-domestication of humans.

I prefer a domesticated human to a savage human that would go, you know, would pee all over the place and do stuff like that. But in animals, it is terribly inappropriate, particularly in regard to the dogs, you see. Now, I don't know, I don't, I have anybody who observes wolves. And I believe there are documentaries to that effect. Observed wolves sees the elegance, the dignity, the cleverness, you know, because when they chase, they have to establish one line going straight and the other has to curve around to catch the prey, the perverts have to run faster than the straight guys. And the way they organize the team to put the older people straight and the younger ones on the curve, and they do it instantly without any bossing around, just teamwork, it's just highly admirable.

Wolves are highly admirable individually for aesthetic reasons, but in groups because of the way they operate. Yes, no, it's very impressive. So your love of wolves make you dislike dog, but what is this about cow? You own cows, do you know what I mean? The cow is not, it's again, not philosophical, but what happened is that I wanted to have a ranch and primarily to be able to ride horses and spend time, you know, out in nature riding horses. And then I, in order to pay in, I got my ranch in the Amazon and Son in order to pay, the only way to pay a ranch is to keep cows on it, and when the males are old enough, you sell the males, and then you eventually change the bulls every couple or few years. And so I did it purely as a way of making money, because as you well know,

the word capital is actually derived from the French, châtel, which means a herd of cows so then it's a herd of domesticated animals but usually it's cows and the while you're asleep they reproduce the cow becomes pregnant in the second year so in the second year the cow is pregnant that product of their pregnancy if female will then be pregnant in second year you can work out the numbers that this is the natural functioning of capital you're asleep but your money is reproducing. That is the whole basis of capitalism. So while deducing and thinking and inferring about these things, I was exposed to the spectacle of cows themselves. And if anybody sees my cows on my ranch any evening, they will fall in love with cows because what they do is

they have to descend, make a descent to a lake in order to drink extensively after their day of hard work, of eating, ruminating, and so on. And the way they do it is that groups of 1890 cows follow a single heifer and who emerges as a kind of natural leader and they complete silence, in total complete silence, they descend to the lake in this silent procession, all very aligned with no no quarreling or fighting and some and there is such a beatitude in their calm descent to the lake that anybody who sees the spectacle will immediately fall in love with cows this very beautiful what kind cow if i may ask what breeds you you know the only kind you can have in the amazon are our cows which are the indian cow the the humped cattle which originally centuries ago

the Portuguese brought from the colony of Goa to the colony of Brazil, although the particular cows I have, which are exactly the same, they're the products of a visitation in the 1960s of a group of enterprising Brazilians who went to South India and instead of having just the any old descendants of Portuguese cows, whatever, I mean cows from Goa, from India, they went and selected beautiful animals and made the breed called Nellore. Nellore is the same comped Indian cattle, you know, rather thin compared to Western and all that. It's the same species exactly, but it's not degenerated and picked from the best possible specimens they found in South India. And they're called Nellore, and now they're probably 100 million Nellore in Brazil and Bolivia. Yes, do you- My cows are Nellores,

and menorahs are relatively narrower animals, they're not so heavy, but they naturally resistant to all the problems in the Amazon because they are tropical themselves, and they give birth naturally with none of the chains and traction that ranchers use to give birth of these animals which have been overbred, which have been bred to be big, so they're born big, so they can't have Natural births and moreover my cows only eat grass and the cows happen to be pure herbivores So the fact that they systematically give them cereal proteins concentrates to call them Supplements puts them. Yes, they become factor. That's true, but they also go into acidosis because They they can't really Digest it properly which means they lose their immune system

And that's why when you visit a European or North American cow, there's a vetiveranum strip next to it where it's held with this injection, that injection for blue nose, for yellow tongue, or whatever it's called, all these infirmities that arise from feeding something else to a pure herbivore. Yes. They don't even tolerate alfalfa. It's a pure herbivore. So when you give it only grass, or you don't give it anything, you let it find its own grass and walk around, it is an incredibly healthy animal, partly because they died by the age of 15. And as you know, very few humans would die by the age of 15 except for infantile diseases that rhinoceros don't have. No, this is very good that you raised them this way. Can I ask you, do you eat their own flesh yourself? Do you eat your own cows?

Well, as a matter of fact, I can't, because we do not have electricity on the ranch because it's a true Amazonic ranch designed to get, you know, not frantic chasing after maximizing productivity and all these stupid things that in the end don't really work. So I don't have electricity. I have no refrigeration. So the only time I could eat a cow, and it has happened, is when I have a lot of visitors descending at the same time because then I can kill the cow. And then, of course, since I can't hang it to rot, the way all the beef that everybody eats, which is pre-rotted beef, it is naturally very, I have to boil it and boil it and boil it and boil it, and you get, you know, boiled meat. It will still be a bit tough by your standards.

So I don't actually eat what we eat all the time, a piranha, because piranha is a wonderful white flesh. fish tastes like seafood not like like carp or river fish it's got a wonderful taste and they're very easy to catch and very abundant. As a matter of fact once going with my wife and daughter and even in canoeing just with a paddle with no engine you bump into them they jump up and half of them jump in the boat I came back with maybe 10 pounds of piranha just because we went out at night to see the stars. Yes, you can see the wonderful fish, delicious, and the little ones you actually fry and you eat them whole because the birds become crystallized. The big ones, you would cook exactly the way you cook high grade seafood because they're identical. See, they don't

eat vegetables, they don't have the muddy taste. In Brazil, it's easy to get Piranha soup in many places. The reason I asked you about eating the cow is because you mentioned the hump on the tropical Indian cow I don't know if you have you tried in Brazil's a so-called the humps are only on the bulls yes but we would only ever eat the bull if a bull dropped dead I see we do not actually bulls are in in places like Europe Argentina United States people go to bull auctions they to pay up to a million dollars or whatever it is because they do artificial insemination. We don't do artificial insemination. We don't have refrigeration to do that. We undo it. And so our bulls wander around, enjoy themselves by having, I mean, I dare to mention sexual relations with other cows, with cows, I mean.

And so, because the cow becomes pregnant in two years and its daughter will then become pregnant in two years, we have to change the bulls, which means that we take the bulls and we change them with a ranch far away, which is 200 kilometers away, and we exchange them bull for bull. We don't go to bull auctions and buy million dollar bulls, and we just say 10 bulls for 10 bulls, unless they have to be reasonably the same age, or fairly young, not very old, and that's it. So we never actually end up with access to bulls to eat the bull unless it drops dead on the ranch In which case of course one eats it and it's very good meat, too Yes, it's just that the hump the barbecued hump is one of most delicious things

But I haven't really seen the barbecue hump of a bull which is well fed consists of animal fat Yes, and it tastes and is exactly the same as the the camel hump fat which of course I ate, although it was not the dromedary, it was the actual camel, I ate in Kazakhstan. The actual, but it is just fat. It's animal fat and it has that good flavor that you can eat once a year and enjoy, like the Christians eat pig. I'm told that they eat pork and they enjoy pork fat, grilled pork fat. And I looked at it and it's very similar, but the camel is The fat you can eat is kosher. So I've tried that and the bull fat would be but I've never it never happened that We had a bull drop dead that we ate. Yes. No Dr. Ludwig, I want to ask you just if I may is this uh in brazil brazil or

In bolivia, I don't know if you can say what country this ranch is in but uh, I am very interested in this amazon region Uh, do you have I I have heard rumors? I don't know. Do you mind talking about this? Well, no, I mean, the Bolivian, the Amazon, the actual Amazon region divides not politically but in two kinds of regions. It's the region where there is savanna with big islands of rainforest jungle. And then there are the regions which are closer to the equator, which are not savanna with islands of jungle, but jungle with islands of savannah in there. That is, there is rainforest and then, inexplicably, inexplicably, the rainforest just stops for a while and creates an island, a big island, if you look at it from an overhead, of savannah. And I am exactly

at the border between these two areas. That is where savannah zones with islands of jungle giveaway to jungle with islands of savannah. And it doesn't matter the jurisdiction they're all the same they're all characterized by two important things. The first one is that because of the prevalence of insects powerful insect life the population is low. It's a low population insects preserve the amazon much better than amazon protection societies do. And whenever Whenever you read that people have cut down the rainforest to plant, they're always referring not to the rainforest, but to subtropical areas near the rainforest, but not the full deal. And I am in the area where not a single tree has been cut, and there's just savanna.

