Motus Mentis

Some of the most interesting conversations in all of media for many years now have been the periodic discussions that John Batchelor has had on his radio program with thinkers such as law professor Richard Epstein, the late Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, and war historian Michael Vlahos. For a couple of years Batchelor and Vlahos devoted their weekly talks to the topic of the possibility of a new civil war in America, but more recently they have assumed the personae of Gaius and Germanicus, well-to-do Roman citizens living in 1st-century Britain, with the gift of foresight into the future — a way of examining the parallels between the arc of Roman history and that of the modern-day Global American Empire. Lately they’ve been releasing a weekly installment, as a podcast, every Monday, and the topic for the last year or so has been the war in Ukraine.

Despite what you may have heard from our government and media (to the extent that you pay any attention at all), Ukraine’s position is utterly hopeless — and every day that the West shovels more money and Ukrainian lives into the meat-grinder merely prolongs and intensifies that nation’s suffering, and fattens the purses of predatory interests (did you know, for example, that as much as 40% of the equipment we send to Ukraine is simply sold on the black market?). Meanwhile, the war has been a disaster, too, for America’s position in the world: aside from the colossal waste of taxpayer dollars, it has sharply destabilized the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, driven China and Russia into each other’s arms, made things extremely awkward for the GAE’s vassal states in Europe, and generally caused the rest of the world to realize that they might be better off just trying to get along without us.

Messrs. Batchelor and Vlahos discuss all this and more in the latest episode of their podcast (with, at the end, a brief return to the possibility of civil war). You can listen to it in three parts: here, here, and here.