But we have islands of rainforest that nobody would dream of cutting, and so on. Not because we're so environmental or ecologist or whatever, it's simply because of the present moment in the marketplace, you can buy 100, you can buy a hectare, hectare, which is, you know, 2.4 acres of savanna for about $200. And it costs $300 to clear an hectare of rainforest. Yes. Common fuel prices because the war is probably $500. So rainforest is more expensive than savanna. So anybody who cuts down the rainforest to make savanna is an idiot unless he's operating under particular regimes, because, as you know, the perversion, the perversity of states is infinite. And for a long time, the Brazilian law incentivized cutting rainforest

because you could deduct rainforest cutting costs, which you set yourself, from your general taxes. Cutting rainforest was considered a good thing in itself, tax deductible. A lot So, the Amazon destruction was caused by the tax deductibility. In other words, you run a business in São Paulo, Brazil, and you go and you tell the tax man that you have spent a million dollars destroying rainforest, and they allowed you to deduct it from your taxes because it was a national aim to convert, quote, useless rainforest into usable land. So, this perversity went on and on and on. know, alongside the other famous Brazilian perversity, I don't know how much you know about Brazil, but it's the pension system, pension system whereby most people in Brazil live and die without

pensions and so on and old people wander around begging, but people like bureaucrats, professors, bank employees have fantastically great pensions that became very early and they're very high. As a matter of fact, the pension fund of the central bank of Brazil, central bank, I don't mean banks present in a million places, central bank, it's just a relatively small number of people who have to manage, like the Federal Reserve, right? The Federal Reserve has a, you know, it doesn't have a pension fund of its own, it's a government thing, but in Brazil it has their own pension fund. It's a major holder of capital because they have such gigantic pensions. The University of São Paulo, the guy who gets a job, teaches at the university, he retires at age 42 and has a lifetime pension.

So the publicity of the Brazilian state is manifest in two places, the pension system and the Amazon. And about the pension system, I don't really care, but I do care about the Amazon. It is largely destroyed because of government action. Where the government doesn't incentivize cutting the rainforest, nobody cuts the rainforest, because it's damn difficult and expensive. Yes, Brazil, you know, I lived there many years, actually, and it's very perverse. Overall, their voting system, you know, voting is mandatory or you don't get social security. And this leads to massive open voter fraud. I was present with an owner of some bakeries with some, he claimed several hundred or a thousand employees was selling his votes to some deputy congressional, deputy, so forth.

It's a very perverse system. The reason I asked you about location of ranch is just this. Have you been to Rondonia? Have you been to Rondonia? I have, and it's... I've heard horror stories, Dr. Lutvak, about property owners there, about the local Indians, the local government, about squatters. This is why I ask about location of ranch. I mean, you don't have to say, but... The answer is that I am not in Rondogne, but I am in another country, which I will not mention, which is Spanish-speaking, not Portuguese-speaking, and which has the sublime virtue, sublime virtue that it neither, it does not police or administer its Amazonic territories. So you are operating in an environment where there is no administration, there is no police.

The law of no other is of a very high standard because it's sustained by the fact that all the communities are small and stable. There aren't migrators, there are no migrations and so on. So you have 700 people living in this little town. They all know each other. They know each other's parents, uncles, cousins, and so on. And if somebody lies or misbehaves or steals in that town, they have to leave and they have to go to one of the big cities because they cannot stay there. So when you have stable societies with no immigration in, no migration out very much, they operate, they have to be in a social relationship to each other. And that is why I can say that in 19 years of ranching I've never lost a cow. I don't

know how many thousands of my cows have wandered beyond my property over the years because the plants tear down the fences. You know, the Amazon growth tears down fences, so we are always repairing the fences, but there's always gaps. And what happens is you don't do anything to recover your cows that is wandered off, because what happens is that once a year there's a big kind of fair, and all the managers of the different branches go through all their cows, and they return the cow according to its, you know, we brand them. according to the brand. Yes. So, it is an area where people wander around without guns, and if there is any kind of misbehavior, then everybody comes out with their shotgun, because we all have shotguns, and we go after them and we execute them.

We have never knowingly handed over anybody to the legal authorities. Although it has happened, It has happened when they did it right in the middle of town because there is no police force as such, but there is a mayor and so on. So if it were killed, then it would be conveyed to the nearest town that has the court, which is several hundred kilometers away with no asphalt. Yes, no, but this is very good. Ripio, ripio is a word you must have encountered in Rondonia. It's that red, rocky, glamorous soil that it provides a decent drug service. Yes. What you're describing is some kind of a self-organized community. Yes, it has to be because the state is absent. Yes. The state is absent and therefore there are only two. That is the reason why, for example,

there is a huge amount of drug trade in Bolivia and in Paraguay there is a huge amount of drug trade and there are the no crime except in very circumscribed areas. And in Colombia, because Colombia is so much richer, so much more advanced, I mean, to go from where I am to go to Colombia is practically like going to downtown Manhattan. Because of places like that, then the drug trade is violent. It's violent because they do cartels, monopolies, and things like that. In Amazonic conditions, some of my best friends are people who also have a sideline in smuggling drugs. But there is no violence, and there is no more connected violence at all. In fact, you can see that the drug trade is present, heavily present, in different countries,

but the criminality is limited to places which are relatively advanced, like Mexico or Colombia. Yes, before we go to break, it is just this that I wanted to ask you, because you describe this beautiful, self-organizing, stateless community, and it reminds me of what you just said about the pack of wolves on the hunt, which organize again spontaneously by nature somehow, or your herd of cows. And I wanted to ask you maybe a slight philosophical question. Do you think that man also has this type of monarchical instinct or some type of natural self-organization instinct that perhaps the state perverts? Anyway, listen, early on, one reason why I stayed there all these years as I get older and all that is that I have very good, really warm relations with people, very close relations

there, but also because people have been impeccable in the treatment of an absentee guy who shows up two or three times a year. Now with COVID, of course, I didn't go for a long time and just was there last month, but even without COVID, I would come a few times a year and so on. And my property was entirely safeguarded, protected by the community. And that's because early on we had the problem as a matter of fact with cattle seeds who came from a adjacent country with aluminium boats with powerful outboards and they would come and steal our cows, load them on these aluminium boats and take them away. So when I first arrived there I got some cheap Ruger rifles 22, you know, 22 is not big calibers, get it to the campesinos which is the Indians who live on the

ranch and that's another reason why there's a little violence and tension is because the deal is this, you go and work for a ranch, you don't stand there being ordered this and that, do this and that. No, you go there with your family, your children, you raise as many chickens and pigs and goats as you want, and then you use your machete to plant the plantains and to yucca and whatever, and then you do a few things the rancher wants from you. One of them is to ride the fence and to see where the fence needs to be fixed and you fix the fence. And the other thing is that once a day you have to go to a shed where there are the sacks of salt and open up the sacks and and put them out so the cows can eat them, because every known boba on the door is salt,

and there's always, somehow, always one more salt. So working for a rancher means living on his property and using as much of his land as you care. Of course, you don't have a tractor, so you can only use an acre or two, and raise all the animals and live there, and you get paid a modest pay, a small pay, you get paid, to get paid, and you free yourself of this land, of course, to do only two things. Fix the fence, the section of fence to the next guy taking over another 10 miles away, and once a day, take sex assault from A to B, that's it. And that kind of thing does not generate a feudal relationship, because it's the same as we have with our cows, we don't do animal husbandry taking the cow, moving the cows, shoving the cow, milking the cow. Now they live there and we do

roundups. Every six months you do a roundup. That's it. The rest of the time they wander around, reproduce and all that stuff. So how humans are treated and animals are treated are very similar. When visitors come to a ranch and I take them and we come to the places where the campesinos a living, you know, this kind of very simple house and very minimal things and so on and so forth, they find the only thing that they have, they have a high frequency radio, they cost several hundred dollars because that's the only way to communicate because there's no electricity and cellular service hasn't arrived really beyond the little time there. And they're living on their own, they're cooking, they're living there, they have a place and so on, and when you visit them they're doing

their own thing for their own purposes and they only they execute these two functions and that's it. So of course your pay is very low but it is really pocket money because they're feeding themselves and all that stuff and also they're producing things for sale like platanes are typically they're taken with you know with carried with the mule will be carried to to a place where where somebody collects the plantains and sells them for money in the furrowed world. Now, this is very good, self-organizing, primitive government by nature. Dr. Lutwäck... That's correct, because you cannot have crowding. Yes. This doesn't... If humans live in the unnatural agglomerations, these metropolises, okay, in a place like New York City and so on, there is no actual civilized way to live in New York City.

Not even if you have a helicopter and you fly in and out from the Hamptons. It's still not really civilized. Because you can't, you know, human beings, once they're stuffed, they put too many rats in the cage. They start behaving exactly like the people of the New York City. No, it is awful. I want to ask you more about this. I believe Europe is overpopulated. People don't agree with me. Do you mind, however, if we take a short break, We can have a smoke break or this and we will be right back. Okay fun, right back Yes The show I have here. Dr. Edward Lutvak is great honor. Dr. Lutvak. Welcome back to show I wanted to ask you about Sicily is long been concern of mine I have several shows on matters Sicily history

I know you have special relationship with this island. Do you care to talk this? Well, uh, I had the immense privilege that, when I was five years old, my father, mother, and two brothers, all of us moved to Palermo, Sicily, because this was a long time ago. It was, let's say, January 1st, 1948, more or less. and my father had lost, we left Romania when I was born in Transylvania and left behind all his property. He didn't have a house, he liked to rent and none, but he owned warehouses in Costanza, warehouses in Arad and Vashor and so on, and he owned railway wagons. He was the owner of private railway wagons and he left it all because of the arrival of the, you know, the communist regime. And we left just before. If they hadn't left then, they would have been trapped for years.

Well, perhaps not because he would have crossed the border anyway, but and then he decided to move to Palermo, Sicily, because he had this idea that as a refugee, who didn't speak Italian, had no papers, no app, that only in Palermo he could be successful. and he was very fast. By simply buying green oranges on a tree and waited till they ripened. When they ripened he had people with little hammers and little nails making crates. He put the oranges in the crates and sent them to England where the National Health Service was just starting up and the national was buying oranges to give to pregnant women and children. And as you know there are too many orange trees in England, so they had to import them. Spain was then under complete

economic embargo, so there was no Spanish citrus. The only citrus in practice was Italian citrus, and all of it came from, I mean, the good one came from Sicily, of course, the high quality, and the Palermo, western Sicily, was the citrus land more particularly, so he did it all, and all And all he had to do was to avoid paying money to the mafia, which he did easily enough, and refused to pay the cent. So he made a lot of money very fast. All of these are things I didn't know at the time, since I was five years old. What I knew is that my parents had brought me to paradise, sheer paradise, because first of all, we lived in Palermo, and we would go to Mandela, the beautiful beach of Mandela, gorgeous beach, wonderful beach, you know, framed by a mountain on the right.

the mountains on the left and top. Mandela, by the way, is the place where ice cream was invented. Ice cream was invented because of the coincidence of the Madonia Mountains, which have a lot of snow every winter, and they developed the technology of snow pits in the middle, about 1200 in the Middle Ages, and they would put this ice together with ripe fruit. And to this day, only in Sicily you can eat ice cream, and I spit on the ice cream everywhere else in the world because what they do in Sicily, they get ripe fruit and then they put it with the snow and then turn it together and there's no, and then a little bit of milk, a little bit of milk, no sugar added, absolutely delight, but that requires ripe fruit, it requires people serious about ice cream.

So whenever people offer me ice cream, You know, the famous place, you know, you pay extra and this and that. It's always unspeakably bad, and I never touch it. Of course, I now avoid sugar because I'm very old, but even long before that. So we had wonderful ice cream with wonderful beaches. We had wonderful weather. We were outdoors most of the time. And at the same time, we lived in the heart of Palermo. My parents could walk through the opera, which is very important to them, as good Central European Jews. There were, you know, one of the religious things was music. There was the Palakirama Concert Hall, which in those days, you know, it was all sustained by big landlords. Yes, really. Princess, Marcus, and so on, that had a lot of money

and they used and they supported this cultural institutions. For real, that we go to the opera and I heard Yehudi Menuhim flying in from London in 1948. people there. And this was also, you know, it was the feudal Sicily, which was destroyed by the land reform, which destroyed of course the cultural institutions and the elegance sustained by that. And so it was a beautiful city, notably elegant, in a wonderful setting with the mountains behind, on the side, the water, and everything else. And I loved my school. I went to the state elementary school across the street from where I was living. All the proper people in Sicily would send their children to boarding schools in Tuscany, the rich, and I mean the rich were the aristocrats,

so let me put it, the aristocrats would send them to Tuscany so they wouldn't speak Sicilian but Tuscan. And my parents were enthusiastic about Sicily, absolutely enthusiastic, and they wanted me to learn Sicilian so they sent me to the school across the street. So I grew up with the children of the people who could afford to live in the expensive part of Palermo but who were not aristocratic. So guess who they are? They were of course mafia people. There were some businessmen but any businessman who wasn't poor would send his children again to boarding school away. So it really was me and the children of the mafia but the mafia bosses did not send the children to boarding school. So I grew up with wonderful people in wonderful conditions and it It was great.

So, and the tragedy of my life is that my father developed a perverse passion for industry. As a matter of fact, the horrible industry, PVC, polyvinyl chloride. So in 1950, started being interested. And in 51, tragically, I lost Palermo. And they moved me from paradise of Palermo to the hell of Milano, foggy, rainy, full of Milanese. and they would make fun of my Sicilian. I would punch them and break their noses because that always makes a big impression, you know, with the blouse and everything, but it's actually not serious at all, but that's a bright thing to do. So I got kicked out of school and then I went to another school and I spoke Sicilian, they spoke Milanese, they make fun, I broke their nose, I got kicked out of second school.

Then my parents had to send me to boarding school in England. I mean, boarding school in England, when you're bullied and you break somebody in the nose of a bigger boy, that's considered praiseworthy. Praiseworthy, because it means you're not going whining to your teachers. So exactly the same behavior that got me kicked out to school in Milano accelerated my school career in England, even though I didn't speak a word of English. And that itself was a strange thing because my mother spoke very good English because she had gone to school in Timisoara, Romania, had taken English as her third or fourth language, and that was good enough for her, given the level of the Timisoara school where she went, is that many years later, when she arrived in London, she would go to see Henry V,

and she was probably the only person in the audience, other than a random professor who actually understood every word of Henry V, including the prologue where they explained the war, because of the Salic law. And these days in British theaters, they go through the prologue very, very fast in a formalistic way or drop it completely because people don't even know those words. But my mother, in Timisoara, had learned to be in class, so she knew it. But nevertheless, she did not teach me English, and they had no, they didn't see me as somebody who would go to England or America or something like that, as they themselves did not think for a moment of doing that. Like when my father died, my mother, emigrated immediately, but she emigrated to Israel. They were not really oriented towards

that sort of thing, you know, because, you know, my father had actually been to New York in 1938, and he was appalled by the vulgarity of everybody. Everybody was vulgar. The poor were vulgar, the bourgeoisie was vulgar, the rich were vulgar, and he despised the idea that he would be in a place like New York. So, in London, he had never been to No My mother. Instead of despising the British, the British were despised. When I went to England, despising foreigners was simply a premise. You despise foreigners for being foreigners. Americans did not despise foreigners. Most of them were foreigners themselves. But again, there was the vulgarity, the unbelievable vulgarity. This may be still a problem, but I wanted to ask you your experiences in a mafia school and so forth.

It wasn't a mafia school. It was a Palermo school. It's just a sociological fact. The Palermo school was not in the bourgeois part of Palermo. It was in the very rich part of Palermo, which is rather small. Villa Reale and all that area was a very small thing and it so happened that because it was indeed upper class, when I went to elementary school, I could not go with the children of my neighbors because they were all in college in the boarding schools in Tuscany and some so they would speak proper Italian. Hence the people who were there who could both afford to live in the central Palermo and who were not aristocratic, were the kind of people who were heavily involved, and therefore there were mafia rules in the school. Like, for example, we could fight

and break noses outside the school, but we could not do within the school because within the school, if you broke a nose, then an elder brother would come in, and then another elder brother would come in, and then it would escalate to the parents, and there'd be a shootout. So we learned arms control. Like age six, you learned arms control. That is, you had to use, you had to limit your use of force because of these extraneous factors. And of course, but we could use, we also learned violence because we were free to fight kids outside of school. And so we were living in Villa Reale and we patrolled Villa Reale outside school hours. we will not allow anybody from another area to come to Villa Reale, to play in Villa Reale.

We had a bit of a park there, and we did not allow anybody who didn't belong to Villa Reale to use the little park, period. And if they came, we had a fight. But we didn't organize a game because we had a soccer team. We had our own street soccer team, which functioned as a game when the game was necessary. When it wasn't, it was a subject. Yes. Your experience is there, however, they affected how you think generally about strategy and so forth later. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And in fact, it's also conditioned me to something else which is probably untrue and unfair. But I, whenever I read the writings and disquisitions about war and peace written by people who have never used a weapon in their lives, I find it very, very difficult to be properly respectful to their reason.

I always suspect them for not really knowing it because they never fought, they never used a weapon, you know, they never shot at anybody, they never got shot. Why are they talking about war and peace? You are adept with the stiletto. You have used this tool, the stiletto, before? Well, yes, but that has nothing to do with Palermo, because we were really small children. We had used no stilettos. And we were not stiletto types. And I'm certainly not connected with Sicily, zero. The reason I used the stiletto is because I've been traveling around the world and doing many different things. And if you're not using stiletto, it goes a long way.

But in Sicily, we were practicing violence and arms control, and given our age, there was no question of using either a blade or a gun or anything of the sort. And I never, you know, saw a gun. The only person who, you know, was a person who had a high disposition for dealing with gun violence and all that kind of stuff that I knew was actually one of my father's partners. Because when my father arrived, he didn't speak Italian. He spoke Romanian, and Romanian is quite close to Italian, and he spoke French, which is close to Italian. But he engaged business from the first day arrived, and therefore this type of language is not sufficient. He needed a more precise language, so he recruited himself a kind of fellow, a very well educated person,

who spoke German as well as Italian, and this person was a fellow who always traveled with a gun and a knife. And the reason he did was because he was a commercial traveler selling watches, and he therefore was, you know, subject to possible robberies in areas where the mafia didn't have proper control of crime. And Western Sicily usually is fine, but Eastern Sicily, the mafia was very weak, mostly absent, in fact. It's a Western Sicily crime. And therefore, this guy, who was my father's partner. So when I would ride in a car with a car full of expensive watches, It was my father's partner. So when I would ride in his car, which I sometimes did Sitting in the back. I would my feet would run into his His wife, you know, he would put the weapons there But it was it was not

Absolutely, no childish background in that I Got into weapons when I was in boarding school in England, then we were all in the cadet court from age 13 and you got the .22 rifle and then from age 16, at that time the British Army had soldiers from age 16. We were not in the British Army, we were cadets in the Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, like if Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire like infantry, we were cadets and by the age 16, you got the rifle, you know, a proper rifle. And, you know, I had a Lee-Enfield rifle, which was then the standard rifle, bolt-action rifle, with a magazine holding several rounds. You know, so I was introduced, and the stiletto was the same, because then I was moved to a different unit, airline did whatever it was called, vaguely commando,

So we got the typical stiletto, which is the British commando interpretation of a very narrow knife with the point, though Kant's is the point, not the size. You're not going to use it to chop a tree, you're just going to stab somebody with it. And we were taught stabbing, which is an art of course. Yes. I want to ask you about modern warfare and modern such tools and how they will change world, but if we could leave that for later, because on subject of Sicily, this matter of Sicilian history, I talked on this show before about John Julius Norwich and his book on the Normans in the south of Italy and so forth. I know you don't like him, you don't like Norwich right here. No, because his Byzantine writings, which is, I mean, I envy the fact he made a lot

money with his Byzantine books, but they're worthless. He put together stories and anecdotes. He's a historian of the Herodotus tribe. If he hears a good story, he puts it in whether it's true or not, and he makes no effort to determine if it's true or not. Knowledge reproduces absurd things like, for example, the tale of the bulgar killing emperor who blinded the prisoners and and send them back, all kinds of mythologies and lies. I see. No excuse for Norwich to have it. Yes, but... By the time he wrote these books, there was a decent historiography, historiographical materials and documentations and stuff. So, therefore, I would never spend 10 seconds reading about the Normans because there's a very fine literature on the Normans. Very fine, you know.

Outstanding characters there were, you know. 1,000 of them arrived in the same year 1066 that Normans landed in England They landed in Greece. I mean in in Sicily Yes, I'm from Calabria about the thousand of them but of course we shouldn't count them as men should count them as tanks because there were a Thousand horsemen with you know a big man of big horses with armors and they pushed the Arabs out of Sicily and shoved them back to North Africa and then ruled Sicily. And nobody knows why or how or from what winds. The fact is that these horsemen, Norman horsemen, who after all were nothing but Vikings two generations back, who had originated in what is now Northwest France, France, who had arrived there, nobody knows how the hell they did it, but they had very

superior ideas about government. They operated a very, very effective government that collected very little taxes, very few little money to provide high levels of security. And they invented, they completely invented the idea of pluralism, cultural pluralism, Because Norman Sicily, it was a place where laws were redacted in Latin and Greek and Arabic and many regulations in Hebrew as well, where religions lived together side by side. That's why the Pope hated them terribly, and which therefore Sicily was open to sea traffic from the Muslim world from everywhere in the Mediterranean, without exception, and and became very rich and advanced. The Palermo was during the holy staff and centuries, where let's say, thought like 1200 to late 1200, from 1,250 years, Palermo was the biggest city,

the richest city in Europe, and terribly successful. All under Norman governance and how these simple guys who arrived with their horses and swords had all these great ideas, I don't know, and I've read literature and I still don't know, and there's not, the fact that they understood that in Sicilian conditions, pluralism meant having open ports and becoming very rich without taxing. See, they didn't tax, because they was all paid through port fees. Import, it was simply custom fees, which are notoriously much easier to collect, because there's always a limited number of ports, and the cargo categories, and they took very little money, and in fact, in all subsequent centuries, whenever a new regime started in Sicily, the demand was always that they would continue

the good practices of our Norman kings. And unfortunately, Sicily has suffered ever since, and it's always been misgoverned, and it's misgoverned as we speak. Yes, the Hollandstauffens were eventually kicked out of Sicily. Yeah, but remember, the Hollandstauffens followed the Normans. First, it was the Normans, who are the Norman guys who came and who built the government system. The genius of Frederick II, the Hollandstauffen, is upon taking over the Norman system, he didn't change it. He didn't apply the Holy Roman Empire system or the Italian commune system or the French system. he allowed the continuation of this sort of very simple form of government that was simple and effective. Yes. No, this is true.

But as you point out, that system was eventually removed when there was massive war against the heirs of Frederick Hohenstaufen. Yeah. Well, the Pope called Frederick the Viper. Why? Because of tolerance. Because he tolerated the Orthodox, the Greek who had separated, by that time the Greek Church had doctrinally separated from Catholicism. And he tolerated, all of Eastern Sicily was Orthodox, and he completely accepted them, not just tolerate them under the carpet. I mean, he had pluralism, true pluralism. He published these laws and so on, and he made no laws that would offend either the Orthodox Church or the Muslims or the Jews. And in fact, one of the splendiferous monuments left behind by the Normans is the Capella Palatina of solid gold mosaic, a whole building

interior solid gold mosaic, and outside there is a dedication stone of a priest, a Catholic priest to his mother and which is written in Latin and written in Greek and in Arabic and in Hebrew. Why? Because his friends were, you know, used all these languages. So, Hochstaufen, all he did is to continue those practices. Hochstaufen was a sophisticated guy. He came from a sophisticated part of the world, you know, vanished from what is now Bavaria and through Italy and Italy of the cities was very sophisticated. He was sophisticated, but the system of government he got was from very simple people who got the genius from God knows where. In fact, there's no real explanation of how come these people set up this incredibly, I mean, inventing pluralism,

then using pluralism as a solution to the problem of fiscal problems is a remarkable thing. Yes, no, but what I wanted to ask you about is when the system got removed in part by pressure from the Pope and then the other. The Pope, hating pluralism, procured the intervention of the cadet ruler, the Anjou, Charles Anjou, who had nice monarchical affiliation with the King of France, but was a peaceful bastard cadet. And he, the Pope, invited Charles Anjou to go and destroy Frederick II, and Charles Anjou descended with these French things, and precisely because Frederick's regime was so effective and harmonious and successful, he didn't have a lot of military power because he didn't need power to repress his population. His population adored him, and he had very few

soldiers. So the Pope, the evil, the hatred of the Vatican, of the Vatican for pluralism caused the destruction of the best regime there was in Europe, which was of course known in Latin as tupor mundis, the astonishment of the world, because people would come to Palermo and encounter this incredibly sophisticated advanced society, which is now present in its monuments, which are still today the most ambitious architecture in Europe is still in Palermo, Sicily. To have an entire building, the entire cathedral of Monreale entirely covered in golden mosaics, not in which, you know, they have little sort of chambers, chambers, chambers telling the entire story from the Bible, the Bible and then the New Testament

of the Christians, episode by episode, so that a priest could take a group of illiterate peasants and take them from one square to the other and they would actually learn the whole contents of the Bible quite effectively. All of these things are really... What survives proves that this was a regime that did not need a renaissance. That's the point. There would never have been a renaissance because there'd never been a decay, a collapse of culture. And in Catania, at that time in Catania, they were reading and translating the Greek classics, translated them into Latin, reading them in the original, and in Northern Italy, they did not know that. So the Northern Italians nicely waited 300 years to discover the Greek classics via Venice and Byzantium, but in Sicily, they had them all along.

So this is a case of a grotesquely underestimated culture, which was then misgoverned by ignorant PMMTs and all the rest of it. To this day, to this day. And eventually demoralizing the Sicilians and Catania, they stopped, you know, Catania decayed, you know, they stopped reading the classics and all that stuff. So the classics were, quote, lost. In 1300, Petrarch, the greatest intellectual Italy, did not know Greek. And that would be recovered, you know, from 1400 and so on. But Sicily always had that. Yes, just before we go to break, I wanted to ask you all along. So after this regime in Sicily got removed, eventually, however, there was a vengeance on the part of the Hohenstaufen house through the kingdom of Aragon, together with Byzantium in the so-called

night of the Sicilian Vespers. There was not Hohenstaufen. Oh yeah, yeah, but not Hohenstaufen from Germany. It is that the Frederick II's surviving son and son had married Bianca Lancia from Catania, of the Lancia family, and it was the Lancias that went to Byzantium and the Palaiologos, Emperor Palaiologos gave them gold. They used the gold to hire ships in general. The ships were used to bring the troopers from Aragon to attack, to invade Sicily, and at the same time as coinciding a revolt, the Sicilian Vespers on the Vespers' prayers, time and time, everybody came out to church with daggers and went and killed the French wherever they found them. This was the night of the Sicilian Vespers when the French were killed, whereupon Charles

d'Anjou from his headquarters in Naples sends an army to reconquer Sicily from the rebels, But when his army is approaching, Calabria arrived the Aragonese. And the Aragonese swore that they would maintain the good system of the Normans, which of course is the only staff and that's perpetuated. So the Aragonese came in, and they're not as conquerors but invited by the Sicilian the Lancia family, and the result is the Lancia di Trabia became the head of an aristocratic group of families that divided the island and kept it till 1947. Until 1947, the victors of the revolt to remove the Pope's Frenchmen, Charles d'Anjou and all that, and to establish the Aragonese, the vicars of that war, owned the land in Sicily until 1947. I still know

some of them and some of them at least a few of them have kept their palaces but they lost the land all around themselves and uh but you know this is Sicilian history was once known to every intellectual when Goethe wrote his book about travel to Italy his first thing is if you don't go to if you you go to Sicily first Sicily is the place without Sicily Italian history is Italy is nothing without Sicily. And then what happened is that in the decay, especially of uh, 17th Sicily republicans, the Italian Sicily, uh, Sicily has, you know, declined or something, as a place. But people used to go to Palermo and set up shop in Palermo for the winter and stuff, like, like Goethe did. The Italianisia razor of Goethe is, a lot of it is in Sicily.

Yes, Sicily must be, I think, returned to these families that you mentioned. Dr. Lutvak, I think we need to go to break. We've been having a long segment. Do you have time to come back for another portion? I only have time for a few more minutes, though. Yes, very good. Because there are some people showing up. Yes, very good. Yes, I understand. They are watching us. But yes, we will be right back. No, no, no. And when are these people coming? 🎶 Welcome back to the show. I have here Dr. Lutvak, Edward Lutvak. Dr. Lutvak, I wanted to ask you about the future of warfare. I know you have written and thought much about this. I'll just be blunt with you. Do you see possibility for the rebirth of a glorious age of barbarism?

I know you are not a fan of barbarism, maybe, but I mean something on the order of new technologies that allow infantry, that allow special-type soldiers to remake not just warfare but social relationships in the same way as that bronze armor or compound bow on the step allowed there to be created new social movement, I don't mean movement, but social structures such as the Mannerbund, the society of warrior brotherhoods and so forth. I'll tell you what the war has shown in a is that the arrival of small port man portable weapons has enabled the conjunction the partnership between the classic infantry which is by its nature fluid which is fluid and which is not discrete it's not like 10 tanks 50 times and somebody could be like 10 people 110 people 110 000 the numerical

fluidity of infantry, the inherent abundance of infantry as opposed to tanks let's say or artillery or aircraft or warships, the abundance of infantry, the fluidity of infantry, the tactical fluidity of infantry which is not sitting there for all to see the way a tank is, Yes. But which can hide under, you know, it can wear inconspicuous clothing, can hide behind the wall, can hide in the natural hollow in the ground, can make a hole for itself, can hide in the woods. So the fluidity of infantry and the weakness of infantry is that they walked around carrying puny rifles and things like that, or spears, rifles. rifles when other people started having ballista, stone throwers, artillery, missiles, air power,

armed helicopters that could range over the battlefield and hit everything they wanted and some and there was the infantry carrying around rifles. Then only mid-century, last mid-century it acquired bazooka and bazooka is a weapon that if you're super brave, super courageous or willing to die you can actually destroy something at maybe 70 meters, 80 meters to undersea, something like that, if you're very courageous and something. And suddenly the infantry keeps all its old virtues of abundance, fluidity, flexibility and some, but now they can have weapons that are terrifically powerful, which is anti-tank weapons which are not a tube launching rocket if you're very brave when you approach to within yards of the tank instead you have a missile and moreover it's a

missile that was born as a wire guided missile that was the german invention of world war ii wire guided with a thin wire spooled out behind the rocket of of the you know behind the missile that spools out a very very very thin wire and you send these structures go right left up and back you go from that to optical recognition systems that in fact enable you to elevate the weapon see the target and indicate and click that this is my target that thing that you see mister is the target and then you walk away because the missile has acquired the target yes and it recognizes it as the attack and what tank at t72 slash b slash d and that tank it has a library of pictures of the tank seen from all possible perspectives and therefore you can walk away drink a cup of coffee

in the missile on its way to destroy that tank. Now the same thing can destroy an armed helicopter with with much greater ease because it's got a big noisy machine on top of you just aim shoot and the helicopter is gone, gone. So everybody around the world is now complaining about the very high cost of armed helicopters they can save themselves the money because you can only use it against people who do not have access to any one of these higher quality anti-tank weapons which are also anti-helicopter weapons and which by the way if taken let's say into port or anti-ship weapons and so still the infantry with all these virtues of fluidity numerical economy and mainly the fact that they can come by train by foot by motorcycle as well now they have weapons that can knock out

tanks, knockout arm helicopters, and low-flying attack aircraft. In fact, if you go down the list of the Russian aircraft shut down in Ukraine, which is quite an impressive number, most of them are ground attack aircraft, which were once formidable emperors of the battlefield. You have something like an A-10 with its formidable cannon, a Dura, ranging over, destroying, wiping out things. Now somebody hiding behind the wall launches a missile, and you're a goner, you're dead. So there's been an absolute rise of the empowered infantry, and that is why it's so annoying to me that the frigging Taiwanese, who have all the money in the world and 20 million people, don't raise an anti-invasion infantry that could easily, easily wipe out any Chinese invasion.

The whole Chinese army is less than a million. And if they got even 400,000 to land in Taiwan, the Taiwanese could kill them all. If they raised a militia, a militia, not the stupid army with all these decorated uniforms marching up and down they have, but a popular militia armed with anti-tank weapons, which are also anti-ship weapons and anti-aircraft weapons. Why don't they do this? I know you've criticized them. The Kuomintang generals, all of whom vote for the, you know, the generals are all Kuomintang party, they all have their apartments for their retirement in communist China, across the water in Xiamen, okay? They do now want to fight when conscripts, when they have a sort of feeble conscription,

the conscripts are disgusted by their army because they use them on ridiculous fatigues and things and uniforms marching up and down, they themselves have these uniforms loaded with medals and all that stuff. This is a traitorous, incompetent bunch of people. So the ruling presidency is held by the Taiwan Independence Party, but they haven't acted accordingly, which is to get rid of these people and get young Taiwanese determined to emulate the Ukrainians and defend their islands and drive off the Chinese with great ease, in a very relaxed way, they can wipe them out. Yes. Because, you know, as I say, the Chinese army is 400,000. There are 20 million Taiwanese, so that if they mobilize to the very modest and enjoyable level that the Finns are, you know, the Finns that serve in the army

and then are the Swiss for the Swiss, At age 18, they go in, they learn a few things. They're smart kids. And then they remain in the reserves till age 45. If they copy the system of the Swiss and the Finns, they will be able to laugh off of the Chinese. The Chinese can bomb them if they want to. They can bomb them, but they can't, I mean, with nuclear weapons and wipe them out, but they can't invade them. And they certainly can't use, for example, ground attack aircraft, armed helicopters, or amphibious landings. Because only they can afford, they have the money to buy these missiles that cost, which are expensive, they're not cheap. But the bazooka, I actually used the bazooka once, and that bazooka had was something that probably cost $100. Yes.

And these missiles cost $200,000, $150,000. If I may interrupt, the Swiss and the Finns arguably still have powerful, effective national armies. I have many friends who are United States veterans or active duty. They tell me American military is largely lately turning into just a giant jobs benefits program for not very competent people, and that they believe future of warfare will be outsourced to small companies of private military contractor and so forth. I know you know a lot about this. Did you know Mad Mike Hoar or Bob Denard or these legendary mercenaries from 20th century? Would you care to talk about that? No, the only thing that I had encounters with the subsequent generation of these people, the original people, they were operating way beyond their sell-buy date.

When you buy a bottle of milk, there's a day to sell by. They were operating way beyond that date. A lot of the stuff they did was farcical. I remember Margaret Cash's son got involved in the farcical Capuverde. Equatorial Guinea. Equatorial Guinea, because they had all the money in the world, they're a bunch of idiots, and they couldn't even do that, okay? I could have done Equatorial Guinea much better than they did, but they were drunken, incompetent people. Now in regard to the United States, in the United States, the real fight has always been done by the Scotch-Irish element and the elements that gravitate to that.

For example, Jose Martinez, who crosses from Mexico, if he comes from the right region of Mexico, because in Mexico, like in Central America, the character of the population is determined by the character of the antecedent Indians. The antecedent Indians, for example, in the well-named state of Guerrero, they were real fighters, okay? Yes. There were people who were very passive, like the miserable sort of population, like the Aztecs and so on, which were a slavish population and all that. And then there were fighting people. So Jose Martinez crosses the border and changes his name to Joe Martinez. Then he becomes Joe Martin. He joins the Marine Corps. He gets tattooed with a Marine Corps tattoo. He's a fighter. And we have the Scotch-Irish. We have a certain kind of immigrants

from places like Mexico, a few others who are there. But the urban educated American population are, with the exception of few talented people with military backgrounds or something, They are basically post-Belik people. They're post-heroic, and they are in the military to get paid. The military, of course, has all this absurd, you know, diversity thing and all that kind of stuff, which is, for example, women can be very good warriors. And I know because I'm married to one who is a woman and a warrior, a natural warrior. That is to say, courageous and determined and so on. But the women who serve in American military often are people who are doing it just as a job. Now that's fair enough because there are many functions in the modern military.

In fact, not only the necessary, but the unnecessary over administration, over bureaucratization, too many stupid programs and this and that, public relations, no end, and all the other stuff. But there is a certain part of the female population that is very fit for combat, but they're a small part. But what's happened here is that serving in combat has become a right that you fight and you get. So when the guy becomes chief of staff of the Marine Corps, he's under immediate pressure to make people unsuitable, unsuitable females in combat positions as opposed to reserving the combat for suitable combat people, including suitable females, which exist and really do exist but the fact that you're forced to do it and of course that creates

it's a very bad thing instead of allowing a natural flow of people talents should flow where naturally they occur so I actually would have been very much against the exclusion of women from combat units as a matter of principle but I'm equally or maybe even stronger more strongly to introduce them willfully in pursuit of this abstract aim even when they are absolutely not combat capable, not combat worthy, they don't even have the physical strength to do the job you have to do. You know it's all very well modern weapons but the fact is that you have to have strong arms. If you don't have strong arms I don't care what your propensity is. So you know it's one on those things. So contractors coming back, well, contractors have never left. I've been

a contractor myself. I've always existed. I had contracts, do them. I have them even quite recently, even quite very recently, just a few years back, the last one. And so contractors always existed, but it cannot be central. It was in history, it was only ever central in very brief periods like renaissance Italy when the urban Italian urban Italians of the renaissance cities were just now willing to serve him as soldiers so there was there and then Africa was right and now we have things like Wagner because of the Russian refusal to conscript youth their youth into the armed forces the Swiss are conscripted the Russians are not. Yes. Their friends have conscripted, and now the Swedes. Because, you know, the Swedes are

serious people. When the Russians took Crimea, without any further ado, the prime minister at the time, who happened to be the head of a very left-wing coalition, and a female prime minister, super left-wing, goes to the Swedish parliament and says, well, you've all read the papers, so naturally with the restarting national, compulsory national service. And, therefore, there was a debate that lasted maybe less than two hours and the only issue debated is do we start immediately or do we first have an initial phase where we recruit selectively we conscript selectively to form the corporals and sergeants to absorb the office so this is that showed that sweden has a national myth in good working order which is the kingdom of sweden goes its own way

the kingdom of Sweden defends itself and the Swedes served the kingdom of Sweden. And that was, you know, the political government that did it in 2016, look at that. In America, they were all walks, they were super walks, but they were also Swedes. Yes. But what you have is that you need to have a military culture. However, the military culture is not always where you think it's going to be. Classic example is Israel. One of the reasons why American intelligence, you can look it up, it's online. CIA predicted that the state of Israel would last only a few weeks, because everybody knows the Jews don't fight. Well, it turns out the Jews don't fight for other people. They fight very well for themselves. And so, equally, when I see the elite forces getting filled up with Hispanics,

then I know that there are the right Hispanics. And now they can easily be the very right Hispanics who are made for this country. But as I say, it's not Mexicans who are good in the forces, it's the Mexicans who come from those particular parts and cultures of Mexico that have always been war-like cultures. Yes, I think even so, what you said earlier about the Scotch-Irish, I think they still form about 80% of America's combat forces. I don't know what percentage they form of the force. I know they are a very high percentage of the useful part, the useful part. But there are always exceptions, always exceptions. For example, I know a bunch of people who, a group of people who transited through Goldman Sachs, went to university, went to Marine Force Recon,

and after serving several years in Marine Force Recon, John Goldman Sachs as merchant bankers, and they are very atypical people in every respect, but they are not individual exceptions of something. They come from a subcultures of subcultures. Yes. So they exist, but what you cannot do, you cannot do is to say, oh, well, you know, we have to exclude entire populations or include populations. To be inclusive is destructive, very destructive. Yes, no, of course, but I wanted to ask you. I saw that in the 82nd Airborne, by the way. I went to visit at Fort Bragg, 82nd Airborne. And I saw a group of these people in the 82nd Airborne who belong to the female persuasion, who had absolutely no business in the 82nd Airborne because they just didn't have the physical strength

to do what you have to do. It's just when you jump, you jump carrying with you a thing attached to your leg. that thing is what enables you to function as a soldier once you have been dumped hundreds of miles away from any base of support and these people couldn't even lift that back okay so this is a case of of brow beating and forcing people into doing unnatural and useless things yes and of course now they have the trunes on top of it but look i wanted to ask you because you know i've I've been keeping it a long time. Who do they have and who do they have to say? Well, I'm trying to be polite, but they have, let us say, the unicoid persuasion in the military also lately. What's a unicoid? You know, a eunuch, a transsexual, you know, but they have these in the military.

What do you think about transsexuals and transsexuals? Listen, transsexuals, I am completely opposed to the exclusion of groups, categories that are not relevant. Women, transsexuals, whatever, they can be excellent soldiers. It's a matter of whether they have the actual cultural asset, which is do they think like Achilles or they don't think like Achilles. Achilles was very sorry, really, truly sorry for the gods because the gods being immortal could never be brave. And therefore Achilles was really, you know, very sympathetic to their flight because being immortal, they could never be brave, and if you can't be brave, what's the fucking point of living? That's the point. So I know people, I actually know a transsexual guy who is in the military, and he's a natural-born warrior, okay?

I don't know what he does in bed, and I don't care, but I know that he's a natural-born warrior. The problem with inclusion is not the inclusion, is the fact that this is, is the inclusion, not of individuals. It should be included, but of categories, categories of course. You know that you have to meet a quarter, you have to have 17 transsexuals and 49% women or the other kind of stuff. That is the wrong thing. Look, listen, uh, in, in the late, in the early 1960s, a woman showed up in Israeli pilot course, all of which were men. and tried to get and become a pilot. So she did the various tests and things, and then she became a pilot, and then she learned to fly, and then she became a combat pilot, then she became an ace, and all the time she was a woman,

she actually got married, she had children, and so on. So I do not believe in including categories because they claim, you know, we have, of course, a quarter percentage, and also equally exclusion on the same basis. No, it happens. I think Guy Marov Salerno's wife was a gigantic Teutonic woman who, you know, rallied the troops to victory on battlefield. It happens, yes, but I wanted to ask you. I'll give you my personal experience that shook me up. In the 1967 war, I was a young fellow, I was a volunteer, and I was sent to a place called Kibbut Shamir up in the finger of Galilee because that's where volunteers showed up because the army was replacing Egypt and Jordan. the real army and there were very very few people there. Well the only asset they really had for this

grotesquely exposed vulnerable part of the finger of the gallery which is a few kilometers across from Syria one side 11 on top. The only weapon that was in this particular place that was worth anything was a 14.5, a 14.3 millimeter heavy base machine gun which had been flown in in 1948 in the the war of independence. But this was a heavy machine gun with lots of belts of ammunition and which was really effective because you could hit infantry more than a mile away if you could see them in the sun but you could also tear up trucks and you could damage, heavily damage, even armored vehicles. So the person who operated this heavy machine gun was a woman who I remember who was a rather short, rather fat, and she was the one operating the Besa machine gun.

And she slept next to the Besa machine gun, and she used the Besa machine gun, and she looked everything but like a soldier because she was, I think she was in the late 40s, and she was corpulent. I mean, she was quite fat and so on. And she could not have run up a mountain, she couldn't have climbed the wall or something else, but operating the basic machine gun, she was extremely good. Extremely good. She was very deaf because you have to lift the upper part to slip it. Very effective and brave. Yes, yes, I'm not saying such specimens don't exist, but I wanted to ask you something. Yes, I've been keeping you for a while. I wanted to ask you before we go, because at beginning of show, you mentioned the unnatural way of life in a place like New York or other extreme crowded city.

Manhattan. Manhattan. Manhattan. There's constant noise. Once somebody took me to his penthouse. I go around this penthouse and there is the roar of this insane, insane animal that is Manhattan. I said, how the hell can you enjoy this penthouse? The guys said, I don't know how many millions to buy this apartment, the great penthouse. How the hell can you enjoy it when there's this roar, this endless roar of this monstrous thing? So I'm sorry for people who live in those places and I don't understand why they do. Yes, but this monstrosity, the states, the mega states of our time, The underlying reasoning for these states to exist is the necessity of these very large conscript armies of the 20th century. And I see this as a kind of prison world.

I wanted to ask you before you go, again, if you see some way out of this. I call it glorious barbarism. You don't need to call it that. Is there a way back to small aristocratic armies in which a small aristocratic group could defeat? No, I really don't see it. I do not see it. I'm not sympathetic to this whole line of cooking, because the people who have military service, let me tell you, the Finns, the Swiss, and now the people at the service of the Israelis, the 18-year-olds wait with great anticipation for the day they're conscripted. And in all these cases, by the way, if the young fellow says, I'm not a soldier, I'm not going to be a soldier, and I'm not going to fight, there's no problem whatsoever, to fight is a privilege. And so they will serve in the non-serving capacity,

and if they refuse to do that, they say, I just can't, they just let them go. They don't want people who don't enjoy and service, want to serve, determine. In Israel, rich, the boys, especially the boys, but some girls, of rich people, use their money to pay for special trainers so they can kind of cheat their way into elite forces because they've hired private trainers to train them physically to be able to get good scores. And in places like Switzerland, if a young soldier refuses to serve, They say, fine, just go away. And accept that if you look at the statistics online and you have how many people in the Swiss Army, question, how many enlisted, how many under officers, and so on. And you'll see the enlisted number, there are two numbers.

One is the official number of the required serf, and it's like 200,000. The actual number, 250,000. People show up, they use political connections, family connections to sneak into the military, right? Yes. And the early military on the other hand has to accommodate a lot of people who are physically weak and unfit, some invalid. They have to accommodate them by finding places for them, which is bothersome, where they can serve in a wheelchair, for example, behind their desk, a computer desk. And the same thing in Finland. In Finland, three years ago, actually, there was the assembly of the fully mobilized army for two days in the summer somewhere or other. And the official number that was supposed to show up was a number like 300,000 or whatever the number was.

The number that showed up was 500,000 because people who had finished their obligatory reserve duty refused to not show up and insisted on retaining on unit roles. And so the Finnish government did have to provide their share, you know, the additional weapons, ammunition, and so on. So where you hold, that's where the horrible Taiwanese degenerates, where you have a good military service to defend the country against a real threat. Yes. Then you have enthusiasm. You know, it is the people who have no enthusiasm who continue to do it bureaucratically or beneath contempt. Yes. No, I understand this. You know, Neil Ellis, the mercenary who single-handed saved many people in, I think, Sierra Leone war. No, I don't actually know, but I lost one of my good men

because, as I say, I've been in this business myself. The best man I ever had, Robert McKenzie. You can look him up, there's a Wikipedia. Robert McKenzie, I could not employ him sufficiently, so he went to work with some dubious British outfit training the Sierra Leone army, and they gave him a bunch of people to train Sierra Leoneans, wherever they are, and the guerrillas came and the old flag left him alone on the battlefield when he was killed. So I don't know, at least there are some really good people. Bob McKenzie was a particularly exceptional character. He was a young American who served in the 101st Airborne and became invalid, bureaucratically listed invalid. went to volunteer in Rhodesia and he just showed up and eventually rose to be commander of the SAS,

the Rhodesian SAS squadron. Yes. Then briefly went to Africa but he didn't like a part of it so then he became a contractor and then worked for me and with me and he was the best man I ever had and he died in Sierra Leone, a place where there's been a lot of this title. This is mercenary work done for the Sierra Leone government through an internationally approved program. So this is not your Bob Benard kind of stuff. Yes, yes, but still it's a case where someone like Neil Ellis could single-handed stop an entire admittedly very primitive army. Listen, if you can't deal with the mob of West Africans you You shouldn't call yourself a soldier. Yes, but I was wondering if you think technology will advance to such a level where independent

groups of soldiers who are stateless can defeat large conscript armies. Do you believe? No, I don't think so. You can't get to that from here to there because, you see, for example, serious people work for legitimate governments only, not for private groups. They work strictly within the law. and not piratical, they have letters of mark. When you work with the permission of the sovereign government of that place, you are authorized to work there. This is a letter of mark. This is what people had, you know, a pirate was a gangster of the sea, a thief, a murderer, a criminal, and son who robbed people. And a privateer was a person who owned the ship and got the letter from his government, Authorizing to go and hunt the enemy's vessels

If you are invited by a government to go inside the territory and they give you an authorization to use all Necessary force for the purpose of accomplishing the specified mission of clearing out an area this is a proper way to do things and not like and you know adventuring around the on their own and so on and so forth, you have to have a framework. Like, I would say, the difference between the privateers that did a lot to defeat the Spanish empire for the British crown and the Dutch privateers that did a lot for the Dutch Republic versus the pirates who did it for personal criminal robbery. Privateers did very well. They were very well paid. They had a nice share of what they could, but they had a share, not everything.

In fact, Sir Walter Raleigh, as you know, ended up in prison when he wrote his history of the world, whatever he wrote. Sir Walter Raleigh was a privateer who had crossed the line and become a pirate. Yes. I don't think I've ever been a good soldier. I don't think periodical people are worth anything. Yes, no, that could be. That could be, but even this idea of letters of mark is more what I'm talking about, if more governments could make more use of them going forward. But that's a big step here. The highest form of service to me is still a national system where all 18-year-olds are called, but the ones who really don't want a release to go home, because they don't want people who are unsuitable to corrupt your unit.

yes yes no of course this goal uh well uh i i've kept you for a long time that did look like uh